Jane and James Go to the Movies: Post-Colonial Portraits of a Lady

Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady opened to mixed reviews. Cynthia Ozick, in the New York Times, suggested that the liberties Campion had taken with James’s novel indicated an unwillingness to trust in the Master’s narrative skills (H22). And, for those who desire their adaptations to be exact replications, Campion’s film will prove disappointing. To my mind, however, the film topicalizes James and highlights aspects of his text that render him both accessible and meaningful to contemporary audiences. I would argue, then, that the sequences added to the film work to emphasize how this is a cinematic adaptation of a novel, an adaptation that effectively nuances James’s narrative.

Interestingly, Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady foregrounds the ways in which the female body has served as a site of international cultural struggle. This film, with its English and Australian financial backing, its New Zealand director, and its Australian star, globalizes the plight of James’s quintessential American girl. A multinational production on a number of levels, The Portrait of a Lady highlights the cross-nationality of its author and demonstrates how, as Homi Bhabha has argued, “the ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production” (4). Indeed, Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady crosses and translates an Anglo-American text in order to establish different thresholds of meaning. Both in the feature’s transnational production and within the body of the film itself, The Portrait of a Lady generates other sites of signification, most notably through its equation of the female body with colonization. Campion’s feature illustrates how James’s text speaks to colonial predicaments, and, in this New Zealand director’s hands, The Portrait of a Lady explicitly offers a commentary on imperialism, colonization, and the mapping of the “dark continent” of female sexuality.

Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather that “three of the governing themes of Western imperialism” include: “the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capital” (2–3). Campion’s film addresses these themes, for it traces the new global order of cultural knowledge through its multinational production, at the same time that it dramatizes how white male power is effected over the body of a woman, who herself serves as commodity capital. To these ends, The Portrait of a Lady begins with voiceovers and then pan shots of contemporary Australian women discussing the erotics of a kiss. The opening frames emphasize the film’s antipodean perspective, and the credit sequence positions the ensuing Jamesian narrative on and through a post-colonial screen. The abrupt shift that then takes place from the Australian women to a close-up of Isabel Archer (played by the Australian Nicole Kidman) as the young “American girl” works to situate Isabel as a colonial heroine in an imperial setting—the spacious grounds of her (Anglo-American) uncle’s English estate, Gardencourt. Significantly, because Mr. Touchett is played by the notable British actor, Sir John Gielgud, the American origin of the family fortunes is virtually erased; instead these vast properties betoken the trappings of “Empire.” Isabel, placed in a marginal position in this narrative since she is a poor relation, must rely on the patronage of her wealthier relatives to tour the cultural capitals of nineteenth-century Europe. Clearly, her ability to travel places her in a more affluent and established situation than many colonial subjects, yet her position as a dependant destabilizes the security of her racial and class status. And, as she attempts to forge her own subjectivity free from marital involvements, her efforts and her plight serve as the locus of international struggles to possess her.

Isabel’s efforts to construct subjectivity are dramatized through various dream sequences. In one, she gives vent to her sexuality in a hotel room in...