Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema

6. The Misfortunes of an Heiress: The Portrait of a Lady

133 1Followingthereleaseof ThePiano,JaneCampionfoundherselfriding the crest of a wave, hailed as a supreme auteur. The film was greeted with acclaim by most critics and with delighted astonishment by audiences —especially women, who viewed it as a unique expression of feminine insights and sensibility. One critic, for example, found herself “entranced,moved,dazed,”and“reluctanttore-entertheeverydayworld after the film had finished.”1 An eminent woman scholar experienced a powerful somatic response to The Piano: “Campion’s film moved me deeply, stirring my bodily senses and my sense of my body. The film not only ‘filled me up’ and often ‘suffocated’ me with feelings that resonated in and constricted my chest and stomach, but it also ‘sensitized’ the very surfaces of my skin—as well as its own—to touch.”2 The film won three Oscars(includingoneforbestscreenplaywrittendirectlyforthescreen) and forty-nine other awards internationally. Unsurprisingly, Campion found herself fêted around the world as one of the most outstanding film directors of her generation. In terms of satisfying her childhood urges to create drawings in order to gain attention and to create and enact plays to make the world appreciate her,3 Campion had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. At a personal level, she had also deepened the imaginative exploration —begun in An Angel at My Table—of what her relationship with her mother meant to her, in terms of both her deep empathic identification with Edith Campion and the effects of that affinity on the psychic predispositions she recognized in herself. By developing her ideas about the capacity of eroticism to provide a liberating route to self-realization 6The Misfortunes of an Heiress: The Portrait of a Lady 134 Jane Campion andhappinessthrougharelationshipwithamansensitizedtoawoman’s sensibility and desires, she had attempted to construct a vision of how the ills attending psychological dysfunction could be remedied, and she must have felt delighted at the enthusiasm with which other women responded to this vision. As suggested in the previous chapter, however, Campion had lingering doubts, and they were not minor ones. At one level of her consciousness , she recognized that the vision she had constructed amounted to no more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy that was likely to have “fucked up heaps of women” by generating expectations that, by 1996, she had come to realize were false.4 In a string of bitter comments issued during the later 1990s, Campion refers recurrently to her own disillusionment with romance: “When I was young and falling in love, I did a con-job on myself, occasionally with very unsuitable people.”5 Metaphorically speaking, by the time she made her film version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, she had come to believe that this is what she had done with The Piano—done a “con-job” on herself (and others). She must also have realized that her business in coming to terms with the meaning of her mother’s experience and its effect on her was far from complete. She had explored the nature of narcissistic deprivation and a depressive condition she associated with her mother in An Angel at My Table, and she had explored certain of its consequences in The Piano, but she had not yet begun to probe the causes that could lead a woman to enter into a relationship with a man that could have the power to generate the depth of unhappiness that had led to the divorce of her parents in the mid-1980s. The idea that a relationship in which a woman has invested all her trust and hope could have the potential for disintegration provided yet another source of doubt and insecurity that needed to be explored—in order to be understood, and thus mastered. It is not surprising, therefore, that for her next film project Campion turnedtoanadaptationofJames’sclear-eyednovel ThePortraitofaLady. AsfarasCampionwasconcerned,thisfilmwasmeanttoprovideanantidoteandcorrectivetotheromanticvisionshehadprofferedin ThePiano. In retrospect, one can surmise that it was an attempt to shore up her defenses against any “romantic” vulnerability that she had revealed in her earlier Brontë-esque moment. As she puts it, she was drawn to James on account of the fact that he “is very modern because he’s already tearing The Misfortunes of an Heiress 135 apart the fairytale. He’s saying, ‘Be real. Life is hard. . . . No one’s going to get the right person.’”6 Even though the interpretation of James that Campion expresses here would be considered idiosyncratic by James scholars, it does reflect how...