This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife.

Jane Campion's film "The Piano" (1993) opens an uncanny space in mainstream movies where cinematic enunciation intersects with the linguistic and psychoanalytic innovations of the last half-century. This article presents a glimpse into the traces (semios) of FEMININITY as latent extra-Symbolic discourse in Campion's film.

Emily Bronte's novel and Campion's film not only are distant in time, but they also belong to different aesthetic disciplines. However, their two plots share many aspects and there is direct influence of the novel on the film.

In Jane Campion's film The Piano, mute Scottish widow Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) and her child take themselves off to New Zealand in 1852 to start a new life. Ada and her stuffy, but earnest, new husband Stewart (Sam Neill) do not hit it off. She does, however, strike up a relationship with her husband's overseer, Baines (Harvey Keitel), an illiterate who paints his face in the style of the aboriginal Maoris. Through a somewhat circuitous route, he has ended up the owner of her piano. Baines proposes to sell her back the instrument one black key at a time, in exchange for music lessons. The lessons turn into erotic encounters. All this leads to jealousy and violence.

Jane Campion became the first female director to win the Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or with her extraordinary brooding drama of a mute piano player

Jane Campion says of THE PIANO, "I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously." Certainly American culture shares this romantic impulse, and despite the Victorian setting of The Piano, we are no less isolated, constricted, even contorted, than the characters animating Jane Campion's film. We want to hear stories of passion but most of us learned to smooth over conflicts, to mute our excitement, and to express our sexual and loving selves guiltily or immaturely. Our values and impulses are as tangled as any Victorian tale. As a culture we value compassion and "good works" but we reward self-aggrandizing ambition. We value independence but reward the corporate deferential self. We champion individualism but submit to work in cubicles and go home to confining cells of credit card debt. We seek liberation from isolation and emptiness through the acquisition of money and consumer distractions, and when security and purchased pleasures fail to satisfy us, the fear of emptiness prompts a renewed, often more costly pursuit of happiness. As Americans we are much like Stewart in The Piano whose brush with passion leaves him saying, "I want myself back; the one I knew." (Campion, 115) He wants the self who stoically tolerated isolation while steadily working to acquire more land. The Piano holds a mirror to our constricted lives while at the same time sparking a silent burning will to feel passionately alive and to love fully.

Jane Campion's film (1992) seeks to work within the gothic in order to deconstruct many tropes and themes embedded in that genre.

Jane Campion's biographical film and New Zealand writer Janet Frame , An Angel At My Table ends with a scene of Janet working at her typewriter and achieving a moment of creative satisfaction.