ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), its central character, is brought from Scotland to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century in order to marry a white colonial landowner, Stewart (Sam Neill), a man she has not previously met. 1 She brings with her her ten-year-old daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), her trunks and baggage, and her baby-grand piano. In an opening voice-over delivered by Ada, we learn paradoxically that she has not spoken since the age of six. She is an elective mute who, for no reason apparent to herself or her family, has taken it into her head not to utter a word. Rather than becoming a symbol of the disempowerment and dispossession often associated with the absence of speech, Ada's silence becomes an expression of strength and resistance. It is an assertion of defiance, a refusal to cooperate with patriarchal regulation or to participate in the masculine linguistic economy which circumscribes women. Ada can hear and respond to the speech of others but refuses to engage in verbal dialogue or exchange. Her own expressive communication systems are a complex blend of types of inscription or 'writings'. It is these issues of sound and silence, speech and muteness, writing and erasure that I want to address in this essay in relation to feminist debates around gender and identity.
