Abstract
This chapter looks at Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993) and Daniel Mason's novel The Piano Tuner (2002), analysing the piano as a material object, a thing, but also a symbol of Western civilisation, as something encoded with cultural signification. In referencing Ricoeur’s thoughts on the trace, Daný van Dam focuses on the piano in these two texts serving as an instrument with double meaning: first as a musical instrument and second as a “thing” that enables its owner, player and listener to achieve something. The piano becomes to some extent anthropomorphised—not acquiring human characteristics per se but becoming eroticised and exoticised in relation to the main characters, its players. It also becomes eroticised as an object of desire as it is played and heard by sexualised individuals. Finally, Dam also argues that the piano, as a trace of Western culture, is an instrument of postcolonialism, but it undergoes an exoticisation when played and transformed by native cultural influences.
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Notes
- 1.
Carroll asks for a grand piano as by being demanding, he wants to make the War Office admit his importance to the colonial project by complying with it (Mason 5). Mason repeatedly and specifically refers to the piano’s make. Erard pianos were built in France originally, but in the late eighteenth century, the piano makers set up a London outlet. Queen Victoria played an Erard piano as a child and young adult and acquired a similar, lavishly decorated one in the mid-nineteenth century (“S & P Erard: Grand Piano, 1856”). The piano having a French heritage is also raised at the end of The Piano Tuner, when Drake is questioned as a spy: “Erard…that’s an unusual name. What kind of name is that?” When Drake answers “French,” his questioner immediately responds “French? You mean the same French who are building forts in Indo-China?” (333). While Drake claims that “Piano’s don’t make alliances,” the army Captain questioning him clearly distinguishes between British and French instruments (333), stressing how things are inherently connected to their environment.
- 2.
“The Angel in the House” as an expression comes from Coventry Patmore’s poem of the same title, originally published between 1854 and 1862 (1887). Best-known is Virginia Woolf’s repudiation of the concept in “Professions for Women” (2012 [1931]), where she claims, “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”
- 3.
For further discussion of the use of “trace” in the theorisation of neo-Victorianism, see, for example, Rosario Arias’ chapter “Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian past in Contemporary Fiction” (2014).
- 4.
In Inventing the Victorians, Matthew Sweet explains that the sexual connotation of draped piano legs was already a joke in the nineteenth century (2001, 20). There is no evidence that they were covered for any reason other than to protect them or from a general love of over-ornamentation.
- 5.
In a novel based on the film’s story, written by Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger, the reader does get further details on Ada’s elective muteness. Inescapably, though, the book loses much of the communicative layeredness that the film is able to provide through its mix of voiceover (only used at the beginning and the end), music, writing, and signing (1994).
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van Dam, D. (2022). An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner. In: Maier, S.E., Ayres, B., Dove, D.M. (eds) Neo-Victorian Things. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06201-8_5
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