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Jane Campion has failed to cite Jane Mander's novel "The Story of a New Zealand River" as her primary source in making the film "The Piano." Hoeveler points out the similarities of the two works.

I Imagine their surprise. In 1991 two film crews working in New Zealand discovered that they were both making the same film. Company A was making a film tentatively titled The River, and they owned the film rights to the novel by Jane Mander (1877-1949) on which their project was based. Company B-Campion's group-was filming The Piano. and they owned no film rights to what appeared to be the same story-a widow arriving in New Zealand with her piano and her daughter, later embroiled in a love triangle with her husband and another settler. The River people withdrew their project because Campion had a head start and "because a lengthy court battle would benefit no one," according to documents held by the New Zealand Film Commission. When confronted with the similarities between her film and The River project, Campion at first stated that her film was derived from the "Gothicism" of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (140),1 but later she claimed that her inspiration came from many different sources: "It's that egalitarian thing about New Zealanders. You know, if someone's done well they must have cheated" (qtd. in The Independent, 13 February 1994).

Egalitarian indeed. The fact of the matter is that Campion's film is a revision of Mander's novel The Story of a New Zealand River, originally published in 1920 and reissued in 1938 and 1960 (and also known under the title The River). Although Campion has acknowledged that she has read The River and that she saw the screenplay based on it, she has failed to cite the Mander novel as her primary source, nor does the film or published screenplay give the novel the credit it deserves as her source. I intend to point out the similarities between the two works and then discuss the ironies involved in Campion's unacknowledged use of Mander's book. First, however, a word about the universal silence about The River controversy in the United States media. Campion's film has been lauded in over two dozen film reviews published during the past four years. Winner of the prestigious Palm d' Or award at Cannes in 1993 and the recipient of three Academy Awards, including one for best original screenplay, The Piano is being treated by the United States media as a virtual cultural totem. Further, that same media has decided that Campion is a "serious" "female" director. Her foreignness constitutes, I suspect, a large part of her appeal. The literary pretensions of both The Piano and An Angel at My Table, Campion's earlier television series about New Zealand author Janet Frame, establish her status in a manner that has eluded numerous American women directors. But her claims of originality for either vision or subject matter in The Piano are, unfortunately, inflated and deserve to be recognized as such by U.S. critics.

II

Let's first examine Mander's novel, published in 1920 and greeted in New Zealand with scorn, derision, and censorship. Mander's novel begins with an ill-fated boat journey up a river into a remote New Zealand bush settlement. On this boat is one Alice Roland, her illegitimate eight-year-old daughter Asia, and two younger children, the product of her recent marriage to a New Zealand timber merchant, Tom Roland. While on the boat, skippered by David Bruce, employe of Roland, little Asia loses her balance and falls overboard. Note her mother's reaction to the fall:

Before she could utter a sound, Bruce, who had seen it coming, shot over the stem of the two-boat, and dived at the sinking blue bonnet. There was an eternal moment of silence when Alice knew they were both somewhere underneath the punt. Then she heard a splash towards the rear. She heard him, but she could not move. She heard the swift strokes through the water beside the punt. She saw Sonny Shoreman haul Asia into the little boat . . . Livid and speechless, Alice seized her and looked dumbly at Bruce. He was moved to swift sympathy at the agony in her eyes. ( 18)

Campion concludes her film with a near drowning, and of the mother rather than the daughter. The similarity is, like so many others, unmistakable. And note that in Mander's book the mother-figure, Alice Roland, is capable of speech, but that she spends a great deal of time in the novel "speechless," usually with rage or embarrassment or depression. Campion's originality in creating (or recreating) her heroine lay in making the woman literally dumb, thereby capitalizing on the current feminist interest in what Helene Cixous calls "decapitated" (silenced, muted, ignored) women, victims of a repressive patriarchy.

Why is Campion's heroine silent throughout the film? She clearly has the power to speak, but she chooses to silence herself or rather she chooses to communicate through her piano instead. This dramatic gesture has been widely praised as strikingly original in the reviews of the film in the United States, but consider that silence has long been a traditional posture of female protest in both American and French feminist theory.2 And consider that Campion would appear to be working rather self-consciously in both of those traditions. One could observe further that the word "interdite" means both "forbidden" and "silent" in French, surely a linguistic fact that would have influenced one of the major theoretical voices in French feminism, Helene Cixous. In her well-known article on the subject of silence, "Castration or Decapitation?" Cixous asks her reader, "What is woman for man?" She answers by way of stating that "if man operates under the threat of castration, if masculinity is culturally ordered by the castration complex," then women operate under castration's "displacement, decapitation." The culturally imposed silence on women is simply the opposite of the stereotype that has traditionally plagued woman-that she is an endless chatterer. For Cixous the "Absolute Woman in Culture" is the "hysteric," the woman who by being "prey to masculinity" actually makes possible her Other, the father. But Cixous saw this woman as characterized by other qualities-namely "tactility," "disgorging," and "mourning" for the property relations that circulate in her economy. She is not haunted by a "quest for origins" like the man, but instead "takes up the challenge of loss in order to go on living"(Cixous 479-90).

It should be clear from the above brief synopsis of Cixous's essay that she was presenting a fairly explicit description of a woman who more than remotely resembles Campion's hysterically silenced heroine Ada. Stewart, Ada's frozen husband, stands in polarized opposition to her, both of them caught in the gender warfare that characterizes Western culture. Indeed, witnessing the two of them posing for their wedding portrait reminds the viewer of the notion of marriage as a tableau vivant, a sort of living museum of horrors that both sexes experience as a form of entombment. Campion's heroine, the dispossessed and speechless Ada, is different from Mander's heroine Alice in precisely this quality: Ada is a woman who seems to have read Cixous and understood that silence does not simply make one a victim but that it is the ultimate protest against the patriarchy.

Also aboard the boat is a "piano packed in a heavy case. It had cost Bruce an anxious hour the night before, till with the help of chance riders he had got it safely aboard" (13). The piano is a central fixture in Campion's film, symbolic of the lost voice of the heroine and the means whereby she communicates her emotions to her friends and family. The piano in Mander's novel is less central, instead serving to remind the heroine of the life of privilege and comfort that she lost when she became pregnant in England and was forced by her family to bear her child in exile in Australia. From Australia she fled even further into the wilds of New Zealand and claimed to be a widow. That charade led to the hurried and virtually forced marriage with Tom Roland. The piano, which she attempted unsuccessfully to use as a means of support, was later the vehicle of Asia's escape from the bush. A concert pianist, she travelled as a professional throughout Australia before coming back home to care for her ever-pregnant mother. Mander writes, "Alice's piano, which seemed to fill up half the room, suggested magic rather than plain fact" (81). Indeed, it is the "magic" of the piano that Campion seized on in her film-the piano as Ada's displaced voice-allowing her to leave the world of "plain facts" behind.

And what of David Bruce, the Baines character played so memorably in Campion's film by Harvey Keitel? This is Alice's first reaction to him as he rowed the boat up the river: Only once had her grey eyes rested, carefully expressionless upon his muscular frame, as it swung backwards and forwards with the ease of a well-oiled machine. She did not appreciate the fact that he was giving a magnificent exhibition of physical strength as he rowed desperately to keep ahead of the tide. To her he was a bushman, one of the lawless oddments of humanity who had either fled from civilization, as the result of evil deeds, or was drifting shiftlessly towards a wretched end. And, as a servant of her husband, and a sometimes drunken one at that, he was outside her speculations. (15)

The relationship that develops between Alice Roland and David Bruce is intensely romantic and even strangely erotic, but its differences from the relationship in the Campion film are striking and reveal the significant shifts that have occurred in sensibility from 1920 to the present. The first physical encounter between Mander's characters occurs when David decides to guard the pregnant Alice while her husband is away on business. He ends up startling her and she goes into premature labor. David delivers the stillborn child and Alice is mortified when she learns that her servant knows her more intimately than she would like. This early crisis gives rise to the following conversation between mother and daughter, as Alice tries to learn from her daughter what happened during her period of unconsciousness:

The child drew away frightened and miserable, feeling herself trapped in a tangle of things she could say and things she must not say.... "Oh, Mother, I can't tell you anything if you look like that. What is the matter with you? Are you ill?.... Oh, Mother, do sit down or I shall run away. I don't like you when you look like that. You are not like my mother." (98)

The situation, the young daughter caught between her mother and the lover-figure, tangled in a triangle she does not understand and yet vaguely intuits, reminds one of Flora's position as go-between in Campion's film. Later we learn that David Bruce is not your average servant, being also a medical doctor in his spare time. Alice and David fall in love, but what is most striking about Mander's novel is that they never consummate that love. Indeed, they spend years in the silent agony of unrequited love for each other, a love that the celibate David sees as a sort of chivalric service to his lord's wife. Early critics of the novel found this situation particularly unrealistic, several noting that David was simply too good to be true, or, as Asia muses about him, "he was indeed the deus ex machina of their troubled lives" ( 191). Only a god, it would seem, would renounce sex for twenty years in order to so selflessly serve his beloved.

And it would appear that Campion agrees with that assessment. Her Baines begins fairly quickly to plot his seduction strategy, and he uses the piano as his bait. This aspect of Campion's film is original, but Campion gives the classic love triangle a postmodern spin when she commodifies sexual favors as purchased keys on the piano. If the piano represents Ada's voice, then she will regain that voice only as she embodies it in each bartered key. But notice that this device allows Campion once again to allude to a feminist theme: the exchange of women, the sexual barter system that constitutes the survival of women in a patriarchal society. Mander's novel refers on several occasions to Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, and Mander herself was a devoted reader of all of Schreiner's writings, particularly Schreiner's treatise on "sexual parasitism." The feminism that pervades Mander's novel, however, is very different from the staged, self-conscious feminism of Campion's film. Whereas Mander sees Alice as a victim, Campion sees Ada as both victim and victimizer. Ada's silence reveals both a wound on her psyche (we learn that she simply stopped speaking when she learned to play the piano at the age of six) and her rage.

But what forces victimize Alice in Mander's novel? The answer is simple: her biology. This is a woman who just cannot stop getting pregnant. Her initial downfall-a seduction at the age of eighteen and the disgraceful and hidden birth of Asia-is followed by innumerable pregnancies, miscarriages, and stillbirths during her marriage to Tom Roland. The feminism that concerns Mander centers on this very problem. As long as women are victimized by their bodies, as long as their opportunities are limited by the physically draining realities of continual childbirth, their lives will be stunted and frustrated. Mander wants nothing more than birth control for her female characters. Campion, on the other hand, seeks to explore another sort of feminine consciousness. Her Ada has also had an illegitimate daughter-the irrepressible Flora-and she has been, as she puts it, "sold" into an arranged marriage by her respectable parents. But Ada is nobody's victim. She arranges to buy back her piano and she punishes her husband for selling it to Baines by refusing to have sexual relations with him while accommodating Baines. She begins an affair with Baines and at the same time sexually toys with her husband, in a virtual parody, a complete inversion of traditionally gendered sexual relationships.

And what of the husband-figure in both works? In Mander's novel Tom Roland is a colonial consumed by his sense of "class inferiority," who marries Alice because "she belonged to the class that ruled the world" (67). Very quickly after the marriage both parties regret their haste, but both feel compelled to "do their duty" and remain in the marriage. Compare Tom's attitude to Stewart's in the Campion film:

The thing that annoyed him most was that he could not make her love him. He felt that something tumultuous lay beneath her calm. It piqued his curiosity. He tried to be good to her. And he wondered why the devil he was always wrong. He was just as determined as she was to do his duty. (67)

David Bruce, like Baines, is equally intrigued by Alice:

He had never ceased to be astonished at her powers of endurance, her infinite capacity for silent suffering.... There had always been something he could not get at in her. It had piqued his curiosity again and again. (327)

Tom and David, like the men in the Campion film, stand awed and puzzled by the enigma of Otherness, the "dark continent" that is woman. Later we learn that Tom "did not like music," and that he was "an irritable and irregular eater, a restless sleeper, and a man who had made their intimate relations merely a continuous performance of abruptly passionate acts" (207). Can the specter of Bluebeard be far behind?

Actually, Campion's Stewart is a dull man whose only sharp tool would appear to be his axe. His most dramatic act, chopping off the finger of his adulterous wife, defines him in one fell swoop as a monstrous ogre, every feminist's worst nightmare, the tyrannical and violent husband as murderer: Bluebeard. But why does Campion rely so heavily on the Bluebeard motif, which is definitely not present in the Mander novel? It would appear to be an original touch if one were not also familiar with the well-known contemporary feminist fairytales "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter (1979) and "Bluebeard's Egg" by Margaret Atwood ( 1986). Both Carter and Atwood spin traditional fairytales so that the central consciousness is always that of a cunning, scheming feminist heroine. Both do the same thing with the Bluebeard story, using a tone and a series of images that bear striking similarities to the Campion take on the same story.3

But Stewart's act of castration against his wife, surely a displacement of his own castration at her and Baines's hands, is most blatantly indebted to an idea found in Robert Browning's poem The Ring and the Book. Just listen to the villainous husband Guido discussing how he might deal with his wayward wife Pompilia: If I ...

Had, with the vulgarest household implement, Calmly and quietly cut off, clean thro' bone, But one joint of one finger of my wife, Saying, "For listening to the serenade, Here's your ring-finger shorter a full third: Be certain I will slice away next joint, Next time that anybody underneath Seems somehow to be sauntering." (Book V, 947-59)

Compare this attitude to the one expressed in Campion's film when Stewart tells Ada that cutting off her finger was just a way of "clipp[ing] your wing," (112) or consider what Flora says to Baines when she tells him of the attack on her mother: "He says you're not to see her or he'll chop her up!" (110)! The spirit and substance of Browning's poem, with its triangle and its villainous husband ultimately decapitated for killing his wife, clearly haunt the Campion film, but finally the central source for her characters, situation, and setting derive from the Mander novel.

In Campion's film it is the woman who has been both symbolically "decapitated" and "castrated," but Stewart also has been emotionally destroyed by his act of violence against Ada, and he admits as much when he goes to Baines and begs Baines to take Ada away from him:

Understand me, I am here for her, for her . . . I wonder that I don't wake, that I am not asleep to be here talking with you. I love her. But what is the use? She doesn't care for me. I wish her gone. I wish you gone. I want to wake and find it was a dream, that is what I want. I want to believe I am not this man. I want myself back; the one I knew. (115)

Stewart is aware that Ada is a sort of force of nature, whose will is so strong that she can communicate telepathically through it. He admits to Baines that although she has never spoken, he has heard her request her freedom:

She has spoken to me. I heard her voice. There was no sound, but I heard it here. Her voice was in my head.... She said, "I have to go, let me go, let Baines take me away, let him try and save me. I am frightened of my will. of what it might do, it is so strange and strong." (115)

Campion's depiction here of Ada as strong willed is clearly similar to Mander's portrait of the equally ambiguous but intense Alice. Mander's heroine muses about herself: "But she was secretly afraid of her impulses. She could not understand why any one who hated them as much as she did should have them so violently" (68).

As I have tried to suggest, it would appear that the four central characters of Campion's film were broadly sketched on the canvas already created by Mander, and supplemented by readings in nineteenth-century British literary classics and contemporary feminist short stories. The case is not one of overt plagiarism in that Campion's characters do not literally speak Mander's lines, but the shape of their personalities, their situations, and their attitudes are identifiably similar. There are two crucial similarities between the novel and the film that make the case clear that Campion relied primarily on the Mander text for both her vision and her plot. The first occurs in the protracted and platonic love affair between Alice and Bruce, which culminates in Bruce's shanty on the outskirts of the Roland property. During the first confession of love between Alice and David, listen to the high-minded Victorianism of David Bruce:

There's one thing I must tell you. I cannot go on making love to you in any form here in Tom Roland's house while I take Tom Roland's money.... I can only go on making love to you on one of two conditions. Either I tell your husband and have his consent to go on, which he is hardly likely to give, or we go away. I will not deceive Tom Roland. ( 198)

After several years of such highflown stuff, Alice and Bruce repair to his bachelor shanty on the property to comfort each other. They are there interrupted by Tom Roland, who admits that he had long suspected they were having an affair. The erstwhile lovers are mortified the way only high-minded people can be. The scene that ensues-highly civilized as it is-- reminds one all too well of the dynamics between Stewart, Ada, and Baines in the Campion film. Again, Campion dramatizes, stylizes, and postmodernizes, but the same rather tired triangle enacted in the lover's hut is the focus of her action as well.

And just as both Stewart and Flora peek into Baines's shanty to try to see what Ada is doing when she's not playing the piano, so is there a voyeurism present in Mander's novel, only it is Asia who is silent witness to her parents' sexual activities: Why don't our parents realize that we children have eyes to see and ears to hear? I slept for years with only a thin wall between my parents and me. Slept, did I say? I sat up for hours shivering, sick and faint. I cried, I prayed, I raged. I grew old listening to them. I grew to have a pity and then a contempt for them both, and then just a tolerance. I couldn't understand, and I don't understand now how human beings can be so stupid, and so cruel, and make so much unhappiness for each other. Why did Mother stand it? What good does it do to stand things? She never made him any better. Oh. she's a mystery to me. (231)

The would-be lovers' hut is an important setting in both works, representing an alternative masculine domain, poised in opposition to the patriarchal home because it is sexually fulfilling rather than sexually oppressive. In Mander's book the shanty is sanctified because of David Bruce's great and unselfish love for the woman whose babies he regularly delivers. In Campion's film the shanty is blessed because the heroine has managed to gain an equal and negotiating status within it. Also at the cost of her body.

Campion manages to rewrite Mander's novel so that her lovers can escape the cruel patriarch with his blessing. It is as if the Beast introduces Beauty to his more presentable brother and then shows them both to the door. Mander's book ends differently. She kills off Tom Roland, who dies in a truck accident trying to protect some local children. What is most interesting is the fact that his hands are ripped off during the accident. The castration that Campion delivers to her heroine is meted out instead by Mander to the oafish husband. The long-suffering lovers are finally free to marry, but Mander's novel is as much concerned with the adult Asia as it was with the trials of her mother. We follow Asia's history through her decision to live without a legal marriage to her already married suitor. In that sense the book works like several novels that attempt to look at social and sexual changes occurring over at least two generations. Campion, in contrast, tightly focuses her lenses, ending her film with Ada veiled in black, learning to play a new piano with a recently attached artificial finger. More importantly, however, she is learning to regain her voice, to speak again. And in speaking, Campion suggests, women reassert their power and control their own destinies.

But are either works truly feminist? Mander saw herself as writing a plea for birth control, which she viewed as the crucial feminist issue of her day. Campion's feminism as depicted in the film is, as I have tried to suggest, more complicated because the film itself is not honest about its multiple and conflicting sources. There is no denying the fact that marriage is celebrated in both works, suggesting that women cannot survive without a man at the center of their lives. Campion toys with feminist issues and images, but in the final analysis her film is as romantic and escapist as the Mander novel. Ada's leap overboard and her decision while underwater to be reborn into her body, into her voice, represents in Campion's version the epiphany, the moment of desire. Campion's film is intense and intensely aware of the dilemmas facing women as they struggle to embrace their bodies, their sexuality, in a culture that denies or defaces those bodies. But in that final ambivalent image-Ada stumbling around the porch with a black veil over her face and the newly-civilized Baines giving her speech lessons-we glimpse the ambiguity that surrounds both "decapitation" (female silence) and "castration" (male powerlessness) in our society. Ada would appear to have earned the right to speak again by accepting her body and accepting her need for Baines. But is marrying the Beast and civilizing him a particularly effective strategy for a film that would appear to be making more serious feminist claims for its heroine? In short, does anyone believe that the film's actions take place in the mid-nineteenth century New Zealand? How realistic or historically plausible is it that Ada would behave the way she does in 1850?

The sense we have while viewing The Piano is one of historical dissonance, a sense that we are watching a contemporary drama played out in anachronistic costumes and setting. I would claim that this dissonance results from Campion's unacknowledged use of disparate sources. The staged "Victorian" quality of the film, its strong narratological surface, I would argue, exist in order to conceal the actual source of the screenplay-Mander's 1920 novel. Whether Campion read and used Mander's novel is finally not the issue. The film conceals its true literary source, and that act of concealment results in the gaps, the fissures we sense while viewing it. Much is unspoken in The Piano because much is buried.

III

But ultimately there is one question that should concern us: what does it matter that Jane Campion, New Zealand artist, relied on, adapted, and revised the plot and characters of another New Zealand artist? In her interviews with the U.S. media Campion presents herself as the New Zealand outsider, struggling to overcome her artistic marginalization. But surely it is Mander who has been marginalized-indeed obliterated-in Campion's failure to publicly acknowledge in her film credits Mander's influence on the composition of The Piano. The sad fact of the matter is that Campion does not own the rights to the source material for her film; obviously she cannot acknowledge Mander's presence and yet in not doing so she continues a practice that began in 1920 when The River was first published and promptly condemned by New Zealand critics for its frank treatment of "the sexual problem" in marriage. Jane Mander is the epitome of the lost New Zealand female artist, the truly silenced woman haunting The Piano. After reading The River and the biography of Jane Mander, one is tempted to see Campion's Ada as a symbol of the muted, buried New Zealand woman artist herself. And yet ironically she has been silenced by another woman, and one who has repeatedly depicted herself as a marginalized New Zealander.6 Whereas Campion was more than willing to resurrect the reputation of Janet Frame in her earlier film An Angel at My Table, she would appear now to be confident enough to cannibalize the work of one of her dead and long-forgotten New Zealand sisters.

Jane Mander wrote six novels during her lifetime, and only her first one, The Story of a New Zealand River, is still read today in her native country. In fact, The River was "on most college reading lists by 1960, quite widely known and oddly at ease among recent novels" (Turner 137). Campion graduated from the Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and it seems safe to conclude that she would surely have read the novel during her undergraduate years there. Jane Mander struggled all her life to be heard in her own country, but even she was aware of the fact that her life's work was ignored at best, reviled at worst. As an old woman she made the following ruthless assessment about her life, trying to understand why her novels had never brought her anything but grief:

I have always been far more interested in other people's work than in my own. That is why I have been a very minor novelist and owner of most of the world's best novels by other people. In that I have been entirely frustrated. I might have made a good Beethoven player. I have large powerful rugged hands. But I had nothing but a cracked harmonium to play on till I was able to afford a piano, and then it was too late. My whole life has been lived round the motive . . . too late. I went to school too late to earn a scholarship. I developed too late to be blessed or destroyed by marriage. I left home and N.Z. too late to establish myself in England before the war broke out. I developed a critical sense too late, studied art too late, loved everybody too late, always saw jokes too late and all because I insisted on living in a private world of my own from which I was eternally being jerked to miss the right second. (Turner 153)

Even after her death it would appear that Jane Mander was just too late. The company filming her novel was just too late to compete with Campion, who presumably was too late in purchasing the film rights to the work. And the worldwide community she so much wanted to reach-the audience now enjoying The Piano-will never know the name of Jane Mander and will never know the novel that served as the basis for the film.

Finally, however, I am haunted by the specter of Jane Mander, who returned to New Zealand in 1932 with a contract to write her autobiography. Defeated, she died seventeen years later, having written only two pages. But when I read the conclusion of The River I know that everything she could have ever said about her own life's meaning was already written: She had learned, perhaps too soon, that lives are not finished performances, or any series of rounded-off experiences, but a flow of endings dovetailing into fresh beginnings, of abortive experiments, of searches, of Teachings out after alluring signs, of retreats, hurts and disillusionments, the whole apparently bound by a cohesive thread, sometimes lost sight of. a thread that seems to lead somewhere, but about which no wise man will dogmatize. (431)