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Hellraiser
(Clive Barker, 1987), with the wicked stepmother par excellence, Julia (Clare
Higgins), succumbing to sexual curiosity with her husband’s brother soon
after her marriage and providing him with several male victims when they
resume their affair after his resurrection: a demon lover in this case being
an explicit turn-on for the kinky bride. The sequel,
Hellbound
(Tony Randel,
1988), reverses the situation when Julia is returned from hell and re-fleshed
with the blood of various female victims, a room full of hanging female
corpses explicitly referencing ‘Bluebeard’.
7. Noting the film’s many allusions to ‘Bluebeard’, Tatar affirms a significant
reversal in the plot, arguing that ‘in
The Piano
, it is Ada who carries the bur-
den of a troubled past and who possesses a dark secret’ (2006: 123). Although
Campion leaves this secret a mystery in the film, her novel discloses further
information about the heroine’s background: informing us that she elected
to stop speaking after her father reprimanded her as a child, and significantly
revealing that the piano once belonged to her mother.
8. Interestingly, Campion has since voiced regret about the film’s ending, par-
ticularly Ada’s survival and new life with Baines. As she states two decades
after
The Piano
’s release: ‘I thought some of it was really good, but I thought
[of the ending, in which Ada is tied to her sinking piano, but then kicks free
and surfaces], “for freaking hell’s sake, she should have stayed under there.”
Notes to Chapter 4
185
It would be more real, wouldn’t it, it would be better? I didn’t have the nerve
at the time. What if Ada just went down, she went down with her piano,
that’s it’ (Campion, 2013). It is hard to say how the film would have altered
with this imagined director’s cut, yet the insight suggests an implicit melan-
cholia (or wilfulness) in Ada which even a new life with as unconventional
a lover as Baines cannot alleviate. Gothic romances are often criticised for
shoring up romantic inclinations, even when a critique has been mounted
against patriarchy, and
The Piano
might be seen in this light, with perhaps
too great a transformation afforded to its protagonist through the power
of love. If the piano functioned as Ada’s primary love object (and preferred
means of communication), its loss suggests that she is ready to exist without
it, even breaking her vow of silence and learning to speak again, which can
be read as a conciliation of sorts, yet her desire to join the piano at the bot-
tom of the ocean (confessed in voice-over at the end of the film) suggests
there are no pat endings here. Campion would revisit the motif of death
through drowning in her 2013 TV series,
Top of the Lake
, which opens with
a young pregnant girl wading into the water in a bid to end her life.
9. Such criticism was similarly levied at Angela Carter in response to
The
Bloody Chamber
, with critics contending that masochistic or submissive
impulses in female sexuality are politically regressive and therefore have
no place in women’s writing. (For further discussion of such criticism see
Bacchilega (1997)). The counter-argument is that while women continue to
experience such impulses they have every place in our creative world, with
the accompanying understanding that expressing potentially disturbing
ideas does not necessarily condone them. Indeed, it seems scarcely coinci-
dental that Moore made Frannie a mature English professor with an interest
in Virginia Woolf, who initially describes words as her ‘passion’. Seemingly
confident and assured in her profession, her composure soon unravels
when she becomes involved with a man. From the tarty outfit worn on her
first date with Malloy, trading her usual flats for heels, to the mixed signals
she gives to the various men in her life, Frannie’s tale is designed to provoke
questions about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. Campion inserts a number
of fairy tale references (beyond the ‘Bluebeard’ motif of a killer the heroine
must thwart) to extend this form of questioning, including the nearly lost
shoe (re)placed on Frannie’s foot by various male figures, the romanticised
story of how her parents met while ice-skating (shot in a deliberately dated
film style) and the engagement ring, presented on the killer’s blade, sig-
nalling a fatal betrothal – all of which are designed as a form of romantic
disenchantment. Ironically, while her first fantasy about Malloy is based
on sexual subservience, and she subsequently follows wherever he leads,
without any apparent instinct at self-preservation, Frannie crucially learns
to defend herself through him.
10. We might recall that ‘Le Barbe Bleu’ was said to be influenced by two French
noblemen, Cunmar of Brittany (who murdered a succession of pregnant
wives) and Gilles de Rais (who killed hundreds of children), although the
veracity of these crimes is uncertain. As Marina Warner attests, Gilles de
Rais was a companion at arms to Joan of Arc while ‘Cunmar the Accursed’
deposed the legitimate king of Brittany, factors suggesting their villainy may
have been exercises in propaganda (1995: 260–1).
186
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