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Sloughing off the burdens: Ada's and Isabel's parallel/antithetical quests for self-actualization in Jane Campion's film The Piano and Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady
Literature Film Quarterly, 1997 by Jeanne R Dapkus
8a. Ada is "most of all an artist: not an artist who will necessarily be recognized for her art, but someone who can only expose herself through art" (Buck 127). Ada is an artist through her piano. She eschews speech by being literally mute. Ultimately, through her artistic expression and her self-absorption, she creates an existential truth-herself.
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8b. Isabel is not obviously an artist at first, but she undertakes to make her life itself a work of art. She is constantly compared to a work of art, especially by Ralph, who thinks she is a "real little passionate force to see at play . . . finer than the finest work of art" (65), and by James himself who, after all, is creating "the portrait" in the first place. Isabel tries obsessively to observe and to imitate art. She seeks her true self through her ability to imitate what she interprets to be the truth in art. And, as some interpretations would have, she becomes "an artist of sorts" in the creation of herself (Ventura, McMaster). As with Ada, Isabel's truth is existential because it finally is her.
9a. Ada courts death near the end of the film. There is an underwater sequence as she sinks into depthless waters. Campion describes her near-death in her screenplay: Down she falls, on and on, her eyes are open.... She kicks at the rope ... livers herself free from her shoe. The piano and her shoe continue their fall while Ada floats above, suspended in deep water, then suddenly her body awakes and fights, struggling upwards to the surface. (S 146)
Ada's flirtation with suicide is a deliberate move on her part to attempt to hide in the security that death would offer her. At the point just before she begins to struggle against the ropes which have been holding her to her piano and causing her to be dragged under water, she is still hoping that somehow, if she clings to her piano, she will find refuge from that which threatens her. It is her one last attempt to cleave to the very thing that will certainly entrap her forever-civilization, embodied by the piano. But, the whole sequence indicates that, unlike some interpretations have suggested, her freedom does not come as a result of Baines "taking her away." Rather it is something completely separate from her involvement with him. It involves her getting rid of the imprisoning presence of the piano in her life, and it is only after she comes out from hiding behind the "mask" of the piano that she is able to become "reborn" into the invulnerable, fully self-actualized state that she is in at the conclusion of the film.
9b. For Isabel, "Death.... a sort of petrification-becomes increasingly attractive to her" (McMaster 64). She seeks for a time to become static, like the dead, or like a work of art: "She envied the security of valuable 'pieces' which change by no hair's breadth" (522). She ultimately does not choose death, but, as in Ada's case, the fact that she has flirted with death helps her to direct herself without further fear from those things which have been most confining for her-namely, her sexual passion. At the end of Portrait, at a point exactly corresponding to the point at which Ada experiences her near-drowning in Piano, there is a moment when Isabel experiences a sensation quite similar to Ada's:
