Susan Harrington Breaking Barriers Portrait of a Lady: From Novel to Film       Jane Campion's most recent film, Portrait of a Lady (1996), offers a distinct departure from her previous work, The Piano (1993), with which some critics have found fault. In her 1998 article, for example, while commending Campion for introducing two characters able to renounce the gender warfare that characterizes Western culture, Diane Long Hoeveler criticizes Campion for celebrating marriage, the idea that women cannot survive without a man at the center of their lives (Hoeveler 110, 114). Second, she asserts that while Campion toys with feminist issues and images, Piano is Aromantic and escapist, with Ada's decision to be reborn with Baines a step hardly worthy of the serious feminist issues that Campion seems to be raising in the film (Hoeveler 114). Finally, she points out that Campion is heavily indebted to a 1920s work, The Story of a New Zealand River by Jane Mander. Partly as a consequence of not acknowledging this debt, the film has conflicting sources, Campion's rather permissive twentieth century script about adultery, superimposed on Mander's original, in which the Victorian heroine is not united sexually with her lover until after her husband's death. Enacting a basically contemporary drama in anachronistic costumes and setting, Hoeveler says the film contains gaps, ...fissures we sense while viewing it (Hoeveler 114). For example, how likely is it, she asks, that an 1850s heroine would conduct an adulterous affair? In (Re)Visioning the Gothic (1998), Cyndy Hendershot echoes this view, calling Baines, the film's nontraditional male (Harvey Keitel), a deus ex machina, a fairy-tale character, an imaginary resolution to two real problems, on the one hand the castration of the male by colonialism and on the other the decapitation of a female who fails to sustain a masculine sense of wholeness (Hendershot 98, 102).       As if to respond to these very charges, in her newest movie, Portrait of a Lady, Campion freely acknowledges her debt to Henry James' novel. She also engages feminist issues without resorting to fantasy or romanticism or to the perhaps religious view that struggle or lack are preconditions for the new order of heterosexual love that Ada (played by Holly Hunter) and Baines finally enjoy in The Piano. Instead, Portrait of a Lady places heterosexual love within a historical context and offers an outcome which, while it may be controversial, can scarcely be counted as either unconvincing or escapist.       How different is Campion's film from the novel? In answering this question, I shall argue that in taking the essence of James' work and translating it into terms suitable for a modern audience, Campion's film is more faithful to James than he was to himself. To be sure, both novel and film alike flout the expectations of the audience, who would prefer the heroine, Isabel Archer (played by Nicole Kidder), to marry almost anybody other than the man she does and longs for her to leave him as soon as she gets the chance. I shall argue, though, that the film makes the reasons for Isabel's difficult choices more immediately available to the audience than the book does, including her final one not to leave her marriage. In other words, if the audience finds any gaps or fissures, they are in James' text, not in the film.       The central difference between film and novel lies in their differing assessments of Isabel. Calling her intelligent but presumptuous, James is suspicious of Isabel's refusal to attend school, judging her thoughts a tangle of vague outlines which had never been corrected by the judgment of those speaking with authority (James xxxiv, 137). Campion's view of Isabel's limitations is very different. The audience detects this right from the start. To introduce Isabel, Campion uses tight framing in what Louis Giannetti in Understanding Movies (1990) calls the most intimate of all cinematic shots, a full-front closeup, first of her face, then her eyes (Giannetti 64). As George Bluestone puts it in Novels Into Film (1971), since the audience identifies so closely with the camera lens, it has immediate empathy for Isabel, with the camera preempting the narrator (Bluestone 107). As we will see now, the audience is also given a different kind of first glimpse of her suitor, Warburton (played by Richard Grant), than the rather neutral one offered by James.       As we've just seen, having invaded the arbor in which she has taken shelter, Warburton then follows the convention that the male should provide for and protect the female, phrasing his marriage proposal mostly in terms of domestic arrangements. That is, Campion uses the high-angle image of Warburton's boots and spurs from Laura Jones' screenplay (they were not present in the original) and combines them with the novel's dialogue to demonstrate much more obviously than is the case in the novel that Warburton is irretrievably entrapped within his male, phallic role. No wonder Isabel tellingly responds, I adore a moat (Jones 3).       Soon after she refuses Warburton, a second suitor appears, Caspar Goodwood (played in the film by Viggo Mortenson). Goodwood is merely a more obviously sexual, more unrelenting, American version of Lord Warburton (Jones 159). Isabel puts him off also. The reason for her reluctance? Is it his sexuality, the fact that he appears to Isabel as what Kurt Hochenauer calls a walking erection (Hochenauer 20 quoted in Dapkus 182)? Is Isabel, then, as Fred Millett suggests, if not sexually frigid then at least chilly (James xxxx)? Or, as Cyndy Hendershot said in speaking of The Piano, is it that passionate sex is only possible between equals, and Isabel has no money (Hendershot 102)? When her cousin, Ralph Touchett (Martin Donovan), makes good on this deficit by persuading her uncle to leave her ,70,000, the audience of both novel and film alike now judges that Isabel can choose Warburton, Goodwood or some other male, if not Ralph himself, (since as a consumptive he is not really in the running for her hand).       Enter the manipulative Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich). Here, as in the case of its depiction of both Isabel and Warburton, the film version of Portrait again differs markedly from the novel. But this time it breaks the barrier between old and new not just by modifying point of view but also by drastically altering character, incident and setting. First, Campion presents Osmond as diammetrically opposed to the way Millett argued was James' intention, as the least sexual of all Isabel's suitors. Instead, he appears as a sexual sophisticate, an accomplished lecher. Note how Campion suggests Osmond's control: on declaring his love, rather than waiting for Isabel to grant him an embrace, he immediately claims his kiss, which in the novel is a euphemistic hand which she had failed to surrender (James 310). Moreover, in contrast to the novel, where James fails to tell how she reacts, in the film Isabel shows through facial expressions she is by no means the prude she is reputed to be. Finally, in the novel the seduction scene takes place in the neutral setting of a hotel sitting-room instead of, as here, in the catacombs of a museum. Sinister music adds to the spooky effect.       What is the result of these alterations? My view is that they change the novel to such an extent that Campion's adaptation is not an adaptation at all but a deliberate destruction of the original to show how a strongly proactive heroine is entrapped within and sacrificed to a patriarchal social system. This theme is what Béla Balázs calls the raw material, the naked event within James' novel which Campion releases and augments to refer to all Victorian women (Balázs quoted in Bluestone 63). For example, she makes a significant addition to James' account of a ball which Osmond is now exploiting as an opportunity to match his own daughter with Lord Warburton. Toying with the audience by not giving them time to absorb their full impact, Campion cross-cuts high-angle long shots of dancing with close-ups of woman after woman fainting from anxiety and exhaustion. That is, Campion not only demonstrates how Osmond is forcing his daughter, Pansy (Valentina Cervi), into a marriage de convenance, as is the case in the novel, but also generalizes on Osmond's action to exhibit how a whole class of women is marketed to the most eligible males like slaves on a slave block. In other words, whereas in his novel James individualizes and isolates characters from historical events, in the film Campion typifies and embeds them within history.       In revealing the social and legal reality of Victorian marriage, like Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Campion demonstrates how a women becomes dependent (one might say, hooked) on a man for money and sex. Specifically, until the 1870s (the time that Portrait of a Lady took place) common law had it that upon marriage a woman gave up not only her name but also her property to her husband. Only in 1935 did married women gain the full right to own property. Because of Campion's awareness of such matters, one of James' similes is transformed rather interestingly in the film. At the point at which Isabel is about to surrender to Osmond, James says that Isabel feels an inspired and trustful passion, comparing it to a large sum stored in the bank [which if touched] would all come out (James 309). As the film makes clear, this is no simile, but a factual mutation: Isabel's passion quite literally turns into Osmond's money. In fact, one of our first views of their married life, a clear parody of a portrait of the Holy Family, is Osmond at a luxurious at-home tea, in a group shot between and slightly above both Isabel and Pansy. Later, Osmond's bullying will reveal him as the quintessential abusive husband, who has manipulated Isabel to such an extent that even after he insults and humiliates her, she finds herself drawn to him sexually.       It seems to me, then, that Jeanne R. Dapkus is clearly correct in her assessment that, finally, the issue of control -- and self-control -- is central to Portrait of a Lady, and that the film version makes this clearer than the novel. To capture it, Campion uses the symbolism of doors and entrances, utilizing them to announce stages in Isabel's development of self-direction. The first instance is Campion's long shot at the end of the first sequence when Isabel retreats to Gardencourt. The second marks the fateful meeting of Isabel and Mme. Merle, when Isabel opens the door to the music-room, while the third occurs when Osmond closes the door on Isabel's attendance at Ralph Touchett's deathbed, an order which she defies. The last is an echo of the first, when Isabel breaks away from Goodwood to open the door to Gardencourt and her decision to start on the very straight path, that leads back to Osmond (James 591).       Moreover, in selecting these verbal images from the mass of prose that is Henry James and then translating them into the visual images of cinema in this way, it is Campion, and not James, who makes the final and most controversial phase of Isabel's development intelligible to the audience. To validate the decision to return to Osmond, we need the generalizing character of the film to fill up the gaps and fissures in James. We need Campion's unqualified presentation of Isabel herself, along with her echoes of the heavily overcostumed, perverted, cynical, patriarchal world of La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de La Fayette, of Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) and of Jane Eyre (1847), without its fairy-tale ending, in a context in which a married woman had no right to own property, and by extension, not even the right to be mistress of her own body.       Specifically, we need to comprehend Kumkum Sangari's insistence that Isabel's decision to return to Osmond, like that of the heroine of La Princesse de Clèves, who refused to indulge her passion for her lover, the Duke of Nemours, has finally to do with the revelation that maintenance of freedom is the suspension of its operation (Sangari 731 quoted in Dapkus 180). As Campion suggests quite clearly, all choices of mate result in more or less equal enslavement, both material, sexual and psychic. Consequently, broadening her own empathy to include none other than the daughter of the enemy, Isabel maintains her personal freedom by going home to Pansy, who faces a destiny identical to her own. If nothing else, she will at least be a friend to Pansy.       In contrast to The Piano, then, neither the novelistic nor the film version of Portrait of a Lady celebrates marriage and neither endorses infidelity. Each formulates a classic version of gender warfare and offers a partial remedy, one which seeks not to escape conflict but rather to confront it by holding on. Despite these basic similarities, though, whereas the author's highly complex tone distances, qualifies and muffles his ideas, Campion breaks his barrier of reticence about sex, money and behavior and delivers the facts straight. Hardly faithful to him as she is, though, Jane Campion's work is itself made possible by the original master, Henry James. WORKS CITED Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. California UP, 1971. Campion, Jane. The Piano. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Dapkus, Jeanne R. Sloughing off the Burdens. Film Literature Quarterly 25.3 (1997): 177-187. Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Hendershot, Cyndy. (Re)Visioning the Gothic. Film Literature Quarterly 26.2 (1998): 97-108. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Silence, Sex, and Feminism. Film Literature Quarterly 26.2 (1998): 109-116. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. New York: Random House, 1996. Jones, Laura. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Penguin, 1996. Return to Session I BB Program