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“Sounds that Creep Inside You”: Female Narration and Voiceover in the Films of Jane Campion
Amy Lawrence
Losing Her Voice: Silencing Two Daughters of Hollywood
Karen Hollinger and Teresa Winterhalter
Orlando’s Sister, Or Sally Potter Does Virginia
Woolf in a Voice of Her Own
Glynis Kinnan
His Story Next to Hers: Masochism and (Inter)Subjectivity
in Letter from an Unknown Woman
Sarah Kozloff
Complicity in The Age of Innocence
Sally McWilliams
Desiring Female Power in Cowrie
Kathy G. Willingham
Corregidora: Retelling (Her)Story
Connie D. Griffin
Ex-Centricities: Perspectives on Gender and Multi-Cultural
Self-Representation in Contemporary American Women’s Autobiographies
Nieves Pascual
Depathologizing Anorexia: The Risks of Life Narratives
Marsha F. Cassidy
Visible Storytellers: Women Narrators on 1950s Daytime
Television
All of Jane Campion’s feature films, if most notably The Piano, have generated intense and dramatically polarized debate, especially among female spectators and critics. All make use of female voiceover narration and all share a focus on women together with complex structures of narration, characterization, and plot development that thwart any easy or unambiguous interpretation. In addition, Campion revisits genres and storytelling modes of interest to women—abuse narratives, melodrama, battle of the sexes—and re-tells their stories, significantly refusing to invoke their conventional frameworks of truth and morality. Though Campion consistently deals with abuse, oppression, and mistreatment of women in all of her feature films, she resolutely forgoes the moral judgments of melodrama and refuses to portray her protagonists as victims. In this, she proffers an aesthetic challenge to the ressentiment that Wendy Brown argues has shaped the epistemology and politics of much feminist discourse.
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Amy Lawrence, Losing Her Voice: Silencing
Two Daughters of Hollywood
In films such as Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and Postcards from the
Edge (1990), scenes of post-recording (also known as looping or additional
dialogue replacement) become the site where women come to recognize the
industrial practices that have alienated them from themselves as women
and as performers. Both films are based on novels vividly written in the
first person. In the films, however, the main character’s access to her
voice becomes problematic. Through these films we can chart the process
by which (1) women lose their position as narrators of their own stories;
(2) attempt to find a true self in song; (3) lose control of their physical
voices due to the intercessions of technology; and (4) break down at the
site of re-recording.
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Karen Hollinger and Teresa Winterhalter,
Orlando’s Sister, Or Sally Potter Does Virginia Woolf in a Voice of Her
Own
The recent proliferation of film adaptations from novels written by
women reflects the concern of female filmmakers for capturing women’s voices
on film. A focus on Potter’s claims of fidelity to Woolf’s authorial voice
in Orlando dismantles the interpretive predispositions Potter evidences
in her depiction of key scenes and concepts in the novel. In particular,
the post-feminist utopian vision Potter puts forth at the film’s end relies
heavily on her conviction that she has captured the novel’s authorial “essence,”
especially as she identifies it in Woolf’s depiction of androgyny. But
Potter’s filmic conclusions seem oddly discordant with the critique of
patriarchal power and sites of lesbian resistance Woolf constructs in her
novel. This examination of Potter’s film does not claim an inherent superiority
in the literary source, as has so frequently been done in past studies
of adaptation, but explores the voice the film itself constructs in relation
to its source text.
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Glynis Kinnan, His Story Next to Hers: Masochism
and (Inter)Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman
Identity formation as it has been traditionally understood as predicated
upon polarized sexual difference is under interrogation, particularly by
feminist theorists who note that the oedipal constellation as the locus
for a gendered identity inherently forecloses other possibilities. Offering
a transcendent alternative, theorists such as Jessica Benjamin argue for
a multiplicity of subject positionings, the destabilization of gender,
and a concept of identity as fluctuating. Max Ophuls’s Letter for an Unknown
Woman (1948) offers an interesting opportunity for testing a revisionist
frame of gender, for exploring the possibilities of a theoretical reading
that exceeds the terms of gender complementarity. With its unconventional
voiceover narrational strategy, the film can be understood as privileging
a paradoxical notion of subjectivity in which the self and the other exist
in a state of mutual identification and disavowal.
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Sarah Kozloff, Complicity in The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton’s complex novel uses a careful narrative structure to
withhold vital information from readers and to encourage us to share Newland
Archer’s interpretation of events and his underestimation of his seemingly
naive wife, May. Martin Scorsese’s 1993 cinematic adaptation enlists the
camera to function in complicity with an unusually foregrounded female
voice-over to achieve a similar effect.
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Sally McWilliams, Desiring Female Power
in Cowrie
Cathie Dunsford’s novel enacts multiple acts of identity construction
through four narrative strategies: (1) the deployment of the epistolary
form within the framework of limited omniscient narration; (2) the inscription
of cultural identity through the land; (3) the exploration of sensuality
and desire embodied in the relationship between women; and (4) the invocation
of strong female powers via myth and spirituality. In using these
strategies, Cowrie explores the tensions between giving voice to an oppressed
social identity and creating an alternative emancipatory feminist identity.
The novel synthesizes myth, history, and politics into a recombinant text
that destabilizes and revises discursive power, meanings of cultural identity
and heritage, feminist genealogy, and sexuality from a transcultural position.
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Kathy G. Willingham, Corregidora: Retelling
(Her)Story
In Corregidora Gayl Jones presents the difficult yet profound need
for Afro-American women to voice their (her) stories. One of the first
dilemmas these women face concerns the institutionalized methods used to
silence them. Thus, for expression, they are often left with only one viable
venue—their bodies. The novel demonstrates the literal and figurative impact
of the idea of “body of evidence.” In doing so, it beautifully dramatizes
many aspects of the Cixousian dictate to “write the body.” In addition
to presenting a feminized kunstlerroman, Jones simultaneously foregrounds
important socio-historic aspects of slavery that, perhaps, would be eclipsed,
erased, or denied by the histories told from viewpoints other than those
of the colonized themselves. In this respect, the novel truly signifies
a corrigenda—a book listing and then correcting its errors.
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Connie D. Griffin, Ex-Centricities: Perspectives
on Gender and Multi-Cultural Self-Representation in Contemporary American
Women’s Autobiographies
Contemporary women’s autobiographical fiction not only articulates
the painful position of having no place to call one’s own but also both
illustrates the construction of a space within alienating literary and
cultural forms and the fracturing of those forms so that they might accommodate
the marginal subject. The politics of location that arises in contemporary
women’s narratives of multi-cultural self-representation articulates a
paradoxical position of dislocation even as the subject constructs a self
within a perceived position of absence. It is from this position of paradoxical
being that the ex-centric subject seeks to express herself. Such a subject
is, of necessity, in the process of mapping new cultural spaces. In the
autobiographics of Dorothy Allison, Kim Chernin, and Minnie Bruce Pratt,
there is no final place of arrival, but rather a continual narrative enactment
of the journey of self-discovery, a fluid, ongoing process that, even in
the narratives’ conclusions, opens out into yet another story of the shifting
terrain of subjectivity. Drawing on metaphors of transformation that include
scaling walls, shedding coats, and fracturing frames, these writers convey
a continual process of cultural negotiation of those categories of identity
through which the female subject may represent the self.
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Nieves Pascual, Depathologizing Anorexia: The
Risks of Life Narratives
Anorexia is a disorder based on the negation of desire and the pleasure
that results from it. The anorexic rebels by demonstrating that she gains
pleasure despite her pain and upon her self-cancellation. Three first-person
narratives of supposedly recovered anorexics published in the United States
during the late 70s and early 80s are Solitaire, by Aimee Liu (1979), The
Obsession, by Kim Chernin (1981), and Sheila MacLeod’s The Art of Starvation:
A Story of Anorexia and Survival (1982). Writing reactivates in these women
the desire to go hungry because it imitates the act of fasting and restores
its pleasures. But these women never find the language with which to say
their needs. In addition, this writing entails denial of what happened
and the invention of narratives that gloss over trauma into scenarios acceptable
to the writers and the readers. So not only does it sustain the authors’
desire and inaugurate their hunger, but it also promotes the wish to catch
the illness in readers who see in anorexia a fundamental ontological experience.
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Marsha F. Cassidy, Visible Storytellers: Women
Narrators on 1950s Daytime Television
Before soap opera pervaded daytime television, the airwaves were filled
with variants of the “confessional quiz show,” a hybrid genre in which
“everyday” women traded the public recitation of their life stories for
the chance to win prizes. Kinescopes of the popular programs Strike It
Rich, Queen for a Day, It Could Be You, and The Big Payoff reveal that
while contestants are required to narrate their own personal stories, their
words are routinely constrained and even silenced by overarching narrative
frames. In varying degrees on each program, the voice of the woman narrator
is prompted, interrupted, edited, summarized, and even muted by the authoritative
speech of others. Thus caught between utterance and its curtailment, the
woman storyteller appears on the screen as a spectacle of hysterics and
eroticism. On these early television programs, women narrators are rendered
speechless while a watchful camera records their every emotion.
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