Kramer, Lawrence. “Recognizing Schubert: Musical Subjectivity, Cultural Change, and Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady.” Critical Inquiry 29.1 (2002): 25-52.

The film opens with a miniature music video showing the young women of today dreaming and dancing alone or posing together. The screenplay speaks of  “a series of portraits—not stills but living, breathing young women…innocent and dogmatic, spontaneous, full of theories, with delicate, desultory, flamelike spirits,  facing their destinies.”2The camera, though, cannot quite cross the gap between inanimate stills and “flamelike” animation. All but one of the images—a brief flicker of living flame—are in marmoreal black and white. The camera repeatedly draws close to the figures it captures, as if seeking to embrace or understand them, but they seem indifferent to it. Their very contemporaneity, the unclosed, barely opened shape of their stories, seems to be making them inscrutable. ( P 26)

In the same vein, the women also seem deaf to the music on the soundtrack; one even sways to her own music on a portable CD player with headphones. The soundtrack music is dreamy and lyrical; its texture—a Dorian melody on recorder against pastoral strings—invokes an earlier time, a gesture reinforced by the black-and-white photography. All in all, the video creates a cinematic time warp in which the present appears with the distance of the past. And the past reciprocates; it ends the video and begins the diegesis by assuming the immediacy of the present. The film’s title appears written on a pointing hand, an archaic type of sign vivified by a switch to color and one that will recur, in marble, at a key moment. What the hand points to is Isabel’s face, which becomes the magnet for a long, intimate, color close-up. “We have settled,” says the screenplay, “in intimate detail on [her] face…. She could be today’s girl, but she happens to live in 1870” (PLS, p.1). The story comes to life from this moment of face-to-face intimacy, which will be renewed and deepened throughout the film. ( P 27)

A key role in this story is played by the mysterious Madame Merle, a pawn ---revealed too late---of Gilbert Osmond, Isabel’s husband, as well as his former lover and the mother of his daughter, Pansy. The meeting of these two women forms a key scene early in the novel. Strange to tell, the person who introduces them is Franz Schubert:

The lady at the piano played remarkably well. She was playing something of      

Schubert’s---Isabel knew not what, but recognized Schubert—and she

touched the piano with a discretion of her own. It showed skill, it showed

feeling; Isabel sat down noiselessly on the nearest chair and waited till the end of

the piece. When it finished she felt a strong desire to thank the player and rose

from her seat to do so…. “That’s very beautiful, and your playing makes it

more beautiful till,” said Isabel with all the young radiance with which she

usually uttered a truthful rapture. [PL, p.151]

Schubert disappears from the novel after this, but his bit part in the scene is important. His music is the medium for the state of entrancement that prefigures Madame Merle’s  “momentous influence” (PL, p.151). Just what music doesn’t matter; it is the ineffable and familiar Schubert style that inveigles Isabel into an emotional intimacy measured both by her noiseless sitting down and her voluble getting up. James’s text clearly assumes that the reader shares Isabel’s cultural lore as common property. It assumes an image of Schubert as the composer of a very beautiful but somewhat enervating music, a music both prized and mistrusted for eliciting gushes of emotion.3 ( P 28)

An image of Schubert also plays a role, and an expanded one, in Campion’s film, but both the image and the role it plays are very different. Campion’s Schubert is a tormented outsider, a figure for what Isabel, against all expectation, turns out to be. This Schubert, this musical double for Isabel Archer, evolves out of the dialogue with which the scene in the novel continues. Isabel is referring to her dying uncle: ‘“I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better.’ The lady smiled and discriminated. ‘I’m afraid there are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us’” (PL, p.151). James’s irony here goes mainly to Isabel’s naivete, her failure to divine the disenchantment hidden beneath the musical and social surface. Thanks to Schubert’s slightly overripe beauty, Isabel mistakes a common blackbird—le merle—for a nightingale. Campion goes further. She takes Madame Merle’s pronouncement as a kind of witch’s spell or hypnotic suggestion and shapes the film’s narrative around it through the medium of the soundtrack, into which Schubert increasingly steps as a haunting presence. As the failure of Isabel’s marriage drives her to despair, Schubert will indeed have “nothing to say” to her, but he will have a great deal to say for her, and about her, in her place. At the turning point in her crisis, when she wins an equivocal moral victory at the cost of continued misery, Schubert will once again speak “to” her through the medium of memory, albeit a deeply internalized and perhaps unconscious memory.( P 28)

As filmed by Campion, the meeting of Isabel and Madame Merle proves the point, inverting the subject’s turn and displacing the speaking voice towards music as a higher, more numinous source. Campion’s Isabel (Nicole Kidman) is not merely controlled by the playing of Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey); she is mesmerized by it, almost made its puppet. When her presence causes an interruption, she gropes for the nearest chair as if her nerves had come unstrung and haltingly asks to hear more. Madame Merle, meanwhile, with her back to her listener, has not seemed to be addressing Isabel at all. The authoritative voice that puts one woman under the other’s spell is entirely Schubert’s, figuratively or incorporeally present in the music, which the movie audience, unlike the reader, can actually hear, and hear at length. As the scene unfolds, it assumes the character of a seduction, not to an erotic tie, but to Isabel’s idealizing/narcissistic identification with Madame Merle as the embodiment of refined sensibility and emotional depth. The vehicle of these impressions---false ones, as events will prove—is once again the voice of Schubert, which comes to Isabel as the reward of a tacitly negotiated social and psychological exchange. ( P 30)

A scarcely audible tinkling at first, the music seems to summon Isabel from afar. It clarifies gradually as she turns her head, descends a staircase, and approaches the closed room from which the sound emanates. The piece proves to be the A-flat Impromptu of Op.90. Its glittering upper-voice arpeggios and striving inner-voice melody accompany Isabel as she nears the door to the piano room, where she stands and listens by a mirror that gives us, but not her, a double image of her face (figs.1-3). Just as this happens the music makes the transition to its middle section, an agitated, highly emotional episode in C-sharp minor. The juxtaposition of image and sound tells us that Isabel is reflected in the music: that the music, in Lacanian terms, is the imaginary, the specular image, by which she is captured, and in which she perceives her split, incoherent self as a single entity. Isabel is her own doppelganger. Like someone singing the famous Schubert song to which the soundtrack will later allude, she plays the roles of both Death and the Maiden.

The music’s own split personality mirrors, so to speak, this mirroring. The arpeggios and the striving theme are expressively worlds apart, yet they sound together; taken together they are an expressive world apart from the impassioned music they envelop, yet they incubate the passion by the way they combine. The arpeggios descend in little iridescent bursts, rhythmically regular and broken by rests, while the theme extends itself continuously through repetition of a single syncopated figure along a rising trajectory (example 1). Reiterated incessantly, the two seem to be seeking, with mounting urgency, a point of convergence, of reconciliation and release—seeking, one might say, the threshold of their fate, like Isabel at the door. What they find, however, is not the expected A-flat-major cadence that eventually ensues, but its sudden, revelatory conversion into the transitional passage leading to C-sharp minor and the middle section (example 2). By adding a dissonant note-a routine dissonance, but one that sounds enormously transformative in this context—the transition recasts the tonic A-flat major as the dominant of Db minor, which is respelled as C-sharp.6

Schubert’s music, as the mirror at the piano room door has told us, and subsequent mirror images will tell us again, is Isabel’s alter ego. It is a character, a doppelganger, a directly embodied subjectivity that is half Isabel’s and half Schubert’s. The quartet music is the more uncanny in this respect both because Isabel never hears it when we do and because, with a single exception, it is never fully present in its own right. It is, as presented, series of  fragments that both intimates and in a larger sense contains the whole of which it is a part: the whole person and the whole story, which is to say, the whole film. Its fragmentation, which becomes increasingly pronounced after the first excerpt, becomes a realization of Isabel’s subjective incoherence: bleeding pieces of an unarticulated whole. Taken together with the piano excerpts, the quartet sequence—the quartet quartet, so to speak---gives the essence of Isabel’s story without its narrative elaboration. Like the theme of Death and the Maiden itself, the musical story assumes the role of an archetype, a deep home truth: that inescapable fate again. ( P 35)

First, the images accompanied by the quartet music parody or revoke Isabel’s initial freedom. Staircases during the first and third excerpts recall the stairs down which Isabel was first drawn by Madame Merle’s performance of the A-flat Impromptu; the

marble hand from the first excerpt recalls the living hand of the title sequence, pointing the Isabel with the legend The portrait of a Lady inscribed across its palm (thus turning us all into palm readers); the iron grate by the Colosseum in the second excerpt speaks for itself. In the final excerpt, with the multiple images of her face in extreme close-up, Isabel seems to be imprisoned or crushed by the film screen itself, which her face abrades as the music abrades it.

Second, the music in these scenes is warped—fragmented and exacerbated—in response to Isabel’s predicament. Though all but one of the variations in the quartet movement are anguished or agitated, the movement sustains an underlying harmonic pattern that offers degree of mitigation. That pattern is a recurrent rise from a beginning and continuation in the minor mode to a conclusion in the major, a recurrence, one might say, of chances for consolation that affirms a consoling potential even though it ultimately fails to console. The film’s quartet music is decisively cut off from this pattern. The only excerpts allowed to conclude are the fragment of variation 2, whose close in the major is immediately revoked by the onset of variation 3, and the semi-complete statement of number 3 itself, which is the only variation in the movement that ends in the minor. The excerpts from variations 1 and 5 are cut off before their conclusions in the major can be heard; variation 4, which is all major, is never heard. In addition, the retroactive turn of the last excerpt to the first variation suggest the workings of a cyclical rather than a progressive movement, the tightening of an emotional noose from which Isabel has only the most narrow and equivocal of escapes. ( P 42)

The quartet episodes gain still further significance in relation to the film’s standard extradiegetic music. Campion uses this music sparingly. Its dominant message (or trigger) is the pressure of sexuality, to which Isabel is highly sensitive but which she does not know how to enjoy and constantly seeks to repress. The first instance involves heavy, pulsating, erotic strings, bound to the minor mode and carrying overtones of both Puccini and the Baroque. The music materializes—as so often in this film, creeping up from the threshold of audibility—after a persistent suitor, whom Isabel both dislikes and desires, touches her face in her London room. The touch provokes a long, quasi-masturbatory scene that segues into an explicit sexual fantasy involving three different men, including Ralph. The pressure of sexuality translates literally here into the heavy stroke of bow on strings. The next instance, to the identical music, occurs in the underground passageway—symbolically the crypt or hellmouth—where Osmond first kisses Isabel, evoking a sexual response reminiscent of her earlier fantasy.(Isabel’s arousal expresses itself in faint, half-suppressed moans that form a counterpoint to the music both here and elsewhere.) Osmond’s kiss is explicitly the kind that “stops the mouth,”  cutting off speech with the direct oral production of desire. The film registers this oral leap, which seems to thrill Isabel and threaten her autonomy in equal measure, with the onset of sensuous music. Two scenes of kissing also conjure up such music at the film’s conclusion. The die is cast, however, at or even before the very beginning, as “ acousmatic” (that is, sourceless) female voices talk candidly about kissing over a black screen just before the opening “music video” begins.12 ( P 43)

Osmond’s kiss remains with Isabel as she goes on a world tour. The sequence that tracks her voyage is shot like an old-fashioned black-and-white movie on a screen-within-the-screen whose slightly rippled edges also suggest an old-fashioned picture postcard. The scene on this card-screen, introduced by piano music that sustains the silent-movie allusion at a certain remove, combines travel footage with erotic fantasy. One memorable sequence shows Osmond at the center of a Hitchcockian pinwheel (derived from his earlier twirling of Isabel’s parasol) with a distinct Svengali look on his face, into which a tiny naked Isabel plummets. The tiny figure, seen from behind, is subsequently  enlarged and seen frontally, now falling toward the audience. Isabel’s memory of the words before Osmond’s kiss, “I’m absolutely in love with you,” begins with his offscreen voice, but gradually comes to be echoed antiphonally by hers as the Svengali spell completes itself. The subsumption of her voice by his carries the visual imagery of evil-magician Osmond and puppet-Isabel into the resonating subjective interior; both her memory and her desire become a mechanical repetition of his words.13 ( P 44)

In Campion’s film, the music’s embrace of the broken self, or more exactly of the break that it takes to constitute selfhood, is confined neither to the narrative specifics of the diegesis nor even to the invocation of the postmodern Schubert as Isabel Archer’s alter ego. The musical vicissitudes of Schubert as Isabel’s story all reenact the core trope of center-margin reversal, which they invest with the full force or musical affect and impulse. In other words, the music repeatedly translate a conceptual indeterminacy into a symbolic priority. The process begins with the movement, literally tracked by Isabel’s following the sound of the A-flat Impromptu to its source, from aesthetic recognition to interpellation, and more particularly from the compelling Beethovenian traits of autonomy and veracity to the seductive Schubertian ones of intimacy and illusion. Thereafter the symbolic priority goes to the Schubertian soundtrack itself in excess of the narrative image, and this at several levels, though without overtly disrupting the image’s conventional centrality.24 Thus we have the general displacement, the synoptic compression, of Isabel’s narrative into Schubert’s music; into music that both does (“Death and the Maiden”) and does not (the Impromptus) have textual associations that reproduce that narrative as an allegory of her fate; and into a musical “from” that is both narratively open (all made of excerpts, most lacking cadences) and musically closed (the A B A cycle from Impromptus to Quartet to Impromptus). ( P 51)

But she is also running into the future. Surrounded by the snows of yesteryear, Isabel is more a paradigm than a person, as much so as the postmodern Schubert who is her tutelary spirit. The cocoon the two have woven together is, like all cocoons, a liminal space. Isabel’s story is over, but it could be just beginning: “She could be today’s girl, but she happens to live in 1870.” So her story is not quite over because the stories of her heirs, the girls in the opening video, have scarcely begun. Campion’s Schubert defines the space of vital marginality from which those stories can be imagined, not least by their appointed heroines, even if he has nothing to say to them. His music becomes the medium in which Isabel’s thwarted fate survives as a possibility for others because it alone has not been given up. The music secures this survival not simply by giving symbolic priority to the figure of the tormented outsider but by establishing both the historical distance and the contemporary nearness of that figure in the same breath, at the same time. The film’s postmodern voice belongs to Schubert. And the Schubert it belongs to is above all a figure of relocated social power, the bellwether of a change not just in musical politics but in the politics of subjectivity. ( P 52)