A century and a half later, Jane Campion, writer and director of The Piano, returns to the battleground of her iconoclastic predecessor, Emily Bronte. Many viewers are aware that the awesome vision Campion commits to film springs from the same mythopoeic source as Wuthering Heights . A psychoanalytic critic might see that the film's voyage and return (from Scotland to New Zealand and back) embodies a regression to the impassioned, primitive wilds of symbiotic attachment and rage mat the girl child (and the boy) must negotiate on the developmental journey to adult sexual and human(e) maturity. The feminist critic would add that Campion has returned intentionally to Bronte's time to restate the problem of the girl child/woman trapped in patriarchal culture.

Still further, it is my premise mat The Piano is a deliberate, complexly restructured telling of the same (her)story as Wuthering Heights. The same urgent questions underlie both works: What are we capable of looking at,