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Tram Dao
Professor Mang
English 101
13 December 2015
Feminine Self-Expression in The Piano and “The Story of an Hour”
The film The Piano, directed in 1993 by Jane Campion, and the short story of “The
Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin in 1894, are two examples of outstanding perception of
female reality embodies in words and in actions. Both of these authors enable the audience to
dive into the psychological barriers and restricted freedom faced by women throughout their
life. Both Campion and Chopin’s work emphasizes that gender interrelations have an inept
effect on the sensation of happiness among women. Moreover, both works send the message
that women should be treated equally as to men and to live life at its fullest rather than being a
grey shadow who takes anything in life as an obligation. Thus, The Piano and “The Story of
an Hour” have a wide range of similarities that refer to a woman’s self-expression in terms of
gender role in society; both works exhibit a woman’s desire to be free from their unwanted
husband.
First of all, both The Piano and “The Story of an Hour” reflect the problems faced
by the females back in the end of the 19th century, the burden of the obligation to live with a
man they do not love and the spiritual and emotional necessity to be free from this burden. In
her essay “Power and Pleasure in Jan Campion’s The Piano,” Reshela DuPuis introduces The
Piano as a film that is “much more than just one woman’s vision of a classic nineteenth-
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century European romance, a potentially tragic love triangle transported to a far outpost of the
empire. The Film contains graphic, highly eroticized scenes of sexual and physical violence
against its main female character, including coerced sex, attempted rape, and brutal
dismemberment” (DuPuis 52). Indeed, The Piano is a story about the sensual and hidden
emotional life of a woman. The film is not only coved with a pleasant atmosphere and
romantic, which makes this film more attractive, but also the film brings out a message about
gender relations, which still has meaning in our modern society. In the film, the viewer sees a
deaf woman Ada and her little daughter. The woman has lost her husband and was sold by her
farther into marriage to a New Zealand frontiersman, Alisdair Stewart, though faced serious
difficulties finding love in her heart for him. Not understanding how the piano is important to
Ada, Stewart refuses to carry the piano to her new home. Stewart then trades Ada’ piano to
