Rule, Britannia! by Homer B. Pettey R. Barton Palmer

Author:Homer B. Pettey,R. Barton Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Uncanny Dress

Nelly’s dark dress as she walks along the sea in numerous scenes of the film is uncanny and haunting; it is too similar yet too strange in its evocation of other Victorian dresses paraded before our eyes in many other films. It seems to be uncomfortably placed on Nelly’s body as she breathlessly walks along the coastline and seems to hark, visually and metaphorically, to other Victorian screen women who likewise wear their dresses with ill ease. Nelly reminds me of, for example, Mia Wasikowska’s Jane Eyre in the 2011 film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, who paces restlessly within the winding landscape and house of Thornfield Hall in a tightly-laced Victorian dress, holding her slim hands against an equally slim and fragile waist in frustration and breathlessness. Similarly, the dark tones of the dress speak of Ada’s darkly exaggerated Victorian garbs in The Piano, which are self-consciously depicted as strange creatures in themselves, distinctly out of place in an alien colonial landscape. In one scene, we view the outline of her dress’s bone corseting forming an emaciated, womb-like creature on the shores of a newly colonized land, while in another, we see this huge billowing dress float around her like “a domed sea creature,” to use Gail Jones’s words (The Piano 3), within the bottom of the sea.

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