Using her mind's voice, Ada tells us at the beginning of The Piano that she has not spoken a single solitary word since the age of six, and that she does not know why. She is in her thirties when we are introduced to her, and has a young daughter, Flora, who is quite vocal (she has, as Roger Ebert correctly notes, more lines than anybody else in the film). But, as Jacques Derrida would be apt to point out, Ada is not silent. She is communicative in her silence, using sign language, the written word, and her piano as her preferred methods of expression, but is also vocal by simply inhabiting her space and being quiet. It is significant that Ada's muteness is by choice and not accidental. She could speak if she wanted to, but she remains mum for whatever reason. This way she is in control, is slightly subversive, and is in effect a strong female character, which is something arguably absent in much of cinema's celluloid corpus.

          The piano is her main form of expression. So integral is it to her life that she brings it with her by boat all the way from Scotland to New Zealand when she is sent abroad to be married off to Stewart, an unsentimental and charmless bachelor involved in some sort of manual labour there with Maori tribesmen as his crew. Stewart is so insensitive to this attachment to the piano that he decides it is too heavy to be lifted back to their home deep in the forest and it must remain on the beach where they landed. He then decides to barter it off to Baines, a neighbour, and tells an indignantly respite Ada that they must all learn to make sacrifices. He does not understand just how much the piano means to her, how it is more than just a recreational musical instrument. It baffles him to see Ada carve piano keys into their kitchen table and tap on it as though she were playing it like a piano. It makes no music and is silent, as he tells one of the older women in the house. She is instantly perceived to be peculiar and odd; someone who is going to give him a difficult time, he can tell.

          Baines does seem to understand how much the piano means to Ada. She first seeks him out to show her to it so she can play, and this is the point where Baines hears her play and decides that the music is so beautiful that he must possess it. Of course, the music's beauty is an extension of Ada's inner beauty, which perfectly eludes Stewart. Thus begins Baines' crude attempt at erotic seduction, offering the piano back to her in increments of keys for every sexual activity she goes along with. Ada, reluctant at first, concedes, wins back the piano and takes it home, but longs for the attention that Baines gave her through his appreciation of her music. I think that there is a temptation to accuse Baines of sexual extortion (sextortion?) by making Ada go along with his prolonged foreplay, but it seems innocent and almost childlike. He does want her, and not just her body. And she in turn wants him - he has her heart, which she reveals to him on an engraved piano key from her very piano. The two of them seem like teenaged star-crossed lovers because there is such pure sexual and emotional enjoyment in their relationship. Indeed, there were moments when I felt that Flora was more of an adult than Ada or Baines.

          Stewart is unreceptive to Ada and her affinity for her piano, and expects her to warm up to him and be his affectionate and doting wife without any expectation that he should be interested in her. He strikes me as the sort of man who likely wouldn't mind a wife who spoke but said nothing, which is a concept that Derrida speaks of in his article "What I Would Have Said..." He is forceful in his idea of emotional attachment, punishing her at the very end by first chopping up her piano with his axe and then slicing off one of her fingers when she spurns him for Baines, threatening to cut off every other finger with each succeeding offence. This lead me to think that despite his ability to speak, it is Stewart who has difficulty communicating his feelings openly, not Ada, and only through his silent carnage in the end do we really get a sense of how profoundly disturbed he is. All along we seem to know just what Ada is feeling; it is coded in her music, translated for us animatedly by Flora, and written with exclamation points on her notepad.

          I think that Stewart can read Ada's silence as telling him that she does not find him interesting at all, though, and this bothers him. It is especially noticeable in the scene where Ada goes to his bedroom and undresses him while he is asleep. He awakens, startled, and tries to touch her back but she shirks back to her own room. She finds him curious, and tries to be the sort of nondescript erotic sexual object described by Laura Mulvey in her book, The Sexual Object. But she snaps back to reality and returns to her previous state of mind, pining away for Baines instead, who truly understands her, and truly mystifies and interests her. Stewart does not seem to see Ada as someone he can reason with because his words do not seem to connect with her and she cannot communicate with him in any way that is intelligible to him, other than by the obviousness of keeping her distance from him, acting coldly towards him, and running off to make love with Baines. If she spoke, she might tell him what she feels, not that he would act much differently towards her in the end. But contrasting this with the sort of woman he appears to want, which fits Mulvey's description of woman as sexual object (in other words someone sexually submissive who is quiet but listens to him, and someone he can communicate with), I wonder what sort of person she would be. Would this little obedient wifey be a mere vessel, devoid of any character? Verbal and responsive to him but still saying nothing and exuding a lack of depth? Or would she be someone otherwise muted, her piano on some faraway beach or her finger chopped off (her tongue cut out, metaphorically speaking)? Would she have any character, or would her character simply be silent or imprisoned? I think the latter to be true. But what accounts for the silence of a character, not simply the silence in a person's demeanour? Perhaps it is a lack of the proper outlets, or being forced from them. Ada, for me, had mastered her outlets of communication and freely expressed her character, which I deeply admired her for.