AustLit

'This thesis provides a study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this thesis draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. The first two chapters look at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. They explore the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity. The final two chapters discuss Dorothy Porter's 1994 verse novel The Monkey's Mask and the ways in which the female voice is articulated within Porter's text. Drawing on Silverman's argument that the embodied female voice in film works to contain the woman in the symbolic, I argue that, although the female characters' voices are embodied, their poetic language breaks down the subject-object dichotomy of the symbolic order. However, in its attempt to fulfil detective narrative conventions, the film adaptation privileges the unity and closure of the phallocentric language critiqued by Irigaray. Compared with the novel, the film adaptation privileges masculine unity and truth over Porter's complex multiplicity. Porter uses the hysteric strategy through her parody of the detective genre and thereby brings to the foreground the complexity of female sexuality. In Porter's novel the relationship between female detective Jill and murder-victim Mickey reveals a continuous link between the living and the dead, bringing to light Irigaray's model of the maternal genealogy in which the mother is freed from the burial given to her by a phallocentric culture at the onset of motherhood. Porter's use of elegy rejects Silverman's suggested severance of the mother-daughter connection which Silverman argues is necessary for identity.' Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 06/07/2010).