One of the most unsettling films of the 1990s, Jane Campion's awardwinning The Piano abandoned the safe ground of classic adaptation, the favoured mode of Victoriana at the movies, for something altogether riskier and more inventive. A few weeks after its United States opening, a cartoon poking gentle fun at the media hype surrounding The Piano appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Reprising one of the film's most memorable scenes, the piano itself stands alone on the sweeping curve of a New Zealand beach. A thought bubble rising from the stranded instrument encloses a mental image of a comfortable Victorian parlour. The piano is dreaming, not of music, but of home. By providing the piano with domestic longings and an interior life, The New Yorker cartoon parodied the film's own elaborate conceit that the piano was as much subject as object – one of a trio of nineteenth-century émigrés that include its owner, the mute Ada, and her young daughter, Flora. As the prosthesis that serves as Ada's lost or repressed ‘voice’, the piano supplies the missing sense that to others makes her human, a symbiosis that animates the instrument also, endowing it, for characters and audience alike, with figurative agency. In the film's extended play on the piano's metaphorical possibilities, place and time become more or less equivalent, so that the piano's perilous journey and miraculously safe arrival on the beach – only a little out of tune – is itself suggestive of its survival as a marker of cultural literacy that extends – but only just – into the present.