Jane Campion’s Palimpsestuous Gothic: Kinship in Top of the Lake: China Girl

Schmertz’s chapter explores Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) as a consideration of the incest taboo and the traffic in women that manifests it, framed by the work of Gayle Rubin (1975). If, Schmertz argues, Rubin critiques the practice of mapping law and culture onto sexuality and female reproduction through incest taboos, Campion’s exploration of the outsourcing of reproduction through surrogacy deepens Rubin’s assertions. With the theme of surrogacy, the cultural goal of exogamy established by the incest taboo is exploded from within by Campion, in what the director calls an ‘ovarian’ rather than ‘feminist’ practice (Vineyard 2017). Schmertz argues that Campion thus takes us back to a non-differentiated, pre-civilized space, harnessing the disruptive potential of Gothic themes. In this way, China Girl critiques social structures created through exclusion and division rather than attachment, proscription rather than connection. In the ocean’s ebbs and flows, in its liminal spaces that signify birth and return to origins, Schmertz argues Campion’s ‘mother’ returns to threaten patriarchal structures in order to reclaim her child. The director’s palimpsestuous approach to exploring the family, according to Schmertz, explodes kinship structures, so that new ways of ‘making kin’ can occur.