Flaunting dissonance: The queering of narrative and gender boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story

Introduction: Patrick White and the queer critical field

Many of the early critical works on Patrick White’s oeuvre (Morley, 1972; Beatson 1976; Wolfe, 1983; Bliss, 1986) seek to recuperate his novels within what Donald Pease perceptively refers to as “the bankruptcy of the ‘universalizing’ discourse of liberal humanism” (Pease, 1995: vii). These works subsume the subversive implications of White’s work by restraining them safely within a canonical tradition imbricated with academic (and, as I hope to show) heterosexual orthodoxy. Even within much present scholarship on White, as Elizabeth McMahon notes:

the critical emphasis remains heavily weighted towards White’s depiction of the “human condition” rather than the sexualized subject […]. But the deflection from the queer specifics of White’s writing is not the same as a universalized mode of reading. Rather, it performs a slippage between the putatively universal subject of White’s fiction, well ensconced in the readership by White’s preceding work, and a universalizing reading practice that is “sex-blind”. In this desire to include the homosexual as the familiar “universal subject of a Patrick White novel”, the specifics and differences of this figure and the writing are elided and remain quarantined from other ways in which White’s fiction is discussed ― the discourses of metaphysics or phenomenology, for instance. (McMahon, in McMahon and Olubas, 2010: 85–86)

While later scholars have utilized queer theory as a means of challenging orthodox explorations of his fiction (McCann, 1998; McMahon, in McMahon and Olubas, 2010; ¹ Davidson 2010; Moore 2015, 2018; Grogan, 2018), they have tended to concentrate on later novels, such as The Twyborn Affair (1979) and Memoirs of Many in One (1987), where the queer valences are more overt. In her groundbreaking recent book, Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan includes a chapter dealing with The Aunt’s Story and The Twyborn Affair. However, in line with her central thesis, the emphasis is on how these novels posit “a language of corporeality in which identity dissolves and the ambiguous merging of self and other is effected” (2018: 180). Grogan foregrounds the importance of the body in White’s work, where “bodies blur the boundaries necessary to maintaining fixed ― in White’s view, dangerously rigid ― identities, overturning, moreover, the modern denial of the body that incorporates the hypocritical politeness of British colonialism” (2018: 15). In my examination of The Aunt’s Story (1977), though, I intend to focus on how the eponymous aunt as unruly, “queer” subject, becomes the carrier of her creator’s own contestatory re-enactments of his fraught relationship to representation, agency, and gender politics. As Guy Davidson points out, “a postmodern camp aesthetic that emphasizes theatricality and surface […] always lurked as a potential within his work but […] was only fully manifested with White’s breaking of the compact of the open secret that had formed around his sexuality” (2010: 17). It is this relatively arcane potential in an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story that this article attempts to bring to light.

White’s dissident queer authorship

Denied the oedipal completion afforded by an “authentic” relationship to the heterosexist patriarchate to which he can only gesture, White is nevertheless able to exploit his liminal status by scrambling the codes of sexual legitimation in such a way that the social hypostatization of authenticity is itself called into question. The novel reflects his role as outsider and nominal insider, offering a dualistic typology which centres upon a paradoxical simultaneity of concealment and confession. ² This is something which becomes particularly important in relation to White’s autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). As far as The Aunt’s Story is concerned, White displaces this paradoxical sense of doubling/dividedness onto Theodora Goodman. As Brenda Bosman comments:

Theo/Theodora has been incapable from the first of accepting the either/or subject-positions of “man” or “woman”, offered by the symbolic order […] and has long since fallen into the double hell of non-meaning in terms of those strict alternatives. (1989: 62)

Bosman sees this dualism in terms of the “disjunction and dislocation to which the androgyne is subjected” (1989: 62). She therefore holds that it is in keeping with her examination of Alternative Mythical Structures in the Fiction of Patrick White, as the title of her study indicates. However, I view the figure of the androgyne as a euphemistic signifier for the gay subject, a convenient but ultimately false lure deployed by White as a means by which he can enact, and yet also refract and sublimate, his gay identity.

It is through Theodora that White turns the gaze of hegemonic culture against itself. He does so by means of a phalanx of scopophilic images, which accrue a capacity for an ironic destabilization of viewer and viewed, insider and outsider, primary and secondary, and the unequal purchase on power with which these positions are associated.

White deploys this network of visual images most tellingly in the form of the triangulated desire which exists between Theodora, her sister Fanny, and Frank Parrott, Theo’s potential — but Fanny’s actual — suitor. A central incident which occurs fairly early on in the novel provides a suggestive allusive framework for a discussion of the visual register which is insinuated provocatively between sexual otherness and sexual orthodoxy. The incident concerns the shooting contest involving Theodora and Frank who go out hunting for rabbits, accompanied by Fanny. Significantly, Theo is depicted as a discordant presence, existing outside the self-assured realm inhabited by her sister and Frank Parrott: “Fanny’s face bloomed in the frost beside Frank’s red gold. Why, God, am I this? Theodora asked, knowing that expectation and the temperature had turned her skin a deeper yellow” (1977: 68). ³ The colour imagery here emphasizes the pathos of Theo’s position as other, a position confirmed on the visual plane by the sexual complicity between her sister and Frank: “[Fanny] pulled at a piece of grass and giggled. Frank laughed too. He could not look at her enough” (69; emphasis added). When Theo shoots the first rabbit, Frank having missed with his initial shot, Fanny says: “‘I told you […] that Theo would thrash you’. But she touched his arm to soften the blow, and her glance excluded Theodora” (70; emphasis added).

As excluded other, Theodora cannot participate in the circuit of desire, and remains outside the eroticized relay of glances between Frank and Fanny. Her feelings of otherness at first compel her to succumb to the feminine masquerade. ⁴ She adopts a mask of cultivated incompetence whereby she parades her own lack, in order to acquiesce to the phallic imperative residing in Frank, who is an attractive figure both to herself and to her sister. After shooting the first rabbit, Theodora deliberately aims a little to the right: “She had wanted to. She had wanted to feel his child’s pleasure soar, and say this is mine” (70). Significantly, before this, when most acutely aware of her deviance from the feminine stereotype, Theodora feels that “[n]ow the weight of her gun would not console” (68). It is as if the gun initiates a sudden awareness of her unwitting trespass against orthodox gender roles, which has caused people to view her as being like “some bloke in skirts” (67). At first, Theo wishes to accede to the fact of her castration/lack so that she will be able to participate in the heterosexualized libidinal economy as an object of desire. Earlier on in the novel, this economy is represented, significantly, in terms of a game, where the child, Fanny, casts Theo as her husband:

“Let us play at houses,” Fanny said. “I shall have a house with twenty rooms […]. You are my husband, Theo, but you will be out most of the day, riding around the place. You have many sheep, and you will make a great deal of money, and buy me diamonds and lovely furs […] Listen, Theo, look! How can you play if you don’t listen?’

‘Yes? Tell me,” Theodora said.

And she returned. She stood to learn the rules of the game that she must play. (31; emphasis added)

Fanny’s exhortation to her sister/husband to “[l]isten, Theo, look!” implicate listening and, more importantly, looking, within a register of mimicry and masquerade, the rules of which Fanny has managed to learn by rote, as indicated by her automatic assumption of feminine lack in the shooting episode with Frank: “[Fanny] looked about, a little too keen, confident that her failure would not detract. She could feel his eyes. He would swallow down any little prettiness she might perpetrate” (69). This is a lack which Theodora, in her mimicking of her sister’s masquerade by feigning inadequacy as a markswoman, has consciously to embody. The stress on learning the rules of the game of heterosexual self-constitution through looking/imitation/mimicry, however, also carries the implicit suggestion that all mimicking involves a potential failure to mimic correctly. Any accession to heterosexual citizenship can only ever approximate, rather than fully instantiate, the ideal which such citizenship represents. Even for Lacan who, like Freud, tends to valorize the heterosexual matrix, the elaborate system of masks and masquerade by which the sexes approach one another produces “the effect that the ideal or typical manifestations of behavior in both sexes, up to and including the act of sexual copulation, are entirely propelled into comedy” (Lacan, qtd. in Mitchell and Rose, 1985: 84).

In the examples quoted above, Theodora’s role in the visual/sexual economy is a passive one: it is Fanny and Frank as the embodiment of orthodox gender positions who are connected with an active looking, one which confirms and reinforces the rules of the game within which their courtship rituals are enacted. And yet, significantly, once Theodora opts out of the heterosexual masquerade and refuses to be complicit with her own subservient role, she becomes associated with a murderous clarity of vision by which she demonstrates her tacit repudiation of the heterosexual contract. This occurs when she decides to shoot the little hawk:

[Theodora] knew with some fear and pleasure that she had lost control. This, she said, is the red eye. And her vision tore at the air, as if it were old wool on a dead sheep. She was as sure as the bones of a hawk in flight.

Now she took her gun. She took aim, and it was like aiming at her own red eye. She could feel the blood-beat the other side of the membrane. And she fired. And it fell. It was an old broken umbrella tumbling off a shoulder. […]

She felt exhausted, but there was no longer any pain. She was as negative as air. […]

After that Theodora often thought of the little hawk she had so deliberately shot. I was wrong, she said, but I shall continue to destroy myself, right down to the last of my several lives. [The hawk] was her aspiration. In a sense she had succeeded, but at the same time she had failed. If Frank had not understood the extent or exact nature of her failure, it was because he could not. His eyes would remain the same glazed blue. (71; emphasis added)

As Carolyn Bliss points out: “In the first of the novel’s three sections, Theodora suffers a series of deaths, or diminutions of self, most of them suicides […]. Chronologically, her first death takes place when she shoots the little hawk” (1986: 37). Bliss does not really offer an analysis of the significance of what Theodora considers to be self-annihilation, or of the powerful and strange attraction which it seems to hold for her. That said, she does note in passing that “the shooting incident puts an end to the tentative interest Frank had been developing in [Theodora]” (1986: 39).

To my mind, it is here that the main import of the event lies. By implicitly linking Theodora’s actions with a suicidal impulse, White hints at the murderous logic of what Adrienne Rich has famously called “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich, 1980: 632). A failure to comply with the cultural imperative which the heterosexual pact implies is suicidal in terms of the forfeiture of social tenure that inevitably accompanies such failure. This is why Theodora sees the hawk as “her aspiration. In a sense she had succeeded, but at the same time she had failed”. She has aspired to the socially sanctioned safety which a relationship with Frank Parrott would offer, but her shooting of the hawk is a deliberate act of self-destruction which stems from a refutation of the culturally mandated inevitability associated with hegemonic sexual norms. According to such norms, she has “failed”, but, with her visionary insight, she realizes that she has also “succeeded”. Aiming at the hawk is “like aiming at her own red eye”. Shooting the bird is an act of self-blinding by which, paradoxically, Theodora can see more clearly. She is able to view herself as someone who is able to function outside the sustaining rituals which constitute social normativity, albeit at the cost of social and sexual endorsement. It is against her fierce and uncompromising vision that White deliberately sets Frank’s obtuse “glazed blue” stare, thus hinting at the superior vision of the outsider, which is turned against the unthinking, blind ratification of social and sexual roles which hegemonic “vision” represents. In order to underscore the point even further, at Mrs Parrott’s ball described immediately after the shooting incident, Frank’s eye is said to be “a fiery china” (75). This obviously recalls the hawk’s and Theo’s red eyes, but “china” reinforces the use of the word “glazed” earlier on, stressing Frank’s imperviousness to the nature and extent of his unthinking entrapment within the shibboleths of his enculturation. It is this entrapment which makes him mistrust the instinctive integrity which Theodora embodies: “He would have hated her for the incident of the hawk, hated her out of his vanity, but because there was something that he did not understand, he remained instead uneasy, almost a little bit afraid” (71).

Diana Fuss makes an astute observation which has important resonances in terms of my understanding of Theodora as a narrative stratagem for the gay self. Fuss writes:

In Freud’s reading of identification and desire, homosexual desire is not even, properly speaking, desire. Rather homosexuality represents an instance of identification gone awry ― identification in overdrive (or, one might say, oral drive). This overdrive is also implicitly a death drive: cadere (Latin for “to fall”) etymologically conjures cadavers. For Freud every fall into homosexuality is inherently suicidal since the “retreat” from oedipality entails not only the loss of desire but the loss of a fundamental relation to the world into which desire permits entry ― the world of sociality, sexuality, and subjectivity. (Fuss, 1993: 63; emphasis in original)

Significantly, Theodora’s thin, angular body conjures up the image of a cadaver, and the name of her beloved family home, Meroë, means, among other things, “country of bones” (108). As John B. Beston points out, too: “As a child, Theodora [finds] difficulty identifying with the sex of her destructive mother […] Her alignment accordingly [is] with her father […]. Theodora consequently does not succeed in attaining a clear sexual identity” (1971: 23–24). In this way, Theodora may be seen as an inverted mirror image of the gay male subject, who is traditionally depicted as identifying with the mother, and hence as failing to consolidate his masculinity. In terms of Fuss’s account, Freud associates the homosexual subject’s unruly identifications with a deathly exclusion from cultural viability. As Brigid Rooney points out:

The drive to imagine the self as a unified whole or, as Lee Edelman argues, to make “face”, collapses into fragmentation and failure of identification, marking the difficulty for the abjected artist (read homosexual man) of “making a public face” beyond that which is “dissipated”, theatrical, and feminized. (2010: 10)

Diana Fuss goes on to say: “What Freud gives us in the end is a Newtonian explanation of sexual orientation in which falling bodies are homosexual bodies, weighted down by the heaviness of multiple identifications” (Fuss, 1993: 63). Theodora’s “failure of identification” leads to “multiple identifications”, the adoption of a liberating plethora of identities ⁵ in the Jardin Exotique section of the novel, which I analyse later on. However, in White’s novel, what Fuss refers to as the “entropic “tendencies’” (63) which Freud associates with homosexuality are subjected to a subversive counter-movement: the queer becomes associated with what Erica Meiners refers to as a “freefalling play” (Meiners, 1998: 127), one that belies Freud’s conception of homosexuality as a regressive fall into a self-destructive lack of “true” differentiation. In The Aunt’s Story, this play is represented most tellingly in the form of Theodora’s travels in Parts Two and Three of the novel.

Theodora’s nomadism and “homelessness” in these sections of White’s text are depicted in terms of a necessary dereification of the univocal concept of “home”, ⁶ particularly as this functions as an idealized and overdetermined signifier of heterosexual normativity, something I discuss in greater detail in connection with Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Through Theodora’s protean identities, representation itself is dislodged from any complicity with heteronormativity, reconscripted and re-presented in the service of a queering of social and sexual orthodoxy.

Theodora Goodman as referent for her gay author

I argue that Theodora Goodman represents Patrick White’s unspeakable femininity, which is only partially sacrificed, and which persists as an elegiac psychic residue by which he manages to escape from the closet of humanist, Western representation, with its stern hierarchies of gender difference. As Jennifer Rutherford notes, White “was a melancholic writer in a long genealogy of Australian writers for whom the writing of melancholy has provided a means of expressing the paradoxes, inconsistencies, blind spots, and fractures of the culture” (Rutherford, 2010: 52). Theodora Good-man, with her ambiguous sexual status, becomes a carrier for her author’s own incoherence as a sexed subject and for his encrypted homosexuality, which dare not speak on its own terms. One of the ways in which this is indicated is through a suggestive intertextual resonance with White’s autobiography, Flaws in the Glass. This reflectiveness is captured, aptly enough, in two instances involving what in White’s oeuvre is the ubiquitous and multivalent symbol of the mirror. In The Aunt’s Story, one reads the following description of Theodora contemplating herself in the mirror at Meroë:

[T]he mirrors began to throw up the sallow Theodora Goodman, which meant who was too yellow […] She went and stood in the mirror at the end of the passage […] and the old mirror was like a green sea in which she swam, patched and spotted with gold light […] the face was the long, thin, yellow face of Theodora Goodman, who they said was sallow. She turned and destroyed the reflection, more especially the reflection of the eyes, by walking away. They sank into the green water and were lost. (27)

These lines bear an uncanny resemblance to a similar passage on the opening page of White’s autobiography:

There was the Long Room, at one end the garden, at the other the great gilded mirror, all blotches and dimples and ripples. I fluctuated in the watery glass; according to the light I retreated into the depths of the aquarium, or trembled in the foreground like a thread of pale-green samphire. Those who thought they knew me were ignorant of the creature I scarcely knew as myself. (1)

In their depiction of alienated, ironized selfhood, both descriptions may be seen as affording an implicit understanding of the illusory plenitude of self-presence associated with the Lacanian Mirror Stage, which seems already to be mediated by a sense of failing to meet the exacting proscriptions and demand for conformity associated with the Symbolic. The fact that the image of herself Theodora sees is “patched and spotted” recalls the “blotches” which distort White’s self-reflection. As the New Oxford Dictionary of English points out, the word “blotch” is “partly a blend of ‘blot’ and ‘botch’”. These last two words, with their combined associations of stain, tarnish, and bungling, are in keeping with Theodora’s and White’s sense of their marred identities, and of their position outside the validating structures of cultural intelligibility which would confirm them as legitimate subjects. Both White and Theodora, haunted by a sense of inadequacy, attempt to evade their own reflections. Significantly, in Flaws in the Glass, White signals his sense of self-estrangement by switching from the conventional autobiographical first-person narrative mode to viewing himself in the third person:

If the adults noticed a shadowy boy, eyes set in discs of beige flannel, floating in and out of their conversation, they couldn’t quite get the measure of him. Voices trying to jolly him, fell, and he would make his temporary escape, not only from the company, but his own reflexion in the glass. (3)

Like Theodora, too, White “hate[s] the appearance [he] ha[s] been given”, and wishes that he could substitute it with “something strong and handsome” (3). In other words, he longs for a bodily image that is vigorously masculine, and hence acceptable in terms of the unambiguous manly ideal expected by hegemonic culture. And yet, White writes later in his autobiography: “As I see it, the little that is subtle in the Australian character comes from the masculine principle in its women, the feminine in its men […] Alas, the feminine element in the men is not strong enough to make them more interesting” (155). As William Pinar points out: “The queer constitutes [the] subject as ‘essential incompletion’” (1988: 41), thereby divesting society’s pathologization of gays as incomplete men or women of its reductive classificatory bias. It is the mutually invigorating cross-play between the polarities of male and female within the same person, rather than a confinement within the rigid binarisms of fixed gender identity, which provides both Theodora and her gay author with the ability to indulge in a productive unworking of stereotypical sexual positionings. Theodora represents and constantly re-presents the duplicitous femininity which, in terms of the heterosexist assumption of monolithic masculinity, her author’s gayness embodies. The very fact that the primal feminine (m)other is foreclosed as a condition for full investiture within the parameters of anaclitic identity constitution, which is by no means unconditionally assured, associates the feminine itself with excess, with an innate volatility. This threatens to unseam the pretended univocity by which heterosexuality’s hegemonic insurance is secured. White’s femininity becomes encoded in the manner in which Theodora exceeds the stable referentiality of gender. In this way, the feminine is no longer divested, being transformed instead into a reinvested performative ⁷ capable of political agency. Theodora Goodman offers a re-scripting and a re-conscripting of the male/female binary in such a way that both terms become destitute of an absolute signifying function. Subverting the naturalized polarity of male and female in a way which, interestingly, recalls the actions of her French namesake, Théodore, in Théophile Gautier’s novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Theodora becomes associated with a performative supplementarity, an acting out of ambiguously sexed re-positionings. These serve both to highlight and to undermine the overdetermined fixity implicit in the prevailing culture’s ritualized repetition of hierarchized gender-bound roles.

David Tacey (1988: 27) views Theodora as an embodiment of White’s own nihilistic longing for dissolution and “extinction in the matrix”, based upon his failure to relinquish his attachment to and identification with the feminine (m)other. However, I would argue that, in The Aunt’s Story, such an identification is translated into a liberating context. Theodora may be seen instead as a carrier for an unruly, feminine, Bakhtinian carnivalesque by which White manages to write/right the feminine self which the Symbolic attempts to edit out of existence. This is a femininity which, because it emerges out of the unconscious of a putatively undivided male subject, has the ability to unseam and hence to undermine the patriarchal investments by which the Symbolic shores up its privileged position as the ultimate signifier in the field of gender relations.

Theodora Goodman, as a carrier of Patrick White’s partially repressed femininity, reveals that the gay male’s female identification, far from being commensurate with an imperiled masculinity, actually has a transgressive volatility. This calls into question the apparent stability of heterosexual subjecthood, highlighting its always tenuous achievement of gendered coherence. Becoming associated with a potential for a renegade displacement of gender polarities, this femininity eludes the bonds of repression, misogyny, and pathology by which it is configured as an agonistic other, and becomes other-wise. It does this by reticulating hierarchized modalities of identification and desire in such a way that gendering, in the sense of an either/or sexed position, is subjected to a heteroglossic en-gendering.

The Jardin Exotique as Foucauldian narrative heterotopic space

The Jardin Exotique section of The Aunt’s Story both reflects, and yet also undermines, the seemingly unified textual “body” of Part One. Similarly, Theodora, as stand-in for the only partially legible gay body, reflects hegemonic culture, and yet also threatens the transhistoricism and apparent seamlessness which this culture/body represents. As a signifier for the invert, Theodora threatens to unground the culture in which she is grounded, ironically by virtue of the very otherness by which she is labelled and seemingly contained. Through its equivocal status as a transitional narrative space, Part Two of the novel, with its fantastic, paraxial elements, undermines the “reality” established in the first part, and continues to haunt the apparent closure of the final section. In his essay, “Of Other Spaces”, Foucault alludes to one of the functions of heterotopias as residing in their ability “to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory” (Foucault, 1986: 27). By virtue of its liminality, its function as a surrealistic area in-between, the jardin exotique is an antithetical place of rupture which disturbs and revisions the symmetrical complementarity of the first and final parts of the novel.

In his book The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Kevin Hetherington examines the work Foucault undertook regarding the concept of heterotopia, which, as Hetherington points out, “originally comes from the study of anatomy. It is used to refer to parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or, like tumours, alien” (1997: 42). “Heterotopia”, originally from the Greek etero + topia, literally means “place of otherness” (1997: 8) and can refer, by extension, to “marginal space, paradoxical space, or third space” (1997: 41), a space where incommensurate discourses can co-exist. This has important implications with regard to the ambiguous space which Part Two of White’s novel represents, as embodying what Rosemary Jackson calls “the place, or space, of the fantastic” (1981: 19) and its potential for an unsettling of conventional sites of social, textual and sexual ordering. “For Foucault”, Hetherington writes:

there exist places of Otherness, heterotopia: sites of contrast whose existence sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate things within either the body of society or within a text […]. In the main, Foucault is interested in the heterotopic character of language and the way that a textual discourse can be unsettled by writing that does not follow the expected rules and conventions. (1997: 8)

The Jardin Exotique section acts as a disruptive realm of dissonance and dislocation which confirms the appropriateness of the Henry Miller quotation which forms its defining epigraph: “we walk against a divided world, asserting our dividedness. All things as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridescent fragments” (133). The textual fragmentation of Part Two inverts the promise of unity found in the initial section of the book. The verb “invert” has several connotations which may be appropriated in a discussion of the significance of the Jardin Exotique segment: “To overthrow, upset; to subvert”; “To divert from its proper purpose; to pervert to another use”; “To turn outside in, or inside out” (Oxford English Dictionary). The narrative apostasy that is paraded in Part Two in the form of its surrealistic otherness refutes the privileged humanist status of wholeness and coherence as transcendental signifiers, signifiers which are embodied and entrenched in the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear heterosexual family, an ideal which Lee Edelman trenchantly refers to as “based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” (2004: 4). The idealized domestic space which family and child represent is required by the wider social structures of society as a bulwark for its complex vectors of power, which rest upon a rigorously defended system of delimitation and control. As a partially occluded referent for the gay self, a self implicated, as Earl Jackson Jr notes, with a “ludic insubordination to the reality principle” (1995: 49), the textual subversion with which Theodora is associated in the second section of the novel reflects a turning-in of the outside(r), by which the margin now becomes the centre. The lawlessness represented by the figure of the invert himself, as someone who purportedly perverts what is “proper”, comes, like an unwelcome return of the repressed, to trouble the very order which paradoxically both sustains and rejects him. This is also enacted on the level of narrative. Part Two of The Aunt’s Story replays some of the images and events comprising the seeming order of the Meroë section which, through a fantastic, hallucinatory mode, ⁸ is reflected, distorted and re-presented, just as the gay self both mirrors and inverts the dominant culture. As Rosemary Jackson points out:

Fantasy re-combines and inverts the real, but it does not escape it […] it is the inverse side of reason’s orthodoxy. It reveals reason and reality to be arbitrary, shifting constructs, and thereby scrutinizes the category of the “real”. Contradictions surface and are held antinomically in the fantastic text, as reason is made to confront all that it traditionally refuses to encounter. (1981: 20–21)

The Jardin Exotique and the Derridean mirror

The Jardin Exotique section may therefore be seen as offering a reflection of, and also an ironic reflection upon the “reality” depicted in Part One. The notion of reflexivity and mirroring is itself integral to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. In “Of Other Spaces”, he writes that heterotopias or “counter sites” exist “in relation with […] other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (1986: 24; emphasis added). As Rodolphe Gasché notes, reflection has its “etymological roots in the Latin verb re-flectere […] [which] means “to bend” or “to turn back” or backward, as well as “to bring back’” (1986: 16). In terms of etymology, “bringing back” co-exists uneasily with a recursive bending/deviation/distortion. This carries an implicit reminder that any mirror reflection is always already inverted: hence it can only ever pose as “true”, because its reification as unified and self-grounding is inextricably implicated with the distortion/inversion which inaugurates it as its founding moment. It therefore bears the ineradicable trace of its own potential confounding. The inverted doubling back creates an aporia, whereby there is a blurring between original and copy, self and image. As Gasché puts it: “The originary duplication eliminates the possibility of establishing a last source, origin, and original, installing instead an infinite reference between originals and doubles” (226).

The second section of White’s text brings back Part One by establishing an ironic vacillation between “originals” and “doubles” which, to recall Jackson’s words quoted above, means that the Jardin Exotique section functions as “the inverse side or reason’s orthodoxy” (Jackson, 1981: 21). Such an inversion compels reason, traditionally conscripted into serving the perpetuation of hegemonic differentials of power, to confront its own contingency. Theodora’s parents are re-covered and recreated in the second section as Mrs Rapallo, General Sokolnikov, and Katina Pavlou recall Theodora’s relationship with her niece, Lou. The garden at Meroë, which Theodora experiences as “an epoch of roselight” (22) is translated into the harsh cactus world of the jardin exotique, where “the soul, left with little to hide behind, must forsake its queer opaque manner of life and come out into the open” (140; emphasis added). The use of the word “opaque” is significant, as it is in keeping with the doubling that takes place in the second section, where the speculum becomes associated with a speculative and subversive potential. This has the effect of rendering the opaque transparent. The ruptures within the apparent seamlessness by which orthodoxy shores up its elaborate façade of a seemingly always prior authenticity are highlighted, thereby revealing the constructedness, and hence vulnerability, which underlies its “original” and “monolithic” authority. The re-doubled and inverted figures of parents and niece point to the ways in which White’s text, to use Jean Baudrillard’s words, “volatilize[s] itself in […] simulacra” (1994: 4). As such, White also intimates the cultural constructedness underlying subjectivity itself and, by extension, the masquerade which gender represents. The “truth” of gender is shown to be susceptible to a radical queering, whereby the supposedly naturalized immutability of gender roles can be subjected to an appropriability which renders the natural itself an artificial category. This is sustained by the repeated and shifting imagery of roses ⁹ in the novel, from the “natural” roses at Meroë, to the fake roses on the wallpaper of Theodora’s bedroom at the Hôtel du Midi, and the flagrantly artificial black rose on Theo’s hat.

Taking up and extending the whole notion of equivocation and doubling, I want to argue that Part Two of The Aunt’s Story functions in a way which brings to mind Derrida’s concept of the tain of the mirror. Rodolphe Gasché explains that the title of his book dealing with the philosophy of reflection in Derrida, The Tain of the Mirror:

alludes to that “beyond” of the orchestrated mirror play of reflection that Derrida’s philosophy seeks to conceptualize. Tain, a word altered from the French étain, according to the OED, refers to the tinfoil, the silver lining, the lusterless back of the mirror. Derrida’s philosophy […] is engaged in the systematic exploration of the dull surface without which no reflection and no speculative activity would be possible, but which at the same time has no place and no part in reflection’s scintillating play. (1986: 6)

The Jardin Exotique section of the novel may be seen as the tain of the mirror, implicated in the discursive “reality” of Part One. Yet it also deconstructs this reality by subjecting it to an excessive mirroring which, through its hyperbolical reduplication, exposes the underside of the speculum which passively reflects conventional society’s self-legitimating structures. In so doing, it discloses the exclusionary mechanisms which have enabled cultural orthodoxy to reproduce itself as original and true. In a similar way, Patrick White himself, as gay author, stands both beyond and behind his own text. The Aunt’s Story is a work which he originates, and yet it is also one in which he “has no place and no part” in the sense of his estrangement from the phallocentric imperative of language. This estrangement is enacted through the encryption, rather than direct expression, of gay desire in the novel, desire that is veiled, mediated and displaced through the volatile figure of Theodora Goodman.

Concerning the mirror as a heterotopia, and its relevance to Theodora’s isolation and absence from cultural hegemony, Foucault’s comments are particularly appropriate: “From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (1986: 24; emphasis added). This observation suggests that a fundamental alienation underlies the specular witnessing of the self, encapsulated in Lacan’s insight that an essential méconnaissance or misrecognition haunts the seemingly unified image in the mirror. What White’s novel does, though, is to play this misrecognition back at the dominant culture, through the tain of the mirror which his narrative becomes. Theodora, as outcast figure, already recognizes her absence of a totalizable identity. This absence, however, becomes a strength, in that it is used to highlight the gap between the image of fullness which society wants to see, and the actuality of its inherent divisions. Hegemonic society’s reflected image has a specious, virtual unity which has constantly to be reiterated and performed, ⁷ and hence can only ever gesture towards its reification as a universal norm.

The deconstruction of gender is conveyed most tellingly in the Jardin Exotique section of The Aunt’s Story, which may be seen as a space that functions as a diasporic, queer spatiotemporal zone. As Kevin Hetherington makes clear, the emphasis on research in the field of cultural geography has “moved away from an interest in the dominant space of capitalist society, towards the margins and the marginal use of space by those who have, in various ways, been located on the fringes of society”. He goes on to say that: “Major themes within this work have included: the different and multiple meanings attached to space; the Otherness of place; and especially the relationship between marginal spaces and forms of cultural resistance, transgression and alternative identity formation” (1997: 4). The heterotopic nature of Part Two of The Aunt’s Story as a liminal space is illustrated through White’s depiction of the jardin exotique and the appropriately named Hôtel du Midi ― literally meaning “Hotel of the mid-point” ― the locales where Theodora spends much of the European part of her journey. The jardin exotique, situated next to the hotel, may be seen as a subversive marginal place, an inverted Garden of Eden, which is portrayed, near the beginning of Chapter 7, through the use of aggressive images of orality: “This was a world in which there was no question of possession. In its own right it possessed and rejected, absorbing just so much dew with its pink and yellow mouths, coldly tearing at cloth or drawing blood” (140). Later on, there is another reference to the garden, with “its impervious forms, of sword, and bulb, and the scarlet, sucking mouths” (165).

In a discussion of Freudian psychology, Diana Fuss points out that one of the definitive traits of homosexuals is supposedly reflected in “their insatiable oral sex drives” (Fuss, 1993: 56). These are regressive drives which recall an earlier, infantile, pre-oedipal phase of psycho-sexual development, resisting organization under the rubric of anaclitic oedipality. As Earl Jackson Jr makes clear, “infantile autoeroticism is an anarchic array of pleasures localized in specific erotogenic zones” (1995: 23). Homosexuality is linked to a plural realm of polymorphous perversity which, as Freud would have it, refuses the teleological univocity of focus associated with reproductive sexuality. Part Two of White’s novel, with its interruption of a deterministic narrative trajectory, and its saturation with Theodora’s multivalent identities, replays the polycentric nomadism that same-sex desire represents. The Jardin Exotique section may be viewed as an encoded narrative transcription of the gay self, which recontextualizes and radicalizes the geography of sexuality, repoliticizing the social body politic. This garden in The Aunt’s Story represents a heterotopia which transgresses against the utopic space which the Garden of Eden symbolizes.

The garden depicted in Genesis is the transvalued original utopia of a culturally and theologically mandated heterosexuality. And yet, the fact that it is also part of myth makes it both a place and a non-place ― a place of impossibility ― but one which has been sutured over by means of the repetitive re-enactments of the valorized universals which underpin society, universals which depend upon a procreative imperative and the privileged continuity which is enshrined within the heterosexual family. The gay self, situated, as Earl Jackson Jr puts it, “[b]etween phallic citizenship and sodomitical forfeiture” (1995: 19), performs in the non-place of his social disinvestment. Francette Pacteau emphasizes that “somewhere behind the rationalization of the sexually ambiguous figure looms the vertiginous possibility of a dual sexual identity ― vertiginous in that from dual sexual identity to non-sexual identity, in effect non-identity, there might be only one step” (Pacteau, 1986: 62). Pacteau is looking specifically at the figure of the androgyne here, but the gay self, too, represents an unsettling ambiguity which hints at a potential for a confounding of the very sexual difference upon which the human subject is founded. Although this potential is structured upon an impossibility ― the erasure of the binary opposition which defines identity itself ― it is nevertheless invested with a paradoxical agency. This agency centres upon a process of deferral, whereby this same potential continues to trouble the foundational gender differentials of heterosexuality with the spectre of their own contingency and is, in this way, never completely foreclosed.

The Aunt’s Story ultimately subverts the promise of completion, although it seems to hint at wholeness at the end. This is implied by Theodora’s visionary encounter with Holstius whose name, from the German holz, suggests wood or a tree, an association which identifies him as a referent for Theodora’s late father, George Goodman, who is linked at the beginning of the book with pine trees. Whilst it would appear that Holstius’s role as father/prophet is to lead Theodora to a philosophical acceptance of her impending incarceration in an asylum, she remains identified with the principles of deferral, fragmentation ¹⁰ and excess which has typified her thwarted odyssey. As the narrative makes clear, “there was no end to the lives of Theodora Goodman. These met and parted, met and parted, movingly” (284). The fact that the “white room” of the asylum is characterized by its “pathetic presumption” (284) serves to predict its failure to confine Theodora’s multivalent personae. ¹¹ The doctor who arrives with the Johnsons to convey her to the asylum is called Dr Rafferty, and, as Alan Lawson points out, “in a colloquialism well-known in Australia, Rafferty’s Rule means ‘no rules at all’, anarchy. So Theodora does not achieve psychic wholeness at the end of the novel. Perhaps her rose does, but then it is a fake rose anyway and it remains “doubtful’” (1992: 14).

Conclusion: The resistance to finality

The novel remains open-ended, despite the enclosure of the asylum as a carceral space. One is at first made uneasy by the fact that the transgressive political agency with which Theodora is continuously associated is, finally, subsumed by virtue of her seeming reduction to the role of madwoman/psychotic. And yet, Kevin Hetherington identifies heterotopia as “sites of limit experiences, notably those associated with the freedoms of madness, sexual desire and death”, and, as such, they “can be seen to facilitate acts of resistance and transgression” (1997: 46). Significantly, in her analysis of representations of the androgyne, Francette Pacteau makes the point that: “Discussions of androgyny invariably seem to come up against a resistance ― not so much, or not only from the speaking subject, but from language itself. Any attempt to define androgyny reveals an ever evasive concept which takes us to the limits of language” (Pacteau, 1986: 62). These comments are interesting, in that they are also particularly appropriate in relation to the gay male. As a representative of (to use Lord Alfred Douglas’s famous phrase) “the love that dare not speak its name”, the male homosexual is subject to a prohibition which marks him off as the inhabitant of a bounded, pathologized realm coincident with his status as sexual outlaw. However, this is a marking which is unravelled in the very process of its enactment as a defining taboo. For, paradoxically, it is its delimitation which provides gayness with its limitlessness as a signifier. As discussed earlier on, in Lacanian terms, the gay male exists beyond the reach of the law-of-the-father, the law which is synonymous with language. This means that he becomes coterminous with a subversive slippage, whereby he is defined by a language whose definitions he always exceeds. Here, in a process of infinite regress, every limit is already dissolving into yet another “beyond” which, ultimately, fails to afford any sort of containment.

At the end of the novel, the shack which Theodora briefly inhabits is surrounded by a “soft and moving” and “disintegrating light” (275), the fluidity of heterotopic deferral, where limits and horizons never achieve the stability of containment or teleological closure. As Hetherington makes clear, heterotopias are “spaces of the limit, but a limit that is never reached” (1997: 140), just as Theodora never reaches Abyssinia. He goes on to say that these spaces are those

into which social relations are extended, beyond their own limits, into a gap that is betwixt and between, unlocatable, unrepresentable and impossible […]. It is a space of integration and disintegration, of combination, resistance and disorder […]. It is also a space of an impossible striving for an imaginary beyond in which all of that uncertainty will be resolved and a form of closure achieved […]. Modernity defers and that is all. Except that it leaves traces of itself that can be followed. (1997: 140)

So Theodora’s “doubtful rose trembled and glittered, leading a life of its own” (287). The rose becomes the free-floating trace of its wearer’s radical and unsettling performativity, a trace which points to an ever-elusive moment beyond the defining imprints of social ordering and, in so doing, persists as a mirage of possibility which confronts the shibboleths of culture with the unwelcome truth of their own inescapable contingency.