Star-crossed lovers

On re-reading Coonardoo

I used to think that Romeo and Juliet was a Bildungsroman gone wrong, and that much the same analysis would apply to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1926 novel Coonardoo, Having recently re-read the novel, however, I have realised that such a reading, though understandable – and who can’t forgive themselves for their earlier mistakes – misses something characteristic of the star-crossed lover narrative.

The essence of such a story, it now seems to me, is that there are two parallel strands, each with its own Hero. From the order in which we encounter them, we might call them major and minor Heroes respectively. Each Hero has a narrative, but the two narratives are out of synchrony with one another. They are wire-crossed lovers, in fact, rather than star-crossed: at cross puposes – their aims and expectations fail to mesh. So we have this sort of situation:

Major Hero – Romeo	Minor Hero – Juliet
City: Act I, i
New place: Act I, v	City: Act I, v
Garden: Act II, ii	New place: Act II, ii
Wilderness: Act III, i	Garden: Act II, v
City: Act V, iii	Wilderness: Act III, iii

What is a new place for Romeo: the Capulets’ ballroom, is part of the city for Juliet – located in a settled polity with which she is familiar, as are her previous scenes, I, ii and I, iii. What is the garden for Romeo: the Capulets’ garden and following, is a new place for Juliet – unlike Romeo, she is new to love. By the time Juliet is married and longing for Romeo to come to her (the garden for her), he has already been exiled (the wilderness).

Romeo has an epilogue – which has to be the city again, of course – in which he kills Paris, now cast as the Villain. It’s the same old violent world again that we saw in I, i, but from the beginning of Act IV the play is Juliet’s story above all. Friar Lawrence is her Donor, the sleeping draught his magical gift; when she awakes, even her death is not synchronised with Romeo’s.

The part of the play involving both Heroes (when looked at from Romeo’s point of view) does seem like a Bildungsroman, now with a prologue – you can see where that misreading comes from – but one’s left with the difficulty that nothing has turned out. True, we have the hint of a new polity formed at the conclusion – the protagonists reunited with their reconciled parents, but it is a solution that excludes those very protagonists. In fact, what we are given is two overlapping narratives each as sardonic in its own way as the narrative of Othello.

How does this apply to Coonardoo? That book tells the story of Hugh Watt, son of a station-owner somewhere in the wilds of the Pilbara or thereabouts, and his conflicted relationship with Coonardoo, an indigenous girl and later woman of about his own age. For students some years ago I summarized the book in the words ‘It’s sex that makes the world go round’, which seems to me still a good characterization. Hugh becomes more uptight, his property is ravaged by drought and disaster, but nothing bad ever happens to Sam Geary, his crude and boorish neighbour with the string of indigenous mistresses and half-caste children. No drought on Sam’s property.

But what I don’t think is that the book is about Coonardoo the woman, or that Prichard explores the indigenous situation in any more than a superficial way; on the contrary, her view of the indigenous characters is coloured by an almost unrelieved orientalism. Coonardoo’s role as sexual symbol (her name is supposed to mean ‘well in the shadows’) and as symbol of the landscape occludes our reading her as a realistic character on the same level as the European actors in the story (she only comes alive when her hunger for sexual contact leads her to submit to Sam). We have all met Jessica, the fleetingly glimpsed character unable to face becoming Hugh’s fiancee; we have all met Bessie and Mollie and Phyllis – Hugh’s mother, wife, and daughter – but I doubt even those of us with extensive indigenous acquaintance have ever met Coonardoo.

More than anything, she reminds me of one of the female leads in Morris’s romances, who stand for value – for life itself, in the end. Generally they remain outside the action until the Hero qualifies to embrace them: just what Coonardoo does for most of the time. Had Prichard read Morris? Very likely, I think. Considering she became a fervent communist by way of a journey through various brands of socialism, he is just the author we would expect her to have read. The episode of al fresco copulation between Hugh and Coonardoo is a very Morris-like touch (The House of the Wolfings, The Wood beyond the World, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, The Well at the World’s End), and Coonardoo may remind us of the well which is life itself in the last of those books named.

It’s perhaps Coonardoo’s similarity with a William Morris character that led me to take the book first as Bildungsroman, just as Morris’s romances are, but in fact it has the same doubled structure that we find in Romeo & Juliet.

We begin with a pre-existing polity, the city: Wytaliba station under the benevolent despotism of Hugh’s mother. Hugh, who has grown up with Coonardoo, is about to leave for school. Coonardoo is hurt: for her it is the wilderness, though her character is peripheral at this stage. Hugh is the major Hero.

The new place for Hugh is inaugurated by his return, to be loaded with responsibility for the property in view of his mother’s imminent death. For Coonardoo, though, Hugh’s return is a reaffirmation of the city.

Hugh’s garden is his time of marital security with Mollie; for Coonardoo a new place, being subjected to a woman ignorant of the station’s ways. Hugh’s wilderness, ultimately revalorized by the appearance of his daughter Phyllis, is Coonardoo’s garden, a phase in which she is installed in the homestead and becomes Hugh’s partner in all but sex. Finally, for Hugh, we are back to the city again – a new polity where the brunt is borne by Coonardoo, brutalized, diseased and dying in the wilderness. As in Romeo and Juliet, the focus has moved away from the major Hero in this last act. It belongs to primarily to Coonardoo.

If Romeo and Juliet were to be star-crossed whatever their good intentions, it can be argued that the same holds for Hugh Watt and Coonardoo. European values belong in Europe; to survive in the wilds of Western Australia, people have to accommodate themselves to the country as its indigenous inhabitants have done (whatever that may mean). Prichard doesn't seem to offer any clear solution, but that appears to be part of her message.

With the clarity of hindsight, I can see it was in just such a situation of disparate desires that I had my own heart broken many, many, many years ago – and perhaps it’s a little bit humiliating to realise now that in that situation my part was that of the minor Hero. Such is narrative.

What women want?

If what men want is to replace (or embrace) their mothers, and what women want is to supplant them, their respective ambitions can be caught by the narrative analogues of Lacan’s Discourse of the Master and Discourse of the Analyst respectively, namely $ → S₁ → S₂ → a and S₂ → a → $ → S₁. Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella if you like.

The respective narrative types are not confined to male and female protagonists, but nevertheless may be thought of as embodying stereotypical gendered aspirations. It is interesting, then, to see how they are treated in two of the Canterbury Tales where Chaucer seems to subvert the apparent message.

The texts I have in mind are the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale. In the first we have a knight who finds himself in the wilderness ($) when he is reprieved from sentence of death for raping a girl encountered by the riverside; the queen and the ladies of the court dispatch him to find the answer to the question what women want.

After a long and fruitless search the knight falls in with an old woman (the Donor), who provides him with the answer on condition he will agree to perform the first task she asks of him.

             ‘Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

             As wel over hir housbond as hir love,’

is the answer provided, and when he returns to the court (the city), the ladies have to agree that he has satisfied them (and for those who want a point by point deconstruction of the narrative, this is the easy task).

The Hero must now, however, encounter the Villain: the role now taken by the ‘olde wyf’ in her insistence that the knight marry her: he protests

            But al for noght; the ende was this, that he

            Constreyned was, he nedes moste hire wedde;

            And taketh his olde wyf, and gooth to bedde.

(the easy journey).

Now he is in the new place, where the ‘olde wyf’ has the role of King: that is, she explains what true gentillesse consists of, and faces the Hero with the difficult task to choose

                                    oon of thise thynges tweye:

            To han me foul and old til that I deye,

            And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,

            and nevere yow displese in al my lyf:

            Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,

            And take youre aventure of the repair

            That shal be to youre hous by cause of me ...

The knight finally leaves the choice up to her: his reward is to find himself at last in the garden (a), where the woman, now his Princess, has made the choice not only to be young and beautiful, but faithful as well.

What women want? To help an abusive male live out his gendered fantasy? Couldn’t the fairy bride have done better for herself? Let’s compare this story with the Clerk’s Tale. Once again, the transition to the new place (for Grisilde) is connected with a wedding – here, by the surprising revelation of the marquis Walter’s desire to marry her.

Then he, in the role of King, faces her with the difficult task, or difficult ask, at least, of agreeing to submit without question to whatever he requires:

            I seye this, be ye redy with good herte

            To al my lust, and that I frely may,

            As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

            And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?

Having sworn, Grisilde is now in the garden; Walter is her Princess. This completes the second part of the tale.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 are laid in the wilderness, and concern the trials put upon Grisilde by Walter in the character of antagonistic Donor. She is first made to believe that her daughter has been done away with, then her son, and finally that her husband is repudiating her in favour of a younger woman (the daughter, now twelve years old). All of this Grisilde bears without question or complaint; which brings about the ‘happy ending’:

            And whan this Walter saugh hire pacience,

            Hire glade chiere, and no malice at al,

            And he so ofte had doon to hire offence,

            And she ay sad and constant as a wal,

            Continuynge evere hire innocence overal,

            This sturdy markys gan his herte dresse

            To rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse.

It is an easy task, it seems, for her to fall in with his change of heart, and we are back in the city, the polity restored:

            Ful many a yeer in heigh prosperitee

            Lyven thise two in concord and in reste ...

In both tales an abusive male gets what he wants, in the wife of Bath’s Tale as Hero, in the Clerk’s Tale as Other; however the narrative is gendered, it seems the women can’t win.

They are sort of depressing and reassuring at the same time, he thought, looking back down the aisle and turning over in his mind the possibilities of a review. Those Blue Mountains vistas hazed over with purple, and there are always a lot from round Yass or somewhere with a river at a distance between bare paddocks in a wiggle of trees, and sheds with rusty iron and old abandoned farm machinery. And that man that does river stones – he’s always there. Maybe it’s just always the same picture – who would know? Here and there are people taking photos of each other in front of the displays. Perhaps they’re the artists. It’s something to get hung, he thought, however meagre your talent. But just once in a while, there’s a picture that has something.

In front of him was a desert, or semi-desert scene done in overlapping glazes. There were areas where the paint had been applied so sparingly that the texture of the canvas was the chief thing you noticed, but others where the ground disappeared while the colour maintained a paradoxical appearance of transparency. And here and there verticals, thick strokes, almost calligraphic, were suggestions of trees, vegetation, people even, glimpsed from afar off.

Cliche, perhaps, but among the purple-headed mountains and the sheds and the not-quite-Streetons, not to mention the river stones, there was something about this picture that was not trying so hard to be representational – something of the dreamlike, a landscape in a mirage. Dennis liked the implicit metaphor that gave to the temporal beings their own dimension while the flat land stretched in boundless timeless surface all about them. He looked at the catalogue.

Untitled – Deniliquin, it said, and $800. That was pleasing. For all that this painting had reminiscences of Fred Williams, it was a sure touch, he thought, to let the metaphor of the picture flow through into its name. For what can we call those landscapes other than ‘untitled’ – and yet, as long as we presume to occupy them, whether our title is of the traditional or Torrens kind, we will put up our obsessive little signs like ‘Sandy Gully’ and ‘Ten Mile Creek’. Ghost towns too had street names once. This artist saw more deeply than most. He checked the catalogue again; the name meant nothing. Now he was about ready to move round the corner and begin on the watercolours.

‘Do you like it?’

Dennis didn’t immediately take the words as addressed to him. But they had to be, it seemed, for they clearly came from the only other static presence in the immediate neighbourhood. The lateral current shuffled the crowd along the aisles: they two alone, caught in an eddy, were slapping the seawall side by side. He had been conscious that there was someone else pausing near the picture, but hadn’t taken much notice.

It was a young woman, or young enough anyway – say 25 to 35. Jeans, a white shirt with unbuttoned cuffs, a long cardigan the way people were wearing them then: a patterned knit in a sort of weed-green.

‘It’s got something,’ Dennis said warily – was this perhaps the artist? ‘It’s certainly saying “look at me”, but I don’t think it’s saying “buy me”. But I’d sooner look at it than most of what’s here.’

‘Do you buy things?’

‘I have sometimes. And I think you always know when you really want to; I’ve never bought anything I wasn’t happy with afterwards.’

‘So you’ve got an eye – or you’re just pleased with yourself.’

‘Was that a question?’

‘Not really.’

This insolence from a total stranger was a precious thing.

‘I will tell you why I don’t want to buy it, then,’ said Dennis. ‘To me, the coloration is just a tiny bit vulgar.’

‘Vulgar – isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘See that pink there, and that shade of green up here in the sky?’

Leaning over the barrier to make the point.

‘No touching the works of art, please, sir,’ from a security guard.

‘What really upsets me – no, it doesn’t upset me, it disappoints me – is that the artist, who is obviously an intelligent person, has let him- or herself down, and if someone comes along and buys it, it will only encourage them and they will keep on doing it.’

‘You’re very sure of your opinion – I’ll give you that. But you can have a few points for “him- or her”. You’re not as completely hateful as I first thought.’

‘I don’t find myself specially hateful. If I seemed a bit over-critical, perhaps I was just annoyed by that guard calling me “sir”. I don’t know about you, but I always find it irritating.’

The Goldsworth students had been profuse with their ‘sirs’.

‘I don’t get called “sir” much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Shall we look at the watercolours?’

‘Why not? Do you like licorice allsorts?’

‘Intensely.’

‘Have some.’

The aniseed, the musk, the banana. Flavour and colour: perfect synaesthesia. They chewed in front of the watercolours.

A saint’s progress – a quick look at Ælfric Catholic Homilies II, X: Depositio Sancti Cuthberhti

It’s interesting to see some familiar patterns in how the life of St Cuthbert unfolds as Ælfric tells it (based on Bede’s Latin lives of the saint).

1. At the beginning of the Homily tout est luxe, calme et volupté, as it were: we find Cuthbert as an eahtwintre cild ... plegende mid his efenealdrum. But God has other plans:

Ac se ælmihtiga god wolde styran þære nytennysse his gecorenan cuðberhtes

2. God sends a 3-year-old child to let Cuthbert know that this behaviour is inappropriate in a future bishop. By implication Cuthbert must now take an unwished-for journey from the heedless life of a child to the commitment of a religious calling.

3. During his apprenticeship to the religious life, Cuthbert has four miraculous encounters:

• He receives advice from a mysterious stranger on the treatment of his afflicted knee

• He sees Aidan’s soul conducted into heaven

• He is sustained in the wilderness by the appearance of a loaf

• He offers hospitality to an angel, who disappears leaving heavenly bread behind (whiter than lilies, smelling of roses, sweeter than bees’ honey)

4. Cuthbert is ministered to by animals on two occasions: seals who dry and warm him on the beach, and an eagle that feeds him and a doubting companion.

5. He does successful battle three times with the devil;

• Quenching an ignis fatuus that is terrifying villagers who have lapsed from their faith

• Diverting a fire which is menacing a house

• Casting out a devil from the wife of a pious man

6. He decides to retreat from his popularity: ferde ða to farne. on flowende yðe. His retreat to the solitary island is facilitated by the discovery of a spring of fresh water, by the ministry of grateful ravens who bring him pig fat to waterproof his shoes, and by the sea casting up a sill-beam for his outhouse.

7. Cuthbert reveals the future to Ælflæd; he is drafted into the office of bishop, thus fulfilling the prophecies of the 3-year-old child and of Boisil; while bishop his saintliness is manifested by his healing of

• an ealdorman’s wife with holy water

• a bedridden girl by anointing her with oil

• a man at the point of death with consecrated bread

• a man borne on a litter with his blessing

• a half-dead child with a kiss

By clairvoyance Cuthbert perceives the death of one of Ælflæd’s woodmen; he foresees his own death, and is able by his prayer to obtain a simultaneous death for the priest Hereberhtus; his tomb is opened, and his body found to be uncorrupted:

þa wearð þæt halige lic. hal on eorðan gemet. gesundful licgende. swilce he slapende wære