[In the following essay, Schaffer analyzes "The Chosen Vessel."]

When critics of Australian literature focus on the writers of the Bulletin school of the 1890s in terms of a tradition of democratic nationalism, they seldom mention women. A. A. Phillips however, in his 1966 revised edition of The Australian Tradition, includes a new chapter on Barbara Baynton, author of Bush Studies (1902). Phillips applies the label 'dissidence' to the character of Baynton's writing, along with that of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, Norman Lindsay's Redheap, Arthur Adams' poem, 'The Australian', and some of the short stories of Henry Lawson, like 'The Union Buries its Dead'. He writes that they exhibit an 'undercurrent of revolt against the barbaric fate of being an Australian'. The issue is not woman's fate, but that of 'being an Australian'. Nonetheless, the manner in which this so-called dissidence is approached has relevance in the light of contemporary theoretical questions concerning the relationship between narrative and gender. Phillips' remark concerning Baynton's dissidence is relevant to both the production of 'woman's place' in the annals of Australian literature and to the processes of naming through critical exegesis. An examination of Barbara Baynton's short story, 'The Chosen Vessel', an abridged version of which originally appeared in the Bulletin in 1896 under A. G. Stephens' title, 'The Tramp', and its critical reception by Phillips and others will serve to illustrate the nature of the problem. Focusing on the place of woman as sign in the short story and critical commentaries, keeping in mind the question of women's dissidence, I will trace the ambiguities of meaning within the original text and its more singular 'truth' as represented by the critical tradition.

Part One of the story introduces a woman and baby alone in the bush. When the story opens the woman is tethering a calf to prevent its wandering with the cow during the night. She is vaguely restless. As she works, she reflects on her fear of the cow, whose protests she has been taught to curb with a stick, and her husband's deprecation of her fears of both cow and bush. In anger at her fear, he has called her 'cur'. She wonders if the enemy who is her husband would run as does her enemy the cow if threatened by a stick: 'but she was not one to provoke skirmishes even with the cow'.

A swagman has been by earlier in the day looking for food, money, and something more by the look of his eyes as he gazed upon the mother with babe at her breast. In expectation of his return, the woman leaves some food and her mother's brooch, 'the only thing of value that she had', on the kitchen table. She then retires with her child to the barricaded house for the night. The sound of the returning swagman wakes her and she listens intently, careful not to wake the sleeping baby in her arms. In mounting terror, she watches his shadow circle the hut as he seeks a place of entry. When he is about to gain access through a fallen slab, the woman hears the sounds of horsehooves approaching and she runs from the hut, babe in arms, shrieking to the horseman for salvation. But she falls into the arms of the intruder as the horseman rides away, with curlews picking up her final cry of 'Murder', as they fly above his head.

Part Two details the discovery of the dead mother and her child by a boundary rider who initially misinterprets the scene as that of a lamb and ewe murdered by a dingo. 'By God', and then, 'Jesus Christ', he utters as he cuts away the infant's gown from the dead mother's grip.

Part Three recounts the story of the horseman, Peter Hennessey, who passed the woman and child without stopping to help them. A devout if superstitious Catholic, he had been riding that night to a nearby voting district to cast his ballot for a candidate of his own political persuasions but one not supported by the Priest. He contemplates his revolt, which 'had over-ridden superstition' as well as his mother's pleas, when the mother and child appear to him, calling 'For Christ's sake!' Peter misinterprets the scene as a holy vision sent to redeem him in answer to his mother's prayers. He proceeds to cast his vote for the Priest's squatter candidate and only learns the 'true' nature of his vision when he returns to the Priest to confess of his revolt and redemption.

Part Four depicts the swagman and his dog at the waterhole. The dog faithfully runs to return the swaggie's hat from the water but will not allow the man to wash the blood of sheep from its mouth and throat—blood which makes the swagman tremble. The original story and the 1917 final revision ends with the comment, 'But the dog also was guilty'. (This sentence has been omitted from the Angus and Robertson editions of Bush Studies. Krimmer and Lawson restore it to their edition of Barbara Baynton.)

If one accepts the opening as a distinct element in the story, what emerges is a five part structure which includes:

opening—mother, called 'cur', isolated, fearful but passively resigned to the bush;

action—her rape and murder by a non-descript swagman-as-Everyman;

discovery—by boundary rider whose presence links natural (lamb and ewe), actual (mother and child), and supernatural ('By God', 'Jesus Christ!') levels of meaning;

action—redeeming vision of the horseman which quells his revolt;

ending—guilty swagman and his loyal dog.

This was the only story by Barbara Baynton to appear in the Bulletin (December 1896). A. G. Stephens, editor of the Red Page, thought her work 'too outspoken' for an Australian audience, but praised it for its realism. Six of her stories, including 'The Chosen Vessel' were first published in England under the title Bush Studies in 1902.

Like 'The Chosen Vessel', all convey a hostile image of the bush as perceived by its victims—the old, the weak, the women. But the stories have been read in terms of the way in which they reflect the Australian tradition. Censorship of the stories to fit their assumed context began with first publication. Stephens cut the entire third section, concerning the Catholic voter/horseman, and he retitled the story 'The Tramp', possibly even changing Baynton's neutral pronouns for the man as 'he' into 'the tramp'. Baynton offered the title 'What the Curlews Cried', but it was rejected. Thus, from the outset, the religious theme of section three, which unites the sexual with the symbolic, the bush mother with the Virgin Mother, the silenced with the spoken theme, is censored. And the title was changed, thus shifting reader interest away from the murder, evoked on several levels of the text, and on to the male character, called a 'tramp', not bushman or swagman, by Stephens.

When A. A. Phillips writes of the story he comments that Stephens' judgements were 'sound' in these matters and suggests that even more could have been peeled away. He cites the opening episode, in which the text evokes a harsh image of the husband (not to mention the wife), as unnecessary as well. We only need to know, he says, that the husband was absent. The extra details are examples of Baynton's 'subjective obsession' about man's cruelty forcing its way into the incidental details of the story. Phillips is clearly bothered by Baynton's 'obsessions'; 'grim prepossessions' he calls them in another place. In reading the history of Phillips' association with the works of Baynton, and this story in particular, one begins to wonder whether the term might accurately be applied to him. Phillips is one of the few critics to take an interest in the works of Barbara Baynton. His major essay on her work, and 'The Chosen Vessel' in particular, has been republished with slight revisions no fewer than seven times between 1961 and 1980.

But Phillips, like Stephens before him, explicates and situates the text on another terrain. He makes it meaningful on his terms. This involves a chopping and changing, a literal cutting up of the text, in the name of 'objective' literary and critical standards, to make it mean what he wants it to mean. The story in his hands is not about the murder of a woman at all, but about the bush legend. Once the critic has pared away all the superfluous details of the story and reduced it to the interaction between the mother and the tramp, he can interpret it in terms of his favourite obsession, the Australian tradition: the 'rock [upon which] the Australian pride is ultimately based'. Baynton is a 'dissident' because her writings pose a threat to that tradition. The critic's task becomes one of restoring the reader's faith in the legend by distinguishing between tramps and true bushmen and then ridding the bush of its tramps, both literal and figurative, even if they only appear in the 'intensely subjective' … 'nightmare obsessions' of a 'unique' Australian bush writer who was 'not… primarily moved by socially critical motives'. Reading these phrases, one asks: who speaks and for whom? Phillips' critical qualifications not only serve to rid the bush of its tramps but the tradition of its dissidents as well. Whose 'grim prepossessions' are being expressed in the defensive pattern of this rhetoric?

An analysis of Phillips' discourse on Baynton reveals a myriad of ways in which the writer is literally blind to women as writers/characters except as they reflect or challenge the bush ideal. The category 'woman' is empty and filled by shifting significations which mirror the place of woman in what might be called the Australian Imaginary (in the Lacanian sense of what we take to be real but is imagined with reference to a patriarchal symbolic order). The woman, herself, does not exist; she is absent from the discourse. For example, when Phillips delineates what he sees as Baynton's major themes, he says that they convey: 'the most intense effect… of the image of a lonely bush hut besieged by a terrifying figure who is also a terrified figure'. In 'The Chosen Vessel' we recall that it is not the hut, but the woman in the hut, who is besieged. And the terrifying figure is certainly not 'also the terrified figure'. Here Phillips repeats Stephens' trick of shifting emphasis from victim to attacker. The second theme Phillips mentions is: 'the fierce power of the maternal instinct'.

Still there is no mention of the woman who possesses it. But later the text reads, 'the possessor of the maternal instinct is usually the victim of evil, which wreaks a terrible destruction'. The evil, we are assured, is 'essentially weak', while the maternal force 'has lasting strength'. So 'woman' as a central character, motif, theme in Baynton's fiction, has thus far been displaced as (1) the bush hut, (2) the terrifying figure of her attacker, (3) the maternal force, (4) the possessor of the maternal force, (5) the victim of evil, (6) the survivor (child or dog) which endures as the maternal representative. Where is the woman? Absent. How is she portrayed? Objectified into the unproblematical motif of 'the maternal'. This treatment is hardly justified given both of the author's designated titles: 'What the Curlews Cried', (that is, 'Murder!'), and 'The Chosen Vessel', that is, the maternal mother/Mother ironically fused and, thus, destroyed.

Phillips' analysis aligns the maternal force, or instinct, or power, or what have you, with a 'bitter insistence on man's brutality to women'. He writes, 'One feels, perhaps without logical justification, that the two themes beat together in the pulse of Barbara Baynton's intuitions'. In this sentence the reader can begin to detect the workings of Phillips' imaginary, and the discursive transference to the symbolic order, in his juxtaposition of the logical with the intuitive. 'Perhaps without logical justification', for whom?

Phillips seems to be suggesting that he (the objective critic) has no logical justification for linking the two themes in her work. But as the sentence reads metonymically, he is also saying that perhaps she has none, that is, that there is no logical justification for linking the maternal instinct with man's brutality to women. This introduces a confusion between critic and writer, logic and intuition, objective truths and subjective obsessions, male and female. A battle, which is both sexual and textual, surfaces in the text.

From this point on the polarities between critic and writer, (analysis and its object), will vie for mastery. And the substance has more to do with woman's place in patriarchal discourse than with any content in Baynton's fiction—the ostensible 'subject'.

The strategy the critic will employ in his analysis to deal with this troublesome writer of dissident texts is to alternately praise and then condemn her writing by use of his categories, which are also our categories for establishing differences between "male" and "female" within the symbolic order of language. For example, Phillips concedes that Baynton is a powerful writer who conveys a sense of bush realism. In this she is 'one of the breed' of Australian writers. But, her 'nightmare visions' threaten to place her in the camp of melodramatic writers of 'popular genres of the period'. Her work is located on the border of nightmare visions and objective realism. What Phillips finds hard to deal with is her compulsion to detail man's cruelty to women ('perhaps without logical justification …'). In this she was 'obsessional', 'subjective'—in the country of the Freudian subconscious, the text dares to whisper. That is, the writer is seen as a possibly neurotic female, writing to assuage or cathect by revenge some emotional pain of her past. But if that (personal) theme is her weakness, which locates her among 'popular' writers, her strength, which locates her among Australian realists of the nineties, is her style. Her style is described in terms of its 'concrete detail' for portrayal of 'life-as-it-is', her 'bread-and-butter directness', the 'spare muscularity' of her prose, the power of her visualization, and, lastly, the 'austere directness' of her 'pouncing feminine accuracy' which mark her writings as 'masterly' works of 'thorough and effective craftsmanship'. What, one wonders, is 'pouncing feminine accuracy', and might it conflict with the 'masterly craftsmanship'? How does it pounce? For whom? On whom? Phillips is caught in the dilemma of trying to characterize a woman writer as an Australian writer of merit, without specific regard to her sex—in fact, with what often seems a deliberate suppression of the possible significance of her sex—and yet the analysis bristles with real and repressed gender-marked confusions. There appears to be a difficulty of viewing Baynton as a writer, and a good one, who is at the same time not-male. The arguments proceed, leaving a trail of unspoken assumptions concerning the difference between good and bad writers, differences which sound suspiciously like naive critical assumptions concerning writers and women writers e. g.:

Where to locate 'Phillips' and 'Baynton' within these dichotomies is a repressed question in the essay. Although the critic might place himself on the positive side of the polarities, we often find him slipping into the negative mire. As the essay progresses, the author increasingly substitutes his intuitions and feelings for an objective analysis of Baynton's logic and craft. In relation to point-of-view, for example, Phillips writes:

'The reader is forced to sit behind her [Baynton's] eyes and see with their pouncing feminine accuracy'. He then corrects himself that in fact Baynton never writes from an 'uninventive' first person narration. The reader always follows her text through the vision of the characters. So, the critic denies what might be (but is not) a fault in her fiction by calling attention to it as if it were present in the stories. This repeated strategy links Baynton's style to all the attributes of an inferior, one might say 'female' fiction—the melodramatic, the subjective—making her guilty by association, and then shifting to praise the work for its superior, dramatic, symbolic and carefully controlled craftsmanship which marks Baynton as 'one of the breed'. Once Phillips makes a dubious case for the power of her creations, he concludes with the final thrust:

Yet, despite evidence of alert and considered workmanship, I doubt if she deliberately chose the method of viewing the action through the character's eyes. It seems more likely that it grew naturally from her strong sense of actuality, her intuitive assumption that the essence of a story's effect lay in the reader's sense of involvement in event. (Emphasis mine).

In the end, the careful craftsmanship of the stories becomes the happy result of accidental circumstances. Her power is reduced to the intuitive, the natural; while his intuitions take on the air of critical logic.

In Phillips' argument there is a constant shifting of referents from Baynton's text to Phillips' text (the logical and the intuitive); from Baynton's bush to Phillips' bush; from her ambiguous naming of the 'maternal' to his reading of the 'fierce power of the maternal instinct'. The 'maternal' is constructed through a signifying chain of referents which exist outside of the text in the symbolic order of language but are also located within it. In the actual story 'The Chosen Vessel' there is a conflation of the mother and the Maternal. The literal and the figurative meanings exist together. They cannot be separated. The 'maternal' is that which saves a child but kills a mother. But the mother is, inescapably, the maternal. The woman is an empty signifier which as mother/Mother stands for both sacrifice and redemption. It is not filled by woman, who can be absent in an absolute sense, but by religion, mythology, politics in the discourses of the symbolic order which supplement the image of woman-as-lack, disguise the imagined 'truth' of woman's castration by a denial of her absolute difference outside the orders of patriarchy. This operation of substitutions in which woman is defined as other in relation to a phallocentric norm is what gives rise to the concept of Identity—precisely what is at stake in Baynton's fiction as interpreted by the tradition—the rock upon which 'Australian pride is ultimately based'. Baynton's story appears to have threatened the rock's foundation. And all of Phillips' rhetorical devices, which include attempts at balance, fusion, undercutting, veiling and replacement, have failed to heal the breach. Indeed, they trace a fault line which underlies all Western discourse in the name-of-the-father. In this case, they reveal how the Australian tradition is formulated with reference to a particular construction of 'femininity', herein represented as 'the fierce power of the maternal instinct'.

Phillips is not alone in his interpretation of Baynton's work. A majority of critics, including her most recent commentators, Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, assess the strength of her achievement in terms of her evocation of 'the maternal'. Krimmer and Lawson write [in their introduction to Barbara Baynton, 1980] that in her stories the 'malevolent landscape' is linked to a 'man/woman confrontation where women, without choice, become acquiescent victims of men, largely without realizing it'. They continue: 'the woman is shown as maternal, loving and peaceful while man is portrayed as brutally sexual'. They refer at length to 'The Chosen Vessel' as a representative piece which shows 'motherhood as a hope for humanity …' They conclude that 'the supreme example of woman's instinctive desire to protect her young is found in "The Chosen Vessel", where motherhood is presented as being the one quality which cannot be overwhelmed'.

Is there not something ironic about the title 'The Chosen Vessel', which in this case refers to a woman who is brutally raped and murdered but also and at the same time refers to the appellation for Mary, the Mother of God? Is the concept of the 'maternal' which defines and thus denies the 'real' woman, not problematic in its fusion of literal and figurative levels of textuality? Is the woman 'without choice' on both levels, or can we separate the two? Only when we do separate them can we register Baynton's irony in saying that which confers the power of the maternal as a concept, also demands the denial of the mother as a person. Baynton does not allow an unproblematic concept of 'the maternal' to dominate her text; the critics do. In fact, one could argue that it is the ironic handling of this concept which operates as a deconstructive force on the text. Lawson and Krimmer appear to avoid these ambiguities in relation to both the theme and form of her work. They conclude their introduction to Baynton with a few brief comments on her style which they characterise as a 'terrible logic', a 'singlemindedness', which renders her theme through a 'consistent style … a consistent vision … (and) a careful ordering'.

Perhaps we all need to look again at the text. Beginning with the ironic title and continuing through the development of theme, on a purely literal level, there are at least two contradictory messages. One, which I have already referred to, is the confusion between mother/Mother; another is the question of the woman's innocence or guilt. On the question of her fate, Krimmer and Lawson and a host of other commentators, maintain that the woman is innocent and has no choice. But the text reads ambiguously. Read thematically, with reference to metonymic associations conveyed through the narrative, one could conclude that the woman is implicated in the guilt which results from her murder. The problem with this reading is that there is no direct thematic evidence, aside from the final and disputed sentence, to support this conclusion. The woman does nothing 'wrong'; she is apparently guilty of no crime. She does not 'deserve' her fate. And yet, she is murdered while the swagman goes free. These events set up a problem in the text which critical interpretations attempt to resolve.

How is her guilt established textually? One recalls that the woman has no name except that which her husband has given her—'the noun was cur'—in relation to her fear of the cow. The nature of this naming relates to other networks of meaning in the text which work in at least two contrary directions. One linking chain of signifiers establishes a relation between the woman and the dog. As the attacker approaches the house, the woman hears a 'thud of something striking the dog's ribs, and the long flying strides of the animal as it howled and ran'. Violence to the dog (heard) precedes violence to the house (heard and felt, as if on the body of a woman): 'She heard his jerked breathing as it kept time with the cuts of the knife, and the brush of his clothes as he rubbed the wall in his movements, for she was so still and quiet, that she did not even tremble'. This violence to the house precedes the woman's own struggle with the attacker and describes by displacement her violent rape and murder, which is neither seen nor heard but represented by the cry 'Murder!' which is picked up and carried across the plains by the shrieks of the curlews who fly with the horseman. These connections echo back to the 'long flying strides of the animal [dog, now woman] as it howled and ran'. The final evocation of the dog occurs at the end of the story which depicts the dog's unswerving loyalty to the man who has been its and the woman's attacker. The final sentence, which appeared in the first and in the 1917 revised edition of the story, reads, 'But the dog also was guilty'. Having registered the various links between dog and woman from the opening to the conclusion, the reader is forced to rethink the message of the text. Why divert attention, in the final sentence, from murderer to victim, from man to dog? On a literal level the dog is guilty of killing sheep (he has blood on his mouth and throat which makes the man tremble); but one normally assumes that the action arises out of instinct, to which no blame is attached. Perhaps it might be said that on a moral level the dog is guilty by association with the man to whom it is loyal; but loyalty is usually taken to be a virtue, not a fault. Now, the woman exhibits both these characteristics: the 'instinct' of a mother to protect her child and the 'loyalty' to a man who abuses her. In this she is like the dog; but unlike the dog, she is a human agent, capable of making decisions for herself and thus culpable in the creation of her situation. In other words, if one accepts moral arguments concerning the agency of the human will for which there is some textual evidence, she had choice. She could have left the house and her vulnerable situation in the isolated bush and returned to her former home in the town. Her passive acceptance of the situation makes her an accomplice in her fate.

On the other hand, if one traces the links set up between the woman and the cow—the fear of which earned her the appellation 'cur', one comes to a quite different set of conclusions. The cow, in its relation to the calf (as the ewe in relation to the lamb, later) figuratively represents the maternal instinct. The cow bellows whenever the woman tries to tether its calf and she fears that it might turn on her. She 'was afraid of the cow (that is, the maternal) but she did not want the cow to know it'. This suggests that she fears something in herself, that which is called the maternal and the demands of its authority over her existence. Now, the woman does not impose demands. She is content to let the animals run free. Her husband insists on their control. His authority is represented (no doubt ironically) by the slight stick which he has given her to brandish at the cow and thus subdue the 'enemy'. Why must she do this if not to protect his property? She stands in for the absent father, both concretely and symbolically. Thus the imposition of rules for which there is no effective escape and the repressed impulse toward revolt are two contradictory directions in the text which are opened up in the first paragraph and yoked together throughout the tale. Although never made explicit within the text, by metonymic links and metaphoric referents, the woman paradoxically is what she fears. She embodies 'the maternal' in the symbolic order. She belongs to the same economy which brings about her murder.

The father's law limits the otherwise unlimited relationships between cow and calf, mother and child. It severs a 'natural' relationship, making the mother the enemy of the maternal even as it transforms her into its agent. The first sentence reads: 'She laid the stick and her baby on the grass'. The stick represents the father's law; her baby represents her entrance into that law as the maternal, as defined by the symbolic order. This first instance sets up a series of relationships between the actors and the acted upon, the dominant and the dependent, those who have the power to name and to act, and those to whom such power is denied. As the story progresses this dimension is conveyed through a conjunction of the literal and the figurative, the mother and the Maternal. But, to paraphrase Lacan, the images and symbols of the woman cannot be separated from the images and symbols in the woman. She is constituted by the patronym which binds her existence to the name-of-the-father.

And the patronym by which she is constituted and possessed extends well beyond the actual domain of the husband. A series of influences 'act' upon the woman. They effectively deny her herself, that is her difference outside of a relation to Man in the symbolic order she inhabits with him. These influences subdue her and locate her in a relational place. Firstly, there is the 'natural' order of calves and cows, lambs and ewes, dogs and masters; then, by order of appearance, there is the husband whose verbal abuse establishes the law and the woman's inferior relation to it. 'Needn't flatter yerself… nobody'ud want ter run away with yew', he tells her ironically. Then there is the swagman who steals 'the only thing she had of value', referring specifically to her mother's brooch, prefiguring the loss of her sexuality and ultimately her life, that is, her legacy from the mother. Then the horseman acts upon the woman by confusing her actual presence with an imagined vision of the Madonna and Child. Lastly, the Priest acts upon the woman. His religious doctrines translate the mother and child into an image which offers redemption and salvation for Man, but only by a displacement of woman into a religious mythology of the sacred Mother. She is sacred because she nurtures and protects the Child and guarantees the succession of authority from father to son, God to Christ, Priest to Peter. This final evocation of the woman as Madonna represents the ultimate denial of woman outside of the patriarchal order.

It is important to note that the text links the sacred to the profane through the effect of the male gaze, that is, on the level of the Imaginary. When the swagman first approaches the woman to ask for tucker, we are told, 'She feared more from the look of his eyes, and the gleam of his teeth, as he watched her newly awakened baby beat its impatient fists upon her covered breasts, than from the knife that was sheathed in the belt at his waist'. The man first possesses the woman with his gaze. The specular appropriation of the woman-as-mother by the swagman, who captures her as an object of desire, contains the image of both Virgin and whore. It links male incestuous desires to the castrating image of the mother as corrupted, that is, tainted by her sexual relation to the father. In the Imaginary, with its links to the Oedipal triangle, endemic to Western culture, the mother is not only guilty, but the source of the crime. She is to blame for having been desired. She becomes the cause of his crimes against her. The sublimation of mother as Madonna and Virgin, freed from sexual taint, acts as a powerful defence against that which has been repressed. In 'The Chosen Vessel' the Priest and Peter represent these dynamics of repression, and in each case the operations are effected through the gaze. Peter imagines a vision of the Madonna and Child as he rides out his attempted revolt against paternal authority. He confesses his assumed crime (revolt against the Priest) under a painting of the Mother and Child which beams down on him in the Priest's study. 'Her eyes seemed to beam with the forgiveness of an earthly mother for her erring but beloved child'. Thus, the 'woman', read at once as mother/Madonna, is not only the source of the crime(s), actual or imagined, but also the agent, spiritual and physical, for forgiveness.

The religious connections which link the two levels of the story of a mother/Madonna, given the 'reality' to which they refer, are almost heretical. Each prayer spoken in the text becomes a profanation. And Peter, the horseman who does not stop to help the screaming woman, is the only character to have a name, a signature within the text. What is his importance? Like the biblical Peter, he too sins in a denial which saves himself. We recall that he is on his way to cast his ballot for a candidate the priest does not support. His revolt against the priest's authority is played out under the 'glorified sky of earliest spring', that is, according to biblical referents textually invoked, Easter. The dialogue he imagines as he rides through the night invokes the presence of Mary as the Mediatrix between father and son. He recalls his mother's praying 'Mary, Mother of Christ, save my son', at the same time as he hears the woman 'calling loudly in despairing accents, "For Christ's sake! Christ's sake! Christ's sake!"' He interprets the image of the real woman as a vision conjured up by a preexistent and pre-ordained vision of woman which literally blinds him to the real. He sees her not; she is nothing to him; and yet she is the source of his 'blessed vision'. He returns to relate his redeeming vision to the priest as the curlews pick up the mother's cry of 'Murder!' We are reminded of Peter the Apostle's denial of Christ before the cock crowed thrice. Both Peters are forgiven, and both the Christ and child retain their authority. But a woman has been violently murdered. She is 'murdered' not only by the swagman, but by the various levels of signification which deny her existence—the 'natural' world of ewes and lambs, the domestic world of male dominance and female submission, the religious world of the Madonna and Child. The evocation of 'the maternal' also causes the death of woman by negating any sense of her difference from man's law. Peter is forgiven, but the woman is dead. Nevertheless, or by the same stroke, 'order' is restored. Yet the woman, like the Virgin Mary, retains the hallowed title 'The Chosen Vessel'. We recall that Mary was a 'vessel' because she received the spiritual semen of the Holy Spirit (i. e. Jesus). The woman in Baynton's story becomes the 'vessel' of the swagman's semen. His possession effects her death; she becomes Everywoman.

The conflation of referents which blend literal and figurative meanings, denying as they uphold the 'fierce power of the maternal', exist together, at every point of text. But they work most explicitly with reference to the third section—that which both A. G. Stephens and A. A. Phillips deemed unnecessary to the unity of plot, character, action. In the third section a doubling takes place. The main action is repeated in a way that transforms murder into redemption, revolt into acquiescence, the absence of woman into the insistence of the maternal power, the transference of the literal into the figurative, the imaginary into the symbolic. If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all—she is wholly absent. She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore. Her 'lack', disguised as maternal power, enables 'him' (husband, son, horseman, priest) to attain or maintain an identity. She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, raped and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text. And these contradictory practices through which the 'woman' is disseminated in the text are made possible by her very absence from the symbolic order except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. Baynton's text, in its deliberate irony, calls attention to these facts while it calls into question the idealization of the bushman as the embodiment of the Australian personality.

The text, as our 'chosen vessel' comes to contain these contradictions. In its deliberate irony, it functions to deconstruct the 'place' of women in the (male) Imaginary. The writer mimes the role imposed upon women by pointing to it from the stance of a dissident, speaking to a tradition from its dangerous margins. But critics like Phillips, Krimmer and Lawson, by reducing the text to determinate meanings and singular visions, reproduce what the text deconstructs. The critics therefore reify a foreknown law—whether it is Phillips' bush ideal, the bedrock principle on which the Australian legend has been built, or Krimmer and Lawson's motherhood-as-the-hope-for-humanity ideal. One critique works through repression, the other through sublimation—both deny differences. They censor and repress the very aspects which Baynton's irony calls to our attention. A deconstructive reading also establishes a critical position. But it challenges interpretations which would posit 'a truth'. It insists that texts disseminate meaning which can never be reduced or determined, given the rich referentiality of language. The text calls attention to the complex constitution of woman in patriarchy through the discursive practices of language which name her as other in relation to man. By analysing the text as a question, by asking how it means by way of its constitution of the place of woman through its discursive practices, we can also begin to represent what has been unrepresentable all along. That is, woman not as other (in relation) but as Otherness itself in her radical resistance to all her specular representations to which the text calls our attention: the non-sense of the unspoken, the unrepresented, the absence whose place is filled by the phallic mother who can be at once our 'damned whore and God's police'.

Through our examination of Baynton's text as it attempts to deconstruct the place of woman we can register her dissidence, not only as interpreted by A. A. Phillips as that which denies the legend but also, and more fundamentally, as imagined by Julia Kristeva in her insistence [in Polylogues] that woman is the perpetual dissident. 'Woman is here to shake up, to disturb, to deflate masculine values, and not to espouse them. Her role is to maintain differences by pointing to them, by giving them life, by putting them into play against one another'. This surely has been one of the functions of Baynton's short story, 'The Chosen Vessel'. Its re-presentation here, by way of this analysis, may help to restore to the vessel a richness and multiplicity of meanings which have been lost through repeated critical attempts at phallic mastery.