SOURCE: "Gender and Genre in Barbara Baynton's Human Toll," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, May, 1989, pp. 66-77.

It is not surprising that Human Toll, which was recently reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1907, should have received little critical commentary; but what there does exist by way of comment is remarkably homogeneous. Beginning with A. G. Stephens' review in the Bulletin, and continuing through H. M. Green in 1930, Arthur Phillips in 1961, up to the editors of the 1980 reprint, there is clear agreement that Barbara Baynton's one and only novel, while it manifests the same grim vision of malevolence and victimisation as her Bush Studies, is severely flawed by her poor management of structure. One obvious conclusion to be drawn from this unanimous judgement of the novel's failure is that Baynton's forte was the short story after all. Thus Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, editors of the Portable Australian Authors Barbara Baynton, rescue the novel by granting it the virtues of Baynton's short stories—vivid scenes of rural town life and, in the final chapter, intense psychological conflict. Yet to conclude thus is to leave unquestioned notions of the well-made realist novel against which Human Toll has been measured and found wanting. Questions of narrative strategy, then, form one branch of my subject in this discussion.

The other branch concerns women writers and the ways in which they are read. It originates in the common assumption among critics that Human Toll is disguised autobiography. Krimmer and Lawson find the novel interesting, despite its many digressions, in that 'Baynton is clearly writing from personal experience, but how much of it is autobiographical is difficult to determine'. In this, they echo A. G. Stephens: 'Human Toll bears the impress of an autobiography loosely held together by a plot of hidden treasure that is lost sight of long before the end of the book'. Certainly it has autobiographical elements—the central character is a young girl growing up in the bush, who occasionally expresses the desire to become a writer or an actress, and other characters may be loosely linked with people from Baynton's youth. But the assumption that it is autobiographical deflects attention from the novel's textuality—as if the assertion that it was all 'true' and that writing it was a necessary catharsis could account for its strangely-wrought prose and obscure dynamics of desire. Moreover, the novel lacks the usual characteristics of autobiographical fiction. The narrative point of view does not stay consistently with the heroine, nor does it grant the reader privileged access to her consciousness, except in the final chapter. What we are faced with here is the patriarchal assumption that when a woman writes—and particularly when she writes in an unfamiliar and difficult manner—she is artlessly unburdening herself of her own experiences. It is an assumption made more attractive, perhaps, in cases when the writer's life is thought to have been more interesting than the sensationalist or domesticated romance plots often favoured by women novelists. Yet an acquaintance with the substantial body of nineteenth-century 'women's fiction' suggests that Human Toll can profitably be read as a contribution to that tradition, and a subversion of certain elements in it.

Nineteenth-century 'women's fiction' (which was not exclusively produced by women, nor exclusively read by them) has at its centre the pattern of a young woman's growth to adult femininity. Sometimes this includes an ambitiously female version of the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, within an elaboration of social rites of passage, courtship and marriage. According to Ellen Moers [in Literary Women, 1977], the major conventions of this tradition are an orphaned (or at least motherless) girl, whose guardians are socially unsuitable or cruel persecutors, or both, who suffers in extreme forms the usual experiences of initiation into femininity: masculine cruelty and feminine malice, restraints on her freedom (including physical ones), mysterious and unexplained social rituals, the terrible need always to appear, as well as to be, virtuous, and the danger of slipping from the respectable to the unrespectable class of womanhood. There are usually two suitors, one true and one false; there is often a bad or mad woman who functions as the heroine's double; and there is frequently, as the means of securing her freedom to choose the true lover as her husband, an inheritance, which has been lost or kept from her.

'Reader, I married him' is the outcome, conventional in both senses: Jane Eyre is perhaps the prototype of this tradition. But its conventions are found early and late, in the Gothic form of Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as well as in staid domestic romances. Nina Baym has studied the rise and fall of popularity of these domestic romances in the United States during the nineteenth century as a barometer of changes in the social definitions of femininity and argues that many of these novels are proto-feminist in that their heroines are granted moral independence, at least. Baynton's Australian predecessors, including Catherine Spence and Ada Cambridge, wrote variations on the domestic romance which range from the novel of ideas to the comedy of manners. Feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have discerned behind many of the conventional romantic narratives in this tradition 'another plot, hitherto submerged in the anonymity of the background', which tells the story of the woman writer's struggle for self-definition, and which involves the heroine's close and ambiguous relationship with the figure invoked in their title, The Madwoman in the Attic. For them, too, Jane Eyre is the prototype. Yet there is a sub-group of women's novels in which the outcome for the heroine herself is madness or death. Often this is the heroine who harbours ambitious wishes more conventionally appropriate to the male protagonist of a Bildungsroman (Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss) or strong aggressive and erotic passions that break through the bounds of the courtship-and-marriage plot (Catherine in Wuthering Heights). This tragic (sometimes Gothic) version of the woman's novel can be distinguished from both the heroic novel of development and from the staid or comic domestic romance. I want to argue here that Human Toil is confusing (but not confused) because it mixes these modes. It directly confronts the conventions of the heroic women's novel by invoking them and then blocking their operation. The dominant mode, finally, is the Gothic/tragic.

Keeping in mind the major conventions of the woman's novel, let's look at the events and relationships that are set in action in Human To]L The novel opens with the death of the heroine's father on a poor selection. Boshy, an old lag who has been employed there, wants to take care of the four year old orphan, but she is whisked away by the neighbour, Cameron, to be 'schooled' in town, along with his own son, Andrew, under the guardianship of his widowed sister. Chapters 3 to 9 see the child, Ursula, through various childhood experiences, mostly unpleasant. The widow has remarried and her parson husband, Mr Civil, plays the part of persecuting stepfather to Ursula and Andrew. After a period of absence at school (arranged by Boshy) Ursula is called back to town, to Mrs Civil's deathbed. Now, in adulthood, she and Andrew are estranged. Boshy returns, and she nurses him in his terminal illness. He has talked a lot about leaving Ursula his money, but dies without telling her where it is hidden. Again she is persecuted by Civil, who has declared himself her guardian. Andrew appears to be caught up with a girl from a nearby farm, Mina Stein. Ursula appeals for help to Hugh Palmer, Cameron's widowed son-in-law, who is fascinated by her but is actually, it appears, having an affair with Mina. Mina tricks Andrew into marrying her, is thrown out of home, and goes to live, with Ursula accompanying her, in the selector's hut which is now part of Cameron's property (though legally, perhaps, it belongs to Ursula). Andrew and Palmer both work there, and visit the hut now and then. An indeterminate period of time passes. Mina gives birth to a child, which she abuses. Ursula, who adores it, finally runs out into the scrub with it, to save it from Mina, but it dies. She wanders about with the dead child in her arms for several days, lost in the scrub. She suffers terribly from thirst and hallucinates a vision of Christ hanging on a tree. Spurred on by the desire to succour Him, she finds water at last. Then she sees two figures, which seem to be part of the hallucinated crucifixion scene, but the last word of the novel is her childish cry of recognition, 'Andree!'.

The tragic or at least ambiguous redemptive ending (comparable to Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm) follows from the ways in which Baynton has subverted the tradition's usual representation of male power and female struggle. Usually (taking Jane Eyre as prototype) the heroine develops, through experiences of rebellion against and reconciliation to patriarchial power, her own 'moral sense' and this, together with the freedom granted by the acquisition of material or social resources (e.g. being 'adopted' by a respectable family), enables her to choose the man who is loving, reliable, and socially appropriate for her to marry. In Human Toll this process is blocked at several points.

None of the adults in Ursula's and Andrew's world is reliable. Though Jim and Fanny, the servants, are kind to them, they are powerless to defend the children against Mr Civil. Similarly Boshy, and later the Aboriginal couple on the selection, are powerless in the social world of the novel—moreover their protectiveness (e.g. withholding information from Ursula) is actually harmful. All the father-substitutes, even Boshy, and her brother-figure in Andrew, fail to support Ursula; she is confined in her isolation. While it is quite usual for all the adult women in these novels to be represented as venal, malicious or frivolous, it is rare for there to be no protective male figures—even in The Story of an African Farm there is the old German uncle. It would seem that, with the death of her father, the possibility of a benevolent paternal god disappears.

Ursula is particularly isolated, passive and silent. Two incidents in her girlhood are marked as decisive. On her first Sunday in town the little girl learns a sense of her own wickedness together with a fear of certain punishment, and she ends the fateful day hiding in the brick oven in terror of God's wrath in the form of a thunderstorm. 'Since the Sunday of the storm', we are told in a rare explanatory comment from the narrator, 'she had met all dangers silently'. Later, when Ashton's circus visits the town, she loses her heart to 'these light-hearted folk of the tinsel and spangles' and 'that great world beyond these hills and near the sea' where they belong. Her small attachments to people and places are loosened as she grows older.

Her strongest relation to others is a protective one. For instance, having identified Aunt Civil as the heroine of Maria Monk, a cautionary tale, she resolves to 'guard' her from danger, and this prefigures Ursula's relationship to Boshy, to Andrew, and to Mina's baby. (Also, it is reminiscent of the faithful dogs in the Bush Studies stories.) There is a strong element of rivalry in her relation to Mina, most dramatically demonstrated in the Hardyesque incident of the pig's blood. Later this rivalry over Andrew is suppressed in a complex of Christian submission and silent vigilance (also rather dog-like) which, of course, is met by escalating victimisation from the sadistic Mina.

This relationship between the two young women conforms to the heroine-and-her-double type: they are opposites, yet their fates are inextricably bound together. Whatever virtue Ursula represents is sheer negativity, the failure or refusal to act, and so in contrast to this, Mina's predatory sexuality, cruelty, sloth, drunkenness and so on seem to represent Ursula, inside out. Her anger, for instance: 'Looking at Ursula's terrible little face, Hugh Palmer thought there was little to choose between the suppressed tempest of Ursie's now and Mina's unsuppressed passion earlier'. Just as Mina could be said to enact all Ursula's suppressed passions of anger and desire, so Ursula takes on the role of conscience, or watchdog over Mina, when she realises that Mina is 'muckin' around with Boss Palmer'. 'I will never leave you out of my sight, day and night', she storms, 'You are Andrew's wife, Mina; remember, Mina, you are Andrew's wife!' The narrator comments laconically: 'This was the beginning of an espionage of Ursula that bespoke the mettle of martyrdom'.

It is a strange martyrdom, though, as she continues to suffer shame and guilt over her unacknowledged passion for Andrew, as if Mina's sins had been her own. Ursula identifies with Mary Magdalene, that 'picturesque sinner' who 'had waited through the long night, then "very early while yet it was dark" had come: He, though knowing, was gone'. The reference recurs at the height of Ursula's literal martyrdom at the end of the novel: Magdalene is cast as the woman abandoned by Christ, the faithful keeper of the vigil by His body. Unlike the great majority of nineteenth-century heroines, Ursula is not only powerless and oppressed but also passive and purposeless—unless her purpose be the suppression of her love. The suppression of desire and the guilt which accompanies it, renders her mute and incapable of decision. Her actions are frequently described, as the narrative draws to its climax, as those of an automaton: 'spurred by an indefinable impulse', 'the mist of her ever-recurring sub-consciousness', 'spellbound with a compelling sense of waiting', 'an uncontrollable impulse mastered her'. 'Moral sense' fades before the power of the 'sub-conscious', and the discourse of psychology takes over from that of ethics.

Even more striking than her variations on the established theme of the young woman's moral development is Baynton's treatment of the inheritance motif. There are several strands to this. First, there is the inheritance from her father, which Boshy fears she will be denied, either because she is a girl or because her parents may not have been married; other characters deny that such an inheritance exists; when Ursula finally receives a copy of her father's will, Mina steals it before she has read it. The heroine shows no interest in it whatsoever. Baynton thwarts our readerly expectations of the heroine's triumphant reinstatement in respectability and (some) independence. Then there is the matter of the hidden treasure, the 'plot' that seems to lose its relevance to the narrative. It is elaborately introduced in the opening scene of the novel, when Boshy discovers a hoard which readers of Bush Studies will recognise. The 'gold-lined belt' which he drags out of the fat-can (a wonderfully anal image) is certainly 'Mr Baldy's hoard', the object of 'Scrammy 'And's' attention in the story of that name. In the tale, the hidden hoard is not found, the threatened murder not committed, despite all the suspense engendered by both possibilities. In the novel, its function is not (as we might expect) suspense, but rather as a bargaining position. Boshy drops hints about it to gain himself credit of more and less tangible kinds in town; after his death, when Ursula is supposed to have inherited it, or at least to know its whereabouts, everyone is greatly interested in her, and her persecutors Civil and Mina redouble their attacks; finally it is discovered and stolen from the grave where Boshy buried it, presumably by Mina. So, again, Baynton plays with the expectations set up by what looks like a familiar plot. It is not so much that the hidden treasure plot becomes irrelevant, as that its significance shifts. The hidden treasure becomes synonymous in the public eye with Ursula's value as a marriageable woman—but it remains hidden from her, and she is indifferent to it.

The likelihood that she will be made to suffer for this indifference, or carelessness of her 'value' as an object of exchange, is prefigured in Chapter 1, in the ballad of the 'Three Golden Balls' taught to the child by Boshy. In the ballad, the daughter who loses the golden ball given by her father must be hung, unless the ball can be found. She asks each relation and friend in town, but none can help. They have only come to see her hung 'upon this iron gallows tree'. At last, however, comes the 'one true lover' who can give her back her golden ball and save her life from her father's wrath. The patriarchal transaction around female value/virtue is crudely clear. But Ursula does not ask for masculine protection, and none is offered her. The ballad's implications for the novel's ambiguous last-minute rescue scene at the 'crucifixion tree' are interesting, too, in that Ursula the martyr is associated with the Christ figure as well as with Magdalene. This is certainly a subversion of conventional representations of women.

The heroine's indifference to her possible material inheritance, which would enable her to function as an object of exchange in the patriarchal economy of marriage, seems almost sublime. It is no accident that her story ends on this sacrificial note. Her martyrdom is directly associated with the repression of her erotic longings and not with her egotistic and ambitious wishes. These, the expressed desires to write or to act, are precisely what Ursula gives up when, 'following some indefinable impulse', she accompanies Mina to the selector's hut in pursuit of Andrew and Palmer:

'Good God! What is life here!' she groaned, and covered her eyes. Unrestrained mentally she faced reality—instead of world wide fame—'Mina's Keeper', 'detecter', visualising the attitude of intense hatred of the sometimes thwarted and baffled Mina. [sic]

She is most of the time paralysed and mute, trapped in this conflict. It is only in a state of terror and madness that her desires and fears can be represented in the narrative. In the final chapter, as she wanders crazed with thirst, grief and exhaustion, she becomes haunted by a sense of her own 'lawlessness' and, 'because of her strenuous repression, Andrew was multiplied' among the images of people crowding her mind. Yet Nancy Miller's reading of the 'plots and plausibilities' of women's fiction [in her 'Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction', in The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter, 1985] leads her to suggest (pace Freud) that 'egoistic and ambitious wishes' are also repressed along with 'erotic longings' in young women, and that these wishes are figured in the sufferings of the victimised heroine which mark her ultimate superiority to her victimisers and take her beyond love and 'erotic longings'. It is this kind of martyred exaltation that marks Ursula's final trial and spiritual union with the composite figure of Christ/Andrew. Human Toll belongs to the melodramatic/tragic version of the 'women's fiction' plot.

I have been concerned so far to show that when Human Toll is situated in relation to the major nineteenth-century tradition of women's fiction it makes much more sense as an extended narrative structure. I hope that, in doing this, I have not re-familiarised Baynton's text. I would not want to deny that it is very peculiar, but rather to suggest some ways in which its peculiarities may be read as narrative strategies in accord with and in subversion of the genre of the 'women's novel', rather than the incompetence of that chimera, the 'born short story writer'. The qualities which I want to discuss now, however, can also be found in Bush Studies. They are to be found at the points where the writing draws attention to itself, to its own textuality, frustrating expectations that writing should provide a transparent window onto an unproblematic, already-constructed reality.

Baynton is usually read as a realistic writer, but one who offends by drifting out of control into melodrama and sentimentality or who distracts from the Gothic mode by being too satirical. As Rosemary Moore has pointed out [in "'Squeaker's Mate": A Bushwoman's Tale', Australian Feminist Studies, Summer 1986], to read Baynton as a realist is to be faced with the problem of morally justifying her negative vision of men's inhumanity to women: 'Readers have comforted themselves by constructing the "maternal instinct" in Baynton's stories as providing the necessary "human value"', affirming the continuity of life despite the death of female figures. Kay Schaffer goes on [in her Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, 1988] to read the contradictory constructions of femininity in Baynton's ironic texts as the mark of her dissidence from the Australian bush legend. The days of reading these texts in terms of realism and unified moral vision are surely numbered. In the discussion which follows I want to focus in particular on the narrative positioning of the reader as the major source of disorientation and dissidence.

Disorientation is the predominant state induced in the reader by Baynton's writing, in the stories as well as the novel. The opening chapter of Human Toll is a case in point. Krimmer and Lawson call it 'confusing', and object not only to the introduction of the hidden treasure plot referred to earlier, but also to 'Baynton's attempt to recreate the vernacular of the bush': the reader's difficulty in following dialect speech 'impedes the flow of the action'. These comments demonstrate readerly expectations of classic realist narrative in two respects.

First, the implied criterion is one of narrative flow and accumulation of significant information; that is, an organicist notion of narrative development, with its latent metaphor of a stream becoming a river in full flood—a notion particularly apt, it might seem, for a novel of development which can be expected to follow the life of the protagonist from childhood through adult crisis to resolution. But I need only recall the opening chapter of Great Expectations (Pip's encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard) to suggest the counter-view that not all such novels flow smoothly along without holding their readers up in dialect speech and entangling us in plots that make no promise of unravelling themselves gradually.

Secondly, Baynton's 'attempt to recreate the vernacular of the bush', while it frustrates our eagerness to get on with the story, forces us to notice that the actors in this scene are, in fact, an 'old lag', a very young child and three aborigines, a couple and an old man—not a standard literary pattern of social relationships. What used to be called 'standard English' is noticeably absent, for the authoritative voice of the white Boss is silenced. He lies dead in his hut. On this morning after his death Boshy, the one-eyed ex-convict, quite literally steps into the Boss's boots and attempts to control this remote domain in his place. What follows is a scene of Misrule, a parody of authority. Nungi, the Aboriginal rouseabout, rebels, threatening sabotage and murder:

'Urgh!' grunted Nungi, now at a safe distance from whip or even missile. 'Fat lot you can see, old Bungy-Blinkey-eye, ole one-eye! Couldn' see er butterfly nur anythin' else, yur ole blather skyte! 'Oo cares fur you? Nut me!'

This sudden outburst shocked and surprised Boshy into fatal weakening, and he stood for parley.

'N-N-Nungi,' he stammered, 'W'ats come over yer ter go orn like thet? Nungi,' coaxingly, 'look 'ere now, ole man, yer know well w'at I gut ter do ter day. Go om now an' get ter yer work an' water them yeos an' lambs, like ther w'ite man w'at yer are.'

'Not be meself,' said Nungi, but less aggressively, till, turning to take a look at the well, and catching sight of the rising sun, he grew at once savagely and cunningly courageous.

Boshy's discomfiture increased.

'Go on now, Nungi; don't be a slinker on a day like that.'

'Nut fer you nur no one like yer, b—old blinky Boshy, ole splay-foot! Lars night I collared a bag er yer wool, an' ter smornin' I'll take it into Tambo, sell it, an git on ther plurry spree, sneak back ter night, plenty matches me,' drawing one from his trouser-pocket and striking it along the bare sole of his foot. 'Budgeree fire that feller, cobbon fire that feller,' pointing to the house 'See ole plurry one-eye Boshy burnin' like blazes! See old splay-foot runnin' 'ell for leather!'

Not unexpectedly, Boshy's appeal to Nungi to co-operate and 'act like the white man what you are' fails. His response to Nungi's insubordination is to threaten Old Jimmy with violence—kicking the one beneath him on the ladder. The verbal battle is then interrupted by one of those precisely worded but strangely hard-to-visualize descriptions often found in a Baynton text: '[Jimmy] slid down from the logs, and burrowing a hip into the ground, resolved into a rapidly-revolving four-spoked wheel, his hands and feet actively protecting his threatened hub'. It is a grotesque image, and a distinctly unfamiliar instance of cause-and-effect in the representation of human behaviour. The narrator's interpolation in this Tower of Babel scene provides no reassurance beyond a calm tone of voice.

All this dialect speech in the first chapter constitutes a denial of direct communication, in several senses. It is a mimetic denial, in that it frustrates at the same time the reader's anticipation of action and the character, Ursula's, desire to know what is going on—for Boshy's talk and singing is intended to distract the child from knowing that her father is dead. It is also, then, a symbolic denial: it confirms Boshy's often-repeated maxim, 'Ask no questions and ye'll be told no lies', advice that she fatefully takes to heart. And Boshy is trapped in his own maxim, in his inability ever to give up his long held secret, that is, his knowledge of the treasure-hoard's whereabouts.

The position of the narrator, here and in most of the first section of the novel, is that of a direct observer and reporter, providing little reassurance and no authoritative explanation of events. In this position, however, there is room for irony: the reader is invited to compare versions, as it were. We are placed somewhere between the child's bewilderment and the maxims, the threats and the mockeries imposed on her by a series of adult figures: Boshy, Cameron, Mr Civil, Jim and Fanny, the shopkeepers, the Chinese gardener. But in the later section of the novel, the return to the Bush when Ursula is an adult, this position changes significantly. Now the narrator's position is close to the heroine, but still observing without explaining. So we, as readers, share the position—it can hardly be called the consciousness—of a passive, almost-silent protagonist, who is opaque to herself. The space where irony could operate is now closed, and what we experience is the anxiety of paranoia. It is a position well described by David Punter in The Literature of Terror:

The reader is placed in a situation of ambiguity with regard to fears within the text, and in which the attribution of persecution remains uncertain and the reader is invited to share in the doubts and uncertainties which pervade the apparent story.

Paranoia is also foregrounded in the text by the proliferation of spies and eavesdroppers. There is Ursula herself in her self-appointed roles as Mina's 'keeper' and the baby's guardian, as well as her several deathbed vigils. In return she suffers Mr Civil watching her like a jailer, Andrew and Boshy benevolently but unsuccessfully protecting her, Mina watching her with the child, Palmer observing her lustfully, and so on.

The position of listening or watching in mute fear or anguish marks almost all the moments of greatest tension and suspense in Baynton's writing. This is a feature which links it closely with the narrative mode of the fantastic as Rosemary Jackson describes it [in her Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 1981]:

The fantastic exists as the inside, or underside, of realism … The fantastic gives utterance to precisely those elements which are known only through their absence within a dominant 'realistic' order… [It] introduces areas which can be conceptualised only by negative terms according to the categories of nineteenth century realism: thus, the im-possible, the un-real, the nameless, formless, shapeless, un-known, in-visible.

And, it must be added, in Baynton's text the un-utterable: key scenes are marked by the muteness and paralysis of the protagonists. There is a curious instance of this phenomenon of muteness and paralysis in the farewell scene between Ursula and Andrew outside the selector's hut:

Would he go in the night, as he did before from Stein's, without a word? Ursula's heart quickened agonizingly, though she lay still, tingling with the thought. Suddenly, an uncontrollable impulse mastered her; she rose and, shrouded with the counterpane, passed barefooted, without sound, into the night.

The moon had almost sunk to a level with the stockyard, where her eyes turned. Standing near the old myall logs, she saw Andrew. He was bare-headed, but otherwise ready for his journey. He stood motionless, though he had seen and known her first, but from his eyes came beams of light as though to guide and draw her to him.

At the head of his shadow she stopped, her eyes fixed on his, and blazing as though fed by the same flame. All about her fell the dazzling moonlight, greedily enveloping her lest his shade, stretching towards her, should dull its gleaming power on her face, throat, and bare feet. Her hands were out-stretched to him, his to her, yet both were motionless, for about them was a stillness, stagnant and omnipotent as death—and it was Death's moment, thought, and desired the girl—when suddenly, from a far point in the river, with the solemnity and clarity of Gabriel's trumpet, came that Bush-call, which few, even of its chosen, are privileged or fated to hear. In a span of sound it floated high over them, mournfully dying as it sank towards the lagoon, miles away in the scrub.

Both had followed the sound with their eyes, but the light had died in Ursula's when they again sought Andrew's, and his shadow had conquered the moonlight. She raised her fallen hand in voiceless farewell, and in the same way his went out to her.

Like the example from chapter one of Jimmy rolling on the ground, it is a detailed description but strangely difficult to imagine. The 'Bush-Call' and other ghostly phenomena such as the sound of the pick and shovel outside Boshy's deathbed are not explained (though in several of her stories Baynton uses the eerie cry of the curlew to signal death). The ordinary senses of sight and sound are inadequate to meet this evocation of the supernatural, the uncanny. The man's figure signifies death (the enveloping shadow) as well as desire—the beams of light suggesting an Annunciation scene. The imagery of death is counterposed with that of desire, in a silent struggle in which death conquers.

There is a strong suggestion that the union of Ursula and Andrew, even if it is only symbolic, is fateful, and fateful because forbidden. The heroine's unexplained and apparently inexplicable guilt in relation to her de facto brother may be read, with the Gothic lens provided by the narrative here, as the guilt of incestuous desire. The elimination of the desire together with the guilt in death ('it was Death's moment, thought, and desired the girl') is the logical end of her muteness and emotional paralysis. This desire for union with the brother in a single self, effecting an imaginary relief of the pain of separation, of sexual differentiation, can often be discerned in women's texts, especially those drawing on the Gothic mode (Wuthering Heights, for one).

The Gothic, the fantastic, the literature of terror: all these terms invoke traditions of writing which disappear in the historical amnesia produced by criticism based on the assumption of realism. They are also traditions which have proved hospitable to the imaginations of women writers. Neither the genre nor the gender is readily accorded a place, even now, in the mainstream of Australian literary criticism. The recent spate of reprints of nineteenth-century women's texts and the publication of critical commentaries upon them raises the questions of whether the current task for feminist criticism is to gain mainstream recognition for women writers, or to establish a separate women's tradition, or to divert mainstreams and dismantle canons altogether. As for genre, however, in most of this recent criticism the assumptions of realism remain solidly in place.