The Thorn Birds confirms not a conventional femininity but women's contradictory and ambiguous place within sexual difference. Feminist cultural criticism has initiated a very interesting debate about the meaning of reading, and watching, romance. What follows is a contribution to that discussion which tries to see how, in historical, political and psychoanalytic terms, texts like Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds come to have such a broad appeal for women, centering the female reader in a particular way, and reworking the contradictory elements which make female subjectivity such a vertiginous social and psychic experience.

History

Fiction, fantasy and femininity. Since the rise of the popular novel directed at a female audience, the relationship between these three terms has troubled both progressive and conservative analysts of sexual difference, not least those who were themselves writers of narrative. The terms of the debate about the relationship between 'reading romance' and the construction of femininity have remained surprisingly constant in the two hundred years since Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen first engaged with the issue as a response to the expansion of sensational literature directed at the woman reader.

Both Wollstonecraft and Austen agreed that the 'stale tales' and 'meretricious scenes' of the sentimental and gothic novel triggered and structured female fantasy, stirring up the erotic and romantic at the expense of the rational, moral and maternal. Both thought that such reading could directly influence behaviour—inflamed and disturbed readers might, in Wollstonecraft's evocative phrase 'plump into actual vice.' But Wollstonecraft's main concern was not with junk reading as the route to adultery but as the path to conventional, dependent, degenerate femininity—to the positioning of the female self in the degraded, dependent role as 'objects of desire.' At the time she was writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft was defending a relatively conventional sexual morality. Even so, she was much less concerned with the danger to women's sexual virtue which romance reading might breed than with the far-reaching political effects of such indulgence. As the narrative of desire washed over the reader, the thirst for reason was quenched, and the essential bridge to female autonomy and emancipation, a strengthened 'understanding' was washed out. The female psyche could not, it seemed, sustain or combine two mental agendas; for them it must be either reason or passion, pleasure or knowledge. Austen's version of this libidinal economy was perhaps slightly less punitive, but this was only because her ambitions for her heroine/reader were a less radical and more limited moral autonomy within the dominant convention as wife, mother and lover. Moral and spiritual integrity and, to some extent, independence for women were essential, but an independent life and an independently productive life were not unthinkable within her novels. Both Wollstonecraft and Austen assumed, as most analysts of romance reading do today, that romance narrative works on the reader through rather simple forms of identification. The reader aligns herself with the heroine and suffers her perils, passions and triumphs. The narrative structure of the fiction then 'takes over' everyday life, and gender relations are read through its temptations, seductions and betrayals. Alternatively romance provides an escape from the everyday realities; the pleasure of fantasy numbs the nerve of resistance to oppression.

Wollstonecraft's implicit theory of reading assumed the reader would identify herself with the female heroine. The reading of popular fiction and the fantasy induced by it depend at one level on the identification of reader and heroine, and the subsequent acting-out of a related narrative trajectory. Late-eighteenth-century theories of reading, as they appeared in both aesthetic and political discourses, assumed a fairly direct relationship between reading and action, especially from the naïve reader, i.e. the barely literate, uneducated working-class person—and women. In this period of expanding literacy and political turmoil, the question of the ability to read is at the centre of both progressive platforms of radicalization and transformation of the mass of people, and conservative fears of revolution. A great deal of attention was given to not only the dynamic effects of reading on the unschooled subject but also to the distinction between reading as a social act (a pamphlet read to others in a coffee house or village square, books read at the family hearth) and reading as a private act, unregulated and unsupervised by authority. Both forms of reading could be subversive, but the latter, less open to surveillance and control, more defiantly announcing the mental autonomy of individual subjects whose 'independence' is not acknowledged by the dominant social and political order, offered a particularly insidious form of subversion.

The question of women's reading, as it was understood in the 1790s was situated within these wider anxieties about reading and revolution, literacy and subjectivity. Accordingly both Wollstonecraft and Austen knew women must read to achieve even minimal independent status as subjects and were, in somewhat different ways, concerned with something more intangible and complex than a simple incitement, which sensational novels may produce, to misbehave. Private reading is already, in itself, an act of autonomy; in turn it sets up, or enables, a space for reflective thought. Fiction gives that reflection a narrative shape and sensational fiction produces a sort of general excitation, the 'romantic twist of the mind' that concerned Wollstonecraft. The desire to inhabit that provocative landscape and mentally live its stories rather than those of the supposed social real was as worrying as any specific identification with romantic female protagonists. In fact Wollstonecraft's analysis of the construction of a degraded and dependent femininity in A Vindication insists that although female children have no innate sexuality—she bitterly rejected Rousseau's insistence that they did—women come to see themselves narcissistically through the eyes of men. Through the gaze of the male rake, they become 'rakes themselves.' Female subjectivity was characterized in this account by its retrograde tendency to take up other subject positions and identify self as object. It was this already unstable degraded subject (constructed in childhood and early adolescence) that reads romance and fantasizes about it. For Wollstonecraft and Austen popular sensational literature both reinforced and evoked a set of romantic scenarios which the reader will use at once to interpret, act through and escape from ordinary lives. Each part of this reading effect is 'bad,' each involves different elements of projection and displacement and together they constitute the negative effect of fiction and fantasy.

There was very little possibility in late-eighteenth-century progressive or conservative thought for a positive account of fantasy for women, the lower classes or colonial peoples. For all of these lesser subjectivities the exercise of the imagination was problematic, for the untutored, 'primitive' psyche was easily excited and had no strategies of sublimation; a provocative narrative induced imitation and disruptive actions, political or social. When radicals supported the subjective equality of any of these groups, they generally insisted that their reasoning capacity was equal to that of a bourgeois male. The psyche of the educated middle-class male was the balanced psyche of the period: reason and passion in a productive symbiosis. Men of this class were felt to have a more fixed positionality. Radical discourses presented them as the origin of their own identities, as developing independent subjects, the makers and controllers of narrative rather than its enthralled and captive audience. This capacity to produce a master narrative like their rational capacity to take civic, political actions remained latent in them as readers. Men of the ruling class, so went the dominant mythology, read critically, read not to imitate but to engage productively with argument and with narrative. They understood the difference between fiction and fact, between imagination and reason. The normative male reader, unlike his credulous female counterpart, could read a gothic novel for amusement and pleasure. Like the poet whose writing practice used 'emotion recollected in tranquility,' the two modes of reason and passion were ever open to him; in the same way he could inhabit both a public and private sphere and move between them. The enlightenment asked man to subordinate passion to reason. Romanticism argued for a productive interaction between them, assuming optimistically that the rational would act as a check to passion, and that passion itself would be transformed, sublimated through the imagination.

As literacy spread and reading became one of the crucial practices through which human capacity, integrity, autonomy and psychic balance could be assessed, reading habits and reading response were increasingly used to differentiate readers by class and sex. By the 1790s reading by the masses was being argued for as a necessary route to individual and group advancement, as the crucial preparation for social and political revolution, and, at the same time, argued against as the significant activity which might stem the revolutionary tide. Thomas Paine pushed the polemic furthest, conflating reading with civil liberty itself—prophesying that censorship would breed its own revenge—that it would become dangerous to tell a whole people that 'they shalt not read.' Reading, both as an activity and as a sign of activities it may engender, became a metonymic reference to forms of good and bad subjectivity, of present and potential social and psychic being. So Wollstonecraft in 1791 ends her diatribe against romance reading on an uncertain note, insisting that it is better that women read novels than not read at all.

Fantasy

In the preceding two sections I have been deliberately using the term fantasy in its contemporary everyday sense: as a conscious construction of an imaginary scene in which, it is invariably assumed, the fantasist places him/herself in an easily identified and constant role in the narrative. This common-sense working definition has been undermined at various points in the discussion of autobiography and history, but it is more or less adequate for a preliminary account of fantasy as 'daydream,' as a conscious, written narrative construction, or as an historical account of the gendered imagination. Yet fantasy used solely or unreflectingly in this way invokes a notion of the relation between dream and fiction, without actually theorizing that connection. Unless we actually do work through that relationship and distinguish between fantasy as an unconscious structure and as forms of social narrative, we are unlikely to break free from the stigmatizing moralism which taints most accounts of romantic fantasy and gender, representing romance as a 'social disease' which affects the weaker constitution of the female psyche.

Psychoanalytic discussions of fantasy are not wholly free of elements of moralization but, as Alison Light has commented in her illuminating discussion of romance fiction, sexuality and class, psychoanalysis at least 'takes the question of pleasure seriously, both in its relation to gender and in its understanding of fiction as fantasies, as the explorations and productions of desires which may be in excess of the socially possible or acceptable.'…

Text: The Thorn Birds

In 'Returning to Manderley' Alison Light reclaims Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as a text which provides 'a classic model of romance fiction while at the same time exposing many of its terms.' I would like to adopt a similar critical strategy towards Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, a family saga whose events start in 1915 in rural New Zealand and end in 1965 in a London town house. Written by an Australian emigrée living in America in the mid-seventies, the novel subtly appropriates elements of feminist discourse, integrating the language of romance fiction with new languages of sexuality and sexual difference. Fantasy is quite unashamedly mobilized in The Thorn Birds both at the level of content—the narrative scenario—and at the level of rhetoric—the various styles which mark out its different registers within the story. Through these means the novel weaves a seeming social realism together with a series of original fantasies so that the text resembles the heterogeneous or hybrid form of fantasy described by psychoanalysis. Although, like a retold dream, the text rationalizes fantasy scenes into a coherent narrative sequence, the plot is in fact full of unlikely incident and coincidence which characters and authorial voice are constantly trying to justify. The implausible elements of the plot and their elaborate rationalization signals the presence of original fantasy in the text. Like many family sagas, The Thorn Birds inscribes all of the generic original fantasies, often mapping them over each other and repeating them with variations in the experience of different generations. Laplanche and Pontalis describe these fantasy categories as:

Fantasies of origins: the primal scene pictures the origin of the individual; fantasies of seduction, the origin and upsurge of sexuality; fantasies of castration, the origin of the difference between the sexes.

Ambiguities about paternity run through the text. Intimations of incest affect almost all the familial and extra-familial relations, as father-daughter, mother-son and brother-sister ties. These fantasy scenes are structured and elaborated from the women's position, which sometimes means only that they offer a mildly eccentric elaboration of the classic fantasy scripts. For example, castration fantasy in the narrative emphasizes both lack and power in women and mothers, on the one hand, and retribution by that eternally absent father, God, on the other. The third-person narration, typical of family saga romance, allows a very free movement between masculine and feminine positions, and different discursive genres and registers. It also permits the narrative as a whole to be contained within a set of determinate political ideologies for which the characters themselves bear little responsibility. Like Gone with the Wind, but with significant differences, The Thorn Birds pursues an interesting and occasionally radical interrogation of sexual difference inside a reactionary set of myths about history.

At the heart of The Thorn Birds lies a scandalous passion between a Catholic priest, Ralph de Bricassart, and Meggie Cleary, whose family are the focus of the novel. Ralph meets Meggie when she is 9 years old, the only and somewhat neglected girl child in a large brood of boys. Ralph himself is a strikingly handsome and ambitious Irish-born priest in his late twenties, sent into temporary exile in this remote bit of rural New South Wales because he has quarrelled with his bishop. Ralph loves the child for her beauty, and for her 'perfect female character, passive yet enormously strong. No rebel, Meggie: on the contrary. All her life she would obey, move within the boundaries of her female fate.'

The whole first half of the novel follows the Clearys' fortunes on Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station, which belongs first to the widowed millionaire matriarch, Mary Carson, and after her death to the church, with Ralph as its agent. Its narrative moves in a tantalizingly leisurely fashion towards the seduction of the proud, virginal Ralph by Meggie, whose female fate seems to include some fairly fundamental disobedience to church and state. Ralph 'makes' Meggie, as he tells his Vatican superior and confessor later in the text, shaping her education and sensibility from childhood. She, like a dutiful daughter in someone's fantasy, returns his seemingly non-sexual love with a fully libidinized intensity.

The text plays with great skill on the two narratives of prohibition, familial and ecclesiastic, that are bound together in Meggie and Ralph's romance. 'Don't call me Father,' he keeps insisting, while disentangling himself reluctantly from the arms of the teenage girl who assaults him at every opportunity. Ralph is represented as mother, father and lover in relation to Meggie. Somehow it is Ralph, in the confessional, who has to tell the 15-year-old Meggie about menstruation, because mother Fee is too busy with the boys. Somehow it is Ralph, not Meggie's negligent macho husband, who arrives in a distant part of the outback to hold her hand in her first painful experience of childbirth.

The ideal feminine man—he has a way, he tells us, with babies—Ralph is bound to the church by pride and ambition, sure that it will give him a transcendent identity: 'Not a man, never a man; something far greater, something beyond the fate of a mere man.' Losing his virginity at 40 odd, Ralph discovers in media res that he is a 'mere man' after all, while Meggie finds out that only symbolic incest and transgression can make a woman of her. Their brief week's consummation takes place on a remote South Sea island. After an Edenic interlude, Ralph leaves for Rome and his rising career in the church. Meggie, gestating his son, returns to the Cleary family base at Drogheda with Justine, her daughter, by her husband Luke. Here, under her mother's benign matriarchy (her biological father, significantly dies before her marriage and adultery), she will raise her children and even enjoy a short second honeymoon when Ralph comes to Drogheda to visit years later.

The novel, 591 pages long, deals with major events in the life of three generations of Clearys as well as Ralph's trajectory from country priest to cardinal via his broken vows. Like Gone with the Wind and other family saga romances, part of its pleasure is in the local, historical detail. Most of the energy of the text, however, is reserved for the emotional encounters. Its power to hold the female reader, in the first half anyway, is linked to the inexorable unfolding of Meggie and Ralph's story, the seduction scenario played through the narrative of another durable fantasy—the family romance in which a real-life parent is discarded as an imposter and a more exalted figure substituted.

The incest motif is everywhere in the novel, saturating all the literal familial relations as well as the metaphorical ones. Within the Cleary household all the boys remain unmarried; they are, as Meggie tells Ralph during their island idyll 'terribly shy … frightened of the power a woman might have over them … quite wrapped up in Mum.' Most wrapped up in Fee Cleary is her eldest son Frank, the illegitimate child of a New Zealand politician, half Maori. Through her affair with him Fee has lost her social position; her upper-class Anglican family marry her off to their shy dairy hand, the Irish Catholic immigrant Paddy Cleary, and then disown her. Frank acts out an Oedipal drama with Paddy who he believes is his real father, until he goads Paddy into revealing his illegitimate status. They quarrel. Frank calls his father 'a stinking old he-goat … a ram in rut' for making his mother Fee pregnant yet again. The father, stung, calls the boy 'no better than the shitty old dog who fathered you, whoever he was!' This quarrel takes place in front of the child Meggie and Father Ralph. After it Frank leaves home, eventually commits murder and is given a life sentence. His fate is seen in the text quite specifically as Fee's punishment for her sexual transgression. In the second half of the novel, Meggie too will lose her much loved son by Ralph, first to the church and then by death.

These symmetrical events are reinforced by the deep but sexually innocent attachment of brother-sister pairs in each generation: Frank and his half-sister Meggie; Justine and her half-brother Dane. Within the male Cleary brood there are homosocial attachments too, the twin boys Patsy and Jims are represented as a symbiotic couple. And The Thorn Birds extends and elaborates the homosocial, homoerotic themes, though never in a very positive way, through Meggie's husband Luke's preference of his workmate Arne, and, within the church, through Ralph's friendship with his Italian mentor. Male bonding is seen as something of a problem in the book, a problem certainly for Meggie who, as she says, seems drawn to men who don't have much need of women and fear too much closeness with them.

Meggie (and Ralph) witness two primal scenes—in discursive form to be sure—in watching and hearing the revelations in the argument between Paddy and Frank. They hear a graphic, animalized account of the act between Paddy and Fee, and between Fee and some unknown lover, whom we later discover to be the half-caste politician. (Children often interpret parental coitus as a fight.) Ralph fears that Meggie will be psychologically damaged by witnessing the argument. The text doesn't follow this up with any reflexive comment. At a narrative level, in relation to the sequence of the fantasy scenes involving Meggie which now begin to move inevitably towards the seduction scenario, the fight, as a stage in the destruction of her innocence and perhaps an erosion of her father's authority, is certainly important.

Having sorted out in one part the question of the origin of babies, the next fantasy sequence is the one in which Ralph tells the super-innocent 15-year-old that she is menstruating, not dying of cancer. Meggie is presented as peculiarly ignorant of the facts of life for a girl who lives on a working farm. The author has to insert a long justifying didactic passage which claims, incredibly, that the sexual division of labour on the station, together with the patriarchal Puritanism of Paddy Cleary, has kept her wholly innocent. Even this touching moment of instruction stops short of full knowledge. When Ralph asks Meggie whether she knows how women get pregnant her answer is wholly within the register of fantasy:

'You wish them.'

'Who told you that?'

'No one. I worked it out for myself,' she said.

The next scene in the seduction sequence is the first unintended kiss between Ralph and Meggie, aged 16, which she half initiates. Ralph then leaves Drogheda for some time. In his absence Meggie has a conversation with her father in which it is clear that she believes that Ralph will, when she tells him to, leave the church and marry her. Paddy tries, without much luck, to disabuse her of this illusion:

'Father de Bricassart is a priest, Meggie…. Once a man is a priest there can be no turning away … a man who takes those vows knows beyond any doubt that once taken they can't be broken, ever. Father de Bricassart took them, and he'll never break them…. Now you know, Meggie, don't you? From this moment you have no excuse to daydream about Father de Bricassart.'

But Paddy is unconvincing as bearer of the reality principle, either to the reader or to Meggie.

After one more unsuccessful attempt to seduce Ralph in the hours after her father's death, Meggie is temporarily persuaded to give him up. She marries Luke, one of the seasonal sheep shearers, because he reminds her of Ralph physically. The substitution is an abominable failure, although it gives McCullough a rich opportunity to expand on the incompetent sexual style and homosocial tendencies of working-class Aussie males. Luke is like Ralph in that he can do without women, preferring the world of work and men, but he is unlike Ralph in that he has no nurturant qualities whatever. The text records Meggie's painful, incompetent deflowering in graphic and ironic detail which combines the style of a sixties sex manual with a feminist debunking of heterosexuality. Luke sets her to work as a servant for a crippled farmer's wife and goes off with the boys to cut cane.

Although the book's account of their brief marriage is convincingly realistic in its local incident, the extremity of Luke's punitive treatment of Meggie actually extends the fantasy register of the narrative. Ralph's accidental arrival during Meggie's difficult labour is the penultimate scene in the seduction sequence. He takes her through the menarche and childbirth and will, on Matlock Island, answer her wish at last and take her sexually.

Through the novel sexuality is discussed in at least two different languages. Sex which is pleasurable for women is narrated in the generic style of historical romance—steamy, suggestive and vague: 'It had been a body poem, a thing of arms and hands and skin and utter pleasure.' Bad sex is exposed in the new pragmatic realism of post-war prose: 'with a great indrawn breath to keep her courage up she forced the penis in, teeth clenched.' Ralph fucks Meggie in Barbara Cartland's best mode. In the process of losing his virginity he also forgoes his exalted notion of himself as above sexual difference. In sexual pleasure Meggie's femininity is confirmed. Meggie and Ralph conceive a male child, though Ralph's punishment is to be ignorant of this fact until after his son's death, since this is a fantasy from the women's position. Keeping men in ignorance of their paternity can be seen a female prerogative. The question of origins is thus reopened for the next generation in the final seduction, but the question of identity, sexuality and difference is temporarily resolved for Ralph, Meggie and reader.

Narrative rationalization binds the fantasy scenarios together. No amount of tricky discursive justification really explains why Meggie should witness Frank and Paddy's quarrel, need to be told by a priest about menstruation, time her labour for Ralph's visit—and so on. Yet all these events are necessary to construct a complex fantasy, a series of scenarios in which the reader's position vis-à-vis Ralph and Meggie is constantly shifting. Until the sequence reaches its penultimate moment, it is fair to say that the reader oscillates from the woman's position to the man's position—represented as poles of subjectivity rather than fixed, determinate identities. For it is wholly unclear that these subject positions can be actually identified with the gendered characters Ralph and Meggie.

What, in text and context, creates this reading effect which is responsible in great part for the pleasure of the novel? The Thorn Birds is directed at a female audience, one that by the late seventies has certainly been affected by debates around feminism, if only in their most populist and watered-down form. Even through media representations of feminist discourse there had developed among women a more inquiring attitude towards traditional masculinity and femininity. The acceptable social content of daytime fantasies had shifted enough to allow the woman to be the sexual initiator, especially if, like Meggie, she is also the model of femininity who only wants marriage and babies, content to stay out of modern, urban public space, down on the farm. Within the terms of the fantasy Meggie is allowed to be both active and feminine. With certain fundamental reservations about her social role The Thorn Birds offers the female reader a liberated de-repressed version of the seduction fantasy, a written-out, up-front story of 'A daughter seduces a father' in place of that old standard 'A father seduces a daughter.'

Most mass-market romance, as Modleski and others point out, has stuck with the conservative androcentric version, counting on the third-person narrative which looks down on the woman in the text to inscribe the active female as the knowing reader in the narrative 'a man seduces a woman.' Shifts in the public discourses about sexuality, specifically feminist discourse, permit the seduction fantasy to be reinscribed in a more radical way in popular fiction. They allow the narrative itself to express the terms of original fantasy from the place of the woman, while reassuring us through Meggie's character that such a fantasy, however transgressive in social terms, is perfectly feminine. If the text stopped there it would still be disruptive for, if we put the relationship between femininity and transgression another way, the fantasy sequence suggests also that, in order to be perfectly feminine, a woman's desire must be wholly transgressive. But the role reversal of the seduction fantasy is only the first and simplest stage in the transformation of the seduction story.

More unexpected and eccentric is the way in which Ralph as the feminine man and virgin priest is mobilized within the fantasy. Critiques of traditional macho masculinity abound in the popular fictions of the seventies, especially perhaps in Hollywood film. Decentred masculinity can be represented through a figure like Ralph, whose maternal characteristics are balanced by his public power. Ralph's feminine side is also signified, however, by his great personal beauty, to which he himself calls attention in the early scenes, and his prized virginity. As a beautiful and pure object of desire he stands in the text in place of the woman, often obscuring Meggie. As decentred man, Ralph displaces Meggie as the object to be seduced. This blurring of masculine and feminine positions is worked through in all but the last seduction scene.

Meggie's passion is usually straightforwardly expressive; Ralph's is held back by taboo. His desire is accompanied by shame, disgust and horror at his own wayward libido on whose control he so prides himself: 'I can get it up. It's just that I don't choose to.' 'Spider's poison,' 'snakes,' 'ghastly drive' are the phrases used to describe Ralph's illicit desire for Meggie. Yet Ralph is at last moved by his love for her, and his suppressed desire, to consummate the relationship. In the final scenario it is Ralph who pursues and takes action, restoring the initiatives of sexual difference to their right order. The moment of absolute transgression, when Ralph breaks his vows to the church, is later described by him as another kind of 'sacrament.' It is also the moment when the even more transgressive definitions of sexual difference that have been offered the reader are withdrawn. Incest makes real men and women of us all.

It is not simply plot and character that structure the text's unstable inscriptions of sexual difference. The narrative strategy and the language of the novel contribute centrally to this effect. Third-person narration helps a lot. Although the novel starts out with Meggie's early childhood traumas, setting her up as a figure who endures loss and punishment at an early stage, her psyche is always held at one remove. The authorial voice is adult and knowing about her, its tone sympathetic and realistic but never really intimate. Ralph's consciousness, on the other hand, especially where it touches on his feeling for Meggie, is presented consistently in lyrical and philosophical terms. Long paragraphs speculate on Meggie's attraction for the priest:

Perhaps, had he looked more deeply into himself, he might have seen that what he felt for her was the curious result of time, and place and person … she filled an empty space in his life which God could not….

Ralph 'redecorates' a room for Meggie at the presbytery in which she is installed as surrogate daughter. The text 'decorates' Ralph's feelings for her, offering us a running inner narrative on them, while Meggie's growing feeling for Ralph is rarely given such discursive space. The text gives us a 'natural' identification with Meggie because of her initial priority in the story and because she is the woman in the novel, but it also offers us a seductive alternative identification with Ralph, as a more complex and expressive subjectivity. The oscillation between the realistic and lyric modes, the disruption of the terms of sexual difference, is both titillating and vertiginous. It makes obvious what is perhaps always true in romance reading for women: that the reader identifies with both terms in the seduction scenario, but most of all with the process of seduction. In The Thorn Birds sequence the term in which subjectivity is most profoundly inscribed is the verb: seduces. It is both disappointing and a relief when the scenario reverts to a more conventional set of positions:

Go, run! Run, Meggie, get out of here with the scrap of pride he's left you!

Before she could reach the veranda he caught her, the impetus of her flight spinning her round against him.

It is as if the act itself, so long deferred, textually speaking, so long the subject of daydream within the narrative, stabilizes the scandalous encounter in terms of socially normative gendered activity and passivity.

There is a whole further generation of things to say about the rewriting of sexual difference in The Thorn Birds, but for the purposes of this argument it is perhaps enough to note that Meggie's 'liberated' 'bitchy' actress daughter makes, in the end, a typically feminine match with a macho German financier into whose hands Ralph delivers the stewardship of the Cleary family estates. The novel ends in the moment of European modernity with the union of Rainer and Justine. Twin 'stars' in public life, they also represent socially acceptable and highly polarized versions of late-twentieth-century masculinity and femininity in which tough public men are privately tender and ambitious, successful women are little girls at heart. There are fantasy elements in the 'European' part of the novel, but they are relatively superficial ones. And the seduction scenario between Rainer and Justine is definitely the right way round: 'A man seduces a woman.' Modernity turns out to be pretty old-fashioned after all.

The most daring interrogation of gendered subjectivity is located in the story of Meggie and Ralph and articulated through original fantasy. The English-speaking sub-continent, New Zealand and Australia, before World War II, and especially its idealized rural locations, Drogheda and Matlock Island, stand in as the 'archaic' and 'primitive' setting for the origins of modern sexuality and difference. They work in this way historically for the Australian reader, just as the pre-Civil-War American South does for the American reader, or early nineteenth-century Yorkshire for the British reader. But for the 'foreign' reader—and The Thorn Birds is written with an international reading market in mind—the setting is doubly displaced and mythologized through distance and history. It is as if, to paraphrase John Locke's famous colonial metaphor about America, 'In the beginning, all the world was down under.'

Myths of origin need actors as well as settings. The Thorn Birds does not revise biblical wisdom in this respect; transgression and sexuality are set in motion by Fee's adulterous, cross-racial affair with the half-Maori Pakeha. And I must admit, dear reader, that I have been an unreliable narrator and have held back a crucial piece of information from the text so that it can round out my argument. When Fee and Meggie confess their transgressions to each other, Fee lets slip an important piece of information.

I have a trace of Maori blood in me, but Frank's father was half Maori. It showed in Frank because he got it from both of us. Oh, but I loved that man! Perhaps it was the call of our blood…. He was everything Paddy wasn't—cultured, sophisticated, very charming, I loved him to the point of madness….

How does this 'trace' of 'Maori blood'—McCullough, like Freud, chooses a racist definition of race—work to explain an heredity of transgression in the text? In the first place the inscription of sexual difference at any historical moment not only requires an 'original' myth of a primal scene, it frequently takes on a third term of social difference and prohibition. This acts as defence, perhaps, against the scandal of the child watching the scene of its own origins or, in castration and seduction fantasy, the scandal of sexual difference itself. In any case, it is interesting that in modern Western myth this social difference frequently takes both a racial and specular form, projecting and displacing sexual taboo and illicit desire into cultural taboo and hierarchy. In The Thorn Birds, racial and religious taboo serve to express the transgressive and asocial character of original fantasy, just as class, race and symbolic incest do in Wuthering Heights. Although the men in these texts may threaten social coherence by their 'hybrid' nature and their deceptive veneer of civilization, it often turns out to be the 'savage' nature and original taint of the women who love them that are most profoundly disruptive. It is Cathy, not Heathcliff, who stands most absolutely outside the social, knocking at the window in vain. In these texts written by and for women, women nevertheless end up responsible for the scandalous origins of sexuality and difference. The Thorn Birds makes this point quite explicitly, adding Fee's own drop of 'primitivism' as a gratuitous racialist confirmation. These two anarchic women are contained in the narrative by the chosen role as mothers and matriarchs. Kept on the plantation, they are not allowed to affect the modern resolution of sexual difference and invade the public sphere. '… where do we go wrong?' Meggie asks Mum, 'In being born,' Fee replies.

The second half of the novel disappoints in terms of its normalization of sexual difference, rather like the last section of Wuthering Heights. But the really worrying elements of the European portions of the narrative reside in their overt politics. I have said very little about the novel's lengthy and interesting treatment of the Catholic church and the priesthood, a treatment which was in dialogue, no doubt, with elements of the reformist debates within the Catholicism in the seventies. Although the author takes a liberal Catholic line on the chastity of priests, the rest of her views on the church are anything but progressive. Despite acknowledging its economic opportunism and political infighting, the novel is largely uncritical of the church's international influence. Indeed, it openly defends the Vatican's record in relation to fascism and endorses its steadfast opposition to revolution. When Meggie and Ralph's son Dane becomes the perfect priest, he goes on holiday to Greece where his visit is shadowed by a threatening crowd which is 'milling' and 'chanting' in support of 'Pap-an-dreo.'

Although the story contains a rags-to-riches element, the origins and morality of wealth are never questioned. Rainer's rise to fortune and power endow him, in the novel, with wholly admirable and desirable qualities. With Ralph and Dane dead, he becomes the secular inheritor of the power which the church held earlier in the narrative. Fantasies of wealth and power find a lot of scope in family sagas, where they intersect with and support the original fantasies which are represented there. Like Lace, Dallas or Dynasty, The Thorn Birds masks the origins of wealth, naturalizing and valorizing it even as it exposes and, up to a certain point, reflects upon the nature of social myth and psychic fantasy about the origins of sexuality and sexual difference. It is this appropriation of fantasy, not fantasy itself, that is implicitly dangerous.

Reading The Thorn Birds should warn us away from those half-baked notions embedded in certain concepts of 'post-modern' culture and 'post-feminism' which see the disruption of subjectivity and sexual difference as an act which has a radical autonomy of its own and a power to disrupt hierarchies beyond it. The Thorn Birds is a powerful and ultimately reactionary read. In its unashamed right-wing bias the text assumes that its millions of women readers have become progressively reflective about sexuality, but remain conservative, uninterested and unreflective in their thinking about other political and social concerns. Indeed, to return to my initial analysis of the pleasure of reading Gone with the Wind, the reactionary political and social setting secure, in some fashion, a privileged space where the most disruptive female fantasy can be 'safely' indulged.

If we ask why women read and watch so much popular romance, the answers seem at one level mundane and banal. Still excluded in major ways from power (if not labour) in the public sphere, where male fantasy takes on myriad discursive forms, romance narrative can constitute one of women's few entries to the public articulation and social exploration of psychic life. It is wrong to imply, as many studies of romance reading seem to, that fantasizing is a female specialty. On the contrary fantasy is, as Freud's work suggests, a crucial part of our constitution as human subjects. It is neither the contents of original fantasies nor even necessarily the position from which we imagine them that can, or ought, to be stigmatized. Rather, it is consciousness of the insistent nature of those fantasies for men and women and the historically specific forms of their elaboration that need to be opened up. Our priority ought be an analysis of the progressive or reactionary politics of the narratives to which they can become bound in popular expression. Those narratives—which of course include issues around sexual difference as well as around race, class and the politics of power generally—can be changed.