[In the following review, Nelson asserts that “Dead Roses” is one of the best works in The Burnt Onesand shows how White uses myth to add comedy to the story.]

‘Dead Roses,’ the longest and one of the best stories in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones, is saturated in classical myth. The central figure, Anthea Scudamore, is a goddess manquée who, faded and suburban as she is, seems in her finer moments to have ‘strayed out of some other category, of divinities and statues’ (p. 68).¹ When Anthea arrives for the first time at the Tullochs' island retreat she appears to the watching Flegg as ‘a regular Juno’, monumental, over-dressed, and forbidding (p. 18). But on her second, solitary visit she is metamorphosed into Venus wading in the foam:

So deserted was her desert beach that she took off her clothes once, without even looking over her shoulder, and walked into the milky sea. Exquisite skirts of foam clung to her ankles, and began to soothe her thighs …

(p. 64)

This latter theophany is a little pathetic, since there is nobody around to see it. Anthea herself evidently senses that it has been wasted, since she later tries to evoke it for Flegg:

“I went across to the Island, Barry, not so very long before I left. I was alone. I lived on eggs. And bread. I tramped about the bush. I was pretty miserable at the time. I swam.”

She was surprised at the directness, the candid softness of her own voice. Did she, perhaps, hope he might watch her rising from the sea?

(p. 73)

But if Flegg does momentarily visualize Anthea as Venus rather than Juno, he refuses to admit it; he merely laughs an embarrassed laugh, and the last meeting between the two of them ends as inconclusively as the first.

White moves, with Olympian casualness, from myth to myth. Fleetingly, he will transform Anthea into an unnoticed Venus or all-too-conspicuous Juno, but his favourite characterization of her is as an ashen parody of Proserpina, goddess of spring. At the beginning of the story she is offered a chance to blossom, which she fails to take: elsewhere there are many signs that she ‘was meant to swell, and ripen and burst’,² but somehow she never does so. The critical action of her life is her acceptance of a proposal of marriage from Hessell Mortlock: Mortlock's name, like his riches, his miserliness, his dead roses, and his morgue-like house, is irresistibly suggestive of Pluto, god of the dead, who carried Proserpina off to hell.³ Even Pluto's chariot has its counterpart in Mortlock's elegant but old-fashioned car. But Anthea, unlike Proserpina, is not carried off by force: she goes of her own accord. She is an accomplice in the death of spring. Likewise Mrs Scudamore, though outwardly as fond and possessive a mother as Ceres in the ancient story, resigns herself remarkably easily to the loss of her daughter. In a letter written shortly after Anthea's marriage (and dotted, incidentally with discreet allusions to the myth), Mrs Scudamore announces that she cannot yet manage a visit: ‘… Perhaps when it is spring, Anthea dear … I do not feel it is altogether right for a mother to intrude … I cannot help feeling you have changed towards me since Hessell Mortlock carried you off …’ (pp. 45-46).

Far from searching tirelessly through the world for her lost child, Mrs Scudamore allows almost five years to elapse before flying to Adelaide to visit her daughter.

I have said that White moves freely, when it suits him, from myth to myth. If Mortlock, whom Anthea chooses, is Pluto, the central character in a myth of death, then Flegg, whom Anthea rejects, is Bacchus, the protagonist in a myth of life. In the early encounter on the beach Flegg offers Anthea the part of Ariadne,⁴ she turns it down, but it continues to fascinate her, so much so that when she hears Flegg has got someone else to play it she finds herself overcome in church with dionysian visions:

Once Mrs. Mortlock, from behind her Gothic hands, was horrified to receive a vision of the bodies of Barry Flegg and Cherie Smith lashed together by ropes of hair. Lashed and lashing. She was so horrified with herself, she felt faint. … All she could do was bow her head and suffer the blasphemy which had been thrust upon her …

(pp. 47-48)

Just as Mortlock is endowed by White with Pluto's chariot in the shape of a bottlegreen Riley, so Flegg is equipped with Bacchus'chariot in the shape of a minibus with an attached tent. In Titian's painting of Bacchus and Ariadne, as in Keats' poems ‘Endymion’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Bacchus' chariot is drawn by leopards, and this attribute of the god is reflected in the leopard-skin pants of Flegg's wife.⁵ These pants disturb Anthea because they represent a part of her being with which she has never come to terms: subconsciously, she would like to wear such pants herself. In the penultimate paragraph of the story, after the meeting with the Fleggs, Anthea rouses herself from a troubled sleep and begins ‘with slow distaste, to accept that she [has] been dreaming of Cherie Flegg, of her stained leopard-skin matador pants.’

White uses myth; he does not let myth use him. Just as Mrs Scudamore and Anthea are in many ways unlikely castings for Ceres and Proserpina, so Flegg is an unexpectedly tawdry Bacchus (his hairiness makes him almost a Silenus) and Mortlock a too-prepossessing Pluto. That is the point. There is a spring goddess latent in Anthea, but she allows this part of her personality to be appeased rather than fulfilled. And it is appeased by something in Mortlock that is delusively suggestive of life and growth. Mortlock's car is green, he has a passion for roses, and he even turns out (a less dignified touch) to nurse acquisitive feelings about horse-dung. He also drinks wine, though he seems pleased that Anthea does not normally ‘tipple’ (p. 35). But the roses Anthea finds on arrival at Pluto's palace are dead roses, and Mortlock's wine-drinking has nothing Bacchic about it: in an Australian context, both wine and roses are irredeemably respectable and safe. On the paradisal island holiday Anthea daringly drinks gin, and at the mock-heroic banquet around the minibus she is offered ‘a drop of that ouzo stuff’ (which is at least Greek) as an alternative to ‘an authentic Australian cuppa tea’ (p. 70). She accepts the tea.

Inevitably it is the titular roses that epitomize Anthea's confusion over the respective attributes of Mortlock and Flegg. Before the marriage Mortlock comes in ‘on a hot morning bringing Anthea Scudamore the largest bunch of crimson roses’, roses ‘of the overpowering kind’ (p. 37). Anthea is duly overwhelmed, even though the cleaning woman reminds her that there is a glut of roses, so that Mortlock may not have paid much for his impressive bunch. The appeasement of the fertility-goddess latent in Anthea is never more obvious than in her joy over the flowers: ‘She liked to look up and catch sight of herself in the glass. She remembered a photo she had seen, of a film star, her bust brushing a bowlful of enormous roses’ (p. 38). Mortlock's gift helps Anthea persuade herself to associate Mortlock with lushness, even ecstasy: the moment when he holds her hand in front of the arranged roses is ‘one of the serious moments in life, which the scent of the roses attempted to intoxicate’ (p. 38). Yet the Mortlock family's usual way with roses is to imprison them in metal and glass, amongst funeral furniture, as Anthea finds when she first enters her husband's house:

… All that brooding furniture. And the roses. The neglected roses. For somebody had filled the rooms with silver vases and cut-glass bowls of roses. There they were, the brown roses, in some cases almost turned to metal, to bronze. The petals of the dead roses creaked as she passed.

(pp. 42-43)

As she falls asleep on her wedding night this scene struggles for mastery in her dreams with images of her encounter with Flegg on the beach: ‘And soon the gulls were lashing at the metal petals of Egyptian roses. While she was sunk in safety. The creaking of roses, their knife-edged wings, grew silenter for distance’ (p. 44).

Finally, too late, Anthea is allowed to see that roses are properly an attribute of the bacchic Flegg, not the stygian Mortlock. The insight comes as she sits, momentarily goddess-like again, ‘enthroned on the camp stool’ beside Flegg's car:

So, she was preparing to leave, when the old Greek came along the path with the bunches of roses, the crimson-purply, country bunches. Because he was asked, Doctor Flegg bought a bunch, giving too much, Mrs Mortlock saw—she was quick to master the currency of any country she visited—and tossed the roses into his wife's leopard-skin lap.

(p. 72)

Mrs Flegg protests and tells her husband to give the roses to ‘Mrs Scudamore.’ But Anthea is no longer Scudamore, she is Mortlock, encrusted with jewels and preoccupied with the prices of things. She accepts just one flower:

And pinned the rose with a brooch, which seemed, rather, to draw attention to the diamonds, though she had not intended it that way.

“Flowers die on me,” she apologized, “very quickly.”

White's use of myth in ‘Dead Roses’ is organic, not casual or accidental. Not the least of its merits is that it helps to buoy up the comedy of the story, which might so easily have become submerged in the prevailing atmosphere of melancholy and pathos. Yet, like most other successful essays in mock heroic, it dignifies its subject matter at the same time as it ridicules it. The mythic level of reference helps White to establish in the reader's mind an image of the scintillating Anthea who might have stood alongside the image of the tarnished Anthea who actually exists.

Notes

1. Page references are to the first edition of The Burnt Ones (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964). I am grateful to my colleague Michael Cotter for constructive criticism and advice.

2. cf. Patrick White, The Aunt's Story (London: Routledge, 1948), p. 33.

3. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), Vol. I, Sections 25 c, f—k. Graves normally gives only the Greek names for the divinities, whereas I have used the more familiar Roman ones. The equivalences are: Hades/Pluto; Demeter/Ceres; Core-Persephone/Proserpina; Dionysus/Bacchus; Zeus/Jupiter; Hera/Juno; Aphrodite/Venus.

4. For Ariadne see Graves, Greek Myths, I, sections 98 n, o. Bacchus and Ariadne meet on the seashore. White uses this detail but not much else. (See, however, note 6 below).

5. See John Keats, The Poems, ed Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 255-57. The note on ‘Endymion’, IV, 241, points out that the leopards are a post-classical addition. A deliberate, impish misreading of IV. 240-42.

   And, save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,
   Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,
                                 With Asian elephants.

   may have been the starting point for White's description of Flegg's minibus with tent attached, and of his cat-like concubine with ‘leopard-skin matador pants’ (The Burnt Ones, pp. 70-71).