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A review of the White Garden
by Nicholas Birns,
from Antipodes
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This review first appeared in the literary journal Antipodes, of which Nicholas Birns is reviews editor.
Copyright © Nicholas Birns 1995. All rights reserved.
Dr Birns' homepage is at www.users.interport.net/~nicbirns
The story is told in dribs and drabs and from multiple focus-points,
as if to frustrate Goddard's obvious desire for a unified, master
narrative at which he will be at the center; the only way Bird
can depict his victims' resistance is through diffusion. This
can make it hard for the reader to get into the book at first,
but it also has the merit of giving a slow approach to Goddard,
letting us see his monstrosity from various angles. One of these
angles centers around Vickie Field, a troubled young patient murdered
(and, like all the rest of his patients, sexually violated) by
Goddard, and the efforts of her younger sister, decades later,
to solve the mystery of her murder. Another concerns Rosamund
Pryce-Jones, a young girl from a Welsh migrant family who fancies
herself to be St. Teresa, a delusion strengthened and fortified
by Goddard in order to cement his dominion over her. Goddard eggs
on the girls' yearning for saintliness because on his own wish
for omnipotence: 'I am God and I am fucking a saint' he gloats
to the hapless Rosamund/Teresa (109). One of Rosamund's fellow
inmates is Therese Gillis, who fancies herself to be the other
famous Teresa/Therese in Catholic hagiography, St. Therese of
Lisieux 'Teresa' and 'Therese' actually meet on the grounds of
the asylum and compare notes in a manner reminiscent of the famous
case of the 'Three Christs of Ypsilanti'. To add to the metafictional
irony, both are aware of a book by Vita Sackville-West in which
the lives of both saints are chronicled; this awareness somehow
does not pierce the veil of illusion in which they are relentlessly
strangled.Vita Sackville-West reminds us of Virginia Woolf, and her famous
portrait of an uncompassionate and controlling psychiatrist in
Mrs.Dalloway. But there is a long genealogy between Woolf and
Bird on this theme, much of it postcolonial--Doris Lessing and,
of course, the far superior Janet Frame come to mind. But Bird's
revision of, especially, Lessing is striking. Lessing, at least
at one point, was an advocate of the "anti-psychiatry" movement
of the 1960's and an advocate of regarding schizophrenic delusion
as but another form of the unfettering of repressed imagination,
of a creative fantasy that would herald countercultural bliss.
Bird's position is precisely the opposite; Goddard is an advocate
of anti-psychiatry, a disciple of R.D. Laing, but his opposition
to the psychoanalytic establishment makes him more, not less,
menacing. The asylum's name is 'Mandala Psychiatric Clinic' but
there is no incense and reincarnation here, just authoritarian
savagery. Goddard makes his patients believe they are St. Teresa.
St. Therese, Shirley Temple, et al so that they will be lured
by the siren song of their own imaginations to become his spiritual
captives. The counterculture, it is implied, may have had its
own agenda of domination; one generation's (or gender's) liberation
may be another's oppression.Vita Sackville-West also supplies the book's title, via the white
garden at her estate in Sissinghurst, Kent. The title, and Sackville-West's
significance in the book, is no easy topic to resolve. In a way,
Sackville-West is pictured as an advocate of women's spiritual
and emotional experience, someone whose visions are misused and
perverted by Goddard and his wife and whose writings are a potential
source of replenishment for the victims. Yet Sackville-West is
also a shaper, a molder, whose garden is an aesthetic triumph,
but also a burnished conceit (36). Its imagined transplantation
to Goddard's sanatorium is, of course, an act of postcolonial
mimicry done without postcolonial irony; Goddard includes the
cultural cringe en passant among his many infelicities. Yet all
the book's dream-images are from outside Australia, whether they
hail from European piety, Bloomsbury esprit, or American mass
culture. Any real identity the Australian girls may be trying
to formulate is usurped, taken from them, by Goddard's imported
simulacra. Bird does not at all drive this point in any doctrinaire
way. The book's presentation (made not just in narrative but in
diary, monologue, dream, list) in fact, is so gossamer, so permeable,
that even the terrible sorrow it chronicles does not traumatize
the reader as it might in a more blunt transmission. But the issue
of the position of the White Garden with regards to Australian
identity is there, and raises questions readers of the book ought
to grapple with.Goddard dies, discredited, in 1985, and one is made to feel that
the victims' lives were not totally lived in vain, that some form
of restitution is made. The principal agent of this restitution
is Vickie Field's sister Laura, who in the latter portion of the
book acts as almost a sort of detective, bit by bit ferreting
out the secrets that Goddard would rather keep forever silent.
As Laura says at one point, 'I have a sense of purpose now--unravelling
the story of Vickie's death, a story that must includes the stories
of so many other people' (156). Laura acts as a sort of ratiocinative
cure for Goddard's calculated abusiveness. She epitomizes a conscientiousness,
or, it might be said, a sense of conscience, that means the retort
to Goddard's mad visions will not just be mere randomness and
defeat, that there will be someone with a sense of mission, duty,
and compassion to tell the tale the victims could not themselves
relate.Bird's previous books were impressive, but it has to be said that
she has exceeded herself in The White Garden. It would be nice,
of course, if all Australian books were brought over and did well
in the United States, but Bird's novel should be a top priority
in this regard. It would have an immediate place in literature
and psychology courses and possibly even women's literature courses,
and would tend to give American readers something to relate to
in several ways. Whether or not The White Garden achieves immediate
fame on these shores, though, is finally irrelevant. Bird's book
is a splendid, plangent, and memorable achievement, and a permanent
contribution to Australian literature.Return to homepage