REVIEW OFThe White Garden
Reviewer: Nicholas Birns
Antipodes 1995

St. Teresa of Avila continues to exude a deep resonance as an image of female spirituality, a resonance whose abuse and violation by a sadistic therapist is one of the sources of Carmel Bird's riveting new work of fiction. It is an intensely emotional experience to read THE WHITE GARDEN; although an intensely aesthetic one as well. Dr. Ambrose Goddard is a psychologist who sadistically abuses his patients. (He is based on a real-life Australian case of about a generation ago). His air of superiority and professional know-how masks a desperate and seemingly imperturbable desire to control others, especially young women, several of whom he drives insane and even murders.

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.