The three stories chosen for this essay have several points in common. All are set in the country and all examine the lives of an incomplete family, one with the father absent. The first one, Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife,” is set in the Australian bush, as is the second, “The Chosen Vessel” by Barbara Baynton; and the third story is set in the American South, Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” In the first story, the husband is away droving cattle, in the second he is away shearing sheep and in the third, he has been divorced by Mrs. Hopewell.
These women are heroic in their way, isolated from the world and primarily concerned about the well-being of their children, even Mrs. Hopewell’s whose daughter, Joy, is thirty-two years of age. The stories have one other factor in common: all have deep religious subtexts but unconventional ones in that all are to a greater or lesser extent critical of God for placing an excessively great burden on these women’s shoulders.
Lawson’s story does not have an religious theme. It is the story of a drover’s wife who lives in a shack in the bush with her four children and a dog called Alligator, nineteen miles from the nearest house. The presence of a black snake throws the household into an uproar, and it is only the mother’s cool head that prevents a full-scale panic. She orders the children into the kitchen where she can keep an eye on them, as well as on the snake’s hiding place.
Day turns into night, and it is the mother who keeps a vigil by candlelight, a stick by her side, as she waits for the snake to come out. Throughout that long night she recalls episodes from her life in the bush: putting out a bushfire, helped only by her oldest son, Tommy; making bullets to shoot a mad bullock, then skinning it to sell the hide; trying to save the dam her husband dug from breaking during a flood; fighting disease, deterring tramps from invading her home, and always there is the maddening monotony of the bush and the loneliness of being without a husband, friends or neighbors.
She takes pride in her achievements, even though the world takes no notice. The only time she breaks down is when she realizes the aboriginal she hired to stack wood built the wood-pile hollow, a betrayal of trust and goodwill that she finds hard to forgive. She is saved by “her keen sense of the ridiculous” (Lawson 5) when she picks up a handkerchief to wipe her eyes and finds it full of holes. Eventually, the snake is caught and beaten to death and everything goes back to normal, except that her oldest realizes how difficult his mother’s life is, and promises never to go droving.
Even though there is no explicit religious reference in this story, it may be argued that this story is a lay version of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. The house is set in a bush that “consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees” (Lawson 1), and the snake, of course, played an important part in the undoing of Eve by persuading her to eat an apple. For that she, and all the women who followed her, were cursed by God: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).
Not only that, but her husband, who took up squatting after their marriage, was cursed for listening to his wife and as a result “Thorns also and thistles shall [the land] bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field” and for the rest of his life “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3: 18-19). A drought ruined him and forced him to return to droving. God also “put enmity” between Eve and the snake, all of which is represented in Lawson’s story.
The bush is in every respect the opposite of paradise, just as the drover’s wife’s life is anything but perfect. Yet the story contains a defiant felix culpa element in that the wife savours her ability to deal with hardship and crises, even if they are God’s punishment for Eve’s disobedience. She still has her dreams, which is why she dresses the whole family up each Sunday for a walk in the bush, thereby giving their lives a sense of structure, pretending to be part of society and worshiping God, all at the same time; and which is also why she reads the Young Ladies’ Journal. As far as her husband is concerned, he is “careless, but a good enough husband” (Lawson 3).
She loves her children more than she loves herself, although the harsh life in the bush makes it difficult for her to show it. If her husband were with her, as God had intended, she would not question her lot. As it is, she has to bear Eve’s curse as well as Adam’s.
Barbara Baynton’s “The Chosen Vessel” announces its religious motif in the title, a sarcastic reference to the Biblical term which describes a person who is the recipient of God’s grace since the woman in this story receives exactly the opposite. Lawson is often credited with describing the Australian landscape from an Australian point of view, seeing its harshness but also the heroism of the people who try and fail to tame the bush. Baynton has a different point of view; her stories, says a reviewer, “have a gothic intensity; her characters are victims of ugly poverty, and of the immutability of the Australian landscape” (Anonymous).
The shearer’s wife is alone with her baby, with no more protection than a badly built house. When a swagman comes to her house and shows more than usual interest in her situation she senses she is in danger, and thinks of taking the baby to her husband, but when she had expressed her fears in the past he had responded by deriding her. “She need not flatter herself, he had coarsely told her, that anybody would want to run away with her” (Baynton 2). Instead, then, she remains in the house to face the danger on her own.
As in the Lawson story, the wife keeps a cool head and does whatever she can do to survive. While the man tries to break into the house she does her utmost to keep her baby from crying and to keep herself from panicking; but when she hears a horseman approaching she rushes out of the houses calling out to God to save her, then asking the rider to stop in Jesus’ name, then her baby’s, but he keeps going and she is caught by her assailant, raped and murdered.
The horrible irony is that the rider, an Irish Catholic called Peter Hennessey, believes he saw a vision of the Virgin Mary and Child when she came running out of the house. His head is full of his mother’s prayers for him so that when riding to town at night for the elections, the sight of a white-robed woman holding a baby “gliding across a ghostly patch of pipe-clay” (Baynton 4) appears to him as a vision whose purpose is to warn him not to vote for the secular candidate. He races to town to vote for the Church’s man instead, then reports his vision to the local priest.
While he waits for the priest he is seated so that he has to look at a picture of the Madonna and Child but this time they look at him in silence and in peace. The narrator says that “the half-parted lips of the Virgin were smiling with compassionate tenderness; her eyes seemed to beam with the forgiveness of an earthly mother for her erring but beloved child” (Baynton 4). The irony turns to sarcasm at this point as Hennessey’s prayer, addressed to My Lord and my God, “And hast Thou chosen me?” This question perversely echoes Jesus’ question on the cross, “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” which is what Hennessey did to the woman. In that way the narrator seems to blame God Himself for the cruel fate of the young woman who might have been saved but for Hennessey’s religiosity.
O’Connor’s preoccupation with religion is well-known but probably least obvious in “Good Country People.” Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy live on a farm that is prosperous enough to employ Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. While the mother talks in clichés, she does not think in them, and she watches her daughter closely as the one-legged philosopher stumps towards her doom. She understands that her daughter has changed her name to Hulga because it is the ugliest name she could come up with. By occasionally peeking at the books her daughter reads she knows she is moving toward a self-destructive nihilism by focusing on the Nothing underlying existence, but she is powerless to stop her daughter.
A cynical Bible salesman enters their lives who plays on the women’s weaknesses to assert his own supremacy. He talks the daughter into accompanying him to a barn where he asks to see where her wooden leg meets her real one. This is Joy/Hulga’s vulnerable point. She has overcome shame and belief but is “as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail” (O’Connor 1060). His apparent innocence persuades her to remove her leg, an act of surrender equal to giving up her virginity.
He takes full advantage, throwing the leg into his suitcase where it comes to rest with a Bible on each end, then derides her for claiming to believe in nothing whereas in fact the remnants of her faith are propped up by that wooden leg. He tells her that “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born” (O’Connor 1062), and leaves her lying there, thereby taking away everything that makes her special, including her femininity.
The story is colourful, funny and on the surface of it just recounts an incident in the lives of ordinary people. However, O’Connor puts her characters through life-changing events in her stories, and in this case Hulga is symbolically raped by the Bible salesman, in the sense that he deprives her of everything that made her different from other women. As David Havird says, Hulga has been sexually humiliated by the salesman, not by withholding sex but by reminding her that she is, after all, a woman. “It is not simply that they are merely human while God is divine,” says Havird,
it is rather that they are female while God is male. O’Connor’s insistence that these women surrender their pride, which has been masculine in its figuration, to Christ and that the dramatization of this abasement take the form of sexual submission bears also on their relationships with the men in their lives. (2)
This is the point all three stories have in common. The drover’s wife, the shearer’s wife and Hulga are vulnerable because they are women without men, in a world and perhaps a universe that observes the masculine principle. The drover’s wife comes closest to incorporating that principle, even putting on her husband’s trousers during the bushfire, an action which alarms Alligator and amuses her children; but the shearer’s wife adheres strictly to the feminine principle while Hulga, once she is deprived of her (phallic) wooden leg, is reduced to the woman she never wanted to be: her mother. In each case it is the incomplete family that is at fault. The presence of a man would have restored the male-female balance and permitted both sexes to do God’s work in this fallen world.
Works Cited
Anonymous. “Henry Lawson: Australian Writer.” Australian Government Culture Portal. Web.
Baynton, Barbara. “The Chosen Vessel.” Web.
Havird, David. “The Saving Rape: Flannery O’Connor and Patriarchal Religion.” The Mississippi Quarterly. Volume: 47. Issue: 1. 1993.
Lawson, Henry. “The Drover’s Wife.” Alldownunder. Web.
O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s Press, 1995.