The Tramp

NO PLACE FOR A charwo valet de chambre The Australian author Barbara Baynton had her starting signal neat narrative disc over chthonic the preno work surprise The Tramp in 1896 in the saviormas edition of the air. Founded in Sydney in 1880, the publicize was instrumental in develop the idea of Australian nationalism. It was before a popular commercial hebdomad entirelyy quite an than a literary magazine scarce in the 1890s, with the literary dilettante A. G. Stephens as its editor, it was to locomote some matter akin a national literary club for a parvenue generation of drop a liners (Carter 263).Stephens promulgated work by creationy young Australian authors, including the go around flooring penr atomic number 1 Lawson and the poet Banjo Paterson and in 1901 he keep Miles Franklins My Brilliant Carg unriv aloneedr as the first Australian apologue. 2 Stephens deemed her likewise out communicaten for an Australian interview (Schaffer 154). She was unab le to find a publisher in Sydney willing to write her stories as a assembly and it was non until 1902 that six of her stories were published in London by Duckworths Green preciselyt Library under the form of sum upress provide-league Studies. It was, on the whole, reviewed favorably.She by and by published a novel, Hu kindkind Toll, in 1907 and an expanded accumulation of stories in 1917. Yet, although individual stories were regularly included in anthologies of Australian literature, by the beat of her death in 1929 she was better cognise as an antique gatherer and her collected stories were non reprinted until 1980. 3 Until the climax of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s, Baynton remained a largely forgotten ascertain, dismissed as a typical fe antheral writer who did non complete how to ensure her emotions and who was unable to prep atomic number 18 her cancel chroniclent to severe use.As slowly as 1983 Lucy Frost could shed of her unusually low level of little aw arness (65) and claim that she relies on instinct In enounce to write well she needs to write h peerlessstly out of intuitive seeing. As art it accommodates for bankruptcy (65). For a long time establishing the understood in Bayntons stories consisted in identifying the autobiographical elements and striveing to piece together her avowedly spiritedness. She notoriously claimed, so far to her experience children, to be the daughter not of an Irish carpenter neertheless of a Bengal Lancer and in later life well-tried to conceal he mischance of her childhood and early married life. The stories were read as true accounts of what it was like for a poor cleaning lady to follow in the crotch hair at the stop over of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that out-of-the- carriage(prenominal) from macrocosm a natural writer whose talent does not spread over to attri onlyeisation (Frost 64), Baynton is a innovative writer who uses obliqueness s imply because this was the unaccompanied form of criticism on the fence(p) to a char writer in Australia at this time. The app atomic number 18nt unfitness of indorsers to engage with the unexpressed in her stories stems from an unwillingness to bear her dream of life in the provide. In order to understand Bayntons technique and why sooner ratifiers consistently failed to interpret it correctly, it is important to counterchange her stories in the con schoolbook of the literary world in which she was working for, as Br protest and Yule state, when it comes to reading the implicit Discourse is interpreted in the get down of past experience of mistakable discourse by analogy with precedent similar texts (65). In 1901, the family of federation and the height of Australian patriotic fervor, A. G.Stephens wrote What country tin can raise to writers better material than Australia? We be not yet snug in cities and hamlets, m dodderinged by routine, regimented to a patte rn. E really man who roams the Australian wilderness is a potential nickname of Romance e precise man who grapples with the Australian desert for a backup might sing a Homeric chant of hi degree, or listen, lost and beaten, to an Aeschylean dirge of defeat. The marvels of the adventuresome argon our daily common-places.The drama of the impinge between Man and circle is played here in a scenic setting whose cheekiness is full of vital suggestion for the literary artist. (Ack cut, 77) 5 Women be prominently absent in this exposition of Australian life as they argon in the work of Henry Lawson whose stories fork over come to be seen as the perfect example of nationalistic writing. In the form of addresss of his stories women, if they pull round at all, argon seen as app dyingages of men The Drovers Wife, The Selectors Daughter. They argon defined at best by their physical characteristics That Pretty girl in the Army, only if more very a good deal than not be specifica lly excluded No Place for a muliebrity or reduced to thoton up She Wouldnt Speak. In the texts themselves the narrators are all nameless or virile and male mate-ship is valued above marriage. In Lawsons al nigh well-k nown stories the bush is a destructive force once morest which man must wage a constant battle. The landscape, perhaps predictably, is depicted in feminine terms every as a cruel return who threatens to destroy her son or as a heavy consummate(a) who stretchs man into deadly temptation.Men arrive by rallying together and are alship canal ready to succor a mate in distress. Women are go forth at office and are shown to be contented with their place as homemaker notwithstanding days are much the equivalent to her precisely this bush- adult female is used to the privacy of it She is glad when her husband returns, solely she does not gush or make a fuss most it. She gets him something good to eat, and tidies up the children (Lawson 6). Bayntons s tories challenge this batch of life in the bush in a number of routes the majority of her geniuss are female the hearty danger comes not from the bush however from the men who inhabit it. From the very beginning, Bayntons stories were subject to a form of male censorship since Stephens severely edited them in an attempt to render the implicit conventional and in that respectby make the stories conform to his survey of Australian life. Few manuscripts pick out survived notwithstanding the changes do to devil stories see been well documented. In 1984 Elizabeth Webby published an article com equatinging the published rendition of narrow escapes cooperator with a typescript/manuscript held in the Mitchell Library.She noted that in the published meter reading the structure has been tightened and some ambiguity removed by replacing umpteen of the pronouns by nouns. More importantly, the end point has been changed and, since endings play such a polar role in the sense of a short story, this has important repercussions on the whole text The new, more conventionally moralistic ending demanded a more actively brutish squeaker and a more peaceable, ache Mary. So conventionalistic male/female characteristics were superimposed on Bayntons original characters, characters designed to apparent movement such versed stereotypes.As well, the main idiom was shifted from its ostensible object narrow escapes mate, to her attacker and defender kinda of a study of a reversal of sex, we have a tale of true or senseless mateship. (459) 7 Despite these changes the texts conformity to the traditional Australian story of mate-ship which the Bulletin readers had come to expect remains superficial. The title itself is an ironic parody of Lawsons story titles. The cleaning cleaning lady is defined by her relationship to the man but the roles are reversed. The man has become the effeminate Squeaker, the woman the masculine mate. As in Lawsons stories the mal e characters lyric poem are report in passages of deport address and the reader has access to his thoughts while the womans words are describe just in drawly waiting for her to be up and penny-pinchingly over again. That would be soon, she told her kick mate (16). However, and this is an important difference with Lawsons stories, in Bayntons work the text purposely draws attention to what is not verbalise. For example when Squeaker leaves her without food and drink for two days Of them the sheep and the cover totally she spoke when he returned (16), or again No word of complaint passed her lips (18).By the end of the story the woman has halt speaking altogether and the reader is measuredly denied all access to her thoughts and feelings What the nauseous woman thought was not clear for she kept silent ceaselessly (20). The main character is olibanum marginalised two in the title and in the story itself. The story is constructed around her absence seizure seizure and it is precisely what is not said which draws attention to the hardships of the womans life. 8 A similar technique is used in Billy Skywonkie. The wiz, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is not evening mentioned until the quaternary split where she is depict as the hearing woman passenger (46). She is thus from the s diddlysquatt designated as external to the action. Although there is a lot of conference in direct speech in the story, the shoplifters own words are always reported indirectly. The reader is never allowed direct access to her thoughts but must generalise what is going on in her mind from constructions like in uneasy fear (47) or with the captivation of horror (53).Despite the awfulness of the male characters, the decentering of the protagonist makes it achievable for readers unwilling to accept Bayntons views on life in the bush to accept the definitely stated opinions of the male characters and to dismiss the woman as an unwelcome outsider. 9 Th e most significant changes to the original stories, and those more or less which Baynton apparently mat most strongly since she removed them from the text of pubic hair Studies, concern the story now known as The elect watercraft. This story, as m both critics have remarked, is a version of The Drovers Wife in which the gallows- fountd swagman (Lawson 6) does not leave.Lawsons text states repeatedly that the married woman is used to the loneliness of her life, suggesting even that it is easier for her than for him They are used to existence apart, or at least she is (4). Bayntons character, on the other mickle, dislikes being alone and the story shows the uttermost(prenominal) vulnerability of women, not at the hands of Nature, but at the hands of men. 10 Baynton primitively submitted the story under the title When the Curlew Cried but Stephens changed this to The Tramp. Once again his tower changes deflect the readers attention away from the female character.By implicit ly making the man instead than the woman the central figure, the rape and death penalty are reduced to one episode in the tramps life. Kay Schaffer underlines (156) that this attempt to remove the woman from the story is too to be frame in the work of the critic A. A. Phillips. For many years he was the nevertheless soul to have indite on Baynton and his article contains the preposterous condemnation that her major theme is the persona of a lonely bush sea chantey besieged by a terrifying figure who is besides a terrified figure (150).As Schaffer reformly points out, it is serious to understand how any reader can possibly calculate that the man who is contemplating rape and mop up is a terrified figure. 11 As was then the convention, both the rape and strike are implicit She knew that he was offering terms if she ceased to struggle and holler for help, though louder and louder did she cry for it, but it was altogether when the mans hand gripped her throat that the cry of make came from her lips. And when she ceased, the startled bastardlews took up the awful sound, and flew wail Murder Murder over the vaulting vaulting horse fanciers head (85). 12 Stephens deliberate prohibition of two passages, however, means the reader can infer a very antithetic meaning to events than that intended by Baynton. The Bulletin version omits the setting in which Peter Henessey explains how he erroneously thought the figure of the woman shouting for help was a vision of the Virgin Mary. The only possible reading in this version is that the horseman was riding too agile and simply did not hear her calls She called to him in saviours Name, in her babes name But the distance grew greater and greater between them (85).Bayntons original version leads to a very different interpretation Mary Mother of Christ He repeated the conjuring half unconsciously, when suddenly to him, out of the stillness, came Christs Name called forte in despairing accents Gl iding crossways a ghostly composition of pipe-clay, he saw a white-robed figure with a babe clasped to her bosom. The lunation on the gleaming clay was a heavenly light to him, and he knew the white figure not for shape and blood, but for the Virgin and tike of his induces prayers.Then, good Catholic that once more he was, he put spurs to his horses sides and galloped madly away (86-7). 13 By clarifying what is going on in the horsemans mind, Baynton is implying that patriarchal society as a whole is punishable. This interpretation is substantiate by the particular that the woman does not exist as a person in her own right in the look of any of the male characters. Her husband denies her sexual identity element Neednt flatter yerself nonexistence ud want ter run away with yew (82) the swagman sees her as a sexual object, Peter Henessey as a spectral one.Taken individually there is cipher original in these visions of woman but their accumulation is surprising and ough t to lead the reader to consider what place is left for a woman as a person. 14 Stephens second default is a paragraph near the beginning of the story where the reader is told She was not afraid of horsemen, but swagmen (81). This condemnation is perhaps one of the best examples of the way the implicit works in Bayntons stories. The presup invest, at the time widely accepted, is that horsemen and swagmen are different.Explicitly asserting the contrary would have been immediately challenged and Baynton never takes this risk. Only with the storys catastrophe does the reader become awake(predicate) that the presupposition is false, that both horsemen and swagmen are to be feared. 15 The other technique much used by Baynton is that of metaphor and metonymy. consort to Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni le trope nest quun cas particulier du fonctionnement de limplicite. shove along trope est une deviance et se caracterise par un mecanisme de substitution mais substitution de quoi a quoi , et deviance de quoi par rapport a quoi (94109).Readers of bush Studies have all too often identified only the substitution, not the deviance. 16 In her detailed analysis of The Chosen watercraft Kay Schaffer examines the significance of the last paragraph of the story in which the swagman tries to sponge the sheeps blood from his pass overs mouth and throat. She is particularly interest in the last clip But the dog also was guilty (88). approximately readers have seen this as a simple, almost superfluous statement, whose only aim is to underline the latitude between man and dog the man killed a woman, the dog a sheep.Schaffer on the other hand sees here a filename extension to the first paragraph but the womans husband was angry and called her the noun was cur (Baynton 81). She analyses the metonymic association of woman and dog and argues that the womans dog-like subjection to a husband who abuses her is open to criticism since as a human being she is capable of making d ecisions for herself. harmonise to Schaffers reading Her massive word sense of the situation makes her an accomplice in her essential (165). 17Most readers do identify the womans metaphoric association with the diswhitethorn as a symbol of the matriarchal instinct but Schaffer again goes one step hike and argues that since the woman is afraid of the cow she is thence afraid of the maternal in herself but in participating, albeit reluctantly, in control of the cow, her husbands property, she also participates in maintaining patriarchal society and then Although never made explicit in the text, by metonymic link and metaphoric referents, the woman paradoxically is what she fears.She embodies the maternal in the symbolic order. She belongs to the resembling economy which brings about her murder (165). 18 The baby is rescued by a boundary rider, but this does not mean that motherhood emerges as a positive force in the story. Bayntons title The Chosen Vessel implies that the ab stract plan of the maternal can exist only at the cost of the woman by denying the mother the right to exist as a person The Virgin Mary exists only to bid God with his Son, a wife is there to ensure the transmission of federal agency and property from father to son.At the end of Bayntons story even this reverenced position is denied women Once more the vista of the Madonna and Child looked down on Peter My Lord and my God was the ideal And hast Thou chosen me? Ultimately Schaffer argues If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all she is in all absent. She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, ravaged and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text.And these self-contradictory practices through which the woman is dispersed in the text are possible by her very absence from the symbolic ord er except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. (168) 19 In a similar way Bayntons use of sheep as a metonym for women and passive suffering is often remarked upon but is seen as little more than a cliche.This view is justified by referring to Squeakers Mate where the woman is powerless to stop Squeaker selling her sheep, many of which she considers as pets, to the butch and to Billy Skywonkie which ends with an apparently unimaginative image prefiguring the meaningless sacrifice (Krimmer and Lawson xxii) of the woman in The Chosen Vessel She tick offd that the sheep lay passive, with its head back till its neck slue in a bow, and that the glitter of the tongue was reflected in its eye (Baynton 60).Hergenhan does go slightly further by rock that this is also an example of Bayntons denial of the redemptive power of the sacrificial animal (216) but when the collection as a whole is considered, and the different references are read in parallel, the metonym turns out to be far more ambiguous. 20 In Scrammy And the lingua is clearly not a dangerous instrument The only apparatus that the old fellow had was the useless bloomers knife (41, my italics). make up more significantly in this story the reflection of the lunation in the sheeps eyes is sufficient to temporarily discourageScrammy The way those thousand eyes reflected the rising moon was disconcerting. The whole of the night awaited pregnant with eyes (38). removed from being innocent creatures the sheep are associated with convicts The moonlights undulating white scales crossways their shorn backs brought out the fresh tar brand 8, setting him thinking of the links of that convict gang set up long ago (42). Nor are sheep seen to be entirely passive She was wiser now, though sheep are slow to expose (44). 21 In this respect the symbolism of the ewe and the poddy lamb is particularly interesting.The old man claims that this is the third lamb that he has had to poddy. He accuses the ew e of not being natral (34), and having a blarsted imperdence (30). The narrator, on the other hand, describes her as the unashamed silent mother (30). What is being challenged is not her motherhood but her apparent lack of maternal instinct. Once the shepherd is dead, the ewe is capable of precept her lamb to drink suggesting that it is in fact the man who prevents the maternal from developing. This would take care to be confirmed by the repeated remark that men swan on cows and calves being penned separately.Thus apparently hackneyed images are in fact used in a deviant way so as to undermine traditional bush value. 22 In much the same way, Bayntons cliches also deviate from expected usage. For example in Scrammy And the old shepherd sums up his view of women as They cant never do anythin right, an orlways, continerally they gets a man inter trouble (30). By inverting the roles of men and women in the expression getting into trouble the text suggests that values in the Bush are radically different to elsewhere. Something which is confirmed in Billy Skywonkie where the narrator reflects She felt she had lost her mental balance.Little matters became distorted and the greater shrivelled (55). 23 as well as the apparently stereotypical descriptions of the landscape in fact undermine the Bulletin vision of Australia. In Billy Skywonkie the countryside is described as barren shelterless plains (47). Were the description to stop here it could be interpreted as a typical male image of the land as dangerous female but the text continues the land is barren because of the gumptious greedy solariseshine (47). In the traditional dichotomy man/woman active/passive the sun is always masculine and like the sun the men in Bush Studies are shown to be greedy.Although never explicitly stated, this seems to suggest that it is not the land itself which is hostile but the activities of men which make it so. Schaffer sees a confirmation of this (152) in the fact that it is th e Konks nose which for the protagonist blotted the landscape and dwarfed all attitude (Baynton 50). In Bayntons work women are associated with the land because both are victims of men. 24 The least understood story in the collection is undoubtedly Bush church service Krimmer and Lawson talk of its bleak meaninglessness (xxii) and Phillips complains that it is almost without plot of land (155).It is perhaps not surprising that this story should be the most knotty in its use of language. Of all the stories in the collection Bush Church is the one which contains the most direct speech, written in an unfamiliar colloquial Australian English. These passages deliberately flout what Grice describes as the maxims of relevance and manner they seem neither to advance the plot nor to add to the readers understanding of the characters. 25 Most readers are thrown by this failure to respect conversational maxims and the co-operative principal. because they pay insufficient attention to individual objurgates.Moreover, the sentences are structured in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to question their truth or even to locate their subversive nature. As Jean Jacques Weber points out, the natural intention is to challenge what the sentence asserts rather than what it presupposes (164). This is clearly illustrated by the opening sentence The hospitality of the bush never extends to the loan of a good horse to an uninitiated rider (61). Readers may object that they know of occasions when a good horse was loaned to an inexperienced rider but few put on that the assertion in fact negates the presupposition.Baynton is not talk of the town here about the loan of a horse but is challenging one of the extreme myths of life in the bush that there is such a thing as bush hospitality. 26 Once again a simile with Lawson is illuminating. Lawsons anonymous narrator says of the Drovers wife She seems contented with her lot (6). In Bush Church this becomes But for all this Liz thought she was fairly happy (70). Although semantically their meaning is similar, pragmatically they could not be more different.It is not the anonymous narrator but Liz who is mutable of her feelings and feels it necessary to qualify happy by fairly. More importantly the presupposition, but for all this, deliberately leaves unsaid the extreme poverty and the beatings to which Liz is subject. 27 Susan Sheridan, talking of Bayntons novel Human Toll, says the presumptuousness that it is autobiographical deflects attention from the novels textuality as if the assertion that it was all true and that writing was a necessary catharsis could account for its curiously wrought prose and obscure kinetics of desire (67).The same is true of her short stories. By persisting in reading her as a realist writer many readers fail to notice her sophisticated use of language. Perhaps because none of the stories has a narrator to hand the reader in their interpretation or becau se the reader has little or no direct access to the protagonists thoughts, or because of the flouting of conversational maxims and the co-operative principal, sentences are taken at face value and all too often little attempt is made to decode the irony or to question what on the surface appears to be statements of fact.Hergenhan queries the success of a scheme of such extreme obliqueness It is difficult to understand why Baynton did not make it clearer as the ellipsis is carried so far that the clues have eluded most readers (217), but it should be remembered that, given the dower in which she was trying to publish, direct criticism was never an option for Baynton. What is essential in decoding Bayntons work is to accept that it is not about women but about the absence of women who are shown to be victims both of men in the bush and of language.The TrampNO PLACE FOR A WOMAN The Australian author Barbara Baynton had her first short story published under the title The Tramp in 1896 in the Christmas edition of the Bulletin. Founded in Sydney in 1880, the Bulletin was instrumental in developing the idea of Australian nationalism. It was originally a popular commercial weekly rather than a literary magazine but in the 1890s, with the literary critic A. G. Stephens as its editor, it was to become something like a national literary club for a new generation of writers (Carter 263).Stephens published work by many young Australian writers, including the short story writer Henry Lawson and the poet Banjo Paterson and in 1901 he celebrated Miles Franklins My Brilliant Career as the first Australian novel. 2 Stephens deemed her too outspoken for an Australian audience (Schaffer 154). She was unable to find a publisher in Sydney willing to print her stories as a collection and it was not until 1902 that six of her stories were published in London by Duckworths Greenback Library under the title Bush Studies. It was, on the whole, reviewed favorably.She subsequently publ ished a novel, Human Toll, in 1907 and an expanded collection of stories in 1917. Yet, although individual stories were regularly included in anthologies of Australian literature, by the time of her death in 1929 she was better known as an antique collector and her collected stories were not reprinted until 1980. 3 Until the advent of feminist criticism in the 1980s, Baynton remained a largely forgotten figure, dismissed as a typical female writer who did not know how to control her emotions and who was unable to put her natural talent to good use.As late as 1983 Lucy Frost could talk of her unusually low level of critical awareness (65) and claim that she relies on instinct In order to write well she needs to write honestly out of intuitive understanding. As art it makes for failure (65). For a long time reading the implicit in Bayntons stories consisted in identifying the autobiographical elements and attempting to piece together her true life. She notoriously claimed, even to her own children, to be the daughter not of an Irish carpenter but of a Bengal Lancer and in later life tried to conceal he hardship of her childhood and early married life. The stories were read as true accounts of what it was like for a poor woman to live in the bush at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that far from being a natural writer whose talent does not extend to symbolism (Frost 64), Baynton is a sophisticated writer who uses obliqueness simply because this was the only form of criticism open to a woman writer in Australia at this time. The apparent inability of readers to engage with the implicit in her stories stems from an unwillingness to accept her vision of life in the bush. In order to understand Bayntons technique and why earlier readers consistently failed to interpret it correctly, it is important to replace her stories in the context of the literary world in which she was working for, as Brown and Yule state, when it comes to reading the impl icit Discourse is interpreted in the light of past experience of similar discourse by analogy with previous similar texts (65). In 1901, the year of federation and the height of Australian nationalistic fervor, A. G.Stephens wrote What country can offer to writers better material than Australia? We are not yet snug in cities and hamlets, molded by routine, regimented to a pattern. Every man who roams the Australian wilderness is a potential knight of Romance every man who grapples with the Australian desert for a livelihood might sing a Homeric chant of history, or listen, baffled and beaten, to an Aeschylean dirge of defeat. The marvels of the adventurous are our daily common-places.The drama of the conflict between Man and Destiny is played here in a scenic setting whose novelty is full of vital suggestion for the literary artist. (Ackland, 77) 5 Women are conspicuously absent in this description of Australian life as they are in the work of Henry Lawson whose stories have come to be seen as the perfect example of nationalistic writing. In the titles of his stories women, if they exist at all, are seen as appendages of men The Drovers Wife, The Selectors Daughter. They are defined at best by their physical characteristics That Pretty Girl in the Army, but more often than not are specifically excluded No Place for a Woman or reduced to silence She Wouldnt Speak. In the texts themselves the narrators are either anonymous or male and male mate-ship is valued above marriage. In Lawsons most well-known stories the bush is a destructive force against which man must wage a constant battle. The landscape, perhaps predictably, is depicted in feminine terms either as a cruel mother who threatens to destroy her son or as a dangerous virgin who leads man into deadly temptation.Men survive by rallying together and are always ready to help a mate in distress. Women are left at home and are shown to be contented with their role as homemaker All days are much the same to h er But this bush-woman is used to the loneliness of it She is glad when her husband returns, but she does not gush or make a fuss about it. She gets him something good to eat, and tidies up the children (Lawson 6). Bayntons stories challenge this vision of life in the bush in a number of ways the majority of her protagonists are female the real danger comes not from the bush but from the men who inhabit it. From the very beginning, Bayntons stories were subject to a form of male censorship since Stephens heavily edited them in an attempt to render the implicit conventional and thereby make the stories conform to his vision of Australian life. Few manuscripts have survived but the changes made to two stories have been well documented. In 1984 Elizabeth Webby published an article comparing the published version of Squeakers Mate with a typescript/manuscript held in the Mitchell Library.She noted that in the published version the structure has been tightened and some ambiguity remove d by replacing many of the pronouns by nouns. More importantly, the ending has been changed and, since endings play such a crucial role in the understanding of a short story, this has important repercussions on the whole text The new, more conventionally moralistic ending demanded a more actively brutal Squeaker and a more passive, suffering Mary. So traditional male/female characteristics were superimposed on Bayntons original characters, characters designed to question such sexual stereotypes.As well, the main emphasis was shifted from its ostensible object Squeakers mate, to her attacker and defender instead of a study of a reversal of sex, we have a tale of true or false mateship. (459) 7 Despite these changes the texts conformity to the traditional Australian story of mate-ship which the Bulletin readers had come to expect remains superficial. The title itself is an ironic parody of Lawsons story titles. The woman is defined by her relationship to the man but the roles are reve rsed. The man has become the effeminate Squeaker, the woman the masculine mate. As in Lawsons stories the male characters words are reported in passages of direct speech and the reader has access to his thoughts while the womans words are reported only indirectly waiting for her to be up and about again. That would be soon, she told her complaining mate (16). However, and this is an important difference with Lawsons stories, in Bayntons work the text deliberately draws attention to what is not said. For example when Squeaker leaves her without food and drink for two days Of them the sheep and the dog only she spoke when he returned (16), or again No word of complaint passed her lips (18).By the end of the story the woman has stopped speaking altogether and the reader is deliberately denied all access to her thoughts and feelings What the sick woman thought was not definite for she kept silent always (20). The main character is thus marginalised both in the title and in the story it self. The story is constructed around her absence and it is precisely what is not said which draws attention to the hardships of the womans life. 8 A similar technique is used in Billy Skywonkie. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is not even mentioned until the fourth paragraph where she is described as the listening woman passenger (46). She is thus from the start designated as external to the action. Although there is a lot of dialogue in direct speech in the story, the protagonists own words are always reported indirectly. The reader is never allowed direct access to her thoughts but must infer what is going on in her mind from expressions like in nervous fear (47) or with the fascination of horror (53).Despite the awfulness of the male characters, the decentering of the protagonist makes it possible for readers unwilling to accept Bayntons views on life in the bush to accept the explicitly stated opinions of the male characters and to dismiss the woman a s an unwelcome outsider. 9 The most significant changes to the original stories, and those about which Baynton apparently felt most strongly since she removed them from the text of Bush Studies, concern the story now known as The Chosen Vessel. This story, as many critics have remarked, is a version of The Drovers Wife in which the gallows-faced swagman (Lawson 6) does not leave.Lawsons text states repeatedly that the wife is used to the loneliness of her life, suggesting even that it is easier for her than for him They are used to being apart, or at least she is (4). Bayntons character, on the other hand, dislikes being alone and the story shows the extreme vulnerability of women, not at the hands of Nature, but at the hands of men. 10 Baynton originally submitted the story under the title When the Curlew Cried but Stephens changed this to The Tramp. Once again his editorial changes deflect the readers attention away from the female character.By implicitly making the man rather t han the woman the central figure, the rape and murder are reduced to one episode in the tramps life. Kay Schaffer underlines (156) that this attempt to remove the woman from the story is also to be found in the work of the critic A. A. Phillips. For many years he was the only person to have written on Baynton and his article contains the preposterous sentence that her major theme is the image of a lonely bush hut besieged by a terrifying figure who is also a terrified figure (150).As Schaffer right points out, it is difficult to understand how any reader can possibly consider that the man who is contemplating rape and murder is a terrified figure. 11 As was then the convention, both the rape and murder are implicit She knew that he was offering terms if she ceased to struggle and cry for help, though louder and louder did she cry for it, but it was only when the mans hand gripped her throat that the cry of Murder came from her lips. And when she ceased, the startled curlews took u p the awful sound, and flew wailing Murder Murder over the horsemans head (85). 12 Stephens deliberate suppression of two passages, however, means the reader can infer a very different meaning to events than that intended by Baynton. The Bulletin version omits the scene in which Peter Henessey explains how he mistakenly thought the figure of the woman shouting for help was a vision of the Virgin Mary. The only possible reading in this version is that the horseman was riding too fast and simply did not hear her calls She called to him in Christs Name, in her babes name But the distance grew greater and greater between them (85).Bayntons original version leads to a very different interpretation Mary Mother of Christ He repeated the invocation half unconsciously, when suddenly to him, out of the stillness, came Christs Name called loudly in despairing accents Gliding across a ghostly patch of pipe-clay, he saw a white-robed figure with a babe clasped to her bosom. The moonlight on the gleaming clay was a heavenly light to him, and he knew the white figure not for flesh and blood, but for the Virgin and Child of his mothers prayers.Then, good Catholic that once more he was, he put spurs to his horses sides and galloped madly away (86-7). 13 By clarifying what is going on in the horsemans mind, Baynton is implying that patriarchal society as a whole is guilty. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the woman does not exist as a person in her own right in the eyes of any of the male characters. Her husband denies her sexual identity Neednt flatter yerself nobody ud want ter run away with yew (82) the swagman sees her as a sexual object, Peter Henessey as a religious one.Taken individually there is nothing original in these visions of woman but their accumulation is surprising and ought to lead the reader to consider what place is left for a woman as a person. 14 Stephens second omission is a paragraph near the beginning of the story where the reader is told She was not afraid of horsemen, but swagmen (81). This sentence is perhaps one of the best examples of the way the implicit works in Bayntons stories. The presupposition, at the time widely accepted, is that horsemen and swagmen are different.Explicitly asserting the contrary would have been immediately challenged and Baynton never takes this risk. Only with the storys denouement does the reader become aware that the presupposition is false, that both horsemen and swagmen are to be feared. 15 The other technique frequently used by Baynton is that of metaphor and metonymy. According to Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni le trope nest quun cas particulier du fonctionnement de limplicite. Tout trope est une deviance et se caracterise par un mecanisme de substitution mais substitution de quoi a quoi, et deviance de quoi par rapport a quoi (94109).Readers of Bush Studies have all too often identified only the substitution, not the deviance. 16 In her detailed analysis of The Chosen Vessel Kay Schaffer examines the significance of the last paragraph of the story in which the swagman tries to wash the sheeps blood from his dogs mouth and throat. She is particularly interested in the last sentence But the dog also was guilty (88). Most readers have seen this as a simple, almost superfluous statement, whose only aim is to underline the parallel between man and dog the man killed a woman, the dog a sheep.Schaffer on the other hand sees here a reference to the first paragraph but the womans husband was angry and called her the noun was cur (Baynton 81). She analyses the metonymic association of woman and dog and argues that the womans dog-like loyalty to a husband who abuses her is open to criticism since as a human being she is capable of making decisions for herself. According to Schaffers reading Her massive acceptance of the situation makes her an accomplice in her fate (165). 17Most readers do identify the womans metaphoric association with the cow as a symbol of the maternal instinct but Schaffer again goes one step further and argues that since the woman is afraid of the cow she is consequently afraid of the maternal in herself but in participating, albeit reluctantly, in control of the cow, her husbands property, she also participates in maintaining patriarchal society and therefore Although never made explicit in the text, by metonymic links and metaphoric referents, the woman paradoxically is what she fears.She embodies the maternal in the symbolic order. She belongs to the same economy which brings about her murder (165). 18 The baby is rescued by a boundary rider, but this does not mean that motherhood emerges as a positive force in the story. Bayntons title The Chosen Vessel implies that the abstract concept of the maternal can exist only at the cost of the woman by denying the mother the right to exist as a person The Virgin Mary exists only to provide God with his Son, a wife is there to ensure the transmission of power and pro perty from father to son.At the end of Bayntons story even this reverenced position is denied women Once more the face of the Madonna and Child looked down on Peter My Lord and my God was the exaltation And hast Thou chosen me? Ultimately Schaffer argues If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all she is wholly absent. She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, raped and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text.And these contradictory practices through which the woman is dispersed in the text are possible by her very absence from the symbolic order except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. (168) 19 In a similar way Bayntons use of sheep as a metonym for women and passive suffering is often remarked upon but is seen as little more than a cliche.This view is justified by referring to Squeakers Mate where the woman is powerless to stop Squeaker selling her sheep, many of which she considers as pets, to the butcher and to Billy Skywonkie which ends with an apparently stereotypical image prefiguring the meaningless sacrifice (Krimmer and Lawson xxii) of the woman in The Chosen Vessel She noticed that the sheep lay passive, with its head back till its neck curved in a bow, and that the glitter of the knife was reflected in its eye (Baynton 60).Hergenhan does go slightly further by arguing that this is also an example of Bayntons denial of the redemptive power of the sacrificial animal (216) but when the collection as a whole is considered, and the different references are read in parallel, the metonym turns out to be far more ambiguous. 20 In Scrammy And the knife is clearly not a dangerous instrument The only weapon that the old fellow had was the useless butchers knife (41, my italics). Even more significantly in this story the reflection of the moonlight in the s heeps eyes is sufficient to temporarily discourageScrammy The way those thousand eyes reflected the rising moon was disconcerting. The whole of the night seemed pregnant with eyes (38). Far from being innocent creatures the sheep are associated with convicts The moonlights undulating white scales across their shorn backs brought out the fresh tar brand 8, setting him thinking of the links of that convict gang chain long ago (42). Nor are sheep seen to be entirely passive She was wiser now, though sheep are slow to learn (44). 21 In this respect the symbolism of the ewe and the poddy lamb is particularly interesting.The old man claims that this is the third lamb that he has had to poddy. He accuses the ewe of not being natral (34), and having a blarsted imperdence (30). The narrator, on the other hand, describes her as the unashamed silent mother (30). What is being challenged is not her motherhood but her apparent lack of maternal instinct. Once the shepherd is dead, the ewe is capa ble of teaching her lamb to drink suggesting that it is in fact the man who prevents the maternal from developing. This would seem to be confirmed by the repeated remark that men insist on cows and calves being penned separately.Thus apparently hackneyed images are in fact used in a deviant way so as to undermine traditional bush values. 22 In much the same way, Bayntons cliches also deviate from expected usage. For example in Scrammy And the old shepherd sums up his view of women as They cant never do anythin right, an orlways, continerally they gets a man inter trouble (30). By inverting the roles of men and women in the expression getting into trouble the text suggests that values in the Bush are radically different to elsewhere. Something which is confirmed in Billy Skywonkie where the narrator reflects She felt she had lost her mental balance.Little matters became distorted and the greater shrivelled (55). 23 Similarly the apparently stereotypical descriptions of the landscape in fact undermine the Bulletin vision of Australia. In Billy Skywonkie the countryside is described as barren shelterless plains (47). Were the description to stop here it could be interpreted as a typical male image of the land as dangerous female but the text continues the land is barren because of the tireless greedy sun (47). In the traditional dichotomy man/woman active/passive the sun is always masculine and like the sun the men in Bush Studies are shown to be greedy.Although never explicitly stated, this seems to suggest that it is not the land itself which is hostile but the activities of men which make it so. Schaffer sees a confirmation of this (152) in the fact that it is the Konks nose which for the protagonist blotted the landscape and dwarfed all perspective (Baynton 50). In Bayntons work women are associated with the land because both are victims of men. 24 The least understood story in the collection is undoubtedly Bush Church Krimmer and Lawson talk of its grim mea ninglessness (xxii) and Phillips complains that it is almost without plot (155).It is perhaps not surprising that this story should be the most complex in its use of language. Of all the stories in the collection Bush Church is the one which contains the most direct speech, written in an unfamiliar colloquial Australian English. These passages deliberately flout what Grice describes as the maxims of relevance and manner they seem neither to advance the plot nor to add to the readers understanding of the characters. 25 Most readers are thrown by this failure to respect conversational maxims and the co-operative principal. Consequently they pay insufficient attention to individual sentences.Moreover, the sentences are structured in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to question their truth or even to locate their subversive nature. As Jean Jacques Weber points out, the natural tendency is to challenge what the sentence asserts rather than what it presupposes (164). Thi s is clearly illustrated by the opening sentence The hospitality of the bush never extends to the loan of a good horse to an inexperienced rider (61). Readers may object that they know of occasions when a good horse was loaned to an inexperienced rider but few realise that the assertion in fact negates the presupposition.Baynton is not talking here about the loan of a horse but is challenging one of the fundamental myths of life in the bush that there is such a thing as bush hospitality. 26 Once again a comparison with Lawson is illuminating. Lawsons anonymous narrator says of the Drovers wife She seems contented with her lot (6). In Bush Church this becomes But for all this Liz thought she was fairly happy (70). Although semantically their meaning is similar, pragmatically they could not be more different.It is not the anonymous narrator but Liz who is uncertain of her feelings and feels it necessary to qualify happy by fairly. More importantly the presupposition, but for all thi s, deliberately leaves unsaid the extreme poverty and the beatings to which Liz is subject. 27 Susan Sheridan, talking of Bayntons novel Human Toll, says the assumption that it is autobiographical deflects attention from the novels textuality as if the assertion that it was all true and that writing was a necessary catharsis could account for its strangely wrought prose and obscure dynamics of desire (67).The same is true of her short stories. By persisting in reading her as a realist writer many readers fail to notice her sophisticated use of language. Perhaps because none of the stories has a narrator to guide the reader in their interpretation or because the reader has little or no direct access to the protagonists thoughts, or because of the flouting of conversational maxims and the co-operative principal, sentences are taken at face value and all too often little attempt is made to decode the irony or to question what on the surface appears to be statements of fact.Hergenhan qu eries the success of a strategy of such extreme obliqueness It is difficult to understand why Baynton did not make it clearer as the ellipsis is carried so far that the clues have eluded most readers (217), but it should be remembered that, given the circumstances in which she was trying to publish, direct criticism was never an option for Baynton. What is essential in decoding Bayntons work is to accept that it is not about women but about the absence of women who are shown to be victims both of men in the bush and of language.