The Phantom and Transgenerational Trauma in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

ELIZABETH JOLLEY'S THE WELL, one the most celebrated examples the Australian female Gothic,1 can also be studied as a trauma novel. Set in the vast and dry postcolonial Australian countryside, the novel deals with the intense, traumatic, and somehow bordering on the homoerotic, relationship between elderly and embittered Hester Harper, heiress to a large agricultural estate, and young and unformed Katherine, a sixteen-yearold orphan whom Hester unofficially adopted one day. For the lonely and tormented Hester, who also struggles with a lame leg, Katherine is the only companion she has had in many years, with the exception her father's loyal friend and accountant, Mr Bird, who is still concerned with the best way to handle Hester's property and investments. Having lived on the farm alone with her father for most her life (she did not know her mother, lost her dear teacher Hilde Herzfeld when she was still very young, and her grandmother died soon after Hilde left), Hester longs for companionship and affection. Hester and Katherine take to each other from the very beginning, and this bond only becomes stronger after Hester's father dies. Now a free and wealthy woman, Hester spoils Katherine and satisfies all her wishes: they go on shopping sprees, cook expensive banquets for themselves every night, and even get used to drinking champagne with their cornflakes at breakfast. Katherine is full life and fantasies (she is mad about American music and film stars, whose accent she keeps on imitating), and Hester, who suffered such traumatic losses and loneliness during her childhood, feels so happy living through Katherine that her attitude towards this young woman ends up being abnormally lovesick: did not regard herself as a mother or even as an aunt. She did not attempt to give any name to the relationship. She realized quite quickly that she was possessive.2 Hester scrutinizes every single letter Katherine receives from Joanna, her only other friend, with whom she grew up at the orphanage, and does her best to keep Joanna away from Katherine. Hester's wasteful spending and mismanagement her property soon relegate the couple to an old and out-of-the-way cottage with a dried-up well on the edge Hester's land. One dark night, as Katherine is driving the two women recklessly back home from a party on a deserted road, they hit something, and Hester decides to get rid the corpse by dumping it in the unused well. From this moment onwards, all their troubles begin. All the action will now centre on the well, from which Katherine starts hearing a mysterious male voice, a presence /absence that will haunt the two female protagonists until the well's final covering up gives way to a much discussed open ending. This problematical ending discloses the existence unresolved gaps /wounds in the psyche both female protagonists, and in Australian society as a whole, which demand some kind ethical mourning. Although the novel's final ambiguous return to 'normality' inscribes it in the female Gothic tradition, it nonetheless puts to the test its own initial subversive potential, together with the possibility working through these two women's traumas.As is well known, the Gothic novel emerged in reaction to Enlightenment literature as a dark foil to literary Romanticism, and has been often described as one of unconscious desire, a release repressed energies.3 The Well mobilizes the Gothic to negotiate issues genre, gender, class, and race, and weaves into an apparently simple horror story multiple meanings which, like an echoing well, return defamiliarized images while drawing on a traumatic and phantasmagoric scenario. Last but not least, this novel, first published in 1986, could also be seen as a plea for the so much wished-for Australian Reconciliation process, which would finally start in 1991, when the Commonwealth Parliament voted unanimously to establish the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and a formal reconciliation process that might contribute to building relationships for change between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. …