Down in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well: An Essay on Repression

Abstract

Female writers traditionally have found in the Gothic a useful weapon for criticising patriarchal ideologies and the constrictions they force upon women. This is the project undertaken by The Well, whose main character is a woman who usually challenges social norms in many ways and finds herself crippled, both physically and metaphorically, by the conservative Australian community in which she lives. The mysterious content of the well next to her cottage invites various interpretations. It acquires a richer meaning from a psychological perspective since it turns out to be the distorted reflection of the two female protagonists’ psyche. It functions as a projected unconscious, a container of individual and collective memories, repressed fears, and desires. In the constant battle for power that takes place in the novel, the well becomes a site of female struggle against patriarchal authority. Above all it represents the main character’s repressed sexuality, in a story wherein feminine sexuality significantly evokes the abject, and offers her the chance to come to terms with it.