T H E O D O R A G O O D M A N A N D T H E M I N D S O F M O R T A L S : P A T R I C K W H I T E ’ S T H E A U N T ’ S S T O R Y DOUGLAS LONEY McMaster University . .. the Minds of Mortals are so different and bent on such diverse journeys that it may at first appear impossible for any common taste and fellowship to exist between two or three under these suppositions. It is however quite the contrary. Minds would leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey’s end.* — k e a t s Ih e Aunt’s Story is an account of the odyssey of a woman’s spirit; the story of Theodora Goodman’s quest after true knowledge of her self and her world. She establishes on her journey a doctrine of spiritual acceptance by which ultimately she attains the prize of her soul’s integrity and peace. Her journey is in the world of experience and of human relationships, and it is by the people who touch and are touched by Theodora that she is schooled. The interlocking and complementary structures of Theodora’s relationships with those who would be guides, those who would follow, and those who would be stumblingblocks, are essential to the writer’s design in this novel. Patrick White explores his theme in three parts: Theodora Goodman’s child hood at “ Meroe,” her season of intense spiritual confrontation with the human flora of “Le Jardin E x o t iq u e and her eventual triumphant arrival in the company of “Holstius.” In describing White’s differing modes of expression in the three sections of the novel, Marjorie Barnard writes: The treatment of the theme might be likened to that of a fragmentary and unorthodox symphony. The first part, “Meroe,” is the adagio, slow as the years of childhood and the turning earth; the second, “Jardin Exotique,” is the scherzo and the last, “Holstius,” the coda, in which all the themes are resolved and quiet descends.1 * Epigraph from a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Thursday, 19 February 1818, in Maurice Buxton Forman, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 3rd edition (London: Oxford, 1947). E n g l is h St u d ies in C anada, v iii, 4, December 1982 Perhaps a more precise description of the novelist’s technique in The Aunt’s Story can be made with a metaphor from geometry. Maqbool Aziz has sug gested that the reader consider the linearity of the narrative in the chapters of Theodora’s development at Meroe; and the angularity of style in the “Jardin Exotique” section, wherein the narrative leaps from the physical and temporal plane to the spiritual, as Theodora empathically discovers her “several selves.” Finally, the novel’s principal conflict is resolved in “Holstius ,” wherein the most important narrative effect is circularity, completion, wholeness.2 We might consider the earliest part of Theodora’s journey as if it were a medieval morality play, in which the Everyman (or “ Goodman” ?) protago nist, Theodora, is suspended between the Virtue and Vice figures of George and Julia Goodman, “the kinder. . . and the cruel.” 3 The central figure of the drama must find her path between these poles. Theodora’s father is kind, but he is also ineffectual, and perenially sub missive to his terrible wife. He is a dreamer and a poet, and is associated always by Theodora with the cool and graceful pines which cloister his study. When he is confronted by Julia, George Goodman’s bloodlessness suggests the effeminate or the epicene; yet, although his masculinity is tenuous, he does provide Theodora with the fatherly love and conversation she needs to begin her quest for the discovery of her soul. George Goodman’s wife, Theodora’s mother, is ruthless and pragmatic. Her fierce and frustrated sexuality is manifested in her sadistic manipulation of those lives which have had the bad luck to be drawn within her orbit. Tn...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Sep 24, 2024
Dr V Geetha + 3
Open Access