Carmel Bird’s the White Garden: Symbols and Images in a Space of Their Own

The White Garden shows the most worked, formal and contained use of the language existing in the chasm between the conscious and the unconscious. This is the territory that the novel explores because the female characters adopt different personifications and they subvert the personalities of the women they stand for enjoying the status of deluded women. The boundary between the conscious, the symbolic order superimposed by Goddard, and the unconscious, the pre-Oedipal phase in which the dreams strive to appear from the subconscious in the privacy of the cell becomes the mainstay of the novel. The outcome of all this is a rich and profuse web of influences and cross-referencing; a transposition of systems of signs that results in a dense and complex relationship whose imagery is achieved by means of the white garden, a representation of female freedom and triumph. There has been a resurgence of women’s writing in Australia since the 1960s and we can account for it in a number of ways since there was, first of all, the rise of feminism and an accompanying appreciation of women’s writing, then a proliferation of publishers and the appearance of women’s studies courses in universities that helped to promote their writing. This coincides with the stage termed “female” by Showalter which, in A Literature of Their Own (1977), she defines as a stage of self-discovery as women free themselves from reacting to patriarchal values and turn inward, searching for their own independent female identity. The articulation of subjectivity is one of the fields that women have felt the need to explore in their works since their thoughts and most