The Aunt's Story by Patrick White

First published: 1948

Type of work: Psychological symbolism

Time of work: The early decades of the twentieth century, particularly the years just prior to the outbreak of World War II

Locale: Meroe (near Sydney, Australia), the Hotel du Midi on the French Riviera, and the United States

Principal Characters:

• Theodora Goodman, the protagonist, a middle-aged spinster
• Lou Parrott, her young niece
• Moraitis, a visiting Greek concert cellist
• General Alyosha Sergie Sokolnikov, a fellow guest at the Hotel du Midi
• Holstius, the owner of the house in the United States where Theodora takes shelter

The Novel

The Aunt’s Story boasts one of the great opening lines in the history of the novel: “But old Mrs. Goodman did die at last.” Following her domineering mother’s timely demise, Theodora Goodman embarks on a lengthy trip from her native Australia to pre-World War II Europe and thence to the United States. Much of the action of The Aunt’s Story is filtered through the increasingly disjointed consciousness of Theodora; hers is a psychological as well as a physical voyage.

The novel is divided into three sections, each of which takes place in a different geographical locale. The first part, “Meroe,” opens in Sydney with the arrival of Mrs. Goodman’s other daughter, Fanny Parrott, her husband, Frank, and her children, among whom numbers Theodora’s niece and soulmate, Lou. Such empathy exists between them that Theodora obliges Lou with a retelling of the story of her own childhood on Meroe, her father’s estate in the country named for a similarly beautiful place in ancient, mythical Abyssinia. Theodora, the eldest child, is the bane of her mother’s existence: Stiff, awkward, and sallow, Theodora often says and does startling things. Her beloved father seems to understand her, though, and so she enters his world, learning to shoot like a man and to love the land. Unlike Fanny, who is plump and rosy and who perfects piano and other acceptably feminine hobbies, Theodora hones her hunting skills and communes with roses and trees. Following Mr. Goodman’s death, however, Theodora and her mother move to Sydney, where Theodora waits on the old tyrant and enjoys a limited social life that includes meeting a concert cellist named Moraitis. He, like Theodora, sees things more clearly than other people do, and his music stirs her profoundly. This first section of the novel, related mostly in flashback, ends where it began, with Theodora ready to start her travels.

Part 2, “Jardin Exotique,” finds Theodora checking into the Hotel du Midi in the south of France, where she plans to rest from her European tour for some time. Whereas narrative is mostly linear in “Meroe,” it becomes increasingly disjointed during the course of this second section. White relies on surprising combinations of words and fractured syntax to chart the disintegration of both Theodora’s sanity and pre-World War II Europe. Longterm residents of the hotel include General Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov, a retired Russian military man; Mrs. Elsie Rapallo, a wealthy American; and Katina Pavlou, an innocent young girl traveling with her chaperone. Theodora gets so caught up in the dreams and fantasies of each of her fellow guests that her own identity starts to fade and her grip on reality to retreat; she becomes the General’s sister Ludmilla in his reminiscences of time past and also plays confidante to her Lou-surrogate, Katina Pavlou. Theodora finds herself doing inexcusable things, such as stealing and smashing Mrs. Rapallo’s beautiful, fragile seashell. Tensions between the hotel guests eventually build to a boiling point. Part 2 ends with the destruction of the hotel and many of its guests in a fire.

Theodora survives the fire to make her way to America. In part 3, titled “Holstius,” she rides a train headed west. At an undisclosed stopping point along the way, Theodora gets off the train and continues her journey on foot. As she walks, she discards most of her worldly possessions, including train tickets and personal identification. Eventually, she comes across a shack inhabited by the Johnson family; she gives them a false name, and they provide her with food and shelter. Theodora wanders off again and discovers an abandoned house. She believes that it belongs to a treelike man named Holstius, with whom she discourses about the nature of life. Holstius’ philosophy helps restore Theodora to some wholeness of being before the wellmeaning Johnsons find her and turn her over to civilization in the form of a doctor from an asylum.

The Characters

Patrick White uses the convention of the voyage in order to trace Theodora’s changing psychological states. As a child, Theodora travels only imaginatively; her family home is named for some far-off, exotic place she never sees, but her father’s tales about the other Meroe stimulate her fantasies. When Theodora embarks on her actual voyage of discovery, she trades her few family connections and a colonial past for a disintegrating culture on the brink of war. The Hotel du Midi serves as a metaphor for the madness of the times, and Theodora epitomizes the general breakdown in morals and ideals. White uses increasingly fragmented sentences to impressionistic effect in order to render the confusion in Theodora’s mind between dream, fantasy, and reality. She loses her own identity in the maelstrom of events to the extent that it becomes impossible to know whether characters such as Sokolnikov, Pavlou, and Holstius are not simply projections of Theodora’s imagination. Not until both the Hotel du Midi and its guests disappear does Theodora embark on her final journey. She travels first to and then through the heart of the New World, pausing only to shed all vestiges of her former life. Her physical voyage ends in a simple shack in no-man’s-land, but her spiritual journey back to wholeness is, as Holstius assures her, only beginning. Theodora’s entire trek involves discarding the superfluous and paring down to her essential self; the journey motif charts the process by which an unusually sensitive, complex character comes to accept herself.

White’s major characters frequently exhibit signs of confused sexuality, and Theodora proves no exception. Because Mr. Goodman is the romantic he is, he encourages Theodora’s individuality; she identifies with and emulates her father, emerging into womanhood with a shaky sense of her own sexuality and, indeed, of her own identity. She bears the feminized version of a decidedly masculine name meaning “gift of God,” and is presented throughout her life as thin and angular. In middle age, Theodora sports a mustache that her nephews in particular like to stroke. Her love life proves nonexistent, except for minor flirtations with Fanny’s eventual husband, Frank, and later with a wealthy bachelor named Huntly Clarkson. Each of these men is in turn fascinated and repulsed by Theodora; Frank abandons her for mindless Fanny, and Huntly cultivates an interest in her only because rare, incongruous objects fascinate him. Theodora enjoys the most satisfying relationships with men such as her father, Moraitis, and Holstius, all of whom see beyond the superficial and conventional in life around them. For the most part, female characters other than Theodora are depicted as either silly, like Fanny, or venomous, like Mrs. Goodman. The exception to this tendency is Lou, who resembles her aunt in many ways. Male characters are similarly typecast: They can be either beefy and bullheaded, like Frank, or sensitive and muddled, like Mr. Goodman. The main impression, though, is that there is only one main character in the novel, and that is Theodora; the temptation is to see the other, minor characters merely as different aspects of her.

Critical Context

Many critics still consider White’s third published novel his best because of its rich, poetic language and dense, complex style. The Aunt’s Story demonstrates an ambitious and innovative use of imagery, and shows White as willing to experiment with style and novelistic form. The work also exhibits modernist touches, such as stream-of-consciousness technique, intricate symbolism, and emphasis on the individual, but thematically it is clearly concerned with a fragmented, postmodern world. Still, its message is neither nihilistic nor even pessimistic: In the sympathetic character of eccentric, unlovely Theodora Goodman, White urges acceptance of negative as well as positive aspects of being.

The Aunt’s Story represented an adventurous departure from the novel which preceded it, The Living and the Dead (1941), with its derivative, highly symbolic style, and in no way suggested The Tree of Man (1955), which followed. Here White turned to simple, biblical diction and long, rhythmic sentences in order to create an Australian epic of life on the land.

The Aunt’s Story won for White international acclaim and also succeeded in putting Australia on the twentieth century literary map. (In 1973, White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.) Unlike The Living and the Dead, which was set in England, The Aunt’s Story is partly set in Australia, and White continued using his native land as a setting for many of the novels which followed. It was significant not only for White but also for Australia that he began turning to its indigenous forms and vistas in order to articulate his vision of life. The success of The Aunt’s Story brought White back home from years of self-exile in Europe and rescued the Australian novel from its tendency to imitate British trends.

Bibliography

Barnard, Marjorie. “The Four Novels of Patrick White,” in Meanjin. XV (Winter, 1956), pp. 156-170.

Dutton, Geoffrey, ed. The Literature of Australia, 1976.

Kiernan, Brian. Patrick White, 1980.

Walsh, William. Patrick White’s Fiction, 1977.

Wilkes, Gerald Alfred, ed. Ten Essays on Patrick White: Selected from Southerly (1964-1967), 1970.