Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 'White, Fierce, Shocked, Tearless' : The Watch Tower and the Electric Interior
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

In Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966), Clare Vaizey visits a doctor in Sydney’s Macquarie Street to see about an allergic rash on her neck. She assures the doctor that the rash appears nowhere else on her body and yet – ominously – he requires her to take off all her clothes. She obeys. The doctor’s motives are opaque, his expression impassive, his manner clinical. His tenth-floor surgery sits high in a cliff-like row of buildings, its windows staring down on the harbour and the “barbered greenness” of the Botanical Gardens.2 The doctor’s office resembles, it seems, a “watch tower”. It is uncertain whether the surgery is a malignant space of punishing surveillance or benign, illuminating perspective. The view the surgery commands recalls the watch tower that is Clare’s own suburban bedroom in the Neutral Bay house where she lives with her sister Laura, and with Laura’s husband, Felix Shaw, the novel’s Bluebeard. With its view of the world outside, of glittering blue harbour and suburban streets, Clare’s bedroom is, on the one hand, a space of retreat from the more threatening communal areas of the Shaw house. On the other hand, the bedroom is uneasy, occupied territory; it is cheerless, blank and exposed, clinical and impersonal like a doctor’s surgery. In both locations Clare must submit to the intrusive gaze of a dominant male figure. Naked but for her high heels, Clare gazes upon the dazzling landscape of garden and harbour while the doctor circles her body. She practises detachment, shielding her private self as her pearly white flesh is exposed. She maintains composure under inspection. But at the moment of parting, an intense, wordless exchange takes place, the import of which is not directly stated: the doctor looks at Clare deeply and she returns his gaze. In that moment, “an invisible rocket sped between them, rocked the room, shocking and enlightening her to the very tips of her high-heeled shoes” (Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph: the truth of a text is not the truth of what that text says; it is – paradoxical notion – the truth of its form —Roland Barthes

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Elizabeth Harrower : Critical Essays Elizabeth McMahon (editor), Brigitta Olubas (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2017 12996118 2017 anthology criticism

    'In 2014, four decades after it was written, Elizabeth Harrower's novel In Certain Circles was published to much anticipation. In 1971, it had been withdrawn by the author shortly before its planned publication. The novel's rediscovery sparked a revival of international interest in Harrower's work, with the republication of her previous novels and, in 2015, the appearance of her first new work in nearly four decades.

    'Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays is the first collection of critical writing on Harrower's fiction. It includes eloquent tributes by two acclaimed contemporary novelists, Michelle de Kretser and Fiona McFarlane, and essays by leading critics of Australian literature. They consider Harrower's treatment of time and place; her depiction of women, men, and their interactions in the mid twentieth century; her engagement with world history; and her nimble, complex, profoundly modern approach to plot, character and genre. Together they offer new insights into a writer at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism, and invite readers to read and re-read Harrower's work in a new light.' (Publication summary) 

    Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2017
    pg. 86-100
Last amended 23 Jul 2020 13:20:16
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