A Fringe of Leave by Patrick White (review)

332 Western American Literature A Fringe of Leaves. By Patrick White. (New York: Viking Press, 1977. 405 pages, $10.00.) With A Fringe of Leaves, 1973 Nobel Prize winner Patrick White returns to the landscape of nineteenth century Australia, no doubt partly because, as he remarked when Voss (1957) appeared, “there is nothing left to explore here now.” I suspect White would admit, if pressed, that some­ thing remains to be explored in our own century, for his novels are ulti­ mately concerned with the timeless exploration of the wilderness of the human spirit that, as the narrator of A Fringe of Leaves states, “cannot but grasp at any circumstantial straw which may indicate an ordered universe.” Yet however timeless and appropriately anti-Newtonian his protagonist’s spiritual quests may be, White’s preference for the past century centers on the presence of a pioneer landscape that awaits, as does the interior landscape of human consciousness, exploration by a capable Theseus. Or Ariadne — for the protagonist of A Fringe of Leaves is a Victorian woman who, by the force of circumstances, exchanges her green shawl for a fringe of leaves and penetrates the secret depths “which sooner or later must be troubled.” The force of circumstances, as in Voss, is that of history — in this case, the 1836 captivity experience of Mrs. Eliza Fraser, captain’s wife turned bare-skinned wet-nurse, ceremonial object, and slave for a Queensland aboriginal tribe after her husband’s brig foundered on the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. The woman of A Fringe of Leaves is Mrs. Ellen Roxburgh, a sturdy Cornish farmer’s daughter turned gentleman’s wife who cannot abolish childhood dreams of romance in Tintagel, furtive glances at masculine hands and wrists, or an excessive indifference to her husband’s favorite reading, Virgil’s Bucolics. Like the historical Mrs. Frazer, White’s Mrs. Roxburgh departs Australia in 1836 aboard a brig, gives birth to a child (hers is stillborn; Mrs. Frazer’s drowns later) in the longboat after the shipwreck, loses her husband, serves a two month term of exile with the aborigines, and then discovers her deliverer is a convict and not, as in the usual tradition of captivity narratives, God. Like the historical event, the novel’s structure is as starkly archetypal as the descent and return pattern of Hawthorne’s tales: as the novel closes, Mrs. Roxburgh returns to Sydney aboard a government cutter and must again await a sturdy ship and a fair wind to take her to England. Since history comprises only the fringe of the novel, White’s imagina­ tion concentrates instead on Mrs. Roxburgh’s eventual human confronta­ tion with the deepest levels of experience which, as she writes in her journal, are usually not experienced “this side of death.” Unlike the historical Mrs. Frazer, Ellen Roxburgh struggles — between the adolescent days of smearing cucumber pulp on her cheeks to soften their rawness and the day she emerges from the bush smeared with blood, grease, and cow dung — with an unsatisfactory marriage to a civilized invalid “lost in the raft of his Reviews 333 own negative abstractions,” an adulterous affair with her husband’s brother in Tasmania, and her own guilt over her convict rescuer’s (and lover’s) refusal to leave the bush after they have sighted the sheep station near Moreton Bay. Unlike the historical Mrs. Frazer, her child could only be stillborn and her breasts could only be dry, for she has too long attempted to balance the conflicting halves of her personality and to juggle her various roles as wife, nurse, adulteress, slave, and expectant mother. As she and Jack Chance flee “into the timeless frieze, of burning earth, and ghosts, and ghostlier living figures” that defines the Australian bush, Ellen Roxburgh realizes that she is a spiritual ghost as well as the physical ghost the aborigines tried to conceal under a covering of grease and feathers. One could question, as one reviewer has, the pedestrian nature of portions of the novel’s dialogue; yet that would be to overlook both the omniscient narrator’s at times ironic impreciseness and the fact that Austin and Ellen Roxburgh cannot...