| Library home | Catalogue | Resources | Services | Help | Libraries | About us |
| Staff directory | A-Z index | Site map |
| Library home | Catalogue | Resources | Services | Help | Libraries | About us |
| Staff directory | A-Z index | Site map |
Chosen by:
Dr Nina Philadelphoff-Puren,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts
Baynton, Barbara, 1857-1929.
The chosen vessel / by Barbara Baynton. [Sydney: F. Cunningham, 1896?]
The work of author Barbara Baynton was considered too difficult and uncomfortable for an Australian audience, and she had to publish her first collection of short stories in London with Duckworth’s Greenback Library with the title Bush Studies in 1902. Its originality struck a chord with reviewers in both England and Australia and she developed a significant literary reputation. In 1907 she published a novel titled Human Toll, and in 1917 an expanded collection of stories titled Cobbers.
This undated pamphlet is a remarkable artefact from the publication history of Baynton’s most famous short story, ‘The Chosen Vessel’, for which no manuscript exists. This disturbing tale depicts an isolated bush woman who is raped and murdered by a swagman. Baynton’s genius is to show that this event is not an isolated act of male violence but rather the ultimate expression of a patriarchal system which can only read the woman as a ‘Madonna’ or a ‘whore’. Printed and distributed for private circulation in Sydney, this version of the story is highly melodramatic- it makes liberal use of exclamation marks and includes critical authorial commentary on the woman’s actions as she tries to defend herself from her attacker. As a text, it draws attention to the moral horror of the situation it depicts and explicitly involves the reader in a process of judgement.
The story was then officially published in the Christmas edition of the Bulletin in 1896. Baynton originally submitted it to the magazine with the title ‘What the Curlew Cried’, but the editor A.G. Stephens renamed it ‘The Tramp’ and excised a pivotal section of the story in which a young Catholic horseman called Peter Hennessey had the chance to save the woman but mistakes her for a vision of the Virgin Mary and leaves her to her fate. Feminist critics such as Elizabeth Webby and Kay Schaffer have noted that these changes transform the story- rather than being an indictment of a masculine symbolic order that projects fantasies onto the bodies of women, it becomes instead a much more straightforward tale of a man who commits a violent and horrible crime. The Bulletin’s editorial policy on short fiction also could not tolerate the more gothic adornments of the original story and thus muted the punctuation and eliminated the authorial comments.
Ultimately, then, the pamphlet version of A Chosen Vessel contains what was considered an unruly excess that was pruned away from both ‘The Tramp’ and the later publication of the story in Bush Studies, where Baynton restored the Peter Hennessey section but maintained the cool narrative voice of the Bulletin version. In this way, it represents the secret history of this important and disturbing tale.
Photo album created with Web Album Generator