Abstract
Breath by Tim Winton is an Australian surfing narrative. As a postcolonial novel, the novel’s absence of indigenous representation and its portrayal of the central female character, Eva Sanderson, solicit a reading that attempts to make sense of the intersections between gender and race central to many such texts. In this paper, I explore the representation of Eva and provide a feminist reading of the novel that re-considers its racialized, gendered, and nationalist dimensions. It is Eva, I suggest, who provides the potential for reconfiguring white surfing masculinities, but whose over-determined masculinization and often misogynistic representation within the patriarchal logic that structures the work, hinder attempts to realize this potential. This attempt is further restricted by the text’s erasure of indigenous people from the landscape.
The body is not open to all the whims, wishes, and hope of the subject; the human body, for example, cannot fly in the air, it cannot breathe underwater unaided by prosthesis, it requires a broad range of temperatures and environmental supports, without which it risks collapse and death…[T]he various procedures for inscribing bodies, marking out different bodies, categories, types, norms, are not simply imposed from outside; they do not function coercively but are sought out. (Grosz, 1994:187-8; 143)
Literary reviews and academic work dealing with Tim Winton’s prize winning novel, Breath, focus primarily on the text’s central theme of risk-taking as this relates to the male characters, and specifically, to Australian surfing masculinities. Breath offers possibilities for rethinking white male subjectivities through a retrospective narrative of 1970s surfing culture. Oddly, though, little focus has been given to the only female of the four central characters, middle-class American Mormon and ex-champion skier, Eva Sanderson, whose preferred practice of sexual asphyxia is, to my mind, central to the text’s attempts to re-present surfing masculinities. Representations of Eva form a basis for a preferred patriarchal reading of the text. Where discussions of Eva occur, they are mostly negative, in keeping with the text’s characterization of her. Despite the veracity of Eva’s negative representation, it is this character, I contend, who allows for a reading of Breath that gives rise to new ways of thinking about the construction of gendered and sexualized subjectivities, and allows us to examine how these are inflected by the patriarchal logic that underpins the narrative, specifically, the foregrounding of white surfie culture and the absence of any direct 1 reference to indigeneity in a narrative set in Western Australia.
Marking the absence of indigenous representation in the text, and the politics inscribed by this absence, affords a closer look at the tensions that structure many surfing texts, specifically in relation to surfing’s iconic status in Australia as a national trope. Many of Winton’s narratives have a surfing theme or focus and invoke white masculinities through the lens of surf culture. Indigenous representation in these stories, though, is notably sparse or non-existent. As Rooney notes, Winton’s characterizations, while ensconced firmly in Australian landscapes, give only “the briefest of nods to Aboriginal presence” (Rooney, 2009: 180). In Breath, the excision of indigenous presence from the landscape augments the articulation of nation in terms of an assured white sovereignty, unmarred by reference to colonial history or indigenous struggle. Establishing Breath as a white surfing narrative produces a less troubled, less complicated space that allows the writer to address issues of gender and sexuality as distinct from issues of race.
It is no secret that the genre of surfing text and its restrictive framework of representation struggles with representations of women. Surfing texts are notoriously misogynistic as I have argued elsewhere (McGloin, 2008). It is also the case, though, that surfing narratives conform to generic conventions that inscribe a certain set of signifiers often seductive to readers. For example, surfing texts focus on nature, freedom, descriptions of the seascape, and a general jouissance 2 encapsulated in the masculine experience of surfing. Surfers, as anyone who has ever read a surfing magazine will attest, wax lyrical about the spiritual potential of the seascape, man’s re-connection to nature and the seascape’s perceived absence of culture. These generic elements of surf narratives are replete in Breath.
Breath foregrounds four central characters: the adolescent son of English migrants, Bruce Pike, who narrates the story retrospectively as a middle-aged paramedic recalling his youth as his younger self, Pikelet. Pikelet’s youth is recounted through his relationships with his mate, Ivan Loon, Loonie, Bill Sanderson, Sando, a thirty-six year old ex-champion surfer who befriends the two teenage boys, and Sando’s twenty-five year old wife, ex-skiing champion, Eva Sanderson. Sando’s hedonistic, counter-cultural lifestyle, enjoyed at the expense of Eva’s trust fund, becomes the heroic inspiration for aspiring pre-pubescent surfers Pikelet and Loonie, whose lives in a small Western Australian town are ordinary and lacklustre. Their mateship is explored through various risk-taking practices. On the surface, Breath is interested in exploring the limits and potential of human fear as this exceeds the constraints of ordinariness, for example, fear of massive waves, of “deviant” sexual practice, of drowning, and more generally of dying itself. But Breath is also an exploration of female sexuality, of gender ascription and the anxiety produced by women who dare to transgress through unconventional or deviant sexual practice.
Eva’s sexuality is represented through her preference for sexual asphyxia referred to in medicolegal discourse as a form of “paraphilia” or sexual behaviour considered in some cases, deviant, and potentially harmful (Sharma, 2003: 280). 3 The text depicts Eva’s behaviour, both sexually and generally, as excessive, “unfeminine”, (indeed she is defeminized, disorderly, abject, in the sense that meaning is broken down, identity, systems, and order disturbed and norms are transgressed [Kristeva, 1982: 4]). I return to this point in more detail later. Eva threatens to disrupt the perceived coherence of a patriarchal social order, a threat that incurs the ultimate penalty of her excision from the narrative. I see the overdrawn patriarchal “masculine” attributes ascribed to Eva, her defeminization within the constraints of patriarchal discourses of femininity, as crucial to the text’s desire to reconfigure white surfing masculinities. As I will demonstrate, though, these overstated representations simultaneously undermine this aim; as excessive depictions they provoke a rethinking of Eva.
Breath, like Winton’s short story collection The Turning, is set in a fictitious area of south Western Australia. The narrative opens with Pike attending the death by asphyxiation of a young man, indicating the text’s interest in this theme, although it does not reappear until the final quarter of the novel when readers are told about Eva’s predilection for sexual asphyxia. By that stage, the reader has been positioned by a range of negative depictions of Eva which, it seems to me, have had considerable influence on some critical articles about the novel. For example, in some articles and reviews, Eva doesn’t rate a mention, while in others she is invariably negatively represented, e.g., as “Sando’s disgruntled partner” (Brady, 2008: np), his “fractious wife” (Steger, 2008: 3), Sando’s “moody, ill-tempered American wife” (Gustafsson, 2010), a “seductress and entrapper” (Knox, 2008: 3), “bitter and unfulfilled” (Thomas, 2010: 58). I am not suggesting that these descriptions are at variance with Winton’s characterization of Eva; on the contrary, Breath’s narrative positions readers to comply with a very specific view of her so that when her sexual deviance is introduced into the narrative representations of her concur with narrative expectations already set in place.
Breath follows the trajectory of a surfing yarn: the young surfers live for surfing and risk-taking thrills, while nurturing a hero worship for the older, ex-champion counter-cultural surfer, Sando, who enjoys the “hippy” lifestyle subscribed to by many white Australian middle-class surfers able to afford this during the 1970s. The narrative tracks the relationship between Pikelet, Loonie, and Sando and its development through their mutual interest in surfing. Winton presents this relationship as a safe, untroubled, and normative form of hero worship, “I put all my efforts into trying to be like him” (Winton, 2008: 137). 4 Winton invokes the illusion of an unsullied, mythical past where any reference to sexual impropriety is unthinkable: “all that sort of fear and panic was far in the future” (106).
The normalizing of the relationships between the three male characters is ambivalent, though. The avowal of 1970s pristine morality and the male heterosexual camaraderie within white heterosexual surfing masculinities in the text is fragile, as affirmed when Sando and Loonie’s relationship culminates in surfing escapades that exclude Pikelet because he fails to take up the ultimate risk to ride “the most dangerous wave I’d ever seen” (176). Pike recalls, “I found myself on the outside of whatever it was the other two had going” (171). Pikelet’s refusal to surf the “Nautilus” with the other two introduces a shift in the friendship. Sando and Loonie’s “conquering” of the “Nautilus” solidifies a bond whereby future escapades take them surfing overseas together ostensibly in search of bigger risks and more intense thrills. Left behind, fifteen-year-old Pikelet forms a relationship with Eva who sees both herself and Pikelet as having been deserted: “Well, here we are Pikelet. We’re both abandoned” (160).
Breath refers here to the seemingly naturalized and longstanding practice Australian surfers have long enjoyed of travelling to other, often poorer places such as Bali and areas of Thailand. Surfing magazines abound with anecdotes of travel and sexual conquests of indigenous women from those nations. 5 Again, the removal of indigenous representation on any level supports an untroubled representation of white Australian surfing culture’s naturalized occupation of other seascapes. This is not to imply that all surfers are necessarily disrespectful of indigenous cultures or indigenous land rights in other nations, but to draw attention to the naturalizing of the overseas surfing escapade as a practice that has a long history normalized within surfing culture and its associated texts.
Eva’s abandonment pre-empts her seduction of fifteen year-old Pikelet, a seduction that begins a relationship grounded in mutual pleasure, although it can also be read, particularly in the context of current discourses surrounding this issue, as a representation of paedophilia. Knox, for example, sees Eva as a “seductress and entrapper” (2008: 61). Thomas claims Eva is “an enigma, a woman who seduces a teenage boy”; that “[S]he uses her age and aggressive sexuality to exploit Bruce in vengeance” (Thomas, 2010: 58). Where judgement is suspended, Eva is described as “somewhat predatory and, possibly spiteful, but more likely lonely and abandoned” (Kelly, 2009: 8). Although Eva is at times presented sympathetically as lonely, most depictions of her are misogynistic.
Misogyny in surfing texts is commonplace and has a specific textual function, as I claim elsewhere (McGloin, 2008: 135-9). It can recuperate surfing masculinities inflected by the patriarchal feminine, or frequently used and often overly-descriptive linguistic emphasis, for example, “I will always remember my first wave…The blur of spray. The billion shards of light…I was intoxicated” (40), “[W]hen you make it…you get this tingly electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake in your body” (94). Dramatic and often flowery descriptions of surfing’s ecstasy use terminologies such as “beautiful”, “mind blowing”, “breathtaking” and so on, descriptors often ascribed to a feminine literary lexicon. Such terminology at times appears to defy language, contained within ellipses suggesting indescribable bliss (see McGloin, 2008: 89). It is not unusual in surfing texts to see a seamless shift from misogyny to expressions of bliss that are almost spiritual in their praise of the seascape. Breath is no exception, flitting between negative portrayals of Eva, for example, “[H]e hated her acerbic talk and slanting mouth. She was in his way” (84) to religious descriptions of surfing experience: “Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God” (94). Misogyny acts as a counterbalance to surfing’s linguistic excess constructing in Breath a negative reading of Eva. The following extract refers to the narrator, Pike’s, remembrance of a conversation between the young surfers, Pikelet and Loonie:
I couldn’t interest Loonie in anything beyond Eva’s many shortcomings…[S]he was a drag, a bitch, a stupid Yank, and a junkie… [Y]eah, she’s a whingein female… [S]he’s not that bad… You saw those mags. He was famous, mate, and maybe if it wasn’t for her still would be. Chicks, Pikelet. They drag you down. (83-4)
Representations of Eva’s body construct female sexuality in very particular ways through corporeal descriptions that mark her as unfeminine, hence masculine, within the matrix of patriarchal discourses of gender and sexuality. Pike describes his first sexual experience with Eva as follows:
I shoved off my damp jeans and clambered onto the bed and kissed her inexpertly. Eva’s hair was unwashed and her mouth tasted of hash and coffee. Her fingers were stained with turmeric. She smelled of sweat and fried coconut. She was heavier than me, stronger. Her back was broad and her arms solid. There was nothing thin and girly about her. She did not close her eyes. She did not wait for me to figure things out for myself. (199)
There is an ambiguity about the representation of Eva in this text that erupts in the text’s attempts to reconstruct white masculinity. The above extract, for example, depicts Eva’s sexuality in “active” terms more commonly associated with representations of patriarchal masculinity. In an attempt to reverse the hierarchy, Eva is divested of patriarchal “girliness”, inscribed instead with characteristics of strength, sexual dominance, bodily odours and stains. Adorned with these (less “feminine”) qualities, she is subsequently positioned as “lacking” − and simultaneously fetishized as irresistible, as in the following extract. The problem with this simplistic reversal is that its attempts to re-present or reconfigure sexualities are fraught by ambiguities. These tensions are produced by the patriarchal system of signification that structures the dialogue and marks Eva as both inside the symbolic order yet unable to be contained by it. I would suggest it is precisely these ambiguities, or tensions in the text that provide the basis for a potential reconceptualization of patriarchal dictates of gender and sexuality. Instead, however, the narrative resorts to what can be read – within the text’s patriarchal framework – as a form of misogyny amplified through the fetishized body of Eva:
She wasn’t quite the stuff of my erotic imaginings. True, she was blonde and confident in that special American way but there was nothing Playboy or Hollywood about her…[A]s a blonde, she tended towards the agricultural. She lacked rock-and-roll insouciance on one hand, and on the other she failed to give off the faintest aura of fey sensitivity. If anything she was abrupt and suspicious, handsome rather than pretty. Her limbs were shapely enough though tough and scarred. Yet the idea of her had taken hold. The fact of her body overtook me. Eva was suddenly all I could think about. (201-2)
The text offers few descriptions of male corporeality, but one of Sando is worth citing as a point of comparison: “[H]e was a big, strong man. The tight wetsuit showed every contour of his body, the width of his shoulders, the meat in his thighs” (69). There is no attempt to reformulate any of Eva’s “lack” (as expressed above) into a broader paradigm of what might (re)constitute female sexuality. At best, Eva is characterized as pathetic; at worst, self-obsessed, painful, and “stroppy”. Within the binary formulation of logic that structures the narrative, she is not “feminine” and is thus masculinized in the terms of that discourse: “handsome”, “agricultural”, “tough”. And while Pike’s retrospective acknowledgement that the masculinized figure of Eva had become an obsession might contribute to a rethinking of his own masculinity, this is obscured by the text’s defeminization of Eva: it is as if she must be masculinized, stripped of the attributes of patriarchal femininity, in order for Pike to avow his own “feminine” characteristics. There is an opportunity for Eva’s characterization to be drawn out, given more scope, but it is not taken; the focus of the text is to attempt to re-imagine surfing masculinities; this is a worthy endeavour, but it is partly Eva’s defeminization that provides the basis for this:
I watched her so long that I saw her body was a sequence of squares and cubes. Her teeth were square, so were her ears. Her breasts and buttocks were block-like. Even her calf muscles, which squirmed beneath my fingers, had corners. She had wide, blunt hands with square nails and deep ruts at the joints and her feet were the same. (215)
Eva’s “masculinity” is pronounced: her “lack” over-determined. She cannot be feminine – in patriarchal terms − because her behaviour exceeds the proscribed limits of the patriarchal feminine. So she is masculinized. However, this doesn’t work either because eventually, she finds she is pregnant, the paramount female condition in patriarchal discourse: she is the “fallen” Eve. The only option is to excise this character from the narrative. Thomas argues that Eva’s representation is a decoy for the “traditionally masculine”:
It is important to offer the female character in contrast here, since she is, in an almost perverse sense, a foil, to the traditionally masculine in the novel…[S]he uses her age and aggressive sexuality to exploit Bruce in vengeance for Sando’s “guru shit and bad manners” (p. 160). She acts out in a pseudo-masculine power play over the more vulnerable…[It] is fitting that Eva is not the epitome of a feminine woman, but rather heavy, solid, all muscle. (Thomas, 2010: 58)
Perhaps also Eva’s representation can be understood as a “foil” for the text’s incapacity to represent male characters as able to engage with, or reify, their own corporeality and by extension, to reconfigure surfing masculinities within the limitations of surfing narratives’ generic conventions. The textual codes inscribed in this narrative raise an important question relating to surfing genres: how are such representations – and their attendant readings – so adept at reinforcing ideas of social control over women even when an inversion of gender dynamics is deployed in an attempt to re-present gender relations? Such codifications, it could be argued, underpin an anxiety. Eva is depicted as an unhappy, emotionally and physically scarred, defeminized subject who distorts a masculinist social order by “imposing” what is represented as an horrific practice on a fifteen-year-old male. I suggest that Eva can be read as a textually abjected subject, a misogynized character whose love of her own capacity for pleasure constitutes a significant threat to patriarchal femininity: in marginalizing the phallus as the primary signifier of pleasure, Eva reduces its power as a social regulator.
I want to introduce the theme of sexual asphyxia as this practice is used in the text to represent Eva Sanderson’s sexuality. Although there is much dialogue to contribute to Eva’s construction as ill-tempered, it is not until later in the text that the reader discovers she “lived at the radical margin of her own sport” (209) and is unable to ski again because of a skiing accident that has severely damaged her knee leaving her limping and in pain requiring medication. Fear and fearlessness through auto-erotic sexual asphyxia are represented as replacements for her lost skiing prowess. So, in effect, readers are positioned to read Eva as “damaged” (painful) in advance of knowing about her skiing accident: when the accident is revealed, the reader “knows” and accepts the assumption that her physical injury is the reason or justification for her negative traits. Eva’s pleasure in sexual asphyxia, the narrative implies, is a way she can experience again the adrenalin rush of competitive snow skiing lost since her skiing accident: “I miss being afraid, she said. That’s the honest truth” (220). The adrenalin rush of skiing for Eva is thus re-presented through the act of sexual asphyxia.
Eva and Pikelet’s relationship is initially represented as a mutually enjoyable fling: “I spent all my free time at the house with Eva: in the woodshed, the bathtub, the bed. I helped with her rehab exercises and carried shopping up the stairs…I told her I loved her and I believed it” (212). When Eva introduces Pikelet to her asphyxiation routine, she produces a padded collar and brass ring and asks him to watch while she “hangs” herself:
You hang yourself? Sure sometimes. Fuck. Why? Because I like it. (223)
Sexual asphyxia in women is largely under-researched (Byard et al., 1993; Sharma, 2003; Zaviačič, 1994), “a rarely reported phenomenon” (Byard et al., 1993: 70) due possibly to its social stigma and its association as a male preoccupation. Research into this practice focuses on men, as Sharma notes of paraphilia generally “[V]irtually all paraphiliac people are men and the majority of individuals who practice sexual asphyxia are men” (2003: 277; 280). Researchers are generally of the view that the motivating force for women who enjoy sexual asphyxia is an increased or heightened pleasure, as Eva tells Pikelet, “It makes me come like a freight train” (223). Zaviačič suggests that “in some women, the practice is accompanied by expulsions of fluid (ejaculation)” considered the main reason for “repetitive deviant asphyxiophilic behaviour” (1994: 318). Eva’s intense, self-producing, and explosive pleasure underscores an anxiety about female ejaculation that threatens the masculinities represented in the text and generates the need to represent Eva in such negative terms. Although Eva seeks Pikelet’s “help” in the process, there is a sense that he is inconsequential: “I just want you to watch”… “I’ll make do on my own, Pikelet. I’m a big girl” (223-4).
Sexual asphyxia for Eva is an autoerotic practice that threatens the text’s desire to reconstruct surfing masculinities: misogyny works to alleviate this threat. As a practice that not only produces intense rapture, but ejaculation – a material bodily substance that affirms triumph of the object over the subject, the paraphernalia over the phallus – Eva’s desire for the breathlessness produced by asphyxia constitutes the ultimate form of transgression. This activity falls beyond the parameters of heterosexual practice within what is deemed “proper” for female subjects, undoubtedly a contributing factor to it being “rarely reported”. Auto-sexual asphyxia is a direct challenge to the imposed power relations that position Eva as unwholesome, recalcitrant, and unfeminine in patriarchal terms. While the reader is positioned to read her auto-eroticism as simply a reaction to her relegation to the indeterminate “no man’s land” of pain and loneliness while waiting for the return of the surfer, or (phallus), her sexual preference can also be read as simply that: a preference, regardless of pain or loneliness. It can be conceived as a form of desire that produces more pleasure than a phallus and therefore displaces the phallocentric symbolic order that regulates women’s gendered and sexualized subjectivities. So while the text is at pains to depict Eva as an abject “object”, a figure of transgression whose desire, flows, moods, intensities, and pain exceed the proscribed limitations of patriarchal femininity, her refusal to be limited, to take up a position of “normativity” within the heterosexual matrix, functions textually to reinstate her agency and to inscribe in this character the possibilities for dissensus.
Read in this way, Eva’s experimentation distorts her subject position, removing her sexuality from its patriarchally defined significations and limitations and destabilizing the relations of power that inscribe their authority. In this light, Eva, as the inscriptor of her own subjectivity, represents possibilities for a radical reformulation of reading positions, and by extension, of female sexualized identities as these are textually inscribed. It could be argued that agency is not much use when the character is eventually excised from the text: “Eva was found hanging naked from the back of a bathroom door in Portland, Oregon” (253), we are told in the final pages of the novel. However, Eva cannot be recuperated in this narrative precisely because she does too much damage to the symbolic order on which its logic rests. In dictating the limits and terms of her own pleasure and through this the terms of Pikelet’s masculinity, this character must be penalized. Her capacity for reformulating sexual subjectivities remains threatening as it intervenes into existing power relations producing a discursive shift, however temporary. Eva’s preference for the object (plastic bag/paraphernalia) over the subject (phallus) marks her as an effect of difference, a product of what cannot be conceived of as same. To borrow from Grosz:
[O]nce the subject is no longer seen as an entity – whether psychical or corporeal – but fundamentally an effect of pure difference that constitutes all modes of materiality, new terms need to be sought by which to think this alterity within and outside the subject. (Grosz, 1994: 208)
As I have claimed, Eva represents a figure of abjection in the sense marked by Kristeva as that which is beyond assimilation into “the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva, 1982: 1). The abject sits outside of, or is segregated from, discourses of cultural normativity. It is constituted by excess, a capacity to shock, nauseate, to arouse fear, and to disturb the boundaries of “normality”. Eva’s sexual asphyxia threatens the dictates of female heterosexual practice. She consequently disturbs the social order, particularly in view of the possibility of death associated with sexual paraphilia. Her simultaneous love and fear of the collar and ring represent repulsion and jouissance, to cite Kristeva: “[I]maginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (1982: 4). There is a danger, though, in marking Eva as abject; this can be read as a reproduction of normative assumptions about women’s sexuality that feminist scholarship critiques. So it is necessary to consider Eva’s abjection by acknowledging that in this text, she both breaks down meaning and provides a focus for its reconstitution: in other words, although her behaviour can be construed as unthinkable, it also provides a focal point from where discourses of sexuality can be interrogated even if this is not effectively taken up in the narrative. Her representation as a figure of abjection is rendered more complex by the disarticulation of race from this work. Constituted as an “outsider”, Eva represents a presence that is both integral to, and in excess of the narrative’s capacity to reconstruct white surfing masculinities. Due to the framework of white, nationalist heterosexuality that underpins the narrative, the text inevitably returns to the dominant significations it seeks to interrogate. The excision of indigeneity in Breath plays a crucial role in Eva’s “otherness”, therefore; it allows her to be scripted as an outsider – racially and sexually − to the corpus of nation, and for the nation itself to retain its dominant nationalist significations of Australian-ness.
Pikelet is obsessed with Eva: he can’t get enough of her: “I watched her when she was present and conjured her when she was not” (214); “How I watched her, what a catalogue I made of her movements. I saw her pee, watched her shave her armpits” (215). Despite the pleasure and comfort she affords him, not merely as an object for his voyeurism but also by nursing his surfing wounds, providing companionship, coffee, food, and so on, the retrospective telling of events assumes the moral high ground that inspires critics previously cited to follow the lead of the text’s narrator, whose “remembrances” of the narrative, in the final judgement are forgetful of the above comforts, of Pikelet’s complicity and intense pleasure:
I understand lapses of judgement, the surrender to vanity, the weight of loneliness… (209)…Eva was not ordinary. And neither was the form of consolation she preferred. Given my time over I would not do it all again…She had no business doing what she did, but I’m through hating and blaming. People are fools, not monsters. (211)
Pikelet’s eventual response, under the guise of fearing Eva would kill herself, can thus be understood in this context as the only “rational” response to what is clearly an intensely pleasurable experience for him: in order to reconstruct his own phallic identity, he must “fake” his performance:
It was intense and consuming, and it could be beautiful. That far out at the edge of things, you get to a point where all that stands between you and oblivion is the roulette of body-memory. You feel exalted, invincible, angelic because you’re totally fucking poisoned. Inside it’s great, feels brilliant. But on the outside, it’s squalid beyond imagining…[So] I began to deceive her…[In] the end I was faking it all. She saw to herself anyway; she was on automatic by then. (234)
The above echoes so many of the “inside”/ “outside” representations of surfing as it replays these through analogous “waves” of fear, tension, and anxiety. Eva’s power refuses the limits of her sexual subjectivity, expanding the borders of her sexuality and invoking a disquiet that Pike responds to by recollecting his withdrawal under the guise of the fear of her death: “each time I let go Eva’s throat and ripped the slimy bag off her face, I didn’t see rapture. What I saw was death ringing her like a bell” (234). And when Pikelet recollects his horror, it is in line with the text’s previous characterization of Eva as fractious:
[O]nce when I began to giggle at how stupid we looked, how ludicrous it was to be lurching about like this while the dog scratched at the door, she slapped me so hard that I rode home and lay on my narrow bed and shouted at my mother to turn the bloody vacuum off and get a life. (235)
It is easy to dismiss this representation as that of a fifteen-year-old boy who was “lured” into what became a scary sexual experience. The text suggests that Pikelet was very much an active and compliant agent in his own seduction, complicit in all its activities until the point where he realized he may be held responsible. The above excerpt represents Eva’s ultimate control over Pikelet and his need to regain some control by attempting to subjugate his mother. The maternal in this text erupts throughout as a site of acute anxiety and ambivalence: Pikelet states of his relationship with his mother that “our relationship was a polite, undeclared failure” (249). His wife found reverence for pregnancy “creepy”, “grotesque” (250-1). Eva’s body, once a site of meaning whereby Pikelet’s emerging adult masculinity could be imagined, where his subjective fantasies could materialize, is finally scripted as the maternal site of his rescue:
I was on the bed one afternoon, spent and full of loathing, when she limped up naked from the steaming bathroom, a towel coiled around her head. It was right there in front of me. Eva, I said. You’re pregnant…Go home, she murmured. The fun’s over now. Fuck, I said. Fuck you…C’mon, she murmured…[I] can’t do this shit with a baby coming. Is it mine? Don’t be absurd…Even as I lay there I felt my shock becoming relief. (236)
The text releases Eva and Pikelet from their “horror” and restores them both to a culturally appropriate value system whereby normativity is returned to the text and the narrative can proceed with Pike’s retrospective litany of life’s tribulations: a failed marriage, loss of his father, attempts to reconnect with his mother, mental health problems, and an eventual restoration to the role of a functioning citizen – recalling the narrative opening – to a paramedic who now saves lives. For Eva, though, the consequences are unequivocal: she must be removed from this text, “hanged” by her addiction to sexual asphyxia and relegated to a non-space that allows the adult Pike to grieve her loss and ascribe his human failings to her “seduction” of him. “I was no great success as a man”, he laments, “but I had been, I thought, a faithful, gentle husband. Never sexually insistent, I steered clear of oddness” (251). At the end of the novel, which Lawrence laments is the “most unsatisfactory part of Breath” because of what he calls its “almost perfunctory review of the character’s lives after their formative years” (Lawrence, 2008: np), the reader is positioned to sympathize with Pike, pitted against a wife who doesn’t understand him.
Rooney notes that critical or scholarly attention to Winton’s work doesn’t match his public profile as a writer (2009: 159). I have sought to contribute to a scholarly reading of Breath that refuses to accept the dominant reading position of Eva. I’ve departed from reviews and articles that give primacy to the text’s attempts to re-define surfing masculinities focusing on surfing escapades and depictions of masculine oceanic prowess. Rather, I’ve read the text against its generic conventions which, as they appear to make room for discursive shifts in surfing representations of masculinity, are fraught by an anxiety that reproduces misogynistic representation as a recuperative textual strategy. Reading Eva’s desires according to this reasoning refutes a neat conceptualization of the character as a victim of loneliness imposed by her surfie husband’s escapades. Eva’s sexual preference can be understood as a desire to exceed the discursive limits of female sexuality, its limitations, its “procedures” and its regulative power relations. Both in her relation with Sando and Pikelet, Eva imbues her own body with pleasure. To read her as disillusioned, bored or fractious, sexually “deviant”, an incomprehensible “Other”, does not do justice to the character’s potential for subverting the logic that inscribes the gender relations in the text.
Having drawn attention to the significance of the absence of indigenous representation in Breath something must be said about the politics of representation inscribed by this absence, and the effects on the narrative construction of nation intrinsic to the iconographic surfing yarn. Despite the centrality of the character Eva, the attempted reconfiguration of white Australian masculinities is a central theme in Breath. As an Australian surfing yarn, the text enters a pre-existing literary canon where its status as a national narrative is assured. I have demonstrated that there are points of tension in attempts to reconstruct masculinity and have focused primarily on how the struggle to do this has been attempted through a phallocentric framework of representation. More significantly, though, the siphoning off of race in an acclaimed work set in contemporary Western Australia, leaves in situ the colonial relations of power that inform the narrative, underpins its phallocentric focus, and gives it “breath”. To cite Langton, “[T]he easiest and most ‘natural’ form of racism in representation is the act of making the other invisible” (2003: 113). The erasure of race augments the illusion of a seamless inversion of patriarchal power relations: unfettered by an indigenous presence in the landscape, the text’s attempts to reconstruct white surfing masculinities in a landscape divested of indigenous history are seemingly easier, less complicated, less onerous a task. Closer reading, however, suggests that the absence of indigenous representation in this work not only leaves colonial relations of power in place, neither questioning nor disturbing the complexities that discursively produce white masculinities, but also reproduces those power relations. In this reading of Breath, therefore, it is the text's phallocentric representation that draws attention to the absence of colonial history and the re/production of nation as white. Like Eva’s eventual excision from the narrative, the absence of colonial history or indigenous presence contributes significantly to the difficulties this text faces in its attempts to reconfigure white surfing masculinities.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.