Exploring the Gothic Imagination through
a discussion of “The Chosen Vessel”
by Sylvia Merkt
The Chosen Vessel
by Barbara Baynton (1896)
Baynton was a novelist and short story writer whose works examine the
alienation and isolation experienced by women in the Australian outback
during the late nineteenth century. Contradicting the romantic ideals of
independence and mateship popularised in Australian fiction of the 1890s,
her works provide realistic depictions of the hardships of bush life while
presenting a grim, subjective vision of a malevolent landscape and the
sinister figures who populate it.
Exploration of the Gothic Imagination
Gothic fiction places heavy emphasis on atmosphere, using setting and diction to build suspense
and a sense of unease in the reader.
The stories set in Australia are particularly interesting for the way in which traditional English
elements of the supernatural tale appear in new forms or are moulded afresh to a harsh, new
environment – the haunted house is no longer a rambling manor, but an abandoned shanty or
rundown homestead; the English wood, shadowy lair of ancient evils and creatures from folklore,
becomes the oppressively hot, fly-infested bush; and the wind-swept moor is the empty, endless
Australian outback with its blood-red sands and emaciated Myall trees.
Writers, no less than explorers, artists and settlers, were challenged by the environment, and this is
reflected in many of the stories. Australia, indeed, is a gothic landscape.
Baynton’s works created a sensation among Australian readers but generated little interest abroad
until English critic Edward Garnett championed the publication of Bush Studies in 1902. Called
“stark” and “savage”, her works have been chiefly valued for their unrelenting realism and
uncommon vision of women’s status in rural Australian life in the late nineteenth century. What
sets Baynton’s work apart from her turn-of-the-century contemporaries, is her totally
unromanticised, unsentimental approach. She saw the rough bush life as being, for women,
especially, in no way heroic or ennobling; rather, she viewed it in terms of crushing defeat. Her
work has a depressing, sombre, nihilistic quality, but it is vigorous, spare and terrifyingly realistic.
“The Chosen Vessel”
Read Baynton’s short story entitled “The Chosen Vessel”. You can find a copy at:
http://www.australianclassics.com.au/files/Baynton-TheChosenVessel.pdf
The short story “The Chosen Vessel”, first published in the Bulletin in 1896, is one of the tales that
together comprise a short story collection entitled Bush Studies written by Barbara Baynton. The
writer’s realistic and detailed way of describing the harshness of life in the bush, the anxiety and
the terror of an isolated woman in danger, along with other features presented in “The Chosen
Vessel”, make it a distinct gothic short story. In “The Chosen Vessel”, a bush wife is raped and
murdered by a travelling swagman while her husband is away
1
Some critics have pointed out that “The Chosen Vessel” is one of the short stories that contradict
the literary style of the 1890s. Differently from other productions of that time in which a strong
nationalism was developed, in “The Chosen Vessel”, Baynton examined the hardships of a bush life
focusing on the struggles a lonely woman has to face in the outback. Nationalism not even comes
close to a short story like “The Chosen Vessel” in which an unprotected and bush wife all by herself
with her baby is raped and murdered by a swagman.
“The Chosen Vessel”depicts the perfect female gothic. A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms points
out the female gothic as one of the first elements of the Gothic literature. The female figure would
have different roles in the story. One of them, which certainly represents the woman in “The
Chosen Vessel”, is the female character in Gothic expressing a patriarchal and male-dominated
structure criticism, aiming to express the female independence. This form would be focused on
gender differences and oppression.
Gender differences and oppression are strong points in “The Chosen Vessel”. The woman is
exploited, and morally and psychologically repressed by her husband. She is forced to take care of a
cow she is afraid of, and when she shows fear, she is received with laugh and snide remarks.
She had been a town girl and was afraid of the cow, but she did not want the
cow to know it. She used to run at first when it bellowed its protest against the
penning up of its calf. This satisfied the cow, also the calf, but the woman’s
husband was angry, and called her – the noun was cur. It was he who forced
her to run and meet the advancing cow, brandishing a stick, and uttering
threatening words till the enemy turned and run. “That’s the way!” The man
said, laughing at her white face. (Baynton, 13)
According to A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms, live pursuits and the persecutions by a
villainous patriarchal figure in a terrifying landscape is also part of the female Gothic’s work.
However, the role of the female gothic as well as Baynton’s protagonist does not stop here. The
Gothic female is also a woman in distress. As an attraction to the reader’s pathos and sympathy, the
woman in Gothic fiction usually faces fainting, terrified and screaming situations. A lonely and
oppressed heroine, who is the central figure of the novel, has her suffering on focus.
The situations the woman in “The Chosen Vessel” has to pass through goes beyond moral and
psychological repression, achieving physical harm at the end of the short story. After running away
from the swagman carrying her child and struggling with the man, Baynton’s woman is brutally
murdered in the bush by him:
But the distance grew greater and greater between them, and when she
reached the creek her prayers turned to wild shrieks, for there crouched the
man she feared, with outstretched arms that caught her as she fell. She knew
he was offering terms if she ceased to struggle and cry for help, though louder
and louder did she cry for it, but it was only when the man’s hand gripped her
throat, that the cry of “Murder” came from her lips. And when she ceased, the
startled curlews took up the awful sound, and flew wailing “Murder! Murder!”
over the horseman’s head. (Baynton, 17)
The figure of a villain is an important element in Gothic literature. In “The Chosen Vessel”, men
represent the villain. The husband, for instance, is a depraved character, who exploits and
represses his wife. He leaves her alone, treats her with lack of respect and criticises her when she
has any fear. He does not support her in anything:
More than once she thought of taking her baby and going to her husband. But
in the past, when she had dared to speak of the dangers to which her
loneliness exposed her, he had taunted and sneered at her. “Needn’t flatter
yerself,” he had told her, “nobody’ud want ter run away with yew.” (Baynton,
15)
2
Baynton does not only use the husband as a villain character. The figure of the swagman runs over
the psychological and moral harm done by the woman’s husband and achieves physical violence.
She is persecuted and murdered by the swagman.
If the common Gothic story has its setting in an old and dark castle, in Baynton’s “The Chosen
Vessel”, the story does not become less Gothic because of its unusual Gothic setting. In Baynton’s
short story, the realistic way the narrator describes the harshness and the dangers of a woman in
the story’s setting, the bush along with the isolated house, helps to create an environment full of
terror and suspense, and makes it Gothic in essence.
Considering this short story, the bush is definitively not a place for women and children. Lynne
Marsh, in the website NSW HSC on line from Charles Sturt University, claims that Baynton’s tale
leaves no doubt of the danger and the horror lived by women and children in the bush. Even the
dog, which is common in bush stories and is considered to be a friend, is portrayed in an opposing
account in “The Chosen Vessel”.
Mark Edmundson in his book Nightmare on Main Street claims that “one of the most common
functions of the gothic it to turn anxiety, the vague but insistent fear of what will happen in the
future, into suspense”. Following the same criteria of Edmundson, Brian Stableford defines horror
according to anxiety.
A horror story is defined by the anxiety, which is suffered by its characters,
and communicated by imaginative identification to the reader. It is the threat
of death (which subsumes the threats of pain, injury or rape) or the threat of
madness which evokes the definitive anxiety, and is therefore its proximal
cause." (Stableford, 62)
Anxiety is an element that pervades the story, especially the uncomfortable feeling of nervousness
and worry about the swagman. The woman living totally alone in the seclusion of the bush with her
baby is threatened by the swagman. The stress increases throughout the story. She fears not only
for herself, but also for the baby. The moment she is in the house reveals the apogee of suspense,
which is going to culminate with her persecution and, later, her death.
She waited motionless, with her baby pressed tightly to her, though she knew
that in another few minutes this man with the cruel eyes, lascivious mouth,
and gleaming knife, would enter. One side of the slab tilted; he had only to cut
away the remaining little end, when the slab, unless he held it, would fall
outside (Baynton, 16)
Baynton’s story’s ending has a dark and Gothic intensity. The woman, after going through the
severity of the bush and suffering in terms of physical and psychological harm, ends as a victim of
the Australian bush’s hostility. The same way the short story’s title follows the Gothic idea. Being
completely ironic, “The Chosen Vessel” is a reference to the Virgin Mary. However, instead of being
chosen to give birth to a saviour, the protagonist is chosen to suffer and be killed in the bush.
In conclusion, Baynton’s detailed and realist way of depicting the situation of women in the bush
through a female character gives a terror essence to the short story. The characters’ description, the
anxiety and the terror of an isolated woman in distress, along with other features presented in “The
Chosen Vessel” make it a great example of an Australian Gothic short story.
3