| Chapter : | Introduction |
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explicitly the trope of antipodean reversal, and mobilises a dichotomy of inside/outside space:
Here in Australia, it seemed to have been summer all her life—breathless burning days of drought. The pictures of smoking chimneys were like the snow scenes that arrived on cards from England each year during the Christmas heat wave—brief representations of that other, authoritative world where seasons were reversed (it was implied, correctly), and where children wore gaiters and mufflers and lived indoors. (58)
The contained space of the house expands with this image to encompass both geographical distance—the disproportions of the colonialist globe—and psychic space. Ida takes her doll, Rosie, out of “the dark room” to “the back of the house, where a screen door opened from her father’s study onto a glassed-in verandah.” The enclosed maternal space is secret, unpredictable, eroticised. Ida’s mother is described as
dark and beautiful and very loving … [with] strong, impatient opinions…. Ida was both afraid to be out of her sight and afraid of making her angry…. But her mother just smiled and let her come and sit on the polished floor beside her and play with the coloured silks and reels of cotton in the quilted box. Ida lined them up in the varying sizes and then in their different shades, and when she tired of this she simply sat leaning against her mother’s leg, rubbing with one finger the round button on the high-heeled shoe. (59)
The contraction of Ida’s gaze here could not be more complete; reduced to the utter and fetishistic specificity of a button on a shoe, the synecdoche masking and making possible complete intimacy, imaginary reunion with the mother. (The scene also incorporates Ida’s father, again synecdochically and fetishistically through his shiny black shoes, with which Ida also plays.) After the scene of intimacy, the narrative quickly lurches back to the larger, externalised space of Ida’s actual world; the warmth shifts gear, becoming oppressive heat, anathema to Ida’s mother, and generating both fury and homesickness. This displacement turns on the figure