The Chosen Vessel

The Chosen Vessel

What is a woman supposed to be - or rather what is she made to be? This question is perhaps the key to this highly critical story of Barbara Baynton - very cleverly and implicit she attacks society and so this essay will try to make sense in writing yet another response to The Drover's Wife(Henry Lawson)

Our protagonist in this story is a very young town girl who is scared to death at living in the wrong element; isolated just enough so that she has to live as a bush woman outside town on her farm. She is married to a shearer, who is never at home. She has a baby child that is not yet old enough to be mentioned with its gender as it is hardly a person yet. Therefore she is very lonely - one can assume she is used to having many people around her at all times.

Now she's living there, where she is afraid of her own responsibility: the cow and its calf. Even though her husband mocks her fear and in despite of her thinking, that he is even worse than the cow, she is still lonely and lost without a patriarch to guide her.

Baynton's story is an echo of The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson, but the protagonist has been set back in time to when she is not nearly as experienced in life as more importantly in her marriage. In Lawson's text it is the woman who finds it easiest to be apart: They are used to being apart, or at least she is (The Drover's Wife) where as in this text Baynton's character dislikes being alone. This vulnerability is a key in the text.

Also another significant change has been made. This is the story where the gallows faced swagman (The Drover's wife) does not leave... To get back to the vulnerability it is perhaps not a case of woman being vulnerable in nature but being vulnerable with men.

There has been used significantly much space on describing Baynton's character's desperation and helplessness as the man tries to enter the house and when he sets out to catch her. Both the murder and the rape are kept implicit though:

She knew that 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

That is of course to underline that the story that is to be taken into consideration is not the mere rape and murder of one woman but rather the helplessness of her.

There are several leads in this story as to where Baynton would wants to take us. As a first the Virgin Mary plays a role, as our protagonist is mistaken for her by the catholic man going to town for the election. He is not in himself an important part of the story, his importance lies in the need of him to bring the religious aspect and the aspect of motherhood into the story.

In The Chosen Vessel the small child is rescued by the boundary rider. This is not however putting motherhood as a positive force in Baynton's story. The title itself refers to motherhood and implies the concept that the maternal can only exist by denying the mother the right to exist as a person: The Virgin Mary's only function in the world is to provide God with a vessel from which she gives birth to his son, she is there as a wife to ensure the diffusion of power from father to son.

Another point brought in the text is brought through by clarifying what is going on in the horseman, Peter's, head when he sees the "holy vision" or at least what he thinks it is:

'Mary! Mother of Christ!' He repeated the invocation half unconsciously, when suddenly to him, out of the stillness, came Christ's Name