Mirrors and Interiors

Abstract

From his return to Australia in 1947 until the end of the 1960s White was chiefly preoccupied as a novelist with the problems of adapting an international modernist style and outlook to the material of a country which seemed to him provincial and inimical to art and to the spirit. All his novels, from The Aunt’s Story to The Vivisector, explore and dramatise the problems of the artist and of artistic representation and reflect his feelings of alienation as an artist from the society in which he found himself. Nevertheless, during that same period we discover an increasing acceptance of the artist’s place within that society, of the artist’s dependence on the forms and practices of society for the production of novels, paintings and so forth. The Vivisector is both a romantic celebration of artistic vision in the face of philistinism and a subversion of the romantic stereotypes that allow the artist to assert his separateness and superiority.