A bloodied bond: Fly River heads and body image in Beatrice Grimshaw's colonial landscapes

Abstract

In a paper published previously in the Irish Studies Review I discuss the anthropomorphic features of Beatrice Grimshaw's landscapes in relation to colonial fears of the unknown. Following on from this I argue in the present work that this trope, ubiquitous in colonial literature, is exacerbated in Grimshaw's oeuvre by a body image or body image tendencies associated with penetrability, the foundations of which would have been laid long before she first saw the delphinium skies of the south. Grimshaw's body image, her realisation of her own physicality, is the primary focus of this essay. Drawing on the research of psychologists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, I explore Grimshaw's conception of body boundaries, the boundaries of the touristic self and the indigenous Other. Such an analysis requires an examination not only of the body, and its extension dress, but also of physical terrain, the spaces and places, landscapes of the past and the present, home and the away, within which these cartographies of flesh and bone move.

Keywords:

• pacific
• body image
• body armour
• clothes
• anthropomorphic landscapes
• boundaries
• penetrability
• travel-writing
• fiction
• space and place

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kathleen McCracken for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Thank you to Patricia Bartlett for proof reading this paper. Thanks to the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW for permission to publish figures 1, 3 and 6. This paper is for Diane and Patsy O'Hagan.

Notes

 1. For biographical information relating to Beatrice Grimshaw see my doctoral dissertation: McCotter, ‘Colonising Landscapes and Mapping Bodies’, 18–65.

 2. Grimshaw, Isles of Adventure, 52. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

 3. Grimshaw, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, 223. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

 4. McCotter, ‘Woman Traveller/Colonial Tourist’, 481–506.

 5. For a discussion of colonial fears of unknown landscapes, landscapes that could engulf the intruder, see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 21–31.

 6. Commenting on body image, Fisher and Cleveland have stated ‘Body image is a term which refers to the body as a psychological experience, and focuses on the individual's feelings and attitudes toward his own body’ (Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, x).

 7. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality.

 8. Fisher and Cleveland make it clear that their use of the term barrier is not intended to refer to ‘an obstacle or obstruction’ but rather ‘any limit or boundary’ (Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 58).

 9. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 59.

10. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 61.

11. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 60.

12. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 58.

13. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 61.

14. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 62.

15. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality

16. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 61–3.

17. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 62–3.

18. Lett, ‘Miss Beatrice Grimshaw’, 8.

19. Lett, ‘Miss Beatrice Grimshaw’, 9.

20. For a discussion of Grimshaw's journeys on Papua's Fly and Sepik Rivers see McCotter, ‘Seduction and Resistance’, 81–97.

21. For a discussion of Grimshaw and the death drive see McCotter, ‘Islanders, Tourists and Psychosis’, 1–18.

22. Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors, 3.

23. Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors, 3.

24. Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors

25. This conception of self as a coherent, autonomous, unified entity is, of course, an illusion. As Lacan reminds us, it is one of ‘the méconnaissances [misconstructions] that constitute the ego’. Lacan, Écrits, 6.

26. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 14–15.

27. Grimshaw, Broken Away, 191. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

28. Grimshaw, ‘Into Unknown Papua’, 391.

29. Grimshaw, The New New Guinea, 64. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

30. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

31. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

32. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

33. For further discussion of landscapes imbued with a capacity to consume in Grimshaw's travel writing see McCotter, ‘Nurses, Fairytales, Cannibals’, 125–39.

34. Grimshaw, In the Strange South Seas, 237. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

35. For a discussion of the influential role played by Grimshaw's family in the development of spinning and weaving industries in the North of Ireland see McCotter, ‘Colonising Landscapes and Mapping Bodies’, 18–22.

36. Grimshaw, My Lady of the Island, 152. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

37. Sigmund Freud, cited in Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 30.

38. Grimshaw, Conn of the Coral Seas, 163. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

39. Fisher and Cleveland, Body Image and Personality, 60.

40. Grimshaw, Kris Girl, 233. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

41. In Grimshaw's 1907 novel Vaiti of the Islands caves are once again associated with female anatomy and death. The treasure that Vaiti and her cousin are seeking in the underground chamber is a collection of ‘curious skulls’ (58). But in order to reach it they have to traverse a huge chasm. In doing so Vaiti's cousin falls and is consumed by an underground monster. Contemplating this limitless, boundary-less space of infinite depth, which is suffused with a foul smell, causes Vaiti's own body to void: ‘Vaiti made no answer, but stood leaning up against the wall of the tunnel, both hands pressed against her chest. In a moment she was violently sick’ (58). With her back against the wall and her hands pressed to her chest Vaiti appears to be trying to establish body boundaries, confirming a map of the self. And also, by applying pressure to her chest, she seems to be trying to prevent the expulsion of the internal flow. She fails; abject, ambiguous, the contents of her stomach refuse to follow the correct trajectory. As has been stated, Fisher and Cleveland designate a mouth that is used for intake or expulsion, and bottomless pits, as being indicative of Penetration responses. Grimshaw's depiction of Vaiti vomiting at the side of a bottomless abyss, having witnessed an underground monster swallow her cousin, is a powerful Penetration image. Grimshaw's caves, combining hope (possible or actual riches) and death, are ambivalent sites.

42. Grimshaw, ‘In the Far North’.

43. , ‘A Fool of Forty’, 366. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

44. See McCotter, ‘Bodies of De/composition’, 81–106.

45. Re: castaways and mud see Woods, ‘Fantasy Islands’, 141.

46. For a discussion of mud, masculinity, the polymorphously perverse infant and island topographies see Woods, ‘Fantasy Islands’, 141

47. Freud, An Infantile Neurosis, 84.

48. See Hardy, ‘Dust Piles and Damp Pavements’, 112–123.

49. MacCannell, The Tourist, 57.

50. See Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, 277–8.

51. Larkin, ‘Foreword’ to Dublin Slums, ix.

52. Prunty, Dublin Slums, 74.

53. Thomas Grimshaw, ‘Remarks on the Prevalence and Distribution of Fever in Dublin’, in Thomas Wrigley Grimshaw, http://www.grimshaworigin.org (accessed 4 May 2005).

54. Charles Cameron, cited in Prunty, Dublin Slums, 81.

55. Grimshaw, When the Red Gods Call. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

56. For a discussion of Lynch's body armour see McCotter, ‘Bodies of De/composition’, 81–106.

57. Grimshaw, The Sands of Oro. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

58. Grimshaw, The Wreck of the Redwing, 107. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

59. Edmond and Smith, Editors’ Introduction to Islands in History, 4.

60. In When the Red Gods Call, Hugh Lynch's island home is ransacked and razed to the ground. A similar fate befalls Herod Pascoe's steal-lined, island fortress in the The Wreck of the Redwing. In Conn of the Coral Seas, the eponymous hero's well-fenced island retreat is broken into by a group of bandits.

61. Grimshaw, Murder in Paradise, 218. All further references to this text will be given in the body of the paper.

62. McCotter, ‘Maintaining a Wide Margin’.

63. Grimshaw, ‘How I Found Adventure’, Blue Book, April 1939, 3, http://pulprack.com/arch/000107.html (accessed 17 May 2004).

64. Grimshaw, ‘How I Found Adventure’, Blue Book, April 1939, 3, http://pulprack.com/arch/000107.html (accessed 17 May 2004)

65. Anon., Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Women's Supplement’, Monday 13 February 1939.

66. J.C. Flugel, cited in Garma, ‘The Origin of Clothes’, 184.

67. For a discussion of clothes and Grimshaw's Dublin journalism see McCotter, ‘The Geometry of Innocence Flesh on the Bone’, 6–10.

68. See Grimshaw, ‘The Lady Cyclist’, Irish Cyclist, 12 January 1898, 525; Grimshaw, ‘The Wheelwoman’, The Social Review, 30 July 1898, 81.

69. Rabbi Arthur A. Feldman, cited in Garma, ‘The Origin of Clothes’, 190.

70. Garma, ‘The Origin of Clothes’, 184.

71. Garma, ‘The Origin of Clothes’, 184

72. See Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, 99–100.

73. Garma, ‘The Origin of Clothes’, 187.

74. See n. 60.

75. These words are from the ‘Apostles’ Creed’, a prayer with which Grimshaw as a convert to Catholicism would have been familiar.

76. Susan Gardner states that she commissioned a headstone for Grimshaw. Gardner, ‘“A ’vert to Australianism”. It was not erected. Thanks are due to Diane and Patsy O'Hagan for undertaking the long drive to Bathurst Cemetery in order to obtain this information.