THE HANGING GARDEN BY PATRICK WHITE

In the occasion of the celebrations of Patrick White’s centenary, Australian critics dedicated studies on his posthumously published novel The Hanging Garden (2012), concentrating mainly on his masterful representation of adolescents. Elizabeth Webby and Margaret Harris, for instance, compared The Hanging Garden with White’s very first novel Happy Valley (1939). In both works they convincingly detected White’s attention to a couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, who suffer for being bullied at school and feeling outsiders, while also exploring the talents of would-be artists. Similarly, Alastair Niven, discussed the two child-protagonists from their model role of orphaned and traumatized children to never-enough-Australian young adults, needing a refuge and a space of their own. In this essay, I would rather analyse the garden as protagonist in the story. The Hanging garden is suspended not so much as a chronotope between childhood and adulthood, but rather between Biblical myths of the origins and a whole net of classical literary references. The Australian garden of Eden – as blissful space of well-being for new Adam and Eve – turns out to be a still imperfect possibility of would-be environmental engagement in care.