Generally, the male characters in the McCullough corpus seem to be
deficient or damaged; or at least dull, thick and lacking any substance when
compared to her potent, powerful feminine-archetypal women. However, standing
back, it seems more a case that McCullough is rather conjuring-up that which has
generally been lost to contemporary society, the truly strong feminine soul, the
descendent of the Earth Mother or goddess. I ndeed, embedded throughout the
McCullough corpus there seems to be an authorial subtext of narrative primitivism
through which she praises the primitive urges that exist beyond time, and place,
thereby offering a critique of Western modernity with its Enlightenment values of
instrumentality and reason. This reveals some important aspects of McCullough’s
attitude towards the primitive and place. First, what might appear to be her
acceptance of the European position, generally, to be normative, is disproved on a
closer reading because of the significant bearing of the thematic structures that I
have described. Second, McCullough through these themes brings to life the place-
elsewhere-place paradigm, a paradigm which all of her protagonists experience
fundamentally and which determines their behaviour. McCullough, in the same way
as Chaucer, is a recensionist and inventor; she retells a story by building it up from
the known facts; like the true alchemist reworking the base material into something
richer and more substantial.
5.4 Discussion
A critical element in my research was to broadly determine of each of the
writers’ narratives, from whence it came, under what circumstances or beginning,
and with what design did it emerge or become active. Having analysed the
narratives we must now search for clues in their structure, motifs and the usual
elements of literary criticism, and consider what these reveal but against a backdrop
of the responses of the writers to the research questionnaires provided in Chapter
- Certainly, the narratives examined here have demonstrated that storytelling is a
potent language of the psyche. However, we must examine the means by which
that potency is achieved.
I n such fictional works offered as a narrator’s account, no first person
pronoun refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which they write but rather
to an alter ego, a de-centred self in an elsewhere-place; a similar circumstance to
that of the reader. Thus, the reading experience of this literature is that it creates