disguised or profound truth emerging from a seemingly Mills and Boone narrative.
McCullough’s work and range of subjects is immense; from her first novel Tim,
published in 1974 to The Masters of Rome Series, of which the last volume Antony
and Cleopatra, was published in 2007; her corpus, like those of David Malouf and
Thomas Keneally, is interwoven with intertextual dialogical parts or themes.
(a) Power of Sexualities
I n her first novel Tim (1974), whether consciously or otherwise, McCullough
reverses the conditions of this Pygmalionesque story, by switching the chronological
identities of the central characters in having the middle-aged Anglo-Celtic Mary
marry the youthful Tim. By acknowledging the primal sexual urges and needs of a
middle-aged, middle-class professional woman outside the bounds of mediocrity and
social conformity, McCullough presents the psychosexual urges as an imperative
function of self-identity, as she does throughout her corpus. However, Tim is also a
parable of initiation. Both Tim and Mary, the protagonists, are incomplete and
unfulfilled and literally, in terms of Platonic theory, long for the oneness inherent in
the idea of an archetypal, androgynous creature. Implicit in this longing for origins
is an element of dissatisfaction with modern sexual-social mores that legislates the
mutual exclusivity of hetero and homosexualities and places a taboo on
intergenerational sex. Tim is a variation on the theme of returning to a more
innocent Edenic state (non-conformist purity and innocence) and elsewhere-place
(the beach house), where the sex act initiates not guilt but liberty and development,
and where, paradoxically, the young and the old transcend categories of time.
The theme of the potency and subtlety of sex, of the archetypal nurturing-
feminine, as opposed to the popular girlie or glamorous type, is repeated in An
I ndecent Obsession (1981), where the major characters include Sister Langtry, a
young woman of competence, dedication and humour who has a special relationship
with one of her patients, Neil Parkinson, who suffers involuntary melancholia.
Parkinson, like Honour Langtry, comes from the upper class but is one who “...
made a mistake and his men paid for it” (McCullough, 1981:39), which brought
about a total loss of confidence in him. A third character, Michael Wilson, upsets
the balanced and professional, albeit passionate, relationship between Langtry and
Parkinson. Wilson is suspected of “... unsound mind following an unsavoury
incident” (McCullough, 1981:50); the near murder of an officer who made sexual