Water is the Last Thing to Get Dark: Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well

Queer Critics is our new podcast and review series exploring the Australian LGBTQIA+ canon. Listen to interviews, read the companion essays and learn about the trailblazers who paved the way. Subscribe/listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to find your podcasts—or tune in right here!

When I was younger, I had one of those intense girlhood friendships that seemed to quiver on the precipice of something else, some dark unknown whose edge we danced along even as we trembled at the idea of crossing it. We knew what was on the other side—but also, we didn’t. We were seventeen and lay in bed together, our hands entwined, afraid to breathe in case, like dominos, it all fell down. In my early twenties, there would be the intensity again, with a housemate. Though I was older, the pattern played out the same: a propulsive intimacy, a quivering static in the space between us, a knowing and not knowing.

What was there could not be spoken aloud until, at last, it overflowed. In both cases, men had something to do with it: my first boyfriend; later, the man my housemate was dating. These relationships changed the salinity of our shared waters, and we grew bitter towards one another. The mood became itchy and tense, our silence diverted into impatience and small cruelties. All the things we didn’t say no longer floated around us but dammed the space between us.

This is not an uncommon queer experience. But I was surprised nonetheless all these years later to pick up Elizabeth Jolley’s 1986 gothic novel The Well and read the same dynamic playing out decades earlier. I was more surprised still by the way Jolley so affectingly—and so staunchly—captured all the sticky feelings that attend it: the claustrophobia, yearning, confusion, possessiveness, jealousy, betrayal.

These days, it might be imagined that this springs from a place of lived experience, but with Jolley it’s hard to say. In some ways she is a transgressive figure, having had a child out of wedlock while involved in a three-way relationship between the man who would become her husband and his then-wife. She also spent most of her writing life working on books that heavily figure queerness (or, rather, homosexuality), incest and love triangles. Yet at the same time, Jolley publicly performed a dowdy grandma-from-the-suburbs persona, refused to answer questions about her sexuality and explained that her writing did not celebrate homosexuality because such relationships tend not to last and are ‘often a very experimental, a very painful thing’. This view was reflected in most of her novels, in which same-sex love could only ever be fraught and short-lived.

Such a narrow view of queer possibility was perhaps a reflection of the times she was living in. It’s harder to understand forty years later and will—I hope—be completely unimaginable someday. Even so, for me and many of my queer friends, the isolation and painful yearning Jolley wrote about in books like The Well is all too familiar and lingered well into the first decades of the new century.

Jolley publicly performed a dowdy grandma-from-the-suburbs persona, refused to answer questions about her sexuality and explained that her writing did not celebrate homosexuality.

Hester Harper is a rich, middle-aged landowner who one day brings home a sixteen-year-old orphan named Kathy, her ‘new acquisition’. The precise nature of their relationship is nebulous: ostensibly Kathy is Hester’s companion, but the power difference between them is taken for granted, even if it is rarely made explicit. Hester gives instructions, and Kathy follows them. They live this way for years, moving—after the death of Hester’s father—to a small cottage on a corner of the property and contenting themselves in a life of easy domesticity: cooking, gardening, keeping poultry, sewing dresses. They eat duck once a week, drink champagne with their cornflakes, buy whatever they want—jewellery, material and trimmings, oil paints, guitars. To Hester, this is bliss.

It’s hard to know exactly how Kathy feels about this arrangement because the novel follows Hester’s perspective, but the uncertainty is the point: it’s where the tension metastasises. Kathy’s motivations are obscure, her feelings unknowable. She seems happy enough, but the women never speak honestly about their desires. Even so, it’s clear that Kathy wants more than to live alone in the fields with Hester. She talks with animation about the possibility of a friend visiting, going to parties, meeting boys, and all this makes Hester uneasy. The friend, in particular, ‘carried a threat; things read about in newspapers’. This is as close as Hester can come to contemplating lesbian desire, and she shrinks from it, brushing the thought away in her commitment to making Kathy happy—a thing she cannot do unselfishly. The friend can visit, but afterwards Hester will take Kathy away to Europe.

This proprietorship frames the novel, which opens with an epitaph-like snippet of a conversation between Hester and her father. He asks what she has brought him from the shops, and Hester replies, ‘I’ve brought Katherine, but she’s for me.’ Rooted in classist and colonialist privilege as it is, Hester’s possessiveness is also legible as supressed queer desire: a longing to have more of someone else than one feels entitled to, to keep them for oneself for fear that another person might take them away.

The novel is also framed by the well (a literal one) and its penetration. Jolley opens the story in medias res to a scene of Kathy driving too fast at night in Hester’s ute. Almost home, she hits something at the bend, and in the panic that follows, Hester throws the body into the well. This scene haunts the novel, returning like a tide and bringing with it the clarity of its victim: a man. This partial unveiling subtly destabilises the reader, putting them in the position of questioning—both seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing—hoping it turns out to be something else. In this way, the novel parallels certain queer awakenings: a glimpse into a future collision of self against world, doubt, denial, burial. When the truth rises to the surface, it does so with the force of a flood.

Wells, it is true, seem almost too obvious a metaphor insofar as sapphic novels are concerned. They’re vaginal—dark, wet, spelunk-able orifices—and they’re queer, their watery contents bringing with it associations of sexual fluidity, formlessness and shifting-ness, the at-once-ness of penetration and penetrability. As far as I know, Jolley never expressed publicly an interest in French feminist poststructuralist theory, but its conception of womanhood—and by extension, queerness—as innately embodied, liquid, swirling, nonlinear, multidirectional and porous, seems to have had at least an indirect effect on her sapphic imagination.

Water—and its absence—is a recurring theme for Hester, who is a farmer’s daughter after all. Since childhood, she made ‘secret pictures for herself of water flowing far under the ground; water seeping over smooth rocks and gathering in small underground pools to swell little rivulets moistening the dark soil’. As an adult, Hester wishes she could ‘reach this good water which was somewhere a long way down under the earth pouring itself away, wasted’. The liquid she yearns for is always subterranean, and it is always beyond her reach.

Like her land, Hester’s well is dry. She has often been told this. Partially covered up, it could easily be forgotten. Yet Hester and Kathy enjoy spending time along its stone coping, having picnics, sunning themselves, listening to ‘somewhere far down, drip drop, the soft sound of water, cool sweet water under the earth when they know there is no water’. The fact of its dryness is reiterated over and over, contradicting the women’s experience of hearing—and even once smelling—water inside. On the well’s edge, Hester may flirt with lesbian desire, but she does not consummate it: the well is dry and sapphic possibility, at every moment, foreclosed. Instead, the two women take to throwing into it broken crockery, burned food and dishes too difficult to clean, turning the well into a repository of their feminine failures.

Wells, it is true, seem almost too obvious a metaphor insofar as sapphic novels are concerned. They’re vaginal—dark, wet, spelunk-able orifices.

When the narrative loops back to the body hidden in the well, it does so after repeated pressures from the outside world: comments about Hester’s spinsterhood, about keeping a young woman like Kathy locked away, about Kathy’s intentions. The last, made by an old family friend, is quickly followed by an observation that the ‘well cover’s a bit loose’, implicitly connecting the danger Kathy poses to its vaginal depths and to queerness. The pressures of heteronormativity continue to mount around the two, and when the dead man reappears he does so as the embodiment of these judgements. His return causes a rift between Hester and Kathy, straining their well-worn dynamic and seeding ugly doubts. Kathy can hear his voice calling up to her from inside the well, wooing her with the promises of heterosexuality: marriage, children, a home. Hester can only see that Kathy is becoming someone she does not recognise or trust, that she is being taken away.

Once heteronormativity trespasses into Hester’s tightly controlled world and she is forced to the brink of her sapphic desire, the world is awash: rain falling in sheets, rivers carved into the dry earth. Suddenly there is water in the well, and Hester is afraid of it and ‘what its power might have yielded’. The teeming liquid is too much, too unpredictable, too uncontrollable. As Hester’s land swirls with rising queer tension, there is ‘no other sound except that of the rain which became a torrent thundering on the safe roof of the cottage’. It is overwhelming.

Afterwards, she longs for things to be dry again, to be walking ‘small and safe, low down close to the earth, along the road beneath the immense sky’. She yearns to return to how things were, when she only fantasised about water and it never rose to threaten the stability of her home. After the storm, nothing can be the same as it was before.

There is much to dislike about Hester: she is fearful, dishonest, selfish, ashamed. When she feels out of control, she becomes demanding, cruel, cowardly. In some ways, she is the amalgam of all the ugliest impulses of repressed queer desire, and for this reason she inspires both shame and pity. In her, I see flashes of my past: my friend who feigned terminal illness when she felt I was drifting away, the jealousies manifested as competitive jabs between my former housemate and me. The lies and manipulations, secrets and obfuscations. Like Hester, we thirsted, and we feared the flood. We did everything we could to trap the water in our hands. To hold onto it. To contain it.

In the intervening years, of course, we have learned something that Hester could not: that part of us cannot be contained. It will always spill and overflow, swirl and splash, and it is a joy to let it.

Today’s world is very different to the one in which Jolley was writing, and also unlike the one in which my friends and I grew up. I don’t know if young queer readers coming to The Well will still recognise themselves in Hester. I hope they do less and less every year.

KYD’s Queer Critic Series is supported by the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency.