The collection's child persona grows to adulthood and dies, only to be reborn in a new, metamorphosed form, in an act of embracing. Gothic notions of decay, destruction and reconstruction offer a new, grotesque, but efficient form of existence. Even though this collection of free-verse persona poems is framed by images of death and metamorphosis, the persona does not end up being consumed or defeated by these confrontational images. Instead, Alice lives her life surrounded by these ideas, and manages to reconcile with and defeat what oppresses her, namely representations of physical mortality, stifled creativity and social discrimination, by embracing death and Gothic transformations.

Striking images of the grotesque, which include mutilated bodies, blood, madness and physical transformations, fail to elicit the kind of terrified, helpless reaction in Alice that a reader would expect from a traditional Gothic heroine. These morbid motifs do not promote a pessimistic message. Instead, Hewett flanks Alice with these images to present the idea of personal triumph over the ‘horrors' of the ‘real' world, particularly regarding restrictive gender conventions for women, thwarted creative energies, and the inevitable limits of mortality. However, the horrific aspects of these images cannot be completely ignored. The problems that Alice faces still render the heroine vulnerable, and it is only at the poems' conclusion that she is able to embrace the Gothic as a means of asserting her own identity.

The term ‘Gothic' has a long and varied history, the initial meaning of which, outside of architecture, was ‘barbarous' (1923: p 434). In the eighteenth century, the adjective ‘Gothic,' according to Alfred Longueil, was often used ‘in connection with ignorance, cruelty, or savageness' (p 455) When attached to literary conventions, there came a shift from ‘decorum' to ‘imagination' (p 456), particularly with reference to the ‘supernatural' (p 458). Gothic conventions are therefore synonymous with the ‘grotesque, ghastly and violently superhuman' (p 459), including use of images associated with death, physical and mental decay, madness and surrealist metamorphoses. Hewett's poems reflect these ‘barbarous' beginnings, but Alice in Wormland is not a horror story. The collection is not entrenched in the supernatural style of eighteenth-century Gothic fictions, yet the same tone of overarching morbidity and confusion is present. Similarly, Hewett freely invokes images of death and physical decay, which are represented with particular clarity in Alice's family members, and in Alice's own experiences. The heroine is confronted with madness, blindness, the deaths of infants, and deaths of animals. At one point, Alice too wishes for death, but this desire is quickly and sardonically dispatched. Death and madness are not her solutions. Instead, these Gothic motifs illustrate larger restrictions, imposed by patriarchal expectations of women, as well as physical mortality, while the Gothic image of bodily transformation assists in Alice's triumph over these same issues.

The persona's clashes with gender expectations are swiftly introduced in the Wormland collection. In addition to these, Hewett sets up the issues of loss of innocence, obsession with control, and preoccupation with life and death that dominate the collection. The persona's innocence and childhood are the first victims of the Gothic, as the ‘Alice' section closes with Alice's ejection from ‘the Dream Girl's Garden' (‘Alice,' 10, line 1), after leaning in to listen to ‘the spotted snake' (‘Alice,' 10, line 24). This biblical imagery foreshadows a dichotomising of good and evil, and the struggle of humanity against its own mortality. Even before ‘Alice was driven howling from the garden' (‘Alice,' 10, line 26), Gothic imagery creeps on the outskirts of the section, particularly in descriptions of the setting, to foreground issues to come. Hewett refers to ‘the magic forest dark & beckoning' that surrounds Alice's home, while the farmhouse in which she lives is inhabited by characters that are traditionally affiliated with the Gothic (‘Alice,' 10, line 10). Four mad brothers live at home: one isolated inside a silo; another in the sheepfeeder; one in the chaffhouse; while the other was ‘a blind albino building crooked fences' (‘Alice,' 4, line 19). Alice also plays with an imaginary friend named Alma,

in the wardrobe mirror who smiled
like a demon
& always understood her. (‘Alice,' 4, lines 29-31)

Madness, a demonic, imaginary playmate, and physical ‘strangeness' manifested in all of these characters, give a morbid tone to Alice's childhood home. Maximillian Novak remarks that demons of the Gothic, whether they are ‘real, dreamed, or fabricated – represent a sudden revelation of the uncontrolled forces of the mind as they are reified in the seemingly ordered, real world' (1979: p 58). Considering that Alma is only referred to once in the entire collection, this may appear too extreme in Wormland's case. However, the overarching idea of revealing psychological ‘revelations' or developments is particularly poignant in Hewett's work. In this case, Alice's childhood is identified with a perceived lack of order and thwarted development, through her awareness of her unfortunate brothers. Her creation of a demonic playmate foregrounds her future creation, Nim, who will be discussed later, and who serves as a (semi-) physical manifestation of Alice's struggles with the real world and with her own creative energies and desires. The very act of turning inwards, and away from real children as playmates, also signposts Alice's inevitable struggles with other people, and in particular, with women and conventional expectations of women.

The reference to the wardrobe mirror, as well as Alice's name, and the collection's title, all point towards parodic elements in Hewett's Wormland. Hewett's Alice bears very few similarities to Carroll's Alice from Alice in Wonderland, or Alice's Adventures Through the Looking-Glass. While Carroll's Alice falls into a fantastical Wonderland, Hewett's persona falls out of her Edenic garden. Carroll's little-girl Alice is frustrated by the nonsensical rules of a fantasy world, finding herself unable to reason with the world's inhabitants, nor relate to their struggles. Conversely, Hewett's Alice does not remain a child, but grows to adulthood, only to still be alternately restricted or goaded into action by the societal expectations of the ‘real' world. However, Hewett and Carroll's characters are similar in their frustrated stance, as well as the sense of persecution and incomprehensibility throughout these works. Despite these similarities, it is not abundantly clear that Hewett intended to make this persona a mirror of Carroll's Alice, and indeed, the highly sexualised nature of the poems suggests more dedication to traditional Gothic heroines, rather than displaced children in Alice's construction.

It is in keeping with the fragmentary, ambiguous tone of Alice in Wormland that no one source can be cited as the inspiration for Alice. Jennifer Strauss observes that Hewett's Alice becomes ‘a grown woman with experiences that are quite beyond those of Carroll's Alice, experiences as [a] lover… show remarkable correspondence to those of Ms Hewett' (1995: p 61). Potentially autobiographical and parodic elements aside, the list of potential sources of inspiration for Alice's character does not stop there. In 1961, Hewett published the short story ‘Who's to Remember Sweet Alice?' The Alice in this version is described by Strauss as a ‘sad little nay-sayer,' (Ibid) which suggests that Alice from Wormland is a step up in the evolutionary ladder of personas' confrontation of their troubles. Far from a being a ‘nay-sayer,' the Alice in this collection is vivacious and passionate, and does not recoil from horrific images or events in her life. She escapes the impotent trappings of Gothic heroines to the extent that they were set out in The Castle of Otranto and The Mad Monk. Strauss also recognises the mythic qualities of the metamorphosed Alice, and claims that such a construction means that as a ‘romantic quester, she also has the heroic specificity of the legendary, the comical and the sad literalness of the historical individual' (Ibid) Bruce Bennett's observations on Hewett's early poetic influences also lead him to assert that in her poetry, she tends to reflect, ‘in spite of [her] professed atheism…the biblical duality of good and evil, Paradiso and Inferno, the traditional dialectics of literary representations of space' (1995: p 20-21). Alice is a fragmentary character, drawn from multiple sources and assembled, Frankenstein-like, in opposition to the Gothic-tinged, gendered, and largely hostile atmosphere of the ‘real' world.

Much of this hostility is represented in the book by the themes of maternal inheritance, conservative gender roles, and Alice's clashes with these concepts. Hewett rigorously depicts an aggressive, uncaring maternity, which leads the young Alice to seek out the company of male figures for comfort, and to reflect on the natural environment. The confronting image of

an old woman in a darned cardigan
with a carving knife mouthes
Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! (‘Alice,' 1, lines 7-9)

commences Hewett's unsympathetic portrayals of older women. Alice's grandmother is blind, ‘calling on God/her pupil turning milky,' (‘Alice,' 4, 3-4) silent and inanimate for the entirety of the collection. Conversely, Alice's mother takes decidedly hostile action towards her daughter: she ‘tacked a sign over Alice's bed / I must not tell lies against my mother,' (‘Alice,' 5, lines 14-15) complaining that ‘we can't have her / growing up like a savage' (‘Alice,' 6, lines 6-7) At no point does either woman take instructive or affectionate initiatives towards Alice. Edna Longley recognises the tendency of Hewett to represent women unfavourably in her poetry, commenting that

‘If… the great sin of coldness, of emotional parsimony, can be committed by either sex, Hewett portrays father-figures more positively than mother figures: ‘From mother to daughter the curse drops like a stone.' Greeting menstruation as indeed a curse, the mother in Hewett's poetry appears to repress her daughter's creativity along with her sexuality' (1991: p 12).

Illustrations of uncommunicative and paranoid female role-models indicate that Alice must look elsewhere for support, namely to male family members, masculine creations, while familial conflicts and personal issues are depicted in the environment around her.

The effect of this withdrawal from and distrust of female figures is the rejection of conservative expectations regarding female sexuality. Alice loses her virginity at a young age, and is attacked by her mother, who ‘sliced her legs/with the iron ruler / Great Gawk!' (‘Alice,' 9, lines 10-11) The image of the iron ruler is symbolic of the conservative expectation that women uphold virtues of chastity and modesty, in preparation for marriage and motherhood. These views, prevalent in early to mid-twentieth century Australian society, are suggested by potentially autobiographical elements that have been highlighted in the collection. Despite this treatment, Alice is almost impassive, already separate from the female members of her family, a fact hinted at in the beginning of poem nine, with the observation that Alice is ‘Hallucinating in the daze of summer/flushed with sex & shame' (‘Alice,' 9, lines 1-2). Even though Alice apparently feels shame for her actions, there is no suggestion that this knowledge will impact on her life; indeed, the highly sexualised nature of the rest of the collection implies a contrary conclusion. Alice's solution to her mother's hostility is to go and sit by her grandfather's bed, while the landscape outside takes on a more vicious edge:

blind armoured figures
plumed & helmeted
bled in the green woods
outside the window
the lamb of God hung upside down
in the stable yard
sodden with rain
I'm as good as ever I was
death smote his boastful tongue' (‘Alice,' 9, lines 16-24).

Death is never far away in Wormland, particularly when it comes to the protagonist's statements about herself, and reflections of her own nature. Even though Alice does not openly appear to react to her grim surroundings, there is a considerable amount of ominous foregrounding within them. Not only does the environment suggest that conflict will rise, or emphasises that which has already arisen, but it also serves as a mentor figure in this situation. The lack of an approachable female role model beckons the introduction of fantastical, otherworldly elements to the young persona's imagination, to compensate for this absence. As a frustrated child, Alice recognises her ‘otherness' compared to the rest of her family, and aligns herself more closely with a compassionate natural environment:

‘I'm a changling she cried
I don't belong with them
she imagined they'd found her
under the rhubarb plants
swaddled glistening with frost
like an afterbirth' (‘Alice,' 5, lines 29-34).

Of course this sympathetic, nurturing environment that coddles her as an infant is a fallacy which Alice admits to almost straight away: ‘the blood of them all swam in her / she was caught in the web of their history' (‘Alice,' 5, lines 36-37). Alice's fixation on the natural environment as a source of instruction and comfort is not extinguished until the final poem of the collection. The effect emphasises this idea of Alice's surroundings as representative of a Gothic, mocking mirror of her mistakes and troubles. After losing her virginity, Alice goes into ‘the Dream Girl's Garden' to think. During this period of reflection, the persona contemplates moving outside this arguably domestic, controlled area to explore the wider world, and also ponders over what it means to be loved. Despite these independent thoughts, this action is accompanied by the statement that ‘Alice ringed her hair & wrists with chains,' made from flowers, during this scene (‘Alice,' 10, line 12). The flowers here play a symbolic role in that they represent ‘naturalised' restrictions on Alice. Not only will Alice later become ‘chained' by stereotypical expectations of women – namely that she will eventually get married, have children, and play the role of wife and mother – but she will impose these expectations on herself, through her own actions. Alice, almost absentmindedly, sets the floral chains drawn from her Gothic-tinged environment on herself, with the result that she will be fighting with their restrictive implications for the rest of the collection.

Image: John Graham, 'She' (2008)

Alice's obsession with (and ironic self-denial of control over) her life is also highlighted in her construction of ‘Nim': a character alternately identified as Alice's child, lover, muse and poltergeist. The ‘Nim' section revolves around Alice's creation of her own ‘sinister boy' (‘Nim,' 1, line 2) which leads to her acknowledgment that:

Why I can make him live
or make him die (‘Nim,' 2, line 3)

However, as the rest of the collection reveals, Alice's control over Nim is practically non-existent, and the character haunts most of the sections of the poem which represent Alice's pervasive feeling of loss of physical and psychological control. This semi-tangible figure is more a symbolic representation than a character, since only Alice appears to acknowledge his existence. This reconnects Alice with the supernatural elements of her childhood imaginary friend, and strengthens connections with the Gothic. The return to the supernatural is partially in keeping with Robert Hume's observation that while the direct use of the supernatural in fiction contravenes readers' ingrown idea of ‘the essential realism' of narrative fiction, this same symbolic usage bothers us much less in poetry (1969: p 284). While Nim is certainly not the villain of Wormland, he is representative of Alice's creativity, and also her sense of self. The loss of Nim, or separation from him, is symbolic of the isolation from Alice's own creative abilities, and her inability to enact control upon her life. John McLaren takes this interpretation further, claiming that Alice and Nim are ‘mythic projections of the inner self,' which seem to be

reaching back beyond history and time to when Adam and his first lover, Lilith, were still as one in a garden when the wholeness of the mind and the senses was still intact (1995: p 34).

This is certainly an interesting allusion, and the biblical level of these constructions is backed up by Bennett's earlier comments, as well as his claim that Nim may also anticipate ‘other idealised figures of the lost ‘other half' of Hewett's Romantic yearnings… idealised males whose evil is never quite realised for what it is because she is rebelliously attracted to it' (p 25).While this autobiographical interpretation is not wholly convincing, it is still intriguing to consider in light of the traditional, Gothic fixation on what was lost, or warped by disillusionment. Alice's desire to control Nim could be seen as a basic need to control her own desires and abilities, yet ironically it is this control that threatens to subjugate her to Nim himself.

The ‘Nim' section is full of warped Romantic imagery: ‘her secret garden' (‘Nim,' 2, line 1) where ‘she lives her magic life' (‘Nim,' 2, line 3) is dotted with ‘sheep carcasses in calico/blood-spotted shroud the verandahs' (‘Nim,' 2, lines 6-7). These bloody, violent images are paired with the description of Nim appearing as

… a shadow on the shivery grass
hanging between the sun & the round hill
a falcon on his wrist a white owl on his shoulder
she sees his doomed face waver at the bottom
of the well.
the sky darkens with locusts
the dry scratch of wings
& the jaws working
hand in hand they fly
Alice & Nim, the falcon & the white owl
from the blackened garden (‘Nim,' 2, lines 19-29).

Fairytale elements mask more threatening undertones: while freedom is offered by the creative, rebellious and masculine spirit of Nim, his ominous appearance, shape-shifting, and foreshadowed destruction suggest a similar fate for Alice. The darkening sky, the presence of locusts, and the ‘blackened' Edenic garden all suggest biblical vengeance, from which Nim and Alice only temporarily escape, as Alice is pulled back to reality (and societal constructions of femininity) by the beginning of her menstrual cycle. Nim, despite his best efforts, is not able to survive Alice's transition into womanhood, nor is Alice able to maintain contact with him, a fact symbolised by Alice's setting adrift of their newborn infant on a wooden raft. The baby and Nim both ‘die,' and while Alice surveys Nim's grave, she does not express comprehension of the significance of these events. Devoid of emotion, she steals the falcon and white owl, an action that only leads Nim to shout ‘Thief! … on the winter wind' (‘Nim,' 7, line 15). This distance from emotion, and the grim depiction of a childhood flanked with the death of innocence and muffled creative abilities, is powerfully suggestive of the issues that will confront Alice for the rest of the collection. Her theft of the falcon and owl feature as recurring symbols that lead to her ultimate embrace of the Gothic image of physical transformation and metamorphosis, in order to rise above the conflicts in her life.

Life does not offer solutions to Alice's conflict between her desire for creative independence and freedom from societal expectations. The only solution to Alice's torn loyalties is that of transformation: the physical destruction and decay of her mortal, human body, and the adoption of a new form, outside of mortal restrictions. Alice transforms into the white owl at the end of Wormland; this action reconciles her with Nim, who adopts the form of the falcon, and the collection ends as the two fly off to ‘make friends with death' (‘The Shape-changers,' 71, line 123). This line in itself recognises the prevalence of death on the outskirts, or the immediate foreground, of Alice's life, and denotes her triumph over this formerly oppressive presence. Metamorphosis after death, and rejection of mortality's constraints, including societal expectations, is the only way for the heroine to embrace her creative potential and to move on. Initially, this transformation is viewed as an aspect of the Gothic; something uncontrollable and terrible; as Alice observes

I am the owl she hoots
half-blind with light
& double visioned
is it over? (‘The Shape-changers,' 71, lines 110-113)

This distressing image is quickly countered by Nim's assurance that

it is the beast fable
it is the myth of ourselves
& only just beginning, (‘The Shape-changers,' 71, lines 115-117)

indicating the solution to Alice's troubles lies in the Gothic imagery that had followed her through her life, up to the point of her death, and now beyond it. While the resolution is not essentially positive, since Alice had to die before she could be reborn, the overall tone is optimistic. The ending portrays a persona who has been confronted with horrific images and situations throughout her life, and is now at peace, beyond the effects of these ideas, but who did not achieve this peace by passively accepting death.

Bodily contortions, transformations and adaptations are images typically aligned with the Gothic and mythology. Deleuze and Guattari's discussions about the nature of the human body, and physical dismemberment, are of use when considering Alice's physical reconstruction into the form of a white owl as a resolution for the collection. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of the ‘Body without Organs' (c1987: p 150): whereby the body ‘sloughs off' (Ibid) organs in order to take away ‘the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole' (p 151). This may be what has happened here: Alice has shucked off her human form and reduced her self-image into something more manageable, namely the body of a bird. Beyond this, however, there is also the notion that Alice has rejected her humanity entirely in order to ‘triumph' over death and societal oppression alike. Peter Brooks, in his discussion on the image of the body in literature, comments that:

The body is both ourselves and the other, and as such the objection of emotions from love to disgust…Most of the time, the body maintains an unstable position between such extremes, at once the subject and object of pleasure, the uncontrollable agent of pain and the revolt against reason – and the vehicle of morality (c1993: p 1).

In the case of Alice, the human body is most certainly the ‘other': an undesirable creative vacuum upon which gender constraints and mortal restrictions are placed. Her transformation into an owl, far from being a grotesque, uncontrollable shapeshift, is a conscious escape from the demands of humanity and human society. Brooks also observed that bodily ‘punishment,' such as the images of Alice's loss of vision, assaults and injuries throughout the collection, construct notions of ‘the tortured body,' however this body ‘refuses to give satisfaction to the torturing regime; indeed it betokens the moral bankruptcy of the regime' (p 285). Alice is clearly a victim of an uncaring, if not morally bankrupt, societal regime, if the persona has to undergo such trauma and seek such an extreme form of escape. Hewett's use of transformation therefore works in a variety of ways: not only does this image maintain the Gothic motifs that recur throughout the collection, but it also emphasises the victimised nature of the persona. The new bird-form she adopts is a more basic, but socially unconfined identity that Alice can use as she wishes.

Hewett's use of the Gothic in Alice in Wormland initially gives the collection a darker more sombre tone than its conclusion would suggest. The fragmentary construction of the heroine, Alice, and the prevalence of death, decay and unsympathetic figures in her life present an unpleasant atmosphere. However, ultimately it is death and Gothic images of the supernatural and transformation that welcome in Hewett's optimistic resolution. These constructions reveal that it is not the Gothic – namely the grotesque, madness, death and decay – that Hewett wishes to depict as features of the ‘real' world. Instead, the Gothic permeates the collection and illustrates Alice's struggles, and then finally contributes to her rising above issues of thwarted creativity and unsympathetic responses by female figures and conservative expectations of women. The ‘dark' tone of the book is twisted into one more accepting, as Alice embraces the Gothic attributes of her imagination by transforming into a white owl, moving beyond death, and into a new understanding of herself, free from fear, and free from mortal restriction.

References:

Brooks, Peter, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, c1993.
Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c1987. [Translated by Brian Massumi]
Hewett, Dorothy, Alice in Wormland, New South Wales: Paper Bark Press, 1987.
Longueil, Alfred E., ‘The Word “Gothic” in Eighteenth Century Criticism,' Modern Language Notes [8.38 (1923), 453-460].
Longely, Edna [ed.], Dorothy Hewett Selected Poems, Fremantle, W.A: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991.
Hewett, Dorothy, & Kinsella, John, Wheatlands, Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000.
Novak, Maximillian E., ‘Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque', NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction ¹.
Hume, Robert D., ‘Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel' PMLA ².
Bennett, Bruce [ed.], Dorothy Hewett: Selected Critical Essays, Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995.
Interview between Nicole Moore and Dorothy Hewett: 1999, for Jacket magazine, http://jacketmagazine.com/09/moor-iv-hewe.html [accessed 10 February 2010].