In Gulliver’s Wife, LAUREN CHATER recasts one of the classics of English literature in a completely unexpected way. Rather than re-interpreting Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver’s Wife looks at what Gulliver might have left behind. GREGORY DOBBS writes.
Escaping into an alternative reality is one of the joys of reading fiction. Of course, it’s up to the skill of the author to create something authentic and convincing to make us read on.
Historical fiction faces a dual challenge: to create a believable reality that is dependent on being historically accurate and convincing. In a sense it’s a synthesis of fiction and non-fiction.
Gulliver’s Wife is the second novel by young Australian author Lauren Chater. It continues her preoccupation with historical fiction but does that in a unique and genre-bending way.
‘Any kind of fiction is an unreality,’ says Lauren. ‘Historical fiction offers a scaffolding for me to build a story around, but I guess it’s finding that balance between authentic and believable, and what you’re trying to say with the story and reshaping it so that it has a structure that modern readers can connect with and understand.’
But what happens when a work of historical fiction is itself based on a work of fiction and a fictional character?
‘I think people are fascinated by the classics,’ Lauren says. ‘Reading them requires a different mindset to the way we read novels these days. But the characters are enduring for a reason. When re-reading Gulliver’s Travels I wondered what his wife might have been like and found myself fascinated by the idea of this woman who was left behind to care for hearth and home and what life might have been like for her.’
The story is set exclusively in the district of Wapping in the docklands of East London by the River Thames. Here we find Mary Gulliver, a dedicated midwife, herbalist, mother of two and wife to Lemuel Gulliver, a man of questionable reputation who has set off on another of his fantastic voyages. Even in his absence, Mary is under the constant scrutiny of local gossips. Nevertheless, she sets about raising her children the best way she can and soon finds that ‘Life as a working woman without a husband has its blessings.’
Three years later Gulliver, presumed lost at sea, is pronounced dead. This announcement brings with it a renewed sense of freedom in Mary’s life. But her pursuit of a career as a midwife unhindered by the burden of a difficult husband is interrupted by an unexpected knock at the door: her husband, returned.
Gulliver is now a broken man, consumed by the drink. His sleep is plagued by ‘muscle twitches, night terrors and blundering confusion’. Could it be that these tall tales of Lilliputians, talking horses and giant wasps are merely the rantings of an opium addict?
Woven around this central plot are characters and subplots that enrich the historical setting: the midwives battle for respect amid a power struggle with London’s emerging profession of male surgeons; Mary’s fast-maturing daughter Bess comes to terms with a father she once regarded as a hero; women as the property of men who possess the power to cast their wives on to the street, rendering them homeless.
These are universal themes still facing women today. Through it all Mary stands as a beacon, a heroic figure illuminating a gallery of rogues, scandalmongers and immovable patriarchs.
‘Mary is a hero but she’s also just a woman’, says Lauren. ‘She became this symbol for all women from that time and how they would have survived. Like any woman, she has dreams and goals and juggles a whole lot of different competing priorities that I hope modern women will identify with.’
It’s this nexus between fantasy, fiction and the grim reality of life in 17th century Britain that places Gulliver’s Wife in a genre of fiction all of its own. Mary is convincing enough as a hero to be symbolic of women of her age for Gulliver’s Wife to qualify as allegory. And there’s certainly a moral lesson buried within these pages that liken it to parable.
‘I’d be very happy if people made that interpretation,’ says Lauren. ‘My intention was to tell these women’s stories, but it is a parable about female power and female strength in overcoming these patriarchal systems that women had to work within at that time. I wanted Mary to have this idea that she could be free in her own way.’
Gulliver’s Wife, like Gulliver’s Travels, requires the reader to enter into previously unimagined worlds and set the imagination free. Just as Lauren Chater has set those unknown and unimagined characters that Jonathan Swift omitted, free.
Gulliver’s Wife by Lauren Chater is published by Simon & Schuster.
