Summary
The Vivisector opens by bringing us straight into a day in the life of the Duffields, a working class family in Australia. Hurtle Duffield, the novel’s protagonist, lives with his parents and six siblings on a farm where the same actions and conversations occur habitually. On the opening Sunday of the novel, Hurtle’s father is showing him a box of old family materials, prompting Hurtle to inquire about his grandparents, and his namesake, even though he already knows these things. When Hurtle’s mother and the other children come near, Hurtle’s father ends the conversation, and Hurtle knows implicitly that “secrets aren’t for everyone” (4), but rather for chosen ones.
While the children are playing, Hurtle asks his mother about his father: whether he is a gentleman, and if he was handsome as a young man. Hurtle asks these questions in the hope of figuring out what he will be like as an adult, to which his mother replies that he could be anything he wants as long as he gets an education. The desire to learn and be successful is already within Hurtle, articulated in a way that sets him apart from the rest of his family. He senses he is different; even his name is not a name anyone is familiar with. Clinging to his mother’s neck, he hopes that he might be her favorite child.
Hurtle is a precocious child and sticks out from his family as well as the other local kids. He senses that his family looks at him in an imploring way and detects his disinterest in playing games with the other kids. When he recedes from socializing he turns to reading, and this swiftly ignites a desire to draw the stories he is discovering, which he does on the walls of his family home, inciting anguish from his parents. When Hurtle recounts stories from the Bible unfamiliar to his mother, she decides the suitable thing would be for him to take on studies with the respectable Mr. Olliphant, the town rector, until he is old enough to go to school.
Hurtle soaks up everything he learns from Mr. Olliphant and even begins to imitate his speaking voice, imagining himself as an adult speaking smartly across a wide range of subjects. Hurtle keeps this habit from his family, however, continuing to speak in his normal voice at home: he senses that the more he learns, the greater his alienation from his family grows. His parents, while proud of him, grow nervous that they would “lost control of him, [and] worst of all, control of his thoughts” (9). When, while cleaning brass medals one afternoon, his father remarks that Hurtle should give up reading and writing to learn a trade – saying that reading and writing can only take you so far – Hurtle realizes that he does not know what, exactly, he wants to do, but that it certainly is not becoming a tradesman. Though he does not know his medium yet, it is beauty, above all, that moves and intrigues Hurtle.
Hurtle’s mother gains employment washing the laundry at the home of Mrs. Courtney, a wealthy woman known around town for her luncheons and balls. When Mr. Olliphant falls sick, putting a stop to Hurtle’s lessons, Ma decides to bring Hurtle along to the Courtneys. The housemaid Lizzie brings Ma and Hurtle around the house so they can see the property, during which Hurtle has a profound experience looking at a chandelier, an object he had never seen before but which he felt innately familiar with. When Mrs. Courtney walks in on them having a look at her bedroom, she says it was kind of Lizzie to acquaint the new worker with the house, and congratulates Mrs. Duffield on having a nice, handsome son.
The Duffields continue to make do with meager bits of food. Hurtle continues to dream about the chandelier. He carries on going to the Courtneys with his mother and soon meets their daughter Rhoda, a frail child with a muscular condition that gives her a hunchback. Mrs. Duffield encourages the children to play together but both of them refuse, immediately repelled by one another. Hurtle instead wanders into the house to take in its beauty once more and finds peace standing beneath the chandelier, at which point Mrs. Courtney beckons him into the study, thinking he must be her daughter. She finds him very charming and talks to him for a while about her social commitments as well as her daughter; he tells her about his siblings and about Mr. Olliphant.
Having felt seen by Mrs. Courtney, Hurtle now longs to return to her company. His mother, sensing something wrong, stops having him come along until a day when he insists he will come along to help her out with Septimus, the newborn baby. When Mrs. Courtney discovers he can read, and that he wants to read more, and learn in a serious, dedicated way, she insists that he meet her husband, Harry. After a day spent together, Harry insinuates that Hurtle will come along to their other property with them, a prospect which excites him. At night back at the farm, he overhears his parents arguing: the Courtneys offered them five hundred dollars to take in Hurtle and raise him as their own. The Duffields ultimately accept.
Analysis
The novel opens in media res: we see the Duffield family going about their typical Sunday activities, we see the plants and the animals in their yard, we see young Hurtle asking his father mundane questions. The opening is heavy on exposition, introducing us to characters through their habituated actions, such as when we learn that “It was Mumma, anyway, who did the talking. Pa was a quiet man” (1). The prose is languorous and the descriptions rich, all of which drive home this sense of slowness and habituality.
The fact that the first conversation in the novel addresses Hurtle’s name – why he was given this strange, unfamiliar name so unlike everyone else he knows –signals an interest of the work in naming conventions, in the meaning that a name can hold. Hurtle was named for a foreign woman (spelled Hertel) that married into his grandfather’s family: named for an outsider, and doubly defamiliarized for its new spelling, which bears no resemblance to the original. All of this underscores the otherness that Hurtle feels.
Good and bad things come from this feeling of otherness. On the one hand, Hurtle suspects that he is his mother’s favorite child, and is told things by his parents that his other siblings are not privy to. On the other hand, his desires do not align with the desires his parents have for him and his life: while his parents want him to continue his education and then ultimately learn trade skills to work a labor job, his passions lay in the realm of aesthetics. As these desires become articulated, a gap widens between him and his family, strengthening Hurtle’s feeling of alienation.
At the opening Hurtle is still too young to articulate his interests, so White shows us instead. He writes: “[Hurtle] loved the feel of a smooth stone, or to take a flower to pieces, to see what there was inside. He loved the pepper tree breaking into light, and the white hens rustling by moonlight in the black branches, and the sleepy sound of the hen shit dropping…but people looked down at their plates if you said something was ‘beautiful’ (10-11).” His proclivity for beautiful things is further emphasized with the image of the chandelier that he encounters at the Courtneys' house: having never seen a chandelier, young Hurtle feels an immediate warmth – familiarity and excitement – upon seeing the Courtneys' chandelier. He knows that “inside him [was] his own chandelier. This was what made [him] at times jangle and want to explode into smithereens” (45).
This desire to be surrounded by beautiful things, and people who appreciate beautiful things, is enough to make young Hurtle love Mrs. Courtney, and believe that he wants to live in her house instead of his own. Of course, the practicing and appreciating of art has always been more available to the upper class than the laboring class, and this was especially true in White’s mid-century rural Australia. And so, seeing the opportunity for their child to have access to the things he desires, and living in precariousness so real that there is a price agreeable enough to offer up their son, the Duffields give Hurtle away. White makes clear that the wealthy Courtneys can do whatever they want, that by the time they decided they wanted Hurtle there likely was not a way out; simultaneously, he depicts the cruelness of the Duffields, who claim they did it for love.
