This study arose out of what I saw as a gap in the criticism of Patrick White's fiction in which satire and its related subversive forms are largely overlooked. It consequently reads five of White's post-1948 novels from the standpoint of satire. It discusses the history and various theories of satire to develop an analytic framework appropriate to his satire and it conducts a comprehensive review of the critical literature to account for the development of the dominant orthodox religious approach to his fiction. It compares aspects of White's satire to aspects of the satire produced by some of the notable exemplars of the English and American traditions and it takes issue with a number of the readings produced by the religious and other established approaches to White's fiction. I initially establish White as a satirist by elaborating the social satire that emerges incidentally in The Tree of Man and rather more episodically in Voss. I investigate White's sources for Voss to shed light on the extent of his engagement with history, on his commitment to historical accuracy, and on the extent to which this is a serious high-minded historical work in which he seeks to teach us more about our selves, particularly about our history and identity. The way White expands his satire in Voss given that it is an eminently historical novel is instructive in terms of his purposes. I illustrate White's burgeoning use of satire by elaborating the extended and sometimes extravagant satire that he develops in Riders in the Chariot, by investigating the turn inwards upon his own creative activity that occurs when he experiments with a variant subversive form, satire by parody, in The Eye of the Storm, and by examining his use of the devices, tropes, and strategies of post-modem grotesque satire in The Twyborn Affair. My reading of White's novels from the standpoint of satire enables me to identify an important development within his oeuvre that involves a shift away from the symbolic realism of The Aunt's Story (1948) and the two novels that precede it to a mode of writing that is initially historical in The Tree of Man and Voss but which becomes increasingly satirical as White expands his satire and experiments with such related forms as burlesque, parody, parodic satire, and grotesque satire in his subsequent novels. I thus chart a change in the nature of his satire that reflects a dramatic movement away from the ontological concerns of modernism to the epistemological concerns of post-modernism. Consequent upon this, I pinpoint the changes in the philosophy that his satire bears as its ultimate meaning. I examine the links between the five novels and White's own period to establish the socio-historical referentiality of his satire. I argue that because his engagement with Australian history, society, and culture, is ongoing and thorough, then these five novels together comprise a subjective history of the period, serving to complement our knowledge in these areas. This study demonstrates that White's writing, because of the ongoing development of his satire, is never static but ever-changing. He is not simply or exclusively a religious or otherwise metaphysical novelist, or a symbolist-allegorist, or a psychological realist, or any other kind of generic writer. Finally, I demonstrate that White exceeds the categories that his critics have tried to impose upon him.

In Renaissance culture there was an iconographic and literary language of trees, related to the motif of the tree of life, an ancient symbol of immortality associated with paradise. The properties of trees were used to express a range of ideas, including the death and resurrection of Christ, the fall and regeneration of political regimes, and virtue and vice within the individual soul. The juxtaposition of the tree of knowledge with the tree of life, as motifs of sterility and fertility, expressed aspects of the human condition and constructions of spiritual history and destiny. This thesis explores the language of trees in visual art and a range of English Renaissance texts from the late-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century: two plays by Shakespeare, two country-house poems, and a prose treatise on growing fruit-trees. Each of the writers drew on arboreal metaphors and motifs in unique and innovative ways. However there are numerous parallels and connections between the texts, and with contemporary and antecedent visual art, to justify considering these works together. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594) Lavinia, when she has her hands cut off, is metaphorically described as a tree with lopped branches and linked with the stricken political entity of Rome. Shakespeare evokes the tree of virtue, the classical myth of Daphne, and the arboreal language of virtue and vice. In the late tragicomedy Cymbeline (1610), the king is symbolized in a dream vision as a tree, with its cut branches representing the princes who are initially stolen but then reunited with the king. The tree represents the family tree as well as the political state, two interlinked concepts in the play and in contemporary iconography and ideology. Since Cymbeline’s reign heralded the Nativity, the prophecy of the lopped and regenerated tree invokes the idea of Christ as the tree of life and the fruit of the tree of Jesse. In both plays, Shakespeare’s tree imagery comments on the exercise of political power and the resultant health of the state. Shakespeare’s contemporary Aemilia Lanyer wrote “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611), part of a published volume of poetry entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. In the poem she imagines a prominent tree on the estate as the tree of life. An abstract metaphor is envisaged as part of the physical landscape. The motif transforms the estate to sacred terrain, enabling her to claim access to a space she is otherwise excluded from by class and gender. Lanyer links the sap from the tree of life with her writing, seeking to legitimize her claim as a female poet. Such strategies are part of her bid for patronage from the Countess of Cumberland, her primary dedicatee. In another country-house poem, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax” (1651), the poet creates a forest of the mind in which he explores different aspects of the language of trees. The speaker imagines himself encircled by vines and crucified by thorns, in imitation of Christ as the tree of life, while a fallen oak tree suggests the regicide. He takes on various roles including that of the enigmatic Green Man. I place Marvell’s imagery in the context of the Civil War and the relationship with his employer Lord Fairfax. Marvell’s exploration of arboreal motifs also subjects Christian tree of life imagery to the challenge of its pagan antecedents and reflects anxieties over the natural processes that threaten metaphors of regeneration. Lastly, in Ralph Austen’s A Treatise of Fruit-trees and Spiritual Use of an Orchard (1653), the author blends advice on horticultural practices in growing fruit-trees with religious metaphors. For Austen, gardening is both a physical and a metaphysical pursuit. His readers are expected to plant fruit-trees in orchards that evoke the idea of Christ as the tree of life and related ideas. His use of the motif is part of his advocacy of agricultural and social reform, motivations that were part of those in the circle surrounding Samuel Hartlib. Austen’s text is situated at the end of the English Renaissance and at the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, when emblematic and symbolic frameworks for interpreting the natural world were subject to new pressures derived from empirical and rationalistic outlooks. What becomes apparent from these works is that tree metaphors were literalized, just as they had been in visual art, and given a new naturalism as they were projected onto landscapes. Symbolic trees merged with botanical trees in imagined landscapes, creating hybrid terrains that were both descriptive and mythical. Recognition of the language of trees in Renaissance culture opens up new readings of both canonical and lesser-known texts and highlights the porous disciplinary border between literature and art. Our historical readings are richer for understanding the potent language of trees. Overall the thesis highlights the importance and cultural preoccupation with trees in European visual and literary traditions.

This study represents an exploration of White's concept of transcendence in The Tree of Man and Voss by means of a detailed account of some of the key patterns of imagery deployed in these novels. White's imagery is a key mode of expression in his work, not simply manifesting in overarching religious symbols and framing structures but figuring in constantly modulated tropes continuous with the narrative, as well as in minor, but no less significant images occasionally susceptible to etymological or onomastic reading. While no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive exploration of the tropes at work in these novels, a sufficient range of material is covered, and its metaphoric density adequately penetrated, to highlight and explore a fundamental concern in White's work with a paradoxical unity underlying the dualities inherent in temporal existence. A useful way of approaching his fiction is to view the perpetual modulations of his imagery as the dramatisation of an enantiodromia or play of opposites, in which the conflicts of duality are elaborated and paradoxically - though typically only momentarily - resolved. This resolution or coincidence of opposites is a significant feature of his notion of transcendence as well as his depictions of illuminatory experience, and in this respect White's metaphysics share an essential characteristic, not only of Christianity, but a range of religious and mythological systems concerned with expressing a transcendent reality. Despite these analogies, however, the novels at hand are not so tightly bound to Christian, or any other, meaning-making systems so as to constitute sustained allegories, and hence this study does not aim to chart a series of correspondences between White's images and biblical or mythological symbols. Indeed, a criticism often levelled at White - with The Tree of Man and Voss typically figuring in support of this claim - is that he too rigidly imposes religious frameworks on his work. An extension of this view is formulated in the Jungian critique of White's corpus offered by David Tacey, who argues that White's conception of transcendence is consistently challenged by the archetypal significance of the images he employs, which point to a contrary process of psycho-spiritual regression in his protagonists. In a fundamentally text-based approach, this study explores White's use of imagery while taking biblical resonances and archetypal interpretations into account, and suggests that, though White's images are highly allusive, they are not merely agents of imported Christian, or other traditional symbolic values. Nor do they undermine the authenticity of his depiction of the spirituality of his protagonists, or obtrude on the fabric of the narrative. Instead, the range of his images are - though often ambivalent - integral to a network of mercurial tropes which articulate and constantly evaluate a notion of transcendence through inflections and oscillations rather than equations of meaning.