In the opening pages of The Harp in the South (1948; hereafter Harp), Ruth Park delivers a memorable description of the dilapidated Surry Hills terrace house, Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street, where much of the narrative will take place. Painted brown with a ‘blistered green door’, the house is preceded by a sandstone step ‘worn into dimples and hollows’ (183). This is the first of many stone steps, ‘hollowed’ by passing feet or urban drifters who sit upon them ‘waiting, worrying, thinking, smoking’, that appear in Park’s body of work (Roses 271). In the Miles Franklin Award – winning Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), Cushie explores Sydney ‘along precipitous back alleys, up flights of hollowed stone stairs’ (201). In Park’s most popular novel for adolescents, Playing Beatie Bow (1980), young apartment-dwelling Natalie imagines living in a ‘little terrace house’, with ‘sunflowers higher than the roof and little hollows in the stairs’ (24).1 The step or stair is a threshold space, an interstice, and it is hollowed because so many people have passed through or lingered there that the stone has been marked by their transient occupation. We might read it, then, as a symbol of the precarious living situations about which Park so frequently wrote. However, like many thresholds and passageways in Park’s work, the hollowed step is also a liminal space of positive potentiality, of transformation and becoming. When it rains in Plymouth Street, the Darcy children, Roie and Dolour, ‘always’ expect to find frogs in the little pools that collect in the step’s dimples and hollows (Harp 183). Given the ‘swift imagination’ that allows Dolour to project herself into exotic, enchanted other worlds, it is not surprising that she and her sister assume that this threshold space will gift them the fairytale’s prince-in-waiting (444).
The real-world origins and symbolic potency of the hollowed step make it a useful heuristic for thinking through Park’s spatial imagination and the way it shapes her fiction. Park’s depictions of poverty and precarious living drew from life. During her childhood, the Depression brought her family close to homelessness. As a young reporter in New Zealand, she accompanied the City Missioner on visits to urban slums; later, she lived in one as she and her husband struggled to find ‘a roof in overpopulated and houseless Sydney’ (Park, Fence 140; Fishing 12). In her autobiography, Park wrote that these early experiences resulted in an abiding interest in ‘housing’ (Fishing 77), using a word that, as Emily Cuming explains, augments the ‘rich symbolism of “home”’ with connotations of socio-economic precarity (4). Yet in Park’s writing, even the most precarious dwellings hold within them the possibility of transformation, escape or transcendence. We might think of them, then, as porous spaces, drawing our definition from Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, ‘Naples’ (1925). Inspired by the ancient Mediterranean city’s distinctive tufa sandstone, Lācis suggested the term. In the essay, it denotes the interpenetration, ambiguity and improvisation that define Neapolitan spatial arrangements and social relations. In Naples, private life spills from crumbling homes into warren-like streets, and families dissolve into each other as abandoned children are taken in by neighbours. The old and new intermingle, the sacred and profane blur together, and ‘the stamp of the definitive is avoided’ (Benjamin and Lācis 169). Despite its genesis in intense poverty and social dysfunction, for Benjamin and Lācis, porosity is a fundamentally positive attribute. Porous spaces admit the unexpected, and this means porosity is potentially liberatory. We see a similar logic at work in Park’s spatial imagination. The rain that falls on Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street leaves behind damp and mould but also, in the house’s hollowed front step, the dream of transformation.
In this essay, I show how close examination of Park’s precarious, porous homes yields new insight into the operation of realism in her fiction for adults. Specifically, I argue that Park’s favoured narrative mode is best described as what I call porous realism. As with other mid-century Australian women writers, including Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack and Kylie Tennant, critics have pondered Park’s relationship to realism. Monique Rooney has pointed to Park’s combination of ‘social realist concerns’ and ‘populist style and technique’ (‘Stages of Development’ 102). Paul Genoni compellingly rereads so-called sentimental or romantic elements in her early novels as manifestations of her ‘Catholic realism’ (‘Catholic Realists’ 27). Reading the abortion plot in Harp, Nicole Moore argues that Park ‘works both with and against’ cliché (78). Framing Park’s realism as porous extends this conversation by legitimising her elastic approach to genre as a fundamental strength of her work, as well as allowing for a more precise mapping of the specific generic modes that function in it. As urban theorist Maren Harnack explains, porosity means that cities can ‘assimilate and accommodate contents and ideas, without necessarily having to change their physical form’ (37). My concept of porous realism applies the same logic to genre. Park’s fiction for adults is not realism destabilised or undermined by other generic interlopers, but the product of her idiosyncratic and inventive combination of realism with a range of other generic modes, which interact with and extend the realist narrative in productive ways.
Though it admits a range of genres, Park’s realism is most often interleaved with what I will call the ‘fantastic mode’. Critics have recognised this element of Park’s work: Alice Grundy notes ‘the interplay of fairy-tale stories and realism’ (2) in Swords and Crowns and Rings, while Jill Greaves goes further, suggesting that ‘fantasy is never far beneath the surface in Park’s writing’ (127). There is need, however, for a clearer definition of Park’s fantasy and explanation of its position in relation to her realism. As a genre, fantasy is notoriously difficult to define (Mendlesohn 1). Pioneering the academic study of modern fantasy in the 1930s, J. R. R. Tolkien used the term ‘fairy story’ to describe fiction that combines the real world with an imaginary or magical other world. For Tolkien, fantasy relies on a balance between the ordinariness of the primary world and what he calls the ‘enchantment’ or ‘arresting strangeness’ of the secondary world, which allows readers to see the primary world in new and often restorative ways (144). Colin Manlove defines fantasy as ‘fiction evoking wonder’, where wonder involves ‘anything from crude astonishment at the marvellous, to a sense of … the numinous’ and ‘contemplation of … strangeness’ (Modern Fantasy 1, 7). Manlove develops a taxonomy of fantastic fiction based on the ways in which narratives evoke wonder and manage the relationship between the primary and secondary worlds (Fantasy Literature 4). As I will show later, elements of these definitions are relevant to Park’s work; but, for our present purpose, Brian Attebery’s distinction between fantasy as a genre, which he argues tends towards the formulaic, and the fantastic as a mode is most useful. Defining ‘mode’ as ‘a stance, a position on the world as well as a means of portraying it’, Attebery maintains that the fantastic is a ‘basic operation of narrative’ and can coexist in texts alongside mimesis (2, 4). These texts, he writes, mingle ‘the marvelous’ with the mimetic, ‘in order to heighten contrasts and to bring out the extraordinariness of story, as opposed to the ordinariness of daily life’ (4). Along similar lines, Rosemary Jackson draws attention to the ‘dialogic of realistic and fantastic modes’ in work by the Brontës, Dickens and Balzac, which disrupts ‘a “monological” vision’ and ‘constitutes an interrogation of the ideals sustained through bourgeois realism’ (77, 73). Park’s narratives accurately reflect the difficulties and depredations of precarious living and highlight the socio-economic forces that produce this precarity. Yet her work is ultimately motivated by earnest belief in the capacity of fiction to challenge these forces by bringing into being the possibility of other worlds not governed by them. Essentially, as Attebery and Jackson show, this is the impulse of the fantastic mode.
This essay illustrates the functioning of porous realism in Park’s work through close reading of two of her most precarious homes that are also the site of enchantment as a means for self-transformation. In Harp and Poor Man’s Orange (1949; hereafter Orange), Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street is insufficiently sealed against rain, heat and cold; it is shared between strangers – the Darcy family sublease attic rooms to lonely lodgers – and haunted by lost relatives and its own grand past as a bourgeois nineteenth-century home. In A Power of Roses (1953; hereafter Roses), the ironically named ‘Jerusalem’ is a Dawes Point pub turned ‘decaying old residential’, whose tenants dwell uncomfortably in a ‘honeycomb of little wet evil-smelling rooms, given over to the rats and the cockroaches’ (89, 6). Each home is a synecdoche for broader socio-economic precarity in postwar Sydney, where landlords refuse to treat their slum houses for mould and pests, and society’s most vulnerable are ‘beggars on the Commonwealth charity’ who must live on ‘the sweepings’ of an otherwise wealthy society (Roses 29). Yet these porous spaces are also a major means by which the fantastic enters the narratives, and in turn, allows for transformation and development.
In each of the novels, a canny, questing adolescent girl finds in their precarious home threshold spaces through which enchanted other worlds can be glimpsed. In Harp and Orange, Dolour’s faith in the existence of a ‘spellbound, exciting world’ is confirmed when she sees signs of it through Twelve-and-a-half’s grimy windows (402). In Roses, Miriam McKillop is certain that ‘the fairy world [is] there, hanging like heaven behind the accidents of this life’ (239). She is brought closest to this other world when she climbs onto the Jerusalem’s roof with a telescope of ‘enchanted glass’ that transforms mundane sights into wondrous visions (173). Dolour and Miriam’s ability to imaginatively conjure these ‘spellbound, exciting’, ‘fairy’ worlds enables them to reframe the limitations of their lives as possibilities and see beyond the constrictions of their immediate environments. Exemplifying her fiction’s porous realism, the characters allow Park to capture not only the very real impacts of growing up in precarious circumstances but also the consolations of wonder and enchantment.
Monique Rooney has noted the importance of the bildungsroman to Park’s work (‘Stages of Development’ 95). With its connotations of pliability and transformation, the hollowed step can be linked to Park’s deployment of bildung structures. Dolour ages from twelve to twenty over the course of the two Harp novels, while Roses follows Miriam from twelve to sixteen. Both characters are located on what Park’s narrator in Harp calls the ‘threshold of womanhood’, and this liminal position means that they face challenges that threaten their faith in the existence of other worlds and ways of being (386). Not for nothing do their names mean ‘state of great sorrow’ and ‘sea of bitterness’, respectively. It is possible to suggest, then, that what Park reflects in the characters is simply the consoling power of the child’s imagination, a theme readily apparent in her work for children. This reading is seemingly confirmed when she writes of sixteen-year-old Dolour in Orange:
So she went on, a child one hour and a woman the next, seeing the world often as a bright and lovely place with every possibility of great happiness for those who searched for it, and sometimes as a bog that crawled and seethed with hidden dreadfulnesses. (581)
As I will show, however, the novels’ larger trajectories affirm Dolour and Miriam’s faith in the enchanted other world, concluding with scenes that can be read as each character transitioning into that world in adulthood. In this way, Park’s narratives respond structurally to the fantastic mode, offering readers ‘consolation’ through ‘the combination of the familiar and the impossible within the context of an affirming, reordering narrative’ (Tolkien 153; Attebury 16).
The Harp duology loosely follows an ensemble cast of characters centred on Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street; however, as Rooney indicates, Dolour’s ‘plights and adventures’ remain a focus throughout the two novels (‘Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe’). Dolour’s association with the fantastic is established early in Harp. On the night her elder sister Roie is attacked by Dutch sailors and loses her unborn baby, Dolour escapes this terrible manifestation of adult reality by climbing into bed with her Irish-born grandmother, who she thinks of as an ‘old fairy woman from another and more fantastic world’ (307). Grandma comforts her with a story about the wondrous possibilities of another precarious, porous home. The house where she grew up was ‘right in the middle of the shaky, quaky bog, and there was pools of brown water … right at the back door. When you stamped very hard on our front door sill the whole bog shivered all over’. One day, Grandma found in the mud ‘a golden coin … of the fairy times, long before any people at all came to Ireland’ (299). Reminiscent of the frog in the hollowed step, the fairy coin in the bog represents the possibility of enchantment and escape: Grandma’s father uses the coin to buy the family freedom of movement in the form of a pony and cart. Dolour is arguably closest to Grandma; she alone among the Darcys shares the ‘fierce positivity of the Celt, a surging energy that made her long for the world she did not know’ (418). She is brought into contact with this other world through her imagination, which allows her to see the marvellous and numinous in the ordinary.
Dolour shares with Roie an attic room, infested with bugs, smelling of ‘mustiness’ and stained with mould (214). Importantly, however, this dank space has a window. When Dolour looks through it on tiptoe, she sees not workaday Sydney but the ‘onion-shaped domes and slender spires [of] an eastern city dreaming in the early morning’ (229). As she cleans the kitchen, she pauses to flick one of the house’s many cockroaches out the window and smells cinnamon, which to her ‘breathe[s] of palaces with onion domes, and brown canals where little shoe-shaped boats floated’ (465). In Dolour’s imagination, there is frequent slippage between other worlds real but ‘exotic’ and secondary, magical worlds. Both are enchanted by virtue of their distance from the life of a poor child in Surry Hills and provide similar respite from ‘hard recognition’ of the ordinary world’s ‘sorrow and failure’ (Tolkien 144, 153). For Dolour, the cinnamon triggers a fantasy that draws on both fairy stories and the modern fairy land of Hollywood: she is a princess and ‘she had been imprisoned in the harem … A stranger was there, a fine handsome stranger with no shirt on, like Alan Ladd, and a striped tea-towel on his head’ (465). There is humour in this scene of adolescent longing, but it is important that the narrative frequently affirms Dolour’s imagination through omniscient descriptions that similarly frame ordinary Sydney as exotic and enchanted. One summer day, the ‘magic’ of sunshine casts ‘a gleam and glitter over everything, so that shadows seemed furry and mysterious, and the iron lace around the balconies Moorish and exotic’ (276). In this way, Park’s narrative shares features of what Manlove calls the ‘metaphysical fantasy’, in which imagination, as a portal from reality to the fantastic, is valued as ‘a source of spiritual truth’ (Fantasy Literature 73).
It is significant too that Park emphasises that it is the ‘word’ cinnamon, rather than the spice itself, that serves as Dolour’s passage to the fantastic (465). On a visit to Paddy’s Market early in Harp, Dolour ‘flutter[s] the torn pages’ of a battered volume of Shakespeare, quoting lines from Henry IV verbatim: ‘I like that bit about the billows curling their monstrous heads and hanging them with deafening clamour in the slippery shrouds’ (204). Dolour has access to language as ‘one of the most powerful tools of Enchantment conceivable’ (Schmiel 17). Drawing on Tolkien, Mary Schmiel explains that ‘the moment the mind frees itself from preformed notions and fits words together in a new way, whole worlds open up’ (17). In this way, Park’s recourse to the fantastic is motivated by belief in the transformative capacity of language and story. There is further evidence for this in Park’s own delight in words, which frequently manifests as internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration, which inject a kind of joy into even grim descriptions, such as the ‘great map-like stain of last winter’s rain’ that mars Roie and Dolour’s bedroom walls (Harp 214).
Dolour’s imagination is a bulwark; her capacity for enchantment means that ‘all the discomforts, the vulgarities, the harsh jovialities of her little world broke against her as repeatedly and unavailingly as a wave breaks against rock’ (418). In addition to porousness and pliability, rock is subject to erosion. In both Orange and Roses, Park introduces trials into her adolescent protagonists’ lives that threaten to erode their ability to access the enchanted other world. If, as Brian Attebery states, the fantastic’s reliance on the contemplation of strangeness means it has much to do with ‘ways of seeing’, then it is significant that Dolour comes down with conjunctivitis, waking one morning to ‘find her eyelids stuck together’ (Rhetorics of Fantasy 16). When she attempts to open them, ‘the slant of light from the attic window struck them like a blow’ (485). It is literally too painful for Dolour to access the enchanted other world, and soon she feels ‘as if she had been at home for ever’: ‘Grey and disillusionary and hopeless the world stretched before her’, Park writes, ‘with no avenues of escape’ (496, 498). ‘Deep down within her,’ Park writes:
[S]he knew that she was doomed from the start to become just like them, worn down like a stone with the flow of her environment. For how did you get away from it? What were the first steps? (563)
Park’s imagery here recalls the hollowed step, suggesting Dolour’s liminal position between her precarious home and the possibility of a brighter future in another world. We are reminded that the etymological origin of the word ‘passage’ is in the Latin patio, which means to suffer and undergo. As a spatial and temporal concept then, ‘“passage” indicates a displacement, a process of transformation undertaken, but not yet finished’ (Thomassen 13). Park’s porous realism aligns this trajectory with the comic structure of fantasy, which as Attebery explains, requires a problem followed by resolution (15). If Park’s narratives are to provide the readerly ‘consolation’ crucial to the fantastic mode, then her questing youths must be challenged to find ways to retain in adulthood the ‘acute and sensitive vision’ through which they access the enchanted other world (Tolkien 153; Harp 599).
Roses, Park’s fourth novel, is in many ways much darker than its predecessors. In the ‘tumbledown, melancholy, dirty’ Jerusalem, there is sexual abuse, family violence and children dying of tuberculosis (6). Yet the narrative is also directly framed as a fairytale. At the close of the first chapter, Miriam asks her guardian, her great-Uncle Puss, to recite her ‘favourite story’, which begins: ‘Once upon a time, under the Bridge, in the grand city of Sydney, there lived a little girl of twelve, and her name was Miriam McKillop’ (14). Placing Miriam spatially in the real world but temporally in fairy land, this sentence is salutary for the rest of the novel’s combination of mimetic and fantastic modes. Further fairytale allusions include Uncle Puss’s name, frequent descriptions of characters as animal-like, and the use of a poisonous spider as revenge against a villain. Park also evokes adventure stories, with the Jerusalem – named not for the Holy City but for ‘the lovely clipper’ that brought the alcohol the pub sold – turning into a ship during storms, its attic room a ‘crow’s nest’ for spotting ‘whales and pirates’ (15, 190).
Miriam embodies the collision between the real and the fantastic: ‘in [her] heart’, Park writes, ‘her practicality fought with her faith’ (147). She is adept at navigating the Jerusalem’s liminal spaces and finding in them ways to reframe its failings as possibilities. ‘Hurrying down a dark passageway’, she is momentarily ‘frightened at the urgently in-pressing closeness and dimness’ but finds ‘with relief … the place in the roof where the shingle had gone, and bright Bootes looked through’ (27). In the Jerusalem, the ceilings bend ‘downwards into great tumours where the water had seeped in through the old shingles’; but to Miriam, these gaps are portals to the immensity of the universe: the constellation Bootes contains Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky (189). Significantly, there is a similar image in Harp, when Mumma – exhausted and overwrought by Roie’s illness – looks up ‘at the greasy, dirt-stained ceiling and see[s] nothing but vast azure expanses with bright slits through which she could glimpse the cool avenues of paradise’; ‘Dear Lord,’ Mumma thinks, ‘don’t let go of me hand now, there’s a good Lord’ (306). By Roses, Park no longer associates the fantastic with the divine in this way; indeed, Miriam tosses aside a medal of St Christopher, believing the saint uninterested in the plight of slum dwellers (77). The numinous in the later novel is overwhelmingly secular and realist.
The spyglass that facilitates Miriam’s strongest connection to the ‘fairy world’ has been in her family since an Irish ancestor took it from the body of an English soldier ‘during a “ruction”’ (16). In this way, it represents rebellion from restrictive conditions. As Brigid Rooney writes, in the narrative it functions as a ‘device symbolising and materialising the narrative mobilisation of different scales’, allowing Miriam to cross the distance between her present and future worlds. On the roof of the Jerusalem, the telescope grants Miriam contact with the ‘vastness of things’ (18). She feels ‘impish and magical’; she becomes ‘a queen, her kingdom stretched beneath’ (87, 129). She is bird-like, a ‘city sparrow’ untethered from the physical constraints of humanness and the real world (17). Devastated after witnessing an episode of child abuse, Miriam goes out onto the roof, ‘put[s] the spyglass to her eye and turn[s] it on the sky. All the frankness and nobility of heaven were there, and her angry soul grew quieter’ (85). This heaven is best represented for Miriam by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which ‘fill[s] the sky’ (17). A flurry of similes and metaphors endows the Bridge with fantastic qualities.2 It is a ‘giant anaconda’ but also ‘more than a snake’, with ‘massive Egyptian pillars of the pylons, like the legs of some great beast’. It is ‘sentient in every rivet, alive, vibrating, ready to lash its tail and stalk away over the North Shore’ (17). ‘It was as though’, Park writes, Miriam ‘sat beneath the belly of a crocodile’ (17). Genoni writes that for Miriam, the bridge is ‘a promise of the world from which she is excluded, a world of busy-ness, jobs and a transformed future’ (‘Sydney Harbour Bridge’ 3). Notably, however, Park’s imagery also positions the bridge as a promise of the enchanted world. Park’s use of the Bridge epitomises the inventiveness and individualism of her porous realism and its recourse to the fantastic. With its origins in Romanticism, fantasy often casts itself in opposition to industrial civilisation (Selling). Here, however, industry is not necessarily anathema to the fantastic – indeed, Miriam’s ‘kingdom’ is ‘mechanized’, ‘its iron heart bumping and banging like the throbs of some incalculable steam hammer, never stopping, never sleeping, never hesitating’ (129). What Park foregrounds is the capacity of the fantastic, and imagination and language as its major tools of enchantment, to recover from this world the ‘potency’ and ‘wonder’ lost to its everyday inequities and failings (Tolkien 147).
Like Dolour, Miriam must endure the momentary closure of her portal to the other world. Lending the spyglass to the disabled boy who lives upstairs, she is devastated when he breaks it. Park writes:
She longed desperately for the shattered spyglass. Without it she had no doorway from the world of trivialities. Her life with Uncle Puss, which had seemed to be unique, wonderful, as cosy as a child’s game in a cave, an existence as secret as an ant’s in the antheap of the Jerusalem – this life, she knew now, was nothing but an existence, a beating into a harsh wind that parched the spirit and calloused the sensibilities, and all for nothing. (238)
Again, Park draws on the language of erosion to capture Miriam’s loss. Without the enchanted vision provided by the spyglass, Miriam must reckon directly with the limitations of her precarious existence. She is like ‘a fish that had leaped for an instant into the fantastic world of air, and ever afterwards wondered about and longed for that nameless element’ (238). The simile emphasises how unachievable a different kind of life now seems: fish cannot survive in air. Yet this is also the moment when Miriam directly articulates her belief in the ‘fairy world’:
But when had she seen any other world than that which had been hers in the Jerusalem? She only knew that somewhere was precious and perfect joy and assuagement for her restless heart. … But Miriam, sixteen years old, did not know where to look. She was aware only that the fairy world was there, hanging like heaven behind the accidents of this life. (238–39)
The quest and bildung structures of the novel require that Miriam must find an internal means of accessing the other world; she cannot rely on external aids like the telescope. Consequently, soon after it is broken, Miriam leaves the Jerusalem on an ‘escapade’ into the city on Cracker Night (239). Park writes this event as a ludic carnival during which usual social and civil rules are suspended. In the darkened streets Miriam becomes ‘invisible’ and disappears as if ‘by magic’, merging into the city’s ‘cornucopia of energy’ (240). She finds herself in Circular Quay, which Park calls the city’s ‘doorstep’ in her guide to Sydney (1). Accordingly, as Genoni writes, in this scene, Circular Quay serves ‘serves as a threshold for an encounter with the world of [Miriam’s] dreams’ (‘Sydney Harbour Bridge’ 4). This moment is a transition point in Miriam’s life and in the novel, as she properly enters her ‘kingdom’ and recovers her capacity for enchantment.
At the end of Orange and Roses, Dolour and Miriam both leave their precarious homes, accompanied by young men written as belonging to the enchanted other world. Charlie’s Aboriginal heritage, lack of a Surry Hills upbringing, and strong ethical code make him ‘different’; to Dolour, he is the ‘last fence to protect her’ from the profane world’s ‘coarseness and cruelty’, the ‘last link she ha[s] with delicacy and sensitivity and self-respect’ (Orange 563, 621). Miriam’s young man is a bridge painter she watched work through her spyglass, whose lack of a name emphasises his allegorical role as a personification of the fairy world she longs to enter. Though she loses sight of him when the spyglass is broken, Miriam’s experience on Cracker Night grants her ‘exquisite confidence that some day the city would bring [him] right to her doorway’; here again, the hollowed step is associated with development (Roses 246). Both men are literal ‘strangers’ to the primary worlds of the novels; they represent and facilitate for Dolour and Miriam the ‘arresting strangeness’ that serves as passage into the fantastic, other world (Tolkien 144).
The conclusions of both narratives epitomise Park’s porous realism. Dolour might simply be walking away from Sydney with Charlie; after Uncle Puss’ death and at sixteen years old, Miriam might only be leaving her childhood behind. But the staging of each ending scene allows for a more metaphysical reading. Dolour, thinks Charlie, ‘doesn’t know what life is yet’ because she has ‘been shut in here by the greyness and dirty buildings’ (Orange 679). In the last scene of Orange, the pair walk through a half-demolished street and the absence of one of those dirty buildings has left behind a ‘square of stars’ (683). There is silence, ‘as though already Surry Hills felt its doom’ (683). The primary world and its pain and sorrows are diminished; Dolour’s ‘spellbound, exciting’ world seems within reach. Miriam meets the young man on the threshold space of the Bridge, during her first direct contact with this symbol of her ‘fairy world’. The pair instantly recognise each other despite never meeting before: ‘She did not ask how he came to be there,’ Park writes, ‘[s]he did not wonder’ (286). Miriam does not need to wonder because the impossibly marvellous has become real. These conclusions are not the happy endings of conventional romance, as some critics have suggested; rather, they are best read as the ‘eucatastrophe’ of the fantastic. A term of his own coining, Tolkien defines the eucatastrophe as:
[T]he sudden joyous ‘turn’ … not essentially ‘escapist’ … In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace … It does not deny the existence of … sorrow and failure … it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat … giving a fleeting glimpse of … Joy beyond the walls of the world. (153–54)
Tolkien’s description almost exactly reflects the logic of the ending scenes of Orange and Roses; indeed, his metaphor of ‘Joy beyond the walls of the world’ is echoed by Park’s square of stars between dirty buildings. There is realism in Dolour and Charlie mourning for Roie, and in Miriam’s grief for her beloved guardian; nevertheless, Park offers the characters and her readers the possibility of future joy. This is the consolation of the frog in the hollowed step, where imagining the miraculous thing is succour enough. Late in Orange, Charlie thinks of Dolour:
[H]er idealism was not that of the escapist, who shuns realism, but was strong and untainted enough to come hard against the utmost brutality of evil and retain its integrity. (665)
We might apply the same description to Park’s work. Her fiction strives for accuracy in its portrayal of precarious homes and the difficulties of dwelling in them. Yet her porous realism also admits the fantastic, a mode motivated by belief in fiction’s capacity to shift or extend our perceptions in productive and potentially restorative ways.