Mute Eloquence: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well as Encrypted Melodrama

Drawing on Derridas reading of the crypt as both secret place and no place (Fors, 1986), and on Catherine Malabous work on the plasticity of form, this essay argues that buried in Elizabeth Jolleys The Well (1986) is a Pygmalion-esque melodrama about animated stones and the turning to stone of the animated. This essay shows how the novels juxtapositions of song and speech place it in a musical-dramatic tradition that, reaching back to antiquity, has crossed spatio-temporal borders and metamorphosed in migration through various media, genres and modalities (including theatre and novel). Like the words carved on the palm of a hand, The Wells melodrama is partly buried within its written form. Melodrama is, in this Australian story, an encrypted imaginary that nevertheless animates the novels fascination with terrestrial death and sub-terrestrial life and its depiction of a human will to closure or burial that exists alongside a will to expose, transfer, transform and renew