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This woman of contradictions embodies all of O’Brien’s fantasies of the ‘Otherworld’. She is
Parvati, Durga and Kali all at once, the mother, warrior and destroyer, and, whether he like it
or not, to her he is instinctively, uncontrollably drawn. O’Brien finds repelling contradictions
in the mother-protector figure. Though her breasts ache with milk, she has deserted her child,
and is, in O’Brien’s view, sickly sentimental and capable of great cruelty (Tiffin, 1982, 330).
Both Ilsa and Kali combine contradictory traits into one irresistible personality, which
seems to offer to O’Brien what a more Western figure, built on concepts of ‘polar opposites’,
cannot, namely to ‘reconcile contradictory attitudes in the colonial that fret him’. Ilsa is, like
Kali, a dancer whose dance is the lila of creation and destruction. They are both weavers ‘of a
world of magic illusion’—maya, in Hindu terms, the illusion which is the created cosmos.
Yet, as O’Brien learns, Ilsa is best seen as the European goddess who dances an illusion which
no longer suits his world:
In the colonial imagination Europe dances before the colonial to weave the
illusion of its reality that in one sense renders the colonial’s own world a world
of shadows. (Tiffin, 1982, 331)
Ilsa’s dance destroys the illusion of their ‘marriage’ when he tries to forbid her to perform a
strip-tease, but Ilsa’s identity-shirking irritates the identity-seeking O’Brien far more deeply
than that. Kali is associated with akasa, a concept Koch mentions in Crossing the Gap. He
writes of discovering Kali’s ‘identification with infinity: akasa, the void’, a dualistic concept
which he puts among ‘the fullest revelation of her mysteries’ (Koch, 1987, 8). Akasa has a
double sense in Sanskrit. It is ‘an all-comprehending container, enclosing not only the
universe (loka), but also the non-universe (aloka)’ (Zimmer, 1969, 270). It is also the ‘brilliant
spiritual space’ which ‘abides within’ the individual self, and contributes to the shared identity
between the individual and the ‘pure Self’ (Zimmer, 1969, 430). Helen Tiffin points out that
naïve O’Brien has doubts about his venture into the world, and is ‘terrified of the striptease
which will expose the void in his idea of existence’ (Tiffin, 1982, 332).
Koch is mixing his mythological symbols in Ilsa, who, as the abandoned European
goddess, is ironically representative of the European culture which has abandoned Australia.
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