The Transit of Venus

Imagery of cats is prominent throughout Hazzard’s novel, especially in association with Caro, who embodies similar independence, fierceness, and sensuality. Indeed, the first time Ted meets Caro, she is looking for Tom, the Thrales’ pet cat (5). The cat’s name is suggestive, since a tomcat is a male that hasn’t been neutered—the implication being that Caro is looking for a sexual partner. The rest of this first encounter at Peverel bears out this reading; as Caro rejects Ted’s advances, she lavishes affection on Tom instead, indicating that she prefers being close to a creature that will accept her caresses casually rather than come to rely upon them in a dog-like manner. Caro’s admiration of the sleek indifference of cats is a precursor to her passion for Paul, who is cat-like in his grace and ability to emotionally detach.

The motif of a woman being affectionate with a cat as a substitute for a person also occurs with Ted’s wife Margaret, who kisses and caresses her ginger cat because she knows that her unloving husband will reject her advances. Margaret’s symbiosis with the cat becomes fully evident when woman and cat mirror each other’s reactions in a charged conversation with Ted. As the cat requests to be held differently, “it seem[s] to expect something more” (266); it then listens itself when Ted tells Margaret “if you knew your beauty” (266), picking up on the unspoken emotional dynamic of unrequited love.

Death by water is a recurrent motif throughout the novel. The first instance—the Bell sisters’ childhood loss of their parents in a shipwreck—is an event outside of human control, much like the transit of Venus that led to Australia’s colonization. The chance event changes the girls’ lives forever by subjecting them to overbearing Dora’s guardianship, which defines their adult approach to relationships.

The parents’ drowning also makes the girls less rooted in their native Australia, as they leave for the continent that has shaped their education. For Australians, “[G]oing to Europe […] was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same” (37). Here, Hazzard likens the sisters’ journey to Europe as a kind of death by water, as though sea travel leads to the passage from one life to the next. Still, while they imagine that sailing to Europe will be their entry into a new life, Grace eventually realizes that her parents’ drowning remains the most eventful thing that has ever happened to her; Europe has in fact erased anything that could make her unique or interesting.

For Caro, the motif of the capsized ship returns just at the moment when she has reached a point of self-knowledge and reconciled with Ted; the sound of “the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down” enters her mind as her plane takes off (337). Thus, while Caro thinks she has taken control of her destiny by using this modern means of transport to meet her lover in Rome, she has the premonition that fate has decreed she will die in an accident like her parents. An earlier moment in the novel foreshadows this hypothesis, when on a pleasure-boating trip Caro “ha[s] the luminosity of those about to die” (332).

The other prominent death by water is that of Paul’s lover Victor, who drowns in a river when Paul purposely does not rouse him just prior to a flood. While the death of Caro’s parents was accidental, Victor’s dispatching is calculated. Paul uses his intimate knowledge of how deeply Victor sleeps, along with his fear of water and his inability to swim, to engineer Victor’s death and his own escape from responsibility. He even boasts that “[I]t couldn’t have been better if God had planned it” (308). However, the one flaw in his plan is that Ted saw him and retains the power over his secret. Here, Hazzard brings Paul a measure of the justice he deserves by reintroducing the cosmological framework that depicts humans as in thrall to random elements.