Submitting to the Destructive Element

“No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be.” Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

Wentworth is the popular Australian series set in a women’s prison that has run for six seasons and will soon begin a seventh. I started watching because I saw that Danielle Cormack played Bea Smith, the central character, and I remembered her as Ephiny, an Amazon on Xena: Warrior Princess. I was hooked from the beginning. Besides extraordinary writing and acting, the series also portrays two of the finest lesbian love stories that I have ever watched.

Bea Smith is sent to Wentworth for attempting to kill her abusive husband. She arrives woefully unprepared for a milieu in which violence and corruption are rife on both sides of the bars. Subplots accumulate but Bea’s story dominates, and in the first season Bea stumbles toward calamity through accident and choice with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Staff are nominally in charge, however Wentworth’s prisoners are actually ruled by a top dog whose tyranny is ameliorated only by the character of the top dog herself. Several women will take on the crown throughout the series but the first one Bea encounters is Jacs, wife of a drug kingpin. Bea’s naïve mistake is to believe that she can touch the softer side of Jacs only to learn that there is none. By the end of Season One, Bea has lost much more than her naïveté.

I think of Season Two as demonstrating the theme from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” Prison itself is a destructive element, largely through violence—sudden, shattering, ubiquitous, ever imminent violence. The top dog of this season is Franky, openly gay, played by Nicole da Silva. The prison also has a new governor, Joan Ferguson, surely descended from Nurse Ratched, who intends to solidify her position by playing Bea and Franky against one another. Bea initially has no ambition to unseat Franky, but Franky knows her power cannot be maintained by ignoring even unintentional threats.

Single-mindedly pursuing her own agenda, Bea sinks deeper into the prison’s moral quagmire. Her rise through the inmate hierarchy corresponds to her personal deterioration as she hardens her heart, losing her aversion to violence and to using people. “You’re a natural,” Franky tells her by the third season. “You think it’s all for a good cause. Your type’s the worst of all.” Throughout the series, Bea’s struggle to hold onto power battles her broken moral compass. In one scene she instructs Maxine to watch carefully lest a third woman hurt herself and be moved out of reach into medical. Maxine replies that there’s another reason: the woman just might hurt herself. Another chilling theme of Wentworth is that an offer of protection almost always portends disaster, or as Franky tells Bea: “You’re not the great protector, you’re the grim fucking reaper.”

The third season begins the first of the two outstanding love stories. As Bea falls further into Wentworth’s morass, Franky begins a struggle toward personal accountability and parole. Her ally is the prison psychologist, Bridget Westfall, played by Libby Tanner. Their burgeoning attraction avoids becoming a cliché and, throughout the series, Bridget and Franky’s courageous struggle to love in spite of the separation imposed by legal rules and iron bars is portrayed with pathos and heart. The story also reveals how the world of the inmates may occupy the same space as that of the staff, but living as a prisoner requires radically different codes, strategies, and behavior. Despite extraordinary empathy, Bridget has only the least inkling of how being a survivor requires compromise and self-distortion. “You do what you got to do to survive,” Franky tells her, “because if you don’t you have shit done to you.”

The violence in Wentworth has taken me to some interesting reflection. The aversion that Bea exemplifies at the beginning rests on class privilege maintained by the state’s insistence it has a monopoly on violence—the rationale justifying prisons in the first place—and on the gendered presumption that the fair sex needs others, i.e., men, to protect them.  A subtler class struggle occurs between Franky and Bridget and is not resolved until Bridget crosses the last line where she is allied to the system that separates her from Franky.

In the fourth season, the story of Bea and Allie comes to the foreground. Bea’s hardened heart has begun to show cracks even before it’s touched by Allie, but that is far from opening to trust another person. Played by Kate Jenkinson, Allie’s attraction to Bea steadily deepens. “I’m not gay,” Bea tells her to which Allie replies, “I don’t care what you are.” In an interview in Curve, Jenkinson says, “So in my mind I always imagined Allie, it sounds silly, but I imagined her as this big warm blanket. You know when you’re being held by someone that you love, it’s like all of the worries in the world just magically disappear?” Initially put off, I quickly realized how patriarchally prejudiced I was in not recognizing that offering comfort, love, and support is active, is a choice, is to be valued.

It would be possible to compare other stories of lesbian love awakening amid difficulty – among others I’m thinking of “Aimee and Jaguar.” Love overcoming obstacles resonates strongly with lesbian experience particularly because the world’s homophobia may be residual in some places but there is plenty left. What makes the stories of Bridget and Franky, of Bea and Allie, so special is the affirmation of connection, the insistence on caring and loving and loyalty, an elevation of affection. This is what makes love stories so persistent. We understand beyond words that love is the only thing that can ever save any of us in a broken world. 

I’m prone to finding meaning in shows I like very much, and it would be easy to consider Wentworth as a parable of the larger world. The series has its share of melodrama and coincidental moments that make you shake your head, but then wait a moment or two and there’ll be another moment of brilliance. I’ll just end by saying that Wentworth rewards watching by thoughtful, intelligent, superior quality storytelling and wonderful characters. Oh, and that the best thing about a women’s prison drama is that it has lots and lots of women in lots and lots of juicy roles.

Gems: Turquoise and obsidian

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