The Bathtub in Poukahangatus: A Symbol of Entrapment, Death, and the Male Gaze

The Bathtub as a Recurring Domestic Object

The bathtub in Poukahangatus is a deceptively ordinary domestic object that Tibble transforms into a charged site of contradiction. It is at once a place of private cleansing and a stage on which the speaker is positioned, posed, and observed. Across the collection, the tub recurs in three key contexts: the imagined drowning of the 1960s Māori women in In the 1960s an Influx of Māori Women, the speaker's fantasy of dissolution in a rose-gold tub in LBD, and the custom-made tub that arrives as a troubling gift in Receipt. In each appearance, the bathtub gathers new layers of meaning—entrapment, death, the male gaze—while remaining anchored to the domestic spaces where Māori women's lives are lived and surveilled.

The 1960s Bathtub: Imagined Drowning as Escape

In In the 1960s an Influx of Māori Women, the bathtub appears at the end of a poem that catalogues the constrained routines of Māori women who have moved to Tinakori Road. They shop, they hide vodka in a basement refrigerator, they smile at wives who refuse to kiss their cheeks, they eat white bread in the dark. The poem's final lines pivot from these rituals to a startling interior thought: the women contemplate drowning themselves in the bathtub, then resurface with clean skin and repeat the routine.

The bathtub here is not a place of comfort but of imagined escape. The drowning is contemplated, not enacted—the women resurface and return to the cycle. The tub becomes a private space where the fantasy of ending one's life can be briefly entertained before the performance of domestic contentment resumes. This connects directly to the theme of assimilation and cultural erasure: these women have migrated to the city, adopted its fashions and customs, and now find themselves trapped in a life that demands they stay quiet in their husbands' arms. The bathtub offers a momentary, imagined exit from that trap.

The repetition of the rinse-and-repeat cycle is crucial. It frames the drowning fantasy as part of the same mechanical routine as the shopping, the dinners, and the nightgowns. The thought of drowning is not a rupture but another step in the cycle—a ritual of imagined death that the women perform privately before returning, cleansed, to their prescribed roles. This connects to intergenerational trauma and ancestral grief, as the poem's depiction of 1960s Māori women anticipates the speaker's own struggles with entrapment and escape in later poems.

The Rose-Gold Bathtub: Desired Dissolution

In LBD, the bathtub returns in a transformed register. The speaker, moving through a club as if walking on water, describes an inner darkness she wears like a little black dress. She is surrounded by the wailing of the women she carries within her, and a nervous man is present. Hiding in a matte-black bathroom, she asks for a cab and articulates a wish to drown in a bathtub carved out of rose gold, filled with champagne and shame too thick to choke down.

Here the drowning fantasy is the speaker's own, and it is rendered in luxurious, almost decadent terms. The rose-gold tub is a fantasy object—carved, precious, absurdly opulent. The champagne and shame suggest a desire to dissolve not just into death but into a kind of aestheticized oblivion. The speaker wants to dissolve into night, which fits tight and acidic like a womb. The tub becomes a womb-like space of return, a place where the speaker can shed the performance of the little black dress and the male gaze that accompanies it.

This connects directly to the theme of the male gaze and objectification of Indigenous women. The speaker is in a club, observed, desired, and the bathtub fantasy is an escape from that scrutiny—a private space where she can stop performing. But the fantasy is also shaped by the very gaze she seeks to escape: the rose-gold tub is a commodity object, the kind of thing a wealthy admirer might provide. The speaker's imagined drowning is both a rejection of the male gaze and a surrender to its logic.

The poem's closing lines—in which the speaker declares she is the dress worn to a funeral, the dress that comes off—suggest that her identity is itself a garment that can be removed. The bathtub, in this reading, is the place where the dress comes off, where the performance ends. But the acidic womb imagery complicates this: the return to the womb is also a return to a space of origin and constraint.

The Custom-Made Bathtub: An Imposed Trap

In Receipt, the bathtub shifts from fantasy to unwanted reality. The speaker recounts a photo session in which she was posed in a bathtub with her wrists tied to either side of a broom. She felt less like a pin-up and more like a rotisserie chicken, her skin rubbed raw. Though the photos turned out acceptably, she criticizes the photographer, noting he is no Irving Klaw and is a family man with a volcanic complex.

The poem then turns to a custom-made bathtub the speaker received as a gift. She finds it impractical: it is bolted to the floor, cannot be moved or re-gifted, and would not fit in her small flat. She suggests the giver might sell it in Auckland, where he plans to return. The poem concludes with the tub's symbolism: it sits there, expectant, a little bit like the giver, hoping she would spend her time in there holding her breath.

This is the bathtub as an imposed trap. Unlike the 1960s women's private fantasy or the speaker's own rose-gold dream, this tub is a gift from another person—a man who expects her to use it. The tub is bolted to the floor, immovable, permanent. The speaker observes that it is really a gift for the giver himself. Her remark that she would prefer not to have access to the perfect facilities to finally do it in makes explicit what the tub represents: a site of potential suicide, offered by someone who claims to care for her.

The photo session and the gift tub are linked. In both, the speaker is positioned in a bathtub by a man who controls the frame. The photographer ties her wrists; the gift-giver bolts the tub to the floor. The bathtub becomes the stage on which the male gaze is enacted—not just observed but physically imposed. This connects to identity performance and self-mythology: the speaker resists being cast in the roles these men assign her, whether pin-up or recipient of a romantic gesture.

The Bathtub in Community Life

The bathtub also appears briefly in Long White Clouds, where young men chase girls in sheds, bathtubs, and beds. Here the tub is one of several domestic sites of sexual pursuit, alongside sheds and beds. The bathtub's inclusion in this list suggests it is a space where young women are cornered or caught—a private room that becomes a site of unwanted pursuit. This brief mention reinforces the tub's association with vulnerability and the male gaze, connecting the 1960s women's entrapment to the speaker's experiences in LBD and Receipt.

How the Symbol's Meaning Shifts

Across these appearances, the bathtub's meaning evolves from imagined escape to desired dissolution to imposed trap. In the 1960s poem, the tub is a private space where women can briefly entertain the thought of drowning before resuming their routines. In LBD, the tub is a fantasy object the speaker longs for—a luxurious site of self-erasure. In Receipt, the tub is a real object, bolted to the floor, that the speaker cannot escape. The progression moves from interior fantasy to external imposition, from the speaker's own desires to the desires of others.

The bathtub also connects to the collection's broader engagement with water and death. The lake in Nobody in the Water is a site of a discovered body, stained like shame in the thick skin of the city. In Hawaiki, some believe the paradise of that name is reached by diving off Cape Reinga. Water in this collection is both a site of death and a site of origin—a womb to which everything returns. The bathtub, as a contained body of water, concentrates these associations into a single domestic object.

Character and Theme Connections

The bathtub is most closely associated with the narrator, who appears across LBD and Receipt as a speaker navigating the male gaze and her own desires for escape. The 1960s women in the earlier poem are not named characters but anticipate the narrator's situation—they are the generation that came before, and their imagined drowning resonates with the narrator's own fantasies. The narrator's mother and nana are part of this lineage of Māori women whose lives are shaped by domestic constraint and cultural erasure.

The bathtub's connection to indigenous hair politics and colonial beauty standards is indirect but present. The 1960s women remember the appointment they made to get their hair fixed on Lambton Quay immediately before contemplating drowning. The hair appointment and the drowning fantasy are juxtaposed—the women's attempts to conform to colonial beauty standards are part of the same cycle of performance and erasure that makes the bathtub an appealing site of escape.

Study Questions

1. How does the bathtub function differently in In the 1960s an Influx of Māori Women compared to Receipt?

In the 1960s poem, the bathtub is a private space where the women entertain an imagined drowning before resurfacing and resuming their routines. The fantasy is internal and unobserved—a momentary escape from domestic entrapment. In Receipt, the bathtub is an external imposition: a custom-made gift, bolted to the floor, that the speaker cannot move or re-gift. The tub's expectant presence mirrors the giver's hopes that the speaker will use it. The shift is from a private fantasy of escape to a public, imposed trap—from the speaker's own desires to the desires of a man who controls her space.

2. What does the rose-gold bathtub in LBD reveal about the speaker's relationship to the male gaze?

The rose-gold tub is a fantasy object that the speaker longs for as a site of dissolution. She wants to drown in champagne and shame, to dissolve into night. The fantasy is shaped by the very gaze she seeks to escape: the tub is a luxurious commodity, the kind of object a wealthy admirer might provide. The speaker's desire to dissolve suggests a wish to stop performing the little black dress—the identity constructed for the male gaze—but the fantasy itself is expressed in terms drawn from that gaze's aesthetic. The tub is both an escape from objectification and a surrender to its logic.

3. How does the bathtub connect to the theme of intergenerational trauma in the collection?

The 1960s women's imagined drowning in the bathtub is part of a cycle of domestic constraint and cultural erasure that the narrator inherits. The rinse-and-repeat framing suggests that the fantasy of drowning is itself a routine—a ritual the women perform privately before returning to their prescribed roles. The narrator in LBD carries the sound of women wailing within her, and her own drowning fantasy in the rose-gold tub echoes the 1960s women's contemplation. The bathtub becomes a site where intergenerational trauma is enacted and re-enacted, a private space where the weight of the past is briefly acknowledged before the performance resumes.

4. In Receipt, why does the speaker describe the custom-made bathtub as a gift for the giver himself?

The speaker argues that the tub's impracticality—bolted to the floor, immovable, too large for her flat—reveals that it was designed for the giver's satisfaction, not her use. The tub sits there, expectant, like the giver, hoping she would spend her time in there holding her breath. The gift is an attempt to control the speaker's space and, implicitly, her life. By framing it as a gift for the giver, the speaker rejects the romantic narrative he intends and exposes the tub as an instrument of surveillance and expectation—a permanent fixture that demands her presence and, potentially, her death.