The Personal and the Political: A Study of Contemporary Australian Feminist Novels

The emergence of numerous feminist novels was a spectacular phenomenon in contemporary Australian literature, which had been under the influence of and at the same time influenced the second-wave women’s movement and feminist literary criticism in Australia. This body of fiction emerged in the 1970s and reached its peak in the 1980s. The outstanding achievements not only represent the highlights of contemporary women’s literature, but also make anew the present scene of literary creation in this country. However, the critical reception so far has not done justice to all the great achievements. There is no attempt to tease out a common thread to all these feminist novels, let alone generalize the features of feminist novels of each stage. Starting from this omission, this dissertation attempts to redress some typical bias against contemporary Australian feminist novels. Contemporary Australian feminist novel writing has in effect gone through three main stages: the first stage witnessed the feminists’ appropriation of the radical ideologies of “counterculture sub-communities”; the second stage is the one in which the feminists aimed at subverting Australian nationalist history, either the formal written history or the informal oral history; the third stage is the one in which the feminists began to reflect on the negative side of the radical period, formal experiments becoming the most prominent characteristic of this stage. The title “The Personal and the Political” derives from the second-wave feminist slogan “The Personal is Political”, but with some alteration. This phrase is coined in order to describe the consistent concerns of contemporary Australian feminist writing at different stages, i.e., both the private worlds in which individual women live and the public sphere in which women’s voices can be heard. Contemporary Australian feminist novel writing transgresses the borders between “the personal” and “the political”. Such a feat is to some extent the inheriting and development of female precursors’ artistic ideal. In addition, it not only resonates with the feminist political tasks, but also sheds light on the postmodern preoccupation with individuality and diversity. This dissertation consists of six chapters: Chapter One serves as the introduction. It begins with a summary of the historical origin, social context and critical influence of Australian feminist literature. Then it offers an overview of the contemporary feminist novel writing and its studies. Finally, this chapter explains the objective, the methodology, the theoretical framework and the contents of the study. Chapter Two offers an analysis of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977). This chapter is mainly concerned with how the feminists in the 1970s made use of the positive elements of the counterculture movement, for the sake of gaining autonomy of themselves and revising the traditional views and lifestyles of the local community as well as the whole society. The disquieting scenes in this book are loosely relevant to sexual liberation, women’s movement, rock and roll, drugs and the ethos of the collective household. Monkey Grip offers an honest account of the counterculture lifestyle, and it proves the indisputable “presence” of women in this minority movement. This book also discloses how second-wave feminism has affected the actual life of heterosexual women which comprise the majority of the female population, and how the “body” views of those avant-garde women have influenced their relationship with “the other sex”. Chapter Three takes Jean Bedford’s Sister Kate (1982) as a case to examine feminist writers’ rewriting of nationalist “myth” in the 1980s. Bushrangers are an indispensable part of Australian national mythology. Ned Kelly, the most famous Australian bushranger, has detached from the original implication of robbery in the bushes and has come to symbolize the romantic and revolutionary aspects of Australian identity. Although his career as a bushranger may cause some embarrassment, Ned Kelly as a legend can by no means be cut off from the “Australian-ness” and the Australian national identity. He represents an anti-imperialist, working-class, subaltern, “Irish-inflected” national identity and at the same time represents and reinforces the white male, heterosexual, misogynist and even the violent part of this identity. Sister Kate is deeply concerned with the representation of women in Australian nationalist narrative framework. By retelling, especially by making Kate Kelly (Ned’s sister) retell the stories of the Kelly women, Bedford creatively reinvented the “true” life story of those women eclipsed by nationalist “myth-making project”. This novel also examines how “Mateship” and the Australian-style Masculinity conspire to repel the Other, namely, the women, the indigenous population, people not of the working class, the immigrants from non-European countries, etc. Through disclosing the dark side of “Mateship” and the construction and maintenance of Masculinity within the Kelly Gang, Bedford succeeded in lifting the veil of the nationalist “myth”. This novel also depicts Kate Kelly’s personal “odyssey” in the post-“Kelly Gang” years, during which time the heroine’s pursuit of Selfhood is inseparable from the shifting of locations. The tragic end of this young woman throws light on the importance of uniting with other female members to develop women’s space. Chapter Four presents an analysis of Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History (1988) and explores the “revisionist” ideology embodied in the neo-historical fictions by feminist writers in the 1980s. Above all, Joan Makes History tries to redefine the Australian Bicentenary. The Bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988 is a significant historical period in which different political forces rush to claim their place, and voices from diverse interest groups vie for influence. In Joan Makes History, women not only become “present” in all the important historic moments, but also gain the subjective status in the world of today and tomorrow. The novel itself is a metaphor of women’s “presence” in the Bicentennial discursive field. In addition, the layout, the naming of female characters and the strategic way of dealing with the indigenous issue, all reflect the writer’s meditation on how to represent the “true” female subject. This novel also tries to change some traditional views about history, rectify the traditional way of historiography, so as to come up with a new way of compiling history from women’s perspective. Chapter Five focuses on Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy (1990) and examines feminist writers’ reflections on the extremist tendencies of radical feminism in the second-wave period. Poppy is a piece of life-writing based on the life experience of an ordinary woman—the author’s mother. This work marks a turning point of feminist writing entering a new stage in the late 1980s. In this work, Modjeska made great efforts to interpret three sets of relationships, i.e., the relationship between “Mother” and “Daughter”, that between “father tongue” and “mother tongue”, and that between formal experiments and feminist tasks. Through exploring the “Mother-Daughter” relationship, Modjeska tried to point out the dubious attitudes radical feminists held for the “Mother”. This relationship also serves as a metaphor for the relationship between Britain and Australia. The author’s reconciliation between “father tongue” and “mother tongue” reveals her interest in finding the most appropriate working language for a female academic who wants to write the life story of an everywoman. Poppy also exemplifies the perfect combination of carrying out formal experiments and accomplishing feminist political tasks. Poppy declines any definite labeling or categorization, but it is viable to view it as a serious theoretical revision of radical feminism in an unfavorable social context of Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter Six is the conclusion. First and foremost, this chapter puts forward the main finding of this study, i.e., contemporary Australian feminist novel writing has gone through three main stages. Furthermore, it points out that contemporary feminist novels stand for the harmonious fusion of the feminists’ interest in the women’s living experiences in “the private worlds” and their political and social concerns over events in “the public sphere”. In doing this the study aims to dispute some critics’ prejudice against the writers of contemporary Australian feminist novels, i.e., they are blinded by their own ideologies, are narrower in many respects, and are therefore inferior to their female precursors in the first half of the twentieth century.