SOURCE: Bird, Delys. “Towards an Aesthetics of Australian Women's Fiction: My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom.” Australian Literary Studies 11, no. 2 (October 1983): 171-81.

[In the following essay, Bird presents My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom as two “incipiently subversive novels” that depict the struggles of women in a society that generally diminishes feminine social value.]

Following the resurgence of the women's rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s in the English speaking world, an explosion of both formal and informal speculation and assertion regarding the ‘difference’ of the feminine, and demanding recognition and authentication of the woman's voice in literature and in literary criticism has given rise to a new and increasingly credible academic industry. Critical questions which depend on the central assumption of this activity derive from the problem of how women's writing may be specified; whether it is possible, or indeed useful or desirable to define a body of literature written by or about women; whether a mode of apprehending and analysing this body of literature can be established; whether, in fact, the ‘difference’ is discernible as a female discourse in either or both the language and structures of women's novels.

If it is possible to identify an aesthetic and ontology of women's writing, then the proposition that the condition of being a woman in a particular society is socially, politically and psychologically definitive, that women are distinctively ‘placed’ within their own culture, must be addressed. Thus knowledge of the culture as well as both the place of women and the nature of the female experience in that culture will assume primacy in analysis and criticism of women's writing. Virginia Woolf observed the need for reading fiction by women within as broad a perspective as possible—‘in dealing with women as writers, as much elasticity as possible is desirable; it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing to do with art’¹—postulating that attention should be paid to the influence on their work of those outside factors which are apparently inconsequential to art.

Woolf both particularises writers according to their gender and suggests that their cultural background and the experience of being a woman in their world conditions and shapes literature by women, and that knowledge of these things will illuminate a reading of their work. In a recent survey and analysis of the contemporary theories of women's writing, Elaine Showalter proposes a methodology which relates to Woolf's ideas.² For Showalter, a theory of reading women's writing based on a model of woman's culture can ‘provide … a more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity and difference of women's writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or psychoanalysis’.³

What is problematical for Australian readers is the availability of a theory of Australian woman's culture. Although Showalter's remarks focus my present concern, which is to suggest a methodology for reading and interpreting the forms, themes and rhetoric of Australian women's fiction in terms of the historical, social, political and psychological implications of their lives, as yet the contextual and theoretical evidence to establish this mode of reading women's writing in Australia is scant and lacks authority. Therefore, what follows is necessarily exploratory rather than conclusive, leaning more towards Woolf's desire for flexibility than undertaking a rigorous description of the difference of Australian women's writing—writing which, according to Showalter's theory, ‘can only be understood in terms of this complex and historically grounded cultural relation.’⁴

The question of cultural identity is central to notions of cultural relations, and has been a continuing preoccupation of Australian post-colonial social history,⁵ which consistently endows an Australian archetype with male traits. Recently, the recognition that women are absent from a historiography of Australia has meant that a more difficult, questionable search has been initiated to establish an Australian female identity, and furthermore to account for that identity.⁶ Since the nexus between history, culture and literature is crucial in this idea of an aesthetics of Australian women's fiction, the fact that Australian women's history is in an undefined, pioneering phase,⁷ just as are theories of the unique quality of women's fiction, underlies the speculative nature of my hypothesis.

However, this contemporary attention to women's lives and writing by social historians and literary critics affirms that Australian society has an identifiable ‘male’ ethos, which arises in part from its distinctive colonial beginnings, and which identifies women solely in negative terms. Australia was statistically a predominantly masculine world at its inception; ideologically it has always been one. Established in an atmosphere of hostility, cruelty and ignorance, colonial Australia's inchoate social structure was held in an uneasy, aggressive balance between a powerful minority and a powerless majority. Its convict settlers had a natural antipathy to their new environment; in turn the land itself was both strange and resistant to these immigrants. (A persuasive but fallacious myth links the inability to live in harmony with the natural world with a society supposedly unable to accept or integrate female life.)

In terms of fact, an overwhelming proportion of Australia's early settlers came from the lower orders of English society. They were uneducated; motivated and preoccupied almost solely by the instinct for survival. These qualities were then exacerbated by their harsh social and natural environment. It was an impoverished society, increasingly hostile to the intellect and to women, one which Manning Clark has called ‘a broken, cold and unnatural form of society.’⁸ Vulnerable in this male world, women were excluded from the masculine power structures which form a history of Australia and proliferate in its organising dogmas. This female subculture could then be defined only by negation, that is by its lack of masculinity.

Nevertheless, it is possible to identify what I will call a counter ideology of female life in Australia which can be seen as a positive product of the masculine hegemony. If, as Michel Foucault asserts, power structures are dynamic rather than wholly repressive, women in Australia are controlled by the dominant culture precisely because their potential power is so threatening to it. Consequently, women so crudely devalued are enabled to struggle against the dominant power, and arguably the struggle itself is positive. One of the available modes of struggle is in writing. In their texts women can voice their special experience; through a reading of these texts which is attentive to women's cultural situation the specificity of both women's writing and women's lives may be explored.

To demonstrate the possibility of this reading of Australian women's fiction, I have deliberately chosen texts—My Brilliant Career⁹ and The Getting of Wisdom¹⁰—which are familiar and autobiographical; accessible yet seminal as a basis for a theory of this writing. Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson are recognised as among the founding members of the Australian literary canon. Each author lived for a significant part of her adult life outside Australia, both consciously adopting a masculine pseudonym, suggesting their deference to the aesthetic world that acknowledges male superiority; both novels are bildungsromans, concerned with the maturation and education of their heroines. My argument opposes the persistent parochial tendency to read and criticise Australian literature as a second-class relative of English literature, whereby Australian women's writing may be placed in the so-called ‘female tradition’ of English fiction, and is instead directed towards an aesthetics of Australian women's fiction.¹¹

The first edition of My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, with a Preface by Henry Lawson which presupposes categories for reading Australian fiction, as it gives the novel a seal of approval from the established male literary world by praising its realism: ‘The descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me … the book is true to Australia.’ Lawson dismisses the novel's female aspect: ‘I don't know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book’.¹² For Lawson, bush life is Australian life and admirable, emotion is girlish and therefore unacceptable. The Preface also indicates the separation of male and female life in Australia. It sentimentally patronises the author, whose pseudonym is no protection against Lawson's discerning from a manuscript reading that ‘she is just a little bush girl.’ Franklin is both tolerated because her topic is approved, and belittled by notation of those characteristics which are made to seem exclusively female. She is ‘little’, young ‘barely twenty one’, and lacks life experience, having ‘scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life’. The tone of the Preface, its insinuations and the reductive attitudes it discloses, all pronounce the female author a member of a minority group, excluded from the male world which Lawson represents in both its socio-cultural and its literary aspects.

Lawson's remarks reflect the values of his masculine society. They reinforce a perception of the position of women in Australian culture as displaced and disinherited. Dominated by aggressively masculine hegemonies and ideologies, Australian society has made women invisible.¹³ My contention is that the coarseness and barely latent hostility of Australian attitudes to women are perceptible in their fictions (although Henry Handel Richardson wrote from outside Australia, her cultural conditioning was Australian, and her novel is concerned with and relates to this experience), and that the effects of writing from a position which is antithetical to prevailing or accepted attitudes is disabling, resulting in paradoxical patterns of metaphor, structural uncertainties, and thematic evasions and irresolution. This can be seen as equivalent to Virginia Woolf's suggestion that women's writing suffers from ‘distortion’, which ‘is frequently the cause of weakness’.¹⁴

A hastily written first work, My Brilliant Career is technically crude. The beliefs and attitudes it reproduces by way of its heroine's life and psyche and through its narrative structures are obtrusive, and thus easily identifiable. Its thematic tensions and narrative weaknesses arise in part from the female author's acknowledged desire to write according to the received masculine literary conventions: she calls her tale a ‘real yarn’, placing it in the nationalist-realist tradition. In part, of course, they stem from her own lack of aesthetic control. But My Brilliant Career in its awkwardness allows its reader to perceive very clearly the problems facing the Australian woman writer, who lacks a literary model or a cultural identity.¹⁵ The novel is the tale of Sybylla Penelope Melvin's childhood and adolescence. Sybylla's life veers from pastoral to pigfarm, from happiness to misery. Her narrative remains unresolved, and its irresolute structure reflects Franklin's inherently negative reaction to the male tradition she seeks to be part of.

Caddagut, Sybylla's grandmother's property, and McSwat's, the squalid farm to which she is sent as governess, manifest an uneasy dialectic in the novel between pleasure and pain. These settings seem to offer opposite possibilities for life. Sybylla, her grandmother and her Aunt Helen live a life of casual ease and elegance at Caddagut. Yet while Sybylla's grandmother is head of the family and in command of her property, her son Jay Jay, whose bird-like name signifies his inconsequential nature, is deferred to as the public figure of authority. Sybylla's Aunt Helen also symbolises the socio-sexual inequality of this world. Deserted by her husband, she lives in a female limbo: ‘neither wife, widow or maid’ (p. 49). Fulfilling none of the conventional roles her society allows a woman, Aunt Helen is an outcast. Although Caddagut exhibits mythic pastoral tokens of escape, enjoyment, vitality and beauty, it also portrays a world organised according to the classic polarisation of the sexes which interprets male life as active and female life as passive.

McSwat's is a parody of Caddagut, presenting ‘a desolate and prison-like aspect’ (p. 170) where life is crude, degraded, filthy, and most invidiously, monotonous. Here too, women are rendered insignificant, and hence lack self-esteem. Sybylla's final vision of her future is defined by its constriction as it is categorised through repetitious, female tasks: ‘Today it was washing, ironing tomorrow, next day baking, after that scrubbing—thus on and on’ (p. 226). Each world denies women choice or liberty. The possibility that a woman can transcend her situation, which is represented in both its mythic and its realistic aspects, is thereby negated. And as the trap for the Australian woman is clarified by the circumstances of Sybylla's life, so the structural indecisiveness of the novel is representative of the incapacity of the Australian woman writer to resolve her dilemma.

In My Brilliant Career, the increasing narrowness and stultification of Sybylla's life and her ambiguous attitude to it expresses the self-limiting nature of the domestic snare which awaits her maturity. The Getting of Wisdom, on the other hand, finishes as its heroine casts off her hat, gloves and bag, trappings of conventional female life, and runs into the distance and out of sight. But this gesture of freedom will be shown to be as deceptive as the freedom Sybylla enjoys as a child at the beginning of her narrative.

Throughout My Brilliant Career, marriage is constantly urged on Sybylla, who recognises its potential degradation, and dreams of economic independence. However, her ambition for a brilliant career is vaguely defined. Called ‘boundless as the mighty bush’ (p. 33), it is identified with the myth of Australian male life, thus made unattainable for a woman. Similarly in The Getting of Wisdom, marriage is called the ‘goal’ (p. 117) of life, making it the metaphoric end of the girls' growth and expectation. Trapped by their biology—‘the curse of Eve’ (p. 14) is on Sybylla's mother—women in My Brilliant Career cannot escape the limitations of their gender. Sybylla recognises this: ‘it came home as a great blow to me that it was only men who would take this world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, metaphorically speaking, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither, battering and bruising without mercy. Familiarity made one used to this yoke’ (p. 33). Authorial ambivalence towards this resignation to an arbitrary life complicates the familiar metaphor of women confined by their sexual difference and at the same time punished for it.

Sybylla flounders between acceptance and denial of that world in which all recognised values are male. She rejects her femininity, which has no status according to the dogmas to which she is subject, and identifies strongly with those qualities approved by the masculine world, initiative, adventurousness, courage, and the desire for mateship not as an alternative to heterosexual love, but as an essential sexless bonding. A reference to her suitor as ‘a man who is a man, utterly free from the least suspicion of effeminacy, and capable of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow’ (p. 218) is typical of Sybylla's identification with male attitudes and values. Yet she accepts the index of female value as beauty without recognising its reductive implications, continually berating herself for her plainness, and describes her allotted place in the social hierarchy as ‘below all a woman’ (p. 152). The limits of the author's understanding of the destructive, manipulative male world are revealed as the heroine's ambivalence towards her sex intensifies.

A curious sequence of actions between Sybylla and her suitor, Harold Beecham, illustrates the equivocations of the narrative. Sybylla takes up a whip, metaphor of male power, and strikes Harold when he reacts complacently to her acceptance of his proposal. She is then remorseful in female terms: ‘I had done a mean, unwomanly thing’ (p. 125). Sybylla longs for and invites punishment from Harold, sunburnt symbol of male Australia, and the pleasure of the victim in abuse relates directly to the slave subculture mentality. After a day of physical and verbal conflict with Harold, Sybylla discovers ‘on my white arm and shoulders—so susceptible to bruises—many marks, and black’ (p. 148). Active masculine power and domination and passive feminine weakness and submission are indicated in the imprint of black on white, while the complex signification of the relationship is apparent in Sybylla's reaction to her discovery: ‘It had been a very happy day for me’ (p. 148).

The very conspicuousness in My Brilliant Career of masculine Australian ideologies and those attitudes to women which derive from these ideologies exposes the difficulty of a woman writing in a culture which denies her aesthetic or cultural worth. Sybylla's constantly ambiguous reaction to the masculine world she inhabits is echoed by the awkwardness and ambiguity of her narrative. Interestingly, Sybylla tries to escape the choice offered to Australian women between two equally undesirable female roles as either ‘good sort’ or ‘good woman’—‘damned whores or God's Police’ according to Anne Summers' terminology¹⁶—by the only possible route as she adopts masculine behaviour.¹⁷ This reflects Franklin's need, to which I've already referred, that she write in the Australian male literary tradition. Each attempt to enter the male world, Sybylla's or Franklin's, results in confusion.

Women in both novels are often strong, practical, honest and uncomplaining, displaying qualities the male world values, yet whose presence does not allow women to become part of that male world. These women are also sometimes intelligent, sometimes creative, and all have the potential for deep feeling. Those are the conventional attributes assigned to female life, yet it is precisely these that the masculine culture derides and rejects. Sybylla, too, rejects these qualities. Her inability to achieve a positive role is clear as she equates her weary life with her female expectations: ‘I am only—a woman!’ (p. 232) in a tone which combines self-denigration and self-congratulation. Sybylla remains Australian by her final, forceful (and forced) identification with the male nationalist myth, but this conclusion is hopelessly at odds with the narrative movement of the text. The textual shifts—formally from romanticism to realism, thematically from optimism to pessimism, or as a discourse, from biographical narrative to apologia or apostrophe—denote the helplessness of the woman who lives in a world she can neither control nor become part of. These narrative movements also betray the uncertainty of the woman who writes from this world, as Franklin seeks to integrate into her fiction an Australian ideology which makes female life worthless.

A more coherent text than My Brilliant Career, The Getting of Wisdom nevertheless displays formal and metaphoric tensions and weaknesses, subtler but comparable to those of My Brilliant Career. For most of the novel its heroine, Laura Rambotham, boards at a Ladies' College in Melbourne. Although this female world is significant for its lack of men, its ruling dogmas are male ones. The novel's title comes from its Biblical epigraph: ‘Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom and with all thy getting get understanding’ (Proverbs iv, 7). The repetitive imperatives of this shaping voice are imposed by a patriarchial, authoritarian religion whose morality is hard to resist. Laura is often seen apart from those around her, and in conflict with those in authority, yet she yearns for a specifically female conventionality, one that will mitigate against her individuality: ‘Like most rebels of her sex, she ardently desired to re-enter the fold of law and order’ (p. 161). It is difficult to assess the author's attitude to this wish to comply with the Protestant patriarchial rule which organises the world of the text. But it is clear that Laura is unable to recognise that the social identification for which she strives will ensure the limits of her potential freedom. This ambiguity typifies the latent textual conflict of The Getting of Wisdom.

Both My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom are incipiently subversive novels, as they attempt to assert a place for a growing girl in a society which disallows her one except in its own reductive terms. Franklin's subversion is aggressive, uncontrolled and ultimately compromised, as its final uncertain, whining tone becomes assertively masculine and nationalistic. The Getting of Wisdom handles the problematical nature of Australian female life differently, and the escape route offered its heroine is not through acceptance of the mores of the male world, but by way of her mind. Laura's imagination initiates textual subversion of masculine power structures.

Like Franklin's, Richardson's latent feminism produces a potentially unconventional, rebellious heroine. Laura rejects her mother's demands that she ‘learn to behave in a modest and womanly way’ (p. 10), and seeks to avoid the implications of her adolescence, recognising as ‘disagreeable and disturbing’ the warning that she ‘would soon be a woman’ (p. 90). In the world of the girls' school, deprived of men who are that mysterious Other, sought after yet feared, the schoolgirls create an illicit, uninformed, romantic discourse which produces and explores the absent male reality. Laura's central fantasy has as its hero Mr Shepherd, the school curate, romanticised for the schoolgirls by his aura of authority, piety and inaccessibility. During a weekend at his home, Laura accurately observes his miserable reality. Shepherd is a male tyrant whose house is devoted to his ambition and education, and whose female appendages, wife, sister and maid, are his willing ‘slaves’ (p. 131). To escape this oppressive world, demanding obedience and conformity from women, in which male domination is unquestioned, based on force and controlled by fear, Laura invents a tale of passion between herself and an idealised Mr Shepherd. Laura is humiliated when her fantasy is discovered, but in the contrast between illusion and reality the author depicts the consequences of unenlightenment and the enforced limitation of women's lives.

Yet the narrative often verifies those attitudes which make certain characteristics female then denigrates them. Laura's schoolmates are said to be ‘cruel, with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness which makes a woman's cruelty so hard to bear’ (p. 148). A woman teacher describes female intelligence reductively, implying its more valuable male counterpart as she describes to her pupils a ‘real woman's brain, vague, slippery, inexact, interested only in the personal aspect of a thing’ (p. 60). Laura laughs with the others at the sarcasm, accepting and internalising the criticism, but she alone recognises its force. She realises that ‘true knowledge’, socially acceptable knowledge is held to lie in the acquisition of facts, traditionally a masculine capacity. But neither Laura nor the author is able to acknowledge that interest in ‘the personal aspect of a thing’ may also be an admirable ability. Thus the traditional, obfuscating male/female dichotomy which separates and categorises reason and intuition according to gender is echoed in the narrative structure and in its discourses. Female life is colonial and its reality is its lack of knowledge, therefore of power, which is masculine. Women romanticise as a defence against these lacks, but romantic values, like female values, are denied by the male world. Women in this world are thereby doubly devalued. Abstracted from the ‘real’ world, the masculine world, they must nevertheless learn to live by its rules and values, while their stereotypical qualities of intuition and creativity are also derided. The lessons women must learn in The Getting of Wisdom, ones sometimes confirmed, sometimes denied by the author, are those disseminated and perpetuated by the conservative, patriarchal, puritanical, masculine Australian dogma. One of its central tenets is that to be female is not to get wisdom, not to be free, not to achieve.

This preliminary reading of two representative novels establishes a paradigm for a greater range of Australian women's fiction. As they are depicted in these women's novels, women's lives are consistently threatened, limited, exploited and made subordinate. These texts are characterised by structural irresolution, thematic ambiguity and shifting modes of discourse: all qualities which can be seen to derive from women's experience in a culture in which they are dehumanised. An interpretation of women's writing in relation to a specifically female social context allows a new critical perspective, described by Showalter as reading a ‘double-voiced discourse’, and resulting in a ‘radical alteration of vision’.¹⁸

In both My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom the heroines depict the difficulty of being a woman in a particular kind of Australian society. Each heroine has unspecified ambition, each values knowledge, and each questions her world and its expectation of women. Yet Laura and Sybylla struggle to conventionalise their differences, and live the kind of life demanded of women by their worlds. Each is finally denied the freedom, independence and power needed to achieve her potential. Laura's difference is sublimated in her fantasies, and allowed no valid expression in her everyday life. Sybylla is punished for her difference, condemned by fate, who is female, a ‘heartless harridan’ (p. 5) to a life of unremitting, unrewarding toil. Yet each text attempts to assert a resolution at the end, one which has not been allowed for in the strategies of its narrative. Miles Franklin seeks to reconcile her heroine with her larger social world, as she intones the masculine ideology of Australian nationalism, produced by the proletarian culture. Henry Handel Richardson propels Laura away from the constriction of petit-bourgeois female life, represented by the school. But the romantic metaphor of freedom is vaguely conceived, and denied by the knowledge of the text that within her own society Laura cannot escape her impending womanhood, which will surely confine and limit her.

My Brilliant Career and The Getting of Wisdom are inconsistent narratives whose confusion can be seen to originate in the position of women in masculine Australia, a position cogently expressed by Catherine in Christina Stead's novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney: ‘I've fought all my life for male objectives in a man's world … I fight so hard and suffer so much and get nowhere.’¹⁹ The fight can be made productive if as readers of Australian women's fiction we learn to recognise and interpret the voices of these problematical texts through an awareness of the curious cultural situation of the woman in Australia who pursues creative or intellectual endeavour. This situation can be established by way of two major premises and a conclusion, as follows. Australian society is masculine and patriarchal, and as an androcentric culture it denies the value of female life. It makes women objects or rejects them, producing an ideology of the female which is negative and limiting in all its aspects except one, that area of life which deals with imagination and emotion, which can be called creative life. Further, Australian society disparages the value of intellectual or creative life, mocking its thinkers and artists by labelling their activity non-masculine, thereby negating it. Women, then, can be creative, and the subjects of their fictions can be those the masculine culture devalues, but since as women they are alienated from their culture, to be a writer invites a double alienation.²⁰

This dual contradiction encourages a reading of Australian women's fiction which distinguishes in its thematic and formal structures those tensions and ambiguities which are the result of history, social attitudes and ideology. My argument does not assert that these qualities are exclusive only to female writers in Australia. It does propose, however, that they are more intense, differently produced, and perhaps sometimes more positive in women's fiction, since women in Australia have been accorded the potential for intellectuality and creativity by their society's ideological rejection. This may be the reason why a comparatively large proportion of major Australian literature is written by women.

Despite this debatable artistic freedom, the Australian woman who writes doubles the number of roles she must play which lack social and ideological sanction. As a woman she is endowed, stereotypically, with the potential for creativity. But as art is held in such low esteem by the Australian culture, the second-class condition of the female is not ameliorated if she is also a writer, but exacerbated. Not only her existence but her art is made insignificant by the masculine ideology.²¹ The unavoidable pressure this creates is then exhibited in her work through textual dislocations such as structural uncertainty and thematic irresolution. Narrative strategies are self-conscious, ambiguous, and often either aggressive or apologetic. This completes the critical model suggested in my introduction. Such a theory of reading will properly identify and focus the internalised uncertainty Australian women's writing inherits from dominant masculine attitudes, as well as the conflict which derives from and is produced by the repression or exclusion of women and art from Australian life. For without a sustaining or mediating ideology, Australian women's fiction must be ‘self-divided by the very contradictions it vulnerably reproduces’.²²

Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’ in Women and Writing (London: The Woman's Press, 1979), p. 43.

2. Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ in Critical Inquiry, 8, (Winter 1981), 197.

3. Here, culture is used in the anthropological sense of describing a particular way of life, including institutions and behaviour as well as literature and art.

4. Showalter, p. 202.

5. Numerous citations could be given here. Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958), is perhaps best known, while most recently Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) has described the history of Australian images and identity.

6. The background for my reading is largely drawn from Miriam Dixson's foundational study of the role and place of women in Australia between 1788 and 1975 (The Real Matilda, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

7. The paucity of historical annotation of women's lives in Australia is daunting, but a recent article, ‘Women's History’ by Kay Daniels in New History: Studying Australia Today, G. Osborne and W. F. Mandle, (eds.), (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1982) is an excellent summary of the available sources for this history. It provides descriptions of the various positions taken, and a spirited argument for a historiography of women in Australia. The form this will take is still unclear. Miriam Dixson's The Real Matilda and Anne Summers' Damned Whores and God's Police (both cited) are two of the first major works on Australian women's history.

8. Cited by Miriam Dixson, p. 115.

9. Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (Australia: Angus & Robertson Classics, 1974). All page references are to this edition.

10. Henry Handel Richardson, The Getting of Wisdom (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1977). All page references are to this edition.

11. A scholarly, feminist article, ‘Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career and The Female Tradition’, by Francis McInherney in A.L.S. [Australian Literary Studies], 9, (1980), 275-285 adopts this premise. While I cannot disagree with Ms McInherney's critical conclusions, our purpose and methodology are divergent.

12. It is interesting that A. G. Stephens implicitly criticises Lawson for his ‘womanish wail’, while Lawson himself apologises for it: ‘My Aunt said I should have been a girl’ he wrote. Cited by A. G. Stephens, ‘Lawson's Latest Book—A Temporary Adjustment 1901’, in John Barnes (ed.), The Writer in Australia 1856-1964 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 99. Further, and at the risk of sounding insistent, Joseph Furphy wrote to Miles Franklin, Shepparton, Aug 20—, in relation to his attention to My Brilliant Career: ‘Well, frankly, there's a lot of the average girl in it—just as there's a lot of quartz in the Great Boulder Reef’, in Joseph Furphy, J. Barnes (ed.), (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1981), p. 432.

13. Richard White is the most recent social historian to explain the basis for this exclusion, albeit cursorily, in Inventing Australia, op. cit., p. 83. See also Kay Daniels, pp. 32-50.

14. Woolf, op. cit., p. 47.

15. Judith Kegan Gardiner in ‘On Female Identity and Writing by Women’, Critical Inquiry, 8, (Winter 1981), 347-61, examines the importance of identity theory for both cultural and literary criticism.

16. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Summers' title establishes this Australian dichotomy.

17. This role choice derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition that women are either Liliths or Eves. But the Australian nomination of women which I have characterised as good sort or good woman is cruder and more demeaning than that of other cultures. As good sorts Australian women are abused as purveyors of immorality; as good women they are lauded as purveyors of morality; in both roles they are seen as the property of the acquisitive male world, therefore subject to it and denied individuality. There are, of course, numerous examples in Australian literature of female characters who try to establish an identity in male terms as a ‘mate’.

18. Showalter, p. 204.

19. Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971), p. 214.

20. Dorothy Hewett in ‘The Garden and the City’, Westerly, No. 4. (Dec. 1982), also refers to this: ‘But then the role of the woman writer is always doubly subversive in a predominantly male ethos. She thinks subversively by nature and experience, and she writes from that other country of spirit and physicality, which still remains, for us, largely uncharted’ p. 102.

21. Responding to a series of questions to do with her writing and influences upon it, Shirley Hazzard struggles to define Australian culture, and does so, significantly, by linking rejection of women and of ‘the arts’: ‘It may be that gender has to do with this—the arts, though forceful enough in their way, being (or being seen as) part of the “feminine” aspect of humanity; and for this reason lying under particular proscription in a country whose “maleness” was a matter for strident and even panic-stricken assertion; and whose derision of all artistic expression was not unconnected with derision of women as a sex’ (A.L.S., 10, Oct. 1981, 207).

22. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), p. 127.