My Brilliant Career Themes
The main themes in My Brilliant Career are poverty and labor, education and the arts, and marriage and women’s freedom.
- Poverty and labor: Franklin emphasizes the toll that poverty and labor take on her working-class characters, who must constantly struggle to make ends meet.
- Education and the arts: Sybilla is enlivened by her access to education and the arts at Caddagat and is crushed when she must leave it behind to care for the M’Swat children.
- Marriage and women’s freedom: Sybilla rebels against society’s expectations of women by rejecting marriage and aspiring to become a writer.
Poverty and Labor
Franklin highlights the stultifying effects of poverty and labor on her characters. When the Melvyn family moves to ’Possum Gully, they begin dairying, and Sybylla’s first-person narration describes the myriad tasks associated with raising cattle. One chapter focuses on the procedure of “lifting” cattle when they have grown exhausted. For two summers, there is a severe drought, paired with extreme heat, and the cattle struggle to stay upright. They must be lifted by a complicated and cumbersome process. Sybylla tells of farmers’ “great struggling” to lift the cattle, repeating the phrase “Weariness! Weariness!” while detailing the physical pains they suffer. Beyond the bodily consequences, Sybylla feels deadened by the monotony of farm work. In the end, all of their work comes to naught, as most of the cattle die anyway. The drought and heat, therefore, have the family “on our beamends financially,” and combined with Dick’s alcoholism and irresponsibility, the Melvyns descend deeper into abject poverty.
Early in the text, Sybylla seeks to overturn the notion “that poverty does not mean unhappiness.” She goes on to list all of the simple things those who are poor cannot have, like “a stamp to write to a friend” or “reading and music.” Instead, people are “force[d] . . . into doing work against which every fiber of their being revolts.” Under such circumstances, she claims, people cannot possibly be happy. She has not only her direct experience with the drudgery of working-class life to support her beliefs, but also the number of “tramps” she witnesses traveling through Caddagat. When she considers the many squatters and people in need that she helps her grandmother serve, Sybylla wonders, “In a wide young country, of boundless resources, why is this thing?” She does not understand why lawmakers seem to refuse to solve the problems of class inequality in Australia. Later, she is disgusted by the squalor and lack of refinement in the M’Swat household, though she claims to not see herself as above the family; she considers it noble that they are able to survive and remain good-natured despite their conditions.
To close the novella, Franklin speaks to her “sunburnt brothers” and “sisters . . . Daughters of toil,” praising them for their uncomplaining dedication to struggle in all its many forms. She comments, “Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, closer, tighter, tighter around you; a few more generations and you will be as enslaved as were ever the moujiks of Russia.” Despite her love for Australia, Franklin recognizes that the wealth gap is only widening and that those in the laboring class will only continue to suffer more as the years trudge on.
Education and the Arts
For a young woman like Sybylla, it is not simply the literal fact of poverty that crushes her soul; rather, it is the contrast between what she wants for her life and what she can expect to actually experience. Sybylla laments that she has had “nothing but peasant surroundings and peasant tasks, [which] have encouraged peasant ignorance.” She argues that only those who are ignorant can be content under such conditions. She, on the other hand, experiences “wild passionate longing” to learn and to express herself through writing. To be a woman destined to exist on the bare minimum but to also aspire and yearn for knowledge and stimulation is the crux of Sybylla’s discontent.
Early in the novella, Sybylla expresses her need to write as a means of relieving her overstimulated brain. She is even willing to ignore the physical exhaustion of a day’s work on the dairy farm, as well as how tired she will...
(This entire section contains 466 words.)
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be the next day, in order to steal writing time in the evenings. She is able to briefly enjoy the pleasures of literature, visual art, and music when she stays with Grannie and Aunt Helen in Caddagat. As she enters Grannie’s house, Sybylla sees “three things for which I had been starving [pictures on the walls, books, and a piano]. An impulse to revel in them immediately seized me.” The way Franklin describes Sybylla’s desire for artistic and intellectual stimulation as starvation suggests how strongly she needs these outlets. When she must leave Caddagat to teach the M’Swat children, she is devastated to leave these marvelous resources, which, along with a more leisurely existence, have comprised the best time of her life: one in which she felt she could freely enjoy the arts.
Ultimately, Sybylla learns that the life of a peasant and the life of the mind are mostly antithetical. She recalls how her parents were once patrons of the arts but now, having “no use for them, had lost interest therein.” Though they once loved literature, they actively “discourage” Sybylla from exploring such “frivolous” pursuits. It is preached to her daily “that the little things of life were the noblest.” She is taught to endure and accept. Even aunt Helen, who lives in much more comfortable circumstances than her sister Lucy, reiterates that lesson to Sybylla when she protests her assignment at Barney’s Gap with the M’Swats. Being around people who are content to remain ignorant is intolerable to Sybylla. Though Franklin did eventually have a writing career, Sybylla equates her longing to publish her work with “Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive Hope . . . [that one day] my dream life would be real.” By the end of the novella, Sybylla seems convinced that her circumstances will prevent her from achieving her dream.
Marriage and Women’s Freedom
Her desire to become a writer sets Sybylla apart from the other women of her community in late 1890s Australia; however, it is her antipathy toward marriage that makes her truly rebellious. When Grannie writes to Sybylla’s mother to express concern for the girl, she highlights how important it is that Sybylla marry well. She worries that “she may be in danger of forming ties beneath her” if she were to stay in ’Possum Gully during her teenage years. Sybylla reflects that Grannie is “of the good old school, who believed that a girl’s only proper sphere in life was marriage.” Though she is not surprised at her grandmother’s priorities, Sybylla herself is completely against the idea of marrying: “I determined never, never, never to marry.” More than one man expresses interest in marrying Sybylla when she is at Caddagat, but it is only Harold Beecham whom she even considers. When Uncle Julius notices her flirtations with Harold, though, she tells him, “I never intend to marry. . . . I wish you would get me something to do, a profession that will last me all my life, so that I may be independent.” Her freedom from any and all constraints is the most important thing to Sybylla. She fears that marriage would be a “yoke” that would chain her to her husband.
When Harold proposes, then, it is surprising that Sybylla accepts a temporary engagement with conditions. Even before they are officially engaged, Harold grows jealous of Sybylla’s flirtation with other men, which only proves her suspicion that marriage would mean that she would belong to Harold. She does not want to accept the ring he offers, because it would make them “irrevocably engaged,” but she eventually takes it anyway. Sybylla blames “the social laws” that decree “a woman’s sphere is marriage.” Time and again, Harold and her family members are appalled that she spurns the idea of marrying a man with property and money, as if those are the only concerns that could determine her happiness. By the end of the novella, Sybylla must turn Harold down one last time, simply saying, “I do not mean ever to marry.” For Sybylla, it is the institution of marriage itself and all that it connotes that makes it impossible for her to acquiesce to such a union.