by Anne Summers
Mary Gilmore’s seemingly inexplicable actions are perhaps an excellent illustration of the endemic insecurities of women writers who seek recognition for their work. Because they have no tradition of their own to identify with – and which could legitimate their achievements – they are forced to try to identify with standards devised by men. This entails self-abnegation and leads to a form of schizophrenic insecurity. I later discuss how Henry Handel Richardson resolved this dilemma. Perhaps Mary Gilmore tried to gain recognition and respect from the definers of the male tradition by claiming that some of its notable contributions were in fact inspired by her, thereby insisting that she was entitled to some share of the accolades these men writers received.
The other women writers of this turn-of-the-century period, those who did not care to participate in the nation-building literary frenzy, concentrated on chronicling social life in the cities or else clambered into sheer fantasy. Ada Cambridge became a perspicacious observer of the manners of Melbourne middle-class society and applied a gentle wit and a mild irony to its pretensions and hypocrisies. Rosa Campbell-Praed discarded any pretensions to critical accolades and created superb if implausible heroines who dashed all over the country, achieving extraordinary feats though usually ending up with a suitable male companion. A revealing feature of her writings was her proclivity for having her female characters dispense with weak, cowardly or uninteresting men and take up, legally or otherwise, with more exciting characters. She had a marvellous, if unconventional, romantic strain, one that was definitely at odds with the current literary tradition even though it generally used its settings and even some of its themes. Neither she nor Cambridge nor any of the bevy of women who wrote novels at this time are remembered by any but literary historians or they are rediscovered every generation or so by the curious woman who, searching for some reference point for her own restlessness, digs into the past.
The novels of these women were not great works, but they are as competent as those of Boldrewood, Rudd, Louis Stone and many other men whose works are still read. These women and their works have not been absorbed into the tradition for the tradition was a rigid one, preoccupied with men’s lives, searching for epochal dimensions and thereby forced to turn to the vast remoteness of the outback, a location that, as we have seen, offered little scope for women. There was no alternative tradition to which women could contribute and they were evidently unable, or did not see the need, to try and create a workable alternative for themselves.
Those women who wanted recognition of their literary creations had to crash through from the domestic dramas or the romantic escapades of their contemporaries into the universe of men; once there, they were accepted only inasmuch as they conformed to the standards and preoccupations these men had defined. Their situation was therefore precarious and almost invariably dishonest, for by conforming to men’s ideals they were denying something in themselves. They were sublimating their own needs and their own experiences while vicariously contributing to those of men. Occasionally they would be true to themselves and, as in Mary Gilmore’s poem ‘Mother’, some of their real feelings would be permitted to emerge, but too much of this was condemned as self-indulgent. So they invariably circumscribed themselves to avoid being classed, crucified and condemned as women writers, for the common judgement of their literary products was resoundingly denigratory. According to the Bulletin at the time, ‘… feminine literature consists largely of that inane drivel of monthly journals, in which fifth-rate writers gush in pages of weltering stupidity about coroneted heroes, noblemen of impossible elegance, and demi-gods from the Upper House of the British Legislature’.12
That writers who were female felt this kind of sexist criticism to impede their creative efforts was demonstrated by the delineator of the second colonial literary tradition, Henry Handel Richardson. She is the classic example of a woman being forced to deny self in order to pursue her craft unimpeded. She was determined to conceal her sex until her reputation was established, a task that took four novels and 21 years. In using a male pseudonym, Ethel Richardson was acquiring a basic form of self-protection, which a great many women writers, including the Bronte sisters, George Eliot and George Sand, felt compelled to have. But while these masquerades gave women the freedom to write as they wished, their maintenance often entailed the price of psychic schizophrenia or even loss of fixed identity. This was Richardson’s tragedy, for by the time she was writing, the novel was concerned with psychological explorations. Her novels were in many respects autobiographical, but in order to write about herself and still conceal her female identity she was obliged to assume a male persona and thereby move into a limbo of self-assigned androgyny in which honest self-exploration was virtually impossible.13 Androgynous self-identification is nowadays advocated by some people as a means of negating sexist categorisation, and Virginia Woolf argued in 1928 that the great creative mind was necessarily androgynous14, but neither argument can accommodate the dilemma of Richardson.
Denial of one’s sex is not equatable with having the profound insight necessary to be able to portray characters of either sex. There is a range of universal human emotions, responses and yearnings that both sexes experience, but these are mediated by the usual cultural situation of each sex, which has a determining influence on the actual experience. So long as social differentiation between the sexes remains, a writer who denies this, for self or for created characters, is in danger of overlooking decisive areas of human activity. Shakespeare, as Woolf suggests, may have had an androgynous mind, but it was not necessary for him to repudiate his male identity. Richardson’s masquerade was forced upon her by the common practice of critics applying sexist and demeaning judgements to the writings of women. She was a fugitive from discriminatory treatment and sought to solve the resulting problems for her work by writing about women as a man. She did this so skilfully in the novel about her schooldays, The Getting of Wisdom, that no-one suspected that the young Laura Rambowtham was a self-portrait. But once out of the realm of reminiscence her difficulties became manifold and were reflected in her major work, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. She was obliged to transpose her own cultural and psychic alienation onto Mahony, a man, and as convention demanded, to portray him as married to a rather prosaic Australian wife. The critical result was inescapable: Mary Mahony became equated with the pedestrian Australian culture that impeded Richard Mahony’s soaring imagination and Richardson was responsible for, if not creating, then at least providing a powerful reinforcement to the idea that women as wives are impediments to male self-realisation. Since Australian society has not permitted women to be anything else, this literary creation became yet another of the cultural dead-weights denying women individuality and self-determination.
In striving for her own independence but failing to realise that such a battle cannot be a solitary one if real gains are to be made, Richardson achieved success within the male literary world; but it was a tawdry victory for it contained within it the denial of the intrinsic merit of female creativity. Richardson played the game by the male rules, denying herself the opportunity to explore her own specifically female experiences and thereby perpetuating the prejudice that women’s experiences are unworthy material for a national literary tradition.
Although Australian literature has undergone several innovations since the colonial period, there has been no alteration in the pattern of excluding women. The definitive trends have all been totally preoccupied with male experiences, and where women have been included as subjects, their presence has always been to serve some symbolic or ideological purpose. They may be props, or sounding boards for the central male characters, or they reappear, with the monotonous regularity of the weekly wash, as stereotyped and passive suburban housewives. Those later writers whose style is a Nietzschean rejection of the democratic realism of colonial literature all tend to equate women with life itself and, making heavy use of the symbolic possibilities of the womb and its mysterious cycles and life-nurturing pote
ntialities, invest in their female characters a capacity for transporting men, through sexual intercourse, out of the pedestrian realms of everyday life into a timeless and spirit-rejuvenating territory. This means of evading having to cope with women as unique and diverse individuals, reducing them instead to a sexist conglomerate, has been used by Patrick White and AD Hope, the two ‘grand old men’ of Australian letters. In his study of sex and nature in modern poetry, John Docker argues that for Hope, woman, a universal category, is an object or process for the artist-male to explore, and that she is used by Hope as an ideological end for himself.15
White uses women in a similar way. In The Vivisector two of the female characters, the prostitute Nance Lightfoot and Hero Pavloussi, the artist-hero’s Greek mistress, are depicted as the embodiments of ‘life’. White employs the dualistic device of dividing life and, in this case, women into two opposing categories. Good and evil are personified into two characters, in very much the same way as, this book argues, Australian women have been subjugated by stereotyped cultural impositions. But White also uses women in the way Richardson used Mary Mahony, to represent suburban stultification. In his play A Season at Sarsaparilla White has the three housewives speaking identical lines simultaneously, implying that women, at least in their housewife roles, can be reduced to a composite configuration, which allows them no means of individual expression. Their husbands on the other hand, dreary as they might be, at least retain a semblance of individuality even if it is only by virtue of their having different jobs. The models presented by this literature, White and Hope being examples of an almost ubiquitous tendency in 20th-century post-realist writing, offer no hope to women. They are presented with the alternatives of trying to be Nature incarnate to enable their jaded lovers to reach back into a pre-technological past, and thus of living at a level of pure biological capacity; or of submitting to aimless anonymity as housewife slaves. The Aunt’s Story is a cautionary tale for women who are disinclined to follow either route: exiled to a joyless Gehenna of unfulfilled sexual fantasy and frustration, the single woman who has no bodily contact with men is an amputated anthropoid, lacking that penetration by the penis that will complete her humanity.
A similar preoccupation with stereotyped females, and their use for the working out of male dilemmas, appears in the writings of younger men, showing that their revolt against the old men is one of form rather than substance. Although he shows a little more sympathy for the psychic deadlock resulting from female socialisation, Frank Moorhouse retains much of the methodology of the Nietzscheans: he implants in his female characters those qualities that he wants to contrast with those possessed by the male protagonist. These are usually mysticism, or other forms of irrationality, sexual prudery or simple lack of imagination and innovation in social relations. The same themes recur in Moorhouse as were seen in all our literature except that here they are, by virtue of the modernity of the settings and situations and the pretensions of some of the characters, seemingly in discontinuity with what went before.
At a time when Australian playwrights are subjecting the institution of mateship to some trenchant criticism, Moorhouse is affirming a variety of male comradeship which, while it possesses a self-awareness and is more intellectually based than the digger variety, is nevertheless posed as an alternative to the threatening ubiquitousness of women. In The Girl who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris16 three beleaguered males sit around and pun about a retreat into buggery to escape the aggressive retribution of two feminist women. Moorhouse depicts a variety of women who are individualistic, non-conformers or otherwise set apart from the female stereotype, but their presence serves to make the conflict resolution or ironic self-parody of the hero more impressive: the women still function as props around which the central concerns, which invariably involve only male self-preservation, are explored.
Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll began what has become a central concern with Australian male writers of plays: a critical examination of mateship. Plays like The Back-room Boys, White with Wire Wheels, Rooted and Don’s Party have all explored the fragility of the bonds that men still affirm as precious and indissoluble, and a secondary concern with all of these works has been the detrimental effect on relations between the sexes that retention of the myth has. Olive, in The Doll is portrayed as a hopelessly romantic irrational female who is content to sublimate her desire for children in almost idolatrous attachment to the gaudy kewpie dolls that Roo brings her from Queensland each year; she rejects the security of marriage in order to retain an idealised attachment to the independent male who renews his masculinity afresh each year by his seven-month confrontation with nature in the cane fields. Olive sees her role as being to sustain Roo’s illusions about his masculinity especially as he gets older and is challenged by younger men; Roo compliantly accepts, even demands, this role. He does not ‘womanise’ while up north, unlike his philandering mate, Barney, because his identity is secured by Olive’s idealised devotion. But their relationship is glass-brittle; the fantasised life of the lay-off season cannot endure into old age and declining physical strength. Roo expects Olive to provide the traditional female qualities of succour and emotional protection when he meets his existential crisis. But all he can offer her is marriage, something she had had to reject 17 years before in order to play out his attenuated summer games. When she rejects his rejection of her 17 years of self-sacrifice he deserts her, the rifts between Roo and Barney healed by a mutual hostility towards women. Lawler allows the women in his play only the slightest range of possible lifestyles and identities. His work is an affirmation of the retreat into male solidarity being possible even if, as Barney says, ultimately they will be both ‘left in the cold’. Lawler does not dare even suggest what will happen to Olive, left to sink hopelessly among the smithereens of the 17th doll.
Drama perhaps even more than literature is able to create characters whose quintessential representation of a contemporary issue or dilemma secures their absorption into a culture, so that subsequently the mere mention of the name of that character becomes a kind of shorthand for referring to a particular situation or set of personal problems. Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is such a character and so were several of Ibsen’s creations.
In recent Australian drama, Alf and Hughie Cook in The One Day of the Year have come to symbolise the clash between the values of the old Australian ‘digger’ mentality and those of the newly educated postwar rising middle class, a battle typically fought out between two males: father and son. No such enduring female character has emerged from contemporary Australian drama.
The women who do appear serve dramatic functions in relation to the main conflict, which is always between the men. Jan Castle, the girl from the North Shore in Seymour’s play, is the agent for the brutal attack on the brash cockiness of the working-class Australian and is portrayed as a snob and a bitch, but we are given no insight into her conflicts, into what attracted her to Hughie the working-class boy at university. She is a shallow, virtually faceless persona, a stereotype that serves a useful dramatic function but offers no comment on the problems of a girl trying to escape her family and the particular demands of her social class.
Similarly the wives in David Williamson’s play Don’s Party serve mainly as props to the central male characters. Certainly Williamson has gone beyond Seymour; his female characters are two-dimensional and we are given some notion of their failed aspirations and their present self-hatred and despair. Part of the point of the play is to delineate the extent to which the fragile egos of Don and his ‘mate’ have been cossetted and sustained by their long-suffering wives, the bearers of the brunt of the illusions and self-deceptions of their husbands; but the audience’s sympathies are directed towards the men.
The consequences of this are two-fold. Firstly, there have been no noteworthy or memorable female characters created who exist outside, or who challenge, the God’s Police stereotype of Australian womanhood. It is surprising
that no playwright has utilised the rich dramatic possibilities of the alternative stereotype. We would still be dealing in cultural constructs rather than real people, but the possibility of variety from the claustrophobia of a single option might open the way to further change. The reason the Whore stereotype has been neglected seems to confirm my thesis about male writers: the women usually depicted by this stereotype are independent, self-assertive creatures who do not need men and would therefore be poor material for a man needing a character against which to contrast his own dilemmas. And so Australian women are not presented with a viable alternative to the stereotype. Nor is there even a reasonably complex working out in any of the recent Australian plays, which have been seen by mass audiences around the country, of the demands, conflicts and disappointments of what it is like to try and live in accordance with that stereotype. Secondly, the result has been that there are virtually no rewarding parts for Australian actresses in indigenous drama. A newspaper interview with actresses from the Melbourne Pram Factory gave voice to their discontent in this respect: ‘Their complaints centre round the scarcity of parts for women in many plays currently being written. A quick glance over recent APG programs reveals three major productions without a single female part: Oakley’s Beware of Imitations, and The Feet of Daniel Mannix; and Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination’.17
The single exception to this would seem to be the character of Sally Banner created by Dorothy Hewett in The Chapel Perilous. Hewett has said of her work: