by Anne Summers
What I think I succeed in is writing some big roles for women. These brilliant young men playwrights of ours haven’t done that yet. I guess it’s the frustrated actress in me – I’m writing roles I’d love to play. But all the actresses tell me my women’s roles are terrific. Well, we have to know how women think – and that’s what I’m trying to get across on stage.18
In The Chapel Perilous, Hewett has created a superb female character, one who does express the varying demands made upon a woman as she grows up and struggles against society’s proscriptions and its terrible retribution when she transgresses the boundaries within which women are supposed to reside contentedly. Sally Banner is no quiescent and compliant little girl. At school she tells a school mate, ‘I want to feel everything. To tell everything, to walk naked …’19 Later after she has defied the world, abandoned her husband and her child, joined the Communist Party and been betrayed by her lover – for whom she forsook everything – she tells the same woman:
I could never accept annihilation. The shadow of it lay over everything I did. My whole life has been a struggle to be identified with someone, something, anything that gave me even a brief sense of my own immortality. And yet I’ve always known, even when I struggled hardest, that annihilation was the end of it. Even when – no, especially when – I was wild with joy because I thought I’d found, even for a moment that immortal otherness at last.20
Inevitably Sally Banner fails, and in the conventional way. She becomes annihilated and absorbed by the tentacles of fame and fortune, and she curbs her anarchic instincts and, old age advancing, begins to conform to a subsidiary stereotype, that of the Famous Woman, winner of an OBE and donor of a stained-glass window to her old school chapel. Shortly before her capitulation to the forces that defeat her, she voices her own epitaph: ‘I had a tremendous world in my head and more than three-quarters of it will be buried with me’.21
What words from the mouth of an Australian woman! Here is a mere woman voicing an anguish that, from reading the books and plays of the last few decades, we would have thought was confined to men. For perhaps the first time in our literature, a woman has been permitted to express universal problems and not have them sound incongruous or pretentious.
Sally Banner is some 30 years later providing substance to balance that lopsided world that so disturbed Christina Stead’s Teresa Hawkins when she could find no written recognition of her internal turmoil:
At each thing she read, she thought, yes, it’s true, or no, it’s false, and persevered with satisfaction and joy, illuminated because her world existed and was recognised by men. But why no women? She found nothing in the few works of women she could find that was what they must have felt.22
It would be consoling to think that at last the tide was turning, that it was being recognised that women’s lives and ideas are as complicated, as disillusioning and as unresolved as men’s, and that The Chapel Perilous was simply the first wave of a new, integrated literature. But it was performed for two short seasons, seen by perhaps a few hundred people. It has had none of the delirious success of The One Day of the Year or Don’s Party, and has been noticed only by the devoted followers of new drama. Few of the women for whom it would be so rewarding have even heard of it and it is probably a sad truth that it will go the way of its few predecessors.
For there have been works, written by women, that have at least tried to portray an alternative existence to the cosy wife/mother stereotype, or have probed the discontent that so often accompanies the living out of this supposed ideal existence. But, remarkably, none of these books is known beyond small circles of searchers who, over several generations, have sought and clung to whatever books they could find that spoke to them in a language that approached their own needs and conflicts and depicted situations or quests that resembled theirs. Several processes have operated to censor the reading of generations of women for whom these books might have held out a small glimmer of hope that their alienation from the expectations of a crushing and suffocating society was not unique, and that therefore there was some possibility of transcending it.
Some of these books have been misinterpreted. Christina Stead was probably the first Australian woman in the post-realism era to begin to challenge the literary stereotype. Her books, principally For Love Alone and Seven Poor Men of Sydney, both of which are set in Sydney, were for years ignored by those who preside over syllabuses of Australian Literature courses at universities, just as the fact that she chose to live in England was deemed sufficient reason for not considering her an Australian writer. This fate was not extended to writers like Patrick White, Martin Boyd or George Johnston who similarly sought exile in climes more conducive to the requirements of their art.23 Stead’s virtues are now beginning to be recognised and her books are being re-issued in Australia and being read at universities, but there has been no critical recognition of one of her major contributions to Australian literature: her characterisation of women. Her prose style and poetic descriptions have received accolades, but her depiction of the turmoils experienced by young women growing up in a repressive Australian culture have gone unremarked upon except by those feminist teachers who, usually in adult education classes – outside these definitive university walls where status and standards are determined – have tried to redress the balance.
There have also been works by writers who, while being acknowledged for their other books, have found that those which concentrate on the fortunes of a beleaguered woman are steadfastly ignored. Kylie Tennant is a good example. She is well known for books such as The Battlers, Foveaux and Tell Morning This, all of which are powerful chronicles of communities, which contain perceptive portraits of women but where these are not the central concern of the novel. By contrast, her Ride on Stranger is somehow omitted from the list of her credentials; it figures in the bibliographies but it is seldom read or discussed. This book was published in 1943, three years before the first English-language translation of Camus’s L’Etranger (The Outsider) appeared. Its central character can be seen as forming a connecting link between Teresa Hawkins and Sally Banner. Shannon Hicks is an unwanted child, subject to ridicule for being called by her mother’s maiden name, jeered at by schoolteachers for wanting to be a lawyer (‘Why, there is only one thing for girls to do, and that is to grow up to be good wives and mothers. Isn’t that so?’).24 Doomed to wander relentlessly through a variety of social and political situations, never fully accepted because her rejection of the traditional female destiny, made her an alien and enigmatic figure; she is a rare female creation in Australian literature. Yet only one critic (a woman) has even recognised her:
I have written at this length on Shannon because there has been, among Australian reviewers and critics, a curious reluctance to believe in her, or to accept her. In America she was immediately acknowledged as interesting and significant, but it is hard not to form the impression, reading H. M. Green and T. Inglis Moore, the Bulletin reviewer, and others, that Australians in their understanding of feminine psychology have not caught up with Ibsen, let alone anything more modern; nor have they recognized that Shannon, as Stranger, is that figure, more typical than any other of our age, who stands outside society and whose solutions as presented in literature, have been among the main themes of serious writing in our time.25
Literary critics have no trouble identifying, and either decrying or ignoring, the standard feminist who pops up in so many Australian novels. She appears in varying guises in the work of Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack and in Kylie Tennant’s other novels: a women, usually unmarried, who is staunchly sceptical about men’s pretensions and is scornful of a male-constructed and male-run world. She is, however, usually a transparent figure, whose main function seems to be to provide propagandist light relief to the complexities of the other characters. Her continual appearance has not helped the creation of a clear tradition within our literature of writing seriously about women, of examining the many facets of their lives with the same inquiring c
oncern that is applied to men and to male psychology. Because she has been an underdeveloped character it has been too easy for the critics to pose her as the only alternative to current modes in men’s writing and to sneer at the possibility of a serious examination of women by a woman writer. Creations like Shannon Hicks are conveniently forgotten.26
There are some quite remarkable parallels between the career of Shannon Hicks and Emily Lawrence, the main female character in Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect. This book belongs to a third category in the processes by which these books about women have been suppressed. All of Harrower’s novels have been denied critical attention in Australia. The only article ever, to my knowledge, to have appeared about her work claimed that she
is a writer of remarkable stature in the current sense. Along with Patrick White, albeit of slighter range and power than Australia’s dominating literary genius, she stands head and shoulders above the current pack of sociological realists in the national novel … Barry Humphries may satirize the surface absurdities of the Australian norm; but Elizabeth Harrower has seen deep into the destructive core.27
Emily Lawrence in The Long Prospect, like Shannon Hicks and, incidentally, like Louisa Lawson and countless other Australian women whose names have never been recorded, suffers the pain and intellectual frustration of being denied books by the Philistines in whose charge she has been placed. Within a general Australian anti-intellectualism, women who harbour longings for a stimulating world between hardcovers suffer more because such abstract ardour is patently incompatible with the concrete demands of being a wife and mother. Intellectual women, that is to say women who translate their intelligence into carefully formulated opinions or Utopian longings, have been and remain objects to terrify men, even intellectual men (for their claim to merit is then not unique) and are automatically exiled from an easy friendship with other women. It is not easy to guess why literary representations of such women should prove similarly terrifying but this has been, apparently, the reason for their neglect.
Elizabeth Harrower must possess a very special strength and conviction to be able to continue to write her splendid books about women for a world that mostly fails even to acknowledge their existence.28 Other women have lacked her tenacity and, when their offerings have been ignored, have disappeared. There has been a string of works by young women who have never published again.29 A similar descent into anonymity also occurs with many young male writers and one cannot ever be certain of the reasons for a writer’s failure to publish a second book, but it is certainly the case that where there is no encouragement to pursue what is probably the hardest and loneliest of crafts; only the most stalwart and determined will persist.
There are particular difficulties for any woman who tries to combine being wife and mother with writing. She will have more domestic responsibilities and therefore less sheer time than the husband/father who writes. Good serious writing requires solitude and tranquillity. Many a male writer has a wife or mistress or some devoted person to cosset him, feed him, protect him from the telephone and other jangling intrusions of the outside world, to listen to his ideas (and often suggest many of them), type manuscripts and correct spelling, to soothe away despair and self-doubt, to convince him of the worth of his project. In short, to create and maintain the environment in which writing can be done. The traditional two-line acknowledgement: ‘To my wife, without whom etc…’ is a nauseatingly jejune recompense, which disguises what is often the absolute truth, as would rapidly become apparent if the slaves upon whose supportive psyches these books are written were to withdraw their services. The wives of writers contribute more than is ever acknowledged to the getting out of a book.
Similarly, the conflicts and double binds of the mother/wife/ writer are ignored by all but the overburdened women themselves. Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘Burning Sappho’ describes the frustration, anger and, finally, fury at the never-ending demands made by children, visitors and husband each time the poet/housewife takes up her pen to write.30 Charmian Clift recounted how her work suffered because of her other duties:
I knew by this time [1946] I was a writer and of course George [Johnston, her husband] encouraged me very much indeed. At this point I should have taken wings and started to fly but at this point also, of course, I was involved in having children, and for many years I had this dual thing, the frustrations that are inevitable with any creative person being tied and bound and at the same time struggling, beating one’s head against a wall to do what one wants to do. I think those are terribly difficult years for any young woman and for a young woman who wants to write or paint or anything else, even more so.31
But on top of the demands of motherhood, a woman is also a wife, and especially if her husband is involved in his own creative work, has other demands placed upon her. Clift remarks that her collaboration with Johnston in several novels was actually
a phony collaboration because I was beyond the stage where I could collaborate any longer. I wanted to do my own work in my own way. In any case, I didn’t have time because I was the one who had to learn the Greek and I was our interpreter and I was our cook, and I had this awful problem on my hands of two small children who were lost and bewildered and lonely in a foreign country, and it took about a year to adjust all that. Then I found that I was going to have another baby, and this plunged me back into a long long tunnel which I thought I’d just got clear of.32
When Clift’s work is compared to Johnston’s, it is always regarded as being slighter. Should we then take into account what it was that prevented her from attaining the heights that she herself probably aimed for but, because she put others and their needs before her own, could not reach? Those women writers who have been most prolific and most successful have always had the physical assistance of their husbands or of secretaries who did their typing and answered their telephones and generally played the kind of protective role that we are inclined to associate with being a wife. Both Kylie Tennant and Henry Handel Richardson had substantial help from their husbands in getting their books out and this must be seen as a factor in their success. Writers who are childless or who have not married are in an easier position in that less of their time will have to be spent in tending to other people’s needs. But it is a monstrous expectation that decrees that a woman should have to eschew some of the things she wants in order to have the others. Why should a woman have to sacrifice marriage and children, if these are what she desires, so that she may be a successful writer, while men need not make such a choice? The battle against physical or psychological disabilities is seen as semi-heroic when it occurs in a man. Scott Fitzgerald was pitied because of his wife’s diagnosed insanity: no wonder he took to drink, people said sympathetically. The New South Wales Government awarded Henry Lawson a literary pension while tacitly acknowledging that his alcoholism would prevent him from ever writing again. Allowances and concessions are made in such cases. They are made to the person if not to the art. It is recognised that the art is debilitated by these circumstances. What then of the woman for whom a comparable debilitation is virtually the premise of her existence? How can she be accommodated in a world that, almost by definition, requires a supportive individual and culture ?
The kind of criticism mounted in this section has begun to penetrate the consciousness of a number of men writers and some are beginning to make attempts to move away from using women as stereotyped props. These efforts constitute a change but it would be a mistake to conclude that a rash of Coralie Lansdownes is all that is needed. What is happening at present is the creation of a new stereotype, that of the ‘liberated woman’. The difference is that this stereotyped character is the main, or a central, figure rather than a prop but she remains a stereotype nevertheless. As such she is a projection of men’s fantasies, expectations or fears rather than a representation of a real person. Whether or not many men will be able to move away from merely updating their stereotypes and acquire the necessary insight and empathy to be able to create
female characters who crystallise the dilemmas of women today remains to be seen. But more importantly, until women writing about themselves is acknowledged as being as worthy an endeavour as either men writing about men or men writing about women, and men begin not only to read such writing but to treat it seriously, then an important part of my argument has not been met.
This does not yet appear to be happening. In the last few months (late 1974) a spate of new books by young Australian writers has been published and they have been extensively promoted by the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts. They have included three good works of fiction by women – Vicki Viidikas, Suzanne Holly Jones and Christine Townend. But while they have been given virtually the same amount of publicity as the men’s books, they have not received equal attention from the book review pages of newspapers nor have any of them been treated as seriously as literature as the books of Robert Adamson and Bruce Hanford, Michael Wilding, Peter Carey and others. The physical exclusion and critical neglect of women from Australian literature will persist until those things that impede women writers are recognised. Even if they are acknowledged, their erosion will not follow automatically, but this could be the beginnings of the process of redressing the solid male balance of this level of Australian culture.
CHAPTER TWO
Manzone country
We are in the terminal days of a sort of Menzies era of social criticism. But the new men of a new age are waiting on the sidelines. It won’t be long.
Max Harris, The Australian, 9 February 1974
The second ‘level’ of culture consists of theories and interpretations that intellectuals have devised to describe what they perceive as the quintessential elements of Australian life. For the most part these are – or used to be – expressed in semi-academic works or in journalistic essays, that enormous collection of commentaries that pile up annually.1 More recently they are also contained in those newspapers and magazines that set themselves up as critical commentators of either the entire corpus, or of some particular facet of Australian society. Both modes of articulating interpretations of Australian life have to be looked at here for it is important to gauge the extent of the self-professed radicalism of the latter. Certainly many of these little magazines or newspapers set themselves up in opposition to the bland theories of their intellectual fathers, but it is possible that the limits of their protest have been obscured by their flamboyant, seemingly iconoclastic style.