Representations of the Mother-Figure in the Novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark
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REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MOTHER-FIGURE IN THE NOVELS OF KATHARINE SUSANNAH PRICHARD AND ELEANOR DARK Jenny Noble Master by Research School of English The University of New South Wales 2005 Lovingly dedicated to my mother, my father, and my godmother ACKNOWLEGMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Bruce Johnson and A/Professor Sue Kossew from the School of English, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), for their unfailing support over more years than we originally anticipated. In particular, for their meticulous care in reading my work at various stages as it developed and for their accessibility in spite of their very busy teaching, supervising and research commitments. Their academic integrity and personal courage inspired me to persevere when ill-formed ideas and confused writing would not take shape. I would also like to thank Dr Peter Kuch for supervising me in the early stages of the thesis, Emeritus Professor Mary Chan for her insights and wise counsel, Dr Elizabeth McMahon for reading and evaluating early drafts and to the staff in the School of English for their interest and encouragement. I was very fortunate to be in the intellectual company of other postgraduate students during the research process, especially Julia Martin, Paul Allatson, Sarah Gleeson-White, Dave Coleman, Ian Collinson, Penny Ingram, Michael Lozinski and Justin Lucas. I remain deeply grateful for their generous support and humour. I would also like to acknowledge family and friends outside of the University who maintained a long-standing interest in this thesis, many of whom are ‘real’ mothers raising children in the material world. They include Shirley Gardner, Diana Trigg, Lucy McCarthy, Gwen McCarthy, Margaret Noble, Margo Trigg, Melanie and Laith Wark, Keren Kiel, Monica Froml, Jules Martin, Gaye Poole, Sheelagh Mahon, Anne Taylor, Ian McCulloch and Gavin Greenoak. To my husband Geoff Noble and our daughter Julia, thank you for your patience and love. Finally, I want to thank UNSW for granting me an Australian Postgraduate Award and for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for awarding me a Travel Grant to conduct research nationally and internationally. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 1-28 2. Section 1: Mothers of the Nation 29-35 Chapter 1 Working Bullocks (Katharine Susannah Prichard) 36-60 Chapter 2 Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard) 61-86 3. Section II: Mothers and Madness 87-93 Chapter 3 Prelude to Christopher (Eleanor Dark) 94-111 Chapter 4 The Little Company (Eleanor Dark) 112-123 4. Section III: Mothers and Ideology 124-132 Chapter 5 The Goldfields Trilogy 133-146 The Roaring Nineties (Katharine Susannah Prichard) Golden Miles (Katharine Susannah Prichard) Winged Seeds (Katharine Susannah Prichard) Chapter 6 The Timeless Land Trilogy 147-164 The Timeless Land (Eleanor Dark) Storm of Time (Eleanor Dark) No Barrier (Eleanor Dark) 5. Conclusion 165-167 6. Bibliography 168-185 Abstract This thesis argues that through bringing together two branches of inquiry—the literary work of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark and socio-feminist theory on health, contagion and the female body—the discursive body of the mother-figure in their novels serves as a trope through which otherwise unspoken tensions—between the personal and the political, between family and nation and between identity and race in Australian cultural formation—are explored. The methodology I use is to analyse the literary mother-figure through a ‘discourse on health’ from a soma-political, socio-cultural and historical perspective which sought to categorise, regulate and discipline women’s lives to ensure that white women conformed to their designated roles as mothers and that they did so within the confines of marriage. The literary mother-figure, as represented in Prichard’s and Dark’s novels, is frequently at odds with the culturally constructed mother-figure as represented in political and religious discourses, and in popular forms of culture such as advertising, film and women’s magazines. This culturally constructed ‘ideal’ mother-figure is intimately linked to nationalist discourses of racial hygiene, of Christian morality, and of civic and social order controlled by such patriarchal institutions as the state, the church, the law and the medical professions during the period under review. This is reflected in Prichard’s and Dark’s inter-war novels which embody unresolved tensions in a way that challenges representations of the mother-figure by mainstream culture. However, their post-war novels show a greater compliance with nationalist ideologies of the good and healthy mother-figure who conforms more closely with an idealised notion of motherhood, leading up to the 1950s. Through a detailed analysis of the two writers’ changing representations of the mother-figure, I argue that the mother-figure is a key trope through which unspoken tensions and forces that have shaped (and continue to shape) Australian culture and society can be understood. INTRODUCTION This thesis analyses representations of the mother-figure in the novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark, published between 1926 and 1953. To date, these representations have not been the subject of a sustained textual analysis that focuses on the maternal body within the context of Australian literature. In some of these novels the writers’ representations of the mother-figure are completely aligned with contemporary nationalist ideologies, reinforced through popular forms of culture such as advertising, film and women’s magazines which identify women and femininity with the maternal body and domesticity. These ideologies claim that women are ‘born’ to be mothers, are ‘naturally’ domestic and conserving of virtuous, ordered lives. This culturally constructed mother-figure is the embodiment of health and wholesomeness, fulfilling her reproductive role in a young nation preoccupied with white women bearing children. In other novels, however, the writers’ representations resist these ideologies. These literary mother-figures are shown to refuse to conform to a constraining model of ‘maternal’ goodness and health; at times even flaunting the role of outcast, victorious in their defiance of ‘feminine’ purity and restraint. Through bringing together two branches of inquiry—the literary commentary on Prichard and Dark and socio-feminist theory on health, contagion and the female body—I argue that the discursive body of the mother-figure in these novels serves as a trope through which otherwise unspoken tensions—between the personal and the political, between family and nation and between identity and race in Australian cultural formation—are explored. The methodology I use is to analyse the literary mother-figure through a ‘discourse on health’ from a soma-political, socio-cultural and historical perspective. By a discourse on health I mean the way in which the female body is represented and positioned in society according to contemporary markers of ‘health’. These include a woman’s maternal role in nation building, her fertility, her sexual behaviour, her race, her physical appearance, her marital status and her domestic ability to ‘scientifically’ manage her own body, her family and the home. Thus, the discourse on health, with its signifiers of purity and pollution, order and disorder, its interest in bodies and boundaries, its anxieties around signs of difference, and concerns with social control through the segregation and regulation of female bodies and behaviours, forms the framework for analysing the mother-figure in the novels. Women’s bodies have been coopted by prevailing ideologies over time but in an emerging nation like Australia in the early twentieth century, it was considered crucial that the declining birth rate amongst white Australians be addressed by encouraging white women to have more children. Federation in 1901 evoked a conscious sense of nationalism—with its attendant racism—and modernity. The ‘health’ of the nation depended on white women mothering and managing their bodies to fulfil their reproductive role. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the decline of the birthrate in Australia focuses on the female—not the male—body and equates a woman’s desire to restrict fertility with decadence, degradation and moral deterioration. A reading of the transcript from the 1904 Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the Mortality of Infants in New 2 South Wales, highlights a woman’s ‘dislike of the interference with pleasure and comfort involved in child-bearing and child-rearing’ and ‘[a] desire to avoid the actual physical discomfort of gestation, parturition, and lactation’, not to mention ‘[a] love of luxury and of social pleasures, which is increasing’.1 The Report concludes, based primarily on the evidence of male clinicians and the clergy, that it is a woman’s selfishness that needs disciplining if white Australia is to prosper. Subjection and control of the unruly feminine are clearly identified as solutions to Australia’s reproductive problems. The questions being asked through official political processes such as the 1904 Royal Commission are what characterises a ‘healthy’ woman and what kind of woman would best embody the maternal values sought in Australia’s female citizens to safeguard society. With the increasing medicalisation of motherhood in western nations in the early twentieth century, ‘scientific’ theories defined what it meant to be a healthy and good woman in a nation concerned with the health of its