Representations of the Mother-Figure in the Novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark

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 citizens and society while apprehensive about the threat of contagion on several levels. Keeping the nation secure from a perceived external Asian threat, from the fear of internal inter-racial ‘contamination’, and from political and socio-cultural challenges occurring with the rise of modernity and the Woman’s Movement, impacted on the female body. ‘Policing’ women’s bodies to reflect their social roles, especially the role of mother, placed stricter controls on the behaviour of women in an era of greater scientific scrutiny of the female body and domestic space. As a consequence, the construction of the ideal mother-figure, with an emphasis on health and purity, was pivotal not only to the bourgeois family but also to serving the interests of the dominant ruling class as it sought to maintain an homogeneous ordered society while shaping a young Australia.

1 Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the Mortality of Infants in New South Wales: Volume I (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer, 1904) 17.

Structure

The structure of this thesis reflects a thematic approach to the texts. I argue that, particularly in the novels written during the social and political upheavals of the inter-war years, Prichard and Dark reveal the mother-figure to be a site of instability and dissidence which subverts nationalist constructions of motherhood. National narratives of imperialism, war, depression, capitalism, and indigene/settler relationships with the land are interleaved with the various representations of the mother-figure. Whereas the mother-figure disturbs concepts of order and unity in Prichard's and Dark's earlier texts, this is not the case in the writers' later trilogies. In the trilogies, the mother- figures are represented as symmetrical and unified, serving the greater political and historical causes. The two novels which foreshadow this change (Prichard's Intimate Strangers and Dark's Waterway) signal the transition from concerns with a more personal focus to those directly addressing Australian politics and history.

Thus, the thesis is divided into three sections in order to explore specific themes contained within the texts through the mother-figure trope. Within these sections, the theme of maternal resistance, evident in the writers' earlier novels (written between the two world wars with the exception of one novel, The Little Company, started in 1941 and published in 1945), changes to one of greater compliance in the writers’ trilogies (written after WWII, with the exception of one volume). When the maternal body as represented in these texts is viewed through a discourse on health, what becomes clear is that these literary texts reflect attitudes towards the mother-figure that were prevalent in society at the time. That is, that resistance is seen to be unhealthy, and dis-ordered in the mother- figure compared to compliance which is viewed as healthy and feminine and wholly aligned with the socially sanctioned model of motherhood.

Section I analyses the mother-figure in relation to motherhood and the nation in Katharine Susannah Prichard's Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929). The theme of contamination and the feminine is explored through the way in which white women are positioned as ‘mothers of the nation’, as members of a ‘sex’ rather than as citizens with equal rights to men. White mother-figures who subvert this position are either feared for their strength and independence or are viewed as ‘unnatural’; ‘contaminating’ of accepted socio-cultural values. The black mother-figure is represented as sex object and servant by those same values, victimized and abused because of her desirability and because she ‘contaminates’ a ‘healthy’ white Australia.2 The racial tensions and disease are played out over the body of the black mother-figure. Both these novels are set in isolated rural communities and throughout the novels the theories and philosophy of European intellectuals are interwoven with the storyline. Emancipated from the Law of the Father (Marx, Jung), the two aging

2 I use the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ in certain places in the thesis rather than the more acceptable current terms, indigenous/non-indigenous, in keeping with Prichard’s and Dark’s own usage. Both writers refer to their Aboriginal characters by their fictional names and by race, as well as using the descriptors

but powerful matriarchs (Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks and Mrs Bessie Watt in Coonardoo), find themselves autonomous but alienated within their own culture. They are both represented as virile women, containing a double gender role which is represented as powerful, but destructive. These representations demonstrate that matriarchy, too, can breed tyrants and that any form of power can lead to excess. Representations of the settler and indigenous mother-figure in Coonardoo explicitly invite a Jungian analysis of these representations. Where the white male protagonist is described in the novel as fit and clean-living, his relationship with the black mother- figure is violent in the extreme. Coonardoo is defiled and debased in what remains for me one of the most graphic depictions of black/white relations in Australian literature, despite the passage of time since its publication.

Section II explores the motif of motherhood and madness. I investigate this theme through the analysis of two of Eleanor Dark's novels, Prelude to Christopher (1934) and The Little Company (1945). In the first novel, the politics of white middle-class motherhood are intertwined with the subject of eugenics through the character of Linda Hendon, a scientist herself who is married to a medical doctor who is an enthusiastic believer in eugenics. Linda is not a mother but she longs to bear children and does fall pregnant but miscarries. Her husband, however, considers her ‘unfit’ to mother because of his ‘medical’ assessment of her genetic history. Through the intersection of motherhood, eugenics and feminist politics, the novel explores how the cultural construction of motherhood impacted on women who transgressed its rigid boundaries. In the second novel, this ideal is shattered through a representation of the good and devoted mother-figure who is now a cultural anachronism. Phyllis Massey is a self-deceiving and fearful character who is incapable of adapting to rapid social changes taking place around her. Both of these mother-figures are represented as bad and mad and neither survives within the world of the narrative.

Section III, the final section in this thesis, explores Prichard's The Goldfields Trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948 and Winged Seeds, 1950) and Dark's The Timeless Land Trilogy (The Timeless Land, 1941; Storm of Time, 1948 and No Barrier, 1953). The mother-figures in both trilogies are brave and good women who serve the greater historical and political cause either on the goldfields at the turn of the twentieth century or in establishing the colony of New South Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Prichard's trilogy becomes increasingly didactic as the subject of socialism dominates both character and storyline even though Sally Gough, the resilient and generous mother-figure continues to carry the narrative and remain central to it. By comparison, Dark's trilogy is more nuanced historically and politically. Australia's first colony was established against a background of nineteenth-century liberalism based on a ‘man-made’ dream of equity, a dream which excluded other voices and different cultures. Thus, although white middle- class mother-figures are obedient and worthy women, and are the main focus in terms of mother-

‘native’ and ‘black’. Their non-Aboriginal characters are referred to in a similar way interchanging ‘white’ with ‘colonist’ and ‘native-born’.

figures, Dark also explores, through the body of the indigene, the convict and the servant mother- figure, those fault lines of race, class and gender.

Australian literature, of the quality produced by women writers such as Prichard and Dark in the first half of the twentieth century, starts to decline around the time the last volumes of the trilogies are being published. Modjeska argues that women writers were undoubtedly ‘producing the best fiction of the period’ in the inter-war years.3 But as Australian society turns away from radical politics and towards cultural conformity and social conservatism at the end of WWII, women in general, but the mother-figure especially, are excluded from the locus of pragmatic public agency. The trilogies bear witness to this lack of agency. Even though these novels are rarely included in a discussion of the writers' work (with the exception of Dark's first volume, The Timeless Land), and they are no longer in print, I consider the trilogies are significant because the mother-figure trope continues to operate as a site of transition in zones of contestation. Even though the trilogies do not engage with the social context as it relates to motherhood, they draw attention to the maternal embodiment of power and oppression which, I argue, reflects the situation of many white middle- class Australian mother-figures in the post war period of the 1940s and and the 1950s when the trilogies were written.

The theoretical field

While I acknowledge theories of motherhood (including references to the work of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir and Nancy Chodorow), this thesis is not about the theory or practice of motherhood per se. Rather, this thesis seeks to re-evaluate representations of the mother-figure in Australian literature written in the first half of the twentieth century through the theoretic framework of a discourse on health. Each novel has its own particular profile and in order to analyse the mother- figure, I have used the work of a range of theorists rather than impose the same theoretical grid which I consider occludes the variation between the novels. In particular, I have been influenced by Mary Douglas’s theory of pollution as a signifier of dissidence, together with Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse as a mechanism of power. I link the two within one discursive realm and engage with current feminist theories on ‘health’ and the maternal/female body in order to map the themes of surveillance, contamination, racial dis-ease, eugenics, and madness through representations of the mother-figure in the selected novels. The range of theoreticians, philosophers, clinicians and feminist historians who inform my analysis include Judith Butler, Moira Gatens and Elizabeth Grosz, who use Foucault’s genealogical writings in their own research. I also refer to Julia Kristeva’s theory on abjection and the maternal body which stands apart from Foucault’s theories. Influenced by the work of Mary Douglas, Kristeva’s theory on abjection reinforces notions of the maternal space as both

3 Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990) 1. Also noted by Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (1994; Sydney: Harcourt Brace, 1996) 311.

feared and fearful because the concept of the abject confronts notions of the healthy, unified body and are forever threatened by it.

Among the many feminist theoreticians who inform this thesis, I take account of Simone de Beauvoir’s work, The Second Sex (1949) because it was one of the early and most significant publications on the subject of woman’s subordination to man because of her reproductive role. De Beauvoir argues that on the one hand, femininity is associated with pristine nature in western cultures but, on the other, the female body is aligned with corruption. The origin of these associations, according to de Beauvoir, stems from ‘the writings of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times’ whereby women are associated with nature and animism, and men with culture and the material world.4 According to de Beauvoir, carnal possession of the earth—the subjugation of nature—is through man’s possession and domination of woman, even though there are inherent dangers in the act of conquering. As de Beauvoir writes:

we have seen woman as flesh; the flesh of the male is produced in the mother’s body and re- created in the embraces of the woman in love. Thus woman is related to nature, she incarnates it … she opens the door to the supernatural, the surreal. She is doomed to immanence; and through her passivity she bestows peace and harmony – but if she declines this role, she is seen forthwith as a praying mantis, an ogress.5

Women and femininity are aligned, on the one hand with non-sexualised flesh, naturally passive and submissive; creatures of harmony and easily ruled. On the other, they are aligned negatively with sexualised flesh as temptress or ‘ogress’ and as such are a danger to men and a threat to society. De Beauvoir’s expression of male images of anxiety concerning women who refuse their assigned social and cultural role is the antithesis of the bourgeois stereotype of the nurturing mother. Envisaged as outrageous and rebellious if she refuses the conventional maternal role, she becomes aligned with subversion and dis-ease; an unruly creature in need of discipline and control. She contaminates the healthy, the normal, the socially acceptable ideal mother.

Certain novels lend themselves to a post-colonial reading and while I have chosen not to take this as an overall approach, I do make reference to several post-colonial theorists including Francois Lionnet, Anne McClintock, Ann Laura Stoler and Robert Young when discussing racial difference and desire in Prichard’s novel, Coonardoo as well as in the trilogies. I also make reference to the work of Carl Jung in Coonardoo, given there are direct references in the novel to his theory of the unconscious and repression. I have, in addition, been influenced by the work of Australian feminist historians, including Joy Damousi, Katie Holmes, Marilyn Lake, Susan Magarey, Jill Julius Matthews, Drusilla Modjeska, Kerreen Reiger and Susan Sheridan. I am indebted to this rich field of study. Where these historians use

4 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Dreams, Fears, Idols’ in The Second Sex, trans. & ed. H. M. Parshley (1953; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 187-188. 5 de Beauvoir, ‘The Myth of Woman in Five Authors’ in The Second Sex 278 (author’s italics).

literature to substantiate historical evidence, I reverse the emphasis and connect broader political, social and cultural forces to the literary texts as part of the analytical process.

Theory and discourse

Feminist and historian, Susan Magarey, also drawing on Foucault’s theory of discourse in her research on Australia’s first-wave feminists, has made a valuable link between Foucault’s concept of power and discourse and Australian literary and socio-political contexts. Magarey argues that:

… it was the discourse on health that generated the subject position which made it possible for the Woman Movement to emerge as a political mobilisation based in sexual difference, in the sexually specific conditions of women’s lives.6

Magarey’s thesis is that the role of reproduction enabled white women to be granted Australian citizenship, a role that worked for and against women politically. Magarey’s emphasis on discourse and reproduction in the context of women as Australian citizens has enabled me to use the concept of the body of the healthy normative mother-as-citizen as a basis for analysis and comparison. The novels being discussed in this thesis, given the racial and sexual politics of the time, lend themselves to an exploration of the multiplicity of meanings of the word ‘health’, as it relates to the maternal, the social and the political body.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault demonstrates that sexuality (which he considers both a discourse and a practice), can be shown to have emerged at a specific point in Western culture, coinciding with another historical narrative—the rise of capitalism. According to Foucault, this begins to develop some time after the start of the seventeenth century and reaches its full strength during the nineteenth century. The rise of capitalism meant that women’s role across these centuries was focussed on the home and the conjugal family, with the transformation of sexual pleasure into ‘a concerted economic and political behavior’.7 Thus, the procreative married couple is established as the norm for all sexual behaviour and a taboo and silence shrouds the subject of sex at the height of another patriarchal institution—European Imperialism. Foucault states that ‘the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality’,8 a restraint which simultaneously produces an incitement to discourse on the very subject that is now prohibited. Colonial desire and repression lie side by side in nations like Australia and become the anchorage points for the various forms of racism and sexism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 Discourse has the power to produce actual forms of colonial subjugation. This is demonstrated in the way race has been represented and re-presented over time.

6 Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: UNSW P, 2001) 3. 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; New York, Random, 1990) 26. 8 Foucault, History of Sexuality 3. 9 I have paraphrased Michel Foucault here. Foucault, History of Sexuality 26.

Discursive practices and the way relations of power and resistance are played out over the body are fundamental to Foucault’s theories. He argues that ‘truth’ is determined by the discursive practice of a particular discipline and, as a result, certain groups are empowered through discourse while others are disempowered. This is of crucial importance to feminists who argue that the dominant discourse is patriarchal and therefore not equally accessible to individuals and groups who have no authority or ways of exercising power. Through investigating those discourses which exercise power on what appears to be the randomness of everyday reality (sickness; insanity; sexuality; criminality), Foucault demonstrates that within individual discourses there lie power mechanisms aimed at controlling and administering desire.10 This can be seen in the medical management of motherhood in Australia in the period under review, stemming from, inter alia, nineteenth-century medical views on women and hysteria. According to Foucault:

the hysterization of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of their bodies and their sex, was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of society.11

The medical colonisation of reproduction led to a mapping of human sexuality with new terms entering the lexicon which facilitated the mastering and ordering of the ‘normal’ over the ‘abnormal’ based on classifications of ‘health’. The maternal obligation placed on white women to be physically ‘healthy’ and morally ‘fit’ and raise numerous healthy children, demanded forms of discipline and control to produce politically desirable codes of social conduct with significant implications for women. The themes of surveillance, contamination, racial dis-ease, eugenics and madness embodied by the female/maternal body are taken up in the novels in the following ways.

Surveillance and the maternal body

In the socio-cultural context of Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, the ideal mother-figure was constructed as the bodily incarnation of all that was healthy, white and pure. In Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, I demonstrate how this maternal ideal was both self-regulated and externally scrutinised to define and restrict the literary mother-figure’s social role and cultural place. Historically positioned as mother-of-the nation, it was a white woman’s duty to selflessly produce and reproduce future Australian citizens to secure racial dominance and to establish a strong ‘British’ presence in the Pacific region. This allegorical female figure epitomises health and nurturing, obediently caring for the well-being of her family, thereby ensuring the well-being of society and the prosperity of the nation. The mother-figure is represented as natural and naturally fertile, bound to her body and corporeal abundance.

10 Foucault, History of Sexuality 150. 11 Foucault, History of Sexuality 146-147.

Politically, at the beginning of the twentieth century, such a representation was crucial to the argument that Australian white women be granted the vote, based on their reproductive capacities.12 In an emerging nation such as Australia, newly federated, demographically isolated from its mother country Britain, and with a cultural bias enshrined in the White Australia Policy, maternal issues that would seem to belong to the private realm were highly politically charged. Motherhood became a national obsession. Federation, in fact, was celebrated through a maternal discourse, as a birth, with Australia’s first Prime Minister (Edmund Barton), cast in the role of midwife in newspapers of the day, delivering the infant Commonwealth of Australia. As Joan Eveline has argued, it was the assumed ability of ‘White’ mothers:

to reproduce superior-grade future citizens which marked her as a suitable member of the Australian body politic and generated her need to distinguish herself from the mothering bodies of ‘non-White’ women.13

The political emphasis on the health and fertility of the female body, in settler societies like Australia with a colonial history of racism and gendered violence, tied the idealised white mother-figure to a racist national agenda.14 This is particularly evident in the novels Coonardoo and in the trilogies. At the turn of the twentieth century, when women were seeking lives of their own defining which included the use of contraceptives and opting for smaller families, the idealised mother-figure continued to be co-opted as a tool of a patriarchal and conservative hegemony. ‘The Mother’ and ‘The Suffragist’ were frequently contrasted in cartoons of the day portraying the former as ‘good’, ‘voluptuous’ and ‘young’ and the latter as ‘bad’, ‘beak-nosed’ and ‘ill-favoured’.15

There is, however, an inherent contradiction in the ideal of motherhood which confines women to their bodies when the Christian tradition, an integral part of Australia’s settlement history, views the body as the source of temptation which must be transcended. This dualistic view places the mother-figure in a highly ambiguous situation, as her own survival and that of her offspring depend on her vigilant attention to the body. The association of the flesh with temptation, of temptation with the female body, and the female body with nature and maternal instinct have led to a “policing” of the female body and the way the mother-figure is culturally represented.

As a result, authorised discourses of nationhood, incorporating population ideologies, constructed an ideal mother-figure as its central icon.16 This icon of contradiction was a highly fertile

12 Magarey, Passions 8. 13 Joan Eveline, ‘Feminism, racism and citizenship in twentieth-century Australia’ in Patricia Crawford and Phillipa Maddern (eds), Women As Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2001) 142. 14 Sue Kossew, Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (Routledge: New York, 2004) 4. 15 See Eveline, Women as Australian Citizens 157. 16 See Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (1984; George Allen & Unwin: Sydney 1987); Alison Mckinnon, Love and

but virtuous woman, healthy in body and mind to bear her procreative responsibilities. In a young nation preoccupied with its birth rate, the body of the mother-figure became the subject of socio- political and medico-legal discourses which sought to regulate the maternal body in the national interest. Accordingly, women were encouraged to manage their bodies and behaviours to conform to the ideal. Children and the home were also to be managed according to principles of science and rationality. In fact, the word ‘management’, as Reiger argues:

became a favourite term not only in industry and commerce but in discussion of housework, childrearing and sexuality. The kitchen was to be a laboratory, children’s play a training ground for business, and the marital bedroom the site of family planning.17

The healthy family was a disciplined unit, managed along ‘scientific’ lines. Given that the white able- bodied male epitomised health and normality, inherent in the ideology of ‘scientific management’ was social control, in terms of maintaining an unproblematic gender order and keeping racial lines intact. Historically, this period was a time of tension between the changing political status of women and the natural role of traditional motherhood. It was a period of growing feminism and liberalism on the one hand, and repressive sexual/social conventions and racial segregation (in particular the removal of indigenous children from their mothers) on the other. With the infiltration of the health sciences into the home, leading to the rationalisation of personal relationships and of domestic life, the female/maternal body is increasingly under surveillance in the period under review.

The scrutiny and subsequent reinforcement of the ideal mother-figure were facilitated through a wide range of cultural ‘texts’ including feature films, film advertising, newsreels, photography, radio serials, women’s magazines, and newspaper advertisements, which reinforced the association of the maternal body with purity, morality and health. The main subject-matter in these ‘narratives’ was inevitably marriage, motherhood and family relations. Women’s magazines, for instance, from the interwar years and beyond—The Australian Woman's Mirror (1924-1961), The Home (1920-1942) and The Australian Women's Weekly18—reinforced the ideology of motherhood as the province of white middle-class Australian women. The ideology also included separate spheres for women and men, housework as domestic science, and women fulfilled, healthy and happy with their mothering and domestic responsibilities. Similarly, Gwen Meredith's radio serial The Lawson's (1944-1947), a forerunner to her extraordinarily popular radio serial Blue Hills (1947-1976), was one of 200 radio programmes aired on Australian radio every day after WWII,19 which focused on the same subject matter and positioned mothers as sensible, sexless and good. This is also the case in the

Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001). 17 Reiger, Kerreen M., The Disenchantment of The Home: Modernizing the Ausralian Family 1880-1940 (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1985), 214. 18 The Australian Women’s Weekly was first published in 1933 and continues to be published. I am referring, however, to images of the mother-figure detailed in the magazine in the first half of the twentieth century. 19 Ian Doyle, narr., Blue Hills Revisited, audiocassette, ABC Radio Archives, 1988.

popular series of films (and later radio serials) made around the Steele Rudd characters better known as ‘Dad and Dave’. Ma Rudd is featured in these films as an enduring representation of the ideal and good mother. First screened in the 1920 silent film On Our Selection, Ma Rudd is described in the film in the following words:

The Mother. The big kind-hearted soul, the light and love of the home, the willing help-mate of us all. Never sad, never selfish, never despairing, never desponding; ever thoughtful, ever making, ever mending, ever hoping for the better days to come.20

Ma Rudd is fulfilling the ideology of the day, namely that it was a woman’s duty to sacrifice her body uncomplainingly to multiple pregnancies and the rearing of many healthy children. The pressure to undertake the mothering role and to do so in a de jure marriage, in the period under review, was intense. There has always been the fear that women will cease to mother or that they will do so without being attached to a legal father. Thus, the discourse on health served to confine women to a specific model of motherhood whereby patriarchal fears concerning fatherless families or indeed, the absence of families, could be avoided.21

In these public and popular forms of representation there is constancy in the images which conform to hegemonic cultural norms. According to Caroline Pascoe, historically there has been little change in the representation of the mother-figure in Australian feature films covering the period 1900-1988. Pascoe argues that the mother-figure is either constructed around a restrictive binary of good/bad or she is absent from the film altogether.22 Hoorn also notes that within Australian nineteenth-century academic painting, maternity is regulated by either portraying mothers as victims, or through totally ignoring motherhood and family life ‘as regular subjects for painting’.23

Even when the mother-figure is featured as central to these cultural texts, her domestic and familial role is idealised, naturalised and depoliticised. This empties the role of its significance and power. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for instance, the Australian News and Information Bureau

20 On Our Selection, dir. Raymond Longford, perf. Arthur Greenaway, Evelyn Johnson, Percy Walshe, Beatrice Esmond, ScreenSound Australia (National Screen and Sound Archive), moving image, Cover No. 6749, 24 July 1920. 21 Sneja Gunew (ed), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (London: Routledge, 1992) 295. Some fifty years later, these fears are well founded as the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald states that ‘some forty-five percent of Australian marriages fail, and most mothers retain primary care of any children after divorce’ (‘A case of the reluctant male’, editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 2003: 8). While the thesis is not a sociological study, I have drawn on many disciplines to inform my research as both Prichard and Dark saw their role as writers as equal to that of social commentators. In an interview with Jean Devanny during WWII Dark states that her writing is, ‘an interpretation to the people of what they are doing and why’ (Modjeska, Exiles 86). Prichard states that in her writing she is ‘impelled to interpret the life and ways of the people of my own time and people’ (Throssell, Straight Left: Katharine Susannah Prichard (Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1982) 121). 22 Caroline Pascoe, ‘Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1988. Pascoe states that in the 700 films she viewed the mother-figure was present in only 200 (Pascoe, Screening Mothers 20). 23 Jeanette Hoorn, Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender (Calton (Vic): Melbourne UP, 1994) 111.

produced a series of photographs to promote the Australian way of life to prospective immigrants. One of these photographs, Housework for Mrs Maxwell 1953 shows a serious and slim young mother vacuuming an already immaculate carpet while overseeing her young daughter who follows on behind with brush and pan on bended knees.24 The bourgeois or middle-class notion that women's place is in the home and that women's only genuine fulfilment lies in child-bearing and domestic duties is anticipated in this maternal image. The compositional device inscribes into the photograph the closing circle of women's lives in the healthy-white-middle-class society that was promoted and established in Australia after WWII as the cultural norm.25 The image conforms to an idealised notion of motherhood: order, sanity, health and contentment within a sanitised domestic sphere. Rarely in these 'texts' are representations of working class mothers, Aboriginal mothers, migrant mothers, mad mothers, madly untidy mothers, and mothers who are neither happy nor healthy—to be found. In a ritual of surveillance and segregation only one myth of motherhood is sanctioned.

Contamination and the feminine

In order to explore the theme of contamination and the feminine, a theme found in all of the chapters, I initially drew on Mary Douglas’s anthropological research of the 1960s. Douglas’s work on boundary rituals and the dangers of pollution, whereby social boundaries are transgressed through dirt that is associated with the illicit and the corrupt, is germane to the thesis.26 Demarcating a clean and proper body for the purpose of constructing the acceptable, unified social subject is, according to Trinh T. Minh-ha, futile because ‘[d]espite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak’.27 This concept of leakage, invoking bodily fluids which corrupt and infiltrate ‘pure’ bodily and cultural spaces, not only applies to the gendered and racialised body informed by rituals and customs which belong to the postcolonial and anthropological, the concept has also influenced philosophy and psychoanalysis. The mother-figure in particular, immersed in her own flesh through pregnancy and breast-feeding and through the growth and development of another person’s body, is clearly associated with bodily fluids which are abundant and vital to new life. Despite the reliance on fecund white women to secure the health of the nation, maternal power is at odds with a highly masculine culture like Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. One way of denying that power is to segregate and regulate women to a role of reproduction, rather than fully integrate women to participate in all facets of society.

24 Australian News and Information Bureau, Housework for Mrs Maxwell, 1953, Australian Archives (ACT): A1200; L15693. 25 I have used Griselda Pollock's ideas about the representations of motherhood in painting to inform my analysis of this photograph. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (1988; London: Routledge, 1994) 48. 26 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 27 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989) 94.

Despite the futility of trying to segregate visceral and spatial zones, as argued by Minh-ha, there are other ways of maintaining patriarchal power and ‘protecting’ the social body from that which is deemed contaminating and dangerous. According Foucault it is through ‘the method of asepsis.28 that individual bodies (the ‘diseased’; the ‘criminal’; the ‘mad’) are segregated and quarantined from the social body in the interests of social control. Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power and discourse, where discourse is defined as systems of linguistic representations through which power sustains itself, is important to this thesis. With the focus on the body, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality studies the ways in which power is able to gain access to the most individual forms of behaviour through ‘the multiplication of discourses concerning sex’,29 especially within the discourses which detailed the lives of the bourgeois family. Similarly, in his study of the politics of health in eighteenth-century Europe, he argues that:

the healthy, clean, fit body, a purified, cleansed aerated domestic space, the medically optimal siting of individuals … figure among the family’s essential laws. And from this period the family becomes the most constant agent of medicalisation.30

In both the study of sex and the analysis of noso-politics (the politics of disease), Foucault demonstrates how deployments of power are directly connected to the body through the proliferation of specific discourses.

The theme of contamination and the female body is explored in Section I through the white mother-figures in the novels, as well as through representations of the black mother-figures who are deemed unclean and impure by virtue of their race. Kristeva’s theory of the abject applies to the maternal in general, but I have found it useful when interrogating the black mother-figure and her cultural place because Kristeva is interested in the ways through which ‘proper’ sociality and subjectivity are formed through the exclusion of the improper and the unclean elements of corporeal existence that must be separated from the clean and proper self.31 The unified self, however, is always under threat given that the abject can neither be assimilated nor obliterated but waits at the border of the self’s identity to disrupt apparent order and unity.32 Kristeva's definition of abjection is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in- between, the ambiguous’,33 thus positioning the mother as a border-line or dissident figure. The advantage, according to Kristeva, of situating oneself (or being situated by others) on the border is the

28 Michel Foucault, ‘Body/Power’ in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980) 55. 29 Foucault, History of Sexuality 18. 30 Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’, Power/Knowledge 173. 31 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U P, 1982) 13. 32 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Body of Signification’ in John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (eds), Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990) 86-87. 33 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 4.

capacity to use transformation to one’s own advantage or as part of a revolutionary strategy.34 The concept of abjection emerged as a central theoretical impulse of 1990s literature and art, and draws on psychoanalytic theories of the visceral unconscious and the bodily ego, the way boundaries between the inside and outside of the body, between self and other, are contagious, blurred and betrayed.

In Sections I and II of this thesis, I demonstrate that wittingly or unwittingly, the white mother-figures ‘contaminate’ identity, system and order. The greater disturbance however, is caused by the presence of the black mother-figure. Wherever she appears sexual tensions are heightened and racial dis-ease is foregrounded.

Racial Dis-ease

Ideas about the healthy/unhealthy female body, from the time of Australia’s European settlement in 1788 through to the years of post-war reconstruction following the Second World War, have shaped gender and race relations in Australia.35 In the novels a language of purity and pollution differentiates the white from the black mother-figure respectively. Where the white and the black mother-figures interact in the novels, the former is distinguished because of her virtue and goodness compared to the black mother-figure who is inevitably considered unclean and socially unacceptable, an object of sexual desire but the victim of abuse. There are instances of this cited in Chapters 5 and 6 but the more sustained evidence is in Chapter 2. In this chapter, the character of Coonardoo represents the site of sexual anxieties for white men and white women, and at the end of the narrative, becomes the repository of all that is deemed impure and fouled. The racial dis-ease in countries like Australia with its Imperial and Christian heritage, is not simply at the sexual level, made manifest with the birth of mixed-race children. The violation of individual human bodies directly impacts on the social and political body in an emerging nation through tensions surrounding racial purity, citizenship rights, and national security. These soma-political issues are used to justify, amongst other things, strategies to control and separate the black mother-figure from her mixed-race children in the interests of regulating bodies and boundaries.

McClintock and Stoler argue that maintaining standards of bourgeois civility, incorporating rituals of cleanliness and bodily discipline, represent ways of legitimating European identity in a colonial context with its racial and class anxieties. In Coonardoo (as well as in both trilogies) it is the white mother-figures who uphold bourgeois boundaries of purity and order, subjecting black women to the cleaning and washing of bodies and clothes before they are permitted to cross the threshold of a white woman’s abode. For the black mother-figure these purifying routines are incomprehensible but

34 Marie Maclean, The Name of the Mother: Writing Illegitimacy (London: Routledge, 1994) 7. 35 Joy Damousi argues, for instance, in her history of convict women, that it is through ‘the language of pollution, purity and abandonment’, inter alia, that forces which have shaped this history, can be understood. Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 171.

are treated as sources of mirth and mimicry as they are forced to follow imposed rules of health and hygiene.

The ‘science’ of eugenics

The imposition of ‘scientific’ rules concerning human bodies and behaviours had a profound effect on the matenal body, whether black or white, through the pseudo-science of eugenics. The construction of the mother-figure was made fundamental to all the issues emerging from eugenic theories involving the study of hereditary human improvement by genetic control. The ‘science’ of eugenics was supported by men and women and the movement was most active in Australia between the 1910s and the 1930s. In Chapter 3, I explore the subject of eugenics as it related to the mother- figure in the novel Prelude to Christopher which covers a similar time-frame to Australia’s eugenic movement. Fears relating to racial hygiene, the declining birthrate and national security, justified not only racist policies and practices but also gave legitimacy to the practice of eugenics and made the subject of motherhood a central tenet in eugenic debates, as outlined in the novel. Modjeska has argued in relation to Prelude to Christopher, that motherhood is seen ‘as the fundamental experience for women through which they lay claim to their social influence’.36 In the novel, eugenic theories are applied to the novel’s protagonist, which deem her unfit to mother due to unsubstantiated hereditary madness. The woman who longs to be a mother, is instead condemned to being an outcast and considered unclean because she is not fit the standards of health and hygiene, inherent in the title ‘ideal mother-figure’. In this chapter, the script of motherhood is disrupted and the discourse on health unsettled because the ‘heroine’ challenges the iconography of the ideal mother-figure by presenting other viewpoints and different values, as she struggles against her ‘diagnosis’. In this context, the female body is regarded as a threat to masculine-defined cultural reality which is not simply at the level of the physical body. The destabilisation or corruption of masculine ideals emerges in aesthetic representations of ‘modern’ life in the early years of the twentieth century along with the fear of mass culture, the commercial and ‘mob’ rule which are associated with the feminine.37 As a thoroughly modern woman, the protagonist pits herself against irrational fears and ideologies. Sanity and madness are recurring themes in the novel as the experience of the First World War, tearing apart bodies and lives is juxtaposed with the longing of a ‘mad’ woman who seeks to create and nurture life.38

36 Modjeska, Exiles 219. 37 Hoorn (ed.), Strange Women; John E. Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). 38 The First World War is in the background of Prelude to Christopher. With the outbreak of war the mother-figure has the potential to destabilise fixed categories of feminine behaviour which accord with, and advance, the national agenda. Women were afforded greater opportunities to defy feminine conventions and create change in their lives. Regulating women’s bodies according to a discourse on health represented a significant challenge at this time when women were willingly participating in the war and witnessing the carnage in direct, and distinctly ‘unfeminine’ ways. The chaste and obedient mother-figure embodied what was needed most for the war—that mother’s son. Whereas the Australian women’s vote was critical to the success of the conscription campaigns of 1916 and 1917,

Madness and the mother-figure

The theme of women and madness continues in Chapter 4 of this thesis through the mother- figure, Phyllis Massey. Phyllis conforms to the prevailing ideology which defined ‘good’ mothers as fertile and sacrifical, the ‘Angel in the House’, producing and reproducing for the health of the family and the prosperity of the nation. The opposite representation is the ‘bad’ mother-figure, who refuses rules and standards and is aligned with sexual deviance, disease, and moral decline. In Chapters 3 and 4, conventional mother-figures are shown in a much more negative light than women like the protagonist in Prelude to Christopher who pursues an intellectual and artistic life. In this case, the heroine’s ‘madness’ is caused because she is considered genetically unfit to mother. In Chapter 4, however, the mother-figure descends into madness and attempted suicide because she has nothing to sustain her given her vocation as an ‘ideal’ mother is no longer needed.

In a rapidly changing society in the middle of the Second World War, this prim, self-serving housewife revolts against and resists change, manifesting symptoms of hysteria that many feminists regard as symptomatic of women’s confinement within (and rage against) patriarchal definitions of femininity. Jill Julius Matthews in her work on the construction of femininity in twentieth-century Australia argues that motherhood is one of the three crucial sites for constructing Australian femininity, together with sexuality and work. She suggests that the physical ideal of femininity associated with bodily beauty incorporated ‘an ideal of physical fitness for maternity’ and the notion that the ‘good maternal body would produce the good child’.39 This is not the outcome in the novel The Little Company. Matthews also argues that the surveillance and monitoring of mothers and children, meant that the medical profession profited from ‘whatever was deemed progressive and successful’.40 Women, however, ‘took the blame for individual failures’,41 internalising an ideology of motherhood which compounded a sense of fear and guilt if they, for whatever reason, did not measure up to contradictory medico-legal and socio-cultural standards of maternal health and fitness. Even though Phyllis Massey blames everyone else bar herself for the failures of her marriage and her mothering, she is plagued by rage and alienation. The result is a mother-figure fearful and desperate and finally driven to suicide as her only release.

women who opposed the political pressure to sacrifice their sons for the nation posed a serious challenge not only to the cultural construction of the passive mother-figure but also to a masculine hegemony. See Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist women and gendered space: Anti-conscription and anti-war campaigns, 1914-1918’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 254-73.

Similarly, during the Second World War, women increasingly participated on the war front and in essential services, wearing military uniforms and working in non-traditional trades, thereby threatening the representation of women as ‘feminine’ and ‘maternal’, as women reshaped the meaning of femininity, including the meaning of motherhood. See Catherine Speck, ‘Nora Heysen’s View from the Pacific Region’, in Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 2004) 125-145. Marilyn Lake, ‘Female Desire: The meaning of World War II’ in Gender and War 60-80. 39 Matthews, Good And Mad Women 175. 40 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 176.

The critical field

Since the publication of two seminal works on Australian women writers during the interwar years (Drusilla Modjeska's Exiles at Home and Maryanne Dever's Wallflowers and Witches), Prichard and Dark have attracted considerable interest and have been the subject of continuing scholarship, resulting in new publications, memorial lectures, postgraduate research and continuing education courses.42 As a direct result of this attention, Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher, which Dark considered her best novel, has been reprinted for the first time in almost fifty years.43 A second and definitive biography of Eleanor Dark has also been published.44 In contrast to Dark, the critical literature on Prichard has invariably been linked to her political activity. This point is reinforced in a 1984 interview with Eleanor Dark's husband, Eric Dark, when he was asked whether ‘Eleanor's books, in their concern with ideas, run the risk of being thinly propagandist?’45 He responded by stating:

I don't think they’re overtly propagandist. I think that’s a great difference between her and Katharine Susannah Prichard whom we like immensely and whose books we admire. But take those three books about the gold mining town [The Goldfields Trilogy]: the first book is socialist background, as it were, the second book is stronger and the third book is pure Labor politics, recklessly overt.46

41 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 176. 42 See Carole Ferrier (ed), Gender Politics and Fiction: Twentieth-Century Australian Women's Novels (St. Lucia: U Queensland P, 1985). Patrick Buckridge, ‘Intellectual Authority and Critical Traditions in Australian Literature 1945 to 1975’ in Brian Head and James Walter (eds), Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988). Marivic Wyndham Luther-Davis, A ‘world-proof life’: Eleanor Dark, a Writer in Her Time, Unpublished thesis, Australian National U, 1995. Drusilla Modjeska, ‘A Hoodoo on that Book’, Herbert Blaikloch Memorial Lecture, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996 (published under the same title in Southerly 57 (1997): 73-96). Delys Bird, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard: A Thoroughly Modern Woman’, Herbert Blaikloch Memorial Lecture, Sydney, 1997 (published under the same title in Southerly, 58:1 (1998): 98-115). Carole Ferrier, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1999). Carole Ferrier (ed), As Good As A Yarn With You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992). Catherine Ellis, Between Revolutionary Rapture and Historic Inhibitions: The Novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard, Unpublished thesis, U New England, 1999. Delys Bird, Katharine Susannah Prichard: Stories, Journalism and Essays (St Lucia: U Queensland P, 2000). 43 Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher (1934; Rushcutter's Bay (NSW): Halstead Press, 1999). Dark’s novel is the first text to be reprinted under the new Halstead Classic title. 44 Brooks, Eleanor Dark. See A. Grove Day, Eleanor Dark (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976) for the first biography. 45 Giulia Giuffré, A Writing Life: Interviews with Australian Women Writers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) 110. 46 Giuffré, Writing Life 110-111.

Two recent Australian publications focus on Prichard's politics and resurrect the debates surrounding her political significance.47 The Ball and Horner publication is the culmination of extensive research by these two Canberra-based academics, following the release in 1995-96 by the USA National Security Agency of the previously classified Venona cables which claimed that some Australian communists, including Prichard, were spies for the USSR. Whether Prichard was a Soviet spy may never be determined, but both she and Dark were the subject of long-term surveillance by ASIO, an organisation established as a direct result of the Venona cables and the efforts by allied cryptanalysts to decipher the material between 1943 and 1980. Prichard and Dark are part of this complex story which encompasses both the history of communism and Soviet espionage in Australia during the Stalin era (1920-1953) and beyond.

Despite the surveillance, writers and critics who knew Prichard were of the opinion that she was more a political face than a political figure. When Norman Bartlett interviewed Prichard in 1933, he stated that Prichard was a communist of the heart rather than the head and that while she was what C. Hartley Grattan, the American critic who visited Perth at this time, called ‘the hope of the Australian novel’, she was more ‘an unwitting political front rather than a political force’.48 Bartlett also states that ‘Katharine Susannah insisted that her interest in Marxism did not originate in a theoretical approach to social problems’ but in the lived experience of what Jack London referred to as ‘the people of the abyss’, the victims of physical labour and poverty in their worst forms.49 A continuing focus on Prichard's life and work was made possible through her son, Ric Throssell, who, as a writer himself, published a biography of each of his parents, collected and published numerous articles written by Prichard, and continued to correspond with researchers, including myself, who have sought to know more about his mother and her writing.50.

Unlike Prichard, Dark enjoyed financial security that enabled her to write in relative middle- class comfort. As Barbarba Brooks and Judith Clark state in their biography of Dark, ‘Eleanor can sympathise with real poverty but she hasn’t been there’.51 Despite these economic differences,

47 See Desmond Ball and David Horner, Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network 1944-1950 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 48 Norman Bartlett, ‘Perth in the Turbulent Thirties’, Westerly 4 (1977): 61-69 (63. 66). 49 Bartlett, Westerly 63. 50 See Ric Throssell, Wild Weeds and Windflowers: The Life and Letters of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1975; North Ryde: Angus & Robertson, 1990); My Father's Son (Richmond: William Heinemann, 1989); Straight Left and Tribute: Selected Stories of Katharine Susannah Prichard (St. Lucia: U Queensland Press, 1988). I am indebted to Ric Throssell for his correspondence with me in relation to his mother. Unfortunately, Ric Throssell died in 1999. 51 Barbara Brooks with Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life (Sydney: Macmillan, 1998) 190. The economic difference between the two writers is symbolised by the architectural difference in their respective homes. Dark’s home, Varuna, in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney (NSW) is a large two- storey residence built along modern architectural lines and surrounded by gardens and a separate brick and tile studio. Prichard’s residence in Greenmount, in the Darlington Ranges outside of Perth (WA), is a nineteenth-century single-storey worker’s cottage with a separate wood and corrugated iron studio. Both residences are now writers’ centres. The visit to Varuna was made on 19 September 1998 for the

Prichard and Dark were close friends and correspondents. In a 1984 interview, Dark’s husband, Eric Dark, was asked whether he and Eleanor were friendly with any of the major writers of their time. He recalls:

No close friends. Oh, of course, Katharine Prichard we saw her several times and we stayed with her. We visited her in Perth, reading her books and writing letters backwards and forwards to her. I thought we knew her very well. She was a lovely person.52

Prichard also reflects that:

They were all my friends, … Hugh McCrae, Mary Fullerton, Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark … —this generation of men and women who loved Australia and sought to make others care for the glorious potentialities of the country and people.53

Through their exchange of letters, Prichard and Dark wrote about the competing roles of family responsibilities and writing careers to many of their contemporary women writers, such as Miles Franklin, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw.54 In a letter to me from Olive Cotton who photographed Eleanor Dark in the Max Dupain Studios in 1945, Cotton states that Dark ‘simply had no unbroken time to think about writing at present’ given the war and the labour shortage. Dark was compelled to act as her doctor/husband’s receptionist and keep up the family’s cooking and cleaning.55 Similarly, Prichard’s son recalls his mother in the 1940s, ‘worn out struggling to find the time and energy to devote to the great trilogy on the Western Australian goldfields … trying to earn a living and keep up with the household chores’.56 Prichard reinforced this recollection in her own words when she wrote to Nettie Palmer in 1949, stating:

But Golden Miles [second volume of the Goldfields Trilogy] has gone to the typist—which is a great relief to my mind. This year, I’ve been so ill, and there have been so many breaks. I seem to have been ‘in labour’ most of the time. Do hope I hang out to finish the trilogy! How any woman, writing in Australia, gets anything done, is a miracle to me.57

I outline these brief biographical details to show not only the tensions Prichard and Dark personally experienced in terms of the domestic demands made on their writing careers but that publicly they endured a lifetime of political suspicion and investigation. As women and as writers, they attracted controversy because of their writing, their political alliances and their personal beliefs. How

launch of Barbara Brooks’ and Judith Clark’s biography on Eleanor Dark and to Greenmount on 10 January 1997. 52 Giuffré, Writing 113. 53 Katharine Susannah Prichard, ‘Some Perceptions and Aspirations’, Southerly 28:4 (1968) 235-244. Prichard’s son, Ric Throssell, refers to this particular article of his mother’s as ‘her literary testament’ Throssell, Straight Left 206. 54 See Ferrier, As Good As A Yarn With You. 55 Olive Cotton, letter to Jenny Noble, 9 August 1995. 56 Throssell, My Father’s Son 161. 57 Katharine Susannah Prichard to Nettie Palmer, 4 February 1949. Prichard papers, NL MS 1174/1/7594.

influential these forces were in terms of writing the mother-figure into the symbolic order will never be known. However, the maternal and marginalised voice, which has access to (an)other side of the social and symbolic order, offers a unique critique of the society in which Prichard and Dark wrote. Even in the trilogies where history and politics subsume the split and disturbing interiority of Prichard’s and Dark’s fictional women in the earlier novels, the maternal voice presides over the novels.

Whereas the mother-figure has been the subject of critical attention in the social, political and health sciences in the context of Australia, as well as in the fictional work of other Australian writers of the period such as Barbara Baynton, Martin Boyd, Gwen Harwood, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Patrick White,58 there has been no sustained textual analysis of the mother-figure in the work of Prichard and Dark in the novels chosen for discussion. Nor am I aware that their work has been singled out for consideration together. It is my contention that the mother- figure is under-researched in the general context of Australian literature written in the first half of the twentieth century. This thesis seeks to address the literary analysis of the mother-figure and her position within a broader cultural, social and political framework.

Whereas feminist and social historians have researched the mother-figure in the context of Australia and in the same period, I have drawn on this scholarship which covers many of the issues being discussed here, and forms part of my literature review. There is a gap, however, in approaching the mother-figure through literature which can penetrate the past in different ways to history, free to challenge what Johnson refers to as ‘those impossible contradictions’59 and less restricted by historical or biographical evidence. In utilising socio-feminist theories on health and contagion as they relate to the female body I have been able to explore Prichard’s and Dark’s novels using a different framework.

As part of the literary analysis, I make connections with broader socio-political and cultural issues outside of the novels, because these are either directly referred to or are implied in the narratives. The period under review saw the emergence of a scientific management of both motherhood and the home that also applied to familial and personal relationships. The medicalisation of motherhood and rationalising of relationships emphasised bodily health and moral hygiene, targeting the female body in general and the mother-figure in particular. Nationalist discourses on health, however, extended beyond the corporeal to cultural pursuits, including the visual arts, in the period which has come to be known as modernist. Jeanette Hoorn argues, for instance, that in Australia prior to World War II, when women’s contributions to visual culture were repressed, the

58 See David Tacey, Patrick White, Fiction and The Unconscious, (Melbourne: Oxford UP) 1988. Keeping Mum: Australian Representations of Motherhood’ Westerly 34:4 (1989) 41-107. Joan Kirkby, ‘Barbara Baynton: An Australian Jocasta’, Westerly, 34:4 (1989): 114-124. Jennifer Strauss, Boundary Conditions: The Poetry of Gwen Harwood (St Lucia: U Queensland P, 1996). 59 Johnson, The Feminist Difference 13.

whole tradition of Modernism might be read ‘as being contested through representations of the female body’.60 According to Hoorn, representations of maternity, in particular during this modernist period, lack positive images and where women struggle with motherhood, ‘men are seen to intervene and to regulate maternity’ as represented in paintings of the period.61 I discuss this further in Prichard’s novel Working Bullocks.

Scholarship to date on these two writers has concentrated mainly on their literary histories, on their personal politics, their intellectual contributions, and on the interpretation of their narratives through historical, political and biographical research. There are several places in the thesis where I have drawn on this research and in some cases have added to it. However, so as not to re-rehearse this material in the body of my discussion, I have relegated the material to footnotes. In addition,

60 Hoorn, Strange Women 15. 61 Hoorn, Strange Women 4.

recent Australian feminist studies have focussed on representations of the mother-figure to show how discourses of nationhood are inextricably linked to gender relations. Within the narrative, it is women like Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks who were granted the vote based on their reproductive role; on the womb as the site of production. However, in literature generally, as Nicole Moore argues, ‘the reproductive plot’ in Australian women’s writing of the period (including Prichard’s Intimate Strangers and Dark’s Waterway), acts not to support but to subvert maternal citizenship and interrupt maternal destinies through the use of birth control and the practice of abortion.62

Alison Mackinnon draws on demographic statistics and literary texts (including Dark’s novel Slow Dawning published in 1932), to ‘map the emerging changes in women’s sense of themselves’ at a time when Australian women were first entering the professions. The fertility decline was being ‘blamed’ on the selfishness of women who desired economic and intellectual independence as a priority over maternity.63 The idea that motherhood was pitted against the intellectual life was central to early feminist debates on sexual autonomy. As Elodie Blackwood states in Prichard’s Intimate Strangers, ‘[i]t was necessary for an artist to experience love and passion … but to marry—to have children, prohibited individual development—a career of any kind’.64 Mackinnon argues that the opportunities ‘offered by higher education and work contributed to the reshaping of subjectivities, enabling some women to significantly alter their reproductive futures’.65 However, Mackinnon concludes that the discourse of binary opposites (‘that linguistic straightjacket’),66 such as nature versus culture and duty versus autonomy, which shaped the world of Australia’s early professional women, continues to retain its grip on women’s lives. This is a theme explored in Dark’s The Little Company through her character Marty Ransom, a fictional writer whose work in progress about a mother of six childen, is constantly interrupted because of ‘barren’ days—‘cooking, sewing washing’.67

Feminist studies such as Magarey’s and Mckinnon’s draw attention to women’s bodies as being central to a political analysis of a gendered structured society. Feminist discourses have politicised the body to show the ways in which bodies are produced according to contemporary social beliefs and practices. According to Pamela Hyde, ‘women’s bodies and social roles have been historically constructed and reconstructed in accordance with changing social circumstances and

62 Nicole Moore, ‘‘Me Operation:’ Abortion and Class in Australian Women’s Novels, 1920s-1950’, Hecate, 22, 1 (1996): 27-46; ‘The Rational Natural: Conflicts of the Modern in Eleanor Dark’, Hecate, 27.1 (2001): 19-31 and ‘Interrupting Maternal Citizenship: Birth Control in Mid-wave Women’s Writing’, Australian Feminist Studies, 17.38 (2002): 151-164. 63 Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Resha;ing of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) xii, 17. 64 Prichard, Intimate Strangers 359. 65 Mackinnon, Love 13. 66 Mackinnon, Love 14. 67 Eleanor Dark, The Little Company (Sydney: Collins, 1945) 312.

expectations’ during the period under review.68 These studies have increasingly paid attention to the ways in which historically, power is exercised over women’s bodies, especially in the realm of maternity. Throughout my research, I have wanted to stay close to feminist theories as they relate to the maternal body but recognise that Prichard, because of her public advocacy of socialism, was careful not to challenge the pre-eminence of a class analysis over a gender critique. As a result her narratives refer to Karl Marx and to Carl Jung. Where there are references to their theories in relation to the mother-figure, I have noted these links. In particular, Jung’s psychoanalytic theories relating to symbols and archetypes such as ‘The Great Mother’ and the anima/animus contrasexual archetypes, incorporating his life-long interest in the feminine, are used in my analysis of Coonardoo given that the novel intersects with Jungian and nationalist discourses.69

Summary

The novels chosen for analysis, published between the 1920s and the 1950s, refer to the turbulent war and interwar years which held out the promise of radical social and political reform for women in western industrial nations. Australian writers, whether members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) like Prichard, or a socialist sympathiser like Dark, believed they were working for and would witness political and social transformation within their own lifetimes.70 In fact, this did

68 Pamela Hyde, ‘Managing bodies—managing relationships: the popular media and the social construction of women’s bodies and social roles from the 1930s to the 1960s’, Journal of Sociology, 36,2 (2000): 157-171 (158). 69 The influence of Jung and Freud, with the rise of psychoanalysis as a profession during the period under review, cannot be ignored. Even though, as Luce Irigaray and others have shown, Freud does not take the womb into account in his concepts of normality and health, he provoked a plethora of research on his theory of the Oedipus complex and the role of the mother. According to Freud the maternal love object represents an Oedipal conflict which is resolved by the male child repressing the love of his mother in fear of his more powerful father. In addition, the female child also moves away from her mother because the mother is deemed ‘castrated’ or lacking the father-figure’s penis/authority. In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray asks the question ‘what meaning could the Oedipus complex have in a symbolic system other than patriarchy?’. One response is to look at the work of Nancy Chodorow whose research focuses on personality formation of men and women through their early socialisation by the mother in Western cultures where women bear the prime responsibility for the caring of children. While rejecting the determinism of Freud’s theories, Chodorow nevertheless acknowledges the far- reaching consequences of Freud’s Oedipus theory, stating that it ‘constitutes the ultimate formative cause of both health and neurosis’, and marks the origins of gender differentiation in personality formation. Even though Freud ignores the mother, his work on the difference between male and female behaviour provided a platform for theorising motherhood by early twentieth century psychoanalysts such as Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Melanie Klein. 70 See Egon Kisch, ‘Landing in Australia’, Communist Review, IV:11 (1937): 17-22. Jack Beasley, The Rage for Life: The Work of Katharine Susannah Prichard (Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1964). Dorothy Hewett, ‘Excess of Love: The Irreconcilable in Katharine Susannah Prichard’, Overland, 43 (1969-70): 27-31. H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature: Volume II 1923-1950 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1985). Audrey Blake, A Proletarian Life (Malmsbury [Vic]: Kibble Books, 1984). Bruce Bennett, An Australian Compass: Essays on Place and Direction in Australian Literature (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1991). Patrick Buckridge, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard and the Literary Dynamics of Political Commitment’ in Carole Ferrier (ed), Gender, Politics and Fiction (1985; St. Lucia: U Queensland Press, 1992), 85-100. Paul Gillen, Jack Lindsay: Faithful to the Earth (Pymble [NSW]: Angus & Robertson, 1993). Audrey Blake, ‘Notes on the Development of the Eureka Youth League and its Predecessors’, Unpublished manuscript, 1993.

not take place. As Prichard explained to one of the great feminists of the day, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, during her interview with Gilman in London in 1912, although the women in Australia had been granted the vote, it ‘didn’t seem to have made very much difference to their traditional disabilities’.71 Mothering and family responsibilities continued to be women’s primary roles. As a result, women remained in subordinate positions because of their gender difference, with unequal access compared to men to social citizenship rights, to income, and to labour market opportunities. However, it is through the maternal body that the novels interrogate issues of national identity, gender relations and race dynamics. As Diane Stubbings argues in relation to the maternal in Anglo-Irish writing:

By “writing” mothers who defy the spaces constructed for them by the patriarchal cultural tradition, by “writing” mothers who exist at or beyond the borders of these socially and symbolically sanctioned spaces, the writer is able to access the underside of the symbolic order.72

It is here, argues Stubbings, that the nature of the structures which reinforce cultural traditions are revealed and made vulnerable. It is here that the potential to resist and re-figure those cultural traditions is found.

More generally, through analysing the mother-figure in literature, where literature is read, as Barbara Johnson argues, ‘as a mode of cultural work, the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions that cannot yet be spoken’,73 Prichard’s and Dark’s novels offer a wealth of material providing different perspectives to support Johnson’s argument. In a nation dependent on white women’s mothering, the novels demonstrate that women frequently resisted the central icon of the nationalist discourse, the ideal mother-figure, and sought to experience lives of their own creation.

Throughout this thesis, I draw on material from personal interviews I had with key figures in Prichard’s and Dark’s lives in the early stages of my research for this thesis (1995-1997). During interviews I conducted with Prichard's and Dark's family and friends, they indicated that both writers believed socialist ideals would take root in Australia and significantly change Australian society. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with Michael Dark (10 March 1995); Annette and Duncan Cameron, Revo and Pat Gandini (2 January 1997); and with Audrey and Jack Blake (13 November 1998). Telephone interviews were conducted with Len Fox (July 1995); Geoff Davis (7 January 1997) and Joan Williams (7 January 1997). This important primary research is currently being prepared for publication and is available for examination if required. 71 Ric Throssell, Straight Left 225. Prichard also states in her autobiography that ‘[l]ike most seriously- minded young women of my generation I had a tremendous admiration for Charlotte Perkins Gilman: had read her books, What Diantha Did, The Man-Made World, Women in Economics, and respected Charlotte Perkins Gilman as lighting the way to that future, when, as she said herself: ‘An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably lead [sic] to an economic democracy’. Katharine Susannah Prichard, Child of the Hurricane (1963; London: Angus & Robertson, 1974) 189. 72 Diane Stubbings, ‘Modernism and the representation of the maternal: the mother-figure in Moore, Yeats, Joyce, Synge and O’Casey’, PhD thesis. The University of New South Wales, 1996, 25. Published as Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal: From Yeats to Joyce (New York: St Martins P, 2000).

This is reflected in the writers’ inter-war novels which embody unresolved tensions in a way that challenges representations of the mother-figure by mainstream culture. As Mrs Bessie states in Coonardoo, she had not ‘the least respect for conventional ideas which hampered her in anything she wanted to do’.74 Freedom from conformity and the conventions of respectability and domesticity, however, are counter balanced with suffering and loss in these earlier works. In the trilogies, which I classify as Prichard’s and Dark’s post-war novels (even though Dark’s The Timeless Land was published in 1941), the mother-figures show a greater compliance with nationalist discourses of the good and respectable mother-figure who conforms more closely with an idealised notion of motherhood. In the trilogies, the white mother-figures enjoy happier endings with a sense of fulfilment not found in the earlier narratives.

In summary, this thesis analyses representations of the literary mother-figure in the novels of Prichard and Dark using socio-feminist theory on health, contagion and the female body to inform its analysis of the literary text. 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.

73 Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998) 13. 74 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo (1929; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994) 22.

SECTION I

MOTHERS OF THE NATION

Working Bullocks75 Coonardoo76

In this first section of the thesis, representations of the mother-figures in Prichard’s novels Working Bullocks and Coonardoo are analysed to show how they challenge the masculine ideology of this period in Australian history but, at the same time, become tragic victims of this ideology. The novels are set in isolated rural communities in Western Australia at the end of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, settings where, historically, masculine values such as the ethos of ‘mateship’, male courage and physical brute strength, have prevailed amongst the Australian bushmen. In the novels, the bodies of healthy, strong male characters are emphasised and celebrated. Aggressive physical strength is central to the economic survival of the male characters through logging, droving and working the land in an era prior to mechanisation. Consequently, the novels emphasise bodily health, physical fitness and physical pursuits which focus on masculine, rather than feminine, strength and endurance. Whereas women characters in the novels are physically strong, and admired for that quality, it is not in their own right but because they are ‘virile’ (WB 8) and ‘like a man’ (C 16). The fit and able male body signifies superior strength, power and sexuality in the novels, characteristics which are aligned with the coarse strength of bullocks and the instinctive mating of wild horses. A stallion’s instinct to mate, for instance, is paralleled with a man’s desire to sexually ‘master’ a woman. The male characters, in fact, form closer and cultivate more compatible relationships with animals than they do with women in the novels. As Red Burke, the male protagonist in Working Bullocks says to his horse, ‘[w]e got to be mates . . . got to be mates, my beauty’ (WB 62) and the narrator in Coonardoo describes how ‘[t]he filly and Warieda stood caressing, embraced’ (C 54) as Warieda breaks in the animal and rider and horse become one. There is a homo-erotic element in the narratives which bind men to men and men to their animals.

Corporeal descriptions of men and women in the novels highlight the savage as well as the sensuous side of bodily pursuits and physical pleasures. The descriptions of male physical and sexual violence in both novels focus attention on the power of the male body to conquer and master. This is

75 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Working Bullocks (1926; North Ryde [NSW]: 1991). Further references to the novel will appear in the main body of the thesis as WB, followed by the page number.

consistent with cultural perceptions of the Australian bush in the period under review, which is associated with feats of heroism and the dominance of man over nature. In the novels, however, it is the mother-figure who is heroic and dominant in her capacity to endure physical hardship and to persevere in her effort to fulfil personal ambitions. Despite this, she is vilified for her difference and punished for her transgressions according to a discourse on health that privileges the male body. And even though the male characters are physically and emotionally destructive, they refuse to register remorse, repent or redress their abusive behaviour. It is the mother-figure who bears the tragedy inherent in the two narratives; in part because she contradicts stereotypes which placed taboos on the female body in the interests of ordering gender and race and in part because there is a radical confrontation with the artiface of gender in the novels, given that strength and independence are attributed not to the male characters but to the mother-figures.

Outside of the novels, the fin de sie-cle saw the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in countries like North America and England.77 Women were keen to broaden their experiences without submitting to male domination and particularly deplored male sexual licence and the consequences to women’s health. In the less rigid social structures of countries like Australia, this ‘New Woman’, taken up by the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, can be seen in the characters of Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks and Mrs Bessie in Coonardoo. These aging mother- figures strive for a different world and especially for economic independence in the uncertain economy of the Australian frontier. Defying cultural and social conventions, both mother-figures successfully negotiate this masculine terrain but tragedy surrounds them, implying that women who are successful in transgressing the gender boundaries pay a price for their success which has limits and is subject to masculine authority. One of these restraints is the control of women’s bodies, confining women’s sexuality to the marriage bed for the purpose of reproduction rather than sexual pleasure. In the novels there are different responses to this control, illustrating the point that women who comply are considered socially and morally ‘healthy’ compared to women who flirt with convention and refuse to fear their sexual desires or the consequences of their sexual behaviour.

Even though the control of women’s bodies and behaviours has philosophical and historical roots long before white settlement in Australia, there are events in Australia’s history which reinforced sexist (and racist) attitudes. One of the most significant events, as noted in the Introduction, was the granting of the vote to white women in Australia at the turn of the century, just after Federation. The Australian Federation movement generated a newly-founded nationalism which coincided with the decline of the birth-rate in Australia and elsewhere in the western world. This was

76 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Coonardoo. Further references to the novel will appear in the main body of the thesis as C, followed by the page number. 77 The American novelist, Sarah Grand, first used the term, ‘New Woman’ in an essay in the North American Review published in 1894. It was a term used to describe a sense of modern discontent with marriage and motherhood, deemed the appropriate roles for middle-class women. Even though the character of Mary Ann is a representation of a working-class woman, she exhibits traits of restlessness

a time when the generative power of the mother-figure was essential to the prosperity and security of Australia. Thus, women’s bodies were imbued with political significance, as western nations like Australia became increasingly concerned with the health, the size of its population, and the colour of its citizens. For instance, when Mr W. M. Hughes, later Prime Minister of Australia (1915-1923), was interviewed by The Bulletin at the time of Federation, he stated:

Our Chief Plank is, of course, a White Australia. There’s no compromise about that. The industrious coloured brother has to go – and remain away!78

Female suffrage in Australia did not include Aboriginal women (or men) and what was seen as a triumph for white women has been shown, as Joan Eveline argues, ‘as a triumph of racism over sexism and a signal for the further demolition of Aboriginal women’s rights’.79 Where the body of the black mother-figure at the turn of the century became the site of racist and sexist violations in the extreme, the white maternal body also became the focus of social anxiety in the same period, because of ‘the fear that enfranchised women would refuse to obey her sacred calling of motherhood’.80 In the novels, these political and social tensions between men and women are written on the maternal body as forces are exerted to control and subdue a woman’s urge for sexual, social and political independence. Surveillance, segregation and social ostracism are ways in which the mother-figures encounter control.

Reading Working Bullocks and Coonardoo through a discourse on health highlights the nation’s obsession with sex and more specifically with (white) women giving birth. Women’s sexuality as defined by male parameters is always a signifier of women’s ‘health’. Thus female sexual behaviour and women’s role in reproduction became national preoccupations during the time period covered by the novels (1890s to 1920s). These preoccupations occurred at a time when, as Magarey argues:

across the Western world, a discourse on health brought into prominent focus the health of national populations—as producers of cannon-fodder in imperialist wars, as producers of healthy industrial workers and prolific consumers in an increasingly competitive capitalist world. Because it was concerned specifically with reproduction, this discourse positioned women and men as polar opposites. An emphasis on sexual difference and heterosexuality

and dissatisfaction with her role as wife and mother, traits that motivate her to pursue ambitions beyond those roles. 78 The Bulletin, 16 February 1901, 15. The italics are in the original quote. The Hon. William Morris Hughes is attributed to coining the phrase ‘populate or perish’, referring to Australia’s defence policy and the urgency to increase the nation’s Anglo-Celtic population. In 1934 he became Minister for Health and Repatriation. In this role he was known as the ‘Minister for Motherhood’ because of his support for the George V Jubilee Fund (the fund which established the King George V Maternity Hospital in Sydney, NSW), in his tireless advocacy of white women mothering. See Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds.), Australian Dictionary of Bibliography: Vol 9: 1891-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1983) 399. 79 Patricia Crawford and Phillipa Maddern (eds), Women and Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2001) 147. 80 Crawford and Maddern (eds), Women and Australian Citizens 157.

necessarily followed. And from that, complementarily, emerged a solidarity between members of one sex as opposed to the other.81

The novels are concerned with many of the issues raised in Magarey’s argument. Working Bullocks incorporates maternal attitudes to the imperialist war of 1914-1918. The novel covers the deaths of healthy men by ‘the butcher’ saw (WB 237) in a ruthless and unregulated timber industry, and singles out young couples like the characters Red Burke and Deb Colburn, whose destiny it is to reproduce the next generation of healthy industrial workers. There is, however, a different emphasis placed in the narratives on sexual difference and heterosexuality where white women, on the one hand, work and survive in the bush through a denial of difference by developing a way of being more like men. On the other, a young woman like Tessa Le Gaze in Working Bullocks, who highlights her feminine difference is considered to offend and contaminate the clean and the natural, according to male characters like Red Burke (WB 74).

The solidarity between members of one sex as opposed to the other is made more complex in Coonardoo which explores the relationship between two characters—a ‘black’ woman and a ‘white’ man. The novel places another meaning on ‘the health of national populations’ referred to by Magarey, given the exploitation of black women by white men which leaves Coonardoo ‘fouled and doomed’ (C 229) at the end of the narrative. Ultimately, it is the unhealthy and irrational racist and sexist attitudes that condemn Coonardoo given that white men in the narrative would not call into question their violent behaviour towards Aboriginal women because they ‘treated a gin anyhow and never turned a hair’ (C 225). The themes of sexual violence and sexual repression in the novel belong not to Black but to White Australia and are linked to sterility and the death of all forms of life, including the landscape.

Returning to the historical events at the beginning of the twentieth century in Australia, maternal citizenship and the social role of motherhood were subjects both Prichard and Dark wrote about in their non-fiction. Prichard was closer to the suffrage movement because of her age but it is worth nothing that Eleanor Dark’s father, Dowell O'Reilly, as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, introduced the first bill for the extension of the franchise to women in September 1894. Drusilla Modjeska has noted that ‘in contrast to his daughter he saw women's position as wretched but inevitable, because there could be no reconciliation of their sexuality and intellectuality ... the tragedy of modern women was that their developing intellect was powerless against their inevitable and eternal biological condition’.82 On the basis of women’s reproductive capacities, the vote was granted to Australian white women federally in 1902 but it is ironic that it was the issue of motherhood which prevented women from achieving other significant changes they had campaigned for in the lead up to Federation. As Magarey states:

81 Magarey, Passions 2. 82 Modjeska, Exiles 217-218.

being included in the new nation—accorded the rights of citzenship [sic]—harnessed the new white women citizens to a nationalist agenda in which it was their sex—their reproductive capacities—which would become their most important contribution to the nation.83

Working Bullocks and Coonardoo illustrate that on the one hand the mother-figures fulfill this nationalist agenda, but on the other they delay, limit and resist ‘their reproductive capacities’ in the belief that women’s work rather than their sex took priority (C 65) in this new era for women.

Prichard was connected to the suffrage movement in both England and Australia. In London to cover the Franco-British Exhibition for the Melbourne Herald in 1908, she recalls:

London was full of interest: the suffrage movement in full swing. I joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, and, though not an active member, carried a banner in the Women’s thirteen-thousand strong march through London.84

The suffrage banner, which was carried in English suffrage processions such as the one Prichard described, was painted by Australian artist Dora Meesom. The banner, painted on hessian, is an image of Britannia/Mother England with helmet, shield and trident being encouraged by her Australian daughter to ‘Trust the Women Mother, As I have Done’, to grant English women the vote.85 In Australia, Prichard was connected to some of the well-known first-wave feminists such as Catherine Low, Vita Goldstein, Mary Fullerton and Miles Franklin.86 In London she interviewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman whom Prichard describes as ‘the most brilliant feminist of her day: the outstanding writer, poet and sociologist of what has been described as ‘the women's century’’.87 This ‘brilliant feminist’ was certainly championed by the Australian Women’s Movement.88 Prichard does not mention whether she had read Gilman's Herland, a novel based on a matrilineal society (and published in the same year as Prichard’s prize-winning novel, The Pioneers—1915), but she had read several of Gilman's texts in which Gilman brilliantly analyses gender; her analyses are still relevant today. Prichard does state that Gilman's books ‘revealed the injustices and wastage women had suffered through the ages of ‘a man-made world’. They pleaded for the recognition of motherhood as ‘the highest process of physical evolution, and all rights, political, economic and social for women, in order that they might perfect their function, and work for the betterment of human relations’.89

In Working Bullocks and Coonardoo, the mother-figure characters, in their efforts to improve social and political relations in a ‘a man’s country’ (C 64), create tensions which are never fully

83 Magarey, Passions 155. 84 Prichard, Child of the Hurricane 178. 85 Dora Meeson’s banner is on permanent display at Parliament House, Canberra. See Ann Millar, Trust the Women Mother: Women in the Federal Parliament (1993, Canberra: Department of the Senate, 1994) 1-4. 86 Throssell, Straight Left 228-233; 243-250. 87 Prichard, Hurricane 188. 88 Magarey, Passions 18. 89 Prichard, Hurricane 188 and Throssell, Straight Left 223.

resolved in either of these novels. For instance, the celebration of masculine strength and the solidarity between men is destabilised in the narratives as men are represented as the ‘weaker’ sex in terms of their attitudes and behaviour. Unlike women, men are unable and unwilling to organise and fight for change. Representations of the mother-figures blur the boundaries of sexual difference and dis-order the idealization of white moral motherhood as depicted through political policies and social practices imposed on the maternal body. Yet these representations of the mother-figures demonstrate that matriarchy too can generate oppression. In analysing these representations, I draw attention to these shifts and contradictions in the texts whereby the mother-figure usurps the patriarchal law of the father, in her longing for change, independence and fulfilment.

CHAPTER 1 Working Bullocks

In this chapter, I argue that the aging mother-figure Mary Ann Colburn is represented as a masculine mother-figure, living and working in a time and place which could not accommodate her maternal power. Mary Ann is an ambiguous representation of fecundity and fearlessness that fulfils the national agenda with her many offspring but she exerts an oppressive influence that her daughter Deb Colburn cannot escape. In comparison to Mary Ann, the widowed mother-figure, Tessa Le Gaze, has motherhood imposed upon her but strongly resists socio-cultural constraints to regulate her sexual and social behaviour. My argument is that the female character in the novel who best fits the ‘feminine’ role of motherhood will in fact be yoked, like a ‘working bullock’, to an itinerant life of labour. The novel’s representations of the mother-figure remain deeply ambivalent about the maternal role; a consistent theme in the novels analysed in Sections I and II.

When Prichard’s novel was published by Jonathan Cape in 1926 it was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement and praised for its descriptions of ‘a new country and a strange life’, but denigrated for its title, which the reviewer stated would offend female sensibility—at least that of ‘nine women out of ten’.90 It is not known whether this was because the reviewer thought that bullocks sounded too similar to the colloquial word for testicles, bollocks, but it is significant that bollocks can also mean ‘to throw into confusion’. I suggest that the novel does precisely that because characters like Mary Ann and Tessa disorder the ‘masculine’ world of paid employment and political life and demonstrate that economic authority lies in the hands of the mother, not the father-figure. These two mother-figures are emblematic of the ‘New Woman’ who empowers herself with material gain and emotional fulfilment. It could also be argued that the title is ironic rather than descriptive since Prichard disrupts traditional representations of the Australian bushman in Working Bullocks and celebrates instead the physical strength and mental endurance of the bushwoman. In spite of this, neither triumphs by the end of the novel. The legend of the 1890s inherited from male writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson idealised the traits of independence, egalitarianism, fair-play and mateship. This was a self-confident legend in its sense of a structured, masculine identity. In the context of Working Bullocks, the bushman is the bullocky, timber-cutter, farmer and mill worker, living and working in the karri forests of Western Australia, in the early 1900s. Prichard certainly acknowledges the legacy but she also critiques it by portraying these men as no better than the bullocks they whip and work, and as ‘no more than children inside’ (WB 254). Fear, violence,

90 The Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 1926, 932. The review implies that the sales of Working Bullocks would be adversely affected by its title but in fact it sold well and has been reprinted three times—1972, 1980 and 1991. It is currently out of print.

impulsive acts, immature, and irrational thinking make the Australian bushmen unable or unwilling to change their working conditions; they exist, like beasts of burden, yoked and driven by a ruthlessly exploitative industry and its capitalist owners. There is nothing admirable, strong, or inspiring about these literary representations of Australian masculinity.

In Working Bullocks, Prichard interweaves literary representations of the Australian bush worker with an overriding political intention around a conventional romantic theme. The values and expectations implicit in these three strategies are simultaneously accepted then rejected, dismantling myths and traditions.91 In relation to the construction of the mother-figure, Prichard also protests against, and rejects conventions and ideals of the 'good mother' and the 'maternal female', which separate women from nature and from culture, thus denying women access to and enjoyment of their own socio-cultural, political and sexual power. This nineteenth-century concept (carried over into the twentieth century) has idealised incorporeal virtues and values of moral goodness, selflessness and Christian ethics which Prichard refuses to perpetuate in this novel. Having said this, Deb Colburn, Mary Ann’s virginal daughter and a pivotal character in the novel, is one of the few female figures who signifies maternal ‘values’ even though she is not yet a mother. Deb is associated with nature and the natural environment of earth, water and trees. She exhibits traits of moral goodness and selflessness and conforms more closely to the ideal of the mother-figure than any other female character in the novel. However, she bears a fateful identity, predetermined by nature and by culture. The attraction in the novel of purity to danger infers this representation of the maternal ideal is inevitably tragic for the female subject. Her own mother, Mary Ann Colburn, together with Deb’s rival in love, Tessa Le Gaze, are unruly mother-figures whose mis-rule creates havoc and tragedy both within and outside the family unit. It is through Mary Ann Colburn, Deb and Tessa Le Gaze that women as mothers are shown to work for and against their prescribed roles in the new nation which narrowly defined women through their role as healthy and good mothers.

Citizen-Mother and the new ideal of woman

In the opening lines of this novel, Mary Ann Colburn is described as a woman who:

91 I am indebted to Pat Buckridge's article 'Katharine Susannah Prichard and the Literary Dynamics of Political Commitment' (published in Ferrier, Gender, Politics and Fiction) for pointing out the way Prichard 'appropriates' the romantic love story in the service of an overriding political purpose. For Buckridge, appropriation—a term used by Engels in his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific—is the core concept of Working Bullocks which is both direct and indirect and centres on the body, physical strength and consumption. He states that expressions of delight in the physical strength of human beings 'form a signifying chain which prefigures, both metaphorically and metonymically, the direct appropriation by the working class of the products of their labour and of the means of production' (96). Rather than reworking appropriation as a political strategy in Working Bullocks, Buckridge argues that it is a political 'cover' 'to make possible the release and textual articulation of a broad spectrum of desires, from the social and political to the sexual and familial (97). The concept of desire, inherent in the character of the mother-figure, is a recurring theme in all of the novels under review in the thesis.

did not look a day more than forty, though she was fifty or thereabouts, and the mother of eighteen children … [with] … [a]n extraordinarily young face [which was] as virile as a young man’s. (WB 8)

This middle-aged woman, one of the three mother-figure characters in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Working Bullocks (1926) that I will discuss in this chapter, symbolises the energy and exuberance of a newly-born nation. She, like her daughter Deb Colburn, epitomises a health and vitality that is aligned to her ‘feminine’ and generative powers of being a woman. But both women are also aligned with ‘masculine’ qualities of vigour and strength. At the outset of the novel, the uneasy coupling of motherhood and masculinity in Working Bullocks disrupts gendered constructions of ‘the feminine’ and ‘the masculine’, and unsettles relationships between women and men.92 The novel’s celebration of physical fitness, vitality, and strength, at a time when, outside of the novel, Australia’s early feminists were campaigning for female suffrage on the basis of women’s reproductive capacities, capacities which were crucial to the growth of an emerging young nation, invites a reading of the novel through a discourse on health.

Australian feminists like Vita Goldstein, who were campaigning for female suffrage, were also ‘seeking new definitions of womanhood, definitions of women as ‘human beings’ rather than as ‘the sex’’.93 A vision of the Australian version of ‘the New Woman’ included a change in the conditions of heterosexual sex and a yearning for a different world. As the strong and capable mother, the character of Mary Ann represents an old but ‘new woman’ in a young nation who longs to be part of a world she ‘had never dreamed of’ (WB 257). But in order to fulfil her reproductive role, it was vital that women be positioned, as Magarey argues, ‘as members of a sex’94 as a way of regulating and disciplining female behaviour. In the period under review, motherhood was the intended outcome of feminine sexuality and mothering was at the centre of women’s work. Mary Ann, on the one hand, conforms to this ‘feminine’ ideal, many times over. On the other hand, her representation challenges the category of women as members of a ‘sex’ whereby her identity and subjectivity are fixed and bound by her biological capacity to reproduce. Her awesome fecundity is not associated with self-sacrifice, oppression or the imposition of demands upon her freedom; motherhood for her has, in fact, led to liberation, political activism and financial gain. Mary Ann has served her country eighteen times over and is now free to pursue her own interests. Her representation challenges the masculine/feminine binary to reveal it as a limiting cultural construct

92 I use the word ‘feminine’ to mean a socially-constructed image of femaleness. The word ‘masculine’ is more problematic because although it is inherently linked to ‘the feminine’ as both parallel and opposite in terms of a socially constructed subject-position, the term is privileged in patriarchal discourses signifying that which is rational, logical and sane; that which is normal and not deviant. See Sarah Gamble (ed), The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism (Cambridge: Icon, 1999) 270. 93 Magarey, Passions 3. 94 Magarey, Passions 2.

rather than an essential difference. Despite the fact that in the realm of the narrative Mary Ann’s dream is not realised and there is an overriding sense of failure surrounding her in the novel, I do not read this as Prichard’s expression of pessimism. Rather, I see the mother-figure instigating and embodying contradiction and change, where she is implicated, like feminism, in the very discourse she seeks to oppose.

It is, however, woman as mother, reduced to her quintessential biological function, that Mary Ann (and Tessa Le Gaze) work against in Working Bullocks. Mary Ann’s generative powers have fulfilled the national agenda, intimately connected to the discourse on health surrounding nationhood, racial purity, and the vigour of national ‘progress’, a male enclave which is epitomised by the masculinisation of the Australian labour force as outlined in both novels. But at the same time she is at the forefront of political activism to improve the conditions of workers and both she and Tessa succeed in achieving social and economic independence within a masculine terrain. This is not the case, however, with Mary Ann’s daughter, Deb Colburn, the young mother-to-be, who, at the end of the narrative perpetuates the mythologised, ‘natural’ role of women as mothers. It is significant that at the beginning of the narrative there is a celebration of the mother-figure’s generative authority, but at the end, the issue of reproduction is crudely vocalised by Red Burke shouting to Mary Ann that her daughter will ‘breed ... like you done!’; the next generation of ‘working bullocks’ (WB 316). His statement lays claim to this young woman’s body, undermining all that the older mother-figure has envisaged and fought for.

Mary Ann Colburn, though she works against the ideology of motherhood in terms of a loving maternal presence in the home, also complies with that ideal as the producer of many children. In her reproductive role, her socio-cultural, historico-political, and economic significance cannot be denied in a nation dependent on white women’s mothering. Women were expected to mother and as a result the prevailing, normative ideology of motherhood and the family prescribed women's lives. Federation itself was celebrated as the ‘birth of the nation’ with politicians such as the first Prime Minister and male cartoonists of the day appropriating motherhood metaphors to describe and illustrate the event.

Patricia Yaeger argues, in relation to this appropriation of maternal sublimity, that:

This female labour provides a metaphor of incredible power for heightening male discourse; it yields a scene of blockage that culminates in the male writer's appropriation of the birthing woman's terrifying, gratifying access to life and death.95

95 Patricia Yaeger. ‘The ‘Language of Blood’’ in Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (eds) ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture (Toronto: U Toronto Press, 1993) 106.

As mother-figures in the narrative wrestle for status and power, male characters deploy these metaphors of motherhood to underscore masculine drives and desires. As the character Mark Smith states, he loved Karri Creek and its people ‘in the hungry, yearning way of a mother’ (WB 247), enabling a unique access to his feelings through motherhood. And although Working Bullocks makes no direct reference to either Federation or to Australia’s demographic profile, the novel celebrates ‘breeding’ and the male characters in the novel denounce women who are not ‘good and wholesome’ or ‘clean and natural’ (WB 74), mating instinctively like animals. Beyond the narrative, the refusal of women to have large families resulted in the national birthrate falling by 1901, a situation viewed by the masculine hegemony as a threatening social change.96 Doctors and politicians feared that the choice of many parents to have smaller families endangered the growth of ‘White Australia’, a policy of racism enshrined in the Commonwealth's constitution. As a result, childbirth was viewed as a national duty. Motherhood was not simply a private and personal event; it was a major social and political issue to ensure that a greater number of the right Australian ‘type’ were reproduced. Consequently, Australian population policies, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, have aimed to control the female body and especially female sexual behaviour.

One way of regulating female desire and persuading women to mother was through promoting a public idealisation of motherhood, thus encouraging settler women specifically, to have (and to have more) children. Ideological representations of the mother-figure depict the mother as a model of Christian love and servitude; a sensible and civilising white woman who serves as a stabilising force in the history of the nation. Frequently positioned as ‘ahistorical’ or a background figure, her representation in cultural discourses has been perpetuated by contemporary popular media which place her in the home, happy and good, fulfilling her domestic and child-rearing roles.97 Her extreme opposite, depicted in Australian bush mythology, is the engulfing primal mother.98 This monster-mother myth breeds fear and repulsion in the bush inhabitants and the only response to her is fight or flight. However, between these extremes of maternal martyr and mythical beast, the mother-

96 In 2001, when Australia celebrated the Centenary of Federation, the very low birth rate amongst non- indigenous Australian women continued to be a social, political and economic concern. In Australia (as in other so-called 'developed' countries) women have controlled their fertility to the point where the birth rate is no longer able to maintain current population levels in the twenty-first century. It would seem that, from the beginning of Federation, women have resisted the idea that multiple births and the institution of motherhood are compulsory for women and the nation, in spite of political and social pressures applied on women to fulfil the role of ‘mother’. This has not prevented politicians over the years from calling on Australians to have more children. As recently as May 2004, the Federal Treasurer, Mr Peter Costello was publicly urging Australian couples in the so-called 2004 ‘Breeding Budget’, ‘to do their patriotic duty and have three children: “One for your husband, one for your wife, one for your country”’. ‘‘Home Births’ on the rise’, Editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald 11-12 December 2004, Weekend Edition:34. 97 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 88. 98 Kay Schaffer, ‘Women and the bush: Australian national identity and representations of the feminine’, Antipodes, 3.1 (1989): 10. Susan Falkiner, The Writers' Landscape: Wilderness (East Roseville (NSW): Simon & Schuster, 1992) 118-119.

figure's more complex relationship with the broader socio-cultural and political aspects of Australian society emerges.

Mary Ann Colburn as a symbol of matriarchal power

The character of Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks is self-consciously represented as the new ideal of woman as citizen and nation-maker, promoted around the time of Federation and linked to the campaign for female suffrage. Marilyn Lake has argued that the ideal woman in the new nation would be ‘strong, healthy, practical, self-sufficient and independent’ and cites The Dawn which urged women to wear sensible clothes and follow a nutritious diet.99 Mary Ann embodies all of these qualities to the degree where her matriarchal authority is respected and feared. This powerful mother-figure is introduced in the first few pages of the novel as ‘the mother of eighteen children’ (WB 8) who is ‘a terror for work’ (WB 8) and who worked ‘like a man’ (WB 105). She is vital, strong and tough and takes pride in the size of her family. The many masculine signifiers throughout Working Bullocks in relation to Mary Ann are indicative of the authoritative and dominant position she holds in the Colburn family and the community of Karri Creek. The aggressive Red Burke, the hyper-masculine hero of the novel, states he ‘used to be afraid of her’ (WB 9) and was ‘anxious to stand well with her’ (WB 8). Chris Colburn, Mary Ann's firstborn, ‘thought there was no woman in the countryside to compare with his mother’ (WB 8) as he willingly hands her his weekly wages.

On the one hand, Mary Ann wholly conforms to her citizenship role as mother-of-the-nation and to the early feminists’ ideal of the strong, healthy woman. She signifies the strength and vitality in keeping with the birth and growth of a new nation. Ivor Indyk argues in his introduction to Working Bullocks that allegory functions in the novel to give ‘the sense of a young nation awakening to a consciousness of its power’100 but in the text, the power and primacy belong not to patriarchy but to the matriarch. Thus, on the other hand, Mary Ann reverses the polemic of equal rights for all citizens which was the basis on which women fought for their citizenship rights. In the narrative, it is the Law of the Mother which must be obeyed as the mother-figures dominate their husbands, manipulate their children and successfully bargain with men who impede their plans. In addition, the representation of maternal desire of white mother-figures subverts patriarchal definitions of appropriate female sexual behaviour. These representations reveal that the mother-figure not only has drives and desires outside the role of motherhood but that these desires are not easily obliterated by discursive rules and social conventions. The mother-figures also transgress the prescribed feminine role of motherhood with its association of intimacy, tenderness and warmth. Mary Ann exceeds the

99 Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The history of Australian Feminism (St. Leonards [NSW]: Allen & Unwin, 1999) 22. 100 Ivor Indyk, Introduction to Working Bullocks by Katharine Susannah Prichard (1926; North Ryde (NSW): Imprint, 1991) v.

bounds of strength and independence to the point where she terrifies her family through exercising absolute power.

There is also an erotic self-possession about this aging matriarch demonstrated by her celebration of the number of children she has produced. Multiple births are a signifier of her fecundity and not an indication of maternal devotion. As the narrator states, ‘[s]ixteen living and two dead’, she would tell you (WB 8), but in fact the children are all handed over to their sister Deb who fulfils the role of the self-sacrificing, ideal mother-figure. The image of resistless production and relentless toil, breeding more 'working bullocks' for the future labour force, is a devastating image observed by Deb when she watches, in fear, the work of machines and men cutting and sawing trees. She refers to the machines as ‘great devouring monsters’ (WB 235) and it could be argued that Mary Ann herself exhibits the same qualities of irresistible energy, mass production and the mindless power of these machines. Mary Ann embodies qualities of a 'great devouring mother' driven by her love of money and the desire to acquire more through the exploitation of nature as well as of her children’s labour. Both her sons are killed in the novel through industrial accidents, working to supplement their mother's income. Mary Ann is seemingly liberated by childbirth and is not oppressed by the demands of birthing and rearing sixteen children. She actively resists her assigned motherly role and Deb puzzles over the fact that she had never seen her mother kiss any of her children. Deb states that she herself ‘had never kissed her mother, as she had seen children in the township kiss and cuddle up to their mothers’ (WB 242). The narrative ends with Deb reiterating that she could never ‘remember ever having kissed her mother ... she had never kissed her mother’ (WB 316). The significance placed on a mother's kiss may indicate its transforming powers, but no kiss from Mary Ann is ever forthcoming. The association of motherhood with love and intimacy is corrupted is this instance, threatening ideology and order.

The mother-figure and masculinity

Mary Ann also transgresses her prescribed feminine role through her treatment of and attitudes towards men. Lake has argued that Australian masculinity was a problem for women and children in this historical period, because the ‘Australian frontier conditions had encouraged a certain style of masculinity’101 which was commemorated in nationalist culture as:

a particular model of manhood—eulogising in print and paintings the Lone Hand, the mobile, independent, seasonal worker, freed from the trammels of domesticity. His unencumbered lifestyle enabled him to indulge in distinctive leisure pursuits—casual sex, gambling, smoking and drinking deep.102

101 Lake, Getting Equal 31. 102 Lake, Getting Equal 31.

For Mary Ann, it is because of this particular model of manhood that she is able to dominate and dismiss men even though she admires their physical strength. Their ‘unencumbered lifestyle’ is a point of ridicule and a source of humour in the narrative, epitomised by conversations between the characters Red Burke and his Uncle Wally. Marriage and domestic life are viewed by these men as ‘no good to you—that gettn’ married—feedin’ another man’s daughter’ (WB 39), but Mary Ann has capitalised on these attitudes. For instance, the narrator states that her hapless husband Tom ‘had lost an eye when he was working as a faller, and he liked his beer’ (WB 8), but Tom’s disabilities allow Mary Ann a free hand in ‘driving her little team’ of working bullocks, ‘strenuously’ (WB 133). This mother-figure enjoys being the head of the family or unit of production, driven beyond life's necessities because the mother-figure had ‘a liking for money’ (WB 133) and ‘she wanted to accumulate; it was the money she liked; and knowing she owned so much’ (WB 133).

Power in the form of material possessions is shared by both women and men in the novel. But where the mother-figure is prudent and patient, male-figures like Red Burke are easily dismissed because of their irrational behaviour and lack of commitment. Mary Ann admires Red Burke's physical and sexual presence, describing him as a ‘powerful brute’ (WB 8), but in the same breath she slashes this image, concluding that he is a ‘motherless foal!’ (WB 10), implying immaturity and helplessness—orphaned from maternal relationship and language. Unleashing her female rage at the end of the novel she tells him, ‘[y]ou're no better than the beasts you're driving’ (WB 315). Mary Ann subverts social and sexual roles that govern heterosexual relations in a place and time which resisted the feminine. She is determined to participate in public life on her own terms. She represents an excess of female desire which has no place in an aggressively male-dominated culture. This mother- figure is no poor selector's wife, worn down by many births and hard physical labour. On the contrary, she possesses a vibrant and ‘reckless gaiety’ (WB 8), suggesting a release of female libidinal energies which are abundant, youthful and robust. Her energies annihilate feminine roles and conventions which ideologically associate the feminine with the private realm of birthing and nurturing, inferior to and excluded from the public realm of masculine pursuit.

Despite Mary Ann's age she is clearly an emancipated woman, a ‘new woman’, who is ambitiously confident in her desire to live a public life in roles created through her own decisions. Even in the face of war she holds sentiments and attitudes which are antagonistic to the stereotype of woman-as-mother, yielding up her progeny to the Great War. Carmel Shute has argued, in relation to Australian women and the Great War, that the war facilitated ‘virtually unchallenged, the inviolability of the stereotype of woman as mother—passive, yielding, self-abnegating’.103 Mary Ann does not comply with this stereotype even though she wants her first born, Chris Colburn, to go to war. The

103 Carmel Shute, ‘Heroines and heroes: Sexual mythology in Australia 1914-1918’ in Damousi and Lake (eds), Gender and War 30.

Great War is in the background of Working Bullocks; Red served in the war and Chris Colburn unsuccessfully tried to enlist.104 Mary Ann states that she ‘would have been proud of him in all that danger’ (WB 9), unconsciously willing her son to war with a remark which has an edge of greed and satisfaction in it, as the mother-figure thinks only of what his sacrifice will mean to her and not what it may do to him. Greed does, in fact, get the better of Mary Ann as she concludes that it was better to have ‘Chris handy and being sure he was not pot-shotted at’ because ‘she did not know how she was going to manage without his wages’ (WB 9). The veneration of the Australian male during the Great War, idealised by the ANZAC who embodies the democratic-egalitarian tradition of the Australian bushman, is nowhere to be found amongst the bushmen of Karri Creek.105 Instead, pettiness, desertion, ignorance and drunkenness prevail. As the character Mark Smith states to Red Burke and the men of the Six Mile, ‘You're no more than children inside—and you haven't got the guts of kids who sell papers on the streets’ (WB 254).

Motherhood and Marxism

With the exception of Mark Smith, the itinerant Marxist philosopher, all the men in the novel suffer from psychological or physical disabilities which leave them with an impotence of will to fight for better living and working conditions. However, even Mark in the end is ineffectual and he leaves Karri Creek, hurt, bitter and defeated, deserted by the people he had come to love like a mother (WB 247). If evidence is sought for a crisis of masculinity as a result of the Great War, it can be found in the irrational and excitable Red Burke as well as in the itinerant and chaste Mark Smith. Mark is the political activist who convinces Mary Ann that socialism will change the old and create the new world. Part of the irony in the novel is that it is the doctrines of Karl Marx that have awakened the maternal in Mary Ann, rather than the experience of motherhood itself. Towards Mark and his teachings, she feels ‘a tenderness so exquisite, so poignant, her being was suspended in it. She had never experienced anything like that tenderness. So fine, of such humility!’ (WB 259-160) and she stands on the old karri stump to publicly speak of ‘this crusade for a better world’ (WB 256). As the narrator states:

104 The Great War is featured in Prichard’s Intimate Strangers and the Goldfields Trilogy. Prichard herself was working as a journalist in London when the war broke out and ‘she tried unsuccessfully to secure an assignment as a war correspondent and to join a women‘s auxiliary unit’. She visited an Australian Voluntary Hospital in France (Wimereux) in 1915 and in the same year, back in London, began writing The Pioneers. Prichard's London of 1915 gave clear signs of the changing status of women because of the need for women to enter the work force to support the war effort. Even though the Great War is in the background of Working Bullocks and is not mentioned at all in Coonardoo, I suggest that the exploration of a modern, self-determined identity for women, made more urgent because of the events of 1914, underscores all of Prichard's novels under review, whether her characters work for or against the emerging ‘new woman’. 105 Australia's official war historian, C.E.W. Bean, mythologised the Anzac in his war despatches, asserting ‘that Australian nationhood and manhood were attained at the landing of Gallipoli’. Damousi and Lake, Gender and War 11.

No one worked harder during the strike than Mary Ann Colburn, arranging with Mark for food supplies to go to the bush camps and navvies’ huts. ... taking all her milk and eggs into the Creek and giving them away to women with young children, talking from the stump with Mark Smith, tongue-banging the bosses for all she was worth ... . (WB 257)

Mary Ann’s bold and bodily insertion into the political struggle is short-lived. Mark leaves town almost immediately following the birth of her political consciousness. When the timber strike is defeated, Mary Ann acknowledges that she ‘did not exist for him’ (WB 260) and the next day he departs, ‘wearied and worn out by the fury’ (WB 261). Significantly, there is an edge of contempt or scorn in his final thought of this mother-figure linked to her considerable generative powers. He objectifies the maternal body through an unflattering analysis of her physical appearance, concluding that he ‘noticed how broad in the beam she was’ (WB 260). This may well be a defence against the primal omnipotent mother-figure whom he now rejects. As the narrator states, she no longer existed for him and he no longer hears her speak (WB 260). However, to Mary Ann, their combined efforts have only reinforced her maternal authority as she emerges as the triumphant archaic mother, having delighted and glorified in their political fight. From his failure she has gained the ‘Promethean spark, the fighting spirit’ (WB 257) for a new world she ‘had never dreamed of’ (WB 257). His exhaustion is her empowerment and this dynamic is a potential threat to political and social power relations within the young Commonwealth. Mothers were helpmates, compassionate and kind, but Mary Ann defies this description, in both the private and public realm.

Mary Ann's ungovernable energies and generative powers can be viewed as a strategy for initiating questions about gender constructions and roles for women (as well as men), in the new nation. Ancient myths of mother-monsters such as Hydra, Medusa, and Medea disrupt culture's patrilineage and confront issues of masculine power and control. These myths also violate concepts of maternal love and maternal bonds between mother and child. The anxiety and fear which these violations evoke cannot be ignored since all relations—identity, race and place—lead back to the mother-figure.106 Mary Ann instils awe and fear in all of her children but especially in her daughter, Deb Colburn, who states that ‘Mother is synonymous with ‘the Almighty’’ (WB 132). The Law of the Mother (or 'Mother-Right' as Johann Bachofen termed matriarchal law),107 goes unchallenged in the Colburn household embodied in the mother-figure as capitalist-exploiter of her own family. Deb sees her mother as ‘the all-wise and all-powerful’ (WB 138), and her word ‘had the force of natural law’ (WB 138), which she as the daughter had to obey. Mary Ann wields a power that is as vital as it is

106 See Marina Warner, ‘Monstrous Mothers: Women Over the Top’ in Six Myths of Our Time: Managing Monsters. The Reith Lectures, 1994 (London: Vintage, 1994) 1-16. 107 J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen. Trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXXXIV (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967). Bachofen published Das Mutterrecht, a monumental work on the theory of motherhood in 1861. Das Mutterrecht, gives primacy to the mother-figure and matriarchal societies as a prefigurement of the patriarchy. His work has been incorporated into Marxian theories concerning private property and the state. Bachofen was also a fellow townsman of Carl Jung.

fierce and the effect on her daughter as the surrogate mother-figure forms part of the next analysis in this chapter.

Deb Colburn as ‘the natural-born mother’

Nature’s reproductive processes are clearly aligned with Deb’s representation in the narrative. As the young mother-to-be, Deb Colburn is ignorant of the processes of growth, including her own sexual maturing. Nevertheless, in Deb’s mind there is an inevitability about nature which she neither questions or resists, particularly the prescribed role of normative mothering. In the following quotation the narrator introduces Deb, stating that she:

knew nothing of ancient philosophies; but she had a sense of being close to the life about her, a knowledge of oneness with it, profound and serene. She could not have put it into words; but the feeling hovered. The great trees with their power, the flame of their lives, the fate they were moving towards, she was akin to them; and to the earth, sombre and fecund, thrusting forests from her deep soil, holding them in the air through all the years.

The processes of growth had always been a miracle to her, and no one had been able to tell her much of them. How the earth fed the trees, fertilized them? Why the leaves spread the silk of their young green and withered; flowers germinated; their fibres fell into the earth again? The law was the same for ants, bees, birds, midges, and for her, as for the trees, Deb surmised, and was content. (WB 312-313)

This description of Deb as a symbol of femininity embodying nature, fertility and nurturance is in sharp contrast to the description of her own mother, described in the beginning of the novel as a woman who was ‘as hard and straight as nails’ (WB 8). Deb Colburn embodies Rousseau-esque concepts of the goodness of nature and the evils of society. Rousseau’s ‘woman in nature’ is pliant, naturally submissive and accepting of her inferior role to her husband. She will also not ‘swaddle’ (sexually represses) her sons, preoccupied as Rousseau is with male emancipation which is social as well as sexual.108 Deb epitomises health and strength and is described as ‘a fine lump of a girl’ (WB 121). The word ‘lump’, however, implies something formless and ungainly and while Deb is represented as possessing mythological qualities drawn from feminine archetypes and matriarchal symbolism, she is in fact degraded by her own mother’s, as well as other characters’, greed. Her relationship with nature establishes her as potentially the abundant ‘Great Mother’, source of all life as it arises, unfolds and transforms, but for Deb this is a destructive transformation.

Deb's acceptance of her fertile female spirit and her oneness with the earth as the fruit- bearing tree of life—nourishing, protecting and generating—sets her apart in the novel as a person who instinctively understands nature and its relevance to communal life. With this passage in mind, one way of analysing Deb's representation is to refer to Erich Neumann’s text, The Great Mother

108 Jean Jacques Rousseau. Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (1911; London: Everyman's Library, 1963) 10- 12.

(1955), in which he draws on Bachofen’s (and Robert Briffault’s) philosophy of matriarchy.109 Neumann argues that the tree is a symbol of the Great Mother and as a feminine archetype is associated with the earth mother in all her abundant and transformative ways. Like the Great Earth Mother, the tree is a vessel or protective container and everything born of it belongs to it and remains subject to it. However, the tree also symbolises paradox and ambiguity. It is the tree of knowledge and the site of original sin; a symbol of cradle and coffin; of life and death.110 Neumann dedicated The Great Mother to ‘C. G. Jung’ in acknowledgment of Jung's theoretical model of dialectical logic and the play of opposites in determining psychological development. Jung believed that life organises itself into fundamental polarities because ‘life, being an energetic process, needs the opposites, for without opposition there is, as we know, no energy’.111 In Jung's arbor philosophica, the tree is a symbol of psychic development and he associates the tree with matriarchal consciousness, specifically related to time and the phenomenon of destiny. Bachofen implies and Neumann argues that the matriarchal figure is associated with the tragic aspect of transience and it is the tragic and transient elements of the matriarch, rather than her earlier promise of transformation, which predominate at the end of this narrative. These male-authored texts can be criticised on the basis of essentialism which renders the mother-figure passive and disembodied, outside history and material reality. I argue, however, that these perceptions represent the mother-figure as a strong and positive image and, in turn, provide insights into the myths and beliefs which align the mother-figure with nature.

This identification of women with nature has a long and ambivalent history. It has helped reinforce assumptions about motherhood, as well as beliefs about how women (and men) inhabit a world deeply marked by gender. This association makes, as de Beauvoir has argued, woman the Other to man, positioned as the exception to the privileged male norm.112 In turn, nature is presented as other to culture and must be dominated, tamed and ruled. This otherness of women and nature has particular resonance in the Australian context as settlers and soldiers alike sought to master the threat and power of nature, perceived in many instances to be hostile and impenetrable. The identification is well illustrated in the representation of Deb Colburn, personified in Red’s mind as ‘a tree growing, or

109 Erich Neumann. The Great Mother: An analysis of the archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series XLVII (1955; Princeton: Princeton U P, 1974). Robert Briffault’s matriarchal theory of social evolution differs from Johan Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht in that Briffault does not define matriarchy in terms of actual mother-rule or inheritance of the maternal line, but in more general terms as a period in which women were socially predominant. Briffault asserts that the change from matriarchal to patriarchal societies is associated with the change from hunting to agricultural production and the associated emergence of property. The foregoing, paraphrased from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s Introduction to Robert Briffault, The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927; London: George Unwin & Allen, 1959). 110 Neumann, Great Mother 48-54. 111 Claire Douglas, ‘The historical context of analytical psychology’ in Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 22. 112 de Beauvoir, Second Sex 16.

a spring welling , deeply, quietly, underground’ (WB 122) whom Red wants to ‘ravish’ (WB 116) and violate in his lust for domination and desire to possess both woman and nature.

Where Mary Ann refuses the tragedy that motherhood and separation involve, it is Deb, the future mother-figure living in a natural, pre-lapsarian state, who is most at risk because of her ‘naturalness’ and her passivity embodied in this feminine archetype. Breast milk, bees, warm sweet fragrance, honey-sweet wells, and bodily warmth (WB 151-153) could be either sexual or maternal signifiers, but in this situation they image Deb as the quintessential earth mother who labours and sacrifices herself for the nation and provides succour and comfort to men. It is undoubtedly her alignment with nature and nature's relationships with maternity that attract men to her. However, at the end of the narrative motherhood is reduced to nourishment to sustain her itinerant and hungry bushman. Red describes Deb as ‘a young tree fallen’ (WB 113), anticipating that her personification as a dream of innocence, living in an imagined state of the natural realm, will be destroyed, cut down and exchanged for profit. Unlike her mother, Deb's representation is reminiscent of a return to an early modern mother who first emerges in Europe with the philosophical teachings of Rousseau and the institutions needed by the first Industrial Revolution.113 There is an echo of Rousseau's philosophy in the society of Karri Creek, expressed in the opening lines of Émile: ‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil’.114 If Deb's representation is a strategy to reconcile nature and society, there is no resolution at the end of the novel. On the contrary, Deb is neither revered nor feared for her generative powers. Rather, she is an object of masculine desire, ‘the promise of meat and drink’ (WB 314), to be consumed like nature itself for the advancement of capitalism and national progress.

Part of the tragedy in the novel is that the older mother-figure represents the promise of change through her civic and political involvement but her daughter, the younger mother-figure, represents a collapse of mother-citizen and a return to the construction of mother as nature and nurturer, content in her exclusion from the public realm. Magarey has noted that by the 1920s Australia’s Women’s Movement had not achieved all that it had campaigned for, primarily because of the restrictive role of women as reproducers whose labour in terms of birthing, nurturing, and unpaid domestic work, was not counted as part of the gross national product. Magarey suggests that all ‘the central critiques and desires concerning heterosexual relationships of suffrage-era feminism’ evaporated.115 In Working Bullocks elements of these unfulfilled dreams are worked out through the juxtaposition of mother and daughter. In the closing of the narrative, when the two women are together but forever apart, they represent two very different models of motherhood. The old but new

113 E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 8. 114 Rousseau. Émile, 5. 115 Magarey, Passions 179-184.

mother-figure embodies all that Australia’s suffrage-era feminism sought but failed to fully achieve for a complex of reasons. The young and future mother-figure represents an acceptance of her mothering role and male authority to define her life. By way of exploring these points further, I go on to explore how Prichard represents Deb Colburn’s role as her mother’s daughter.

Deb as the dutiful daughter

Deb Colburn has spent her life taking care of her mother's numerous children. In addition to her mothering duties, Deb helps her father hauling timber and working ‘like a man’ (WB 105). She is described as having ‘the broad frame, the dumb and patient air of a young labouring animal’ (WB 13) who will ‘breed’ (WB 316) like her mother. But where, as argued above, Mary Ann's generative powers signify a strong sense of authority and self-sufficiency, Deb is linked to the natural world of benign animals and vulnerable trees. This suggests innocence and inevitability in terms of this young woman's destiny to reproduce like an animal. Though depicted as a strong, healthy young woman, Deb is, in fact, a tragic figure because of her alignment with nature (and essentialist notions of the female as reproducer), and her consistent exclusion from culture. As the narrator states, Deb ‘liked living and working among the big trees’ (WB 17) but she had never seen a film or read a book because her mother ‘thought reading a waste of time’ (WB 235). As the undifferentiated and dependent future mother-figure who ‘could neither see nor think, except through her mother's eyes and brain’ (WB 220), Deb acknowledges the dominance of the maternal image.

Deb only knows she exists through a negative state of dependence on and subordination to her own mother. She cannot release herself from her mother’s dominance. Her silence throughout the novel and her lack of verbal skill contrast with her mother's linguistic competence and political oratory. I suggest that her dependency is partly owing to the linguistic power inherent in her mother's word, which Deb says ‘had the force of natural law’ and must be obeyed (WB 138). The mother tongue and maternal power are not in any doubt in Working Bullocks, substantiated by Deb's association of her mother with natural law. The inexhaustible and sophisticated linguistic debates of the twentieth century concerning the origin, formation, and gendering of one's mother-tongue, are, in fact, foreshadowed in Neumann's work on matriarchal symbolism. He states:

The positive femininity of the womb appears as a mouth ... and on the basis of this positive symbolic equation the mouth, as ‘upper womb,’ is the birthplace of the breath and the word, the Logos.116

116 Neumann, Great Mother 168. Also cited in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 265.

According to Neumann’s theory, the mother-figure plays the crucial role in the child's entry into the symbolic order because of the mother's womb. Issues surrounding the semiotic/symbolic relationship and maternity will be explored more fully in Section II of the thesis. Here it suffices to note that Deb is so fused to the word and to the flesh of the mother-figure that she cannot separate. At the close of the narrative she is still puzzled by having not touched that maternal flesh despite her passion and devotion to her mother (WB 316).

The end of the narrative signals the separation of mother and daughter, the acknowledgment of failure to achieve a greater political purpose (for women and for men), and the duplicity of individual behaviour. As Deb passes through and vanishes into the natural world of trees and animals, she is mocked by nature in the form of ‘the laughter of a butcher-bird’ (WB 316). Watched by her mother who ‘refused to take seriously, fuss over, or make tragedy for’ (WB 315) the sight of her daughter with a man like Red Burke, Mary Ann knows that Deb will never escape the burdens of motherhood to which her society has morally condemned her. Nature, in fact, mocks both mother and daughter trapped in their reproductive roles, but I suggest that it is the future mother-figure who is more at risk because to survive she will have to come to terms with that distinctive model of Australian masculinity, which is itinerant, unpredictable and resistant to the female presence. Red’s treachery, for instance, at the end of the novel—he is ‘intoxicated with rejoicing’ because of Deb but at the same time lusts for the ‘ripe fruit’ of Tessa Le Gaze (WB 314)—not only transgresses the romance tradition, but also exposes the dangers of maternal dependence and devotion in a society and time where a woman’s role is clearly defined as ‘mother’. Deb fulfils the ideology of motherhood which stresses women’s ‘natural’ propensity for birthing and nurturing, an ideology which obfuscates and perpetuates gender relationships of power clearly favouring males in industrial capitalist societies. At the end of the narrative, there is no closure in the form of a final social ritual where the marriage ceremony sublimates the erotic. Instead, Tessa Le Gaze, the ripe fruit of Red's imagination, is held up as a symbol of female eroticism whose libidinal desires suspend closure. Tessa is represented as a sexually predatory female who performs her femininity in an endless flirtatious game. The idea of performance denaturalises mothering and recognises differences in women’s experience of motherhood. As a result, Tessa offers a very different model of motherhood compared to Deb and Mary Ann and she is the third and final mother-figure to be analysed in this chapter.

Tessa Le Gaze as sexual predator

Unlike Deb Colburn, Tessa Le Gaze is very conscious of her sexuality and the effect she has on men. From the outset she contradicts stereotypes of ‘healthy’ feminine behaviour and courts danger through her sexual flirtations with several men, flirtations which are an end in themselves and not intended to lead to marriage or motherhood. The narrator describes Tessa was a woman who:

had made up her mind to claim Red Burke, take possession of him again ... Red’s seizure, reluctant though it had been, his rough hungry kisses were still on her. She had melted away

for him, given herself to the joyous flurry, slipping, and wild dancing of all her nerves and instincts. Currents of virility from Red were still pricking, flashing and flickering through her. Tessa felt herself craving, with a drunkard’s craving, for its shocks, the sensuous intoxication with which it could fill her. After all there was nothing like this gay madness for a man, she confessed to herself. It made you feel alive; it was worth being alive to feel so alive and tingling, to be gay and crazy—as crazy as she was about Red Burke. (WB 279)

Tessa immediately fashions herself as a femme fatale in this quotation whose entire body, unequivocally craves forms of physical and sexual excess without restraint or control. She seeks the sensuous and the mad, states of being entirely inappropriate to the ideology of mother-figure. The description of Tessa’s sexual desire for another woman’s ‘beau’ also positions her in the narrative as a dangerous, immoral mother-figure who exceeds the boundaries of sexual propriety. There is an over- turning of the traditional double standard of sexual morality which women had fought for as part of their ‘votes for women’ campaign, where men were constructed as sexually aggressive beings whose desires must be restrained in the interests of physical and moral hygiene. In Working Bullocks, it is not the male but the mother-figure—Tessa Le Gaze—who aggressively pursues then discards men when they no longer serve her sexual and social needs.

Tessa, like Deb and Mary Ann, is represented by Prichard as a country girl but one who had ‘learnt all the tricks of dressing and speaking as town girls do’ (WB 40) from films and fashion magazines. She is an emancipated, modern, and ambitious woman who loves to dance and drive and will eventually become a financially independent woman with ‘£1,000 a year’ to spare (WB 281). But unlike the mother/daughter dyad represented by Mary Ann and Deb Colburn, Tessa is not circumscribed by her role as a mother. On the contrary, she is represented as a non-custodial mother who rarely relates to her one child and her being-in-the-world is as a desiring subject who is socially and psychologically mobile. Unmarried and pregnant at the beginning of the novel, Tessa is representative of urbanised and feminised women out of place in the bush who traditionally come to a ‘sticky’ end in Prichard's novels (Jessica in Coonardoo, Chrissie Fields in Intimate Strangers, and Amy Gough in the Goldfields Trilogy). However, Tessa exhibits a ruthlessness which not only corrupts the ideological positioning of women as nurturers, domestic angels and moral influences, but she also subverts theories of maternal dependence. Motherhood is rarely on her mind even though she gives birth to her son Bobbie in the narrative. He is referred to only once in a direct way by his mother. Throughout the novel, Tessa is aligned with anarchy and rebellion, epitomised by her association with milk that sours and curdles (WB 169). I suggest that this is a metaphor for resistance to the 'natural' world of motherhood which Deb Colburn represents and Tessa seeks to usurp. Unlike Mary Ann who disrupts the ideology of motherhood through being hard and direct (WB 8), Tessa achieves her aims through being ‘the flutter of triumphant coquetry’ (WB 72).

Tessa is represented as a provocative young woman who had learnt the art of flirtation from ‘some of the moving picture actresses she so much admired’ (WB 73). Red describes her as ‘cheap’ (WB 73) and asks, ‘what was to be expected of a girl who made a bird's nest of her hair and powdered

her face to look like the face of a corpse?’ (WB 75). Tessa's mask of paint and powder transgresses the natural world of instinct, mating and ‘physical fury, fecundity’ (WB 74) which is a world Red understands. He states that animals ‘swung true to their instincts. That was good and wholesome ... it was clean and natural. That he understood, but this game of Tessa's—’ (WB 74) in which he is entangled, shatters his sense of masculine order and hierarchy. The narrative states that he felt ‘impatience and disgust’ with Tessa's charade because he ‘did not understand it; he did not want to understand it’ (WB 74). Nevertheless, at the end of the narrative, his final thought is not of Deb but of Tessa. Tessa represents a triumph of artifice over nature in an era when the culture of consumption was having a transforming effect on women as they were imaginatively reconceived through cosmetics, beauty aids and fashion. Through characters like Tessa (and Mrs Ray Morris in Intimate Strangers), the female face and body is commercialised; disrupting attempts to naturalise the feminine and offering new discourses around female desire and sexuality. As Robert Holden argues, this new feminine style was ‘untrammelled by a narrative embodying and endorsing home life or maternity; they are consumer messages writ large; they are style personified’.117 This process promoted the reification of women as objects of desire in the many forms of 1920s mass culture, including film, illustrated women's magazines, cartoons, and advertising graphics.118

The mother-figure, modernity and modernism

Tessa is a thoroughly modern woman in a nation born modern, where the experience of modernity, by which I mean the everyday lived experience of modern life, was strongly aligned with the female body. This is also true of modernism, the aesthetic movement which sought to capture modernité and express the modern consciousness. Martin Pumphrey argues that:

Any adequate reading of the modern period ... must take account of the fact that debates over women's public freedom, over fashion and femininity, cosmetics and home cleaning were as essential to the fabrication of modernity as cubism, Dada or futurism, as symbolism, fragmented form or the steam-of-consciousness narrative.119

Popular culture and women’s writing were conspicuous vehicles for the emergence of modernism in Australia, unhindered by tradition or reputation. I argue that modernism emerged through the female artist in Australia and in the context of the time period covered by this thesis, through women's writing, painting, and graphic art. Fear of the feminine, particularly during the interwar years, suggests one reason for the lack of attention and artistic reception of many of the women writers and

117 Robert Holden, Cover Up: The Art of Magazine Covers in Australia (Rydalmere (NSW): Hodder & Stoughton, 1995) 117. 118 A survey of The Bulletin magazine’s cartoons for the decade of the 1920s, drawn by male cartoonists, shows hundreds of stylishly drawn young women at the centre of the cartoon who are invariably the erotic object as well as the subject of humour. 119 Martin Pumphrey, ‘The Flapper, the Housewife and the Making of Modernity’, Cultural Studies, 1.2 (1989): 179-194 (181).

painters of the day.120 As Jeanette Hoorn has argued, we ‘might read the whole tradition of Modernism as being contested through representations of the female body’.121 Modernism has its origins in Europe and developed as the means by which European intellectuals, from the late nineteenth century, appropriated the experience of modernity and controlled the meaning of ‘modern’.122

However, in Australia modernism had quite a different periodisation from that in Europe with a rather different set of representative figures and a very different cultural dynamic.123 Where Prichard saw herself unequivocally as a ‘realist’ and not as a ‘modernist’ writer, all of her novels are imbued with an awareness of modernity expressed through her female characters. Prichard herself, an icon of the emerging female artist, exhibits certain traits of the modern woman by refusing to relinquish her maiden name after marriage and by relentlessly pursuing her writing career as a serious profession, alongside her political career, in spite of motherhood. Delys Bird argues that between the 1920s and 1960s when Prichard was establishing her reputation as an artist and as a political figure, ‘major debates were taking place in Australia about how a nascent nationhood and a national identity could or should best be represented’.124 Claims that either modernism or realism were the most appropriate mode of representation of modern Australia, argues Bird, ‘provided one area of focus in such debates’.125

As a metaphor for modernity and mass culture, the female body signifies the irrational and ‘tainted’ elements of modernism in relation to Australia’s cultural hegemony. The feminine gendering of literary modernism in Australia during the period under review constituted a threat not only to the ‘fragile first flowerings of indigenous cultural traditions’, as David Walker has argued, but to patriarchy itself.126 As Walker states:

120 See Modjeska, Exiles; Dever (ed). Wallflowers; Hoorn (ed). Strange Women. 121 Hoorn, Strange Women 2. 122 Bruce Johnson, ‘Modernity and Modernism’ and ‘Jazz, Mass Culture and Gender in Australia’ in The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2000) 31-77. 123 One of the many reasons for this may be that writers like Prichard and Dark refused to see themselves as intellectuals, a hallmark of European modernism. Another may be their political and artistic alignment with socialism and a possible third is the popularity of their fiction with ‘the masses’, from which European modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot distanced themselves. Prichard, and to a lesser extent Dark, were depending on their writing to make a living in a way that Woolf and Eliot never were. In particular, as Richard Nile has demonstrated, they were dependent on assumptions about the tastes of the English lending library reader to get published at all—it is significant that Dark’s most radical and most modernist work, Prelude to Christopher, was the one that she had most difficulty in getting published. 124 Bird, Southerly 98-115. 125 Bird, Southerly 98. 126 David Walker, ‘Introduction: Australian Modern: Modernism and its Enemies 1900-1940’, Journal of Australian Studies, 32.3 (1992): 1-75 (5).

The final step was to see society itself—crowds, masses, cities, modernity—as expressions of modern degeneration. The mob was often depicted as a condensed expression of a modern propensity for chaos and disorder. Moreover, insofar as mobs were considered easily influenced and ruled by emotion, which was commonly held to be the case, they were regarded as feminine ... among the stigmata of modernism, was a failing that male critics often attributed either to the feminisation of art (and the superficial pursuit of fashion) or, less directly, to the trivialisation of male qualities, another of the alleged impacts of modernity.127

The links Walker makes here between modernism and the mob, mass culture, and socio-cultural degeneration, connect the female body with the corruption of a ‘feminine’ mass culture and its representations in tension with the purity of individual and ‘masculine’ artistic expressions. The discourse of advertising, for instance, focused on women’s roles as modern homemaker and fashion object, with the emphasis on the energy and dynamism of city living, rather than on the ‘wholesome, sun-kissed’128 idealisation of the Australian bush, expressed in the poetry and painting of male artists. The discourse of modernity interlocks with the discourse on health in that pleasure and power invade one another in an endless circumnavigation of sexed bodies.129 Manifestations of female desire become markers of moral cleanliness not just of the female body but also of the social body. Hence the antagonism to ‘contaminating’ and ‘feminised’ forms of modernity which served to release desire in an era which concerned itself with promoting and policing the physical health and social vigour of its citizens. The mistrust of pleasure and the growing anxiety over sexual activity are directly related to ‘the feminine’. Many of the mother-figures in the novels, such as Tessa Le Gaze in Working Bullocks and Linda Hendon in Prelude to Chrisopher, are icons of modernity who corrupt concepts of health and normality. Through a new public freedom the mother-figure celebrates modern life in both the city and the bush, ignoring assigned roles and power relations.

The mother-figure and sexual liberation

An essential part of Prichard's literary representations of the mother-figure, and women generally, is the recognition of female emancipation, which included a sexual and social freedom, at least for middle-and upper-class women. Part of this freedom was the expression and experience of modern life through feminised forms of popular culture—film, radio, women's magazines, fashion, popular music, and dance—references to which are in all of the novels under review. As an icon of modernity, Tessa plays ‘her part, as a girl in the pictures would, among all these rough men’ (WB 79) except that she is the active subject rather than the passive object of desire and of representation. In these situations, she is both the producer and the transformer of knowledge and cultural meaning.

127 Walker, Australian Studies 6. 128 Walker, Australian Studies 4. 129 I have paraphrased Foucault’s theory on pleasure and power in relation to the medicalization of the sexually ‘peculiar’ which Foucault argues emerges in the nineteenth century as part of the interplay of truth and sex for the purpose, amongst others, of regulating reproduction. Foucault, The History of Sexuality 45-73.

Despite her games and coquettishness, there is a substance or self-presence to Tessa which defies the stereotypical ‘baby’ image she seeks to portray (WB 269). There are many references in the narrative relating to Tessa seeing herself as she is being seen by others. In other words, she is simultaneously actor and spectator, projecting and internalising the same image she seeks to perform. This simultaneous action serves to reinforce her identity because men respond to her in whichever way she chooses to manipulate the image and, as a result, Tessa, as performer and image maker, is in control of masculine desire. Motherhood does not form any part of this modern woman's consciousness as she celebrates the reinvention of herself as a woman of irresistible erotic desire, illustrated by the following passage:

She went to the little square glass on Deb's table, pushed back the hair on her forehead and looked at herself as she had looked at Red. Yes, that was the way. She could still get men when she looked at them like that she assured herself. Half-closed her eyes, glimmered and smiled at them, mouth a little open, head back, a long breath, breezy in the nostrils, being sure the man caught it. It was easy enough if you knew how. Smiles skimming, she gurgled and chuckled at herself, a child pleased at its own reflection. (WB 277)

Tessa’s narcissistic performance through this mirror imaging is an appropriate device to reaffirm her self image. The narrative states that ‘Tessa was sure of herself now. She had assurance and a quite genuine jollity’ (WB 269) in relation to her identity and subjectivity. Kaplan asks, in relation to representations of the mother in popular culture and melodrama, whether the mother-figure, because she is constructed ‘by/through the patriarchal Imaginary to fulfil specific patriarchal or capitalist needs’,130 can ever be liberated. Or put another way, Kaplan asks whether motherhood can ever be ‘non-patriarchal, non-complicit?’131 Is Tessa as subversive and progressive as I am making her out to be, given Kaplan's argument?

To answer this question it is significant to note that Tessa's mother is absent from the novel altogether. Tessa and her sister have been raised by their father who ‘had always been proud of his girls and as fussy and careful of them as a clucky hen’ (WB 206). Unlike Deb Colburn who identifies with her mother, Tessa identifies with her father and follows in his professional footsteps. The father/daughter relationship has taught Tessa that motherhood is not of supreme importance in her life and as a result there are very few references in the novel to her being-in-relation to her son. Tessa, in familial terms, is very much a product of patriarchy, a construction which is overlaid by her own feminine self-fashioning borrowed from Hollywood's iconography of the female body and behaviour. But unlike Deb she is not tied to the Law of the Father, which demands, as Judith Butler argues, that the female body be required ‘to assume maternity as the essence of its self and the law of its

130 Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation 39. 131 Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation 40.

desire’.132 As Tessa tartly observes, Deb ‘was woman stuff, virgin, primitive’ (WB 278) whereas Tessa epitomises all that is unnatural and unexpected—a parody of femininity spawned by artifice and guile. Of the three representations of the mother-figure in Working Bullocks, Tessa has the potential for what Butler refers to as ‘an open future of cultural possibilities’133 once the illusion of ‘a true body beyond the law’134 is removed. I suggest that Tessa survives through appropriation of and adaptation to the laws of the culture which has shaped her and she is ruthless in using that law to shape her own life.

One instance of this is found in her use of elements of the carnivalesque and the unruly. Tessa, on many levels, employs strategies of rebellion which turn the world awry, so that it was ‘shattered like pieces of a child's picture puzzle’ (WB 174). Her participation in the race-fixing at the Blue Flowers Races and her presence at the Karri Creek Woodchop scandalise, confuse, and debase. In particular 'the hero', Red Burke, is degraded by circumstances engendered by Tessa. As Mikhail Bakhtin has argued, disguise, obsession, insanity and mystification are all elements of the folk- carnival and it is the carnival or carnival sense of the world which violates the 'normal' social codes which integrate a society.135 Birth is at the centre of the race- fixing as Tessa, pregnant but not married, must secure social acceptance through the respectability of marriage to the father of the unborn child. Tessa is practical and shrewd, vowing that the man responsible will ‘pay all his days’ (WB 169) for the dilemma she is in. Disguise and secrecy surround the race-fixing and her actions create chaos in the ordinary and everyday lives of people; lives which are momentarily suspended. Tessa does not conform exactly to Bakhtin's grotesque body except that she is exaggerated and excessive in her strangeness—’like a wild cat going to spring and claw’ (WB 169). However, her acts of cunning, provoked by her pregnancy, unmask the corrupt nature of the various relationships outlined in the novel.

Maternity, however, disempowers Tessa and momentarily robs her of all agency and self- control. It is significant that the agonising bush birth described in the narrative is regulated and controlled by the male rather than the mother-figure. The entire birth process depends on the courage and fortitude of two men rather than that of the woman giving birth. Tessa cries out for her own absent mother—‘Mother! Oh, mother! Please come, mother ...’ (WB 200) but it is the active presence of the male who will ‘see [her] through’ (WB 202). This description, I argue, evokes the image of Aby Alston’s Flood Sufferings, painted in 1890 in which the image plays on the word ‘suffering’. The mother-figure is featured as the central victim, helpless and distressed, as she clutches her newly-

132 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) 92. 133 Butler, Gender 93. 134 Butler, Gender 93. 135 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984).

born child, totally dependent on the strong arms of two men to carry mother and child through the flood. Hoorn analyses this painting stating that it represents a popular nineteenth-century genre and reinforces:

the nationalist, masculinist discourse of the bush pictures, in which men act freely. ... The dominant role which nationalist academic painting provides for women in the rural context is that of the victim or the individual in distress ... The treatment of motherhood as a difficult condition in these pictures perhaps also reflects what we know was an economic fact, that motherhood created problems for pastoral capitalism. The condition of motherhood impeded the progress of life on the pastoral frontier which in the late nineteenth century signified the economic health of the nation.136

Even though Tessa’s confinement is treated as an illness which reinforces the idea that pregnancy and motherhood arose from the same source, namely a discourse on health, Tessa and Mary Ann ultimately work against this idea because they are represented as confident and emancipated women who are not confined metaphorically or spatially to an interior world of pregnancy, children and domesticity. They cross frontiers into the masculine world of action and economic prosperity, unhindered by mothering responsibilities. By contrast, Deb Colburn, represented as the future and very maternal mother-figure, will seemingly be victimised by motherhood through the passion and abuse of her bushman.

Conclusion

As this chapter has argued, whereas women like Mary Ann Colburn and Tessa Le Gaze escape the masculine abuse and disloyalty potentially threatening young Deb (and which destroys the character Coonardoo in the next novel for discussion), these white women are all subject to ridicule by men because they live in a culture which does not value female sexuality other than for procreation. Motherhood and virtue are paired and privatised, sealed off from the public world of politics and nation-building. Desiring female subjects who act out their sexuality in ‘modern’ ways of behaviour, dress, independence, and celebration represent a threat to the health of the nation if they are not constrained and categorised into the paradoxically asexual world of motherhood. The threat of the feminine, and its alignment with modernism, during and after the First World War, was seen as contaminating and weakening a masculinity enmeshed in social and political structures. The historical and social debates of the time demonstrate how the discourse on health justified the invasive and often violent impact of the law and of science on the female body. And the novels analysed in this chapter illustrate some of the ways in which women resisted these constraints and fought against the impositions to regulate their bodies, their sexuality and their behaviour.

136 Hoorn, Strange Women 107.

CHAPTER 2 Coonardoo

In Prichard’s Coonardoo, I argue that the young Coonardoo is doubly defenceless through her sex and her race and will be victimised by motherhood in a very different way compared to Deb Colburn. It is not through repeated pregnancies that Coonardoo will suffer but through the birth of her so-called ‘half-caste’ son, Winning-arra. Imperialism and xenophobia were wedded to the Constitution and Australian-born was synonymous with fit, white and healthy. Thus Winni’s birth represents a cultural crisis in terms of national identity born out of a hypocritical sexuality linked to racial hygiene and the discourse on health. Thus, I argue that the novel's reception is symptomatic of a young nation uncertain of its cultural beginnings and unreconciled to its bearings at a time when the slogan ‘populate or perish’ could not contemplate the black mother-figure.

The aging white mother-figure Mrs Bessie Watt in Coonardoo, like Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks, is modern in her independence of thought and deed and dismissive of social conventions except when it comes to the issue of race. Mrs Bessie loves her ‘daughter’ Coonardoo provided she stays in her proper ‘uloo’ place, without legal rights or rightful wages. It is the ambiguous teachings of this masterful matriarch that sew the seeds of tragedy between her white son and black ‘daughter’ for Coonardoo will eventually die through the emotional, physical and sexual violence of white men, not least of all through the ‘clean-living’ Hugh Watt. Impregnated with disease and with her body literally ‘rotting away’ (C 229), she is labelled a black prostitute and destined to die in custody. The irony is that her own culture does value and celebrate her sexuality both before and after motherhood in ways that are alien and feared by white men as well as white women. It is, however, primarily the repression of white men’s sexual desires that is the source of the tragedy and it is the black mother-figure who is both the bearer of his fantasies as well as his fury. This is borne out in Coonardoo in terms of relationships between individual characters and their relationship with the landscape. The novel provokes the question: who is responsible for breeding the pestilence and spreading the disease? The answer lies in the fact that it is not the indigenous culture that is the focus of interrogation. Rather it is the settler culture’s psychological health that is under scrutiny and the dis-ease of a new nation seeking prosperity and progress will have a devastating impact on the body of the black mother-figure, as outlined in this novel.

The writing of Coonardoo commenced in the same year that Working Bullocks was published—1926. Katharine Susannah Prichard, accompanied by her four year old son, Ric Throssell, travelled to Turee Creek Station, an isolated property in the Pilbara region of Western

Australia's far North West, where they stayed for a few months. It was this experience that inspired her to write Coonardoo (The Well in the Shadow)137 which is also located on a cattle station in a similar part of the Pilbara and is set in the early 1900s. The public outrage following the novel’s publication was due to a general anxiety on the part of White Australia over miscegenation and racial hygiene, given the narrative centres around a love story between a white man (Hugh Watt) and a black woman (Coonardoo). The controversy surrounding the subject of mixed-race relations is evident when The Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ of the period is surveyed. A reading of the letters to this journal indicates there was utter disbelief that a white man could actually love an Aboriginal woman, let alone desire her over a white woman.138 Indeed, one of the male characters in the narrative validates this conviction by stating that ‘[a] man doesn’t love a gin, not a white man’ (C 223) but Hugh’s obsession with Coonardoo and his love for their son is at the heart of the narrative and challenges this belief.

Early in the novel it is clear that Hugh and Coonardoo have had a sexual relationship, resulting in the birth of Hugh’s only son, Winning-arra. The narrator states that:

Hugh stood beside Coonardoo, looking down at the child, knowing as he did so that this was his son, knowing what the blacks did not suspect, as if someone had twisted the fibres of his being, giving them a sudden wrench and tightness. Coonardoo looked at him, and then down at her baby; but Hugh had seen her eyes, waiting for him, asking nothing, expecting nothing, ready, he knew, to serve his wife, this white woman he had brought to live with him, as tenderly and devotedly as she had him and his mother. (C 88)

In this quotation, Hugh acknowledges that his son has an Aboriginal mother even though Coonardoo, according to the narrator, is unaware of the fact that Hugh is the father. The white woman Hugh refers to is his newly-wedded wife, Mollie, who holds the belief that ‘the abos are filthy and treacherous’ (C 117), a perception shared by many of the readers of the novel, at the time of its

137 Prichard's original title, Coonardoo (The Well in the Shadow) appears on the cover page of the 1929 and 1956 editions, and invites a Jungian reading of the novel, related to the ancient myths and legends C. G. Jung’s theories rely on, incorporating ‘the well’ symbolism as a pathway to individuation, and the ‘shadow’ archetype which is one of the means through which the individual confronts repressed desires and fears. However, subsequent editions have simply titled the book, Coonardoo, as is the case with the edition being used here. When the novel was first published as a serial in The Bulletin in 1928, the shorter title was also used. I suggest that Prichard's original and full title is a direct reference to the psychoanalytic theories of Jung used throughout the novel. The full title immediately establishes the overriding theoretical impulse of the novel which is suppressed by the use of the shorter title. 138 I was unable to ascertain how many letters of complaint were received by The Bulletin. However, throughout the serialisation of Coonardoo there are cryptic references found in The Bulletin's 'Answers to Correspondents', and Cecil Mann, the editor, was defending both the granting of The Bulletin's First Prize Award to the novel as well as the novel's content, twelve months after the serialisation was finished. He states: ‘Coonardoo, in fact, has been more severely criticised than all the rest [of the prize winners] put together’. And he cites one correspondent's letter alleging that ‘it was one of the worst stories I ever read, and every person whose opinion I sought expressed similar ideas’. (‘The Red Page’, The Bulletin, 4 September 1929: 2). In 1934, the derogatory comments still held. Perth’s Sunday Times referred to the novel as a ‘nor’-west nigger romance’. Sunday Times, 6 May 1934, 1. Cited in Dever (ed.), Wallflowers 154.

publication, judging by the letters to The Bulletin. Hugh’s mother, Mrs Bessie, dead for some years, would have been shocked and angry to learn of her mixed-race grandson, given Hugh’s promise to her before she died that he would ‘marry white and stick white’ (C 51).

In the socio-political context outside of the narrative, controlling Australia’s demographic destiny to keep Australia ‘white’ required a reconfiguring of how the traditional owners of the land were to be re-presented to conform with the view that they were filthy and treacherous. This was done in obvious and subtle ways by white men and white women particularly when it came to occupying and owning Aboriginal land. In the novel, Wytaliba Station, for instance, is the fictional ancestral home of Coonardoo and her people from the Gnarler tribe who view the land as sacred and maternal. Under statute law, however, Coonardoo’s country is owned by white settler woman, Mrs Bessie Watt, who bequeaths the land to her only child, Hugh. For Mrs Bessie and Hugh, the land is property and capital; a commercial asset and their economic security. Even though the issue of land ownership is not directly addressed in the novel, there is a shift in the way Aborigines are represented in the beginning compared to the end of the novel which justifies attitudes and behaviours on the part of the settler culture including their right to take possession of the land from the original Aboriginal owners. Through this ‘right’, Mrs Bessie, the aging mother-figure who will be analysed in this chapter, is inherently complicit in the violence committed against the Aborigines. Patty O’Brien substantiates this point when she argues that, in order to occupy the land, it was in the interests of pastoralists to shift the representation of the dispossessed Aboriginal. Where once they were members of a ‘noble’ race, in the fight for land occupation, the Aborigine is re-presented as diseased and doomed, an ‘abject’ figure from an ‘abject’ race, unworthy and incapable of managing the land.139

It is through a discourse on health that the novel traces this shift in the representation of the main Aboriginal character—Coonardoo. At the start of the narrative she is respected by black and white characters alike, given her intelligence and dignified authority. She is described as ‘handsome and spirited’ (C 27), a ‘clean straight aboriginal woman’ compared to the Aborigines populating the towns and coastal settlements described by the narrator as ‘[d]irty, diseased, [and] ill natured’ (C 112). At the end of the narrative, however, Coonardoo has become one of the ‘remnants of a dying race’ (C 112). Ultimately, she too is represented as alienated from her tribal laws and customs; a nameless and filthy outcast ‘no longer Coonardoo’ but ‘the “black pearl” of a pearler’s crew’ (C 230); a prostitute ‘rotten with disease and booked for the island’ (C 222). Even though Coonardoo has committed no crime except to love and serve a white man, his mother and his family, Coonardoo is condemned for her race, and punished for her bodily desires and sexual relationships, even when

139 Patty O’Brien, ‘The Gaze of the ‘Ghosts’: Images of Aboriginal Women in New South Wales and Port Phillip (1800-1850)’ in Jan Kociumbas (ed.), Maps, Dream, History: Race and Representation in Australia, Sydney Studies in History No. 8 (Sydney: U Sydney Department of History, 1998) 352.

these have been violently forced upon her. Her tragedy becomes the source of ‘malicious’ pub gossip amongst white male characters in the novel, recounted with drunken humour and utterly devoid of empathy (C 221).

In his History of Sexuality, Foucault analyses the interplay of sex and truth as discursive practices which emerge in the nineteenth century through politicising and regulating sex and reproduction as part of an overall strategy of power.140 The fertile bed of Malthusian ideals are referred to by Foucault in his thesis concerning the ordering of populations and, in particular, of the heterosexual (European) couple. The white European couple now represents all that is healthy and normal and placed first in line in the hierarchy of race. Foucault’s thesis is used by Magarey to support her argument in reading Australia’s early feminist movement through a discourse on health. I suggest that this discourse on health became an organising trope for other power relations involving the sexual subjection of women, which had very little to do with health at all. In the context of Coonardoo, the discourse on health becomes a euphemism for racism and a rationale for brutality. I use this premise to situate the racial ambiguities, incorporating the fear of and the fascination with racial violations embodied in Winni’s birth, which converge on the novel through the three mother- figures—Mrs Bessie, Coonardoo and Mollie.

At a time when female sexual desire, let alone sexual relationships between black women and white men and the birth of mixed-race children, were taboo subjects, Prichard is unafraid to explore this territory, and to explore it through white and black women. The history of the nation, as Marilyn Lake has argued, ‘was the self-conscious record of the white men who made the nation’141, but this novel traces the nation’s history through women’s eyes, and specifically through the experience of the mother-figure. This maternal perspective reflects larger social, political and economic tensions in Australia at the time the novel was published. Coonardoo is a story without resolution and the issues raised in the broader social context remain unresolved to this day. Nineteenth-century theories of race, carried into the twentieth century, as Robert Young has argued, ‘did not just consist of essentializing differentiations between self and other: they were also about a fascination with people having sex—interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex’.142 The novel bears witness to this obsession with sexuality and fertility and the fascination with miscegenation and inter-racial transgression. Fascination is coupled with disgust in the novel, and supports Young’s argument that ‘we find an ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion’.143 Sexual

140 Foucault, History of Sexuality 25. 141 Lake, Getting Equal 6. 142 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1994) 181. 143 Young, Colonial Desire 149.

exploitation, rape, ‘illegitimate’ births, deaths, and disease tear the fabric of Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal family life apart within the realm of the narrative. And nowhere are these racial tensions and ambiguities more clearly articulated than through Mrs Bessie, Coonardoo and Mollie.

White Australia’s black history: reading the nation through the novel

The birth of Winning-arra is the excuse Mollie uses to take her and Hugh’s five daughters away from Wytaliba because she refuses to stay on the station with Hugh's ‘gin and her half-caste brat’ (C 143). The narrative also implies that Hugh and Coonardoo share the same white father (Mrs Bessie's husband, Ted Watt) and are in fact half-brother and sister. When Coonardoo was first published in serial form in The Bulletin in 1928, as stated earlier, it offended many critics and most readers.144 If miscegenation was unthinkable, I suggest that it would have been impossible to contemplate the subject of incest. However, it is possible that the incest taboo offers a vehicle or safety valve for the representation of miscegenation. That is, the prohibition against sex between black and white Australians could be projected onto the incest taboo more easily because it is seen as wholly negative compared to inter-racial marriage. Nevertheless, the narrative incorporates elements of the Oedipal curse even if the issue of incest is ambiguous and unintended. Following Mollie's departure, Hugh takes Coonardoo to be his defacto wife but enforces celibacy on them both because he is too ‘awfully decent’ (C 194) to acknowledge his sexual and emotional feelings for this black woman. Throughout the novel, desire and abjection are coupled in an unrelenting and unreconciled relationship between white and black Australians. As is the case in Working Bullocks, relations between men and women in Coonardoo become part of broader concerns about nationhood, citizenship, and civil society, now made more complex through the forced colonisation of Aboriginal women’s sexual and labour power.145

144 The Bulletin ran the first installment of Coonardoo on 5 September 1928. It is not without irony that this national Australian journal which carried the by-line, 'Australia for the White Man', should proudly publish Prichard's novel, despite J. P. Archibald, advising his contributors to 'keep away from the black velvet'. ('The Red Page', The Bulletin, 14 August 1929: 2). C. H. Percival provided the illustrations for the novel’s serialization and depicts Coonardoo and her people as having negroid rather than Australian Aboriginal features. There could be many reasons for this but the effect is to reinforce the racial representation of the indigene by the settler culture. The last installment was published on 12 December 1928. Quite unrelated to the serial, The Bulletin placed a poem by E. J. Brady underneath the last paragraph of Coonardoo. The poem, entitled My Mother, is a romantic eulogy to a woman who has inspired ‘Wonder and worship, love of the true/Patience and effort, merits her due...’ as the narrator keeps vigil beside the mother's deathbed. As the reader following the end of the novel which flows into the poem, except for two fine horizontal lines, I was struck by the contrast between the two dying mother-figures. Aboriginal Coonardoo is diseased and alone, calling out for her lost children while My Mother, whom I argue to be a white woman, is adored and loved as her son keeps vigil beside her. The Bulletin 12 December 1928: 53. 145 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 2-3. McClintock’s argument in relation to Western imperialism (and specifically the experience in South Africa) is that ‘the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capital’ are three of Western imperialism’s governing themes.

Letters to newspapers of the day concerning the novel show a refusal to accord equal status or basic human rights (let alone land rights), to the indigene, either socially, culturally or politically. White Australia considered itself superior in all aspects of life, thus Aboriginality is constructed to reflect Anglocentric presumptions of Aboriginal Australia. Mollie’s first impression of the indigene is that they are unspeakable and untrustworthy (C 117) and Coonardoo at the end of the narrative is described as ‘[a] gin, naked and wasted by disease’ (C 227). The narrator refers to the Aborigines and their descendants as surviving traces of a doomed race (C 112) and indeed the reference to ‘bleached bones’ (C 228) lying on the deserted landscape of Wytaliba in the same context as the missing Gnarler tribe, invites the question: are these human bones? Throughout the narrative the boundary of purity is policed by the white mother-figure to prevent racial, sexual and cultural ‘contamination’. The discourse on health becomes the justification to ‘just clear out and let 'em starve’ (C 109) in order that white, middle-class men like Hugh can still believe in ‘[h]onour, courtesy—and keeping yourself clean’ (C 194).

Representations of the Australian Aborigine in Coonardoo reveal an obsession with racial purity and a fear of Otherness, exposing racial and cultural anxieties as well as an antagonism to difference. Despite Prichard's consultations with and assurances from ‘Mr Ernest Mitchell ... Chief Inspector of Aborigines for Western Australia [who] could not fault the drawing of aborigines and conditions, in Coonardoo, as he knew them’ (C xiii), according to Aboriginal and academic writer, Jackie Huggins, ‘[t]here are no books written by non-Aboriginals that can tell me what it is to be Black as it is a fiction’.146 Thus the fictional constructions operating within Coonardoo continue what Huggins calls the ‘‘Daisy Bates’ serial’147 alluding to anthropological (and ethnocentric) studies of Aboriginal society and culture without that society's knowledge, participation or consent. However, because the novel invites a Jungian reading (and I use this schema in conjunction with other theoretical approaches), the construction of the black (and white) mother-figure prevents any white ethnographic reading of the text. Through the symbolism of dark wells, of shadows, and of water (Jungian references to archetypes and symbols),148 White Australia is reflected back to itself through

146 Jackie Huggins, ‘Always Was Always Will Be’, Australian Historical Studies, 25-100 (1993): 459- 464 (459). See also Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (St Lucia: U Queensland P) 2000. In a different but related context, Moreton-Robinson discusses the contradictions and ambiguities encountered when the process is reversed; that is when an indigenous woman seeks to write about white women. As an indigenous researcher, Moreton-Robinson states that she was positioned as being ‘responsible for my body and my race simultaneously … I had to mask and perform the politeness of whiteness while experiencing an intense level of discomfort in contending with my consciousness of racialised power and its manifestation in the research context.’ Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Researching Whiteness: Some Reflections from an Indigenous Woman’s Standpoint’, Hecate, 29-2 (2003): 72-85 (84). 147 Huggins, Australian Historical Studies 459. 148 Jung’s central thesis is the concept of self-individuation, or ‘the process of becoming an authentic integrated person, through a synthesis of opposites in the personality’. Elio J. Frattaroli, ‘Me and my anima: the Jungian/Freudian interface’, in Young-Eisendrath and Dawson, The Cambridge Companion to

the indigenous mother-figure, as psychologically unhealthy, unintegrated and unreconciled with itself and with its indigenous Other.

If White Australia is shown to be unhealthy and ‘[r]otten’ (C 216), Black Australia is represented as defiled and dispossessed. François Lionnet argues that in cases of forced subjection and servitude, observed throughout cultures that have been colonised, there exists a ‘necrotic ideology’149 that applies especially to women. She states that:

Women in particular, dominated in every culture, are often victims of this syndrome. In literature, it translates into passive and exploited female characters, often incapable of escaping unhealthy or degrading situations; or else messianic or maternal figures whose self-abnegation enables the liberation of others.150

In Coonardoo, both the black and the white mother-figure are unable or unwilling to escape the unhealthy and degrading situation with their respective ‘husbands’. In the beginning of the narrative, Ted Watt’s affair with Coonardoo’s mother, Maria, is a situation Mrs Bessie had taken ‘to heart ... but she held her tongue’ (C 8), even though the affair ends in the violent death of both Ted and Maria. Hugh’s affair with Coonardoo also ends in violence and tragedy and both mother-figures endure agonising deaths directly related to the liberation of Wytaliba’s male heir—Hugh Watt. However, in the narrative the origins of Lionnet’s ‘necrotic ideology’ lie with the white mother-figure, Mrs Bessie Watt, who instigates the tragedies through her racial and sexual prejudices and reveals the complex relationship which forever entwines the two cultures in contradictory, reciprocal and intimate ways. It is mainly through Mrs Bessie’s eldest grand-daughter, Phyllis, who returns to Wytaliba as a mature woman, that the reader witnesses the relationship between Coonardoo and Hugh. It is Phyllis, the ethnographer, third generation white settler woman, who invokes the work of Carl Jung and invites the Jungian paradigm in the novel (C 223). Similarly, it is Prichard the creative writer,151 as stated by her son many years after their stay at Turee Creek Station, who witnessed ‘her host's conflicts with

Jung 178. Jung understood individuation in terms of a symbol, hence the emphasis placed on opposing symbols (water (feminine)/fire (male)) and the importance of the archetypes (anima (male)/animus (female) and the shadow). These symbols and archetypes apply to cultural individuation as much as they do to the individual and ‘manifest themselves as instincts and affects, as the primordial images and symbols in dreams and mythology, and in patterns of behavior and experience’. Sherry Salman, ‘The creative psyche: Jung’s major contributions’, in Young-Eisendrath and Dawson, Cambridge Companion 58. 149 François Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) 88. 150 Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations 87-100. 151 M. E. McGuire, ‘The Legend of the Good Fella Missus’, Aboriginal History 14.1-2 (1990): 124-151. McGuire argues that there is a three-phase process embodied in the 'Good Fella Missus'. There is the 'Imperial Mother', the 'Colonial Daughter' (who is raised amongst Aboriginal children as her friends) and the 'Writer, Artist or Anthropologist'. The colonial daughter grows up and becomes the modern urban woman of the twentieth century ‘who ventures into the unknown Australia as writer, artist or anthropologist’ (24); McGuire places Katharine Susannah Prichard in this latter category.

the land and its people; watched as the heat and the dust corroded loyalty and affection’.152 It is these conflicts saturated with libidinal desires, felt through a landscape of extremes, that are explored in the narrative through the mother-figures. And it is the shrewd and formidable Mrs Bessie, through her ‘resistless' energy’, who drives ‘everything and everybody’ (C 15) to ensure that life on Wytaliba is lived clean, ‘straight’ (C 64) and ‘square’ (C 117). Nevertheless, this sacrificial, self-denying mother-figure proves in the end to be life-denying. In the name of moral and racial hygiene, extreme acts of sexual and physical violence are committed, lives are destroyed and the land is left infertile.

152 Throssell, My Father's Son 94.

In the name of the white mother-figure: Mrs Bessie Watt

In the previous chapter I argued that the aging mother-figure, Mary Ann Colburn, defied social conventions which regulate maternal behaviour and in Coonardoo there are similarities in another aging, bush mother-figure—Mrs Bessie Watt. Patricia Grimshaw, among others, has argued in relation to male writers ‘confronting the challenge of the gendered transformations of late colonial life’ that they did so by denying women agency through depicting the bush as ‘no place for women, particularly mothers, and most, like the drover’s wife whom Henry Lawson sketched, were oppressed, dehumanised and defemininised by it’.153 Mrs Bessie works against these practices, stating that she had no intention of adhering to social conventions that impeded her progress or challenged her authority (C 22). She is not oppressed by the bush but she is ‘defeminised’ in that her culture denigrates the feminine and female sexuality through valuing Mrs Bessie, not because she is a woman but because she is ‘so manly’ (C 61). The novel draws comparisons between the sexual mores of Black and White Australia and I suggest that both settler women and men are ‘dehumanised’ in that both are anxious and irrational about sex. Sexual freedom in the settler culture equates to repression and abstinence. As Mrs Bessie states: ‘[w]ork’s the thing … not sex’ (C 65), a sentiment echoed by her granddaughter, Phyllis, who remarks that she is ‘[h]appy to be sex-free’ (C 183) and ‘living in the rough hard way of men, with a sense of independence and exhilaration in the courage and skill required for the work she was doing’ (C 183).

There is, however, no uncertainty about Mrs Bessie’s status and authority, empowered as she is through matriarchal and patriarchal qualities signified by the Aboriginal name—Mumae—for this powerful mother-figure. Like Mary Ann Colburn in Working Bullocks, Mrs Bessie Watt rules her family and Wytaliba's people with a similar hardness and vitality to Mary Ann except that Mrs Bessie is a more complex figure. In fact, Mrs Bessie's character is considered to incorporate many qualities signifying authority and therefore her name—Mrs Bessie Watt—has been replaced with a Gnarler word—Mumae—because ‘Mumae in their dialect meant a father, and was not Mrs. Bessie, father and mother to her son, the woman master of Wytaliba’ (C 3). The Aboriginal naming of Mrs. Bessie is significant. Its meaning implies displacement and fragmentation—a clash of cultures—with neither culture reconciled to the other nor either one having sovereignty over the land. The word plays on the English word Mummy and the Australian derivative, Mum. It incorporates the mu and ma of Jung's contrasexual archetypes, the animus and anima. It also borrows from the Latin, ae, for its suffix. The word Mumae borrows bits and pieces from other cultures in an attempt to represent the complex and contradictory make-up of this Australian matriarch; a masculine mother-figure. It is outside the lexicon of both the indigenous and colonising cultures. It is not a legitimate word, yet it attempts to translate the authorial qualities assumed by this masterful woman.

153 Patricia Grimshaw, et al, Creating A Nation (1994; Ringwood [Vic]: Penguin, 1996) 187.

The struggle for a strong and unified national identity by an emerging young nation through language, through meaning, and through shared attitudes and values, which would ensure cultural and linguistic dominance, is impeded in Coonardoo. The process of naming influences how a society relates to its culture and to its landscape. In this context it suggests liminal identities and ambiguous meanings which undermine narratives concerning White Australia's identity which, at this time, sought to secure not only a homogeneous but also a masculinised national identity enshrined in such narratives. Coonardoo fits into this national tradition of fiction which celebrates the land and the ordinary people who live out their lives in the Australian outback. However, the cultural anxieties and psychological insecurities of the settler culture highlighted in the novel, problematise the narrative and the genre. These problems are further compounded by the fact that in this narrative, it is the female figure who holds the power and possesses the land. On Hugh's return to Wytaliba, his patriarchal place as the legitimate owner of the land is bestowed not by the father but by the mother- figure—Mumae. And ultimately it is only the diseased Coonardoo who can transform the landscape and secure survival for both black and white Australians, a transformation which is never realised in the novel.

Mothers of the race

Susan Lever argues, in relation to Coonardoo, that Prichard ‘set herself the ambitious task of writing a novel from the subjectivity of a character for whom the novel form and its language are alien’,154 and celebrates the narrative for its insight into ‘the limitations of Western linguistic patterns’ and ‘the white male-centred attitudes which accompany them’.155 There are many examples in the narrative of linguistic alienation and discrimination against the indigene which support Lever's argument. Thus, very little is known of Coonardoo’s thoughts and feelings because she never fully understands the language, the humour, or the cultural heritage of her mistress, even though mistress and maid pretend that she does. As the narrator states:

There was a good deal Mrs Bessie talked of that Coonardoo did not understand; but she liked to pretend she understood very well; and Mrs Bessie like (sic) to pretend that Coonardoo understood. (C 13)

Where Coonardoo does not understand the settler culture, nor does Mrs Bessie understand the indigenous culture, thus it is true to say that the conventions of Western language are unable to express or decode Coonardoo's experience of and interaction with her culture and landscape. As Lever argues, ‘[t]he novel declares its awareness that its literary forms are inadequate to the

154 Susan Lever, Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction (Rushcutters Bay (NSW): Halstead Press, 2000) 61. 155 Lever, Real Relations 68 (both quotes).

experience of its subject’.156 As a result, the black mother-figure is represented as a symbol, as an object of fetishism, and as a white male fantasy of available sexual pleasure. Where the white mother-figure can be represented in the fullness of her character, Coonardoo can only ever be a symbol of or expression for something not directly known. The inability to capture the character of Coonardoo is compounded by the complicit role Mrs Bessie plays in the white male-centred attitudes of language and discourse, which positions Coonardoo as a silent and submissive woman in the presence of white people (C 146). Even though amongst her own people Coonardoo ‘was a different person [who] ... ruled the camp with an intelligence and authority which were unquestioned’ (C 146), Mrs Bessie’s outward authority dominates the novel, and it is therefore the white mother-figure, rather than the black mother-figure, who is more accessible to a sustained analysis.

Despite Mrs Bessie's authority, in mid-life, she is situated in the novel as a lonely woman living in physical and emotional isolation without family or friends. She is devoid of adult (especially female) company and feels that ‘for the first time in her life the yearning and ache of loneliness threatened her’ (C 12). She has a falling out with her manager's white wife and she deliberately restricts hospitality on Wytaliba. She is surrounded by the Gnarler tribe but her imperialist and xenophobic views prevent her from speaking their language and there is no indication that she can do so. Mrs Bessie openly rejects their cultural practices, stating that she ‘had fits of loathing the blacks’ (C 22). The irony is that the person she is closest to, apart from her son, is the young Coonardoo. As the narrator states, ‘Coonardoo had come into a blank place in Mrs Bessie's life, a place of hunger and desolation’ (C 12) and their relationship equates to that of mother and daughter despite the fact that the mother is white and the daughter is black, and there is the lingering possibility that Mrs Bessie's deceased husband is Coonardoo's father.

From a post-colonial perspective, the relationship between Mrs Bessie and Coonardoo is an uneasy meeting between settler and indigenous mother-figures and constructs a peculiarly Australian contact zone. This is not simply a clash of Aboriginal and European cultures, but a ‘transculturation’157 or collision of both cultures whereby the lives of Mrs. Bessie and Coonardoo are

156 Lever, Real Relations 61. 157 The term and concept of transculturation originated in the work of Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz, in the 1940s and has permeated post-colonial studies (without reference to its Cuban origins) as a reading mode which militates against any tendency to collapse the meeting of indigenous people and Europeans into a one-way narrative of destruction and all pervasive European power. Ortiz states that ‘the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. In the end ... the result of every union of culture is similar to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them’. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis, (1940; Durham: Duke UP, 1995) 102-103.

enmeshed, opened and ruptured. Lionnet argues that the prefix 'trans' suggests the act of traversing or of moving across cultural territories and boundaries in relation to colonisation and colonial power. She states that:

Its specifically spatial connotations demarcate a pattern of movement across cultural arenas and physical topographies which corresponds to the notion of 'appropriation,' a concept more promising than those of acculturation and assimilation, and one that implies active intervention rather than passive victimization.158

But this is the very situation that Mrs Bessie struggles against. Even though Coonardoo traverses two worlds, living between ‘the white house’ (C 12) of Wytaliba's homestead during the day and ‘with her people beside their fires in the uloo’ (C 12) at night, and Mrs Bessie too is surrounded by both cultures, she seeks to impose standards of hygiene in the belief that these will prevent ‘active intervention’ between the races. She dies before she is forced to acknowledge that in spite of her coercive authority, bodily boundaries have been traversed through the birth of her grandson, Winni. Thus her ruling that hard physical work takes precedence over sexual desire has been conspicuously ignored (C 65). However, within her own lifetime, one of the ways she attempts to restrict movement across racial and sexual lines is not only to prevent white men from working on Wytaliba, but also to ‘police’ boundaries of racial and sexual ‘purity’ through rituals of cleansing hitherto unknown to Coonardoo and her people.

158 Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations 13.

Policing the boundaries of purity

The intersection of racial and sexual issues in the Nor’-West is a concern Mrs Bessie is singularly prejudiced against and outspoken about, even though she remains silent in relation to her husband’s affair with Coonardoo’s mother, which leaves the lovers dead and Mrs Bessie widowed. It also leaves Hugh without a father and Coonardoo without a mother. Despite her husband’s fatal transgressions of racial and sexual boundaries, Mrs Bessie is determined to prohibit further inter- racial ‘adulteration’ occurring on Wytaliba and goes to great lengths to keep the races apart, even refusing to employ white stockmen ‘because she said they would only make trouble about their gins with Warieda and Chitali’ (C 15). Mrs Bessie is a courageous and strong woman given the patriarchal bias of her culture in a time and place which historically denigrated the female sex and resisted the presence of white women on the frontier because they interfered with white men's relationships with black women.159 In spite of her ruling not to employ white stockmen, she still enforces certain cleansing rituals on Wytaliba's Aboriginal women, which I argue are symbols of racial separation, employed as a means of protecting herself from inter-racial ‘contamination’. Even though she ‘prided herself on treating her blacks kindly’ (C 8) and believed that ‘as long as she lived, aborigines on Wytaliba should remain aborigines’ (C 14), this is not strictly so. There are contradictions between what she says and how she behaves involving concepts of pollution and taboo, concepts which have particular relevance to the female body and society.

In this context, the discourse on health is an instrument not of patriarchy, but of the matriarch. For example, a morning ritual of showering and washing is mandatory for Coonardoo and other house ‘girls’ before Mrs Bessie permits these women to enter the homestead. For the older Aboriginal women this ‘morning wash was a real hardship’ (C 91) as they ‘gasped and suffered the breaking and splash of the water’ (C 91). The ritual takes place on the margins of the homestead. It is a ritual which, in Mrs Bessie’s mind, removes ‘the dirt’ of the Aboriginal world of the uloo and prevents impurities entering the settler world, a world symbolised by the many references in the narrative to Mrs Bessie’s ‘white house’ and her ‘white dress’ (C 12, C 24). As the narrator states, Meenie and Coonardoo always ‘washed and dressed before they went into Mumae’s house’ (C 19). So indoctrinated are the women with Mrs Bessie’s policing of racial categories, that years after her death, Coonardoo reminds herself that Hugh too would ‘expect that she should wash like this every day’ (C 92). However, the ritual is obsessive in its detail and repetition and because it is only black

159 McGuire, 'The Legend of the Good Fella Missus', Aboriginal History, 144. McGuire refers to the disruption of white men’s sexual and economic exploitation of Aboriginal women by the presence of white women. According to McGuire, the favoured archetype of the pioneer heroine civilising the frontier is false. In her reference to Coonardoo, McGuire states that ‘[i]t is in this novel that the failures of the good fella missus first comes under scrutiny’. However, I suggest Mrs Bessie is alert to the socio- sexual dynamic between white men and black women and reverses the situation by refusing to employ white stockmen.

women who are forced to clean their bodies, the ritual implies the danger of racial (and sexual) defilement if the ritual is neglected. Wytaliba’s Aboriginal women must be purified through washing and dressing in the white woman’s way to avoid contamination when crossing the racial and social divide that separates the uloo culture from that of the white-house. This, however, is a one-race crossing. Where sexual relations, for instance, between Aboriginal women and white men are evident, Mrs Bessie will neither meet nor allow these women into the white world of her homestead; she will, however, invite the white men. As the narrator states:

Mrs Bessie could forgive the children; but she would not meet a gin as mistress of a white man’s household, or spend a night under Sam Geary’s roof, if she could help it. (C 33)

However, Mrs Bessie’s definition of racial purity is an ambiguous one. It is significant that she seeks to preserve the racial characteristics found in the Gnarler tribe that signifies her own race— light skin and fair hair. The narrator, for instance, goes to some lengths to point out that Coonardoo and Meenie are both ‘fair-haired, full-blooded aborigines of the Gnarler tribe’ (C 10) who Mrs Bessie thought ‘were half-castes or had some white blood’. Her attitude to so-called ‘half-castes’ is one of strict censure as evident in the fact that Mrs Bessie will not allow Sam Geary’s mistress or their mixed-race children to go beyond the boundary fence of Wytaliba's homestead (C 36). Mrs Bessie fears inter-racial transgressions and is angered by the physical presence of white men's Aboriginal ‘wives’ and their children on her property. It is significant that ‘once she was satisfied after a while that ... among tribes which had no contact with white people there were fair-haired women’ (C 11), it is the fairness that Mrs Bessie wants to preserve and not the darkness. As the narrator states, ‘Mrs Bessie thought that when the women washed their heads every day, as her house-girls did, their hair remained fair longer’ (C 11).

Purity implies an absence of pollution and defilement. It is a quantitative assessment of homogeneity and uniformity and is also associated with innocence and chastity. But Mrs Bessie categorises purity as it relates to whiteness and not to its opposite pure form—blackness. She associates sexual and racial morality with cleanliness, wholeness and separateness. She speaks of life being ‘straight’, of keeping ‘in tune’ (C 64) and of ‘square dealing’ (C 117); codes of living which call for clear and rigid lines of demarcation. Her attitudes and values bring to mind the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose seminal work on boundary rituals provides a way of understanding this complex mother-figure and the sexual and racial ambiguities which surround her. Douglas argues that the concept of pollution is an attempt ‘to protect cherished principles and categories from contradiction .... What is unclear and contradictory (from the perspective of social definition) tends to be regarded as unclean. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order’.160

160 Douglas, Purity and Danger 53

One of the ways Mrs. Bessie protects her ‘cherished principles and categories from contradiction’ and keeps her ‘white woman’s prejudices ... intact’ (C 22) is to insist on these cleansing rituals ‘every day’ (C 87). Mrs Bessie also teaches Coonardoo the rituals of good housekeeping by showing her ‘how to wash dishes with boiling water, making the soap froth and foam; [and how to] sweep the veranda and bedrooms, dining-room and sitting-room’ (C 11). The white walls of Wytaliba are routinely washed by the Aboriginal women and there are several references in the narrative to the constant washing of white women’s clothes as part of the Aboriginal women’s duties (C 56-57). There are also references to the crisp clean appearance of Hugh (C 167) compared to the dirt and the dust (C 31, 170) surrounding the Aborigines and the ‘torn rags’ (C 47) worn by their children. Douglas writes that ‘ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience’.161 I am suggesting that in Coonardoo, this ‘inherently untidy experience’ has been committed many times over on Wytaliba in the form of adultery, murder, possibly incest, and through the birth of a mixed-race child. Nevertheless, Mrs Bessie attempts to guard the actual and metaphoric boundaries of Wytaliba to protect herself, her son, and her nation from racial and sexual ‘defilement’. For certain cultures, writes Douglas, dirt and madness are explicitly linked and to neglect rituals of cleansing is to invite madness and encourage pollution of the social group or culture.162 In the case of boundary pollution, writes Douglas, there is a particular focus on sexuality, and it is these boundaries or margins that are especially dangerous.163 Hugh, for instance, is determined to ‘keep faith’ with himself through his fiancée Jessica, insisting that there will be no ‘black velvet’ for him (C 51). In the narrative, it is the settler culture which fears the symbolism of dirt as, I suggest, there is no context for racial purity or repression on the part of the indigene.

Citing Mary Douglas’s work, Anne McClintock argues in relation to British imperialism that the Victorian middle class exhibited a:

peculiarly intense preoccupation with rigid boundaries ... As colonials travelled back and forth across the thresholds of their known world, crisis and boundary confusion were warded off and contained by fetishes, absolution rituals and liminal scenes. Soap and cleaning rituals became central to the demarcation of body boundaries and the policing of social hierarchies.164

McClintock argues that the Pear’s Soap advertisement of 1899 not only teaches ‘the virtues of cleanliness’ but also ‘implies, purifies and preserves the white male body from contamination in the threshold zone of empire’ and because soap is a domestic commodity, it becomes a guarantee of white

161 Douglas, Purity and Danger 4. 162 Douglas, Purity and Danger 176. 163 Douglas, Purity and Danger 125; 63. 164 McClintock, Imperial Leather 33.

male power.165 In the Australian context of Coonardoo it is not male but matriarchal power which needs to secure itself through ‘the crude soap of fat and wood ashes Mrs Bessie made’ (C 11) for the purpose of imposing bodily hygiene on Aboriginal women. It is through rituals of cleanliness that the mother-figure seeks to ward off crises and boundary confusion and by staying in a permanent state of vigilance as her guarantee of authority and protection. The irony is that it is Coonardoo and members of her tribe who need protection from imperialist forms of power, exploitation, and physical and sexual violence, thus it is Mrs Bessie and her race who represent the problem in the novel.

In her interrogation of issues concerning racial and sexual fetishism, the erasure of dirt and colonial paranoia, McClintock identifies the convergence of imperialism and psychoanalysis originating with Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents. McClintock argues that ‘psychoanalysis cannot be imposed ahistorically on the colonial contest, if only because psychoanalysis emerged in historical relation to imperialism in the first place’,166 and bases her argument on theories of abjection, invoking the work of Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva. My own use of Douglas’s work on boundary rituals and danger is also used in conjunction with Kristeva’s concept of abjection, to explore the racialised and sexualised female body both here and in Chapters 3 and 4. And because Coonardoo invites a Jungian reading, I refer to the psychoanalytic theories of Jung rather than those of his teacher and one-time mentor, Freud. There are few parallels between a Jungian approach to self-individuation through Jung’s theory of contrasexuality and a Kristevian approach to individual autonomy through her concept of abjection. Indeed, Kristeva would argue that abjection challenges any theory of the unconscious which is dependent on a dialectic of negativity, incorporating the repression of desire. For it is the repression of desires in Coonardoo which lies at the heart of the tragedy in the novel. Kristeva would argue that abjection is beyond the unconscious and not sustained by desire.167 Nevertheless, both Jung and Kristeva emphasise the force and influence of the mother-figure, lodged deeply in the unconscious, whether as archetype or ambiguity.

Abjection, projection and the mother-figure

Psychoanalysis, in Kristeva’s hands, concerns the subject in process, a subject equally constituted by symbolic and semiotic elements. This involves both union with and separation from the mother, who is essential to ego formation but ultimately must be rejected. Kristeva, amongst others, expands Georges Bataille’s concepts of excess and transgression, and links these concepts of

165 McClintock, Imperial Leather 32. 166 McClintock, Imperial Leather 73-74. 167 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 6-8.

abjection to the feminine, the female and the maternal body.168 Abjection, according to Kristeva, is ‘a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside’.169 Kristeva argues that in order to become social, the individual has to expel everything that society deems polluting or impure (menstrual blood, semen, tears, vomit, food, masturbation, incest—the mother) but that this act of expulsion can never be fully realised because it returns to disrupt the subject’s identity. Or, to use McClintock’s elegant words, ‘these expelled elements can never be fully obliterated; they haunt the edges of the subject’s identity with the threat of disruption or even dissolution’.170 For Kristeva, the cause of abjection is not ‘the lack of cleanliness or health’ but that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous’.171 And the mother-figure, according to Kristeva, bears the most direct relation to abjection because she too must be expelled in order for the subject to become an autonomous social being. The abject for Kristeva is an exiled figure, living on the socio-symbolic boundary as a ‘permanent threat ... to the homogenizing rhetoric that the writer composes against and with the abject’.172

The abject comes in different forms and while the category of Other is a general classification of difference, the abject poses a greater threat to identity, system and order. Coonardoo, for instance, is both the racialised (and feminised) Other, who, as the object of his desire, threatens Hugh’s sworn allegiance to himself and his mother that there will be ‘[n]o stud gins for mine—no matter what happens’ (C 51). And as a literal presence she is an abject figure who disturbs his identity as ‘a good ordinary little man’ (C 223) who has absorbed his mother’s teachings to lead a life of ‘common sense, and cleanliness, moral and physical’ (C 43), yet retaliates against the disturbance of his own identity through acts of insensate cruelty. On a cultural level, Coonardoo and her people are objects to be expelled and exiled from the psyche of the settler culture. Within the narrative, white men like Hugh are shown to hide from their psychological, sexual and emotional realities behind frustrated desires and masculine violence. In a man like Hugh whose ‘repressions have rotted in him’ (C 224), he is menaced night and day by the external physical presence of Coonardoo. She embodies both his sexual desire and his refusal to express the passionate aspects of his personality.

168 Georges Bataille, the dissident Surrealist writer and philosopher has contributed significantly to the theory of abjection through his notion of ‘base materialism’. Bataille challenges the concept of mind/body dualism and establishes categories of social taboos through investigating the body’s degraded elements. Faeces, blood, pus, and bodily fluids are excreted, banished, abjected but for Bataille they are equivalent to a sacrifice, a ‘gift’, which can be reintroduced into the body; they are force and energy. An excess of energy places everything in a state of disillusion, nothingness, limitlessness. Bataille wants to place the edifice of culture at risk in order that it is not protected, secured or self-possessed. Obscenity, violation and eroticism are Bataille’s tools ‘to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still’. G. Bataille, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars,1987) 17. 169 Guberman, Julia Kristeva Interviews 118. 170 McClintock, Imperial Leather 71. 171 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 4. 172 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 22.

Culturally, she represents all that he has been taught to disavow in terms of decency and yet his frontier existence is totally dependent on her. For ten years Coonardoo literally sleeps on the margins of the imperial world—the homestead verandah—in her chaste bed untouched by ‘Hugh’s hunger’ (C 157). Coonardoo, ‘knowing his loneliness, the deep surge of his drawing to her’ (C 157), is bewildered by his sexual repression which he enforces through a punishing regime of physical work. Eventually he will destroy Coonardoo, alienate himself and bankrupt Wytaliba. To use Kristeva’s words in relation to the process of abjection, ‘‘subject’ and ‘object’ push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject’.173 It is over this terrain, states Kristeva, that ‘[g]reat modern literature unfolds’.174

From a Jungian perspective, it is the disavowal of the Other or feminine aspects in Hugh’s nature, learnt from his mother, that has created the tragedy between the lovers. By feminine aspects, I refer to Hugh’s inability to acknowledge his ‘hunger’ for sexual and emotional intimacy with a woman of a different race, as well as an acceptance of his desires and passions in a masculine and pragmatic culture. I am conscious that Jung’s theory of feminine/masculine archetypes (incorporating the anima, or female nature of a man's unconscious; the animus, or masculine nature of a woman's unconscious; and the shadow, or the personification of an unacknowledged aspect of one's personality), runs the risk of essentialising on the basis of gender. And this is also true of Prichard's characterisation of the indigene on the basis of race. Indeed, Kristeva’s theory of the abject which aligns abjection with the feminine and the maternal is also an implicitly essentialist assumption. Whilst I acknowledge these dangers, my argument is that Prichard is informally, though consciously, using a Jungian model to throw aspects of the novel into sharper relief. The monstrosity of Kristeva’s abject can be appropriated to challenge conventional representations of the feminine and the racialised Other.

Extending the concept of the Other, Jung’s theory of contrasexuality, namely that at a psychic level there exists a contrasexual archetype (which he designated as the anima (‘soul’) and the animus (‘spirit’)), calls attention to otherness, to difference and to gender in a unique way. According to Jungian analyst, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Jung’s:

theory of contrasexuality, that everyone has a biologically based opposite-sexed personality derived from genetic traces of the other sex (hormonal, morphological, and the like), is tainted by essentialism but clear about its psychological domain. This condition creates an Other within, an unconscious subpersonality. That subpersonality has a life of its own, usually dissociated, and often projected onto the opposite sex, a fetish, or an aspect of the world, in order to defend the self against anxiety and conflict.175

173 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 18. 174 Kristeva, Powers of Horror 18. 175 Young-Eisendrath, Cambridge Companion to Jung 224.

Jung's theory of contrasexuality, argues Young-Eisendrath, ‘is both a cultural analysis of universal opposites, and a psychological theory of ‘projection-making factors’’.176 Jung believed that this theory was not only a key to understanding personal behaviour but it is also a way of exploring those repressions hidden from and disavowed by the conscious self. Thus, this play of opposites— anima/animus; shadow/self; unconscious/conscious; black/white; desire/abjection—are forever in tension and are eternally returning until they are integrated into the personality. Where the shadow is a motif or archetype of the personal unconscious, the anima/animus are archetypes of the collective unconscious. They create the potential for, or are the tools of, personal transformation.

According to Young-Eisendrath, Jung's theory of contrasexuality ‘is a contribution ... that problematises the ‘opposite sex,’ tracing the shadow of Otherness back to its owner’.177 In the narrative of Coonardoo, tracing the shadow of otherness back to male figures in the narrative is straightforward. Hugh, for example, exhibits a pattern of behaviour whereby he represses the ‘feminine’ or emotional aspect of his personality by shunning the shadow of femininity, personified by Coonardoo. Seemingly, it is not enough just to ignore the shadow of otherness; it must be destroyed. Thus, the pattern of male violence against Aboriginal women, perpetrated by decent white men like Hugh (and his father), is accepted in the harsh and masculine culture of the Australian outback. As a result, Hugh’s defencive sexism and racism prevent him from being ‘sentimental about a gin’ (C 69), thus ‘[e]very finer, less reasonable instinct he had stamped on, kicked out of his consciousness’ (C 69) to avoid relationship with Coonardoo. I am interested, however, in tracing the shadow of otherness back to the white mother-figure, as a way of understanding the ‘defeminising’ of Mrs Bessie. For she not only rejects the feminine in herself, as well as in other women, but she lives in a culture which cannot accept the otherness of femininity and insists that women be like men (C 39). Thus in the ensuing discussion of the white and black mother-figures, I continue to make reference to Jungian theories related to contrasexuality and projection.

The ‘defeminised’ white mother-figure

Mrs Bessie rejects ‘feminine’ behaviour and symbols of femininity on the basis that they represent weakness, passivity and loss. She resents, for example, women like Jessica Haywood, Hugh's fiancée, who embodies these qualities. Jessica is a fragile young woman who dresses in muslin frocks and dainty shoes. She sings sentimental songs about romantic love which incur Mrs. Bessie's silent wrath. Mrs Bessie thinks her a ‘[l]ittle fool! ... a weakling [and] a poor spirit’ (C 43) and states that she ‘hated weaklings [and] hoped to goodness Hughie did not mean to marry this girl’

176 Young-Eisendrath, Cambridge Companion to Jung 224. 177 Young-Eisendrath, Cambridge Companion to Jung 224.

(C 43). Mrs Bessie’s final insult and contradictory ruling in relation to this young woman, is to announce to her son, ‘I'd rather you took a gin than a white woman like that’ (C 64), implying that racial difference is preferable to sexual difference if sexuality is marked in flagrantly feminine ways. The feminine, according to this mother-figure, marks a woman as unfit to marry and bear children. As the self-appointed authority on marital health and fitness, Mrs Bessie prevents the marriage between Jessica and Hugh, leaving him free to marry the ‘physically fit and suitable’ Mollie (C 124). However, from the outset of their married life, this white woman confronts resistance to her presence on the frontier, beginning with Hugh’s denial of his sexual relationship with Coonardoo and the paternity of his son Winni.

Like Jessica, there is no place for Mollie within the national discourse which engages with work, heat, dust and physical hardship, a discourse in which the feminine values have little room for expression. Mollie is an avaricious and obdurate young woman delighted to find herself married to a station-owner like Hugh, until she gives birth to a succession of five daughters. Mollie is a distressed mother and an angry woman who eventually takes a ‘perverse pleasure in thwarting [Hugh's] passion’ (C 141) that makes him swear ‘never to touch her as a wife again’ (C 141). Mrs Bessie has instructed Hugh to marry a white woman who ‘will face hardship with a man, stand by and fight through with him’ (C 64), but Mollie is keen to socialise, shop, dress up, and entertain. She fits the motherhood model described by Hoorn in relation to colonial academic painting—namely, that the condition of white motherhood stood in the way of the pastoral frontier, holding men back from their work and their contribution to the economic health of the nation, through women's maternal dependence.178 The morning after Mollie arrives on Wytaliba Station, for instance, Hugh is mounted on his horse ‘to go out after a killer’ (C 95). The narrator records that ‘Mollie looked up, startled. Was he going away already? Far? And would he be long?’ (C 95). Mollie lacks the ‘grit and good humour’ (C 133) that Hugh expects of women, exemplified by his mother. Sam Geary confirms that ‘the weakness and unfitness of white women for the hard and lonely life of the Nor'-West’ (C 133) makes Mollie doubly unsuited because of her maternal role and social needs. Geary’s predilection for Aboriginal women, however, and the historical fact that the presence of white women interfered with white men's inter- racial relationships, weakens his argument. The exception to Geary’s ruling is, of course, Mrs Bessie but if she is going to ‘fit’ with the overtly white masculine culture which dominates the Australian outback, she must repress the feminine and emphasise the masculine.

To illustrate this point, it is significant that she is invariably described (and admired), by male characters in the narrative for her masculine appearance. The narrator states that she is a ‘wiry, restless figure in a pair of trousers, white shirt, and old hat of Ted's’ (C 14), with eyes as ‘hard and blue as the winter skies’; ‘Mumae, the woman who was like a man’ (C 7, 16). Hugh describes the

178 Hoorn, Strange Women 107.

way his mother walks, ‘striding, with the lurch and sway of a horseman’ and Sam Geary declares she is a ‘[g]reat little woman ... sewed into her pants’ (C 39). My argument is that the sewing is culturally imposed, as a way of constraining the feminine and dismissing women's participation in and contribution towards Australia's outback life. On the one hand, Mrs Bessie’s presence disrupts the masculine ordering of the Australian frontier but, on the other, her authority can only be legitimated if she acts like a man. In other words, her own Protestant Christian-based culture validates her, not because she is a woman, but because she has lived and worked as men do (C 22).

It is obvious that Mrs Bessie’s opposite-sexed ‘masculine’ personality or animus is well integrated. It is her anima or female/feminine qualities which irritate her, yet all the while menace her. I am referring here to the presence of Coonardoo who has become ‘Mrs Bessie’s shadow’ (C 14) who works, every day, alongside her mistress. Coonardoo, represented as a sexualised mother-figure, loved and valued within her own culture for her maternal and sexual powers, is a constant reminder of the anima qualities, debased and ignored in the settler culture. Even the naming of Coonardoo, which translates into the ‘the dark well, or the well in the shadows’ (C 2), resonates with psychological references relating to repressed or thwarted libidinal drives which, in the narrative, lead to projection, sublimation and inversion. In fact, the repression of the anima manifests itself in the assiduous search for, but the failure to find, water. Where water plays a central role in keeping Mrs Bessie and her culture from racial ‘contamination’, in another context it is the element obsessively sought after by mother and son as the means to their survival. In Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), water is a symbol of fertility and maternity and is aligned with the anima archetype.179 As the feminine archetype, unreconciled by Mrs Bessie (and her culture), it nevertheless becomes an unconscious but powerful presence through the very existence of Coonardoo, the mother from whom all life is born(e). Water is the life-blood of the landscape and therefore, as the narrator states, Mrs Bessie:

talked wells and well-sinking with Charley half the night, costing and depths, and worked with him on a map she had made of Wytaliba, where wells ought to be sunk; where they could best be sunk. Mrs Bessie had a bee in her bonnet about wells, Charley said. It was the dream of her life to have Wytaliba honeycombed with wells. (C 14)

Water, wells, maps, honey and bees are sexual and maternal signifiers relating to the generative powers of the female body and female sexuality but these are associated not with the body of the white, but with the body of the black mother-figure. Coonardoo is an ever-present reminder of the lack of integration of the feminine and the maternal into the settler psyche. And while ever the feminine goes unacknowledged, failure and impotence leave relationships barren and the landscape decimated. Mrs Bessie, thrust into prominence as the hardworking matriarch of Wytaliba Station,

179 C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916).

resides in a culture which has no place for her because her culture cannot easily appropriate the authority of the mother-figure which includes the generative powers and sexual difference of a mature and aging woman. Mrs Bessie has position and power but she has no direction to creatively disperse that power. Even this mother’s relationship with her son, according to Hugh, is more ‘a man's for his workmate, a comrade in arms [with] scarcely any sentimental tenderness; personal affection for her’ (C 65). Denial of the feminine archetype in mother and son makes itself felt in destructive and negative ways, illustrated by examples of physical and psychological violence within the settler culture (C 223, 223). Nevertheless, representations of the ‘feminised’ black mother-figure, who embodies maternal qualities of fertility, nurturance and abundance, considered integral to the survival of the tribe, their spirituality, and their land, will ultimately be destroyed. It is through a discourse on health that the black mother-figure is destroyed as the shifting representation of Aboriginal women illustrated by Coonardoo’s characterisation serve to justify the dispossession of the indigene as well as legitimating the forced removal of children from their Aboriginal mothers. At the end of the novel, half-crazed with disease through the abuse of men, Coonardoo reflects on her life and wonders ‘at the ways of white men with aboriginal women’ (C 230). As the feminised Other, the black mother-figure has endured emotional, physical and sexual violence inflicted by the settler culture to the point where it has destroyed her body and deranged her mind.

The ‘unfit’ black mother-figure

The representation of the black mother-figure in the narrative as diseased and doomed with a body ‘weakening and rotting away from her’ (C 229) is a consequence of ruthless race theories which emerged through influential publications by Englishmen such as, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and had specific relevance to Australia’s settlement history. O’Brien has argued that such theories ‘were used to justify the rampant ill-usage’ of Aboriginal women by European men, citing E. M. Forster’s impression of the Indian indigene as so morally debased that he asks ‘what relationship beyond carnality could one establish with such people?’180 Even the illustrations by C. H. Percival in The Bulletin’s serialisation of Coonardoo depict Aboriginal women as servile and physically unattractive with bent, shapeless bodies.181 Australian history has shown that the black mother-figure has borne the brunt of Imperial ‘carnality’ because of racial theories, embedded in the discourse on health, which denied many indigenous women even the basic right to mother their own children.

180 O’Brien, Maps 360. The quote by E. M. Forster is cited by Ronald Hyam, ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XIV.2 (1986): 39-90 (53). 181 ‘Coonardoo. By Katharine Susannah Prichard. Illustrations by C. H. Percival’, The Bulletin, 3 October 1928, 51; 10 October 1928, 51.

In the matter of miscegenation, it is not the white father-figure who is singled out for discipline and punishment. Rather it is the body of the black mother-figure who will bear the ‘crime’ and wear the consequences. The publication of Coonardoo coincides with the overt and covert operations to remove mixed-race children from their mothers even though there is no indication in the novel as to the future of Hugh and Coonardoo's son, nor of Sam Geary’s seventeen children fathered with his three Aboriginal ‘wives’. 182 However, Hugh states that some white men treat their 'gins' and offspring well, while others ‘let ‘em starve’ (C 109), ignoring (or denying) any other possibilities. Outside of the novel, the 1997 publication of the Federal Human Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Report, Bringing Them Home, has resulted in a proliferation of academic and creative texts in relation to the subject of Aboriginal mothers and their mixed-race children. Marilyn Lake argues that ‘[f]eminist organisations between the wars were centrally concerned with improving the status and rights of all mothers’,183 and that these organisations actively opposed the removal of indigenous children from their families. Lake states that:

Feminist opposition to the government policy of removing part-Aboriginal children was an extension of the maternalism that characterised feminist political thought in those years. Maternalists saw the task of government as providing care to the vulnerable and defenceless; they also focused on the mother as the national political figure around whom they mobilised.184

Lake concludes that individuals make choices about their social attitudes and personal behaviour and, in the context of the narrative, Hugh, as a representation of white patriarchy, has decided to repress all emotion and feeling in relation to the mother of his son as well as his duty of care towards the child

182 The Australian film Rabbit-Proof Fence (based on Doris Pilkington’s biographical story of her mother and aunts, Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence (1996)), directed by Phillip Noyce and released in Australia in February 2002, is partly filmed in the Pilbara District, which is also the setting for Coonardoo The film recreates the actual treatment of three so-called ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal girls (Molly, Daisy and Gracie) who are forcefully removed from their mothers in 1930 to live in a white church-run institution in order to forget their origins and 'breed out the colour'. The objective of removing these children by government or non-government agencies was to enforce integration into white society. This practice continued in some parts of Australia until the 1960s. These children are now known as 'the stolen generations'. Where a number of Prichard’s short stories deal with the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families, there is no mention of this practice in her novel, Coonardoo. Despite the many references to ‘half-caste’ children in the novel and to Hugh and Coonardoo’s ‘half-caste’ son Winni who is pivotal to the story, it is not revealed what happens to these children even though there are references to ‘bounty hunting’ and ‘black-birding’ (C 118) detailing the ways white men attempted to ‘eradicate’ the Aborigine. See Sue Kossew, ‘Writing women: gender, identity and representation in Coonardoo and A Kindness Cup’, in Jennifer McDonell and Michael Deves (eds), Land and Identity: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (1998): 37-43 and Kossew, Writing Women, Writing Place. Anne Brewster, ‘Aboriginal life writing and globalisation: Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence’, Southerly, 62.2 (2002): 153-161. Brigitta Olubas and Lisa Greenwell, ‘Re-membering and taking up an ethics of listening: a response to loss and the maternal in ‘the stolen children’’, Australian Humanities Review, July (1999): 1-8. 183 Marilyn Lake, ‘Lessons from the stolen children’ The Age (Melbourne) 17 January 1998: 9. (Italics in original article.) 184 Lake, The Age 9.

whose features bear the traces of white paternity. In fact, self-denial is so extreme in Hugh that he ‘could not understand the fury which had consumed him’ (C 214). He questions whether he is mad but rationalising his brutality he concludes that he is merely:

Rotten ... Rotten, that’s what I am. There goes my son to look for his mother ... and I haven’t the spunk to go with him. It’s beneath my dignity. My pride won't let me. (C 216)

Hugh's pride and dignity may defend him against conflict and anxiety but, in the end, his attitudes and behaviour prove tragic for the indigene and inevitably destructive to the settler culture. Hugh is bankrupt financially and emotionally at the end of the novel; alienated from himself, his family and the land he is left wandering across an infertile landscape, searching for gold. As Henry Reynolds argues:

Pervasive racism when combined with coercive authority was an enormously destructive force. When it became involved in the desire to preserve a white Australia and to ‘breed out the colour’ the consequences were tragic for thousands of Aboriginal families all over the country.185

The point of focus of this pervasive racism and coercive authority, in some of its most brutal forms, is the black mother-figure. She stands at the forefront of this ‘enormously destructive force’, both within and outside the narrative. Physical violence towards the Aborigine and in particular the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women, who bore the burden of mother as victim, denied her children, her civic rights and her land is now acknowledged, albeit controversially, as part of Australia’s historical

story.186 Coonardoo introduces these forbidden and neglected subject-matters long before they became the focus of official attention.

Conclusion

The novel continues to shock and challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture. Through repressed drives and desires, the aging white mother-figure sets in train destructive

185 Henry Reynolds, ‘Afterword’, in Carmel Bird (ed), The Stolen Children: Their Stories (Milsons Point (NSW): Random House, 1998) 191. 186 It is worth noting that in March 2001, during the nation's celebration of its Centenary Year, the Australian National Museum in Canberra was established. Since its conception in the 1980s, the idea of a national museum was to provide a public place where civic discourse about Australia's national idenity, about the representation of its history (especially its frontier history), together with the role of public institutions could take place. The establishment and the opening of this institution has been the subject of controversy and criticism because of the way the museum has presented nationhood, in terms of the Australian Aborigines having a prior official history spanning thousands of years, compared to the settlement history of white Australia spanning the last 220 years. The former Museum Director, Dawn Casey, has stated that who gets included in the presentation of nationhood and what histories are representated, provoke discomfort. She also stated that you cannot represent Australia's black/white relationship in a museum context without discussing massacres, in the same way that you cannot represent Australia's migration history without talking about the White Australia Policy. ‘The

forces which defile and disenfranchise the Aboriginal characters in the narrative. In Coonardoo, it is the ‘fit’ and ‘clean-living’ white Australians who corrupt relationships and destroy traditions. Racism and sexism are partnered in the novel where white men violate Aboriginal women and ignore basic human rights yet take pride in their decency as men. Where history has shown that indigenous women bore the brunt of racial theories, based on the work of men of science, I argue in the next chapter that these same theories, rationalised through a discourse on health, also denied white women their right to mother. These women too stand outside the health hegemony and its central icon: the Ideal Mother. As the state and science increasingly intervene in the matter of motherhood by regulating and supervising procreation, women like Coonardoo in Prichard’s novel, Linda Hendon (in Dark’s Prelude to Christopher) and Phyllis Massey (in Dark’s The Little Company) are singled out as ‘abject’ and ‘tainted’ or simply too mad to continue to mother.

Relationship Between Social History Museums and Contemporary History’, Hindsight, producer Jane Connors, Radio National, 14 March 2002.

SECTION II

MOTHERS AND MADNESS

Prelude to Christopher187 The Little Company188

In the previous section I explored racial and gender differences through a discourse on health to show, inter alia, how the aging white mother-figure conformed to the discourse to gain economic and social power, primarily by becoming ‘like a man’. Where the black mother-figure was concerned, the discourse on health attempted, at best, to ‘white wash’ the black maternal body and at worst, it annihilated her through Australia’s intense racial self-consciousness linked to an equally intense preoccupation with national security. Reading the mother-figure through the discourse on health serves to critique an ideology which transformed cultural images into ‘a mother’s nature’. Motherhood was mythologised as natural, fulfilling and joyous. This perception of motherhood as a natural role for women (into which women slide unequivocally), positions the mother-figure within the so-called untamed and irrational realm of nature and body which poses a threat to a masculine hegemony. This is a hegemony strongly identified with the rational and scientific world of spirit and reason. Such a gendered dualism is an early thesis of feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, who argues that woman is ‘Other’ and object to the subject, man.

De Beauvoir’s thesis is similar to Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s argument in the Dialectic of Enlightenment where the more positive identification of women with nature in the ancient world has taken a negative form in modern bourgeois society—that of incorporating women into a male-dominated world—but only in a broken form, that of ‘female chastity and propriety’.189 More recent scholarship looks closely at the relationship between mind and body, and, in particular, at the ways the medical sciences have scrutinised and objectified the female body in the pursuit of scientific rationality through endeavours to subjugate nature. Ludmilla Jordanova, for instance, in her examination of the biological and medical sciences between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in respect to gender and the gendered character of natural knowledge, argues that ‘[t]he idea of conquering or mastering nature is a case in point, where the sense of otherness implied by the idea is

187 Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher (1934; Rushcutters Bay: Halstead, 1999). Further references to the novel will appear in the main body of the thesis as PC, followed by the page number. 188 Eleanor Dark, The Little Company (Sydney: Collins, 1945). Further references to the novel will appear in the main body of the thesis as TLC, followed by the page number. 189 M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialetic of Enlightment (London: Allen Lane, 1973) 69. See Reiger, Kerreen M., The Disenchantment of The Home: Modernizing the Australian Family 1880-1940 (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1985) 219.

also generally understood in terms of gender, with nature commonly, but by no means universally, being identified with woman’.190 Jordanova argues that the mastering of nature has led to the medical sciences’ incessant regulation of the female body; women and not men are the focus of medical attention and women’s role in reproduction is a particular focus. Regulating women’s behaviour, including restricting their bodies and minds, have made the medical sciences one of the key sites of patriarchy, discounting the authenticity of women’s experience and inhibiting their agency through common means of control such as institutionalisation and incarceration. In this section, I explore the impact of this discourse on health on the mother-figure in Eleanor Dark’s novels, Prelude to Christopher and The Little Company. In these novels, mother-figures both conform to and work against the discourse yet their destinies are similarly bleak, incorporating fits of psychosis, hysteria, hospitalisation and in one instance, suicide. In this section I argue that Dark draws on the discourses of medical science that pathologised a woman’s ‘fitness’ to mother in the representation of the two mother-figures under discussion.

Through the medical definition of hysteria, regarded at the time Dark was writing these two novels as a disease of women due to a disturbance of the uterus, a woman’s mental health was firmly tied to her reproductive organs. The relationship between hysteria, psychoanalysis and feminism, according to Charles Bernheimer, is a complex one of contestation, implication and solidarity.191 Freud’s study of women (and men) with hysteria at the beginning of the twentieth century gave birth to the psychoanalytic profession and since then the psychiatric and medical professions have delivered a running critique on the performance and appearance of women with mental illness. The prescriptive force of Freud’s theories in psychiatric practices throughout most of the twentieth century has reinforced notions of what Jill Astbury calls ‘the holy trinity of Freudian femininity—narcissism, masochism and passivity’.192 Women themselves have taken no part in devising this theoretical model which renders them unable to speak or represent themselves other than through the mediation of doctors and psychiatrists who, in the period under review, are invariably male. Elaine Showalter argues that, in fact, madness is considered ‘a female malady’ not just because of statistical evidence (more women are recorded as experiencing mental illness compared to men) but because the relationship between nature, culture and gender positions women, ‘within our dualistic systems of language and representations, [as] typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind’.193 As Elizabeth Grosz suggests, these are not neutral terms whereby mind and body, reason and passion exist equally

190 Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Harvester, 1989) 14. 191 Charles Bernheimer, ‘Introduction: Part One’ in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (eds) In Dora’s case: Freud, hysteria, feminism (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 1. 192 Jill Astbury, Crazy for You: The Making of Women’s Madness (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 142. 193 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985; London: Virago 1987) 3-4.

in ‘an otherwise all-encompassing descriptive field’.194 On the contrary, the second or subordinated term ‘is merely the negation or denial, the absence or privation of the primary term, its fall from grace’ whereby the primary term defines and empowers itself ‘by expelling its other and in this process establishes its own boundaries and borders to create an identity for itself’.195 Grosz’s philosophic thesis of the mind/body binary logic has powerful implications for women as ‘the sex’, the other and the object of the discourse on health. Women generally, but the mother-figure specifically, became the focus of intense surveillance and intervention by the medical and scientific professions in the first half of the twentieth century at a time when there was no adequate feminist framework to interrogate the gendered dualism of Australian society and women’s subordination within it.

Rarely in this period are the conditions of women’s lives within the patriarchal family explored. Dark’s The Little Company enters the patriarchal household through the character of Phyllis Massey who ironically is determined to maintain rigidly defined male/female roles despite her oppression and increasing delusion about ‘a world which had incomprehensibly departed from the pattern of a good world which she understood’ (TLC 239). Phyllis is angry with men like her husband who refuse the role of ‘a knight-errant’ (TLC 239), shielding her from a ‘bad world’, and she is openly hostile towards women who choose to alienate themselves from their prescribed female roles. Rather than step outside these gendered roles as Linda Hendon does in Prelude to Christopher, Phyllis seeks to push her role to an extreme, believing it was ‘natural’ for women, especially her daughters, to ‘flirt and drink cocktails’ and most unnatural and abnormal:

to be interested in politics, and go to lectures and meetings more than to dances, and read queer books, and that ridiculous modern poetry, and reports on housing and malnutrition, and even venereal disease …. (TLC 28-29)

The thought of women earning their own living, reading books and developing their minds causes Phyllis to panic, thrusting these thoughts aside by busying herself with household chores. Phyllis is deliberately self-limiting and refuses change in a society and culture thrown into chaotic change because of another world war. In defence of her conventions, this mother-figure becomes increasingly psychologically disorientated as the narrative progresses.

Citing the work of Freudian analyst Karen Horney, whose most influential papers on the subject of women and madness were written between 1926 and 1935, Showalter argues that the socio- cultural influence on female psychology is not considered in the psychoanalytic/therapeutic situation, especially the importance of motherhood and the significance of men’s envy towards pregnancy,

194 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards (NSW): Allen & Unwin, 1994) 3. 195 Grosz, Volatile Bodies 3.

childbirth, and breast feeding.196 Freud, for instance, largely ignored the mother-figure. The positive aspects of motherhood (with the potential for male envy) are more recent and welcome considerations in the psychoanalytic situation. Jill Astbury supports this view, arguing that scientific theories from the nineteenth century onwards ‘that sought to explain women to themselves, and none more so than Freud’s revised theory of hysteria, have functioned as a defensive bulwark that prevented the conditions of women’s lives being taken into account in explanations of their mental distress’.197 In addition, the role of male fantasy in the construction of feminine ‘nature’ leads Astbury to conclude that scientific theories about women with mental health problems are psychogenic, ‘that says infinitely more about the psychology of the observer than the observed, and especially about the observer’s often malign fantasies of the other’.198 These themes are of particular importance in my reading of Dark’s character, Linda Hendon, whose husband is a medical doctor and a passionate eugenicist. Linda believes motherhood would redeem her tortured life and cries out ‘for a saving maternity’ (PC 91). Her husband, however, refuses to have children. He spends their married life vigilantly observing his wife for signs of hereditary madness. He is determined that his dream of ‘order and sanity’ and his ‘creed’ of ‘normality and the rational ordering of an irrational world’ will not be impeded by his wife (PC 42). For the medical profession characterised in the novel, Linda is simply scientific evidence in the study of women and madness.

The making of women’s madness has been the subject of women writers and feminist scholarship throughout the twentieth century. Where Freud sees hysteria bound up with issues of sexuality and identity, Astbury argues that scientific and medical theories about women and madness, including hysteria, are, in fact, neurotic, ‘being powerful ideological instruments in the creation of neurosis’, thus she refers to these theories as ‘neurotic science’.199 Astbury, Showalter, and Grosz all draw attention to the fact that women have been denied self-representation or a space for the inclusion of their own accounts of the histories and experiences of their own bodies. The inability of language to adequately represent women’s desires and roles in a rapidly changing political and social milieu, are themes in the novels being analysed in this section. In her linking of language and sexuality, feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray argues that there has been an effective and continuous repression of women’s desire, as old as Western civilization which is embodied in the logic of language. According to Irigaray, female sexuality cannot articulate itself, even minimally, in:

an Aristotelian type of logic … within this logic, which dominates our most every-day statements – while speaking, at this moment, we are still observing its rules, female sexuality cannot articulate itself unless precisely as an “undertone”, a “lack” in discourse.200

196 Showalter, Female Malady 200. 197 Astbury, Crazy for You 2. 198 Astbury, Crazy for You 2. 199 Astbury, Crazy for You 2. 200 Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke (New York: Cornell UP, 1985) 25.

To survive, the mother-figures in the novels either adopt the language of patriarchy and their place within it or suffer the consequences. Where Linda Hendon is associated with sorcery and sexual promiscuity because she freely expresses her sexuality for the sake of pleasure rather than procreation, Phyllis suffers from sexual prudery and ‘the blighting restrictions’ of her father-in-law’s religious dogma (TLC 239), fearful of her own and her daughters’ sexual expression. Either way, these two extremely different portrayals of female sexuality are disturbing in that the body is betrayed through knowledge on the one hand and ignorance on the other. The novels demonstrate the betrayal of and mistrust towards the female body in a time and place when motherhood was the expected outcome of female desire, depriving women of other possibilities. As a result, women have also been agents of illness behaviours, of somatisation and the erotic aspects of their own performance in taking on the role of patient, succumbing to a discourse on health which binds women to their bodies and to restricted roles and responsibilities.

The implications of this discourse on health are evident in contradictory ways in the narratives. On the one hand, Linda Hendon in Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher, is considered ‘a creature over-complicated, agonisingly over-perfected by civilisation, trained beyond bearing, educated beyond endurance’ (PC 71) and is herself immersed in the knowledge and discourse of medicine and science; Linda is a practising biologist. She is strongly aligned with scientific rationality, a reality grounded in an empiricist epistemology. On the other hand, Phyllis Massey in Dark’s The Little Company has an unshakeable faith in what she believes is the natural basis of social life—of women as wives and mothers living their lives in the private arena of home and family life. Unlike Linda, Phyllis is agitated by most forms of mental effort. Whenever Phyllis thinks about her life and the world she plunges into domestic activity to suppress these thoughts (TLC 29). Where Linda works against the discourse on health which decrees that she must not mother because she is considered genetically ‘unfit’, Phyllis complies with the discourse as the conservative mother of three children. Nevertheless, both women become increasingly deranged in the world of the narrative and the novels reinforce the power of the discourse on health to prescribe a female pathology where women are the focus and the problem for the male medical practitioner. In these novels medical knowledge decides, on the basis of a woman’s sexual and psychological health, whether she is fit to mother.

The relationship between Linda and her husband, Nigel, personifies the increasing medicalisation of motherhood in the early twentieth century, a medicalisation which incorporates eugenic principles, wedded to prevailing population theories designed, as British psychologist Havelock Ellis stated at the time, to ‘elevate the race’ and maintain the ‘social hygiene’ of Western

societies.201 Tensions and ambiguities that converge on the mother-figures in the previous section, once again converge on the mother-figures in Dark’s two novels, even though they are of very different kinds. Prelude to Christopher and The Little Company reflect the social and political upheavals during a time of international warfare and the impact on women’s lives of irrevocable change following the First and Second World Wars. However, these momentous events are in the background of women’s lives as they continue to grapple with laws and customs designed to ensure that women not only desire to be mothers, but that they mould themselves to fit the category of a gendered ‘normality’ (P 18), according to contemporary medical models and social mores. Where Linda Hendon is labelled from the outset as deviant because she deliberately flaunts codes of thinking and behaving that are deemed appropriate for women, Phyllis Massey becomes dangerous through clinging to social conventions and fulfilling her ‘natural’ reproductive and domestic roles in a time of war when women’s roles were being transformed. Wartime production needed the female body out of the home and into the factory. Fulfilling one’s national duty took on a very different meaning for Australian women by 1942, the year in which The Little Company begins. Production and reproduction no longer referred to motherhood but to munitions and making sure the factories were ‘manned’.

Whereas Linda provokes hostility because of her rage and stubborn intellect, Phyllis is feared for her very lack of reason and for the ‘confused care’ of her children even though she prides herself on her accomplishments as a wife and mother (TLC 51). The ambivalence surrounding the nature, culture and gender associations call into question the rationale and legitimacy of these associations, nevertheless they have a powerful legacy that neither women can escape.

201 Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (London: Constable, 1912) 2.

CHAPTER 3 Prelude to Christopher

Prelude to Christopher, Eleanor Dark's second novel, was published in 1934. Dark wrote the novel when she was in her early thirties and was confident that both she as a writer and her writing—‘of a modern Australian variety’202—would make their mark. Dark considered it to be one of her best works because it contained an immediacy, an intensity and ‘a sort of spontaneity’203 that made it unique. In order to achieve this spontaneity, Dark structures the novel using a condensed time-frame, interior monologue and a stream of consciousness technique. She concentrates twenty- four years of Linda and Nigel Hendon’s married life into four days. The novel explores both random and routine experiences such as answering a telephone and adjusting a pillow, rather than the grand events of the day. Insignificant and apparently unrelated incidents connect a motor vehicle accident, a childless marriage and a wife's suicide with the extreme events of the time, namely the practice of eugenics, the ‘birth’ of modern warfare during the First World War, and the violence and barbarism which followed in its wake. These incidents intensify and crowd in upon Linda’s deteriorating mind to the point where she takes her own life. I also consider Prelude to Christopher to be one of Dark’s most significant novels, and Linda Hendon, the novel’s protagonist, and main focus in this chapter, to be one of the most complex mother-figures to be analysed in the thesis.

Despite numerous attempts to get the novel reprinted, Dark was only successful in having it republished in London in 1936 where it was chosen as the Evening Standard Book of the Month, but received mixed reviews. The novel was published once more in Australia in 1961 (by Rigby in Adelaide) but has remained out of print for some forty years. Indeed, the difficulties concerning the novel's publication, involving bankruptcy and litigation, prompted the author to state in her letter to Miles Franklin in 1936, ‘[t]here is a hoodoo on that book, without doubt’.204 But Dark also knew the novel ‘had a quality ... I'm not likely to recapture’,205 which sets Prelude to Christopher apart from her other work. Through the work of scholars and writers such as Drusilla Modjeska, Barbara Brooks and Patrick Buckridge, whose work has kept these novels alive, Prelude to Christopher was republished in Australia in 1999. It is significant that the complex social and philosophical concerns outlined in the novel, involving scientific approaches to reproduction, the rights of women to mother

202 Modjeska, Southerly, 73. 203 Eleanor Dark, letter to James Putman, 7 September 1942, ML.MSS4545. 204 Eleanor Dark, letter to Miles Franklin, 19 September 1936. Ferrier (ed), As Good As A Yarn With You 34. Drusilla Modjeska also used the words, ‘A Hoodoo on that Book’, as part of the title for her 1996 Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture which was later published using the same title. See Modjeska, ‘‘A Hoodoo on that Book’: The Publishing Misfortunes of an Eleanor Dark Novel’, Southerly, 57.2 (1997): 73-96. 205 Eleanor Dark, letter to James Putnam, 11 September 1942, ML MSS4545.

and the political and ethical issues surrounding science and reproduction, are still at the forefront of scientific and political debates in the new millennium. The question of ‘normality’ itself, always a vexed category, is a crisis point for many of these current debates surrounding human cloning.206 What and who represents ‘normality’? Who decides? Based on what criteria? And whose well- being is advantaged? In the novel itself, there is a reticence or reluctance to provide answers and I suggest that this signifies Dark’s own ambivalence in relation to her feminist position. This leads me to consider that the critical neglect of Dark’s novel is in itself a feminist issue; the silencing and disciplining of women who have been assigned to, and must remain in, their proper place.

The medicalising of motherhood

Keeping women in their place reveals how specific discourses were enmeshed with ideologies concerning the female body that had a masculine bias in a culture which revered the masculine as opposed to the feminine. Invoking the authority of medicine, science, religion and the law, patriarchal power was exercised over the female body in the name of population control and racial purity in countries like Australia in the early part of the twentieth century. Thus, legitimation was given to theories and practices surrounding motherhood that embodied a white male bias. The scientific management of population, although not initially politically motivated, became so in support of certain social, economic, and cultural interests. Inevitably, population theories and practices were born out of a deep fear and hostility towards difference and otherness. Within these discourses there is a denial of ambivalence and complexity and a refusal to accept multiplicity and diversity. The discourse on health for instance, operated to control women’s bodies and behaviour, and reveals the Anglocentric, conservative and patriarchal prejudice of Australian society, especially in rural Australia in the 1930s where the novel is set. Significantly, it is located in a rural hospital where the all-male medical staff are quick to judge Linda's physical and mental state and thus condemn her whole character. The hospital's medical superintendent, for example, calls Linda not by name but by category, referring to her as ‘that mad wife’ (PC 57) of Nigel Hendon, despite the fact that Nigel is the patient under hospital observation, not Linda. Even the compassionate Dr Marlow concludes:

that it was all Linda’s fault, anyhow, for being different and disturbing and enigmatic. For being the sort of woman who made you feel she might indulge in eccentric infidelities or take drugs—or fly about on a broomstick at Hallowe’en … (PC 125)

206 Francis Fukuyama’s thesis is concerned with the concept of human dignity and the human soul, concepts which are often omitted in the debates on human cloning. He points out that the current advancements in biotechnology or genetic enhancement technology, founded on the state-sponsored eugenics movements of the early twentieth century, will make it possible to breed children who are more intelligent, more healthy, more ‘normal’ than occurs without intervention. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Profile Books, 2002).

There is no foundation for these fears; they are made on the basis of Linda's refusal to conform to perceived standards of ‘feminine’ behaviour, which include domestic virtue, social compliance, and mental ‘obtuseness’ (PC 52). Even if Linda's unusual upbringing did not set her apart from other women, her childlessness, her iconoclastic wit and her ‘queer, cold manner’ would (PC 63).

Thus it is her sexuality and her sanity which become the subjects of small-town gossip as well as the justification for her condemnation. Linda’s ‘femininity’ is always under question because of her anger and independence. Her sexual promiscuity marks her as deviant. She is problematic because at various times she is an unfaithful and an unhappy wife, ‘modern’ in her moral confusion, and transgressive in her behaviour according to conventional and contemporary representations of what it meant to be a morally and physically healthy woman. These representations sought to order and constrain women’s lives, especially their sexuality, their professional aspirations and their intellectual abilities. As Gilbert and Gubar argue in relation to the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century, female intellectual pursuit was considered to have the potential to ‘sunder even the most sacred bond, the bond between mother and child’.207 The implication here is that intellectualism in women will ‘breed’ sterility and become a threat to the stability and future of society. Medical intervention was one way of ensuring that women continued to mother since medicine, according to Michel Foucault, had as its objective the surveillance and control of ‘the sexual physiology peculiar to women’.208 Motherhood is what Linda desires but she is condemned on several counts—health, housework, intellect, and attitude—by what I would call the politics of motherhood that prevailed at the time.

With the advent of scientific approaches to child-rearing, domestic duties and housework during this period, motherhood and the home became objects of official scrutiny by the state. These scientific approaches also included the increasing medical intervention into reproduction (conception, pregnancy and birth) and infant health (feeding, nursing, disciplining etc.), thus ensuring that women’s lives were increasingly subject to the institutionalised power of patriarchy through discursive and ideological regulation. Linda, however, is contemptuous of these so-called scientific truths which attempt to order women’s lives, specifically in the realm of reproduction. As a scientifically-trained, professional and competent woman, Linda refuses to conform to gender stereotypes. Her non-conformity has compounded the medical diagnosis that she is ‘unfit’ to mother and as a result is considered ‘an outcast uncleanliness’ (PC 106). As the young nurse Kay Mannering states in relation to Linda, ‘that a woman should be so—so disturbing at forty!’, unlike her own mother who, at a similar age, ‘was plump and comfortable and jolly’ (PC 25). Compared to Nurse Mannering and to Linda’s mother-in-law, Linda is shown to be socially ‘bad’ and medically ‘mad’,

207 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 10. 208 Foucault, History of Sexulity 116.

brought to heel by the words and deeds of these ‘good’ and sensible women. In this novel, it is Linda who bears the burden of the biological sciences which sought to control the reproduction of the race by taking, as Havelock Ellis states, ‘deliberate action in favour of better breeding’.209 In Prelude to Christopher, it is specifically the pseudo-science of eugenics that reveals how direct and tragic the hegemony of health has been for women like Linda, categorised as ‘tainted stock’ (PC 63) with a brain that is ‘diseased’ (PC 169). Throughout the narrative, Linda is compared with Nigel’s nurse (Kay Mannering), who represents ‘the normal, the healthy, the decent and the orderly’ (PC 24). It is Kay’s ‘normality’ (PC 18) which secures her future as the mother of the unborn ‘Christopher’, fathered by Linda’s husband. And Kay is aligned with Linda’s aging mother-in-law, Mrs Catherine Hendon, both of whom Linda considers ‘smug, sane people’ (PC 64) who condemn her for her different and difficult nature. It is through these three women that I analyse the mother-figure in this chapter.

Linda Hendon as the ‘unfit’ mother-figure

Both men and women collude in the narrative to condemn Linda for her childlessness. It is the doctor/husband who decrees that the couple must not have a baby and it is Linda’s uncle, father, her lover and her husband’s colleagues who consider her unfit and unhealthy to mother, based on spurious evidence. For instance, Nigel’s young colleague, Dr Marlow, notes that Linda is ‘childless and lame ... [with] ... not one solitary domestic virtue’ (PC 63) and adds that ‘[a] couple of hundred years ago ... they’d have burnt her as a witch for that’ (PC 63). The very fact that she prefers to sleep, not inside, but outside the house, adds to Dr Marlow’s criticism of Linda, given that in his mind ‘woman’ and ‘home’ are ‘intimately connected’ (PC 101). For Linda, the home is a trap. It is ordinary and ugly; a metaphor for stifling confinement and potential insanity. It is felt to be a lonely and fearful place that Linda prefers not to enter or inhabit. As Linda states unequivocally about her home, ‘I don’t like that house’ (PC 101). She refuses to be contained or limited, conditions which are associated with female bodily space and intellectual options. In her refusal she reinforces her overwhelming social isolation. And there is an implication here that if Linda would only behave ‘normally’, like ‘every other woman’ (PC 101), there was a possibility that she would be ‘spared’ her fate, which the narrator likens to that ‘of an animal about to be slaughtered’ (PC 74).

But even her body, in its thinness and barrenness, ‘misbehaves’ in that it is under-nourished and anti-maternal. The many references to her angularity, to her limp and to her sensuality mark her as a woman who embodies irrationality, abasement and disturbance. As Linda herself states, she stood before:

209 Ellis, Social Hygiene 29.

some fantastic judgement-seat, following women who had lived long and fruitfully and left behind them a train of lusty posterity; you saw yourself a figure of fun with your angular barren body, a figure vaguely repellent with your starved and haunted eyes. (PC 181)

Judged as a witch and a harlot, Linda is represented as a social and sexual deviant who disrupts and transgresses the standard codes that dictate what is healthy and clean. However, Linda believes that the qualities outlined in the foregoing quote are her ‘gift’ (PC 181) and represent a ‘triumph of the normal’ (PC 181) in a society where women’s personal and cultural authority can only be acquired through her role and social position as a mother. Despite falling pregnant, Linda has lived her reproductive years without producing a family and she has also survived those years through a barrage of private and public criticism.

Linda points out the irony of the authoritative discourse which condemns her in the name of sanity, normality and rationality as ‘someone unworthy ... unclean!’ (PC 80)—a ‘woman-monster’ (PC 83)—yet at the same time sanctions war and the principles of eugenics, the legacies of which have contributed to making the twentieth century, to date, more barbaric and bloodier than previous centuries. The definition of barbaric times is made by Linda when her own mental state is again under scrutiny. As the narrator states:

With the years [Linda] had lost, by degrees, some of her reverence for sanity as such ... She had seen sanity plunge the world into blood and agony. She had seen sanity burn cornfields and wreck cities and pour out life like water on the ground. She, the madwoman, knew better than that. (PC 53)

Linda is not persuaded by the merits of ‘sanity’ or the rhetoric of victory. Her perspective is unacceptable in a time and culture imbued with nationalistic pride in its participation and sacrifice during war. Death and disease may be the legacy of the First World War, but ‘smug complacency’ (PC 57) of a nation’s triumph is the reality. As the narrator states, the Australian people ‘would not, could not, dared not, think of their dead save as heroes, fallen gloriously in a noble cause’ (PC 63), otherwise their own sanity would be seriously undermined.

Motherhood and the ‘science’ of eugenics

Denied motherhood on the basis of suspected hereditary madness, Linda's views on sanity draw attention not only to the subject of motherhood in a radical and controversial way, but also to contemporary debates on science and reproduction. As Havelock Ellis wrote in 1912:

The most vital problem before our civilization to-day is the problem of motherhood, the question of creating the human beings best fitted for modern life, the practical realisation of a sound eugenics.210

The history, ideology and politics of eugenics would have been very familiar to Eleanor Dark given that her aunt was Marion Piddington (1869-1950), a committed eugenicist who crusaded throughout her lifetime for the acceptance of hereditarian eugenics and the establishment of a eugenic utopia. Piddington was a radical and controversial public figure who lectured tirelessly on sex education and parenting. While Piddington’s specific eugenicist concerns are not explored in the novel, the narrative does interrogate scientific principles and the plight of women who do not conform to standards of ‘health’ or conventional codes of social behaviour, which became the subjects of debate in eugenicist circles. Moreover, the novel explicitly describes a failed eugenics colony, Linda’s paternal grandfather had written the definitive text on eugenics (PC 41), and Nigel, as the ‘founder of a colony whose basis was to be the rearing of healthy children from untainted stock’ (PC 43) had also published his medical findings. Thus, the novel calls for an understanding of the social history of eugenics movements in both global and national terms.

The word eugenics comes from the Greek eugenes which means 'wellborn', and according to Mark Adams ‘was coined by the Englishman Francis Galton in 1883 to denote the ‘science’ of the biological improvement of the human kind. Galton was convinced that a wide range of human physical, mental and moral traits were inherited’.211 Galton based his theories on the work of Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer. National eugenics movements emerged and operated in many countries (Germany, France, Russia, Great Britain and Australia), including many of the Latin American states (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil),212 from the time of Galton’s first lectures in London in 1904 through to the 1940s. Galton’s search for race improvement has been rekindled in the past decade through biological cloning and genetic engineering with a similar reception of excitement and enthusiasm from the medical and scientific communities.

As noted in Section I, the eighteenth-century concepts of Thomas Malthus concerning population control became the basis for an ideology linking ideas of social order, civic good and economic profit. These concepts coincide with colonisation in Australia. Further, Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution contained in On The Origin of the Species (1859) was adopted by Francis Galton in order to formulate his ideas about racial improvement and racial purity. In Australia, following Federation, eugenic theories found fertile ground because of the debates

210 Ellis, Social Hygiene 86. 211 Mark B. Adams, The Welborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) v. 212 Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘The Hour of Eugenics’: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 35-62.

surrounding the newly formed nation-state, because of the nation's preoccupation with nationalism, and because of the perceived dangers facing Australia's 'national stock' due to the declining birth rate. In Australia at this time, eugenic debates stressed the importance of both hereditary characteristics and environmental factors as an explanation for evolution, hence the two different terms: hereditarian and environmental eugenics. Carol Bacchi argues that:

The tendency to prefer ‘nurture’ to ‘nature’ was due largely to the hope, which frequently became the conviction, that Australia could surmount the problems of the Old World. This, of course, was the period in which Australia won her reputation as the ‘Social Laboratory of the World’ and there was a near consensus of belief, across political party lines, that state action could remove the cause of class hostility and create a new and healthy social order ... [It was argued] that the Australian environment could transform the British raw material and create a new man, physically healthier and mentally more stable.213

Historically the white, able-bodied European male has been the dominant signifier in relation to which all other bodies are situated.214 The ‘new man’ was constructed as the healthy and sane male individual and as a consequence, reason and culture are firmly tied to this privileged signifier in Western discourse.215 Nigel, for example, is the centred knowing subject throughout the narrative, possessing the power to represent and exclude women. His wife, his mother and his nurse have to negotiate the world through the masculine, active agent; through masculine social, cultural and linguistic practices. It is ironic that Nigel is the ill and incapacitated male who spends the entire span of the narrative confined to a hospital bed. The implication here is that while his body may be injured the male mind, the site of reason and rationality, remains superior to the physically healthy women who tend him. Woman as body, regardless of colour or race, is sexualised and triviliased and can never compete with ‘rational’ man. Thus, the female body, a figure of irrationality and abasement in a man’s world, continues to be a contaminating and infiltrating force, an object of repulsion as well as desire. As the narrator states, using free indirect speech to present Nigel’s viewpoint:

Woman ... [t]he damnable nuisance ...! Always, into the neat austerities of a man’s mental life, thrusting their emotions and their moods and their untidy intuitions! Always, as he went to step over the threshold of his spiritual achievement, standing there in his path with a tear, or a baby, ... —an eternal complication! (PC 103)

Even when women like Linda are intellectually accomplished, this is further evidence of her lack of conformity, and reason to be the focus for interrogation, for discipline and for punishment. And her punishment is symbolised in the male artist’s Portrait of Linda, which positions her looking

213 C. L. Bacchi, ‘The nature-nuture debate in Australia, 1900-1914’, Historical Studies, 19.75 (1980): 34:4 (200). 214 Luce Irigaray has referred to this as ‘sameness-unto-itself’. That is, the way Western discourses privilege the masculine as the basis of signification and identity and, as a consequence, posits the feminine as other only in relation to masculine sameness, that is, not as a different mode of signification. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 221. 215 Through textual and feminist analysis, these signifiers have become contested sites but in the 1930s, especially in the Australian context, they were sacred sites.

‘incredibly furtive and apart’ (PC 106) from the joy and the vibrancy of life depicted in the painting. As Linda states, this is ‘the prison and the torture’ (PC 118); ‘the queer death-in-life’ she had been forced to live because of her distinctiveness and failure to mother (PC 119).

Inherent in Galton’s theories on eugenics was the idea of population control, which, according to Jill Julius Matthews, became a preoccupation of the western world, including Australia from the 1870s through to the 1950s.216 As Matthews argues, population ideology in Australia ‘was concerned with the supervision and regulation of procreation, migration, mortality, the level of health and life expectancy’.217 Matthews’s thesis is similar to later research by Susan Magarey, and while neither writer is specifically concerned with the subject of eugenics, both argue that it was the female, rather than the male body, which became the primary focus of population ideology and theory. Matthews, in her study of the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia, states:

[t]he central focus of this population ideology was women’s bodies; its principal mode of control was women’s work within their families; its central icon was the Ideal Mother.218

Matthew concludes that counter to the politics of this ideology were the individual and collective struggles of women to control their own lives and bodies. Female desire and male anxieties surrounding women’s autonomy and independence is a theme in all of the novels. So powerful is the icon of the Ideal Mother that where men consider Linda to be degenerate and finally deranged, it is the other women in the novel, those who fulfil the cultural agenda of the racially pure and morally healthy mother-figures, who are her fiercest opponents.

Shortly after her marriage, Linda is positioned as ‘an outcast, someone unworthy; almost like a leper, unclean!’ (PC 80) because she is deemed unfit to mother. She is denied Nigel's child even though he remains uncertain whether Linda has hereditary madness or whether she is simply the victim of emotional and physical abuse through familial and social cruelty. Nigel conducts his own medical research through the establishment of a eugenics colony on a Pacific island in 1910, where he practises a mixture of hereditarian and environmental eugenics in the belief that his scientific methods can rid the world of ‘incredible ignorance, incredible ugliness and futility’ (PC 9). In fact, Nigel’s vision of utopia is of ‘a little world—unpeopled’ (PC 10). Newly married, Linda is permitted to accompany her husband to the island ‘on sufferance’ (PC 81) and only if she agrees to ‘no children’ (PC 82). Through ambivalence and negation, Nigel reinscribes the very fears he seeks to overcome,

216 Matthews, Good and Mad Women75. 217 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 75. 218 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 75.

namely that his wife is descended from ‘tainted stock’ (PC 63) and that he is married to ‘a potential lunatic’ (PC 43).

Beyond the fictional narrative, the issue of eugenics was complicated by the fact that, while some of Australia’s leading physicians, psychiatrists, politicians and sociologists were eugenicists, so too were a number of women who also professed to be feminists. It is worth noting that Marion Piddington does not fit into this category. Her real interest within the eugenics movement was what she termed ‘scientific motherhood’ or ‘celibate motherhood’ (artificial insemination) which, according to Kay Daniels, ‘remained a subterranean theme of all [Piddington’s] later work’.219 Inherent in this idea of celibate motherhood was women's emancipation. If women could control birth and/or fulfil their desire for motherhood, without the need for sex, they would have a greater share of cultural, social, and economic opportunities under capitalism. Piddington’s thesis has proved far more complex in this century where affordable and safe birth control has meant Australian women are largely free from what the narrator refers to as ‘the ever-lasting tyranny of her sex’ (PC 12). The lived experience of motherhood in the twenty-first century demonstrates that women who are mothers do not accrue the same opportunities and resources as Piddington predicted, compared to many men (and women) who do not have children or chose not to participate in mothering roles.

The abject and anti-maternal female figure

Dark's novelistic intersection of eugenics and the female/maternal body allows for an analysis of women's position and oppression through a discourse on health in a culture preoccupied with normality and fitness. The alignment of the female body with the threat of contagion is a recurring theme in the novels discussed in this thesis. In Prelude to Christopher, I contend that Dark consciously represents Linda Hendon as abject in order to disrupt, disturb and disorder as a path to consciousness and knowledge. Here, epistemological truths are not only in the mirror as Linda sits before it watching herself go mad (PC 29), but they are also found through breaking into the body, through implacable rage and states of madness, as well as the act of suicide. Within the novel the dominant signifier of masculine rationality and the abject signifier of the female body remain inseparable; in symbiosis. Where one seeks to repress, to fix and to colonize, the other struggles to reveal, to shift and to liberate.

Linda's desire to mother is refused on the basis of her perceived genetic imperfections. Her husband refuses to risk the birth of a child in the interests of upholding his scientific principles. As a scientific rationalist, with a belief in racial purity, sanity and precision, Nigel is compelled to state ‘that the business of human life should be decently ordered’ (PC 22). He believes in order and logic which seeks to contain or limit the free play of possibilities. Nigel negotiates the world in unambiguous terms, through his scientific mind and the language of patriarchy. Categories of identity

219 Kay Daniels, ‘Marion Piddington’, National Times, 9-15 January 1983: 25-26.

in relation to health, gender and sexuality are produced in ways that appear natural and inevitable. Where the narrative revolves on perceptions of health and disease in a society intolerant of the ‘unfit’, the unorthodox and the unpredictable, Linda challenges the theories, the practices and the inevitability of such perceptions. Her attempts to mother by any means available to her, further brand her as ‘evil’ (PC 78), and as a ‘callous and wanton’ woman (PC 109). From Nigel’s perspective, Linda is the ‘[w]oman, who would not fit into his careful plans; Woman, the joint in his armour ...’ (PC 103). Linda, in this context, is seen as the ‘[c]omplication!’ (PC 103) in her husband’s ‘careful plans’ to rear healthy children from selected adults who had ‘been passed by himself and Pen as mentally and physically sound’ (PC 43). Her existence ‘taints’ the very discourse on health with its scientific and political rationale encoded in the term ‘normality’. In fact, Linda reminds Dr Marlow by way of comparison to those normal and ‘sound’ adults, of ‘a sick child whom he had examined once and who, with fierce, agonised shame, had held the covers tightly over a deformed leg ...’ (PC 104). Linda does have a limp, but she uses her deformity to perform her difference and show the world that she is unafraid of their stares and whispers. Ultimately, those whispers become the howl of the fit and able-bodied defending their boundaries, but more specifically protecting the relationship between the ‘healthy and normal’ mother and child.

Throughout the narrative, Linda is situated beyond these rigid borders and outside the regulated categories of normality. She is considered morally and mentally contaminating; a body marked and alienated. But as object and abject, Linda unites the sensuous and the sinister, challenging natural law and the discourse on health with her composite being and rationality. She is, for example, contemptuous of ‘civilization’ which has plunged ‘the world into blood and agony’ (PC 92). She implies that the ills of the early twentieth century, born on the battlefields of the First World War, are the acts of a beastly and universal madness, originating in the hearts and minds of so-called sane and rational ‘man’. The implication of Linda’s conclusion is that it is man as primitive beast, in the guise of normality and rationality, who is driven to destroy and then to impose order on a culture organised around ideas of contagion and purification. The material reality of death and disease which followed in the wake of the war, with thousands of Australian soldiers returning home with venereal disease, would be cause enough for fears regarding contamination. However, it is not the male but the female body that is deemed abject and corrupt. It is female sexual behaviour that is aberrant and unhealthy—dangerous in its desires and freedom of expression. As Dr Marlow scrutinises Linda in ‘a thin silk wrap falling half off her shoulders and away from one knee’, he emphasises his conviction that ‘the woman was peculiar...’ (PC 67). But it is not only men who condemn a woman for her difference. Women, too, in accepting and fulfilling the ideology of woman as self-abnegating, dependent, and a ‘good’ mother-figure, affirm the dominance of patriarchal values and beliefs. Linda’s mother-in-law puzzles over the fact that her son’s ‘very essence had always seemed to her to be his health, his soundness, his triumphant normality’ (PC 112) and so why did he not simply divorce Linda? Especially since ‘[b]y now he could have had children growing up; sane, healthy children’ (PC 112) which in her view was a man’s right and a woman’s obligation.

In fact, Linda does fall pregnant but miscarries. The circumstances of her miscarriage leave her both childless and lame. The narrative describes her as having a ‘limp that looked like a swagger’ (PC 19, 83), a masculine descriptor which defies feminine propriety and provokes outrage in the minds of the local community. To these ‘normal’ citizens, Linda’s deformity signifies arrogance that crosses into the male domain of bravado. Not only is she deviant in brain and behaviour, but her actual body is constructed outside of normative constraints. It is these constraints which not only produce but also regulate the maternal body (as well as other bodily beings), that Linda usurps. In analysing the character of Linda, one way of understanding why she antagonises men as well as women, is to engage with Foucault’s theory of regulatory power. According to Foucault’s theory, power produces the very subjects that it seeks to control, but, as he argues in The History of Sexuality, power can only operate in a binary system of that which is permitted and prohibited.220 Judith Butler takes Foucault’s theory on power as a point of departure in her own thesis, arguing that gender distinctions only have meaning within a phallocentric order built on a hierarchy of binary difference. In Bodies that Matter, Butler plays on the word ‘matter’, linking it to mater (mother), matrix (womb) and materia (nourishment) with all its ‘problematic’ associations with reproduction, stating that ‘[i]n reproduction, women are said to contribute the matter; men, the form’221 and that the form/matter binary has become ‘the site at which a certain drama of sexual difference plays itself out’.222 Butler’s dense theories on the sex of materiality (and the materiality of sex) go beyond my purposes here, but her thesis provides a model for the interrogation of regimes of power/discourse.

It is useful, then, to use Butler’s thesis, in relation to the discourse on health, to interrogate what would happen if women refuse the binary required of them to maintain sexual difference, demanding separate codes of conduct and convention. If women reject the binary of normality which pits itself against that of abnormality, producing fixed categories constructed as fundamentally normal and natural, these categories collapse. In thinking about alternatives and possibilities, women like Linda subvert categories which insist on restricting roles according to sexual difference. Her body, for instance, appears to shatter all stable points of reference in terms of a woman’s fitness to mother. In fact, Linda describes herself as ‘[a] freak’ (PC 115) and as ‘a figure of fun’ (PC 181). She parodies her femininity and anti-maternal body with her ‘figure vaguely repellent’, with her ‘starved and haunted eyes’, with her gaunt face and her limp (PC 181). She is the antithesis of the fecund, fulfilled and healthy female made comfortable and ‘jolly’ (PC 25) through the role and status accorded to the socio-cultural ideal of the healthy mother-figure. As suggested previously, her

220 Foucault, History of Sexuality 83. 221 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, (New York: Routledge, 1993) 31. 222 Butler, Bodies that Matter 49.

angular and anti-maternal figure contests and destabilises the codes and conventions that determine women’s lives within the narrative.

There is a performative element in Linda’s appearance and behaviour which denaturalises the female/maternal figure while retaining a provocative sense of agency. As a result, she attracts strong social disapproval and instills fear and hostility in the minds of ‘healthy’ mother-figures, personified by Linda’s mother-in-law and Nigel’s nurse. As mother/nurse/womb, these women fit the regulated ideal of motherhood—nurturing, domesticated and compliant, — ‘smug’ (PC 64) in their sanity and reproductive roles. Linda loses the fight against these ‘good’ and ‘sane’ women who are secure and confident in their maternal role. But at the same time she confounds the very binarism of categories and roles which have defined women in terms of their fitness to mother. Despite the tragedy that surrounds her, there is a sense of liberation, of celebration and of self-determination embodied in the representation of Linda compared to the representation of the ideal ‘fit’ mother-figure exemplified by Cathy Hendon and Kay Mannering. Linda endures contempt from both women, referring to them as ‘stupid’ and Kay in particular as having a ‘silly conventional little mind’ (PC 180). Linda believes that, in the end, it is she who is triumphant because she is making a sane and rational decision to remove herself from the ‘[m]adness, cowardice, [of an] inhospitable world’ (PC 182) in which women like Mrs Hendon and Kay Mannering presume to sit in judgement of her. It is to the cultural construction of these ‘fit’ mother-figures that I now turn my attention.

‘Fit’ to Mother

There is a strong sense of sisterhood between Linda’s mother-in-law, Cathy Hendon, and Nigel’s nurse, Kay Mannering, who are depicted in a relationship of mutual support based on their devotion to Nigel. This ‘sisterhood’ excludes Linda whose lack of motherhood, perceived lack of normality and lack of servility set her apart from these other women. The novel is underpinned by a locus of male power that goes unchallenged except by Linda, but there is also a pervasive female force which she must contend with. As the narrative states, these other women ‘shared, and gladly shared, a cold unrelenting animosity towards Linda’ (PC 97). In fact, I argue that it is the silent hatred of her conventional mother-in-law which eventually destroys Linda. Mrs Hendon is represented as an icon of maternal devotion, reflecting the medico-social model of maternal health and goodness. She is described as ‘elegant, upright’ with ‘her beautifully gloved hands folded in her lap, her grey hair immaculate beneath her hat ... taking refuge in her height, her air of aloofness, her regal silence’ (PC 36). It is she who introduced her son to Linda but over the years she has developed a ‘loathing’, a ‘dread’ and a ‘mad, passionate hatred of her daughter-in-law’ which ‘was almost physical’ in its revulsion (PC 36). Her hatred began when her son announced that he and Linda would not ‘be having any children’ (PC 39) and it is significant that it is the female and not the male who is punished for this transgression for what Mrs Hendon considers to be a normal and natural outcome of married life.

Similarly, Kay Mannering is represented as ‘the normal, the healthy, the decent and the orderly’ (PC 33). She is the young ministering angel who is ‘cool and reassuring’ around the ailing (and aging) Nigel, who visualises her at one point in the narrative as having ‘a white ring of light around her head’ (PC 47). Kay is the blue-eyed, fair-haired younger woman who Mrs Hendon describes as ‘so pretty and fresh and sensible’ (PC 49). And both Kay and Mrs Hendon are described in terms of their neatness and narrowness, their rigidity and the fact that their lives operate by way of ‘a blind non-recognition of other points of view’ (PC 13). The text constructs both these women as mother-figures who are not particularly intelligent but who nonetheless meet all the criteria inherent in the discourse on health. It is significant that Kay is constructed as the Virgin/Mother, an inherent contradiction in idealised womanhood, and Mrs. Hendon as the Lady. Together they embody an absolute feminine power and authority, bestowed upon them because they reinforce contemporary ideologies pertaining to health, to sex and to gender. While Linda’s body and brain have become the repository of masculine cruelty and obsessions, it is the sisterhood which precipitates Linda’s final breakdown. As the narrator states in relation to Linda’s mother-in-law:

Quite clearly, from behind the older woman’s calm eyes and courteous voice, her conviction said: ‘Mad! Mad!’ Because standards were standards and one didn't question them, there raved behind her aloof silences a mob that shouted imprecations and flung stones, there loomed the shadows of a stake and a ducking-stool, there whined and whispered the hatred that is fear—fear of the normal for the abnormal, of the crowd for the outcast, but beyond all, and reaching infinitely farther into the past, of the mother for the danger to her child. (PC 64)

This image of witchcraft and its association with transgressive female power and with abjected aspects of the female body living outside patriarchal control, marks the witch/Linda as a woman who must be purged from society, in order to protect the virtuous mother and divine child from evil.

As stated previously, there is no evidence that Linda is unfit to mother or a danger to society apart from pseudo-scientific theories and socio-cultural prejudices which prevailed at the time. However, given the focus of the discourse on health which accorded cultural meaning and social place only if women fulfilled their reproductive roles, Linda sees herself as ‘warped and dangerous’, not because she is insane but because she is ‘barren’ (PC 169). The alignment of childlessness with perversion and dissidence instills a collective fear and makes the female body a scapegoat. As her mother-in-law warns the young Kay Mannering, Linda is ‘mad! She’s dangerous’ (PC 174). This alignment also serves to silence women, which, as Denise Russell argues in her analysis of Irigaray’s philosophy on women and madness, not only suppresses women’s sexuality but is linked to women’s madness.223 Thus the discourse on health is not just a mechanism of control over the individual female body, but is also a justification for refusing women a strong political ‘voice’. Linda has learnt late in her life to be silent lest she be incarcerated for contaminating or infecting the healthy social body. She has learnt not to question standards or challenge rules. Moira Gatens argues that,

223 Denise Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) 120.

historically, considerable physical coercion has been exercised to confine women to the private/familial sphere and to prevent women from taking advantage of social unrest and ‘voicing’ their political concerns.224 Gatens refers to the ‘fantasy of political man’s autonomy from both women and the corporeal, specifically, autonomy from the maternal body’ given all human life emanates from the mother.225 Linda, however, is silenced by both patriarchy and matriarchy. Her whole life has been at odds with the social and political body and foreshadows Julia Kristeva’s question, namely ‘how can we [as women] reread our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?’226 In Prelude to Christopher, this remains an unanswered question.

Compared to Mrs Hendon and Nurse Mannering, Linda is not ‘normal’ in terms of her sexuality, her intelligence, her pride, and her cynicism (PC 30). It is these attributes which isolate her, coupled with her determination to make women (and men), accountable for what they say, noting that ‘only the sane can afford to tell lies’ (PC 52). Nevertheless, she has a certain admiration for her mother-in-law’s ‘fixed standards’ which enable her to ‘preserve through a whole long life the poise and the calm of sanity with a dash of obtuseness’ (PC 52). My argument is that Cathy Hendon and Kay Mannering, who fully endorse and perpetuate the binarism relating to gender and to sex, are less liberated compared to Linda. In order to comply with the discourse on health, they must repress or close off other possibilities for personal or cultural transformation. In order to preserve the most sacred of conventionalised relationships—that of mother and child—these women must conform to social mores and rigid conventions which disempower them because they must form an unequal alliance with the institutionalised power of men.

Linda is vulnerable but obstinate in her stand against conformity. She is vilified for being barren, even though her mother-in-law feels fleetingly the inequality of women’s lives precipitated by motherhood, stating that motherhood was a ridiculous and ‘quite hopeless’ vocation for women (PC 50). And the narrator speaks of an inherent female mistrust of ‘short cuts ... to a perfected humanity’ (PC 55). Nevertheless, Mrs Hendon is quick to defend her position as the mother of her ill-married son and is eager to conspire with his nurse to defend Nigel against his wife—’that foul woman’ (PC 55). Kay Mannering, twenty-four years Nigel’s junior, exhibits the same ‘fixed standards’ Linda observes in Nigel’s mother. Kay is everything Linda is not—young, pretty, optimistic and ‘un- analytical’ (PC 61). She is the angel (not in the house but in the hospital) fluttering at Nigel’s beside, blushing and chaste in her white veil, yet all knowing of (and fantasising about), the male body lying helpless before her. While not yet the mother of Nigel’s unborn son, in her role as nurse she is a powerful symbol of mother and saviour. Like Nigel’s mother, Kay too has ‘a vague mistrust of cleverness in her own sex’ (PC 95), thus reinforcing the idea that intelligence in women equates to

224 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996) 54. 225 Gatens, Imaginary 55.

unproductive and infertile bodies, bodies that are ‘naturally’ born to be ‘useful and competent and pretty’ (PC 95). In turn, Linda is contemptuous of Kay, stating that she is a ‘[s]anctimonious little fool’ (PC 180), ‘with her beautiful body and her pretty face and her youth’ (PC 85) conscious that she herself ‘was lame and old and very nearly insane’ from a lifetime of medical surveillance and social ostracism (PC 85). Despite her wit and her intellect, Linda is unable to defend herself from the discourse on health that decreed that the reproduction of mothering was the role of ‘normal’ women. Nevertheless, Linda considers that acting out her decision to take her own life which would secure Nigel his personal, his social and his economic freedom, is ‘the ultimate triumph of the normal’ woman (PC 181).

Conclusion

As this chapter has argued, Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher is experimental, troubled and highly ambiguous. The novel demonstrates how professional discourses with a masculine bias gave legitimacy to theories and practices born out of a fear of and hostility towards the female body. The construction of the ideal mother, the good woman, the sane individual, and the fit national type arising out of these fears, refused difference and ambiguity and sought to simplify the complex. A woman was constructed and accorded her social place in terms of her fitness and fertility and her gendered role as ‘mother of the race’ was to produce a healthy, happy (white) family. Dark’s heroine transgresses this construction on several counts and with tragic consequences. By focussing first and foremost on the woman’s experience, not just in relation to the man, but within her own right as a complex and intelligent individual, the narrative interrogates contemporary social and cultural values. The tissue of society is pulled back to reveal the political, economic and social forces that shape women's lives. Values that inscribe cultural representations of women who are and are not mothers are held up for question. In this novel, Dark is deliberately writing against the grain by focussing on a barren women in order to explore and expose these representations. In so doing, Dark subverts conventional representations of the mother-figure, but refuses to reveal her own position in relation to the issues she interrogates.

In choosing not to answer but only to pose the many questions which surface in the novel, Dark does confront and challenge socio-cultural representations of madness and motherhood. Dark invites a response as to how women like Linda Hendon make and shape their own meaning within the bounds of their social, cultural and psychological situations. Indeed, the novel both hinges on and leaves its readers with two crucial questions. What strategies are available to well-educated and highly intelligent professional women like Linda to undermine masculine authority (medicine, science, the law) given she has been denied motherhood by the very authority which now condemns her for her motherlessness? How does she negotiate the sexual politics of her day that insist that the

226 Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 199.

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ability to reproduce is essential to the definition and identity of ‘woman’? Answers to these questions are problematised by the fact that although Linda's husband acknowledges her superior intellect and professional ability, he states, ‘scientifically you don't—you can't come up to the standard’ (PC 81). Masculine discourses and male control over the female body continue to be the narrative focus in Eleanor Dark’s next novel, The Little Company. In this novel, Phyllis Massey slowly goes ‘mad’ through years of maternal duty which go unthanked and unappreciated. The ideology that motherhood is an unambiguous vocation for all women starts to unravel.

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CHAPTER 4 The Little Company

In Dark’s The Little Company, written and published during the Second World War when population and gender ideologies were irrevocably changing, alternatives to motherhood are articulated. Women were needed and valued for war-time production independent of their mothering roles. Motherhood was no longer the only criterion for being labelled a ‘fit’ woman. Ironically, however, the mother-figure to be analysed in this novel is caught on the cusp of this social change and is panic-stricken by the shifts in social and sexual relationships as a result of the war.

In the last chapter I argued that Linda Hendon is deemed abject and abnormal because of her barren body and her sharp brain; in this chapter I argue that Phyllis Massey, the mother-figure to be analysed in The Little Company, is considered ‘mad’ in spite of her fertile body and will to fulfil the ideals of motherhood. In this novel, motherhood and the discourse on health become the site of psychic crises, not because of social or medical prejudice, but because of an intense desire to adhere to social standards that are now in flux. Where Linda Hendon rebels against the constrictions of the female role and the power of the medical profession to pathologise this rebellion, Phyllis Massey seeks to emulate the ideal mother-figure through a passive dependence on social conventions and codes of behaviour. For Phyllis, the outcome at the end of the narrative will also be tragic.

Eleanor Dark interrupted the writing of her Timeless Land Trilogy (The Timeless Land, Storm of Time and No Barrier) in 1941 to start The Little Company which was finally published in 1945. Exhausted by the research and writing involved in completing The Timeless Land, and despite the overwhelming success of that novel, Dark was determined to write a different sort of novel, one which engaged with the political debates and social problems of her own time; living and writing as she was in Sydney during the Second World War. Her desire to write another 'modern' text once she had finished The Timeless Land is expressed in Dark's wartime correspondence with her London publishers. In a letter to W.A.R. Collins of Collins Publishers, dated 11 July 1941, she writes:

I wanted and still want to do a modern one in between [The Timeless Land and Storm of Time], but as it does not seem to be forthcoming in spite of innumerable experimental beginnings, it seems better to go on with the next historical one than do nothing. I shall abandon it temporarily if I get any sudden illumination about a modern one.227

The Little Company is the outcome of her ‘innumerable experimental beginnings’ and a return to an unremitting self-consciousness, and the emphasis in the text is not on the dramatic events

227ML. MSS. 4545. Box 22.

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of a world at war. It is not about Australia's fears of invasion by the Japanese in 1942 or about the heroic fighting by Australia’s military forces in the Pacific. Rather the emphasis is on the ordinary and everyday events of people's lives. In particular, the novel is an expression of the impact and lived experience of wartime trauma on a group of Sydney intellectuals and socialist writers, only one of whom actually engages in active service. As in Prelude to Christopher, it is through stream of consciousness, montage and interior monologue that Dark explores the failure and existential meaninglessness of life ‘in the face of a crumbling civilization!’ (TLC 15).228

Unlike Prelude to Christopher, the protagonist in The Little Company is not a woman but a man, Gilbert Massey, who is at the centre of a group of Sydney writers and intellectuals around which the novel is created. He is a writer who has not written a book in four years. His ‘nightmare impotence’ (TLC 15) and his ‘productive paralysis’ (TLC 151) reflects Dark’s own sentiments after completing The Timeless Land.229 Gilbert is represented as the urbane, intelligent and creative individual, ‘more capable of coherent thought’ than his wife (TLC 236) and highly articulate. He is a fit and attractive middle-aged man, married with three children to a woman ‘he had never loved, and now heartily disliked’ (TLC 159). There has been no sexual relationship between Gilbert and his wife Phyllis for some years and, as the novel progresses, Phyllis becomes increasingly suicidal. It is not Gilbert, however, but his wife Phyllis, a conventionally maternal figure, dull in thought and dependent in life, who is the focus of this chapter. Despite her gross appearance, her apparent simplicity and inflexible mind, Phyllis Massey, like Linda Hendon, is one of the more complex and difficult representations of matriarchy to be studied in the thesis, but for very different reasons. She is a grotesque caricature of the mother-figure who prevents any possibility of stability in the politics of gender identity. As the narrator states, Phyllis is a mother ‘bewildered by life … a panic-stricken animal butting its head blindly against a wall’ (TLC 291). One way, however, of understanding her representation is in terms of the devalued female role within the patriarchal family, a role which is pushed to an extreme in the narrative resulting in an excessively dependent and submissive characterisation of the mother-figure. As Drusilla Modjeska argues in her introduction to the Virago edition of The Little Company, a way of reading Phyllis:

228Eleanor and Eric Dark owned an extensive personal library which included many contemporary European writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. It is not known whether Eleanor Dark had read Sartre's Nausea (1938; Sartre, J.P., Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander, New York: New Directions, 1964) but it is interesting to note that Sartre explores the existential meaninglessness of existence, through the character of Antoine Roquentin, writer and historian. Similarly, Dark explores these issues through Gilbert Massey, writer and bookseller. 229W.A.R. Collins, Collins Publishers—Eleanor Dark, 6 December 1941. In this letter, Dark states: ‘For my productive paralysis I blame the war. I must and of course will get over it in time, and think it may be partly due to the long strain of writing a book which required a type of mental effort which doesn’t come naturally to me, and which left me with a sort of loathing of my desk which still survives.’ ML. MSS. 4545. Box 22.

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is as a powerful indictment of social conditions that result in such maiming of the female self. It is a dialogue about that process. We may not sympathise with Phyllis but we understand what she says.230

It is true that while it is hard to feel sympathy for Phyllis, through her representation a strong critique is made of the repressive social conditions which turn her into an hysterical woman, infecting the lives of all of the characters in the novel. The narrator, for example, refers to the ‘contagion of her hysteria’ (TLC 286) and the ‘corrosive hatred’ (TLC 287) she exhibits towards her husband who believes he was ‘quite immune’ (TLC 286) to her hysterical outbursts. The threat of contamination is embodied in this frightening portrayal of the mother-figure and reveals how the discourse on health continues to operate through a language of contagion, in this case, within a conventional marriage.

Gilbert describes his wife in unflattering physical terms, referring to her as ‘lumpish’ (TLC 239) with a ‘big and ungainly’ body; a woman who wears glasses and has grey-streaked hair (TLC 237). The narrator adds to this physical description by contrasting the aging process of the couple, stating that:

By 1935 [Phyllis] had already begun to look bulky and move slowly; the bright colouring, which had been her chief claim to prettiness, had faded from her cheeks and eyes; her hair was greying; she wore glasses, and she had an upper plate. Gilbert, on the other hand, though his body had acquired the solid outline of maturity, and though he was rather grey at the temples, and though he wore glasses for reading, had kept his waist-line, his hair and his own teeth. (TLC 76)

Phyllis’s body is shown as subject to decay while Gilbert is maturing gracefully, not needing any prosthetic ‘unnatural’ devices. Immediately, Phyllis is characterised as not fulfilling cultural expectations of feminine beauty because of her physical appearance. Her unshapely body contests representations of the trim and competent ideal mother-figure featured in contemporary cultural texts (feature films, film advertising, radio serials, women’s magazines) as detailed in the Introduction of this thesis. Phyllis argues that this is due to motherhood. ‘Men! It’s a pity they don’t have to have children, and look after them!’ she declares (TLC 76), but it is a rationale which serves only to alienate her husband from her sexually. He will later take a much younger woman as a lover which in turn precipitates his wife’s mental disintegration.

Added to her physical unattractiveness is Phyllis’ ‘terrible pride’ which the narrator states belongs to ‘the self-consciously inferior’ (TLC 239), for Phyllis has few original ideas, preferring to cling to the faith of the Christian Watchers' Circle and to the doctrines of her deceased father-in-law. She chooses to live amongst the conservatism of the parochial Blue Mountains community rather than the vitality of the Sydney metropolis because cities ‘bewildered her’ (TLC 155). She is comfortable

230Drusilla Modjeska, ‘Introduction’, The Little Company (London: Virago Classics, 1985) xv.

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in a society that is closed to new forms of identity and social relations. As the narrator states, Phyllis was:

essentially a small-town dweller [who liked[ small communities, small problems, small issues, small scandals and small talk ... Here she discovered a compact and cosy circle of respectable matrons with whom she could endlessly exchange calls, recipes, knitting patterns and gossip. (TLC 155)

Phyllis seemingly thrives on the conserving, traditional aspects of motherhood and family and recalls happy times ‘when everything had its place, and stayed there’ (TLC 30). Australian women’s magazines of the period represent motherhood through images of domestic bliss and maternal harmony, around desires driven by production and reproduction. However, Phyllis actively rejects consumerism and the desire for domestic commodities inherent in the advent of the commercialisation of the home. Her primary concern is that of duty, not desire. Consequently, as wife/mother/homemaker, she invokes images of exhaustion, chaos and loss. It is significant that the absence of desire becomes the hallmark of the mother-figures in Dark's The Timeless Land Trilogy (and Prichard’s The Goldfields Trilogy) to be discussed in the next section. The Little Company is the last ‘modern’ text Dark publishes. Thus, the construction of the mother-figure in this text is seen as particularly important (and problematic) because it is a threshold or opening which offers a last opportunity to explore the complexities and contradictions of this representation.

By concentrating the text on a writer and his wife, I argue that Dark is able to exploit the personae of Gilbert and Phyllis in order to convey her feminist and socialist commitments. If Dark is to interrogate prescribed roles as opposed to private desires in relation to the mother-figure, and at the same time criticise the cultural misoneism and political conservatism in Australia during the 1940s, she needed a strategy which would deflect rather than attract criticism. To remain silent, to write and go unpublished was obviously not an option. The body of the mother-figure, in the guise of Phyllis Massey, becomes metonymic of the hysteria, irrationality, and antagonism towards socio-cultural innovation and radical political ideas which challenged the cultural and political hegemony of the time. It is also an intimate insight into a patriarchal marriage where the mother-figure, though oppressed and disempowered, resists change. At a time when women are seeking personal and political transformation, Phyllis resents any shift in her role as the dutiful wife and mother. As the narrator states above all, ‘she wanted the conventions of married life to be observed’ (TLC 155). The Masseys’ marriage becomes the site of fragmentation and destruction; a place of psychic panic, fear and rage. It is the dialectic where change occurs but it is the father-figure who emerges as the desiring subject; the mother-figure has been written out of the narrative. As the novel progresses, Phyllis regresses further and further into the past, stepping outside of history and culture and into the natural world of the Australian bush landscape. This is not a place of rest or serenity; rather nature provides the death ground for Phyllis to end her life.

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Compared to Linda Hendon, Phyllis Massey in The Little Company is a dull and unsophisticated woman who frustrates her family because she flees from change in a rapidly transforming society which has no place for her religious dogma, her traditions and her conventions. Where Linda may be categorised as sexually ‘bad’ and psychologically ‘mad’, Phyllis is a ‘good’ woman, in the sense that she is faithful, obedient and dutiful in her devotion to family life. Nevertheless, like Linda Hendon, she becomes increasingly deranged as the novel unfolds. Phyllis manifests symptoms of hysteria that many feminists regard as symptomatic of women’s confinement within (and rage against) patriarchal definitions of femininity.231 Using Irigaray’s philosophic analysis of madness and femininity as the basis for her argument, Russell states it is specifically the lack of women’s voices within a patriarchal language which ‘is highlighted in hysteria, where through paralysis the woman communicates in a different language, a somatic language’.232 Phyllis is no match for her husband’s wit and intellect (and as the narrator states ‘they had no longer any means of communication’, so estranged have they become as a married couple) (TLC 236), but her physical and violent gestures—her somatic language— exhibited in times of anger and confusion, make Gilbert pay attention. In the end, however, these gestures mark her as a mad woman and her maternal- feminine power is diminished in the eyes of her family because of her uncontrolled attacks of hysteria.

Irigaray argues that there is a revolutionary potential in hysteria, arguing that:

Even in her paralysis, the hysteric exhibits a potential for gestures and desires … A movement of revolt and refusal, a desire for/of the living mother who would be more than a reproductive body in the pay of the polis, a living, loving woman. It is because they want neither to see nor hear that movement that they so despise the hysteric.233

As the female hysteric, Phyllis exhibits the somatic language that Irigaray refers to, ‘rocking backwards and forwards with her hands buried in her greying hair’ (TLC 234), ‘beating her head against the frame of the door’ (TLC 272), gesturing violently, and moaning as she cries out ‘Haven’t I been a good wife? Where have I failed?’ (TLC 273), slamming doors and sobbing wildly (TLC 282). All the ‘miseries and frustrations of Phyllis’ life’ (TLC 285) are undoubtedly communicated through the body rather than through a rational verbal language. It is a language, however, which infuriates her husband to the point where he feels only ‘a callous hatred of her’ (TLC 234) and an ‘unaccustomed ruthlessness’ (TLC 284). It is hard to see, however, Irigaray’s revolutionary potential in Phyllis when Gilbert will, in the end, happily rid himself (and society) of Phyllis by silencing her

231 See Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979). Showalter, The Female Malady. Jill Astbury, Crazy for You. 232 Russell, Women, Madness and Medicine 121. 233 Luce Irigaray, ‘Women-mothers, the silent substratum of the social order’, trans. D. Macey, ed. Margaret Whitford in The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 47-8.

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and confining her to an institution. She certainly repeatedly disrupts the textual flow of the narrative. However, once this mother-figure has been removed and sedated, the creative male is free to explore his ‘urgent, hungry desire’ to write his next book, a desire which the narrator states ‘felt like health after illness, safety after danger’ (TLC 318-319), so polluting is the female hysteric in the narrative.

Language and the inability to articulate, interpret and write the ‘enormous world-story’ (TLC 318) surrounding the characters is a central theme in the novel. Even Phyllis, who lacks the verbal means to express herself emotionally, identifies a problem with the ability of language to express these rapidly changing times. In a domestic setting, she complains to Gilbert that the recipe is ‘all wrong’ because the jam ‘won’t set properly’ (TLC 118). Even tried and true cooking directions fail and she has no alternative ‘text’ to guide her. This problem of language is explored more fully through the character of Gilbert, a writer of non-fiction who is blocked in a time of war and unable to write another book. It is also reinforced through his sister Marty Ransom, a writer of fiction. Marty, too, is unable to progress creatively in a time of world destruction. However, even when she is inspired to write, it has to compete with the tedium and exhaustion of domestic routine. As the narrator records, a typical day for Marty had been:

A day of dusting, preparing vegetables, carrying groceries from the shops, cooking, sewing on buttons for Peter, washing dishes. A day of dragging her mind away from Sally Dodd [the subject of Marty's next novel] who clamoured incessantly for its attention, and bullying it into concentration upon the clock and the routine of domestic duty. Sentences, whole paragraphs, had formed themselves in that rebellious mind, only to slide away unrecorded, and now forgotten; the tiredness born of conflict between what she wanted to do and what she must do, made her feel old. (TLC 312)

Marty is a mother-figure without a child but as a woman it is culturally expected that she will cook and clean for others. Her literary and intellectual endeavours are frustrated by the tedium of domestic routine. Her ‘forgotten’ text is her current work-in-progress, a work of fiction based on the mother- figure and her six children. This ‘tiredness born of conflict’ between duty and creativity is one Dark and Prichard understood and experienced, expressed in their private correspondence to one another and to other contemporary Australian women writers.

Given the context in which The Little Company was published, fiction written by women was often marginalised because it was considered untrue or trivial compared to the ‘real truth’ of history or politics. Yet, it is in the writing of fiction that sexual relations are most freely and more precisely treated. The intellectual ability and conservative literary talent of Gilbert compared with his sister’s more experimental work provides a paradoxical symbol for the struggles of Australian women writers during the 1930s and 1940s, writing in a society which was conservative, patriarchal and strictly censored. Consequently, in the novel it is Gilbert’s factual/‘real’ work which is published; not Marty’s fictional/‘made-up’ writing.

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Gilbert, as a symbol of patriarchy, recognises that he has contributed to his wife’s discontents. Nevertheless, as a reader it is not easy to empathise with Phyllis partly due to the fact that Phyllis is confined by her own choosing to a chauvinistic life, subservient to children who ignore her and to a husband who displays a ‘bitter anger’ towards her (TLC 284). She is less an agent of illness behaviour and more a monument of suppressed rage that eventually explodes in inappropriate times and places. In a letter to Gilbert, their daughter writes:

Mother … has crying fits, or suddenly starts praying out loud, which she still does at all sorts of odd moments … I found her in your study one day reading some of your MS. I didn’t say anything, but I’ve packed it up and am sending it down to you with this, because the way she looked at it made me think she might take it into her head to burn it, as she did all your other books that were in the house … I think it would only make her worse again if you came up. (TLC 288, italics in original)

Phyllis is angry and vengeful towards her husband because of a lifetime of unhappiness, partly brought on by her own romantic fantasies as well as his emotional neglect. Female rage is precisely the emotion that brands women as dangerous to society. Where Linda commits suicide, Phyllis threatens on several occasions to take her own life and as a result, she is eventually hospitalised. Like Nigel Hendon, Gilbert Massey is portrayed as the rational male who has to endure his wife’s threats and recriminations. He too finds comfort in the arms of another and much younger woman; he too survives the ‘drifting … neurosis’ (TLC 236) of his wife within the world of the narrative even though he has contributed to her madness.

A Note on Suicide

From the perspective of social history, Phyllis has clung to nostalgic views of marriage, family and community life as ideological alternatives to the alleged social and cultural disintegration caused by modern urban life, accelerated by the Second World War. The rejection of modernity has been fostered by her father-in-law, an uncharitable man, ‘who regarded innovation of any kind with loathing’ (TLC 17). Traditional values, especially the maintenance of the patriarchal family, would counter, in her mind, the deep ambivalence, indeed pathological fear, she has regarding personal and social upheaval. This strategy fits a nineteenth-century model of medical thinking about suicide outlined in Emile Durkheim’s influential essay, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897).234 Durkheim argues that because women are more subsumed by family life, it was assumed that they would be more ‘naturally’ immune than men to the social disintegration, brought about through modernity, that led to self-destructive behaviours.235 Suicide and civilisation are paired in Durkheim’s theories and

234 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 235 Howard I. Kushner, ‘Suicide, gender, and the fear of modernity in nineteenth-century medical and social thought’, Journal of Social History, 26.3 (1993): 461-491.

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by extension, since a healthy society depends upon the density of families, women were expected to be the mothers of many children and remain in traditional roles.236

This is precisely what Phyllis strives to do. She clamours to be a good wife and mother and misses on both counts. Her inability to adapt, compromise or counter other possibilities in terms of relationship has resulted in a stubborn adherence to her mothering and family roles as her primary defence against the forces of social disintegration, made even more fractured because of the war. Durkheim’s influential thesis, citing motherhood and family life as a defence against suicide, cannot be applied to Phyllis. And even though more current and abstract feminist theories on women and madness explain her oppression within a patriarchal system, it is difficult to empathise with Phyllis and her situation. As the novel progresses, she becomes more deranged; a woman who cannot manage without the doctrines of her father-in-law, without the security of her husband, without the church to ‘guide’ her, and without the state to take care of her. As her daughter Prue states, ‘[p]oor Mother, driven and defeated by herself!’ (TLC 293). Unlike her daughter Prue, her sister-in-law Marty, and even the elderly Aunt Bee, Phyllis is unable to negotiate change and adapt to the alternatives that modern urban life, especially during the war years, offered women. She seeks refuge in repressive behaviours such as religion and self-renunciation in the form of duty to her family and community. However, there is no refuge and as Prue, states, ‘Mother’s not a good parent because she’s not a good human being. I mean her intentions are good, but she’s all muddled and sentimental’ (TLC 167).

Embedded in the representation of Phyllis as a ‘good’ woman is a rage so powerful that suicide seems to her a logical release. In a tirade against her husband she states that she ‘had nothing to live for any longer, she had thrown away her life on him and the children, and they thought none the more of her because of it ... I’ll end my own life ... if I failed to save you I must go on a long journey—into death’ (TLC 233). Unlike Linda Hendon who suicides, in her eyes, as a form of altruism, sacrificing her life in order that Nigel may prosper, I argue that Phyllis’ suicide is Dark’s strategy to call attention to the failure of the patriarchal family even though her character is positioned as being complicit in maintaining its structure. Phyllis’ threat of suicide is described by her husband as ‘too grotesque’ (TLC 235) and dismissed as ‘exhibitionism’ (TLC 234). Unlike Phyllis, Gilbert wants to live, and feels ‘an urgent, hungry desire to get on with his task of recording and interpreting even a trivial fragment of this enormous world-story [...] obsessed by a feverish longing for the physical act of writing down words’ (TLC 318, 319). Writing constitutes survival and the very essence of ‘health’ which in the narrative is the domain of the creative male-figure; not the mother- figure.

236 Kushner, Journal of Social History 461-491.

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Patriarchal doctrine

Phyllis has neither the literary skill nor the linguistic competence to construct her own subjectivity or represent her social circumstances through language. She, in fact, refuses to think, to identify, or to name the personal and social crises she is living through. At one point, she chastises Gilbert for not writing by stating that ‘[t]here's really nothing to disturb you here!’ (TLC 157). It is the winter of 1942 and the failure of her own marriage reverberates in an isolated society that is increasingly being brought into direct confrontation with the war. Phyllis has no language of her own to produce the words in order to express her thoughts and feelings. She is unable to enter the symbolic (and therefore the social) contract and thus her identity is vulnerable. Thoughts and words disturb her. Her response is to fling herself into domestic activity, ostensibly to serve the family. As the narrator states:

When thought became difficult, disturbing, confusing, she always tried to drown it in physical activity, and to restore confidence in herself by the performance of domestic tasks. She jumped up now and busied herself feverishly. It did not matter in the least, to-night, what time they had their meal; her glance at the clock was merely to set her right with herself, to account for the sudden bustle in some way which saved her from recognising it as a symptom of panic. (TLC 29)

Phyllis is a modern, unstable and empty subject without authenticity or agency. Her identity, which enables her to live in the world, that is to say, within the symbolic order, is dominated by patriarchal law and order, which is symbolised by the law of Mr Massey senior, the owner of the family home where three generations now reside. As a symbol of the past and as the greatest obstacle to progress within the narrative, Phyllis aligns herself with her husband's father, a nineteenth-century Australian patriarch who lives in the twentieth century by longing for a nostalgic past. He is outraged, for instance, by:

the wickedness of a world forsaking God, over women who smoked and wore trousers, over Sunday sport, over modern art, over strikes, over James Joyce, and contraceptives, and Bolshevism, and cocktails. (TLC 30)

Phyllis, indoctrinated by his language, his philosophy and his morality, is controlled and dominated by a man whose patriarchal world-views are those belonging to a previous century. She has inherited a religious and ethical structure that bankrupts her as far as participation in the social contract is concerned. Phyllis is marginalised by other women as well as men, not least of all by her husband and children. She becomes the burden which is the past, and one which Gilbert and the others will have to carry in the present and into the future. Phyllis has ceased to be a subject in process; she has ceased to make meaning. Nevertheless, she clings to the one word—Duty—that symbolises her moral and ethical life. It enrages Gilbert that it costs more money to indulge Phyllis in her falsehood of family duty—making jam, sewing clothes, knitting socks—than it would if she just purchased these household necessities. As the narrator states, she would ‘invoke Duty—not the concept, but the word

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which she saw as a fetish, a totem, a Stern Daughter of the Voice of God’ (TLC 236). The word 'Duty' is her strength and foundation. It is at this linguistic point that the mother-figure splits and fragments. Where her family seek a new ethics, one which is outside any concept of morality or duty, Phyllis resists any disruption to her world. To her family, Phyllis’s word ‘Duty’ has a lethal meaning, incorporating ideas of resentment, arrogance and martydom. If motherhood is a regarded as a specifically female access to love, in The Little Company this concept is turned on its head.

Despite the brutal representation of the mother-figure, through Phyllis the patriarchal family, and the roles constructed for women within it, are explored in all their rawness. Despite ‘treading the beaten paths of faith and custom’ (TLC 300), she has managed to ‘rudely’ disorder family life by becoming ‘an incalculable factor’ (TLC 308). Her hysterical ravings can be seen as sites of linguistic rebellion that defy the conventions of language with its inherent masculine bias. Her overweight and misshapen figure is a form of excess that mimics or parodies ideals of feminine and maternal beauty. Her grotesqueness is both comic and tragic. The maternal-figure repels in a way that continually disrupts the narrative to the degree that this self-righteous, dishonest and psychotic woman is a most compelling and contradictory mother-figure who produces an equally ambiguous response.

Conclusion

As a literary representation of the mother-figure, Phyllis contests representations of the ideal mother-figure featured in contemporary cultural texts in her futile endeavours to fulfil this ideal of goodness and devotion. Her psychotic states continually disrupt the narrative as she increasingly becomes irrelevant to her family and to a society undergoing rapid social transformation. In the background of The Little Company references to the Second World War show how opportunities for women, whether married or single, arose in relation to employment as well as social and sexual freedoms. In the novel, however, there is no sense of transformation on the part of Phyllis as the mother-figure. Where the representation of Phyllis offers an opening for change and liberation, in the end the mother-figure is maimed and silenced.

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SECTION III

MOTHERS AND IDEOLOGY

The Goldfields Trilogy The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950)237

The Timeless Land Trilogy The Timeless Land (1941), Storm of Time (1948), No Barrier (1953)238

In the previous section, I explored the impact of a discourse on health which aligns the female body, on the one hand, with sex and sedition and the dangers of knowledge, and on the other, with fertility and family and the devotion to duty. Either way, the women discussed in the novels are represented as being contaminating⎯mad or bad⎯and ‘unfit’ to mother. Through the maternal body, issues of a eugenic ordering of society, miscarriage, abortion, marital infidelities, and attempts to reshape sexual relationships in a time of war were opened up for discussion. Compliance and sacrifice are traits exhibited in the overall representations of the white mother-figure in the next novels for consideration. Representations of the mother-figure conform in Prichard’s The Goldfields Trilogy and Dark’s The Timeless Land Trilogy to the healthy mother-model, happily advancing the pursuits of men. Working-class mother Sally Gough (The Goldfields Trilogy) and middle-class mother Conor Mannion (The Timeless Land Trilogy) are peripheral to the main events of politics and history and are subject to patriarchal forms of regulation which preclude their full participation in the formation of their culture. And although the trilogies on the whole do not engage with the social context as it relates to motherhood in the 1940s and 1950s (when the trilogies were published), they do draw attention to controls and expectations which reinforced a new, but old, ideology which made mothering the central focus of women’s lives. Sally and Conor are represented as mother-figures who are less disruptive and more content with their mothering roles.

There is a strong emphasis on these mothers’ many births and on their fit, healthy bodies. Even though these mother-figures are positioned at a time and place in history when society and social institutions are in flux, and therefore the role and representation of motherhood too are open to

237 Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Roaring Nineties (1946; London: Virago, 1983); Golden Miles (1948; London: Virago, 1984); Winged Seeds (1950; London: Virago, 1984). Further references to the novels will appear in the main body of the thesis as RN, GM and WS, followed by the page number. 238 Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land (1941; Sydney: Collins, 1963), Storm of Time (1948; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980), and No Barrier (1953; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991). Further references to the novels will appear in the main body of the thesis as TL, ST and NB, followed by the page number.

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change, curiously this does not take place. Sally’s personal history covers more than six decades, but she remains the same in social, political and bodily terms. Although Conor’s personal history is shorter (three decades), her endeavours to understand broader intellectual and political issues fade as she embraces a busy domestic and mothering routine in her second marriage in a new century. Their happier endings are possibly the ‘reward’ for conformity to the idealised model of motherhood which was promoted in post-war Australia.

In this third and final section, Prichard’s The Goldfields Trilogy and Dark’s The Timeless Land Trilogy serve as counterpoints to their previous novels. In the trilogies, Prichard’s working class mother-figure, Sally Gough, and Dark’s middle-class mother-figure, Conor Mannion, are constructed as good and ‘proper’ women who identify with, and perform, the naturalised gender role of wife and mother, with little or no challenge to the socialist and historical narrative, respectively. This is an aspect of the trilogies that has not been studied before in this way, that is, tracing the representation of motherhood and linking these to prevailing ideologies. When these novels were published, it was a time of increasing political and social conservatism for women as they were ‘conscripted’ back into the home to accommodate the returned soldier as he reunites with his family and returns to the civilian workforce at the end of the Second World War.239 While the trilogies do not directly address these issues, it is my contention that they reflect the conservatism of the time in which they are published. The trilogies demonstrate the way in which the body of the mother-figure is manipulated and reinvented to make way for an ideal of a compliant, domesticated mother-figure that would complement the peacetime social and political structure.

In the trilogies, Prichard and Dark retreat from fully exploring the feminist issues previously addressed in their work, however ambivalent and complex these may have been, and simultaneously change their writing styles. Modjeska and Sheridan have argued that, given the international political crises during which women writers like Dark and Prichard were writing and publishing their respective trilogies (1937-1953; 1939-1950), it was impossible to reconcile their feminist concerns with their situation as women and with their politics.240 Sally Gough, for instance, the irrepressible mother-figure in Prichard’s trilogy, is enmeshed in workers’ rights and feminist struggles. The representation and control of women’s bodies are crucial to these struggles but now they are co-opted by socialist politics’ privileging of class and the economic mode of production, over sexual and gender difference. In 1963, Prichard herself states that she had ‘always resented the separation of women’s interests from those of men’.241 Thus, The Goldfields Trilogy allots a primacy to the

239 See ‘Working for the Duration-(1939-1969)’ in For Love or Money, dir. Megan McMurchy and Jeni Thornley, Flashback Films, 1983. 240 Modjeska, Exiles 256-257. Susan Sheridan, ‘Women Writers’ in Laurie Hergenhan (ed), The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1988) 324. 241 Justina Williams, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard’, Our Women (Sept-Dec 1963), 27.

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ideological, rendering the female body passive; as a given rather than as a construction that needs to be explained.

Criticism of Prichard’s trilogy has often focussed on her social realist style. Critics argue that Prichard felt pressured to conform to the Soviet literary doctrine of socialist realism which impacted unfavourably on her work.242 Prichard’s long-time friend and part-time secretary, Annette Cameron, confirmed that Prichard was being pressured by the CPA to be more political in her writing and to write novels which carried the communist message.243 Prichard herself, in what her son refers to as her ‘literary testament’,244 defends her reputation ‘for what has been described as the socialist realism of much of my writing’,245 arguing that ‘[r]ealism, not fantasy, is what Australians, the majority of us, stack on’.246 It is not so clear in Eleanor Dark’s case as to why she embarked on and continued to write social history given her distaste for this style of writing. Dark responds to Prichard’s gift of an inscribed copy of Winged Seeds (the third volume in Prichard’s trilogy), by referring to what will become Dark’s The Timeless Land Trilogy, stating:

I’m using this time in Sydney to try and gather all I need from the Mitchell [State Library of New South Wales] for a Macquarie [Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of NSW, 1809-1821] novel to end my chore, but have not felt at the top of my form for some years now, and find that actual writing just doesn’t “go” ... In the meantime I hate the sight and thought of the blasted book.247

It is my contention that, in a manner similar to Prichard, Dark succumbs to external pressure, this time from her publishers, to employ a different literary style and write a different kind of novel. Dark’s use of stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue in her earlier novels, together with modern concepts of time, order and shifting emphasis, marks her work as “modernist”. Dark’s London editor at Collins, however, while enthusiastic about another book following the publication of Waterway, written in the modernist style, was keen for her to try something different and suggests to Dark:

[w]rite something which would have not only the chance of being a big commercial success, but also one which would have a permanent place in the literature of the future.248

242 See Drusilla Modjeska, ‘Introduction’ to Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Roaring Nineties (1946; London: Virago, 1983) x. Van Ikin, ‘The Political Novels of Katharine Prichard⎯III’, Southerly, 3-9 (1983): 296-312. Brenton Doecke, ‘Australian Historical Fiction and the Popular Front: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfields Trilogy’, Westerly, 39-3 (1994): 25-36. Ellis, ‘The Triumph of Ideology: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Goldfields Trilogy’, in Adams and Lee, Frank Hardy 199-219. 243 Annette Cameron, personal interview, 22 December 1997. Prichard’s last novel, Subtle Flame (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1967) is dedicated ‘To Annette’. 244 Throssell, Straight Left 206. 245 Prichard, ‘Some Perceptions and Aspirations’, Southerly, 4 (1968):240. 246 Prichard, ‘Some Thoughts on Australian Literature’, The Realist, 15 (1964): 200-205. Republished in Throssell, Straight Left 204. 247 Eleanor Dark to Katharine Susannah Prichard, 26 February 1951. Prichard papers, NLA. MS. 6201/10/3. 248 W.A.R. Collins to Eleanor Dark, 6 July 1938. Dark papers, ML MS. 4545.

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The phrases ‘a permanent place’ and ‘the literature of the future’ suggest the publishers’ intent that history and time will secure Dark a position of specific and ultimate importance only once she conforms to the master narrative of history. Whether Dark believed in or cared about her literary status is unknown but throughout the early years of the Second World War she wrote The Timeless Land, and over the next fifteen years she completed the trilogy. In response to her publisher’s letter Dark acknowledges her shift in writing style and states:

I’m doing it in “straight” narrative, which should but probably won’t please the reviewers who don’t like my ‘backward and forward’ method. This is partly what is making me so slow; I don’t like it, and it doesn’t come naturally to me, but somehow it seems the right way for this particular book.249

For both writers, adopting a literary style which either did not come naturally or was forced because of its ideological basis, was anathema. I argue in this chapter that the effect of this change is to overburden the trilogies with historical and political details which at times flatten character, action and narrative.

Prichard’s trilogy in particular has been criticised in Australia as a triumph of socialist ideology but a failure as a literary work.250 This point is reinforced in a 1984 interview with Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Dark, when he was asked whether his wife’s novels were in fact propagandist.251 He denied this but responded by stating, as already quoted in the Introduction to this thesis,252 that he regarded Prichard’s ‘three books about the gold mining town’ as overtly propagandist.253 At the time of publication, Prichard’s Roaring Nineties was well received but the last two volumes in the trilogy received mixed reviews. In contrast, Dark’s first volume, The Timeless Land, was highly acclaimed and a commercial success; it is undoubtedly Dark’s most successful novel in terms of sales.254 What is significant about the writing of the trilogies is that no

249 Eleanor Dark to W.A.R. Collins, 23 June 1939. Dark papers, ML MS. 4545. 250 See Van Ikin, Southerly 296-312; Doecke, Westerly, 25-36; Ellis, Frank 199-219. 251 Giuffré, Writing Life 110. 252 Introduction, 20. 253 Giuffré, Writing Life 110-111. 254 The Timeless Land was first published in the United States of America (The Macmillan Company, New York) in 1941 and was chosen as the New York Book-of-the-Month Club in October of the same year. It was later translated into German, Italian and Swedish and reprinted in 1963, 1972, 1973, 1980 and 1995; it is currently out of print. I was advised by Collins (now Harper Collins Publishers) in Australia and the United Kingdom, by telephone and facsimile dated 1 September, 1995, that the company no longer has publication records for the 1930s and 1940s and therefore I have been unable to ascertain how many copies were eventually sold. However a search of the royalty statements covering the period 1941-1942 shows in excess of 200,000 copies. Considering a ‘best seller’ in Australia in 1942 was approximately 3,000 copies (this figure supplied by the Australian Book Publishing Association 28 August, 1995), the novel was an overwhelming success. By way of comparison, royalty statements show Prelude to Chrisopher sold 3,510 copies and The Little Company, 8,122 copies. These figures would be incomplete given the ‘gaps’ in the manuscript material, but it is clear that The Timeless Land was Eleanor Dark’s most popular novel. ML MS4545.

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other woman writer of this period attempts such monuments of research which the writers themselves acknowledge was arduous work.255 Mental depression and physical illness accompanied both women throughout the writing of their respective trilogies. From the point of view of a shifting ideology during periods of radical social and political change, the trilogies offer unique insights into the acquiescence of the mother-figure to the ideology of motherhood in the postwar period. The novels demonstrate how the idealised mother-figure persists across time and space, despite the agitation by women for change and in the face of the unruliness of social relations.

Published, as they were, primarily in a time of postwar reconstruction, I argue that representations of the mother-figure in the trilogies show a greater compliance with nationalist ideologies of the good and healthy mother-figure who conforms more closely to an idealised notion of motherhood, leading up to the 1950s. The 1950s, a period usually referred to as ‘The Fifties’, is, as John Murphy and Judith Smart have pointed out, ‘seen as emblematic of an Australia that was either static, complacent and monocultural, or, for conservatives, an Australia that was prosperous, unified and satisfyingly middle class’.256 For writers like Prichard and Dark it was a time of weariness which Dark refers to in her letter to Miles Franklin dated 1950 as ‘Weltschmerz’.257 Dark and Prichard are now middle-aged women, living and writing in the conservative political culture of the Menzies era which ‘saw the private and domestic sphere—the home—as a barrier against alien and radical influences and a secure basis for conservative political values.’258 The home is the site of heterosexual marriage, with a focus on hygienic and harmonious family life at the centre of which is the moral mother-figure. This Fifties ideology which focuses on white middle-class families belies those jagged edges of class and racial difference which made the 1950s a continuing struggle for basic rights and basic freedoms for working class, Aboriginal and migrant groups.259

The trilogies are also novels of the Cold War period, written as the Cold War intensified throughout the late 1940s and the early 1950s, and when anti-communist sentiment was in its harshest phase. Representations of the mother-figure in Prichard’s trilogy are less complex, more unified and

255 Vance Palmer was the only other writer to have published a three-volume work in approximately the same time frame as Prichard and Dark. His Golconda trilogy was published between 1948 and 1959 (Golconda (1948), Seedtime (1957), and The Big Fellow (1959)]) and was poorly reviewed, except by Prichard. Jean Devanny attempted a trilogy about the sugar cane industry in Queensland, but this remained incomplete with only the first novel, Cindie, being published in 1949. Henry Handel Richardson had published her three volume work, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney , in 1930. 256 John Murphy and Judith Smart (eds), The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1997) 1. 257 Eleanor Dark, letter to Miles Franklin, 13 April 1950. Reproduced in Ferrier, As Good As A Yarn With You 240. 258David Hilliary, ‘Church, Family and Sexuality in Australia in the 1950s’ in John Murphy and Judith Smart (eds), The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1997) 136. 259 Mark Peel, ‘A New Kind of Manhood: Remembering the 1950s’ in John Murphy and Judith Smart (eds), The Forgotten Fifties149.

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unproblematic compared to representations in Dark’s trilogy where issues concerning class and race are refracted through ‘depraved’ convict mothers and more nuanced representations of Aboriginal women. Even though Dark’s trilogy is concerned with re-presenting Australia’s settlement history, there are links and reverberations with the idealised mother-figure of the period in which she was writing. That is to say, a traditionalist view of women’s role and possibilities, dominant in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, is reinscribed in the 1940s and 1950s by idealising the domestic mother-figure in the interests of postwar economic growth. To make way for returned servicemen re- entering the civilian workforce, women were coerced back into the home to consume, cook, clean, and care for the family. The response to political and social upheaval can be transformational, or it can be a return to or reinforcement of tradition and convention. The two different responses can be seen in the novels under review in this thesis. The earlier novels, prior to each writer’s trilogy, challenge the gender specific ideological component of mothering and household responsibility whereas the trilogies more forcefully articulate and reinforce notions of women being unequal workforce participants and ‘natural’ reproducers and socialisers of children. ‘Motherhood’, as Sheridan argues, ‘was central to the domestic ideal of femininity’ in the Cold War period.260

This feminine ideal was very much a bourgeois notion of idealised motherhood as featured in forms of popular culture such as women’s magazines in the postwar years. Where Sheridan has researched representations of ‘Everywoman’ in The Australian Women’s Weekly during this period, I argue that the traditional ideal of feminine respectability, ‘so prominent and inflexible’ in the Weekly, is also reflected in the trilogies.261 Even though the mother-figure of Sally Gough (The Goldfields Trilogy) and Conor Mannion (The Timeless Land Trilogy) have different class affiliations (while their respective husbands are men ‘born with a silver spoon in the mouth’),262 they both conform more closely to a bourgeois notion of idealised motherhood. ‘Good wives and mothers’ like Sally and Conor, sexually virtuous and morally pure, are confined to the private sphere of domestic life and child-raising as society restructures and reshapes itself around them. Disorderly and difficult women who do not conform or respect the sexual rigidity or individual self-restraint inherent in the ideal are invariably marked as ‘bad’ women and unfit mothers. With few exceptions, representations of the Aboriginal mother-figure in the trilogies are at times romantic and heroic but invariably bleak; destroyed by starvation, abuse, and neglect.

Writing the black mother-figure out of the texts reinforces the connections made in the trilogies between the ideology of motherhood and a nationalist and gendered discourse on the importance and meaning of being born a white Australian. The ideology is founded on the restraint of

260 Susan Sheridan et al, Who Was That Woman?: The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002) 42. 261 Sheridan, Weekly 6. 262 Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Roaring Nineties (1946; London: Virago, 1983) 58.

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white women’s sexuality and personal desire as opposed to the exploitation of black women as concubines and unpaid labour. In emphasising the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulation of the life processes of human populations which ‘constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed’,263 Foucault reconceived the notion of power and how sexuality is tied to it. Ann Laura Stoler, in her study of Foucault in a nineteenth-century colonial context, argues that discourses of sexuality, inextricably linked to specific forms of power were constructed ‘first and foremost to set out the distinctions of bourgeois identity rooted in the sexual politics of the home’.264 Defining features of bourgeois identity include self-discipline and self- determination, affirmed in the ideal family milieu where the mother-figure serves as the role model. It is her sexual behaviour and moral intent that must be ‘policed’, not just in the interests of nation- building and family life, but also in the interests of what it meant to be truly ‘Australian’.265

The fact, as Stoler points out, that these features were ‘often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contamination in those same European family homes’,266 is clearly evident in Dark’s trilogy through her representation of a very young Aboriginal woman working in the domestic sphere as a housegirl/nanny, raped by her white master and bearing his child. Race relations, however, between European men and Aboriginal women on the Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie goldfields in the 1890s are represented in the beginning of Prichard’s trilogy as an open and informal arrangement, accepted by prospector and Aboriginal alike, even though Sally’s husband considered it ‘an insult to a white woman, this open and flagrant consorting with a gin’.267 These relationships sour, however, as Prichard’s trilogy progresses and Aborigines become increasingly dispossessed. Where Sally and Conor take an interest in Aboriginal women, it is to teach them to be more like them, like white women; cleaning and covering their bodies, cooking and caring for the home, teaching them ‘feminine manners’ where ‘certain words were forbidden for women’.268 These white mother-figures live by, and try to impart, the rules and limitations imposed by regulations of purity and a high moral consciousness, inherent in the ideology of motherhood. If it seems odd to link working-class Sally with bourgeois Conor in this context, it is to demonstrate that regardless of class, political affiliation or historical period, the construction of the idealised white mother-figure has been a pervasive and persuasive icon of femininity. Even though the ideal has been constructed and manipulated, reinvented and challenged, ideological pressures, supported by government policies, have kept women vigilant about their bodies and behaviours.

263 Foucault, History of Sexuality 139. 264 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke UP, 1995) 3. 265 I have paraphrased Stoller here who argues that ‘[t]hese discourses on self-mastery were productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of “whiteness” and what it meant to be truly European’, Stoler, Race 8. 266 Stoller, Race 8. 267 Prichard, Roaring Nineties 117. 268 Prichard, Roaring Nineties 120.

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In her study of the ideology of motherhood, Betsy Wearing argues that such an ideology contradictorily offers ‘a way of seeing the world and living which is at once illusory and efficacious, fictitious and real’.269 At different stages throughout the trilogies, Sally and Conor challenge the ‘illusory’ and the ‘fictitious’ construction of what it means to be a ‘proper’ white woman, bringing politics into the home and questioning injustices and inequalities. However, despite the rhetoric of revolutionary change, regardless of the opportunity to create a new social order far from the influence of Mother England, the ideology of motherhood persists. Despite resistance and challenge to this ideology by the different women characters in the novels, at the end of the trilogies representations of the mother-figure and the family have been ordered and regulated in such a way that they serve to reproduce gendered relationships of power. Such relationships favour the male characters in the novels and keep women agreeable, obedient, and above all, devoted mothers.

269 Betsy Wearing, The Ideology of Motherhood: A Study of Sydney Suburban Mothers (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984) 17.

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CHAPTER 5

The Goldfields Trilogy The Roaring Nineties (1946), Golden Miles (1948) and Winged Seeds (1950)

The history and politics of the Western Australian goldfields contained in Prichard’s three novels which are generally referred to as The Goldfields Trilogy, span a half century, commencing in 1890 and finishing in 1946. Despite the trilogy’s focus on men (their work, their wars and their politics), Prichard continues to choose the mother-figure as the central character through which the narrative is politicised. Even though Sally Gough is on the periphery of these events, Prichard confirms that ‘Sally is the monolithic figure around whom the narrative is built.’270 Indeed, Sally does represent stability and uniformity; consistent in her values and belief that she must conform to socialist ideals and ‘not separate herself from this struggle’ (RN 297). Sally is constructed as ‘the proper woman … who identifies with, and performs according to, naturalised gender roles’ within a heterosexual marriage.271 This construction, however, has the effect of dissipating her authority; authority being the hallmark of Prichard’s mother-figures in her earlier novels, such as Mrs Bessie (Coonardoo) and Mary Ann Colburn (Working Bullocks). In the pursuit of socialist ideology, the sense of individuality, so evident in the characters of Mrs Bessie and Mary Ann, has fragmented. The subversive thoughts and deeds of these mother-figures may be their undoing but this, in turn, enriches the textual and theoretical possibilities, as earlier argued. The often contradictory psychological motivations, the complex processes and the strategies which formulate human existence, have been subsumed to socialist politics. If Sally is to be the bearer of socialism, she must divest herself of independent thoughts and ideas in order that the history of the economic class struggles on the goldfields can be mediated through her. As Prichard states, ‘[t]he socialist message for the future had to come through [Sally]’.272 In the pursuit of a socialist ideal and ideological purity, Sally must shed more and more of her identity, leading not to liberation but to loss.

In a similar way, the ideology of motherhood, which claims that it is women’s ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ destiny to bear and rear children and to take care of the associated household tasks, confines and impels women to a way of being and behaving which diminishes their autonomy. These factors are reinforced by the historical period in which the first volume of the trilogy, The Roaring Nineties, commences. The 1890s was a time when Australia’s national identity was being forged as

270 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Tribune, 16 December 1964: 7. 271 See Brigid Rooney’s discussion of Christina Stead’s novel Cotters’ England in ‘Gendering the revolutionary subject: the role of Marxist thought in Christina Stead’s authorised production’, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 1997, 20. 272 Prichard, Tribune, 16 December 1964: 7.

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the question of a federated Australia was being put to the people. As discussed previously in the Introduction, nation-building depended on white women mothering. It was a white woman’s duty to her country and to the empire to reproduce and to ensure that notions of racial (and masculine) superiority, prevailed.273 The overlapping discourses of nationalism, socialism, and the ideology of motherhood are embodied in the character of Sally Gough. As a good working-class wife and mother, Sally must negotiate the gender bias of all three. However, in the midst of radical socialist politics there is no radical restructuring of gender politics. In the interests of maintaining relationships of power and privilege, the ‘natural’ role of motherhood legitimates and justifies women’s confinement to no/low-paid, gender specific work. It is not so easy to interrogate the mother-figure through gender and bodily difference given her capitulation to an ideology which neutralizes the maternal body; or attempts to normalize it as a masculine body. Sally, for instance, is delighted to be known as her father’s ‘head-stockman’ (RN 71), as ‘a good mate to Morris’, and ‘as good as a man in camp’ (RN 188). Despite the masculine signifiers, Sally’s principal desire is to marry and please Morris, and conform to a construction of femininity which stereotypes women as ‘the angel in the house’. Sally is likened to a brown moth, ‘that took on the protective colouring of bark on the trees’ (RN 53), implying that she blends into the landscape and a highly masculine culture by disguising, rather than declaring, her feminine difference.

Sally as a ‘proper’ mother-figure

Sally’s presence on the goldfields, living in a tent, working and birthing amongst hundreds of men in an environment of extremes, has the potential to distract men from their industrial struggles. Sally is 22 when the Roaring Nineties begins, having eloped with her husband, the Hon. Morris Fitz- Morris Gough, whom she hasn’t seen since he left to go prospecting some two years previously. Despite Morris’s and other men’s objections, Sally eventually follows him into the goldfields, where she gives birth to the first of her four sons. It is Morris who observes that:

women were scarce and [Sally] might have chosen from a dozen men, all of them woman- hungry, had she wished to console herself in his absence. Having cashed in on rich claims, they were willing to offer her anything she might desire, if, and when, she would sleep with them. (RN 84)

The atmosphere surrounding the men, the money and the mania in the search for gold is highly volatile. There are also several references to male sexual needs as well as to Sally’s own sexual desires for the swashbuckling Frisco Jo Murphy, which heightens that volatility. But at the point when tensions run high, there is a diffusion of passion through Sally’s remembering her maternal role, her wifely responsibilities, and the workers. To be deemed a proper woman and not destabilise the

273 See Stoler, ‘Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves’ in Race 95-136.

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workers’ struggle, certain moral prescriptions and modes of conduct have to be met. Sally consistently reminds herself she was:

glad she had not broken faith with herself or the way of life to which she was committed: Morris and the children, and providing for them. That was the job she had undertaken to do. Did she love Frisco? No! No! Sally told herself. It was Morris and the children she loved and must hold to. She felt free of the crazy desire to lose herself in Frisco’s arms now. Free, and at peace, with a sense of reprieve from disaster. (RN 291)

For Sally, to be ‘free, and at peace’, she must not fall from grace, or fail to meet standards of respectable behaviour. She must fulfil ideals of femininity, which, as Matthews argues, ‘establish both the imperative and the meaning of being a good or true woman’.274

Part of the ideology of femininity is the physical fitness for maternity but it also necessitates levels of self-scrutiny and bodily surveillance that produce specifically feminine forms of embodiment such as how a woman should walk, talk, dress and behave.275 Throughout the narratives, Sally is constantly scrutinising herself in terms of her appearance, her behaviour, and her thoughts, reminding herself that she ‘must not be a little fool: [must not] let her emotions run away with her now’ (RN 59). The many references to her emotional discipline, to her bathing and dressing, to the way she speaks and moves, mark Sally as a true, and truly good, woman. When Morris finally takes her to his camp, the narrator states that he is ‘pleased with her performance’ (RN 94) as a woman who accords with his consciousness of race and class and as a wife who will reproduce his Englishness, for Morris ‘could never quite forget that he was an Englishman’ with an entitlement to ‘the privileges of gentlefolk’ (RN 88). His approval of her behaviour is based on the fact that Sally is careful not to ‘make a display of legs and underclothing as she got out of the buggy’ (RN 95). The socialist message may have to come through Sally but overriding this is her representation as a ‘well- behaved’ feminine white woman, as a mother and homemaker whose domestic skills will help ‘to maintain and promote the daily and biological reproduction of the settler population’.276 Even though the narrator states that Sally ‘thought it absurd to claim these privileges in a country where so much hard work had to be done’ (RN 88), the cult of domesticity where the mother-figure maintains a rigid decorum, prevails. Even in this wild country where white women like Mrs Buggins publicly scream abuse as the mood takes her and Aboriginal concubines of European men walk naked and pregnant around the camps, Sally is careful not to breach traditions or defy conventions which mark her as a ‘proper’, discreet and feminine woman.

274 Matthews, Good and Mad Women 15. 275 See Susan Bordo, ‘Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture’, in Diamond I. and Quinby L. (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988) 87-117. Sandra Lee Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990) 63-82. 276 See Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiolgraphy (London: Cassell, 2000) 66.

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Where Sally’s self-scrutiny is evident, she is also the subject of repeated surveillance by other women as well as men, but especially by her husband, who concerns himself more with Sally’s reputation than he does with paying his bills. Living in rough conditions, where ‘men tramped past the tent all day’, Morris is overly concerned that Sally does not transgress sexual proprieties, warning her ‘to wash and undress with care behind [the] canvas wall, particularly at night when the kerosene lantern made a shadow play of every movement’ (RN 104). This is despite the fact that on a previous night Morris ‘had flung himself upon [Sally] while men kept passing only a few yards away. She could hear their guffaws and jokes’ (RN 99). Sally is outraged but the narrator then states that she ‘was proud and happy’ (RN 104) to be with Morris. Sexual double standards, including marital rape, unmarried motherhood, venereal disease, and prostitution are raised in the trilogy but abandoned in the interests of maintaining the status quo. Prostitution, for instance, is defined as ‘an institution which safeguarded the family’ (RN 75), a statement which is left unchallenged except by the childless Marie Robillard who argues it is a problem of poverty, not of politics. Women’s control over their bodies is a key site of struggle for the emancipation of women which is alluded to in the trilogy but not interrogated. As Delys Bird states, Prichard ‘always remained convinced that the class struggle predominated over feminist claims to a politics of liberation’.277 Even when Sally does contest Morris on his patriarchal and conservative views on women and work, it is with a ‘most beguiling smile’ (RN 115). Pleasing the man was paramount to harmonious family relationships and conforming to a cultural construction of femininity was pivotal to a happy family home. Prichard seems to raise these issues but not to pursue them, showing how Sally is forced to submit to patriarchal views in order to conform to the normative role, as Sally reminds herself, of being ‘a respectable married woman’ (RN 217). Notions of being the ‘good’ husband, however, or challenges to the construction of manhood and masculine strength, are not scrutinised (or made vulnerable through interrogation), in the trilogy.

Long before feminist theories of the fashion/beauty complex have been formulated, women were forced into conforming to ‘a central component of normative feminine identity, namely sexual attractiveness’.278 The discourse on health shapes and manipulates what it means for a woman to be attractive through a disciplinary normalization of bodily shape and physical appearance. Throughout the trilogy, for instance, the narrator emphasises Sally’s slender figure and how men appreciate her physical form and decorous behaviour. Even at fifty, the narrator states, she can fit into her twenty year-old daughter-in-law’s bathing suit, although it was ‘a little tight on her bosom and thighs; but she was still slim enough to wear Amy’s suit comfortably’ (GM 199). Good women like Sally and Marie

277 Delys Bird, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard: A Thoroughly Modern Woman’, Southerly 58.1 (1998) 98-115. 278 Jana Sawicki, ‘Foucault: feminism and questions of identity’ in Gary Gutting (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 291.

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Robillard are represented as trim-figured and well-groomed (GM 359). They are admired by men on the gold fields who follow ‘their trim, energetic figures with ruminative eyes’ (GM 359). Bad women and prostitutes are described as ‘fat and slack’, ‘flabby’ and ‘shabby’ (GM 361). And Sally’s rival in love, Mrs Rooney, is described as ‘fat’ with a ‘swivel eye’, dressed in a ‘soiled kimono falling away from her huge floppy bosom’ (WS 208-209). Mrs Rooney is not only physically out of shape with a facial impediment; she is represented as unclean and untidy. Women who reject standards of health and beauty, even in a climate of revolutionary struggle, are not tolerated in the trilogy. Where Mrs Rooney (Ma Buggins, and the prostitutes Bertha and Lili) could potentially be viewed as dissident figures who resist or ignore feminine ideals of woman/motherhood, they are instead represented as tragic figures, scorned by women and men alike. In her study of Foucault, Jana Sawicki argues that an intentional but non-subjective ‘patriarchal power operates by attaching women to certain paradigms of feminine identity’ which reduces women’s personal development and political achievement.279 Women characters like Sally Gough and Marie Robillard, for instance, are preoccupied with taking care of families (husbands, children and aging parents), and keeping their homes and their bodies ‘neat and tidy’ to the exclusion of their own political and personal attainment which is beyond the domestic sphere.

As a result, Sally’s relationship to the industrial struggles on the goldfields is based on her nurturing role rather than on her political knowledge. Even though, over the years, she has listened to the theories and debates articulated by men surrounding industrial conflicts and international affairs, she understands the miners’ struggles, is involved in their conflicts, declaring ‘[i]t seemed her struggle as much as theirs’ (RN 297), she rarely offers her opinion and her endorsement of male- centred knowledge and masculine authority serves to consolidate her reputation not as a comrade but as a good working wife and mother. Sally is represented as a maternal presence not as a serious political activist; she cannot be both. Sally is also romantically involved throughout these industrial disputes, which I argue diminishes her political commitment. The narrator states that she ‘went to meetings ... provided meals ... tramped miles collecting money ... for the families of men in prison’ (RN 321). Sally admits, however, that her exhausting work to support the alluvial struggles ‘helped to drive Frisco from her mind’ and to repress the self-hatred she feels ‘for having yielded to his kisses: burned to them’ (RN 322), when Frisco has sided not with the workers but with the capitalist mine- owners. Romance and revolution are intertwined in Sally’s private life and the overall lack of reconciliation between the personal and the political confirms how pressured women are to conform in the narrative to cultural stereotypes of feminine identity.

The contradictions in Sally’s role as ideal mother-figure and as socialist witness are compounded by issues of race and place, given that her politics advocate a classless society but her

279 Sawicki, Foucault 291-292.

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representation as an icon of white motherhood demands the exclusion of the indigene. Prichard states that the socialist message for the future had to come through Sally, but socialism is impossible to achieve where the settler society must dispossess the indigene of land and watering holes if the gold industry is to flourish. Inter-racial comradeship is unthinkable on the socialist frontier where, as the narrator records, ‘[i]t was one thing to have a grievance and be ready to air it, and another to send three men up for murder of a few blacks. No jury on the fields would convict the prospectors, everybody knew. … Prospectors approved of the verdict, chuckling over it round the camps and in the hotel bars’ (RN 151). When it comes to the paternity of mixed-race children there is the convenient explanation of the ‘mingari yarn’ or belief on the part of the indigene, according to the narrator, that conception is not sexual but of the ‘spirit of one of the tribe’s ancestors’ (RN 161).280 As Frisco states in relation to his own involvement with the Aboriginal woman, Maritana:

Every aboriginal woman is supposed to have an immaculate conception of sorts, it seems,’ he exclaimed, enjoying the joke of having escaped from an unpleasant obligation. ‘She catches a baby from any rock or water hole haunted by ancestral spirits, and the mingari is one of ‘em.’ (RN 161)

Sally’s private response to the gross mistreatment of Aborigines generally, but specifically to Frisco’s abandonment of the mother of his child, is to feel ‘sick and furious at the man’s brutality’ (RN 161) and to provide shelter, food and clothing to Maritana.

Sally responds to situations of abuse and oppression through maternal acts of nurturing and kindness. Equality, however, is a different matter. The narrator states that ‘[t]here was nothing Maritana liked better than to have a cup of tea with [Mrs Sally] like a friend and an equal’ (RN 158), but there is no evidence that the desire for equality is reciprocal. Unlike Prichard’s earlier novel, Coonardoo, relationships between black and white mother-figures are not politicised in the narrative. Despite the fact that women like Maritana and Mrs Sally live in the most rudimentary and intimate of circumstances, there is no suggestion of inter-racial cross-cultural exchange on the socialist frontier. Maritana’s mixed-race son is written out of the text. Murder and miscegenation are accepted where the Aborigine is concerned; white men exploit black women and black labour. Compared to the public outcry following the publication of Coonardoo, the text does not pursue these portrayals of black/white relationships, possibly because they reflect rather than disrupt the cultural values of White Australia in the late 1940s. Similarly, Sally’s representation as the ideal mother-figure is under pressure in the narrative to conform to cultural expectations of femininity rather than disrupt feminine norms and values by being a political challenging her own class for their treatment of the Australian Aborigine.

280 This is also the explanation given by Hugh Watt in relation to the conception of his ‘mixed-race’ son, Winning-arra, in Coonardoo. As the narrator states, ‘Hugh stood beside Coonardoo, looking down at the child, knowing as he did so that this was his son, knowing what the blacks did not suspect.’ Prichard, Coonardoo 88.

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The gendered division of labour

Apart from the racial inequalities in the narrative, gender inequality in relation to women and work is an issue. In the trilogy, work, and the discourses surrounding labour relations, including the gendered division of labour, form the nexus which binds people to one another and to the landscape. It is work that is central to the relationship between the genders in the three novels, and not sexual passion which bound men and women in the earlier novels. As Modjeska points out in the introduction to The Roaring Nineties, the ‘sexual division of labour becomes central to the relationship between the sexes, just as it is work and the vastly different relationship to gold that irrevocably divides the miners from the owners’ (RN xi). In the world of socialist politics, however, women’s contributions are neither visible nor acknowledged. In the trilogy, Sally’s work is domestic (waitressing, cooking, and ‘running a boarding house, sweeping, scrubbing cooking and washing dishes all day’) (RN 104), but there is no attempt to represent this as having an economic or equal value compared to men’s work (prospecting, mining, entrepreneurship). Thus, Prichard maintains the notion of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women despite the socialist politics underwriting the texts and her own declared position that she could not separate women’s interests from those of men.

Maintaining the gendered division of labour, however, is a source of contention in the Gough marriage given Morris’s inability to adequately provide for Sally and their family. Through necessity, Sally has to create a means of earning a living to provide for her family, herself and her husband. Economic independence, traditionally the preserve of men, is seen as anti-feminine and a threat to patriarchal values. Sally’s insistence on being a wife and a mother and ‘a successful business woman’ (RN 86) deeply offends her husband. To counteract the offence, Sally has to pretend to Morris that even though ‘her back and her bones had ached’, it ‘amused her’ to work so physically hard for long hours with little financial return for the sake of the family (RN 86). That women and men work together appalls Maurice who ‘could not yet accept democratic tendencies in the colonies as anything but a disease which had to be endured if it could not be cured’ (RN 89). Nevertheless, women’s relationship to the mode of production is unequal in the novels, and highlights the fact that whether Socialist or Conservative, political economic theories are concerned with the male capitalist and the male labourer⎯not with the mother-figure. Similarly, women’s relationship to patriarchy as a form of oppression, shared by socialism and capitalism alike, is expressed but not explored in the novels and contributes to the overall sense of retreat by the mother-figure to a life of domesticity compared to the more dissident mother-figures in the earlier novels. This lack of challenge seals off new insights and opportunities for literary exploration but it also makes Sally’s representation as the maternal embodiment of socialist (and by inference, egalitarian) ideas, increasingly difficult to sustain as the narrative progresses.

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The issue of women and inequality in the trilogy extends beyond the economic, the political and the social. It is found in other realms such as the mythic where cultural icons such as The Returned Soldier and The Bushman/Prospector as Hero (even socialism itself) are highly masculinised, made through the exclusion of the feminine. In the trilogy, these icons are symbolic of death and impotence and have no affinity with life and creativity which surround the maternal body. Nevertheless, women must not threaten male traditions of strength and endurance by highlighting the inadequacy and failure of men in the narrative. Morris, for instance, follows a false dream of amassing wealth and regularly gambles the household budget but relies on Sally to financially support the family. He is dictatorial and chauvinistic towards Sally who must treat Maurice ‘with becoming deference’ (RN 91) for the marriage to work and for the mother-figure to work at all. While Prichard, I argue, is drawing attention here to the falseness of such deference given that Sally is the strength of the family and eventually becomes its main breadwinner, Prichard also suggests that disharmony in the home must be avoided. Sally therefore reins in any radical thoughts and ideas about exercising her abilities or pursuing her personal desires, eager to demonstrate norms and competencies associated with feminine identity and restricting her business to a domestic and modest earner. Selfless devotion, unconditional love and family duty are her trademarks as she reminds herself that sexual passion, freely expressed by men on the goldfields, ‘was not permissible and must be repressed’, along with ‘that altogether disgraceful feeling’ (RN 212-213) she holds for a man who is not her husband.

Sally is fully aware of the power of sexuality to disrupt the matrimonial home but more particularly to undermine the struggles of the workers who are her sons, her friends and her neighbours. She is not permitted the luxury of a better or easier life money could offer. Unlike Morris or Frisco, Sally is represented as highly ideologically disciplined, encapsulated in her belief ‘that motherhood is sacred’ (WS 200), implying that the maternal body is beyond political interrogation or economic analysis, purged of its ambiguity. Maintaining this idealogical purity demands that Sally assumes an unequal and passive position in relation to the main⎯and male⎯protagonists, a position that is problematic because the narrative is told through her representation as a woman of strength and endurance who outworks and outlives most of the male characters in the narrative.

Maintaining standards of ‘hygiene’

Women’s work in the trilogy, and Sally’s in particular, involves attitudes and practices around physical and moral cleanliness. McClintock and Stoler (as outlined in the Introduction and Section III respectively), have argued that maintaining standards of bourgeois civility was one way of legitimating European identity in a colonial context which also signalled racial and class anxieties.

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Carnal knowledge of the indigene or abandoning standards of bourgeois civility represented a threat to imperial power.281 In Prichard’s trilogy, it is the white working class mother-figure who is the arbiter of good behaviour and moral practices. As mother of the nation it is her personal conduct that is tied to racial survival, conduct that is mimicked by the indigene, and breaks down in the face of miscegenation. Sally states that ‘[i]t was a comfort to believe Morris had not associated with aboriginal women: they were repulsive to him’ (RN 118). Nevertheless, she forms a friendship with Kalgoorla and Maritana, Aboriginal mother and daughter, a friendship that provides opportunities for Sally to carry out her maternal and civilizing roles. Sally teaches Maritana ‘to sweep and tidy-up’ around the tents, to wash dishes and scrub her white man’s dirty clothes, to cover her naked body in ‘the same sort of dress a white woman wore’ (RN 120); to cook and sew and to wash ‘her face and hands, as Missus Sally was doing’ (RN 160). For Maritana it is a game, as she parodies white women, sending the younger “gins” and children ‘into fits of laughter, by the way she walked over the rough pebbly ground, holding up her skirt, as if she were Missus Sally; or by giving an imitation of Ma Buggins … screaming at Paddy Cavan’ (RN 162). But for Mrs Sally it is about normalizing “the native”; encouraging her standards of cleanliness to ensure compliance inside her domestic territory. As the narrator points out, nakedness and dirt distress Mrs Sally and a mere glance towards Maritana makes the naked and dishevelled girl ‘busy with her ablutions’ (RN 158) and clothing her naked body, before visiting Mrs Sally’s tent. Similarly, Maritana’s mother is learning ‘to wash clothes, make a bed and cook a little’ (RN 202) from the notorious Theresa Molloy; that ‘big slatternly woman’ (RN 202) who had ‘almost as many children as goats’ (RN 201). Theresa acts as midwife to Sally’s firstborn when she momentarily concedes to standards of health, having ‘dressed up for the job’ (RN 230), and looking ‘like a nurse, very clean and capable, in a print dress with a white handkerchief pinned over her head for a cap’, to reassure Sally that the delivery would be hygienic (RN 229-230). Nevertheless, where Sally Gough is represented throughout the trilogy as the epitome of respectability⎯‘[d]utiful wife, devoted mother, and all that’ (GM 32)⎯the unwed and much maligned Theresa Malloy who tells Sally ‘I’m a bad lot’ (RN 202), is lower down the social scale. Through a discourse on health and hygiene, then, hierarchies of race and class amongst white and Aboriginal women are established and maintained in the text.

The mother-figure and politics

Outside of the narrative and with the end of the Second World War in sight when Prichard was writing her trilogy, her son Ric Throssell recalls that she ‘saw a danger to her hopes for [post war] reconstruction through a Socialist Australia’.282 As a result, during Prichard’s International Women’s Day Address of 1945, she asks women to ‘so organize their domestic affairs, that they can give time

281 McClintock, Imperial Leather; and Stoler, Race. 282 Throssell, Straight Left 234.

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to read and attend meetings, join in the activity around movements for the improvement of local conditions.’283 She urges women to give up:

so much futile polishing, shopping and refurbishing of garments, [which] wastes the priceless thought and energy of women. If only most women would keep their minds as clean and tidy as they keep their houses, we would get somewhere.284

This exasperated call to women to politicise their lives through setting aside the domestic and the personal, at the time Prichard was writing the trilogy, begs the question, why not make Sally, as one of the mediators through which the historical forces are dramatised, an example of such a politically involved woman. Instead, Nadya Owens is represented as the model of socialist intellectualism and the person young socialists like Tom and Eily Gough look up to and learn from. There is Eily herself who works tirelessly for her family and also supports Tom in his struggle to improve the wages and conditions of men in the mines. Both women are mother-figures who are depicted as physically exhausted by their political work. Nadya suffers an early death and Eily ‘fades into an ideological mist’.285 The positioning of women as political advocates and models of motherhood merely illustrates that these roles are impossible to reconcile. The roles are fundamentally antagonistic in the period under review which demanded that women spend their ‘priceless thought and energy’ beautifying themselves and cleaning their homes in the interests of husbands and family. Prichard’s words foreshadow Sawicki’s argument relating to the demands of femininity which drain women’s personal energies and distract them from political achievement.286 In addition, politicising the personal would mean challenging the very institution on which motherhood and marriage were founded with a distinct separation between workers’ struggles and women’s rights.

Representations of the mother-figure in the trilogy signal a return to order and stability linked to masculine and hegemonic values, wherein reproduction is central and ‘circumscribing of women’s life activities and of women themselves’.287 The figure of Sally Gough reflects this return and the

283 Throssell, Straight Left 235. 284 Katharine Susannah Prichard. ‘International Women’s Day: 1945’ in Throssell. Straight Left 235- 236. 285 See Drusilla Modjeska, ‘Introduction’ to Katharine Susannah Prichard, Golden Miles (1948; London: Virago, 1984) x. 286 Sawicki, Foucault 291. 287 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering 12. In this study, Chodorow acknowledges that Friedrich Engels outlines the importance of social reproduction and its fundamental historical role in his 1884 publication, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Chodorow also points out that both Engels and Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‘early recognised the family as a central agent of women’s oppression as well as the major institution in women’s lives.’ (Chodorow, Reproduction 13).

Prichard was familiar with both the work of Engels and Gilman. She had interviewed Gilman in London in 1912 and writes in her biography that she had read Gilman’s books, (including Women in Economics) and greatly admired her as ‘the most brilliant feminist of her day’. According to Prichard, Gilman’s books ‘revealed the injustices and wastage women had suffered through the ages of ‘a man-made world’. They pleaded for the recognition of motherhood as ‘the highest process of physical evolution’, and all

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increasing conservatism of Australian society of the 1950s. Jane Sunderland’s critique of Prichard’s novels (including the trilogy), argues that ‘Prichard’s attitude to motherhood never changes’ and in fact that all her novels stress ‘the benefits and joys of motherhood [and] the primacy of the traditional family for women.’288 I argue, on the contrary, that, while motherhood is central to all of Prichard’s novels, the struggle to reshape the lives of women, as exhibited in the earlier novels, collapses in the trilogy. Prichard demonstrates in the trilogy the strain involved in conforming to cultural constructions of feminine ideals through representations of stereotypical good and healthy mother- figures who no longer disrupt the narrative. As the idealised working class wife and mother, Sally’s oppression is not specific or separate; it is shared by all workers to whom Prichard refers as ‘our mother the masses’.289 Maternalising rather than politicising women’s role in the trilogy is consistent with Prichard’s declared position on gender politics, namely that the struggles of men and women are interwoven and humanity is best served if they work together. Thus, her socialist philosophy and politics has a feminine (rather than a feminist) base, one that is nurturing and philanthropic.290 This view of a shared human struggle depends, however, on the mother-figure remaining silent about her personal concerns, her subjectivity, and her difference. As Prichard herself struggles to incorporate the mother-figure into the political arena, it explains why Sally Gough is never given a key political role. Apart from her family’s care, Sally’s role is to feed and nurse the weak and the poor and the overall effect is to tame the mother’s tongue and turn her into an obedient companion and marginalised worker.

One way of ensuring obedience is to devalue the work that women do and confine them to a place that is deemed as having no significance. Prichard herself states that domestic work is

rights, political, economic and social for women, in order that women might perfect their function, and work for the betterment of human relations’. Prichard, Child of the Hurricane 188. 288 Jane Sunderland ‘‘Lines Driven Deep’:Radical Departures, or the Same Old Story for Prichard’s Women?’, Hecate IV.1 (1978): 7-24 (20). 289 Prichard herself expresses the strain and exhaustion in writing the trilogy in her personal correspondence with Nettie Palmer in 1949. Prichard states: ‘But Golden Miles has gone to the typist - which is a great relief to my mind. This year, I’ve been so ill, and there have been so many breaks, I seem to have been “in labour” most of the time. Do hope I hang out to finish the trilogy! How any woman, writing in Australia, gets anything done, is a miracle to me’. Katharine Susannah Prichard to Nettie Palmer, 4 February 1949. Prichard papers, NL MSS. 1174/1/7594.

A few months later she writes again to Nettie Palmer and states: ‘I’m still obsessed with Vol. III. Was ill for awhile, after I got home, and couldn’t work at all. Now, am beginning again - though my solitude has been broken by friends, evicted, with baby coming, so haven’t the peaceful atmosphere, I need, most of all. Meetings have to be addressed, too. Defence of democratic rights! and so. It’s really a frantic struggle always to get time for thought and creative work. But I do not regret having kept close to “our mother, the masses”. From whence cometh our strength etc.’ Katharine Susannah Prichard to Nettie Palmer, June 1949. Prichard papers, NL MS. 1174/1/7672. 290 See Sandra Burchill, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard: Romance, Romanticism and Politics’, dissertation, U New South Wales, 1988, 139-61 quoted in Delys Bird, ‘The Politics of Race and the Possibilities of Form in the work of Katharine Susannah Prichard’ in Adams and Lee, Frank Hardy 197.

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‘futile’291 because it robs women of their mental energies. While this may be so, in the narrative, Sally’s only source of income is through cooking and washing for men and she is kept physically exhausted through attending to the health and wellbeing of others. However, in order to maintain the proper model of motherhood that sustains the ideology of socialism and satisfies political and cultural expectations of women, Sally must repress her individual needs as a working wife and mother and not interrogate who her oppressors are. Her desire to understand the conditions of her existence while committed to family life but simultaneously unable to challenge forms of oppression that come from within that life, displaces her agency and authority. The dominance of political and historical discourses which exclude debates surrounding gender difference and equality of opportunity, leave women, and the mother-figure in particular, outside of and abandoned by the political struggle they actively support. Sally herself expresses this when she equates her life with that of the dead Aboriginal woman, Kalgoorla, referring to their ‘tragedy ... in common’ as women and mothers who were now ‘bereft of their children and the people they loved’; mother-figures who, like ‘that shaft over an old mine’ were ‘[d]erelect and stranded, ... forgotten by time’ (WS 376).

This feeling of personal neglect is compounded by a sense of political failure as Sally observes that a lifetime of struggle has not provided ‘a better way of life for workers on the Golden Mile …. Everything that’s been done to change things here amounts to almost nothing’ (WS 386). The trilogy ends in 1946, which, for many Australian families, signalled the end of the Second World War even though Germany had surrendered on 7 May 1945 and Japan on 14 August 1945; it would take many more months for servicemen and women to actually return home to Australia. At this time, there is a sense that the representation and the reality have converged as Australian women outside of the narrative are coerced to leave the paid work force and confine themselves to a modernized domestic life raising children, cleaning homes, and advancing the careers of men. Domesticity, motherhood, and concerns about increasing the nation’s birth rate are indeed key issues during postwar reconstruction when peace and political harmony are represented as synonymous with a happy/healthy home where mother and children are dependent on the benevolent father-figure. Access to professional opportunity and public office were only available to men. As women were forced out of essential war-time employment and back into the home, Australian mothers of the late 1940s and 1950s did remain silent and stranded in the institution of marriage and family life (and as marginalised workers), until the resurgence of feminism and feminist politics in the late 1960s.292

Conclusion

291 Prichard, Straight Left 235. 292 See Meaghan Morris, ‘Review’ in A Study Guide for Love or Money (Sydney: Penguin, 1983) 3.

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In relation to women and history, McClintock argues that ‘women are relegated to a realm beyond history and thus bear a particularly vexed relation to narratives of historical change and political effect’.293 In defence of this statement, I have argued in this chapter that Sally Gough, though the bearer of socialist ideology, is excluded from the political arena because of her gender and her maternal role.294 Similarly, Conor Mannion in Dark’s trilogy tries desperately to understand and participate in the history and politics of colonial New South Wales but is ‘relegated’ to her place inside the home as a dutiful wife and mother. In the next chapter, I show how Eleanor Dark’s representations of the mother-figure in The Timeless Land Trilogy mark the beginning of a national obsession with white women mothering in the interests of racial hygiene as the colony of New South Wales is established. Dark’s trilogy links women’s lived bodily experience and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body through the birth of the British colony in the late eighteenth century, with mother-figures in Prichard’s trilogy in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

293 McClintock, Imperial Leather 31. 294 I have primarily used quotations from the first volume of The Goldfields Trilogy because representations of the mother-figure are more numerous and nuanced in this volume compared to the second and third volumes. The ‘recklessly overt’ Labor politics in the last two volumes (referred to by Eric Dark and quoted in the Introduction to this thesis on page 28), dominate the narratives, albeit the mother-figure continues to carry the story-line to the end.

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CHAPTER 6 The Timeless Land Trilogy The Timeless Land (1941), Storm of Time (1948), No Barrier (1953)

In this chapter, I will mainly focus on Conor Mannion, middle-class wife and mother, who struggles against social, political and economic ideologies that contour the categories of ‘goodness’ and ‘health’, confining women to the domestic sphere. Whereas Conor is considered to be property belonging to her husband, I will also explore the character of Ellen Prentice, a convict mother-figure who is under the relentless power of the state in terms of disciplining her body and policing her life. Ellen is a ‘bad’ woman according to the law but she defies this law by her unsettling sexual power and her willingness to exploit it in the interests of her, and her children’s survival. In addition, I will briefly consider some of the Aboriginal mother-figures such as Cunnembeillee and Dilboong who strongly impact on the lives and households of Conor and Ellen. These black mother-figures are testimony to the oppressive power relations encoded in the name of race for Aboriginal women serve both coloniser and convict in the trilogy, including the white mother-figure. Aboriginal women are considered ‘black’ and ‘dirty’ and members ‘of an inferior race’ (NB 32), thus sexual relationships between these women and coloniser/convict are denigrated or denied. Despite the birth of mixed-race children, the black mother-figure is excluded from connection to the coloniser’s emerging social body whose health and ‘regulated fecundity’, white mother-figures like Conor were ‘supposed to ensure’.295 Thus, it is through a discourse on health that I continue to read the mother-figure in this final chapter of this thesis.

Eleanor Dark’s novels The Timeless Land, Storm of Time and No Barrier, set in the early days of Australia’s settlement history, are generally referred to as The Timeless Land Trilogy. The novels:

cover the first twenty-five years of settlement history in the colony of New South Wales, commencing with the arrival of Governor Phillip in 1788 and finishing with the building of a road which crosses the Blue Mountains, in 1813. The trilogy is overtly traditional in form and structure but the novels interweave sub-texts which resist a conventional reading of social history.296

While Eleanor Dark spent 15 years researching official records, documents, letters, journals and survey maps to complete her trilogy, her sub-texts are the fictitious histories of the Mannion and Prentice families—together with some of her Aboriginal characters—interwoven with the historical detail. The trilogy problematises history through this fictional device of writing against the grain by

295 Foucault, History of Sexuality 104. 296 Jenny Noble, ‘The Historical Trilogy’ in Lorna Sage (ed), The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 321.

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focussing on the feminine within a conservative and highly patriarchal cultural tradition. In relation to women’s exclusion from history and politics in the period under review, Dark’s trilogy overcomes this exclusion by reversing gendered accounts of history and by witnessing historical change and political effect through the mother-figure. While Dark ‘cannot escape the relations which structure her difference and desire within the phallogocentric norms of culture’,297 one of the ways she is able to challenge and question these norms of self-definition is through her representations of the mother- figure. Where Dark meticulously reconstructs historical figures such as Governors Philip, Hunter, King, Bligh and Macquarie, her mother-figures, as she states are ‘entirly imaginery’ [sic].298 Through writing the mother-figure back into Australia’s colonial history, Dark addresses this exclusion of women as social subjects in relation to colonial constructions of power and knowledge.

Representations of the fictional mother-figures, however, are complex and equivocal and contribute to the overall moral ambiguity of the trilogy. On the one hand, these imaginary mother- figures provide the author with a literary device through which to negotiate the official record of history without seemingly corrupting the historical monologue as well as succeed as a woman writer in a masculine discipline. Dark could not re-write Australian history, but, by interleaving fact with fiction, she could incorporate a female perspective, expressed through her fictional mother-figures, which would not only be meaningful and specific to women but would provide an alternative history of Australia’s settlement period to counter the overtly masculine view which prevailed at the time of publication. On the other hand, these fictional mother-figures are positioned on the very extreme margins of cultural production and meaning. Nevertheless, their silence and absence produce their own kind of discourse and power which resist the master narrative, even though the convict woman Ellen Prentice meets with a terrible death and middle-class mother-figure Conor Mannion must endure years of unhappiness witnessing cruel acts of violence perpetrated by her husband. Aboriginal mother-figures like Dilboong are doomed from the start not just because she is ‘black’ but because she is considered by her white master to be ‘ugly’ (NB 32) by prevailing standards of racialised feminine beauty. Where Cunnembeillee is the most positive model of motherhood, she too suffers under the relentless workload imposed by her white ‘husband’ and his complete lack of joy for life. I argue that the moral ambiguity demonstrated in my analysis of the mother-figures is brought about by the fear and fascination of racialised and sexualised bodies as women fight for a place within the nationalist discourse.

The female body and history

297 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 107. 298 Dark, The Timeless Land 10.

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In focusing on the discourse on health as a way of reading the maternal body and reinserting her into culture and history, I have been influenced by Moira Gatens’ research on corporeality, ethics and power. Gatens argues that early feminist writings by Firestone and de Beauvoir both proposed the thesis that nature and the body were conceived as outside culture and outside history.299 This split between nature/culture and body/social foregrounds the sex/gender distinction which formed the basis for feminist critiques in the 1970s and was crucial, for example, to Nancy Chodorow’s theories on motherhood.300 ‘This acceptance’, argues Gatens, ‘of the body on the one hand and culture on the other’ where ‘[s]ex is understood to be a fact of bodies [and] gender a socialized addition to sex’ reduces the body to ‘a non-cultural, ahistorical phenomenon’.301 Gatens rejects this model on the grounds that the body is a cultural product subject to and determined by the forces of history and culture. To speak or write of the body is to submit or subject it to language, itself a cultural product. Gatens’ research clears the way to re-present the maternal body not as a product of nature nor as a determinant in the organization of culture but rather as a dynamic product ‘of the way culture organizes, regulates and remakes itself’.302 Through interrogating representations of the mother- figure in this way, the trilogy highlights how the mother-figure is reproduced, regulated and reshaped, inseparably linked to cultural, economic and political changes. Where Gatens’ investigations into the social, political and ethical understandings of sexed bodies and their parallels with corporate bodies goes beyond my own research, her thesis shows the inability of the body politic, which she argues is masculine⎯‘free from the tasks of reproduction, free from domestic work’⎯to countenance difference and disunity.303 In the trilogy, the voice and the body of the white mother-figure represents one type of difference and the convict woman another. Aboriginal women are represented as wholly different. Regardless of the category of difference, the characters of Conor Mannion, Ellen Prentice and Dilboong, consciously or unconsciously, all challenge the body politic. The strategies employed to repel these ‘successive invasions by the excluded’ are instructive and only Conor will survive in the life of the narrative.304

Beyond the narrative, it is significant that the birth of the British colony in New South Wales coincides with the emergence of a population ideology in Western nations in the eighteenth century. This ideology sought to analyse, regulate, and manage the size, composition and health of a nation’s

299 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996) 51. 300 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering. Chodorow rejects the determinism of Freud, arguing that boys and girls do not go through parallel Oedipal processes but that the female continues to derive a sense of identity from the mother. For Chodorow, the psychic roots for the different socialisation of girls and boys are found in the experience of a culture where women continue to bear the major responsibility for the raising and caring of children. Her work has been criticised because she blames the mother-figure for gender inequalities. According to Chodorow, it is the mother-figure who encourages independence in her sons but not in her daughters. 301 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies 51. 302 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies 52. 303 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies 25. 304 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies 25.

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population. While the trilogy recreates the ‘infancy of a nation’ which men like Governor Phillip had ‘nursed’,305 according to Foucault, Governments of the day:

perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. All these variables were situated at the point where the characteristic movements of life and the specific effects of institutions intersected.306

At the centre of this economic and political problem of ‘population’ was the body and specifically ‘the manner in which each individual made use of his sex’.307 The use of the phrase, ‘his sex’ is important because the colony was founded on late Enlightenment (and Eurocentric) ideals of social, political and economic life, advancing ideas of racial, class and gender superiority, which excluded the majority of the colony’s population (convicts, Aborigines, women and children). In the narrative, however, it is specifically the mother-figure’s use of her gender and her body, linked to ideals of feminine behaviour and feminine beauty, that come under scrutiny and must be controlled. The trope of clothing is also important in the trilogy as nakedness is linked to dirt, disorder and sexual licentiousness. Clothing the body is part of the ‘civilising’ mission of colonialisation and signifies chastity, discipline and social order. In the narrative, the naked body is viewed by middle-class white women in particular with ‘horror and disgust’ because it is ‘immodest and disgraceful’ to display the female form (TL 253). There is a fundamental difference in the trilogy, however, in the way the indigene celebrates the female body and its changing shape compared to English women who are fearful and shamed by displays of sexual potency.

The character of Booron, for instance, is charmed by ‘her gently swelling breasts’ (TL 252) and delights in her reflection in Mrs Johnson’s mirror. The character of Mrs Johnson, however, is ‘terrified’ (TL 253) by this scene as Booron parades and practises movements which will enhance ‘her desirableness in the eyes of her husband’ in a culture which rejoiced, discussed and congratulated women on their sexual powers (TL 263). Nakedness, Booron concludes, is a symbol of fear in the white culture and sexual matters must not be spoken of as Mrs Johnson ‘hustled Booron into her dress again’ (TL 253). Thus, it is specifically white woman’s sexual repression, her clean body, her well- clothed appearance and her obedience that will determine whether or not she is a ‘healthy’ and ‘pure’ woman. The bourgeois mother-figure, as represented by Conor Mannion, fight against these determinants and the double standards they obscure, given Conor’s husband’s cruel and contemptuous attitudes towards convicts and servants who sustain Stephen Mannion’s privileged life and meet his every need, including his extra-marital sexual needs. Stephen epitomises conservative, masculine and imperialist ideals of the nineteenth century as the only basis for civilised society. He

305 Dark, The Timeless Land 372. 306 Foucault, History of Sexuality 25. 307 Foucault, History of Sexuality 26.

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believes in the superiority of the white able-bodied male to determine social and political life as well as his right of inheritance and his right to rule. As he states, he cannot leave the colony while ever ‘this place’ remains ‘unmastered’ by men such as himself (ST 188). Mastering labour and land also extends to his wife (his mistress and his servants) who must obey his ideal of what it means to be a respectable woman, a good wife and a healthy mother-figure. He will not tolerate any resistance to what the narrator refers to as his ‘god-like authority’ (ST 83), especially the different ways in which his authority is challenged by women in the narrative.

Healthy and unhealthy bodies figure prominently in the discourses surrounding gender and sexuality in colonial Australia. As suggested already, in her research of female convicts, historian Joy Damousi argues that the language of purity and pollution ‘shaped understandings of femininity, masculinity and sexuality’ on board the convict ships as well as in Australian colonial society.308 Terms such as ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ not only illuminate ‘the ways in which male observers constructed their own sense of themselves as white, male and middle class in relation to convict women’ they were descriptors which reveal ‘the way in which convict women became a particularly potent site of sexual anxiety’.309 In the trilogy, the convict mother-figure Ellen Prentice, for instance, is regarded collectively as one of ‘those depraved and unfortunate women’ (TL 59). Individually she is referred to as ‘a slut’ (TL 285); ‘merely a female body which would be available’ to men such as Stephen Mannion (TL 52). Nevertheless, her youth, her attractiveness and her ‘cool self-possession’ (TL 236) unsettle the ruling class. Significantly, it is her breast milk which is needed to succour his son and thus grants Ellen considerable power making her ‘very much mistress of the situation’ (TL 236). Where Conor seeks to befriend a mother-figure of her own race and Stephen seeks sexual gratification with a white woman who will guarantee her silence, Ellen’s presence and influence within the Mannion household becomes a source of psychological and sexual disquiet.

Women and male violence

In a similar way to convict women, ideas of the racially pure and healthy body, as discussed in Chapter Two of this thesis, are measured against the white able-bodied male that signifies the universal norm. In the narrative, to protect bodily borders between the races, the colonisers represent and vilify the indigenes as ‘naked savages’ (TL 76), ‘untaught, heathen, little better than beasts’, who are considered ‘even lower’ than the convicts (TL 154), in fact ‘the lowest in the scale of human existence⎯no better than Baboons’ (NB 157); ‘repulsive’ (NB 234). Despite the fact that the indigene finds the colonisers similarly ‘quite incredibly ugly’ (TL 38) and the convicts ‘violent, ignorant, and undisciplined, hereditary enemies of order’ (TL 153), these counter-views provide no

308 Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly 4. 309 Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly 4.

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protection against white racism and systemic violence. Aboriginal women in particular are disturbed by what they perceive to be a lack of virility or an androgynous sexuality in white men, asking themselves whether any woman ‘could find joy or pride in lying with such beings?’ (TL 56). It is, however, Bennilong’s wife, Barangaroo, who understands the ultimate threat to her being and her body. As the narrator states:

Not her mind, but her blood denied these pale intruders, not her reason, but her body revolted, as if, already, they had threatened rape. (TL 56)

Rape is, indeed, what Aboriginal women will suffer through colonial contact but it is the white middle-class male who represents himself as contaminated and victimised even though he has forced sexual contact upon these women. Patrick Mannion, heir to his father’s wealth and property is appalled, not at the abuse of his power, but that he has allowed himself to cohabit with an Aboriginal woman, described by his brother as ‘noisome filth’ (NB 242) even though she had been ‘employed’ by his father because she ‘look[ed] clean’ (ST 73). In this instance, inter-racial conception has infringed his bodily rights, rather than the body of the black mother-figure. As the narrator states:

Dilboong, the native girl, Dilboong the black, ugly, awkward, docile member of an inferior race … He had tried to see that business as a man of the world would see it; he was not the first white man to take a native woman for mistress, and he would not be the last. It was a mere incident, and one that was common enough. Yet it continued to trouble him. He, the eldest son of an old, proud, and wealthy family, cohabited with a black heathen not even beautiful; and in a few months his child, a half-caste, would open its eyes upon the world …. (NB 32)

Conor, as a white woman of privilege, can dismiss ‘that business’ as ‘an occurrence which is far from uncommon, and can often claim less excuse than I am able to discern in this instance’ (NB 64), because she, too, as a maternal symbol of colonial power, is implicated in Dilboong’s exploitation. Patrick’s involvement, however, with both convict and Aboriginal women employed in his own home, cannot erase ‘a mere incident’ quite so easily. Initially, mother and child are powerful reminders of his perceived racial and psychological defilement of his body and his pride but in the final stages of the trilogy, these become ‘matters which gave him pause’ (NB 155). As the narrator states, ‘Dilboong and her child confronted him, mutely accusing’ (NB 155; my italics). But not for long, since Dilboong, cast out of her master’s house, will take her own life. Ellen will be hanged, accused of a crime she did not commit. Sexual and emotional abuse, rape, floggings, murder, incarceration, and capital punishment corrupt colonial life where colonial violence is rationalized and gendered. Even the colony itself is described using a metaphor of mutilation or disfigurement; on the brink of festering and infecting the social body. As the narrator states, the settlement ‘looked like a fresh wound’ (TL 62). And in the trilogy, men construct the ideal white bourgeois woman as the embodiment of perfection with the power to heal the ‘wound’ of colonisation.

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The pure and spotless mother-figure

In Dark’s trilogy, in the minds of colonial authority figures, the ideal woman, quarantined from public life, embodies the healing balm which they provide for government officials, military officers, and English gentlemen in their unhappy isolation. On the one hand, these men idealise women as ‘pure and spotless’ (TL 75), linking them to virtue, dignity and domesticity. The character of Lieutenant Clark for instance, believes in ‘the ennobling influence of a pure woman’ and his fellow officers debate ‘the charms and virtues of the ideal woman’ (TL 89) with whom they seek union. On the other, the anti-ideal are women who are ‘lying sluts’, ‘depraved’ (TL 59), ‘damned whores and a disgrace to their sex’ (TL 89), taunting and polluting the lives of these disciplined men. The fact, however, that there are so many abandoned mother-figures and illegitimate children within the first decade of settlement is an indication that there is a considerable sullying of the ideology of feminine purity by the very gentlemen invested in the production and maintenance of the ideal. The character of Governor Hunter ponders the demographic reality in Storm of Time (in the section dated 1799), observing that he ‘found vast numbers of women who, deserted by husbands or lovers, were now a serious problem for the Government stores’ (ST 15). He concludes that he must maintain these women and children ‘with as little expense as possible to the mother-country’ (ST 15). In the narrative, England as the mother-country is represented for the majority of the population as a harsh and rejecting maternal icon, a symbol of inviolable privilege which casts aside those who transgress her laws to an unknown fate in an unknown land. In the context of Australia’s settlement history, as represented in the trilogy, there is a perversion of the maternal metaphor where exploitation is the primary motivation rather than protection.310

In the trilogy, the characterisation of government and official authorities like Hunter, concerned with sexual and gender disorder and race and class dynamics in the Australian colonial context, shows how they sought to impose rules of law and order over sexual and social relations. In the narrative, abandoned mothers, convict mothers, and Aboriginal mothers of mixed-race children represent a highly visible transgression of these laws, even when these women are invisible, unacknowledged or forgotten. There are many examples of ‘depraved’ mother-figures as well as ‘virtuous’ mother-figures who attempt to challenge the laws that bind them. Women’s bodies and the representations and control of women’s bodies are a crucial site of challenge in the trilogy, from the perspective of men who sought to police women and by the women themselves who struggle to break free and participate in the birth of a new social order. Dark represents the character of Conor Mannion as a rich illustration of this struggle whereas the character of Ellen Prentice is shown not to

310 Eleanor Dark argues in her essay commissioned for the sesquicentenary of New South Wales in 1938, ‘the real preoccupation of the “mother-country” was not to develop, but to exploit’. Eleanor Dark, ‘Caroline Chisholm and Her Times’ in Alan W. Baker (ed) The Peaceful Army: A Memorial to the Pioneer Women of Australia 1788-1938 (Sydney: Arthur McGuitly, 1938) 66.

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be concerned with change; only with survival. Nevertheless, it is through the bodies of these two mother-figures, who are the main focus of this chapter, that contradictions of power and knowledge, which otherwise are left unchallenged and unspoken, are interrogated by Dark. Conor, in particular, is shown to attempt to confront the power relationships which control her behaviour and confine her experiences to the repetitious role of mothering and domesticity, confining her to the home in the following ways.

Conor Mannion as a construction of the bourgeois mother-figure

Conor is characterised as a member of the political and cultural hegemony that has produced and championed institutionalised and highly developed forms of patriarchy, including the bourgeois family. She is the beneficiary of hereditary privilege and patriarchal protection because of her birthright. Despite Conor’s social position, it is her lack of freedom and limitation of opportunity that she feels most acutely. She struggles, for instance, to make sense of the links between the institutions of patriarchy (Imperialism, Christianity and the British legal system), and the various forms of oppression she personally experiences and publicly witnesses. Laws are made for women and the lower classes not for men of privilege. Her life is lived against a background of nineteenth-century liberalism based on a man-made dream of equity, with notable exceptions including herself. For instance, Conor’s interest in colonial politics and forms of social and economic ‘misery and degradation’ (ST 102), provoke a sharp rebuke from her husband. He confirms that while she is ‘perfect’ in his eyes and that he will shield her ‘from all such knowledge as could bring the faintest frown to that lovely brow’ (ST 103), he considers her questions aberrant. Thus Conor’s protection and privilege, bestowed by Stephen, are dependent on her conforming to his established standards of feminine propriety. Fixed in her anatomy, the features, attributes and practices that mark her body as feminine, including motherhood are ignorance, restraint, tranquillity, and above all silence. According to Stephen the pursuit of knowledge by women is a sign of abnormality. He is ‘disturbed’ by Conor’s ‘impetuous liveliness, that tendency to chatter, that perverse interest in matters of no concern to a gentlewoman’ (ST 379). Thus, he attempts to impose rules and regulations on the women in his household to maintain his sense of wholeness and integrity. In an age of scientific knowledge and increasing rationality, Conor’s challenge to and disruption of normative foundations of feminine ideals, of binary understandings of bodily difference, racial diversity and public/private space, mark her as deviant.

Dark represents Conor’s evolving resistance to prevailing hegemonic values with Conor’s developing first pregnancy. As Conor’s body is transformed so too are her mental processes as she becomes acutely aware of her ‘ignorance of the world’ which was ‘like a wall through whose chinks she saw only fragments of a bewildering and incomprehensible whole’ (ST 184). As Conor states in Storm of Time, she is surrounded by walls that ‘not only protect me⎯they shut out my view. I’m safe. But I can’t see’ (ST 203). Stephen participates in the cultural construction of those walls to

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ensure that his image of the ideal woman, wife and mother-figure remains in-tact. Conor’s transgressions begin with her first pregnancy and it is through recurring images of sweat and dirt that she completely disorders the ideology of femininity and motherhood in her attempts to participate in the world around her. She has already traversed the clean/unclean boundary that demarcates the binary of power/oppression in the colonial context, through touching (and worse, through smelling), the convict Finn. She equates rebellion with ‘dirt, sweat, rags, the degeneration of unwashed and untended bodies’ (ST 133) which must be separated and incarcerated away from the well-washed and finely-clothed body of the bourgeoisie. She compares her own healthy, well-ordered body to a state of ‘cleanliness through which the convicts moved like an offence⎯like a blasphemy’ (ST 133), defiling her wholesome innocence and privileged place in society and history. This changes, however, during pregnancy and giving birth, bodily states which engender feelings of entrapment and significant physical pain, given the body has been broken into and new life has emerged. Through the sweat and exhaustion of her daughter’s delivery Conor acknowledges, ‘labour, this was work...’ (ST 208) and ponders her own place in history concomitant with the birth of ‘the troublesome, undisciplined infant’ (NB 28) which the colony represented. Dark’s play on the word ‘labour’ with its double meaning of physical exertion and parturition, and her use of maternal similes throughout the narrative, draw attention to the mother-figure’s essential and corporeal contribution to culture and history, albeit marginalised by the time the last volume of the trilogy was published.

The reframing of Australian history to fully include women and their ‘labour’ is inherent in the trilogy. However, it will be many years of political activism before bourgeois women as represented by Conor Mannion are included because of the cultural meaning affixed to her historical representation. Dark emphasises this soma-political issue in the text when she shows Conor’s husband, Stephen, declaring motherhood as sacred and the sole purpose of women’s lives. Stephen insists, for instance, that Conor play the role of a passive, inactive and fragile female during her pregnancy, treating her like ‘something mystically sacred, like an idol’ (ST 183), as he takes control of her changing body. He demands that she not wander unaccompanied from the homestead, that she ‘remain indoors’ and be ‘condemned ... to idleness’ (ST 183). He chooses the books she reads and the conversations she hears, and in so doing controls and adulterates the production of truth and knowledge for a woman’s consumption. Dominant in the public sphere, he also claims superior knowledge in the domestic sphere, despite his declaration that women are born to mother. As the narrator records with the birth of their first child, Stephen now ‘claimed omniscience in the matter of infant welfare as in all other matters’ and when Conor ‘ventured an opinion, gently pointed to the inexperience she could not deny. Her own desires thwarted in relation to their first born, Conor felt that her daughter ‘was a stranger’ (ST 226). Despite the fact that she has wet-nurses and household help to assist with every facet of child rearing and domestic work, she continues to feel a ‘confused unhappiness’ (ST 184). She is trapped not only by walls of ignorance, through her husband’s domination, but also by her bodily confinement due to pregnancy. As the narrator states, she ‘could not subdue the restlessness of her young, healthy body’ (ST 183) but is helpless to resist.

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Approaching motherhood evokes ambivalent feelings, not just towards Stephen, ‘the author of this demanding parasite’ but towards her ‘maternal sanctity’ (ST 183), which has rendered her powerless. Her dreams at this time are about physical and spiritual freedom as she lies ‘thinking of her husband’s convicts’ (ST 184), and endures ‘a strange period of psychological confusion’ (ST 183) that sets in motion a political awakening which will irrevocably sever her marital bonds.

In the second volume of the trilogy, Conor, having given birth, recognises that she must resist institutionalised forms of power which protect but constrain her. Her alignment with and compassion for the convict Finn makes her a woman in touch with her humanity. According to Modjeska, women writers like Eleanor Dark (and Katharine Susannah Prichard) were saying ‘that as women we must keep touch with our humanity: that is what women represent’311 but, as Modjeska argues, this is not enough; women must intellectualise and politicise their own experience. Modjeska states that ‘confronting our own lives must be integrated into the business of our political and intellectual work’312 if women are to effect change. Modjeska goes on to argue that one of the greatest obstacles women writers of this period have had to face in their writing and in their lives is anger, but confronting anger would have involved critiquing the very institutions women accepted and were dependent on.313 Without an adequate feminist theory to frame their anger, it was very difficult for such women to confront the contradictions of their everyday encounters. In the following passage Dark illustrates this point by having Conor rail against the laws, the traditions and the institutions that have defined her and that she herself has accepted and trusted. The potential for other possibilities and for dialogue about different ways of living and working are closed off by these laws and conventions, but it will be several decades before solutions are debated and taken seriously. Conor’s protest may be politically stillborn but her rage and condemnation are significant because it is through the body of the mother-figure, through ‘embodied speech’,314 that the pervasiveness of patriarchy in its many institutionalised forms is highlighted in the following passage. The narrator states that Conor:

bathed Finn’s face and gave him occasional sips of water, and all the while her mind seemed wandering through long corridors of thought, vaguely seeking some ratification by her brain of the emotion so frighteningly aroused in her—condemnation and abhorrence of the whole machinery of her society … She sought the image of a kindly and indulgent grandfather and found his face austere, his voice chilled with rebuke. She invoked justice, and quailed under the cold eye of a bewigged judge, clothed in scarlet and the incomprehensible majesty of the Law. She appealed to religion, and heard the echo of thunder from a hundred pulpits. And yet, strangely, as she fell back denied and denounced by every authority she knew, she found a kind of comfort in her outcast state. She could not refute the only standards which her world

311 Modjeska, Exiles 256. 312 Modjeska, Exiles 256. 313 Modjeska, Exiles 256. 314 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies 26. Gatens argues that ‘[o]ur political vocabulary is so limited that it is not possible, within its parameters, to raise the kinds of questions that would allow the articulation of bodily difference: it will not tolerate an embodied speech’.

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had given her, nor find words even to question them, but she felt a growth of rebellion in her heart which sustained even while it startled her … she was shaken now by the rage of unreasoning conviction with which she could condemn it. They could shriek "felon" at her till her ears were deafened; … they could trumpet the sacredness and the frailty of female reputation, the glory of female obedience, and the inadequacy of female understanding; she would not—for she could not—raise one argument against them. (ST 562-563)

In this passage, Dark links felony and free-thinking through images of contamination as she couples the Irish political prisoner Finn with the wealthy middle-class Conor in their shared misery and ostracism. Their bond is the blood and sweat of resisting bodies which contaminate the political body, the social body and the gendered body. His bodily fluids defile her class and privileges; her tears reject those privileges. Conor appeals to the face of patriarchal power, represented as ‘a bewigged judge, clothed in scarlet’ (ST 562), for understanding. The irony is that there is no justice for a woman who blemishes her reputation, and in so doing, exposes the inequalities of a social and political system she was previously loyal to. She acknowledges her complicity in the construction of ‘the sacredness and the frailty of female reputation the glory of female obedience, and the inadequacy of female understanding’ (ST 563), which she now refuses.

As she offers comfort to the dying Finn, his blood and filth besmear Conor’s skin, her hair and her clothing. She throws into chaos the clean and ordered bodies associated with dominant social and political systems as she is voluntarily befouled and disrobed in the encounter. As a representative of patriarchal power and hegemonic values, Stephen stares in horror at this ‘dirty, dishevelled, disreputable woman’ (ST 565) who is his wife and the mother of his children. The narrator records:

Her gown had been dragged away from one shoulder by the pressure of Finn’s arm; it was dirty, flecked here and there with blood; her hair was in wild disorder, her stockings stained and torn; her face was plain and pallid, her expression dull. (ST 565)

Stephen’s outrage is not just about the defilement of and repugnance for a woman who has fouled her body and social class with the blood and filth of a felon. This public act disturbs his self-image of completeness and domination in the world. Through the physical act of inserting her maternal body between the political body and the social-outcast body, she has defied his rule and all that has hitherto shaped her. In addition, because her hair is dishevelled, her nakedness exposed and her clothing ‘stained and torn’, it implies carnality or whorishness in his wife. Stephen is therefore compelled immediately to ‘re-clothe her in the dignity she had so shamelessly abandoned’ (ST 565). He states: ‘You have disgraced yourself—and me’ (ST 565) by her literally rolling in the dirt with the most despised and feared of social outcasts: the Irish political prisoner. More particularly, she has disordered masculine ideals of femininity and feminine conduct befitting her class and position. So strong is the urge to control and “clothe” women according to these ideals, that years later, Stephen’s eldest son, Patrick, vividly recalls the scene at the same time as he is instructing Conor on the meaning of ‘the civilised world’ (NB 38). The narrator states that:

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lurking in his memory was the shocking, incredible picture of [Conor] … stumbling like a drunken woman across the field … dirty, dishevelled, splashed with the blood of the dead convict, Finn, her feet shoeless, her stockings torn, her hair wild across her white smeared face. (NB 38-39)

Patrick’s sensibilities are ‘embarrassed’ (NB 38) and his class consciousness ‘affronted’ (NB 39) as he remembers the day when Conor ‘polluted’ all that he and his father represented. He cannot erase this image of defilement from his memory and therefore queries Conor’s fitness to mother in terms of understanding what is best for her child.

When Conor buries Finn she thinks of her own Irish mother who also was persecuted because she transgressed the laws of her society, a society which was able to preserve itself by two responses to change—resilience and resistance. Conor’s act of rebellion has the stirrings of feminist protest and even though it cannot be sustained, she demonstrates the way in which motherhood is reshaped and redefined through different forms of resistance and cultural change. I want to turn now to Ellen Prentice, the convict woman employed in the Mannion household, who represents a very different model of motherhood and deviance.

Ellen Prentice as the ‘low convict woman’ (TL 306)

Where Conor Mannion challenges authority by breaking down the barriers between pure and impure bodies, Ellen Prentice must remain pragmatic about enforced sexual relations in a colony and class system that is highly unequal. Not only is there a disproportionate number of men compared to women, but, unlike Conor, she has no bodily rights or the luxury, as a female convict, of being concerned about moral transgressions. As Stephen Mannion’s housekeeper/mistress, her body and his protection are her means of defence against the very harshest forms of oppression given her convict status. Nevertheless, it is the consequence of those sexual relations—motherhood—which represents the greatest threat to her economic and physical security. Ellen’s experience of her second pregnancy, disclosed because of her inability to bear the consequences of a previous night’s orgy of drinking and sexual pleasure, is filled with resentment of ‘the griefs and anxieties of motherhood’ (TL 77). While Conor settles into a second marriage and a happy pregnancy, Ellen’s survival as a working-class mother means living in a world without her own children. She has three children by three different fathers but only knows who fathered one of her children, Andrew Prentice, her estranged husband and the father of her first born, Johnny. Johnny states that his mother on the one hand was ‘his place’, but on the other ‘she was merely the first authority in that monstrous hierarchy which had oppressed his childhood’ (ST 213). Her hard mothering does not invite warmth or hope and, in this instance, there is a perversion of the maternal symbol with its associations of intimacy and love. Ellen curses the burden of her children and is seemingly indifferent to their fates. As the narrator states, Ellen had ‘never regretted’ the disappearance of her first child, abandoned for a time by his mother, but who then, like her husband, ‘had just vanished’ (ST 45). It is the prevention of motherhood which Ellen

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truly rejoices in, describing her situation as an ‘unbounded relief’ because ‘no pregnancy had resulted from her association with Mannion’ (TL 312). It is absence and infertility that reward Ellen with physical beauty, sexual power and socio-economic security rather than the reverse.

In her discussions of convict women and the theme of abandonment, Damousi argues that absence or depravity was synonymous with a woman’s ‘flight from femininity’ because the ‘wandering’ life ‘was often conflated with freedom of choice, especially in sexuality’.315 Ellen has no desire to leave her master’s service because of the ‘advantages’ inherent in being ‘Stephen Mannion’s mistress’ (TL 312). However, the fact that it would be easy for her to find another protector does give her choice and ‘an influence over him’ (TL 312) he finds disturbing. As the narrator states, Ellen ‘was very conscious of her power’ (TL 311) for she:

recognised quite clearly that she was using [Stephen Mannion] quite as much as he was using her, as she saw their relationship as a wary contest to see which would win the greater advantage from the other. (TL 312)

Ellen’s position within the Mannion household is therefore a source of considerable apprehension as neither Stephen or Conor can penetrate Ellen’s indifference to their mastery over her body and her brain. Ellen is virtually mute in their presence and there are several references throughout the narrative to her ‘cool self-possession’ (TL 236) and her ‘cold and empty civility’ (ST 123) which infuriates Stephen, and which Conor finds forbidding. The fact that Stephen’s son has been nurtured on the breast milk of ‘a woman so obviously immoral and abandoned’ is a fact from which ‘he could never recover’ (TL 237). Nevertheless, for nine years, prior to his marriage to Conor, he has cohabited/‘debased’ himself with this ‘low convict woman’ (TL 306), conveniently ignoring the reality that Ellen has raised his two sons and run his household. So potent is the theme of gender, contamination and class consciousness in this colonial setting that Stephen questions whether he has forfeited his right to return to his ancestral home and aristocratic family because of this relationship. As the narrator queries:

Was he, contaminated by long and shameful association with a depraved woman, to return to his gracious home among the trees in Ireland, to kiss the cheek of his mother, to pollute the pure air which his young sisters breathed? … was he, who had lived among its infamies, shared its squalor and its sordidness, now fit for any better life? (TL 306)

Specifically, Stephen characterises the feminine as that which paradoxically pollutes and purifies and it is along the borders of clean/unclean bodies that class (and race) divisions are drawn. Ellen recognises the difference when she states that unkempt and inebriated Stephen seemed like ‘a mere man, not very different from others she had known’, whereas ‘[d]ressed with care, shaved, brushed, and sober, he became a gentleman again’, and as a result, ‘a gulf opened between them ‘ (TL 311).

315 Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly 158.

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Ellen’s resistance to the dominion over her body takes the form of remaining silent and unresponsive to Stephen’s use of her body and Conor’s need for her domestic skills. It is her lack of verbal and physical response that are her weapons against exploitation. Even in the end, it is Ellen’s silent power that holds sway. As the narrator records in relation to Stephen’s murder, it is his son and heir who now ‘obeyed the command in the eyes of a convict woman’ (NB 31-32), whose ‘fierce, challenging demand’ (NB 32) defies the laws that govern her being as she wills her own death for the sake of saving her son. These very private moments, filled with ambiguity and tension, are where, according to Damousi, broader cultural and social meanings are illuminated rather than at the public level of political and military display.316 And it is precisely at the level of the “depraved” female body that colonial relationships are shaped and defined.

The mother-figure in past and present Australian society

As Dark re-presents the social history of Australia’s settlement history through the mother- figure, she also makes connections with mother-figures of her own period when she is writing and publishing her trilogy. The narrator states for instance, that Conor:

felt the movement of her child, and for the first time saw her motherhood not as a personal matter but as a link between the present and the future. Would this land speak to her children⎯her grandchildren⎯her great-grandchildren? (ST 200)

Motherhood is aligned with women’s growing self-consciousness of their own identity and place in a transforming society. Given the international crises occurring at the time of the Second World War when Dark was writing her trilogy, identity and place also became serious concerns for the predominant race of white Australians. Australians were now themselves threatened by a Japanese foreign invasion and the possibility of having to survive within it and resist it. Through the pure/impure body of the mother-figure the trilogy provides a replay of issues surrounding identity and place against a background of contemporary and current social and political upheaval. The similarity between the 1940s and the novels’ setting in the 1780s is the breakdown of tradition and convention due to uncontrollable socio-political forces. Colonisation, for instance, had shattered conventions and rules as bodies intermingled and cohabited and felon became free settler and a colony became a country. As the narrator states:

Not the least tormenting aspect of this fantastic community was the manner in which all social values were upset, and contradictions which challenged all accepted conventions a daily commonplace. (ST 271)

316 Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly 172.

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This description of a ‘fantastic society’ could as well be applied to Australia during the early 1940s when the first volume of the trilogy was published. Sexual practices in a time of war broke time- honoured codes and taboos concerning courtship, marriage, and social behaviour. It is well recognised, as Marilyn Lake argues, ‘[t]hat thousands of Australian women did try foreign pleasures in the 1940s in the form of sexual relationships with American servicemen’.317 Where venereal disease escalated during this time, there were local fears relating to a different kind of sexual ‘infection’ surrounding black men in American military uniforms and their liaisons with white Australian women.318 In addition, American slang, film and dance now seduced and invaded a deeply conservative nation. As women worked in trades and management and went on strike to demand equal wages and better conditions for female workers, the war held out the promise of radical change and opportunity for women but this was never fully realised.

Similarly, even though feminist issues are raised through Dark’s representations of the maternal body they collapse and fade as the trilogy progresses. The character of Conor, for instance, embodies two opposing states of being, that of power and of oppression. Her power is ascendant in, but not necessarily confined to, the mothering sphere. As Conor states, motherhood has brought her ‘at least some semblance of authority and independence’ (ST 225) but it is dependent on and subordinate to the same institutionalised forms of power that oppress women. I have argued here that Dark’s trilogy draws attention to her own era and to a similar confinement of women to the private sphere of home duties and child-raising as women are relegated back to the home as society restructures and reshapes itself. White middle-class women, as characterised by Conor, were consigned to an apolitical domestic space in the first half of the twentieth century. Where Conor resigns herself to the ‘busy life which she had so ardently desired’ (NB 314), birthing and raising children, her attempts to politically and intellectually impact on a society in formation have failed. Her protests against social injustice and political cruelty stem from her own unhappy marriage and foreshadow a feminist perspective on gender, class and race which emerged in advanced industrial nations like Australia from the early 1970s when motherhood and the family became key feminist issues. Both trilogies then, have illustrated my argument that the mother-figure has ceased to challenge and destablise the ideology of motherhood which naturalised and mythologised women’s sexual, social and political role in the period when the last volumes of the trilogies were published.

317 Lake, ‘Female Desires: The meaning of World War II’ in Gender and War 66. 318 Saunders, ‘In a cloud of lust: Black GIs and sex in World War II’, in Gender and War 181.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis has argued that by bringing together two branches of inquiry—the literary commentary 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 key 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—can be understood. The novels analysed, written and published in the first half of the twentieth century, was a time when it was considered to be a woman’s duty to mother. Controlling women’s bodies according to national ideologies is not a new phenomenon but, in Australia in this period, specific political and social events converged on the female body to coerce white women to mother. I have therefore considered historical, political and social debates while simultaneously engaging socio- feminist theories to produce a systematic reading of the ten novels contained in the thesis. In particular, I have made reference to theories on purity and pollution whereby ‘pure’ bodies are invested with traits of health, fertility and morality and ‘impure’ bodies are marked as unhealthy, flawed and deviant. My argument is that the discourse on health—which sought to separate women as ‘the sex’ rather than as citizens and restrict their sexual and social role to one of maternity—was of crucial importance to the progress and protection of a young Australia.

Central to women’s work and place within the family was the ideal mother-figure who, amongst other things, was healthy, white and fertile. Ideology is inextricably linked with power in all its aspects, thus the ideology of motherhood acts as a mechanism of power to maintain existing relationships of power, but it is not static. The novels analysed in this thesis demonstrate that this ideology has been constructed and manipulated, reinvented and challenged, in the period under review, to support the conservative ideas of a patriarchal hegemony. Nevertheless, political pressures and social conventions have kept the mother-figures (and women in general) ever vigilant about their bodies and their behaviours, conforming to—but also resisting—the idealised notion of the pure and fertile white female body.

Representations of the mother-figure in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century are currently under-researched, particularly in the light of the mother-figure’s very visible presence in forms of mainstream culture such as film, advertising, and radio serials of the day. In these cultural texts, the mother-figure is invariably an icon of health and goodness, ignoring racial and individual differences. The period under review was a time of widespread social and political upheaval and held out the promise of significant change for women with the expectation that this would be reflected in both the reality and the representation of women’s lives. However, this is not the case, as motherhood continued to define women and their social role. Birthing and nurturing children and the family were at the centre of women’s work.

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This would seem to be a private and domestic affair. In Australia, however, it has been very much a political and public concern. The control of women’s bodies by patriarchal cultural traditions has a long history. There are, however, historical, political and social concerns which converge on the body of the mother-figure, which were unique to western nations such as Australia. These include eighteenth-century theories on population control which coincided with the settlement of New South Wales and the decline of the birthrate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when Australia was about to become a Federation. As feminist historians have shown, the white maternal body was essential to the new nation at a time when the Constitution could not contemplate the black mother-figure. Policing and controlling women’s bodies to mother and behave in culturally expected ways demanded forms of surveillance and discipline in order for women to fulfil their national duty.

As I have shown, the discourse on health, which binds women to their bodies, is fundamentally rooted in anxiety. It promoted an ideal of white motherhood based on purity, sanity and goodness which serves to confine women not only to a specific model of motherhood but also attempts to limit women to their role of reproduction. It was a discourse that found currency throughout British Imperialist history and, historically, has had particular resonance for an emerging young nation like Australia which sought to protect its external borders with an Anglo-Australian population in the event it was invaded by its northern (and Asian) neighbours. Protecting its internal borders from racial ‘contamination’ proved much more difficult given the sexual exploitation of black women by white men in the period under review. In addition, coinciding with the formation of an Australian identity in the first half of the twentieth century through Australia’s participation in two world wars, the emergence of the aesthetic movement known as modernism at this time had a significant impact on Australian women artists. I have argued that writers such as Prichard and Dark were alert to and interested in this movement, albeit in very different ways. Writers and painters who expressed their work through ‘modern’ techniques were criticised for infecting or corrupting the purity of established traditions of Australian art. Thus, I argue that the discourse on health operates on several levels in the thesis; on the bodies of women, on the roles they performed and on their creative work.

Motherhood and mothering have become increasingly important areas of scholarship in Australia during the writing of this thesis. One hundred years after Federation, the issues of health and women’s bodies are again on the political agenda as a 2004 Australian Federal election issue with the promise of financial rewards if women would only mother and have more children. Given that socio-feminist theories in the twenty-first century challenge the core notion of the ideology of motherhood that it is a woman’s natural and inevitable destiny to bear and rear children, persuading women to mother can no longer rely on these arguments. What Australian literature will have to say about the mother-figure over the next decades is yet to be written. However, one of the legacies of

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Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark is the way in which their novels explore the complexity and richness of a culture through their representations of the maternal body which continue to resonate today.

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