TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2-38 1. Obscene ecstasy: Interactions between seeing men and blind women in The Architect, The Blind Eye, Transplanted and Miranda 39-87 2. Looking (im)properly: Women objectifying men’s bodies in Last of the Sane Days, Miranda and The Architect 88-137 3. Different ways of seeing and knowing? Psychic abilities and homeopathy in The Blind Eye and The Architect 138-170 4. Happily (n)ever after: The (im)possibilities of equitable heterosexuality in The Blind Eye, Last of the Sane Days, Transplanted and Machines for Feeling 171-210 5. How to survive (without) a shipwreck: Explorations of feminism, postmodernism and the perception/construction of men’s bodies in Miranda 211-248 Conclusion 249-260 Works Cited 261-286 1 Introduction How to praise a man? She cannot vow His lips are red, his brow is snow, Nor celebrate a smooth white breast While gazing on his hairy chest; And though a well-turned leg might please, More often he has knobbly knees; His hair excites no rapt attention – If there’s enough of it to mention. She cannot praise his damask skin, Still less the suit he’s wrapped it in; And even if he’s like Apollo To gaze upon, it does not follow That she may specify the features That mark him off from other creatures. No rime can hymn her great occasion But by a process of evasion; And so she gives the problem over, Describes her love, but not her lover, Despairs of words to tell us that Her heart sings his magnificat. [Dorothy Auchterlonie, “A Problem of Language” 79] As Auchterlonie’s poem asserts, there are more generally recognised and accepted ways of praising or even describing a woman’s body than a man’s. Theorists like Susan Bordo (Male 19) and Maxine Sheets-Johnston align this literary dissimilarity with more widespread cultural conventions, with Sheets-Johnston declaring that, “Within cultural practice generally, a male body is not anatomised nor is it ever made into an object of study in the same way as female bodies” (cited in Bordo, Male 19). Moreover, the terms that are used to praise a man’s body have a very different tenor and implications when compared to those commending a woman’s beauty. While she is aligned with passive, stationary and generally fragile objects (like the hourglass or porcelain) he is virile, muscly or strong – terms that refer not so much to his appearance as to the manifestation of his body’s power. Even handsome, a word frequently used to describe male (usually facial rather than bodily) attractiveness, additionally connotes something well-made or skilfully executed, thus suggesting ability or achievement rather than rather than a state passively or fortuitously endowed. 2 The dissimilarity in available descriptors for men’s and women’s bodies, as well as their different nature, arises because “A Problem of Language,” as Auchterlonie puts it, is always a problem – and a question – of power. The idea that men (and more particularly, white men) have historically and culturally controlled the means of representation is a common and generally accepted feminist argument. A manifestation of such control relating specifically to the dissimilarities between available and utilised descriptions of men’s and women’s bodies is that, in controlling the means of representation, men have been able to align themselves with the mind, while associating women with the devalued realm of the body.1 Discussion of this division is particularly prevalent in analyses of visual culture, where the idea that men look, while women are looked at, is frequently described.2 Peter Brooks notes the applicability of this division to fiction, asserting “vision is typically a male prerogative, and its object of fascination the woman’s body, in a cultural model so persuasive that many women novelists don’t reverse its vectors” (88). More recently, however, the increased visibility of men’s bodies in popular arenas has challenged this general demarcation. This book investigates this reversal as it is manifested in a selection of contemporary Australian women’s fiction. Specifically, I will argue that interactions between male characters’ bodies and female characters’ gazes function, in complex ways, both to confirm and to challenge patriarchal constructions of masculinity and the male body.3 Auchterlonie’s poem led me to wonder how contemporary Australian women writers describe men’s bodies. Since her poem was originally published in 1967, has the new visibility of men’s bodies in popular culture influenced their depiction in literature by women writers? To address this question, I spent a number of months in the Fryer Library (the Australian literature collection at the University of Queensland) consulting every novel by an Australian woman published between 1990 and 2002. What I found largely supported Auchterlonie’s observations: although there are male characters in almost every 1 For an excellent discussion of this division, and a summary of its different treatments in feminist debates, see Bordo’s introduction to Unbearable Weight (1-23). 2 John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” are often identified as foundational statements and explorations of this division. 3 These last two sentences unreflectively employ a number of terms integral to this book: namely, and on the one hand, contemporary, Australian, women and fiction, and on the other, patriarchy, masculinity and the male body. None of these terms is simple, and all will be variously problematised, unpacked, justified and explained as this Introduction progresses. 3 work – as Jane Miller points out, “women have always written about men” (9) – their bodies are almost completely absent. While facial features as well as general size and comportment are frequently described and used as aspects of characterisation, male characters’ bodies are rarely depicted in any particular or extensive way. Male characters are accordingly peripheral to the central focus of such fictions, namely, the desires, struggles and triumphs of female characters. This scarcity of detailed descriptions of male characters’ bodies in Australian women’s fiction, and the peripheral nature of such characters, is reflected in critical discussions of women’s writing generally. Until recently, there have been virtually no analyses of representations of men’s bodies in women’s writing. In the last few years, critical works such as Tanis Macdonald’s assessment of Lorna Crozier’s “Penis Poems,” and John Stout’s analysis of the depictions, by nine contemporary French women poets, of men’s bodies through a reworking of the Renaissance blason, suggest both a critical and a fictional change, one which this study intervenes in and investigates. In terms of the broader issue of male characters, assertions regarding their peripheral role in women’s fiction are a significant element of what little criticism there is concerning the phenomenon. It is, for example, a tendency described in many of the essays in Men by Women (see, especially, Kort 189; Poovey 40; Rogers 10, 22), and a central tenet of Helena Eriksson’s Husbands, Lovers, and Dreamlovers (an investigation of men in women’s fiction of the 1970s) and of Miller’s Women Writing About Men (an analysis of male characters in women’s fiction from the early nineteenth century to the early 1980s). In all of these critical works, men in women’s fiction are shown to function not as fully delineated characters, but as nominal figures in the heroine’s world (fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, lovers) and as symbols, embodiments of choices or tests she must confront.4 The peripheral nature of male characters in women’s writing particularly contrasts with the often central position of female characters in men’s writing. For instance, Ben Knights notes that, “frequent[ly] … male novelists have preoccupied themselves with a female protagonist. … Women 4 See also Ursula K. le Guin (8) and Nainsi-Jean Houston (9). Alternatively, Gloria G. Fromm describes men in Dorothy Richardson’s fictions not as fully developed characters, but as a means by which the author “offered her own distinctive version of the critical questions human beings have always asked about the nature of their existence” (171). 4 novelists have been much less forward in volunteering to speak for men’s experience” (135; see also Segal, Slow ix). In analyses of Australian women’s fiction, male characters are similarly peripheral, and are predominantly discussed in order to explore the heroine’s character.5 The different gendering of author and character is rarely noted, and references to male characters overwhelmingly focus on their negative qualities, particularly their ill-treatment of female characters.6 A possible reason for this relative absence of fictional and critical attention to male characters and their bodies in women’s writing in the Australian context, may be the noted desire and tendency of women writers and critics since the mid-1970s through to the early 1990s (a timeframe generally associated with the influence of second-wave feminism in Australia) to concentrate on women’s experiences and bodies in an effort to redress their traditional silencing and/or disparagement in patriarchal literature and history.7 More generally, as Lynne Segal points out, in contrast to books focusing on the experiences of, for instance, female, black or gay characters, the construction of white men as “universal” subjects means that, when they are the subject of a novel, it is rarely “classified as such” (Slow ix). Although women writing men is not a generally recognised category in literary analysis, some women writers (Australian and other) are noted for making male characters – fully delineated figures with, but not defined by, their negative qualities – central to their fictions. George Eliot is a frequently cited example (Knoepflmacher 133-134; Todd, “Introduction” 3; Wallace, “Ventriloquizing” 322), and Steven Cohan has discussed Iris 5 All of the essays in Elizabeth Jolley adopt this approach, as does Kerryn Goldsworthy’s discussion of Helen Garner’s fiction.