University of Wollongong Thesis Collections University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Year 1996 Odysseus unbound and Penelope unstable: contemporary Australian expatriate women writers Karen Ruth Brooks University of Wollongong Brooks, Karen Ruth, Odysseus unbound and Penelope unstable: contemporary Aus- tralian expatriate women writers, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, Department of English, University of Wollongong, 1996. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/1371 This paper is posted at Research Online. ODYSSEUS UNBOUND AND PENELOPE UNSTABLE: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN EXPATRIATE WOMEN WRITERS A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY from THE UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by KAREN RUTH BROOKS, B.A. (Honours) Department of English December 1996 DECLARATION I certify that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for a degree to any other university or institution. The work contained in this thesis is my own work except where otherwise indicated. Karen R. Brooks, B.A. (Honours) 13th December 1996 TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 111 ABSTRACT IV -VI INTRODUCTION Transience versus Permanence and the Female Expatriate Writer 1-31 CHAPTER ONE Expatriation and the Schizonational Subject: A Psychoanalytical Interpretation 32 - 73 CHAPTER TWO Travelography - The discourse of Self-Begetting: Charmian Clift and Mermaid Singing 74 -129 CHAPTER THREE Peeling the Lotus: Ambivalence and the Female Expatriate 130 -176 CHAPTER FOUR Through the Looking Glass: Dislocation and Cerebral Cartography in The Bay of Noon 177 - 224 CHAPTER FIVE Interrogating the Limen: Terrestrial and Psychological Oppositions in The Transit of Venus 225 - 270 CHAPTER SIX Odysseus Unbound: Singing with the Sirens - Liminality and Stasis in Dancing on Coral 271 •313 CHAPTER SEVEN Signifiers and Signified - The Identity Crisis: Movement, Memory and Lexical Play in Longleg 314 -354 CONCLUSION 355 •363 BIBLIOGRAPHY i -xviii ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my appreciation to the following for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. To Dr Paul Sharrad and Professor James Wieland for their scrupulous attention to detail and patience. To Dr Sara Warneke for her special friendship, timely advice and encouragement. To Frances Gladwin for being there. I would also like to thank my fellow postgraduates at the University of Wollongong, in particular, Greg Ratcliffe, who convinced me, with his unshakeable faith, that this could be done. To my colleagues in the Arts Program at Sunshine Coast University, whose continual emotional and physical support was unequivocal and generous in the extreme. I would especially like to thank my dear colleague, Dr Sally Scott, whose multiple readings, meticulous commentary, and sense of humour will take years to repay. I would also like to thank my grandmother Eva Meyer, an expatriate herself, whose love and doubt gave me the strength to damn well continue down this sometimes rocky path. Most of all, however, I wish to express my eternal indebtedness and love to my partner in everything, Stephen Brooks, and my children, Adam and Caragh, who all proved that sacrifices are worthwhile and that to be unwaveringly supportive is a rare virtue indeed. ill ABSTRACT By examining the selected fiction of three prominent expatriate Australian women writers: Shirley Hazzard, Charmian Clift, and Glenda Adams, I analyse the expatriate experience generally, and advance a particular pattern of representation common to these writers. Their work evokes the liminality and ambivalence of the expatriate and "rewrites" the Homeric legend by giving an active and mobile prominence to Penelope figures. In exploring the psychological and physical dilemmas expatriation entails, they all disrupt generic literary forms (quest, romance, travelogue) and call into question systems of meaning from cultural conventions to language itself. Expatriate fiction juxtaposes dynamism and stasis. The expatriate can experience both the need to articulate collective truths which stability and conviction allow, and the individual psychological harm that the inability to express these generates. Signifiers become arbitrary; nationality, land, chronology, temporal and spatial verities, and even gender, are all disturbed in the nomadic lives portrayed in the fiction of Clift, Hazzard, and Adams. The principal method of the thesis is a close textual analysis of the various works of Clift, Hazzard and Adams, with some consideration of their different spatial and psychological relations with the country of their birth. This is informed by selected postcolonial and feminist theories. By also using the theories of Lacan as a useful heuristic for investigating the nuances and iv unconscious designation of language and cultural identification, I establish an expatriate theory. This argues for the importance of a liminal discourse which I call Femination, a juncture that transcends physicality, culture, and gender without seeking to dominate any position, and as such is polemically situated against, while simultaneously embracing, the concept of "nation" which is masculine (imperial), colonising, and exclusive. v INTRODUCTION TRANSIENCE VERSUS PERMANENCE AND THE FEMALE EXPATRIATE WRITER I realise that some people would argue that by leaving Australia I had surrendered my birthright to comment on it ... I would reject that notion. I argue that instead of being in a disadvantaged position I am in a very privileged one by virtue of being born into one culture, knowing it intimately and then moving on to experience another. This I believe should put me in the position to say something relevant about Australian society with the possibility of seeing Australian values in relation to the values of another society and culture.1 Tell me where you live, and I'll tell you who you are.2 The relationship between Australian culture, national identity, and expatriation is a long and often antithetical one. From the time of Australia's first white settlement, right up until the mid 1900s, England, and later America, were considered logical destinations for Australian writers or artists — a means of testing their worth against an international yardstick and of gaining financial returns.3 In 1899, Henry Lawson advised "any young Australian writer whose talents have been recognized... [to] seek London, Yankeeland, or Timbuctoo — rather than stay in Australia till his genius turned to gall."4 Even though this shift from colonial province to 1 Anna Rutherford, "Not One Of the Jacks," Westerly, 32A (December, 1987): 16. 2 Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, London: Phoenix House, 1995, 271. 3 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, London and New York: Longman, 1988, 135-6. 4 Henry Lawson, '"Pursuing Literature' in Australia," The Portable Henry Lawson, edited by Brian Kiernan. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976, 210. Throughout this thesis there are numerous quotations from writers and critics who have employed "he" as a universal expression for both genders. Whilst Lawson, in the above quote, undoubtedly meant a male, Lacan, the principal theorist used in this 1 western metropolis was culturally sanctioned, it was not unproblematic. Australia's relationship to England, for example, was complicated by firm political, national and cultural allegiances between the two countries. The expatriate's (and, indeed, the resident Australian's) antipodean identity was rendered insignificant by the larger and more "authentic" British one, creating a type of cultural (and national) schizophrenia:5 a sundering of loyalties and self-identification. The fiction of early expatriate writers (such as Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead) reveal the conflict within the subject over juxtaposed sites of identification and torn loyalties. The writings often describe the cultural pull both towards England and away from Australia, and the heterogenous desires of the subject and the drives these geo-political movements set in motion. Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, is an example of the type of psychological fracturing that the dislocated and expatriated subject experiences. For Mahony, there is no firm sense of the self because there is no one space he can identify with in either England or Australia. His neither/nor geographical identity results in a psychological dislocation as well. His condition is shared by other Australian expatriates and interrogated in their fiction. thesis also (but not exclusively) uses "he." I am conscious of the problematics of such a usage, I have not used "sic" to designate my awareness, rather, I have maintained the integrity of the selected quotations. While I am aware of the debate surrounding Lacan's phallocentrism (see footnote 34, page 13), and the problematics in general of using the male gender as a universal example, I have still chosen to retain the problematic "he". However, I wish to signal that in this thesis the use of a generic "he," in any quotations, signals both male and female subjects. 5 Rickard, 135. 2 Stephen Alomes describes Australian intellectual and artistic life from the late 1800s to at least the 1980s as an impossible dialectic, where the artist was either "unloved" at home and/or ignored as a pretentious colonial overseas: Australian writers and radical intellectuals felt themselves falling between the two uncultured cliffs: the smugness of the Establishment, the colonisers, who could only understand culture guaranteed