'A Pale Expectancy': Female Mobility and the Post-War Space in the novels of Jessica Anderson, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower
NAOMI RIDDLE
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
UNSW Submitted for examination August 2014 ORIGINAUTY STATEMENT
'I heteby declare that U.S Slbnission is my own WOI1< and 10 !he best of my knowledge rt ccnlaCls no materials previously pul)lis/led 01 wntton by 8I"IC4he< pettOII, 01 - proportions of ma!enal wfjch have been acx:epled fOt the IIWIId of any - degae 01 di>Joma at UNSW 01 any - educatiOIIal llSb!Wln, except whant ckJe aaa-1edgemett is made 11 !he thesis. Arty CCII1tlb.cocn made 10 !he researth by othet$. with v.tlom I have worked al UNSW 01 elsewtlere, is elq)ilcitly ad Signed . ~ ...... 0 81& ..~ .~/.9.f.h ~ .. :...... COPYRIGHT STATEMENT 'I hereby grant the Unive<$~Y of New South wales or ~s agents the nghl to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libreries in all forms of media, OON or here after known, subject to the provisions of the~~ 1968 I retain all proprietary r9Jts, such as patent ~ts I also retain the <%tot to use in tw.e wor1 Signed ~ ..... '" ... "' '" '" •...... Date .1.':'!.b~../.!S:...... AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT 'I certify that the Libral'f depos~ digital oopy is a direct equivalent of the final offocially approved version ol my thesis. No emendation of content has occured and K there are any minor variations in fonnatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.' Sopd .. ~ ...... Date .!.1./.' .t!.1. I.L ...... '" "' ...... ABSTRACT This thesis will align the work of the three Australian women writers Jessica Anderson (1916-2010), Elizabeth Harrower (b.1928) and Shirley Hazzard (b. 1931) within the frame of post-war modernity. Their representation of space and place will be examined in order to reveal the implications of a disintegrating public and public divide, resulting in the reconfiguration of notions of female agency, mobility and gender relations. Therefore, this thesis will push Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard outside a specifically Australian context, instead focussing on a more international and large-scale preoccupation in twentieth century modernity: the female subject’s negotiation of the new spatial frames opened up in the post-war space. In order to chart this preoccupation, the thesis moves from a discussion of the construction of global space, movement and transportation, to the city-space and topographical memory, finally contracting to the representation of the house, ending with the claustrophobic and fractured domestic space. The motif of an unstable public/private divide, a modern in- between space, will recur across the thesis in order to expose a distinctive preoccupation by all three writers with a contradictory and multiplicitous female subjectivity – one that offers both mobility and freedom on the one hand, and a pervading sense of anxiety and stasis on the other. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have done this without the support of my family, especially my parents, Kate and Kevin Riddle. Nor would this thesis have been possible without the continuing guidance and encouragement from my supervisors, Assoc. Prof. Elizabeth McMahon and Assoc. Prof. Brigitta Olubas. I am extremely grateful for the support, motivation and invaluable feedback given by both of them across my candidature. Both Assoc. Prof. McMahon and Assoc. Prof. Olubas have had a huge impact on shaping my ability to think critically and independently, whilst also showing me the value of this kind of careful and thorough work. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the support offered by Maddie Barton, Lorraine Burdett, Dr. Laura Joseph and Mia Pinjuh throughout my candidature, and in particular, Benjamin Pritchard and Tim Bruniges, for taking the time to proof-read final drafts, often at very late notice. I would also like to take this opportunity to express gratitude towards the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) for their continued support of postgraduate students. ASAL has not only provided a forum for presenting and receiving feedback on research throughout my candidature, but also provided me the opportunity to be a Postgraduate Representative and gain invaluable experience within the organisation. CONTENTS Introduction 1 PART I: The Globe Chapter 1 23 Masses in Motion Chapter 2 55 Refracting the Gaze: Shirley Hazzard and writing the globe PART II: The City Chapter 3 82 Memory-place: the City-space Chapter 4 118 The Tight-Rope Dancers: Jessica Anderson’s Sydney, from the shop to suburbia, and the space in-between PART III: The House Chapter 5 148 The Space Within: Retreat to the house Chapter 6 178 Turning Inward on Himself: Male hysteria in Elizabeth Harrower’s empty houses Epilogue 204 Works Cited 208 INTRODUCTION ‘I have set myself on a course. Don’t divert me. Don’t upset my balance. I mustn’t fall off my rope’ Jessica Anderson, ‘The Milk’ in Stories from the Warm Zone (1987), p. 128 ‘It could indeed be demonstrated that the Second World War, though fought in the name of national values…brought an end to the nation as a reality: it was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed.’ Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ (1986), p. 188 ‘At the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one’, who was so called because she strangled all those who could not answer her riddle: female sexuality, womanhood out of control, lost nature, loss of identity.’ Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (1991), p. 7 Women writers across post-war modernity occupy a specific place in history, caught between the advent of early twentieth-century women’s suffrage and the second wave of feminism, occupying neither a specifically demarcated modernist or post- modernist period, instead often oscillating between the distinctions of both categories. The phrase ‘post-war space’ is used here, and deployed across this thesis, in order to incorporate the radical shift and reshaping of geography and mobility in a post- Holocaust and post-Hiroshima globe, in particular the new sense of agency and movement that was opened up for the female subject, a specific historical juncture that exists in-between feminist movements. Whilst this space is inevitably connected to the anxieties surrounding the Cold War, the jarring of political ideologies, and the reshaping of boundaries across Europe and Asia, the term post-war allows for the inclusion of shifts in the everyday, changes in living-space and routine. It is a space that gestures to the rapidly disintegrating public and private divide across the globe of late modernity, the overlapping between the very public ideological conflicts of the Cold War, mass mobility and transit, with domesticity, the interior and the household. As this space anticipates the rapid closing up of distance, the work of Australian post-war writers, positioned on the periphery, as outliers of Anglophone literature, provides a distinctive lens with which to (re)configure and (re)appraise the construction of the transitory spaces of post-war modernity, and their relation to the female subject. In order to examine women’s post-war literature, this thesis draws upon Australian literary critic Susan Sheridan’s claim that it is ‘possible to think of modernism 1 as a continuing project of responding to modernity, a project that includes both the Cold War debates and the postmodern movement.’1 Taking up this contention about the continuing project of modernism aligns this dissertation with the contemporary reframing of the parameters of modernism and the modernist project, which seeks to incorporate the tenets of modernism (experimentation with form, the disruption of temporality and space, a multiplicitousness) with works from across the twentieth century. Sheridan argues for the contradictory position that is specific to post-war women writers, as they oscillate between the public and private: [They are both] caught up in the massive changes that [take] place in everyday life brought about by the spread of post-war consumerism and media culture, and intellectuals who share with others concerns about nationalism versus internationalism, artistic modernism versus realism, and the political responsibilities of artists in a post-Holocaust and post- Hiroshima world.2 It is this contradictory position that suggests how the post-war woman writer’s construction of modern space is distinctive, and what the consequences are for the female subject negotiating the unstable point between spheres: the public, the private; the political, the domestic; the urban and the suburban. As Sheridan suggests, ‘if ‘post- war modernity’ is understood in terms of both everyday life and the war of ideas, then women writers are positioned on the fulcrum of these two forces.’3 This thesis will chart the preoccupation with the space of post-war modernity in the novels of Australian authors Jessica Anderson (1916-2010), Elizabeth Harrower (b. 1928) and Shirley Hazzard (b. 1931), through an inquiry which argues for the centrality, and ramifications of, a disintegrating public/private divide, which prefigures the exposure of a female mobility that is almost-always inherently fluid, mobile and contradictory: the female subject is found to inhabit a space offering on the one hand safety, a new-found sense of mobility and independence, but on the other, a space that is unstable, threatening and disruptive. It is a position that is at once multiplicitious and fragile, that reworks and attacks ideas of privacy, the everyday, and is the result of 1 Susan Sheridan, ‘When was Modernism? The Cold War silence of Christina Stead’, Hecate, 35.1-2, (2009), p. 215 2 p. 215 3 p. 215 2 entering the new spaces and forms of agency opened up to the female subject in the post-war globe. Thus, this thesis takes up the challenge to reconsider the construction of the space of post-war modernity in the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, authors that have a troubled and problematic relationship with the Australian literary canon, whose preoccupations lie outside the boundary of Australian nationhood. These mid-century women writers constitute a distinct group not only by virtue of their critical neglect, indeed their contributions to literature have only recently begun to gain critical and public attention, but also through the way in which their work as a collective whole points to a turn in post-war women’s writing towards a preoccupation with the construction of female mobility in late modernity.4 In order to track Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s specific construction of the female subject within the post-war space, which reaches outside of the boundaries of nationhood, this thesis draws upon a theoretical framework which exposes the gendered nature of public and private space, building upon feminist literary accounts of the early twentieth century, and pushing these critical discussions into a post-war space. Rita Felksi’s claim in The Gender of Modernity (1995) that ‘intimate relationships emerge as a central arena within which the contradictions of the modern are played out’5 established a turn towards the significance of the private sphere in relation to modernity, a turn continued by the critical accounts of gender and space across the 1990s. Referring to the work of Gail Finney, Felski points to ‘the centrality of familial ties and identities’: ‘the so- called private sphere, often portrayed as a domain where natural and timeless emotions hold sway, is shown to be radically implicated in patterns of modernisation and processes of social change.’6 As the private sphere has always been inherently linked to notions of femininity, the maternal, domestic and the everyday, such a claim allows for the reappraisal of the position of the female subject within the constructions and representations of modernity: ‘the analysis of modern femininity bring[ing] with it a recognition of the profoundly historical nature of private feelings [my emphasis].’7 The 4 Susan Sheridan’s recent work Nine Lives, which includes a reappraisal of Jessica Anderson’s work, was published in 2011, two years after Anderson’s death, whilst Brigitta Olubas’ in-depth criticism of Shirley Hazzard’s entire oeuvre in Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist was published in 2012. A recent interest in Elizabeth Harrower’s work has seen her novels republished by Text Publishing in 2012 and 2013, years after they were out of print, as well as the publication of the ‘lost work’ In Certain Circles (2014). 5 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 3 6 Feslki, p. 3 7 p. 3, for a discussion of women’s relationship with the private sphere see also Linda K. Kerber, ‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History’, The Journal of 3 recasting of the parameters of modernism to account for the female subject, and the specific way in which the female subject negotiates modernity, points to a critical path for unraveling the way in which the representation of space in literature, specifically the novel form, (re)forms and (re)constitutes the female subject of late modernity. The re- examination of women’s position in relation to literary modernism, the fin de siècle, and the dramatic cultural and social shifts during the pre-war and inter-war years, has demonstrated the significant and unique contribution of Anglophone women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen, and this critical framework will be deployed across this thesis in order to undertake a similar reappraisal of the work of Anderson, Hazzard and Harrower.8 The 1990s is a distinct moment of feminist reconsideration, a critical period that sees a turn towards the reexamination of the relationship between gender and space, therefore much of this critical reframing will be deployed in the discussion about the female subject’s movement within the post-war space. The publication of Janet Wolff’s Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1995), Elizabeth Wilson’s The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (1991), Diana Agrest’s The Sex of Architecture (1996) and Felski’s own Gender of Modernity, demonstrates this desire to reframe the parameters of not only modernity, but notions of public and private space; architecture itself, and these accounts weave their way through the following discussion on Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard. Such a reframing disrupts and challenges the presupposed belief that female subjectivity sits outside of, and apart from the modern. As psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva suggests in relation to time, ‘female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations.’9 The female subject is proposed here as being locked in a timeless stasis, in some ways an atemporal and ahistorical position, set aside from the progression of linear time: one that has ‘a massive presence of monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape.’10 American History, 75.1, (1988); Cynthia Wall, ‘Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 5.4, (1993); Kathy Mezei; Chiara Brigtani, ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’, Signs, 27.3, (2002); Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 8 see Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Maud Ellmann, The Shadow Across the Page, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Mary Lou Emery, ‘The poetics of labour in Jean Rhys’ global modernism’, 90.2/3, (2011) 9 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ in T. Moi (ed) The Kristeva Reader, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986), p. 191 10 p. 191 4 Yet, as Kristeva goes on to argue, this conception of a monumental time becomes problematic when aligned with the time of history (‘time as departure, progression and arrival’), a temporality that is explicitly bound up with space – and given this specific relationship between deep time and femininity – it is the female subject who apprehends, occupies, and acts from, the point when these two temporalities buff against and overlap one another.11 Indeed, Kristeva points to, and then troubles, the gendered binary of time and space (significantly taking the modernist James Joyce as her starting point): ‘‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, as Joyce put it; and indeed, when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space regenerating and forming the human species than of time.’12 Yet through the collapsing of distance between deep time and historical time, the female subject is positioned on the point where time and space meet; an unsettled encounter: it is ‘the problematic of space, which innumerable religions of matriarchal reappearance attribute to ‘woman’.’13 Kristeva’s claims point to a unique position for the female subject – the female encounter with space will always be a troubled one, sitting outside of, apart and separate from the modern masculine subject. It is a contradictory position, which suggests instability and anxiety, a position that sees the female subject move between the public and private. Therefore, in drawing attention to this position, this thesis moves away from feminist approaches that avoid or deny the presence of the female subject in the public sphere. Felski suggests just such an approach where ‘the common sense of much mainstream feminist thought has been a belief that such phenomena as industry, consumerism, the modern city, the mass media and technology are in some sense fundamentally masculine.’14 Yet, for Felski, the ‘hybrid and often contradictory identities’ of women, and the gender-specific way in which women of the early twentieth century move within modern space, from the advent of shopping arcades and department stores, the streets of Paris and London, to female writers and artists, proves the masculine nature of modernity to be a troubled and troubling method of categorisation. It pulls female subjectivity away from a monumental time right within the frame of specific historical time and space, implicating the female subject, and in turn, the private sphere, right within the heart of the modern, even if they are situated diagonally or parallel to the masculine subject. 11 p. 192 12 Kristeva, pp. 190-1 13 p. 191 14 Felski, p. 17 5 Elizabeth Wilson suggests the way of classifying both public and private as immediately masculine and feminine is problematic in her discussion of women occupying the city-space of the late nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century: ‘it would be possible to say that the male and female ‘principles’ war with each other at the very heart of city life. The city is ‘masculine’ in its triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions; it is ‘feminine’ in its enclosing embrace, in its indeterminacy and labyrinthine uncentredness.’15 Yet, such a binary, whilst important, is formed on ‘underlying assumptions,’ which are ‘based both on this unconscious division and on consciously spelt-out ideas about women’s rightful place,’ a division which has ‘determined the shape of contemporary cities.’16 Yet whilst ‘women have lived out their lives on sufferance in the metropolis…industrial life still [draws] them into public life.’17 What Wilson is gesturing to here is the significance of the in-between, an overlapping between the two, the public and private blending and intermingling, and this thesis will chart what happens to the female subject who occupies this in-between space: ‘at the heart of the urban labyrinth lurk[s] not the Minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx.’18 Kristeva’s discussion of the existence of ‘a signifiying space, a both corporeal and desiring mental space,’ for women can be applied here: gendered space suggests ‘a parallel existence,’ a modernity that ‘exists in the same historical time,’ right alongside Walter Benjamin’s city-space or Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s account of modern transportation, an existence that is simultaneously separate and interwoven.19 As Felski argues, any discussion about female agency and modernity requires not only ‘a reconceptulization of women as modern subjects but also a significant revision and rearticulation of the defining categories of the modern itself.’20 Such an argument is furthered by Wolff and Wilson’s discussion of women inhabiting the public space of the modern metropolis, as well as the publication of Andrea Weiss’ Paris was a Woman (1995), which highlights the impact of the female literary modernists inhabiting Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. Indeed both Wolff and Wilson argue for a reappraisal of the way in which women inhabit and encounter space, and their analysis 15 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 7 16 p. 8 17 p. 8 18 p. 7 19 Kristeva, p. 209 20 Felski, p. 210 6 of women’s experience of the city-space in the early twentieth century will be taken up here alongside Benjamin when tracking the representation of the post-war female subject in Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard. As Wolff claims, ‘dislocation makes a different understanding possible. But we must differentiate between the various types of marginality – class mobility, lack of an institutional base, exile, other kinds of geographical mobility and so on.’21 It is the dislocation of women that is paramount, as such dislocation offers a differing perspective of marginality: ‘women as outsiders,’ who are operating parallel to, and separate from, the male flaneurs of the fin de siècle.22 Wolff goes on to reinforce the connection between mobility, space and writing, as ‘for the woman writer who is either geographically displaced…or culturally marginalized…it may be her very identity as woman which enables a radical re-vision of home and exile.’23 Victoria Rosner continues such a gendered spatial analysis of literary modernism in Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2005), which suggests the significance of the female subject and the apprehension of space in the early twentieth century, and this understanding will be deployed as a starting point for moving into the frame of the post- war space. The recent critical accounts of the relationship between the domestic space, the gendered experience of modernity and literary representation develops upon the claims made by Felski, Wolff and Wilson.24 For Rosner, it is ‘the spaces of private life’ which are ‘a generative site’: ‘the spaces compose a kind of grid of social relations that shifts and slips, often upending the individuals who traverse it.’25 Rosner’s discussion suggests the way in which the space of modernity becomes inherently unstable; it can no longer be assumed as being contained within the boundaries of the public and private, masculine and feminine, no longer relegated to separate spheres. Space is no longer firm ground, but most significantly, the private sphere (the everyday, femininity, the kitchentable, and the domestic) is seen to be central to the apprehension of space, as being pushed forward as the site where anxieties are at their most exposed. If, as Gerald Kennedy claims in Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing and American Identity (1993), the twentieth century brought with it ‘new ways of conceptualising time, space, form, distance, speed 21 Janet Wolff, Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 2 22 Wolff, p. 2 23 p. 9 24 see Kathy Mezei; Chiara Briganti, ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27.3, (2002); Jo Croft; Gerry Smith, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006) 25 Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2 7 and direction,’ changes which in turn, ‘radically altered the general meaning of the past, present and future as frames of experiential reference,’26 so too did the fin de siècle radically rupture and reform notions of boundaries, thresholds and borderlines, inside and outside. As Rosner claims, the very ‘customs of daily life were changing…the peace and stability of the Victorian household deteriorated, deformed by the pressure of changing social, sexual and cultural mores.’27 The delineation between public and private is blurring, and the palpable anxiety surrounding this disintegrating divide is evident in Virginia Woolf’s catchcry – ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed.’28 Not only did this disrupt and challenge the apprehension of space by the modern subject, but also offers new spaces for representation: new forms of transport, the explosion in the air, ship, rail travel, the way in which far reaches of the globe were suddenly accessible, but in particular accessible to solitary female travellers. Such a shift demands a reading of the way in which writers respond to and construct such spaces. As Sheridan suggests, ‘feminist reconfigurings of the earlier modernist period offer many new perspectives of the operations of gender, which [can] be applied to the art and writing of the long 1950s, especially the work of women.’29 That is, as Sheridan implies, it is through engaging with criticism which discusses the contribution made by women writers at the fin de siècle, and the changing nature of space at the beginning of the twentieth century, that a historical trajectory, a specific starting point, is established for the connection between notions of femininity, the female subject and the apprehension of space. Thus, when attention is turned to the space of post-war modernity, a similar framework and focus is demanded in order to establish the presence of yet another re-visioning and re-fashioning of female mobility. It is a mobility that is undoubtedly connected with and influenced by the female subjectivity of the fin de siècle, and indeed the inter-war years, but is one that is again further destabilised by the increasing sense of movement available for post-war women: the growing accessibility to the public sphere, the changing nature of living arrangements with women able to live independently or in new communal accommodation such as boarding houses and lodgings, and the opening up of the commercial space for women to earn and distribute their own wealth. 26 Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: exile, writing and American identity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 185 27 Rosner, p. 3 28 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1925), quoted in Victoria Rosner, p. 3 29 Sheridan, p. 215 8 This thesis will align the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard alongside these reconfigurings of gendered space, female mobility and new-found agency in post- war modernity, in order to reform the underlying assumptions of their place in Australian canonical literature. Their position as Australian writers is one that allows for a specific examination of mobility, agency and post-war space from a geographical periphery, a sense of the global sphere from a point of isolation, which serves to expose the multipilicitous and multidimensional nature of female subjectivity in post-war modernity. As suggested, Australian literature offers a distinctive lens with which to view the construction of post-war space and the position of the female subject within that space, given the Australian literary landscape, from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the inter-war and post-war years, is noted for its number of women writers, with Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin and Christina Stead followed by the work of Eleanor Dark, Ruth Park, Eve Langley, and later not only by Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard but also Thea Astley, Barbara Hanrahan, Elizabeth Jolley and Amy Witting. Brigid Rooney suggests in ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ (2013), the way in which ‘literary modernism in Australia has a gendered history, and Dark – like Christina Stead – was among the first Australian writers to engage with modernism as a set of cultural ideas, and to experiment with modernist literary techniques in her prose,’ whilst Sheridan argues in Nine Lives (2011) that ‘our picture of the Australian literary scenes from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s as strongly male dominated is far from accurate.’30 This gendered history is in some ways specific to Australian literature, and exists far more overtly than the literary movements of Britain and America, as ‘women writers on the whole [are] poorly represented in the literatures of Europe and North America in the post-war decades.’31 Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard all configure the post-war space in terms of mobility: all three are positioned on what Sheridan terms ‘the fulcrum’ of two forces, moving between the shifting nature of the everyday and the domestic, whilst engaging and representing the ideological clashes of the Cold War, an unravelling of a sense of security of space and home following Hiroshima. All three writers trouble the distinction between the public and private sphere, oscillating between them and opening up the instability that lies at 30 Brigid Rooney, ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (eds) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013), p. 107; Susan Sheridan, Nine Lives, (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011), p. 2 31 Sheridan, Nine Lives, p. 16 9 the heart of post-war space, which is a crucial turn that perpetuates their representation of the multiplicitous and contradictory position of the female subject. As suggested, all three writers trouble the category of Australianness – Hazzard and Anderson were publicly criticized and ignored following their expatriation, and Harrower’s decision to cease writing after the publication of The Watch Tower in 1966 saw her thereafter absent from the Australian literary scene. Drusilla Modjeska points to the particularity of the experience of expatriation for women writers, the tension between those who stayed home and those who went abroad: expatriation and travel offered on the one hand a means of escape and freedom from the traditional shackles of domestic femininity, but also was a move that could still be decidedly isolating.32 Elaine Barry points to the anxiety surrounding expatriation, arguing that such a move by ‘Australian writers has been seen either as a subversively un-Australian activity or as a hair’s breadth escape to a world of Culture and Refinement.’33 As Sheridan argues, Anderson was ‘isolated from the Australian literary scene. Because she published abroad, reviewers of her early books frequently expressed surprise and chagrin that they had not known about her,’34 whilst for Barry, Anderson is ‘an exile twice over: once from Brisbane, where the old family home still stands, to Sydney, and then from Sydney to London.’35 Hazzard refutes the label of expatriate, stating that ‘it is a privilege – to be at home in more than one place.’36 Brigitta Olubas discusses the negative public reception to Hazzard’s 1984 Boyer Lectures, the claims that ‘her account of Australia was uninformed about contemporary culture’ pointing once again to the anxiety and questioning of Hazzard’s claim as Australian author.37 It is because of this suspicion surrounding expatriation, and the way in which Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s work has been continuously held up against the perceived better works of the time by the canonical male writers such as Patrick White, David Malouf and Thomas Keneally as detailed below, that the work of all three writers has routinely been discounted and overlooked. 32 Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, (London; Sydney: Sirius Books, 1984, 2nd Edn.), pp. 16-39 33 Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984), p. 3; see also Bruce Bennett; Anne Pender, From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012, (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2012) 34 Sheridan, Nine Lives, p. 198 35 Barry, p. 5 36 Shirley Hazzard, quoted in Brigitta Olubas, ‘At Home in More than One Place,’ in ABR (April 2010), p. 9 37 Olubas, p. 9 10 The question arises as to why the work of these three women often incites a highly emotional and judgmental response across the prevailing criticism, particularly criticism at the time of Harrower, Hazzard and Anderson’s publications from the 1960s through to the 1980s. The answer to this question is inextricably linked to the way their work moves away from and challenges the traditional themes of Australian literature: they are not nationalistic, nor are they post-colonial, but instead (either explicitly or less directly) cosmopolitan, they prompt uneasy questions about gender, family and the self, they challenge and contest fundamental understandings of novelistic discourse: their styles cannot be described as realist, modernist or post-modernist, but are instead a complex hybrid. A survey of the critical commentary underscores and clarifies this response to the work of all three authors, a response which moves from the historically gendered and elitist literary criticism from the 1960s and 1970s, to the taking up of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard by the feminist project of the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, the representation of gender, and the perceived difficulties in the formal style of these three writers, has contributed to the lack of critical, and indeed educational, interest in their work. That is to say that it is not only the gender of the writers themselves, but also their focus on the construction of the female subject combined with a level of stylistics that are not easily defined in strict genre parameters, which has seen their work avoided. It can be seen that the gender of a writer drives the ways in which their work is not only received but also analysed, and subsequently taught. Such a historically gendered response to both Harrower and Hazzard becomes evident when looking at R.G Geering’s account of their work in Recent Fiction (1974), as he states: ‘Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard may lack the flourish of Stow and Keneally, but they practise an artistic economy which should appeal to the discriminating reader.’38 In particular, this view of Hazzard has been fuelled by White himself, who publicly criticised her literary merit. Whilst Hazzard’s novels have ‘impressive insights and solid details,’ she lacks ‘exposure to everyday squalor and vulgarity,’ perhaps fuelled by the ‘unusually charmed life writing away in the NY apartment and Capri villa.’39 Bronwyn Levy highlights the critical response surrounding Hazzard’s publication of The Transit of Venus (1980) in the article ‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ (1992): 38 R.G. Geering, Recent Fiction, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 30 39 Patrick White, quoted in B. Bennet, ‘Contending Styles: Patrick White, Shirley Hazzard, Ethel Anderson, Dal Stivens’, in Australian Short Fiction: A History, (St Lucia Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2002), pp. 170-1 11 Peter Pierce describes the novel as ‘the best dressed women’s magazine fiction of its year,’ a work which ‘stylishly disguises its origins in soap opera,’ Sylvia Lawson compares the character of Caro to ‘an empty fifties feminine fantasy,’ and Drusilla Modejska claims that the novel ‘ends up very close to romantic women’s fiction.’40 It is a question of quality, of the value of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s work, which is bound up with the undoubtedly passionate and emotional debate as to what qualifies as a literary text worthy of continued study. I would argue that the main reason the work of these three writers has not been taken up is the level of critical confusion surrounding their position within, and their contribution to, the Australian literary canon. Significantly, Hazzard’s style is criticised for being too literary, too stylish, and out of touch with the contemporary novel form: Pierce argues that Hazzard’s writing ‘addresses an exclusive audience, a suprasociety…with a taste for elegant moral formulations and a disdain for social realism as a literary mode.’41 Hazzard is dismissed here not only for her connection to the form of popular romance, but also for her elegant use of language. Delys Bird points to this inherent contradiction in the article ‘Text Production and Reception: Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus’ (1985): ‘the novel is described as elitist, as ‘literature’, and as popular as romance; received according to alternative textual and social formations.’42 On the one hand Hazzard is aligned with the world of eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, rather than the challenging or ‘unruly’ novels of the twentieth century, yet on the other is criticised for ‘lack[ing] the propulsive narrative energy of…great Victorian prototypes.’43 Robert Burns offers a similarly scathing attack on Harrower’s credibility in reducing her work to the realm of ‘caricaturing, stereotyping [and] dismissing with a few quick, contemptuous, summarizing strokes all aspects of the existing urban order,’ whilst Peter Pierce criticizes Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), for being enveloped in a haze 40 Peter Pierce, Sylvia Lawson, Drusilla Modejska quoted in Bronwyn Levy, ‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ in C. Ferrier (ed) Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels, (St Lucia Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1992), p. 190 41 Peter Pierce quoted in Delys Bird, ‘Text Production and Reception: Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ in Westerly, 30.1 (1985), p. 45 42 Delys Bird, ‘Text Production and Reception: Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ in Westerly, 30.1 (1985), p. 45 43 Bronwyn Levy, ‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ in C. Ferrier (ed) Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels, (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1992), p. 191; Robert Towers quoted in Delys Bird, ‘Text Production and Reception: Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’, Westerly, 30.1, (1985), p. 44 12 of nostalgia, which does not adequately account for the complexities of modern Australian life.44 This confusing account of the literary merit of Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard, governed by inconsistencies and dichotomies, is the predominant reason their work has not been taken up. Nicholas Mansfield, in his discussion of Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966), takes up her uneasy style of the novel, suggesting that the dichotomy between ‘national enthusiasm and political responsibility’ and ‘cosmopolitan sophistication and formalist experimentation’ is the fundamental reason why Harrower’s work has been ignored.45 Just like the response to Hazzard’s novels, Harrower’s reviewers similarly discount the underlying difficulties and formal challenges of the book as evidence of a failure on behalf of the novelist. Robyn Claremont argues that Harrower ‘is working, partly at least, within a realist tradition,’ yet acknowledges that ‘it is not an easy or comfortable work to confront’: ‘the problems of her method of direct confrontation include, as I have suggested, the fact that she is sometimes left looking for the proper vantage point, an even handed approach to the truth…The situations her characters face are genuinely puzzling, their solution at best tentative.’46 Whilst praising Harrower for her maturity, David Burns relegates her fiction to one that is confined to the interior, to the distinctly feminine domain of the private household. Harrower is distinguished from White and Keneally, whose characters are described as ‘repositories of soul stuff or of social significance,’ and whose fates are ‘public and pictorial.’47 Interestingly, there is a general consensus on the value of Jessica Anderson’s work, and yet, like Harrower and Hazzard, such value is consistently relegated to that of only minor significance compared to the other Australian, predominantly male, canonical writers. As Sheridan suggests, ‘the invaluable archive of Jessica Anderson’s professional correspondence reveals attitudes of patriarchal condescension on the part of publishers that it is difficult to imagine, say, Patrick White having to endure.’48 It is telling that even Anderson’s obituary in 2009 suggests that her emergence as a writer was delayed by her own ‘diffidence regarding her gifts’ and ‘caution that combined 44 Peter Pierce, ‘Exploring the Territory: Some Recent Australian Novels’ in Meanjin, 38.2 (1979), p. 225 45 Nicholas Mansfield, ‘The Only Russian in Sydney: Modernism and Realism in The Watch Tower’ in Australian Literary Studies, 15.3, (1992), p. 131 46 Robyn Claremont, ‘The Novels of Elizabeth Harrower’, Quadrant, 23.11, (1979), pp. 16, 21 47 D. R. Burns, ‘Australian Fiction since 1960’, World Literature in English, 11.2, (1972), pp. 62-3 48 Sheridan, Nine Lives, p. 198 13 ingrained gentility and hard aesthetic sense,’ the reasons for her work being overlooked being firmly pronounced as partly her own doing: ‘her struggle to emerge as an author involved more than an overcoming of unfavourable circumstance; it demanded what philosophers would call an epistemic shift.’49 Not only did Anderson undergo considerable difficulty in achieving publication, but again, once her novels entered the public domain, her style, form and use of narrative technique are questioned and discounted by critics: ‘technically her novel is a minor tour de force, an unbroken first- person narrative in which memory, conversation, and incident merge almost imperceptibly’; ‘her normal style is ideally suited for conveying the nuances of social and moral discrimination.’50 Donald Gallagher criticises this response to Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by River, suggesting that ‘the Miles Franklin judges must be congratulated for honouring a novel that most reviewers and some academic critics have dismally failed to comprehend.’51 As Gallagher’s statement suggests, the response by both literary critics and reviewers is directly at odds with the overseas success of these writers, and in spite of their winning numerous accolades: Shirley Hazzard is a recipient of the Miles Franklin Award and the US National Book Award in 2003, Jessica Anderson was awarded the Miles Franklin Award twice, and the Fiction Award for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Elizabeth Harrower received the Patrick White Award in 1996. As Brigitta Olubas says of Shirley Hazzard, a statement which nonetheless can be applied to all three post-war writers: ‘despite this ongoing and prominent participation in the literary and cultural present, Hazzard is nonetheless persistently read by her Australian critics and reviewers as a writer from another time and place, situated somewhere beyond the press and ambit of contemporary Australia.’52 Thus Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s position on the periphery of the Australian literary scene, the common thread of being discounted and disparaged by both critics and reviewers, and the very way in which their novels always sit just outside of the frame of the nation, provide a unique lens through which to examine their construction of post-war space. That is, that their preoccupation with the boundaries between public and private, domestic and political, centre and margin are rendered problematic and troubled from the outset, 49 Geordie Williamson, ‘Novelist’s Struggle to Emerge’, The Australian Literary Review, 02/02/11, sec. Literature 50 Donald Gallagher, ‘Tirra Lirra by the Brisbane River’, LinQ, 10.1, (1981) p. 109 51 Gallagher, p. 101 52 Olubas, p. 9 14 given their inherent position on the borderline, outside of the Australian literary canon, which challenges the somewhat constraining categorisation of Australian authors. Given the underlying sexism that pervades much of critical discussion of the works of all three writers, the feminist project of emancipation can be seen as a form of reaction against much of the existing criticism. This is particularly evident in responses from the early 1980s onwards, as the works of Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard are realigned with the construction of female subjectivity in literature. This feminist turn is a distinctive aspect of the Australian critical landscape of the time, with many of the feminist literary critics discussing Anderson and Harrower suggesting that the work of both writers involves the use of the quest plot in order to allow the female protagonists to break free from the shackles of masculine confinement, abuse and manipulation, and arrive at a true sense of independent self. The character of Nora in Tirra Lirra by the River is consistently used as a positive emblem of female emancipation: In her struggles the reader finds a composite of the trials of all the Anderson heroines: oppression of marriage, oppression of family, oppression of place, oppression of growth. But in Nora the reader also finds courage, the courage that all Anderson’s heroines share, the courage to seek an independence.53 Undoubtedly the dominant focus of critics is with the representation of female subjectivity.54 In charting the development of Jessica Anderson’s oeuvre, P. Gilbert argues that Anderson’s preoccupation is with ‘the various faces that women must wear,’ that her contribution to the literature lies in exploring ‘the gender construction at different historical periods in Australian society, for women of different ages and social classes.’55 Such a consistent assertion by critics has only further served to fuel the argument by feminists that Anderson’s heroines are able to undermine and transcend patriarchal oppression. Elaine Barry moves away from a focus on an emancipated female subject in her seminal work Fabricating the Self: The Fictions of Jessica Anderson (1996), instead pointing to Anderson’s representation of both a masculine and feminine 53 Ray Willbanks, ‘The Strength to be Me: The Protagonist in the fiction of Jessica Anderson’, Span, 27, (1988), p. 63 54 see D. Gallagher, R. Willbanks, P. Gilbert, D. Jones 55 P. Gilbert, ‘Jessica Anderson’ in P. Gilbert (ed) Coming Out from Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers, (Sydney: Pandora, 1988), p. 131 15 selfhood: ‘Anderson’s fictional parameters are deliberately inclusive,’ focusing on family and gender relations, rather than just the female subject.56 However, such an assertion has not been further developed or taken up by other critics. When Anderson’s work is pushed into a more global framework alongside theoretical discussions of gendered space, her construction of female subjectivity can be seen in a different light. As suggested, this thesis will trouble such accounts of selfhood, instead moving towards a more contradictory and unstable female subject engaging with the post-war space, one that is not able to achieve fulfillment of emancipation. Elizabeth Harrower’s novels have been similarly aligned with an analysis of female subjectivity and emancipation. In his discussion of Harrower’s The Watch Tower, Laurie Clancy points to the achievement of the female self, ‘an integrity of being,’ that ultimately defeats the oppressive and sadistic masculine subject.57 As the novel revolves around the relationship between sisters Laura and Clare, and Laura’s husband Felix, it is Clare’s recognition that she is unable to change the misogynistic tendencies of Felix, the only option being to escape from them, that Clancy terms as ‘the central discovery of The Watch Tower and the triumphant source of relief.’58 Mansfield also highlights the way in which Clare is able to stand up to, and flee from, Felix’s power, which is of great contrast to Laura, whose selfhood is consumed by Felix’s masculine authority: ‘[Laura’s] vulnerability to Felix’s unstable and indefinite desire robs her of independent selfhood,’ whereas ‘Clare is aware of the vacancy’ and is ‘sensitis[ed] to the possibility of another life elsewhere.’59 Sneja Gunew argues in ‘What Does Woman Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction,’ (1983) that The Watch Tower ‘is structured as an elaborate cautionary tale,’ ‘a salutary lesson to other women’ about oppressive patriarchal structures.60 There is a constant assertion in the criticism that Harrower’s texts are modern feminist fairy tales, relying ‘on the gothic tale in which women are traditionally caged up and their lives threatened.’61 Whilst there is no doubt that Harrower alludes to the tale of Bluebeard in The Watch Tower, this thesis will seek to move away from a reading that privileges a whole, 56 Elaine Barry, Fabricating the Self: The Fictions of Jessica Anderson, (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1996), p. 10 57 Laurie Clancy, ‘Fathers and Lovers: Three Australian Novels’, Australian Literary Studies, 10.4 (1982), p. 466 58 Clancy, p. 467 59 Mansfield, pp. 134, 137 60 Sneja Gunew, ‘What Does Woman Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction’, Hecate, 9.1-2, (1983), p. 119 61 Gunew, p. 119 16 transcendental and emancipated female subject, or alternatively an oppressed female self that serves as a warning. Whilst critics have acknowledged that this prevailing feminist literary criticism has led to an assumption of a positive and universal female subject, any reappraisal of Harrower’s work has been decidedly absent, until the republication of her novels by Text Publishing in 2012.62 In her discussion of Harrower, Carole Ferrier warns of the dangers of placing a particular feminist ideology on texts: ‘writing and criticism must now develop beyond this stage to avoid the dangers of a collapsing into a limited reformism amid friendly ‘feminist’ consensus.’63 This thesis will develop and depart from such a feminist reading, pointing to the contradictory and troubled nature of the female subjects in both Harrower and Hazzard; both writers’ preoccupation with female mobility and agency in the new spaces accessible to women in the post-war globe will demonstrate the palpable anxiety surrounding women’s fluid movement between the public and private spheres. The feminist criticism surrounding the work of Hazzard is of great contrast to that of Harrower and Anderson. Instead of being associated with an emancipated form of the female self, Hazzard has been repetitively criticised and questioned for her implied acquiescence with the dominant patriarchal structure: a reliance on the themes of romance, where women are subjected to, and conform with, the desires of men. In the article ‘The Novels of Shirley Hazzard: An Affirmation of Venus,’ (1981) Geoffrey Lehmann argued that Hazzard is preoccupied with ‘one-sided, destructive love between two people of goodwill,’ where ‘being is not enough unless it is intersected by love – love which is absolute, a culmination.’64 Susan Moore suggests that in form and content The Transit of Venus is a ‘moving and responsible act of love,’ whilst E.B. Moon contends that it is ‘a study of love and pain…the deepest of human relationships.’65 These claims demonstrate an approach to charting the centrality of love in Hazzard’s work as being a distinctive move in the criticism of the 1980s, a move that aligns Hazzard’s work with the tropes of romance. Significantly, such a focus on love, and Hazzard’s leanings 62 However, even with the republication of The Watch Tower in 2012, Harrower’s male protagonist Felix is described as ‘unhappy, meanspirited’ and once again, ‘one of the most superbly drawn evil characters in Australian literature’ in Gay Alcorn, 'Written in the Past', the Sydney Morning Herald, 06/05/12, sec. Books. 63 Carole Ferrier, ‘Is an 'Images of Women' Methodology Adequate for Reading Elizabeth Harrower's The Watch Tower’ in S. Walker (ed) Who is She?, (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1983), p. 192 64 G. Lehmann, ‘The Novels of Shirley Hazzard: An Affirmation of Venus’, Quadrant, 25.3, (1981), pp. 33, 36 65 Susan Moore, ‘Meaning and Value in Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus’, Quadrant, 28.5, (1984), p. 79; E.B. Moon, ‘Indispensable Humanity: Saviours and Destroyers, and Major and Minor Characters, in Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’, Southerly, 45.1, (1985), p. 94 17 towards romance and melodrama, become a point of contention for feminist critics – Hazzard is attacked and discredited as being naive, lacking in substance, depth and complexity. Anne Rutherford suggests that ‘they are…regarded as market commodities to be colonized and exploited,’ Drusilla Modjeska argues that The Transit of Venus ‘fails to challenge stereotyped assumptions,’ whilst Sylvia Lawson maintains that the construction of Caro in The Transit of Venus is static and arbitrary: ‘within the elegant outlines of her figure, absolutely nothing happens; it is at all times totally unified.’66 This is a point that is echoed by Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman in their recent collection After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007 (2009).67 Hazzard’s women are typically read as being simply passive, working within assumed feminine roles and the boundaries of patriarchal oppression, with little attempt to subvert or undermine such a role, whilst the complexity of Hazzard’s characterization is overlooked. Recent work by Brigitta Olubas, Nicholas Birns, Gail Jones and Brigid Rooney has challenged this view by critics, instead pointing to Hazzard’s complex construction of gender, one which is concerned with modern mobility and cosmopolitanism, which points to the tension and anxiety that is inherent in any form of female agency before the second wave of feminism.68 Olubas in particular reappraises Hazzard’s use of melodrama and the tropes of romance, arguing for the construction of a unique feminine temporality that reworks notions of habit, privacy and interaction with the modern global space, as ‘the certainties of romance forms [are] tested by human vulnerability and the often brutal social and political canvass of modern life.’69 Such claims will be taken up in this thesis through the lens of post-war space, developing and tracking the way in which Hazzard’s construction of the female subject offers not only a unique consideration of the modern globe, but also what happens when women are given access to this global space. 66 Anne Rutherford, Drusilla Modejska and Sylvia Lawson quoted in Bronwyn Levy, ‘Constructing the Woman Writer: The Reviewing Reception of Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus’ in C. Ferrier (ed) Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels, (St Lucia Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1992), p. 190 67 Ken Gelder; Paul Salzman, After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), p. 118-19 68 see Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: Literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist, (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012); Brigid Rooney, ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (eds) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013); Brigitta Olubas (ed), Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014, in press) 69 Olubas, ‘At home in more than one place’, p. 9 18 The discourse surrounding the work of these three Australian women writers has been dominated by a level of confusion and criticism from the academy in relation to the Australian literary canon. The quality and style of their work, their subject matter, its importance, and even their ‘Australianness’ has been consistently questioned and debated. This has resulted in their texts being undervalued, which in turn has prompted large gaps in research, and assumptions made by critics need to be questioned in order to recuperate the position of Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard. The existing criticism exposes a gap, a lack, and opens up the potential for the critical reframing of these writers, moving away from and challenging the historical moves in Australian literature and Australian literary criticism. Therefore, this thesis is proposing the expanding of the critical frame to situate Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard internationally and within the large-scale formations of post-war global modernity in order to counter and read outside the parochial and gendered frames of their Australian male contemporaries. This is aligned with the (re)worlding of literature that is a defining characteristic of the present moment. Brigid Rooney and Robert Dixon argue for the need for the ‘worlding’ of the study of Australian literature in ‘Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province’ (2013), as much of the Australian canon and subsequent literary criticism has always been vastly driven by a perpetual anxiety about ideas of nationhood: ‘Australian literature today…is actively negotiating the relationship between its legacy as a national literature, which it owes substantially to the work of Nettie and Vance Palmer, and its growing reach outside the nation in the era of globalisation.’70 This thesis will take up and develop upon Sheridan’s suggestion that the critical work done on the changing nature of space and women’s relationship with space at the fin de siècle provides a starting point for moving and assessing the work of women writers of post-war modernity. As the dissertation performs a topographical analysis of post-war space, there are three specific spatial frames that are taken up here across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard: the globe, the city and the house. Each of these spaces are reshaped and reformed in the post-war period, and each not only suggests the growing instability between the public and private sphere, the fragility that is an inherent aspect of modernity, but each also allows for new ways of being, a way of being 70 Brigid Rooney; Robert Dixon, ‘Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (ed) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013), p. x 19 particular to that space, new forms of access, for the post-war female subject. These spaces form several interwoven threads rather than a singular argument around post- war space, and therefore there are three moves, and as they follow one another, these three moves in succession perform a contraction, a tapering to a point. What we are left with is the contradictory position of the post-war female subject: on the one hand, a new found sense of freedom and mobility, but on the other an underlying sense of anxiety, of stasis and constraint. This is a position that ultimately points to a retreat, the turning aside and movement of the female subject back within the domestic space – there must be a return into the private sphere. Contained within each section of the dissertation are two chapters, one consisting of a comparative analysis of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, the second focussing on one of the three authors that has a particular connection with that post-war space, whether it is the globe, the city-space or the house. Through this analysis I will offer a reshaping of Anderson, Hazzard and Harrower’s position as Australian authors, pushing away from the historical concern with their relationship to their male contemporaries, and their stylistics, and towards their alignment with a more international and large-scale preoccupation of post-war space. This thesis is comparative, drawing attention the ways in which the spatial ambiguities residing in the fictions of one author perpetuate and feed into the preoccupations of another. That is, comparing the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard reveals similarities as well as points of departure across their oeuvres. Therefore, close readings and textual analysis form a large part of this dissertation, an important move given the lack of this type of critical work on many of Anderson and Harrower’s novels. In order chart their exploration of the post-war space, and its effect on the female subject residing within such a space, it is necessary to draw upon several critical and theoretical co-ordinates particular to the globe, the city and the house. Part I of the thesis will take up theoretical accounts of the global space of late modernity, in particular the work done on modes of travel within this space – the train, plane, ship and car – including Wolfgang Schivelbusch, which will be situated alongside literary criticism on the function of transport in fiction. Following from this the work of literary theorists Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin will also be deployed, charting a connection between novelistic discourse and the transitory nature of the global space. Part II will see a move to the accounts of the city-space, including the work of historical materialist Walter Benjamin, as well as the feminist discussion of Rita Felski, Elizabeth Wilson and Janet Wolff on the gendered nature of the metropolis. The thesis will then 20 make a final contraction in Part III to a discussion of the domestic space of the house, a space that has been traditionally associated with the feminine and maternal. Thus critical work done on gender, the everyday, domesticity and the maternal will be used, as well as psychoanalytic formulations of the uncanny and hysteria by Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth Bronfen and Elaine Showalter. Chapter One, entitled ‘Masses in Motion’ discusses the role of modern transportation in opening up the global vistas for the post-war female subject. The advent of rail, plane, automobile and sea travel opens up new spaces for engaging with the globe, as well as providing the starting point for charting a destabilised public and private space, the beginning of an overlap between boundaries. This chapter will chart the growing level of anxiety surrounding the loss of autonomy and coherence in the face of such mass systems of travel, and the way in which Anderson, Hazzard and Harrower take up the trope of solitary female traveler to question and trouble the newly discovered agency of the mobile female subject. Chapter Two moves to a discussion of Hazzard’s construction of the global sphere, suggesting the way in which the novel form, like modern transport, acts as a container for apprehending the global space of post-war modernity. Hazzard’s globe is temporally and spatially unstable, exposing a slippage between the public and private, the political and the domestic. This chapter will chart the way in which this unstable space is apprehended by the female subject through the ‘imaginary’, through a fragmented and occluded mediation and distillation of the world through narrative and words. Chapter Three is a contraction to the metropolis, a city-space governed by transition, stratification and layering, which exposes topographically the complete blurring between public and private space. The gendered nature of the city will be taken up here, Wilson’s female sphinx will be discovered, as will the way in which all three writers construct a space that is both a point of constraint and anxiety, as well as freedom and mobility for post-war female subject. Chapter Four will then move to a discussion of Anderson’s particular preoccupation with the city-space, the way in which the commercial sphere is uneasily inhabited by the female subject – a subject whose position on the borderline between the public and private is one that ultimately is so untenable that it results in their complete destruction. Chapter Five sees the contraction to the final point – the space of the house. Here, it will become evident that the post-war female subjects across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard retreat into the private sphere: a private sphere that 21 is still invaded by and in contact with the public. The gendered understandings of the home will be troubled, and the contradictory nature between seclusion, freedom, anxiety and stasis will be brought to the fore. Chapter Six will turn towards the construction of the space of the house in Harrower, arguing for the presence of the male hysteric across Harrower’s oeuvre, a hysteric that invades and disrupts the gendered domestic space of the home. It is a formulation of the hysteric that is embedded in language and narrative, and attacks and stagnates any agency on the part of the female subject. 22 CHAPTER ONE Masses in Motion ‘The principle of our boat – to outstrip the elements rather than adapt to them – made itself felt at once, outstripping thought and sensation, causing one to feel involuntarily propelled to the island, as if this weird vessel were the visible form of forces beyond our control.’ Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon (1970), p. 177 ‘The accident is an unconscious oeuvre, an invention of the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen…to invent the sailing ship or the steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.’ Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (2007), pp. 9-10 ‘Through the French doors of Ida’s room, beyond the veranda, I could see a ship coming in to berth. ‘But first of all,’ I heard myself saying, ‘I’m going away.’’ Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), p. 99 The complete reworking of space, travel and modes of transport during and after World War Two disrupts and fractures the passage of time, providing great speed, constant movement and motion, the ability to traverse and destroy boundaries, at once bringing great distances, including the Antipodean colonial outpost and imperial centre, within arm’s reach. Yet this mass movement, the intricate networks of air travel, passenger ships, which on the one hand seem to inflate and increase the rapidity of time passing, at the same time reinforce a sense of stasis, of complete containment and stifling stillness. This chapter will consider the distinctive representation of transport in the work of Hazzard, Anderson and Harrower, aligning their work with the modernist preoccupation with the machine. Although much criticism has been devoted to the sense of homelessness, and movement that characterises the works of all three writers, and their desire to leave Australian shores, it is important to return to their complex construction of the modes of travel. Such a turn allows for an account for the way in which female subjectivity is linked with, and seeps into the mode of transport: the loss of autonomy and will in the face of mass mechanized systems of travel. I am proposing here that all three writers develop and reconfigure the representation of transport in the post-war space. Each mode of transport discussed in this chapter, from the train, which carries with it the anxieties of the nineteenth century, to the ship, plane and the automobile, function on a different scale; through their speed and movement, and whether on land, sea or air, each has a particular relationship with the modern female subject. Significantly, these constructions of modes of travel offer reworked spaces for 23 literary representation, given the changes in the breadth, scale and technology of modes of travel in the post-war space, in their very accessibility and speed for the modern subject, and prompt a preoccupation with their distinctive in-between nature: movement alongside stasis. It is this binary that Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard continually expose, a sense of a new and freeing form of agency, the ability to move from one country to the next at will, but an agency that is dangerous, threatening, potentially catastrophic and always appears to be outside the subject’s parameters of control. It is one that gestures to a decidedly new moment of agency for the post-war female subject – systems of travel are now accessible to the solitary female traveler. This in itself prompts new forms of representation about female mobility and agency, and all three authors contribute to a tradition of the travelling expatriate in Australian literature, but offer a distinctive focus that is linked to the post-war global space.1 As Drusilla Modjeska suggests in Exiles at Home 1925-1945 (1981), ‘escaping to Europe, or America, was the only other alternative for women in the harsh years of the early decades of this century and there was a long tradition of expatriate women in whose footsteps to follow,’ yet in the post-war space this alternative, and the modes with which to travel and establish an alternative to being completely contained in the private sphere, undergo rapid change.2 Through examining Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s preoccupation with planes, rail, ships and automobiles across the chapter, it will be seen that although each author takes up modern transport in different and unique ways, they return again and again to this feeling of a loss of will, of a perpetual sense of waiting in transit, a loss of autonomy further opened up in the post-Hiroshima landscape. Therefore, this chapter will open up how Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard negotiate the way in which temporality and space become interwoven and inseparable when viewed through the transporting machine, whilst the public and private divide is revealed to be disintegrating and ultimately, illusory. It prompts, particularly for the female subject, a tension between mobility and immovability, a sense of containment and stillness right alongside rapid 1 For a discussion about travelling Australian authors at the fin de siècle and the tradition of expatriate Australian writers see Meg Tasker, ‘‘When London Calls’ and Fleet Street beckons: Daley’s poem, Reg’s Diary – what happens when it all goes ‘Bung’?’, Southerly, 71.1, (2013); Lucy Sussex, ‘A ‘Close-Cropped Sribess’: Agnes Murphy as a Gossip Columnist, New Woman (Lesbian?) Novelist, Opera Entrepreneur and Militant Suffragette,’ Southerly, 71.1, (2013); Catherine Pratt, ‘Walking Round the World: Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead as expatriate Australian writers’, Women’s Writing, 5.2, (2006) 2 Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, (London; Sydney: Sirius Books, 1984, 2nd Edn.), p. 25 24 speed and movement. Thus, this claim functions as a starting point in charting the multiplicitous and contradictory nature of the post-war female agency across this thesis, beginning with the new-found global movement across the sky, sea and land. The incursion of the sky-writing aeroplane in the middle of London in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is one of the most potent images of modernity: The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something!...The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater…It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was – a mission of the greatest importance.3 It is the new machine of the twentieth century that fills Woolf’s subjects with awe and delight, causing them to turn away from the antiquated image of the queen passing unseen through the streets.4 It is an object that inspires a sense of freedom, wonder, and amazement; it is at once sublime but all-consuming, with its ability to wing through the clouds, ‘the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall.’5 The pilot is decidedly absent and unimportant: what remains is a brand new modern machine operating by itself, outside the boundaries of human control, but with the power to inspire, disrupt or attack the subjects below. Most significantly, the mission of the airplane, which is ‘of the greatest importance,’ is never fully discovered, the message in the sky remains indecipherable, conflated and confused, access to the machine’s true intent is denied but the power of the spectacle remains. This scene in Mrs Dalloway ominously gestures to the 3 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (Hertforshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996 [1925]), p. 15-6 4 For a discussion of Woolf’s use of the aeroplane, and the novel’s relationship to modernity see Benjamin D. Hagen, ‘A car, a Plane, and a Tower: Interrogating Public Images in Mrs Dalloway’, Modernism/Modernity, 16.3 (2009); Christina Britzolakis, ‘‘The Strange High Singing of Some Aeroplane Overhead’: War, Utopia and the Everyday in Virginia Woolf’s fiction’ in R. Gregory; B. Kohlmann (eds) Utopian Spaces of Modernism: British Literature and Culture, 1885-1945, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilisation and Modernity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); L. Davis; J. McVicker; J. Dubino (eds), Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, (New York: Pace University Press, 1998) 5 Woolf, p. 16 25 distinctly modern power of the aeroplane, used to great effect as an instrument of war, and the images of planes flying over London with a vastly different destructive mission haunt and distort Woolf’s representation.6 As Woolf’s sky-writing aeroplane suggests, the twentieth century brought with it a rapid change in transportation, new modes of travel and machinery, which saw the once inaccessible global space suddenly opened up. Such rapid change, the expansion of older systems of transport such as the mass rail networks of the nineteenth century, provide new modes of access for the modern female subject, vistas that were once shut off or contained are suddenly within reach. These forms of modern transportation develop and depart from the initial form of independent travel for the female subject: the railway carriage, which provided movement on an industrial scale, immediately collapsing time and distance, bringing with it its own sense of anxiety and rupture, as seen across the work of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell and Leo Tolstoy. Objects of transportation, with their ability to move vast masses of people across the globe, function as a means of apprehending modernity, and the objects themselves open up questions about the fragility of the public/private divide and rupture the way space, particularly the global space, is perceived. None opens up the vista of the global sphere more so than the ability to see space from above, and the aeroplane wings its way through the narratives of the early twentieth century, and like Woolf’s, it is an object of great joy, achievement and wonder, but also threatening, disruptive, a symbol of war. The interwar years saw the new form of transport become an important spectacle on film, with the 1927 American silent film Wings telling the story of two World War I pilots, including the death of one in an air crash, whilst the Italian Futurists were devoted to the representation of this powerful new machine. Jessica Anderson gestures to this sense of wonder and spectacle attached to the modern aeroplane in the interwar years in her short story ‘The Aviator’ (1987), where the young protagonist Bea witnesses the acrobatics of the aviator between the wars in regional Queensland: The noise was coming from the eastern sky and resembled a wooden rattle rotated with absolute regularity at very high speed…I had never 6 Much has been written on the underlying sense of trauma and mourning in Mrs Dalloway, particularly through Woolf’s characterisation of Septimus Smith, see Kathryn Van Wert, ‘The Early Life of Septimus Smith’, Journal of Modern Literature, 36.1, (2012); S. Henke; D. Eberly (eds), Virgninia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts, (New York: Pace University Press, 2007); Marlene A. Briggs, ‘Circling the Cenotaph: Mrs Dalloway, Historical Trauma and the Archive’ in E. Barrett; R. O. Saxton (eds) Approaches to Teaching Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009) 26 heard that rapid regular sound so close before…Then I heard the hundreds of voices springing in unity into the air, crying oh ah oh ah oh, rising and expanding until the roar of the aeroplane was matched by an airborne concert of joy and triumph and wonder.7 Like the crowd in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, there is the act of looking up, of astonishment at this new machine in the sky, signaling such a rapid advancement in travel, and for the first time, heralding a new form of viewing space from above, the ability to look down on the topographical landscape of the globe. The aeroplane brings with it a contraction of landscape, a rapid accessibility: an accessibility that in itself disrupts any coherence of time and space, as vast tracks of land and ocean are easily overcome. These modes of transportation, movement and travel, further exploding during the inter-war and post-war years, constantly growing in their technical ability, scale and public accessibility, move from being objects of such ‘joy, triumph and wonder’, of sublime beauty - instead they bring with them certain anxieties and a disruption to the modern subject’s cohesion in a post-Hiroshima (an event carved by the act of a far more sinister aeroplane) and post-Holocaust world. The vast tracks of higher-speed rail networks, cars, roads, ship routes, and airports, all in themselves decidedly unclear spaces, prompt new forms of literary engagement and representation with such spaces, disrupt and change ways of writing, and prompt new questions about subjectivity, agency and control. This preoccupation with transport is a distinctly modern concern, with the early sense of unease surrounding such new forms of machinic power and mobility by Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and Joyce in Dubliners (1914), the anxiety of Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the sinister personification of Elizabeth Bowen’s cars, trains and ships and the return of the post-war romantic aesthetic of Jack Kerouac’s automobile. In regards to Australian literature, developments in transport opened up new ways of thinking about the subject and travel, further fuelling a preoccupation with Australians abroad, the consequences of subjects choosing to be flung far across the globe, away from the antipodes and country. This is particularly seen from the turn of the century with the works of Louise Mack, Mary Gaunt, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson to Christina Stead and later, Barbara Hanrahan, all of whom repeatedly take up the desire to leave Australian shores themselves and then construct such a 7 Jessica Anderson, Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1987), p. 108-9 27 journey within their novels.8 As Catherine Pratt (2006) suggests, the early decades of the twentieth century fostered a strong tradition of expatriation for Australian writers, often women, a tradition that brought with it an underlying anxiety about the relationship between the colonial outpost and imperial centre.9 For Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead, the desire to ‘walk round the world,’ allows a particularly gendered escape from ‘domestic restrictions, but also from the parochial horizons of colonial or small-town life,’ and it is a journey made all the more accessible to the solitary female traveler through the modern transport of the twentieth century.10 In order to take up these claims it is necessary to draw on theoretical work undertaken on the impact of modern transportation on the subject and the representation of that subject in literature. The significant development of steam powered rail travel in the nineteenth century is the starting point for the development of an uneasy relationship between subject, transport and machine, and highlights that a feeling of unease and a loss of will goes hand in hand with mass mechanised movement. Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests the relationship between transport and the subject in the work The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1986). Here Schivelbusch highlights the way in which the advent of rail transport radically disrupted and reshaped a subject’s interaction with space, time and movement. For Schivelbusch, ‘transport technology is the material base of potentiality, and equally the material base of the traveler’s space-time perception. If an essential element of a given socio-cultural space-time continuum undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time will also lose its accustomed orientation.’11 Rail travel, which over the latter part of the nineteenth century rapidly expanded across vast distances, collapses and condenses geography, brings cities, towns and countries closer, and highlights what Schivelbusch terms ‘temporal shrinkage,’ time appearing to speed up, resulting in new forms of spatial and temporal orientation.12 8 see Bruce Bennett; Anne Pender, From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012, (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2012); Catherine Pratt, ‘Walking Round the World: Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead as expatriate Australian writers’, Women’s Writing, 5.2, (2006); Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad, (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1996); Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, (London; Sydney: Sirius Books, 1984, 2nd Edn.) 9 Catherine Pratt, ‘Walking Round the World: Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead as expatriate Australian writers’, Women’s Writing, 5.2, (2006), p. 214 10 p. 213 11 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1986), p. 36 12 p. 34 28 Yet this new way of apprehending space and time, distance and mass movement brings with it a pervading sense of danger and unease, a danger that only continues to build with newer and more powerful methods of travel. The advent of railway brought with it rail disasters, derailments and the spectacle of a new scale of destruction, a form of destruction that appears at once to be completely outside the subject’s parameters of control. As Paul Virilio suggests in his discussion of technology and the industrial accident, the threat of the accident, of derailment, catastrophe and disaster exists at the same point the new form of technology is invented: ‘the accident is an unconscious oeuvre, an invention of the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen…to invent the sailing ship or the steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.’13 Schivelbusch charts the significance of the rail disaster and its effect on the travelling subject in his discussion of the accident, arguing that to travel by rail is often to travel with a ‘fear of derailment,’ a ‘feeling of impotence due to one’s being confined in a fast-moving piece of machinery without being able to influence it in the least.’14 The ominous nature of the machine lies in the way that the accident demonstrates the way in which ‘technical apparatuses destroy themselves by means of their own power,’ with no sense of agency or control: in a way the accident itself reinforces the personification of the machine. This is evident in Felix Tourneaux’s account of steam power rail accidents in 1844: The velocity they engender, their very power, once halted or turned from its proper objective, is transformed into a terrible agent of destruction. Steam power, while opening up new and hitherto unknown roads to man, also seems to continually put him in a position best compared to that of a man who is walking along the edge of a precipice and cannot afford a single false step.15 The Frankenstein nature of the modern train, the way in which it could collapse space and time for the subject but with an underlying risk of destruction prompted new forms of anxiety, neurosis and unease for the subject, with Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham’s pointing to particular new forms of railway stress and fatigue prompted by 13 Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 9-10 14 Schivelbusch, p. 78 15 Felix Tourneaux quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, pp. 131-2 29 the steam powered vehicle itself: the threat to the subject’s coherence and control. This sense of impotence, a lack of autonomy, is important, an underlying feeling of stasis and weakness against a rapidly moving machine, which on the one hand opens up new geographies but disrupts and closes up the subject: this fear and impotence is further perpetuated with the spectacle of the planes, boats and automobiles of the twentieth century, and the literary representation of just such transport. Thus, transportation opens up a new means of apprehending and engaging with modern space; it offers a new spatial environment for literary modes of representation.16 Liam Lanigan, in ‘Becalmed in Short Circuit: Joyce Modernism and the Tram’ (2012), develops the spatially and temporally disruptive nature of the nineteenth century railway in his discussion of James Joyce’s representation of the tram network of Dublin. The twentieth century saw a rapid explosion in new forms of mechanised transport: introduction of the electric tram, newer and faster systems of rail, early forms of flight, steam ships, the modern car. All of these forms of movement again bringing with them the same sense of wonder, spectacle, excitement and freedom for the modern subject compromised by underlying anxieties and suspicion. Through focusing on the electric tram, Lanigan develops Schivelbusch’s claims of temporal shrinkage and geographical condensation, as these short tram journeys undo and re-orientate the subject’s understanding of space, they disrupt boundaries between the public and private spheres, attack understandings of autonomy and the crowd. As Lanigan suggests, the ‘result of this fresh mode of travel’ is the way in which ‘public space, edifices of state power, and symbols of the culture of consumption become blurred and indeterminate.’17 Joyce’s preoccupation with the electric tram in Dubliners (1914) points to the significant effect that transport itself has on representation of the modern subject, and on modernism itself, the way in which ideas of space, temporality and autonomy are at their most exposed when viewed in relation to transport and movement. Lanigan highlights the way in which a tram ride opens up these questions, as ‘the tram both constrict[s] the passengers’ view of the city, subordinating their subjectivity to the demands of the machine that carr[ies] them, whil[st] also seeming to enable a more 16 This vast expansion of systems of travel develops the way in which rail travel figured largely in the Victorian imagination: just as the train journey has a significant place in the narratives of the nineteenth century, so too do new modes of travel such as the aeroplane and cruise-ship open up other imaginary spaces of narrative representation. See Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860-2000, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 17 Liam Lanigan, ‘‘Becalmed in Short Circuit’: Joyce, Modernism, and the Tram’, Dublin James Joyce Journal, 5, (2012), p. 37 30 comprehensive understanding of the cityscape.’18 This multiplicitous subject position is only further perpetuated and complicated in the face of the globalised mass movement of the post-war space: the mass movement of refugees, the complete reshaping of national boundaries and parameters, the full force of machinic destruction brought to the fore after World War Two. The explosion in global systems of transportation in the post-war space furthers the claim made by Lanigan that new modes of travel, are ‘agent[s] of paralysis, rather than its remedy.’19 The very nature of mechanised movement, ‘the sensation of not experiencing sensation,’ whilst traversing great distances and disrupting temporality exposes the uneasy blending of mobility and stasis, a fundamental symptom of the ruptured and incoherent modern subject.20 Maud Ellmann (2003) takes up this idea of constant movement with an underlying stasis when discussing Elizabeth Bowen’s two inter-war novels To The North (1932) and The House in Paris (1935). Ellmann argues that Bowen’s fiction is dominated by modes of transport, taxis, railways, the ‘dizzy to-and-fro of ferry journeys,’ where such transport ‘have an ominous dimension, overturning the supremacy of mind to matter…The transport of messages via post, telephone, and telegraph, combined with the transport of persons via motorways, shipping routes, and flight paths, has the effect of alienating speech and motion from the human will.’21 This is a significant claim, that the overbearing nature of transportation brings with it an undoing of a subject’s coherence, where the will of the subject leaks into the mode of transport, whether it is by car, train, ferry or airplane, and each mode of transport bringing with it an underlying anxiety, a sense of disruption, the loss of autonomy and singularity of self: ‘these networks override the boundaries that separate one person from another, creating mysterious and uncontrollable relations of dependency.’22 Modern transport, particularly forms of transport that are so drastically new, jarring and continually reforming during the inter-war and post-war periods, create a new space where any boundary between public and private is radically disrupted: where the notion of a great other, the subject as part of a mass group becomes threatening and destabilizing, where time and space itself become confused and incoherent, and where machine and object override and attack the subject. It is what Ellmann describes as a form of aboulia, a 18 p. 36 19 p. 43 20 p. 43, 36 21 Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: the shadow across the page, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 96, 97 22 p. 98 31 ‘deterioration of the will,’ which places travel and movement at the centre of the destabilization of the modern subject: this aboulia is the ‘psychological effect of the industrialization of transport, an expression of the utter helplessness of the human being in the midst of great masses in motion…a transport of will into the mechanical extensions and networks.23 These claims made by Schivelbusch, Lanigan and Ellmann offer new perspectives with which to consider the representation of transport and movement across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard. All three writers develop and reconfigure the representation of transport in the post-war space, taking up the sense of a subject’s will, particularly the female subject’s will and autonomy disintegrating in the face of mass systems of movement and travel, but also the modern anxieties surrounding the disruption of a coherent sense of time and place. It is this binary that Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard continually expose, a sense of a new and freeing form of agency, the ability to move from one country to the next at will, but which is an agency that is dangerous, threatening, potentially catastrophic and always appearing to be outside the subject’s parameters of control. Therefore, this discussion moves their work into the frame of a distinctly modern configuration of the travelling subject, a never-ending sequence of arrivals and departures, foreignness and instability, which exposes the rapidly disintegrating borderlines of public and private space, and the consequence of perpetual stasis. This move suggests the ways in which Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard are engaging with the more universal preoccupation of how the female subject negotiates the new spaces opened up for her in the post-war space. Shirley Hazzard’s protagonists are constantly in motion across the globe, caught up in the post-war explosion of sea, air and rail travel. Whilst the travel of Bowen’s frenzied ferry trips, car rides, and trains are fairly contained in their geographical distance, with air transport only a very rare and expensive privilege in the inter-war years, Hazzard moves across great distances: from Australia to Geneva, Rome, London, New York, and across the countries of South America, Africa, Japan and China. Her protagonists find themselves flung across all parts of the globe, most under the influence of other forces, whether they are for government, military, or family obligations. Hazzard’s early preoccupation with decidedly modern forms of transport, and their distinctive incursion into the narrative, is evident in the short story Cliffs of Fall (1963), where the character Elizabeth is convalescing in Geneva following the sudden death of 23 p. 111-2 32 her young husband in an airplane crash. Not only is Elizabeth preoccupied with the sky and movement as her grief is intertwined with modern travel, only picturing her husband in ‘a Sunday-school Heaven not much higher than the mountains around them, not much higher than he had been when the plane exploded in the air,’ but she is caught in a strange in-between state, lodged with her friends in a house and city that are not home, decidedly aware that she will need to depart and make her own journey across the Atlantic via air travel.24 What pervades the narrative is a distorted sense of time and space, much like Woolf’s slowing down of the minutes and seconds as the sky-writer buzzes overhead. Time is distilled, slow and heavy, further emphasized by Elizabeth’s bed-ridden state: ‘She could hear outside the faint sound of a plow in the nearby fields. Charlotte was moving the furniture in the living room…In a little while, there was the ring of the postman’s bicycle bell, and the sound of the front door being opened and closed.’25 The sonorous nature of Hazzard’s description highlights the sense of waiting, of time passing, on the one hand emphasizing the constant outside movement by others, which is at odds with Elizabeth’s static confinement. These two forces are constantly in opposition throughout the short story, as Elizabeth acknowledges that ‘everything goes on and on,’ but remains unclear as to ‘whether this reassured or isolated her.’26 The story opens up a form of modern anxiety, the preoccupation with a sense of disaster, as Elizabeth argues ‘a sense of impending catastrophe had rendered absurdly insignificant all this taking of temperatures and bringing of tea.’27 Hazzard aligns this feeling of impending catastrophe with travel, with motion, as the two disasters of the story both involve systems of modern transport: the death of Elizabeth’s husband, somewhere in the sky, the direct details of which are never clearly given, and the figure of Etienne, an acquaintance of Elizabeth’s friends in Geneva who is recovering from a road accident in which the car ‘miraculously, had not tumbled into the ravine and he had tried to continue his journey by train.’28 This suggests what Ellmann refers to as the ‘ominous dimensions’ of travel, of a pervading feeling of unease and anxiety surrounding these new machines, which on the surface appear to offer so much, but also undo and attack the subject. 24 Shirley Hazzard, ‘Cliffs of Fall’ in Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, (New York: Penguin Books, 1988 [1963]), p. 129 25 p. 134 26 p. 134 27 p. 133 28 p. 125 33 The story closes with Elizabeth’s departure and Hazzard only seeks to further highlight the anxiety surrounding the journey, the movement across the ocean, not the destination. Elizabeth cannot ‘envisage her arrival or make plans for the resumption of her ordinary life,’ and the scene is again decidedly slow, contained; Hazzard is not concerned with the frenetic activity of the modern airport, the joy and awe that inspired Woolf’s subjects in Mrs Dalloway is now completely absent, wonder and bewilderment instead replaced with dread, unease and distrust, a recurring sense of waiting: ‘every action now seemed to [Elizabeth] to involve an important and costly effort, as though she were being presented with obstacles she must continually surmount.’29 Hazzard is taking up earlier anxieties such as the loss of the autonomy of the subject to radical new forms of machinery and transport networks, but is also exposing at the same time the way travel itself disrupts and manipulates the female subject’s apprehension of time and space, it distorts and ruptures coherent understanding of motion, of geography, perpetuating and fuelling the subject’s unease and dread at such a new form of agency. Hazzard refers to this disorientating sense of time, which is compacted by Elizabeth’s own static position within the transport machine in the final page of Cliffs of Fall: ‘the flight to New York at that time took sixteen hours, and she was ready to be overwhelmed by the prospect…She could not expect to sleep and must spend hours staring, upright, at the sky that was now to be associated with him always.’30 Here, Hazzard highlights not only the passage of time spent by the subject inert, awake and in a numb sense of grief, the way in which travel is now associated always with death and catastrophe, but also the way in which the very journey itself overwhelms and overtakes any sense of self. It is what Ellmann describes as a complex ‘deterioration of the will’ into the modern machine. The image that remains is of Elizabeth sitting bolt upright for sixteen hours, awake, contained within a confined space that is on the one hand supposed to incite freedom and an opening up of the subject, but instead shuts down and constrains. Hazzard’s preoccupation with the unstable and uneasy nature of modern transport, with aeroplanes, cars and trains as signifiers for impending catastrophe and destruction is again explored in The Bay of Noon (1970). Indeed, the novel opens immediately with an accident: ‘A military plane crashed that winter on Mount 29 p. 139 30 p. 139 34 Vesuvius.’31 This opening line demonstrates right from the outset how modes of travel function across the novel, that is, as distinctive symbols of post-war modernity that assert and literally crash themselves into places of antiquity, as the plane is discovered ‘crumbled against the snow-streaked cone of the volcano, overlooking the airfield from which it had set out.’32 Through the reflective first-person account of the English Jenny’s time spent in post-war Naples, Hazzard constructs the city as an unstable temporal space: it is constantly and jarringly exposing the past, ‘half-reconstructed’ by World War Two, with ‘disintegrating frescoes’, layers of Greek, Roman and Renaissance architecture, with antiquity ‘buried in the walls.’33 Yet this temporally unstable city- space is always disrupted by the modern machine, whether it is by car, boat, or plane: the airfield at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the train line from Naples to Florence, which the Italian Gianni exclaims is ‘acting so efficient that I’m afraid it’s going to break down,’ and the ferry that carries Jenny from the one island to the another, ‘mock[ing] with its frenzied velocity.’34 These modern machines operate across the novel in a way that on the one hand aligns such new forms of transport as symbols of the post-war modern age, that create an endless sense of motion, velocity and transit, but on the other are recurring agents of death and catastrophe. The accidental death of the subject whilst in transit, whilst occupying the in-between space between arrival and departure, reoccur across the novel from the plane crash at the outset, to the death of the Neapolitan Gioconda’s fiancé in a boat accident, the British scientist Justin Tulloch missing and presumed dead after the disappearance of a plane in the Caribbean, and even the misnaming of Jenny on her boat arrival in Cape Town a form of death, as she states, ‘I went on board as Penny and disembarked as Jenny.’35 This constant sense of potential doom and catastrophe pervades the descriptions of modes of transport throughout the novel, that these new forms of mobility are dangerous. The modern subject that occupies such modes of transport is propelled into an anxious and uneasy state. Jenny describes the ships of Cape Town Harbour as ‘shabby, painted grey,’ who arrived only to ‘disappear in the night and perhaps for ever,’ whilst Gioconda describes in the detail the failure of her fiancée’s boat, which ‘had a small engine, but half-way there it must have failed…There 31 Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, (London: Virago Press, 2010 [1970]), p. 1 32 p. 1 33 p. 8-9 34 p. 160, 177 35 p. 13 35 were oars in the boat. He had to row to shore. He found a sandy place among the rocks where he could land. He pulled the boat up the shore – and on to a mine.’36 Hazzard’s construction of the scene, the importance placed on the boat’s perceived failure mid-way through the journey, creates an unstable link between subject and the transporting machine. The potential failure in the very act of transit is heightened, that movement itself is threatening: it is the nature of the loss of control by the subject that creates this anxiety, the blurring of boundaries between the networks of transport and the contained subject, again the idea that will and autonomy is leaking out of the vessel. This is evident in Jenny’s paranoia and fear when Gioconda travels to Tripoli by plane: ‘I felt anxiety that the plane might crash, that something else might go wrong. I felt as if I were being let down: nothing connected with Gioconda had ever been inauspicious until this.’37 Significantly, Hazzard’s modes of transport are not personified, remaining objects, machines, and in some ways embedded with a mythic and uncontrollable sense of movement beyond the subject’s control. These machines are not imbued with a sense of self, like Bowen’s telephones, cars and taxis, nor are Hazzard’s subjects turned into mechanised objects. The transportation systems across The Bay of Noon function differently, as unstable and disruptive containers, as objects that create spaces where the subject is locked in a sense of predetermined motion. Hazzard’s description always revolves around the subject’s apprehension and experience of this space, rather than the machines themselves. It is this uneasy passivity of the modern subject, this lack of autonomy in the face of mass systems of transport that perpetuate and inform Hazzard’s construction of ships, planes, and trains as being such threatening and destructive spaces. Such passivity is explored across The Bay of Noon which, although predominantly set in Naples, features a constant kaleidoscope of movement, of arrivals and departures, and the narrative action takes place almost always on the cusp of a moment of travel. As Jenny concedes of her time spent with Justin, ‘it was often this way when we talked – we were driving or walking, instead of facing one another in a quiet room,’ and Gioconda is often ‘away a lot, spending the week-days in the islands where the crowds were less’, and her lover Gianni is in constant motion between Rome and Naples via train.38 Jenny’s description of this movement betrays the passivity of those occupied in these recurring 36 p. 14 37 p. 111 38 p. 131 36 networks of travel, between land, sea and air: ‘so much was being carried along, carried away.’ In this post-war space there can be no centre, no firm hold, and therefore action leaks into the machines around the subject, rather than being contained by the subject themselves. This is revealed in the final boat journey of the novel, as Jenny returns to Italy to seek out Gioconda after a long period of absence which, far from being a reassuring or pleasurable experience of rapid travel, only serves to attack Jenny’s sense of time and space: I had been relying on the slow transition of the boat trip, a couple of hours, to do the work of years…now that I was to be hurtled across the harbour in a fraction of the time, it was possible to blame, on that surprise, all one’s unreadiness.39 As opposed to the trickling down of time, the slow fluid movement in Cliffs of Fall, temporality here is sped up, rapid and disorientating, the vessel itself ‘inducing panic,’ once again causing the subject to be caught up in a state of motion and non-motion, static and anticipating arrival whilst hurtling across the water. Jenny distinctly feels the sense that all is out of her control, that the vessel has its own purpose, and the rapidity of time passing whilst she stands stationary on the deck only serves to reinforce an uneasy modern passivity concealed within fast movement: ‘The principle of our boat – to outstrip the elements rather than adapt to them – made itself felt at once, outstripping thought and sensation, causing one to feel involuntarily propelled to the island, as if this weird vessel were the visible form of forces beyond our control.’40 Each one of the four main characters of The Bay of Noon is involuntarily propelled by transport, always ‘at the moment of arrival, the point of departure.’41 Therefore, it is perhaps inevitable that Hazzard sacrifices one of them to a plane accident, and that it just might have been any one of the four that could have perished, caught between arrival and destination. Indeed, it is upon reading news of his death that Justin Tulloch becomes completely static for Jenny, all motion stops, as while she didn’t know of his whereabouts he remained a ghost with a ‘sense of incompletion,’ after the plane accident Jenny states ‘now I will never need to look for [your name] again. The search has been abandoned.’42 39 p. 177 40 p. 177 41 p. 171 42 p. 153 37 It is significant that the novel ends with the ferry journey, not at the point of arrival or departure, but in-between, in transit. The novel is book-ended by two very modern forms of transportation, a crashed post-war military aircraft and a frenetic high- speed ferry. Hazzard is directly engaging here with this uneasy new space that the subject inhabits, where a sense of agency and temporality is disrupted, as Jenny states the ferry ‘mocked, with its frenzied velocity, the constancy of the two points within which we moved [my emphasis].’43 This is an important point: that in rapid motion any constancy of other spaces is revealed as an illusionary ideal, Hazzard exposes transport as a significant force in dismantling the subject’s idea of coherence and containment, instability and the conflation and confused nature of time. What Jenny discovers on this final crossing is not a greater understanding of home but instead the very nature of her sense of homelessness, the way in which ‘the outcome of such a crossing is immaterial. One can only discover what has already come into existence.’44 Yet, as in Cliffs of Fall, there is a tension between the rapidity of travel, the frenetic activity of arrival and departure with a peculiar stasis, a sense of perpetual waiting and confinement. Against the rapid movement of those around her, Jenny is decidedly stationary, bound, locked down: ‘it pleased me to hear their plans, to think of them all going in different directions. It made me feel stable, settled, at peace…in a place, for the first time.’45 Yet it is only after this assertion, the feeling of stability, that Jenny falls ill and contracts hepatitis, and like Elizabeth, she is constrained against movement, whilst ‘below the windows there [is] something going on.’ In a sense the rapidity of post-war travel only emphasizes and conflates any sense of stasis, a sense of being constrained, as Jenny remembers, ‘in the earliest morning there were boats below…during that convalescence I could do nothing but watch.’46 It is during this period of convalescence that Jenny constantly watches the movement of boats, the perpetual movements of arrival and departure. That is, even whilst stationary in her own apartment and domestic space, the movement of fishing vessels invade her thoughts and preoccupy Jenny: In each of their practiced movements there was the intentness, the restraint, that suggest not an industry but an existence. They were 43 p. 177 44 p. 181 45 p. 132 46 p. 138-9 38 there always. Throughout the day, when the water near the rocks was logged with swimmers and with rafts and sailing boats, there on the periphery would be one of these boats…In the evening they were to be seen rocking…in the wake of the fast white ferry bound for Ischia. In the night, no matter what hour one looked for them, they were out.47 Here it can be seen that Hazzard is charting the networks of motion and movement across the Neapolitan bay, and in doing so, highlights Jenny’s preoccupation with these networks, that whilst she herself remains motionless the movement of others presses upon her, the claim that the fisherman’s very existence is intertwined with the vessel’s pattern of movement. It is after her illness that Jenny herself is set in motion, which eventually results in her own permanent departure from Naples. Jenny’s sense of agency is subsumed under such movement, and she remains a passive figure across the novel, even when in motion. As Ellmann argues, ‘technologies of transport seem to reach into the inner nervous system’ of the subject, and throughout Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon, modes of travel are constructed as spaces which operate outside and separate from the subject’s control, that attack and destroy any sense of cohesive self. This preoccupation with a double bind between movement and stasis, the symptom of aboulia pervading and threatening Hazzard’s protagonists, is further developed in The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). Once again death and all modes of transport from planes to ships to cars and trains are intertwined, as space and time is collapsed on an even larger scale than The Bay of Noon, and brings with it a greater sense of unease, disorientation and potential destruction for the travelling subject. Death by accident reoccurs at a rapid rate, from the death of Caro and Grace’s parents in a capsized ferry, the death of Caro herself in a plane crash in The Transit of Venus to the near miss of Aldred Leith in a Hong Kong plane crash in The Great Fire: these new forms of mobility are dangerous, they are anxious and uneasy states for the modern subject to inhabit. As Caro writes to Ted Tice whilst in the South American countryside, in what is an unsettling proleptic description of Caro’s fate aboard an aircraft, ‘Dear Ted, I am content. Yet even in this silent place there’s the foreboding roar. As if a jet plane passed over paradise.’48 Here, planes are symbols of potential catastrophe, just as Virilio suggests, the threat of the accident lurking only just below the 47 pp. 138-9 48 Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, (London: Virago Press, [1980]), p. 251 39 surface, they are foreboding, even the threat of the jet plane, the sound of an engine is enough to disrupt and attack space and time, to dislodge silence in the global space. I want to suggest here that Hazzard goes further in the rupturing of temporality in The Transit of Venus, as whilst the modes of transport in The Bay of Noon serve as a distinct reminder of modernity, the description of machines in The Transit of Venus blurs the line between mythic and antiquated descriptions and modern machine. Allusions to Greek and Classical myths are intertwined with transport, railway platforms, and plane departures. This is evident in Ted Tice’s description of Caro as a ‘rush-hour Eurydice,’ with her ‘red coat pass[ing] the barrier, mov[ing] with the Down escalator, gliding, diminishing, descending.’49 That is to say that all the modes of travel in The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire are imbued with a mythic and doom-laden unease, highlighting the way they operate outside the boundaries of human control. This is evident in the fatalistic descriptions of ships and planes, from cruise-liners to ferries to jet planes: ‘the Benbow [which] turned over in Sydney harbour and hideously sank,’ Caro’s recollection of farewells on ocean liners, ‘the lunch on board…streamers, handkerchiefs, the world before a war. The great shape passing through the Heads on its leisurely way to heaven,’ Ted and Caro’s ferry ride, ‘moving in the light of a past or other world. The scene, too, in its humane dimensions, was experienced, discoloured, flawed, lacking the modern gloss,’ and the description of Caro’s final flight: The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging in to the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the planer rose from the ground, a long hiss of air – like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.50 A similar catastrophic airport scene returns in The Great Fire, as Aldred Leith’s arrival in Hong Kong is preceded by a plane crash, where the plane’s ‘wings walked onto a stage where all activity was in that instant precipitated, as by magnetic force, far off at the water’s edge – concentrated there in a black swirl seared by flame.’ Yet the quiet hush of Caro’s descent is here followed by sudden noise, the horror of the machine’s demise: 49 p. 295 50 pp. 33, 331, 337 40 ‘havoc first broke loose in silence and slow motion. But then the sound came in, of sirens, motors, and the low explosive roar.’51 Brigid Rooney takes up Hazzard’s construction of the ferry disaster and its relation to temporality in ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ (2013) suggesting that ‘as a ‘scene’, it can be likened to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’, ‘a narrative unit that compresses space and time together, thickening scenes and investing them with meaning’: ‘the scene of ferry disaster, temporarily eclipsed, spirals through the language of the novel, resonating with the earlier fictions and looping an encrypted local experience into the story’s global, indeed planetary, orbit.’52 It can be said that the transport disasters that recur across The Bay of Noon, The Transit of Venus, and The Great Fire all function as chronotopes, moments, which loop and repeat, and which ripple outwards across the subjects and events of the novels. They function as a moment of temporal unease and displacement, on the one hand modern systems of transport, on the other vessels imbued with an antiquated and mythic quality. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of the shipwreck and the subject’s relationship to existence and space through the shipping accident, Rooney suggests the way in which the idea and the place of the transport disaster within a narrative changes across the course of modernity, with ‘the gradual shortening of the narrative distance between the spectacle of the wreck and the detached observer standing safely on the shore.’53 Indeed, in the post-war globe, in Hazzard’s construction of the modern airport, and ‘with the collapse of epistemological certainties, the spectator, no longer on safe ground, is cast adrift in the sea itself.’54 There can be no distance here, and the spectator is as implicated in the event as the subject taking part. These recurring scenes of catastrophe, and the way in which the distance between spectator and subject collapse, are also a function of the melodrama narrative. Nicholas Daly suggests a link between the melodrama narrative and the advent of modern transport itself, arguing that ‘the plot twists, reversal, and shocks characteristic of melodrama register the disorientation consequent upon sudden technological change as much as the ‘reverberations of political or social modernity’ to which they have often 51 Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire, (London: Virago Press, 2003), p. 101 52 Brigid Rooney, ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (ed) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013), pp. 103, 109 53 Rooney, p. 104 54 p. 104 41 been attributed.’55 The melodramatic affect of the reoccurring number of tragic accidents that pervade all of Hazzard’s novels is the point where the nature of the machine, its effect on the subject is decidedly revealed.56 It is like Heidegger’s broken hammer in Being and Time, that it is in the moment of the break, in the destruction, that the nature of the object is most exposed, the importance of predetermined motion, the way transport is in itself temporally destructive and threatening, that it can in one moment ‘shrivel in an instant.’ As Schivelbusch suggests, ‘the more civilized the schedule and the more efficient the technology, the more catastrophic its destruction when it collapses.’57 What is significant here is that Hazzard is taking up earlier anxieties such as the loss of autonomy of the subject to radical new forms of machinery and transport networks, but is also exposing at the same time the way travel itself disrupts and manipulates the subject’s apprehension of time and space, it ruptures coherent understanding of motion, of geography, of the global space, fuelling the subject’s unease and dread at such a new form of agency. Whilst the doom-laden machine is a recurring trope across Hazzard’s novels, so too is the continuous construction of scenes where the relation between an unstable temporality and modes of transportation comes to the fore. The scientist Ted Tice discovers on a London train platform in The Transit of Venus, the way in which ‘the refusal of time to pass was stupefying, and he recorded, with no detachment, the multiplication of moments in that hour…the waiting passengers appeared to age, nothing and nobody was kind or young, or ever had been.’58 Indeed, it is significant that Hazzard returns to rail transport to expose this form of aboulia, the subject’s apprehension of stasis in the face of mass movement, ‘the sensation of not experiencing sensation’. The anxieties surrounding the train and rail travel in the nineteenth century, the way in which rapid movement and the modern machine exposed ‘a multiplication of moments in the hour,’ is only further heightened in this post-war setting, in a space where rapid movement lies outside the subject’s agency: ‘the spectator is no longer on firm ground.’ This is seen in the construction of Caro’s train journey to London, where she adopts a ‘becalmed attitude…hold[ing] this gaze, unthinking, unblinking [my emphasis].’ Caro is distinctly passive, experiencing what 55 Nicholas Daly, quoted in Liam Lannigan, p. 33 56 For a discussion of Hazzard’s use of melodrama see Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: Literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist, (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012) 57 Schivelbusch, p. 131 58 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 177 42 Liam Lanigan describes as a severe sense of ‘spatial dislocation,’ and subject to ‘the whims of the city as an organization system’ as ‘hills and dales wobble past the window…a factory momentarily obliterat[ing] the view, and [is] swiftly withdrawn like the wrong slide in a projector.’59 This relationship between a passive and static subject, the moving machine, and unstable space and time is reinforced in Paul Ivory’s final scene on a subway carriage in New York: The doors closed, but the train remained stationary: an endurance test during which no one so much as sighed…When the train started up, there was no murmur of surprise or relief…If, here among them, Paul fell dead on the dirty floor, he would be no more than an obstacle to the exit. Similarly, no value was attached to his remaining, though sickened, on his feet.60 Paul Ivory, who retains a sense of complete control of his actions, manipulating and active throughout the novel is finally rendered as passive, suddenly exposed to the full force of the aboulia that pervades Hazzard’s subjects, the lack of will; a disabling apprehension of space. It is only through the transporting machine that Paul, sickened by the thought, realizes that ‘no value’ is attached to his presence, that he is no more than an obstacle, an object, of less importance than the subway train itself, experiences a sudden reverse of the subject/object position. When turning to the work of Anderson and Harrower, it can be seen that both take up this notion of movement and travel as being temporally unstable, whilst also prompting a sense of stasis and immobility. Writing at the same time as Hazzard, they similarly expose the ways in which these new spaces, the very transportation that Paul Ivory finds so confronting here, are opened up for the female subject: the ship, the plane, train and automobile, which whilst opening up new vistas, new forms of mobility and new points of arrival, once again perpetuate an unease at the loss of autonomy in the face of modern travel, in a sense of spatial disorientation, resulting in constraint and immobility. Both Anderson and Harrower develop the idea of female agency in relation 59 Lanigan, p. 37; Hazzard, Transit of Venus, p. 110 60 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 315-6 43 to modern transportation, that is to say that their female protagonists apprehend their relationship to space, time, stasis and movement through a distinctly gendered lens. Significantly, as it is for Hazzard, global travel is linked with death in Anderson’s novels: Nora Porteous returns to Brisbane after the death of her sister in Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), whilst in The Impersonators (1980) Sylvia Foley is able to afford her plane trip to Sydney because of a legacy from two Canadian travelers and in time to see her ailing father, and Cecily Ambruss in Anderson’s final novel One of the Wattle Birds (1994) travels to Italy during which time her mother passes away suddenly. Here systems of modern transportation, movement across the globe, the returning expatriate to the antipodes is one governed by an anxiety at the very modes of travel which allow such movement. This is seen in the opening of Tirra Lirra where Nora takes a train from Sydney to Brisbane because she is too afraid to fly again, and Sylvia’s plane journey home is filled with ‘a long, half-dozing reverie’ which is ultimately ‘overtaken by sleep, full of haunting dreams.’61 Time expands and lengthens in this new space within the modern aeroplane, a space that is disruptive and disorientating for the female subject. This temporal confusion is further highlighted upon Sylvia’s first impressions of Sydney: ‘The breaking leaf-buds she had seen when she left London in April she now saw, with the dark winter seed pods, on these plane trees in Sydney.’62 That is that the rapid progression, the movement between hemispheres attacks and dismantles the modern subject’s coherence, disrupting the ability to apprehend space, collapsing distance but expanding time. Yet the idea of modern travel provides a lens with which to explore the consequences of the solitary female traveler able to move beyond the antipodes. As suggested, this references a long tradition of expatriation in Australian literature and the inevitable leap to British shores.63 Meg Tasker details the prevailing desire to make such a leap at the turn of the century in ‘When London Calls’ (2013), suggesting the way in which ‘the common conception of the trip ‘Home’ to Britain [was seen] as a quest for cultural and professional success,’ whilst both Louise Mack and Christina Stead 61 Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1997 [1978]), p. 1; Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators, (Sydney: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1980), p. 40 62 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 27 63 see Bruce Bennett; Anne Pender, From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012, (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2012); Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad, (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1996) 44 construct the journey in An Australian Girl in London (1902) and For Love Alone (1944).64 Elaine Barry takes up the distinctive anxiety surrounding the expatriation of Australian writers, suggesting that ‘there has always been a curious defensiveness about Australian literary expatriation...[It] has been seen either as a subversively un-Australian activity or as a hair’s breadth escape to a world of Culture and Refinement.’65 Hazzard consciously gestures to this desire for Australians to make the journey to the other side of the globe as Caro in The Transit of Venus remembers that ‘going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven…a mystical passage to another life,’ and so too do Anderson’s female protagonists believe in this mystical passage and look to make the journey from Australia to Europe.66 However, Anderson’s construction of the spectacle of the modern ship, the cruise liner or the airplane that transports her female protagonists is decidedly different from Hazzard’s mythic and fatalistic machines. That is to say that for Anderson’s female protagonists modern transport is initially viewed as a gateway to freedom, much more in alignment with Woolf’s subject’s awe at the airplane swooping overhead. Nora Porteous describes this feeling of amazement at a new sense of agency after a divorce battle, and the idea of unsupervised travel, of modern transport, is directly linked with her notion of freedom: Through the French doors of Ida’s room, beyond the veranda, I could see a ship coming in to berth. ‘But first of all,’ I heard myself saying, ‘I’m going away.’ I didn’t really have a firm intention of going anywhere, but I said London because it was the first place I thought of. And to myself I said that I could go, too, if I pleased. Nobody could stop me.67 Anderson constructs this scene so that Nora as narrator repeatedly affirms that leaving Australia, her decision to depart, only comes about because of the discovery that it is a new option now open to her, ‘that’s how I came to go to London, not because I particularly wanted to, but as an affirmation of the wonderful discovery that nobody could 64 Meg Tasker ‘‘When London Calls’ and Fleet Street beckons: Daley’s poem, Reg’s Diary – what happens when it all goes ‘Bung’?’, Southerly, 71.1, (2013), p. 107 65 Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984), p. 3 66 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 37 67 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 99 45 stop me [my emphasis].’68 Sylvia Foley makes a distinctly similar resolution in The Impersonators, ‘in filtered light and deep silence,’ where ‘the thought had first passed casually through her – I could go away – but had then returned and settled. Suddenly it was a fever.’69 However, this initial sense of freedom and agency is repeatedly compromised, it is revealed as illusory, unstable and once again, constraining in its passivity. This sudden apprehension of free agency in Tirra Lirra by the River, of new spaces opening up to Nora is contrasted with the housewife Dorothy Rainbow, who Nora sees just before she takes her journey on the ship. Anderson constructs Dorothy as a completely wasted female figure, passive, and uneasy: ‘her extreme thinness made apparent the elegance of her structure, and blue shadows had appeared on her temples…The result was an uneasy blend of the exotic and the commonplace, and her body, as if confused by these conflicting edicts, moved nervously and abruptly.’70 This scene stands in opposition to Nora’s repeated cries that ‘nobody could stop her,’ and propels Nora’s belief in the necessity of movement, travel, of departure. In this moment, Anderson is engaging with an Antipodean history with women leaving Australian shores for the colonial centre. Rooney suggests the significance the ship has in the Australian literary imaginary, the way in which it is linked to the pervading desire ‘to challenge or escape colonial provincialism in search of a freer, more cosmopolitan modernity’.71 Yet, for Anderson, it is the journey on the ship, the transporting machine-space itself that exposes this new form of female agency, a new sense of mobility, as troubled and troubling. Anderson moves away from the construction of the ship as a method of emancipation and freedom, so described in Mack’s An Australian Girl in London and Stead’s For Love Alone, instead suggesting the more multiplicitous position distinctive to the post-war female subject, a tension between anxiety and freedom. Nora is overcome by unease on her entrance to the ship, as ‘even at the top of that bent, even as I was walking up the gangplank of the ship…I was weighted by a sub-stratum of sadness,’ her new-found understanding of freedom becomes performative, a mask that she adopts, whilst acknowledging that ‘like fruit affected by hard drought, I was likely to be rotten before ripe.’72 Here, Anderson continues to reappraise and readjust the trope of the lengthy ship journey of her 68 p. 99 69 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 62 70 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 103 71 Rooney, p. 102 72 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 104 46 predeccessors, not only the trope of the ship as being a method of escape, but also as a space for the feminine discovery of sensuality and agency, as Nora’s movement across the globe by sea is more than a means of discovery, more than being unfettered from the bonds of husband and family. Fiona Morrison takes up the trope and specific nature of the cruise-ship in ‘The Elided Middle: Christina Stead’s For Love Alone and the Colonial ‘Voyage In’’ (2009) suggesting the way in which time spent at sea is augmented, in-between, caught in stasis and yet still in motion. Through examining Stead’s construction of Teresa Hawkins in For Love Alone, Morrison argues for the way in which the ship journey functions as being ‘the pivotal moment of threshold’ in the novel, disrupting and challenging the way in which the journey can be seen as a moment of freedom, mobility and escape: ‘the ocean and its sublime potential may be all about desire, but ships are socially marked and constrained zones.’73 Such an account of the ship journey from antipodes to colonial centre, a journey of the solitary female traveler, what Morrison terms as a the voyage in rather than out, provides an avenue for reappraising Anderson’s construction of Nora’s time at sea. Anderson disrupts a coherent sense of time in the description of journey in what is already a temporally unstable first-person narrative, being a recollection of Nora’s life, clouded and altered by unclear memories. Significantly Anderson opens with the departure and subsequent arrival in England, where Nora announces ‘when I left the ship at Southhampton, I was pregnant,’ before returning to an account of the time of travel itself.74 Just as Hazzard’s description of travel creates a disturbance between the modern and the ancient, disrupting time through a radical incursion or disruption, or a sense of extended and expanded time, Anderson’s scenes are similarly disruptive but through the construction of an uneasy female agency in an already unstable public/private place. Nora’s only affair can only take place on the ship because it is a space unto itself, but as Morrison suggests, a space that is also constrained and limiting: ‘the confusion of the interstice is the confusion about whether these boundaries or limits operate as inside or outside, or both, a confusion that indicates a disruption to the circumscribing space between subject and object.’ 75 It is a space neither decidedly public nor private but rather in-between, in transit, a machinic space outside the boundaries of the subject’s autonomy and will. As the ship propels Nora forward to 73 Fiona Morrison, ‘The Elided Middle: Christina Stead’s For Love Alone and the Colonial ‘Voyage In’’, Southerly, 69.2, (2009), pp. 155-6, 160 74 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 105 75 Morrison, p. 162-3 47 London, this unease, the length of time governed by inactivity and the passive nature of her position is brought to the fore, as she and her lover roam the decks, idle: ‘It was usually on deck that we talked, walking slowly in our engrossment, and sometimes, in disagreement or perplexity, drifting of one accord to the ship’s rail to rest on our folded arms.’76 Once again distance is collapsed and time expands, but instead of the railway journey across land, this distance is traversed on a global scale, with a ‘voyage lasting for six weeks,’ and the description highlights the way in which the usual scales of time, days, hours, minutes are inadequate for the long blurry journey. Once again, the mode of transport performs the function of chronotope in the novel, a condensing and thickening of time and space. As Nora recounts, ‘the voyage was peaceful, with calm seas and skies, and as day succeeded day, and I continued to keep this friend and lover by my side, and to wake up each morning to the instant realization of his presence in the ship, I grew incredulous.’77 Yet, as the announcement of her pregnancy prefigures, pregnancy and the ship signifying in themselves duration and stasis, the journey does not end with a new sense of freedom or agency: Nora is constrained, trapped by her pregnancy, by the departure from transport, and even after her demand for a ‘definite break on arrival,’ is left not with a feeling of freedom and independence, but rather ‘suddenly feel[ing] discarded.’ Even her claim that the journey and the on-board affair ‘had shown me a happy sexual pattern by which I could live’ is undone, with the pregnancy and subsequent painful abortion, not only leaving Nora’s body scarred but also meaning that ‘never again did [she] have any sexual contact, of any kind, with anyone.’78 Anderson is aware of the recurring trope of the travelling woman, the way in which the journey to Europe is traditionally associated with self-discovery and a newfound sense of freedom. This problematic narrative is directly addressed in the scene preceding the abortion, where Nora takes issue with her friend Olive who writes about heroines and romance, asking ‘what contraceptives [do your characters use]? They have affairs, so they must use something.’79 It is a suggestion immediately dismissed by the writer: ‘contraception – the avoidance of pregnancy – simply is not part of my theme.’80 Anderson is directly attacking and subverting depictions of female agency, particularly a new form of post- 76 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, pp. 105-6 77 pp. 106-7 78 p. 117 79 p. 110 80 p. 110 48 war female agency that precedes second-wave feminism: Nora’s journey, initially a matter of necessity, driven by the desire that nobody could stop her, results in both the scarring of body and mind, returning Nora once again to a passive subject position. Indeed, once again in The Impersonators, Sylvia Foley, distinctly aware that she is part of a mass ‘exodus of young people from Australia in the fifties,’ arrives in London newly married and finds herself caught in ‘a life of routine and constraint.’81 Anderson exposes the tension, the double bind, between the opening up of new vistas and spaces for women through modern transport and at the same time the disorienting temporal and spatial nature of this space, the resulting sense of stasis and unease. Harrower’s female protagonists undergo this loss of will, where the boundaries of self/object become confused. Of the three writers it is Harrower’s women who, in the face of such modern transit and movement, are most constrained, immobile, static. Much of the movement and transportation occurs around them, there is no active announcement that they will undertake a journey simply because they can, in most cases this option is not even available. The protagonists, particularly in The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960), and The Watch Tower (1966) are distinctly passive, insular, and movement here is in contrast to the kaleidoscope of air, boat and rail travel that occurs across Hazzard’s novels and the problematic agency of Anderson’s female subjects. Yet Harrower’s construction of her subjects and their relation to modern transport is significant as it exposes how the symptoms of aboulia reside within the female subject. The loss of will, the feeling of helplessness in the face of mass movement and transport, shapes the female subject constantly, even when they are separated from and outside the modes of travel themselves. The foreboding sense of disaster, the fear of a distant aeroplane roar, which Caroline Bell felt in Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, is constructed in Harrower’s work as being there always, something intangible and uneasy that is outside of the subject’s grasp. This is seen in The Watch Tower with the account of Laura Vaizey’s apprehension of the ship that will send her mother to England: On the sunny windy wharf, beside the big camouflaged ship, with a war in progress, having just been married, saying good-bye to her mother, Laura felt herself falter. None of this – wharf, ship, war, 81 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 60 49 marriage, farewell – was of her planning. Who had constrained her? She felt like an object.82 Like Nora on her ascension to her ship, Harrower’s female subjects are governed by a pervading sense of unease, of some sort of loss of cohesion in the face of such huge mechanized objects. Here the systems of transport that for Ellmann in Elizabeth Bowen’s novels ‘alienate speech and motion from the human will,’ only serve as reminders of what has become embedded in the female subject, this notion of external machine-like forces rendering Laura static and passive, objectified, without forethought or planning. As Ellmann argues, ‘technologies of transport seem to reach into the inner nervous system,’ and for Harrower’s subjects this has become internalized, part of post- war female subjectivity itself. The female protagonists across Harrower’s novel return constantly to this unnamable feeling of disquiet, of unease. The young girl Emily, about to undertake her first unsupervised train journey in The Long Prospect, is startled by the thought that ‘things were always happening lately and there never was, would never be, time enough to sit and think about what it was that was so worrying,’83 whilst Clemency James loses all sense of self in the streets of London in The Catherine Wheel: The speed and colour of the traffic, the general clangour of commerce and society in the streets made me feel disembodied. It was as though I were taking part by proxy in a pageant that I watched through a telescope, from a vast distance.84 These women are continually in states of disembodiment, distanced from their surroundings, like the stagnant passengers on a train carriage watching the scenery go by, as Schivelbusch contends, where action is framed by the carriage window, turning it into a screen, a constructed mise en scène. As Clemency acknowledges, ‘my mind grew wings and flapped away, and my will,’ that ‘I was temporarily missing from my body,’ and she is left an empty container, almost like a form of transport herself.85 Similarly Emily finds herself inert and impotent at a bus stop, unable to garner the attention of the only caring adult she knows, ‘[Thea] lifted a hand, and then the bus disappeared 82 Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1991 [1966]), p. 43 83 Elizabeth Harrower, The Long Prospect, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1979 [1958]), p. 197 84 Elizabeth Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1988 [1960]), p. 122 85 p. 156 50 through the tunnel in the yellow cliffs. Emily’s arm, bare and meaningless as a vacant flagpole, fell to her side.’86 This sense of aboulia, its dissemination into and embodiment by the female subject, is evident in two distinctly similar scenes in A Long Prospect and The Catherine Wheel. Both Clemency and Emily find themselves on transport, one on a train the rather on a London bus, moving whilst stationary. The binary between movement and stasis is summed up as Clemency argues that she wants to catch a bus ‘rather than walk, rather than sit still [my emphasis],’ and yet once on board, still finds herself ‘slumped, staring out at the road ahead.’87 The action here is highly static, inactive, time slow, extended as Clem admits that ‘I feel very ineffectual. Not much staying power.’88 Once again any sense of coherent agency is removed, again the image of an empty container recurs, and yet the scene closes with a reinforcement, a reminder, that Clem is in fact in motion, travelling: ‘The bus braked suddenly and everyone lurched. It moved again and the passengers vibrated, swayed and stared out of the windows.’89 This scene returns to and reconfigures what Liam Lanigan describes as the dangerous potential for modern transport to subordinate subjectivity, to fuel rather than free the subject from paralysis. Yet in the post war setting this potential has become far more actuated, far more inherent in the subject, specifically the female subject, who for Harrower, is constructed as being far more implicated and disrupted in moments of subordination. Far from providing any potential for freedom or self-discovery, of the kind Anderson explores and alludes to in her novels, Harrower describes the railway station in The Long Prospect as a ‘constant assault’ on the subject, ‘eyes tormented by flying grit,’ the train itself disruptive and invasive with ‘the wild shrieks and blasts of shunting engines’ as Emily and her companion turn to the commuters, standing ‘blankly and rather bitterly watching the other passengers and porters.’90 There is no sense of spectacle here, but rather exhaustion, distrust, emptiness and blankness in the face of machines and movement, as even Emily’s grandmother, looks on travelling ‘as an endurance test.’91 Nor is there a sense, as there is in Hazzard, of impending catastrophe or disaster, but instead just a pervading feeling of emptiness, of stagnation, stasis and constraint. This is further heightened by the female protagonist being only twelve but 86 p. 191 87 Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, p. 205 88 p. 208 89 p. 208 90 Harrower, The Long Prospect, p. 198 91 p. 198 51 decidedly without any youthful excitement or sense of purpose, listening to her grandmother in a ‘perfunctory way’, confused by ‘the row of white faces opposite’ in the confined train carriage, the space itself being disorientating, once again not clearly demarcated as public or private. Emily’s listlessness is contrasted with the train itself being so invasive, an assault on the senses, particularly at the moment of departure when ‘it [is] noisy everywhere…the train rock[ing] and rattl[ing] and, it is to be supposed, [going] forward through the blackness.’92 Once again, Harrower’s female subjects are left in limbo, between stasis and movement, and Emily’s will and autonomy leak out into the transporting machine. Whilst planes and ships do not figure largely across Harrower’s oevre, as they do in both Hazzard and Anderson, it is the automobile that comes to the fore. Harrower’s female subjects are repeatedly driven across city and country landscapes, in erratic and vicious moments, by masculine subjects. Transport here is depicted as being a masculine object, and the car functions as an extension of Harrower’s constructions of masculinity as being manipulative and aggressive, particularly that of Stan Peterson in Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City (1957). Therefore, the car functions as a stifling and smothering space for femininity, despite the sense of movement and freedom that the modern automobile attests to. Esther Prescott finds herself in a parked car with Stan in Down in the City, and ‘in the smothering intimacy of the car her awareness of him [is] agonising. Their dark looming figures filled her mind. They [are] cramped in a world where there [is] no light, no land or sea.’93 Female subjectivity is subordinated here to the transporting machine, whilst at the same time increasing the power and assuredness of the masculine subject, and the repeated references to the erratic nature of Stan’s driving, its jerkiness and sudden stops, suggest the way in which the vehicle is constantly on the edge of movement, of attack, and yet Esther remains passive, closed down and immovable: Esther turned her head instinctively as the words appeared and disappeared in her mind. Her eyes met Stan’s for a fraction of time, then they both turned again to the windscreen, to the road ahead where a face hung 92 p. 198 93 Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013 [1957]), p. 33 52 mirage-like in front of each for an instant, and then dissolved. Everything had altered.94 Indeed Stan makes his incursion into the novel through bursting into Esther’s contained and ordered private sphere, marking an unwelcome and unannounced arrival in his ‘long, heavy-nickelled, American car’95 Like Hazzard’s modern machines that crash into images of antiquity, Harrower’s automobiles invade and rupture the domestic space, destabilizing any sense of containment within a private feminine space. Stan moves from car to room almost instantaneously, rupturing and challenging Esther’s solitude, as ‘there was a slam, a pause, a crunch on the gravel, and then drive stepped from the path into the room,’ and Esther finds her apprehension of space and time completely disrupted and challenged, any coherence is found to be illusory: ‘there was a vast singing space in her head: eyes and ears and nose and mouth did not exist. She jerked her hand away and stood up, catching hold of the table to steady herself.’96 Like Anderson’s construction of Nora’s time spent on the cruise ship, Harrower disrupts the temporality of this scene, and embeds this automobile arrival with portentous meaning, the way the ‘long yellow beam of the headlights soak her and wheel crazily across the garden,’ given the announcement in the chapter before that Esther ‘married Stan Peterson, after having known him for two weeks.’97 Significantly, the decision to be married is taken in Stan’s brash American car, and the seeming inevitability of the outcome is propelled forward by Harrower’s descriptions of the automobile itself, of inhabitants awoken by the ‘unfamiliar sound of a car speeding past their bungalow,’ of the ‘swerving cadillac’ at the toll booths. Such movement is set against Esther’s passivity, ‘silent and rigid,’ initially attempting to ‘escape, in spirit and consciousness’ only to find that Stan’s ‘dumb acceptance of attitude killed [her] triumph. This was not what she had wanted.’98 The jilted and half-finished sentences, the awkward sideways discussions between Stan and Esther, whilst in motion, suggest Harrower’s construction of a contained post-war space that is neither private nor public, that cannot be clearly demarcated, which is temporally unstable in the very nature of its movement. It is a space that is markedly modern in its conception, but one 94 pp. 30-1 95 p. 18 96 pp. 19, 23 97 pp. 25, 16 98 pp. 34, 30, 33 53 that reduces rather than opens up a sense of autonomy of the female subject. Whilst there is a reference to travel, to move off Australian shores at the beginning of the novel, like the protagonists of both Hazzard and Anderson’s fiction, ‘everyone’s going and it makes you look ignorant if you can’t say you’ve seen all those places,’ Harrower’s construction of space and the modern transporting machine is instead contracted to the insular and suffocating upholstery of the motor vehicle.99 Transport is again caught between stasis and movement, the female subject’s autonomy leaking into the propulsion of the machine. When taking up Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s representation of transport across their work alongside the modern anxieties surrounding the vast networks and systems of transportation, and mass movement, it can be seen that all three authors are engaging with and reconfiguring ideas of movement and transit. The construction of the mode of travel itself brings with it an uneasy new space that is fraught and fragmented, one which ruptures coherent notions of temporality and space, one that is linked to catastrophe, death and destruction. When looking at the works of these authors together, questions surrounding the distinctive impact that modern transportation has on the female subject are opened up, as each author addresses movement and travel in unique ways, from the collision between antiquity and modernity of Hazzard, the problematic female agency of Anderson and the stifling arrestment of Harrower’s protagonists. Modes of travel, from the plane, to the ship, train and finally car, whilst opening up new forms of post-war mobility, of allowing the subject, particularly female subject, to move across countries, immediately pull the subject back into a static and passive position: the position of the female subject is rendered unsettled and contradictory, public and private space blend and overwhelm one another, and what is left is an underlying sense of passivity in the face of mass systems of movement. 99 p. 5 54 CHAPTER TWO Refracting the Gaze: Shirley Hazzard and writing the globe ‘Every written work…leads us to a great door – through which there is no passage.’ Georg Lukács, ‘The Moment and Form’ (1908), p. 135 ‘The significance of the polyphonic novel is that it recognises the complexity and the contradictions of the modern world, the dialogic nature of human consciousness, and the ‘profound ambiguity’ of every voice, gesture and act.’ Jha Prabhakara, ‘Lukács, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the Novel’ (1985), p. 84 ‘What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature…Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.’ Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus (1980), p. 31 Shirley Hazzard’s construction of the modern post-war space across all her novels is one that is focused on the globe, the way in which modernity has brought with it a compression and closing up between borders, a breaking down of the traditional modes of apprehending and operating within the world space. As suggested in Chapter One, through her construction of global travel and movement, Hazzard’s spatial coordinates are at once both modern and antiquated, temporally unstable, looping and repeating – the past reaches forward, whilst there is a recurring use of prolepsis, a sense of monument and melodrama in the events and future time to come. Through charting Hazzard’s preoccupation with just such spatial and temporal ambiguities, this chapter moves from the discussion of modes of transportation as unstable and disruptive containers for apprehending the global space, towards the way in which the global sphere disrupts and overlaps with the private, domestic and the personal: across Hazzard’s novels a separation and boundary cannot be maintained. Such a move argues for the implication of the female subject in the political and historical frames of the post- war world. The global space that Hazzard constructs is one firmly rooted in late modernity, in the after effects of the second world war and Hiroshima, in the new found sense of mobility and transit available for the female subject.1 This chapter will take up Hazzard’s construction of a global geography, particularly across the novels The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003), which in turn, opens up questions about the 1 Gail Jones, ‘Glasses and Speculations: On Hazzard’s Transits’ in B. Olubas (ed), Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014), in press np. 55 way in which her distinctive stylistics and use of the novel form offer a lens through which to view the female subject’s position and relationship within the post-war globe. As Brigitta Olubas suggests in Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist (2012), ‘the dense metaphorics, narrative structure, and distinctive stylistics…suggest the immense complexity of Hazzard’s writing, particularly in the face of earlier reading of these novels as slight or middlebrow romance.’2 Indeed, the significance of Hazzard’s oeuvre lies in the way ‘the work proposes for her readers the question of what it means for a writer to work self-consciously outside the terrain of the nation…determining a very particular imaginative geography.’3 Hazzard’s post-war geographies, the global spaces which track across all her novels, expose a slippage between the public/private divide, an oscillation between the domestic and everyday, and large scale global events. This suggests a multiplicitous position for the subject, once again governed by a rapid opening up of space and a dramatic compression. Brigid Rooney draws attention to the importance of the ‘the oscillation between microcosm and macrocosm’ in relation to the intermingling of the province and metropole in Hazzard’s work, and in doing so, opens up the significance of a similar oscillation between public and private, the domestic and the global frame: Just as Hazzard’s monumental style lends gravity to the melodrama of her plot, slowing an impending future already proleptically given, so the insignificant, encrypted local coordinate re-weights and interpenetrates with the expanded coordinates of the wider world that the narrative seeks to encompass, and within which it seeks its home.4 As Rooney suggests, there is a sense of moving forward and outward in the narrative, the constant adjusting of a sliding scale between the local and the global. For Hazzard, the post-war global space figures largely, penetrates the subject’s negotiation of the local, everyday and domestic, reshaping and relooping back outside to what I term in this chapter as a global imaginary: Hazzard’s subjects’ perceived relationship between themselves, and their alignment with, and place in, the modern world. 2 Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: Literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist, (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), p. 149 3 p. 11 4 Brigid Rooney, ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (ed) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013), pp. 112-3, 110 56 This term stems from Mireille Calle-Gruber’s account of the modern city in her discussion of Hélène Cixous, the way in which ‘literature makes a ghost of the city suddenly appear’: ‘the imaginary city is a space of the unknown: the uncertainty of the existence of the world is inscribed next to the skin of words.’5 Such an account of the city suggests a way in which the global space can operate on a similar imaginary scale – the subject apprehends the many voices and multiple layers of the globe through language, through words and through an imaginary construction of this space which is always-already fragmented and occluded. As Gail Jones proposes, Hazzard’s locations and the doom-laden modes of transport within them are perilous spaces, which function across her novels against the backdrop of a ‘global, deterritorised, and inhuman horizon of event.’6 The global horizon is always present, even right within the space of the drawing room, or even at the dinner table conversation at the opening of The Transit of Venus: When Sefton Thrale said the word ‘global’ you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of the world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean. Or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.7 Indeed, Sefton Thrale’s use of the word global, suggests the way that for Hazzard, the world is apprehended and mediated through the frame of language, ‘the skin of words.’ Jones claims that this scene in the novel, whilst not only highlighting the significance of the ‘unevenness of surface,’ it is also ‘in part an ideological critique of the normativising capacity of language, its authority to smooth over differences.’ Thus, Hazzard’s sense of the global imaginary is one that highlights difference and outcroppings, multiple layers and overlappings, rather than flattening out the space into smooth ball, it is what Jones terms ‘inclemency as an irresistible narrative incitement.’8 Both Rooney and Jones highlight the importance of Hazzard’s distinctive narrative style, and her engagement with the novel form, as being always-already connected and entwined with layers of meaning, whilst Olubas argues for the 5 Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘Hélène Cixous’ Imaginary Cities: Oran-Osnabrück-Manhattan – Places of Fascination, Places of Fiction’ in New Literary History, 37.1, (2006), pp. 136, 137 6 Gail Jones, in press np. 7 Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, (London: Virago Press, [1980]), pp. 10-11 8 Jones, in press np. 57 significance of reading and misreading in both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire.9 For Rooney, ‘movement in time and place most often occurs, in Hazzard’s narrative, at the exacting level of the sentence, tugging against an otherwise linear plot progression through time,’ whilst Jones argues that ‘Hazzard is inducting the reader into a densely notated system of precedents: all actions are anticipated, literary exemplars are co- present, there is a kind of assumption here that signs and symbols everywhere abound.’10 Such an account of Hazzard’s stylistics, the densely notated system, opens up the possibility for thinking about the relationship between the construction of the global imaginary and the novel form, and its function as a method for the subject, especially the female subject, to negotiate a shifting and ever-mobile post-war space. That is, the way Hazzard constructs a temporally charged and unstable narrative, her monumental and proleptic style, her breadth of intertextual references, symbols and clues to modes of reading and misreading, offers a way of thinking about the novel form, and the narrative within it, as a lens with which to view and apprehend a transitory and shifting modern globe. Thus, Hazzard’s stylistics and narrative frames repeatedly revolve around modes of oscillation, between macro and micro, between global and local, private and public, antiquity and modernity. These moments of intermingling and blending offer a way of suggesting Hazzard’s preoccupation with an uncertain and unsettled global sphere – one that is temporally unstable, a sense of anxious afterness and instability – where global events reach right within the domestic frame, informing the way in which the subject, particularly the female subject, can negotiate the modern world. Pointing to the existence of a global imaginary in her work, of a preoccupation with an ever-present constructed view of the global sphere, suggests the way in which the mobility offered in the post-war space brings with it a shifting in subject view, and new ways of apprehending and engaging with modernity. This imaginary is at once linked to the dissonance and dialogic nature of language, modes of reading and the novel form. Throughout both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, Hazzard draws upon the significance in representation, specifically reading and writing narrative for moving within this modern global space. 9 see Brigitta Olubas, ‘Chapter Five: The Great Fire’ in Shirley Hazzard: Literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist (2012) 10 Rooney, ‘Time’s Abyss: Australian Literary Modernism and the Scene of Ferry Wreck’, p. 109; Jones, in press np. 58 This chapter will take up just such a position through aligning Hazzard’s work alongside theoretical accounts of the novel itself, the significance of form and representation of space: the way in which the novel is inherently interwoven with modernity, where modernity is characterized by a fundamental sense of the instability and fracturing of the global space. Discourse on the novel in the early twentieth century, in particular the work of Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bahktin, who both engage with the novel from different standpoints of history, stylistics, and linguistics, points to the significance of the historical growth of the genre, especially the way in which it is systematically entwined with transformations in culture and ideology. As Galin Tihanov argues in the comparative study The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (2000), ‘for both Lukács and Bakhtin the novel became the pinnacle of their efforts to problematise the connections between culture and society…the genre of the novel is a site of intersecting literary and philosophical analyses which strive to understand modernity and to respond to it.’11 For Lukács and Bahktin the genre of the novel, as opposed to the Epic and poetry, opens up a distinctive way of exploring connections between philosophy, ideology, the subject and society. Thus, the narrative functions as a mediation and conversation between competing and often antagonistic discourses and voices that can be threaded together. It is through looking at Hazzard’s work through this lens of novelistic discourse, which aims to clarify and explore the unique and often fractious position of the genre, that connections can be drawn between Hazzard’s use of the novel form and her construction of mobility and space in the post-war environment, that the represented globe ‘imagined, a substitute, holds the revelation of vertiginous supplement.’12 Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (1915) directly ties the form with the modern, the way in which the genre corresponds with modernity that is characterised by instability, incoherence, and fragmentation. It is a melancholic lament for the totality and coherence evident in the Epic form, a form that for Lukács has disappeared from view, whilst the novel has been taken up by an ever-increasing bourgeois class. Lukács theorisation of the novel, especially his discussion of its ascent as the dominant narrative form is, for him, inseparable from capitalism and production. It is a form that exists in a society that has lost its way, as Jha Prabhakara argues in ‘Lukács, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the 11 Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time, (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 7 12 Calle-Gruber, p. 136 59 Novel’ (1985): ‘the novel is the epic of a society in which the extensive totality of life has ceased to be sensuously given.’13 As opposed to drama, the epic, tragedy, and poetry, the relatively young novel form functions around what Lukács terms an ‘incompletely resolved dissonance,’ both mirroring and refracting the dissonance of the space and time it seeks to represent.14 Although critics have highlighted Lukács’ theorisation of the genre’s connection with his movement towards and subsequent conversion to Marxism, and his later project of establishing a clear Marxist history of the novel form, it still is significant outside of this political frame through the way it points to the inherent instability of the form itself.15 Indeed much of the resurgent interest and current critical debates surrounding Lukács’ work revolves around possible ways to reframe or reapply his Marxist leanings into current discourse surrounding the novel. David Cunningham seeks to negotiate how to find ‘new life’ in Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel in ‘the wake of the apparent disappearance of a horizon of world proletarian revolution,’ in the article ‘Capitalist and Bourgeois Epics’ (2011), whilst in ‘Typing Class: Classification and Redemption in Lukács Political and Literary Theory,’ (201) Patrick Eiden-Offe examines the way in which Lukács’ discussion of narrative opens up the way in which class consciousness and Marxist principles can be interwoven into form.16 However, whilst Lukács’ relationship to Marxism remains an important aspect of the critical accounts of his theory of the novel, what remains clear across recent scholarship is the recurring significance in Lukács’ insistence on the dissonance and instability of the novel, a dissonance that can be taken up outside the Marxist frame. This movement against the Marxist leanings of Lukács, and the turn toward the way in which Lukács’ discussion of form offers a new way of engaging with the genre, is suggested in the recent republication of his early writings in John T Saunders and Katie Terezakis’ Soul and Form (2010). As Katie Terezakis suggests in the afterword, ‘The 13 Jha Prabhakara, ‘Lukács, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the Novel’, Diogenes, 33.63 (1985), p. 70 14 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971 [1915]), p. 71 15 see Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time, (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000); John Neubauer, ‘Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel’, Poetics Today, 17.4, (1996); Jha Prabhakara, ‘Lukács, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the Novel’, Diogenes, 33.63, (1985) 16 David Cunningham, ‘Capitalist and Bourgeois Epics: Lukács, Abstraction and the Novel,’ in T. Bewes; T. Hall (ed) Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 49; Patrick Eiden-Offe ‘Typing Class: Classification and Redemption in Lukács Political and Literary Theory’ in T. Bewes; T. Hall (ed) Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, (New York: Continuum, 2011); see also Stewart Martin ‘Capitalist Life in Lukács’ in T. Bewes; T. Hall (ed) Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, (New York: Continuum, 2011) and Galin Tihanov The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time, (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000) 60 Legacy of Form’ (2010), ‘Lukács is the spirit haunting the whole domain of literary criticism,’ and points to a reappraisal and (re)turn to his theorisation of form and narrative outside the boundaries of Marxist thinking.17 Indeed Timothy Bewes contends in the article ‘The Novel Problematic’ (2011) that the legacy of Lukács work lies in the way in which it precipitates the idea of the novel form as being decidedly elusive: it is ‘predicated on a fundamental uncertainty regarding its own definition and ontology, its ethical substance, and the possibility of its making any meaningful utterance whatsoever.’18 What I am proposing here is the spatial nature of Lukács’ theorisation of narrative discourse and the novel, outside a Marxist frame, particularly the claim that ‘the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless,’ offers a new way of thinking about Hazzard’s use of the novel form and a global imaginary: ‘artistic genres now cut across one another, with a complexity that cannot be disentangled, and become traces of authentic or false searching for an aim that is no longer clearly and unequivocally given.’19 The novel form of the twentieth century is itself a construction of the spatially incoherent modern global space, where connections are drawn around dissonance and instability; there is no absolute centre or bedrock for the narrative to weave itself around or ultimately resolve. As Lukács suggests, the novel itself must engage with such instability and dissonance in order to expose ‘the fragile and incomplete nature of the world as ultimate reality: by recognising, consciously and consistently, everything that points outside and beyond the confines of the world.’20 It is, as Prabhakara argues, an oscillation between seeking totality and yet being unable ever to reach it: ‘the extensive totality of life has ceased to be…given, but it yet seeks to discover and construct a totality of life, ’21 pointing to what Bewes reminds us is a unique aspect of the novel genre, a double bind, where ‘the novel is the expression of the gap,’ a gap ‘predicated on uncertainty’: ‘the novel designates less a form or genre than a condition in which form and content are for the first time radically heterogeneous.’22 These claims allow for a theoretical avenue for considering how the global imaginary functions across Hazzard’s novels, in the form itself, the way in which 17 Katie Terezakis, ‘The Legacy of Form’ in J. T. Saunders; K. Terezakis (ed) Soul and Form, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 224 18 Timothy Bewes, ‘The Novel Problematic’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 44.1, (2011), p. 18 19 Lukács, p. 41 20 p. 71 21 Prabhakara, p. 70 22 Bewes, p. 17l; Olubas, p. 11 61 global effects, uncertain historical moments in the post-war space invade the personal and private sphere. These global events are never represented as being complete or whole, but rather they are always partial and occluded. This inconsistency, the inability to apprehend a complete spatial and temporal environment, and the way in which form and content are inseparable from each other, tracks across Hazzard’s novels, particularly in their situation within a post-Hiroshima world, and the subsequent nuclear age of the Cold War. It is in this space that Hazzard’s protagonists move, and this is further perpetuated through what Olubas terms as shifting mobility, the opening up of new vistas for the post-war female subject.23 Gail Jones draws on the work of Gerhard Richter and his theorization of ‘afterness’ to account for the different sense of global space and time of post-war modernity that Hazzard is constructing across her novels. As Jones argues, there is ‘a preoccupation in modernity with nachlebe – living on, living after, surviving, after-life – that is to say, not with the conceptual governance of temporal unfolding, as we expect with conventionally sanctioned historicism, but a kind of anxious afterness’: ‘there is a sense that history has already happened (in the war) and that futurity is doomed.’24 This sense of disrupted space, an ‘anxious afterness,’ where the global imaginary infects and permeates the domestic, trivial and everyday, is seen throughout The Transit of Venus. Both Caroline Bell and Ted Tice are configured against the backdrop of war, of world events invading and informing their subjectivity, and their apprehension with the space around them. These are referent points situated outside the frame of the narrative, suggesting Lukács’ claim that the power of the modern novel lies in its ability to demonstrate the way in which ‘everything is seen as many-sided, within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction and as suffering itself.’25 For in The Transit of Venus there is a recurring collision between the events of World War Two, especially Hiroshima, and the post-war political uncertainty, with recurring events minutely historicised, protests, food shortages, the war in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, alongside the private space, the interior lives of subjects, the colour of Caroline Bell’s hair, her sister’s brief romance with her child’s doctor, Ted’s position on an escalator in Harrods. It is in this 23 Olubas, p. 1 24 Jones, in press np. 25 Lukács, p. 75 62 positioning, which is more like a kaleidoscope rather than an antagonistic juxtaposition between opposing spheres, that moments are created which are in themselves abstract fragments but which gain meaning through their distinctive positioning. Hazzard’s novels expose these moments in the post-war setting, linking just such oscillating fragments across the narrative in order to display the uneasy relationship the modern subject has with History, space and in particular, the global space. Hazzard’s global locus is grounded in a recurring tension between the domestic space and the cacophony of world events, of constant transit, movement, and the expansion of space. The well-known portentous opening of The Transit of Venus affirms this tension, and it is a tension that constantly repeats and loops again and again across the novel: By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning…As late as the following morning, small paragraphs would even appear in newspapers having space to fill due to a hiatus in elections, fiendish crimes, and the Korean War – unroofed houses and stripped orchards being given in numbers and acreage; with only lastly, briefly, the mention of a body.26 It is in this epic landscape that Hazzard drops a single man, ‘walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning.’27 This technique occurs frequently throughout the novel, where landscapes are constantly expanded, increasingly involving the masses, the public, political and international events, before contracting to a single individual; a private struggle is set against or aligned with the turning of the globe. Hazzard represents Caro and Ted Tice’s growth from children to adults as being interwoven with the global landscape, with World War Two governing and reshaping their way of viewing and apprehending the world. Caro’s teenage years in Australia, her transition to womanhood, is jarringly related to military conflict, to global events: 26 Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 1 27 p. 1 63 Caro was becoming flesh. Her hands were assuming attitudes…The belt of her school uniform, which at the time of Dunkirk had banded a mere child, by the siege of Tobruk delineated a cotton waist. Her body showed a delicate apprehension of other change…Greece fell, Crete fell. There was a toppling, even of history.28 This short description constantly shifts the reader’s focus as it deliberately links the gendering of Caro’s teenage body to military battles. There is a simultaneous contraction and expansion here, exposing the way in which the narrative can simultaneously draw a link between fragmented global events, things which ‘appear as isolated and yet connected.’ This is a gendered collision here, an intermingling between what Kristeva terms ‘women’s time,’ and the linear cursive progression of history – where women’s experience of space-time is diagonal or parallel to ‘time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding.’29 What this passage does is at once set up an opposition between the masculine nature of war and conflict and the female body, and in doing this perpetuates an undoing of the boundaries between public and private: Caro’s developing sexuality ingrained with the traits of cyclical temporality, the minute gestures and traits of femininity, a cotton waist and the attitude of her hands is represented through the lens of military history, and a constantly shifting and reforming global space. Caro’s sexuality, the way she becomes flesh, is bound to global events, to the public space of military and political events that mark the narrative of History. This collision between masculinity and femininity, and the public and private, is similarly constructed in the days after World War Two in The Great Fire with Aldred Leith’s discovery of a young Japanese servant’s suicide. The suicide is foreshadowed in the previous scene when the soldier Leith interrupts the Australian brigadier Barry Driscoll, whose family now occupies the house, interrogating the young man for ‘coming back to the locked house at an unauthorized hour.’30 The discovery of the body takes place immediately after Leith comes across the sleeping Helen Driscoll, ‘who [lies] on her side, sheet pushed back over raised hip, body reaching forward as if to follow her free arm.’31 Helen is a picture of femininity enclosed within the private space of the 28 Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, p. 42 29 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time,’ in T. Moi (ed) The Kristeva Reader, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986), pp. 189, 192 30 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 36 31 p. 40 64 bedroom, whose ‘innocence, of youth and sleep, were entire and defenceless.’32 This gendered body is then immediately juxtaposed with the discovery of the Japanese body, with ‘a welter of blood and innards partly contained by a coloured robe and loosened obi,’ and there is a distinct contrast with Helen’s sleeping abandon and the body’s ‘slippered feet project, inviolate…blameless, irrelevant.’33 Here both the masculine and feminine bodies are aligned, set beside each other, but in doing so the body of defeated soldier, the body of the failing side of war is feminised, weakened and domesticated: becoming the image of the obverse side of Helen’s burgeoning sexuality. It is an afterness, where history reaches forward - ‘so the war, apparently, has not receded, but is able to return in ordinary moments and by casual details. It is sui generis, timeless and interceptive; but also relegated to individual subject positions’ – it intercedes right within the domestic feminine space.34 This idea of the private being suddenly interrupted by the public is a trope that repeats across both The Great Fire and The Transit of Venus, implicating the ethical terrain of history and world events into the frame of the personal. Ted Tice’s account of his wartime youth in The Transit of Venus takes on a similar vein, with the interruption of his solitary teenage walks by an escaped German soldier, the sudden disruption of the private sphere, an incursion of war. As Ted argues in his admission to Caro of letting the soldier escape, being caught ‘with conclusive proof the war was real,’ and immediately forced to undertake a moral choice, ‘a conscious act of independent humanity,’ he attempts to conceal it, to let it remain private: ‘I didn’t look forward to the hullaballoo if it became a public matter.’35 This is a crucial point in the narrative, exposing both Caro and Ted’s moral alignments that precipitate the way in which they negotiate the modern world, a way of reading events within the frame of humanist beliefs. Caro’s understanding of Ted’s humanism, a sense of obligation to the solitary soldier and his decision to let the man go sets up an important precedent for the ending of the novel where Ted’s moral choices are once again exposed in his concealment of Paul Ivory’s crimes. Hazzard creates a tension here between the public and private, the global scale of war and a single individual act, an act that in turn has global ramifications, with the German soldier moving to America to make weapons, his 32 p. 40 33 p. 41 34 Jones, in press, np. 35 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 61 65 escape ‘part of his public legend, almost admirable as presented in magazines.’36 Once again different threads are joined together, dissonant fragments of the modern world bound in the narrative, demonstrating the way in which the novel form exposes how such threads can be both set against and aligned with each other. Indeed, as Hazzard constructs a tension between the individual protagonist’s personal experiences of war and the public markers of history, the spaces themselves become increasingly dissonant and fragile. With Caro’s removal from Sydney to a country villa at the foot of the Blue Mountains, there is a distinctive uneasy space created: it is a wealthy private house with interiors of great beauty and yet it is also situated alongside an Italian prisoner of war camp. As Caro recalls ‘these rooms enclosed loveliness – something memorable, true as literature’ and yet ‘in a forbidden paddock below the house, a wire fence surrounded tents, tin buildings, and thirty or forty short men grotesquely military.’37 It is in these moments that Hazzard creates a particular narrative space that denies a separation of completely private or domestic spheres, but one that is instead a public and private space interwoven, threaded, always putting the modern subject on unstable ground, and alongside the course of History. It is with Caro’s marriage to Adam Vail and her movement across the globe to America that sees the return of the kaleidoscopic scene that Hazzard uses at the outset of the novel. As Olubas suggests in her discussion of The Transit of Venus, this is a function of melodrama, which ‘attends to all the novel’s monumental events,’ the notion that time ‘is marked and circumscribed by fate,’ and that these moments ‘operate as a kind of modern or fallen tragedy.’38 I want to suggest here that these melodramatic descriptions that repeat across the novel also perform an essential function of creating the global imaginary, over situating and contextualizing the action of the novel within a distinctly expanded global rather than local space: In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war in Asia…Protesters with aerosol cans had 36 p. 60-1 37 p. 44 38 p. 166 66 sprayed Stonehenge dark red. In London there was foul weather, and the balance of payments on the blink or brink.39 In this moment that geographies here are opened up, national identities and boundaries are discarded. Instead what comes to the fore is the simultaneity of events, the way in which colossal moments are taking place alongside each other in the same temporal frame, and yet this global space is then radically reduced down to the singular and personal action of the individual. As suggested, Rooney takes up this constant oscillation of perspective between local and metropole, individual and global locus, arguing that such movement ‘might speak less to the valorization of world over local or even national literary frames, or vice versa, than to a need to recognize sites of their mutual interaction, their necessary entanglement.’40 That is to say that these sudden contractions are disorientating: they are moments where public political events, part of the broad global imaginary outside the modern subject’s frame of apprehension, are brought alongside the individual, alongside small gestures. It is not so much a tension between global politics and the everyday, the domestic and the interior but rather a blending, an intermingling, a ‘necessary entanglement’ of the post-war global space. This is seen once again with Caro and Adam Vail’s return from South America ‘during a heat wave’: ‘there was a demonstration against war…In the locked house man and woman embraced, because a measure of safety can be attained under almost any circumstances. Letters were stacked on a table. A folded newspaper half-disclosed a presidential scandal.’41 Lukács’ claim that with the possibility of a complete whole, a totality, has been lost with the passing of the Epic and the advent of modernity, proposes that this blending and intermingling between spheres is a distinctive aspect of the novel, the way in which the novel is persistently ‘establishing a fluctuating yet firm balance between becoming and being,’ the form itself being full of movement, transit and mobility. However, as Lukács’ central tenet for his theorization of the novel genre is to despair and lament such a loss of totality and coherent forms, it is important to situate any discussion of the novel alongside the work of Bahktin, who takes up and challenges 39 p. 245 40 Rooney, p. 113 41 Hazzard, p. 256 67 Lukács’ history of the genre, and its power as an unstable and fluctuating form.42 John Neubauer argues in the article ‘Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel’ (1996) for the way in which both theorists’ projects of providing a detailed account of the history of the novel as a genre, and its position within Marxist thought, are interwoven: ‘the two most comprehensive theories of the novel in our century are infused with notions of homelessness that relate the two theories to each other.’43 This movement to Bakhtin enables a contrasting view, which whilst resonating with Lukács’ discussion of homelessness, allows the inclusion of a different aspect of the novel form. It is necessary to turn to Bakhtin’s linguistic account of the genre in order to shift Lukács’ discussion of homelessness and transience away from a melancholic lament for the loss of totality towards the more multiplicitous, contradictory and expansive nature of the novel form. Of particular significance here is Bakhtin’s central claim in his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1935) that the novel is both dialogic and multiple.44 Through outlining the significance of language, multiplicity and the ‘heteroglossia’ of voices that exist within the novel, Bakhtin argues for the dialogic nature of the form: ‘the distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogisation – this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.’45 This move resituates Lukács’ claim about homelessness and instability within the frame of linguistics, as Neubeuer suggests, Bakhtin creates a move from ‘transcendental homelessness into linguistic homelessness.’46 When Bakhtin’s concept of language is situated alongside Lukács’ discussion of the novel, there is a move from the constant transitory homelessness inherent in the form, to the multiple and unstable nature of its many voices. Bakhtin adds a linguistic level, and in doing so, sees the novel’s instability as a means for opening up possibilities for expression, as the distinctive modern site for the collision between discourses and ideologies. Prabhakara takes up this claim in her comparison of Bakhtin and Lukács, arguing that ‘if Lukács and his 42 see Galin Thanov’s ‘Introduction’ in The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time for a historical account of Bakhtin’s relationship with Lukács’ work, as well as John Neubauer, ‘Bakhtin versus Lukács: Inscriptions of Homelessness in Theories of the Novel’, Poetics Today, 17.4, (1996) and Prabhakara, ‘Lukacs, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the Novel’ 43 Neubauer, p. 531 44 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘‘Discourse of the Novel’ in M. Holquist (ed) The Dialogic Imagination, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008 [1935]), p. 73 45 Bakhtin, p. 263 46 Neubeuer, p. 532 68 followers had seen the novel as an expression of decline…Bakhtin…finds in the novel not any manifestation of decline but rather the liberation of discourse from the fetters of authority.’47 What is distinctive, and what is useful when applying Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic novel to Hazzard’s post-war narratives, is how this form of heteroglossia can function as a way of presenting the fragmented nature of modernity and the global space. This is evident in the way in which critics return to the affirmation that the novel is the most potent form of the twentieth century, that it provides a unique frame for distilling the flux and indeterminate nature that is the modern world. Prabhakara suggests that ‘the significance of the polyphonic novel is that it recognises the complexity and the contradictions of the modern world, the dialogic nature of human consciousness, and the ‘profound ambiguity’ of every voice, gesture and act,’ whilst Neubeuer argues that ‘novelistic action becomes a fight against time, its temporality,’ and perhaps most forcefully Tihanov contends that Bakhtin’s theory of the novel suggests that the form is ‘recommended as the indisputable epitome of modernity; it is seen as the living Other of literature placed within literature itself. It is the built in clock-work of change [my emphasis]’: this stems from ‘Bahktin’s proximity to the epistemological paradigms of modernity and its ideas of flux, of change and equally consecrated, yet ultimately transitory views.’48 Rooney has applied the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to Hazzard’s construction of moments where temporality becomes radically unstable, such as the scene of the ferry wreck in The Transit of Venus, where ‘signifiers maintain the narrative’s looping of past into present, province into metropole,’ and Bakhtin’s dialogic understanding of the novel also offers a way for viewing Hazzard’s construction of the post-war global space.49 It is this state of modernity that Hazzard’s protagonists occupy, ‘of flux, of change,’ of contradiction, being both inside and outside, near and far, and the homeless nature of the modern novel form, the many voices of a dialogic system of language bring this to the fore. Hazzard’s construction of the global space performs alongside a connected dialogic understanding of language, and the significance of reading and writing is both inside and outside of the narrative frame. The post-war globe is understood and apprehended across The Great Fire through the medium of 47 Prabhakara, p. 78 48 Prabhakara, p. 84; Neubeuer, p. 534; Tihanov, pp. 148, 142 49 Rooney, p. 110 69 language, through reading, whether it is through letters, novels, philosophy books, atlases and literature. There are numerous descriptions across the novel of Aldred Leith reading. Right from the outset in the train carriage Leith is ‘holding a book in his right hand – not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover.’50 It is established that Leith’s father is a novelist, a novelist whose works are set in places across the globe, ‘novels of love from Manchuria to Madagascar.’51 Ways of understanding the magnified global post-war space are mediated through the frame of a modern romance novel, with Leith aligning his sense of mobility, of vast stretches of space, with a narrative: ‘looking from his window at the stricken coasts of Japan…he wondered with unconcern what circumstance would next transform the story…Having looked awhile at Asia from his window, he brought out a different, heavier book from his canvas bag.’52 Here language, narrative and the novel are interwoven with the subject’s ability to encounter the vast and unstable spaces across post-war modern Japan and Hong Kong, with the same travel romance from the first scene of the novel reappearing in Leith’s Australian driver’s hand. It is a self-conscious gesture that immediately draws attention to the significance of reading novels as a way of apprehending an arrival in an unfamiliar formerly enemy territory through the lens of literature: Leith asked, ‘What were you reading?’ The soldier groped with free hand to the floor. ‘My girl sent it.’ The same photograph: Oliver Leith at his desk. On the front cover, the white title, cobalt sky, and snowbound Acropolis. Leith brought out his own copy from a trenchcoat pocket. ‘I’m damned.’53 A similar scene recurs again later in the novel between Leith and Peter Exley: [Leith] bought a novel by a rising author, about wartime love in West Africa. He already had a military map of the island, but found another – better, because more personal, with old villas and monuments marked: of time as well as place… 50 Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire, (London: Virago Press, 2003), p. 3 51 p. 4 52 p. 6-7 53 p. 7 70 Peter saw the package from Kelly and Walsh. ‘Can I see what you’ve got? I could have let you have my copy. The best novel since the war.’ Leith had changed his boots and was filling a flask from the bottle of boiled water on the table. ‘So we still carry the same books, Peter.’54 Both these scenes suggest the importance of novels, literature as a means of apprehending the global sphere. All three travelers who are constantly in motion, constantly apprehending new spaces, find it a necessity to carry books across the globe, books that discuss and refract the new post-war space, as Peter says, ‘the best novel since the war.’55 Olubas suggests the significance of sharing both letters and books across The Great Fire as a way of negotiating the opening up of new vistas and new forms of mobility, whilst Robert Dixon suggests in ‘‘Turning a place into a field’: Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies’ (2010) that the presence of literature, particularly Western literature across the novel again suggests a colonial imagining of the Asian space, ‘an affirmation of high European culture.’56 I want to expand on Olubas’ claim to suggest that the significance of literature for Hazzard, the importance of the written word, points to the correlation between story-telling and the subject moving within the modern world, functioning as means of strengthening and shaping a sense of a global imaginary. This takes up the correlation between Bakhtin’s unstable heteroglossia, and the way in which, as Tihanov suggests, ‘language is inseparable from the very idea of human existence: we only come to know the world by articulating it, and the words we use to do so are not entirely ours.’57 Caroline Bell apprehends and negotiates the global space across the Transit of Venus, particularly the northern hemisphere, through the articulation of the world in British Romantic poetry, refracted through the lens of English literature, involving herself ‘in a journey of ten thousand miles.’58 Hazzard draws attention to this early in the novel when constructing the scenes of Caro’s childhood: 54 p. 111-2 55 p. 112 56 Olubas, ‘Chapter 5: The Great Fire’; Robert Dixon, ‘‘Turning a place into a field’: Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies’ in R. Dixonl; N. Birns (ed) Reading Across the Pacific: Australia- United States Intellectual Histories, (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), p. 277 57 Tihanov, p. 59 58 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 31 71 What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these but believed in them with perfect faith. As you believed, also, in the damp, deciduous, and rightful seasons of English literature…Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.59 There is a tension set up here between the colonial outpost and the perceived centre of the global space, the centre of empire preceding the instability of World War Two. Here, Caro makes the vast journey that was discussed in Chapter One through her imagination, in literature: instead of travelling around the world on a ship or plane, Caro travels through language. This is central to the sense of the globe that Hazzard is building, where the written world (hedgerows, skylarks, and the rightful seasons) are more significant in forming Caro’s sense of the world, her global imaginary, than the reality of the space around her. It is, as Tihanov suggests, an articulation of the world where the words are not entirely her own. Hazzard’s subjects continually perform this mediation of their experience with a rapidly expanding and connected globe through the lens of literature, specifically Western literature, as Ted Tice also acknowledges, ‘We too…We knew about things from books.’60 Indeed, as Gail Jones suggests, Hazzard’s protagonists are engaged in a mode of looking and of reading, just as the reader of Hazzard’s fiction must themselves ‘read with an awareness of the occult and of occultation.’61 Bakhtin’s discussion of the nature of prose, where ‘the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by the social consciousness,’ suggests the spatial shape of the novel form itself, its ability to track vast routes and roads in a kaleidoscopic movement.62 The dialogic nature of language, a heteroglossia which ‘widen[s] and deepen[s] as long as language is alive,’ and which allows for ‘boundaries [to be] drawn with new sharpness and simultaneously erased with new ease,’63 suggests an understanding of the world through a distinctly unstable, multiple and evolving optical 59 p. 31 60 p. 50 61 Gail Jones discusses the use of optics and glass that recur across Hazzard’s novels, and the significance of looking and seeing, a sense of looking that is often occluded and distorted, in press np. 62 Bakhtin, p. 278 63 pp. 272, 418 72 lens. The modern global space, and the apprehension of this space by the subject, is constructed through language, is seen through the written word, even though as Bakhtin suggests, the relationship between author and text is in itself constantly in a state of motion, of becoming: ‘a state of movement and oscillation...a continual shifting of the distance between author and language.’64 The position of literature and writing in both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire is of particular significance in regards to the female subject’s apprehension of the modern post-war space. Hazzard’s works represent a time before the advent of second wave feminism, a time which saw the rapid opening up new global vistas, agency and forms of mobility for the female subject, changes which prompted a pervading sense of anxiety and uneasiness.65 Therefore, letters, literature and books are a significant means for female subjects to apprehend the global space right within the domestic sphere. This is particularly evident with the character of Helen Driscoll in The Great Fire, as whilst travelling across vast distances from London to Paris to Kure and New Zealand, she remains caught within the home, decidedly stationary. This space is opened up when the political and the public cannot be kept outside of the household, but also simultaneously through the letters shared with Aldred Leith, as well as books, atlases and maps. As Helen writes in her letter to Aldred, ‘When you were Harbin, we looked at Harbin on the map; at Shanhaikwan, the same. When you get to Kwangchowwan, think of us with the atlas open…Looking up Shanhaikwan, I learn that it ‘is situated’ where the Great Wall descends to the sea. Describe this, please [my emphasis].’66 Helen finds access to a sense of movement and transit, like the transporting machine of Chapter One, but instead right within the domestic space. Whilst gesturing to the long tradition of virtual transport through novel reading, this moment demonstrates the way in which Helen understands and envisages the post-war global space mediated through language, a space that is in itself politically fragile and transitory, the very boundaries that she is looking at on the map unstable and impermanent, subject to change in the build up of Cold War tensions. Like Caro in Transit of Venus longing to travel to England after reading about the deciduous trees and the skylarks, Helen’s novels, maps and atlases jostle alongside each other to form an incomplete and fragile representation of the post-war globe. 64 p. 302 65 Olubas, p. 1 66 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 106 73 Olubas discusses the significance of the way letters are framed across the novel, arguing that these incidences are ‘at once modern, habitual, and domestic,’ and yet they ‘open up and compress the space and time between the lovers’: ‘through their exchange of letters these characters carve out a place for themselves in a world dense with time and configuration.’67 When taking up this idea of a compression of time and space, another form of chronotope, the two subjects are rendered static and connected through their written communication, and yet the letters also function to open up the global space. For Helen, the world is at once rendered closer and more accessible, transcending the domestic boundaries within which she is contained: With a knife from the blotter, she slit the envelope and lay on the bed to read, pulling out both letters and setting Ben’s aside. There was no one to see that she lay there with her life changing, glad to be alone and on his bed…And thought of his comings and goings at the hotel, where the lobby was an arcade of pale green marble.68 This ability to open up space has always been a feature of letters, yet for Hazzard, these letters are politicised in the post-war space, framing a global imaginary that is decidedly unstable, involving the personal within the frame of History, ‘a world dense with time and configuration.’ Leith’s letter acts a catalyst for Helen to then move to recalling her own time spent in Hong Kong, her imagination takes her outward, opening up the space, outside of the ‘shuttered light’ and confined room to the top floor of the Hong Kong hotel ‘with a fine view of the strait…a serious but not solemn restaurant, and a dance floor at which, on weekends, a band from Manila in pastel zoot suits played foxtrots.’69 Therefore, Leith’s letters function not only in bringing the two lovers closer together, in rendering their position static and compressed, but also allowing the globe to invade the domestic space, to offer a way of viewing the world outside of the bedroom: global space is being refracted through a linguistic form of homelessness, representation without any coherent centre or bedrock. This apprehension through language is not solely spatial but also temporal: the subjects of both The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire experience History, apprehend 67 Olubas, p. 219 68 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 130 69 p. 130 74 seismic political and international shifts through language and representation. It is, as Gail Jones suggests, a different form of temporal unfolding, one that is not linear or progressive, but which loops and repeats, an anxiousness of surviving after the events of history: what Jones terms ‘historical disfigurement,’ which causes a perpetual strain to ‘redeem the sullied everyday.’70 The construction of this unstable in-between space, characterized by a form of historical disfigurement of space and time, where global events that are markers of History appear within the domestic sphere, comes to the fore in The Transit of Venus in Caro’s relationship and marriage to the wealthy activist Adam Vail. The domestic space is constructed from the outset, with Caro looking down on Vail from her apartment with ‘bare feet on the yellow carpet,’ as ‘she leaned, he looked.’71 By constructing their meeting using the tropes of romance, Hazzard creates an uneasy space once this distinctly private moment is suddenly opened up into the office room with Vail’s petition on behalf of imprisoned South Americans. In the depiction of the meeting, where Vail ‘describes certain tortures, the two officials [become] disconcerted, withdrawn, fascinated, as if he [is] discussing in public the act of love,’72 and once the petition has been refused and Caro is alone in the meeting room, the political act is once again related to the private sphere: ‘it was like sexual frustration to be always yearning for some spasm of decency that in this context could never occur.’73 Indeed, Caro and Adam Vail’s meeting and subsequent engagement are directly related to the plight and demise of the imprisoned South Americans. The prisoners constantly occupy a position in both the subjects’ imaginaries, their apparitions occupy the hotel room, become inherently part of the domestic and distinctly feminine space: ‘the glass bottom of the bowl of flowers had been set over a telegram that lay on the table. Through beveled water the print rose up, unevenly magnified: ‘EXECUtion INEVItable,’ like a lesson in elocution.’74 Hazzard is charting just what Lukács suggests is unique to the novel form, ‘everything is seen as many-sided, within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it.’ Yet it is also the incursion of the events of History, the effect of the socialist uprisings in South America, the consequences of American nationalism and Cold War politics: there is a 70 Jones, in press np. 71 Hazzard, Transit of Venus, p. 180 72 p. 181 73 p. 183 74 p. 186 75 movement and alignment with global events, where the personal is exposed here as being directly invovlved with and propelled by an absent cause, a deferred politic. The political dissidence and activism in South America in The Transit of Venus plays an important part in continuing the tension between the public and private space, between the personal and political in the narrative frame. Indeed, Vail’s desire to help those incarcerated or those whose lives are under threat consistently runs parallel to his marriage to Caro, during which time Caro comes into contact with the poet Ramón Tregeár on a country estate in the Andes. Like Ted Tice in the landscape of Hiroshima, Caro is similarly unable to reconcile the trivial and the everyday against Tregeár’s probable execution: ‘yet I can’t think that all the rest – what went on before and still goes on – has been unimportant.’75 Tregeár’s response is to affirm the important link between the two, ‘on the contrary. The rest is the reality that has a right to happen. Any proper struggle against injustice is an access, merely, for a more normal confusion.’76 Indeed, this discussion is interrupted by the domestic, the feminine, a ‘sullied everyday,’ with a child wanting Tregeár’s attention, a gardener tending to the flowers, and the scene ends with a familial and peaceful scene, ‘a reality that has a right to happen’: ‘the boy held up his mask, like a fencer. The dog lay on its side, a grey rock now, yellowed with age or lichen. On the woman’s hair and shoulder, white petals clung like flakes from a defective ceiling.’77 Once again there is a distinctive contraction of the gaze, to a sleeping dog, to the bent child’s racket. Yet at the same time Hazzard’s deliberate shift to a lack of personal naming, a reversal to ‘the woman,’ ‘the dog’ and ‘the boy,’ keeps the scene at a distance, connected to the effects of History that are moving outside the frame of the scene. A constantly shifting temporality is significant here as well, as Hazzard’s rapid movement between global and local events, the public and the domestic causes time to speed up and slow down, to be constantly in flux, even within single paragraphs. With the description of Caro and Adam Vail’s return to New York, a tension created between stasis and mobility, between the ‘demonstration against war,’ ‘the mounted police speaking by machine,’ ‘the neutral wail of the ambulance’ and the Vail’s door, ‘which now had a complex lock’ and ‘could be relocked from the inside, then chained and bolted.’78 This scene is directly followed by a lengthy description of three television men 75 p. 249 76 p. 249 77 p. 250 78 p. 256 76 discussing a range of political topics, and renders the narrative immediately static even though the discussion takes the reader across the globe from Hanoi to the Bay of Pigs to Washington.79 Similarly, as suggested, the protagonists of The Great Fire are enfolded in the shadow of war, attempting to operate within a disrupted and unclear post-war space. Although The Great Fire is geographically and temporally more focused than The Transit of Venus in its direct construction with the early post-war years after Hiroshima, Hazzard continues to set up a tension between the individual post-war subject, a contracted gaze, and the public space of politics, ideology, war and the dramatic reshaping of boundaries after World War Two. It is a tension once again driven by the pull of History: the disparate events of post-war Asia, Britain and America invade, resonate with, and directly shape the narrative. This is seen right from the outset with the soldier and writer Aldred Leith contained in a train compartment moving across the Japanese landscape, ‘his body submissively chugging,’ viewing ‘the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders.’80 Here, Leith apprehends the vast destruction of war through the small frame of a train window only partially, the effects and not a reified History itself, and yet these monumental events enfold him, ‘men, women, infants in the miasma of endurance…the steam of humanity.’81 This link between History, the globe and narrativisation provides a post-war spatial and temporal lens with which to view the recurring reference to writing, reporting and text across The Great Fire. Aldred Leith’s global field reports that move across vast tracts of space from Hong Kong to rural China to Japan, are potentially dangerous to the military ‘victors,’ those that see Japan and China through the lens of what Robert Dixon suggests is ‘Cold War orientalism,’ which seeks to feminise and infantilise the subjects of a nation through their current military occupation.82 Indeed, Leith’s position moves uneasily between the domesticated and feminine household with Helen and Ben Driscoll, whilst engaging and negotiating with military personnel, yet remaining outside this sphere of authority positions. Leith is in-between, he is threatening and in turn, his writing becomes dangerous as well, with Helen and Ben 79 p. 257-261 80 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 3 81 p. 5 82 Dixon, p. 270 77 ‘ha[ving] to [keep] Leith’s papers in a locked box beneath Ben’s bed. It did not surprise or scandalize them that these peaceable pages were being safeguarded.’83 The uneasiness surrounding Leith’s work, which is outside both national and military boundaries, is further seen when the American soldier Thaddeus Hill draws attention to his superior’s suspicion surrounding Leith’s writings. As Hill suggests, drawing personal ethics alongside the international frame of conflict, ‘whatever you say will be misrepresented, they’ll have their knife into you…because it’s you, because it’s China, because you short-circuited the bureaucracy…Most of all, because you’re clever and decent, and go your own way.’84 Leith’s private humanity, which becomes evident in his position as an author, disrupts the public and political wills of his superiors, of those seeking to further national causes. As Dixon suggests, ‘Hazzard alludes to the institutional affiliation of the military, intelligence and scholarly personnel in the novel, and also…Leith’s values as transcending them.’85 Yet this ability to move outside of the institutions is through the power of language, of text to distill and refract the absent cause of History, of reconfiguring an understanding of the global space through a global imaginary, through the ‘skin of words.’ The threat lies in what Leith’s text will add, remove or change to the overarching linear march of History. The significant need of the modern subject to negotiate a disruptive public and private space, and History itself, through narrative is further explored through the character of Peter Exley, an Australian soldier who is now responsible for investigating war crimes in the post-war Hong Kong. This colonial space, tied to the aftermath of Hiroshima and World War Two and just before the ascent of Cold War tensions, is the site of ‘simmering tension between rival global powers and geographies.’86 As Olubas suggests, ‘Hazzard’s fictional geography is imbued with the specific history of recent global and ideological conflagration,’87 with the descriptions that situate the novel in a specific political time and space: ‘from the Western world, the talk was all of war: America and Russia would grapple across the prostrate body of Europe. Meanwhile, China was poised in her own colossal concerns.’88 It is through Hazzard’s construction of Hong Kong, and Exley’s movement within this space, that there is a tension set up between the over-arching public sphere, the explanation and testimony of war crimes, in 83 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 146 84 p. 160 85 Dixon, p. 274 86 Olubas, p. 210 87 p. 210 88 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 196 78 themselves personal narrative accounts and memories repeated and reconfigured, military administration, the movement of ships across the globe, the vast mobility of political personnel, and the private and insular sphere. Exley is surrounded by women in Hong Kong, his office is domesticated by the routine conversations of secretaries and administration assistants, as ‘in the adjoining room, Hefty Norah thump[s] her thigh and shout[s], ‘God, I’m getting porkers,’ and the Eurasian Rita Xavier, who brings her own cosmopolitan instability, as her mixed race is ‘disdained by both factions’ and part of a race that Exley labels as ‘ill paid, indispensable and far too obliging.’89 This construction of post-war Hong Kong and ‘Asia’ itself, as well as Exley’s apprehension of the city-space, has been criticized for its inherent orientalism, its position as a colonial outpost. As Robert Dixon contends Hazzard ‘employs classic orientalist tropes’ in the way in which there is there is a constant interplay, a division set up between ‘between subject and object, the modern and the pre-modern, and the transformation of place into space.’90 Dixon goes on to suggest that Exley’s positioning within the space draws on what he terms ‘a standby of middlebrow fiction’: ‘the whiteman in the tropics, rendered inert by the Orient’s filth and miasma.’91 Yet I want to suggest here that Hazzard’s construction of Hong Kong is one that is fundamentally linked to the unstable post-war space, and Exley’s stasis and inertia is perpetuated less by the Orient but instead by the uncertainty between public and private, the kaleidoscopic nature of the political ideology, history and global events pressing on the subject, as well as a novel form that is in the process of becoming. As Olubas suggests, ‘the ‘Asia’ in the novel is certainly colonialist, on the on hand, but nonetheless simultaneously metropolitan, on the other – not least in its inflected and vexed importance to the neocolonial Cold War politics playing out within its borders.’92 Hazzard is negotiating the shifting geographies of the modern global space here: one that brings up a constant interplay between the everyday, the trivial, the local, Rooney’s oscillation between micro and macrocosm, an intermingling between Rita Xavier’s ‘nylon stockings’ and ‘draped linen jacket’ and the global, the public and the overarching sense of Western military authority.93 89 pp. 78, 72 90 Dixon, p. 270 91 p. 276 92 Olubas, p. 224 93 Hazzard, The Great Fire, p. 78 79 Indeed Exley is unable to negotiate this position, to move between the public and private, to engage with the potential of the narratives that he is surrounded by, and Hazzard constructs his sense of mobility and agency within the space as the opposite of his counterpoint, Aldred Leith. This is seen in the description of Exley’s task interviewing those that have undergone or been responsible for various war crimes from torture, imprisonment and violence: Peter had been taking up depositions in the trading houses and banks, and in the colonial administration. Had called on taipans and clerks, and on their wives. Had stood in lofty offices, where looted furniture had yet to be replaced. Strolled on the arcaded upper terrace at Jardine Matheson’s to talk with white-clad Number One…The plain office, the pile of tedious, lucrative papers stirred by ceiling fan, the harbour fluted through slatted blinds. Blackwood table, creaking chairs.94 This description of Exley’s tour of Hong Kong highlights his sense of mobility, his constant movement between offices and terraces, across nationalities, from trading houses, British offices to discussions with wives and taipans. Time here speeds up with Exley’s rapid movement, and the sense of place and geography opens outward, and yet is then compressed down to a single table and creaking chairs. Like Tice and Caro in The Transit and Venus, Exley is left ‘explor[ing] a heap of files and despair[ing] of justice,’ and indeed his one ‘troublesome act of humanity,’ his attempt to save a young child from polio, renders him completely passive, motionless and contained within a hospital bed.95 Bewes contends that ‘the novel is the expression of the gap. Thus the novel designates less a form or genre than a condition in which form and content are for the first time radically heterogeneous.’96 Thus, through seeing Hazzard’s form and content as being interwoven and overlapping, it can be seen that Hazzard is mediating and distilling an unstable global space, a disintegrating public and private divide and the effects of History, through the dialogic and unstable nature of the novel form. As 94 p. 125 95 pp. 70, 200 96 Bewes, p. 17 80 Rooney suggests, Hazzard’s narrative is always moving both outward and inward, it ‘re- weights and interpenetrates with the expanded coordinates of the wider world.’97 It is through this that the apprehension of the global space and its influence on the individual can be linked to ways of writing, of a specific preoccupation with the power of language, of text: the global, the public, the private is described, written, read, misread and appropriated, across Hazzard’s novels. This takes Hazzard’s construction of the modern post-war space, a globe characterized by sudden mobility, mass transit and a disintegrating public/private sphere into a frame which situates discourse and language as being central in constructing the subject’s movement in the post-war space. The significance between temporality and space, modernity and antiquity, and a disintegrating public/private divide across this chapter allows for a similar rethinking of the city space in Chapter Three. The next chapter performs a contraction to the post- war city, envisaging how the a city-space is taken up by Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard through a discussion on how the female subject negotiates this space of late modernity: it is a space similarly characterised by topographical instability, the overlapping between past and present, and with its own distinctive sense of imaginary mapping. 97 Rooney, p. 110 81 CHAPTER THREE Memory-place: the City-space ‘The inconspicuous door, often only a curtain, is the secret gate for the initiate. A single step takes him from the jumble of dirty courtyards into the pure solitude of a tall whitewashed church interior.’ Walter Benjamin; Asja Lacis, ‘Naples’ (1925), p. 166 ‘The city…is always more than one, and always cardinal, stretched between the four points of the compass. And it is always stratified; there is always one under the other, more ancient, more buried, more ruined.’ Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘Hélène Cixous’ Imaginary Cities’ (2006), p. 135 ‘This place has no wholeness…It has an effect on me of mess, muddle, discontinuity. It’s all bits and pieces. I feel this with my body, as well as my mind and eyes. And I find it painful.’ Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators (1980), p. 289 The modern globe, mass movement and transportation figure largely in the construction of space in the work of Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard, and the city itself functions as the privileged site of this globalised modernity, a space rendered both archeologically and cartographically on vertical and horizontal planes. The urbanisation and disruption of a coherent city-space and its shifting temporality are central preoccupations of their work, and thus, this chapter performs a contraction, a move from the global sphere to the space of the metropolis. Through continuing the project of this thesis to examine the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard in spatial terms, this chapter will reveal their contribution to the representation of the modern city-space as being two-fold: first, the interplay between temporality, the city, suburb and the subject will be seen as crucial in dismantling the distinction between the public and private, and second, this disintegration will be revealed as a starting point in exposing, once again, the contradictory and multiplicitous position of the solitary female subject moving within and negotiating the post-war space. That is, all three authors draw upon the familiar modern trope of an unstable and fragmented metropolis, characterised by dislocation, rupture and incoherence, and yet in doing so, render a specific construction of the post-war city-space that is gendered and apprehended through the eyes of the female subject. Taking up the construction of layers and stratification, presence and 82 absence, antiquity and modernity, which are evident in Hazzard’s predominantly European city-spaces, allows for a reconfiguring and reappraisal of the Australian construction of the city across Anderson and Harrower’s novels, representations which are at once both similar and distinctive. What this reveals is an underlying sense of contradiction, of simultaneity, which offers the female subject on the one hand, a sense of freedom and new found mobility, but on the other, immovability and compression. This is perpetuating and developing upon the contradictory position of the female subject in relation to the global sphere as discussed in Chapters One and Two, between macro and micro, public and private, transit and stasis as discussed in the previous chapters. The significance of modern urbanisation and the city-space, and in turn, the subject’s apprehension and involvement within a specific place and space is an important facet and function of modernity. Gerald Kennedy argues in Imagining Paris (1993) for the centrality of the city in modernist fiction, as it exists as a ‘geographical sign of the modern.’1 The twentieth century brought with it ‘new ways of conceptualising time, space, form, distance, speed and direction,’ changes which in turn, ‘radically alter the general meaning of the past, present and future as frames of experiential reference.’2 These new ways of understanding memory, temporality and subjectivity at the fin de siècle disrupt coherent and concrete understandings of space and place, fuelling dislocation and fragmentation. This new way of conceiving the subject within the metropolis is evident in its recurring appearance across modernist fiction, from the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), James Joyce’s Dublin in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Jean Rhys and Gertrude Stein’s Paris in The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Each of these writers exposes the fundamental gaps and incoherence of the early twentieth century, charting a perpetual sense of movement, transition, travel and 1 Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: exile, writing and American identity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 185 2 p. 185; whilst the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre on the discontinuous space of the city highlights a significant turn towards the connection between the formation of modern subjectivity and the experience of place, this chapter focuses on the work of historical-materialist Walter Benjamin, and the later work done on gendered space and urban geographies, due to the focus on cartographical and archaeological mapping, and its connection with the female subject’s apprehension of the post-war city- space. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); S. Elden; E. Lebas; E. Kofman (eds), Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2006); Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1, (1986) 83 homelessness. The significance of the city-space for modernist writers has been well documented, not only in opening up new channels of communication between writers, but also in the way it offered a new space to construct and represent the unstable nature of time, space and the subject.3 This sense of movement, a turn to the city-space, to expatriation and travel is also evident in Australian modernist fiction, particularly seen in Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945). The city-space has continued to function as the site for exposing a fragmented and disintegrating subjectivity by post-war authors across continents. It a space that is temporally unstable and yet decidedly modern and present: with the haunting and memory-filled London in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949), Muriel Spark’s seamy underbelly in The Bachelors (1960), and the inner-city slums of Sydney in Ruth Park’s Harp in the South (1948). The work of historical materialist Walter Benjamin will be taken up here as a starting point in shaping a specific theorisation of place, as he exhibits just such a modern preoccupation with place and temporality. Whilst recollecting his experiences growing up in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century in the essay ‘The Berlin Chronicle’ (1932), Benjamin suggests the effect a particular place, a particular city, has on the apprehending subject: the way in which ‘here more than elsewhere, the human figures recede before the place itself.’4 Benjamin’s recollections – an important point, as much of what is written on the city almost always involves a looking back, a pressing of the past on the present – are infused with fragmentation, disruption, a blending between what is imagined and what is perceived as real. This intermingling between public and private, between the apprehending subject and the space itself comes to the fore when Benjamin reveals his encounters with places that appear as thresholds, moments of discontinuity: There are places endowed with such power: they may be deserted promenades, or treetops, particularly in towns, seen against walls, railway level-crossings, and above all the thresholds that mysteriously divide the districts of a town. The Lichtenstein gate was really such a threshold…It was as if in both, at the point where they were nearest, life paused.5 3 see Andrea Weiss, Paris was a Woman: portraits from the left bank, (London: Harper Collins, 1995); Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris, (1993) 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) in in P. Demetz (ed); E. Jephcott (trans.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (Schocken Books: New York, 2007), p. 24 5 p. 25 84 I want to argue that these thresholds occur in places within the city where the public and private divide is unclear, in-between spaces that open up a dialogue between the past and present, between the subject’s memory and city-space itself. The connection between time and the city space is significant, as Benjamin suggests, ‘life paused,’ time slowed at the apprehension of particular space. Temporality becomes unclear in these spaces, which, for Benjamin, are often gates, markets, cathedrals, and cafes: areas of the city that have been reworked and layered as the city develops and reworks across time. Benjamin’s preoccupation with these inconsistent spaces, which is in itself at odds with early twentieth century accounts of the thriving metropolis, of the city as the heart of industry and production, an image of the power of the state, suggests a fragmented and stratified city, a city that is multiple, where the past reaches forward into the present and disrupts coherent space. As Benjamin argues, ‘noisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business, nevertheless has more, rather than less, than some others, of those places and moments where it bears witness to the dead, shows itself full of dead.’ 6 Benjamin returns throughout the essay to this inconsistency between the public notion of the city-space and a subjective apprehension of it, an apprehension which is grounded in instability and a sense of unease: the way in which the city, a modern space ‘where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits, flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single moment of contemplation,’ also contains thresholds where life can pause, spaces that throw up images of the dead, where the city ‘indemnifies itself in memory [my emphasis].’7 Benjamin uses the first person pronoun in his chronicle in a particular linguistic move that entwines his memories directly with the city. This specific connection between the function of memory and the subject’s understanding and apprehension of space is crucial when contemplating the city-space in these terms: memory itself is spatial. Benjamin suggests this relation in ‘The Berlin Chronicle’: ‘memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.’8 The subject imagines and envisions memories as topographical landscapes, a map, with its own paths, gates, and thresholds, moments which disrupt the public/private divide; similar to the gates that Benjamin comes across in modern Berlin. Benjamin makes this connection, though not overtly, when he discusses the importance of the modern subject 6 p. 28 7 p. 30 8 p. 25 85 engaging and questioning memory: ‘he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum.’9 Here, Benjamin’s tropological language once again envisages memory and individual memories as spatial, as soil deposits that can be scattered over the city-space that must be recollected, gathered and interrogated again and again. Memory becomes another stratum, another topography, a form of stratified archaeology that is overlayed on the map of the city, which not only disrupts the coherence of space but also temporality itself, further perpetuating the subject’s sense of a distorted city-space. These notions of place, the city, temporality, and memory are further extrapolated in Benjamin and Asja Lacis’ 1925 essay on the Italian city of Naples. The choice of Naples is significant as it develops upon the theorisation of the modern city- space in ‘The Berlin Chronicle’, presenting an account of a dramatic shift in urbanisation following the First World War. Benjamin and Lacis present an analysis of a place that is not national or cosmopolitan, but a city on the periphery, a place where authority is decidedly absent, a city that has a tense and uneasy relationship with the modern. The notion of the periphery is an important one, as elements of instability and fragmentation are unique to these spaces, which is a significant theoretical point that has not yet been developed in Benjamin’s earlier discussion of Berlin. Naples is a city where the distinction between public and private has not yet been established, where contemporary Naples is ‘the central image of porosity’: ‘transitional society appears here in images of spatial anarchy, social intermingling, and above all impermanence. One sees neither an ancient society nor a modern one, but an improvisatory culture released, and even nourished, by the city’s rapid decay.’10 Instead of the thresholds and gates of Berlin, the entire city of Naples reveals itself as unstable. There is a singularity to the account that highlights the way in which only particular places are able to sustain these levels of impermanence and transition. It is cities that have an uneasy and indeterminate link to the past combined with an uncertain future, that prompt ‘the interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness, street 9 p. 26 10 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), p. 26 86 and home’11: where public and private are not in a state of co-existence side by side, but instead blend and intermingle, a tense overlapping that is not directly antagonistic. Benjamin and Lacis’ suggestion of Naples’ porosity, of the inability of the place itself to submit to the elegant lines of capitalism, of consistently impermanent and reforming space, provides a theoretical framework with which to explore how and why Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard consistently return to just such peripheral urban spaces: regions, cities, suburbs that lack authority, that are reforming whilst simultaneously decaying. It is in these spaces that the lines between public and private are at their weakest, where ‘improvisatory culture’ can be born, where ‘the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, [and], only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room.’12 Representations of vast metropolitan cities, central hubs of modernity, are transitory, and are again invoked by outsiders trespassing on the periphery, such as the construction of the Australian émigré’s Caro(line) Bell in New York in Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980) and Clemency James in London in Harrower’s The Catherine Wheel (1960). Benjamin and Lacis’ accounts of Naples and Berlin, of an endless sense of permeability, are the starting point when taking into consideration the representation of space, temporality and place. Yet their images of gates, thresholds between the public and private are complicated and ruptured as a result of the violence and destruction of the two World Wars, of the ability for buildings to be reduced to rubble, or of a nuclear bomb erasing an entire city and its inhabitants: it is this post-war modernity that Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard are engaging with, where the city-space has become even more fragmented and unsettling, where the memory, the dead, and past destruction are thrown up immediately by the very buildings and streets of the urban space. Just as a sense of afterness, of anxiety surrounding History haunts the post-war globe, as suggested in Chapter Two, so too is the city haunted and temporally unstable in the post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima space. Therefore, discussions of the urban, of the notion of cities, suburbs and regions have developed and departed from Benjamin and Lacis, spurred on by this increasing sense of hauntedness, absence and vast destruction, as well as the transitory and shifting mobility that is inherent in modernity across the arc of the second half of the twentieth century. As these accounts have developed, notions of temporality and space have 11 Walter Benjamin; Asja Lacis, ‘Naples’ (1925) in P. Demetz (ed); E. Jephcott (trans.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 172 12 Benjamin; Lacis, p. 171 87 become infused with each other: memory and the past has become synonymous when accounting for an unstable modern space. In Fragments of the European City (1995), Stephen Barber discusses the enmeshing of temporality with the construction of the modern city: ‘Just as it moves forward, blindly but sensationally, the European city is moving backward in time, colliding abrasively with extreme moments of conflict: the collections of murder, annihilation, violence that make the twentieth century vivid and tangible in all its horror.’13 Writing just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Barber radically develops Benjamin and Lacis’ sense of porosity, of a blending of public and private. The European atrocities of the twentieth century have led to an exhaustingly bleeding past, where public memories push forward, disrupting and derailing any sense of modernity as progress. The family matriarch Greta in Anderson’s The Impersonators (1980) attests to this post-war preoccupation, offering a specifically removed Australian take on European temporality, an imaginary understanding of the haunting presence of the horrors of two world wars: ‘I have thought of travelling, of going to Europe, since everybody does. But every time I think of Europe, I think of blood.’14 The instability of the constructed city-space is tangible; it is recurringly visual for the inhabiting or visiting subjects, ingrained into the buildings, the very objects that make up the city itself. Benjamin and Lacis’ suggestion of a synchronicity between public and private has decayed to ‘the evidence of loss,’ where ‘new buildings must be discarded instinctually as inept apparitions, visual evidence of malicious will – since to build rearranges the complex network of the objects which are not there.’15 Loss is not simply what the subject apprehends, but is part of the city itself, where the physical networks, objects and buildings do not expose a sense of transformation or progress, but instead what came before, what has been destroyed or lost: a jarring gap, a hollowness that is continually present. Therefore, the notion of the private, and the subject in relation to the city enters an already augmented and disrupted public space. The subjects themselves bring their own destabilising interiority and subjectivity, constructing another layer, multiples, over an already fractured city or urban space. In ‘Hélène Cixous’s Imaginary Cities’ (2006), Mireille Calle-Gruber grafts another plane onto the city-space. As referenced in the previous discussion of Hazzard’s global imaginary, Calle-Gruber argues for the 13 Stephen Barber, Fragments of a European City, (Reaktion Books Ltd: London, 1995), p. 7 14 Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators, (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1980), p. 112 15 Barber, p. 13 88 phrase ‘imaginary city’ when accounting for the representation of the metropolis in Hélène Cixous’ fiction, suggesting that Cixous’ literary representation of the city is governed by ‘magnetization, polarity, separation, ubiquity’: ‘the city…is always more than one, and always cardinal, stretched between the four points of the compass. And it is always stratified; there is always one under the other, more ancient, more buried, more ruined.’16 This idea of stratified space further extrapolates Barber’s concept of the European city haunted and arrested by the memories of the twentieth century. Not only is the city haunted by the recent past, but also the past before, layer upon layer: an endpoint is constantly deferred, ‘the origin of the city [is] cracked…a sequence of apparitions.’17 Barber contends, ‘every European city has a twin that died at birth,’18 yet it is not one sibling, but many: there are multiple deaths, stillborns, making up each layer of the stratified metropolis. However, as Calle-Gruber suggests, gesturing to Benjamin’s earlier subjective accounts of the city-space, the representation of place is inseparable from the apprehending subject, it is always-already tied to the subject’s encounter, relation, conception, and their movement across that place. This space is an imagined space, constructed, changing through, and because of, the subject that inhabits it. It is a space that is not complete, and cannot be complete, as the subject does not comb, feel and inhabit every single aspect of a city, but rather imagines certain limits of the city, projects boundaries, borders, whilst dismantling and disrupting these very boundaries at will. Therefore, a sense of place is caught between a state of transition and arrestment: it can either be constantly reformed as the subject arrives at the same place again and again, or bound and fixed by the memory of a place that cannot be escaped. As Calle-Gruber argues, ‘the city has a presence/absence, is familiar and foreigner, filled with affects, with bodies, with matter.’19 The nature of this presence/absence changes each time the subject apprehends the space he/she inhabits. This construction of the imagined city is temporally bound to the particular subject encountering the city. The subject apprehends cities as ‘sites for memory, as memory’: where memories are constantly being reformed and reconstituted – reimagined. This is separate from, and in addition to, the very public memories that 16 Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘Hélène Cixous’s Imaginary Cities: Oran-Osnabrück-Manhattan – Places of Fascination, Places of Fiction,’ New Literary History, 37.1, (2006), p. 135 17 Barber, p. 25 18 p. 13 19 Calle-Gruber, p. 136 89 Barber described, memories and loss that are forced on the subject by the bare bones of the city. Barber acknowledges the importance of the subject’s apprehension of the space, but suggests that this simply ‘counterfeits the contradictions of the city into the perception of the city,’20 forging the contradiction of the city that was always-already there into a unique subject encounter with the city-space. Yet the imaginary nature of the subject’s apprehension is specific to the subject, and is not just the transference of the fragmented city-space. It is entwined, but distinct. As Calle-Gruber suggests, the concept of the imaginary city can help alleviate the distressing nature of the unstable modern city: ‘[The] Imaginary city, imagined, a substitute, holds the revelation of a vertiginous supplement: a knowing of not knowing, knowing that one does not know, seeing that one does not see.’21 The subject’s own apprehension of the city, of grafting the private onto the public, alludes to the sense of synchronicity that Benjamin and Lacis take up at the beginning of the twentieth century. Urban theorists Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender take up the concept of the subject’s imaginary city in relation to the already fragmented city-space in their edited collection Urban Imaginaries (2007). Both Çinar and Bender argue that the modern city functions as a ‘multifaceted imaginary space.’22 The ‘collective imaginary’ drives the very public fragmenting and endless recycling of the modern city, where temporality and memory infuse space.23 This is in conjunction with, and overlapped by, the subject’s imaginary relation to the city, which ‘remain[s] limited and partial to a fragment of the city, and to their unique perspective of that fragment.’24 Therefore, fragmentation is both internal and external, it is a process of constant metamorphosis, where ‘each component is dispensable and may be restructured at will at any moment.’25 It is in this theorisation of the city-space, where the public and private co-mingle in a tense layering of loss, memory and nostos, and where such layering is constantly shifting, endlessly decaying and reforming, that allows for the representation of an unstable city-space in Hazzard, Anderson and Harrower to come to the fore. However, Barber and Calle-Gruber’s discussion of the city and the urban imaginary avoids the distinctly gendered nature of the space and its complex 20 Barber, p. 34 21 Calle-Gruber, p. 136 22 Alev Çinar; Thomas Bender (eds), Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. xv 23 p. xiv 24 p. xii 25 Çinar; Bender, p. xvi; Barber, p. 9 90 relationship with women. At the turn of the century, women were entirely absent from the city-space, while Benjamin’s accounts of the city are masculine in nature, and any discussion of women’s apprehension of space is entirely absent except for brief descriptions of the Berlin prostitutes. Such an absence of women’s involvement within, and apprehension of, the modern city-space has been reappraised through the critical feminist work in the 1990s from Rita Feslki, Janet Wolff and Elizabeth Wilson. Wilson charts the historical nature of women in urban space in The Sphinx in the City (1991) arguing that the city exposed a fundamental dichotomy for women. On the one hand, the metropolis offered a new and previously unavailable space to inhabit, a new sense of mobility and freedom, and yet on the other, women were still contained and controlled: Women in cities were perceived as objects of both regulation and banishment. It was recognised that women would continue to work, and could not be entirely excluded from the public sphere…At the same, the suburban ideal always acted ideologically to debase and delegitimize the pleasures and possibilities of urban life.26 The suburbs sprawling out from the city-centre are decidedly gendered as a feminine space, safe, a homely environment, able to contain and control women in the domestic sphere, where the distinction between public and private can be maintained. The urban centre, the city-space carries a veneer of masculinity, but as Wilson argues, it is has a threatening femininity, it is an area where the presence of the feminine subject disrupts and attacks the public/private distinction; a distinction that already revolves around an unstable and disintegrating borderline: ‘at the heart of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx’.27 Thus, this discussion of the city as a space infused with temporal instability, a space where memory and history press forward and disrupt coherence, must take into account what Janet Wolff labels the ‘gendered nature of forms of mobility.’28 In her book Resident Alien (1995), Woolf goes on to suggest the way in which a female subject’s apprehension of place, particularly any public place, is constrained by a number of boundaries, and systems of prohibition and regulation: ‘women, …cannot go into 26 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 46 27 p. 7 28 Janet Wolff, Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 4 91 unfamiliar spaces without drawing attention to themselves or without mobilising those apparently necessary strategies of categorisation through which they can be neutralised and rendered harmless.’29 Such gendering of public space allows a frame with which to view the way in which Anderson, Hazzard and Harrower return to such moments again and again, exposing a preoccupation with the continued representation of female subjects apprehending and negotiating their position within new and unfamiliar urban space, ranging from Jenny/Penelope’s encounter with Naples in Hazzard’s The Bay Of Noon, to Sylvia Cornock roaming the streets of Sydney in The Impersonators. Here, the modern female subject in the city-space overtly ruptures the distinction between the public/private divide, exposes rather than conceals the many strata within the place, apprehends and throws open the thresholds and gates that Benjamin came across at the fin de siècle. I’m suggesting that all three authors are not just preoccupied with an unstable city-space, but the specific gendered apprehension of this instability: the way in which post-war female subjects are at once occupying, negotiating and moving between new spaces, but also bringing with it a sense of unease, disruption and instability that is fused and intertwined with an always-already unstable urban space – what happens when female travellers step off the modern transport of boats, planes, trains and automobiles into the labyrinth of the post-war metropolis. As already suggested in Chapter Two, Hazzard’s representation of place is the most international of the three authors, and due to her consistent return to the city of Naples and regions of Italy, is the most closely aligned with Benjamin and Lacis’ account of the excess and porosity of the Italian city-space. It has been argued that Hazzard aligns herself with Naples and Italy because of its link to the Renaissance, as a centre for culture, art, history and civilisation. 30 Ros Pesman argues in ‘Some Australian Italies’ (1994) that Italy carries with it ‘the relics and sites of antiquity,’ as well as a dense ‘cluster of myths and associations of rebirth.’31 For Pesman, Hazzard’s journey to Naples allows her to begin ‘life as a writer,’ Hazzard herself undergoing a transformation and discovery, in response to the Italian sensibility to ‘seize the pleasure of the hour.’32 This claim has also been taken up when examining the representation of 29 p. 8 30 see Giovanna Capone, ‘Shirley Hazzard: Transit and The Bay of Noon’, Australian Literary Studies, 13.2, (1987); Laurie Hergenhan, ‘The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Representations of Tuscany in Some Recent Australian Literature’, Westerly, 36.4, (1991); Algerina Neri, ‘Ripening in the Sun: Shirley Hazzard’s Heroines in Italy’, Westerly, 28.4, (1983); Ros Pesman, ‘Some Australian Italies’, Westerly, 39.4, (1994) 31 Ros Pesman, ‘Some Australian Italies’, Westerly, 39.4, (1994), pp. 96, 97 32 Pesman, p. 99 92 place in Hazzard’s work. Her first two novels, The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970), have been consistently described as transit-quests, which see female protagonists journey to unfamiliar and disorientating places in order to undergo what Giovanna Capone argues is a ‘transformation and rebirth,’ and subsequently, ‘a taste of real love experience.’33 Diana Brydon (1990), in her analysis of Australian expatriate fiction, suggests that the account of the time spent in Naples by the orphaned Jenny/Penelope in The Bay of Noon is a buffoon Odyssey, where an isolated homeless ‘colonial’ is drawn to the imperial centre34: ‘for the narrator, the novel’s ending is yet another beginning…The distance of Italian culture from English culture gives Jenny the freedom to let go [and] also frees her to look back on her past dispassionately.’35 When looking at Hazzard’s construction of place, particularly Naples and the Italian countryside, through the lens of the unstable city-space, with the porosity of time and memory, and the rupture between public and private, it becomes apparent that the representation is far more complex. Hazzard is not simply invoking and continuing the Italian myths of romance and renewal, she is engaged in a far more unique project: Italian culture, particularly through place and space, is not presented as an environment conducive to achieving self-realisation and transcendence, but is instead one embedded in this dichotomy of the public/private. The very landscape itself is performing an exhausting state of transition between these two boundaries. Hazzard’s use of private space cannot be separated from the public. Both Lucy Dougan and Brigid Rooney have taken up the reappraisal of Hazzard’s construction of the city-space, arguing that Hazzard is preoccupied with ‘organic, commingled spaces and temporalities.’36 Both Dougan and Rooney’s analyses of Hazzard’s Bay of Noon will be applied here when looking at the inherently public aspect of the expanded geography represented in Hazzard’s work developing the global locus discussed in Chapter Two, where ‘each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life.’37 Early intimations of Benjamin and Lascis’ sense of porosity and instability are seen in Hazzard’s first novella The Evening of the Holiday (1966): the preoccupation with 33 Giovanna Capone, ‘Shirley Hazzard: Transit and The Bay of Noon’, Australian Literary Studies, 13.2, (1987), pp. 172, 175 34 Diana Brydon, ‘Buffoon Odysseys: Australian Expatriate Fiction by Women,’ in A. Brissenden (ed) Aspects of Australian Fiction: Essays presented to John Colmer, Professor Emeritus of English, The University of Adelaide, (Nedlands: UWA Publishing, 1990), p. 77 35 p. 78-9 36 Brigid Rooney, ‘‘No-one had thought of looking close to home’: Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon’ in B. Olubas (ed), Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014), in press np. 37 Benjamin; Lacis, p. 171 93 the disintegration between public and private, with family and community is apparent. The developing love affair between the middle-aged Italian Tancredi and the much younger English Sophie plays out against the streets of an Italian town, ‘lined with steep handsome buildings and filled with pedestrians and little cars.’ 38 This is not the Romantic and cultural Italy that Brydon and Pesman allude to: it is a modern fragmented post-war space, gripped between crumbling antiquity and urbanisation. Hazzard’s description of the piazza is decidedly modern (and this space is the recurring centre of the novel); it is filled with concrete and steel, instead of cobblestones and decay: ‘at some stage [the piazza] evidently capitulated completely and agreed to receive the work-aday elements of the city’s life – the post office, for which the piazza was named, the police station, the main taxi rank, a cinema, and the prim brick headquarters of the local Communist party.’39 Whilst gesturing to the piazza as being a public space definitive of culture and history, every element of the space also simultaneously exhibits the political and industrial consequences of modernity, the constant sense of movement and transition, taxis, cars, travellers, telegrams, and the pervasive force of twentieth century political socialism. Yet Hazzard places within this piazza a ‘single architectural asset – a church consecrated to one of the town’s numerous patron saints, who appear[s] in marble above the portico.’40 Again there is an oscillation, a constant sense of revolving between the modern and the antiquated. This church, which dominates and overlooks the piazza, presents a clear incursion of the past into the present, where the modern and in turn, the urban, is undermined and diminished by a literally towering reminder of Italy’s antiquity: the marble statue of a patron saint. This sense of the ever-present past is also evident with Hazzard’s description of ‘the summer light, the predominant light of the countryside,’ with the ‘multitudes of small hills’ and stacked grain: the antiquated cycles of rural life occurring just outside the city walls.41 This resonates with Stephen Barber’s contention that the European city moves not only blindly forwards but backwards at the same time: although the piazza has ‘capitulated’ to the modern, it has, at the same time, turned to the past; although the town is freshly painted and urbanised, the city walls are encircled and pressed upon by the immanence of the harvesting of grain.42 Temporality 38 Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday, (New York: Picador, 2004 [1966]), p. 39 39 p. 32 40 p. 32 41 pp. 33, p. 40 42 Barber, p. 7 94 here is uneven and hazy, collapsing and expanding: ‘For Tancredi, it was the time of year when the seasons ceased to have meaning.’43 It is this contrast that creates the jarring sense of dislocation, a blending of the public and private, the present and past, the rural and urban, and it is within this conflicted space that Hazzard plays out the love affair between a wealthy Italian and the English Sophie. The place itself exerts its authority over the couple; and it is the place that the novel constantly returns to, rather than the subjects that inhabit it. Rooney takes up the criticism surrounding Hazzard’s characterisation, that her subjects seem to be never fully formed or drawn, without depth and substance. For Rooney, this is a marker of the way place, particularly the city-space twists and reshapes Hazzard’s construction of the modern subject: It is precisely lack – for example, of determinacy or consistency – that makes porous the boundary between setting and character...Hazzard’s characters may seem at first like mere strokes of pastel, lacking in substance, yet their organic relationship to place and to each other brings dynamism.44 Whilst Rooney is referring to the setting of Naples in The Bay of Noon, such an organic relationship between place and characterisation can be similarly applied to the post-war space of The Evening of the Holiday. Sophie and Tancredi’s affair is predominantly a public one: liaisons take place in the post office, the central piazza, at cafés that spill out onto the street. Hazzard spends little time describing moments where the couple is entirely alone, only small fragments are given. As Hazzard suggests when recounting the couple travelling, ‘there was none of the usual swift anonymity of a drive through town – this ride had rather the character of a slow progress in an open carriage.’ 45 The affair is governed by constant movement, arrival and departure, transitions, any fragments of the couple alone take place in the motor-car: ‘pebbles were flung up noisily about the wheels, and behind the car the dust emerged in a languid cloud…They jolted slowly over the crest of this crest of fields. Sophie brought a scarf out 43 Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday, p. 32 44 Rooney, in press np. 45 Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday, p. 39 95 of her handbag and tied it round her hair.’46 Indeed, Tancredi and Sophie’s romance only begins in earnest once Sophie fights her way through the public throng of a festival, in order to meet Tancredi on the other side of town. The festival is the climactic scene in the novel, full of bustling and confusing crowds, ‘said to reproduce all the rancour and intolerance of the world.’47 It is in this scene that Italy’s spatial anarchy is most apparent, where, as Benjamin suggests, ‘the street migrat[es] into the living room’: ‘the preparations for this festival had completely disrupted the simple routine of Sophie’s day. The courteous, fatalistic character of the town was now transfigured into something clamorous and obsessive.’48 It is this very porosity, the sense that the boundaries between public and private space are being threatened and fragmented, that attacks Sophie’s relation to the city. The very way in which Sophie must go through this ritual, to be ‘drawn along in this meaningless drama,’ even though she ‘loathe[s] public spectacles,’ reveals Hazzard’s preoccupation with the blurring of spatial borders, between exterior and interior.49 As suggested in Chapter Two, for Hazzard, negotiating such instability and moments of intermingling, are key to moving in the modern world. The spectacle of the festival is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, as Sophie struggles to maintain her boundaries, to avoid being co-opted and swallowed by the masses: ‘The press of people surged upon her with a frantic disregard, shouting, jostling, careering along – one would almost have thought, in flight…Abruptly, terrifyingly, the way ahead was filled.’50 Sophie’s passage through the festival is necessary, allowing her to negotiate the invasion of the public, and to come out from it, to understand the sensation of disruption, impermanence and transition: ‘As she walked along she smiled, from a sensation of deliverance, a disproportionate sense of danger past.’51 This passage is significant in the way in which gender disrupts and conflates the public and private space, Sophie embodying the post-war female subjectivity which sees a new level of access to the public space, yet in turn further augments the fractured borderline between public and private, inside and outside. Again, it is the contradictory position of the female subject: on the one hand threatening, frightening and disruptive, on the other, new-found access, a new sense of mobility, freedom and movement. 46 p. 41 47 p. 57 48 p. 57 49 p. 57 50 p. 64 51 p. 68 96 This is the central moment in the novel where temporality and place are ruptured, where the past pushes forward, where any distinction between the public and private domain is attacked. This is evident in the way Hazzard shifts tenses constantly throughout the chapter, on the one hand outlining the medieval festival as a past event that has occurred annually, a time when the town ‘can be entered only on foot. Empty cars and buses stand along the roads outside the walls, and even in the fields.’52 The signs of modernity are removed, transportation becomes obsolete: the festival is a celebration of antiquity, of the urban space before urbanisation, when the public and private spheres were held apart and maintained. However, Hazzard’s construction of the scene moves constantly between past festivals, the preparations two weeks before the festival, a disruption of ‘the simple routine of Sophie’s day’, to the ‘morning of the actual day’,53 which perpetuates a sense of jarring transition between frenetic activity and moments of stasis, the lack of firm grounding in a specific temporality. This is also evident in the shifting tenses even in individual sentences when describing the festival procession as the action becomes stilted, and past events and the present merge: ‘the silver trumpets were blown…the procession must now be in the main street. No one would applaud or speak...first would come the trumpeters, and small boys with kettledrums.’54 Hazzard creates a tension here between repeatedly using the past tense ‘would’ with the sudden present incursion of ‘must now.’ This continues with the next description, as ‘a cross would be carried…and ancient weapons such as one sees in the Tower of London here glittering [my emphasis].’55 Time, memory and recollection, the past and the present are conflated and confused in the urban space, Hazzard continues to expose this sense of instability, transition, and motion through constructing detailed and repeated conflicts between the past and present, moments where Barber’s ‘subterranean strata’ erupt from below, where Benjamin’s thresholds are exposed, and the multiple nature of the space becomes clear. As Sophie seeks refuge away from the festival in her hotel room, always-already an ambiguous public/private space, the sound of the telephone ringing, a fundamental symbol of modernity and urban life is contrasted with the tolling of the festival bell, a bell that invades the private space, ‘widening into the room’: 52 p. 55 53 p. 57-59 54 p. 61 55 p. 61 97 How can a telephone bell, even when it rings…compete with the tolling of a colossal ceremonial bell that has been rung at measured intervals, for momentous occasions, during the last eight centuries? The telephone, a device of wires and plastic, cannot hope to sound other than ephemeral, bleating into the bronze face of history.56 Yet Sophie is able to turn away, to ‘shut out the voice of authority as she picked up the receiver and spoke,’57 but the invasion of the private sphere remains, the authority of the public space moves across the fragile border surrounding the domestic, as even the telephone connection itself is interrupted by the commercial operator, ‘who thought the call was finished.’ 58 Space has become tenuous, dislocated, as the inside/outside, past/present and public/private binaries disintegrate. Once again, it is Sophie’s femininity, the gendered nature of her mobility that always-already brings a disruption to these spaces where domesticity collides with the public space. Such moments return again and again in An Evening of the Holiday, they are distinctive scenes where the past and present are in opposition, where a fragile modernity battles to suppress a disruption from the past: Sophie enters the stillness of a church after the frenetic activity of the festival ‘where the smell of incense and age, the smell of religion itself, [is] lightless’ and her fashionable sandals sound ‘superficial and profane,’ only to go through a series of doors (another series of thresholds) to find herself in a suburban street, ‘a residential area, not prosperous but respectable.’59 The final moments of the novel again bring a disjointed past, present and future together, a collision between rural and urban, modernity and antiquity, with the presence of soldiers on Sophie’s train: When the train was still for a few minutes…the bugler would begin to play – always the same air, an antiquated sentimental tune that belonged, perhaps to a regional song. This wistful music filled the train and floated out on the cold dark station of every town they stopped at. The song never reached its conclusion, for the train would always start up again 56 p. 62 57 p. 62 58 p. 62 59 pp. 65, 66, 67 98 and the instrument would be violently shaken in the musician’s mouth and grasp.60 Evening of the Holiday is full of the presence of ghosts, of the reaching forward of past events. Here, the presence of soldiers immediately stifles and constrains the present, returning the train to the blood and destruction of world war, and antiquated sentimentality that has been lost, out of reach, is pulled from the musician’s grasp. It is significant that both of these moments are sonorous: the clanging of the bell, the solid notes of the trumpet, sustaining and moving into the frame of the subject. The subjects that inhabit these spaces themselves are incomplete, transparent, subjects that may or may not be from a coherent and linear time, and disrupt and augment the space. These moments of disjointed juxtaposition are significant in Hazzard’s work, bringing her preoccupation with the city-space to the fore, exposing what Brigitta Olubas suggests is ‘an encounter with monumentality that unpacks and reworks our sense of time and place.’61 Hazzard’s complex construction of the city-space, the disruption between past and present, and the exposure of the fragile borders between public and private, is developed further in her second novel, The Bay of Noon, with the arrival of the solitary Jenny/Penelope in the city of Naples. The literary criticism surrounding The Bay of Noon emphasises the locality, the way in which Naples is the central character of the novel, and the Italian sensibility and culture allows Jenny to reform her stifled subjectivity: that is to say that similar to An Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon is described as a transit- quest, a buffoon Odyssey that allows for a transcendent awakening for the female protagonist.62 As Brydon argues in her discussion of Australian expatriate fiction, ‘the distance of Italian culture from English culture gives Jenny the freedom to let go in Naples,’ and it is through becoming a part of the city ‘she at last finds a place that she can freely leave and allow herself to miss.’63 Here, Brydon is arguing that the sense of loss, memory and longing that pervades the novel is a positive force that allows Jenny to gain control of her subjectivity even though she remains a ‘permanent exile.’64 In her article ‘Ripening in the Sun’ (1983), Algerina Neri acknowledges Hazzard’s 60 p. 137-8 61 Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: Literary expatriate and cosmopolitan humanist, (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012) p. 11 62 see D. Brydon; G. Capone; L. Hergenhan; A. Neri; S. Roff 63 Brydon, pp. 79, 78 64 p. 79 99 preoccupation with ‘locality, the ways in which our fragmented cultural and physical environments affect our lives [my emphasis]’, and yet goes on to make a similar claim to Brydon, that ‘Italian attitudes and values are central’ and ‘her heroines mature and develop through their Italian experiences.’65 These understandings of Hazzard’s work, whilst significant in the way they place her novels within the frame of a distinctly Australian preoccupation with the representation of Italy, avoid a complex discussion of the representation of the post-war city-space itself, and the overriding sense of fragmentation and instability that pervades Hazzard’s Naples. Both Brydon and Neri allude to the dislocated and uneasy nature of the Italian space, with Neri suggesting that ‘the Italian settings are not just there for their picture- postcard value,’66 they are far more than a mere backdrop, and Brydon refers to the instability of the notions of place, home and time in her discussion of Jenny’s state as a permanent exile, where ‘a single place with its past cannot be enough.’67 Yet neither Neri nor Brydon take up these claims in detail, instead they both return to the contention that Hazzard’s narratives are self-fulfilling travel odysseys, which ultimately provide the female protagonists with a coherent sense of self, a means of operating within the modern world. However, as Rooney contends, Hazzard’s representation of Naples in The Bay of Noon, like the Italian countryside in An Evening of the Holiday, is positioned within the frame of the unstable European city-space, it is a space characterised between the interpenetration between past and present, a rupture between the public and private: ‘spatially, Naples is arrayed along both horizontal and vertical planes, with its verticality serving as an image on the one hand of the unconscious mind and on the other of the depth and layering of the ancient past, a past that animates, imbues and lives within the present.’68 Benjamin and Lacis’ account of Naples is relevant here, here, exposing the way in which Hazzard’s description of the city demonstrates distinct similarities with many of the themes taken up by Benjamin decades earlier. As Benjamin and Lacis suggest, and indeed which Rooney also refers to, Naples is particular in the way in which ‘one can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in…nothing is concluded.’69 Naples is always on the cusp, on the edge of 65 Neri, pp. 37, 38 66 p. 38 67 Brydon, p. 79 68 Rooney, in press np. 69 Benjamin; Lacis, p. 166 100 decay and transformation; nothing can be secure, and the boundaries between public and private, past and present are gradually erased, indistinct and unsettling. This in turn augments and unsettles the subjects who inhabit such spaces, undoing their coherence, bringing fragility to the surface, and perpetuating a contradictory position always oscillating between mobility and stasis. Hazzard’s description of Naples in The Bay of Noon is almost identical, with Jenny describing the Italian buildings as distinct through the way in which they avoid ‘giv[ing] the sense, as do historic sights of other cities, of having died and been resurrected…their capacity for adaption has excluded them; they are engulfed in their own continuity [my emphasis].’70 Hazzard’s representation of Naples gestures to the instability and porosity highlighted by Benjamin: Benjamin’s gates and thresholds of Berlin are no longer contained, they are everywhere, ever-present, multiple at once. As Benjamin writes in 1925: ‘porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere. A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday, and how much weekday in this Sunday.’71 It is a space of contradictions, disruptions, where disintegrating boundaries are not concealed beneath multiple layers of strata, which Barber contends are fundamental to any sense of stability in modern European city-spaces: ‘the essential fracture of the city must be concealed in the process which envelops the eye in metropolitan vision.’72 Fractures and fissures in Hazzard’s Naples are not concealed, instead they are open, exposed, gaping, where ‘outer light and inner darkness, street and home’ co-mingle and blur.73 Jenny comes across these spaces of exposure again and again in her wanderings across the city: The big thing below the cathedral had been a paleo-Christian temple. Those columns came from a temple of the Dioscuri, that church was the site of the Roman basilica. The question ‘What is it?’ took on, here, an aspect of impertinence; one might only learn what it had successively been.74 70 Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, (London: Virago Press, 2010 [1970]), p. 69 71 p. 166 72 Barber, p. 25 73 Benjamin; Lacis, p. 172 74 Hazzard, Bay of Noon, p. 15 101 This scene provides an archaeological layering, a building up of temporal strata, which are at the same time exposed all at once. Such a description of a stratified and multiple post-war space, which disrupts any coherent sense of temporality, can be linked with Benjamin’s similar account of the impossibility of linearity, of any clear line between past/present, public and private. As Benjamin argues, it is ‘impossible to distinguish the mass of the church from that of the neighbouring secular buildings. The stranger passes it by. The inconspicuous door, often only a curtain, is the secret gate for the initiate [my emphasis].’ 75 Once again, the images of the thresholds, of curtains, and unclear boundaries return, in-between spaces that Jenny comes across throughout her wanderings. In searching out an antique shop, Jenny is confronted by the collapsing façade of an old palazzo destroying a parked car below. Whilst no one is hurt, the car, which is ‘so instantly and totally crushed,’ now appears ‘to have been like this always…topped by the stone garlands that had decorated an upper window.’76 This moment is emblematic of Hazzard’s construction of the city. It is a city, and with it, its inhabitants, caught in an endless cycle of renewal and decay, ‘a volcanic extravagance,’ which arrives in ‘inundations – in eruptions of taste and period.’ 77 As Stephen Barber suggests, fragmentation and memory are brought to the fore through the construction of the place itself, the instability is volcanic, bursting forth unexpectedly, hardening in dissonant fragments that betray and expose memory in the present moment. For Hazzard’s Naples, there can be no concealment, it is instead opened up, exposed, revealed – a revelation that is necessary. As Rooney argues, ‘the narrative refigures the city as an uncanny space-time, resembling a double or split subject, a sundered self,’ and such a sundered self is repeatedly exposed to Jenny, the fissures and cracks are opened up; Barber’s twin that died at birth is not concealed here.78 Jenny affirms this, the crushed car ‘far from causing indignation’ produces ‘any number of shrugs,’ with the statement ‘What do you expect?’79 Hazzard’s affirmation of the endless permeability of the city, of the collapsing of time and space, itself also invites such a question. It is Hazzard’s representation of Naples that pushes Benjamin’s description of the unstable city-space further, as a post-war Naples takes on even more incoherence, 75 p. 166 76 p. 71 77 p. 71-2 78 Rooney, in press np. 79 Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, p. 71 102 violence, rupture and fragility than the Naples that Benjamin encountered. Hazzard’s Naples is one bearing the obvious scars of recent destruction, where monuments have literally been blown up and exposed. Barber highlights the significance of bloodshed and loss in relation to the European city-space: ‘the presence of the lost populations of Europe is marked into the cities as their counterface, the violent negation which enduringly aggravates the structure of the contemporary city, congesting or voiding it, haunting it.’80 These recent scars only serve to exacerbate this archaeologically uneven city-space, time and memory becoming stretched to breaking point, and it is in this haunted city that Hazzard places Jenny, a solitary female who encounters the space as an exile, as one whose gendered apprehension already determines a sense of unease and disruption of boundaries. This is not the account of a passionate Italian sensibility and way of living that Brydon and Neri suggest, instead it is an apprehension of modern space that is grounded in unease and decay, fragility and disconnect. It is through the monuments themselves, the very doors and gateways that Jenny travels through, that her upheaval is instigated. This upheaval undermines any sense of coherent female subjectivity, as her subjectivity and the space itself bleed into each other, constructing another stratum, another fragile layer of memory. A scene in which Jenny recounts a summer party at the Neapolitan apartment of Gioconda demonstrates just such an encounter with monumentality, and shares distinct similarities with the festival in The Evening of the Holiday. As Jenny describes the lanterns hanging from the pergola, the public is once again blurred with the private (the party not being made up of close friends but a mixture of unknown acquaintances). There is the same sense of fear and trepidation mixed with joy and excitement, of the past reaching into the present, of ‘some ritual long determined’: Many of the women had taken off their sandals, kicking them away to the edge of the terrace, and were dancing on bare brown feet…As we danced, a glass was swept from one of the little tables, by the swirl of a skirt or a shawl, and smashed on the tiles, the fragments going everywhere, indistinguishable from the coloured tessellations…I don’t think that anyone was hurt; yet the incident, with its sensation…of glass biting through flesh, in retrospect dominates that party.81 80 Barber, p. 37 81 Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, p. 122 103 The past, instability, a hidden horror, haunts both the characters and the place itself in Hazzard’s Naples, and it is the many women, dancing, with skirts and shawls that point to this instability, the party itself being defined in feminine terms, unstable and fluid. Hazzard’s representation of the city of Naples in The Bay of Noon is a gendered one through the city-space mediated and explained by the solitary Jenny, and it is through the gendered nature of the representation that the city-space is exposed as unstable where public/private and past/present intermingle and overlap. This is further conflated by Hazzard disrupting time through the very nature of the novel: it is an account of events past, recalled by Jenny a decade later, it is a memory of the city-space, ‘still clouded with effects and what seem to be their causes.’82 The present, past and future tenses are interwoven in a complex and rapid movement from the outset, a fluidity in the representation that does not allow for any chronological coherence. This is seen in not only the description of the city, but the subjects that inhabit it: ‘Gioconda’s appearance has become merged now with knowledge of her, with moods and events and questions, so that in describing it I feel I am giving a false impression and introducing, even to myself, a woman I do not know.’83 Elizabeth Wilson briefly mentions the post-catastrophic urban landscape depicted in modern video games before discussing women in the city-space in The Sphinx and the City (1991). Yet her description of a place where ‘the vision of the ideal city is reduced to a mere memory trace, no longer either dream or nightmare’ rings true with Hazzard’s post-war Naples. Wilson goes on to suggest that the ‘contemporary city [is] seen and experienced as though it were in the future and simultaneously a ruin.’84 This simultaneity is significant in The Bay of Noon, as Jenny suggests at the end of the novel, ‘this new past of mine – that was still the present, though imagination leapt ahead to seal it from the perspective of departure.’85 Dougan takes up this revolving movement between antiquity and modernity in the city-space, a sense of both ‘motionless[ness] and animation’: ‘What Naples knows, finally, and what is has offered to Jenny, is a kind of consolation. In giving her a new past and a ‘place to miss’ it also offers its great past. Its ancient backdrop, a constant reminder of catastrophe and human fragility functions as a 82 p. 2 83 p. 9 84 Wilson, p. 14 85 Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, p. 171 104 foil to the NATO men with whom Jenny works.’86 For Hazzard, the past reaches forward in post-war Naples, everything happens at once, the explosive fragments beneath the city-space, the unknown women cutting their bare feet on shards of glass, the living room migrating into the street – everything is a new past, still present, but simultaneously, a ruin. What remains is this oscillation between the two, a constant indeterminacy. Hazzard’s construction of this unstable European city-space is significant in the way it then informs and allows for a reappraisal of the representation of the distinctly Australian cities in the work of Anderson and Harrower. When a dialogue is set up between the European space that pervades Hazzard’s work and a representation of Sydney in Anderson and Harrower that foregrounds the significance of a disintegrating boundary between public and private, a unique Antipodean construction of the unstable city can become apparent. Hazzard makes an unusual gesture to an Australian understanding of space in the last page of The Bay of Noon, where Jenny announces: We are like those early explorers of Australia who died of thirst on expeditions to the dead centre of a continent…Deceived by salt deposits, by rivers that flow inland, by the fossils of seashells…by disbelief that one could come so far without drawing nearer to what one sought.87 Viewing Anderson and Harrower’s work alongside Hazzard allows for an absence that is inherent in the Australian construction of the city-space to come to the fore; this idea that subjects are deceived into thinking there is any coherent bedrock at the centre of the metropolis. This is because Australian cities lack the multiple layers of strata that Barber argues are so crucial to the unstable European city-space, they lack the ruins, the pressing forward of the past that are embedded in Hazzard’s Italian landscape. There is nothing beneath Australian monuments but absence, ironically only an absence of a transported European culture, with other presences lying below the surface not recognised: there is no coherence, only further fragmentation, where layers are unstable and conjoined. There is no twin that died at birth in the Australian city, rather 86 Lucy Dougan, ‘Another journey to Italy: The Bay of Noon’ (2014) in B. Olubas (ed), Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014), in press np. 87 Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, p. 181 105 a gaping emptiness. As David Crouch suggests in ‘Writing of Australian Dwelling: Animate Houses and Anxious Ground’ (2009), Antipodean space has an amplified sense of anxiety and discontinuity driven by post-colonial history resulting in an ‘uncomfortable state of ungroundedness’: there can be no bedrock, no layer of firming antiquity beneath the strata of the city-space.88 This sense of emptiness and incoherence, the fragility inherent in the space itself, is evident in Anderson’s construction of Sydney in The Impersonators (1980). Sylvia Cornock’s (re)arrival at the opening of the novel, having lived many years in Europe, suggests a particular framing of the Australian city through the eyes of the European expatriate, and it is through Anderson’s construction of this return that the fragility and discontinuous nature of the city is exposed. Sylvia’s experience of Sydney is layered with memories, it is fractured and, like Hazzard, Anderson depicts the city through the eyes of a single female subject: ‘she stood on the roof of a building itself on the high escarpment above Woolloomooloo…what kept her longest on the roof was her puzzlement that familiarity seemed a glaze which, while not obscuring the scene, made it inaccessible in all but its pictorial aspects. Memory itself seemed a glaze, without penetration to feeling.’89 Much of Sylvia’s experience of Sydney is cartographic, a process of mapping; there is a constant need to attempt to track an outline of the city, which becomes in itself an imaginary map fused with memory rather than a concrete space. Anderson’s constant use of street names, shops, train stations, train lines, and finger wharves to describe the city is of stark contrast to the permeability and endlessness of the Hazzard’s Naples. This is because the Sydney that Anderson constructs is hard to pin down, and can only be described through the implied concreteness in colonial naming, a defamiliarised and repetitive grid placed on top of city-space: ‘Sylvia went to David Jones’s corner by bus, then walked to Wynyard down Market and George Streets…Yesterday she had travelled from Platform 3. Today she waited on 4.’90 The repetition of naming only serves to make the space more unstable, as Sylvia becomes caught up in her attempt to control and organise the city-space, which is infused with her own memories and therefore, equally transitory. The Sydney described in The Impersonators is similar to what Marie Calle-Gruber argues is evident in 88 David Crouch, ‘Writing of Australian dwelling: Animate houses and anxious ground’, Journal of Australian Studies, 27.80, (2009), p. 44, see also Paul Carter’s discussion of ungroundedness and fragility in The Lie of the Land, (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) 89 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 58 90 p. 105 106 Helene Cixous’ work: ‘the city…is always more than one, and always cardinal, stretched between the four points of the compass.’ Yet it is not stratified, as Calle- Gruber goes on to suggest, but sprawling in its multiplicity, the past does not press forward through fragmented and ruined buildings, it is instead alongside, confused, between ‘the bold new towers,’ which tolerate ‘nearby little old buildings with toy turrets or balconies.’91 The significance of Sydney as opposed to the European city comes to the fore in a discussion between Sylvia and her extended family. It is in this scene that the underlying unease and anxiousness of the absence of strata, of a past, of monumental History comes to the fore, highlighting the instability and fragmentation of the modern Australian city-space. The lack of a past, an absence, becomes clear from the outset, when Sylvia claims ‘the spaciousness is wonderful…you can’t imagine it ever being the slightest bit fusty or musty [my emphasis].’92 Yet the spaciousness, the lack of a musty history becomes a point of antagonism and aggression, the difference between Italian cities and Sydney. As Sylvia’s stepsister Hermione exclaims, ‘so many Australians want to go there. Having mucked up our own country, and made it hideous, we rush about looking at the remnants of beauty in other countries,’ only to be rebuffed by her husband that it is because of a ‘lack of intelligent town-planning.’93 The hideousness of the city, the waste and lack of direction returns across the novel. Sylvia’s return far from offering a coherent sense of a mapped out and structured city-space leaves her despising and withdrawing from Sydney. What is revealed is the absence, nothingness, no bedrock or continuity, no past pushing forward, erupting into the city-space: This place has no wholeness…It has an effect on me of mess, muddle, discontinuity. It’s all bits and pieces. I feel this with my body, as well as my mind and eyes. And I find it painful.94 The city is painful because it attacks and disrupts Sylvia’s subjectivity, her glazed memory is muddled and indistinct, what is exposed is a new and reforming city-space without a centre that threatens her apprehension of the space, what she describes as a ‘teutonic concrete city’: ‘Why do so many Australians go to Europe just to admire how 91 p. 105 92 p. 158 93 p. 160 94 p. 289 107 things look? They know something is wrong here.’95 Like Hazzard’s early explorers, Sylvia is initially tricked into thinking there would be something to find in the city-space. This is not like Elizabeth Wilson’s simultaneously present and ruined urban landscape, there are no remnants, what is instead contained in Anderson’s Sydney are ghosts far more recent, fresher, much closer to the surface, and beneath them nothing but absence. Anderson’s preoccupation with mapping and re-mapping the city-space is evident in the number of cinematic scenes across her novels, which reveal a particular Australian landscape that is distinctive from, say, the inner city slums depicted by Ruth Park, Patrick White’s abject and mundane Sarsparilla, or the dry suburbia of Thea Astley’s novels. This need to classify and provide a cartography of Sydney is evident in Anderson’s first novel An Ordinary Lunacy, with the descriptions of the Eastern suburbs and the inner city, of Bondi, Double Bay, Kings Cross, and Martin Place. It is a new, decidedly present rather than past depiction of space, as Daisy Byfield travels by car to her shop in the city each day, singing ‘softly to herself for a few minutes waiting for the ascent of the car to bring into view the expected fragment of city skyline – the new, bold, immediately intelligible skyline that was so rapidly imposing itself upon the haphazard scrawl of the old.’96 Such a preoccupation with the city, the urban and the sub-urban can be charted across Anderson’s oeuvre, through the construction of the Sydney city- space, and a continual contrast with European cities. Anderson represents a Sydney characterized by constant transition and movement, with the recurring reference to direction, the compass points, the sprawling vastness of the landscape, blustery southerlies, changes in season, the pervading heat. As the character of Nora Porteous describes her arrival in Tirra Lirra by the River, ‘I became conscious for the first time of the points of the compass, and felt for the first time the airs of three other climates, borne on to my skin by the three prevailing winds.’97 The sense of movement that pervades Anderson’s representation is significant as it destabilizes the Sydney metropolis; it seems indistinct, vast rather than the layered stratification evident in Hazzard’s Italian spaces. Anderson reveals the lack of archaeological substance below the surface of the city, and therefore has to travel horizontally, outward. It is not surprising that when Nora travels to London, she conceives a ‘gloomy passion for 95 p. 291 96 Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1987 [1963]), p. 24 97 Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1997 [1978]), p. 53 108 ancient history,’ moving from house to house in the same closed area of the city.98 Her account of the space itself concerns the age of buildings, of that which is below, the Georgian terraces, which are ‘formal and peaceful,’ and the ‘spacious and solid’ Victorian accommodation.99 History and depth provide the appearance of permanence and solidification for Nora, but any bird’s eye perspective, or any description of the layout and pattern of London is decidedly absent: ‘each return to London I would appreciate afresh the solidity and weight of its buildings, interspersed by the massy billows or the complex tracery of its trees.’100 As discussed in Chapter One, the movement from Australia to the imperial centre of London is a common trope in Australian fiction. Diana Brydon in ‘Buffoon Odysseys’, associates Anderson with this Australian literary tradition, as an author updating ‘the Anglo-Australian romances,’ where distancing allows for a new exploration and appreciation of Australian values.101 As Elaine Barry argues in the article ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’ (1984): ‘expatriation is the prevailing pattern of twentieth-century writers in any country,’ a pattern which points to the ‘alienation, the rootlessness, of the modern world.’102 Its significance to the Australian literary tradition is that it creates another level of alienation because of the distance from the ‘mother culture’ or colonial centre. Barry goes on argue that, like Henry James before her, Anderson uses the expatriate as a trope for the Outsider-figure, in particular, the outside female subject whose expatriation allows for ‘the discovery of one’s self,’ ‘a metaphor for the individual’s personal, spiritual journey. As such its dimensions are metaphysical, not national [my emphasis].’103 Yet Anderson’s construction of the expatriate, and more significantly the city- space that the female expatriate apprehends, is tracking a different territory than that of her Australian counterparts. To align Anderson with Henry James, or the space itself as a metaphor for alienation, is to move away from the distinctive post-war nature of Anderson’s work, in the way that the space itself, the city, affects and manipulates the subject. Nora Porteous is not merely an outsider figure in London, she apprehends and inhabits the city, and Anderson pulls the city-space radically into the post-war environment. The stability of London, the solidity of the buildings in Tirra Lirra by the 98 p. 121 99 p. 123 100 p. 125 101 Brydon, p. 80 102 Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984), p. 3, 4 103 p. 4, 5 109 River are literally blown apart by urban assault of the World War Two, exposed in their fragility. The London that Anderson constructs is not an imperial centre but one which, like Nora’s description of her looks, ‘collapses overnight.’104 Nora withdraws from the modern post-war city to the domestic home: ‘it was the safety of our sanctuary that prevented us from feeling the change, instead of merely knowing of it,’ there is a retreat from the ‘flow of traffic into one huge hard city,’ a ‘constant movement’ and ‘whose noise beat upon our brains.’105 Sylvia Cornock’s travel across Europe also results in a similarly uneasy apprehension of these new multi-layered and fragmented spaces, ‘when, instead of a building remembered with affection, she was confronted by a towering façade of glaring glass, she would try to assess it…Sometimes she succeeded, and sometimes she pretended to.’106 In the modern Rome, with its political division and violence, Sylvia sees ‘the untended grass in the parks grow[ing] long bleached and dusty’ and ‘twice turn[s] into streets and [sees] the drifting smoke from a recently exploded petrol bomb.’107 There is a sense of removal here, of the desire to withdraw from the city-space – that the contradictory position of the female subject is too much to inhabit. When viewing Anderson’s construction of the female expatriate across her novels in this frame, I’m arguing that Anderson is using the trope as a means of opening up and questioning their movement within the post-war city-space. It is through expatriation that the difference between the archaic and multi-layered European metropolis, fractured and multiplied by the bloodshed of the second world war and the horizontally sprawling Australian city of Sydney is brought to the fore: there is a repetitive gesturing to an absence elsewhere, and a distinctive unstable borderline between outside and inside. Anderson builds upon the significance of the return, again augmenting a familiar trope of Australian literature, and the effect on the city-space in The Impersonators through the construction of Sylvia. It is Sylvia’s return that sees such discussion about the city that prompts the siblings of the Cornock family to become locked in a battle about the future of the development of Sydney, where its beauty lies or whether it is truly disgusting as Hermione claims.108 With Sylvia’s return to Sydney from Europe, there is a need to find links, points of reference with cities of Europe, with her companions in London, only these points of reference seem jarring and off key: 104 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 149, 105 p. 170-71 106 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 51 107 p. 52 108 pp. 159-61 110 Janet Holyoak, hearing Richard and Sylvia talk of the North Shore line, had visualised a train line winding around all the intricate bays and points of the north shore of the harbour…that was only to dramatise her disappointment on learning that after crossing the bridge…the North Shore line settled to a course, varying from north to north-west, through dry and rising country.109 Again when describing the difference between the northern suburbs of Sydney and the inner city centre, Anderson returns to the weather, that which is above ground, ‘its seemliness was helped by its inaccessibility to the north-easterlies. The big damp southerlies blustered their way through…but from the sensuous salty north- easterlies…the North Shore was removed.’110 This is not the solid foundation that Nora apprehends in London, nor is it like the layered memory-space of Hazzard’s Italy. Anderson constructs a city perched on the surface, with no depth, which is distinctive as it is still pervaded by memory and instability, but it is a form of instability that is absent, unseen and deferred, not an archaeology, not of stone, but of a lightness in the air, in the pervading breezes. Memory and time is conflated in the absence of a coherent point of focus, cartographic rather than archaeological. It is what Elizabeth Ferrier refers to as ‘spatial disorientation,’ resulting in Nora Porteous’ globe of memory ‘in free spin, with no obscure side,’ and Sylvia Cornock unable to reconcile ‘the map of the city she had carried for two decades in her head.’111 Significantly, Anderson returns to the point of apprehension of space, the city, the fragmentation and disintegration through the eyes of divorced middle-aged female subjects. This is something more than just an image of woman as an outsider, or as an elaborate metaphor for female subjects discovering and reconciling an inherent alienation from their culture: Anderson is instead opening up and questioning how new forms of female mobility (the possibility for divorce, the ability to travel, to enter new spaces that were previously closed off) affect, expose and confront the already modern disorientation of the post-war city space. As Nora Porteous announces in Tirra Lirra, ‘that’s how I came to go to London, not because I particularly wanted to, but as an 109 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 106 110 p. 107 111 Elizabeth Ferrier, ‘Mapping the Local in the Unreal City’, Island Magazine, 41, (1989), pp. 65, 67; Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 201; The Impersonators, p. 56 111 affirmation of the wonderful discovery that nobody could stop me.’112 It is the solitary divorced woman, a woman past child-bearing age, who is already disrupting the expectations of marriage and suburban family life, that confronts and apprehends the incoherent sprawl of Sydney, or the traumatic destruction of London. This is because the very nature of their mobility pre-determines an already disrupted space, through their uneasy movement between the public and private. Anderson’s protagonists occupy spaces that are on the cusp, in-between and as such the spatial tension between the domestic and the commercial, inside and outside come to the fore. Anderson does not construct female subjects who are at ease with the new spaces they occupy, and there is a tension evident in the descriptions of wandering cities alone. For Sylvia, ‘it [is] not perfect, but it [is] the best she could do; it [is] her compromise’ and in the moments of ‘failure of restoration to keep pace with decay,’ when spaces are at their weakest and most fragile, Sylvia returns: To places she knew instead of seeking new ones…to protect herself against rawness and incoherence, [limiting] her track even further, going only to places which had not been subject to great changes, or which had managed…to absorb them [my emphasis].113 For Anderson’s female subjects, the modern city-space is constraining, it does not open up but instead shuts down. The multiplicitous position that it offers is tiring, and often painful. This is significant when considering what happens to the women across Anderson’s novels who venture outward into the city. Ultimately, constantly occupying the city-space becomes an untenable position, any sense of mobility does not result in resolution, but instead there is a renunciation of city-life and a withdrawal. This tension is evident right from the outset of Anderson’s oeuvre in the gradual undoing of Daisy Byfield in An Ordinary Lunacy, who initially sees herself amongst the skyscrapers of the city, is excited with one foot in both the public and private spheres. However, by the end of the novel the city has become an uncanny and threatening space, where ‘pain so blur[s] her vision that in William Street neon signs were fused into sheets of light, curving around and above them in a ghastly tunnel.’114 Daisy seeks to 112 Anderson, Tirra Lirra, p. 99 113 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 50 114 Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, p. 205 112 escape from this kaleidoscope of colour and neon, which prompts nausea and unease, and in the final pages of the novel she is literally bound by the private sphere, bedridden and unwilling to go outside.115 Nora also returns and remains within the maternal domestic space in Tirra Lirra by the River, retreating from both London and Sydney, to the family homestead in Brisbane, reducing her quarters to ‘the kitchen, the bathroom, and Grace’s two back rooms, and unless circumstances drive me elsewhere, none of the other rooms will be opened.’116 There is the suggestion of a distinctive reinforcement of domesticity here, and the private sphere on the modern female subject, especially for the female subject that has wandered the city-space alone. Anderson draws on a similar spatial instability that is evident in Hazzard’s work, but the consequences are decidedly different for Anderson’s protagonists, as Nora admits, ‘I am often lonely for that audience, and yet, if it were possible to return and regain it, I would not go.’117 Sylvia is similarly constrained by the end of The Impersonators, moving into a small flat with her step-brother Harry as ‘a couple’ who will ‘entertain friends’ and who ‘will need table mats, and china, and candlesticks.’118 This sense of remaining within a very small domestic space is at odds with the Sylvia at the beginning of the novel who traverses across all parts of Sydney, and through depicting ‘Sylvia’s commitment to Harry’ as a matter of much ‘conscious resolve, of management, of setting herself to a task,’ Anderson depicts a female subject consciously constraining and limiting movement in order to achieve some form of stability. 119 Here Anderson draws upon the traditional Australian narratives of expatriation and the city-space but offers a new way of considering these spaces, as sprawling cartographies, and the effect these spaces have on modern female mobility. Anderson’s mapping of the Antipodean city-space suggests a way in which to reappraise and reconfigure Harrower’s construction of the post-war city. Although much of Harrower’s work deals with the interior, a claustrophobic setting that will be explored in Chapters Five and Six, her first novel Down in the City (1957) is deeply engaged with the city of Sydney. Just as Anderson repeatedly configures the city through a form of topographical mapping, of naming co-ordinates, a horizontal rather than vertical engagement, so too does Harrower turn to such detailed descriptions. Indeed, 115 p. 244-5 116 Anderson, Tirra Lirra, p. 195 117 p. 200-1 118 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 317 119 p. 317 113 the prologue functions as a contained mapping of the coordinates of the city-space, it is a kaleidoscopic and cinematic bird’s-eye view of Sydney, which rapidly moves across subjects, but it is one that is firmly rooted in the post-war space, in the modern: Along the southern arm of Sydney Harbour lie the oldest and wealthiest suburbs of the city, beginning with Watson Bay on its high narrow cliff, then, strung in a row along the waterfront and extending back from it, Vaucluse, Rose Bay, Double Bay and Rushcutters Bay. Between Rushcutters Bay and the city proper there is Kings Cross and a slum. It is three miles and as many worlds form the peaceful high-walled streets, the tennis courts and golf course of Rose Bay to the hill of glamour and fostered disreputability that is Kings Cross… [It] is a world of milk bars and juke boxes, plane trees, coffee shops and cults.120 Like Anderson, Harrower is constructing a cartographic outline of the city, and it is distinctly modern, gesturing to the newfound agency for young women, the freedom and mobility in the city space, as ‘six girls from a clothing factory stand on Central Station. They sew tulle, sequin-covered evening dresses from eight till five as an adjunct to their more important task of competing with the American crooners whose records…play all day long.’121 Again, similarly to Anderson, the weather and the seasons figure largely across the novel, the relationship between the wealthy Esther Prescott and the racketeer Stan Peterson configured against a backdrop of sweltering summer heat and winter rain, of easterly and westerly breezes, of ferries, boats and harbour crossings. Rosie Yeo takes up Harrower’s cinematic construction of Sydney in ‘Down in the City: Elizabeth Harrower’s ‘Lost’ Novel’ (1990), suggesting the way ‘Harrower’s typical concern with a difficult intense relationship is here placed within the context of a kaleidoscope of place’: ‘Sydney is accurately described, with streets, suburbs and shopping arcades all named and clearly recognisable…the novel’s Sydney is a pervasive, living entity.’122 Interestingly, Harrower wrote much of the novel having been away from Sydney for some years, once again, like Sylvia in The Impersonators, constructing a 120 Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013 [1957]), p. 3-4 121 p. 7 122 Rosie Yeo, ‘Down in the City: Elizabeth Harrower’s ‘Lost’ Novel’, Southerly, 50.4, (1990), pp. 492, 493 114 map of the city through the layers of memory. In some ways Harrower’s seasons and city-space have a similar alignment with characterisation to that Hazzard in The Bay of Noon and The Evening of the Holiday, to Rooney’s claim of a continuity existing between incompletely drawn subjects and the place which they inhabit. 123 That is, the construction of Sydney and the changing seasons, the ‘gay striped blue days when freshly washed sheets flapped and cracked in suburban backyards,’ are intimately connected with Harrower’s subjects and the narrative trajectory of the novel: ‘It was hot…[Esther’s] hair clung damply to her scalp…She leaned on the balcony and looked out. She supposed, but hardly believed, that people were working somewhere out there.’124 As Yeo suggests, ‘this is a novel very conscious of its setting and of the life of the city, which itself works upon the immediate concerns of the characters.’125 Yet again, always, there is the sense of motionlessness alongside movement, of immovability and stasis set against a backdrop of rapid transit and the clamour of the modern city. Whilst Stan moves about the city in his Cadillac, the female subjects of the novel are decidedly immobile – characterised by an acute sense of isolation, boredom and longing. These women, particularly the female protagonist Esther, seem becalmed, and this jars with and brushes up against the kaleidoscopic and cinematic movement that repeats across the novel. Similarly to Hazzard’s construction of a global locus before reducing the description to a single subject, Harrower tapers her representation of post-war Sydney down to a fine point, the moment of apprehension by the female gaze: ‘A few hundred yards in front of [Esther] the harbour stretched, dark now, forked and islanded, hung from mile on mile with rocky cliffs and ancient gums, with fresh white houses and limp spring flowers.’126 Indeed, much of the action of the female subjects is to view, to look and to gaze, without movement, a sense that they are outside of the space, caught in limbo and stationary, unable to completely undertake any rapid movement or newfound agency. This is seen in the construction of Esther’s young neighbour, Rachel Dempster, who ‘[hangs] with her head and arms dangling over the balcony wall, wondering whether or not she would be sorry if she leaned further and fell.’127 The sense of boredom, of stasis, is palpable in these descriptions, once again at jarring odds with Harrower’s city-space, as both Rachel and Esther do a lot of leaning 123 Rooney, in press np. 124 Harrower, Down in the City, p. 131 125 Yeo, p. 494 126 Harrower, Down in the City, p. 28 127 p. 79 115 off balconies, imagining, and yet remain caught, isolated and constrained - Rachel ‘crane[s] impulsively over the balcony to find someone to talk to, someone to tell, but the cement courtyard [wears] its blank Sunday look, and the balconies above were empty,’ whilst Esther ‘lean[s] over the balcony and look[s] out. She suppose[s], but hardly believ[es], that people were working somewhere out there.’ 128 Harrower withdraws here to the interior, the way in which the post-war female subject hovers uneasily on the borderline between public and private, not wanting to stay inside but not wanting to venture outwards either. This is seen in Harrower’s construction of Laura in The Watch Tower (1966), who attempts to escape her abusive marriage but finds the city of Sydney too threatening and overwhelming. Again, there is a distinct similarity with Anderson with the description, the need to map, lay out the space in a grid-like pattern: ‘Laura walked down Pitt Street from the Quay to Central Station. She walked back down Elizabeth Street to Hunter Street, down Hunter Street to George Street, along that thoroughfare to Bathurst Street.’129 This description demonstrates Laura’s manic need for order in what is a disordered and frenetic space, a space that is fragmented, in a state of partial construction and deconstruction, the gaping holes that Stephen Barber alludes to, but they are recent holes, recent ruins, ‘flimsy as a fun-fair, grit falling from half-demolished buildings, deserted scaffolding rising above those still under construction.’130 It is a city- space described as ‘tawdry, dirty,’ with much the same sense of hideousness that Sylvia Cornock’s siblings find. Laura Shaw’s apprehension of Sydney constrains rather than opens up her mobility: as a woman walking alone in the modern post-war space, Laura does not find freedom but instead the need to retreat, the instability of the metropolis is threatening, leaving her senses ‘fragmentary and disordered.’ Harrower exposes the unclear line between public and private as destructive, confining, as a housewife right within a commercial and masculine environment, Laura finds herself unable and unwilling to maintain her presence within the space: ‘her head began to feel hollow and deep and without boundaries, as if a pebble tossed in her mind would fall for ever.’131 It is significant that Harrower constructs Laura’s one and only attempt to disentangle herself from an abusive marriage, her only attempt to reassert her own subjectivity, fails within the city-space, not the suburb, or the domestic sphere of the home. The female 128 pp. 80, 131 129 Harrower, The Watch Tower, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1991 [1966]), p. 108 130 p. 108 131 p. 109 116 subject’s attempt to escape is enacted right in the heart of a masculine urban landscape, but instead of providing a sense of freedom or possibility, this new form of mobility sends Laura returning to the suburbs, to her contained house at Neutral Bay, as the ‘most tremendous inertia which sprang from the paralysis of a will too long suppressed shackled her. She could do nothing.’132 Laura returns to domesticity, to ‘a kitchen so quiet that [she] could barely swallow for fear of being overhead… ‘Thank God! Thank God!’ Laura muttered thanksgiving without ceasing all morning long as she cleaned the house.’133 Harrower’s construction of the city-space demonstrates its unstable nature and effect on female mobility, the way in which the lack of distinct boundaries, the unnatural threshold between public and private can cause a complete rupture in female subjectivity and the return to the private domain. Such a retreat, a turning inward, will be taken up further in Chapters Five and Six. Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard each trouble and problematise the modern preoccupation with the metropolis, with the city-space, and in doing so, construct a space that opens up the significance of the disintegration between public and private boundaries. When their work is compared side by side, similarities and distinctions become apparent in their construction of the post-war city-space, the way in which the female subject’s apprehension of the city disrupts and exposes the incoherent and unstable nature of the space. When their work is held up against the theoretical backdrop provided across the twentieth century from Benjamin, Barber, Cixous and Calle-Gruber, and the feminist reconfigurings of these spaces, the interplay between memory, time, space, and female subjectivity is exposed. Hazzard’s multiple and stratified Italy allows for the representation of Sydney in both Harrower and Anderson to be reinvigorated and reappraised. What is revealed is an inherent absence in the Antipodean city-space, which perpetuates and reinforces a fractured and unstable negotiation of the metropolis by the female subject. What recurs across their work is the contradictory subject position of post-war female subjects as they move across the city- space – the repetitive and exhaustive oscillation between movement and containment, mobility and boredom, freedom and anxiety. Such a position is ultimately painful and results in a turning away, a retreat into domesticity. 132 p. 109 133 p. 110-11 117 CHAPTER FOUR The Tight-Rope Dancers: Jessica Anderson’s Sydney, from the shop to suburbia, and the space in-between ‘In that moment she was overtaken by one of her old longings for luxury, the pressure of so many wishes, for so many things, giving the moment a craziness that left each thing undefined, yet in its flashing dragnet caught them all.’ Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators (1980), p. 178 ‘Public. Private. Paradise. Prison.’ Roger Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia (1997), p. 5 ‘Familiar spatial distinctions such as the distinctions between inside and outside, high and low, surface and depth, private and public, are collapsed…[it is] impossible for us to have a sense of the overall spatial plan and our space within it.’ Elizabeth Ferrier, ‘Mapping the Local in the Unreal City’ (1989), p. 67 I went to the local shops, one by one, and asked for work. Of the people I asked, I remember nothing but their refusals. Only for the newsagent’s wife. I can still see her angry face as she replied. ‘You’ve got a nerve, Mrs Porteous. Thousands out of work, men hungry, yet here you are asking for work. You with a husband to keep you!’1 Nora Porteous’ search for work in Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) indicates Anderson’s focus on representing and exposing the shifting nature of female agency in the post-war period. Nora’s aspirations are significant in that they move away from, and step outside, the traditional boundaries of the domestic, maternal or sexual woman occupying the modern city-space. Anderson constructs a character who deliberately seeks to enter the commercial domain, who desires to use any ability to make money without the assistance of her husband: such a desire is prompted out of the need for independence rather than financial necessity, it is not a consequence of falling on hard times or there being no other option available, instead it is simply a desire to work and earn. Nora’s desire for financial independence places Anderson’s representation within the frame of a new form of female agency that is rooted in the city-space of post-war modernity, having access to spaces outside the boundaries of the domestic, spaces that are public and commercial, but preceding the second wave of 1 Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan Australia 1978), p. 78 118 feminism. As Elizabeth Wilson suggests in The Sphinx in the City (1991), ‘the independent woman on her own in the big city was likely to be portrayed in a more negative light than had been the case before or during the war.’2 Post-war single and independent women were seen as disruptive to the city space, and, particularly evident in the early depictions of women in film noir following World War Two, solitary urban women figured largely in the public imagination as signifiers for ‘female sterility and death.’3 As Wilson suggests, ‘the majority of women who came to the great cities of the western world did so not as radical bohemians, but simply in order to earn a living. That life could be lonely, and desperate.’4 Nora’s position and desire in Tirra Lirra by the River is threatening to the boundaries between the public and private spheres, her need to move outside of the border of the domestic space is unnatural, is other. Indeed such a position is seen as a reason for her husband’s demand for a divorce: her inability to ‘handle a man’, her constant repetition for her own allowance.5 Significantly Nora is unable to find paid work until she has separated from her husband, when the constraint of the male subject has been removed, and her position inside the domestic space cannot be maintained. Having developed the multi-layered city-space charted across Chapter Three, and the female subject that inhabits such a space, this chapter will unpack Anderson’s reworking of modern subjectivity through the collapsing divide between commercialism and domesticity, examining Anderson’s representation of the complex link between the female subject and post-war commerce. Such a representation again points to the invasion of the public with the private, which in turn fuels an in-between and commingling space that lies at the heart of the newfound female agency of post-war modernity. Sheridan has lauded Anderson for her representation of ‘the conditions of women’s work, creativity and identity,’ and ‘the depiction, sometimes satirical and with deft comic touches, of Australian urban (largely Sydney) social life.’6 Indeed, Anderson’s construction of the Australian ‘working woman’ is far more complex than a gesture to the social conditions at the time, as she reveals and challenges the new forms of female agency that are a consequence of women being able to enter the public domain and take 2 Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991), p. 111 3 p. 111 4 p. 111 5 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 87 6 Susan Sheridan, Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark, (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2011), pp. 188-89 119 part in the systems of capitalism. This female agency is intrinsically linked with decidedly new modern spaces: the department store and suburbia. Engaging with this discourse allows for a reconfiguring of Anderson’s preoccupation with commercialism and consumer desire in the female subject who inhabits the city-space. This again points to a subject position that is in motion, and yet one that remains constraining, and for Anderson’s female subjects, ultimately untenable, resulting in an all out withdrawal into the domestic sphere. Such a retreat prefigures the discussion in Chapters Five and Six of how the post-war female subject can hope to inhabit the space of the house after such an unstable withdrawal. The work of Julia Kristeva, and Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak in the 1980s links the position of the modern female subject with materialism and capitalism – the desire to earn a living. Female agency is bound up with the public and political systems of commerce, and is a symptom of modernity: where the ‘problems of the production of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationship it implies, politics, etc.)’ are aligned with ‘those of reproduction, survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex and symbol.’7 Kristeva argues in ‘Women’s Time’ (1986) that modern female agency cannot be separated from this production/reproduction dichotomy. This implicates the female subject, and subsequently, the maternal, in the systems of capitalism: consumerism, commerce, materialism, and economics. It anticipates the collapse of the public/private divide at the point the female, the maternal, and the commercial intersect. As Kristeva argues, this overlapping between production and reproduction is distinctive for the female subject, once again suggesting that a woman’s involvement within the systems of capitalism and means of production runs parallel or diagonal to the experiences of the male subject, mediated through the domestic and maternal.8 This debate has progressed from the 1980s with Judith Butler taking up Kristeva’s claims about the maternal body, reproduction and women’s time in relation to semiotics and performance in Gender Trouble (1999), as well as Elizabeth Grosz in Space, Time and Perversion (1995), while the state of the maternal, femininity and motherhood continues to be a site of debate for feminist thought.9 7 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ in T. Moi (Ed.) The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986)., p. 189 8 Kristeva, p. 196 9 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1999); Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: essays on the politics for bodies, (New York: Routledge, 1995); for a discussion of the current debate surrounding the maternal, time and motherhood in Kristeva see Fanny Söderbäck, 120 The modern forms of female agency that Anderson constructs develop and trouble the controlled entry of women into the commercial domain, a way of entering the public space, which began with the widespread construction of the department store and arcades at the turn of the twentieth century. Critical work done on the rise of the department store and its position within literature at the fin de siècle provides an important point of departure in assessing the result of the overlap between femininity, consumption and commerce.10 This space facilitated an early blurring of the lines between the public and the private sphere; it began the disruption of the domestic space and the arrival of consumerism into the homes of the female middle class. This would only further break down with the urban space and commercialism of the post-war period, which saw women more directly take part within the systems of capitalism. The fin de siècle brought with it a new commercial space that on the one hand encouraged the female subject to engage in the capitalist economy as consumer, but on the other was deliberately constructed as an enlargement of the domestic space: the image of the household being used for commercial gain.11 As Wilson argues these modern public spaces have an ‘ambiguous atmosphere,’ zones that ‘[are] public, yet aim at the intimacy of the private interior.’12 Rita Felski, in The Gender of Modernity (1995), develops this point further, highlighting the way in which ‘this public domain present[s] itself as an extension of the private sphere, providing the visitor with an experience of intimacy and pleasure, intended to reflect, in magnified form, the comforts of the bourgeois home.’13 The department store was constructed for the female subject, yet remained a deliberately concealed public space underneath the veneer of the private. The male capitalist in charge of the department store relied on a manipulative space designed to seduce the perceived feminine traits of ‘emotionality, passivity, and susceptibility to persuasion,’14 which made the female subject the ideal consumer. Thus, women in modernity were ‘Motherhood According to Kristeva: On Time and Matter in Plato and Kristeva’, philoSOPHIA, 1.1, (2011); Emily Apter, ‘‘Women’s Time’ in Theory’, differences, 21.1, (2010) 10 see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1995); Edward Walsh, ‘Zola, Jourdain, and the architectonics of Modernity’ in N. Harkness; P. Rowe; T. Unwin; J. Yee (eds) Visions/Revisions: Essays in Nineteenth Century French Culture, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003); Alison Walls, ‘Symbolism and Commodified Idenitity in Rachilde and Zola’s Department-store novels,’ New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 28.2, (2007) 11 see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,1995); Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Ubran Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, (1991) 12 Wilson, p. 59 13 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Havard University Press, 1995), p. 68 14 p. 62 121 given access to a public space that systematically controlled and exploited their interaction with the modes of capitalism, and the commodities that supported it. Their private female desire was unleashed, but in a tightly controlled and marketed space that concealed its involvement in the very public systems of consumerism and finance.15 This highlights the way in which women’s involvement in the public space was still highly regulated and controlled, the threatening aspect of the rampant female consumer, ‘a mass of feminine corporeality [that] flows into the store, driven by an overriding and unstoppable desire,’16 manageable by the contained nature of the department store. Women would feel that they had not entered the public space, but rather a dream-like, ideal, and intimate version of the domestic sphere, which pandered to the changing demands of fashion and clientele. This chapter will take up this discussion of the department store in order to examine the way in which Anderson is engaging with a particular post-war female agency: what happens when consumer desire bursts outside the department store doors, when women take up positions previously occupied by male capitalists, as owners and purveyors of their own goods, when the public/private divide becomes unsettled and disrupted. These accounts of the department store will be further developed by the theoretical work done on suburbia, providing a critical framework that will be deployed across this chapter. The relationship between suburbia, consumerism and capitalism develops and departs from the department store of the turn of the century, augmenting and disrupting the agency of the post-war female subject. Across both of Anderson’s Sydney novels, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963) and The Impersonators (1980), her female subjects inhabit in-between spaces as unsettling and volatile figures, opening up and revealing an involvement within the commercial sphere: their changed agency, the slipperiness in their subjectivity only creating an increasingly fractious and untenable position. This develops and refracts the contradictory oscillation between public and private inherent in the post-war female subject inhabiting the city-space as discussed in Chapter Three. With the ability to traverse the public and private spheres, a new found sense of agency and ability to independently become involved with commercialism, property and consumerism, comes an overlapping with domesticity, femininity and the home. The construction of Nora is the starting point for this chapter, before moving to Anderson’s female protagonists Daisy Byfield and Greta Cornock in An Ordinary Lunacy 15 Felski, pp. 62-68 16 p. 73 122 and The Impersonators, both of who tread an increasingly unstable tightrope, and eventually they must lose their balance. Nora inhabits an in-between space, and yet Anderson removes the role of wife and mother, as well as constraining her sexuality. As discussed in Chapter Three, Nora is neither a maternal nor sexual figure, but rather a solitary single woman operating in the new modern city-space, whilst Daisy and Greta are differently conceived, layered with the maternal. Situating these female subjects alongside one another allows their fractious relationship with consumption and commercialism in the post-war city of Sydney to come to the fore. Anderson blurs the line between the domestic and the commercial in An Ordinary Lunacy: this in-between space is a necessary component, and a direct result, of the modern female agency of the character Daisy Byfield. Her ability to reside in-between the public and the private spheres forms, fuels and perpetuates this disruption of the boundaries, which has the particular effect of rendering Daisy’s femininity ambiguous and unstable. This is facilitated by the narrative structure of the novel, through the way Daisy’s disintegration and success are charted at the same time. Her business success is a past event, and is recounted as such through the narrative, with the plot beginning with the point of her descent. Whilst Daisy’s ascent is public, her decline is private, and yet they are bound up in each other. It is at this point, where the paths intersect, that the spaces inhabited by Daisy become increasingly confused and conflated, suggesting the complex and multi- faceted nature of the post-war female subject’s negotiation of the city-space. Anderson continues to explore this problematic female agency, and the complete invasion of commerce and consumption into the domestic space in The Impersonators. Yet, instead of destabilising spaces being constructed and created by the subject’s ambiguity, the space already exists; it is already palpable, in suburban Sydney. The specificity in the construction of the suburban space in The Impersonators is central to the disruption of the public and private spheres, whereas the spaces that Daisy inhabits in An Ordinary Lunacy are quite different in their representation: although suburbs are named or referred to, Daisy is contained within interior spaces, oscillating between her own shop and house, the narrative is far more confined and claustrophobic. This chapter will chart Anderson’s initial disruption of the commercial space, before she moves outward to the space of the suburb. In The Impersonators, written seventeen years after An Ordinary Lunacy, Anderson ventures outside, mapping the way in which the spaces of suburban Sydney push and perpetuate the disintegration between boundaries, fuel the consumptive desire in the subject, and encourage the disruption and the pursuit of 123 wealth. The notion that suburbia is an already-unstable space, fuelled by consumption and the desire for wealth, is taken up, and pervades all of Anderson’s representations of suburban locations, from the east, to the west, and to the north, in the ‘hotch-potch of small buildings that stretch as far as the eye [can] see,’ to ‘the wide grassy verges,’ and the houses with ‘their petty privacy, the trivial discretion of their facades.’17 With her turn to suburbia, Anderson is appraising and reworking a new space that is fundamentally modern, and like the city-space discussed in Chapter Three, Anderson’s construction is a particularly Antipodean representation, which reconfigures a familiar trope across post-war Australian fiction.18 Although the city and the metropolis has long been a focus for the modern, as highlighted in the Chapter Three, the notion of the suburb, of a peripheral in-between space sits alongside and overlaps with the city-space, as Roger Silverstone suggests in the work Visions of Suburbia (1997): Suburbia has remained curiously invisible in the accounts of modernity. The suburban is seen, if at all and at best, as a consequence, an excrescene [and yet for most] the experience of modernity was the experience not of the street, but of the road, not the sidewalk but the lawn, and not the jarring and unpredictable visibility of public spaces and public transport, but the enclosed private worlds of fences, parlours and automobiles. Public. Private. Paradise. Prison.19 As Silverstone’s account of suburban space attests, suburbia brings with it an instability between the public and private in its overlapping between the enclosed domestic space of the house, and the public visibility of consumer desire and wealth. The space itself is troubled, indistinct: the anxiety surrounding the ambiguous department store has been let loose, it is no longer contained by an authority, instead entering into the winding streets, lawns and fences of the suburbs. It is this space that is in-between, fragmented and overlapping: ‘instantly recognisable though never entirely familiar. Ubiquitous but invisible. Secure but fragile. Desired but reviled. Suburbia is neither singular nor 17 Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators, (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1980), pp. 66, 109-110 18 see Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934); Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948); Poor Man’s Orange (1949); Thea Astley’s Well-Dressed Explorer (1962); Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala (1966); The Vivisector (1970); The Eye of the Storm (1973); David Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone St (1985) 19 Roger Silverstone, ‘Introduction’ in R. Silverstone (ed) Visions of Suburbia (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997), p. 5 124 unchanging.’20 The fragmented nature of the suburban comes from the way in which it overtly resists classification and coherence: on the one hand it is, as John Archer argues in his discussion of colonial suburbs, ‘the material articulation of…binary distinctions,’21 rigid in its structure to remove itself from the chaotic city, in its planning, streets and blocks, but on the other it is neither private nor public. Suburbia seems to be outside these spheres, and yet is also both at once. As Elizabeth Ferrier suggests in ‘Mapping the Local in the Unreal City’ (1989), Anderson’s texts are particularly ‘spatial texts,’ and yet ‘orientation is presented as an elusive ideal’: ‘familiar spatial distinctions such as the distinctions between inside and outside, high and low, surface and depth, private and public, are collapsed…this makes it impossible for us to have a sense of the overall spatial plan and our space within it.’22 It is within this already-unstable space, specifically Sydney’s suburbs, which Anderson operates, exposing it as a necessary disorientation that facilitates the female subject’s oscillation between a sense of freedom and mobility, and stasis and constraint. Just as the department store’s ambiguity is located within the gendered domestic nature of the space, the ambiguity of suburbia is perpetuated by the overlap between domesticity, femininity, commercialism and consumerism. As Silverstone argues, ‘suburban culture is a gendered culture [my emphasis]’; it is overtly feminised, as ‘the suburban home has been built around an ideology and a reality of women’s domestication, oppressed by the insistent demands of the household, denied access to the varied spaces and times.’23 Suburbia is relegated to the domain of the domestic, the family, the maternal, and it is this that fuels the initial perception that suburbia is a private space, outside the boundaries of the public, much like the concept of the home itself. Deborah Chambers’ article ‘A Stake in the Country’ (1997) situates women at the heart of suburban development, and in particular Australian suburbia. Although Chambers seeks to chart women’s experience in order to help urban planning and social development, it provides an important insight into the feminisation of suburban space in the post-war period. Much like the department store, which was built with the female consumer in mind at the turn of the century, suburbs were built ‘largely for women and the production of children,’ where ‘marriage, home ownership and the notion of 20 Silverstone, p. 4 21 John Archer, ‘Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1700-1850’ in R. Silverstone (ed) Visions of Suburbia (London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997), p. 52 22 Elizabeth Ferrier, ‘Mapping the Local in the Unreal City’, Island Magazine, 41, (1989), pp. 65, 67 23 Silverstone, p. 7 125 wholesome family life were traditional values consolidated as universal and constant ideals, throughout…Australian suburbia.’24 Here, suburbia can be seen to be a space that brings together Kristeva’s production/reproduction dichotomy – that is the overlapping between the systems of post-war commodification and consumerism, and the perceived sanitised and contained feminine space for the bringing up of children in the family home. Wilson suggests this overlap in her discussion of the initial planning of suburban spaces after World War Two – with the suburbs home to the first shopping centres and malls, and ‘in the suburb or ‘new town,’ women were to be the guardians of taste.’25 The idea that the suburb provides a distinctly feminine space, contained from the the public, that it is ‘the feminine ‘other’ named and domesticated by the father,’ conceals the fragmentary and transitory nature of the space.26 Similar to the concealment of the public commercialism in the department store environment, the layering of a female domestic space in order to trap the consumer, the space suburbia develops and augments bears this distinct veneer of private domesticity. Suburbia exposes, and is the result of, a very public commercialism, which brings the commodity and consumption right into the domestic space, disrupting and threatening coherent borders. The domesticated feminine suburbia is in a constant ‘struggle over meanings associated with space, community and identity.’27 Shopping, buying and selling are all interwoven with the suburban space, as Silverstone argues: ‘fuelled by the increasing commoditisation of everyday life…the corner shop, the department store, the mall, are all designed to contribute to the creation of suburbia.’28 Suburbia may be a gendered culture, but it is also a culture of consumption. The ‘mass of feminine corporeality’ that flows into the department store ‘driven by an overriding and unstoppable desire’29 has been turned inside out, and instead finds itself redirected into the suburban home, away from a controlled environment: the department store is no longer mirroring the domestic environment, but rather the suburban home is mirroring the department store. Silverstone argues for the interrelationship between consumerism and the suburban, suggesting that ‘whatever the 24 Deborah Chambers, ‘A Stake in the Country: Women’s experiences of suburban development’ in R. Silverstone (ed) Visions of Suburbia, (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 52 25 Wilson, pp. 107, 112 26 Chambers, p. 88 27 p. 105 28 Silverstone, p. 8 29 Felski, p. 73 126 changes in the social and gender dynamics of suburbia, they are framed if not determined by the consumerism that makes suburbia a life of style…There is an intimate and indissoluble link between suburbia and buying.’30This highlights the way suburbia is not just a female domestic space, but is directly connected with the systems of capitalism, an connection that is uncontrollable and threatening as consumer desire has seeped into the private sphere, creating a neon domesticity framed by endless consumption. It is, as Silverstone argues, a ‘dialectic of suburban consumption in which the skin of suburbia is somehow turned inside out, revealing the inner workings, the body, of ‘commodified selfhood’…triumphant in the displays of desire.’31 As suggested, the trope of suburbia recurs across the Australian literary tradition from Ruth Park and Thea Astley to Patrick White, David Malouf, and Christos Tsiolkas, all of whom have taken up this understanding of the suburban space. As Andrew McCann argues in ‘Subtopia, or the Problem of Subtopia,’ (1998) ‘suburbia has been a neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century,’ which is characterised by ‘anti-suburbanism’: the idea that suburbia is a negative space, that constrains, that suffocates.32 Robin Gerster takes this point a step further in ‘The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction,’ (1990) arguing that ‘suburbia is a metonym for living death,’ particularly the death of any writer or intellectual. Therefore, writers attempt to distance themselves from the suburban space, preferring to deride it for its ‘stifling conformity, crass materialism and spiritual accidie.’33 There is a particular anxiety about the position of the suburb in the Australian culture, stemming from ‘anxieties about the ‘everyday’…the mundane cycle of work, consumerism and domesticity.’34 There is no coherent bedrock, instead an endless cycle of the habit of work and consumption. The work of both Andrew McCann and Joan Kirkby suggests that these anxieties result in the representation of suburbia as being a highly corporeal, decaying and decomposing space, which fuels transgression and perversity, a space from which the subject either flees or is consumed. In the article ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,’ (1998) McCann charts the way in which White, rather than 30 Silverstone, p. 8 31 p. 8 32 Andrew McCann, ‘Introduction: Subtopia, or the problem of suburbia’, Australian Literary Studies, 18.4, (1998), p. vii 33 Robin Gerster, ‘Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction’, Meanjin, 49.3, (1990), p. 566 34 McCann, p. vii 127 allowing his characters to flee from the suburbs, instead stages the ‘instability and potential perversity inherent in forms of representation that consolidate a commercialised image of the good life.’35 This results in the kind of performative excessiveness and decomposing corporeality seen in The Solid Mandala (1966), The Vivisector (1970) and The Twyborn Affair (1979). Kirkby takes up these claims in the article ‘The Pursuit of Oblivion: in flight from suburbia,’ (1998) tracking the way contemporary writers, such as David Ireland, Bruce Dawe and Christos Tsiolkas continue and perpetuate the trope of suburbia as a site of disgust, alienation, abomination: an abhorrent space spawned by excessive capitalism and consumerism.36 As Kirkby argues, this ‘hideous progeny spawned by modern industrialisation…precipitates the masculine subject into ever more violent and brutal acts of self-maintenance [my emphasis].’37 These male subjects are all constructed as ‘oppressed by the artificial cycle of modern life,’ and the representation of the spaces they inhabit continues the tradition of a corporeal and decaying anti-suburbia in Australian literature. Significantly, the discussion of the representation of suburbia is distinctly masculine and revolves around the construction of the male subject, and male writers, with their protagonists decaying or fleeing an abject space. For McCann and Kirkby, it is the in-betweenness of the Australian suburb, the way it is ‘neither at the centre, nor with a centre; neither one thing nor another,’ that creates this abjection, that ‘visceral imagery…clings to the very idea of suburbia’ because it is the ‘hidden underbelly of modernity,’ and therefore, ‘virulent variations of this theme have dominated the Australian imaginary.’38 Anderson is engaging with this tradition of suburban writing in The Impersonators, but her construction of the suburban also augments and steps away from such a trope. Anderson takes up the incoherence of suburban space, the way in which it is unsettling, and disruptive, but not abject. She does not rage against suburbia as White does, her writing is not corporeal, but rather seeks to explore the indistinct and overlapping boundaries between the public and private – once again, a shifting intermingling rather than an antagonistic opposition. The way the Sydney suburbs are represented in The Impersonators is a dramatic shift from the previous and decidedly masculine constructions of suburbia: the effect of suburbia itself is reformed and 35 Andrew McCann, ‘Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity’, Australian Literary Studies,18.4, (1998), p. 59 36 Joan Kirkby, ‘The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia’, Australian Literary Studies, 18.4, (1998), p. 1 37 p. 1 38 pp. 4, 5 128 reshaped. Anderson is preoccupied here with the women that inhabit these spaces, and what happens to the female subject when they are able to traverse the public/private divide and directly take part in the systems of commerce and consumption. Anderson’s construction of Nora in Tirra Lirra By the River suggests this move, as Nora’s commercially successful dress-making business disrupts the fragile boundary between public and private: it is a business endeavour that enters right into the domestic space, as was the case for many women of the time, commercialism takes place in her own home. Nora’s transactions and fittings with her female clientele are represented in domestic terms, as she describes her customers as ‘women ‘mad about clothes’, always running to me with bits of cloth and pictures cut from magazines, always asking ‘But is it me?’’39 It is a private relationship between dress-maker and customer, there is an element of confession, of trust, of the dress-maker as confidant in the female subject’s desires as consumer, given complete access to her body and her subjectivity, the ability intrinsically to know the answer to the question ‘is it me?’ Nora exhibits traits of the consuming passive woman in the domestic space with ‘the little lamps shining so privately on opulent materials.’ She lusts after fashion magazines for their smell, ‘that celebrated smell of the glossy mag, the scent of twentieth century folly,’40 is unable to resist buying ‘soft blue velveteen, and a beautifully faded Persian rug,’41 and is seen to be ‘hopelessly frivolous.’ The line between her clientele and her own consuming desires blends and intermingles. Even when Nora gives up her own business and enters a design house for the theatre, her relationship with her male seniors is described in terms of the private domain, as a marriage: ‘I did not really find it surprising that I was ready to develop a diplomacy…that I had refused to develop in marriage with Colin Porteous.’42 With Nora, Anderson constructs a post-war female subject able to traverse across the public and private spheres, but in doing so, brings the domestic right into the commercial domain. In her construction of Daisy Byfield in An Ordinacy Lunacy, Anderson deploys a far more destabilising female agency, roving between the public and private, always residing in-between, a female subject bound by the maternal and the familial. Anderson’s construction of Daisy explores the point where the female, maternal and commercial meet, and the subsequent disruption of the spaces she inhabits. Daisy is a 39 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 159 40 p. 55 41 p. 124 42 p. 160 129 modern female subject who has access to the commercial domain, a successful businesswoman operating her own interior design company. Like Nora, who wishes to be employed simply to be financially independent, Daisy’s position as a working mother does not stem from any financial need or necessity, but rather from her own desire. Anderson establishes at the outset of the novel the way in which Daisy is operating in a new social space for women through the ease with which Daisy’s husband is passed over and discounted. Daisy leaves her husband of her own accord, choosing to be a single mother after being filled with a scornful hatred for her husband’s lack of success: ‘she had developed a savage contempt, painful even to herself, for his increasing seediness…and above all, for the submission with which he bore these marks of failure.’43 The position of the female subject and the domestic space is immediately troubled through the acknowledgement of Daisy’s business sense and ambition, through the way the marriage is described in terms of a failed transaction. It is a constraint on her success and her business aptitude, and the male subject, particularly the male subject as husband, is presented as an inhibitor. The masculine presence is a barrier to entering the commercial domain, and must be completely removed in order to allow for new forms of female agency to be successful in the public domain. For Daisy, ‘the thought of her husband, though never painful, had slightly fretted her until he had freed her by dying. This event had coincided with the boom years after the war, and Daisy, the last of her ropes cut, had soared and expanded into real success [my emphasis].’44 The commercial, and the systems of capitalism, are already inhabiting and influencing the private sphere at the expense of an unsuccessful male subject, through the way in which all ties to the male subject must be cut in order for the female subject to achieve any commercial success. Daisy’s success is only possible through her husband’s decline and death, who is not even given a name by Anderson, but is simply ‘a man many years her senior.’45 It is her knowledge of his failure in the commercial sphere that precipitates her departure from him, rather than any private or domestic failing, as although ‘drunkenness was her excuse…it was really his lack of success that she could not bear.’46 Daisy’s initial business success upon entering this public domain is recounted at the beginning of the novel, and yet this success becomes increasingly unsettling and 43 Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan and Company Ltd, 1963), p. 9 44 p. 10 45 p. 9 46 p. 9 130 disturbing as the novel unfolds. This culminates in the complete unravelling of her selfhood, the constant movement and oscillation between the two spheres becomes too much, resulting in retreat. Anderson slowly reveals the way in which Daisy’s subject position, whilst initially presented as a move away from the traditional female constraints of marriage and domesticity is bound up in both the private arena of the maternal and the public domain of commercialism. Daisy’s femininity, her agency, and her position in the domestic and commercial spheres is uneasy and disconcerting. Anderson exposes the indistinct nature of Daisy’s female agency through the descriptions of her shop, and her business dealings. Daisy’s commercial space, which is operating right in the middle of the city of Sydney, is described in very domestic terms, ‘in a little street, closed to all but pedestrian traffic.’47 The boundaries between public and private are indeterminate, as the shopfront cannot help but become domestic even if it is located amongst the masculine skyscrapers of the city because it is run by a female proprietor who operates the shop as if it were an extension of her home. As Kristeva suggests, there exists a fragile link between the domain of the economy and modes of reproduction, and such a link suggests a way of viewing Daisy’s way of occupying the commercial space in these terms, that is, negotiating her femininity and maternal subjectivity alongside the masculine world of business and transaction.48 This is evident in the way that Daisy inhabits the space, her domestic subjectivity seeping into the shopfront as she ‘stand[s] with one foot on the desk and the other in a pigeon-hole, rummaging in a cardboard box.’49 When the character of Myra visits Daisy’s shop, it is revealed as highly intimate, ‘severely lustrous’ – Daisy’s office is similar to a bedroom, rather than a space for business transactions:50 About half of Daisy’s cluttered back room was occupied by an enormous desk, floridly carved and inset with panels of pearlshell…[Myra] looked rather enviously round the cluttered room: at the swathed bales of cloth, at the cardboard boxes, at the pile of dusty bric-a-brac in a corner, and at Daisy’s pretty blue and white teacup, which had a shelf to itself and was protected from dust by a glass dome.51 47 p. 79 48 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, p. 189 49 Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, p. 80 50 p. 79 51 p. 80-82 131 The interior of this shop is very similar to that of the department store, it has the ‘intimacy of a private interior,’52 an alluring and cosy domestic shopfront amongst the harsh skyscrapers. It conceals and hides the commercial nature of the transaction, luring in female customers who respond ‘enviously’ to the clutter, the tactile opulence of the space. This is evident when Myra hears the discussion between Daisy and her customers: ‘‘It sounds more like a party than a shop,’ she thought. ‘What a high old time she and her silly Willy have here.’’53 As opposed to the department store, the ambiguity of the space is not deliberate, but it appears that it is Daisy’s very femininity that must immediately disrupt and challenge the coherence of the space. There is an air of private confession, of gossip, in the way that Daisy interacts with her shop assistant, as ‘Willy’s eyes conveyed news. ‘The Lister-Brocks,’ he mouthed confidentially at Daisy. Daisy clasped her hands. ‘Not the Pembroke table?’ she whispered. Willy gave two slow, ecstatic nods. ‘Oh, bliss,’ murmured Daisy.’54 Daisy’s unchecked desire, the way she clearly has a highly emotionally charged blissful relationship with selling, and business success, immediately troubles and disrupts her position within a commercial workplace. This is perpetuated by the incoherent boundary of Daisy’s business itself, on the one hand it is a public enterprise, with a shopfront and a large clientele, yet the business revolves around the furnishing and re-making of the domestic space, of the home, of creating drawing rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms; spaces to live. Like Nora in Tirra Lirra by the River, Daisy covets and desires the very objects that she is selling, caught between the need to consume and possess and the need to trade and transact. There is no separation between the objects as being her own possessions and goods to sell. This is seen when Daisy sells ‘a little mongrel chair’ (itself a hybrid) to her customers, the Lister-Brocks: ‘[Daisy] leaned over it, laughing, and stroked its upholstery. ‘Goodbye, my darling,’ she crooned…‘Look at her,’ teased Willy. ‘Torn between love and avarice. She’d like to keep them all and live in a warehouse with them and run around all day stroking and petting them and nursing them when they are sick.’ ‘And so I should,’ laughed Daisy.’55 It is as Willy describes, Daisy is torn between, as consumer and seller: she is never distinctly and clearly on one side or the other, but 52 Wilson, p. 59 53 Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, p. 82 54 p. 81 55 p. 85 132 always in-between, a pendulum swinging between the two. This position is even further complicated by the way in which Daisy covets and desires her interior designs, and only uneasily relinquishes them to the homes of her clients, such as the bed canopy made up of braid, brass and ormolu: ‘Liz will spoil it, of course, by lying in it.’56 Here, Daisy is acknowledging a consuming desire to create, design and possess beautiful objects, and as Willy suggests, wishes to contain them in a space just for herself. This is a very different position than the female occupying the department store because, as owner, Daisy is operating from the position of commercial power, which should place her in complete control of the manipulation of the customer. Yet Daisy’s position as a desiring female consumer complicates and troubles this relationship. Daisy is operating from a position that relates to the initial anxiety surrounding the department store: unchecked and uncontrolled female desire in the commercial space. Significantly, this transitory subject position is not confined to the shop itself, but instead is an inherent part of Daisy’s subjectivity, as this ambiguous state enters her own domestic space, disrupting her familial relationships, her work and commercial ambiguity pervading the boundaries of her own home. In what is a reverse of the construction of Daisy’s opulent and feminine shop, the household is consistently described in business and commercial terms: ‘her own house she loved, and sometimes wished she had owned it before high rates and taxes had forced its former owners, one by one, to subdivide and sell the acres of wooded foreshore.’57 Daisy’s love for her ‘reticent’ house is intertwined with its position as a commercial asset and yet ‘it was the only one of her houses she had vowed never to sell. She had been badgered into selling all the others, she said, at irresistibly high prices.’58 Significantly, the domestic space is constructed in far more commercial and public terms than Daisy’s shop itself, with Myra describing it as ‘nothing but a private hotel,’59 another ambiguous space, only further fuelled by the way in which Daisy sells her own furniture directly from the house, causing her rooms ‘to have strange gaps in them.’60 The gaps, holes, emptiness that are evident in the family home directly contrast with the cluttered and opulent jumble of Daisy’s workspace. Anderson, in her representation of both sites, performs a double move, disrupting both at the same time, conflating and 56 p. 134 57 p. 8 58 pp. 89, 8 59 p. 89 60 p. 8 133 confusing the distinctions between the two, with Daisy as the go-between. Her very presence conflates and disrupts borders and thresholds, and it is the slipperiness of Daisy’s agency that endlessly generates and perpetuates these unsettled spaces. This subjectivity is constructed right from the outset of the novel with Daisy immediately exposed as an uneasy inhabitant of the domestic space, as she tackles ‘her nightly maintenance work on her face’ with ‘the same affectionate but business-like spirit that she [brings] to the preservation of furniture.’61 Whilst Daisy’s exterior femininity is reinforced, she is ‘slim as a baton,’ ‘zestful and gay’ with a ‘beautiful, melodious, ringing voice’, her maternal relationship with her adult son David is distanced and cold, ‘he was her best creation, and she regarded him with pride and condescension.’62 Significantly, this is a pattern that Anderson often employs when representing her female characters, Nora’s exterior beauty is repeatedly conveyed in Tirra Lirra by the River, a mask that conceals the inner turmoil of the female subject. This move by Anderson argues for the importance of femininity in the representation, and fuels the sense that it is a particular post-war female agency that Anderson is exploring, with a refusal to give her protagonists the traits of a masculine subject even though they are entering the public domain. Yet the Daisy inhabiting the domestic space is of radical contrast to the desiring and ecstatic subject occupying the furniture shop, far more commercial and controlled in her own home; there is a complete rejection and move away from the traits of domesticity. This rejection of the traditional bonds of femininity and domesticity is furthered by the way Daisy operates and negotiates with other subjects, particularly David, whom she considers a part of her work, and his lover, Isobel Purdy. When Daisy is surprised to find Isobel entering her own home, she immediately adopts the position of a commercial seller, ‘there was no fumbling as she finished buttoning her jacket and advanced towards them, on her face the lively little smile…that she used when an unknown customer walked into the shop.’63 There is an awareness of bringing that same commercial negotiation and manipulation into her familial interactions, ‘although in this case it [is] not Isobel’s spending power she [is] questioning, but her very presence, she put[s] on her richest voice.’64 This adoption is a necessary correlative of Daisy entering the commercial domain, of being successful in a business sense, and it subsequently seeps 61 p. 9 62 p. 15 63 p. 118 64 p. 118 134 into her subjectivity. Yet, although Daisy is aware of it, (‘whatever she did, she watched herself doing’) it seems to operate beyond her control, there is an anxiety, an awareness of it disrupting her position as a maternal figure, and her ability to operate in the private sphere: ‘Daisy raised a hand and looked haughtily at her fingernails. ‘Like shopwomen used to do,’ she suddenly thought, and folded her hands behind her back.’65 Daisy becomes increasingly unstable, her unwillingness to see marriage as anything other than a transaction secured by ‘common ambition,’ and love a temporary illness, perpetuating the rupture between her and her son, and contributing to her losing her balance in the space in-between.66 She increasingly attempts to distance herself from the domestic space, as David finds his mother ‘in the spare bedroom, lying beside a kicked-back rug…spread-eagled on the polished boards, wearing a loose white wrapper.’67 Isobel Purdy is the counterpoint to Daisy, and it is significant that Anderson places these two opposing forms of the female subject alongside one another. She is a character who is completely and utterly confined to the domestic realm, whose lethargy and stupor belongs to the heroines of the nineteenth century novels, and her position in Anderson’s novel is jarring. Anderson places this figure in the middle of the twentieth century in opposition to Daisy, her displacement evident from the opening line of the novel: ‘One seldom sees hair like that nowadays.’68 Isobel is represented as an old- fashioned figure, otherworldly, a statue on a pedestal, embodying a female subjectivity grounded in objectivity: ‘Myra recognized magnificence in its frosty ashen-gold, in its weight, and in its glittering nimbus of escaped curl. But to her modern sense its very sumptuousness condemned it; it was dated.’69 Isobel’s subjectivity is ultimately suffocating and destructive, she remains an object where her subjectivity is never exposed in first-person narratives, and is always seen through the eyes of another. It is a position that cannot be reconciled with the modern world, evident through her complete lack of understanding when David questions what she will do with herself: ‘‘Do?’ she repeated stupidly…The little pulse was fluttering and bounding at the corner of her mouth…‘What I shall do,’ she said, ‘is to sit here for a while, sit here for a 65 p. 124 66 p. 88 67 p. 160 68 p. 1 69 p. 1 135 while…’70 Isobel’s flight from the window to her death is inevitable, emblematic of her incoherence in the modern time and space. Daisy’s rampant commerciality, her continuous movement between the public and private spheres, is contrasted with Isobel’s lethargy and complete consumption by an unending romantic love, stagnant and bound to the domestic and the feminine. Such a contrast between the representation of Daisy and Isobel is seen when Daisy attempts to understand what Isobel wants with her son, and their complete opposition and misinterpretation of each other reveals the incompatibility of these two forms of female agency: ‘Daisy looked at her in complete misunderstanding…It was not until she was putting on her hat in her bedroom that Daisy realised she had not manipulated Isobel as she had intended…Nevertheless, now that it was done she felt only relief.’71 Significantly, Daisy treats Isobel as a piece of furniture in a shop, constantly objectifying her as a possession, that ‘in different circumstances she would have enjoyed taking her in hand, restoring and redecorating her [my emphasis].’72 It is in this exchange that Daisy’s inability to separate the commercial from the domestic is evident, her consuming eye, her need to sell or attempt to manipulate customers translates to the way she interacts with subjects in her own home. This constant infiltration of the domestic space with the commercial is central in contributing to the gradual unraveling of Daisy’s agency. Anderson establishes that Daisy is occupying an untenable and fraught position through her reliance on medication for sleep and for pain, and this medicated state increases dramatically as the novel progresses. Ultimately, Daisy’s bonds with the private and domestic sphere overtake and complicate any liberating or effective commercial agency that she has been able to gain. This is evident by a misplaced sense of the maternal that seeps into both the domestic and commercial sphere, as Daisy develops multiple mother-son relationships with her business partners and customers, at the same time as forging a business-like and distanced interaction with her own son. Although Daisy’s female sexuality is repressed: ‘she could be tolerant of sex in the abstract, but she hated and shied away from its direct manifestations,’73 her maternal desires seem to erupt in the public sphere, they are unable to be contained, and because of this, the position she occupies must come undone. 70 p. 234 71 pp. 129-131 72 p. 128 73 p. 126 136 As Daisy’s agency begins to rupture, so too do the spaces around her, as they have been formed and shaped by her subjectivity. After her encounter with Max Dobie who withdraws his commission in favour of Daisy’s younger male apprentice, and facing bankruptcy with her business, Daisy returns to her house, to the domestic space, yet her consuming and commercial desire continues to run unchecked and uncontrolled in her own home, at a feverish pace that correlates to the agony in her mouth: ‘Pathetic she certainly appeared, wandering about her sitting-room, one hand clasped to her distorted face, the other searchingly and restlessly touching one or another of her possessions. ‘I expect I shall have to sell all these,’ she murmured, ‘but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.’’74 Daisy’s position at the end of the novel contrasts dramatically with the surety and success presented at the beginning, ultimately she is silenced, a failure. This is where Daisy’s movement and oscillation comes undone, her contradictory position cannot be maintained, and there is a domestic retreat that will be again taken up in Chapter Five. Daisy is aware that her transitory performance between both the public and private is untenable, rendered unacceptable by the masculine subject: ‘It seemed to her now that her life among those people had been like the performance of a tight-rope dancer. She had amused and fascinated them, but they had regarded her as something of a freak.’75 This is how Anderson leaves us with Daisy at the end of the novel, still caught between, still unsettling but ultimately rendered passive and mute: Standing silently between the two tall men, turning her dull glare on each of them, [Daisy] looked shrunken, savage and trapped [my emphasis].76 This decline and the complete disintegration of Daisy’s subjectivity is linked in the narrative with Isobel’s death. Anderson invites the comparison between the two, as both occur within hours of each other in the narrative structure, as ‘about two hours after Isobel Purdy had hurtled to her death, Daisy awoke from a sweating sleep…she felt that she herself could never return to the shop…Her nerve had failed.’77 Both positions, one decidedly domestic and caught in the past, the other, a new modern sensibility, are destroyed. It is this parallel sense of decay that troubles the modern female subject, and 74 p. 210 75 p. 220 76 p. 218 77 pp. 240-42 137 whether it is ultimately any more sustainable or coherent than the romantic and objectified figure of Isobel. Daisy’s newfound post-war agency, her ability to traverse between the public and private spheres and inhabit the space in-between, is constructed as being just as problematic and destructive. Whilst the spaces that Daisy inhabits in An Ordinary Lunacy are created and perpetuated by her agency, it is the spaces themselves in Anderson’s later novel The Impersonators that fuel the disintegration between the public/private divide. Here there is a move towards the consequences and after effects of this form of post-war female agency. The narrative structure of The Impersonators is driven by the drawn out illness and subsequent death of a family patriarch, Jack Cornock, and the subsequent division of his assets. Anderson demonstrates the pervasive effect the pursuit of money, wealth and luxury has had on an entire family, seeping from one generation to the next, with a destructive and repeating force. Anderson enfolds the Cornock family with the Sydney suburbs: the extended family is spread out and scattered over all parts of Sydney, creating the sense of the pervasive force of an endlessly-consuming suburbia, of the private space being completely turned inside-out. This takes Anderson’s topographical mapping, which was discussed in Chapter Three, outward, to outside of the city-centre, to the peripheral spaces of Sydney suburbia. Rather than representing the development of this incoherence in the domestic sphere as she does in An Ordinary Lunacy, Anderson is instead concerned with charting the potential destabilizing consequences of such constant disruption between spheres, the rupture that occurs in the family home. The space that the Cornock family is operating within is immediately unsettled, with the string of marriages, divorces, numerous stepchildren and step-parents destabilizing any coherent family centre. Characters do not have just one mother, father or siblings, but are multiple, conflated and confused. Anderson alludes to the Victorian sagas, yet places the family directly in the modern with the divorces and subsequent remarriages. Anderson is already disrupting the coherence of the suburban space by representing those that reside within it as being not a traditional nuclear family, but instead a decidedly post-war and modern complex and tumultuous family circle. Anderson establishes this right from the outset, not only giving a character chart of ‘The Family,’ but opening with the lawyer Keith Burtenshaw explaining the confusing family relations: ‘There was Bruce, killed in the war. Then Stewart. Then Sylvia, a good while after. Yes. After the divorce, still young enough to traipse back and forth between the 138 two houses.’78 Greta Cornock, as the family’s matriarch, is the catalyst for such decay, through her early success of gaining money through her own means. Greta possesses an agency similar to Daisy Byfield: not only is Greta the same age as Daisy, from the same generation of post-war women, she also traverses between the domestic and the commercial, celebrated by her children not for her maternal affection but rather, for providing them money as a single working mother. Like Daisy, Greta’s exterior femininity is similarly highlighted through her physicality, with ‘her head bowed and her hands clasped in her lap,’ perpetually sewing, her eyes still ‘startlingly blue’ and a body which still ‘move[s] pliantly beneath her clothes.’79 This overtly feminine, almost romantic, characterisation is contrasted with the distance and turmoil underneath, with only a hint of indignation and defiance ‘hovering about her mouth.’80 For Anderson, Greta’s in-betweenness is a starting point in charting the gradual disintegration of her children and grand-children. It is a pattern which repeats within, and is bound up in the suburban space, a space which is intrinsically entwined and in dialogue with the Antipodean city. Anderson constructs these spaces by representing them through the eyes of Sylvia Cornock, as outlined in Chapter Three, who having returned to Sydney after a period of twenty years overseas, can take on the role of outside observer, travelling through all regions of Sydney. Sylvia recounts the repetitious nature of the Western Suburbs, the recurring roofed houses and quarter acre bocks punctuated with commercial signage: ‘Hookes buy and sell…Special filters…Funeral Parlors…Come Back to Gas…Lime and Cement…We lend Money.’81 This is contrasted with the garden suburbs of the North Shore, which ‘radiat[e] away from the central ridges, getting quieter and quieter,’ yet although ‘the rectangle [is] less insistent than at bare Burwood…in spite of trees and the hilly terrain, it [does] prevail.’82 The very streets that Sylvia traverses open up and expose the binaries inherent in the modern city- space: public and private are disrupted by the layering of rectangle next to rectangle, the ‘petty privacy’ of verges, hedges and fences dissolve when viewed from Sylvia’s train carriage or car. Anderson is constructing the vision of suburbia that Silverstone suggests in inherent to modern space, ‘the experience of modernity [is] the experience not of the 78 Jessica Anderson, The Impersonators, (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1980), p. 1 79 pp. 2, 11 80 p. 11 81 p. 66 82 p. 108 139 street, but of the road, not the sidewalk but the lawn.’83 Anderson’s suburbia is terracotta, heat, desire and consumption: ‘the best experience this city could offer was the sensual…west again, towards the foundry [Sylvia] drove in heavy traffic. As if stacked against each other were the frail narrow shops, among them big junky discount stores like aircraft hangers, and dusty little bungalows.’84 Although Anderson’s representations of Sydney are no doubt related to class and social status, they are also concerned with the seepage of consumerism and commerciality: all regions, all classes, have been pervaded by a never-ending need to buy and sell, by the in-between unease of the suburbs. Significantly the suburban space is not only disrupting and pulling apart the domestic but also the commercial; there is a sense of commercial decay, of exhaustion, in the description of small businesses, always described in terms of ‘straggling,’ on their last legs, junky, discounted, or disintegrating, caught, stagnant, awaiting demolition and subsequent renewal, such as the description of the suburb of Burwood in the West: ‘the area was in process of expansion, and on one side, the partly collapsed paling fences of demolished houses marked the boundaries of former back gardens, in one of which still grew a peach tree in fresh leaf, and in another a rampant choko vine.’85 It is as Silverstone suggests, a space caught between commercialism, consumption and desire, the point where the feminine domestic space becomes caught up in commoditisation and buying.86 Across The Impersonators there is a sense that the commercial space is barely sustaining itself, is fraying with the ambiguity of the suburb, with a domesticity that has been turned inside-out, pushed out onto the suburban street: ‘At the window of a menswear shop, a young man and woman, with a small boy in pyjamas and a manly little dressing gown, stood talking in lethargic tones about the clothes.’87 Anderson continues to reappraise and trouble the commercial aspect of suburban space, stepping away from the ‘crass materialism’ or stifling boredom that forms much of the representation of Australian suburbs through her representation of the suburban house.88 The houses in The Impersonators are no longer a physical boundary 83 Silverstone, p. 5 84 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 214 85 p. 262-3 86 Silverstone, p. 8 87 p. 262 88 Robin Gerster, ‘Gerrymander: The Place of Suburbia in Australian Fiction’, Meanjin, 49.3, (1990), p. 566, see also Andrew McCann, ‘Introduction: Subtopia, or the problem of suburbia’, Australian Literary Studies, 18.4, (1998); Joan Kirkby, ‘The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia’, Australian Literary Studies, 18.4, (1998) 140 between private and public; they are instead subsumed into this consumption, commercial assets that must be continuously bought and sold. The increasing interest in the worth of houses, in the home being brought directly into the processes of capitalism, contrasts with the decaying commercial businesses in the suburb. As Elaine Barry suggests in ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson,’ ‘Houses in Jessica Anderson’s novels are paradoxically emblems of exile and emptiness – fitting shells for the spiritual drifters who inhabit them.’89 For Barry, Anderson’s houses are the sites for exposing the sense of ‘familial displacement’ and disconnectedness.90 Anderson’s houses and flats are always changing hands, there are always potential buyers, potential sellers, and this movement is the momentum for the novel. All the subjects of the Cornock family, both male and female, are on the verge of, or do eventually, move and change houses from Stewart Cornock, to Greta, to Sylvia, and always inhabit houses that are on the verge of changing hands: ‘You and I are always looking through houses.’ ‘What else?’ said Hermione with a shrug.’91 It is in this unsettling space that Anderson places the family matriarch Greta Cornock, who is the Cornock family’s anchor throughout its gradual rupture and disintegration. Greta exhibits a female subjectivity that is similar to Daisy’s: she is lauded as a successful businesswoman, able to gain money and work to sustain her family as a single mother before remarrying. What ties these women together, indeed across the global and city-spaces, and is the marker of post-war mobility and agency for the female subject is the ability to work, earn and use income independently and for their own ends. However, Greta’s characterisation is distinct from Daisy’s, as this need to gain money and safety is seen as part of a maternal sacrifice and necessity to provide for her children. There is a mythic adulation by Greta’s children in her ability have provided them money, shelter and luxury through her job selling cosmetics, particularly by Harry and Rosamund, the eldest of Greta’s children from her first marriage. Harry ‘always admired his mother for getting them out of it and into a decent flat…without any help from anyone,’ and Rosamund angrily discounts the idea that Greta could have been getting the money from her future second husband, ‘no, I was five when she got that job. I remember it perfectly. She was so good at it, they paid her a lot of money, and we had that nice Spanish girl to look after us.’92 89 Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984), p. 6 90 p. 6 91 Anderson, The Impersonators, p. 163 92 pp. 198, 141 141 Anderson builds up this maternal façade throughout the novel with a specific narrative technique, that is, Greta’s past is narrated, spoken, recounted and repeated again and again by Greta’s middle-aged children: that she worked in a dress shop, giving her just enough money ‘to keep her family,’93 that the housing shortage after the war must have left her ‘like a stray cat with a yowling litter.’94 This sacrificial and maternal image jars against the way Greta is constructed as distanced from, and lacking any affection towards her children, and who readily admits to Sylvia that with the exception of her youngest child Guy, ‘the other three, those three middle-aged people, often seem more strange than actual strangers.’95 There is no real connection presented between the members of the family, particularly between Greta and her children, who are objectified as possessions, as products, and also between Sylvia and her own mother, Molly, whose relationship is described as ‘limp[ing] along,’ and which is so distanced that Sylvia only realises that her mother cannot read or write after a twenty year absence.96 Anderson constructs the sense that Greta is simply ‘impersonating’ or has had the ‘impersonation’ of maternity forced onto her subjectivity. The tale of past success is filled with unease, and is unsettling as far as where this sudden influx of money came from. It is Sylvia, again positioned as an outsider, who as Greta’s step-daughter seems to be able to step outside of the frame of the maternal myth, who recognises Greta’s mask beginning to slip: ‘it was if from her disciplined body another woman longed so much to get out that she could not help but give these hints and nudges and forebodings’ and yet ‘Sylvia saw with relief that Greta had re-entered her usual impersonation.’97 It is necessary that the impersonation remain intact, to give some semblance to the private sphere, to push against the invading commercialism and endless desire for money, that the family unit must at least retain a veneer of cohesion. Sylvia attempts to step outside the boundaries of this impersonation, tries to treat her father as something other than ‘a tourist on a coach,’ ‘determined to demolish this old false act, to force her way through the pretence with truth’: ‘Dad did you know that mum can’t read or write? And never could?’98 Yet, this slip in the pretence sets in motion a chain of disruptive events: Molly is left the bulk of Jack Cornock’s estate in her lifetime, whether out of pity or vindictive design is never made clear, but it is an action 93 p. 198 94 p. 199 95 p. 114 96 p. 72 97 pp. 113, 114 98 pp. 147, 124 142 that prompts Molly’s unchecked consuming desire to be unleashed on the race course, with the excuse ‘why shouldn’t I have some pleasure in life?’99 Anderson removes Greta’s mask at the end of the novel, revealing that her initial wealth had criminal roots, and her ability to get a good flat, is a consequence of being an accessory to a group involved in breaking and entering. Greta’s recount of the criminality of her past is one of the only moments in the novel where Greta speaks in the first-person, we are given access to the woman behind the façade, and what we find is much more unsettling and disruptive. This revelation is also given to a stranger, the nurse, and therefore, the maternal myth remains intact amongst the family. It is significant that the means to Greta’s wealth is through directly invading and stealing from the feminine domestic space, making capital through manipulating wealthy ladies, befriending them before robbing them of their material possessions, in order to gain her own: ‘It wasn’t only the things I could buy – the key to a flat…good beds and food and clothes for the children. No, it was doing it.’100 This brings commerce right into the home, but also suggests the invasion of the private sphere by theft, crime and illegitimacy. Greta is invigorated by disrupting the domestic sphere, through operating as a criminal in between the public and the private: ‘I started because I was desperate, but once I started, I can’t tell you how much satisfaction it gave me.’101 This is much more than simply a woman taking money from the wealthy upper class, or a maternal impulse to protect her children; there is a sense of satisfaction in the risk, in directly disrupting the sense of privacy and coherence in the home, admitting that she would have ‘gone with them to break into the places if they had let me…it lifted me up as nothing else could have done.’102 Whilst Daisy occupies an unstable position within her empty house, Greta’s subjectivity ruptures the very coherence of the domestic space, perpetuating the notion that the female pursuit of money comes with moral questionability and criminality, pervading the private space with a sense of illegitimacy. Significantly, Greta admits that she wanted to avoid her children becoming caught up in this disruption of the domestic space, wanting instead for them to remain contained within it: ‘I wanted them to be insiders. I wanted the them to be safe inside [my emphasis].’103 Yet, the consequences of Greta’s actions instead fuel a frenetic need for 99 p. 314 100 p. 240 101 p. 240 102 p. 240 103 p. 241 143 luxury and wealth, and endless desire for money and capital in the next generation, as her daughter Hermione admits, ‘It can’t be rotten, when it makes me feel so wonderful. It’s like this wine. It puts me back in touch with luxury. I remember my first feeling of luxuriousness…It was supposed to be after mother got her wonderful job, but I think – though Rosie and Harry won’t agree – that she had just met Poppa.’104 It is that first moment of luxury, the moment of Greta’s criminality, the moment that is so admired by her children that unleashes this continuous need for money in her children and step- children, who see the domestic space as asset, and place commercialism at the very heart of the home. The importance of the space of the house as a product, an asset, is particularly evident in Anderson’s construction of Hermione, Greta’s daughter from her first marriage, who exhibits what Greta describes as ‘house-hunger,’105 continually wanting to buy houses that are in the most luxurious suburbs of Sydney: Dover Heights, Vaucluse, Point Piper. Hermione, who has three children, does not seek these houses to establish a domestic or maternal space, nor does she seek them to keep them ‘inside,’ as Greta did. Instead she seeks these houses as symbols of wealth, as evidence of luxury, as commercial assets. This is seen in the way Greta argues that ‘status is Hermione’s first concern, and always has been, though she has called it all sorts of other things.’106 This is only further fuelled by Hermione’s romantic relationship with Stewart Cornock, her stepbrother, the son of Jack Cornock. As Stewart is a real-estate agent, there is an incestual overlapping in this commercial desire for the domestic space, and Stewart facilitates and perpetuates Hermione’s endless quest for money: Jason hooked his ankle round one of Matthew’s, and both fell together to the ground. Emma looked up, saw her mother, turned her back, and flapped faster at her hair. Hermione said heavily, ‘Money.’ ‘Money,’ retorted Stewart, not quite in triumph. ‘I used to want the very best for everyone. Now I want it only for myself.’ ‘Your children?’ 104 p. 224 105 p. 68 106 p. 114 144 ‘Sometimes,’ she said fiercely, ‘only for myself.’ ‘That’s practical at least.’ ‘Is it?’ ‘You know it is.’107 Significantly, in this scene Anderson contrasts the child’s play of Hermione’s children with Hermione’s desire for money. The way Hermione is watching them from the window, and admitting that she seeks wealth for herself, distances her from her children: the desire to consume has overtaken and disrupted the maternal, there is a turning away, a rejection. The domestic sphere, and the family, is ruptured, cut, by the pervasive force of the commercial in the suburbs. There is an endless cycle amongst the second generation for money and wealth, even Sylvia, who is constantly praised for not being interested in money, is suddenly caught by a powerful consuming desire: ‘And in that moment she was overtaken by one of her old longings for luxury, the pressure of so many wishes, for so many things, giving the moment a craziness that left each thing undefined, yet in its flashing dragnet caught them all.’108 Having been brought up in an already troubled suburban space, filled with a sense of illegitimacy and criminality, already objectified and distanced from her own mother, Hermione cannot help but repeat the pattern of the generation before, except this time it is fuelled by an endless consuming desire. This is seen when Hermione says to her sister Rosamund, ‘Rosie, if you want to get money, or you want to keep it, you can’t have scruples. You can’t be nice. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave Ted.’109 Rather than ending the novel with the complete disintegration of the female subject, as is the case in An Ordinary Lunacy, Anderson instead represents this instability, this unsettling ambiguity between public and private as endlessly repeating, as endlessly consuming. There is a reinforcement and continuation of the contradictory position of the female subject: an oscillation between newfound independence and access to commercial gain and an anxious and disruptive stasis, a retreat to domesticity. Anderson suggests that the pattern of illegitimacy, or turning away from the maternal, of the domestic space as commercial asset will continue through to the next generation. Rosamund’s son, Matthew, rejects his family, after learning of his father’s criminal 107 p. 164 108 p. 178 109 p. 205 145 business dealings, and strikes out on his own. Attempting to convince his brother Dominic to join him, Matthew argues, ‘all we need to do is walk out of here, get jobs, rent a flat or a house, and live in it.’110 Yet there is a sense that Matthew will find himself caught in just the same type of illegitimate dealings in order to achieve these goals. Hermione’s children also reveal their growing appreciation of the home as commercial asset, taking on board and repeating their mother’s desire for luxury and wealth: ‘Emma continued to look at the houses, some barely visible behind walls and trees, and exposing facades to the street. ‘They are all nice,’ she said. ‘They are all big,’ amended Hermione.’111 It is Greta who admits to this fear, the compulsive nature of the repetition, when finally revealing her involvement in her own criminal dealings, and exposing her own disruption of the domestic space. She confesses to having looked into the eyes of each of her grandchildren for a kind of madness, a ‘skittering distant unprotected look’: ‘I’ve looked for it in dread, and been thankful not to find it.’112 But it is the repetition of this skittering and distant look that Anderson exposes at the end of the novel, when Hermione’s baby Imogen, is being vaccinated: It was only Greta who saw the baby’s face. Imogen’s dark eyes, swimming with sleep, did not alter as the needle was inserted, but her mouth opened wide. Then pain sharpened her eyes, and the expansion of her chest, the retention of her yell, was like that moment when the plane pauses at the end of its run to gather its forces for the rise…Greta turned abruptly away, and walked to the glass wall, and stood looking steadily at the blazing cars.113 Imogen, to be raised in Hermione’s new suburban home on the northern beaches, will only grow up to repeat the pattern, to continue to occupy an unsettling suburban space that radically disrupts and breaks down the private sphere, which in turn affects the female subject. The way in which Anderson places the Cornock family within the unsettled suburban spaces of Sydney reworks and reformulates the notion of the suburb in 110 p. 225 111 p. 155 112 p. 243 113 p. 329 146 Australian fiction. The suburbs in The Impersonators are not abject, or heavily corporeal, but are instead in-between spaces, public and private at the same time, both domesticating and all-consuming: Anderson’s suburb is an ambiguous space that ruptures the public/private divide, and in turn, this reworks and reconfigures the way in which the female subject occupies and negotiates such a post-war space. There is a movement from the representation of Daisy Byfield occupying the commercial interior space in An Ordinary Lunacy to the rambling suburbs on the outskirts of the city. Yet, at the same time, both novels reiterate the disruptive maternal and familial constraints on female agency, both highlight the inherent contradictory position opened up for women traversing between the public and private, the commercial and the domestic in the city- space. The consequence of such a position is not a complete opening up of agency, but rather there is a tense and fragile overlapping between the freedom, movement, and uneasy constraint and stasis. Therefore, Anderson’s construction of space is concerned with this intermingling, with the way female subjects negotiate this space in-between and the consequences of this negotiation, consequences, which then reverberate and repeat into the next generations. Anderson’s work can be seen to be negotiating a fundamental point of modernity: the space where the maternal, the female and the systems of production, consumption and commodification intersect. As suggested, for both Daisy and Greta, this overlapping results in a retreat, a movement inside to the space of the house. Such a retreat continues across Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard and will be taken up in Chapter Five: the relationship between the female subject and post-war space will be seen to be tapering to a point, a turning inward to the interior. 147 CHAPTER FIVE The Space Within: Retreat to the house ‘No one else had changed. They still lived from day to day, and meal to meal, and talked about the price of peas and potatoes.’ Elizabeth Harrower, The Long Prospect (1958), p. 60 ‘The history of the house is the history of the dialectic that emerges between these two impulses: shelter and identity.’ Gerry Smith; Jo Croft, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (2006), p. 13 ‘The concept home refers to an impossible place, a utopia – but also to an extimate place, a notion of belonging as a possibility that one carries around with oneself in fantasy to help mitigate the lack of satisfaction in one’s real living conditions.’ Elizabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood (2004), p. 73 Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s construction of the post-war space from the globe to the city, and finally to the house, suggests a specific preoccupation with the consequences of the rapidly unravelling and disintegrating divide between the public and private spheres of post-war modernity. As suggested in both Part I and Part II of this thesis, viewing these authors alongside one another allows such a focus to come to the fore, and suggests a specific consideration of the new forms of female agency and mobility opened up in the post-Holocaust post-Hiroshima world. It is necessary that this thesis ends with a contraction to the home, a turning inward, a withdrawal from the outdoors into isolated seclusion: as suggested in Chapters Three and Four, the female protagonists across the works of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard ultimately undergo a staggered and burdened retreat across the threshold, a (re)turn back into the domestic space. Therefore, this chapter draws attention to the withdrawal to the space of the post- war domesticity, arguing that it is a space that is once again characterised by a paradoxical double-bind for the female subject: the opening up and the shutting down, a sense of freedom right alongside anxiety and constriction. As argued across this thesis, Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard draw attention to the multiplicitous position of the post-war female subject, a position which threads its way through their constructions of the globe, the city-space, and finally the house. What is left is the empty shell of the home, one that denies the presence of the maternal, and which deliberately troubles the gendered nature of the domestic space, the everyday and habit. 148 A sense of post-war domestic anxiety pervades the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, pointing to Felski’s claim that the private household is always-already radically implicated in the patterns of the modern.1 The private sphere, the household, functions as an important site for the modern reworking of space across the twentieth century. Victoria Rosner suggests just such a wide-ranging impact that domestic space has had on literary representation in the work Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2005): ‘the spaces of private life [are] revitalized during the modern period and…modernist literature is broadly informed by – and indeed contributes to – the project of reconstructing the form, function, and meaning of the home to meet the demands of modernity.’2 This new form of mobility, the sudden changes in the demands of public and private life, the access of women to houses, flats and boarding houses, of independent and communal living, the ability for women to solely support themselves financially, brings with it new anxieties and concern in the post-war house, particularly due to the traditional gendering of the domestic space as feminine. Diana Agrest et al highlight these gender-based assumptions about the household in The Sex of Architecture (1996), arguing that the suggestion that ‘man builds and woman inhabits; that man is public and woman is private’ must be interrogated when exploring the gendered nature of architectural space.3 As Rosner argues, ‘no social institution is more closely tied to the construction and reproduction of gender and sexual identity than the home,’ and this notion that the house is a feminine arena has a significant influence upon not only the theoretical construction of this space, but also the representation of the house across the novel genre.4 Jo Croft and Gerry Smith suggest in the introduction to Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (2006) that ‘the slightest glance reveals both the ubiquity and the centrality of the house as an image within human culture…modern cultural history is saturated with representations of domestic space’5: the house is a recurring trope across the novel form, a trope that is dramatically attacked and reformed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The breadth of recent research 1 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 3 2 Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 13 3 Diana Agrest; Leslie Weisman; Patricia Conway, The Sex of Architecture, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), p. 11 4 Rosner, p. 14 5 Jo Croft; Gerry Smith, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 16 149 into the function, form and representation of domestic space across literature, architecture and art suggests the importance of reworking and reappraising the private sphere and its significance in exposing the gendered apprehension of such a space, and its relationship with modernity.6 Therefore, this chapter takes up the staged retreat that recurs across Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, away from the representation of the public/private divide in the global sphere and the city-space, to inside the space of the house itself. In doing so, this chapter will contend that the house is a paradoxical and challenging space that brings a sense of stasis and oppression right alongside mobility, moments of independence and a new sense of feminine agency. Whilst similar to the double movement that occurs in both the space of the globe and the city, the contradiction becomes far more insular and claustrophobic, contained within the four walls of the house, reduced to a fine point. As the female subjects who inhabit the post- war globe and city-space make the retreat indoors, they are left with an uncanny emptiness, dislocation and absence. The construction of post-war houses that recurs across the novels of Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard suggests a particular preoccupation with how the female subject inhabits these private spaces – what happens when female subjects are able to occupy rooms of their own in post-war modernity. What will be revealed is the way in which all three authors trouble and reconfigure assumptions about the domestic space. This is particularly seen through the dislocation and denial of memory, childhood warmth and the maternal in the private sphere: for Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, any representation of mothering is often only present in its conspicuous absence. The house is used here to refer to the representation of the dwelling places that the female protagonists occupy across all three writers’ work: places that are significantly tied to the private sphere, to domesticity, femininity, habits, routine and the everyday. Drawing attention to the construction of these dwelling places across Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard suggests a return to the house, bestowing value on the domesticity, reworking a particular space that Virginia Woolf had decried for its stillness and deathly quality, arguing that ‘women have sat indoors all these millions of years.’7 The house itself, whilst imagined as a keystone of stability, is an unstable space, hard to 6 see Kathy Mezei; Chiara Briganti, ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27.3, (2002); Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Jo Croft; Gerry Smith, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006) 7 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Group, 2009 [1928]), p. 87 150 pin down theoretically or draw strict parameters around, as it is infused with imaginative and collective ideas of home, memory, nostalgia and childhood. The house cannot be seen without the maternal, the way in which it is at once bound to the feminine, domestic, private; an architectural sphere which projects both inward to the internal space and outward towards the public domain. Elizabeth Bronfen takes up the ambiguous nature of the space of the house in Home in Hollywood (2004), a study that, whilst discussing the presence of the house in post-war cinema, provides important insights here into the disruptive and unstable nature of the space that can be similarly aligned with post-war literature. As Bronfen argues, ‘to be at home means acknowledging the sense of unease and dissatisfaction that inhabits the familiar at its vey core,’ and ‘failure is always written into the project’: ‘as Richard Selcer has noted, home is ‘the one word the idea of which I cannot explain…It must be depicted rather than defined’.’8 When viewed through this lens, the domestic space moves into a state of unease and dislocation, full of distress and longing, troubling the idea of the female subject being ‘at home’ in the private sphere: instead, the female subject can only inhabit the space uneasily. In order to account for the significance of the representation of such a domestic space across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, it is necessary to draw on the theoretical work done on both the position of the house in the novel form, as well as the discussions and reappraisals of the gendered nature of private space, domesticity and the everyday. This allows a movement away from placing Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard within the frame of particularly Australian literary constructions of suburbia and the house, instead aligning their work with the more universal reconfiguration and reappraisal of the domestic sphere in post-war space. The novel form has always been linked with and explored the private and interior space, the home: it is concerned with domestic ritual and habit, manners, femininity and family. As Phillipa Tristram contends in Living Space in Fact and Fiction (1989), ‘from the beginning the house and the novel are interconnected, for the eighteenth century, which saw the rise of the novel, was also the great age of the English house. Because the novel is invincibly domestic, it can tell us much about the space we live in; equally, designs for houses and their furnishings can reveal hidden aspects of the novelist’s art [my emphasis].’9 Mezei and Briganti take up Tristram’s claims suggesting that ‘novels and houses furnish a dwelling place – a spatial construct – that invites the 8 Elizabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 68, 69, 73 9 Philippa Tristram, Living Space in Fact and Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2 151 exploration and expression of private and intimate relations and thoughts.’10 These houses function as solid and containing spaces for the narratives to unfold, and the estates and manors provide a coherent frame of reference, a central space for the construction of character, for the representation of the private space and the habits of the middle class. Such a preoccupation with the big house continues across the nineteenth century, reinforcing the connection between the novel form and parlours, drawing rooms, studies, libraries and bedrooms: from the Bennet household of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre (1847), and the gothic mansions of Edgar Allen Poe, to the later estates in the works of George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Henry James. Smith and Croft take up the way in which notions of the house and the subject are fundamentally related, in their introduction to Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (2006): ‘the house figures not as a mere neutral setting for the developing action, but as a proactive force in and of itself, trailing a host of associations and values from deep within the psychic history of the human species.’11 As the fin de siècle brought with it a sense of increasing instability, rupture and incoherence, so too did it challenge the solid foundations of the house. The modern house, and the representation of such a house in the novel, can no longer function as a coherent and containing space for modern subjectivity – instead the focus turns to the fundamentally fluid nature of space, house and room, the way in which spaces can no longer be assumed as grounded or secure - they have their own sense of fluidity and disruption, as Bronfen suggests, the idea of home becomes ‘an impossible place, an utopia.’12 Rosner argues for the way in which the advent of modernism is tied to changes in domesticity and the home: ‘the peace and stability of the Victorian household deteriorated, deformed by the pressure of changing social, sexual, and cultural mores. What took its place was a far more provisional, more embodied, more unstructured kind of private life – the kind of life we still call ‘modern’.’13 This is evident in the way in which modernist writers engage in new ways of representing and apprehending domestic space from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster to Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jean Rhys. As Mezei and Briganti suggest, 10 Kathy Mezei; Chiara Briganti, ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27.3, (2002), p. 840 11 Croft; Smith, p. 20 12 Bronfen, p. 73 13 Rosner, p. 3 152 modernity not only opened up new avenues for middle-class domestic living but also saw ‘the decline of great houses and the upper classes and…a more urban, mobile society’: these great houses are ‘disturbed spaces’ where ‘Brideshead, Howard’s End, and Manderley evoke the twilight of empire, a nostalgia for fading nationhood, class privilege, and imperial power.’14 For Rosner, Virginia Woolf signals the advent of the turn to the domestic, ‘the kitchen table’ and its place in experimental art and literature: ‘if modernism and the domestic have often seemed like antithetical categories, Woolf weaves them together as she locates modernism’s origins squarely in the spaces of private life.’15 Such a connection between domesticity and modernism is also seen in the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, particularly evident in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). The private life becomes the site in which questions of coherence, fragility, the explosion in technology, the constant level of movement and transit, the devastation of World War play out. The space of the home is ‘revitalised’ whilst simultaneously becoming increasingly fragile as the Victorian big houses empty and decay. This recurring theme of decaying empty mansions and country retreats such as the Ramsay home in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) suggests the level of anxiety surrounding the position of the home in modernity, as great estates of the gentry were no longer secure and in a state of decline. It is this pervading sense of decay, instability and nostalgia that permeates the work of the early modernists. Therefore, the construction and representation of the house becomes an anxious and disruptive space, one which is no longer secure or containing, one that exposes a rapid fluctuation and disruption of time, a pervading sense of nostalgia, decline and memory – as seen in Forster’s ‘evident disquiet’ in Howards End (1908), the empty shell of Jay Gatsby’s mansion in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and the Ramsay home of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). These modernist works point to a particularly Anglophone construction of the house, and the way Australian writers engage with the house at the beginning of the twentieth century provides a different mode of apprehending the construction of the domestic space alongside this trajectory. Catherine Pratt contends in ‘Walking Round the World: Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead as expatriate Australian writers’ (2013), that the literary circles at the time were preoccupied by the need to produce the ‘great Australian novel,’ a sense of anxiety pervading about the lack 14 Mezei; Briganti, p. 842 15 Rosner, p. 3 153 of, rather than a disruption of, ‘big house culture’ or what Patrick Buckridge terms ‘canonical anxiety.’16 Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead all consider domesticity and the home, yet often through the lens of expatriation and travel, the desire to ‘walk around the world.’17 Their construction of domesticity and the house is always-already disrupted and transitory, given the absence of the house as a defining feature of the Australian novel genre, a genre instead revolving around what Pratt terms as ‘nationalist and imperial sentiment,’ the conflict between the city and the bush, and ‘a budding literary tradition dominated by masculinist values, if not by male writers.’18 The construction of the house shifts and is reconfigured in the post-war space, following the great mass movement, the complete destruction of entire houses and regions in World War Two, and the advent of suburbia. New forms of domestic anxiety come to the fore in the post-Hiroshima world, with bombs and war finding their way into the depiction of the space of the house, as seen in Harrower’s comparison of the living room with a bombed-out city in The Watch Tower (1966).19 This is only further perpetuated by the anxiety surrounding returning to the home after venturing out into the public space during the years of the war. Bronfen argues for the way the idea of the house, and women’s position within that house is of particular importance in the post- war imaginary, that is, ‘the notion of home as a unique state of mind worth fighting for had, in the course of the postwar reconstruction of Europe, become the new ideological force to sustain the Cold War.’20 This ideological drive only further exposes the interplay between the fragile and transitory nature of home and household, and the desire for a return, a sense of containment and stability. For the post-war writer the house can no longer function as merely a central space of the narrative, but instead is a site that is always-already multiplicitous: in its gestures to the past and the opening up of temporalities, in its position as a gateway to the psychic state of the subject, in the gendered nature of domesticity and everyday habit, and its place on the threshold between public and private space. Indeed, as seen in the early film-noir in the late 1940s and 1950s, such as Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947), an unsettled and disruptive domestic space, a space that can no longer be considered a coherent home, becomes a particular source of post-war anxiety: ‘the felicitous home became a new site of 16 Catherine Pratt, ‘Walking Round the World: Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead as expatriate Australian writers’, Women’s Writing, 5.2, (1998), pp. 219-20 17 p. 215 18 p. 215 19 Harrower, The Watch Tower, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1991 [1966]), p. 142 20 Bronfen, p. 87 154 contention, no longer between two cultures but now between American men and women.’21 This domestic space, the rooms of the house, are in themselves, as Bronfen argues, ‘encoded as feminine space,’ and thus such anxiety surrounding an unraveling private sphere translates directly onto the post-war female subject themselves. It is such a domestic anxiety that threads its way through the constructions of the house, the private sphere, and the notion of ‘home’ across Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard. Susan Sheridan argues for the significance of domesticity, the house and the private space in post-war modernity in ‘When Was Modernism? The Cold War Silence of Christina Stead’ (2009), pointing to the unique position of post-war women writers: ‘women artists across the Western world shared to some extent the contradictory position of being women caught up in the massive changes that took place in everyday life…and intellectuals who shared with others concerns about nationalism versus internationalism, artistic modernism versus realism, and the political responsibilities of artists in a post-holocaust and post-Hiroshima world.’22 It is this position that Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard occupy, caught between the desire to represent the changes for women occurring in the everyday and domestic, yet at the same time caught up in the intellectual and political concerns of the post-war period. Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard’s representation of the house draws particular attention to the way in which they can be situated at the centre of this fulcrum, on a point in-between domesticity, femininity and the political, on the threshold between the public and private. The domestic is exposed as the direct site for engaging with the gendered private sphere, the way in which the house is both a freeing and containing space for female subjects across their work: a place that oscillates between repression and control, and providing an independent female space, ‘a room of one’s own.’ This double-fold nature of the house is seen in the kaleidoscopic description of the girls of post-war London in Hazzard’s Transit of Venus (1980): Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed, or in sheer nylon to which an old cardigan had been added for warmth, girls were pushing back bedclothes and groping for 21 Bronfen, p. 158 22 Susan Sheridan, ‘When was Modernism? The Cold War silence of Christina Stead’, Hecate, 35.1-2, (2009), p. 215 155 slippers…Those who shared were nudging each other out of the way…those who lived alone were moaning and switching on the radio or television. It is hard to say what they had least of – past, present, or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun. The weekends washing hair and underwear, and going in despondent pairs to the pictures. For some, who could not have done otherwise, it was their fate…others had come from the ends of the earth to do it. Not all were very young, but all, or nearly all, wished for a new dress, a boyfriend, and eventual domesticity.23 The challenges of a newfound sense of mobility for the female subject, the perpetual moving forward of the inter-war years, has now found itself firmly entrenched in drudgery, boredom, poverty and a stifling sense of imprisonment and containment. ‘It is hard to say how or why they stood it’ and Hazzard’s ‘despondent’ pairs of London girls exposes the way in which share-houses and independent living do not open up a completely new way of living for the female subject, instead what is longed for is for the return to an idea of a coherent private space, the desire for marriage and domesticity. This private space to which these girls long to return is one that is temporally unstable, a disturbed post-war space. Indeed, the construction of the house as a memory-infused container, securely fixed by the surrounding walls appears across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, from the recollections of the Queensland childhood of Bea in Anderson’s Stories from the Warm Zone (1987) to the Prescott family’s Double Bay mansion in Harrower’s Down in the City (1957). These houses offer access to overlapping chains of memory and fluid temporality, but within the purview of a gendered space, in what Rosner terms a social institution more firmly inscribed with femininity than any other. Anderson brings this to the fore in ‘The Way to Budjerra Heights’ where Bea recalls her time spent in her family house: I see my mother going about the resounding house and the fruitful garden and talking to herself. I hear her mounting the back steps announcing that the marmalade must be done, opening the door to the 23 Hazzard, Transit of Venus, (London: Virago Press, 2007[1980]), p. 179 156 darkish kitchen…In our lives, there were two spans of time when she and I were alone in the house together every weekday, the first lasting for a school year, the second for only a month. They have become ravelled together, and deliberation is needed to untangle them.24 Anderson is performing a form of topoanalysis, similar to the city-space, where the memories of childhood and adulthood become merged and entangled: Bea cannot describe her childhood without also describing her mother later in life, it is only possible to separate the two through much painful ‘deliberation’ and effort. It is the experience of women at home that is brought to the fore here. Through exposing the temporal entanglement of the house, Anderson deliberately ruptures the sense of narrative coherence in ‘The Way to Budjerra Heights,’ as Bea’s sudden image of her mother later in life is placed in the middle of what is otherwise seemingly a linear narrative of Bea’s stutter and a year spent at home from school. The sudden shift in the work exposes to the reader the overlapping nature of memory and time that lies within the childhood house. Bea’s memories of the space of the house itself are fused with the maternal, and Harrower’s construction of the childhood house of Esther Prescott in Sydney’s Double Bay is similarly aligned with feminine domesticity, even if the maternal figure is absent. As Harrower describes time passing and the events of Esther’s twenties, the house remains static and supportive: ‘Esther was twenty-eight when Hector married, and it was later the same year that her father died. Neither event stirred the deep serenity of the big airy house that was her home. Its furniture gleamed; its vases were filled. On the hottest days its rooms were still cool, and fragrant with garden air.’25 This description is similar to Woolf’s construction of objects and empty rooms, the house here is personified, the furniture, the vases, becoming part of a supportive containing space that encloses Esther. Indeed, Esther is locked in a mode of ambivalent serenity whilst she stays in contact with the house; it is once she leaves this space that this begins to falter. What this highlights is the way in which the female subject’s movement within the house is caught between a space of comfort and serenity, domesticity and habit, and an underlying threat of containment and stasis. Peter Childs emphasises the paradoxical 24 Jessica Anderson, ‘The Way to Budjerra Heights’ in Stories from the Warm Zone, (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1987), p. 79 25 Elizabeth Harrower, Down in the City, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013 [1957]), p. 15 157 nature of the post-war home in his discussion of the representation of house in American women writers, claiming that the house remains ‘a site of contestation, a place of gender retreat or struggle, a paradoxical symbol of safety and threat, inclusion and exclusion, peace and violence.’26 The house carries with it the comfort established in domesticity and habit, yet the home also carries the hidden or overt threat of struggle, containment and violence. This oscillation between security and an underlying threat of violence of the post-war domestic space, allows for a way of viewing Harrower’s uneasy domestic spaces and the connection with the female subject. Harrower overtly draws this paradoxical distinction across her novels, where masculine violence takes place in the house off centre stage, always in the background, describing the action after events of abuse rather than during. This is particularly evident in The Watch Tower (1966), the title of which refers to the white house in Sydney’s Neutral Bay. Laura and her younger sister Clare witness many scenes of abuse and violence from the malevolent Felix, ‘wander[ing] through devastated rooms as through a city abandoned after days and nights of bombing.’27 Yet it is made very clear from the outset of the marriage that Laura finds comfort in the house that Felix has provided her, weighing up his abusive nature against the backdrop of the home, and indeed much of Laura’s biggest trauma is produced by Felix’s threats to sell the house, rather than the cycles of physical abuse: ‘Against the teasing and the employer’s look and tone, she had to weigh the lovely house, the garden and water views…Yes, against all her silly invisible fancies, she had to set the very real white house.’28 Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei address the impact of the space of the house on the female subject, arguing that women ‘interpret [their] being in the world through domestic ritual and the language of the everyday.’29 Harrower draws attention to this complex interplay between violence and safety, whilst exposing the inherent danger in the constant oscillation between the two for the post-war female subject, preceding the advent of second-wave feminism, through the eyes of the younger Clare. It is Clare who is drawn to this watch tower, but immediately recognises when presented with the house that whilst ‘there was more space, [there was] no more company.’30 Significant, it is in the 26 Peter Childs ‘Householders: Community, Violence and Resistance in Three Contemporary Women’s Texts’ in Jo Croft; Gerry Smith (eds), Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 176 27 Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1991 [1966]), p. 142 28 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 45 29 Mezei; Briganti, p. 838 30 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 45 158 moment of Laura’s fast marriage and move to the house that the point of view of the narrative suddenly shifts to Clare, the only one able to see outside of the domestic space: ‘She looked to the gate in the distance. No one was coming. The gate remained wilfully, so quietly, closed. The white path was untrodden…This window was her look-out tower.’31 Indeed, much of the novel is devoted to the upkeep and maintenance of the house, from the lawn to the level of cleaning, scrubbing and polishing – everything must appear spotless, betraying the way in which the private sphere is always-already public, the cleanliness concealing the destructive force of Felix’s outburst. As Clare suggests of her daily tasks: ‘Laura expected constant assistance in the house. And it was a big house, and Laura’s standards of perfection in cleanliness were very high.’32 Such constant attention to cleanliness suggests the maintenance of the fantasy of the coherent home, the inability for Laura to accept that which Bronfen claims is at the heart of any modern engagement wtih the house, the failure of ever being able to be at home, a failure underwritten into any domestic project, and thus a source of underlying anxiety.33 Thus, the space that Laura and Clare inhabit is dislocated and filled with unease. This tension between cleanliness and what is concealed beneath the cycle of feminine domesticity is prefigured in Down in the City (1957), Harrower’s first novel, where Esther perceives her tumultuous marriage to Stan through the lens of the apartment in which they live, ‘wander[ing] from room to room, rearranging the flowers and looking out of the windows.’34 Indeed, the flat itself, its silence and harmony leaves Stan abashed, who expects to be ‘confronted by his drunken self’ amongst the inanimate, yet knowing, furniture, enclosed by the familiar walls and floor and ceiling’: ‘the wireless was silent, the rugs straight. Esther’s newest purchase – a still life of fruit – glowed innocently on the wall.’35 It is both a refuge for Esther and the site of outbursts and violence at the same time, and like Laura after her, will refuse to leave this space. It is the younger Rachel who perceives this relentless desire to stay, to be unable to leave the home despite Stan’s malicious behaviour, and this exposes to Rachel the threatening and unstable nature of the gendered domestic space: ‘her persistence in staying, the futility of intentions – these, and Esther’s quiet dignity – cut into the girl’s conscience. To Rachel 31 Harrower, p. 52 32 p. 53 33 Bronfen, p. 73 34 Harrower, Down in the City, p. 48 35 p. 75 159 it seemed now that all of the trust of the world was to be betrayed, that some kind of innocence, to which she could not aspire, was to be shattered.’36 Mezei takes up the significance of including the routines of domesticity in the post-war novel, arguing that ‘domestic space implies the everyday, the rituals of domesticity in their cyclical, repetitive ordinariness,’ and it is through ‘writing about…domestic ritual and the domestic sphere, and by their attentiveness to the minute, [that] women writers across cultures bestow literary value on domesticity and domestic space.’37 It is through Harrower highlighting the literary value of the domestic space, and the cycles that the modern female subject is caught up in this space, that exposes the paradoxical nature of the house. Through viewing Hazzard’s representation of the family home ‘Peverel’ in The Transit of Venus (1980) alongside Harrower, which alludes to ‘big house culture’ in its entirety, the large houses seen in earlier fiction from Henry James to E.M Forster and in turn the works of Austen and the Brontës, this illusion of stability is opened up. Whilst similar to the sense of solidity in Harrower’s description, Hazzard’s construction of Peverel also opens up the power of memory and time contained within the housing space, the way in which the house exists ‘in reality and in virtuality’: ‘Through two or three centuries of minor additions, Peverel had held to scale and congruity like a principle; consistent except for one enlarged window – an intentional, frivolous defect like the piercing of an ear for ornament.’38 Significantly, Peverel and the memories that are made within Peverel bookend the novel, and Hazzard pays particular attention to the moments that are lived in this house, each of them imbued with a portentous style and significance to the novel’s narrative as a whole, particularly between the three protagonists Caro Bell, Ted Tice and Paul Ivory. This is seen in the description of Ted Tice’s first meal at Peverel where ‘everything had the threat and promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable…Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break.’39 Each of these characters has a different relationship with, and memory of, the ‘summer at Peverel,’ and the text deliberately exposes the falsities and misreading of these memories at the end of the novel with the final revelation of Paul Ivory’s deceit, his involvement in murder and Ted Tice’s knowledge of this. As Paul says to Caro, ‘I hated 36 p. 239 37 Mezei; Briganti, pp. 843, 844 38 Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, (London: Virago Press, 2007[1980]), p. 4 39 p. 17 160 being in the house with him, sleeping under the same roof. Sharing a bathroom with my nemesis.’40 This is deliberately at odds with the Paul seen at the opening of the novel, who brings ‘the sun, and his luck, with him,’ and Hazzard systematically reworks and reshapes the central memories that lie in wait, contained in the walls of Peverel, not only for the key protagonists, but the reader as well. Indeed Caro’s final conversation with Ted Tice revolves around a return to the events and memories of Peverel, exposing their instability and their subsequent reshaping: ‘I’ve been thinking, these past weeks, of the summer when we met. I remember whole days, whole conversations. Or am inventing them.’41 I’m arguing here that the house itself provides a site, a specific type of enclosing space for Hazzard, to construct and then expose the conflicting memories of youth. Similar to the globe and city of post-war modernity, such a solid and containing space must be revealed to be illusory and unstable. This in turn unravels any security or sense of coherence for the subject inhabiting the house, the space becoming disjointed, ambiguous and uncanny, and any relief is denied: Hazzard ruptures any suggestion that each of the subjects could have been completely ‘at home’ and secure within the walls of Peverel. Hazzard’s construction of Peverel at the beginning of Transit of Venus, and the subsequent return and exposure of events, deliberately exposes this sense of time-travel, a movement and regression towards childhood. This is seen in particular when Hazzard describes Caro as looking at herself in the hallway mirror of Peverel, a moment that is explicitly gendered, the domestic, private and feminine are interwoven: Caro entered the house alone, and stood in the hall. There was a mirror on one wall, and she had lately taken to watching herself…At a distance a door opened, and Professor Sefton Thrale called, ‘Charmian?’ And Caroline Bell could not know why that simple fact should bring her close to tears. It was a state of mind. Or it was because she had stood long ago in a darkened room, a little girl of six years old, and looked in a long mirror cool as water. And, a door opening, had heard her father’s voice call ‘Marian?’ – which was her mother’s name. That was all there was in 40 p. 310 41 p. 133 161 it, that was the evocation: a small spasm of memory that could never elucidate itself.42 Through viewing Anderson’s construction of the house alongside Hazzard and Harrower, we can see the way Anderson is also exposing these patterns of cycles and return, the way in which the house is the site for a specific ruptured temporality, a gendered view of time and space that is apprehended through single middle-aged women. As Nora states on her return to her Queensland home in Tirra Lirra by the River ‘I enter the hall, finding the echoes immediately familiar to me…Through the long mirror the big black-hall-stand I see a shape pass. It is the shape of an old woman who began to call herself old before she really was,’ whilst Sylvia Cornock’s return to the home of her childhood in The Impersonators (1980) finds her standing ‘at the window and, suddenly pressing her forehead to the glass, fervently hop[ing] that she was not fated to repeat all her past mistakes,’ even though conversations with her step-mother can only remain ‘an echo of those past scenes.’43 The house once again functions as an enclosing space for the female subject, which echoes past patterns of domesticity. Joe Moran takes up the way in which houses expose this sense of longing and distress in the essay ‘Houses, Habits and Memory’ (2006), arguing that it is ‘for precisely the same reason that they represent continuity and permanence: they often outlive us, and will probably have already housed people who are now dead,’ 44 whilst both Briganti and Mezei suggest that ‘our imagination, our consciousness, needs to locate itself in a particular space, to find a home, to articulate its homelessness, its longing for home, its sickness for home (nostalgia).’45 Indeed, Peverel remains a space of permanence across The Transit of Venus, representative of that level of continuity, and yet this permanence is undone when Paul reveals his murderous past to Caro. It deliberately exposes the fixations of Caro, and in some ways, the reader; the way in which her motionless and fixed memories of this house are suddenly ruptured, destabilised and revealed as illusory. All three writers trouble and challenge the forms of female agency and spaces that are opened up, thus questioning the consequences of women inhabiting rooms of 42 Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire, (London: Virago Press, 2003), p. 78 43 Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, (Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 1997 [1978]), p. 2; The Impersonators, Sydney: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1980), p. 117 44 Joe Moran, ‘Houses, Habits and Memory,’ in Jo Croft; Gerry Smith (eds) Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 33 45 Mezei; Briganti, p. 840 162 their own in the post-war city and globe. There is a recurring construction of a staged retreat across the work of Anderson, Hazzard, and Harrower, a turn to the enclosing space, a return to domesticity, privileging and bestowing value on the minute and everyday. Moran argues for the significance of routine, the everyday, and the minute in relation to modern space, suggesting that ‘the house is the space of habit: it brings together the social expectations and imposed routines of modernity with the intimate texture and detail of individual lives.’46 This understanding of habit and the everyday is distinctly feminine and moves away from the theoretical notion of the everyday established by Michel De Certeau, who, as Mary McLeod suggests in the article ‘Everyday and Other Spaces,’ (1996) is ‘strangely silent on the issue of women.’47 The space of habit within the home is feminine and domestic, the daily chores and routines of everyday life often relegated to the female subject, a routine that continues in the post-war space and in turn, permeates any representation of the post-war home. Linda K. Kerber highlights the way in which the gendering of space continues to play a significant part in the collective imaginary, particularly in relation to the domestic sphere: ‘the boundaries may be fuzzier but our private spaces and our public spaces are still in many important senses gendered. The reconstruction of gender relations, and of the spaces that men and women may claim, is one of the most compelling contemporary social tasks.’48 It is just such a task that Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard draw attention to, challenging the consequences of women’s claim on the private space of the household. Their comparison serves to illuminate the dialectic and paradoxical overlapping between the sanctity, freedom and strength that the house provides for the female subject alongside a continued sense of entrapment, restraint and containment. Briganti and Mezei suggest the significance that women writers have in constructing the domestic space, arguing that ‘[through] writing about and through domestic ritual and the domestic sphere, and by their attentiveness to the minute, women writers across cultures bestow literary value on domesticity and domestic space.’49 Indeed, all three authors repetitively draw attention to the minute and everyday rituals from domestic washing, ironing and shopping to cooking and cleaning, which implicates these habits 46 Moran, p. 28 47 Mary Macleod, ‘Everyday and ‘Other Spaces’’ in Architecture and Feminism (Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 1996), p. 13 48 Linda K. Kerber, ‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History’, The Journal of American History, 75.1, (1988), p. 39 49 Mezei; Briganti, p. 844 163 and routines as being connected with and significant to the post-war space, as an important site for in the female subject to move within the modern world. The character of Emily draws attention to the repetitive routine in Harrower’s The Long Prospect (1958) stating that ‘they still lived from day to day, and meal to meal, and talked about the price of peas and potatoes,’50 whilst Nora in Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River highlights the necessity of domestic tasks: ‘changing my bed is a laborious matter, but there is enjoyment in deploying my patience, my persistence.’51 Yet when comparing Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard it can be seen that not only are they bestowing value on the domestic space but challenging the nature of the space itself, undoing the notions that the house and in turn, domestic ritual, are forms of oppression, instead opening up the complex interplay between agency and entrapment, opening up the contradictory and multiplicitous subject-position, a position that is central to their construction of modern mobility and the post-war house. Harrower’s construction of Laura Vaisey in The Watch Tower, which has often been held up as a warning of just such oppression by feminist literary critics such as Sneja Gunew and Rosie Yeo, exposes this complex dichotomy.52 As already suggested, Laura’s motives for marrying Felix Shaw lie firmly with the house that he is able to provide, ‘the loveliest house [she’s] ever been in,’ and the house itself is described as an empty container awaiting Laura’s presence as ‘inside, the rooms were large and cool, and stood awaiting furniture and embellishment at the hands of their new owner.’53 It is these large rooms that draw Laura, and she finds comfort in the routines of cleanliness and household chores. Indeed, Felix’s violent outbursts are always mediated through the lens of what he has been able to provide, this contained and sealed private sphere, and Laura retreats further and further into this paradoxical sanctuary as the novel progresses: ‘here they were – lovely house, lovely autumn weather, a superlative view, cupboards and refrigerator stacked full of food, safe from bombs, cold and hunger.’54 However, for the younger Clare, the emptiness and stifling containment of the domestic space is exposed in her own room, as even though provided with a space of her own, she remains distant and absent, it is a watch tower through which to view the world, but a tower which provides no domestic comfort or sense of newfound agency: 50 Elizabeth Harrower, The Long Prospect, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1979 [1958]), p. 60 51 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 188 52 see Sneja Gunew, 'What Does Woman Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction', Hecate, 9.1/2, (1983); Rosie Yeo, ‘Down in the City: Elizabeth Harrower's 'Lost' Novel’, Southerly, 50.4, (1990) 53 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 32 54 Harrower, p. 60 164 Hers was a pretty, sterile room carpeted in pale green; its walls were white. The bed, the dressing-table with three mirrors, and a stool were made of rosewood. So was the small chair in which no one ever sat…The room’s great disadvantage was that there was nowhere in particular to be in it…It was very silent…Anyone or no one might have lived there: she made no impression on it at all. But then, she wasn’t meant to.55 Harrower is fascinated by the hollowness and emptiness of the domestic space, but instead of a hollowness that gestures to a repressed or forgotten past, or the ghosts of the subjects that came before, Harrower’s post-war houses are distinctly devoid of past and memory. Similar to the space of the house in film-noir, Harrower’s houses are jarring, it is, as Bronfen suggests, a construction of ‘the uncanny dislocation of domestic familiarity,’ perpetuated by the sense of sterility, cleanliness and a stifling sense of stasis.56 Harrower constructs the house as being completely absent and removed from layers of memory chains, as well as removing the possibility of it being a feminine retreat or a means of providing a new way for the post-war female subject to inhabit the domestic space. Instead what remains is the uneasy and uncanny oscillation between Laura’s misplaced and dysfunctional trust in the space of the house itself, which all the while remains empty and spotlessly clean, and Clare’s apprehension of the complete absence and distance between the space and her own sense of agency and subjectivity. Hazzard’s female protagonists’ position within the house continues to thread the sense of lack and freedom together: the way that apartments, terraces and houses are inhabited by women suggests an underlying sense of anxiety, of uneasiness at how to negotiate as a female with domestic space in post-war modernity. The description of Jenny’s lengthy illness in The Bay of Noon suggests such an anxiety, as she remains housebound, recovering from jaundice, invalided and contained: ‘Each morning Serafina let herself in, and that was the only interruption in identical days that I passed in bed or, when the disease began to ebb, out on the terrace. The mere fact of growing less ill, the privacy and silence of those high rooms, the emancipation from bureaucracy brought pleasure of a kind I had never known; pleasure that was far from negative, 55 Harrower, p. 74 56 Bronfen, p. 172 165 thought it owed so much to lack.’57 Here, Jenny finds relief and enjoyment, from being completely contained in her apartment, in routine and the everyday, unable to acknowledge or interact with the city and globe outside the four walls. Caroline Bell performs a similar retreat in Transit of Venus, firstly after the end of her lengthy affair with Paul Ivory, contained in her rooms, ‘falling into long reverie, remembering though not pondering sights, episodes, and sensations, or lines she had read,’ and secondly, after her marriage and relocation to New York: ‘glossiness created, or eased, a lack of contact. When summer came, plane trees obscured the view from Caro’s windows, and seclusion was complete.’58 Hazzard’s female subjects have a decidedly different sense of agency and mobility to Harrower’s, given that the houses that they inhabit are of their own choosing and stem from their own volition. Yet, as Victoria Rosner suggests, ‘a simple transfer of ownership is hard to manage,’ as ‘when women acquire studies [and later, in turn, entire apartments], the meaning of the space seems to alter and its secrets become more visible.’59 Like the stillness of Harrower’s watch tower, this seclusion and solitude of the house and domestic space, the relief that is allowed the female subject in their own room is ruptured, exposing a hollowness at the centre, and the solidity of the walls keeping the outside public space at bay is revealed as illusory. This destabilises Woolf’s claim for having a room of one’s own, highlighting the way in which the acquiring space does not bring security and safety, but rather prompts domestic space that is absent and ambiguous. This is evident in the climactic scene of The Transit of Venus where Paul Ivory reveals his deception and involvement in murder, which ruptures not only Caro’s own subjectivity, but also the entire narrative of the novel. It is significant that Hazzard constructs this moment in the secluded New York terrace, Caro’s own home after the sudden death of her husband. Paul’s narrative is interspersed with the house, with the everyday, providing great importance to Caro’s movements and routine through their sudden incursion: ‘Caro got up and switched off the air conditioner. She opened the window, holding the curtain aside.’60 As well as these interruptions, Paul’s recollections are situated alongside Caro’s own memories within the house and domestic space, framing the narrative: ‘Caro had stood in a freezing kitchen and wished to die.’61 57 Hazzard, The Bay of Noon, (London: Virago Press, 2010 [1970]), p. 139 58 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, pp. 171, 203 59 Rosner, pp. 123, 125 60 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 302 61 p. 303 166 What this move does is not only immediately render the scene temporally unstable, moving between the memories of both subjects and the present moment, but also gestures to the significance of Paul’s invasion into the private feminine sphere, his undoing of the tenuous coherence Caro has placed in her retreat to the house. The stillness and focus of this moment is at odds with the rapid and kaleidoscopic movement that fuels much of the novel; the interaction with a global sphere and vast city-spaces is immediately tapered, reduced and funnelled to a conversation in one room of a house. Indeed much of Caro’s revulsion is for Paul’s presence within the home, within the house that was once occupied by her husband and his family before him, as her undoing is described through the objects of the house itself: ‘these chairs and tables withdrew from Paul, as did the furniture of this woman’s memory.’62 Indeed, it is after this point that Caro must leave the space of the house, can no longer rely on it as a space of shelter. The female subjects of Anderson’s novels also complicate the relationship between ritual and habit – cleaning, cooking, moving and unpacking belongings – and a sense of comfort, security and enclosure within the domestic space. As Elaine Barry (1984) suggests, ‘houses, in Jessica Anderson’s novels, are paradoxically emblems of exile, of emptiness – fitting shells for the spiritual drifters who inhabit them.’63 This is particularly evident in Anderson’s short story ‘The Milk’ in Stories from the Warm Zone (1987) in which the recently separated Marjorie rents her own apartment in Sydney’s Newtown. Through constructing the narrative of a late middle-aged woman negotiating divorce proceedings, newfound independence, guilt and sacrifice, Anderson once again returns to the minute and everyday: ‘[Marjorie] became drunk enough to be quite pleased with the improvisation of the folding bed, and to be comforted by the semblance of a cubby house given by the dim shapes around her of her unpacked, mismatched things.’64 Yet what is most striking about the narrative here is the way in which Anderson overtly demonstrates the way in which single women may find freedom in the apartments that they now can pay for themselves and have unlimited access to. Marjorie withdraws to this private space, as she ‘pin[s] her hair high on her head to free the nape of her neck; she [wears] no pants nor bra, no shoes. The dress itself [is] a concession to her visibility from the street.’65 There is a disavowal of the female body, an undoing of 62 p. 310 63 Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984), p. 6 64 Jessica Anderson, ‘The Milk’, Stories from the Warm Zone, p. 123 65 p. 129 167 the constructed layers of femininity, a disavowal that only results after complete solitude and enclosure. Marjorie goes on to hate the occasions where she is forced to leave the apartment as ‘she feel[s] obliged to wear full underclothes, a dress of a more formal sort, panty hose and shoes, even make up. To dress like this she [feels] as a serious and even dangerous intrusion, and she arrive[s] back at her flat in a state of anxiety or even of slight hysteria.’66 This moment is significant, the sense of palpable anxiety and loss of control at having to venture across the threshold of the home, because it demonstrates that this emancipation, the freeing from the trappings of gender – clothing, makeup and cleanliness – can only take place in the walls of the apartment. It is at once rendered distinctly private; something that cannot be seen outside, and therefore perpetuates this sense of retreat and enclosure. It is a retreat that brings with it anxiety and loneliness, and for Anderson this exclusionary existence is repeatedly reserved for solitary older women, such as Nora in Tirra Lirra by the River, who admits that ‘I am often lonely for [an] audience, and yet, if it were possible to return and regain it, I would not go,’ and the widowed Greta Cornock in The Impersonators who ‘enter[s] a seclusion of a kind that none of her children [can] break.’67 Anderson’s move to focus on these older women highlights the way in which all three authors, after drawing attention to the opening up of the globe, the city, the new sense of agency and control and the unstable overlapping of the public/private spheres in the post-war space, turn to the result: an isolated and burdened retreat indoors. What is significant in this retreat, and the construction of the indoor space, is the complete refutation of the maternal presence in the home by all three writers. Figurations of domesticity, habit and the home are in themselves permeated by the sense of the maternal, by the presence of the mother in the domestic space. As Christine Gledhill argues in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and Women’s Film (1987), the advent of melodrama and women’s films in the early twentieth century suggests the preoccupation with the domestic sphere, but also implicates the space of the house with ‘woman’, ‘the maternal’ and the ‘feminine’: thus ensuring ‘a contest between…over construction and meaning of the domestic, of personal life, and the place of men and women in this.’68 E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of the women’s films of the 1940s can be 66 p. 129 67 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 201; The Impersonators, p. 326 68 Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and Women’s film, (London: BFI, 1987), pp. 3, 36 168 applied here in suggesting the way in which ideas of the Mother figure, and the maternal presence, are connected with the domestic space. Indeed, post-war anxiety around the Mother figure is in itself perpetuated by the mother leaving the containing boundaries of the private sphere and moving into the workforce, the mother is no longer relegated to the boundaries of the private. As Kaplan argues, initially ‘dislocation of traditional sex-roles during the Depression created social anxiety about the Mother- figure,’ and following from this, ‘when it was no longer economically feasible for the middle-class Mother to remain at home (or when the War made change in her function necessary), then the Mother becomes a source of trouble. Narratives in the 1930s reflect this unease by showing the Mother stepping out of her allotted place, but also revealing the disruption this causes.’69 This sense of unease surrounding the figure of the mother, as seen in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), combined with a sense of domestic anxiety about women’s position in the post-war space of the house perpetuates a dismantling of traditional representation of the Mother-figure, as well as a new found sense of agency, mobility and financial independence for the post-war subject.70 Such an anxiety surrounding a mother stepping outside of the boundaries of the home allows for a way of understanding the misplaced maternalism of Daisy Byfield in Anderson’s An Ordinary Lunacy, of the complete rupturing of the domestic space. Anderson constantly represents Daisy’s relationship with her ‘neuter’ co-worker Willy, and the younger more aggressive designer Hal, in family terms, as her own sons.71 The uneasy relationship between Willy and Daisy is exposed when the younger Myra sees them working together: ‘she watched them with some envy and found herself thinking that they were not unalike, both so narrowly built and rigidly confined in their dark suits. Nor was that all. There was some other resemblance, too, as elusive as those floating resemblances of blood.’72 It is a closeness and resemblance that is unsettling, unnatural in the commercial space, an ‘odd similarity’ that, whilst not overtly threatening, disrupts the coherence of the space, and points to the anxiety surrounding a Mother-figure outside of the domestic household. Not only are the female and male subject positions disrupted, Daisy being Willy’s boss, there is a closeness between the 69 E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and Women’s Film 1910-40’, in C. Gledhill (ed) Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and Women’s film, (London: BFI, 1987), p. 131 70 Kaplan discusses this construction of the mother figure in both Vidor’s Stella Dallas and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934), pp. 130-135 71 Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, (Sydney, Australia: Macmillan and Company Ltd, 1963), p. 85 72 p. 84 169 two that is decidedly private, that when seen by an outsider, or customer, is strangely unnatural: ‘Daisy pointed her own forefinger, met the tip of his. They had these moments.’73 This is a misplaced maternalism, which is continued by the representation of Daisy’s relationship with Willy who she treats like a petulant child on the one hand, ‘very well, wretched boy, I’ll take a pill. Go and pamper your stomach’, but then proceeds to find a sense of comfort and affection that is decidedly absent in her cold relationship with David: ‘Surprised to find herself comforted by the friendly pressure of his hand, she leaned back slightly, enough to make him add the support of his other hand. Sighing, she said, ‘Oh, Willy, Willy. Perhaps you ought to have been my son.’74 Even Anderson’s choice to use the epithet Willy rather than the stronger William or Will immediately conveys the character’s immaturity and childishness. Willy reciprocates in the sense that he is represented in the role of a spoilt and flippant underling, speaking in a wail, ‘plaintive as a lost child’s.’75 Willy’s relationship with Daisy highlights the way in which she is unable to escape or cut off the domestic space, or indeed, the maternal. Daisy’s initial commercial success is compromised through the private sphere, through a displaced maternalism, disrupting the continuation of such success: Willy’s relationship with Daisy is uncanny, it is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, because of the spaces that it takes place in. This is further complicated through the way Daisy cultivates and exploits her maternal position in the commercial space: ‘She suddenly turned on Willy her best and warmest smile, ‘Now do take them out, like a good boy.’ And ‘she stood looking confidingly up at Willy, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders…Willy, who instinctively felt that someone was being cheated, but who could not think who, or how, looked at her meditatively.’76 The relationship is not one of warmth, maternal love or cohesiveness but is instead jarring and peculiar, through the way in which the maternal position plays out as a manipulative force in gaining commercial ground. Anderson dismantles Daisy’s control however, in one of the final scenes of the novel, where Willy enters Daisy’s bedroom after her control of both spheres has disintegrated. On the one hand, Willy cares for Daisy out of pity, sitting at her bedside, bringing ‘sweet biscuits and hot milk’, 73 p. 134 74 p. 197 75 p. 240 76 pp. 133-4 170 but at the same time the talk is of business, of his pay rise and written agreement if the shop continues to run.77 Here, Anderson disrupts the domestic space, and what would be a familiar scene of the son caring for the sick elderly mother becomes something quite different, it is a business transaction, which ends with Willy gleeful and victorious in Daisy’s downfall: ‘seeking out puddles, he skipped over them, while the words, ‘Daisy is done for,’ ran through his head like a refrain.’78 Yet despite the roving sense of the maternal in Daisy’s subjectivity, what recurs across the work of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard is how the comfort and solace found in seclusion within the house is devoid of any maternal or familial desire; instead there is a turn to complete isolation and stillness. Indeed, Daisy’s familial bonds are all cut off by the end of the novel, and she, like Anderson’s subsequent female protagonists is left entirely alone. It is because of this maternal absence that this sense of stillness is punctuated by anxiety and uneasiness; it is uncanny: the notion of the house as womb, the domestic space as the centre and focus of maternal warmth and return, is repetitively disavowed by Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard. As Nora admits in Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River: I continued to weep because at last I had begun to admit the truth – that my greatest need was not for a baby. Indeed, there were times when I thought that all I wanted in the world was to be left alone in my beautiful room, close to people who never asked, audibly or otherwise, who I thought I was [my emphasis].79 In some ways, Nora is punished for this admission, a pregnancy followed by a painful abortion meaning that she never has any sexual contact again. Abigail Palko suggests the significance that notions of maternity have on modernist female writers, arguing that both Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘depictions of maternity reveal ways that modernism grappled with a pervasive interwar ideology of motherhood,’ that is Anglophone anxieties about ‘reproduction and questions of who could and should mother.’80 Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard instead ask the question of whether a 77 pp. 242-43 78 p. 244 79 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 62 80 Abigail Palko ‘Colonial modernism’s thwarted maternity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark’, Textual Practice, 27.1, (2013), pp. 91, 90 171 woman should mother at all. Palko discusses the sense of paralysis and lack of maternal agency in Rhys and Bowen, highlighting the way in which maternity becomes a troubled category in the inter-war and subsequently post-war years, particularly influenced by colonial and class fears in Britain. One of Bowen’s biggest preoccupations is with maternal relationships whether real or imagined and as Palko argues, ‘for every child searching for a mother in Bowen, there is a woman who has not been mothering.’81 The concern of maternity is different for Harrower, Hazzard and Anderson, as the maternal here is not ‘thwarted’ or misdirected, but instead is entirely absent and denied, which only furthers the hollowness of the domestic space. What this repetitive absence suggests is a preoccupation not with the maternal, but instead what happens to the female subject when the maternal focus is denied and absent, how can the female subject inhabit the space of the home when this traditional trait is removed. This moves away from the preoccupations with melodrama or film-noir in what Kaplan suggests are repetitively more aggressive images of the ‘monstrous mother’: the focus on a ‘Mother’s inadequacies, especially her ability to foster psychic health,’ whilst ‘close Mother-daughter bonding is now seen not merely as ‘unhealthy’ but as leading either to evil or neurosis.’82 Instead, what is taken up here is an absence, a removal, which in turn allows for a reappraisal and rethinking of the post-war female subjects negotiation of the ‘contradictions, ambivalencies and complexities of Mothering.’83 From Esther’s inability to conceive in Harrower’s Down in the City to the complete denial of maternal inclination in both Laura and Clemency in The Watch Tower and The Catherine Wheel, Harrower refuses to allow or negotiate a sense of maternal warmth, which in turn fosters the paradoxical balance between safety and oppression in the space of the house. What is left is an uncanny warmth that is misplaced in objects, in the house itself, in routine and habit, the everyday, and for Laura, a matronly bossiness of her younger sister. Similarly across Hazzard’s work, there is distinct absence of maternal figures, from Bay of Noon, Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. Representation of mothers and children is always removed, at a distance, as seen in the complete lack of maternal interest and concern in the young Ben and Helen Driscoll by both their mother and father in The Great Fire. Caro remains entirely solitary in The Transit of Venus, and whilst undergoing a miscarriage and unable to develop a bond with her husband’s adult 81 p. 97 82 Kaplan, p. 134 83 p. 135 172 daughter, a yearning or desire for children remains unaccounted for. Her sister Grace is the counterpoint to this, married to Christian Thrale, and from the outset her path is set as a maternal figure in her London house with three children. Yet Hazzard deliberately draws attention to the constraining and stifling nature of maternity, and, upon meeting the doctor Angus Dance, Grace finds that ‘she felt her story was undeveloped, without event. Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth…Compared with his variousness, she was fixed, terrestrial; land-locked in contrast to his open sea.’84 Here the maternal is not thwarted or misplaced, but is still constructed as and remains a binding and oppressing force that ultimately stunts Grace, that sees her fixed and immobile, unable to escape or act on her desire. This is even further evident in the way in which Grace’s subjectivity is constantly framed and mediated throughout the novel through a masculine gaze: she embodies, like Anderson’s Isobel Purdy in An Ordinary Lunacy, a female subjectivity from the past. It is a subjectivity that cannot find a point of reference in the post-war environment, as Grace is both aware of but unable to see outside this male gaze: ‘these were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap.’85 The view of her existence becomes fixed and Grace can only act enclosed by the garment of motherhood, and at this point withdraws into her house completely, ‘and like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, crie[s] on her Creator and wonder[s] how long she must remain on such an earth.’86 The sense of stillness and retreat into the house for both Grace and Caro is emphasised at the end of the novel in one of the final scenes before Caro’s fated departure, as ‘they [sit], inclined towards each other, and exchange some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs. Grace got up and went to the piano, as to a haven. [my emphasis].’87 Whilst this scene suggests Hazzard’s underlying preoccupation with issues of morality, humanism and truth, it also exposes a palpable burden for the female subject, a burden that sees the sisters exhausted, seeking a haven in the domestic space, a space that Woolf had so decried at the fin de siècle as being oppressive and stark ‘associating interior spaces with death.’88 This is evident in the tableau that Hazzard 84 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 270 85 p. 287 86 p. 289 87 p. 327 88 Rosner, p. 149 173 creates, a painterly scene that immediately ruptures and freezes temporality, and frames both Caro and Grace firmly within the space of the house: ‘light came through long windows, there was scent from stock in a vase. Two women were silent, one seated, one standing. While a man slept, like a baby, in an adjoining room.’89 Comparing Hazzard’s construction of Grace in The Transit of Vensus with Anderson’s Dorothy Rainbow in Tirra Lirra by the River, reveals a continuing level anxiety about the burden of maternity, of the female subject constrained within the house after bearing multiple children, again, an augmentation of the post-war domestic anxiety surrounding women within the home, an ‘unbearable proximity of the maternal.’90 Whilst Dorothy has routinely been viewed as a means of providing a counterpoint for Nora’s subjectivity, emblematic of what would have happened if Nora had chosen to stay in Brisbane and the dangers of never leaving suburbia, Dorothy can also be seen to be a consequence of what happens when the ornate garment that encloses Grace in Transit of Venus is pulled far too tightly.91 Dorothy’s narrative runs alongside Nora’s, and the slow-burn unravelling of Dorothy’s violent murder of her husband and children, and her subsequent suicide, is as important as Nora’s discovery of her own tangential memories: The story of Dorothy Rainbow’s fate having progressed from accident to suicide, and from simple suicide to suicide with murder, it is unstable that by the time Betty Cust arrives my imagination should have supplied a choice of further progressions, so that Betty’s story of the axe, and of Dorothy’s husband and all her children but one, Gordon, killed in their beds, does not really surprise me.92 This murder, and Nora’s repetitive horror at her use of an axe, cuts into the space of the house, it immediately dismantles and attacks the maternal aspect of private sphere, denies any sense that the home, particularly the childhood home, is a womb, a haven. As Bronfen argues, the sense of the uncanny, of the rupture of the familiar comes to the fore when ‘the external horror infiltrates the domesticity of the home, rendering visible the instability of the boundary between internal and external and thriving on a split,’ 89 Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p. 328 90 Bronfen, p. 161 91 see Elaine Barry, ‘The Expatriate Vision of Jessica Anderson’, Meridian, 3.1, (1984) 92 Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River, p. 179 174 and as such, Dorothy’s axe is a horror that slices through the boundaries and exposes the dislocation inherent in the post-war domestic space.93 Indeed, the horror of Nora’s discovery not only resides in the killing of innocent children but of it taking place within their own home, in their own beds. Anderson takes a common trope of the uncanny nature of the suburbs in Australian fiction, a sense of suburbia as discussed in Chapter Four, and reworks this to expose the fractured nature of the domestic space, questioning the significance of the maternal right within the space of the house. This preoccupation is further evident when considering Dorothy Rainbow alongside Anderson’s later work The Impersonators. Moving away from the sudden violent outburst and rupture in Tirra Lirra by the River, in The Impersonators Anderson instead exposes what happens to female agency when maternal warmth is completely absent from the home, what happens when children mature into adulthood from this space of denial and distance. As the title suggests, family relationships and maternal bonds become a forced impersonation, there is a lack at the centre, a deferred emptiness that is never fully exposed. Like Harrower and Hazzard, any freedom or agency that is found by Anderson’s protagonists in the domestic sphere does not stem from a notion of a feminine enclosing space, of a womb or shelter, instead the domestic sphere is a container, entirely empty. This becomes evident in the construction of Greta Cornock, the family matriarch whose lack of maternal affection is repeatedly evident, and the younger step-daughter Sylvia, who as an outsider figure is more aware of the palpable absence in both her own mother and step-mother. Greta displays the trappings of femininity so despised by Marjorie in The Milk, ‘never since she had come into this house had [she] allowed herself the informality of trousers, even when most fashionable, nor the comfort of bare legs, even in summer,’ yet she is ambivalent about her children, admitting to Sylvia that ‘Guy is still recognisably my child. The other three, those three middle-aged people, often seem more strange than actual strangers.’94 Sylvia is unable to take such honesty from Greta, and whilst recognising ‘as if from her disciplined body another woman longed so much to get out that could not help but give these hints and hedges and forebodings,’ she cannot help ‘shrinking from this importunate other woman.’95 93 Bronfen, p. 172 94 Anderson, The Impersonators, pp. 11, 114 95 p. 114 175 Greta’s disavowal of the maternal, which runs against her older children’s narrative that she has always done everything to provide for them, is jarring, and Sylvia appears to feel more comfortable with the impersonation rather than the slipping of the mask - admitting that for years ‘out of fear, or a queer politeness, or a denial of anything dramatic, or perhaps simply out of shyness, everyone including herself, had pretended that it had never happened.’96 Yet all of Greta’s adult children circle around her, constantly returning to the empty family home, unable or unwilling to negotiate the public sphere. A lack of maternal presence or inclination is repeated and continued into the next generation, in both Sylvia’s complete maternal disinterest and Hermione’s most important concern being with both status and the acquisition of wealth rather than her own children. Dorothy Rainbow’s anger, grief and rage has given way to ambivalence and absence, as Sylvia ‘stare[s] into the mirror, and a remarkably blank face stare[s] back.’97 What this blankness perpetuates is a domestic space that has completely denied the maternal, that is in its essence vacant, and the childhood home itself is dismantled, the furniture sold, Greta and her eldest daughter Rosie occupying a space that is both public and private: ‘in the big, slowly emptying house, the footsteps of the two women, audible on the bare floors, were as far apart, and as circumspect, as each could make them.’98 What is left is a longing for solitude, to be contained, to be as far apart as possible, a retreat into the interior space, but a dislocated modern space without familial warmth or childhood memory. Thus, for Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, the new-found sense of modern mobility that is made accessible to women in the post-war space brings with it a sense of domestic anxiety and uncanniness, emptiness, an undoing of the private sphere, a rupturing of coherence, any ability to be ‘at home’: what remains is an absent and empty interior space, which fragments and thwarts the maternal. Once the modern female subject is able to walk outside of the bounds of the private sphere, and once the bounds between public and private become fragmented and illusory, new ways of apprehending and engaging with the space of the house come to the fore, and such a focus implicates the domestic space within the frame of post-war modernity and post- war female agency. Whilst the houses across all three writers function as temporally unstable spaces which throw up and make the past accessible and reveal memory, 96 p. 123 97 p. 125 98 p. 315 176 ultimately these spaces are the points of retreat: the female subjects find their multiplicitous and overlapping position both within the city-space and the global sphere as being too fraught and painful, too unstable, causing them to retreat to the space within. Yet, the post-war house itself is revealed as perpetuating the fragmented and contradictory female subject position – a never-ending oscillation between mobility and movement, and stasis and containment. The following chapter takes up this sense of emptiness and constantly deferred absence, in a specific discussion of Harrower’s construction of the house and ends with a movement towards the masculine subject: what happens when the post-war male subject is also forced into a similar retreat into the domestic space, a turning away from the masculine domain of the public. 177 CHAPTER SIX Turning Inward on Himself: Male hysteria in Elizabeth Harrower’s empty houses ‘[Felix] had suddenly vomited words at them, his manner extraordinarily agreeable, so that for seconds he might have been speaking Chinese for all the sense he seemed to make… He lurched to his feet. Oiled strands of his brushed-back hair fell over the jagged scars on his forehead. His face was contused, his gestures terrifying, his expression ogrish. Starry-eyed and with a deep fearful incredulity they felt his voice beat against their heads. He lifted and threw and crashed and overturned.’ Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower (1966), p. 66-7 ‘Hysteria [is] a malady of representation.’ Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject (1998), p. 40 This chapter develops and builds upon the failed return of the post-war female subject to the incoherent and anxious domestic space, moving to a critical account of the male subject who is also found to be residing uneasily within the private sphere. Bringing together the contradictory and multiplicitous position of the female subject, one that has recurred across the post-war spaces discussed throughout the thesis, with the construction of masculinity allows for a final turn, revealing a hysteric masculinity that perpetuates the destabilising effect the house has on female agency and mobility. In order to suggest the connection between male hysteria and the female subject’s retreat into the private sphere, this chapter will focus on the construction of masculinity in Harrower’s claustrophobic and uncanny domestic spaces. The representation of masculinity in Harrower’s work has been a troubling and often avoided aspect of her oeuvre. Whilst critics acknowledge and allude to the importance of masculine power and authority in her novels, such a discussion avoids Harrower’s construction of unstable modern identities, and the implications of a mimetic and superficial masculinity. Whilst much of the literary criticism stemming from the 1980s and 1990s highlights Harrower’s construction of what Rosie Yeo terms ‘intimate psychological warfare,’ Harrower’s male subjects are reduced to caricatures of violent, sadistic and misogynistic men, as an ‘embodiment of total inexplicable evil’, ‘of motiveless malignity.’1 Even with the republication of The Watch Tower in 2012, Harrower’s male 1 Rosie Yeo, 'Down in the City: Elizabeth Harrower's 'Lost' Novel,' Southerly, 50.4, (1990), p. 498; Laurie Clancy, 'Fathers and Lovers: Three Australian Novels', Australian Literary Studies, 10. 4, (1982), p. 463 178 protagonist Felix is described as ‘unhappy, meanspirited’ and once again, ‘one of the most superbly drawn evil characters in Australian literature.’2 This focus on female subjectivity and agency stems from the way in which Harrower’s work has been taken up by the feminist literary critics of the 1980s eager to hold up her novels as representations of the oppression of post-war women. A telling case in point is the article ‘What Does Women Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction’ (1983), in which Sneja Gunew argues that Harrower’s final and most successful novel, The Watch Tower (1966), is structured as ‘an elaborate cautionary tale,’ a reworking of the classic gothic narrative ‘in which women are traditionally caged up and their lives threatened.’3 The text is ‘a salutary lesson,’ with the young Clare’s ability to escape her violent brother-in-law’s grasp highlighting the importance of maintaining the integrity of female selfhood.4 Other critics have gone on to further this claim, such as Susan McKernan (1989), who argues that Harrower’s preoccupation lies with ‘her women and children,’ and although David Burns (1986) argues that Harrower demonstrates a particular ‘female attentiveness’ towards an unstable male subject, he returns to her construction of patriarchal control.5 Whilst the representation of patriarchal control and its effect on female agency is an important aspect of the novels, this chapter will develop and depart from this analysis, placing Harrower’s construction of a fractured masculine subject and gender relations within the ambiguous space of the post-war house: the fraught and uneasy domestic space discussed in Chapter Five. Nicholas Mansfield in ‘‘The Only Russian in Sydney’: Modernism and Realism in The Watch Tower’ (1992), suggests that a significant aspect of Harrower’s construction of post-war gender relations lies with the masculine subject, in ‘the brutality and mystery of masculine power,’ through the way in which Harrower returns again and again to ‘scrutinis[e] masculine authority in the vain attempt to understand, even sympathise with it.’6 Mansfield explores this claim through a discussion of Harrower’s female 2 Gay Alcorn, 'Written in the Past', The Sydney Morning Herald, 06/05/12, sec. Books. 3 Sneja Gunew, 'What Does Woman Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction,' Hecate, 9.1/2, (1983), p. 119 4 p. 119 5 S. McKernan, ‘Australian Civilisation?’ in S. McKernan (ed) A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. 211; D. R Burns, ‘The Active Passive Inversion: Sex Roles in Garner, Stead and Harrower’, Meanjin, 45. 3, (1986), p. 353; see also Robyn Claremont, 'The Novels of Elizabeth Harrower,', Quadrant, 23.11, (1979); Carole Ferrier, 'Is an 'Images of Women' Methodology Adequate for Reading Elizabeth Harrower's The Watch Tower ' in S. Walker (ed) Who Is She?, (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1983); Fiona McInherny, ''Deep into the Destructive Core': Elizabeth Harrower's the Watch Tower ', Hecate, 9.1/2, (1983) 6 Nicholas Mansfield, ''The Only Russian in Sydney': Modernism and Realism in the Watch Tower', Australian Literary Studies, 15.3, (1992), p. 131 179 subjects who are either caught up, destroyed by, or able to find freedom from, this masculine power, and yet Mansfield avoids close analysis of the masculine subject, and his incoherent presence within a claustrophobic and myopic domestic space. I want to return to and reopen the question of gendered identity by drawing on contemporary frameworks that have identified masculinity as a troubled and troubling category, and equally as performative as femininity. This chapter will reveal the way in which the contested idea of male hysteria opens up ways of reconfiguring and reappraising Harrower’s construction of male subjectivity and post-war gender relations within the site of the post-war house, the uncanny, temporally unstable and incoherent space discussed in Chapter Five. The male subjects across Harrower’s oeuvre expose a male incoherence, a fractured performativity, hysteric behaviour that subsequently causes a disruptive and violent retreat of the male subject into the female domestic household. What is inherent in the formulation is an absence, a gap, a chasm that is inherent within modern masculinity: the peeling away of the layers exposes only nothingness and incoherence. Any discussion of hysteria immediately occupies a gendered space, as analysis of the concept throughout the twentieth century has focused on the female subject through drawing on Freud’s account of Dora in his hysteria studies, and the argument for hysteria as a illness resulting from concealed trauma.7 This is despite early psychoanalytic accounts by J.M. Charcot pointing to its existence in working-class male subjects, and the fact that six of the subjects of Freud’s eighteen case studies are men.8 Indeed, Freud’s discussion of the malady in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896) focuses on the way in which symptoms derive for both men and women from ‘memories which are operating unconsciously,’ most often a particular memory ‘of a serious slight in childhood which is never overcome,’ and in doing so breaks down the older and perceived exclusive connection between women and hysteria.9 That is to say that Freud’s writings on hysteria deliberately move away from Victorian notions of its link to the wandering womb and a specifically female illness, which in turn refers to Plato’s 7 Sigmund Freud; Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1895]) 8 See Sigmund Freud; Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria; Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ in J. Strachey (ed) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-75), pp. 191-221 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ in J. Strachey (ed), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-75), pp. 212, 217 180 discussion of the uterus in the dialogue of Timaeus.10 However, the idea of hysteria as a specifically female malady has held fast across the twentieth century, especially as the illness is one of the foundational sites for contemporary feminism: a malady construed as a means of rejection and antagonism by oppressed women, as a way of escaping the burden of their female subjectivity. This is evident in the breadth of discussion devoted to hysteria and feminism, such as In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (1985), Freud and Women (1990), and Storms in her head: Freud and the construction of hysteria (2001), where hysteria is portrayed as an unstable form of subjectivity or malady that is exhibited by women, or placed upon them by men.11 As Juliet Mitchell argues in Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (2000): ‘hysteria has been feminised: over and over again, a universal potential condition has been assigned to the feminine; equally, it has disappeared as a condition after the irrefutable observation that men appeared to display its characteristics.’12 Therefore, as one of the prominent focuses of first- and second-wave feminism, female hysteria has been taken up by feminist literary critics, and is particularly evident in the substantial amount of literary criticism devoted to deconstructing the representation of the female hysteric. Gail Finney argues in her discussion of hysteria in relation to the representation of modernity at the fin de siècle, ‘just as the feminist expressed a rebellious, emancipatory, and out-directed response to the condition of female oppression…the hysteric exemplified a rejection of society that was passive, inner-directed, and ultimately self-destructive.’13 Elizabeth Bronfen in The Knotted Subject (1998) continually refers to ‘her’ and ‘she’ when discussing hysteria and representation, gendering the hysterical subject right from the outset, whilst Hélène Cixous takes this point even further, arguing that hysteria is a female state of empowerment connected with a uniquely female language that remains elusive, just out of reach: ‘the hysteric is a divine spirit that is always at the edge, the turning point, of making…She’s the unorganisable feminine construct, whose power of producing the other is a power that never returns to her.’14 10 see Elaine Showalter, ‘The History of Hysteria’ in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 11 see Charles Bernheimer; Clare Kahane, In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Lucy Freeman; Herbet S. Strean, Freud and Women, (New York: Ungar, 1981); Muriel Dimen; Adrienne Harris, Storms in her head: Freud and the construction of hysteria, (New York: Other Press, 2001) 12 Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria, (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 7 13 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Havard University Press, 1995), p. 3 14 Hélène Cixous, 'Castration or Decapitation?', Signs, 7.1, (1989), p. 47 181 The terms of hysteria change dramatically when instead of being aligned with Cixous’ divine female spirit they are brought into the frame of masculine authority. In terms similar to Mitchell, Elaine Showalter (1997) in her discussion of the prevalence of hysteria in modern culture argues that it is because of the unstable link between masculinity and hysteria that male hysteria has been ignored: ‘the cultural denial…is no accident: it’s the result of avoidance, suppression, and disguise.’15 The idea that this feminine construct can be exhibited through the masculine subject prompts unease, its very existence avoided or renamed. Indeed, the discussion of male hysteria consistently returns to the concept that hysteria disrupts heterosexual masculinity, reduces male authority, and hints at homosexuality: ‘when men with hysterical symptoms are emotional and theatrical, psychiatrists hint that they must be homosexual. Freud argued that hysterical men were sexually passive.’16 Freud suggests this when arguing that the root cause of hysteria lies with a sexual childhood encounter, either with an older adult or sibling that results in a ‘severe neurotic illness which threaten[s] to make life impossible.’17 When male hysteria is discussed in terms of the literary and cultural representation of the male subject, this belief in hysteria pointing to a disruption of sexuality, of an attack on coherent male selfhood, resulting in an a sense of enfeeblement and weakness, continues. Paul Smith (1995) suggests this through his discussion of the films of Clint Eastwood, where Eastwood’s perceived healthy, robust and iconic masculine status is threatened by ‘the dangers inherent in identification with women or with homosexuals…glimpsed in moments of incoherence or powerlessness.’18 Lori Jirousek (1999) employs hysteria in a similar vein when examining the representation of men in the novels of Wharton and Freeman, arguing that both imply ‘the male hysteric needs to recover himself,’ that the inherent troubling of masculinity through hysteria means that the male subject ‘cannot comfortably inhabit any specific masculine ideal… reducing American men to mere shadows of men [my emphasis].’19 This means that hysteria is still being placed on male subjects as a feminine construct that disrupts heterosexuality, rather than returning to a distinctly male manifestation. 15 Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 64 16 p. 76 17 Freud, ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, p. 208 18 Paul Smith, 'Eastwood Bound', in M. Berger; B. Wallis; S. Watson (eds) Constructing Masculinity, (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 80 19 Lori Jirousek, 'Haunting Hysteria: Wharton, Freeman, and the Ghosts of Masculinity', American Literary Realism, 32.1, (1999), pp. 64, 54 182 This chapter will move away from this discussion of male hysteria, a hysteria grounded in weakness and concealed femininity, when taking up Harrower’s construction of male subjectivity, instead building on the idea that male hysteria is a fuelled by an anxiety driven by the failure to negotiate the unsettled spaces of post-war modernity, from the globe to the city-space, which results in a retreat to the house – a retreat that retains rather than denies masculine patriarchal authority. This formulation moves away from the idea that male hysteria invokes a complete sense of powerlessness, or is a symptom of overt or concealed homosexuality: instead it creates a destructive male subject that brings authority and instability, power and incoherence into the feminine domain of the house, a house which, as suggested in Chapter Five, is already occupied by the multiplicitous female subject. This builds upon Finney and Showalter’s definition of hysteria as a physical malady, drawing on Bronfen’s suggestion that hysteria itself ‘stubbornly remain[s] elusive to any precise definition,’ that it is in its very nature ambiguous, blurred, and the root cause of the disorder is deferred, leaving only a ‘snarled knot of memory traces,’ an ‘unplumbable spot.’20 The form of post-war male hysteria that I am arguing for in Harrower’s work is one that implies this absence; that the root cause of trauma is always out of reach, inaccessible. Bronfen suggests that this absence is encoded in the outbursts of the hysteric: ‘hysteric constructions both protect and seal off. They prevent something from directly penetrating into or emanating out of the hole they cover.’21 Hysteria is a subject state without a direct object of antagonism, governed by the continuing layering over and over of the initial, or perceived initial, trauma. What comes out of this symptomatic and endless encoding and re-encoding by the male subject is a disrupted sense of temporality, where any notion of the present and the future are interrupted by layers of past narratives: any linearity is radically unstable. Bronfen argues that hysteria is fundamentally semantic, ‘a malady of representation,’ where ‘the symptom takes on the form of memory traces, phantasies, screen memories, somatic conversions, and…the interpretive narratives seeking to encode what evades symbolic representation.’ 22 Such narratives fuel and perpetuate the hysteric, ‘rather than accepting the solution, the undoing of the knot, hysteria preserves the knot in all its ambivalence and 20 Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. xi, xiii 21 p. 38 22 pp. 40, 37 183 inconsistency.’23 The subject will continue to repeat this pattern, fuelling paranoia and anxiety, seeking to shore up rather than untangle the knot. In his work The Metastases of Enjoyment (1994), Slavoj Žižek contends that the hysterical subject is engaging in a dangerous game of theatrics, a play of masks that are donned erratically by the subject as they move between ‘desperate pleas to cruel, vulgar derision.’24 Žižek highlights the frenetic and disabling activity that is part of hysteria, the constant oscillation between these ‘multitudes of masks,’ that disrupts not only the hysterical subject but the other subjects negotiating these traits: ‘here we encounter hysterical theatre at its purest: the subject is caught in a masquerade in which what appears to be deadly serious reveals itself as fraud…and what appears to be an empty gesture reveals itself as deadly serious.’25 Žižek is alluding to the way in which hysteria narratives, or the specific discourse of the hysteric, is a confusing blend of fact and fiction, perpetuated by an unstable notion of temporality, where that which at first appears to be implausible is found to be plausible, and that which appears true is deemed to be false. It is a malady that is intertwined with the paranoid position, which is a subject position, as Eve Kovosky Sedgwick describes in Touching Feeling (2003), ‘marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety – [it] is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part-objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one.’26 Freud’s discussion of paranoia in the essay ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) suggests the link between hysteria, paranoia and obsessional tendencies. Significantly, paranoia is gendered as masculine, where ‘a patient suffering from hysteria or obsessional neurosis has also, as far as his illness extends, given up his relation to reality…he has…substituted for real objects imaginary ones from his memory, or has mixed the latter with the former.’27 Once again there is an introversion, a turning inward, where lie ‘the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’ or more correctly, of being watched, which are striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases.’28 The paranoid symptoms of the hysteric are significant as they develop the level of aggression and perceived strength of male authority that I’m arguing is distinctive to the male hysteric. 23 p. 42 24 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, (London: Verso, 1994), p. 150 25 p. 150 26 Eve Kovofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance, (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press 2003), p 128 27 Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', in J. Strachey (ed) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-75), p. 74 28 p. 95 184 Psychoanalysts Donald and Jean Carverth develop Freud’s discussion of paranoia in the article ‘Fugitives from Guilt’ (2003), pairing the paranoid subject with the hysteric. In doing so they argue that past accounts of hysteria have ‘overlooked psychological factors as unconscious aggression, envy, hostility, malice and destructiveness’ and ‘the resulting persecutory ‘guilt’ and need for punishment,’ which occur after such a level of aggression.29 Such hostile responses, the ‘paranoid-schizoid dynamics of splitting, projection, [and] sadomasochism’ must ‘occupy a central place’ in any discussion of hysteria.30 I want to draw attention to the way in which the male hysterics of Harrower’s novels adopt many of these traits, the idea of a nameless enemy, being watched, noticed and talked about. What hysteria adds to this paranoia is the narrative, the perpetual reforming of stories, the taking up of masks, which furthers and aids these paranoid tendencies, propels and develops the unstable link between real, memory and imaginary. That is to say that what Freud labels as paranoia, ‘the service of internal research’, surveillance, ‘self-observation’ is combined with what Bronfen describes as the hysteric mode of communication, ‘a theatrical manifestation,’ which conceals a nothingness: absence.31 In his discussion of hysteric theatrics and an endless succession of masks, Žižek returns to this idea of absence, of any coherent bedrock or cause of the hysteria, of the root of the changeable narratives, and it is this inconsistency that makes the hysteric subject so unstable and threatening: ‘What causes such uneasiness is the impossibility of discerning behind the masks a consistent subject manipulating them: behind the multiple layers of masks is nothing [my emphasis]; or at the most, nothing but the shapeless, mucous stuff of the life-substance.’32 There is a sense of mobility and instability that is inherent to the hysteric, but this frenetic energy conceals a gap, as Bronfen suggests, ‘converting it into a space constructed around nothing.’33 Yet this unstable hysteric is still gendered by both Žižek and Bronfen as female, with Žižek even going so far as to state that ‘women’s division is of a hysterical nature,’ and the inherent absence that he describes is a means to exposing that there is ‘no ultimate feminine Secret.’34 29 Donald L. Carveth; Jean Hantman Carveth, ‘Fugitives from Guilt: Postmodern De-Moralisation and the New Hysterics’, American Imago, 60.4, (2003), p. 446 30 pp. 460, 446 31 Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, p. 96; Bronfen p. 40 32 Žižek, p. 150 33 Bronfen, p. 42 34 Žižek, p. 150 185 Taking up the hysteric traits of narrative and absence, and aligning these traits within a framework of male hysteria, allows for a rethinking of Harrower’s construction of the post-war male subject and gender relations within the claustrophobic space of the domestic sphere. Mark Nicholls used a similarly specific formulation when discussing the symptoms of masculine melancholia in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence’ (2004), arguing that ‘the male melancholic is able to adopt an emotional stance historically gendered as feminine, yet retain his privileged position of power and authority.’35 I want to suggest here that this stance can related to hysteria; whilst hysteria has been gendered as feminine, the male subjects in Harrower’s work are still able to retain a position of power within the domestic space, whilst faltering outside of it. This male authority is significant as it grounds the instability of the hysteric not in a submissive position, but rather in an active one, which means that the dangerous game of theatrics is not a symptom resulting from oppression, but instead one that is complexly entangled in authority, the public sphere, and a failed sense of masculinity. It is not a position that turns the male subject into a feminised or concealed homosexual one, but rather a male subject that retreats into the domestic space having failed to negotiate the disintegrating public/private divide, who fails in his public masculinity and turns inward. Therefore, I am also arguing for a spatial formulation of male hysteria in Harrower’s work, where the malady’s symptoms come to the fore in the traditionally feminine domain of the house. In all of Harrower’s novels, the paths and tracks between the public and private spheres have been trodden over, scuffed, conflated and confused, leading to a threatening destabilisation of both the public and domestic spaces; boundaries have been ruptured and are indistinct. In this way the public invades the private, gender relations are disturbed, and modern cultural insecurities begin to be played out right within the domestic space. As suggested in Chapter Five, Harrower’s construction of domesticity is not temporal, but is instead an unstable space where public and private blend, which in turn expose and rupture any sense of coherent gender identity. It is within this space that the male hysteric is placed: a male subject that deliberately turns inward into the domestic space, retreats into it, inhabits and dismantles the feminine arena. Both Burns (1986) and Mansfield (1992) allude to the unstable nature of masculine subjectivity in the novels of Harrower, with Burns arguing that the male 35 Mark Nicholls, 'Male Melancholia and Martin Scorsese's the Age of Innocence', Film Quarterly, 58.1, (2004), p. 26 186 protagonists are ‘the creators of all the narrative uncertainty.’36 The man inhabits the domestic space uneasily, and therefore, ‘cast violently out of any restraining supportive context, the male veers and vacillates.’37 I want to develop this claim further here: it is this absence of any supportive context, of any clear public/private divide, of unstable space, that results in Harrower’s representation of the male hysteric. Although Burns suggests this lack of context, he still argues that the female subjects of the novels achieve an understanding of these ‘(hyper)active’ men, that they gain some ‘grasp of the causes’ and undergo ‘complex realisations.’38 Yet when these claims are aligned within the framework of male hysteria there can be no such understanding available for Harrower’s female protagonists, who, as taken up in Chapter Five, already occupy a contradictory and unstable subject position: what is exposed is the endless layers that Bronfen and Žižek have discussed, that there is an absence, an ‘unplumbable spot’ that is a complex manifestation of hysteria. This becomes evident through the way in which Mansfield acknowledges the pervading sense of absence in Harrower’s work, a missing space, when discussing her final novel: The distinguishing feature of the power characters wield upon one another in The Watch Tower is its emptiness. Its source and centre are always evoked as absent, beyond the logic of rational or individual moral responsibility [my emphasis].39 This absence, or lack of coherence comes from the fusing of masculine power with the unstable hysteric, as Mansfield argues when discussing Felix Shaw, ‘the power he exerts on her lacks specific content and is endlessly changing its face’: a male subject who exerts authority but is a wearer of masks, and what lies beneath is only ‘nothingness.’40 Harrower’s first two novels contain male subjects who embody these traits of hysteria, particularly Stan Peterson in Down in the City (1957) and Rosen in The Long Prospect (1958). Both men have failed in the public space, with Stan’s many business ventures failing and causing him to operate on the wrong side of the law, and Rosen 36 Burns, p. 346 37 p. 350 38 pp. 352 - 353 39 Mansfield, p. 132 40 p. 133 187 unhappily married, and forced to lodge under the roof of his mistress. Both of these men have turned inward to the domestic space, unsettling and disrupting the female subjects who inhabit the households. Yet Harrower’s construction of the male hysteric is brought to the fore in her two later novels The Catherine Wheel (1960) and The Watch Tower (1966). The character of Christian Roland in The Catherine Wheel builds on the portrait of male subjectivity suggested in Harrower’s first two novels, and is a complex construction of the authoritative male hysteric that has turned inward into the domestic space. Christian exhibits all of the traits that Bronfen and Žižek label as hysteric: outbursts, threats of suicide, alcoholism, a never-ending number of lies, half-truths and personal narratives, and a succession of masks and impenetrable layers. Her only novel written in the first person and set in London, Harrower writes from the point of view of twenty-five year old Clemency James (Clem) as she attempts to understand, unravel and save Christian from his destructive pattern. The novel is a representation of the process of unravelling, attempting to get to the root cause of Christian’s behaviour, the initial trauma, but ultimately any coherent resolution is denied. The space that Christian occupies is an uneasy one: he is firmly placed in an unstable private sphere, amongst the ‘carpet-dust and lemon shampoo,’ with much of the action taking place in Clem’s bedroom, or the rooms of two boarding houses.41 Any meetings that take place away from this domestic space are still set in confused places, cafeterias, restaurants, telephone booths: places that are still in-between the public/private divide, and traditionally the realm of the feminine. There is little description of these interior spaces, as much of the novel consists of conversations between Clem, Christian and his married mistress Olive, and Clem’s subsequent far-ranging analysis of Christian’s actions. Yet there is still a pervading emphasis on modern domestic spaces that are in-between places, a mix of the public and private, of the domestic and the commercial: the boarding house itself a decidedly new post-war space, and in itself, prompting new modes of mobility and agency for the female subject. Miss Evans’ terrace house is an ‘ancient skyscraper’, barren, and without any sense of homeliness: the entrance is full of ‘shadows and the smell of cold stone and water in buckets,’ with only ‘a few ornaments and [Miss Evans’] print of Cezanne’s apples,’ whilst Clem’s attic bedroom sits ‘at the summit of all this decomposing matter.’42 Yet at the same time, a sense of domesticity and in turn, femininity, pervades: 41 Elizabeth Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1988 [1960]), p. 10 42 pp. 2, 46, 4 188 ‘Miss Evans’ sitting-room was pink-walled and cosy. Three chairs were arranged in a semi-circle round the small coal-fire.’43 Clem’s room at the subsequent boarding house of Mrs Turner is also pink-walled, ‘a glossy paint, pale pink,’ with an ‘empty jar of marvelous flawed turquoise’ and double windows, and yet it is described as an ‘odd little cell,’ ‘dankly cold’ and with gas meters that are ‘impressively geared.’44 Whilst Clem acknowledges the uneasiness and contradictions of these domestic spaces through her very apprehension and first-person description of such places, Christian is drawn to them, he has retreated inward. His window cleaning venture sees him moving between more than just the two boarding houses that Clem occupies, as he boasts that he meets ‘all these funny old girls and their lodgers. They ask me to have tea and biscuits.’45 His desire to be surrounded, fawned over by women, particularly older maternal figures, is a result of being unable to control, or have any success, in the public world. Christian is never able to succeed in gaining a commercial job, or any form of adult independence: instead he retreats inward, turning away from the outside, preferring to be surrounded by ‘absolute sweetie[s]’, and hoping to live in Paris ‘as courier for wealthy Americans travelling over there.’46 There is a distinct absence of male company, other than Rollo Lawson, who is just as hysterical as Christian, and indeed the names themselves suggest this doubling (Christan Roland – Rollo). Yet Harrower does not construct Christian as a feminised male, even though he is occupying the domestic domain and seems incapable of negotiating the outside public space. Burns alludes to this, suggesting that ‘this vulnerability is, in a sense, his strength,’ as what would be considered passive outside this domestic front door, becomes active, grounded in masculine authority.47 This strength is evident in the way Christian occupies these spaces, the way in which he moves between Olive and Clem to stand by the fire like a lord or squire, and yet ‘in a borrowed blue sweater,’ performing amongst ‘the black varnished boards.’48 The way in which Christian occupies and behaves in this space is full of the contradictions, absences, masks, and outbursts that both Bronfen and Žižek suggest are the marks of hysteria. Harrower constructs a male subject who is a gifted actor and mimic, one who can don multiple masks with ease, and yet who does so with ‘a touch of 43 p. 28 44 pp. 85, 86 45 p. 26 46 pp. 24, 33 47 Burns, p. 3452 48 Harrower, p. 24-5, p. 61 189 madness,’ a thirty-year old man who is on the one hand childish, ‘immensely frightened of himself,’ but also ‘very dangerous, and meant to be, to anyone less than heroic.’49 The way the text is constructed also denies the reader any interior access to Christian’s thoughts and process, they are instead mediated and analysed by Clemency, who consistently tries to understand why he expresses ‘too convoluted a logic too constantly,’ and the cause behind the way in which ‘he [is] recreated constantly, at will.’50 Burns suggests that Clem is ‘able to understand him, to knit together his discordant parts, see him clearly, by looking beyond these present appearances into his shattering past.’51 Yet when viewing Clem’s second-hand account in the context of male hysteria, far from producing a clear account and cause of Christian’s behaviour, it instead reveals the way in which his discordant parts are multiple and elusive. Rather than undoing Christian’s whorled subjectivity, Clem instead ‘preserves the knot,’ only furthering the hysterical narratives that Christian continually announces: ‘the foundations began to slide and slip again, as sooner or later, they usually did when Christian opened his mouth. Nothing followed from any thing else.’52 Clem’s desire to understand and attempt to ‘save’ Christian from himself results in her own undoing, in her own destruction in the domestic space. Hysteria is a malady of representation, and Christian’s hysteric behaviour is routinely enacted through narrative and language. Christian continually justifies his outbursts through speech, from attempting to explain a sudden argument with Olive that leaves her with bruises that he is sentimentally attached to, as Clem says, ‘certainly, the bruises were remarkable…he seemed quite to dote on those bruises,’ to suggesting the reasons why he is constantly cheating men and women, taking and losing their money, ‘in and out of bars, caught up in…brawl[s], and ending on the wet footpath’.53 These excuses are hysteric constructions which, as Bronfen suggests, ‘protect and seal off’; they are a cacophony of memories, images, truths and half-truths. An entire chapter is devoted to Christian telling his first narrative to Clem, with Olive as witness, intimating that ‘he should have gone…from success to success,’ that he was struck down by misfortune, ending with the pronouncement that ‘now you’re sorry for me, aren’t 49 pp. 133, 119, 219 50 p. 131, 28 51 Burns, p. 348 52 Harrower, p. 56 53 p. 118 190 you?’54 Christian’s narrative of woe is in itself melodramatic and excessive: his father’s suicide, his mother’s abandonment, and his sister’s descent into prostitution and subsequent disfigurement and death from cancer. Clem immediately takes this narrative to be the cause of Christian’s distress and violence, the reason for his turning inward, uneasily inhabiting the domestic space. This is a hysteria narrative, whether it is fact or fiction, a blend of phantasy, an initial childhood trauma, is undiscoverable, deliberately concealed. Harrower deliberately constructs the scenario to make it clear to the reader that Christian has retold this tale numerous times, especially to Olive, who tells Clem from the outset: ‘It’s not funny…It’s tragic.’55 Christian relishes in the retelling, in the playing out of his narrative that re-encodes and perpetuates his hysteria, as Clem states at the end of his tale, ‘abruptly his expression became one of almost odious gratification. His smile was small and knowing. ‘Now you’ll be able to tell everyone,’ he said, in a tantalizing voice.’56 It is significant that although Clem at first sees this moment of revelation as the end of her search for meaning behind Christian’s subjectivity, it is instead only the initial narrative. It is as if once this tale has been told Christian can now endlessly narrate and adopt as many masks as possible. Indeed, much of the action that then takes place between Clem and Christian occurs on the telephone: they are moments of narrative construction, relaying tales that may or may not be true, and both Clem and the reader are left to decipher the inconsistencies, as Clem states, ‘every few hours a new man talked to me. Continuity would be expected in vain I discovered and ceased to expect it.’57 The Christian on the phone, reduced to only his voice, is multiple, which only provokes indecision and the absence of any coherent truth in the listener: ‘What was this? This teeth-chattering, haunted sort of fear? Was he lolling and laughing somewhere behind that distracted mask?’58 This only continues as Clem imagines his presence in a telephone box (another in-between space), without money, jumping from one narrative to the next: ‘I could see him somewhere standing in a tobacco-smelling phone-box, the sick baited glances flashing round the tight little case of glass and red- painted wood.’59 54 pp. 66, 70 55 p. 61 56 p. 70 57 p. 97 58 p. 75 59 p. 93 191 Harrower continually draws on language that highlights Christian’s complete lack of centre, of coherence, of any bedrock, the absence of continuity. Clem is always sliding, slipping, and shifting in these telephone conversations, where ‘memories of hysteria, fears of suicide, recede to enormous shadowy distances, unsubstantial as hallucinations’: ‘see-saw it had gone all afternoon, one version cancelling another, jerking the scales up and down.’60 This slippage, the absence of coherence only further exposes Christian as male hysteric, with Clem unable to tear off all the masks to find the nothingness beneath them, as she suggests ‘was he lying then? Not altogether – perhaps some of the time not at all.’61 The meaning behind Christian’s half-truths, excuses, explanations and stories is perpetually conflated and confused, often meaning the complete opposite. Therefore, his narratives play out the hysteric masquerade, as Žižek contends, ‘an empty gesture reveals itself to be deadly serious,’ whilst another serious gesture will be revealed as fraud: ‘Friday,’ he breathed, smiling weirdly. ‘See you, darling. What do you think I’m going to do now – go out and get drunk?’ So that was what he was going to do.62 It is significant that Clem is only finally able to extricate herself from Christian after a hysterical outburst where he is eventually rendered speechless; where he is simply unable to continue his narratives, his masks and his performance break down, and what remains is silence which brings with it the full horror of the malady – the absence, that what lies beneath is only ‘the shapeless, mucous stuff of the life substance.’63 Christian bursts into Clem’s bedroom, once again fully occupying the domestic space, whilst bringing with him a perverted masculine authority that is frayed and fractured. At the outset, this scene highlights Christian’s hysteric ‘unplumbable spot,’ where ‘something luminous in his nature had caused a visible light to snap off’, ‘an endless phantasmagoria.’64 The masquerade surges to a crescendo, the masks multiplying. This construction clearly aligns with the unstable framework of male hysteria, where the initial trauma is constantly deferred: ‘the enormous confusion of voices and emotion 60 pp. 96, 76 61 p. 79 62 Žižek, p. 218 63 p. 218 64 Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, pp. 198, p. 202 192 gave the nightmarish effect of twelve stricken men arguing out some mysterious and tragic event in their common past.’65 But the performance abruptly ends, and the uneasiness that surrounds the male hysteric is brought to the fore when the function of speech is removed, when the disease that is a ‘malady of representation’ cannot find an avenue for performance. All that Clem hears is ‘a thin scream of gibberish’: Weirdly it ripped through the silence, gibbering shouts and warrior explanations. Nothing intelligible, no single word. Yet up and down went the tone of the noises, small animal noises, a travesty of speech [my emphasis].66 The gradual destruction of Christian over the course of the novel eventually reduces him to this state, ‘a travesty,’ where the absence of any coherence is brought to the fore, and Clemency realises her quest to understand this form of male subjectivity has failed. Harrower’s construction of Christian is representative of the speech-driven, narrative- based understanding of hysteria that I have argued for, a male formation that occurs right within the domestic space. The implication of this being that masculinity is exposed as a mimetic play on the surface, an unstable performance that plays out right within the female sphere, and when the surface layer is peeled off it only exposes absence, a gap in the male subject, right within the post-war house. This construction of the male hysteric is developed further in Harrower’s final novel The Watch Tower. It is one that again takes on the symptoms of pathological narratives, paranoia and a distinct turn to the domestic space. However, Harrower’s representation of Felix in The Watch Tower is far darker, driven by failure and violent outburst. Christian has the power to manipulate and charm, ‘the rocket explod[ing] in stars.’67 Harrower denies Felix any of this charm or the ability to hide behind good looks and charisma, and yet once again what remains for the male subject is this absence: nothingness and incoherence. Throughout The Watch Tower Felix Shaw is consistently unable to maintain any control or influence within the public sphere; business ventures continually fail, money is lent unwisely, whilst other young men around him prosper into success at his expense. 65 p. 200 66 p. 202 67 p. 29 193 Felix retreats into the domestic space where it ‘is pleasing to hear his name uttered on demand by these light, girlish voices, to have people dashing in and out of the sun with expectant faces.’68 It is in this retreat that the line between public/private is blurred and disrupted, as Felix brings his office right into the home, with the argument that ‘a man’s got everything he wants at home: plenty of space, view’: there is not separation in the space as Felix’s sense of authority and power are increasingly tied to the residential house, king of his own castle.69 Indeed, as he continues to fail in the commercial world, his attention becomes unnaturally focused on the maintenance of the domestic home, a hysterical concentration on the interior space, weeding the lawn from ‘breakfast time till about five o’clock every evening for six weeks’ as ‘without interest or income, Felix was too morose to go further from the house than the garden.’70 These actions suggest the paranoid level of fear and failure that Donald and Jean Carverth argue is inherent in the hysterical subject: The subject operating in the paranoid-schizoid position cannot escape the feeling of attack, having repudiated its own aggressive and destructive impulses and situated them squarely in the outside world. This move, however, fails to dissolve the aggression [my emphasis].71 Significantly, Harrower portrays Felix as being just as trapped and just as contained as her female subjects Laura and Clare, by an inexplicable force and sense of fear, and yet this is combined with an internal and yet outer-directed level of aggression – a contradictory position decidedly similar to the oscillation of the female subject between freedom and stasis. It is significant that the only other space that Felix finds power and a sense of agency in is the pub, or the public house, which gives him a sense of comfort in a space that is once again both public and private at the same time: ‘Nothing could happen to him here. Safety remained within arm’s reach…He could impress them all, at any time he chose. He could emerge in his real majesty and glory.’72 Harrower never gives any clear reason why Felix needs to feel safe, what he is afraid of, 68 Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower, (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1991 [1966]), p. 47 69 p. 50 70 p. 78 71 D. L Carveth; J. H Carveth, p. 465 72 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 119 194 or what he is being denied, because it is the very nature of hysteria to be without a clear focus of antagonism. Harrower continually highlights Felix’s inability to find any focus for his public failure, and to instead turn inward to enact his power upon his domestic female subjects. This manifests not only in the way that each scene of domestic violence clearly follows some form of public failure, or failure to bring other males into the domestic space, but through the way Harrower refers to the incoherence, the troubling and contradictory nature of Felix’s subjectivity: ‘he wanted very much to be generous and to have the reputation of being a generous man. He wanted so much to give, and yet he wanted not to, dreadfully [my emphasis].’73 This is the contradiction of the hysteric, and hints to the mimetic and superficial identity of the male subject. Indeed, in the limited passages where Harrower writes from Felix’s perspective, particularly in his business dealings, this contradictory and dual nature is brought to the fore: Felix deflates around Jack Roberts with ‘a great excessive shrug of acquiescence’; he acknowledges when selling his chocolate business that ‘something elusive, something desirable, something Peter Trotter had found in Shaw’s Chocolates was passing him by,’ whilst placing endless blame on a nameless nemesis, ‘someone had plotted to bring this about. While his back was turned. While he was asleep.’74 Felix’s paranoia, the sense of a nameless enemy, is intertwined with his hysteria. This alludes to a failure of Felix’s early formation as a male subject, a hidden horror which fuels and perpetuates his willingness to inhabit, and in turn, his hysterical outbursts in the domestic space. Felix finds himself with what should be the authority of the male subject, but his authority is frayed, anxious and denied, and as a result, can only turn inward. It is a position that Felix’s male counterparts can ascertain and seek to avoid, perhaps hoping to risk contamination from the hysteric male: ‘passing later in the street, signaling across a bar, whether they were winner or loser, they experienced a common revulsion. [Felix] was only a husk…Had been sucked. There was nothing more to be done with him.’75 Bronfen suggests the link between the hysteria narrative and gender performativity, arguing that the two are intertwined: ‘Given that the seminal characteristic of hysteria, once one sees it first and foremost as a form of communication, is its making visible an inconsistency between self-representation and the real self 73 p. 20 74 pp. 28, 33, 79 75 p. 52 195 [my emphasis], these acts of simulation ultimately are the staging or performative quality of gender.’76 It is this site that Felix occupies, constantly in-between any sense of coherence, always on the borderline, and Harrower repetitively draws attention to Felix’s sense of instability, occupying a ‘hot seat on the hot white footpath like a beggar full of dangerous misery,’ of his anguish, ‘quite alone in the burning sun-stricken street…gnawed at, consumed by an overpowering wretchedness.’77 These failed performances of the male hysteric occupying the domestic domain disrupts and destabilizes not only masculinity, but also the gender relations in the already fraught post-war home. Harrower’s placement of the unsettling hysteric male within the private sphere prompts a level of surveillance and scrutiny by the female subject in order to determine the root cause, the initial trauma of their hysteria. Male hysteria brings with it a destructive force that seeps out into the feminine subject, that is, hysteria is contagious, and the masculine authority played out within the domestic space has a far-reaching and binding impact on the women that occupy these spaces. As Eve Sedgwick argues in Between Men: Male Homosocial Desire (1985), ‘the status of women, and the whole question of arrangements between genders, is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women.’78 Hysteria is a fundamental link in the reoccurring gender triangles in Harrower’s work in a tightly claustrophobic space, deeply inscribed through the way in which male hysteria engenders pity, and a subsequent entrapment on the modern female subject. This develops and extrapolates the claims made by Gunew and Mansfeld about the level of pity, empathy, and subordination of women in Harrower’s work, tying the ‘vacancy’ that Mansfield finds in Harrower’s texts with the absence that is inherent in the male hysteric housed in a disrupted private space.79 I want to develop this point further and contend here that Harrower constructs a complex interplay between genders, driven by the masquerade of hysteria, which fuels the pity and empathy of the female subject, a female subject already apprehending and engaging with a new-found sense of agency: it is an emotion that constrains, binds, and causes entrapment within the domestic space. In both The Catherine Wheel and The Watch Tower, the significance of the female subject’s negotiation with and understanding of male hysteria is evident through the way 76 Bronfen, p. 41 77 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 139 78 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 25 79 Mansfield, pp. 134-135 196 in which the male’s actions and behavior are always mediated through the female’s response. This constant surveillance by the female subject is further heightened in The Catherine Wheel with Harrower’s use of the first person, as all of Christian’s masks are observed and translated through Clem’s eyes. Harrower also continually draws on triangular structures involving a male and two opposing women, which suggests an unusual performance and mediation between the three. It is not an erotic triangle, even though the women are sometimes opposing lovers, such as Clem and Olive in The Catherine Wheel. Instead of a play of desire, it is a play of pity, a play of surveillance of the male, a sense of responsibility and sympathy, a negotiation of the unstable power relationship that is fuelled by the turning inward of both genders into the domestic space. Harrower’s construction of Clem in The Catherine Wheel reveals the gradual destruction of the female subject by the hysteric male inhabiting the household. Clem, as her full name Clemency suggests, is driven towards Christian by the need to care for him, to save him, she sympathises with him, pities him, feeling that she can discover and cure his endless hysterical outbursts: ‘out of nowhere the understanding had sprung up that it was my turn to do what I could with him. He would go through his paces, and we would see who won. He would break free, grow up, I was certain.’80 Harrower takes great care to emphasise Clemency’s resourcefulness, independence, and intelligence from the outset of the novel: alone in London, studying law, and financially capable. Clem is given all of the traits of the new forms of mobility and agency opened up for the female subject, and thus is a decidedly modern post-war configuration having no necessity or desire for marriage, instead intent on entering the work force, taking up a position of public authority as a lawyer. Indeed, it is Clem who lends Christian money, who initially occupies a far more active subject position than he, and yet Clem is caught up in a cyclical pattern, caught on a ‘catherine wheel’ that sees this subject position slip and unravel. Initially, before Christian’s first long hysterical narrative, Clem is able to detach herself from Christian, sees him as eccentric and unusual but at a distance, stating ‘no, emphatically. I did not want to own him.’81 Following this, Clem then begins to analyse and assess his behavior but still refuses to empathise, as ‘his faults and virtues were on a 80 Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, p. 128 81 p. 79 197 grand scale, equally. It wasn’t possible to pity such a man.’82 This is still maintained when Christian goes a step further, involving her in a ‘a great triangular scene’ as the other woman, and yet Clem still asserts that ‘I felt nothing except a movement of faint incredulity and scorn…It was melodramatic, too unsophisticated, for my taste.’83 Yet Clem does pity him, and in doing so, is drawn into this triangle, convinced of her capacity to understand and save Christian from himself. Instead, the hysteria seeps into her subjectivity, the capacity for feeling becomes destructive, the independence suggested at the beginning of the novel is dramatically lost; it is impossible to regain. Through the playing out of Christian’s narratives, his endless capacity weaving new fantasies and memories, half-truths and truths together, Clem’s coherent subjectivity is ruptured: ‘I felt as if something was killing me. The pressure of his personality.’84 Christian’s symptoms of hysteria, the paranoia, unnamed and inaccessible fears begin to be seen in Clem’s own behaviour, there is an unusual doubling between the two subjects, as the borders between the two become indistinct. This is particularly evident in the long scenes of telephone conversations, which sees Clem experience what she describes lightly as her ‘first hallucinations’: Was that the upstairs telephone? The double-ringing? Was it mine? I listened with all five senses, it was still, incredibly, impossible to decide not only if the ringing phone was mine, but also whether or not it was one of those false alarms that started up whenever I abandoned the room.85 These unsettling moments of panic, ‘false alarms’ converge, Clem’s control over her education, finances and friends slips, she withdraws from public, retreats like Christian and turns inward into her small lodger’s room, claiming that ‘I was temporarily missing from my body.’86 Bronfen highlights the way in which hysteria, as a mode of communication, seeps out, it cannot be contained as ‘the analytic narrative can merely repeat’, taken up by other subjects.87 Just as the root cause of hysteria is endlessly deferred, ‘the language of hysteria radically defies closure. The traumatic knowledge it 82 p. 107 83 pp. 147, 109 84 p. 131 85 p. 101 86 p. 168 87 Bronfen, p. 38 198 seeks to articulate obliquely is infinitely convertible.’88 I am contending that Christian’s traumatic knowledge is converted and caught up with Clem’s seemingly endless capacity for pity, as she acknowledges, ‘I did cherish him. He was so awful.’: ‘I knew nothing, yet through him I somehow knew too much.’89 This seepage of hysteria, and the blurring of Clem’s subjectivity with Christian’s, becomes apparent in the scenes with Rollo Lawson. When discussing Christian’s instability and frantic outbursts, Rollo argues that ‘the capacity for feeling…it’s one that damages.’90 Rollo could just as easily be talking about Clem, whose excessive feeling for Christian, the notion that she ‘could have fallen on him,’ is damaging: not only to her ambitions but to her coherence as a female subject. Rollo goes on to suggest that ‘the cumulative effect of Christian’s – sins – seems to have overwhelmed him,’ and in doing so, also overwhelms Clem, she is submerged by the ‘pressure of his personality.’91 There is a battle of wills between Clem and Christian, as she hopes to conquer and overcome this male hysteric: ‘the air-waves ripped, rippled, rippled, quickly. My heart banged in my chest. I will not be broken.’92 The immersion in Christian’s hysteria has destructive consequences for Clem both physically and mentally. Harrower constructs a subject who gradually unravels, who at the outset of the novel seems to revel in coherence, solitude and detachment, and yet becomes more and more melodramatic, irrational and hysteric: ‘unaccountably a wall of tears revolved in my chest. I would not cry. I could not speak. But Christian was reviled. I was anguished. Lewis tortured me!’93 At the same time as Christian is rendered speechless, and his hysteria narratives are silenced, Clem comes undone physically with her body breaking down. Both subjects are ruptured, with Clem ‘at the basin being violently sick. Icy face and scalp and fingers…Another shattering head-splitting wave of nausea. Black and starry and cold.’94 It is only in this physical breakdown that Clem is able to remove herself somewhat from Christian’s hysteria, realising that there can be no saving, that her pity and empathy only serve to propel and fuel his behaviour: ‘to have hoped thus to aid his soul’s sickness seemed now to have the pitiful futility of signalling with flags to someone 88 Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, p. 41 89 pp. 194, 202 90 p. 123 91 pp. 209, 124 92 p. 164 93 p. 147 94 p. 210 199 blind.’95 However, there is no complete resolution at the end of the novel, although Clem is able to remove herself, both subjects are left damaged and ‘overwhelmed.’ Harrower denies the reader any coherent conclusion, what remains is the absence: Perhaps if we had found the strength to go down before each other, to be cut back, razed, we might have risen yet from the holocaust with something hardly gained and durable, instead of this.96 ‘This’ is the absence, the nothingness, the gap that is symptomatic of hysteria, and it is an absence and emptiness that lies at the centre of the Harrower’s construction of the house of post-war modernity. Harrower again draws the female subjects into the domain of the male hysteric in The Watch Tower. Significantly, it is the way in which Harrower constructs the female reactions of Laura and Clare to Felix’s aggressive and violent inhabitation of the domestic space that exposes his hysteria, and the ‘unplumbable spot’ that resides at its heart. There is a constant attempt to analyse his behaviour, with Felix’s first outburst of rage met by Clare with anticipation, as ‘her mind surg[ed] and brilliantly alert and lighted, running the scene again and again in search of clues.’97 Yet, like Clemency, Clare’s attempts to understand and classify Felix’s behaviour, particularly in psychoanalytic terms, are denied any cohesive solution or resolution: ‘[she] had studied the works and case-histories of psychologists, but after much diligent and reflective reading, she began to think: even so, even so.’98 It is the awareness of Felix’s instability, his anguish at an unidentifiable force, which forces both women into entangling positions of pity and empathy; constrained by the knowledge of his never-ending hysteria. Laura wishes Felix to be free of his ‘bondage of misery’: She visualized a Felix visited with ease, the wires that tormented and ham-strung him cut. That dense threatening blackness in him that rose for no reason, which was almost visible, making him seem physically bulkier, all shoulders, arms and head, would go.99 95 p. 219 96 p. 220 97 Harrower, The Watch Tower, p. 66 98 p. 87 99 p. 104 200 This notion of pity as a response to male hysteria in the domestic space becomes an inherently disabling and binding factor in relation to female agency in Harrower’s work. It is pity that is the emotion that binds the three subjects together so closely in an awkward and unsettling triangle, and the emotion is a constrictive and containing force over both Laura and Clare, no matter what the violent consequences of Felix residing in the domestic household: ‘Lower than dust, [Laura] thought, as if Felix had transferred the words from his mind to hers. Lower than dust. ‘Poor Felix,’ she whispered aloud, strangely anguished.’100 This again suggests that Felix is an uncanny figure, whose cause for paranoia and violence constantly evades explanation, with Laura left with only a basic outline, with only some insight into his baseness, and as a result, if left to pity him, to empathise with him. Clare is able to escape Felix’s clutches, and the house on the hill, because she moves past her pity, and recognises that there is no explicable root cause to Felix’s behaviour, that it is inherent in his troubled subjectivity, elusive to any precise definition, ‘so fundamental was his resistance to the very idea of reason.’101 Harrower allows Clare to understand that ‘Felix could never be startled or worn down to the point where any such decision presented itself to him. Some sort of bedrock that she had assumed to be present in all people was lacking [my emphasis].’102 It is in this moment that Felix’s male hysteria is most apparent, in his ‘look of peculiar elation,’ in ‘his intensely uneasy, somehow slippery, smile.’ Because this absence of any sort of bedrock brings to mind Bronfen’s ‘snarled knot,’ or Paul Smith’s ‘contradictory space’ that cannot be resolved: a male hysteric that is both constrained by the private space but also fuelled by the desire to be contained within that space.103 Harrower ends the novel decisively with the avowal that Felix’s behaviour, his hysteria, cannot be understood or defined because it is so bound up in the unnamed and ambiguous anxieties of post-war modernity: grounded in an inability to negotiate the public/private divide, to cope with the disintegrating borders between the two, and the contradictory subject position that such a disintegration endlessly perpetuates. Laura acknowledges that he is aligned with a form of misery that cannot be controlled or exposed, a ‘towering gloom without object,’ acknowledging that ‘if he understood his 100 p. 139 101 p. 143 102 p. 144 103 Bronfen, p. xiii; Smith, p. 80 201 act, he literally would not be the man who had performed it.’104 Yet Laura’s pity remains, whilst Clare removes herself from it. And at the end of the novel, that is how Felix is left, still on the borderline, still contained within the domestic space without any understanding of his own frustrated anguish: ‘Left alone, Felix cleared his throat and patrolled the room, feeling sick, grimacing violently, glaring through the windows, his hands plunged deep into his trouser-pockets.’105 Therefore, when aligning the Harrower’s construction of both Christian Roland and Felix Shaw with a paranoid and aggressive form of male hysteria, it can be seen that Harrower is engaging with a particular male subject that turns inward into the private sphere, that retreats into the domestic domain whilst retaining an uneasy level of masculine authority. Harrower’s representation of masculinity is significant in the way that it opens up questions of mimesis, of a performative identity which can only exist on the surface, an identity grounded in endless narrative and masks without any bedrock or fixed centre. It is not a form of male hysteria that is enfeebling or feminine, reducing men to shadows, but is instead a construction of male hysteria that repetitively returns to what Donald and Jean Carveth describe as the ‘paranoid-schizoid dynamics of splitting, projection, [and] sadomasochism.’106 Harrower’s claustrophobic account of uneasy spaces that lie between the public and private highlights the way in which modern space, and the retreat into domestic space, disrupts and attacks gender relations: producing a male hysteric that traverses between the domestic and the exterior but in doing so brings with him a ‘soul’s sickness’ that cannot be contained.107 Through this, Harrower opens up significant questions relating to pity, empathy and gender relations, which is the effect that such hysteria has on female agency and gender relations within the domestic space. All of Harrower’s female characters are influenced and formed by the hysteric male and their hysteric narratives that are woven throughout her novels, drawn to the belief that they will be able to find some sort of coherence and stability underneath. Each time the ineffectiveness of this level of empathy is exposed, as Clemency James admits in The Catherine Wheel, her relationship with Christian ‘seem[s] now to have the pitiful futility of signaling with flags to someone blind.’108 Harrower’s construction of male hysteria and ruptured identity gestures 104 Harrower, The Watch Tower, pp. 105, 212 105 p. 213 106 Carveth, p. 460 107 Harrower, The Catherine Wheel, p. 219 108 p. 219 202 towards a broader sense of incoherence and isolation that is driven by the disintegrating public/private divide, developing upon and engaging with the position of the post-war female subject. By pointing to this complex interplay between genders within the space of the house, and the presence of male hysteria, we again see evidence of the central tenet of this thesis: the way in which space functions in post-war modernity across the novels of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, and the female subject’s negotiation with the new forms of mobility and agency opened up after the second world war. Harrower’s construction of male hysteria points to the effect of and relation between the failed retreat of the female subject into the domestic domain, and the unstable male subject who is found to be already residing inside. Therefore, such a connection argues for the way in which the spatial ambiguity charted across this thesis is further perpetuated and disrupted by gender relations themselves and post-war masculinity. 203 EPILOGUE ‘From inside the building, they were reached by the ringing of telephones, faint music, voices at the pitch of anger or advertising, and the thuds and gurgles of plumbing. From outside, from the silky continuous tumult of the city, the rush of trains sprang at intervals and receded to leave dominant again the slurring of cars through the underpass.’ Jessica Anderson, Taking Shelter (1989), p. 67 ‘Yet all was far. What she had told him: a hemisphere of skies and seas, a world of that, with the land a mere crumpled interruption. At the close, the clustered fragile wooden city, just as she had described it, clinging to its improvised moorings.’ Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus (2003), p. 312 ‘What a slow learner, she thought, slowly. Still, the day was lovely. And now she could move on.’ Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles (2014), p. 252 As the spaces across post-war modernity brought with them new modes of access, agency, and mobility for the female subject, they also brought an underlying disruption of the coherence of space, and the movement within such a space. The disintegrating boundaries between the public and private spheres, the overlapping and intermingling between the political and the personal, the events of History and the everyday, perpetuated this sense of spatial ambiguity. The post-war space is one that is temporally unstable, charged with anxiety surrounding the level of instability, impermanence and fragility, which characterises any movement within the modern world. This thesis has charted the way in which the Australian women writers Anderson, Hazzard, and Harrower, reconsider and reappraise the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the post-war space, and the particular effect this space has on the agency and mobility of the female subject. Caught between the second-wave and first- waves of feminism, and the new found sense of independence following World War Two, the construction of the female protagonists by all three writers points to a fundamentally contradictory and multiplicitous subjectivity: a subjectivity on the one hand offering freedom, movement and access on a scale never before seen, and on the other, stasis, anxiety and constraint. Viewing the construction of female subjectivity by Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard in these terms allows their work to be aligned with the more international, rather than specifically Australian, preoccupations of late modernity. Such a move connects this thesis with the project of (re)worlding Australian authors through moving Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard into the frame of the spatial ambiguity of post-war modernity. This (re)worlding is a defining feature of the current critical accounts and debates surrounding the position of Australian literature. It is a move that is of particular importance to Australian writers, given the depth of new critical frames opened up by comparative studies across world literatures, a form of comparative study that has previously been avoided due to the prevailing preoccupation with the specific ‘Australianness’ or national aspect in Australian fiction.1 This thesis has charted the construction of the post-war female subject by all three authors through distinct spatial frames: the globe, the city and the house. Each of these frames points to the specific effect that each of these spaces has in relation to female agency and mobility. The global sphere, as discussed in Chapters One and Two, sees the radical opening up of boundaries with modernised modes of travel and transport for the solitary female traveler. Yet these modes of transportation – the plane, ship, train and car – constructed across Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, whilst offering a sense of freedom and movement, are also disruptive and uneasy spaces: spaces that disseminate and attack the female subject’s sense of agency and will. From Hazzard’s repeated construction of aviation accidents and shipping disasters, to Anderson’s in-between space of the cruise ship and Harrower’s confined automobiles, these modes of travel repeatedly pull the female subject back into a passive subject position. Following from this, Hazzard’s preoccupation with the global space highlights a post-war world that is similarly temporally and spatially unstable: politics and ideology occupy the domestic space, implicating the female subject within the public sphere, as the minute and everyday is situated alongside the global events and markers of History. As argued in Chapter Two, the female subject views this global space through a constructed imaginary, mediated through language and narrative frames, but it is an imaginary that is always partial, fragmented and occluded. Chapter Three contracts to the post-war city, a space that is a privileged site for the representation of this form of unstable modernity, and a space that all three authors return to. The city-spaces of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard are ones that are both inside and outside, cartographically and archaeologically rendered, vertical and 1 For further discussion of this debate see Brigid Rooney; Robert Dixon, ‘Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province’ in B. Rooney; R. Dixon (ed) Scenes of Reading: is Australian literature a world literature?, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2013) horizontal, overlapping and indistinct. Hazzard’s construction of the multiple and layered European cities and urban spaces allows for a reappraisal of the particularity of the Antipodean cities seen in the work of Anderson and Hazzard. For the female subjects inhabiting such a space in these fictions, it is one that is painful and burdensome. Although offering new forms of employment, the ability to be financially independent and participate in the commercial space, it is still a space that ruptures any coherence: it is constraining and disruptive. As argued in Chapter Four, Anderson’s female protagonists expose this overlap between femininity and consumerism as they move into positions of power in their own commercial ventures. Anderson’s unsettled spaces of Sydney suburbia, and the disjointed private femininity of the shop, expose a post-war female subjectivity that is contradictory and fractured, an overlapping of freedom and constraint. This unstable and painful position sees the retreat of the female subject into the space of the house, the traditional space of the feminine and the maternal. Yet, for Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard, it is a domestic space that is uncanny, full of absence and emptiness, devoid of maternal warmth and familiarity. There is a denial and refutation here of security and contentment within the four walls of the home, instead it is ambiguous and disruptive, leaving the female subject caught in stasis and confinement, once again, in a contradictory and paradoxical subject position. As argued in Chapter Six, Harrower’s construction of the domestic space, and the presence of the hysterical male within it, demonstrates the connection between post-war masculinity, the female subject and agency. The existence of an unstable masculinity lying at the heart of the home denies the possibility for any sense of security, further rupturing the traditional feminine domain of domesticity and the everyday. Harrower’s female subjects instead find themselves performing a complex negotiation with the narratives and multiple masks of the male hysteric, disabled and constrained by a never- ending cycle of pity and empathy. Thus, the final spaces charted in this thesis, Harrower’s claustrophobic and uncanny houses, open up new possibilities and points of departure for (re)considering the role of the male subject, and indeed, gender relations in relation to post-war space. That is, Harrower’s representation offers a lens through which to continue to view the construction of masculinity, and the way in which the female subject negotiates such subjectivity in the work of Anderson and Hazzard. This allows for a continued approach in accounting for their construction of the post-war female subject. Therefore, this thesis sets up new possibilities for further research in the relationship to, and connection between, the spatial ambiguities of late modernity, masculinity, femininity and gender relations. The multiplicitous, contradictory and uneasy nature of the female subject across the work of all three writers functions as a starting point in opening up further approaches for research surrounding the preoccupation of all three writers with the uneasy and unstable spaces of post-war modernity. The publication of Harrower’s manuscript In Certain Circles by Text Publishing, only this year, points to the critical resurgence and interest in the work of Australian post-war women writers.2 Whilst this thesis focuses on Anderson, Harrower, and Hazzard, it also offers a point of departure for further analysis, critical discussion and reappraisal of what is a broad field of Australian post-war women writers, including Barbara Hanrahan, Thea Astley, and Amy Witting. These are writers who have been similarly historically discounted and avoided, their position within the literary canon remaining tenuous. This thesis’ account of Anderson, Harrower and Hazzard offers avenues to critically reframe and reconsider these writers whose work has been neglected. The gaps in research for many Australian women writers, combined with the level of interest in the republication of their novels by Text Publishing, suggests the need for the continued reevaluation and rethinking of the parameters of the Australian literary canon, and the position of post-war women writers within it. 2 Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles, (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2014) WORKS CITED Agrest, Diana; Weisman, Leslie; Conway, Patricia. The Sex of Architecture, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996). Alcorn, Gay. 'Written in the Past', The Sydney Morning Herald, 06/05/12, sec. Books. 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