The creative component of my doctoral thesis articulates narratives of female
experience in Colonial Australia. The work re-contextualises and re-narrativises
accounts of events which occurred in particular women�s lives, and which were
reported in nineteenth century newspapers. The female characters within my novel are
illiterate and from the lower classes. Unlike middle-class women who wrote letters
and kept journals, women such as these did not and could not leave us their stories.
The newspaper accounts in which their stories initially appeared reflected patriarchal
(and) class ideologies, and represented the women as the �other�. However, it is by
these same textual artefacts that we come to know of their existence.
The multi-layered novel I have written juxtaposes archival pre-texts (or intertexts)
against fictional re-narrativisations of the same events. One reason for the use of this
style is in order to challenge the past positioning of silenced women. My female
characters� first textual iterations, those documents which now form our archival
records, were written from a position of hegemonic patriarchy. Their first textual
iteration were the record of female existence recorded by others. The original voices
of the fictionalised female characters of my novel are heard as an absence and the
intertext, as well as the fiction, now stands as a trace of what once existed as women�s
lived, performative experience.
My contention is that by making use of concepts such as historiographic metafiction,
transworld identities, and sideshadowing; along with narrative structures such as
juxtaposition, collage and the use of intertext and footnotes, a richer, multidimensional
and non-linear view of female colonial experience can be achieved. And
it will be one which departs from that hegemonically imposed by patriarchy. It is the
reader who becomes the meaning maker of �truth� within historical narration.
My novel sits within the theoretical framework of postmodern literature as a variant
on a new form of the genre that has been termed �historical fiction�. However, it
departs from traditional historical fiction in that it foregrounds not only an imagined
fictional past world created when the novel is read, but also the actual archival
documents, the pieces of text from the past which in other instances and perhaps put
together to form a larger whole, might be used to make traditional history. These
pieces of text were the initial finds from the historical research undertaken for my
novel. These fragments of text are used within the work as intertextual elements
which frame, narratively interrupt, add to or act as footnotes and in turn, are
themselves framed by my female characters� self narrated stories. These introduced
textual elements, here foregrounded, are those things most often hidden from view
within the mimetic and hermeneutic worlds of traditional historical fiction. It is also
with these intertextual elements that the fictional women engage in dialogue. At the
same time, my transworld characters� existence as fiction are reinforced by their
existence as �objects� (of narration) within the archival texts. Both the archival texts
and the fiction are now seen as having the potential to be unreliable.
My thesis suggests that in seeking to gain a clearer understanding of these events and
the narrative of these particular marginalised colonial women�s lives, a new way of
engaging with history and writing historical fiction is called for. I have undertaken this
through creative fiction which makes use of concepts such as transworld identity, as
defined by Umberto Eco and also by Brian McHale, historiographic metafiction, as
defined by Linda Hutcheon and the concept of sideshadowing which, as suggested by
Gary Saul Morson and Michael Andr� Bernstein, opens a space for multiple historical
narratives.
The novel plays with the idea of both historical facts and historical fiction. By giving
textual equality to the two the border between what can be considered as historical
fact and historical fiction becomes blurred. This is one way in which a type of textual
agency can be brought to those silenced groups from Australia�s past. By juxtaposing
parts of the initial textual account of these events alongside, or footnoted below, the
fiction which originated from them, I create a female narrative of �new writing�
through which parts of the old texts, voiced from a male perspective, can still be read.
The resulting, multi-layered narrative becomes a collage of text, voice and meaning
thus enacting Mikhail Bakhtin�s idea of heteroglossia.
A reading of my novel insists upon questioning the truthfulness or degree of reliability
of past textual facts as accurate historic records of real women�s life events.
It is this which is at the core of my novel�an historiographic metafictional
challenging by the fictional voices of female transworld identities of what had been
written as an historical, legitimate account of the past. This self-reflexive style of
historical fiction makes for a better construct of a multi-dimensional, non-linear view
of female colonial experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219548 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Herbert, Elanna, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Communication Media & Culture Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Elanna Herbert |
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