Current scholarship on Miles Franklin emphasises the gaps and contradictions of a secretive and mysterious author. The eagerly awaited release of her private papers was marked by Paul Brunton's 2004 publication of her diaries, an edition that has been conceived and understood as a revelation of "the real Miles Franklin" (Lecture Title, State Library). This thesis disrupts the concept of a "real" Franklin by arguing that these diaries, in their manuscript form, give us more delay. Foregrounding the performative guises of the private diary subject, this thesis establishes that we are, and will always be, waiting for the real Miles Franklin to arrive. The insights of diary and textual theories illuminate Franklin, I will argue, as one who seeks the proliferative creativity of the anonymous author, and who would use her diary writing to escape definition within public discourse. Yet the tension between creativity and the daily enables us to see how potential is distorted into waiting in the surrogate space of these diaries, as Franklin seeks protection within the nostalgia of a national past and an Edenic vision of the future. This vantage point directs us to identify, as will be seen, the vulnerabilities and instabilities of this space for Franklin, as it implicates her in the dilemma of her times. In this way, we can ascertain how she holds the line as a "spotless virgin" (3 May 1942) in her resistance to the gender performances of new women, her refusal to be defined as one thing or another. This resistance to imitation will also be analysed as it plays out via the curse of Franklin's self-repetition in an Australia that waits, disrupting her attempts to achieve anonymity as the embodiment of a national literary tradition. In her avoidance of being a private text to be read, Franklin promotes herself, I will contend, as a "world classic" (Franklin Furphy 3) author of and in these diaries, resisting the transition from the readerly to the modernist writerly text at a time of artistic revolution (Barthes S/Z 4). In illuminating Franklin's exposure to these very vulnerabilities as a subject-in-process, in a document intended for posthumous publication, this thesis will establish that she has made a courageous contribution to the complexities of a particular moment within Australian modernity
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258325 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Knowles, Sandra, English, Media, & Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. English, Media, & Performing Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Knowles Sandra., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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