In the 1980s, Thea Astley asserted that she had "to write as a
male" to acquire literary acceptance in the 1950s and 1960s. In
making this statement, Astley outlined what it meant to write as
a male and to write as a female. The increasing critical use of
these statements as an explanation for the subject matter and the
style of Astley's fiction, however, ignores the gendered reception
of her work, generates misconceptions regarding her early novels,
undervalues the continuity of her feminist critique of what she
calls the "genital loading" of Australian culture, and negates her
attack on genres, narratives, and plots which constrain women.
Using the theoretical work of Raymond Williams, Kaja Silverman, and
Rita Felski, this thesis proposes that Astley be read not in terms
of "masculine" or "feminine" writing, but in terms of her political
commitment to feminism. To contextualize Astley's comment, Chapter
One emphasizes the masculine bias of the literary debates in. the
1950s. Chapter Two argues that the "misfit paradigm" used to read
Astley's fiction obscures the feminist and class themes of her
work. To counteract the view that Astley's early fiction
concentrates on male characters, Chapter Three focuses on Astley's
representation in The Slow Natives (1965) of wife and prostitute,
and on Astley's critique of the mutually reinforcing genres to
which they belong: romance and antiromance. Chapters Four, Five,
and Six examine, respectively, A Descant for Gossips (1960), An
Item From the Late News (1981), and Reaching Tin River (1990). This chronological sequence establishes the consistency of her
feminist critique of Australian society. It also accentuates the
theme of masculinity in crisis and foregrounds the way in which
critics have gendered Astley's work as feminine. These chapters
consider the relation between melodrama and masculinity in A
Descant for Gossips, the connection between Astley's use of the
female "I" and the appearance of the transvestite in An Item From
the Late News, and the political implications of the womb as a
metaphor, for escape in Reaching Tin River. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/6133 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Milnes, Stephen |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 17605568 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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