Strategies of marginalisation and tactics of subversion: A study of some recent Australian women's writing

This thesis is titled Strategies of Marginalisation and Tactics of Subversion: A Study of Some Recent Australian Women's Writing, and attempts to provide definitions of strategies and tactics which illustrate how both terms relate to, or operate within, specific literary narratives. I will conduct readings of six texts: Jessica Anderson's An Ordinary Lunacy and The Impersonators, Thea Astley's A Kindness Cup and Beachmasters, Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy and Ruby Langford's Don't Take Your Love to Town. Throughout, I will concern myself with five major points: readings of Astley's, Anderson's, Modjeska's and Langford's texts which focus on the politics of their narratives' practices of inclusion and exclusion; the distinction between narratives which reinscribe marginality and those which displace traditional and reductive notions of race and gender; the difficulty of speaking about either race or gender without participating in the construction or perpetuation of essentialising definitions of either; the problematic nature of accepting the inviolable distinction between centre and margin; and the ways in which so-called marginalised groups can, and do, 'speak for themselves', and thereby subvert or render meaningless mainstream definitions of their own lives, and the centre/margin opposition on which these definitions are predicated. In the first chapter I will introduce the theories that I intend to work with and discuss where the texts that I will be reading are located on a continuum of narrative styles. In Chapter Two I will analyse the ways in which reviewers and critics have tended to produce Astley, Anderson, Modjeska or Langford as either 'mainstream' or 'special interest' authors. In Chapters Three and Four I will outline my understanding of strategies of marginalisation, and detail the ways in which reductive definitions of gender are naturalised in both An Ordinary Lunacy and The Impersonators as a consequence of a lack, in each text, of any workable alternative to the extant hegemony. Then, in Chapters Five and Six I will focus on the ways in which Aboriginals and Pacific Islanders have been routinely positioned on the edge of dominant discourse, and discuss the ways in which A Kindness Cup and Beachmasters ultimately reinscribe the 'naturalised' separation of white from black by demonstrating the political and social incompetence of the indigenous peoples. In Chapter Seven I will foreground my understanding of tactics of subversion and discuss counternarratives which can be used to resist explanations that seek to construct various groups or individuals as 'victims'. In Chapters Eight and Nine I will then conduct readings of Modjeska's Poppy and Langford's Don't Take Your Love to Town in order to illustrate some of the diverse ways in which tactics of subversion can function in literary texts. I will conclude by re-stating the difference between narratives which silence and elide the voices of the 'other,' and narratives in which the 'other' speak for themselves.