Illuminating the Word

It should be cause for congratulation that a study of Christina Stead is among the ﬁrst four titles appearing in a series called ‘Essays in Australian Literature’ (general editor John Barnes). Because only two of her novels have Australian settings, because she has lived abroad most of her writing life, because her work evades the usual categories of ﬁction, because she has no time for the literary marketplace – for a whole complex of reasons Stead’s extraordinary achievement has never been adequately recognised in the land of her birth. This study sets out, in accordance with the aim of the series, to illuminate the qualities of the writing in the two novels which are most often regarded as central to her achievement. Laurie Clancy achieves this aim in such a way as to make the texts more accessible for readers coming fresh to her highly original work. Yet it is an aim which largely precludes consideration of the novels’ social and cultural meanings, and I ﬁnd that Clancy’s attempt to extend his textual analysis to discuss the sexual politics of the characters does not make up for this lack. The distinctive qualities of Stead’s writing to which he draws attention are her capacity for observing and endowing with vivid life a wealth of ‘details, facts, objects, descriptions of natural phenomena’, and her creation of characters who are unforgettably, volubly articulate in deﬁning their reality, uninhibited by Jamesian self-consciousness. The question of the novelist’s relation to these characters is a crucial one because she deals in areas of conﬂict that are rarely encountered in literature outside of Strindberg and Lawrence. Many critics have concluded that her stance is closer to the scientist’s – even the vivisectionist’s – than to the moralist’s. On this issue Clancy makes the acute observation that her characters are not (as is often the case in Lawrence’s ﬁction) ‘obsessively rendered, but obsessed characters dispassionately observed’. He links the study of the two novels, rightly, on the basis of their shared subject and theme: Both novels display an extraordinarily relentless concentration on the growth of the imagination and the inner life of a young woman ... And both novels, ﬁnally, are preoccupied with the exact nature of love, sexual and otherwise, and the illusory forms such as egotism that it can often, especially among males, take. But the extravagant qualifying phrase here betrays a strange uneasiness with the subject, and the critic seems not to have recognised its afﬁnity with the Bildungsroman tradition where ‘concentration on the growth of … the inner life’ is the order of the day, whether the protagonist is male or female. Furthermore, the fractured syntax suffered by Clancy’s deﬁnition of theme is perhaps symptomatic of the same problem in his approach – that is, an unwillingness to see that the woman who writes about female experience and who focuses on the nature of love is asking questions and offering insights from a perspective radically distinct from that of men. In this instance, it could be more cogently argued that Stead presents egotism as a condition of survival, and love as a power struggle rather than a problem of illusion and reality. Despite his succinct observations about Stead’s impersonality as a writer, her refusal of the moralist’s stance, Clancy raises the question of sexual politics in her ﬁction by asking whether the male characters are to blame for the failures of love which she so powerfully depicts. I do not ﬁnd it a useful question, for on that very level of everyday moral judgements which it invites, the answer is ‘yes’. But what does this signify? Surely not, to put it crudely, that the novelist sets up her male characters as villains. Or can their failure to love be seen as the consequence of their patriarchal inheritance? And is the woman’s search for love to be understood as a quest for the ‘ideal relationship’ and therefore to depend entirely on these men? It is surely a patriarchal assumption that a young woman confronting her destiny, as Teresa does in For Love Alone, is simply looking for her Other Half (in either the Platonic or the colloquial sense). Clancy expresses concern that, having ﬁnally discarded the dreadful Jonathan Crow, she settles for James Quick, a man whose sexual inadequacy is, he believes, hinted at in the ending of the novel. It does indeed end on a problematic note, but one obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that no one man can satisfy all Teresa’s needs. Stead’s image for Teresa’s marriage is one of temporary escape, respite: ‘she ﬂed away down the ﬂowering lanes of Quick’s life, and had not yet stopped to reconnoitre or to see and admire the plain’. The search for a loving relationship is an element in the female, as in the male, Bildungsroman, but it is not the whole quest. The comparison drawn in my own article on this novel, between Teresa and Dorothea, in Middlemarch, is that for both women love is a mode of knowledge, an active exploration of the self in relation to the social world. As for the question of masculine failure, the issue is not about moral approval of the novelist’s characters. All of them are writ large, and the monstrousness of Jonathan Crow and Sam Pollit (The Man Who Loved Children) is that they represent a particular historical moment of patriarchal culture and society: inheritors of late 19th-century misogyny (for example, Otto Weininger), bearers of class conﬂict as experienced by upwardly mobile men, examplars of the classic masculine personality structure – control, not expressiveness, fear or sexuality and its anarchistic power – as deﬁned by writers like Reich in The Authoritarian Personality and Rich in Of Woman Born. For these reasons the issue is not, I believe, whether they are to ‘blame’ for exploiting love, but what Teresa’s obsession with Crow means, what Louisa’s successful deﬁance of her father means. Although he does not follow through the implications of the sexual politics issue, Clancy’s analysis of the novels, particularly of The Man Who Loved Children, illuminates the main features of their style and structure in a sensitive and accessible way; he also provides a useful selected bibliography.

Susan Higgins

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