A Well Depicted Woman

Here it is, nearly Christmas, and as usual, the list of Books I Have Read is running into the hundreds, and I have that end-of-year mad, fleeting illusion that also afflicts exam-fevered students … that somehow it All Adds Up. I won’t make the mistake here, though, of trying to make the following selection of books add up in any cosmic way. I’d just like, in quite a pedestrian way, to take another look at some new fiction by Australian women writers to see whether any new ground has been broken in the depiction of women characters. This year, the book that had the most marked emotional impact on me was Barbara Hanrahan’s Goodbye, Mr Moon, her posthumous novel, which I read and reviewed soon after her death. For clout of another kind, that’s followed by Marian Eldridge’s Springfield, and the other books I want to consider are Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino, Gabrielle Lord’s Whipping Boy and Gabrielle Carey’s In my Father’s House. Lots of things beside treatment of women characters distinguish these books severally and jointly, but this seems at least as important as anything else. Of all of these books it can be said that they are ‘mature’ works. All focus on a central woman, fictional or, in Carey’s case, ‘real’. Cosmo Cosmolino centres on the private highs and lows of Certain Women, particularly Maxine and Janet. Springfield focuses on one young woman (though devoting a fair amount of attention to the man with whom she shares different sorts of borders). Hanrahan has created Alexandra May Rodda, on the point of leaving this life into which she was born in Adelaide in 1901. Carey’s strange, cold book is about her own largely unresolved relationship with her father. Lord’s investigator-heroine is professionally independent and competing in a man’s world, most closely tied to her eight-year-old son whom her enquiry into organised paedophilia endangers. Springfield seems to me to be the most daring of these books, in that Eldridge makes a woman character who is very like the self-absorbed and emotionally damaged male in a thousand movies, and thereby courts extra opprobrium from the reader. Gita, though, is young and female and the target for predatory males whatever the limitations of her capacity for response. She has a child, to whom she is strongly bonded, but she has lapses that might be considered unforgivable in a woman. Her behaviour is explained (in passing, never in detail) by references to possible early abuse, but Eldridge is careful never to explain it ‘away’. Oh, shit, Jarrah! Give me a break, will you! The reason I’m going somewhere by myself for a bit is ‘cause I’m full up to here with hassles like that, and I’m not telling anyone where I’m going … She’s not in great shape – she’s an ex-addict – but she’s very recognisably a survivor. Gita is a second-wave hippie (‘… F&V …; rye, butter, soy milk, kahlua, patchouli … incense … tofu, tampons’) who walks into a very nouveau-70s situation down on a farm out of Melbourne, in an uneasy alliance with one of the down-home boys, the difference being that he’s a twenty-years-on Viet. vet. as unstable as she, but more dangerous in being the trained killer, however angst-ridden. Eldridge resurrects a lot of old liberationist hippie cosmology in Springfield, but Gita is under no illusions that men will be colleagues with women in the Great Struggle (she has problems trusting women, too). Do, you have to do. It isn’t enough to be, women must do as much as men do. I know that. But how can a woman do until she is? Damaged as her sensitivities to other people are, Gita has an inviolable sense of self to which she always returns – part of this is her insensitivity (again, always more forgivable in male characters and possibly part of their charm – certainly according to Garner, see below). Mary Springfield, Gita’s elderly neighbour, deserves mention, too, but all I can do here is highly recommend the book. Barbara Hanrahan’s ‘I’-characters are always a touchstone of impermeability in her autobiographical works; not insensitive, just alert to their own uniqueness from an early age and locked inside it, however strong their attempts to understand how everyone else works and to conform. In Goodbye, Mr Moon, the speaker is May Rodda, born at the turn of the century and almost but not quite parodically ‘ordinary’ in every sense the word could have for a typical working woman of the time. She is not unmoved by marriage and children, but she has returned to uninterrupted communication with herself at the close of her life. This book is an attempt to make uniqueness come through, come true, via the profound quality of her ordinariness – where Hanrahan has always believed the mysterious, but in this case also the mystical, lies hidden. ‘And Joss House kissed me again, and said his favourite saying about how he’d come through like a leaf which had landed very good.’ May’s conviction of her own specialness is not shaken by anything that happens. It’s based partly on a sense of her genuine talents and partly on family mythology: ‘Grandpa Rodda had built every one of those houses, and, pushing Lillie, I liked to think of myself as the secret Queen of Beauville.’ It was impossible to read May – especially her eccentric musings on the heavens – without thinking about the stage in Hanrahan’s life that produced her. I have to say – moving now to Cosmo Cosmolino – that Maxine and Janet were a serious disappointment. In a review of Springfield recently, I said that Eldridge has produced a new Monkey Grip with the difference that the central female is a self-sufficient and a survivor. Janet and Maxine, in Garner’s latest, are older and a) nuttier or b) more despairing, This is rendered ‘understandable’ and the writing is inspired in long stretches, but the women are too much the playthings of their neuroses to be inspiring. (Of course I don’t have the right to demand they be otherwise, but they depressed me.) Janet has returned to her house, scene of her early and vital, crowded youth, sans communal colleagues, sans man, sans children, sans joie-de-vivre, and Maxine is there: pitifully but simply whacko. ‘Have you got any children?’ said Janet suddenly. ‘No’ said Maxine. ‘And is that something you … regret?’ ‘For a long time,’ said Maxine, coming forward, still holding her cuffs closed from inside, ‘I thought it must be my destiny not to. But now I’m ready. I’ve got the message. By the end of next summer I’ll have one. … See – angelic beings aren’t necessarily aware of their status …’ Maxine stands for that old female connectedness with mystery and the hidden things of the universe, but Garner turns her into a real angel and thereby cancels out her relevance for a lot of readers, notwithstanding the number of things about which Maxine is uncannily right and the obvious corollary that Janet’s dry empiricism doesn’t prevail either. I ‘liked’ Janet, though, until she betrays all her good sense and goes for Alby in a big way. There was no hurry to move on. Give the girls a hand to sling some paint and Polyfilla round. Janet had had the stuffing knocked out of her; but she seemed pleased to see him. (etc.) And Ray, the other male character who counterpoises the women, is profoundly unpleasant and yet somehow his judgements carry conviction in the context of the novel: ‘You’re a loony,’ shouted Ray. ‘You’re a nutcase. They used to burn people like you.’ Declaring his intention to kill Maxine, he ‘rushed about the room, butting the walls with his shoulders. Janet had never seen anyone in such a frenzy: she gnawed at her nails: it was wonderful.’ Well, that more or less did for Janet, for me. Maxine vaults ‘lightly into the air’ and is well out of it, dropping the burden of self, ‘for I was over: I dropped off her like a split corset: there was no more “I”.’ You can be happy for Maxine, but where does it all leave a girl? (Taking this line is to be unfair to the many brilliant bits of writing and insight in the novel, for which I can only apologise.) Gabrielles Carey and Lord offer one real-life and one imaginary female lead in In My Father’s House and Whipping Boy. The first – Gabrielle Carey herself, is a fascinating muddle of daughterhood. The book is as much about Carey, often unconsciously, as about her father, who committed suicide the day before Carey was about to return home, with her new baby, from Mexico after a long absence. The novel is an attempt to lay his ghost, but succeeds mainly in stirring up old undead resentments. In her early thirties, she has retreated from that early defiant Puberty Blues stance into a strong if unconventional alliance with the Fathers in general: the Fathers of the church, especially – suppressing doubts (surprisingly few) by concentrating on the possibilities of liberation theology. She has gone off to prove her bona fides by living in a third-world country and marrying a Mexican labourer, with whom she has a child. When she later decides to return home to visit, her father takes the opportunity to die. This was an unsettling book precisely for the agenda Carey has adopted as her own, viz. the Good Daughter/Good Woman who mistrusts earthly joys and takes instruction from Men of God as to how to repay her unidentified wrongdoing. The book indicates a strong line feminist readers with psychoanalytic learnings could take on all this (having regard to what emerges about the absent and punitive father). Carey is a female ‘character’ in the sense we have all been created by families, and this is a good book to check fictional females against. Which leaves Gabrielle Lord, whose Cass Meredith is a high-flier with a moral mission that pits her against renegade ‘fathers’ whom even the massed fathers with all their fear of the feminine ‘sphere’ denounce: the participants in a child pornography racket. Lord takes on Big World politics in her admirable up-front way (remember Salt, not long ago), but here the story turns more clearly on the tangled allegiances of the female investigator, who makes an interesting study because she seems to me to draw some of Lord’s own antagonism and anxieties. Meredith is a divided and instructive character, impulsive and with a short fuse that might well have been allotted to a male: it is allotted also to her male counterpart – but he comes out of the whole thing with his judgement less in question – even though his social pathology is much more pronounced. This is disturbing, and so is Cass’s vulnerability to the sharp operator from a private outfit. Her role in the fictional outcome of the book is to be the saviour of her threatened son (with crucial male help). Her dour offsider turns out to be the one with the inner power to fall back on: ‘I was able to start moving when that right time came. It was the “Tao”, non-interference until the right moment.’ Cass looked at him and frowned. And Cass is moved to think about chucking in her job (as who wouldn’t, given what nearly happens to her son), and yet … ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Cass finally said. “I have to rethink my whole life. I don’t know much at all.” Carrigan is awarded the final wise word: (“That’s a very powerful position to be in.”) These are all fascinating females, but none of them is the one I was hoping for. I’ve just read a book by a man (Chris Wilson) called Fou, which might be it. I’ll let you know.

Catherine Kenneally

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