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The fiction of Thea Astley: "To write as a male"?

University of British Columbia

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.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-03-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6133

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace