Paper post - Inaugural Elizabeth Jolley Conference

 

This weekend the Romance Writers Association conference is being held at the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle and it kicked off yesterday with the one day associated academic conference. Here speakers grappled with the idea of romance writing, for instances, and how the theory fits in. Keynote Speaker, Professor Imelda Whelehan from the University of Tasmania attempted the heroic task of fitting 40 years of feminist theory as it might relate to the genre, into her keynote address, and did a great job of this and fielding comments and questions afterwards - mostly comments. I'd call that a success - people were fully engaged, thinking and running with the ideas.

Two of my fellow BLPGers (Lynn Allen and Trisha Kotai-Ewers) and I gave papers, and Lynn Allen, author of Illusions, suggested we put them up on the blog. Great idea, and I'd be happy to put any other papers from the conference up on the blog too, if people want to send them in.

I'll start with mine. I haven't given a paper at a conference for years and so made the mistake of trying to fit too much in too short a time (20 minutes is not long if you want to make little asides).

Again, ideas of how to be a little bit romantic and a loving, independent woman occupied my paper, as it did for others in the conference. Romance and feminism. I was looking at a very truncated view of feminism - a view of the Second Wave as it translated into popular consciousness, and why this became problematic for those women who wanted to maintain good relationships with the men in their lives. The paper references three books which appeal to a Baby Boomer market - Liz Birsky's In the Company of Strangers, Deborah Burrows A Stranger in my Street, and Kathy Lette's the Boy who Fell to Earth. For better or worse, you can read the paper here, and please feel free to comment or question if you feel so inclined:

Make Love, Not War: Baby Boomer (Romance) Fiction in the Australian Context

My thoughts in talking about this topic today were influenced by reading three books featuring romantic situations, each written by smart women who I believe fall into the Boomer demographic. Baby Boomers are identified by the ABS as those born between 1946 and 1964, two generations really. Although this is not a homogenous demographic, what interested me was the effect of maturity on ideas of romance, and particularly on the perceptions of those who had been young and had matured during the rapid and dramatic social change of the sixties, seventies and eighties.

I noticed that the romances portrayed in these three books were not of unconditional love, but dependent on several factors, tests that the romantic hero had to pass before being considered up to muster. I don’t think this was through any lack of courage that the protagonists had with regard to throwing themselves headlong into love, sex was had, but I did notice that their final commitment was contingent upon the bona fide credentials of the romantic hero in relation to his social responsibility, tolerance, and care for others beyond himself and the heroine. I am not claiming that this type of expanded relationship scenario is by any means exclusive to a baby-boomer sensibility, but I began to wonder whether readers and writers who fall into that demographic had their romantic ideas shaped differently to others by their interactions with many of the social movements that occurred during their youth and young adult lives.

 Was their niche in time likely to affect the way in which the writers wrote, and readers read romance? Because Boomers straddled both worlds – pre and post, I wondered if this gave them the view of an outsider, or stranger. Strangers have the opportunity to see the structures of a society differently from those that inherit it, and this can be useful in interrogating some of the assumptions taken for granted by those born into a particular social milieu. Because those in the Boomer demographic helped shape current social conditions, they don’t see the rights of women, for example, as a permanent fixture, but as something achieved within their lifetimes, susceptible to being undermined, and because sacrifices have been made, as precious and worth defending. Was this apparent in their fiction? Boomer women and men have qualitative, lived experience of the kind of societal values that were prevalent before the society changed.

Changes of that time in Australia included:

·         Second Wave Feminism

·         No fault divorce laws

·         The sexual revolution – changes in attitudes with contraception in the form of the pill

·         Wider availability and uptake of affordable tertiary education

·         Increasing numbers of women returning to the workforce after having children

·         Legislative changes to promote equal pay for equal work

·         The ability of women to take out personal and housing loans without having a man go guarantor for them

·         Vietnam marches, a movement against national jingoism, and the decline of Anzac day marches in the seventies and eighties

·         Civil rights movements and condemnation of South African apartheid

·         Indigenous rights marches, referendum supporting indigenous voting rights in the late sixties

·         Ending of the White Australia policy and gradual embrace of multiculturalism

·         Pride marches

·         All to the soundtrack of music of sixties, seventies and eighties

There were other influences, but this gives a flavour of the historical period that the generation was driving, and which influenced them.

Anne Summers’ classic book Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia had a big influence on my own articulation of identity at the time - (I believe this book is currently out of print but that Anne Summers is going to be bringing it back as an e-book.)

Two things I want to note about the book’s title is the binary that Summers identifies (good and bad women) the kind of dualistic labelling against which feminists of the time were struggling, and which implied the use of religion for political control regarding the detail of what happened in the bedroom. Sex and religion are forces of considerable persuasive power, and therefore something that those advantaged by existing power structures might feel they need to micromanage.

The second is the link to colonisation, controversial because it implies a reduction of the experience of colonised societies through an explicit link to the experiences of all women (colonised women got a double whammy) but I think the metaphor can be defended in terms of some of its connotations, in that it spoke to the implicit assumption of subjectivity and authority to represent ‘The Other’ by a sub-group of socially powerful men of entrenched predisposition. This gave permission and active encouragement to other men to view women this way too. In this context, all women were positioned as ‘Other’ relative to men, just as men of the working class were positioned as ‘Other’ by more financially and socially privileged classes, and as First Nations people in Australia were positioned as ‘Other’ by men and women of European descent.

The use of the binary is always fraught because it slips around depending upon who is saying what about whom. It is also fraught because it pits people against one another, as enemies.

So when Second Wave Feminism launched onto the scene using essentialist language such as ‘the Patriarchy’ it allowed no wriggle room for men, unfairly labelled those men who had no intention of undermining women in public or private spheres, and made it uncomfortable for women who still wanted to enjoy loving, respectful relationships with the men in their lives, and did not want to go to war with them. Even while feminism was using these strategies, feminist scholars from Simone de Beauvoir to Elizabeth Grosz, debated the oppressive effects of dualistic conceptualisation on women.

In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz said that the problem with dualism was not some sort of inherent problem with the number two, but that the one could allow no other. But by strategically appropriating essentialist strategies, early feminists likewise permitted no other in gender relations.

Regarding colonisation, Gayatri Spivak argued that there might be a case for strategic essentialism in specific cases where people are resisting oppression. By claiming a fixed position and using either/or language, the communication is clearer, simpler and more persuasive in a competitive situation. Fortunately real life is more complex, and while the essentialist militant approach of Second Wave Feminism was fast and effective in creating much-needed social and structural reforms, there came a time when it needed to transform itself, or become a caricature.

The problem with fixed argument, the us and them used by early feminists, was that it was reductionist, and did not ring true for a lot of women. The personal experience of many women is that power shifts around in private relationships, depends upon the individuals and the situation, and in most relationships neither men nor women exclusively hold all the power. Love is important too, and this is where the love “for instances” of fiction that take the reader inside people’s homes and hearts is relevant to the debate.

I hope this goes some way towards stating my position, and puts the discussion of these three works of fiction into context. Deborah Burrows’ debut novel, A Stranger in my Street, is a mystery romance novel set in suburban Perth during the Second World War. Liz Byrski’s In the Company of Strangers, is about a woman who returns to Australia from England following the death of an old, estranged friend after having being sent to Australia earlier in her life as a forced child migrant, and Kathy Lette’s The Boy who fell to Earth, is a book which largely explores a mother’s relationship with her adolescent son who has Asperger’s Syndrome. Each novel features a strong element of romantic heterosexual love.

Only one would use the overarching descriptor ‘romance’ (also mystery novel)  – A Stranger in my Street. It looks like a romance. Note the kissing couple on the cover, both young and good-looking. The other two feature romantic situations with a promise and degree of resolution by the end.

This novel features the murder of a young married woman, Doreen, rumoured to have been sleeping with visiting American servicemen in return for contraband during a time of rationing, while her husband is at war. While the local community tends to judge Doreen’s actions in terms of the “Damned Whores and God’s Police” binary identified by Summers, Meg, the heroine, is more circumspect, as is the woman’s husband who has since disappeared and is a prime suspect in the case. He is an Italian Australian, and in the climate of WWII this leads to the voicing of stereotypes regarding untrustworthiness, quick temper and hot bloodedness. Meg works in a solicitor’s office as a secretary and takes an interest in the case, becoming actively involved in solving it, not least of all because she does not adhere to the prevalent attitudes either with regard to the young woman or her husband. In this way she is ahead of her time. The stereotypical role of secretary for intelligent single women of that time is expanded to provide the heroine with a chance to show what she is made of – an active agent rather than passive female.

The book is full of strangers, thus alternative suspects in this murder mystery – the vast numbers of visiting American servicemen, Tom, the returned bother of Meg’s former fiancé killed in the war, who is cast as Meg’s new love interest, a stranger because he is previously unknown to Meg, of a different class, and changed through horrific war experience, and the murdered woman’s husband, who as born in Italy is still seen as a relative newcomer, despite his service in the Australian Army, and because Italy is an enemy in this war.

I said earlier that I felt the idea of strangers linked to a Boomer outsider experience following social change. The “stranger comes to town” trope is employed in each of the novels.  I didn’t choose the books on this criterion, but two mentioned strangers in their titles, and Kathy Lette’s had Archie, a stranger as romantic protagonist. The concept of the stranger is implicitly questioned in each of these books, as well as being more typically used as a plot device which introduces a catalyst for change.

In the Boy who Fell to Earth: Archie the stranger and love interest ‘lands’ on the doorstep in London, a brash Australian, interesting in the context of author, Kathy Lette, an expatriate Australian while in England. Though authors ‘disappeared’[1] and were seen as independent of their text for some years, it is unlikely that many people would read Lette’s novels without being aware of some of the novelist’s background, and this provides an interesting context in which her portrayal of the stranger is viewed. Hers is a mirror image of Liz Byrski’s situation, and the ways in which Byrski plays with the idea of the stranger will be discussed presently. In Lette’s book, while not a stranger, her son Merlin “the boy who fell to earth” of the title, is both deeply familiar and a ‘stranger’ in a conventional world of neurotypical people, unable to be understood or fully accepted even by his father and paternal grandmother.

Varrious meanings could be accorded the arrival of the stranger in romantic situations –

-          Potential danger including sexual danger.

-          Entering the unknown, unexplored territory

-          Excitement  - the arrival of something new and potentially life affirming

-          Anxiety and the need for increased vigilance

-          Displacement

-          Disruption

-          Loss of balance – necessary for falling, as in ‘falling in love’

-          Sexual tension. The introduction of new genetic material into an existing gene pool?

-          Re-evaluation of the familiar in light of the stranger

I realised that my assumption was that the stranger would be a man entering the world of the woman, rather than the other way around, and this is another way in which ideas with regard to who’s who are subverted, through manipulating subjectivity.

Byrski’s most confounded these expectations by shifting the meaning of stranger, exposing it for what it is – a relationship that depends on the character’s point of view. Birski’s strangers are multiple, and this accompanies the different points of view that the author employs to tell the story. It is telling that her book honours points of view of a range of women over the age of fifty, two older romantic male protagonists, and an adolescent boy. Adolescent boys feature in each of the three novels.

In Byrski’s novel the initial chapters set up our expectations with the various points of view of the main characters being given a chapter apiece. Chapter One is Ruby’s, a sixty-nine year-old Dame Ruby Medway who is immediately mistaken for someone less esteemed by the postman who needs her to sign for a special delivery, and this foreshadows a theme of re-evaluated realities throughout the novel. Then we have Lesley’s (‘traditional’ housewife in her fifties); Alice’s (former alcoholic and prison inmate); and Declan’s (the first central male character introduced, who co-inherits a Margaret River property with Ruby and who may or may not be a romantic foil for her).

The author establishes and then disrupts a series of initial impressions – strangers become friends and eventually a substitute family. Initial caution and suspicion is tentatively replaced with trust.  Ruby is familiar to herself, not a stranger in England, moving into “the company of strangers” in Australia, but also returning to a place that was once her home, and is no longer. An equivalent scenario is explored for each of the characters and the reader is encouraged to empathise more as more information is revealed. Perhaps it is not incidental that this has echoes for the current political debate surrounding asylum seekers arriving here by boat, particularly given the way in which Ruby first enters the country as a forced child migrant from England as a result of war. The stranger here is used not just as a plot device but as a way in which broader issues can be explored. Each relationship holds within it the kernel of something of much greater relevance to the society as a whole.

Of interest in this context is a fluctuating sense of identity, often tied to the discrepancy between the subjective sense of oneself and the body, and this is explored in each of these books, whether it is through the displacement and re-evaluation of female responsibility and identity when a country is at war (as in Burrows’ book) or an exploration of the aging female body and desire (as in Byrski’s). At one stage in Birski’s book, sixty-nine year old Ruby examines herself naked in the mirror and reflects upon this mismatch between her subjective sense of self and the aging body.

Earlier, Lesley, in her mid-fifties, has a realisation in relation to why she is attracted to Declan – because he makes her feel young and attractive again.

In Lette’s book through the continual re-evaluation of the central character’s role as a mother to a young man with Asperger’s, who is, not incidentally, lying in a coma, again the tension between identity as independent versus relational, is being examined. The stranger offers fresh perspectives and actions – in a world where everything else has been tried and life seems at risk of becoming more of a chore than a joy. This theme of staleness, or routine setting in, is in Birski’s book too, expressed best through the character of Lesley, who creates disruption to her own life in an intuitive understanding that something has to happen for life to be renewed. It is similarly seen, in the early stages, in Ruby, who resists change, but is forced into becoming a stranger (yet again) in a revisited landscape. And in Meg, of Burrows’ book, following a period of mourning.

Each of these books is characterised by community engagement, a driving interest by the female protagonist in the welfare of at least one other character beside herself and the primary love interest. A related feature in each of the three books was the heroine’s interest, concern, and willingness to act on behalf of an at-risk adolescent boy. All three books featured a young, vulnerable boy on the cusp of becoming a young man, in that period of life where things can go right or wrong.

In Lette’s this is the main point of the story - action and decision-making revolves around Lucy’s son Merlin, a lovingly drawn adolescent with Asperger’s Syndrome. It is against Merlin’s character that Lucy’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and those of the romantic protagonist, are revealed. It is this which reveals the true romantic prospect. Merlin’s father ultimately proves self-interested, while Archie puts Merlin’s wellbeing before his own. The celebration of diversity and responsibility to support the young (specifically a young man) seems to be at the heart of this novel, although in Lette’s case the writing had particular resonance because her own son has been identified with Asperger’s. In the other two books, the young man might represent the vulnerable surrogate younger brother, son or grandson, who, with guidance and love, will grow into a happy and well-adjusted man. These books written by women who have undoubtedly lived through love affairs and beyond the urgency of first love, expand a vision of love to include those beyond themselves, whether it is family (in Lette’s novel) or the community as ‘family’ in the novels of Burrows and Byrski.

In Byrski’s book treatment of the young adolescent male again helps to clarify character. Here the young man is fifteen year-old Todd. He works on the property and has been mentored by Catherine (the friend who has died and left the property to Ruth and Declan). Todd has been abandoned by his alcoholic mother who has moved away with her boyfriend. Another family member who works on the property, is a woman with mental health concerns, is a valued worker, but treats Todd badly. The other characters in the story, the ‘strangers’ treat Todd well, sensitive to his insecurities and encouraging of his strengths. In this novel, as in Lette’s, the meaning of family, blood and community responsibility, are examined.

The adolescent boy featured in Burrows’ book is in danger because he appears to have witnessed the murder of Doreen, the woman mentioned earlier. This excerpt demonstrates the heroine’s mettle in realising the need to adopt a perspective beyond her personal happiness:

Whenever I couldn’t distract myself with work I thought of Jimmy McLean as I had last seen him, pale and drawn and obviously frightened. Why hadn’t I realised that something was really wrong? I had been so bound up in my own concerns that I had failed to notice what was going on in my own street. Pp. 276-7

While Meg, is our youngest heroine, and fits most neatly into the traditional romantic female lead, there are disruptions for contemporary readers. Here in Perth our perceptions are affected because the novel is set locally during the Second World War. Depending upon the reader,  young Meg might now be our ninety-year old selves, our mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother, contemporary enough to be simultaneously young (in memory) and still here with the years having passed. This provides a personal, extended view for the reader – a person she (her mother or grandmother) might have been as a younger woman, and who she now is. All historical novels might play with this to some extent, but the proximity of reader to event sharpens the experience.

CONCLUSION

-          The love relationships portrayed are not conclusive – at the end of the novel there is a sense of ongoing challenges within the flawed relationships that have been forged, but a sense that the female protagonists are up to the challenge of this, provided the hero pulls his weight. It is not a fairy-tale ending but a realistic one, which can only work if the man and woman are equal partners

-          An open and accepting attitude towards sex – even in Burrows’ novel set in 1942

-          It is important to two of the heroines that the male love interest takes a constructive role in mentoring the young, and in this case, young men – that they act as healthy role models. In Burrows book, it is important that Tom takes an interest in getting himself back on track and that he has a benevolent interest in the vulnerable members of the society

-          The binary that Second Wave Feminism appropriated in relation to male/female relationships is rejected in these three novels, where men are not set up as straw men to knock down, but as real people with desirable and undesirable traits, and women are similarly portrayed as real, varied, and with strengths and flaws.

-          The influence of Boomer attitudes to multiculturalism and the permeability of national boundaries is evident in each of the novels

-          The disappearance of the older woman from active engagement, self-representation, and sex is actively resisted in each of these novels – in Burrows’ novel somewhat through the character of Doreen and the sympathetic cameo role of Meg’s mother as real person rather than stereotype, multiply in Byrski’s novel and through the heroine and her sister in Lette’s.

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[1] See Roland Barthes Essay on the death of the author