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Article Excerpt
In 1903 A.G. Stephens, literary editor and mentor, wrote to Miles Franklin about the `bruise' scene in My Brilliant Career. `Is this your experience', he inquired. `Does it represent your own feelings? Why should the marks and pain of bruises give you pleasure? Do you mean that you or another woman likes to be hurt and bruised by the man she loves? Scientifically, this is a very interesting question. I wish you would write fully to me about it' (Stephens to Franklin 29 July 1903, Franklin Papers 333). Franklin, if she replied at all, must have equivocated or ignored the question. Seven months later, Stephens was again trying to prise a `secret' out of her. `Bless your innocent heart ... Thought you had something really intimate and tender to confide ... cancel innocent heart above if incorrect' (Stephens to Franklin 8 March 1904 Franklin Papers 336). At the same time Stephens was trying to protect the `innocent' Franklin from the overtures of experienced men like Norman Lindsay. Stephens' relationship with Franklin was saturated in complex and ambivalent erotic and patriarchal investments. In one sense his inquiries were part of a longer masculinist tradition, a puzzled fascination with women as unknowable territory, Freud's `dark continent', to be explored, mapped, tamed, possessed, and exploited. There are also age-old literary questions implicit in these inquiries--what is the relationship between the text and the writer's life? Whatever the personal experiences underpinning MBC, what matters is how they are transformed into literature. Stephens, like many subsequent critics, have seen My Brilliant Career as an intriguing and insightful window onto the world of women in colonial Australia (1) But this sense of looking into the hearts of women works through an evocation of men and relationships between men and women. Franklin's depictions of men are the undertows, pulling the text in important directions.
The relationships between Sybylla Melvyn and the men in My Brilliant Career are, as many critics have noted, difficult and troubled. Some of this arises directly out of the tensions in the genres Franklin plays with in the novel. As Ian Henderson (165-73) and others have noted, My Brilliant Career is a complex mix of realism and romance, but one where romance is continually undercut and subverted, threatening at times to fall into parody. (2) At the same time there are tensions between the nationalist literary elements of the novel and its emotional core. (3) Some of it also arises, as Frances McInherny (71-83) has argued, from the complex imperatives of the feminine and feminist literary traditions Franklin embraced. In a number of women's novels of the nineteenth century the contradictions in the status and role of women in society were played out with particular intensity and force. The difficult choice between marriage and a career, when career could spell poverty and loneliness, while marriage involved degradation, was a persistent theme in the English female literary tradition. Equally Sybylla's punishment (exile to the M'Swat's), in part a consequence of her ambivalence about marriage, is reminiscent of the fate of other characters in such novels as Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey. Moreover the excoriating self-loathing that seems to permeate the representation of Sybylla's appearance, that both puzzled and appalled Colin Roderick (64-70), seems to bias her relations with men from the very beginning. Here again such sentiments had their place in the female literary tradition (Mathew 9), stretching back to Mary Hays (1796), the most striking resemblance perhaps, being to the work of late nineteenth-century English poet Amy Levy (Beckman).
Part of the critical effort in reading My Brilliant Career has been to uncover the social, political and autobiographical elements of the text. (4) This focus is in part fostered by the diverse ways in which the novel itself addresses the reader--as a `story about myself', an autobiography, a story without plot, and as a yarn. (5) Franklin's own relations with men, especially after the publication of My Brilliant Career, were certainly complex. (6) Despite the patronising and patriarchal attitudes of contemporary critics and acquaintances such as Henry Lawson and Havelock Ellis, who disavowed the emotional core of the novel in an effort to pigeonhole it as a diverting piece of bush realism, other men were excited by the author and her text. (7) Norman Lindsay certainly found Franklin `comely', although this hardly differentiates Franklin from the majority of her sex (Bohemians of the Bulletin 143-45). More revealing perhaps is the rather fevered and intense correspondence between Stephens and Franklin over the `bruise scene'. Stephens' evident interest in whether this arose from her life or the life of other women suggests that the barely suppressed sadomasochistic element in the Sybylla/Harry relationship was a source of considerable erotic investment on the part of some influential readers and critics.
But there is something more to male-female relations in My Brilliant Career than genre, literary tradition and autobiography. My Brilliant Career is also a savage political indictment of heterosexual relations in Australian colonial society, and a remarkably intriguing one, especially given her age and social and political context. Critics have been right to detect a strong feminist strand in the text, focusing on her condemnation of marriage as the main social option for colonial women. (8) This is indeed a key element of the novel, the one that grounds the central dilemma facing Sybylla--if she refuses marriage because it represents enslavement, is the only alternative an oppressed life as governess for people like the M'Swats? Sybylla struggles to find a third way, life as a writer. Much of this feminist criticism has focused on Franklin's portrait of women's lot in Australia, but these political discourses work through the portrayal of male and female characters and more importantly the specific relationship of Harold and Sybylla. In developing these elements of the novel Franklin's assessment of men is on the whole particularly harsh. In part the caricature quality in some of the depictions of men underpins the assessment of some critics that the emotional core of the novel is shallow and confused (Mitchell 101-02). These dismissive portraits of men serve to reinforce the logic of choosing a career over marriage. More interesting, however, is the representation of the key male character, Harold Beecham, which is riddled with ambivalence and contradiction. Through Harold, Franklin seems to be grappling with some complex personal, erotic and political problems, and these are not really resolved or only partly and unsatisfactorily resolved, in the novel. Franklin seems uneasy about colonial masculinity, but time and again recoils from its implications, cutting back and forth between a sympathetic representation of Harold as a good, kind-hearted, skilled bushman, and a deeper sense of him...
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