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Article Excerpt
The trouble with historians, Miles Franklin wrote in 1947, is that they are far too fond of `repetition'. (1) She may well have been right. This is by no means the first attempt to assess the radicalism of My Brilliant Career: in the 1980s, in what was called `an intriguing book about a unique woman', Colin Roderick sought to `explain' the radicalism of Franklin's work. Blessed with `the advantage of having known Miles Franklin personally', the analysis was frank and alarming. The `Yarra Bank tub thumpings' (72) of My Brilliant Career, Roderick tells us, are all a product of Miles Franklin's `repressed sexuality' (71): `morbid introspection, with sexual frustration, slides below the story like a tidal undertow' (75, 126).
In a style of literary criticism quite devoid of historical analysis, Roderick is not in the least bit interested in the social problems that My Brilliant Career addresses--the problems, he assures us, are all to do with the author herself. Miles Franklin is a frustrated, irrational, man-hating spinster, a woman who feared what he called `male potency', but at the same time ached `with an unconscious desire to submit sexually' (70). And of course, that denial of nature leads to personal tragedy. With `a mind smarting under the delusion of sexual discrimination', Franklin becomes `a slave' to feminist causes, first in Australia, then in the United States, and finally in England. Roderick dismisses the best years of her life as having been `futile', wasted in the struggle for women's suffrage or one of a dozen other `feminist excesses' (109, 118, 146-47).
These extracts tell us a great deal about Colin Roderick; I am not sure they tell us very much about Miles Franklin. The purpose of this essay is to recover, one might well say rehabilitate, the radicalism implicit in My Brilliant Career. It will situate the novel within the wider political discourse of the 1890s, and examine the personal context that led Franklin to write as she did. It begins from the premise that a life that somehow successfully mediated literature and politics, art and ideology, was anything but wasted. This necessitates a shift of focus: we need to look beyond Franklin's creative achievement, beyond the quest for an Australian literature and the delight in what she came to call `the magic' of our land. (2) What I hope to argue here is that Franklin's life and writings also leave us with a powerful political testament: a relentless critique of the inequalities of class as well as gender, a passion for justice, an abhorrence for what she called superstition and humbug, a republicanism that declared it `a blasphemy' to address any man or woman as majesty, and a pacifism that attributed war to the `lunacy of men' and the political disenfranchisement of women. (3) Where should we begin to examine the political testament of My Brilliant Career? I can think of no better place to begin that task than at the book's end.
As the great sun is sinking in the west, and the novel draws to a close, Sybylla writes `with much love and good wishes' to all who care to read her. Like so much of Franklin's work, it is at once a very personal statement, and a powerful political pronouncement:
I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush. I am thankful that I am a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do. I rejoice that I was not born a parasite, one of the bloodsuckers who loll on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls. (257-58)
Here you have the essential radicalism of My Brilliant Career. Time and time again, the book projects a democratic vision: a rude, frank, confronting, egalitarianism
My organ of veneration must be flatter than a pancake [Sybylla tells us] because to venerate a person simply for his position I never did and never will. To me the Prince of Wales will be no more than a...
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