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Article Excerpt
When Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, members of the public, as well as the extended Franklin family, assumed the work to be autobiographical. Many readers wrote to the young author, directing their letters to `Sybylla Melvyn, Possum Gully'. This tendency to take Sybylla's world as reality is also apparent in historical accounts of Miles Franklin's life, and in commentary on the role of Susannah Franklin as the young writer's mother. Never the central issue of discussion, Susannah Franklin is often assumed to resemble the bitter, unsympathetic woman of My Brilliant Career, the would-be respectable, severe wife of a struggling farmer, who remains unimpressed by her daughter's literary endeavours. The possibility that Susannah Franklin, in contrast to Mrs Melvyn, supported and encouraged her daughter deserves consideration.
Susan Gardner discusses the maternal character created by Sybylla in My Brilliant Career in the light of Adrienne Rich's discussion of `matrophobia', or `the fear of becoming like one's mother' (32). Rich suggests that the mother `stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr ... This cathexis between mother and daughter--essential, distorted, misused--is the great unwritten story' (qtd in Gardner 32). Gardner argues that `the catalyst of Sybylla's writing is confrontation with the archetypal evil mother, partially overlapping with the personal mother' (32). This question of the `overlap' is not discussed at length, but is an indication of the relationship that is taken for granted between Susannah Franklin and Mrs Melvyn. In contrast to the psychoanalytical argument developed by Gardner, this essay will examine historical evidence for the similarity--or otherwise--between Susannah Franklin and Mrs Melvyn.
Although a work of fiction, My Brilliant Career appeared to mirror Franklin's life: the childhood paradise; the distant genteel home of grandmother and aunts; the constant struggle in worsening conditions on the new land; the heroine's creative yearnings and rebellious nature. The parallels between fact and fiction in the broad outline of Franklin's life have been taken to apply to mother and daughter as well. In My Brilliant Career, Sybylla Melvyn reflects on the relationship between her and her mother:
The professions at which I felt I had the latent talent to excel, were I but given a chance, were in a sphere above us, and to mention my feelings and ambitions to my matter-of-fact practical mother would bring upon me worse ridicule than I was already forced to endure day by day ... My mother is a good woman--a very good woman--and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord. (32, 33)
Marjorie Barnard's account of the relationship between Franklin and her mother takes this kind of representation of Mrs Melvyn as a portrait drawn almost directly from life. Barnard reasoned that, following the Franklins' move to `Stillwater',
Miles and her mother were out of tune with one another. Mrs Franklin was a practical woman, of sturdy common-sense, a good mother and a good wife. No matter what reverses the family suffered she never lowered her standards. Displays of emotion were quite out of bounds. She herself was stoical and uncomplaining. She expected her children to be the same. She lacked imagination and thought any sort of fantasy was nonsense and lies. (50)
Verna Coleman, in her biography of Franklin's American years, tempers these negative portrayals of Susannah Franklin as a woman hostile to cultural pursuits with the information that S.M.E. Franklin, as she signed herself, grew up in a more genteel environment, had played the piano, painted, and read Shakespeare and Milton. Coleman argues that `the armour of self-control did not entirely suppress' Susannah Franklin's artistic and independent intellectual impulses. At `Brindabella', Franklin's mother struggled to create the impression of grace and comfort, but at `Stillwater', with six children, the drought, and her husband's failing stock trade, her life became increasingly trying (24). She had reason to feel bitter. Both Sybylla and Miles Franklin express regret over the `hopeless net of circumstances' that conspired to waste their mother's `immense capability'. (1)
Despite Coleman's efforts to understand Susannah Franklin, her ensuing discussion of Franklin's early writing career does not offer a nuanced account of Mrs Franklin's behaviour. Like Barnard, Coleman takes the character of Mrs Melvyn as a guide to the personality of Susannah Franklin, concluding, in relation to the reception to My Brilliant Career, that `since supposedly fictional Sybylla's life so closely paralleled Stella's, the unsophisticated country people of her blood or...
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