Introduction
the dominant figures of Australian social mythology are all male - the bushman, the Anzac, the sporting hero, <...> Australian <...> writers have always been equally concerned with female experience of Australian life, or, indeed, female experience in general. (Goldsworthy, XVI)
Since the beginning of our century, Australian short story writers have extrapolated a broad spectrum of social topics. Significantly, most of them depict the fate of ‘outsiders’ like children, females and foreigners. In the centre of my interest stands the question in what specific way they have fictionalized women’s role.<1> Do they perpetuate rather stereotypical views on the members of the ‘other sex’ or do they prefer to portray them as human individuals by drawing away the reader’s attention from alleged ‘womanish’ attributes? To which degree do Australian fiction writers collide with those criteria of criticism which have been uttered by American, British or German feminist writers? In which regard do their short stories illustrate women’s harmful contemporary social background? How do time and history intervene into their writing? What role do women hold in a social landscape, which originally had exclusively been frequented by males?
To extrapolate a range as diverse and colourful as possible, my survey tries to present a chronologically arranged cross-section of female portraits as they are drawn in Australian short stories. Reaching from late 19th century female writers such as Barbara Baynton up to contemporary literates such as Murray Bail, I selected twelve exemplary stories which I exploited to draw an underpinned image of women as they appear within their Australian social network. Naturally, both time and history intervene in the writer’s portraits. While early 19th century female writers such as Henry Handel Richardson experienced a socio-cultural context where the traditional conception of women had been held together by the cement of strict moral principles, those writers who followed their feminist footprints gained by far more freedom in uttering critique with regard to the ‘woman question’. Up to the mid-twenteeth century most of the female characters have been depicted as “passive objects of or victims of male decisions and actions“ (op. cit., XVI). Thereagainst, contemporary Australian writers tend to depict female characters as enlighted human beings who are able to create a ‘life of their own’. No matter, in what specific way they are finally portrayed, significantly, women are never dismissed as one question among others. Quite the reverse, they often hold the position of the protagonist.
Surely, it would go beyond the scope of these examinations to give a detailed, textimmanent analysis of each story. Consequently, I tried to crystallize out those passages which exemplify the views and behaviour of female characters most urgently and refrained from setting high value on the general ‘message’ in the story itself. I am aware that this strategy runs the risk of ‘shallowness’ and superficiality. Nevertheless, I considered it to be more fascinating to concentrate on the great variety of female existence as it is portrayed through the skilled magnifying glass of Australian writers.
<1> In her Introduction, Goldsworthy (XVI) makes the interesting remark, that “female characters
almost always depicted in a sympathetic light.“
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