Retelling Stories Of Women In Bush:A Feminist Reading Of Barbara Baynton’s Works

Barbara Baynton is a 20th-century Australian bush writer who is the contemporary of Henry Lawson.Baynton’s works mainly describe the difficult life of bush women,especially their tragic experiences of being trapped by the natural environment and men.Baynton changed the male bush myth that was widely praised by nationalist writers,and paid attention to the fate of bush women.Baynton used her unique writing methods to expose the truth of the survival of women in the bush.This thesis reveals Baynton’s feminist thought and her sympathy and concern for the bush women by analyzing the image of her only novel Human Toll and her short story collection Bush Studies.Australian native researches on Barbara Baynton began in the 1960s with A.A.Phillips’s attention to writers in the 1890s,especially Baynton,but the current domestic focus and researches on Baynton’s novels have not yet been deepened.Much researches have focused on feminism and thematic and writing characteristics.Few scholars in China systematically analyze and summarize the feminist ideas of Baynton and her concern about the fate of women in the bush.The starting point of this study is that the Australian national mythology is a myth of masculinity construction without a place for women.The ingenious use of irony in Baynton’s works has aroused people’s attention to the truth,and also caused the questioning of these idealized bush heroes as the incarnation of Australian national identity.This thesis analyzes the image of bush women created in Baynton’s works from the perspective of feminism and theory of power and discourse.It praises the contribution of Baynton to Australian literature.She reveals the absence of women in Australian society in the nineteenth century and causes the public to pay attention to the true living conditions of bush women and to question the male bush myths.This paper is divided into five parts.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to Barbara Baynton and her works Human Toll and Bush Studies,points out the creative ideas and purposes of this study,and summarizes the related researches at home and abroad.The second chapter introduces feminist literary criticism and theory of power and discourse.The third chapter analyzes the masculine construction of Australian national mythology.This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of female writers absent from national literature in the 19th century and analyzes Australian national mythology from cultural and social aspects.This part points out that Australian national mythology is a male construction that establishes literary values with the male norms of realism and local writing and exclude women in all aspects of society.The fourth chapter analyzes Baynton’s subversion of national myths.Baynton’s texts in content and themes expose the truth of bush life,the hypocrisy of"mateship"and the low status of women and subverts the traditional roles of women in her works,breaking the inherent impression of women image in national mythology.In chapter five,Baynton constructs the subject status of women in the bush.Baynton reinvents the stories of bush women,making them the protagonists in their stories,builds a group of women image who have rebellious spirits and pursue their spiritual independence and gives them full discourse power to reverse the image of the females who were distorted by male writers in the past.The final chapter is conclusion,which summarizes the paper,pointing out Baynton’s feminist views and her contribution to the improvement of Australian women status and the challenges of male positioning in Australian culture.