From Transgression To Transcendence Helen Garner's Feminist Writing

Helen Garner(1942-),one of Australia's most popular and contentious contemporary women writers,is a prominent figure in Australian women's fiction and an icon of Australian literary feminism.Her reputation was established in 1977 by her first book,Monkey Grip(1977),an undisguised feminist novel with mixed reviews, and consolidated in 1984 by her third book,The Children's Bach(1984),which won almost universal approval.But in 1995,with the publication of her first nonfiction book The First Stone:Some questions about sex and power(1995),her feminist identity was interrogated by some of her feminist allies.As the first woman writer to have been awarded Australian National Book Council Award,Garner marks a turning point in Australian women's writing.She is also the first in contemporary Australian feminism to challenge the gains of feminism and illuminate the fault-lines in feminist theory.A public figure and a famous writer,Garner has acquired a name for her work, but that name is also a contested site of meaning and an unstable signifier.Thirty years ago,Garner started her writing life with the inspiration of feminist ideology,which,since then,has permeated her work.Unlike other contemporaneous women writers,Garner never disguised her feminist identity.Instead she declared publicly that "If I had not been a feminist,I quite probably would not have become a writer." This statement has provided the basis for a feminist interpretation of her work. Following waves of feminist thought,Garner started writing fiction in search of physical liberation from patriarchal repression,then turned to soul-searching in women as a means of subverting duality,and finally reached a state of transcendence as a post-feminist writer,especially of nonfiction,hoping for the peaceful coexistence of men and women.During the past thirty years,she has been writing about women in their domestic lives,which,by patriarchal literary standards,might be considered meaningless and artless.But Garner has sustained popularity with her "small scope" and her feminist insights.She has become a unique feminist in Australian feminist history.The objectives of this dissertation are threefold:to examine Garner's reputation and reception in their cultural and historical contexts;to explore the subject matters and narrative modes of Garner's writing by using feminist literary theories; and to assess how Garner's writing and life interact with each other and fluctuate with the development of feminism.This dissertation includes three main chapters apart from the introductory and the concluding paragraphs.The introduction chronologically reviews criticism relating to Helen Garner to show how Garner has been usually accepted but sometimes rejected as a feminist icon in the Australian literary circle,and to justify the necessity,the possibility and the significance of a feminist-oriented study of Garner in a Chinese context.Since 1977 and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,Garner's authorial identity as a feminist writer had been questioned repeatedly.Historically,her reputation has revolved around the ongoing debate about sex and gender and her right to be called an author. Her thirty years of writing fall into two phases,with the year 1995 being the watershed that separates her fiction from her nonfiction writing.In all her work of both fiction and nonfiction,she explores women's desire and the gendered power structures within which female sexuality is experienced and sexual transgressions are committed.She focuses predominantly on forms of family relationships and the complex negotiations women undertake between their own needs and the demands made on them,for love and sex,motherhood and independence.Writing in different periods,she has been the focus of several media uproars.The first of these unfolded in the mid 1980s,following the publication of Monkey Grip,a novel that signalled the arrival of a new era in Australian women's writing.The second erupted in the 1990s when The First Stone,questioning male-female relationships in the context of second wave feminism,caused a huge media frenzy.The third time that Garner became a hot item for the media was when her most recent nonfiction work,Joe Cinque's Consolation(2004),initiated an argument over ethics and law.Chapter One focuses on the cultural and historical context in which Garner's identity as a feminist writer has been established.Feminism,a term full of ambiguity and loaded meanings,is difficult to define and its connotations have been changing in pace with the successive waves of feminism.While first wave feminists strived for equality in politics and economics,second wave feminists shifted to the self-empowerment of women by including the personal in politics.The third wave, questioning such basic premises as the gender role and identity dualism embraced by the first and the second waves,has yielded concepts like difference,particularity, embodiment,multiplicity,contradictions and identity.In step with the ongoing feminist movements,feminist literary criticism has been moving into the mainstream and has involving more and more women in reading and writing.As a result,women have subverted the male discourse by constructing one of their own.Such feminist writers as Helene Cixous,Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have argued that the woman's body is a site where power is exerted and that women should write their bodies into text,the world and history.Illuminated by feminist ideology,Garner committed herself to writing first for self-salvation and then for reconstruction and has since been writing in a rapidly changing feminist milieu in ways that enlighten feminist thinking.In the course of her writing,Garner has transformed her identity as a Feminist-Libertarian,evident in her early attempts at writing with the purpose of saving herself from victimhood,into a post-feminist trying to reconstruct male-female relationships from a position of transcendence.In Chapter Two,Garner's three major fictions,Monkey Grip,The Children's Bach and Cosmo Cosmolino(1992)are interpreted respectively to establish Garner's identity as a feminist writer who searches for a way of both physical and spiritual transgression.Monkey Grip,one of the first sexually explicit and sustained expressions of female desire in Australian women's writing,represents a significant turning point by demonstrating that the messy struggle of a woman's domestic and sexual life can form the basis for fiction.In The Children's Bach,Garner works against the notions of traditionally gendered spaces and traditional gender roles by bringing some of her male characters inside the house and sending some of her female characters out into the public,thus subverting the usual binary oppositions. With the language of music intersecting the theme of love,she constructs a political scenario in which the relationships of men and women as well as their respective relations to language are questioned.At the same time,The Children's Bach is called "a moral story" because at the end of the story Athena,who walks out of her marriage, returns home and the Fox family survives.This work embodies a celebration of family life in the context of the thousand and one natural shocks that it is heir to in modern times.Cosmo Cosmolino indicates a surge in Garner's subject matter and her approach:her thematic tackling of life and death,betrayal and retribution, resurrection and salvation,and her stylistic shifting from realism to surrealism.Here three seemingly unconnected but related stories are connected by recurrent characters and themes.The stories celebrate peripheral female figures who transgress regulatory systems in Garner's "world,little world."Chapter Three is dedicated to the discussion of the transcendent state of feminist consciousness permeating Garner's nonfiction,which includes The First Stone,True Stories(1996),The Feel of Steel(2001)and Joe Cinque's Consolation.While crossing to nonfiction writing,Garner's feminist stance has substantially changed.In The First Stone,by raising some questions about sex and power,Garner stopped seeing women as victims in harassment cases.Instead,she condemned the young feminists as priggish and punitive,who went so far as to "wreck a man's life" "with a nerdish pass at the party." Garner's sympathy for men made her the target of feminists and earned her notoriety as a feminist traitor.Her following two nonfictions,True Stories and The Feel of Steel,unveil in a way the paths that led to the writing of The First Stone.In True Stories,her long fascination with institutions and her long-standing concern with the necessity for men and women to coexist peacefully in the world are evident.The Feel of Steel provides some of the clues to her efforts to transcend her earlier positions on life and art.In Joe Cinque's Consolation,Garner writes with a broader mind and vision,reconstructing the subjectivity of men and women with a "narcissistic drama" where a pieta mother fights against a "femme fatale," symbolizing the generational war of feminists.Finally,in the conclusion of the dissertation,I argue that Garner has evolved into a post-feminist writer who celebrates hybrid identities of women and embraces harmonious relationships between sexes.Garner is special among many Australian women writers in several ways.In the first place,she is a feminist known both as a recipient and an exponent of feminist ideology.She grew from a feminist-libertarian practising transgression to a post-feminist hoping for the peaceful coexistence of men and women in the patriarchy,via intellectual or attitudinal transcendence.In the second place,she is a feminist writer who has been writing about women and subverting the hegemony of the male discourse through reconstruction.Her uniqueness lies in a steady manifestation of courage and honesty within a changing feminist milieu.Last but not least,Garner's writing shows her striving as a post-feminist to integrate the different aspects of her being and achieve a union between the feminist,the writer,and the woman that she is.