On Elizabeth Jolley's Narrative

One of the most admirable characteristics of Elizabeth Jolley's narrative is that she tells women's stories by parodying men and their heterosexual relationships and framing the whole text as fictional, and so, she and her works evade ethical judgement.Elizabeth Jolley's works parody nearly every aspect of the patriarchal heterosexual relationships, such as the romantic meeting of a man and玾oman, the weddings and the fairytales, the feminine beauty and the domestic idyll. Particularly she depicts lesbian couples as a parody of heterosexual marriage, the butch/dyke as a parody of man and thus throws doubt into the received distinction between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual.On the one hand she applies the re-currency of the same female characters, and the verified trivial details of women's life, making her readers believe what she writes is true life .On the other hand, she uses isolated institutions, open endings, and particularly, parodies of metafiction to enervate credibility of her stories. Consequently, she enjoys the freedom to tell the previously silenced women's stories, even to elaborate on some unusual themes such as lesbianism, unmarried mother, illegitimate child, odd violence, and incest, and at the same time evades the possible ethical judgement.In a word, the clever combination of feminist content and postmodern technique establishes her as one of the best writers in Australia but also around the world.