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Made in Suburbia: Intra-suburban Narratives in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction

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Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing

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Abstract

Within twentieth-century Australian fiction, suburbia has long been trivialised, satirised, or ignored as a site incompatible with a narrative of transformation, a location from which to flee. However, little critical attention has been directed on contemporary realist tales of the female protagonist located within the confines of suburbia—an increasingly contested yet arguably still feminine/feminised zone. This chapter examines contemporary representations and narrative trajectories of the suburban female protagonist in twenty-first-century fiction. Drawing on “postfeminist” literary theory and emerging reappraisals of the “everyday” and “home”, the chapter presents evidence of intra-suburban narratives of feminine transformation, which contradict second-wave feminist flight trajectories, thereby reclaiming and elevating fictional suburbia as a critical space in which Australian women writers may locate their stories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nathanael O’Reilly, Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel (Youngstown: Teneo, 2012), 335.

  2. 2.

    Joan Kirkby, “The Pursuit of Oblivion: In Flight from Suburbia,” Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, special issue, of Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 4 (1998): 15.

  3. 3.

    Margaret Henderson, “Subdivisions of Suburbia: The Politics of Place in Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs and Amanda Lohrey’s Camille’s Bread,” Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, special issue, Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 4 (1998): 72–86.

  4. 4.

    Andrew McCann, “Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity,” Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, special issue, Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 4 (1998): 56.

  5. 5.

    Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman, After the Celebration (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009).

  6. 6.

    Stephanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

  7. 7.

    Gelder and Salzman, After the Celebration, 212.

  8. 8.

    Gelder and Salzman, ibid 197.

  9. 9.

    Gelder and Salzman, ibid 194.

  10. 10.

    Jane Gallop, Around 1981 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

  11. 11.

    Gelder and Salzman, After the Celebration, 194.

  12. 12.

    Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  13. 13.

    Julianne Lamond, “Stella vs. Miles Franklin: Women Writers and Literary Value in Australia,” Meanjin 70, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 32–39.

  14. 14.

    Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008).

  15. 15.

    O’Reilly, Exploring Suburbia; Jay Daniel Thompson, “‘I Don’t Wanna Live in This Place’: The Australian Cultural Cringe in Subtopia and The River Ophelia,” JASAL 12, no. 3 (2012): 1–13; Brigid Rooney, “Colonising Time, Recollecting Place: Steven Carroll’s Reinvention of Suburbia,” JASAL 13, no. 2 (2013): 1–16; Libbie Chellew, “Uncanny Suburbia in Australian Fiction,” (paper presented at the 17th Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference, Geelong, Victoria, November 25–27, 2012); K. Oliver, “Tiny Leaf Men and Other Tales from Outer Suburbia: Re-Presenting the Suburb in Australian Children’s Literature,” Papers: Exploration into Children’s Literature 21, no. 1 (2011): 57–66.

  16. 16.

    Steven Carroll, The Art of the Engine Driver (Sydney: Flamingo, 20010), The Gift of Speed (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004), The Time We Have Taken (Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2007), Spirit of Progress (Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2011).

  17. 17.

    Rooney, “Colonising Time,” 1–16.

  18. 18.

    Tsiolkas, The Slap.

  19. 19.

    O’Reilly, Exploring Suburbia.

  20. 20.

    O’Reilly, ibid, 337.

  21. 21.

    O’Reilly, ibid, 337.

  22. 22.

    Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations 39 (1999/2000): 15–31.

  23. 23.

    Anne Summers, The Misogyny Factor (Sydney: NewSouth, 2013), 66.

  24. 24.

    Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

  25. 25.

    Mary Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms in the News,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2007): 47–63.

  26. 26.

    Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, introduction to Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–26.

  27. 27.

    Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010).

  28. 28.

    Imelda Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  29. 29.

    Vavrus, “Opting Out,” 54.

  30. 30.

    Sue Kaufman, Diary of a Mad Housewife (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

  31. 31.

    Anne Roiphe, Up the Sandbox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).

  32. 32.

    Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (New York: Summit Books, 1977).

  33. 33.

    Negra, What a Girl, 18.

  34. 34.

    Vavrus, “Opting Out,” 52.

  35. 35.

    Summers, Misogyny, 44.

  36. 36.

    Joanna Murray-Smith, Sunnyside (Melbourne: Viking, 2005).

  37. 37.

    Fiona McGregor, Indelible Ink (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010).

  38. 38.

    Georgia Blain, Too Close to Home (Sydney: Vintage, 2011).

  39. 39.

    Peggy Frew, House of Sticks (Melbourne: Scribe, 2011).

  40. 40.

    Amanda Lohrey, “Primates”, Reading Madame Bovary (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010), 1.

  41. 41.

    Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

  42. 42.

    Alan Gilbert, “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism,” in Australian Cultural History, edited by S.L. Goldberg and F.B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36–46.

  43. 43.

    Murray-Smith, Sunnyside, 190.

  44. 44.

    Murray-Smith, ibid, 311.

  45. 45.

    Patrick White, The Solid Mandala (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966).

  46. 46.

    Felski, “Invention”, 16.

  47. 47.

    McGregor, Indelible Ink, 17.

  48. 48.

    McGregor, ibid, 117.

  49. 49.

    Frew, House of Sticks, 73, 81, 134.

  50. 50.

    Lohrey, “The Liberated Heroine: New Varieties of Defeat?” Meanjin 38, no. 3 (1979): 294–304.

  51. 51.

    Bronwen Levy, “Maternal Questions for the Modern Woman: Amanda Lohrey’s Radical Script,” in Mothers at the Margins: Stories of Challenges, Resistance and Love, edited by Jenny Jones et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), 48–61.

  52. 52.

    Lohrey, “Primates”, 1.

  53. 53.

    Levy, “Maternal Questions,” 60.

  54. 54.

    Lohrey, “Primates,” 6–7.

  55. 55.

    Lohrey, ibid, 27.

  56. 56.

    Lohrey, ibid, 57.

  57. 57.

    Lohrey, ibid, 38.

  58. 58.

    Lohrey, ibid, 31.

  59. 59.

    Lohrey, ibid, 26–27.

  60. 60.

    Lohrey ibid, 27.

  61. 61.

    Lohrey ibid, 37.

  62. 62.

    Lohrey ibid, 58.

  63. 63.

    Lohrey ibid, 58.

  64. 64.

    Lohrey ibid, 59.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Belinda Burns

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  1. Belinda Burns
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  1. Women and Gender Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison , Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Devaleena Das

  2. Department of English, Calcutta University , Kolkata, India

    Sanjukta Dasgupta

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Burns, B. (2017). Made in Suburbia: Intra-suburban Narratives in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction. In: Das, D., Dasgupta, S. (eds) Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_9

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