Title: New Angels for Storms of Progress? Two Historical Novels of Australian Feminism
Abstract: New Angels for Storms of Progress? Two Historical Novels of Australian Feminism The historical legacy and achievements of the second wave Australian women's movement have, as in other western countries, recently been subject to critical and pessimistic assessments in both academic and popular writing. These assessments have often come from self-proclaimed feminists, much to the delight of conservative male commentators.(1) This article analyses two novels that fictionalise the history of the Australian women's movement, in order to see how the historical novel contributes to the current struggle over the control of the meaning and memory of feminism's emancipatory narratives. My title alludes to Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, where the angel of history is surrounded by wreckage from the storm of progress.(2) This image provides a fitting frame for this article, which explores a number of paradoxes: how might the Australian feminist historical novel be written within the contexts of postmodernism's problematisation of history and the dominant Australian literary tradition? What shape might the `angels' or `demons' of feminist historical fiction take in the political, epistemological, and representational storms that postmodernism and feminism have attempted to brew? And crucial to any discussion of these issues, in terms of historical and intellectual context, is Agnes Heller's judgment of the significance of the modern women's movement: `Feminism was, and has remained, the greatest and most decisive social revolution of modernity.... The feminist revolution is not just a novel phenomenon of Western culture, it is a watershed in all hitherto existing cultures.'(3) In terms of such a judgement, I am curious to see how the history of such a radical revolution might be reimagined. Janine Burke's Speaking (1984) and Sally Morrison's Mad Meg (1994)(4) are two novels by contemporary Australian women that are centrally concerned with fictionalising the history of the modern Australian women's movement. While both writers have taken the potentialities of the destabilised categories of history and fiction, and used them to `brush history [and fiction] against the grain',(5) in their differing choice of narrative shapes, historical dynamics, and feminist subcultures through which each writer renovates the historical novel, they offer us very different feminist pasts and futures. Postmodernism's problematisation of history, including both historiography and historicity as representational, ideological, and intellectual practice may seem to be useful to feminism, both movements interrogating history's own claims to offer a privileged knowledge of the past, through its foundations of rules of causality, evidence, objectivity, and so on; or as teleological narrative of redemption, as in Marxist history. But whereas certain versions of postmodernism reject history as being intrinsically flawed, and/or inadequate to the changed conditions of advanced capitalism, whether in Fredric Jameson's fears of the waning of historicity, or Jean Baudrillard's culture of the simulacra,(6) feminism attempts to reclaim its own politicised history. Therefore, how might postmodernism's discourse of posthistoire impact upon the political and cultural production of historical novels, which have an interest in discovering and transforming history and fiction for feminist purposes? Ironically, it seems that in the breaking up of the Western historical master narrative, feminism is positioned to take advantage and write its own petits recits of women's quest for emancipation/liberation. As feminist critics have argued, feminism is not so much an example of the postmodern condition, but rather, one of its enabling conditions.(7) As this essay will demonstrate, feminism therefore, is one of the historical dynamics that is forcing us to locate different languages and shapes of history.(8) Hence, rather than fearing the demise of a generalised `history', we need to ask `whose historicity is waning? …
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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