Representations of the mother-figure in the novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark

Abstract

This thesis argues that through bringing together two branches of inquiry—the literary work of Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark and socio-feminist theory on health, contagion and the female body—the discursive body of the mother-figure in their novels serves as a trope through which otherwise unspoken tensions—between the personal and the political, between family and nation and between identity and race in Australian cultural formation—are explored. The methodology I use is to analyse the literary mother-figure through a ‘discourse on health’ from a soma-political, socio-cultural and historical perspective which sought to categorise, regulate and discipline women’s lives to ensure that white women conformed to their designated roles as mothers and that they did so within the confines of marriage. The literary mother-figure, as represented in Prichard’s and Dark’s novels, is frequently at odds with the culturally constructed mother-figure as represented in political and religious discourses, and in popular forms of culture such as advertising, film and women’s magazines. This culturally constructed ‘ideal’ mother-figure is intimately linked to nationalist discourses of racial hygiene, of Christian morality, and of civic and social order controlled by such patriarchal institutions as the state, the church, the law and the medical professions during the period under review. This is reflected in Prichard’s and Dark’s inter-war novels which embody unresolved tensions in a way that challenges representations of the mother-figure by mainstream culture. However, their post-war novels show a greater compliance with nationalist ideologies of the good and healthy mother-figure who conforms more closely with an idealised notion of motherhood, leading up to the 1950s. Through a detailed analysis of the two writers’ changing representations of the mother-figure, I argue that the mother-figure is a key trope through which unspoken tensions and forces that have shaped (and continue to shape) Australian culture and society can be understood.