The 'Born-Modern' Self: Revisiting the real matilda: An exploration of women and identity in Australia

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 106, 1996, Pages 14-29

  Dixson, Miriam ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949220596     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314619608595994     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. For varying accounts of this influence, see Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Madeay Press, Sydney, 1994
2. Ann Curthoys, 'Labour History and Cultural Studies', Labour History, no. 67, November 1994, pp. 12-22
3. Arthur Marwick, Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical', Journal of Contempory History, vol. 30, no. 1, January 1995, pp. 5-35
4. Hayden White, 'Response to Arthur Marwick', ibid., pp. 233-46
5. Indicting Derrida in particular, the philosopher Peter Dews claims his work contains 'certain ... sloganistic ... characterizations of the history of Western thought'. Derrida's reception - by cultural studies among others - Dews finds 'marked by an astonishingly casual and unquestioning acceptance' of those 'characterizations'. The philosopher John Searle charges Derrida with an 'eccentric reading of the history of Western philosophy', confined in detail to only three major figures. Searle designates key Derridean concepts as 'bizarre', 'simply misinformed', and marked by 'breathtaking implausibility'. Michel Foucault describes Derrida's style as 'obscurantisme terroriste'. (Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso, London, 1987, p. xv
6. John R. Searle, 'The World Turned Upside Down', in Gary P. Madison (ed.), Working Through Derrida, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1993, pp. 170-83. Foucault is reported at pp. 178-9.) Searle describes deconstructionism in literary and cultural theory as, among other things, 'a tissue of confusions', 'enthusiasms generated by. pretentious verbosity'
7. Jurgen Habermas, 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project', in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic. Port Townsend, Washington, 1983, pp. 3-15
8. See, too, Habermas's The Philosophic Discourse of Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987
9. The phrase 'Frankfurt School' refers to the Institut für Sozialforschung, which had several dozen members. For a fuller discussion of the school, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1973, pp. 3-40
10. and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (1986), trans. Michael Robertson, Polity Press and the MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., . 1994
11. See, for example, Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change. Polity Press. Cambridge, 1994
12. David Macey, Lacan in Contexts, Verso, London, 1988
13. and Michael Rustin, The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis. Politics and Culture, Verso, London, 1991, p. 181
14. Michael Rustin, 'Kleinian Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory', in Rustin, op. cit., pp. 181-5
15. Focused on gender, an American reading of the object relations tradition appears in the writings of the feminist theorists Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow and Jane Flax. (See The Real Matilda (1984), pp. 229-57.) Kristeva's move from the Lacanian father towards the pre-oedipal mother has been seen as pan of the 'return to Klein'
16. E.H. Erikson, Ghandi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, Faber & Faber, London, 1970, p. 265
17. (cited in The Real Matilda, p. 18)
18. The one exception seems to be a 1978 article by M.B. Schedvin and C.B. Schedvin, 'The Nomadic Tribes of Urban Britain: A Prelude to Botany Bay', Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 254-76
19. Patricia Grimshaw, 'Women and the Family in Australian History - A Reply to The Real Matilda', Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 72, April 1979, pp. 412-21 (hereafter 'Reply to The Real Matilda')
20. Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988
21. See, for example, Gail Reekie, 'Contesting Australia', in Gillian Whitlock and David Carter (eds), Images of Australia: An Introductory Reader in Australian Studies, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1992
22. John Merritt, 'Labour History', in G. Osborne and W.F. Mandle (eds), New History: Studying Australia Today, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, pp. 130-1
23. Raymond Evans, 'A Gun in the Oven: Masculinism and Gendered Violence', in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992, p. 200
24. Occupying a nodal position in the network of influences the book associated with identity for women was a 'thin' colonial bourgeoisie or élite. Daniels wrote: 'Dixson ... does not undervalue the rule of the middle class, but attempts to explain the implications of their absence (the "thin" colonial bourgeoisie)'. Dixson has an 'absent middle-class heroine, against whom her convicts, Irish and casual poor are measured and found wanting'. (Kay Daniels, 'Women's History', in Osborne and Mandle (eds), op. cit., p. 42.)
25. 'Heroine' may not be the right word: a comparatively gentle reference in The Real Matilda alluded to the 'righteous rapaciousness of bourgeois strata'. (The Real Matilda (1976), p. 227.)
26. Miriam Dixson, 'Clark and National Identity', in Carl Bridge (ed.), Manning Clark: Essays on his Place in History. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 199-200
27. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1958
28. Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Seabury Press, New York, 1979
29. Ivan Szelenyi and Bill Martin. The Three Waves of New Class Theories', Theory and Society, vol. 17, no. 5, 1988. pp. 645-67
30. Adam Jamrozik, Class, Inequality and the State: Social Change. Social Policy and the New Middle Class, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1991
31. The Lacanian tradition overemphasises the negative and antagonistic aspens of the larger psychoanalytic heritage. It overstates the inherent limits of human self-understanding, along with the inevitable distortion and misrecognition involved in representation. The Lacanian tradition also lends itself to an (unending) deconstructive investigation of the inauthentic, in contrast to both authentic and inauthentic, aspects of human consciousness. Partly as a result, this tradition is widely associated with a nihilistic scepticism about the possibility of 'workable, sustainable identities of either individual or social kinds'. (Michael Rustin, 'Lacan, Klein and Politics', in Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (eds), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 1995, pp. 226-33.) Women may have reason to view the Lacan-derived self with particular scepticism
32. The tradition contains a strong tendency to view the feminine as 'full of subversive energy and excitement, but as having no agency and nothing to say'. (Stephen Frosh, 'Masculine Mastery and Phantasy', in Elliott and Frosh, op. cit., pp. 171-2
33. See, too, Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 146.)
34. Grimshaw, 'Reply to The Real Matilda', loc. cit
35. Patricia Grimshaw, 'Man's Own Country: Women in Colonial Australia', in Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (eds), Australian Women: New Perspectives. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986, p. 195
36. See too Patricia Grimshaw and Charles Fahey, 'Family and Community in Nineteenth-Century Castlemaine', in Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 90
37. In feminist exchanges on the family, works bearing on domestic violence in a range of forms also included: Becky Duning, 'Who killed Mrs Ann K-?: Towards an Historical Understanding of Friendlessness in Colonial Western Australia', Hecate, vol. 4, no. 2, 1978. pp. 26-40
38. Margaret Anderson, 'The Family: Some Aspects of its Demography and Ideology in Mid-Nineteenth Century Western Australia', in C.T. Stannage (ed.), A New History of Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Penh, 1981, pp. 473-510
39. Margaret Anderson, ' "Helpmeet for Man": Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century Western Australia', in Patricia Crawford (ed.), Exploring Women's Past, Sisters, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 87-128
40. and Margaret Anderson, 'Women and the Convict Years in Western Australia', in Rica Erickson (ed.), The Brand on his Coat: Biographies of Some Western Australian Convicts, University of Western Australian Press, Penh, 1983, pp. 101-2 and passim
41. Kay Saunders, 'The Study of Domestic Violence in Colonial Queensland: Sources and Problems', Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 82, April 1984, pp. 68-84
42. Hilary Golder, Divorce in 19th Century New South Wales, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1985
43. Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915-38, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987
44. and Patricia Grimshaw, Charles Fahey, Susan Janson and Tom Griffiths, 'Families and Selection in Colonial Horsham', in Grimshaw, McConville and McEwen (eds), op. cit., pp. 118-37
45. For the United States, Erikson argued that this vital process carried important implications for female roles. For example, existing tendencies towards 'puritanism' tended to become 'rigid', though such women were often also 'decent and kind'. (Erik Erikson, 'Reflections on the American Identity', in Childhood and Society, pp. 286 ff.)
46. W.K. Hancock, Australia (1930), Ernest Benn, London, 1945, p. 36
47. Ronald Conway, 'Forget Machismo, Real Men Emote', Australian, 14 September 1995
48. Conway, a consultant psychologist at St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne for some twenty-five years, has developed this theme over a range of publications. See, for example. The Great Australian Stupor. An Interpretation of the Australian Way of Life, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1971
49. Land of the Long Weekend. Sun Books, Melbourne, 1978
50. The End of Stupor? Australia Towards the Third Millennium, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1984
51. See, too, David Tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. Harper Collins, Melbourne, 1995
52. Grimshaw, 'Man's Own Country', p. 186
53. W.E.H. Stanner, After Dreaming: The 1968 Boyer Lectures. Australian Broadcasting Commission. Sydney, 1969, pp. 24-5
54. Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy. Politics, Autonomy (ed. David Ames Curtis), Oxford University Press, New York, 1991
55. See, for example, Trevor McClaughlin, reviewing several publications about Irish-Australian, including convict, history. Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 103, October 1994, pp. 308-10
56. Marian Quartly, 'Bending the Bars: Convict Women and the State', in Saunders and Evans (eds), op. cit., pp. 144-57
57. and 'Conceiving a Colony', 'Transplanting Patriarchy', and 'Making Male and Female Worlds', Quartly's chapters in Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation, pp. 27-105
58. Quartly, Transplanting Patriarchy', pp. 60, 68-9, 89
59. David Neal, 'Free Society, Penal Colony, Slave Society, Prison?', Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 89, October 1987, pp. 508-11
60. See, too, his The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993