Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 "I Sat Back...and Waited to Die" : The Erasure of Self as a Response to Motherhood in Helen Hodgman's Blue Skies
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This paper offers a close analysis of an under-researched Australian novel, Blue Skies by Helen Hodgman, that represents pregnancy and early motherhood as a burdensome, joyless responsibility from which the mother must escape. The un-named first person narrator is unable and unwilling to transition into "a role I didn't choose." Deliberately shunning the 'discourses' of a good suburban mother, the narrator chooses risk and individuality over attributes typical of "good motherhood." The narrative explores her path to self-erasure by reflecting on the natural landscape of coastal Hobart and through the use of Tasmanian Gothic (Davidson). Hodgman's text is a complete denial "matrescence" and positions self-erasure as the only possible outcome where the transition to cultural norms of good motherhood has failed. The lack of naming the mother acts as metaphor for the silence surrounding the loss of womanhood and the absence of any maternal subject position. Blue Skies is a key literary example of the views of motherhood that second wave feminism held it to be a state of erasure, where women claimed that wifehood and motherhood made them feel as though they didn't exist-a problem with no name, as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique documented back in 1963.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Hecate vol. 45 no. 1/2 Carole Ferrier (editor), Jena Woodhouse (editor), 2019 21220789 2019 periodical issue

    'The house husbands or SNAGS, a new phenomenon, did not see this as a permanent role and most, sooner or later, tired of a lack of life in the public sphere; despite a brief fashion for the male population's public job being private Home Duties, many men longed to re-enter the usual world; one in which important or sometimes stimulating things went on. The Australian Institute of Family Studies (in the government Department of Social Services) has regularly researched attitudes to gender roles within households in relation to things such as divided domestic work and has found, in its surveys, considerable support for shared housework. Other factors are in play in many countries, especially the incidence of child marriage (650 million girls) and of Female Genital Mutilation (imposed upon 200 million girls), the latter increasingly administered by actual health services rather than the stereotypical old, female relative with a razor blade and a sewing basket. The witches and midwives of centuries ago were one thing (documented, for example, in Barbara Ehrenreich's 1973 Witches, Midwives and Nurses) but more recently, in COVID-19 times, women are much in demand in their jobs/professions as health workers, and have been given enthusiastic encouragement to lead their working life in close contact with often viralent infections, as "essential workers"-a category that seems to have benefits for the bourgeoisie who belong to it, but not many for nurses working long and demanding shifts, wearing often-uncomfortable Personal Protective Equipment, in hospitals and infection-testing clinics.' (Carole Ferrier, Editorial introduction) 

    2019
    pg. 43-55, 310
Last amended 4 Mar 2021 14:58:39
43-55, 310 "I Sat Back...and Waited to Die" : The Erasure of Self as a Response to Motherhood in Helen Hodgman's Blue Skiessmall AustLit logo Hecate
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