Issue Details: First known date: 2024... 2024 Shame in Ruth Park’s Inner Sydney Novels
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Ruth Park’s inner Sydney novels explore the place of shame in mid-twentieth-century working-class lives, alert to the intersection of class with gender and race. Park is highly attuned to the complex psychosocial toll of poverty, which erodes self-worth and self-respect. She depicts moments in which intensely felt shame manifests, as well as the range of responses her characters have to their everyday circumstances and humiliating encounters. I focus in this essay on scenes in The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949) that involve more or less explicit representations of shame as awful and embodied. Specifically, my reading identifies the shame of privation, the shame of being rendered an object of study, female sexuality as a source of shame, racialised shame as historical stain and the shame of being patronised by experts and authorities. Throughout, I highlight Park’s character’s struggles against and transcendence of shame, either through outright defiance or by ignoring middle-class expertise that undermines intergenerational knowledge transmission and community norms. Finally, I show how Park’s characters invest in a source of collective pride – generosity and mutualism – which serves to recuperate their sense of moral worth.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Literary Studies Special Issue: Ruth Park vol. 39 no. 2 3 October 2024 28925405 2024 periodical issue criticism 2024
Last amended 8 Oct 2024 08:40:07
https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/shame-in-ruth-parks-inner-sydney-novels Shame in Ruth Park’s Inner Sydney Novelssmall AustLit logo Australian Literary Studies
Subjects:
  • Sydney, New South Wales,
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X