Naomi Riddle Naomi Riddle i(A150261 works by)
Gender: Female
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.

Works By

Preview all
1 Brigid Rooney. Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity. Naomi Riddle , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 20 no. 2 2020;
— Review of Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity Brigid Rooney , 2018 multi chapter work criticism '‘One might ask whether both novels and suburbs are obsolete,’ writes Brigid Rooney, at the start of her inquiry into suburban space in the Australian novel (9). Why should we care for the suburbs—those sub-urban spaces ringing the inner city, those in-between feminised spaces neither urban nor rural—when globalism, market deregulation, and the big-four (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) have collapsed the distinction between globe, city, suburb and home. The homogenised and ever-expanding land-creep of late capitalism has nullified ideas of the centre and periphery. The grids, the bungalows, the post-war facades, and the ubiquitous red tile roofs, are earmarked for redevelopment.' (Introduction)
1 [Review] Domestic Interior Naomi Riddle , 2018 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 78 no. 2 2018; (p. 191-196)
— Review of Domestic Interior Fiona Wright , 2017 selected work poetry
1 History Is A Many-Sided Thing Naomi Riddle , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , November 2016;
— Review of Wild Island Jennifer Livett , 2016 single work novel ; Skylarking Kate Mildenhall , 2016 single work novel ; Music and Freedom Zoë Morrison , 2016 single work novel
1 Naomi Riddle Reviews the Juvenilia of Eleanor Dark and Ethel Turner Naomi Riddle , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 76 no. 1 2016;
— Review of Ethel Turner : Tales from the Parthenon 2013 anthology criticism ; Eleanor Dark's Juvenilia 2013 anthology poetry
1 Turning Inward on Himself : Male Hysteria in Elizabeth Harrower's The Watch Tower Naomi Riddle , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 204-213) 'The much-maligned character of Felix Shaw in Elizabeth Harrower's The Watch Tower (1966) has consistently been described as the "embodiment of total inexplicable evil", "of motiveless malignity"; he is a caricature of a violent, sadistic and misogynistic husband who tortures his wife Laura, and her younger sister Clare, into submission (Clancy 463). Harrower charts Laura and Clare's gradual disintegration within the prison of their suburban house overlooking Sydney harbour, a gradual unraveling towards "craven, total submission", which ultimately results in Clare being granted a form of freedom at her sister's expense (Harrower 89). Much of the criticism on Harrower stems from the 1980s and 1990s, when her work was taken up by feminists eager to hold up The Watch Tower as a lesson on the oppression of women in the post-war period. From this perspective Harrower's construction of Felix serves as a warning, a modern fairy tale that exposes the sadistic impulses of patriarchy, and the prison of the suburban domestic space. A telling case in point is the essay "What Does Women Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction" (1983), in which leading critic Sneja Gunew argues that The Watch Tower is structured as an "elaborate cautionary tale", a reworking of the classic "gothic [narrative] in which women are traditionally caged up and their lives threatened" (119). The text is "a salutary lesson", with Clare's ability to escape Felix's grasp high lighting the importance of maintaining the integrity of female selfhood, despite the way the text deliberately denies the reader any form of cohesive resolution or satisfactory solution at the end of the novel (119). So, too, in an interview with Harrower when The Watch Tower was republished as a TextClassic in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald described the novel as a "thriller", and Felix as "unhappy, meanspirited" and "one of the most superbly drawn evil characters in Australian literature" (Alcorn). The epithet "evil", whilst no doubt applicable to Felix, perpetuates the understanding of the figure as a caricature, a fairytale villain.' (Author's abstract)
X