'A young wife and mother watches a clock that seems forever stuck at three-in-the-afternoon. Her neighbour obsesses over the front lawn, and the women at the local beach chatter about knitting patterns. Her husband didn't come home last night.
'She lives for Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the baby is with Mother-in-law and she can escape to a less humdrum life. Jonathan, man about town, is Tuesday. Ben, a freethinking artist, is Thursday.
'But Jonathan is in serious trouble, and Thursdays are turning sour. Very sour.
'A brilliant, acerbic tale of a crack-up in stultifying suburbia, Blue Skies marked the emergence of a unique voice in Australian fiction.' (Abstract for 2011 publication from Text Publishing website.)
'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)
‘In human reckoning, Golden Ages are always already in the past. The Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, posited Five Ages of Mankind: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron (Ovid made do with four). Writing in the Romantic period, Thomas Love Peacock (author of such now almost forgotten novels as Nightmare Abbey, 1818) defined The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in which their order was Iron, Gold, Silver and Bronze. To the Golden Age, in their archaic greatness, belonged Homer and Aeschylus. The Silver Age, following it, was less original, but nevertheless 'the age of civilised life'. The main issue of Peacock's thesis was the famous response that he elicited from his friend Shelley - Defence of Poetry (1821).’ (Publication abstract)
‘In human reckoning, Golden Ages are always already in the past. The Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, posited Five Ages of Mankind: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron (Ovid made do with four). Writing in the Romantic period, Thomas Love Peacock (author of such now almost forgotten novels as Nightmare Abbey, 1818) defined The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in which their order was Iron, Gold, Silver and Bronze. To the Golden Age, in their archaic greatness, belonged Homer and Aeschylus. The Silver Age, following it, was less original, but nevertheless 'the age of civilised life'. The main issue of Peacock's thesis was the famous response that he elicited from his friend Shelley - Defence of Poetry (1821).’ (Publication abstract)
'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)
