This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, locked in behind his mahogany, filling the silence around himself with the busy squeak of the nib across the paper. I will begin when I always like to begin, with a fact. Once upon a time, there was a man and his daughter, all was well.
Albion Gidley Singer appears an entirely proper man: husband, father, pillar of the community. But he is a hollow man, and within him are frightened and frightening dark places from which spring loathing and fear of female flesh. And, finally, the kind of violence that might call itself love.
It is through the eyes of Albion Gidley Singer that the world is seen and in his voice that the story is told, and it is a voice that never suffers from self-doubt. He can never know, as the reader does, that his view of the world is grotesquely distorted by his damaged self. Kate Grenville has written a disturbing, shocking and darkly funny novel that resonated in the mind with the truth of great writing. Dark Places is a literary triumph.
'In 1985, when Kate Grenville’s novel about a fat, unlovely bag lady appeared on the Australian literary landscape, Lilian’s Story was celebrated as a feminist and postcolonial text. By locating Lilian as ex-centric to the nation, to inhabit the abjected zones of the colony—the bush, the asylum, the streets of post-Federation Sydney—Grenville is commonly read as a feminist writer intervening into the gender politics that shaped Australia. Feminists celebrate the ways in which she carves out discursive spaces for women who have existed largely in the interstices between public memory and official history. Postcolonial critical interpretations of Lilian being ‘colonised’ by her father, provoked by the rape narrative, have tended to reproduce the postcolonial trope of Australia’s shift from a colonial relationship to a national structure. Such readings largely neglect the colonial violence of Australian patriarchy, and the skewed gender norms that result when a host culture is transplanted to an imperial outpost. Taking up the colonial metaphor structuring the relationship between Lilian and her father, I read Lilian’s ‘madness’ as a response to discourses of ‘race’ and gender that circulate in the colonial Imaginary to position women as the site for racial anxiety about colonial ‘dirt’, contamination and disorder. While Lilian approaches the rebellious female grotesque celebrated in postcolonial feminist theorising, her obese body also signifies the devouring nature of colonialism. This paper engages with the white politics of women’s ‘belonging’ inscribed in Lilian’s Story to disinter the schizoid nature of white women’s relationship to colonial patriarchy.' (Publication abstract)
'凯特·格伦维尔是在激进女权运动影响下成长起来的女作家,其早期作品认同激进女权主义关于男权为女性一切苦难之源的思想,从家庭、社会和文化三个方面对于男权进行了抨击和批判.而80年代后期,格伦维尔的创作表现出在性别问题上告别激进、寻求反思与妥协的价值取向.她的小说<黑暗之地>通过变换叙述视角表达了对于男性的同情和理解,小说<完美主义>则对激进女权主义所暗含的完美主义思维方式进行了批判.'
Source: CAOD.
