'Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953) focuses on the inhabitants of a boarding house in Sydney’s inner suburb, The Rocks, a diverse community largely sequestered from the modernising city beyond. While the narrative's immersion within the enclave at first holds the larger city at bay, dramatic rooftop visions of the Harbour Bridge begin to open the view. The Bridge in A Power of Roses, as Paul Genoni observes, is richly emblematic of Sydney as a city. But the Bridge is also a figure of ambiguity, conjuring both progressive modernity and an underlying condition of diasporic loss. Through the Bridge, Park’s novel mobilises a poetics of scale and perspective that serves to breach the enclave and to imagine the energies of the wider city. Her young protagonist Miriam McKillop moves outward from the impoverished yet intimate world she inhabits with her beloved Uncle Puss towards adult life in the world beyond. This movement is first anticipated by Miriam’s use of her Uncle Puss’s telescope, which enables her to bridge the distance virtually. Ultimately, however, Miriam’s movement towards the city is a joining premised on an irrevocable separation. This essay considers Park’s mobilisation of scale and perspective for its poetics of the city, and its depiction of the enclave in juxtaposition with the Bridge. It concludes by noting the narrative’s play of perspectives, its crossings of time as well as space, and its uncanny echo of Park’s later retrospective account, in Fishing in the Styx (1993), of her own father’s death.' (Publication abstract)
'Rundown houses, tenements, lodging houses and otherwise unstable dwelling spaces recur in Ruth Park’s large and varied body of work. Importantly, however, these precarious homes often hold within them the possibility of transformation, escape, or transcendence. We might think of them then as porous spaces, drawing our definition from Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis’s famous use of the term to describe the interpenetration, ambiguity and improvisation that marks spatial arrangements and social relations in the ancient Mediterranean city of Naples. Despite their genesis in intense poverty and social dysfunction, porous spaces admit the unexpected, and this means porosity is potentially liberatory. In this essay, close examination of precarious, porous homes in The Harp in the South (1948), Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and The Power of Roses (1953) yields new insight into the operation of realism in Park’s fiction for adults. Specifically, the essay argues that Park’s favoured narrative mode is best described as porous realism. Her fiction for adults is not realism destabilised or undermined by other generic interlopers, but the product of her idiosyncratic and inventive combination of realism with a range of other generic modes, which interact with and extend the realist narrative in productive ways. This paper argues that Park’s porous realism is most often infiltrated by the fantastic, a mode that is ultimately motivated by belief in the capacity of fiction to challenge the forces of socio-economic precarity by bringing into being the possibility of other worlds not governed by them.' (Publication abstract)
Literary Migrations : White, English-Speaking Migrant Writers in Australia
Wollongong
:
2011
Z1860612
2011
single work
thesis
'In this thesis, I am arguing that [a] false core/periphery binary has made a particular group of migrants ,-those who are white and have migrated from English-speaking countries - invisible - invisible as migrants, that is. For the writers within this group, this leads to a critical blindness in relation to their work and place within Australian national literature. As a critic, however, I look at the work of Ruth Park, Alex Miller and John Mateer and see it is profoundly influenced by their migrant experience. More often than not they write about themes that are typical of migrant writing: alienation, identity, belonging, home, being in-between cultures, history. For a more appropriate, complete appreciation of their work, this thesis argues that it is imperative to go back to the beginning and return the 'default setting' of migrant to its literal meaning.' [From the author's abstract]
Literary Migrations : White, English-Speaking Migrant Writers in Australia
Wollongong
:
2011
Z1860612
2011
single work
thesis
'In this thesis, I am arguing that [a] false core/periphery binary has made a particular group of migrants ,-those who are white and have migrated from English-speaking countries - invisible - invisible as migrants, that is. For the writers within this group, this leads to a critical blindness in relation to their work and place within Australian national literature. As a critic, however, I look at the work of Ruth Park, Alex Miller and John Mateer and see it is profoundly influenced by their migrant experience. More often than not they write about themes that are typical of migrant writing: alienation, identity, belonging, home, being in-between cultures, history. For a more appropriate, complete appreciation of their work, this thesis argues that it is imperative to go back to the beginning and return the 'default setting' of migrant to its literal meaning.' [From the author's abstract]
'Rundown houses, tenements, lodging houses and otherwise unstable dwelling spaces recur in Ruth Park’s large and varied body of work. Importantly, however, these precarious homes often hold within them the possibility of transformation, escape, or transcendence. We might think of them then as porous spaces, drawing our definition from Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis’s famous use of the term to describe the interpenetration, ambiguity and improvisation that marks spatial arrangements and social relations in the ancient Mediterranean city of Naples. Despite their genesis in intense poverty and social dysfunction, porous spaces admit the unexpected, and this means porosity is potentially liberatory. In this essay, close examination of precarious, porous homes in The Harp in the South (1948), Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and The Power of Roses (1953) yields new insight into the operation of realism in Park’s fiction for adults. Specifically, the essay argues that Park’s favoured narrative mode is best described as porous realism. Her fiction for adults is not realism destabilised or undermined by other generic interlopers, but the product of her idiosyncratic and inventive combination of realism with a range of other generic modes, which interact with and extend the realist narrative in productive ways. This paper argues that Park’s porous realism is most often infiltrated by the fantastic, a mode that is ultimately motivated by belief in the capacity of fiction to challenge the forces of socio-economic precarity by bringing into being the possibility of other worlds not governed by them.' (Publication abstract)
'Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953) focuses on the inhabitants of a boarding house in Sydney’s inner suburb, The Rocks, a diverse community largely sequestered from the modernising city beyond. While the narrative's immersion within the enclave at first holds the larger city at bay, dramatic rooftop visions of the Harbour Bridge begin to open the view. The Bridge in A Power of Roses, as Paul Genoni observes, is richly emblematic of Sydney as a city. But the Bridge is also a figure of ambiguity, conjuring both progressive modernity and an underlying condition of diasporic loss. Through the Bridge, Park’s novel mobilises a poetics of scale and perspective that serves to breach the enclave and to imagine the energies of the wider city. Her young protagonist Miriam McKillop moves outward from the impoverished yet intimate world she inhabits with her beloved Uncle Puss towards adult life in the world beyond. This movement is first anticipated by Miriam’s use of her Uncle Puss’s telescope, which enables her to bridge the distance virtually. Ultimately, however, Miriam’s movement towards the city is a joining premised on an irrevocable separation. This essay considers Park’s mobilisation of scale and perspective for its poetics of the city, and its depiction of the enclave in juxtaposition with the Bridge. It concludes by noting the narrative’s play of perspectives, its crossings of time as well as space, and its uncanny echo of Park’s later retrospective account, in Fishing in the Styx (1993), of her own father’s death.' (Publication abstract)
