Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 Echoes of a Not so Mythical Past : Memories of Race in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986) has largely focused on issues of gender, but little has been said about the racial inscription of the novel. This lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author's experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with the novel's conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives.

This paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the Native from the contemporary Australian land and textscape, whose Gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel's engagement with female empowerment. The female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the White postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into 'Australianness'. Reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an Aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a 'walkabout' that allows Hester to start controlling her body and story. Thus, The Well may be understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about nativenonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at "Reconciliation" by mainstream Australia.' Source: Cornelis Martin Renes.

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Coolabah Perspectives: Myth, History and Memory no. 3 2009 Z1810124 2009 periodical issue 2009 pg. 116-122
Last amended 2 Mar 2017 11:11:59
116-122 http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/coolabah/article/view/15734/18847 Echoes of a Not so Mythical Past : Memories of Race in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Wellsmall AustLit logo Coolabah
Subjects:
  • The Well Elizabeth Jolley , 1986 single work novel
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