|
Conservative Central |
||
|
Book review: The Diaries of Miles Franklin |
||
|
Mark Richardson 25/4/03 |
||
|
The logic of liberalism has gradually unfolded over many generations. It's not unusual to find a younger generation successfully agitating to take liberalism to a further stage, but then being repelled when the next generation goes one step further. You can see this process at work in the life of the Australian writer Miles Franklin. Her diaries have recently been published and they show a woman who is clearly a liberal, and clearly supportive of the liberalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but a critic of the later liberalism of the early to mid twentieth century. Who was Miles Franklin? She was born in 1879 in southern NSW, the daughter of a prosperous landowner, though her family fortunes subsequently declined. She achieved fame as a writer in her early 20s with her novel My Brilliant Career. After living for many years in Chicago and London, she returned to Australia in 1932 to look after her elderly mother in Sydney. She wrote a number of successful books in her later years, including the Brent of Bin Bin series. She died in 1954. Class & gender Miles Franklin grew up at a time when the key issues for Australian liberals were class and gender. Liberals want us to be self-created by our own individual will and reason. Therefore, they find it hard to accept the influence on us of "accidents of birth" like class and gender, which we don't choose for ourselves. From about the 1850s, Australian liberals focused especially strongly on levelling class differences. They were so successful in this, that it became almost "anti-national" to be upper class. For generations afterwards, left liberals supported a nativist and nationalist rank and file against an Anglo-centric elite. Miles Franklin accepted this aspect of liberalism. For instance, when she was offered an O.B.E. in 1937, she travelled to Government House to reject the award. She recorded in her diary that, "Most Australians deserve this sort of thing for their servility ... He (the official) was being automatically kind to another of these servile colonials ... I'm insulted and wounded right through ... this system of bribing boobies to uphold caste ...I want to know who was responsible for this blunder against Australianism ..." In the later 1800s, liberals also turned their attention to gender. Miles Franklin not only accepted the liberal feminism of her youth, she helped to extend it, by applying liberal first principles to marriage. She did this quite logically. What liberals want is an unimpeded individual will. Miles Franklin observed that marriage carries with it obligations and commitments which limit our individual will. Therefore, in her own life, she rejected proposals of marriage from a number of suitable men and remained throughout her life a spinster. And in her book My Brilliant Career, she has the heroine, Sybilla, do the same thing. Sybilla rejects marriage in My Brilliant Career on very liberal grounds, namely that it is a "tied-down" existence, and that it "offered everything but control". The novel itself has been described as a "bush girl's cri de coeur against the fate of becoming a dependent wife." Developments Self-imposed spinsterhood did not prove to be a liberating experience for Miles Franklin. She had feared that marriage would cost her the time to pursue literary work, but she lost this time anyway through having to work to earn a living. Ultimately, she found her family connection by returning to live with her mother and widowed brother. This was not an ideal existence, as there were disruptions to her writing, and tensions in the relationship with her mother. But it does, at least, seem to have fulfilled the family sense of having a stable connection to others. She wrote after her mother's death, "anguish drowned me in the realisation that never again would I do anything for you; never, never again would you do anything for me. The one constant anchorage of my life was gone." Family obligations might restrict our free will to do what we want, but having people we are closely connected to to care for and look after can also keep us from the sense of living a sterile and alienated life. However, the real drawback to Miles Franklin's youthful liberalism is that the next generation of liberals took things much further than she herself could accept. For instance, Miles Franklin talks about meeting some radical American men some time before WWI. The two men proudly announced to her that they were feminists. Miles Franklin relates: " ... distaste awakened in me. It seemed to me that the word was related to feminine, and for a man to be feminine was to be effeminate, and utterly obnoxious to me, reared where men were men ... "I listened while they extolled the liberties that 'feminism' would extend to women. It seemed to me that the most striking of these were some of the vices of men - smoking for instance - a mild one - and whoring - which they were to enjoy as men did without losing their respectability. "It did not seem to me that such indulgences would make women any more free or happy, but merely that it would relieve men from any sense of responsibility or social disapproval in debauching them. "At that time, some men sometimes had to suffer social disapproval for ruining some girls, but this feminism would free men from any sense of regret, responsibility or remorse to any girl. That was far from what I considered freedom or fair play for women. " ... men in feminism would escape restraint through dialectics and remove old protections for the subject sex, and thus, with so-called freedoms, put upon them even worse disabilities." Is manhood something that men don't get to choose, and should therefore be liberated from? Miles Franklin certainly wouldn't take liberalism that far, but it seems that she could see the writing on the wall. And should we be "emancipated" from sexual conventions which limit or restrain our sexual behaviour? Again, Miles Franklin argues clearly against this, arguing, in a conservative way, that this is not a true freedom, particularly not for women. But she notes in her diary that by the time of a visit to New York in 1923 the more radical interpretation of liberalism had "broken the dams" and that the newer, more radical brand of feminism was operating. Writing in Australia in 1949, Miles Franklin hopes that the older conventions still hold sway to some degree, but she is appalled by the literature of the time. She says of a book by Christina Stead, that it is "a handbook on whores", that the novelist suffers from "neurasthenia of the soul" and that the women "all seem shameless and the men without grit". She concludes "I am glad I am not young now", so strong is her distaste for the newer, more advanced forms of liberalism. But this has been the fate of many liberals: to push forward liberal principles in their youth, and then to regret the even more radical changes which inevitably follow. |
||