School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item'Unlocked Doors': correspondence as female-centric writing practice( 2017)The aim of this thesis is to investigate, through critical analysis and creative work, the notion of a female-centric writing practice that not only accommodates but incorporates motherhood. By dismantling the central tenets of the nineteenth century androcentric Romantic myth of creativity, this thesis begins to imagine what a female-centric creative practice, built around women’s experiences, might look like. To do so, it investigates correspondence as a writing form commonly and traditionally practised by women that subverts the approach, value systems and goals of an androcentric model of literary production. I contend that correspondence has been overlooked as a feminist model for writing practice, and that it provides a blueprint for a female-centric model of creative process — a writing practice structured around a woman’s reality that does not insist upon a ‘room of one’s own’ with ‘a lock on the door’ as proposed by Virginia Woolf in 1929. This model would not be antithetical to the realities of motherhood, but would go so far as to acknowledge the benefits motherhood can bring to a writing practice. I hypothesise that in correspondence a tradition of ‘writing in the midst of life’ can be found that enables mother-writers to differently conceptualise the how of writing, freeing them from age-old conflicts between creativity and mothering. Specifically, this thesis uses a gynocritical analysis of the correspondence of successful mid-century Australian female poet Gwen Harwood to hypothesise the potential of correspondence as a model for a female-centric creative practice.