Reading Women's Writing: The Critical Reception of Miles Franklin

Abstract

In a comparison of the critical reception of David Ireland's The Glass Canoe and Helen Gamer's Monkey Grip, Paul Salzman has demonstrated that women writers are often subject to a "vitriolic reception", due to what may be termed masculinist reading practices. In Salzman's survey the representations of the two authors also differed markedly; Ireland was represented as a "Joycean craftsman" while Garner found herself "pigeonholed along with her work" (Salzman 544). This model of the reception of women's writing is equally applicable to the reception and later critical stature of Miles Franklin. Franklin, like Gamer, was found to be an author whose works lacked an overriding sense of structure and was read as a primarily autobiographical novelist. Franklin's novels were quickly disparaged after her death in 1954, and it is arguable that revisionist criticism of Franklin has revived and appropriated the pejoratives of an earlier generation of reading. What may be necessary then is a new or alternative model/frame of reading where previously privileged ideas are displaced, and instead texts are read for aspects of difference from what is perceived as dominant.