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Australian Patriography

Australian Patriography

Stephen Mansfield

(2013)

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Abstract

The Son’s Book of the Father, as Richard Freadman termed it, is a rich field of relational autobiography, offering a unique set of tensions and insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and the ethics of representing another’s life in writing one’s own.

This study of modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on fathers places an emerging sub-genre within its literary ancestry and its contemporary milieu. Providing compelling readings of Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’, Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’ and many others, this is the first study of its kind within Australian literature.


This study discusses modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on their fathers. Termed patriography (by Couser) or The Son’s Book of the Father (by Freadman), this rich field of relational autobiography offers insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and heritage and the ethics of representation. The current proliferation of ‘father memoirs’ in the marketplace demonstrates that such writing is fulfilling and being fuelled by the need to better understand the traditionally lesser-known parent.

Beginning with an analysis of the paradigmatic case of the sub-genre, Edmund Gosse’s Victorian masterpiece ‘Father and Son’, the study moves quickly on to embrace its Australian literary frame, demonstrating Gosse’s influence on a range of classic Australian autobiographies, including Hal Porter’s ‘The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony’. Mansfield then offers five ‘case studies’ on the seminal works of the current era: Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’; Richard Freadman’s ‘Shadow of Doubt’; Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’; John Hughes’s ‘The Idea of Home’; and Robert Gray’s ‘The Land I Came Through Last’.

How do these authors ‘perform’ their masculinity in the act of writing the father? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic in autobiography? And, ultimately, how does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? These are some of the questions Mansfield addresses in ‘Australian Patriography’, the first study of its kind in Australian literature.


‘This book is about autobiographical writing in Australia, but Stephen Mansfield’s work has profound implications for patrimonial life narratives and father–son relationships everywhere. Employing scholarship from psychology, sociology and humanistic literary study, he exposes both the fault lines of Australian father–son relationships, with their emphasis on silence, privacy and repression, but also honours the way the life writers strive to understand and repair the damage arising from those affiliations. Mansfield renders the voices in those memoirs with a powerful, reverberative voice of his own.’ —Roger Porter, author of ‘Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers’


Stephen Mansfield is an independent scholar as well as a casual research assistant and tutor in the Department of English at Sydney University, Australia. 


‘This thoroughly insightful study of patriography fills an important gap in life writing scholarship. Mansfield makes a crucial contribution to Australian literary studies in his analysis of autobiography, masculinity and the paternal inheritance. “Australian Patriography” offers an original and significant review of contemporary literatures which will resonate broadly.’ —Kate Douglas, author of ‘Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory’


‘“Australian Patriography” illustrates the major virtues of scholarly writing: depth, incisiveness and clarity. It ambitiously brings together literary and sociological interests in the service of superb textual analysis. Stephen Mansfield’s study is not only a major addition to the scholarship of Australian life writing, but to that of life writing generally.’ —David McCooey, author of ‘Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography’


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Australian Patriography_9780857283306 i
Half Title i
Title iii
Copyright\r iv
CONTENTS v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
Introduction WRITING PATRIMONY: THE SON’S BOOK OF THE FATHER AS A SUB-GENRE 1
A Modern Parable 1
Australian Patrimony as a Sub-genre 2
Recent Theorising of Patrimony 4
‘The Child is the Father of Man’ 7
The Ethical Turn in Life Writing 9
Focal Texts 11
Part I CHALLENGING AUTHORITY 15
Chapter One ‘THE PARADIGM CASE’: CONTESTING THE FATHER IN EDMUND GOSSE’S FATHER AND SON: A STUDY OF TWO TEMPERAMENTS 17
Re-framing Edmund Gosse 19
Gosse and Masculinity 28
‘Some Sort of Cousin’: The Gosses in Australia 32
‘A Battle with the God of His Father’: Re-writing Father and Son in Oscar and Lucinda 34
Chapter Two ‘AN INDUBITABLE AUSTRALIAN’: RENOUNCING THE FATHER IN HAL PORTER’S THE WATCHER ON THE CAST-IRON BALCONY 39
A Son’s Book of the Mother 43
The Sadistic Father 48
‘The Living Feminine’ 49
‘A Different Kind of Male’ 51
Conclusion: Doing Justice 56
Part II MEMORIALISING SELF-DENIAL 59
Chapter Three ‘WORDS TO KEEP FULLY AMONGST US’: HONOURING THE FATHER IN RAIMOND GAITA’S ROMULUS, MY FATHER 61
‘The Axe for the Frozen Sea’ 65
Autobiography as Tragedy 67
Gaita’s Father Figures: Mitru and Hora 71
The Son’s Elision of the Mother 76
The Absent-Present Father 79
Conclusion: A Public Legacy 84
Chapter Four ‘I REALLY WAS THE SON OF SUCH A MAN’: REPLACING THE FATHER IN RICHARD FREADMAN’S SHADOW OF DOUBT: MY FATHER AND MYSELF 87
Empirical Human Beings 89
Recording and Recognising the Troubled Inner Life 92
‘Similarity, Influence, Difference’ 93
‘An Inalienable Power of the Self ’ 97
‘The Embodiment of the Successful Career’ 100
‘The Son of a Man Who Could Write This Well’ 103
Representing the Elusive Life 106
Conclusion: An Inside Job 110
Part III PERFORMING MASCULINITY 113
Chapter Five A SPEAKING SUBJECT/A WATCHING OBJECT: ADDRESSING THE FATHER IN PETER ROSE’S ROSE BOYS 115
The Brothers’ Book of the Father 116
The ‘Father–Son Rule’ 120
The Auto/Biographical Exchange 121
Masculinity and Public Gazing 123
Who is Speaking? 132
Conclusion: Speaking for Oneself 136
Chapter Six CHOOSING PATRIMONY: PERFORMING FOR THE FATHER IN JOHN HUGHES’S THE IDEA OF HOME 139
The Son’s Book of Essays 140
‘Watching Me as I Write’ 142
‘Performing’ Masculinity 143
‘Heir to Both His Fathers’ 145
Choosing a Masculine Performance through Literary Influence 149
Performing Masculinity in the Garage, on the Verandah and in the Workplace 151
Sport and the Paternal Gaze 156
Conclusion: The Writer as Sportsman? 158
Chapter Seven ‘NEITHER TO VINDICATE NOR TO VILIFY’: BECOMING THE FATHER IN ROBERT GRAY’S THE LAND I CAME THROUGH LAST 161
‘Diptych’ as Autobiography 162
The ‘Toxic’ Father 164
‘Ineffectual Love’: Gray’s Surrogate Fathers 169
‘An Elusive Friendship’: Gray’s Father and Patrick White 172
‘Mother and Son’: Gray’s Narrative of Deconversion 173
‘Determined to Believe or Not Believe by Temperament Alone’: Gray’s Apostasy 177
Gray’s Elegies: Death and the Impossibility of Redemption 179
‘A Distinction I Did Not Want’: Resembling the Father 181
‘The Gentleman Possessing a Coded Manner’: Gray’s Preoccupation with Style 187
Conclusion: His Father’s Son 188
Conclusion THE TURN TO THE FATHER IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 191
Tracking the Turn to the Father 193
Reading for Ambivalence 194
Accounting for the Turn 196
BIBLIOGRAPHY 201
INDEX 209