Transgressive Women, Transworld Women
Authors: Lowes Elanna Herbert 
Published: October 2020

This paper will discuss the way in which the creative component of my thesis Hannah’s Place uses a style of neo-historical fiction to find ‘good’ narratives in (once) ‘bad’ women, keeping with the theme, here paraphrased as:

The work of any researcher in the humanities is to…challenge what is simply thought of as bad or good, to complicate essentialist categories and question passively accepted thinking.

As a way of expanding this statement, I would like to begin by considering the following quote from Barthes on the nature of research. I believe he identifies the type of research that I have been involved with as a PhD candidate producing a ‘creative’ thesis in the field of Communications.

What is a piece of research? To find out, we would need to have some idea of what a ‘result’ is. What is it that one finds? What is it one wants to find? What is missing? In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning brought out, the statistical discovery be placed? No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent. Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier. (Barthes 198)

My thesis sits within the theoretical framework of postmodern literature as a new form of the genre that has been termed ‘historical fiction’. Although the novel breaks away from and challenges the concept of the traditional ‘saga’ style of narrative, or ‘grand narrative’ within historical fiction, it is no less concerned with events of the past and the idea of past experience. It departs from traditional historical fiction in that it foregrounds not only an imagined fictional past world created when the novel is read, but also the actual archival documents, the pieces of text from the past from which traditional history is made, and which here have been used to create that world–‘sparking points’ for the fictional narrative. These archival documents are used within the work as intertextual elements that frame, and, in turn, are framed by the transworld characters’ homodiegetic narrations.

The term ‘transworld character’ has been attributed to Umberto Eco and refers to any real world personages found within a fictional text. Eco defines it as the ‘identity of a given individual through worlds (transworld identity)…where the possible world is a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of relevant propositions [either true or untrue which] outlines a set of possible individuals along with their properties’ (219). Umberto Eco also considers that a problem of transworld identity is ‘to single out something as persistent through alternative states of affairs’ (230). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale also puts forward a number of definitions for ‘transworld identity’. For my purposes, I take it to mean both that defined by Eco but also the literary device, as defined by McHale, of ‘borrowing a character from another text’ (57). It is McHale who elaborates on the concept as it relates to historical fiction when he states:

All historical novels, even the most traditional, typically involve some violation of ontological boundaries. For instance they often claim ‘transworld identity’ between characters in their projected worlds and real-world historical figures (16-17).

Interestingly for the type of fiction that I am attempting to write, McHale also takes the idea into another area when he discusses the ontological levels of the historical dimension that transworld identities may undergo.

Entities can change their ontological status in the course of history, in effect migrating from one ontological realm or level to another. For instance, real world entities and happenings can undergo ‘mythification’, moving from the profane realm to the realm of the sacred (36).

For transworld identities, such as those within my novel, this may mean a change in status between the past, where they were stereotyped and categorised as ‘bad’ in contemporary newspapers (my intertext elements), to something in the present approaching ‘good’, or at least a more rounded female identity within a fictional world.

The introduced textual elements which I foreground in my novel are those things most often hidden from view within the mimetic and hermeneutic worlds of traditional historical fiction. The sources re-textualised within my novel are both ‘real’ items from our past, and representations and interpretations of past events. The female transworld characters’ stories in this novel are imaginative re-interpretations. Therefore, both the fictional stories, as well as their sources, are textual interpretations of prior events.

In this way, the novel plays with the idea of historical ‘fact’ and historical ‘fiction’. It blurs their boundaries. It gives textual equality to each in order to bring a form of textual agency to those marginalised groups defined by PF Bradley as the ‘host of jarring witnesses, [of history] a chaos of disjoined and discrepant narrations’ (Bradley in Holton 11): In the past in Australia these were lower class women, Aboriginals, the Irish, the illiterate, and poor agricultural immigrants whose labour was excess to Britain’s needs.

Hannah’s Place – A Brief Synopsis

Six individual women’s stories, embedded in or ‘framed’ by a fictional topographic artist’s journal, recount ‘real’ events from Australia’s colonial past. The journal is set in 1845; a few years after convict transportation to Australia’s eastern states ceased, and the year of the first art exhibition held in the colony. That same year, Leichhardt’s expedition arrived at Port Essington in Australia’s far north, after 12 months inland exploration, while in the far south the immigrant ship Cataraqui was wrecked one day short of arrival at Melbourne’s Port Phillip with the drowning of all but one of the 369 immigrants and 38 of the 46 sailors on board. Each chapter title takes the form of the title of a topographic sketch as a way of placing the text ‘visually’ within the artist’s journal narrative. The six women’s stories are:

New South Wales at Last (Woman on a Boat): A woman arrives with a sick toddler to tent accommodation for poor immigrants in Sydney, after a three month sea voyage and the shipboard birth, death, and burial at sea of her baby daughter.

Yarramundi Homestead, as Seen from the East: An ill-treated Irish servant girl on a squatter’s run awaits the arrival of her fiancée, travelling on board the immigrant ship Cataraqui.

In the Vale of Hartley: In the Blue Mountains, an emancipist sawyer who previously murdered three people, violently beats to death his lover, Caroline Collitts, the seventeen-year-old sister of Maria, his fifteen-year-old wife.

She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: In Goulburn, Annie Brownlow, a pretty 24-year-old mother of three is executed by a convict executioner for the accidental ‘murder’, while drunk, of her adulterous husband.

The Eldest Daughter: The isolated wife of a small settler gives birth, assisted by Lottie, her eldest daughter, and Merrung, an Aboriginal midwife.

On Wednesday Last, at Mr Ley’s Coach and Horses Hotel: In Bathurst, a vagrant alcoholic, Hannah Simpson, dies on the floor of a dodgy boarding house after a night and a day of falling into fits and ranting about her lifetime of 30 years migration.

Historiographic Metafiction

Has been defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘Fiction which keeps distinct its formal auto-representation from its historical context and in so doing problematises the very possibility of historical knowledge… There is no reconciliation, no dialectic…just unresolved contradiction’ (106). Unresolved contradiction is one of the themes that surfaces in my novel because of the juxtaposition of archival documents (past text ‘facts’) alongside fictional narrative.

Historiographic metafiction can usefully be employed as a means of challenging prior patriarchal narratives written about marginalised women. It allows the freedom to create a space for a new understanding of silenced women’s lives.

My novel seeks to illuminate and problematise the previously ‘seamless’ genre of hical fiction by the use of (narrative) techniques such as: collage and juxtaposition, intertextuality, framing, embedded narrative, linked stories, and footnote intertext of archival material. Juxtaposition of the fiction against elements from prior non-fiction texts, clearly enunciated as being those same actual historical sources upon which the fiction is based, reinforces this novel as a work of fiction. Yet this strategy also reminds us that the historical narrative created is provisional, residing within the fictional text and in the gaps between the fictional text and the non-fictional intertext. At the same time, the clear narrativity, the suspenseful and sensationalised text of the archival non-fiction, brings them into question because of their place alongside the fiction.

A reading of the novel questions the truthfulness or degree of reliability of past textual ‘facts’ as accurate records of real women’s life events. It does this by the use of a parallel narrative, which articulates characters whose moments of ‘breaking frame’ challenge those same past texts. Their ‘fiction’ as characters is reinforced by their existence as ‘objects’ of narration within the archival texts. Both the archival texts and the fiction can be seen as ‘unreliable’.

The novel uses ex-centric transworld characters and embedded intertextual ‘fragments’ to create a covert self-reflexivity. It also confuses and disrupts narrative temporality and linearity of plot in two ways. It juxtaposes ‘real’ (intertextual element) dates alongside conflicting or unknown periods of time from the fictional narrative; and, within the artist’s journal, it has a minimal use of expected temporal ‘signposts’. These ‘signposts’ of year dates, months, or days of the week are those things that would be most expected in an authentic travel narrative.

In this way, the women’s stories subvert the idea, inherent in previous forms of ‘historical’ fiction, of a single point of view or ‘take’ on history that one or two main characters may hold. The use of intertext results in a continued restating of multiple, conflicting (gender, race, and class) points of view. Ultimately no one ‘correct’ reading of the past gains in supremacy over any other. This narrative construct rearticulates the idea that the past, as does the present, comprises different points of view, not all of which conform to the ‘correct’ view created by the political, social and economic ‘factors’ dominant at the time those events happen. For colonial Australia, this single point of view gave us the myth of heroic (white male) pioneers and positioned women such as some of those within my fiction as ‘bad’.

The fictional text challenges that of the male ‘gaze’, which constructed these women as ‘objects’. Examples of this from the newspaper articles are:

A younger sister of Caroline Collit, married John Walsh, the convict at present under sentence of death in Bathurst gaol, and, it appears, continued to live with him up till the time of her sister’s murder; but she, as well as her sister Caroline, since the trial, have been ascertained to have borne very loose characters, which is fully established by the fact, that both before and after Walsh had married the younger sister, Caroline cohabited with him and had in fact been for a considerable time living with him, under the same roof with her sister, and in a state of separation from her own husband (Collit). Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder.

About twelve months after her marriage, her mother who was a notorious drunkard hanged herself in her own house… Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 1842, The Mount Victoria Murder.

And when we further reflect that the perpetrator of that deed of blood was a woman our horror is, if possible, much augmented. Yes! A woman and one who ought to have been in as much as the means were assuredly in the power of her family-an ornament to her sex and station. She has been cut off in the midst of her days by the hands of the common executioner. And to add to our distress at this sad event she to whose tragic end I am referring was a wife and a mother. It was her hand which struck the blow that rendered her children orphans and brought her to an ignominious end… The Goulburn Herald, October 20, 1855, Funeral sermon on Mary Ann Brownlow.

His wife had been drinking and created an altercation on account of his having sold [her] lease; she asked him to drink, but he refused, when she replied “You can go and drink with your fancywoman”. She came after him as he was going away and stabbed him…..she did it from jealousy, although he had never given her any cause for jealousy. The Goulburn Herald, Saturday, September 15, 1855, Tuesday, September 11, Wilful Murder.

She was always most obedient and quiet in her conduct, and her melancholy winning manners soon procured her the sympathy of all who came in contact with her. She became deeply impressed with the sinfulness of her previous life… The Goulburn Herald, October 13, 1855, Execution of Mary Ann Brownlow.

[Police] had known the deceased who was a confirmed drunkard and an abandoned woman without any home or place of abode; did not believe she had any proper means of support…The Bathurst Times, November 1871.

It is the oppositional and strong narrative ‘voice’ that elicits sympathies for and with the women’s situations. The fictional narratives were written to challenge unsympathetic pre-existing narratives found within the archival intertexts. This male ‘voice’ was one that narrated and positioned women such that they adhered to pre-existing notions of morality; what it meant to be a ‘good’ woman (like Mary Ann Brownlow, reformed in gaol but still sentenced to death) or a ‘bad’ woman (Mary Ann again as the murdering drunken vengeful wife, stabbing her husband in a jealous rage).

‘Reading between the lines’ of history in this way, creating fictional stories and juxtaposing them against the non-fiction prior articulations of those same events, is an opportunity to make use of narrative structure in order to destabilise established constructs of our colonial past. For example, the trope of Australia’s colonial settler women as exampled in the notion of Anne Summers of colonial women as either God’s police or damned whores. ‘A Particularly rigid dualistic notion of women’s function in colonial society was embodied in two stereotypes….that women are either good [God’s police] or evil [Damned whores]’ (67).

With this dualism in mind, it is also useful here to consider the assumption made by Veeser in laying the ground work for New Historicism, that ‘no discourse imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature’ (2).

In a discussion of the ideas of Brian McHale, Middleton and Woods acknowledge McHale’s point of view that readers do recognise the degree to which all knowledge of the past is a construction. They make the claim that ‘the postmodern novelist answers that sense of dislocation and loss…by wrapping ruins of earlier textualities around the narrative’ (66). This to my mind is a call for the type of intertextuality that I have attempted in my thesis. The senses of dislocation and loss found when we attempt to narrativise history are embodied in the structure of the creative component of my thesis.

Yet it could also be argued that the cultural complexity of colonial Australia, with women as the subjugated ‘other’ of a disempowered voice has only been constructed by and from within the present. The ‘real’ women from whose lives these stories are imagined could not have perceived their lives within the frames (class, gender, post coloniality) that we now understand in the same way that we as educated westerners cannot totally perceive a tribal culture’s view of the cosmos as a real ‘fact’.

However, a fictional re-articulation of historical ‘facts’, using a framework of postmodern neo-historical fiction, allows archival documents to be understood as the traces of women to whom those documented facts once referred. The archival record becomes once again a thing that describes a world of women. It is within these archival micro-histories of illiterate lower-class women that we find shards of our hidden past. By fictionally imagining a possible narrative of their lives we, as the author/reader nexus which creates the image of who these transworld characters were, allow for things that existed in the past as possibility. The fictionalised stories, based on fragments of ‘facts’ from the past, are a way of invoking what could have once existed. In this way the stories partake of the Bernstein and Morson concept of ‘sideshadowing’.

Sideshadowing admits, in addition to actualities and impossibilities, a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not. Things could have been different from the way they were, there are real alternatives to the present we know, and the future admits of various possibilities… sideshadowing deepens our sense of the openness of time. It has profound implications for our understanding of history and of our own lives (Morson 6).

The possibilities that sideshadowing their lives invokes in these stories ‘alters the way that we think about earlier events and the narrative models used to describe them’ (Morson 7). We alter our view of the women, as initially described in the archival record, because we now perceive the narrative through which these events and therefore ‘lives’ of the women were written, as merely ‘one possibility’ of many that may have occurred.

Sideshadowing alternate possibilities gives us a way out of that patriarchal hegemony into a more multi-dimensional and non-linear view of female lives in 19th Century Australia. Sideshadowing allows for the ‘non-closure’ within female narratives that these fragments of women’s lives represent.

It is this which is at the core of the novel—an historiographic metafictional challenging by the fictional ‘voices’ of female transworld characters. In this work, they narrate from a female perspective the might-have-been alternative of that previously considered as an historical, legitimate account of the past.

Barthes and Bakhtin

Readers of this type of historiographic metafiction have the freedom to recreate an historical fictional world. By virtue of the use of self-reflexivity and intertext they participate in a fictional world constructed by themselves from the author(s) of the text(s) and the intertext, and the original women’s voices used as quotations by the intertext’s (male) author. This world is based upon their construction of a past created from the author’s research, the author’s subjectivity (from within and by disciplinary discourse), by the author(s) choice of ‘signifiers’ and the meanings that these choices create within the reader’s subjectivity (itself formed out of their individual cultural and social milieu). This idea echoes Barthes concept of the ‘death of the author’, such that:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself; this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (142)

When entering into the world created by this style of historical fiction the reader also enters into a world of previous ‘texts’ (or intertexts) and the multitude of voices inherent in them. This is the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, that ‘every utterance contains within it the trace of other utterances, both in the past and in the future’ (263).

The narrative formed thus becomes one of multiple ‘truths’ and therefore multiple histories. Once written as ‘bad’, the women are now perceived as ‘good’ characters and the ‘bad’ events that occurred around them and to them make up ‘good’ elements of plot, structure, characterisation and voice for a fictionalised version of a past possibility. Bad women make good reading.

Conclusion

This type of narrative structure allows for the limits of the silenced ‘voice’ of the past, and therefore an understanding of marginalised groups within hegemonic grand narratives, to be approached. It seems to me no surprise that neo-historical fiction is used more when the subjects written about are members of marginalised groups. Silenced voices need to be heard.

Because these women left no written account of their experiences, and because we can never experience the society within which their identities were formed, we will never know their ‘identity’ as they experienced it. Fictional self-narrated stories of transworld characters allows for a transformation of the women away from an identity created by the moralising, stereotyped descriptions in the newspapers towards a more fully developed sense of female identity. Third-hand male accounts written for the (then) newspaper readers consumption (and for us as occupiers of the ‘future’) are a construct of one possible identity only. They do not reflect the women’s reality. Adding another fictional ‘identity’ through an imagined self-narrated account deconstructs that limited ‘identity’ formed through the male ‘gaze’. It does so because of the ability of fiction to allow the reader to create a fictional world which can be experienced imaginatively and from within their own subjectivity.

Rather than something passively recorded, literature offers history as a permanent reactivation of the past in a critique of the present, and at the level of content offers a textual anamnesis for the hitherto ignored, unacknowledged or repressed pasts marginalised by the dominant histories. (Middleton and Woods 77)

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Michael Holquist. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath, eds. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1979.
Holton, Robert. Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000.
Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Ringwood Vic: Penguin Books, 1994.
Veeser, H. Aram. The New Historicism. London: Routledge, 1989.

Citation reference for this article

MLA Style
Lowes, Elanna Herbert. "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>.
APA Style
Lowes, E. (Feb. 2005) "Transgressive Women, Transworld Women: The Once ‘Bad’ Can Make ‘Good’ Narratives," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/04-herbertlowes.php>.