Reflective Practice in the field of Creative Media.

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This blog has been conceived as a contributing document for my Masters (in Creative Media) that I am currently in the process of completing through RMIT (www.rmit.edu.au)

Throughout the course of this semester I intend to make weekly entries focusing on topics pertinent to my studies. For my Masters I am majoring in the field of Creative Writing and thus, am writing a memoir as my Creative Project submission; in addition to a supporting Exegesis document. The exegesis will focus largely on The Death of the Novel. An area that first twigged my interest several years ago when I began writing my own book.

Stefan Bollman’s ‘Women Who Write’ (www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Write-Stefan-Bollman/dp/1858943752) has provided me with the richest source of information thus far on the topic of women and the history of the novel. Throughout this work Bollman examines the feminine culture of the novel and the evolution from Jane Austen to Virgina Woolf to modern feminists such as Germaine Greer as well as post feminist works by the likes of Francine Prose and Nancy Friday.

In short, what I am trying to achieve through the course of writing my exegesis is a further discussion on what I deem to be the death of a certain literary form. To break this down further, I’m interested in examining the social constraints of the writers environment. Jane Austen, arguably one of the most prolific writers of her time, female or otherwise, spent the majority of her writing hours in a shared communal drawing room– where by– the entire family would sit, sip tea, discuss this and that, play the piano and embroider. Austen’s manuscripts were hidden beneath tapestries and embroidery. Her plots, character arches, subplots and subtexts were all conceived in a communal space under the close watch of others.

Not how I write.

From this period in time we then shift to the works of Virginia Woolf, who demanded a ‘Room of Ones Own’ to write in. A place of sanction and liberation. A space devoid of watching eyes and prying social constraints. A place to be free in ones own inventions.

To return briefly to Austen, we find that largely her works were deemed autobiographical, in her novel Persuasion, we find this moving description of one of Austen’s characters, Anne Elliot: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth,” she writes, “…She learned romance as she grew older– the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” This comment is equally true of its author, who might be deemed a “late developer”.

It is within this domain that the mind travels to wild and wonderful places and then returns to cook the evening meal, done the family laundry and further serve the patriarchal divide. The novel, as I see it, has historically been a place for women to escape to.

To return to Woolf and the writers that followed, George Eliot, Simone De Beauvoir and the likes of Sylvia Plath, et al one might begin to see the common thread of experience throughout these works. Women writing largely about how they saw the world, the realities of micro/macro verses the possibilities within a fantastic world.

During the process of writing my own work of literary nonfiction I have grown convinced that all “novels” are indeed, works of nonfiction. The defining genre, however, being dictated by the cultural climate and personal bravery of the individual writer. Albeit the writers own fantasies or realities.

Contrary to this, we may ask what did Austen know of romance as an unmarried, virginal woman? Her nephew noted in his own memoir of his aunt, that she died at the age of 41 when “she was just beginning to feel confidence in her own success.” Had she lived a few years longer, Virgina Woolf wrote, she would’ve emerged from the obscurity in which she lived: “She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to open at leisure”. There is a huge sense, throughout the history of womens writing, that a lot of these lives have been cut short. Stunting the growth of what potentially could’ve been a much more vastly progressive trajectory into the world of established post-feminist writings.

Again, Bollman notes that since Austen’s time life expectancy has increased by 40 years or so, and it is still increasing, thereby making possible developmental processes that require more time because they involved following byways and indirect routes, perhaps even losing the way at times. A person whose early years are unhappy, Bollman adds, or are “not normal,” or are even lived too prudently, needs time to change course; ingrained patterns of behavior seldom vanish with a sudden blaze of revelation, he concludes. “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?” wrote Silvia Plath in her own journal. Yet, following the separation from her husband, fellow writer, Ted Hughes, who loved another woman, she did not start a new life in London with her two small children, as she had said she would, she instead chose to die.

I’m interested in examining how these women are received by society and how so much of this brilliant writing is plagued by ill health. My own trajectory has been smattered with large, laborious loads of visits to specialists, various surgeries, treatments and inevitably a whole lot of research and writing. I am curious as to the role of ones own fertility in all of these works I have mentioned, and others, that I, as yet, have not. The role creativity plays in the process (or absence) of ability (or choice) to create life. My interest branches out from here to include the various works of Germaine Greer; Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); and The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991), and most recently Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), all of which examine the politics of what it is to be human and female and perceived by the patriarch.

“Let not women write poetry:/ They should try to be poems themselves,” advised the clumsily worded poem ‘Blustocking’ (1887) by Oscar Blumenthal. In an ever increasingly paedophilic time in history, my paper is an attempt to examine the ever present role of younger and younger women in a time where fertility has never been as big an issue as it is currently. And like all grand issues, interestingly, the subject of fecundity and feminism remains largely uncharted.

In a recent interview on ABCs Radio National, Germaine Greer was asked if she was in fact flattered, beyond comprehension, by the fact her first sweat, The Female Eunuch (1970) is still in print. “Not at all,” she responded, “…if anything I’m disappointed. I was certain there would’ve been at least 15 other works of this nature written since but there haven’t.”

“People say I’m an egoist,” wrote Ethel Smyth, “I’m not an egoist. I’m a fighter”.

And as egotistical as it may seem, I’d love nothing more than for my memoir to be an extension of that beacon. Of all of these womens works. Their ill fated sweats, often cut short by social mores and ill health. I’d like to be the women who personifies it now, currently, in a world of popstars and pint sized quasi feminists. I’d like to be the change that I seek, and the kind of the change that doesn’t find myself packing my pockets full of stones and drowning myself in a river… I’d like to be able to write in a room of ones own with the courage and stealth to attach the generific title of “non fiction” to my work, rather than scampering off to a public place to escape my own realities through the novel.

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