Alternative Imaginaries of the Modern Girl: A Comparative Examination of Canadian and Australian Magazines

Abstract

How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary of marginal status, were given central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity? (Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 1995, 10) Longstanding meta-narratives about modernity and modernism have not only neglected gender, as the epigram above from Rita Felski suggests, but also overlooked whole nations, including Canada and Australia. Standard accounts of their literature tend to focus on narratives of either the pioneering and settlement phases of the colonial era or the development of their self-consciously national literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. In fact, the shared origins of these settler dominions, as well as their "struggle to legitimate the national literature" and overcome "the colonial mentality" which continued well into the post-war years to "disparage... the local product" (McDougall and Whitlock 1987, 7) stimulated the first of many comparative approaches to their literatures. It is consequently unsurprising that settler colonial cultures and their literatures are often either perceived as never modern or born modern, as David Carter has observed of the Australian scene (2013, viii-ix). This misconception tends to contribute to and become reciprocally reinforced by a relative lack of critical attention to the crucial modernising years in Canadian and Australian literary histories.In addition to this chronological miscoding, both Canada and Australia are also typically and falsely coded as masculine societies. "It virtually goes without saying," Kay Schaffer observed, "that national identity and the Australian character are masculine constructions" (1988, 4). Carole Gerson observed much the same of Canada, noting the "dominant view that the great Canadian narrative concerned man's contest with nature" (2015, 345). As a self-described "feminist literary archaeologist" (Gerson 1991, 46), Gerson has challenged this view of Canadian literature as one largely constructed by influential male nationalist critics. Since the 1980s, Drusilla Modjeska (1981) and Carole Ferrier (1985) have also reinstated the place of a number of significant interwar female writers that had been previously overlooked in Australian literature. But, in Australia, Modjeska focused largely on writers of social realist novels and Ferrier emphasised women's political writing.Correspondingly, in Canada, Gerson's significant revisionist literary historical scholarship has tended to focus on women's poetry (1991) or on women's issues in social realist novels (in Sugars 2015).These studies may have restored some aspects of women's literary and cultural history at the cost of overlooking others.One figure missing from these accounts of Canadian and Australian literatures is the Modern Girl. These studies seem to have emphasised versions of the New Woman instead. This e...