Australia the Land of Similes: The Feminine Economy

Abstract

Mircea Elaide has argued that the crucial task of people newly arrived in a country hitherto unknown is imaginative, even spiritual, “the transformation of chaos into cosmos”. The failure to do so may result in what the Chinese call “the dialogue with heaven” and may lead to a loss of humanity. It could be argued that something like this has happened in Australia. Here the culture of colonisation has been essentially “masculine” in the sense in which Helene Cixous uses the term, a culture of domination and control. It has lead to a suspicion of the “feminine” which is prepared to give to and receive from the other and thus, I argue, to the problematic relationship of our relations with the land and its First Peoples. This paper looks at the ways in which Gail Jones' novel Black Mirror explores ways in which the “feminine” might help transform the chaos which faces us into cosmos.

Bibliografia

Drusilla Modjeska, The Orchard. Sydney, Pan Macmillan, 1994.

Gail Jones, Black Mirror, Sydney, Pan Macmillan, 2002.

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Ian Turner, (ed), The Australian Dream. Melbourne, Sun Books, 1968.

Mircea Eliade, The Myth Of The Eternal Return. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974.

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics. London, Routledge, 1991.

Tu Wei-Ming, Centrality And Community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.