Gwen Harwood is an Australian poet. The poems I focussed on dealt mostly on gender and power.
Gwen Harwood employs the battler character in Australian literature to question the distribution of power in Australian society. This can be seen in her poems Home of Mercy and Burning Sappho, where she employs the battler character to present her ideas of the distribution of power within her society. Both poems question the power between the two genders through the use of imagery and passive tense. Burning Sappho is a poem about a housewife who doesn’t want all the responsibility over the jobs in the house. She is unhappy with her role, but battles on continue writing, which is something which she enjoys doing. Despite all the demands of her during the day, she continues to write, even at night showing her determination. In Home of Mercy, the girls in the poem are presented as battlers as they are trapped in a convent, and although the nuns try to suppress and make them feel guilty for their sin, instead they are presented as laundering not only theirs, but others as well. They keep going and are seen as battlers as they are constructed to make the reader feel sympathetic towards them and that they are in an unfair position in society. From these representations, the characters in both poems can be seen to question the power in society between the male and females.
The battler character is one which refuses to admit defeat in the face of difficulty. This can be seen in both poems Burning Sappho and Home of Mercy as they challenge the power distribution in society, between the different genders. The power of that time mostly lay in the hands of the males, and the women were expected to stay indoors and look after the children, or the house, while the male was at work. This was the common ideology of that time, and anyone outside that boundary was considered an outcast of society. Males held the dominant role in society and Harwood’s poems challenge this, and question the distribution of power between them.
In Burning Sappho, the housewife in the poem is constructed with two sides – a devil like side and a good housewife side. She is presented as being very active around the house and lots of demands are placed on her every day that she doesn’t get to write which is her passion and hobby. A battler is one which refuses to give up through difficulty, and the housewife in Burning Sappho can be seen as one as she refuses to give up writing even while she has so many other demands to meet. At the end of the poem, she begins to write when she is not needed around the house anymore, and this is when everyone is asleep. This shows her dedication and determination to write, and although the reader can see she dislikes her role as a housewife, she battles on and doesn’t complain openly to the other characters in the poem. “…all trivial matters cease…” show she does care about her family but she just wants some time to herself. The fact that her day is consumed by housework and expectations of a housewife, her frustration presents a view from a housewife in society, that maybe too much demand is placed on housewives and that they need time to themselves too.
In Home of Mercy, the girls are presented as being in an unfair position as they are trapped in a convent for committing the sin of having a child out of wedlock. They are seen as battlers as they keep going despite the fact they are looked down upon. The nun telling them to keep quiet when they talk reinforces the imagery of a quiet, sterile place and the imagery of plaster saints also help to present this image. The contrast between the fertile girls and the sterile convent shows the suppression of the girls in the convent and depresses the place to position the reader to feel sympathetic towards them. The line “sheets soiled by other bodies” shows that they are laundering not only their sin, but others too. This could imply they are paying for the sin of the male part as well, since the male side is not expressed at all in the poem. The purposeful omission of the male side helps to show the distribution of power in society, and challenges the power between the males and females.
Both characters in Burning Sappho and Home of Mercy question the distribution of power in society, as they both show the characters in the poems battling through difficulty, but not giving up. In Burning Sappho, passive tense is used to show that the mother’s jobs around the house shouldn’t be all her responsibility – “The clothes are aired. The house is clean.” This places no responsibility of the jobs on the mother, and this questions the distribution of power between the males/females or husband/wife in society. The fact that there is hardly any mention of her husband, except when he calls her to bed reinforces the idea that too much expectation/demand is placed on housewives/women and also helps to question the power in society. The poem is saying that the role of being a wife and female is hard as there is a lot of pressure from society to accomplish what is expected of them.
In Home of Mercy, the poem also questions the distribution of power between the males and females. There is no mention of the male side while the pregnant girls in the convent are condemned for their sin and to always be looked down upon. The omission of the male part is quite obvious in the poem and “sheets soiled by other bodies” imply that the girls in the convent are paying for their sin, as well as the males’ part of it. This makes it seem unfair to place all the blame on the girls, as the males would obviously have had some part to paly in it as well. This presents the idea that males did hold the dominant role in society so much of the blame is placed on the female. The imagery of the young girls trapped in the lonely sterile convent help to question the distribution of power in society, and show that males should be blamed equally to the females.
Through the use of these two poems, Harwood questions the power of the males/females in society and challenges the dominant position of the males. The poem shows women as trapped inside their expected role as a female/mother and this helps to question the male role in society. She constructs the characters in the poem as battlers to show the frustration of women in society and the unfairness of their expected roles. The construction of them as battlers reinforce Harwood’s position against the male dominance in society and show the reader there is too much pressure on females to meet expectations. Harwood’s poems show that males and females should be equal and the power in society should be distributed equally instead of the males having the dominant position in society.
Bibliography:
HYPERLINK "http://www.plc.vic.edu.au/Staff/jmweb/JessnCourtz/litanslysis.htm" http://www.plc.vic.edu.au/Staff/jmweb/JessnCourtz/litanslysis.htm
HYPERLINK "http://carbon.cudenver.edu/public/sociology/introsoc/topics/topic4e.html" http://carbon.cudenver.edu/public/sociology/introsoc/topics/topic4e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org