Author: James Franklin

Originally published:  Codex 12 (July-Sept 2000).

SHAME ABOUT THE TURF WAR

Review of Rosamund Dalziell, Shameful Autobiographies Melbourne University Press, $29.95 pb.

The recent film of Mansfield Park placed a slave ship in the Bristol Channel, several thousand miles off course, purely in order to deconstruct Ms Austen's shockingly pre-Marxist lack of attention to the economic power base of her fictional world. After this reductio of the industry that replaces literary criticism about what is in works of literature with all-purpose discourse about power, gender, imperialism and other entities not in the books allegedly discussed, it is a relief to read a work that finds and analyses something new that is actually to be found in the literature studied. Dalziell establishes that shame is a central theme in a wide range of Australian autobiographies. There are books with shame at illegitimate birth (by Robert Dessaix, Bernard Smith), at aboriginality (Ruby Langford Ginibi, Sally Morgan) at being a migrant (Andrew Riemer, Amirah Inglis), and, in earlier times, shame at simply being a colonial and therefore second class (Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Manning Clark). Some of the childhoods described were blighted by an ever-present and debilitating shame, especially those of illegitimate and aboriginal children. Even where the shame is more from intermittent persecution over such issues as "wog" food at playlunch, against a supportive family background, shame is experienced as a peculiarly memorable and significant experience. Much of the book consists of well-chosen extracts from the autobiographies, showing the common features of the experience of shame, but also the differences among the individuals. Dalziell is a little inclined to assume that shame is always unjustified - she is very angry with Kathleen Fitzpatrick for asserting that her failure to get an Oxford first was justified. In general, though, her touch is sure, and the overall picture of a variety of sources of unjustifiable childhood shame, and the various possible reactions to it, is valuable. Perhaps the most common of those reactions is an initial suppression of the attributes believed shameful, followed decades later by its admission and assertion as nothing to be ashamed of, as recounted in the autobiography itself.

A question the book naturally suggests is, what is the difference between autobiographies where shame is important and the rest? Australia is not run by people coping with shame. Public life is dominated by those who took their own importance for granted from their earliest youth, and networked assiduously with the like-minded. A similar book on their stories might be valuable. It would be less pleasant to read, certainly, not only because relentless self-confidence is wearing to the reader, but also because it tends towards an outward-looking focus and concentration on action that is inimical to the introspection needed for autobiography. See almost any political autobiography, passim. Still, the self-confident are important people, and a few of them managed to produce interesting autobiographies. "Weary" Dunlop's is especially revealing on what it took to make a classic Australian leader.

Dalziell's book is a printed-up PhD thesis. By and large, this is one of the books that shows that complaints about this publishing practice are unjustified. Complaint would, indeed, be more productively directed at the sort of 50-year-old author with a "name", beloved of publishers, whose annually appearing books call to mind the comment once made on Woody Allen's later films: "The wheel's still turning, but the hamster's dead." PhD writers often have something new to say, and have put in the effort to get it right. On the other hand, they need a modicum of circumspection to get their thesis past the examiners, which can result in a pruning of viewpoint to keep within the trellis of their discipline's pieties. In the present case, the writer has run into a turf war between the two disciplines which think they have the franchise for the investigation of the human psyche: literature, and psychology. She does write briefly, and illuminatingly, of a few writers on shame who call themselves psychologists, but they are at the more literary and speculative end of the discipline. Standard empirical psychology is simply ignored. The PsycINFO database lists quite a number of articles with "shame" in the title: 765 of them from 1967 to the present, in fact. Almost all of them are empirical investigations of exactly the sort of shame Dalziell is investigating. The unargued assumption that this work must be irrelevant to an understanding of shame in literature cannot be blamed on the individual PhD student. It is a product of the arrogant insularity of the whole discipline of literary criticism, which thinks it is dealing with the finest essence of human nature, far above the world of those who actually watch what humans do. "No facts here, please, we're lit-ish."