Gender, Genre, and Sybylla’s Performative Identity in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career

Abstract

Sybylla Melvyn, narrator of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (1901), has troubled readers from the start. William Blackwood, editor, felt impelled to 'tone down' her narrative, and 'religious, political and sex-problem passages' made Henry Lawson 'blush'. The 'trouble' with Sybylla is that she refuses to endorse any stable and unified model of identity, most crucially, with regard to her gender; Lawson's 'sex-problem'. This gender trouble manifests itself in the question of the genre of Sybylla's narrative—My Brilliant Career is a challenging mixture of realism and romance. These are two modes of writing which were firmly 'gendered' in literary debate at the time of the novel's composition, hence Lawson's distinction between the 'painfully real' and the 'girlishly emotional parts of the book' (xxv). Yet it is just such gendering of genre which is problematised in My Brilliant Career, and despite Lawson's bravado in the preface ('I hadn't read three pages when I saw ... that the story had been written by a girl', xxv), the narrative bamboozled him. In his first letter to Franklin, he asked: 'Will you write and tell me who and what you really are? man or woman?' (vi). Sybylla herself can never settle comfortably or decisively into 'male' realism or 'female' romance. Through a complex weaving of realist and romance structures, her narrative offers a model of identity based not on a single gender/genre, but on a process of performing gendered genre roles in a manner that never quite matches the ruling prescription.