https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.001
Beyond the Tinsel and the Kewpie: Feminism, Domesticity, and the Politics of Gender in Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
DR. T. MARX
Professor
Department of English
Pondicherry University
Puducherry-605014
drtmarx@pondiuni.ac.in
Scopus ID: 59424375400
Abstract: Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) is one of the earliest plays to be enshrined within the canon of Australian national theatre as a significant theatrical achievement. It has long been construed as an elegiac rumination on the bush hero and the cherished ideal of masculine mateship. A more radical and generative dramatic excellence operates beneath this culturally endorsed yet inadequate understanding. If interpreted with feminist theoretical scaffolding, the play reveals itself as an unrelenting, incisive analysis of the very patriarchal ideology that mid-century Australia held most dear. This paper explores how Lawler’s female characters, far from occupying the peripheral spaces of a male-centric narrative, constitute its proper ideological centre, collectively dismantling the masculinist mythology. It is evident that white settler culture had founded its sense of national identity on the pedestal of this phallocentric mythology. Against such a dominant mythical narrative, Lawler’s female characters assert the sovereign claims of female selfhood, economic freedom, cultural autonomy, and homosocial community. The paper proceeds through four thematically interlocked arguments. Firstly, it views the feminist revaluation of domestic space as a site of female governance rather than containment. Secondly, it offers an insightful critique of marriage and motherhood as the primary institutional mechanisms of patriarchal conditioning. Thirdly, it considers the ambivalent and ultimately subversive symbolic economy of the kewpie doll, which functions simultaneously as an emblem of feminine subordination and its own counter-text. Finally, it traces the transformative potential of professional agency and female solidarity as alternative structures of identity and selfhood. Through this reading framework, the paper traces the emergence of a portrait of womanhood irreducible to passive acquiescence. Lawler’s women are articulate, economically independent, and emotionally sovereign who, on their own terms and by their own agency, fundamentally rewrite the gendered social contract the play reflects.
Keywords: Australian drama, feminism, domesticity, gender ideology, kewpie doll symbolism, female agency and homosociality
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