Abstract
Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau leverages the new spaces and cultures of Sydney—art galleries, bookshops, bohemian parties in beachside modernist holiday houses—to explore the social and physical realities of life for women in the modern city. Cusack aims to convey realistically the lives of modern urban women, with an emphasis on relationships and sexuality, and bodily and intellectual autonomy in a social milieu that has not yet evolved to reflect new values for living. At the same time, Jungfrau is a book deeply interested in the philosophical and literary potential of new science, and fundamental questions of life’s purpose in a newly relativistic universe. Cusack tests the limits of modern theories of existence against the social and physical realities of life for women in modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
Cusack always claimed to have a great interest in Australian history and was taught by the same groundbreaking historian, G. A. Wood, who inspired Barnard and Eldershaw (North 2007). Her next work after Jungfrau was a play based on the life of an Irish convict in 1815 Australia.
- 2.
Drusilla Modjeska names it as a ‘prototype for the feminist novel in the interwar period’ (2014: 4). Jungfrau shares many of the concerns of M. Barnard Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark’s early fiction, specifically those of bourgeois women in modernity (2014: 263, 265). Tania Peitzker suggests that generic confusion between realism and romance causes the book’s central conflict, the doomed affair between Thea and Glover. This ‘failed romance’, Peitzker argues, works as a ‘confounding of the binary presupposed by the dominant narrative structures of realism and romance’ (1999: 141). Thus Thea, inscribed by the conventions of neither genre, cannot belong to the social world and must leave it through death.
- 3.
For extended analysis that confirms the enormous impact of physics upon modernist writers, see Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ebury touches on the work of Eddington, Jeans and Dunne, though no writer she considers seems to have been as willing as Cusack to engage with and quote directly from all three in a single work.
- 4.
Eve seems to be referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Everything about woman is a riddle, and woman has but one solution: pregnancy’ (2006: 48).
- 5.
For an analysis of the exhibition’s significance to Australian culture and cultural exchange between London and Sydney, see Souliman (2017).
- 6.
See NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, ‘Careel House’.
- 7.
- 8.
Victoria Stewart considers the impact of J. W. Dunne’s theories in British literary culture in her essay, ‘J. W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s’. She pays particular attention to the work of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, where she argues Dunne’s influence is ‘discernible principally in structural rather than stylistic factors’ (2008: 63). There is relatively little critical work on Dunne, but it seems few if any other female writers made use of his ideas.
- 9.
Benjamin’s most famous statement on seriality is ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Repetition, he writes, ‘withers … the aura of the work of art’, substituting ‘a plurality of copies for a unique existence’ (2007: 221).
- 10.
There is an ecstatic element to Eddington’s prose as he describes the merging of the self with Nature that is not unlike that found in literary celebrations of the immortality of serialism. Consider this passage: ‘If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness—that the harmony and beauty of the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that transfigures the face of man’ (2014: 161).
- 11.
The Australian manifestation of vitalism is explored in the next chapter, on Eleanor Dark’s Waterway.
- 12.
See the Austlit database for further details. ‘Manuscripts: Periodical’, AustLit, 1 October 2013, https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C277773.
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Brayshaw, M. (2021). Science, Everyday Experience and Modern Urban Women: Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936). In: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_3
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