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“A Literature of Violence”: Violence, Gender, and Land
in 20th Century American and Australian Women’s Novels
Jessica Hyatt, Master’s Candidate, English

This paper explores issues of gender, land, and violence in four twentieth century American and Australian novels by women. In both countries, literary criticism has focused on the frontier as a site of violent struggle, both physical and psychic, between humans and nature. This struggle is frequently translated into violence between people—and particularly between men and women. On the farm (in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career [1901], Willa Cather’s My Antonia [1918], and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres [1992]) the desire to control and to subdue the land creates an environment in which violence in male-female relationships is both accepted and expected. In Nikki Gemmell’s Alice Springs (1999), the barren desert of Central Australia provides a backdrop to the equally barren, violent relationships of the female protagonist. This violence is far from one-sided: women in these novels are frequently as violent as the men are, although the violence may be expressed in different ways. A reading of the violence in these works intersects the interests of feminist and frontier criticism, and also provides a subject for comparative critique of American and Australian literature.