\"Beyond Feminist Aesthetics\" has a dual focus. First, Rita Felski gives a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and second, she offers an analysis of contemporary fiction by women, drawing in particular on the genres of the autobiographical confession and the novel of self-discovery, in order to show that this literature raises questions for feminism that cannot be answered in terms of a purely gender based analysis.Felski argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a nonissue that feminists have needlessly pursued; she suggests, in contrast, that it is impossible to speak of \"masculine\" and \"feminine,\" \"subversive\" and \"reactionary\" literary forms in isolation from the social conditions of their production and reception. The political value of such works of literature from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context. This leads her to argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory, and to develop such an approach by drawing upon the model of a feminist counter-public sphere.Rita Felski has produced a closely reasoned, stimulating book that creates a new framework for discussing the relationship between literature and feminist politics. It will interest students and teachers of women's studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and fiction.

Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change

Charlotte Wood, The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin, 2015)Welcome to hell. Imagine that you wake up, alone, in an unfamiliar room. You are dressed in someone else's clothes. The door of the room is locked. You have no idea where you are, or why you are here. If you are a man, you will now have to imagine that you are a young woman. You are being punished for a crime that only a woman can commit.Charlotte Wood's fifth novel opens with this scenario, a scene from the nightmare world of dystopian fiction. This could be 1984, the landscape of George Orwell's Oceania or the remote island of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Margaret Atwood's futuristic Republic of Gilead, home of Offred and the other female victims of The Handmaid's Tale, also comes clearly to mind. Instead, Wood's novel is set in an unmistakably Australian and contemporary society.The ten prisoners in The Natural Way of Things are all young Australian women. They have attractive names - Yolanda, Verla, Leantha, Isobel, Joy - but they are also called 'the minister'slittle- travel-tramp and that-Skype-slut and the yuck-ugly-dog from the cruise ship; they are pig-on-aspit and big-red-box, moll-number-twelve and bogan-gold-digger-gangbang-slut' (47).These women are 'what happens when you don't keep your fucking fat slag's mouth shut' (47). Victims of sexual abuse who have refused to stay silent about their experiences, they have been 'handed over' (56) to a security firm (Hardings International: 'Dignity & Respect in a Safe & Secure Environment') and imprisoned on an isolated rural property.Charlotte Wood's powerful novel examines what happens to the young women as they come to terms with their terrible captivity. Essentially, they are dehumanized and treated like animals: put on leashes, herded around the compound, forced to sleep in dogboxes. 'Exactly like sheep' (17) - or female wartime collaborators - they are 'shorn', their hair shaved off by one of the male jailers. Animalistic references abound in the text: the women are compared to goats, dogs, horses, pigs, hens, rabbits and sheep. Locked in their 'kennels', they 'breathe through their mouths like animals' and 'lunge at their dishes like dogs' (46).Hardings International has hired three people to guard the women: the ex-army man Boncer, an unemployed backpacker called Teddy and a 'nurse', Nancy. Like their prisoners, they seem to be unremarkable, ordinary young Australians. Boncer is the most vicious and abusive of the guards, but he is also a pitiable 'mummy's boy' with pimples and an internet dating profile. Placed in a position of unchecked power, though, he is more than willing to physically abuse the 'slags' and 'whores' in his captivity. Teddy despises the women as 'sloppy seconds' (58) and complains bitterly about his ex-girl-friend Hannah, with her hairy legs and 'unceasing bitching ... like some harpy kindergarten teacher' (129). Nancy treats the girls with 'amused, disgusted pity' and blames them for their plight: 'So what have you done to yourself, you silly bitch?' (81)It is this everyday sexism, so carelessly expressed in this extreme environment, that makes Wood's novel such a chilling and confronting text to read. Early in the book, Verla wonders at the extent of her companions' compliance in their terrible and hopeless incarceration:What would happen if they refused? …

The Natural Way of Things

This thesis offers a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s 2015 novel, The Natural Way of Things (NWOT) as a critical dystopian fiction, which modifies familiar dystopian convention through the spatial, rather than temporal, displacement of its subjects. This departure from the dystopian narrative’s characteristic setting in the near or distant future intensifies the potent horror of the narrative by encouraging readers to consider that the suffering endured by the young female characters in the narrative is, to varying degrees, happening right now, every day, in contemporary Australia. Furthermore, the act of the women’s containment within a prison setting invites a feminist critique of the myriad ways in which women in contemporary Australia are silenced, subordinated by and even sometimes complicit in the perpetuation of a social order that delimits what a woman is or should be, and what a woman does or shouldn’t do. This will be demonstrated through a close reading of the novel that focuses on two key elements. The first is Wood’s use of a distinctly Australian, pejorative rhetoric, the everyday familiarity of which accentuates the contemporaneity of the novel while simultaneously acting as a device for enforcing a male-based dystopic order. The second key element is central character Yolanda Kovacs’ intense alienation from her body; throughout NWOT, Yolanda confronts the chronic, life-long objectification of her body and in so doing, offers a critique of the bodily objectification of women in contemporary Australia. Her eventual retreat into an animal-like state is an act of radical resistance. The implications of this retreat for the intertextual present, however, involve a damning critique of a social order in which the only way women can conceptualise an autonomous subjective existence is through escape, isolation and the abandonment of a human existence altogether.

Asha Ryan

Papers

A feminist reading of Charlotte Wood’s the natural way of things as critical dystopia