Between Girls: Lateral Discipline in Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom

Henry Handel Richardson’s representation of lateral discipline in her 1910 novel, The Getting of Wisdom, is significant for the way in which it makes visible the reorienting of disciplinary structures that took place as the private, domestic tuition of middle-class girls gave way to institutional, collective schooling in the last third of the nineteenth century. Focusing on this novel, which fictionalizes the author's own experience of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College from 1883 to 1887, this article considers her representation of girls as not just objects but agents of disciplinary action. I argue that in boarding school, novels such as Richardson’s discipline functions laterally, between peers, in ways that often reiterate the ‘vertical’ authority of parents and teachers but also contest it, moving into the space created by its failures or absences. Reading these novels thus requires a reorientation of our own theoretical models for thinking about discipline, in particular, the Foucauldian panopticon and his conception of the segmented space of the school, which do not allow for the kinds of sideways glances that proliferate across Richardson’s novel. The Getting of Wisdom thus provides the opportunity to theorize anew the role played by the peer group in shaping girls into social subjects, a role that was a cause for both celebration and concern by commentators of the time

Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione, and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling

Teaching transnational Morrison: Curation and comparative American studies

This article is the edited text of a talk given in May 2021 for the AHRC-funded Black Female Intellectuals network. It argues that through comparative, transnational work American Studies scholars can widen the definition of who is considered a Black Female Intellectual first in terms of what we understand to be public intellectual work and also in terms of who American Studies scholars recognise as Black. I explore the act of curation as an act of public intellectualism by looking closely at exhibitions curated by African American writer Toni Morrison and Aboriginal Australian artist Fiona Foley. I then discuss Foley’s work as a ‘Blak’ Female Intellectual and argue that as such, her work should be engaged with and taught within transnational, comparative American Studies classrooms