The Road from Coorain Analysis - eNotes.com

The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

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The Road from Coorain

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The Road from Coorain is first and finally the autobiography of Jill Ker Conway, the first female president of Smith College, though its focus is not upon her presidency but upon her childhood and young adulthood. It is also a study of feminism—its complexities and its challenges—and a book about the cultural history of Conway’s homeland, Australia. This self-portrait, then, not only explores and re- creates one individual’s past but also situates that life story in a larger, complicated context of humanity and history.

In the tradition of autobiographies that employ fictional devices, such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) or Lillian Hellman’s several self-portraits, The Road from Coorain opens with a storyteller’s description of the setting. The landscape of New South Wales, Australia, is described in compelling detail, with its plains and their endless horizon, its ever-present red dust, its emus and kangaroos and kookaburras. Conway recalls the bleakness of this world that dwarfs human beings and their lives as a place that defies imagining “a kookaburra feeding St. Jerome or accompanying St. Francis. They belong to a physical and spiritual landscape which is outside the imagination of the Christian West.” They also belong to a landscape that shapes its people into self- reliant, independent individuals, “real men” who learn to reject comfort and emotional expression and women who struggle with isolation and loneliness.

Conway’s mother and father are prototypes of these men and women. Purchasing and committing their lives to a soldier settler’s block of land on the western plains, they called their property Coorain, an aboriginal word meaning “windy place.” For Conway’s father, stoic and single-minded in his obsession with the land, Coorain was a dream come true; for Conway’s mother, a nurse who had grown up in a comfortable Queensland urban area, Coorain was a nightmare. For Conway and her brothers Robert and Barry, the early years at Coorain resembled her father’s view, for their lives were idyllic. By 1942, however, when Conway was eight, their lives were changed, and the dream became a nightmare. A severe drought occurred, Conway’s father died in an episode that suggests suicide, and Conway, her brothers, and her mother were cast out from a paradise that, in Conway’s words, “had become literally purgatorial for us.” As they left Coorain for Sydney, Conway recounts her awareness that she would have to serve as her “father’s agent in the family and muster the energy to deal with such further disasters as might befall us.”

Those subsequent disasters were largely familial and mostly related to Conway’s mother, who became both increasingly dependent upon her daughter and increasingly manipulative of her. Conway tried to understand this relationship while dealing with other dilemmas of growing up: finding the right school and friends, dealing with the death of her beloved brother Bob, coming to grips with her sexuality. As she relates the ways in which she learned to reconcile most of her concerns, she considers how her relationship with her mother persisted as a painful conundrum. In her effort to solve this puzzle, she passed through various stages of understanding, including an epiphany she had when reading a Carl Jung essay, “The Positive and Negative Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” She discovered that she and her mother were Demeter and Persephone, and that her mother would be destroyed if she were to lose her daughter. Following her father’s stoic model, she decided to grit her teeth, stop complaining, and devote herself to her mother.

This decision was revoked, however, when Conway recognized that her commitment to her mother, like her commitment to Australia, meant bondage and...

(This entire section contains 1577 words.)

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entrapment. A series of experiences, including not being offered a job in the Department of External Affairs because of her gender, compelled her to leave Australia in pursuit of an education at Harvard University. She remembers deciding to be different from her parents: “I was going to be life-affirming from now on, grateful to have been born, not profligate in risking my life for the sake of the panache of it, not all-too-ready to embrace a hostile fate.” She took the painful—and liberating—step of leaving one part of her life and embracing another, knowing that, like Thomas Wolfe, she could never go home again.

As she recalls this experience of growing up and moving away from home and homeland, Jill Ker Conway also explores the way in which she grew into an awareness of feminism, beginning with the model of her mother, whom she describes as “a modern feminist, a loyal follower of Marie Stopes and Havelock Ellis.” Her mother had learned early that conventional attitudes toward gender were limiting, that a family which assigned sex roles to its daughters—waiting on the males, deferring to the judgment of older sons—was restrictive. She left school at fourteen and earned enough money as an office worker to begin nurse’s training at seventeen (claiming to be eighteen). She finished her training while still in her teens, took nursing positions in places that would teach her various skills, and then assumed a position at Lake Cargellio, where she ran the hospital. When she married Conway’s father, she was an independent woman, accustomed to being in charge—an attitude that persisted throughout her life, sustaining her and her family through difficult times, including the period immediately after her husband’s death. In her effort to sort out the financial situation and provide for her family’s future, she had to deal with a male valuation agent who embodied a system skewed in favor of men and against women. Her actions provided her daughter with her first lessons in feminism, as Conway recalls: “Her outspoken anger cowed the man into some concessions, but her rumblings about this economic injustice continued for years, and instructed me greatly.”

Conway was instructed in feminism in other ways as well, both positive and negative. Formal education introduced her to Elizabeth I, who became her first model for a woman leader. A private school provided her with the confidence that women could and would achieve. The University of Sydney offered an environment of inquiry and intellectual activity that was particularly exciting for Conway, the only woman taking history honors. The confidence and competence that she acquired, however, proved useless when she applied for a position with the Department of External Affairs. Despite having ranked first in her class, she was denied a position because she was a woman, a person who was “too good-looking,” would “be married within a year,” was “too intellectually aggressive.” She was appalled by this assumption of male biological superiority.

As she tried to comprehend the incomprehensible—the injustice of sexism—Conway also tried to understand the country and culture that nurtured this attitude. She recalled the assortment of experiences throughout her childhood that reflected complicated views of colonialism. There were songs: ’God Save the King” and “Land of Hope and Glory,” eliciting a memory of the Empire—not so much England—of which Australia was proud to be a part. There was a school curriculum that ignored the fact that the students lived in Australia and, in fact, reinforced a colonial mentality with maps of the British Empire, uniforms copying those worn in English schools, and speech purged of Australian diphthongs. There was also the issue, after she read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that her parents might be seen as monopolizers of land, exploiting the laborers who sheared the sheep and maintained the property.

Trying to understand herself, feminism, and cultural history, Conway recalls the way in which these mysteries converged and compelled her to leave Australia. She knew that myths and images had shaped her country and herself, and she saw significant parallels and differences between Australian and American myths and images. Reading about Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Oscar Handlin’s ideas about immigration, and Perry Miller’s analysis of the physical environment shaping the imagination of American colonists, Conway determined to go to the United States and enroll in the doctoral program in American history at Harvard. She had multiple goals in mind—self-discovery, knowledge about Australian and American history, and insights into the history of women’s situation in the modern world. Conway’s book ends as one odyssey begins—the trip to the United States—and as another journey, the trip from dependence to independence, concludes.

Even among the ever-growing number of modern autobiographies, The Road from Coorain assumes an important position. Whether it is read as a self-portrait, a study of feminism, or a work of cultural history—or, ideally, as a combination of all three genres—it is a well-written, engaging volume, with prose that is riveting in its description of landscape and people and narrative that is equally mesmerizing in its story of an individual and her cultural context. The author of two books on the role of feminism in history, as well as numerous articles, Jill Ker Conway is both writer and academician, a dual identity she maintained while president of Smith College and subsequently in her teaching and scholarly pursuits. With this book, she joins the ranks of other twentieth century female autobiographers—Lillian Hellman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Virginia Woolf, and Maya Angelou, to name a few—whose voices speak of the urge to understand the self, especially the female self. The Road from Coorain is a road to understanding.

Form and Content

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Jill Ker Conway was born on a sheep ranch in the grasslands of New South Wales, Australia, was educated in Sydney, came to North America to continue her graduate studies in history at Harvard, taught and was an administrator at the University of Toronto, and became president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her autobiography, The Road from Coorain, tells of the beginning of her life journey from her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Australia until she departed for the United States. This thoughtful look at Conway’s formative years gives insight into the position of women in Australian society during the first half of the twentieth century and her personal struggles in dealing with the expectations of women’s role in this cultural milieu.

The autobiography begins with background about the Australian land and tells how Conway’s parents came to Coorain, the sheep station they owned. She relates events of her life in chronological order. The first four chapters cover her childhood at Coorain through a drought that devastated the sheep ranch and claimed her father’s life. In the fifth and sixth chapters, she and her family try to cope with their loss, their relocation to urban life in Sydney, and Jill Ker’s preparatory school education. The last three chapters relate the turning point of Jill Ker’s self-discovery as she attended the University of Sydney and broadened her horizons during a European tour. The book concludes with her departure for the United States to study at Harvard University.

The narrative of this period of her life serves as a framework for a reflective book that confronts a number of issues. Conway writes with a perceptive eye for detail and an evocative style that captures the characters of both rural and urban Australia. Within this setting, she views the position of women from two perspectives. First, she is constantly aware of opportunities for and limitations on women in Australian culture through the tension in the relationship between herself and her mother. Second, the position of women is paralleled in the subordinate provincial status of Australia to Great Britain and the cultural differences between these two lands. These analytical observations enable Conway’s book to transcend the particular events of her life while at the same time endowing women’s issues with a personal humane dimension.

Context

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In many ways, The Road from Coorain is part of a substantial tradition of autobiographical writing by Australian women. Conway’s work, however, has several distinguishing features. First, it excels as a work of literature through the construction of dramatic narrative and a descriptive prose style that makes the setting especially vivid. As a result, this autobiographical account enables readers to relate to the universal character of Conway’s experience, which has been described by Carolyn Heilbrun as “the despair of an ambitious young woman facing a constricted female destiny.” Second, Conway analyzes issues concerning women that she confronted as she grew to maturity. This analytical quality helps to provide an objective evaluation of women’s place in the society in which Conway was raised. The Road from Coorain achieves its impact in women’s studies from this integration of literary and historical features.

As a historian, educator, and writer, Conway has written and edited numerous books and articles on women’s intellectual history and women in education, including The Female Experience in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (1982) and Women Reformers and American Culture (1987).

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