ABSTRACT
The sweep of The Thorn Birds’ narrative gives an equivalent subplot status to both Meg’s long-suffering domestic passivity in its historical setting and Jussy’s liberated activity in the present. McCullough’s superseller thus succeeds in combining profitably what elsewhere crystallized out into a distinct bipolarity in ‘women’s fiction’ and its blockbusters of the 1970s. This bipolarity and its formal characteristics may be represented in a simple diagram:
Although pioneers like Betty Friedan were writing in the early 1960s, it was not until 1968 that the women’s movement was installed in the public consciousness and took off as a widespread campaign. A usual starting point is the much publicized burning of brassieres in Atlantic City, 7 September 1968. As regards the mores of fiction this particular event was significant as being both rebellious and as ostentatiously flouting a taboo, one of the sex’s ‘dirty little secrets’. In male fiction, the parallel, of course, was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, 1969-a work which, as the current witticism had it, took the novel all the way from the bedroom to the bathroom. The women’s movement thus took its stand on emancipation and gross, calculatedly pugnacious affronts to The Feminine Mystique (Germaine Greer’s observation, for instance, that unless a woman could taste her menstrual blood with the same indifference with which she might lick a cut finger, she was not liberated). Out of the new enlightenment and rebelliousness came a number of bestselling novels in the early 1970s catering for an enlightened and rebellious reading public; Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (1970), Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen
(1972), Marge Piercy’s Small Changes (1973). And it was the sexual-political climate of the turn of the decade, together with the new market for women’s fiction, that converted Erica Jong from being an experimental writer (disciple of Nabokov) and minor poet to a multi-million selling novelist:
Fear of Flying had a huge success, and the zipless fuck joined the burned bra as a notorious icon of what was universally sneered at as ‘women’s lib’. But in general the movement’s relationship with fiction was uneasy. ‘Authenticity’ required either poetry (with its minimal readership and consequent freedom from commercialism) or the straight talk of non-fiction. In terms of sexual politics The Female Eunuch was generically sounder than Fear of Flying. The superselling novel with emancipated themes (Fear of Flying, Perdido, The Woman’s Room) was inevitably suspect as being indirectly exploitative of women (making money for male publishers, fuelling male masturbation fantasies) or indicative of a repressive tolerance which insidiously sapped revolutionary energy and confused protest with entertainment.
