Mary And Mrs Spicer example essay topic

In this essay I will consider the roles of city and country in three short stories; Water Them Geraniums by Henry Lawson, Short-Shift Saturday by Gavin Casey, and Trees Can Speak by Alan Marshall. I will argue through contributing to character development, they provide insight into the construction of Australian identity. In Water Them Geraniums the outback is shown to be an emasculating force, particularly for women, that strips away their humanity until they function in a mechanical way to survive off the land. In Short-Shift Saturday the narrator is a product of an inherited colonial culture and imagines that it is the alien landscape and culture in which he lives that is the agent of his suffering. In reality, the countryside is used as a device to allow pathetic fallacy, reflecting the emotional state of the main protagonist. In Trees Can Speak the main character is the personification of the land and demonstrates the desirable state of being in harmony with the bush.

I will put forward that across these three stories, the relationship between the characters and their environment is used to chart a period of progression from English myths and ideals onto the emergence of an Australian identity. At the start of Water Them Geraniums, Joe Wilson and his wife Mary are in the process of moving out to land near Lahey's Creek, where they intend to take up a selection. The path they are riding along is 'a dreary, hopeless track' with 'no horizon' and 'gnarled and stunted trees in every direction '. This track is a metaphor for the path their life together has taken. It is 'the dry season' of their marriage. The couple have 'got out of the habit of talking to each other' and no longer have any plans for the future.

Something that is emphasized as important to characters who live in the bush and stay sane, is having something to look forward to. As Joe says: Shepherds and boundary riders, who are alone for months, must have their periodical spree, at the nearest shanty, else they'd go raving mad... the yearly or half-yearly spree is the only thing they " ve got to look forward to: it keeps their minds fixed on something definite ahead. The fact that the horizon Joe and Mary are riding toward has nothing on it, is a bad omen for their mental, emotional and physical health. It indicates that it is the lack of anything to look forward to in the 'changeless miles' of the outback, that is responsible for the misery, and in some cases early death, the characters will suffer.

This is particularly true for the female characters. Mary and Mrs Spicer, whose family is the Wilson's only neighbour, both die pre-maturely. As Mary says, she 'can't stand' life in the outback, which she says will 'kill her. ' Mrs Spicer is a 'gaunt' and 'flat-chested' woman whose face has been 'burnt to a brick'. She is 'a little wild-looking at times ' and when working she wears clothes like "an old coat of her husband's", to do what would have traditionally been considered male tasks such as fixing a leak in the roof. When she helps Mary lay the table, the way she handles the crockery and napkins convinces Mary that she had been 'fairly well brought up'.

Mrs Spicer is the incarnation of Mary's destiny if she continues to live in the bush. She is a woman whose femininity has been ground down by a hard working and poverty stricken life providing for herself and her many children and whom at the end of the story, dies at a comparatively young age. In order to survive in country which is 'no place for a woman', she has had to become a man. Poverty has stripped her of any luxuries and what possessions she has are worn. The story puts forward that women treasure attractive or stylish objects because they are the hallmarks of civilisation. Both the main female characters in this story display this tendency such as when Mary becomes disheartened as she and Joe share a cup of tea in her new kitchen which has functional furniture which contrasts with their own, more elegant pieces that 'Mary was rather proud of'.

When she is 'outside of her daily life', Mrs Spicer speaks in a 'lost groping-in-the-dark kind of voice', is ashamed that Mary witness her poverty. At times she becomes depressed. Isolation from society and the hard realities of life in the bush have desensitized some of her feminine impulses. For instance, unlike Mary, she is unfazed by the idea that a suicidal man be left to almost die so that he gets 'a good bellyful of it'. Life in the bush has made her practical and at times more unfeeling than an ordinary female. The company of another woman re-awakens Mrs Spicer's social awareness.

The story suggests that women are particularly social creatures that belong around others. Joe gets women to come and keep Mary company and where Mary would like to live is in Sydney. Joe would also like to live in Sydney but the couple haven't moved there because of his susceptibility to alcohol. He talks about how being out in the bush makes people 'do queer things and think queer thoughts-provided you have any imagination at all' and cites sitting and watching 'the lonely track... for a horseman or a cart or someone that's never likely to come'. Mary's brother James is 'too practical' for Joe and thinks Mary is wrong to be unhappy about living in the bush. He is perhaps a character who can remain relatively unaffected by the isolation of the country.

In contrast, the other characters are gradually altered by the land to become 'gnarled' and 'stunted' like the trees at the beginning of the story. Mrs Spicer tries to suppress her shame at the life her and her children lead because it makes her existence more difficult. Fatalism, or being ' past car in' ' about nothing but surviving on the land, is what makes her life bearable. The land has so weakened her female self, that when functioning as an isolated settler, Mrs Spicer talks and acts in a mechanical way.

Being away from society has caused her to lose her humanity. When she dies her body seems 'very little different to when she was alive '. It is not true to say that she died in spirit before she died physically, because her womanliness and humanity are present in many character traits such as her maternal attitude towards her children and the way she conducts herself when in the presence of others, particularly Mary. However, it is only at these times, when she is in a social situation, that they are re-awakened, which illustrates that it is her role as someone who lives an under-privileged, lonely life on the land that stifles her femininity and humanity.

Short-Shift Sunday is a story that examines many of the ideas raised by Water Them Geraniums. A man and his wife named Bill and Annie as well as their son, have been living in an outback town for several years after they moved there from the coast. Bill works at a mine, as seem to most of the other men in the town. He and his wife have grown apart due to their common dissatisfaction at rural life and their incapacity to empathize with each others experiences. This is mainly due to the different lives men and women lead, as well as their lack of communication.

The land has contributed to a build up of resentment for both Annie and Bill because neither of them want to live there but stay because of Bill's regular money and the "five years" that tie them there. Annie has been 'soured' by too many 'early breakfasts' and 'dust storms' while Bill says there is 'nothing to do' at home in the outback. He needs to be distracted from his punishing life of hard labour in the mines and is becoming an alcoholic. He is an heir to the legacy of the convicts that were the first European settlers and has been exiled from his home on the green British landscape of the coast to the arid landscape of inland Australia. Bill and his family are not rich and despite aspiring to upper class values, are towards the lower rungs of the class system. The story addresses the cultural roots of white Australian identity, and the disparity between the history of that identity and it's present.

The coast, where Bill and his family used to live, is depicted as an English landscape or country garden with ' beaches and hills... where the earth was green ' and where Bill could 'stretch out and read on the lawn'. It is set up as an Eden in opposition to the ' brown ground and dust storms ' of the purgatorial outback where Bill and his family have had to move. In the rough landscape both Bill and Annie lead difficult lives, although their son, Young Bill, is nourished by the sunlight and space to run around in. In the early days of their marriage the couple both enjoyed their life at the coast and when they first arrived in the country they were hopeful for a better standard of life. They represent the early immigrants who chose to leave England to come and live in Australia and the couple's ideals reflect their proximity to a colonial background. For instance, Bill sees himself as a martyr, enduring his difficult life for the sake of his son.

He has inherited a Christian ideology which has shaped his views. Likewise, Annie values tradition, gentility and high-mindedness and is disgusted by base human impulses. Bill's self-examination and internal conflict eventually result in a fatalistic attitude towards life, and some degree of peace. At the beginning of the story he finds his wife's attitude towards his drinking an irritation and is himself conflicted about whether or not he should seek escapism in vice.

However, towards the end he has concluded that a man in his position needs a release ' for the good of his soul '. When Annie is disgusted by the violent behaviour of a man named Don, who has just discovered that he has a 'spot on his lung' and will inevitably waste away to become sick and weak, Bill is happy that the man is escaping his depression and has purged himself of internal conflict. He says: That was just it, I thought. She couldn't understand. But I felt good and happy, and I didn't hear much of what was said as we all walked down to Smith's'. Both men and women are in opposition to the land but the men are on the front line of this war with nature and suffer the physical effects brought about by the "unnatural" action of spending so much time underground, breathing in soot.

The land divides the sexes because women can't truly understand the experiences men share that surround being a miner. The man are particularly affected by the loss of strength and physical ability that mining will eventually cause, which is an alien idea to a gender that belongs to the domestic arena. Both men and women suffer alone instead of offering each other the consolation that might have served as a more positive release than alcoholism and alleviated some of their depression. Annie and Joe, as well as the rest of the miner's families, pass through a cycle of heavenly youth, a purgatorial period of middle age and finally an acceptance of a hellish fate worse than death, in the form of disease.

As Bill says of men when they inevitably 'get their ticket', being put on a pension because they are doomed to lose their physical ability and waste away, "For some of 'em it's a ticket to hell". For those who are not killed in an accident, the mine will win its "waiting game" and poisons them. Despite the fact that the symptoms brought on in the final stage of a miner's life are due to his battle with the elements, if they were to stay above ground as nature intended, they would not develop an illness. It is an irony that it is the class system inherited from the society Bill and Annie revere that forces the men to work in the mine and consequently to get sick. Neither of these two characters can be truly happy in the Australian outback because they do not belong to the land and the ideals it inspires. In contrast, Young Bill has grown up in the outback and thrives in a land he does not find lacking.

Despite her attempts, his mother can't help but fail to convert him to her way of thinking. Bill says, 'He would think a man's way, not like a woman'. It is also true that he will think more like an Australian than an Englishman. Bill's son will be part of the same creed of working class mate ship that his father is but will probably not be torn between it and a code of behaviour that belongs to an old civilisation.

Rather, despite the illness that awaits him in old age, he will belong to the land and to a new, truly Australian, way of life. In "Trees can Speak", male identity and its relationship to the land are celebrated. Where the other stories explore the ambiguous positivity of, according to the text, particularly male shortcomings such as interacting with women or a tendency to evade reality, this story praises a culture of friendly, unpretentious mate ship. The lack of necessity to rely on others for a livelihood eliminates the need to be sycophantic. The man who works alone in a mine he dug himself relies on no-one and is therefore honest and his "own man". The bush is depicted as an inhospitable and uncivilised place.

Women, who in ' Water them Geraniums' and 'Short-shift Sunday' are shown to be not well adapted to life in Australian countryside, represent civilisation. In the former story, Mary has an aristocratic appearance and upbringing, and belongs in the city. In the latter, Annie and Clara enjoy the goods on display in town and interaction with others according to social convention whilst their husbands do not. They are also disgusted by displays of uncouth behaviour. In both stories the countryside is viewed in opposition to the city and is seen as isolated, a place where people are distanced from civilisation and therefore, "no place for a woman".

Both Henry Lawson and Gavin Casey conclude that, if they have lived anywhere else, they react badly to a domain where the physical ability to survive on the land is the primary requirement of settlers, or a place without the culture they had been used to. The countryside is a place where what was needed for eking out an existence from natural resources were male traits, and therefore men played a pivotal role in forging the Australian way of life and in making it distinct from European traditions. The male characters in all the stories have a strong connection to the land. Whether the land nurtures or thwarts them, their experience of working on it leads them to respect it. The land is therefore instrumental in building a common sense of empathy among men and in dividing them from women, as the two sexes are removed from each other's experience and concerns.