Choice Of Life And Chain Of Lot

The early Australia witnessed a distinctive colonial and patriarchal period in which women were severely and mercilessly neglected both at social and domestic levels. As a major figure in the literary history of Australia, Miles Franklin had been striving to illustrate the social and cultural elements in forging women’s marginalization and subordination through writing about women’s pain and bitterness both in life and in mind. My Brilliant Career is her first and also most influential work, which is notable largely for its vivid and profound depiction of a refractory bush girl Sybylla who gives strenuously but unswervingly challenges to societal conventions for liberty and selfhood. As a rebel, Sybylla is different, making her treacherous and subversive life option—remaining single and pursuing writing. However, her such different option does not ultimately win her a different lot. She still fails to get rid of the colonial women’s miserable life without any patriarchal persecution. She is reproached and excluded by public. She left lonely and helpless. She is severely tortured between her distorted mental conflicts. She is nearly on her breakdown. She is a brave warrior of feminism, but still another tragic character of patriarchy.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first one makes a brief introduction to the author, the work and related critics’researches. Chapter Two analyses the possible factors in the formation of the protagonist’s rebellion mainly from social, geographical and family perspectives. Chapter Three is the part about the protagonist’s rebellious option—to be single and to be a writer. And Chapter Four focuses on the heroine’s miserable sufferings of her rebellion from conventional exclusion and psychological conflicts. In the last chapter, a conclusion is drawn that women can hardly avoid their miserable lot in the patriarchal system whether they choose to be traditional or to be rebellious.