Less than Feminine Zones: Postfeminist Cession in Georgia Blains Too Close to Home and Peggy Frews House of Sticks

Throughout twentieth-century Australian fiction, suburbia is generally depicted as a feminine domain, set in opposition to the masculine city or bush landscapes. The suburban, domestic setting is trivialized, satirized, or ignored as a site incompatible with a narrative of transformation – a location from which to flee. Traditionally, the male protagonist embarks upon these flight narratives, leaving the female characters to endure dull lives of "domesticated conformity" in the suburbs. Not until second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s is the female protagonist liberated from her suburban "cage" by women writers, many of whom identify as feminist. More recently, "postfeminist" scholars such as Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, Mary Vavrus, and Susan J. Douglas observe the rise of a "retreatist" narrative in popular media such as "chick-lit," television drama, and film. This overtly restorative narrative typically features a female protagonist rejecting the public (assumed masculine) sphere and returning to a more domestic (assumed feminine) domain as the ultimate solution to a problematized state of "incompleteness." This essay explores contemporary representations and narratives of the female protagonist in domestic, suburban settings in Georgia Blain's Too Close to Home and Peggy Frew's House of Sticks, both published in 2011. Of particular interest is evidence supporting rejection, interrogation, or subversion of the retreatist narrative as a viable postfeminist solution, or, alternatively, more creative reimaginings of the suburban setting, which permit "new" narratives of feminine transformation.

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