"I Sat Back...and Waited to Die": The Erasure of Self as a Response to Motherhood in Helen Hodgman's Blue Skies

Headnote

This paper offers a close analysis of an under-researched Australian novel, Blue Skies by Helen Hodgman, that represents pregnancy and early motherhood as a burdensome, joyless responsibility from which the mother must escape. The un-named first person narrator is unable and unwilling to transition into "a role I didn't choose." Deliberately shunning the 'discourses' of a good suburban mother, the narrator chooses risk and individuality over attributes typical of "good motherhood." The narrative explores her path to self-erasure by reflecting on the natural landscape of coastal Hobart and through the use of Tasmanian Gothic (Davidson). Hodgman's text is a complete denial "matrescence" and positions selferasure as the only possible outcome where the transition to cultural norms of good motherhood has failed. The lack of naming the mother acts as metaphor for the silence surrounding the loss of womanhood and the absence of any maternal subject position. Blue Skies is a key literary example of the views of motherhood that second wave feminism held it to be a state of erasure, where women claimed that wifehood and motherhood made them feel as though they didn't exist-a problem with no name, as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique documented back in 1963.

Blue Skies was Helen Hodgman's debut novel of 1976, a first-person depiction of a nameless young mother, in her home during a scorching summer in a coastal suburb of Hobart. The narrative builds towards the climactic death of her neighbour Ollie who is killed when the narrator mother throws a stone object in the path of her electric lawnmower. The text can be read as a darkly-comic critique of suburban life where appearances are deceiving. Extending this reading, a more disturbing portrait can be found of a young woman in crisis, unable to reconcile the life of "unencumbered" woman (Chandler 272) and married mother. She is read in this paper as a series of absences, an erased figure with no fixed moorings on which to begin to form a maternal subjectivity. The narrator experiences an erasure of self: being unable to experience any form of successful transition from womanhood to motherhood, she is left with no sense of purpose and no viable subject position.

Blue Skies and its representation of the erasure of self is...