Watch a short video on this text from the Books That Made Us series, available via ABC Education!
Introductory activities
This novel deals with troubling issues in Australia today. Daily publicity given to the online posting of intimate photos of young women, sexting via smart phones, anonymous bullying of women on blog sites, ‘slut shaming’ and so on seem to indicate an unprecedented level of hatred of women in the national community. It is possible that reading and responding to the issues raised in this novel could be difficult for at least some female students and especially those who may have some personal experience of being the butt of misogynistic behaviour. Male readers may also feel discomfited by this novel. They may feel that they are being put in the ‘hot seat’ by discussion around the themes of the novel. Hopefully, any awkwardness produced by class discussion will have been dissipated during the completion of the introductory activities below.
The teacher is to guide the introductory activities with an emphasis on the ways in which patriarchy is limiting and controlling for both females and males.
[Students could start to read the novel, writing chapter summaries (PDF, 111KB) while the class engages in the following introductory activities.]
1. The power of patriarchy
Begin by explaining the meaning of the word ‘patriarchy’ (literally ‘the power of the father’, which can be translated into ‘male control of society’). Then explain that The Natural Way of Things is a contemporary Australian novel that deals with the explicit punishment of women who have transgressed against the rules of patriarchy. Explain also the meaning of the word, ‘misogyny’, a hatred and contempt of women.
Below are examples of Australian men displaying misogyny towards Australian women. Each example is followed by questions to provoke classroom discussion.
However, before students look at the examples below, the teacher should ask them what other examples they can suggest from their experience of the world and from the media. (One bizarre example could be Kyle Sandilands’ bullying interview of a teenage girl who made rape allegations against her family.)
2. The position of women in Australia? The case of Eddie McGuire and Caroline Wilson
Begin by outlining the controversy over comments made by Eddie McGuire (PDF, 179KB), a TV celebrity and Australian Football League (AFL) club president, about being prepared to give money to a charity if someone would drown Caroline Wilson, a senior sports writer for Fairfax Media in Melbourne. He made these comments on a radio station on 13 June, 2016. (Wilson had previously criticised McGuire on various issues involving the AFL).
Then conduct a whole-class discussion based around these questions:
- What do you think was Eddie McGuire’s motivation for what he said?
- Was he suggesting that there are certain areas of Australian social/cultural life that should be off-limits to women?
- If so, what roles do men like Eddie McGuire think that women in Australia should occupy?
- In Australia are only male commentators allowed to talk about football?
- Has Caroline Wilson pushed up too hard against the limits of what a woman is allowed to do in her society? Should she be punished for transgressing against the unwritten rules of football?
- Eddie McGuire later apologised for his comments but said that he was only joking. What does this tell us about social attitudes in Australia? Should we be concerned?
- Did Caroline Wilson bring it on herself by being a strong, out-spoken woman?
- Is blaming the victim in this case similar to blaming the victim in rape cases?
- How important is it to be careful about the use of language?
- Is mainstream media controlled by powerful ‘white men’?
3. The Hay Institution and other examples
Ask students to research information about the Hay Institution for Girls. Charlotte Wood has said that she heard about the Hay Institution in a radio documentary on ABC Radio National. This institution has been investigated by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
- Ask students to list what features of life for the girls in the Hay Institution are reproduced in the novel.
- Have students find out information about the treatment of Aboriginal boys at the Don Dale detention centre in the Northern Territory. An ABC Four Corners program in July, 2016, revealed the systematic abuse of young men in this institution.
- Refer students to the publication in August, 2016, of a cache of documents about the abuse of asylum seekers at the Nauru Detention Centre.
- Initiate a discussion with students about how marginalised groups of people have been treated in each of these cases.
- Ask students to research the meaning of the German slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ that appeared at the entrance to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland during the Second World War and compare that to the Hardings International slogan, DIGNITY & RESPECT IN A SAFE & SECURE ENVIRONMENT in The Natural Way of Things.
- Ask students if they think that a comparison between the German concentration camps and the other institutions named above is a valid one.
4. ‘Slut-shaming’ at Wesley College, University of Sydney
Ask students to consider why women in Australian society are still the victims of misogyny (hatred of women) and intimidated by comments made by male media celebrities or anonymous trolls on social media sites or even ‘slut-shamed’ in the year book of Wesley College at the University of Sydney in 2014.
Have students read the synopsis of this case (PDF, 153KB) and then discuss as a class these questions:
- What is a ‘slut’?
- Why should sluts be shamed?
- How was the shaming carried out?
- Were the boys involved also named and shamed?
‘Slut-shaming’ in The Natural Way of Things
Ask students to track the use of the word ‘slut’ (either stated or implied) through the novel. Ask them to discuss why the ‘girls’ resist naming themselves or being named as ‘sluts’. The following references are particularly relevant:
- ‘Oh sweetie. You need to know what you are.’ (pp. 18 and 46)
- ‘…her survival depends on this electric white question. What am I?’ (p. 37)
- ‘In the days to come she will learn what she is, what they all are… minister’s-little-travel-tramp and that-Skype-slut and the yuck-ugly-dog…They are what happens when you don’t keep your fucking fat slag’s mouth shut’ (p. 47). Ask students: what is the effect of the use of hyphens in this quote?
Something to think about:
The answer to the question of why women are still victimised by men may lie in the binary opposition (PDF, 114KB) between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women in the social history of Australia. See the section below.
However, before moving to the next section, ask students to complete the exercise on representation of character in The Natural Way of Things using the linked file above on binary oppositions.
5. Damned Whores and God’s Police
Damned Whores and God’s Police is a social history of Australia written by Anne Summers. It was first published in 1975 but a conference in 2015 to mark the 40th anniversary of the first edition agreed that there are many continuing examples of issues raised in the book. (The conference archive contains audio of all the talks given at the conference.)
In this book Summers argues that women in Australia from about the 1850s were ‘colonised’ by the patriarchal order into taking on primarily the roles of wife and mother (God’s police) in order to provide order and stability in what had previously been a wild, unruly convict society in which the women had been loose and immoral (damned whores.)
According to Summers this binary opposition still persists.
Ask students to read this short extract (PDF, 108KB) from pp. 12–13 of the introduction to the 2016 edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police and then complete the three-level guide (PDF, 112KB). [See first the note on three-level guides (PDF, 114KB)].
Then, share with students this quote from Julia Gillard, the first female Australian prime minister: ‘As a woman wielding power […] I was never going to be portrayed as a good woman. So I must be the bad woman, a scheming shrew, a heartless harridan or a lying bitch.’
Discuss with students how Julia Gillard fits within the ‘good’ woman/‘bad’ woman paradigm established by Anne Summers.
6. The treatment of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister
The appalling treatment of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, by many in positions of power in Australia including influential media figures provided the cultural and historical context for Charlotte Wood’s novel. Journalist, Chloe Hooper, wrote an article about Julia Gillard that appeared in the August 2013 edition of the Monthly magazine just prior to the federal election later in that year. Students may be interested in reading the whole article but even a short extract (PDF, 168KB) from it gives some of the flavour of the sorts of attacks made on Gillard at the time.
7. Women’s ‘selves’ and their bodies
On page five of the novel Yolanda stands in front of a mirror and takes an inventory of her body: ‘Good body (she was just being honest, why would she boast when it had got her into such trouble?)’
Later in the novel she again wonders about the disconnect between her own sense of ‘self’ and her footballer rapists’ sole focus on her body, her flesh.
- Ask students to find other examples in the novel of responses to Yolanda’s body, even when she was a child. (How is she positioned, for example, by the footballers?)
- Ask them to debate whether Yolanda may have been partly responsible for what happened to her. (Consider her assessment that she made ‘one terrible mistake.’)
- Ask students who it is they think determines the way women should look in our culture. Introduce them to the concept of the ‘male gaze’.
- Have students brainstorm examples of where the male gaze operates to control the way women present their bodies. A good place to start would be with examples from the novel itself.
- Ask students to discuss/explore whether one’s sense of ‘self’ can exist separately from one’s awareness of one’s body. (This is a bit philosophical but should provoke some interesting class discussion.)
- Foreshadow for students how Yolanda finally escapes the constraints of the ‘male gaze’ and metamorphoses into an animal. (She loses her human form but gains total self-possession. This also fits in with the identification of the female with nature which is a major theme of the novel.) Ask students if they think that it is possible for women in our culture to gain self-possession without reference to the male gaze.
- Discuss the purpose of the uniforms, the bonnets, the head shaving and so on once the ‘girls’ have been incarcerated. Is this a way of neutering the provocation of women’s bodies which is a key theme of the novel?
(ACELR054) (ACELR060) (ACELR061)
Feminism
An overview:
Feminism is the name given to successive ‘waves’ of activism by women to gain political, social, economic and legal equality with men. Modern feminism began with the Suffragettes in Britain in the early twentieth century but arguably, the fight for women’s rights began much earlier with Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote a treatise called A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792.
Ask students to do some research on feminism. A very useful resource is the Reading Australia unit on The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, a famous Australian feminist. Another very good resource is the Gender and Education website.
Students will also find it helpful to track the evolution of feminism through the ‘three waves’ referred to below.
The Suffragettes fought for suffrage and gender equality. This involved women fighting for equality with men and the right to participate in civic affairs and professions previously denied to them.
This phase of the feminist movement began in the early 1960s and ended in the early 1980s. There were several different branches of ‘second wave’ feminism including Germaine Greer’s ‘Liberation Feminism’ (based on Marxist economic theory) and Betty Friedan’s ‘Equality Feminism’. Important issues for feminist activists in this second wave included reproductive rights (access to contraception; availability of abortion), women’s rights within the family and the workplace and divorce and custody rights.
A major focus of third wave feminism has been to explore the very nature of what is meant by sex and gender. Indeed, until the work of Berkeley theoretician, Judith Butler, no distinction was made between the two terms. Butler and her associates now defined sex as biology (and nature) while gender referred to learned social roles (or nurture.) Butler’s ideological position is that the allocation of gender roles in a patriarchal society is designed to maintain male social and cultural dominance. The situation, though, is not as simple as this might seem. Butler challenges the idea that there is an underlying universal and essential femininity. Her theory is that gender is performative, that there are many different possible performances of gender roles and that these performances constitute in themselves the category ‘gender’ and finally the category ‘sex’. There is no underlying reality; both ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are constructs.
Given the complexities of Butler’s theory nevertheless, until recently the concept of ‘sex’ has been assumed to mean either male or female, based on biological criteria. However, this unproblematic division has been challenged by new categories such as ‘trans-sex’ and ‘intersex’. The concept of ‘gender’ is even more fluid. For example, the social media platform Facebook has, since 2014, listed fifty-six possible gender descriptions from which users can choose to identify themselves.
Again, until now there has been a fundamental tension between ‘sex’ (biology: how ‘God’ intended us to be) and ‘gender’ (sociology: how we have been shaped by social conditioning). However, recent research in neuroscience has again expanded both concepts, and recent research has explored the possible interplay of genetics (biology: nature) and life experience (the social: nurture). Followers of Judith Butler may well feel that science could vindicate her position that the deliberate performances of gender roles can enter a feedback loop with our biological beings.
The above is obviously a very potted overview of an important theoretical and ideological approach in third-wave feminism. Teachers and students can obviously explore further in the linked material. However, enough information has been given for students to make some possible links between, say, Butler’s theory and The Natural Way of Things.
For example:
- What aspects of female ‘nature’ (biology) are foregrounded in the novel?
- How are these paralleled in the natural world beyond the compound?
- What gender roles have the ‘girls’ played/performed in their lives before imprisonment?
- Have these roles conformed to the demands of patriarchal power?
- What roles do the ‘girls’ perform in the compound? Is there a greater range of performances?
Many more questions like these could be explored.
Now, another interesting theoretical issue arises:
Luce Irigaray, an earlier feminist theorist thought that there was in fact an essential femininity (an idea rejected by Butler, as we have seen) but that it could not be represented because language was in fact masculine. This idea was reinforced by a French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who theorised that the meaning of language was anchored by the signifier of the phallus, an abstracted symbol of the male penis. This posed a great problem for feminist thinkers. How could women express themselves in the symbolic system of the patriarchy? Another feminist theorist, Julia Kristeva, came up with this answer: that before the entry of boys and girls into the symbolic system of language there was an earlier language that they had experienced that she labelled the semiotic. This is, for example, the language of poetry.
For Kristeva the symbolic refers to the elements of grammar, syntax, logic and so on that are usually thought of as constituting language. By contrast, the semiotic refers to non-linguistic aspects of language such as rhythms and sounds that can nevertheless express powerful emotions.
A significant development in the novel is that Yolanda communicates through language less and less until finally she scarcely speaks at all. ‘Her voice was dull in her throat; she had not spoken in days’ (p. 180). Ask students if they think it is possible that Yolanda is simply withdrawing from the phallocentric language of men.
(ACELR053)
Personal response on reading the text
1. Thinking about the title
The title of this novel is particularly resonant with a number of possible meanings. Ask students to brainstorm what meanings the title could have. Here are some discussion starters to prompt students’ suggestions:
- On page 176 the author actually uses the phrase ‘the natural way of things’ to suggest that women are blamed by the culture (through the use of language, in this case the use of the passive voice of the verb and the thematising of women) for their own victim-hood (e.g. ‘a woman was raped’, not ‘a man raped a woman’).
- There is a repugnance felt even by women themselves for ‘what came out of you’ (p. 122): a placenta, periods.
- This is balanced immediately by ‘what you were capable of’ (the inherent power of women?).
- Without modern body products the girls’ bodies start to revert to greater naturalness (p. 114: ‘their pubes grew bristling back’).
- Yolanda (p. 237: ‘She dreamed of an animal freedom’) and Verla (p. 257: she had been ‘a cuttlefish, a worm, a tree’) are both associated with nature.
- Nature is seen as beautiful, redemptive.
Challenge students with this idea: is the author suggesting that women are part of nature and men of culture? Feminists would challenge this binary proposition that femininity is essentially biological. They argue that femininity is a cultural construct. Ask students what they think.
(ACELR058)
2. Writing a journal entry after reading the novel
Ask students, once they have finished reading it, to write a response to the novel in the form of a journal entry (PDF, 117KB). They should draw upon the ideas that they generated in their chapter summaries completed during their reading of the novel. The journal entry should be a piece of continuous prose in which students reflect on the social issues addressed in the novel, the likely themes dealt with, the plot and the main characters, the central problem and how this leads to conflict. The journal will also allow students to reflect on the readings that they are making of the novel and to consider whether they are the ideal reader that the author may have had in mind when she was writing the novel. (This concept will obviously have to be explained to students.)
Students should be asked to display their journals electronically to the class to generate class discussion and give feedback to class members.
(ACELR061)
3. Different responses to the novel
- A focus on the reader. Introduce the concept of the ideal reader and of preferred and alternative readings of the novel. Encourage students to express to the class and defend with reference to the text the readings that they are making of the novel. (Students are bound to make different readings.) Explore the idea of ‘self-reflexivity’ and ask students to reflect on what their readings may tell them about themselves. If several ‘interpretive communities’ emerge during class discussion encourage students to reflect on this also.
- A focus on the author. Students should do some research on Charlotte Wood, her earlier works and more recent articles and interviews, to gain some understanding of the attitudes, values and beliefs that inspired her to write this novel. (A number of links are included in the More Resources section at the end of this page.)
- A focus on the novel as literary text. Students should focus on the allegorical nature of the novel, or its fantasy elements, or the author’s use of language to construct the world of the novel.
- A focus on the political elements of the novel. This novel won the Stella Prize for 2016 and was on the shortlist for the 2016 Miles Franklin award. Apart from its literary merit it has obviously struck a chord in contemporary society. Students should speculate on how Charlotte Wood has added her voice to the current debate about misogyny in Australia.
Outline of key elements of the text
The story
- Begin by explaining the distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. A story is a series of events as they happen in chronological order. Some of those events may already have happened as a ‘pre-story’ before the plot begins. This is obviously the case with the stories that explain the reasons for the incarceration of the ten girls who have been brought to the outback prison.
- Discuss these ‘pre-stories’ with the class. Ask students whether the stories resonate with their own experience of the sort of popular culture within which they live.
- Have the class summarise the unfolding ‘pre-stories’ of the ten ‘girls’ and map them against real world events. (e.g. p. 66, Lydia from the cruise ship who was left for dead in the toilets and the real story of Brisbane mother Dianne Brimble.)
- Ask students to consider how implicated popular media such as reality TV shows are in demonising the ‘girls’.
The Plot
- Begin by explaining the concept of a narrative arc: the flow of events in a plot from the orientation, through a middle section involving complication and conflict, to a conclusion that resolves the issues raised in the plot.
- Ask students whether they agree that The Natural Way of Things has a three-part structure. If so, ask them to mark off the beginnings and endings of these three sections and then consider the narrative function of each section within the broad narrative arc of the story.
- Since Aristotle*, narratologists have tried to identify the basic plot shapes of stories in Western culture. Aristotle came up with a three-part plot structure: a weakness in the protagonist’s character, self-recognition by the protagonist and a ‘reversal’ in the protagonist’s situation. Ask students whether this plot shape could apply to The Natural Way of Things. (Obviously students will first have to decide which character is the main protagonist in the story.)
* An ancient Greek philosopher.
- Another recognisable plot shape is the Hero’s Journey. Have students debate whether this plot shape could apply to this novel. Again, they will have to decide which character might be the ‘hero’ of this story and they will have to explain how the template of the hero’s journey could be placed over the events in this story.
- Discuss with students the fairly ‘open’ nature of the ending of The Natural Way of Things and invite them to speculate about why the author was not able to provide greater closure.
- The ambiguous nature of the ending allows readers to write their own endings. In an interview at the 2016 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Charlotte Wood quotes two women readers of the novel, one of whom felt a sense of ‘power and triumph’ and the other ‘a sense of utter despair and defeat’ at the end of the novel. Discuss with students how the ending could be read in either of these two ways.
- In more contemporary times various narratologists* have again attempted to identify basic plot shapes. Students should explore Ronald Tobias’ Master Plot 5: Escape or Christopher Booker’s Voyage and Return and consider these as other possible plot shapes for this novel.
(* theorists who study the nature of stories.)
(ACELR059)
Character
The Natural Way of Things has been described as a parable, a simple allegorical tale that holds up to readers a mirror reflecting some aspect of unacceptable human behaviour in the hope of changing that behaviour. Charlotte Wood has created a small cast of characters and placed them in the microcosm of a prison compound in the Australian bush to make a point about an issue in the outside world.
The characters in an allegory ‘stand for’ abstract ideas and concepts. For example, in his play, The Crucible, Arthur Miller uses characters and events in seventeenth century Puritan Massachusetts to represent broad political forces in the USA in the middle of the twentieth century. In The Crucible the prosecutor, Danforth, represents the abstract idea or concept of the power of the State and the protagonist ‘stands for’ the integrity of the individual defending his sense of self at all cost. The author depends upon readers to make the connection between the story and its characters and events and ideas in the world in which the story now circulates.
If The Natural Way of Things is read as a parable about the punishment of women who transgress against the ‘rules’ of patriarchal society today (mainly by speaking out about their sexual liaisons with powerful men), ask students to identify the abstract ideas and concepts represented by these characters.
Character
|
Ideas and concepts |
Yolanda
|
|
Verla
|
|
Boncer
|
|
Teddy
|
|
Nancy
|
|
The other ‘girls’
|
Themes
Ask students to brainstorm the themes that they think emerge from a reading of The Natural Way of Things.
Here are some themes that they might think of:
- misogyny;
- the operation of patriarchal power in society;
- social control;
- human rights;
- stereotyping, socialisation and conditioning of women (and thus, men);
- Feminism;
- Environmentalism – the oppression of the natural world and the attempts to control women.
Synthesising task
Representations of gender in the media
Third-wave feminists such as Judith Butler argue that femininity is a cultural construct produced by representations in literature and in popular culture. In this way, they say, women are socialised and conditioned into certain ways of being. Stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are thus created within the male/female binary oppositions that you explored earlier.
Your task: Option 1
Analyse two magazines, one aimed at a male readership and the other at a female readership, and then report to the class about whether representations in these magazines reinforce stereotypical constructs of masculinity and femininity.
Method of work:
- Find two magazines, one targeted at a male readership and the other for women readers. Men’s Health and Sports Illustrated would be examples of the former and, say, Girlfriend or Cosmopolitan of the latter.
- Do a quick scan of the tables of contents of the two magazines and note the topics covered.
- From your scan, list the areas of personal and social life that each magazine covers. Are they similar or markedly different?
- What are the primary roles of men and women as represented in the magazines? Are there any representations that challenge stereotypical roles? For example, a man shown as a nurturer; a woman in a non-stereotypical role such as a tradie or a business woman?
- How are women represented in the men’s magazine and men in the women’s magazine?
- Look at the images of men and women in the photographs. Do a quick analysis noting colours, layout, use of written text to accompany images, vectors that lead the eye to a focal point and so on.
- What is the main message about being male and female conveyed overall by these two magazines?
Your task: Option 2
Prepare a report on how men and women are represented, and represent themselves, on various social media sites including Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Investigate and explain the ‘rules’ for men and women for these sites. Are these ‘rules’ gender-specific? Research how someone like Zoë Foster Blake has commodified herself and her cosmetics business via her Instagram account. Analyse the representations of herself and her family that she has used to do this. Explain whether these representations recycle gender stereotypes of traditional femininity.
(ACELR054) (ACELR063)