In this wide-ranging study, Laura Deane traces the development of feminist understandings of ‘women’s madness’ through earlier analyses of patriarchal power and psychoanalysis and into the spaces of postcolonial theory. There she locates her central argument that ‘the real text of madness is the text of colonial psychosis.’ Three major Australian novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville are ‘excavated’ for critiques not only of colonial gender relations but also of ‘race,’ nationalism and colonialism. In her readings, Deane demonstrates with power and subtlety that it is the male rather than the female characters who embody the pathology of the imperial enterprise. She makes an important contribution to critical interpretations of both novelists and also to the interrelations of feminist and postcolonial literary theory.
— Susan Sheridan, Flinders University
Laura Deane has written a fascinating book on the logic of the dysfunctional settler colonial family. Drawing on the work of two authors - Christina Stead and Kate Grenville - whose ‘domestic’ novels narrate a visceral mode of masculine power and dysfunction Deane illustrates clearly the relationship between national identities, colonization, desire and patriarchy. This important new book does important work in extending feminist, colonial, and psychoanalytic theories. It applies these ideas to three novels about madness in order to explain how and why, in a country where white people imagine themselves as reproducing happy families within a moral society, terror – in the form of gendered and raced violence – continues to shape our homes and communities. Deane’s nuanced analysis takes the reader to the ‘dark places of the “national psyche” in order to ‘decode powerful cultural fictions’ about Australianness.
— Catriona Elder, The University of Sydney