My Brilliant Career Summary and Themes
My Brilliant Career Summary , Characters and Themes "My Brilliant Career" is a novel by
Australian author Miles Franklin, first published in 1901. The story is set in
rural Australia in the late 19th century and follows the life of a young woman
named Sybylla Melvyn as she struggles against the limitations placed on her
gender and socio-economic status..
Through her experiences, the novel explores themes of
independence, self-discovery, and the tension between traditional and
progressive values. The novel is considered a classic of Australian literature
and has been adapted into several films.
SYBYLLA MELVYN
My Brilliant Career Summary - Sybylla Melyvn is a well-known character in
adolescent literature, films, and television shows: she is hypersensitive yet
honest to the point of rudeness. She is also rebellious, dissatisfied with
anything other than endless horizons, and wary of any attempt to control or
contain her fiercely independent spirit. Sybylla is certain that she is special
and destined for an extraordinary life, but she is deeply unhappy with who she
is and how others perceive her. My Brilliant Career Summary
Sybylla is a character easy to dislike—and Franklin
understands that. The character reveals an insufferable ego, much like any
adolescent: “I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse”
(77). This is the story of the maturation of an artist and writer. What defines
Sybylla’s character and puts her egotism into relief is the novel’s frame. The
story is told by Sybylla looking back on her tempestuous and emotional
adolescence and trying to stay honest to that naïve and adolescent tone in the
writing.
As a result, Sybylla can appear dramatic as she moves
emotionally towards the novel's final epiphany. She is determined to find the
contentment and emotional depth she lacks in her life through her writing.
There would be no greater fear for a sensitive adolescent girl at the turn of
the century than settling for the domesticity of marriage and children. Sybylla
is intelligent, well-read, and artistically gifted; she wishes to be defined by
her talents. She desires a brilliant career in which the word
"brilliant" is not ironic. As a teen, she longs for a future in which
she can be herself. Her name is derived from the sybils, Greek mythological
figures who can see into the future. My Brilliant Career Summary
HARRY BEECHUM
Sybylla's society tells her she should want Harry Beechum,
but he is the last thing such a free spirit needs.
In a traditional romance, Harry would be the ideal suitor. He
is attractive, athletically strong, wealthy, coolly confident, capable of
shoeing a horse with the same dexterity as he plays the piano, and a man who
enjoys playing and having fun. In a world of babbling idiots, Harry is
noticeably quiet, preferring to speak only when he has something to say.
He is an old-school gentleman: When he loses most of his
fortune, he gallantly excuses Sybylla from their engagement and promises he
will return only when he has recovered financial stability. And when Sybylla
tells him, by mail no less, that she cannot pursue their engagement, he steps
back without second-guessing Sybylla’s decision. Instead, he heads off to
America to sort through the devastation to his heart. My Brilliant Career
Summary , Yes, he has a temper, but he
keeps it largely in check until Sybylla capriciously sets out to provoke him at
her birthday dinner; and yes, he is jealous of the attention other eligible
bachelors pay to Sybylla, but that signals the authenticity of her love and his
unwillingness to play games with the heart. He is earnest in his declaration of
love.
As Sybylla's grandmother and mother repeatedly tell her,
Harry would be ideal for her. His unforgivable flaw is that he believes he can
lay claim to her. Even Sybylla realises that when she turns him down for the
final time, she has given up her last, best chance to escape Possum Gully.
My Brilliant Career Summary Yes, he is the "ideal" suitor, but
he is also a clear and present danger to a young woman who aspires to be an
artist, accepts loneliness as a given, and sees any genuine emotional displays
as a sign of weakness.
DICK MELVYN
Dick Melvyn, Sybylla's unlucky father, is the tragic figure
in My Brilliant Career. Following the novel's publication, Franklin faced
widespread criticism, not for her portrayal of a free-spirited, rebellious
Australian adolescent girl, but for her stark and honest depiction of the dark
and depressing life of Australia's farming culture, embodied most ingloriously
by Dick Melvyn.
My Brilliant Career Summary Nothing better suggests Dick Melvyn’s
character than the opening scene in the book. A loving father, Dick takes his
oldest daughter with him to drop salt. Sybylla is only three. She is surprised
when she sees a black snake curled up in the deep fern along the river. Her
father nobly interferes to save his panicking daughter, but in his clumsy
efforts to pull her away to safety, he burns her fingers with his ever-present
pipe. Every noble thing Dick does leads to unintended disaster.
With no qualifications save his noble ambition to provide for
his family, Dick gambles the family’s little money to make a go of sheep
farming. He is Sybylla’s hero when she is a young, happy-go-lucky dreamer—but
his incompetence and naïve trust in others leads to his spiral into alcoholism
and bankruptcy. He is a victim of his poor judgment and unforeseeable bad luck,
most notably the brutal two year-long drought. Unlike Harry, who rebounds from
financial collapse, Dick falls but never gets back up. My Brilliant Career
Summary , Driven to stay afloat through resorting to the equivalent of loan
sharks, Dick quickly finds comfort only in self-medicating with alcohol. He
becomes a laughingstock in town and an embarrassment to his children. As
Sybylla admits when she returns from Five-Bob, her father is a “broken-down
man” with a “miserable appearance and demeanor” (92) whom she barely
recognizes, destroyed by his own virtues.
LUCY BOSSIER
Sybylla’s grandmother offers her granddaughter ample
emotional support. She is Sybylla’s go-to comforter when things go wrong— My
Brilliant Career Summary as, for
instance, when she first arrives at the M’Swat farm. In this, Lucy Bossier is
different from her daughter, Sybylla’s mother, who dismisses out of hand
Sybylla’s quirky behavior, tomboyish ways, and sharp tongue.
But the reality reveals itself to Sybylla. Yes, her
grandmother is sympathetic to Sybylla’s restless spirit, her naïve dreams of
being an artist, and even her quirky ways with the several men who seek her
hand. She is endlessly patient with her granddaughter’s diva-esque sense of her
life’s hardships. And she provides her granddaughter with a sanctuary apart
from the backwater world of Possum Gully.
However, the grandmother eventually reveals that she is very
much of her own conservative time and place. Sybylla, she says, has a talent
for the stage, but that's not what good girls do. Girls propose marriage and
are content with taking their place next to a husband to raise a family.
Sybylla's grandmother will not tolerate her rebellion in this regard.
My Brilliant Career Summary Despite the evidence of her own dysfunctional
family (Sybylla's mother is trapped in a loveless marriage, and her daughter
Helen was abandoned by her loving husband for a younger woman), she will only
counsel the wisdom of marriage and family. Lucy Bossier is not a hypocrite
because of this; she is a product of her culture.
My Brilliant Career Summary
My Brilliant Career Summary - Sybylla
Melvyn moves with her family to 'Possum Gully,' a remote rural town in New
South Wales, Australia, when she is nine years old. Dick, her father, is
determined to run a 1000-acre sheep farm successfully. Dick, on the other hand,
is unprepared for the harsh realities of running a farm, which becomes a
financial liability. Meanwhile, Sybylla aspires to be a singer or a writer,
which she refers to as her brilliant career. In the cultural backwaters of
'Possum Gully,' she suffers. Dick pursues ruinous loans to keep the farm
running as it approaches bankruptcy.
Desperate, Sybylla is sent to live with her grandmother in
distant Caddagat. Sybylla is relieved to be out of 'Possum Gully,' and she
enjoys her grandmother's spacious home and her grandmother's gentle, if
conservative, demeanour.
Sybylla meets the family attorney, Everard Grey, a man in his
twenties who is immediately taken by Sybylla's attractive face and talents.
Smitten, he proposes marriage to the 16-year-old girl. Sybylla, who has a low
self-esteem, politely but firmly declines. Soon after, Frank Hawden, who
manages the farm's livestock, proposes to Sybylla, telling her that when he
turns 24, he will take over his family farm in England. Sybylla declines once
more.
The nearest neighbor to her grandmother is the Beechum
family, who owns the Five-Bob farm. When Sybylla meets Harry Beechum, the tall,
ruggedly handsome, sunburned scion of the family, she is compelled in ways she
does not entirely understand. He is quiet and coolly confident, and best of all
he plays piano. The two form a friendship, though Sybylla is cautioned that
Harry has a temper. When Harry’s family asks to “borrow” Sybylla to help out
for a week or two, Sybylla eagerly accepts. Everything about Five-Bob is
splendid, and Sybylla feels contented. Much of that contentment comes from her
friendship with Harry.
When she returns to Caddagat, she and Harry continue to see
each other until one of his visits, when Harry proposes marriage and presents
Sybylla with an expensive diamond ring, a family heirloom. Sybylla agrees to
wear it for three months before accepting the offer. Harry, a little perplexed,
agrees. A few weeks later, at Sybylla's 17th birthday party, Harry, enraged by
Sybylla's attention to other men at the party, insists on her acting more
appropriately. Sybylla returns the ring but later apologises and vows to be
more mindful of her actions.
Just weeks later, Harry confides in Sybylla that, because of
numerous unexpected financial setbacks, he sold Five-Bob and is now essentially
a pauper. Sybylla assures him that does not matter, but he promises to reboot
his fortunes before Sybylla reaches marrying age, 21, and he departs for
Sydney. Weeks pass, and Sybylla’s mother tells her that because of her father’s
increasing debts, Sybylla is to work as a servant-governess for a family in
distant Barney’s Gap. The father there loaned Dick a huge sum, and Dick could
not repay it.
Sybylla despises life on the farm. The living conditions are
primitive, the children are rambunctious, and her days are long and boring. She
languishes for months until her family, fearing for her health, sends her back
home, the debt forgiven.
Sybylla returns to find her father in a downward spiral of
depression and illness. Her younger sister has gone to assist the Beechums.
When Sybylla is at her lowest point, she receives a letter from Harry. He has a
large sum of money and is eager to reclaim Five-Bob and repair their
relationship. He declares his love for her once more.
Sybylla, on the other hand, declines him, determined to be a writer and seeing Harry's adoration as a sign that any marriage with him would be disastrous. Harry agrees to end their relationship and travels to America to process his emotions. Sybylla, who is initially depressed, decides she has had enough of despair and will devote herself to writing, proud to be an Australian and eager to capture that way of life.
My Brilliant Career Themes
THE ROLE OF WOMEN
Women have always played a major role in Australian society
despite the stridently masculinist views and images that were dominant. This
was particularly true in the nineteenth century when social reformers such as
Catherine Spence affirmed the right of women to independence. Women moralists
also asserted the virtues of temperance as alcoholism was a major vice among
men in the nineteenth century. Women began to realize that their liberation
could only begin by freeing themselves from bondage to a male world that tried
to use them for its own purposes.
This also led to the interrogation of the institution of
marriage and the idea of women being relegated to the domestic sphere. Reading
My Brilliant Career through a 21st century lens, the revolt of Sybylla Melvyn
can seem slight. But from a late 19th century perspective the narrative of
Sybylla’s emotional evolution that climaxes in her determination to become a
writer suggests a very radical perception of the role of women. Though still a
teenager, Sybylla perceives the dimensions of the male-dominated culture in
which she must live: “It was only men who could take the world by its ears and
conquer their fate, while women, metaphorically speaking, were forced to sit
with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither
and thither” (76).
Sybylla, gazing so often in self-loathing into the mirror and
aware, as at her birthday party, of the enchanting beauty of women that
rendered them commodities in the marriage market, struggles with her emerging
sense of a different kind of beauty and power. Within weeks, she receives three
different marriage proposals and rejects them all. She believes that to be a
strong woman, she must go it alone.
One of the quietest ironies occurs when Sybylla first arrives
at Caddagat. Her doting aunt volunteers to direct the Pygmalion-like
transformation of her ordinary niece into a woman of command and social
grace—perfect for the competitive marriage market of the town. Even as Helen
dotes on Sybylla, fusses with the girl’s tumble of red hair, and lays out the
basic ground rules for dinner table politesse, Sybylla tells readers how her
aunt had been left by a conniving husband who decided he would be happier with
his much younger mistress. Helpless, Helen was left to a life of town shame and
family pity. In her emotional devastation, however, Helen finds the requisite
courage to survive with her dignity intact and to caution her young niece not
to play around with marriage.
ROMANCE AND REALITY
Elizabeth Webby notes that throughout the novel there are
hints that Sybylla’s attitude to love and courtship have been influenced by her
reading of popular romance fiction. When Sybylla arrives at Caddagat she is
delighted to find a Marie Corelli novel and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894)
on the table.
In Chapter 20, the episode of Harold’s proposal of marriage
is perhaps the best example of the impact of her reading on her attitude to
love. Harold’s typically Australian matter of fact proposal totally devoid of
any trappings of romance confuses Sybylla. Her response to this proposal to his
attempted kiss of hitting him across the face with a riding whip also reveals
her playing a stiff Victorian heroine. Miles Franklin wants her readers to
notice Sybylla’s lack of judgement in matters of the heart. As Rachel Blau
DuPlessis observes, romance plots are part of the deep, shared structures of
Anglocentric culture. She believes that romance as a mode may have been
historically activated when middle-class class women lost their economic power
in the transition from pre-capitalist economies and were dispossessed of certain
functions. DuPlessis believes that “the romance plot may be compensatory social
and narrative practice”(2). While the domestic labour and childbearing duties
of women were seen as important to achieving a strong Australian nation, they
were relegated to the home with male authority being paramount.
Miles Franklin’s impatience with these marginal roles
assigned to women and her inherently feminist outlook no doubt influenced her
choice of narrative resolution in the novel. By refusing the scripts of romance
and the goal of marriage she opened up alternative narrative possibilities for
women in Australia.
When Harry most sincerely pitches his love, Sybylla realizes
how fawning and dependent he is and how ultimately theirs would be a ruinous
relationship. He wants to own her, Sybylla recalls: “I would be a two-edged
sword in the hand of a novice” (102). An empowered woman here is a singular
entity. Readers are accustomed to a contemporary sense of feminism in which
women are united in a community as a collective voice demanding equal rights,
respect, and dignity for an entire gender. Sybylla’s is a very lonely revolution.
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