Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
differential calculus, all of politics including the Mexican constitution, the current
sermons, housing, the prices of commodities, the scarcity of domestic helpers and
the changes of vocations for young men and women. Nothing was taboo apparently
except bad language’. 43 And that included money. Another comparison with Austen
which can be made was Spence’s treatment of money. Ellen Moers has pointed out
that ‘From her earliest years, Austen had the kind of mind that inquired where the
money came from on which young women were to live, and exactly how much of it
there was’. Spence was neither as precise nor as witty about money as Austen, though
many readers echo Clara Morison’s laughter at Mrs Tubbins’s newly-acquired riches
in the shape of a piano on which she puts the children to bed at night, but she shared
the realism which led Moers to observe: ‘Marriage makes money a serious business
in Austen’s fiction; her seriousness about money makes marriage important’. 44 Clara
Morison is eventually relieved of her burdensome struggle to win an independent
livelihood by her marriage to the adequately provided pastoralist Charles Reginald.
But in The Author’s Daughter such realism has to be got out of the way if Spence is
to present her moral theme clearly, so she takes pains to establish that the three masculine
elements competing for dominance over her orphaned heroine – her English
stepbrother; the English peer who is her suitor; and her childhood suitor, the colonial
son of Scottish emigrants to Australia – are all more-than-adequately endowed
financially. Such a concern in Austen, Moers considered, ‘may be the first obviously
feminine thing about her novels, for money and its making were characteristically
female rather than male subjects in English fiction’. 45 In Spence’s novels it is one of
the most basic considerations in domestic life.
Spence did present direct experience of the public world in three of her novels.
Mr Hogarth’s Will, the book she had completed for serialisation in the Weekly
Mail shortly before she left on her visit to England and Scotland, has excursions
to a séance in London, an electoral meeting in rural Scotland, a discussion among
scheming crooks in a public hostelry in rural South Australia, and defeat of the
schemers on the streets of Melbourne. Gathered In takes its readers through a murder
beside a deserted, water-filled mine-shaft and a public trial of an innocent hero. In
Handfasted, the hero’s wish to show the heroine a world of which she knew nothing
provides a rationale for trekking tourist-fashion through a variety of different public
environments in the United States and Britain. There is a vividly realised moment of
feminist wish-fulfilment in Mr Hogarth’s Will, in her portrayal of Francis Hogarth’s
election meeting. Young Hogarth, showing a thoroughly Spenceian refusal to pledge
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