Crossing the Boundaries: The Versatility of Women in the Novels of Janette Turner Hospital

There is just a membrane between one world and another. When you pass through that membrane, the meaning of everything changes.Janette Turner Hospital, OysterIn a writing career spanning more than three decades, Janette Turner Hospital has produced a predominantly dark and unsettling oeuvre of fiction. Much of her work presents societies that are rigidly hierarchical and compartmentalised. In these texts, status and even identity are most often determined by the accidents of birth and circumstance. Perpetual conflict rages among the various factions, and horrendous crimes are committed both globally and domestically against young and innocent individuals. There is no cosmopolitanism and no egalitarianism either within or across countries. Indeed, Kate Temby argues that The Last Magician (1992) in particular is resigned to the status quo and "the dominant forces in the text eventually destroy or effectively silence those who are oppressed" (48) and while "apparently proposing an emancipatory politics in its writing of the marginalised into the centre of the text, it actually enacts further marginalisation" (55). David Callahan concurs, arguing that Turner Hospital is "more an excellent chronicler of the fault-lines along which the shocks travel ... than a presenter of solutions" ("Becoming Different" 25). However, as this article will demonstrate, though they acknowledge its might, these novels are not entirely resigned to the immutability of the status quo. Throughout her writing, Turner Hospital explores a subtle form of power that belongs predominantly to women. In the majority of works, at least one woman is able continuously and seamlessly to move from one class, creed or nation to another. Their peregrinations and metamorphoses reveal potentialities for interesting forms of internationalism, simultaneously making a mockery of cultural and political systems that seek to enforce division.As others have observed, Turner Hospital's commitment to feminism is steady but "shifting" (Bergmann 364) and does not engage with any "singular feminist agenda" (Lovell 46). At times, indeed, Turner Hospital laments the many failures of feminism, principally those which have resulted not in equality, but merely in the transfer of a dominating force. This stance is given clear voice through Sheba of The Last Magician: "Don't give me feminists. I'll tell you how I know a feminist: they treat me like dirt. They treat me worse than any of the blokes do" (327). The female characters whom Turner Hospital presents as the most admirable are often in many ways aligned with a postmodern feminism which seeks to deconstruct "all binary oppositions" (Bergmann 370). As an example of this deconstruction, Laurel Bergmann uses the finale in Charades in which the young girl Charade assumes "masculine" characteristics while her lover, a somewhat irascible older man, dons "feminine" traits in counterpoint (370). However, the consistent theme of chameleon-like women that threads through the Turner Hospital canon also takes the issue of fusing binary oppositions in another, original direction-an aspect of Turner Hospital's work that has received scant critical attention. First, Turner Hospital extends the paradigm, interrogating not only the binary oppositions often inherent to gender relations but also the oppositions that exist between women of different classes, creeds and races. Furthermore, in many cases, Turner Hospital does not seek permanently to eliminate difference or to diffuse characteristics often distinct to culture or gender. Instead, each of these characters is absorbed for a brief time into the being of another and then each one returns, albeit not unchanged, to her original self. Whether a conglomerate society is desirable or not (and Turner Hospital makes no firm commitment on this point), such a society cannot be achieved in these novels: the fissures between peoples of various kinds run too deep. These boundaries may be crossed only briefly and only on an individual level. …