Fleshed Out: Bodies of Language in Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dark Places

Abstract

People, bodies, and histories are written. But the question of who gets to author these histories and who gets to tell the stories of these people and bodies is not an easy question to be answered. In novels such as Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story and Dark Places the power dynamics that control the way characters live and that determine who gets to write their histories are particularly complex. Grenville takes a narrative about the patriarchal oppression of women from the Victorian era and skillfully weaves it throughout a narrative closely resembling those of postcolonial oppression, exemplifying many struggles deemed that of the settler and/or the postcolonial subject. In these particular novels Kate Greenville uses the bodies of her characters, primarily her two protagonists Lilian and Albion, and their relationship to facts and food in order to show how they are able to unsettle these complex power dynamics in much the same ways that the colonized other is able to find their way out of the oppressive structures imposed on them; Grenville ultimately shows how the journey to a true and authentic self in the physically othered character is almost always a case of appropriating the dominant language and finding a balance, unable to escape the ways in which their bodies are inscribed from the patriarchy or colonizer they must find alternate methods of performing a “whole” self.