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Chapter 37
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Brilliant Career, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Womanhood
Class and Poverty
Ambition, Respectability, and Pride
Love
Maturity and Suffering
Summary
Analysis
Through a poem, Sybylla reflects that though others suffer more than she does, she is still full of longing and regret. It is now March 1899, and Sybylla does not know what the future holds. She is weary. She writes, “Time rules us all. And life, indeed, is not / The thing we planned it out, ere hope was dead; / And then, we women cannot choose our lot.” As time churns on, hope becomes a distant memory of the past.
In this final chapter, Sybylla intersperses prose with poetry, which represents her experimentation as a writer and foreshadows a possible literary career. She describes aspirations and ambitions as nothing but fodder for lost hope, and she asserts that life does not follow the plans people set and that women especially “cannot choose [their] lot.” The notion that “Time rules us all” unifies humanity as an oppressed class under the tyranny of Time, which prevents people from making their lives what they want them to be.
Themes
On this night, Sybylla is overtaken by “the abject littleness” of her life. What is the point of ambition, she thinks, when everyone must die? Her heart is weary, and it aches not like a young heart crying out for battle, but an old heart that has been defeated. She craves only rest.
Sybylla once enjoyed life’s little pleasures, but now she is horrified by her life’s “abject littleness.” “Abject” describes the most extreme degree of something negative, and applying it to the “littleness” of life magnifies the power of that littleness to rob Sybylla of her spirit. She has reached the level of weariness she feared when she first started working at Possum Gully––her ambitions have been replaced with a desire to rest.
Themes
Sybylla snaps herself out of her pessimism and speaks more broadly. She is proud to be Australian, and grateful to be a peasant. Peasants are the backbone of the nation, while the rich are “parasite[s]” who profit from “human sweat and blood and souls.” Sybylla pronounces her love for the Australian workers, who can suffer through the worst tragedies and still emerge cheerful. She loves, too, the female peasants, and she wishes she was more worthy to be one of them. She proclaims her desire to help them, but her own life is bound to the same labor. She is only a commoner, and only a woman.
Sybylla rejuvenates herself with her patriotism and political ideals. She expresses her love of her country, and her pride at being an Australian. Even though she has complained about life as a peasant throughout the novel, Sybylla is grateful to count herself among the class she respects the most. Her description of the upper classes as “parasite[s]” clarifies the subtextual disdain for the wealthy that Sybylla has expressed since childhood. The rich earn their fortunes from “human sweat and blood and souls,” but the humans who sacrifice for those fortunes, the peasants, still manage to remain cheerful. Then Sybylla calls out specifically to the female peasants, an oppressed group within an oppressed group. Though she has complained about their ignorance and wished for peers who shared her ambition, Sybylla closes her story with an expression of reverence for female peasants. She makes no attempt to inflate her own status, acknowledging that she is simply a commoner and a woman.
Themes
Sybylla watches the sun set over the horizon. She appreciates the gumtrees, the kookaburras, and the mopokes. As the sun goes down, Sybylla expresses her love and good wishes for her readers and tells them goodbye. She finishes her story like a prayer: “Amen.”
Sybylla takes in the beauty of the natural world. She loves beauty, and even if she is no longer surrounded by the refined, elegant beauty of Caddagat, she can still find beauty in the landscape of her beloved Australia. She references flora and fauna specific to her country––gumtrees, kookaburras, and mopokes––and watches the sun set over them all. She bids goodbye to her readers directly, emphasizing how personal this story is. Then, despite her self-professed atheism, Sybylla offers her narrative to God, the only being who might be able to help a simple female peasant achieve a brilliant career. With her story concluded, Sybylla finishes, “Amen.”
Themes
Literary Devices
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