Previous
Chapter 4
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
Sybylla is tasked with caring for young calves taken from their mothers, which she considers a godless and cruel task. She does a lot of thinking while she works, though she sees the “power of thought” as “a heavy curse.” The less a person thinks about the reasons of the world and its injustices, the happier they will be, especially if that person is a woman. One of the injustices she thinks about is the sad lot of the calves, which are taken from their mothers and made dependent on the greedy farmers who force that separation.
This section demonstrates Sybylla’s strong moral core, but it also reveals that she resents her own code of morality. She simultaneously recognizes the “power” of critical thinking while also criticizing it as a “curse” that weighs heavily on her. Her longing for ignorance strengthens the earlier implication that injustice is ultimately unbreakable, as Sybylla believes that ignorance of injustice is the only path to happiness, instead of believing in combatting injustice. Her sympathy for the motherless calves also echoes the fractured family structure of the Melvyns.
Themes
In addition to milking the cows and feeding the calves, Sybylla attends school, cares for her younger siblings, washes dishes, cleans boots, and does her homework. These long days of toil characterize Sybylla’s understanding of dairying, which she distinguishes from the refined, pastoral dairy-farming described in agricultural newspapers. The dairying that she has lived and seen is far less glamorous and requires long hours of work with no days off. This hard labor has brought her parents “from swelldom to peasantism,” and none of their old friends come to visit. Sybylla blames this in part on the rigid class structure of her contemporary Australia, complaining that “Australia’s democracy is only a tradition of the past.”
The satire in Sybylla’s narration comes to the forefront here as she directly criticizes how class hierarchies in Australia undermine the nation’s alleged democracy. She distinguishes between the hard labor of dairying and the refinement of the dairy-farming her audience might have read about. This again forces her readers to contend with their understanding of labor and peasantry.
Themes
Sybylla does not mean to disparage peasants, whom she sees as the foundation of all societies, and whose lives are generally honest and good. But she hates the simple life of only work and sleep––her passion for the arts cries out to be fulfilled. She borrows every book in the neighborhood and gives up sleep to read them. The lack of sleep only makes her labor more difficult, but the books give Sybylla an escape from her life. She imagines a life surrounded by artists, and “sweet, cruel, delusive Hope” convinces her that this life is possible.
Sybylla respects the peasant class, but she does not see herself as belonging to that class. She is ambitious and artistic, and she cannot settle for a life of ignorance and labor. As books become her escape, literature establishes its significance in her life, and her love of reading and writing will grow to become a core feature of Sybylla’s character. The description of her hope as “sweet, cruel, and delusive” speaks to Sybylla’s complex relationship with ambition. Hope grants Sybylla reprieve from her constant boredom, but she believes the promises that hope makes are false and deceptive, and she resents it for that.
Themes
Literary Devices
Years pass, and Sybylla and her family scrape out a hard-earned livelihood. They take some pride in the honesty and independence of their work, which Sybylla compares to the fortitude of their British ancestors. Despite their efforts, though, 1894 and 1895 bring a drought that renders farming impossible. Sybylla has left school, and she helps Mr. Melvyn and Mrs. Melvyn lift the cows, which is done to help cows who have trouble standing on their own. Even with their combined strength, they need to call in the neighbors to help, and Mr. Melvyn provides favors for the neighbors in turn. Only a few neighbors have the means to send the livestock to a better area, so the farmers of Possum Gully make a trade of helping each other lift their cows.
The virtues that Sybylla sees in her family’s work speak to the value she places on the peasants’ role in constructing a national identity. By emphasizing the honesty and independence of this kind of work, and comparing the Melvyns’ labor to that of Australia’s original British colonists, Sybylla reiterates the importance of peasants to Australian society. The notion that peasants are the backbone of society is also seen in the support that the farmers of Possum Gully show each other during the drought.
Themes
Literary Devices
Get the entire My Brilliant Career LitChart as a printable PDF.
The drought weighs heavily on Sybylla, her family, and their neighbors. Most dairy farmers love their cows, and to be unable to provide for them is upsetting. Poverty falls upon the Melvyns. They are still too proud to be perceived as poor, so they insist on keeping up appearances; Sybylla thinks this kind of sudden poverty is much worse than inherited poverty, which “is not ashamed of itself” and does not add humiliation to the struggles it inflicts. Sybylla argues against the idea that people can be happy in poverty, since poverty has ostracized her to the friendless outskirts of society, prevented her from accessing the literature and music she longs for, and forced her to undergo hard labor.
Once again, the Melvyns forgo practicality for the sake of family pride. Sybylla draws a connection between her family’s focus on reputation and the fact that poverty struck them unexpectedly. She continues her task of complicating her readers’ understanding of poverty by describing different types of poverty. Her belief that the Melvyns’ version of poverty is “ashamed of itself” depicts shame as intrinsic to their condition of poverty, and she lays out clearly the social, intellectual, and physical hardships that poverty inflicts on peasants.
Themes
Sybylla’s time at school was uneventful, but she recalls an incident when her teacher, Mr. Harris, challenged the school inspector. The inspector insulted the students, saying they have only “the proverbial stupidity of country people.” Harris is an alcoholic and a bad teacher, but he is a good man who loves his students, so he defended them. He told the inspector that the children have to work long hours before and after school, and most of them have to walk several miles just to get to school at all. Harris claimed that if the inspector had to suffer like the children, he would have trouble in the classroom as well. Insulted, the inspector brings Harris out of the room, and that is all Sybylla knows of the event.
Mr. Harris serves to contrast Mr. Melvyn: both struggle with alcohol addiction, and both fail at the roles they are meant to play, but Mr. Harris manages to embody the masculine role of protector despite his personal troubles. He stands up for his students to his direct superior, displaying a level of selflessness that Mr. Melvyn has never exhibited. The inspector’s remark about the “stupidity of country people” also reveals the mindset that Sybylla is combatting with her narrative and clarifies why she consistently voices her support for peasants.
Themes
Mr. Melvyn interrupts Sybylla’s ironing because Blackshaw is coming over to lift the cows. They get five of the six cows on their feet, but the sixth cow is too weak to stand. After a few attempts, the group sits exhausted in the sun. Sybylla thinks about how weariness dominates her life. Mrs. Melvyn is weary, her father is weary, Blackshaw is weary, the cow is weary, Sybylla is weary, the drought-stricken land is weary. She is only 15, but her life and her “brilliant career” amount to nothing but weariness, and as the hard hours age her too quickly, she fears that her life will only ever be weariness. The adults around her had likely had youthful dreams like she has, and now they are only weary. Weariness, she realizes, will probably be the entirety of her life and her career.
Sybylla repeats again and again how weariness dominates the lives of her family and neighbors, and this emphasis challenges the common belief that poor people remain in poverty due to laziness. By showing how exhaustion permeates every aspect of peasant life, Sybylla argues that laborers are not lazy, they are simply worn out by lives of toil. It is amidst her realization of the weariness in her life that Sybylla first begins to worry about her “brilliant career.” She has ambitions of independence and brilliance, but she has only weary adults as examples for what adulthood might look like, which makes her dreams seem impossible.
Themes
Sybylla hates the summer heat. Life itself seems like a curse to her. The world is only a “great dull hard rock,” which all its people are desperately trying to hang onto before it throws them to oblivion. The cow groans, which is unusual for how patient cows normally are. With the “one-sided reasoning” that most 15-year-olds have, Sybylla asks God why he would torture an innocent animal. Sybylla and the others try again to lift the cow, and this time it manages to stand.
Sybylla again disparages her own youthful irrationality. This reminds the reader that she has yet to fully mature and that the ideas she expresses might also be partially formed. Through her lens of teenage misery, Sybylla loses any appreciation for the world around her, deciding that the whole Earth must be as “dull” and “hard” as Possum Gully. However, that belief is challenged as soon as Sybylla voices it, since the collaboration of the farmers gets the cow to stand.
Themes
Sybylla and the others return to the house, where Sybylla and Mrs. Melvyn do housework while the men smoke on the veranda before leaving to help another farmer with his cows. The house is stuffy and hot, and Sybylla again thinks that life is a curse. The drought continues, and Sybylla repeats: “Weariness! Weariness!” After all, she reasons, repeating “weariness” is just as wearying as the feeling itself.
The division between the men of Possum Gully and Sybylla and her mother is another instance of the gendered divisions of Sybylla’s society. The men relax outside while the women return to the domestic sphere by literally going back inside the house to continue working. Sybylla also acknowledges her own repetition of “weariness,” which adds to the novel’s self-deprecating humor and demonstrates Sybylla’s love and command of words.
Themes
