Identity and Belonging

[Chocoholic]

Sometimes Gladness by Bruce Dawe,
Bombshells by Joanna Murray-Smith

PSYCHOLOGIST Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994) outlined eight stages of a person's life. According to his theory, each stage required a resolution of a crisis in order to develop a person's sense of self.

Two stages were in infancy and two in childhood. Two were in adolescence and young adulthood, and the final two were in mature and late adulthood.

To Erikson, the most critical stage regarding identity was in adolescence, when an individual must resolve their identity versus role-confusion crisis.

The study of Murray-Smith's play of six character monologues and the various voices in Bruce Dawe's poetry show many of these developmental crises in action.

Ultimately they say much about how people's sense of personal identity and belonging develop and change as life places pressure on individuals over time.

The poem Public Library, Melbourne connects to Erikson's middle-childhood developmental crisis. His theory involved the opposing forces of industry versus inferiority, and these children entering the library are intimidated by their surroundings, "crowding together defensively".

The poet ties the three boys to their own past as he tells them, "here sleep your history's parents". Yet to feel secure, they need to belong to their own group because they feel out of place in the library.

An adolescent crisis of identity is illustrated in Murray-Smith's Catholic schoolgirl Mary O'Donnell.

Peer pressure, individuality, sexualisation of teenagers and her personal insecurity, demonstrated by her references to her rival Angela McTerry, are all explored in this monologue. She hinges her concept of self-esteem on her expectation to win the talent show because "I am the talent".

Erikson's concept of young adulthood intimacy versus isolation is illustrated in Murray-Smith's Theresa McTerry, a bride keen to give up "singledom" who declares "I'm going to belong to someone".

But the crisis is revealed in her understanding this marriage may not be everything she wants in life. She later claims, "wife . . . it sounds like a kitchen implement".

The mature adulthood generativity versus stagnation stage of Erikson's theory may be illustrated by Murray-Smith's "wom(a)n on the edge" portrayal of frenzied housewife Meryl Louise Davenport -- also echoed in Dawe's poetry.

Davenport tries to fit everything in at a frantic pace. She sees herself as "a failure and a fake and everyone can see through my lipstick". Dawe's poem Up the Wall likewise portrays a scene of kitchen domesticity. Here, isolation is empahised, "If something should go wrong. I'm so alone!"

His poem Mrs Swipe Speaks Out is closer in style to Murray-Smith's monologue.

Written with no punctuation as one long sentence, we hear a woman who has "had just about /enough thank you very much".

She is not internalising her anxieties in the way Davenport does. Mrs Swipe is externalising her complaints, laden with cliches and a punchy ending, getting her own back by confronting her neighbour regarding prawn shells. This is a woman in control.

A sad perspective on the pressures of modern life on men is to be found in Dawe's The Family Man. This is about ultimately not coping. The family man who has said "kids make a home"
has committed suicide.

Unlike the women under pressure, who never cease talking, the man "kept his own counsel". No reason is stated as to why he took his life, though "rumours flower over his absence", suggesting he became a topic of discussion for others.

The final stage of life, according to Erikson, is late adulthood and this is where a crisis between ego, integrity and despair must be fought.

Murray-Smith's widow Winsome Webster is an interesting contrast to Dawe's male version in the poem Widower.

Webster claims: "In our society, being alone can make one feel rather silly."

Belonging to the group of widows who keep her busy in weekly rituals is important to her, yet at the same time she yearns for something more. There is hope and surprise in her life. Dawe's widower is voiceless and reflective. At the end of the poem when the widower returns into the house "the wind / Creaked like an ageing bachelor whose bed / Appears too narrow and too small for him", the reader is left with a sense of sadness and loss.

Dawe's feelings about ageing are further considered in the poems Happiness Is the Art of Being Broken and My Mother in Her Latter Years.

The play Bombshells is about women balancing their internal and external selves.

Each character does this with shrewdness and humour.

Dawe's poetry is, by nature, broader, encompassing half a century of his own wisdom, experience and observation of the human condition. It is remarkable to see the links between these texts of such disparate origins and purposes.

This must say something about the psychological truth of literature -- to reveal something universal about the nature of an individual's sense of identity and belonging over time.

Karen Lenk is an English teacher at Mowbray College and a VCE English assessor