![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Olive's comment to Pearl that Roo and Barney are "real men" suggests that she defines masculinity in terms of how and where men work. ![]() All three male characters-Barney, Roo, and Johnnie-perform backbreaking manual labor for the seven months they work cutting sugarcane, and then for the five months of the layoff season they get to enjoy the fruits of their labor in the city with beautiful women. Despite being confronted with the downsides of clinging tightly to their preconceived gender roles, they struggle to create new definitions, which shows how entrenched their biases about gender are.Ĭritics have noted that Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is classically Australian in the way it styles masculinity. However, when it comes to light that Roo walked off the job after being humiliated by the physical limitations of his age and must then get a job in the city to support himself, the characters grapple with their biases about gender and work. For Barney, Roo, and Olive, cane cutting-backbreaking manual labor in the Australian bush-is an undeniably masculine job that allows for a freeform, untethered lifestyle. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll explores the intersection between gender and work, showing, in particular, how work informs the characters' ideas of masculinity. ![]()
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