What does Henry Lawson’s Drover’s Wife tell us about early pioneering life?
The landscape tests an individual’s strength
The physical landscape exerts a powerful influence on the development of personality
The hostile environment makes exacting demands upon the mother in Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife. It shapes her personality as well as her relationships. Because of the dictates and challenges of her harsh environment that involves confronting floods, fires, snakes and bushrangers, the mother must suppress her emotional support. She often gives scant emotional support to her children because she is so preoccupied battling the adverse challenges of the bush. As Lawson states, “she loves her children but has no time to show it.” Although she has had to suppress her fantasies and girlish romantic dreams, they nevertheless emerge late at night when she sits, during occasionally lonely moments, and reads the Young Ladies’ Journal. “Her surroundings are not favourable to the development of the ‘womanly’ or sentimental side of nature”. Rather she has become cunning, resilient and harsh to survive.
However, the wife increases her strength and builds resilience through her experiences which continues to impact upon her relationships. She becomes stronger because she knows her children are depending upon her. She knows that she must appear strong to the children, otherwise they will become more anxious in the face of all the dangers they must confront. Lawson also suggests that her personality develops and changes… She would be “strange” away from her environment, so accustomed has she become to the loneliness.
Relationships and responsibilities can teach us important lessons.
Our personality and identities often develop and change owing to the environment /landscape in which we live. The Drover’s Wife becomes increasingly more pragmatic/ practical and hardened as she is forced to cope with very harsh circumstances. She battles incredible adversity – such as the drought, the fire, the snake, the “gallows-faced swagman” and the constant threat that her children could be killed from snakes, as her nephew was.
The Drover’s Wife’s life is dominated by her responsibilities to her family which become the most important thing in her life and dictate the way in which she relates to others and finds happiness. Most importantly she takes her responsibilities very seriously and displays a very stoic manner. The drover’s wife learns that in carrying out our duties and relationships there can often be some happiness; despite the hardship there can be personal rewards.
Sons’ compassionate outburst.
Growth and happiness.
The wife’s personality changes as she becomes increasingly accustomed to her harsh surroundings – from a girl-wife who hated the loneliness, and who built the “usual castles in the air” – to a woman who had become so accustomed to the loneliness that “she would feel strange away from it” and to someone who had relinquished her dreams and become increasingly unaccustomed to sentiment and romanticism to such an extent that her son’s compassionate response stimulates a flurry of passion.
Whilst she grows, she does not experience greater happiness – except possibly in unexpected places. She is rewarded by the son’s compassionate outburst. The drover’s wife learns that in carry out our duties and relationships there can often be some happiness; despite the hardship there can be personal rewards.
There can be some happiness; but there can also be disappointments. She expects nothing, because she is used to being betrayed by those closest to her.
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