AustLit

Strain's article looks at the domestic novel in the late nineteenth century, which she argues, functioned to 'enculturate young readers' into adulthood 'through narratives of romance, successful enterprise and the rewards of virtue' (5). For Strain, the novel Annie Carr: A Tale of Both Hemispheres sets up a model of female virtue for young girls to follow which fundamentally fixes 'the female as other' and persuades the readers to '...accept the constructions of gender, race, class, family and Australia embodied in the text' (5). Strain defines the gender model in the text as one that supports the subjugation of women 'through espousing a 'natural distinction' between the sexes based on 'natural' qualitites of masculinity and femininity which subordinates the female through privileging the physically active public role accorded to the male' (16).