‘I’ll Tell My Mother’: Dorothy Hewett and Literary Feminism after #Metoo

Abstract

In the middle of 2018, which for me was also the mid-point in writing the biography of major Australian literary figure Dorothy Hewett, her daughters - writers Kate Lilley and Rosanna Lilley - each published a book revealing their parents’ complicity in their sexual abuse as teenagers in the 1970s. As they both acknowledge, their experiences were never secret, at least not to the people involved, not to some who knew them well from that period and not to those who know them well now. And their testimonies were already part of my research for the biography. The revelations provoked a full-blown press scandal, however, and became a key #MeToo moment in Australia, in which the betrayals of sexual liberation and second wave literary feminism have been held up for new scrutiny.

This paper seeks to re-read Hewett’s poetry through her daughters’ works, understood as examples of what Leigh Gilmore identifies as MeTooLit, to examine the contrary rhetorical work of shame and what we may call freedom – both sexual liberation and the freedom to speak – in the thickly populous intertexts of rape culture that surround Hewett’s biography.