Gender Issues In Ray Lawler's Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll

The play, “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” by Ray Lawler is mainly a story about life of Australia in the 1950s. In the play, one sees that, Lawler gives audiences rich insights into various aspects of gender issues and cultural identity issues typical of Australian life set in that period of time. The play talks about a group of ordinary people who are struggling to stay young as do not acknowledge the reality that they are aging. In their desperate bid to escape the inevitability of the consequences of change, the characters inflict hurt upon themselves and one another evoking pity and compassion in the audiences. Through the characters Lawler explores issues about Australian masculinity, mateship and the so called social "norms". Lawler …show more content…
It revolves around the lives of four major characters, Roo, Barney, Olive and Pearl. Roo and Barney are Queensland cane cutters who spend five months of each year (the layoff) in the city. During this time they live with two bar maids, Olive and Nancy. The play is set in the seventeenth year of this arrangement. Nancy has married and been replaced by the sceptical Pearl. Roo has left the cane fields due to a dispute with a younger cutter and makes plans to settle in the city. Olive fights against the change, desperate to maintain her ideal of ‘the …show more content…
This provides a great deal of tension between the characters and leads up to a disturbing climax. One sees, for example, how each invidual’s dream is disturbed. For Roo, the thing that has gone wrong this summer is that he has had to stoop to the position of holiday laborer in a paint factory - a far cry from his ideal, romantic job as a canecutter. His pride, however, prevents him going grape-picking with Barney and the boys. However, we see that, Roo also knows and recognises how Olive feels about the whole situation and tries his hardest to make it work for them. Also, Olive has lost her ideals of the lay-off; her dreams are shattered by the realities that Pearl confronts her with. The fact that she bursts into tears at the end of Scene One is a reflection that she has realised that her dream life is really only an illusion and she cannot cope with this very well as we later see her in the end. Barney has also lost a friend and has also betrayed the code of mateship, a breaking of the unwritten rules. When he calls on Roo to return his friendship by inviting him grape-picking, Roo's pride and his anger at Barney makes him choose to break the code as well. When Barney says “Happy days 'n glamorous nights” he doesn't mean what he says. Rather, he wants to get out of the rut he is in and go back to be with the boys. His focus is entirely selfish and he