Women in Hewett's Plays

Polly and Lily Perkins are twins and the two sides to the same coin. Like most of the women in Hewett's plays, they reveal both the sexual and repressed side to the Australian female. Hewett hints at her own mother's likeness to both Lily and Polly in her poem:

My mother was a dark round girl in a country town,
With down on her lip, her white cambric blouse
Smelt of roses and starch, she was beautiful,
Warm, and frigid in a world of dried-up women…
…She wept in the tin humpy at the back of the store,
For the mother who hated the father who drank
And loved her; then, sadly, she fell in love
And kissed the young accountant who kept the books,
Behind the ledgers, the summer dust on the counters. (Stanza III, 74-75)

All the main characters in Hewett's plays are female: they are the prime protagonists who simultaneously drive and focus the tensions in the play. But Hewett's characters have not always pleased feminist thinkers in Australia mainly because of her propensity to ‘tell it like it is'. Her women have faults and they are not always aware of their oppression by male characters and many of them remain unaware of their exploitation throughout the plays.

Many of Hewetts' plays have critical and hostile audiences because of her uncompromising honesty that represents both the lyrical and the grotesqueries of female life. Her explicit referral to taboo female subjects such as menstruation, abortion, menopause, domestic and sexual violence, and drunkenness are used to contrast with the ‘freewheeling' musical and humorous style of her plays. This technique goes a long way to blurring characterisation in favour of showing the audience contradiction and complexity which is, ironically, more true to life. The audience is always invited to watch the consequences of their individual and collective actions (Williams 272).

Hewett's women range from eccentric old-timers, pious upstanding women, drunken obsessive mothers, and angry young women who are all actively involved in telling their stories. Yet in all
her plays, Hewett's honesty radiates with love for her female characters because she is telling their stories, not in order to emancipate them, but to celebrate their sublime and grotesque female
attributes. Polly and Lily, Clemmy and Clarry, Widow Tuesday and Edie all have secrets and passions that might be considered ‘dangerous' in a town that gossips like Mukinupin, and yet they
are battlers with their men and the landscape; they may well be the link that joins the two.