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My Brilliant Career: A Study on Sybylla’s Independent Personality
YANG Yifei, ZHANG Shunsheng
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.07.004
University of Xianda College of Economics & Humanities Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
This thesis takes as its subject the classic novel My Brilliant Career by Australian writer Miles Franklin, focusing on the independent personality of the protagonist Sybylla Melvyn and the bush predicament in which she is entangled. The study argues that Sybylla’s three geographical displacements—from Possum Gully to Caddagat and then to M’Swat—constitute a mode of “resistant” existence, through which she subverts Victorian-era feminine discipline and the capitalist logic of courtship and marriage. The paper offers an innovative interpretation of the Australian bush as a double-sided symbol that functions simultaneously as a site of oppression and a source of vitality, and it points out that the fractured nature of Sybylla’s personality—a weave of pride and self-abasement—serves precisely as a spiritual specimen of cultural transition within the colonial context. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that the essence of independent personality is not a triumph but a process of continuously transforming external oppression into inner freedom. This finding not only provides a new interpretive angle for feminist literary criticism, but also offers profound historical experience for modern individuals grappling with the algorithmic cage and the alienation of consumerism.
My Brilliant Career, feminism, bush predicament, Sybylla, independent personality
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, July 2026, Vol. 16, No. 7, 593-603
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