AustLit

'Morrison talks about the rhetoric of Luck in Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946). The novel examines the terrain of female experience between the acquisition of sexual maturity and marriage. It is clear that the topoi of female survival and female ambition are central to this trilogy of books, and in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the framing questions of America and American politics complicate and extend these topoi. The anti-sentimental picaresque offered Stead an opportunity to return to the satirical energy that is so remarkable in House of All Nations (1938), to experiment with New York vernacular, and to anatomize various American dilemmas as she saw them: a materialistic and weak middle-class obsessed with easy success, the irritant of fake radicalism in the New York Left, and the irresistible rise and rise of gangster capitalism. Stead's use of "luck" highlights the episodic and contingent events that make up the life of her anti-heroine, but also provides a rhetorical focal point for her critique of sex and politics. "Luck" is a word at the heart of the novel's purpose as well as its action.' (Publication abstract)