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A collage featuring a shadow of a woman cast over a piles of books on feminism.

Wifedom

with Anna Funder, moderated by Jemma Birrell

10 March 2024

In the Drama Theatre

Sydney Opera House Presents

Talks and Ideas

In theatre and livestreamed

Few writers captured the mechanics of tyrannical power better than George Orwell. That is, until Anna Funder came along. Hear how she exposed the great literary hero’s own ‘Orwellian’ erasure of his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and how the tyranny of ‘wifedom’ persists today. 

Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.

Anna Funder, Wifedom

The doublethink of patriarchy exposed

When Anna Funder turned to her literary hero, George Orwell, for inspiration, she discovered a writer who had deliberately obscured the significant contribution his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy made to his most significant and successful works. It was a grand silent conspiracy across time that included Orwell’s biographers who obscure the fact that Animal Farm and 1984 would not have been the books they were without O’Shaughnessy. The writer who gave us “Big Brother” and critical terms like “doublethink” to describe how tyrannical power works, engaged in his own doublethink to keep his wife’s talents subservient to his own. 

Join Funder, who coined her own term, “wifedom”, to describe this phenomenon, as she wrestles with Orwell’s legacy and how we might dismantle the “doublethink of patriarchy”. 

Sydney Opera House Presents

 

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