Restlessness as the Spirit of Becoming: A Hegelian Interpretation of the Novel Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

Abstract

Kate Grenville’s Restless Dolly Maunder is a thought-provoking Australian novel that narrates the journey of Dolly through the high and low tides of life through three alternative generations. The protagonist Dolly, who in real life named as Sarah Catherine Maunder, is the maternal grandmother of the author. Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, the novel captures the plight of the First Nations people, especially women and their voyage towards liberty, that is powered by the engine called restlessness. In the world of imitation, mind is real. Though the material world seems explicitly crumbled and real before our eyes, the actual reality is spiritual and unified. In other words, the physical world simply shadows the mental reality. Mind unifies all the time period in the entire universe into a rational whole, making it into an absolute spirit or geist is the theory called Absolute Idealism, formulated by the German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This paper attempts to analyse the rigorous expedition underwent by Dolly in her life from being a carefree kid to a restless woman in the novel Restless Dolly Maunder,by making use of the philosophical tenets of Hegel’s Absolute Idealism. The finding is brought forth in such a way that it pounces on to challenge the negative perspective of unsettledness in the novel.