A Study of Female Image in Beverley Farmer’s Gerontissa

The short story Gerontissa by the Australian feminist writer Beverley Farmer, highlights women’s real life experience with the technique of stream of consciousness. It presents Gerontissa—an educated old lady’s reminiscent touch of the youth and sentimental grief over the old age. Lost in her memory of youth, she recalls her two husbands, the painter lover and others, with the ubiquitous recurrence of her nude portrait, mirror and writing, which gives an insight into the ambivalence of educated women’s inner world as well as unfolds women’s destiny as “object” and “other” in the patriarchal society.