Mythmaking and Masculinity in the Fiction of Norman Lindsay By
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Mythmaking and Masculinity in the Fiction of Norman Lindsay by Megan Mooney Taylor BA Journalism, DipEd, MAPrelim Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University January, 2017 2 Contents Candidate Declaration 3 Access to Thesis 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 8 Chapter 1. Myth of the Muse 51 Chapter 2. Reimagining Australian Masculinity 76 Chapter 3. Appropriating the Feminine 97 Chapter 4. Myth of the Bohemian Artist 132 Chapter 5. The Myth of the Larrikin: Lindsay and Male Adolescence 160 Chapter 6. Myths of the Archive: Working with Smoke and Mirrors 179 Chapter 7. Australian Masculinity Take Two: Norman Lindsay and D.H. Lawrence 204 Conclusion 231 Appendix 1: La Revanche – transcript 234 Appendix 2: La Revanche – manuscript copy 249 Bibliography 260 5 Abstract A leader in early twentieth-century bohemia, Norman Lindsay’s position in Australian culture has been elevated to the level of myth. This thesis evaluates the mythopoeic construction of Lindsay’s cultural legacy, paying particular attention to the role of gender. Moreover, it focuses particularly on the role of his fiction in exploring the dynamic between the artist, nation, and masculinity. While many are familiar with Lindsay’s art whether it be his Bacchanalian pen and ink drawings, satirical cartoons, children’s picture books, or propaganda work, far less are familiar with the eleven novels that he wrote over the course of his lifetime. However, these novels were incredibly popular within Australia at the time of publication and subsequently through further editions. Combining close readings, archival research, and theories of masculinity, authorship, and cultural production, this thesis examines how Lindsay promoted a vision of modern Australia culture as simultaneously urban and pastoral, networked and isolate, larrikin and learned, radical and conservative. Examining key areas of Lindsay’s mythmaking such as the muse, bohemia, the larrikin, and the artist, it becomes apparent that the relationship between Lindsay, the person, and his work is highly refracted and richly complex. The mythology surrounding Lindsay’s focus on the female nude, and the translation of these images into a muse relationship with his models is analysed in Chapter 1. Considering the function of The Muses, as well as muses in Lindsay’s novels will provide a deeper understanding of his artistic reliance on the feminine form, and whether that relationship can usefully be considered as a co-dependent artist-muse conjunction. Moreover, I consider how Lindsay may have regendered the muse through his brother Lionel. In Chapter 2, I explore Lindsay’s long-term project to reconstruct Australian hegemonic masculinity by elevating the masculine artist to the position of masculine ideal. As I demonstrate, Lindsay’s ‘exclusive male earth’ was not an earth peopled only by men, but rather an earth where the values and desires of men were served by women, or ‘the feminine image’. Chapter 3 investigates the controlling 6 male gaze in Lindsay’s fiction, focussing in particular on two of his novels which feature a female protagonist, The Cousin From Fiji and Dust or Polish? Contrasting Lindsay’s own analysis of the novels with a combination of feminist theories of desire and the gaze and close readings, I investigate the limitations of female agency in Lindsay’s work. Analysing Lindsay’s semi-autobiographical and autobiographical writing in Chapter 4, I consider Lindsay’s mythmaking around the bohemian artist and, particularly, the significance of its homosociality. In Chapter 5 I explore Lindsay’s engagement with the ‘larrikin’ and national identity. I argue that Lindsay’s focus on the pre-teen and adolescent boy allowed him to create an idealised masculine standing outside both inherited or European social norms and the feminised domestic sphere. I also consider the significance of larrikinism in relationship to censorship in Lindsay’s writing, focussing in particular on the publication of A Curate in Bohemia and his use of anthropomorphised animals to satirise those in power. Chapter 6, I investigate Lindsay’s unpublished manuscripts, specifically La Revanche - or Les Traditiones vive le l’irror Gate, A Romance by Marie Corelli is a handwritten and assembled rough manuscript containing both original narrative and photographs of Norman Lindsay and his friend and future brother-in-law Bill Dyson acting out the scenes. As an example of Lindsay’s uncensored writing it is significant, as its scatological subject matter opens up new discussion of the role of humour and satire in Lindsay’s writing. While exploring its significance within Lindsay’s larger corpus, I also address issues of La Revanche’s archival veracity and the value of ephemera. Chapter 7 places Lindsay in a transnational literary field, linking the masculinity explored in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo with Lindsay’s masculinity project. Identifying their concerns regarding Australian constructed and contested masculinity allows for a deeper understanding of the relevance of Lindsay’s project to discussions of masculinity in their contemporary global context. Lawrence, a modernist writer in direct conflict with Lindsay’s narrative realism, positions Lindsay as both internal 7 and external to global masculinity, highlighting his relevance while giving space to his difference and Australian nationalism. Despite the popularity of Lindsay as a colourful figure in Australian cultural history, there remains little comprehensive critical analysis of Lindsay’s output, far less of his writing. In critiquing the myths surrounding Lindsay at a culture-maker and breaker, this thesis provides insights into early twentieth-century Australian culture and Lindsay’s role as a novelist. It provides a methodology that accommodates the various fictions of self and nation across mediums and a better understanding of both its textuality and gendering. 8 Introduction In the preface to his first published novel, A Curate in Bohemia, Norman Lindsay wrote that A trifling story of this description does not deserve the dignity of a preface, but in my more uneasy moments it seems to demand some sort of sneaking apology.1 The apology was to his friends, who featured as characters in the novel, and not to the unknown reader. This ‘mean way of dodging the consequence of tampering with the sacred name of friendship’ was included in the 1936 reprint, with an addendum that noted This story is dated, not so much by the above date [the original preface was written in 1912 for the 1913 publication], as by the innocence of a pre-war earth. It was possible in those days to have a lark with an exercise of scribbling. Possibly it may seem an experiment in optimism to reproduce the performance at this date.2 In these two prefaces we can see the oscillating emotions Norman Lindsay attached to his writing, from his first publication in 1913 to his last in 1968, a year before his death. The original preface was an attempt to circumvent any anger or distress his reproduction of his friends into humorous caricatures may cause, or may have caused to be directed at himself, by these ‘awfully decent chaps’ (that he also borrowed his two female characters from life seems of lesser consequence). The added note expresses the lightness of intent in the writing; by focussing on its publication before World War I Lindsay seeks to excuse its frivolous subject matter, a frivolity he feels may be inappropriate following two world wars and a depression. In contrast to Lindsay’s professed attitude, writing about Norman Lindsay’s writing is not an exercise to be taken lightly. The triviality with which he 1 Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, Angus and Robertson Publishers, Sydney, 1981, p v 2 Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, p v-vi 9 professed to view his writing is not consistent with either the themes of his novels, or their intended effect on his readers. Lindsay’s most well-known written work is a children’s book about a cut-and-come-again pudding with a potty mouth; the popularity of this humorous novel of thievery and gluttony would not have surprised Lindsay himself as it was written to prove his point that children are more interested in food and mischief than fairies and morality tales3. Despite the ongoing popularity of The Magic Pudding, the relative obscurity of his other written works may have made him question his dedication to the future development of a distinctly Australian literature. In this thesis, I explore the extent that gender underlies much of the mythmaking surrounding Lindsay and his vision of a distinctly Australian literature. Lindsay asserts the superiority of the male gaze and a culturally specific homosociality that extends and contemporises the larrikin with Australian masculinity in the twentieth century. As this thesis demonstrates, he offers a vision of Australia underpinned by a reconsideration of the role of fiction and art and its gendered production. From his childhood Lindsay, as well as drawing constantly, ‘had an itch to scribble prose’4, writing ‘abortive small novels I was always starting and never completing beyond a chapter or two’5 and had to hide from his mother. In an article published in the Bulletin in 1929 entitled Rocks and Mud and Novels he wrote that the novelist had the power to create Australia. He can make Australia not only a place worth living in, but a place where life exists. Life is the burgeoning of the human ego by a release of its emotional mechanism as a conscious impact, and not a blind automatonism that grubs for food and clothes. Pictures, poetry, and music reach only the minority, and at that only of those already developed to react to an imagery of life, but prose goes 3 John Hetherington, Norman Lindsay: The Embattled Olympian, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1973, p 121 4 Norman Lindsay, My Mask: for what little I know of the man behind it, Angus and Robertson Publishers, Sydney, 1976, p 229 5 Norman Lindsay, My Mask: for what little I know of the man behind it, p 50 10 everywhere.