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Modernism En Route Yingjie M. Cheng is a PhD candidate at the University of Robin Hyde’s Sino-Australasian New South Wales. Her research Writings focuses on 20th-century Yingjie M. Cheng Australian and New Zealand women writers and their engagements in literary modernism. Robin Hyde (Iris Guiver Wilkinson, 1906–1939), celebrated as a major New Zealand poet, novelist, and journalist, wrote at a time when New Zealand provincialism started to give way to nationalism. Although she looked into questions of culture and identity high on cultural nationalists’ agenda (Hessell 118), Hyde neither ended up engaging in the diehard nationalism of other New Zealand writers nor remained discouraged by ‘a masculine tradition’ at work behind the nationalist literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s1. Instead, a modernist creative sensibility runs throughout her novels, journalism, and poetry written in the 1930s. Comparable to Katherine Mansfield in composing modernist psychological fiction, Hyde wrote from the ‘inner centre’ of the human mind and was succeeded only by Janet Frame (Jones 168). With the help of her modernist style, Hyde also managed to better negotiate literary topics such as place and identity. Unfastening the fixity of both, Hyde’s writings outrival the ‘constrained, more confined’ (Williams 5) cultural nationalism. Few in the cultural nationalist period realised that a fresh modernist approach was developed in the 1930s, but it is exactly these modernist creative ideas that continued to prosper even after the decay of the nationalist fervour (Caffin 387). Robin Hyde’s Sino-Australasian writings, in particular, bridge the interstice between cultural nationalism and the then budding neo-romanticism in New Zealand literature, and ‘promise’ a cultural and literary identity transnational in scope. Advocating internationalism on her part (Murray 30), Robin Hyde literally carried out a life ‘on the road’. Born in South Africa, she came with her English-Australian parents to Wellington about a year after her birth. Shifting among different posts in journalism, she spent most of her early life travelling in New Zealand. By the time she embarked for London at the age of thirty-two, Hyde had also crossed twice to neighbouring Australia. Semi-autographically recorded in The Godwits Fly (1938), 304 | Westerly 62.2 Hyde’s two trans-Tasman sojourns seem to have helped invigorate her modernist perception of place and identity. For her later trip to London, she followed a circuitous Sino-Australasian route, which she recorded in her writings and which gave further shape to her modernism. A hybrid national and cultural identity facilitated by this prolonged transnational trip is soon reflected in Hyde’s travel book Dragon Rampant (1939) and the posthumous Houses by the Sea (1952) as well as some of her later poems2. In some of the texts discussed here, Hyde’s focus on the female experience (the female body in particular) fosters a similar sense of fluidity and remains emblematic of female literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Labelled as a ‘camouflaged autobiographical’ novel (Towel 19), The Godwits Fly fictionalises Hyde’s own life from childhood to early womanhood. With its effaced narrative voice, The Godwits Fly can be categorised as modernist psychological fiction comparable to that written by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Hyde shifts the point of view among different characters (Jones 167) and weaves a ‘complex subjectivity’ (Murray 187) in the novel. In the meantime, through a fragmentary and mosaic representation of the travelling space and therefore a modernist delineation of the Australian farm and city, The Godwits Fly explores the trans-Tasman interspace and transcends national boundaries. In the chapter titled ‘Follow the Boomerang’, Augusta Hannay (the mother), after a fight with her husband, returns to the childhood home—a family farm in Melbourne—with her three young children. In immediate contrast with their penurious New Zealand life, the Australian farm seems heavenly: ‘The fruit was so cheap, barrows and stalls of piled-up, luscious colours, raw orange, slashing purple and gold’; ‘Rock melons were piled up outside, streaky, stripey piles’; and, there is ‘a red-painted machine, turning a handle. Thin streams spouted from its sides, one milk, one cream. This was rather magnificent; in Wellington they never had cream except on Christmas Day and birthday’ (The Godwits Fly 55–57). Material prosperity, nevertheless, fails to picture Australia as a tangible entity. Instead, the plethora of food remains out of line with the desolate landscape. Countries on the map are misleading. True, Australia was coloured plain red, like New Zealand, but it was so large, and the names of such odd products, pearl-shell, molasses, trepang, were printed in little letters round its coast, that somehow you would have expected it to jump out at you like 305 | Yingjie M. Cheng a Jack-in-the-box, saying, ‘Here I am, I’m Australia.’ Instead, it was plain, indifferent and lonely, with a few startled night- birds flying out of its armpits, and the high gig-wheels turning in deep ruts. (55) Contrary to the Australia outlined on the map, the real land is hard to delineate. The ‘indifferent and lonely’ country features separateness and irregularity. With a formidable land mass and a variety of living forms, ‘Australia kept coming clear in bits and pieces, seemingly unrelated to any whole’ (56). The disconnectedness between localised and definable Melbourne farm life and the vast Australian space—between a cartographic finitude and an unknowable reality—unfolds the strangeness of the place. On their way from Wellington to Melbourne, ‘Tasmania drips with tiny waterfalls, like fringes of glass beads. Then it has vanished, and one-of-the-uncles is finding seats on the train’ (55, emphasis mine). From the Tasman Sea, through Tasmania, and to a Melbourne train, Eliza’s contact with the trans-Tasman interspace and with Australia turns out to be disrupted. Everything remains in motion and emerges in an unidentifiable form. A fixed sense of place vanishes. In the novel, more than a decade later, Eliza embarks on her second trans-Tasman trip. This time, pregnant yet unmarried, Eliza goes alone to Sydney to deliver her baby. Here, Hyde writes through the pregnant female body to break open the fixity of place and identity. At first, Sydney is an intimidating place. To Eliza, ‘crossing a Sydney street was an orgy of cowardice; exhaustion, when you reached the safety of the far side’ (194). Quickly admitting, though, that ‘I wouldn’t feel like this if I weren’t ill,’ Eliza soon replaces her feelings of strangeness with a moony, dream-like impression of the city. It is light very early in the Sydney mornings, not with a clear, sharp burst of light but with a humid grey veil. At noon the torpor is intolerable. The moist colours of the fruit reach their peak of incandescent brightness; then they bloat, like dead things, and commence to rot. (197) Veiled in dim morning light and sunk in an air of lethargy, the city of Sydney verges on being a transitional zone. Streets run along ‘from nowhere to nowhere’, ‘like those sentences in conversation that you never remember’ (197). Purposeless roads and houses—unfamiliar and monotonous—obscure boundaries between reality and imagination and deprive the Australian city of its distinctiveness. The enigmatic city relieves Eliza’s unease about her circumstance. Looking now at the 306 | Westerly 62.2 impending child-birth, Eliza thinks of it only as ‘one of the inevitable, irritating punctuations which break the long sentence of life’ (197). Relying upon a mosaic delineation of the city to release the confined corporeal female body, Hyde presents in a modernist gesture ‘what it was like to be’ a woman rather than ‘what had happened’ to a woman. She ‘rewrites’ the story of her (protagonist’s) life ‘from the inside out’ and presents a type of ‘modernist excursion’ similarly made by early twentieth-century female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and H. D. (Kelley 25). Looking for the ‘smell of the (New Zealand) gorse’, Eliza came out at last on a sea place, ‘cliffs cracking immense over the pearl and ebony fans of the waves, which spread and dissolved far below’ (The Godwits Fly 201). At the fringe of (un)familiarity and with now an unfettered female body, the fixity of place (the New Zealand locality) again ‘dissolves’. By virtue of modernist representations of Australia through Eliza’s two trans-Tasman trips, Hyde cultivates a fluid national identity in the novel. Eliza’s mother Augusta regards Australia as an eclectic space that replaces her ‘beloved, unattainable England’ (25). Going back to Australia is for Augusta going back to ‘old times’, like ‘biting into the warm cheek of’ (55) an Australian pear. To Eliza, however, Australia is a place of uncertainty as well as possibility, where the New Zealand locality is tested and transformed. Back to New Zealand from Sydney, Eliza soon becomes ‘no more of me you knew’ (208). The central metaphor of the novel is that New Zealanders who remain in their country are like incomplete godwits. The death of Eliza’s platonic lover Timothy in London and her own deferral of a trip to the north indicate nevertheless that there are probably ‘no complete (northbound) godwits’. It is rather the trans- Tasman interspace that transforms a fixed ‘New Zealandness’. As Allen Curnow writes, If New Zealand’s littleness cramped that ‘elasticity of pride’, there was always the capacious term ‘Australasia’. Little as it means on either side of the Tasman Sea today, it meant a great deal to the New Zealand poet or journalist of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. (27) In The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde highlights an Australasian proximity.

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