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The Landscape of Empire

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The Landscape of Empire The Landscape of Empire The place of landscape in 19th century colonial novels By Rebecca Leah Gordon A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2010 ABSTRACT This thesis presents a comparative research study of four novels published within two years of 1881 in four colonies of the Victorian Empire. The novels are Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life by Alexander Bathgate from New Zealand, Gathered In by Catherine Spence from Australia, Neville Trueman: The Pioneer Preacher, a Tale of the War of 1812 by W. H. Withrow from Canada, and finally The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner from South Africa. These novels were chosen because of their close publication dates. My purpose is to compare the depictions of landscape in each novel. The purpose of this study is to discover the depiction of landscape in the novels and the effect of the landscape on the characters. Because the authors were writing as English subjects in a non-English setting, they each had to engage differently with the landscape in their novel, depicting the settler experience of colonising the new country. Each novel’s portrayal of landscape is analysed using the text and placed into the historical context of the colony and the literary development of the colony. The findings of all four novels are compared to identify the differences and similarities discovered in the initial analysis. These final chapters show that landscape was closely tied with the settlers’ conceptions of religion, the treatment of the indigenous people, and settler experience in the particular colonies as represented by these authors. ii The importance of this thesis and the comparative study at the end is that my study gives an in depth analysis of four novels from four different colonies that have previously not been compared. The selection of the novels based solely on date of publication makes the comparison all the more interesting because these novels were not chosen due to their content, so the similarities and differences of the novels point out the similarities and differences of the authors’ literary portrayals of the colonies in a comparison study that has not yet been done. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor Jane Stafford for giving me many books, articles, and things to think about while writing this thesis, and her seemingly endless patience. I want to thank my parents for reading and commenting on the entire thesis despite the fact that it is in a completely different discipline than their PhDs. I am grateful for all of their help, support, and plane tickets back to the US to visit them. I am grateful to my partner, Jamie Hoare, for putting up with my obsession with 19th century literature, for his support, and his family for giving us a place to relax when our work piled up endlessly. I have to thank Kimberly Andrews, Brian Keith, Rachel Engel, Daniel Somavilla, Stefanie Brescia, and David & Becca Serfass. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………...…iv INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER ONE: A study of the landscape in Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life by Alexander Bathgate………………………………………………………….17 Landscape in the First View of the Colony………………………………..…..17 Landscape in Pioneer Novels………………………………………………..…19 Alexander Bathgate…………………………………………………………....21 Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life (1881)……………………………....22 Landscape in Waitaruna…………………………………………………….…24 CHAPTER TWO: A study of the landscape in Gathered In by Catherine Spence….35 Landscape in the Developing Australian Canon………………………….….35 Catherine Spence and Her Novels……………………..……………………..40 Gathered In (1881)………………………………………….……..…………42 Landscape in Gathered In……………....……………………………………44 CHAPTER THREE: A study of the landscape in Neville Trueman: The Pioneer Preacher, a Tale of the War of 1812 by W. H. Withrow……………………………55 A Harsh World to Explore: The Canadian Landscape………………………55 v The Canadian Landscape and Pioneer Writing…………………………….57 Prairie Writing……………………………………………………………...59 William Henry Withrow……………………………………………………62 Neville Trueman: The Pioneer Preacher, a Tale of the War of 1812 (1880)………………………………………………………….……………63 Landscape in Neville Trueman………………………………………….…..64 CHAPTER FOUR: A study of the landscape in The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner………………………………………………………………………73 The First Novel and Early Settlement…………………………….………….73 Olive Schreiner……………………………………………….………………76 The Story of an African Farm (1883)…………………………………….…..78 Landscape in The Story of an African Farm…………………………………80 CHAPTER FIVE: Similarities between the novels………………..……….…….…..95 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..…101 References…………………………………………………………………………..107 vi INTRODUCTION Dost thou not remember that the thorns are clustered with the rose, And that every Zin-like border may a pleasant land enclose? Oh, across these sultry deserts many a fruitful scene we'll find, And the blooms we gather shall be worth the wounds they leave behind! Henry Kendall, “Fainting by the Way” The expansion of the Victorian Empire was based on the exploration and colonisation of foreign continents in order to gain land, build on it, and control it. “For the middle-class emigrant, land was the great desideratum, and it is difficult to underestimate the importance of this particular commodity in the English consciousness during the mid nineteenth-century” (Grant 171). As Grant points out, this meant that landscape was at the forefront of colonial consciousness. However, landscape was more than simply the geographical area and material attributes of the land. While these physical characteristics defined the particular geography of a colony, the idea of landscape denoted the cultural and social aspects of the land as well, and thus the settlers’ reactions to it. It is not surprising, therefore, to imagine that landscape and the exploration of landscape played a large part in the literature of the time. The use of landscape in literature in the late nineteenth century was nothing new. In fact, “the use of landscape to reflect moral character goes back to the origins of the novel” (Mingay 3). From the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets “also searched to express the nature of country life in their various ways” (Mingay 3). As Cynthia Wall explains: Through the eighteenth century, "topography," as the rhetorical term for the description of landscape and places, climbed up from a lowly, ancillary, and often 1 despised position in classical rhetorical theory to a full-fledged glamour in the English and French novels of the nineteenth century. (Wall 389) In the collection of critical essays The Rural Idyll (1989), Mingay explains that these writers of the early eighteenth century often focused on an idealized landscape, while writers of the late nineteenth century began to deal with the harshness and truth of the land rather than a romanticized version. Mingay also points out that there is no single unifying vision of landscape through literature. Some authors used landscape to show societal realities, while others engaged with how the use of the land supported the inhabitants. Still others continued to use the romanticized ideals that became popular in Romantic poetry (Mingay 3). What is clear is that writers have been dealing with the implications of the landscape around them from the origins of the novel. Thus, colonial authors would have had the same interest in the landscape in their new settlement, and often more interest as colonisation is centred on holding and conquering land. In fact, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, in their book Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780 – 1830, conjecture that, because the previous century saw the height of Romanticism where poetic and literary works were professing the beauty of the land and the superiority of Britain, these texts became vital to the process of colonisation very early on. They explain that early British colonial administrators found that they had a great ally in the written works of England “which Romantic critics had helped to establish as embodiments of Englishness and Christianity” through the views of the land (Fulford and Kitson 3). The various depictions of English landscape were not only confined to novels during the height of colonial immigration. Robert Grant explains that often pamphlets, newspaper articles, and even “emigrant handbooks” were being published to entice immigration to the far reaches of the empire through “descriptions of new, alluring, distant lands” (Grant 169). These descriptions were designed to give settlers a feeling of both adventure and comfort by 2 highlighting the differences and similarities of the new colony: “It was common to highlight the informality of colonial life and to stress that, in a world of natural abundance, there was no need of complicated, old world social superstructures” (Grant 169). As Grant explains, these descriptions paint a picture of the pure beauty of the new colony due to their need to simultaneously give “English” qualities to the land and settlers, “to negotiate the projected disparities between the old country and new” (Grant 169). However, once settled in the new colony, the focus inevitably changed from foreign landscape seen from a distance to the experience of living on that new landscape. Thus, settler literature had a very different perspective than the literature
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