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Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance a Critical Investigation of the Writing of Joy Packer

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Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance a Critical Investigation of the Writing of Joy Packer UNIVERSITY OF UMEÅ DISSERTATION ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7191-140-5 From the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Umeå University, Sweden Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance A Critical Investigation of the Writing of Joy Packer AN ACADEMIC DISSERTATION which will, on the proper authority of the Chancellor’s Office of Umeå University for passing the doctoral examination, be publicly defended in hörsal F, Humanisthuset, on Friday, 23rd February 1996, at 3.15 p.m. John A Stotesbury Umeå University Umeå 1996 Abstract This is the first full-length study of the writing of the South African Joy Packer (1905-1977), whose 17 works of autobiography and romantic fiction were primarily popular. Packer’s writing, which appeared mainly between 1945 and 1977, blends popular narrative with contemporary social and political discourses. Her first main works, three volumes of memoirs published between 1945 and 1953, cover her experience of a wide area of the world before, during and after the Second World War: South Africa, Britain, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, and China. In the early 1950s she also toured extensive areas of colonial "Darkest Africa." When Packer retired to the Cape with her British husband, Admiral Sir Herbert Packer, after an absence of more than 25 years, she adopted fiction as an alternative literary mode. Her subsequent production, ten popular romantic novels and a further three volumes of memoirs, is notable for the density of its sociopolitical commentary on contemporary South Africa. This thesis takes as its starting-point the dilemma, formulated by the South African critic Dorothy Driver, of the white woman writing within a colonial environment which compels her to adopt contradictory, ambivalent and oblique discursive stances and strategies. The pragmatic intention of this thesis is, then, to (re)read Packer for her treatment of that problematic in the context of South Africa. The approach adopted centres on the reciprocity within Packer’s writing between its generic conventions and its discursive environment, broadly defined here as pre-1950 imperial Britain and, in the main, colonial and apartheid South Africa. Within a critical-biographical frame, attention is paid first to formal aspects of the popular memoir and the popular romantic novel. Their discursive function vis-å-vis their apartheid environment is then examined within a series of comparative studies. The burden of the analysis rests, in part, on the identity of Packer’s fiction as politicised romans ä these and, in part, on her personal identification with political liberalism in South Africa, most notably the Cape liberalism of her youth and the various manifestations of liberalism under apartheid. By focusing on differing motifs—Packer’s professed adherence to political liberalism, her treatment of race within the idealising constructions of popular romance, the metonymy of the fictional family and the patriarchal state, and her portrayal of women held hostage by the racial and masculine other—the study discusses the extent to which the contradictions predicted by Driver’s analysis exist within the apparently seamless fabric of Packer’s narratives. The investigation concludes by recentring its focus on the narrativised identity of the white woman in a colonial environment, at the same time seeking confirmation of the several reasons for Packer’s writing to have gained only contemporary rather than lasting approval. Keywords: Joy Packer (1905-1977); South African women’s writing; popular romantic fiction, memoirs; apartheid, colonialism, liberalism; memory, literary amnesia, propaganda, roman ä these; race, gender, patriarchy. APARTHEID, LIBERALISM AND ROMANCE A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE WRITING OF JOY PACKER © John A Stotesbury Editor Per Råberg Faculty of Arts University of Umeå S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden Distributed by Swedish Science Press Box 118 S-751 04 Uppsala, Sweden Printed in Sweden by Umeå University Printing Office, 1996 ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7191-140-5 ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UMENSIS Umeå Studies in the Humanities 128 APARTHEID, LIBERALISM AND ROMANCE A CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE WRITING OF JOY PACKER John A Stotesbury Umeå University 1996 John A Stotesbury. Apartheid, Liberalism and Romance: A Critical Investigation of the Writing of Joy Packer. Department of English, University of Umeå, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. Monograph 1996, 247 pp. Acta Universitatis Umensis. Umeå Studies in the Humanities 128. ISSN 0345-0155 ISBN 91-7191-140-5 Distributed by Swedish Science Press, Box 118, S-751 04 Uppsala, Sweden. Abstract This is the first full-length study of the writing of the South African Joy Packer (1905-1977), whose 17 works of autobiography and romantic fiction were primarily popular. Packer’s writing, which appeared mainly between 1945 and 1977, blends popular narrative with contemporary social and political discourses. Her first main works, three volumes of memoirs published between 1945 and 1953, cover her experience of a wide area of the world before, during and after the Second World War: South Africa, Britain, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, and China. In the early 1950s she also toured extensive areas of colonial "Darkest Africa." When Packer retired to the Cape with her British husband, Admiral Sir Herbert Packer, after an absence of more than 25 years, she adopted fiction as an alternative literary mode. Her subsequent production, ten popular romantic novels and a further three volumes of memoirs, is notable for the density of its sociopolitical commentary on contemporary South Africa. This thesis takes as its starting-point the dilemma, formulated by the South African critic Dorothy Driver, of the white woman writing within a colonial environment which compels her to adopt contradictory, ambivalent and oblique discursive stances and strategies. The pragmatic intention of this thesis is, then, to (re)read Packer for her treatment of that problematic in the context of South Africa. The approach adopted centres on the reciprocity within Packer’s writing between its generic conventions and its discursive environment, broadly defined here as pre-1950 imperial Britain and, in the main, colonial and apartheid South Africa. Within a critical-biographical frame, attention is paid first to formal aspects of the popular memoir and the popular romantic novel. Their discursive function vis-å-vis their apartheid environment is then examined within a series of comparative studies. The burden of the analysis rests, in part, on the identity of Packer’s fiction as politicised romans ä these and, in part, on her personal identification with political liberalism in South Africa, most notably the Cape liberalism of her youth and the various manifestations of liberalism under apartheid. By focusing on differing motifs—Packer’s professed adherence to political liberalism, her treatment of race within the idealising constructions of popular romance, the metonymy of the fictional family and the patriarchal state, and her portrayal of women held hostage by the racial and masculine other—the study discusses the extent to which the contradictions predicted by Driver’s analysis exist within the apparently seamless fabric of Packer’s narratives. The investigation concludes by recentring its focus on the narrativised identity of the white woman in a colonial environment, at the same time seeking confirmation of the several reasons for Packer’s writing to have gained only contemporary rather than lasting approval. Keywords: Joy Packer (1905-1977); South African women’s writing; popular romantic fiction, memoirs; apartheid, colonialism, liberalism; memory, literary amnesia, propaganda, roman ä these; race, gender, patriarchy. In a new South Africa the past will still live with us.1 We must deny the past its attempt to enslave us.2 To the memory of my great-uncles, Ernest and William, who migrated to South Africa, and of my paternal grandfather, George John, and their brother, Walter, who didn’t. 1 Gillian Slovo, The Betrayal (1991; London: Virago, 1992) 85. 2 Nelson Mandela, as quoted in Hugo Young, "Frontiers of a New Land," Altered State: South Africa 1990 (London: Fourth Estate, 1990) 31. Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1. Aims 1 2. Approaches 11 Chapter One : Forms of Forgetting 1. Forgetting Authors/Forgetting Fictions 21 2. Men’s Stories/Women’s Stories 31 3. Competing Agendas 34 4. Social Melodrama 37 5. Propaganda, Ephemerality, and the Roman å These 41 The Novel and Propaganda Joy Packer’s Ideological Fictions Authoritarian Fictions 6. Conclusions 57 Chapter Two : "Why Do We Marry Sailors?": Autobiography and Travel Memoir as Self-Narrative 1. Introduction 63 2. Memoirs of a Marriage 70 3. Autobiography as a Genre 77 Terminology Women’s Autobiographies South African Autobiographies 4. First Autobiography: Pack and Follow 85 5. Travel Writing: The World is a Proud Place 91 6. Self and Identity 99 Chapter Three : Transitions: The Cracks in the Liberal Seams 1. Introduction 101 2. Liberalism in South Africa 107 3. Transitions 115 Apes and Ivory Valley of the Vines 4. Conclusions 132 11 Chapter Four : Racial Fictions 1. Origins 135 2. Race and Apartheid 140 3. Frames of Reference 144 4. The Glass Barrier 146 5. Veronica 153 6. Conclusions 161 Chapter Five : Marital Parricide 1. Fictional Fatalities 165 2. The High Roof 173 3. The Blind Spot 178 4. Conclusions 187 Chapter Six : Narrative Hostages 1. Introduction 189 2. Hostages 192 3. Texts and their Sisters 195 4. My Bandit Hosts 199 5. The Dark Curtain 206 6. Erasure 213 Conclusion 215 Appendix 1 221 Appendix 2 223 Bibliography 231 Index 243 Acknowledgments This study has been nourished in a variety of locations that are truly homelands in their different ways: my childhood home in Britain; the divided Germany of my youth; the adoptive homeland of more than half a lifetime, Finland; the intellectual homeland of this thesis, Sweden; and South Africa. To each of these I owe more than can be stated here. I should like above all to thank the Department of English at the University of Umeå, Sweden, for its constant academic and financial support over the many years this work has taken to emerge.
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