Why Can't She Stay Home? Expatriation and Back-Migration in the Work Of
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WHY CAN’T SHE STAY HOME? Expatriation and Back-migration in the Work of Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde, Janet Frame and Fleur Adcock Emma Jane Neale University College London Thesis Submitted for PhD Degree 1999 ProQuest Number: 10014874 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10014874 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract My thesis examines changing conceptions of colonial, artistic and female identity. I build on the work of previous critics (including Ash, Parkin-Gounelas, Pride, Sandbrook, Wevers), but I seek to place renewed emphasis on literary-historical context and questions of aesthetic value. My introductory chapter grounds the twentieth-century works in literary analyses of a sample of published nineteenth-century accounts by British women of their emigration to New Zealand. These women ahgn expatriation with bereavement, yet advocate the colony’s new egalitarianism. The chapter ends with a reading of Victorian fiction by ' Ahen' (Louisa Baker: once popular, but now seldom read), for whom expatriation was already a complex matter. For ' Ahen’, the New Zealander’s return to England connotes artistic self betterment and women’s entry into valuable work: themes crucial to Mansfield, in whose early prose expatriation represents similar hberation. However, connections betweai travel and social fi'eedom become increasingly questionable; Mansfield’s stories illustrate the restrictiveness of European sexual moeurs, estabhshing disturbing correspondences between e3q)atriation, the lost past, the undermining of identity, and death. Hyde takes up Mansfield’s preoccupations, in works which richly dramatise the scope and limits of expatriation for a colonial woman artist. The inclusion of back- migration in her narratives reconciles e^qjatriation with rising literary nationalism. Adcock’s initial poetry repeats Mansfield’s adolescent depiction of New Zealand as stifling. Although her stance on the relationship between self and homeland grows more conflicted throughout her career, she rejects Hyde’s idea of redenqjtive back- migration. Return merely leads to reiteration of insoluble debates over identity. Janet Frame’s novels parody - and repudiate - previous perspectives on expatriation. Her autobiography partially returns to modernist structures (expatriation as arrival at self-possession), yet her total oeuvre finds its only possibility of home in interiority. I conclude with a brief examination of fiction by Kirsty Gunn and Emily Perkins, both of Wiom use expatriation to signify moral uncertainty. My study aims to deepen a sense of the intertextual relationships between the selected authors. I hope that my account opens new ways of interpreting the links between history and gender in narratives of leaving home. CONTENTS Introduction p. 5 Chapter One Crossing the Line; Nineteenth-Century Women and E^qjatriation p. 18 Chapter Two This Vast, Dangerous Garden: Katherine Mansfield and E?q)atriation p. 72 Chapter Three In the House of Her Mind: Robin Hyde, Expatriation and Back-migration p. 138 Chapter Four The Imagined Nation: Janet Frame, Expatriation and Back-migration p. 206 Chapter Five Not My Kind of Country: Fleur Adcock and Expatriation p. 267 Conclusion p. 325 Acknowledgements I have been helped at various stages by a number of people who have answered reference queries of all kinds, even in cases when I was personally unknown to them. Assistance has been particularly valuable when New Zealand material was otherwise unavailable to me in London. In this capacity, I would particularly like to thank Barbara Else. Thanks also to Fleur Adcock, Derek Challis, Anna Davin, Rod Edmond, Chris Else, Riemke Ensing (and through her, Michele Leggett), Jenny Jones of the New Zealand Society of Authors, Bill Manhire, Paul Millar, Sarah Neale, Georgia Prince of the Special Collections division at Auckland Public Library, Tony Simpson, D. I. B. Smith, Nelson Wattie, the staff of Auckland University Library, the staff of Victoria University of Wellington Library, and jointly, the staff of Alexander Turnbull Library and the National Library of New Zealand. Further thanks to the staff at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, London, the University College London Library, the University of London, Senate House Library, and the British Library. For invaluable advice in London, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Peter Swaab and Dr. Alison Light. I owe special gratitude to Peter Swaab, who went to considerable initial effort to secure supervision for my proposed topic, and who gave me a great deal of his time. My deepest gratitude goes to Daniel Baillie, without whose support this thesis could have been neither begun nor completed. Ine?q)ressible thanks also go to my father, Jim Neale, and to my mother, Barbara Else. This thesis is dedicated to them. INTRODUCTION If birth is a departure as well as an arrival, we have all left our first homes. Narratives of e^atriation and exile can be traced to the very inception of history and creativity: there are countless such narratives. Michael Siedel reminds us that “the exilic projection is originary, whether the Tartarian and Luciferian expulsions, the trek East from Eden, the saga of lo and Europa, the flight of Daedalus [...]”, and his extensive catalogue brings us up to nineteenth-century America, with “the river odyssey of Huck Finn.”^ We can strengthen this chain by adding numerous journey or exile narratives from other cultures. These would include the Maori myth (which also occurs iu several other Polynesian mythologies) of Rangi and Papa, the lovers Earth and Sky, forced asunder by their sons, and the tradition that tells of the departure of ancestral canoes from the homeland Hawahki: the founding journey - led by Kupe - in the Maori colonisation of Aotearoa. Such traditions have immense psychological power, as parables of cultural dawn and change; their power derives in part from their doubleness. For alongside the sense of initiation, the start of a new state, these traditions also carry those primal notions of the first separation, and the first loss. Personal narratives of leaving home also inevitably interact with these ancient, Janus-faced archetypes: something is always both lost and found. For the women writers in this study, narratives of leaving home are also layered by historical notions of femininity and domesticity. These ideas are implicit in the quotation I have chosen for my title. Taken from Hyde’s novel The Godwits Fly (1938), the question is asked by John Hannay, as his daughter Ehza leaves for Australia: “Why can’t she stay home and behave, like any other girl?”^ The father’s bewilderment is representative of wider issues: how does a woman leave home when she is still identified with home? Eliza, to her father’s mind, leaves the private for the pubhc sphere - yet as ’ Siedel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, p. 8. ^ Rawlinson (ed). The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde, p. 96. my chapter on Hyde will discuss, the conditions which have driven her to expatriate give convincing evidence of how “the recesses of the domestic space” are always “sites for [public] history’s most intricate invasions.”^ John Hannay evidently feels the pain of separation - yet what does departure from a place often emotively identified as either motherland or fatherland mean for the women writers in my survey? Such questions are further comphcated by notions of a developing national and literary identity in transition from the colonial to the post-colonial context/* This study attempts to document some of these con^lexities. Over the course of the final two decades of the twentieth century, e^atriation and exile have become increasingly popular areas of sociological and hterary-critical concern. In two major studies, Paul Tabori in The Anatomy o f Exile (1972) and Martin ^ Bhabha, “Locations of Culture”, The Location of Culture, p. 9. * The debate over the definition and suitabihty of the term “post-colonial” is itself a vast area of literary theoretical speciahsation. Within the bounds of this stucfy, I use it to refer to the general period after New Zealand’s political allegiances had shifted from early fealty to the structures of British Empire, towards increased self-determination, and increased trade and pohtical connections with other nations of the South Pacific. While several New Zealanders had alreacfy questioned the colony’s relation to empire in the aftermath of the Boer War and World War One, a distinctive governmental turning point can be located in the 1930s. In 1936, the New Zealand Labour government took a stance independent from Britain in the League of Nations, over the proposal for the lifting of sanctions imposed on Italy after the invasion of Ethiopia. (See Malcolm McKinnon, “New Zealand in the World”, Sinclair (ed.). The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, p. 250.) Stuart Murray places the beginning of the post-colonial in the 1930s: he argues that post-coloniahsm is “a 'project' [...] a set of practices that are very much grounded in the day to day activities of New Zealand culture in the 1930s, but are also conditioned by the wider context that is the legacy of Empire.” {Never a Soul at Home, p. 253.). Yet it is this very notion of “legacy” that leads to critical anxieties about the “shiftiness of the prefix 'post’.” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 1.) The notion of “legacy” also modifies any description of an author like, say, Hyde, as strictly post-colonial, when her career bridges the 1920s and 1930s, and dramatises the very processes of separation from a close attachment to England.