Boundary Writers: Moral Pragmatism in Henry Lawson and Frank Moorhouse

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Copyright and use of this thesis This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author -subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Copyright Service. sydney.edu.au/copyright Boundary Writers: Moral Pragmatism in Henry Lawson and Frank Moorhouse By Jane Stenning University of Sydney 2006 This thesis is dedicated to Professor F.E. Archer, my grandfather. Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction l Part I. The Pragmatists 1. The Social Contract: John Dewey and James Tufts’ Ethics. 19 2. “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking”: William James’s Pragmatism. 34 Part II. Henry Lawson 1. “An Interrogatory Cope, Cope, Cope?”: Pragmatic Action in 45 “The Iron-Bark Chip” 2. “His Brother’s Keeper”: Provisional Securities in the stories of Mitchell 51 and M’Laughlan and “Telling Mrs Baker.” 3. Ritual and Meaning i. The Union Buries Its Head. 68 ii. “And Not a Soul to Meet”: Making Meaning in Empty Places. 81 4. Social Form and Empowerment in “Joe Wilson’s Courtship” 96 and “A Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek.” Bridging the Gap: Bringing Lawson and Moorhouse Together i08 Part III. Frank Moorhouse 1. “The Ethics and Good Fellowship of this Home”: Inheriting George McDowell’s 114 Pragmatism. 2. Visiting Strange Territory: Balmain and the “Full Anti-Convention Bit.” 131 3. The Radical Pragmatist Takes Flight: Tales of Mystery and Romance. 170 4. The Way of Imperfection: Edith Campbell Berry and Grand Days. 194 Conclusion: The Perpetual Pioneers 242 Bibliography 249 1 Abstract This thesis investigates the philosophical and ethical relationship between the writings of Henry Lawson and Frank Moorhouse and demonstrates that their similar approaches are rooted in moral pragmatism. The formal philosophy of Pragmatism, as it is largely understood through the works of John Dewey and William James, creates the framework for the discussion. In this thesis, the works of Lawson and Moorhouse are seen in the context of periods of social pioneering and their works are focused on society-in-change. Crucial to the study is the idea of meaning and certainty when societies are confronted by changing values. Lawson and Moorhouse both push a vision of society which would privilege a moral method of inquiry7 over absolute moral standards, and which is self-critiquing, progressive and open to the “other”. In both Lawson and Moorhouse, the dreams of certainty7 must give way to the embrace of creative possibility7. In Pragmatism, meaning is derived through action and for Lawson, provisional security is derived through the daily meanings obtained from observing the rituals, duties and obligations of the social unit (with an ironic awareness that these responsibilities are contingent and might change). The importance of duties and obligations to others is largely expressed through the consequent guilt and anxiety when Lawson’s men fail in them. Ritual and social role-plays, on the other hand, are typically powerful, positive forces which steady social meaning and alleviate social dysfunction. In Moorhouse’s fiction, meanings are constructed through role-plays and experimentation with types of being. Moorhouse’s technique is to contrast value systems in order to challenge the locus of meaning. Despite the ontological anxieties such questions create, the ambiguity of the self is given a positive orientation. Moorhouse shows his pragmatic impulses through his dismissal of the possibility of creating one coherent “way” of being, in favour of developing provisional “ways” o i going and doing. ii Acknowledgments My initial thanks go to Professor Ivor Indyk, my original supervisor, without whom these ideas would not have found voice. I am grateful for his intellectual generosity, and his very patient teaching and support during some trying circumstances early in my candidature. Grateful thanks also to Dr Bernadette Brennan, who took over the supervision during my final year, for her enthusiasm for my topic, responsiveness and for guiding me safely in to land. I would also like to thank Dr Greg McLaren for his editorial advice and for reading the manuscript. Thanks to Dr Margaret Rogerson and Dr Will Christie, in their roles as post-graduate coordinators, for their administrative assistance. My personal thanks go to my parents, Barbara and Michael Stenning; to my father for his personal support and to my mother for her academic assistance, especially with feedback on the manuscript. I would like to thank Dr Sarah Knox for her patient friendship (and impatience); I am also grateful to her for being a constant intellectual inspiration and for teaching me science. Thanks also to Megan Albany and Marc Mittag for the shelter. To Claire, Luke, Francis and Raphael Atkins, for always seeming pleased to see me, for continually opening their home to me and the invitations to their precious family holidays at Wategos. Lasdy, I would like to thank the irrepressible Glenn Rhodes for being a living study of pragmatism in motion, for the barbecues on the river, and for digging me in spite of my bookish inclinations. iii 1 Boundary Writers: Moral Pragmatism in Henry Lawson and Frank Moorhouse. The following thesis locates a pragmatic moral tradition in Australian literature through analysis of the works of Henry Lawson and Frank Moorhouse. In their fiction, Lawson and Moorhouse both concentrate on characters that inhabit environments where value has become unstable, where old ethics are challenged and new habits of behaviour are under construction. As such, moral competence becomes a key issue in both writers’ works as their characters face, fail and sometimes even resolve, moral crises. These characters, standing on the brink of ethical frontiers, are social pioneers, revising and pushing ethical boundaries. The characters of these stories must negotiate the new and unknown moral terrain and do so with varying rates of success. This thesis aims to open a new discussion in Australian literary research by mapping the moral dimensions of the shared pragmatic consciousness that is operating in the works of Lawson and Moorhouse. Moral crisis occurs under the pressures of competing systems of value; the critical inquiry and open inventiveness required for successful re-evaluations of this kind form the core of this thesis. Lawson and Moorhouse disrupt expected moral values or socially condoned behaviours; these continual challenges to customary ethos and prevailing mores make room to imagine new ways of being. Building up new social values from an old stock of customary values requires an adventurous, conscientious and reflexive creativity. This is the essence of the pragmatic consciousness and it is the vital attitude which Lawson and Moorhouse share. Gillian Whitlock has commented that in Lawson’s stories: “all social, ethical and moral norms and stable reference points recede.”1 By removing or interrupting expected cultural norms, Lawson’s work sets the task of reimagining value. Lawson’s exploration into moral values and social behaviours reinterprets the popular utopian literary form of the eighteenth century in order to establish the question of value as central to his work. In the imaginary voyages of European literature, {Gulliver s Travels and Kobinson Crusoe are examples) the “fantasy frontiers” of the antipodes often present “a topsy-turvy new 1 VCTiitlock, G. “The Bush, The Barrack-Yard and the Clearing: Colonial ‘Realism’ in the Sketches and Stones of Susanna Moodie, C.L.R. James and Henry Lawson”. Journal oj Commonwealth literature. No.l, 1985. pp. 36-48. p. 41. 9 world waiting to be discovered.”" Maack writes: “In the myth of the antipodes, writers invent a world which in every detail is the reversal of their known environment.”’ By interrupting typical assumptions of order, the reader is forced to assess the reigning order when it is placed in contrast with a possible order. This kind of writing thus demands a reimagination of value. This element of antipodean writing is often present in Lawson’s work in stories like “Hungerford” where, as a traveller to the border town, the narrator inverts the expected order of things. The reader cannot rest comfortably with an image of a plague of rabbits, leap-frogging over and burrowing under the rabbit-proof fence, laughing heartily at the folly of humankind. The narrator says, “I never saw a rabbit laugh before; but I’ve seen a ’possum do it.” In “The Drover’s Wife” this antipodean world is an anti-Eden; the garden is full of rotten apple trees, there is neither God nor man and the wife is victorious over the

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