The Settler Colonial Family As a Site of Trauma for Women

The Settler Colonial Family as a Site of Trauma for Women in Selected Novels by New Zealand Women Writers By Elizabeth Wilson A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand April 2020 In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations. The home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the home, the home-in-the-world. HOMI BHABHA “The World and the Home” (1992) “[T]he personal is political” was originally used to emphasize that one’s own experience is important and is, in some measure, caused by external factors. Currently, feminist psychologists use this notion as a starting point for understanding the formative influence of sociocultural structures and forces on the individual and his or her sense of self, hence the reformulation: “the political is personal.” LAURA S. BROWN AND MARY BALLOU Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals (1992) [T]rauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. CATHY CARUTH Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) Social and psychological theorists caution us not to accept the family system as a natural structure, but as socially mediated, absorbing, and perpetuating ideologies that reinforce social and economic structures. LAURIE VICKROY Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002) iii Abstract This thesis examines the depiction of the settler colonial family as a site of trauma from a female-gendered perspective in selected novels by New Zealand women writers. I argue that women are vulnerable to psychic trauma through their subordinate and marginalized positions in the heteropatriarchal formulation of the settler colonial family and the sociocultural, economic and political structures and norms of settler colonialism. I use the relationships and affective dimensions of family as the lens to examine the ideological and material manifestations of settler colonialism in New Zealand society and culture, focusing on their impact on women. The temporal timespan of the selected novels – The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) by Jane Mander, The Butcher Shop (1926) by Jean Devanny, Wednesday’s Children (1937) by Robin Hyde, The Book of Secrets (1987) by Fiona Kidman, Enemy Territory (1997) by Elspeth Sandys, and Rain (1994) by Kirsty Gunn – demonstrates that settler colonialism is a persistent structure that continues to exert a pervasive influence on the family in the postcolonial period. Each of the novels depicts not only how trauma impacts on an individual woman, but also what it reveals about the interrelationships between trauma experienced in the interpersonal affective intimacies of the family and the broader sociocultural and historical context. I draw on trauma theory to examine the manifestation of traumatic symptomology and sequelae, and to situate the interpersonal locus of individual trauma in its sociocultural and historical context. Structural, non-event-based trauma theories which encompass relational, inter-generational, cumulative and insidious trauma open up ways of exploring the selected novels as trauma narratives. Feminist trauma theorists expand contemporary understandings of trauma through their foregrounding of female experiences of trauma in the interpersonal realm. Their contributions are important for the theoretical frame of my argument that the trauma women experience in the familial locus needs to be understood within its wider context. The novels call attention to the importance of examining how the power relations of the settler colonial family continue to render women vulnerable to psychic trauma. iv Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Associate Professor Chris Prentice. Her constructive criticism and guidance on ways to improve my work have been critical to the completion of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr Simone Drichel for her insightful comments and suggestions as work on the thesis progressed. I acknowledge with gratitude the award of a Doctoral Scholarship from the University of Otago, and express my appreciation to the staff of the Department of English and Linguistics for their support. Finally, I would particularly like to acknowledge the expertise of the staff in the Central Library at the University and at the Student IT helpdesk, and to express my gratitude for the assistance they have given me on so many occasions during the past three years. v Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 1 Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River 27 The Steel Ring of Blood and Contract 2 Jean Devanny, The Butcher Shop 60 Bloody Violence down on the Farm – the Property-Wife and the Collapse of a Constructed Identity 3 Robin Hyde, Wednesday’s Children 100 Relational Trauma in a Fantasy World of Family 4 Fiona Kidman, The Book of Secrets 133 The Matrilineal Transmission of Trauma 5 Elspeth Sandys, Enemy Territory 176 Acting-out, Working-through, and the Possibility of Recovery from Trauma 6 Kirsty Gunn, Rain 219 The Unsettled Landscape of Traumatic Memory Conclusion 242 Cited Works 247 1 Introduction This thesis examines novels by women writers that depict the New Zealand settler colonial family as a site of trauma from a female-gendered perspective. Drawing on trauma theory and exploring the modes, tropes and figures of trauma in the novels, I argue that settler colonialism’s sociocultural structures and norms contribute to making the settler colonial family a site of trauma for women. I situate interpersonal or individual trauma in its social and historical context by examining how the ideological and material manifestations of settler colonialism in New Zealand society and culture impact on women in the context of family. The settler colonial family has been a patriarchally-engendered ideological construct objectifying and commodifying women as homemakers, child-bearers and rearers, and placing domestic management at the centre of efforts to shape and control societal and cultural norms. It is emblematic of the interpenetration of the private and public spheres. I use structural, non-event-based trauma theories which encompass relational, inter- generational, cumulative and insidious trauma to open up ways of exploring the selected novels as trauma narratives. I contend that too narrow a focus on a traumatic event or traumatizing circumstances has the potential to overlook the wider sociocultural and historical context. In each chapter I examine the dimensions of settler colonialism as they bear upon the trauma depicted. My aim is not to invalidate other readings of the novels. Rather, it is to examine the settler colonial family as a site of trauma for women and as an affective lens into settler colonialism in New Zealand. I have chosen the following novels to exemplify the central argument of my thesis: The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) by Jane Mander, The Butcher Shop (1926) by Jean Devanny, Wednesday’s Children (1937) by Robin Hyde, The Book of Secrets (1987) by Fiona Kidman, Enemy Territory (1997) by Elspeth Sandys, and Rain (1994) by Kirsty Gunn. They represent a temporal span from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settings of the novels by Mander, Devanny and Kidman through to the postcolonial period depicted in the novels by Sandys and Gunn. Kidman’s postcolonial engagement with the settler colonial as an historical period distinguishes it from the other novels. She depicts the persistence of settler colonialism and its hegemonic norms and structures across time (1812-1955) and space (Great Britain to Canada, Australia and New Zealand). The temporal span of the novels supports my 2 argument that settler colonialism is a persistent and pervasive structure whose legacies I examine in the depiction of family and female gendered trauma in twentieth-century fiction. Each of the selected novels reflects the importance of examining the “political- ideological context within which traumatic events occur” (Kaplan 2005, 1). Through its figurative motifs and devices and their associations, trauma-writing has the ability to express the violence and founding historical trauma1 of New Zealand’s settlement/invasion by Europeans in the nineteenth century and its interconnections with violence and trauma in its postcolonial condition. Lorenzo Veracini uses the terms “founding violence” and “foundational traumas” (2008, 364) in relation to settler colonial contexts: “A settler society is by definition premised on the traumatic, that is, violent, replacement and/or displacement of Indigenous others” (ibid.). He refers to the idealization of peaceful settlement and a “settled” (ibid.) settler society as defensive mechanisms to obscure and disavow2 a traumatic past, and observes: “Even when trauma is effectively repressed, […] [it] remains in a latent state and can emerge in varied forms” (ibid.). Using Freudian terminology, he describes the violent act of invasion as the primal scene and the fantasy of a peaceful and settled community as a screen memory, and argues that the resulting

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