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Empire Girls: the Colonial Heroine Comes of Age Welcome to the electronic edition of Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age. The book opens with the bookmark panel and you will see the contents page. Click on this anytime to return to the contents. You can also add your own bookmarks. Each chapter heading in the contents table is clickable and will take you direct to the chapter. Return using the contents link in the bookmarks. The whole document is fully searchable. Enjoy. E m pire Girls The high-quality paperback edition is available for purchase online: https://shop.adelaide.edu.au/ E m pire Girls the colonial heroine comes of age Mandy Treagus Discipline of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide Published in Adelaide by University of Adelaide Press The University of Adelaide Level 1, 254 North Terrace South Australia 5005 [email protected] www.adelaide.edu.au/press The University of Adelaide Press publishes externally refereed scholarly books by staff of the University of Adelaide. It aims to maximise access to the University’s best research by publishing works through the internet as free downloads and for sale as high quality printed volumes. © 2014 Mandy Treagus This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for the copying, distribution, display and performance of this work for non-commercial purposes providing the work is clearly attributed to the copyright holders. Address all inquiries to the Director at the above address. For the full Cataloguing-in-Publication data please contact the National Library of Australia: [email protected] ISBN (paperback) 978-1-922064-54-7 ISBN (ebook: pdf) 978-1-922064-55-4 ISBN (ebook: epub) 978-1-922064-69-1 ISBN (ebook: mobi) 978-1-922064-70-7 Editor: Patrick Allington Book design: Zoë Stokes Cover design: Emma Spoehr Cover images: iStockphoto Paperback printed by Griffin Press, South Australia Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction 1.1 Ambivalence and the Other: discursive conflicts in white 1 women’s writing from the Second World 1.2 Bildungsroman and the heroine: patriarchy and the 13 conventions of form 2 Olive Schreiner The Story of an African Farm 2.1 Introduction 27 2.2 Waldo’s tale: work and the deconstruction of the 35 Bildungsroman economy 2.3 Lyndall’s tale: the feminist as romantic 64 2.4 Gendered ends: death and the collapse of meaning in the 100 colonial world 3 Sara Jeannette Duncan A Daughter of Today 3.1 Introduction 109 3.2 The heroine as artist: Künstlerroman and the New Woman 117 3.3 Death as Denouement: discursive conflict and narrative 158 resolution v 4 Henry Handel Richardson The Getting of Wisdom 4.1 Introduction 173 4.2 Child to woman: gender enculturation in the Empire 186 4.3 Imperialism, the boarding school and the emerging nation 204 4.4 Narrative possibilities: Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman and 217 denouement 5 Conclusion: From heroine to hero 243 Works Cited 251 vi Acknowledgements I thank Susan Hosking and Phil Butterss, who have been great mentors and friends, and Carolyn Lake, who provided invaluable research assistance in the later stages of this project. Librarians from a number of libraries have been most helpful, especially those from the Australian National Library, Canberra; the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide; the State Library of South Australia, Adelaide; Flinders University Library, Adelaide; the Fisher Library, Sydney University; the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and Macquarie University Library. Two anonymous reviewers offered useful comments and appreciated encouragement, while Patrick Allington, and all at the University of Adelaide Press, have been a pleasure to work with. Aileen Treagus has been supportive in ways too numerous to mention. The following cats have put in long hours over the years around the computer: Maz, either at my feet or on my lap; Tohi, who thought she could help with the typing, and Ali'i, who was prepared to sit alongside me in the final stages. vii 1 Introduction 1.1 Ambivalence and the Other: discursive conflicts in white women's writing from the Second World This book concerns the Bildungsroman, a form of the novel so dominant that it is rarely examined explicitly. The form is generally understood as one that outlines the growth of an individual from youth into maturity, a growth entailing character development culminating in accommodation between the individual and society. Ultimately, such accommodation results in the mature individual finding a place in his or her world. As M.H. Abrams suggests, 'The subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist's mind and character, in the passage from childhood through varied experiences — and often through a spiritual crisis — into maturity, which usually involves recognition of one's identity and role in the world' (193). The examples of the Bildungsroman examined here are very particular though: their writers all come from British colonies and feature female protagonists. Just as 'the novel stands as the central literary form of the nineteenth century', so the Bildungsroman became the dominant form of that novel (Sussman 549), with many of the century's most celebrated titles examples of it. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Middlemarch are just a few representatives of the form which, in tracing the development of 1 Mandy Treagus a protagonist from childhood to full productive citizenship, so captured the nineteenth-century imagination. In many ways, this tale of individual development reflected the sense of national development, and showed the form's 'intimate connection … with the desires, aspirations and anxieties of its readers' (Sussman 549). If the Bildungsroman held such appeal to its British readers, how would this novel form fare when taken out of the metropolitan context? In a form that seems to embody the aspirations of the colonising power, how would colonial protagonists fare? And despite the fact that several of the most famous British Bildungsromane of the nineteenth century featured female protagonists, what changes might be required in the Bildungsroman's narrative trajectory if its protagonist were a colonial heroine? In analysing the Bildungsroman in its colonial context, it is imperative to consider the role the form itself has had in maintaining the very structures of Empire and patriarchy that I am seeking to critique. I have chosen three novels written by women writers who came from different corners of the British Empire. All three writers are from invader/settler colonies, and all became deeply involved in the literary culture of Europe, spending at least some portion of their lives there. Olive Schreiner lived in Britain in her twenties and thirties during the 1880s and 1890s, returning from South Africa for the duration of the First World War.1 Her novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), was published in Britain shortly after her arrival. Sara Jeannette Duncan was raised in Ontario, Canada, travelled the world, and lived in Britain briefly before moving to India to marry. Much of her work, including the book under consideration, A Daughter of Today (1894), was written in India but after numerous trips back to England she finally settled there in 1915, remaining until her death in 1 The best source of biographical information regarding Olive Schreiner is to be found in Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography. 2 Em pire Girls 1922.2 Henry Handel Richardson grew up in Victoria, Australia, and left for Germany to study music at Leipzig at the age of 18.3 She moved to England in her early thirties and was based in London, where she wrote The Getting of Wisdom (1910). Not only do these novels feature non-English heroines, but they are also written for an English audience from an outsider's perspective. All these works were first published in London, and its literary culture and concerns are an important context for all three books. Duncan and Richardson have rarely been seen in terms of the British literary environment.4 Because they have been absorbed into their national literatures, the national tends to be the dominant context in which they are seen by scholars steeped in those particular literatures. Duncan is written of primarily as a Canadian writer, Richardson as an Australian. In Richardson's case the influence of Continental thought has been fairly thoroughly explored, but not the English literary context. Schreiner was so influential in Britain that she is often thought of as English. The relationship of all three to the London literary world remained ambivalent though, and their status as 'colonials' was a major factor in this. All chose to write novels tracing the development of a young non-English girl whose aspirations brought her into conflict with nineteenth-century conventions regarding the heroine. In my discussion of African Farm, I outline the fact that the nineteenth- century Bildungsroman in English was essentially meritocratic. Most 2 Biographical information regarding Sara Jeannette Duncan can be found in Thomas Tausky, Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire, and in Marion Fowler, Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. 3 Biographical information about Henry Handel Richardson can be found in: her autobiography, Myself When Young; Axel Clark’s Henry Handel Richardson: Fiction in the Making and Finding Herself in Fiction: Henry Handel Richardson 1896-1910; Dorothy Green’s Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction, and Michael Ackland’s Henry Handel Richardson: a life. 4 Though Axel Clark gives an account of the literary reception in England of both Maurice Guest and The Getting of Wisdom in Finding Herself in Fiction.
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