Use of Theses

THESES SIS/LIBRARY TELEPHONE: +61 2 6125 4631 R.G. MENZIES LIBRARY BUILDING NO:2 FACSIMILE: +61 2 6125 4063 THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY EMAIL: [email protected] CANBERRA ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA USE OF THESES This copy is supplied for purposes of private study and research only. Passages from the thesis may not be copied or closely paraphrased without the written consent of the author. FINDING A PLACE: LANDSCAPE AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF PATRICK WHITE Y asue Arimitsu A thesis submitted for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS at the Australian National University December 1985 11 Except where acknowledgement is made, this thesis is my own work. Yasue Arimitsu Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgements are due to many people, without whose assistance this work would have proved more difficult. These include Dr Livio Dobrez and Dr Susan McKer nan, whose patience was unfailing; Dr Bob Brissenden, who provided initial encourage ment; Mr Graham Cullum, for advice and assistance; Professor Ian Donaldson, for his valuable comments; and Jean Marshall, for her kind and practical support. Special thanks must be given to the typist, Norma Chin, who has worked hard and efficiently, despite many pressures. My gratitude is also extended to my many fellow post-graduates, who over the years have sustained, helped and inspired me. These in clude especially Loretta Ravera Chion, Anne Hopkins, David Jans, Andrew Kulerncka, Ann McCulloch, Robert Merchant, Julia Robinson, Leonie Rutherford and Terry Wat- son. Lastly I would like to thank the Australia-Japan Foundation, whose generous financial support made this work possible and whose unending concern and warmth proved most encouraging indeed. IV DEDICATION For my parents and for Vivienne Foster, who in their own ways have con tributed. v ABSTRACT Patrick White's first five novels reveal much of the writer's personal struggle to resolve the dilemma of his dichotomous perception of self. This dichotomy is founded on circumstances of his life which placed him in a situation of cultural conflict. Having spent his formative years in Australia, White then received the bulk of his formal educa tion in England, and this seems to have had a profound effect on his sense of identity. Consequently, his early novels show signs of this difficulty, as if they were written mainly for the purposes of understanding and resolving it. That is the view expressed in this thesis, which traces White's progress from an uncertain sense of self to the point at which he embraces his Australian identity as a wholly acceptable fact. This progression can be seen most clearly in the treatment of landscape exhibited in his five novels. Landscape seems a particularly important source of inspiration to Patrick White, since he uses it not merely as a means of expressing his feelings about a place, especially about Australia, but as a sounding board for the en tangled, disparate emotions of his many characters. Through landscape, White explores such human responses to life as alienation, capitulation, indifference, receptiveness and acceptance. In addition, he uses the same point of reference to exarrnne the relationship be tween man and _God. The author's quest for a sense of place is paralleled by his equally personal search for some religious faith. His characters progress from exhibiting sub liminal desires to look beyond the concrete realities of life, for an indefinable presence they only suspect exists, to the point of acknowledging the existence of God in every thing they see. Yet this twofold preoccupation, with a sense of national identity and a sense of God, does not end there. In the last of these novels, Voss, White synthesizes his views of man's place in things and man's relationship with God in a final statement that evidences strong feelings towards both. For White, it would seem, the end of a personal quest can only be proclaimed by the adoption of a stringent code of beliefs. VI ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES In the text, the titles of the books are abbreviated as follows: Happy Valley JW The Living and the Dead LD The Aunt's Story AS The Tree of Man TM The Flaws in the Glass FG In each chapter, page references to the novel are included, after the first footnote, in parentheses within the text. Where the novel cited is not the main novel under dis cussion in a chapter, page references in the text are prefixed by the relevant abb~eviated title. vu Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii DEDICATION iv ABSTRACT v ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2. HAPPYVALLEY AND THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: 8 ALIENATED CHARACTERS CHAPTER 3. THE AUNT'S STORY: LANDSCAPE AND SELF- 30 DISCOVERY CHAPTER 4. THE TREE OF MAN: THE UNITY OF THE IN- 53 DIVIDUAL AND LANDSCAPE CHAPTER 5. VOSS: IMPRINTS IN THE SAND 82 CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION 115 BIBLIOGRAPHY 118 1 CHAPTER! INTRODUCTION Every earnest glance we give the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really songs of praise.1 The above quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Nature is an apt epigraph to this study of Patrick White for several reasons. The underlying argument of this thesis is that White for many years felt at odds with his native land of Australia. During these years he drifted between Australia, Europe and America as though uncertain of his eventual destination. These were not unproductive years, for in that time he produced his first three novels. In these novels, Happy Valley, The Living and the Dead and The Aunt's Story, he has used the landscape as a sounding board for his disorientated responses to Australia and for his search for a sense of place. It was D.H. Lawrence who said: "Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away" ,2 and it was Judith Wright who pointed out that: "The writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can turn confidently to its ') human figures"." These words are central to the idea of a sense of place and equally central to this thesis, the core argument of which is that Patrick White feels it necessary to come to terms with Australia itself. Consequently, the landscape feature~ dramatically in the first five published novels, to be discussed in this study, in such a way as to suggest a gradual evolution of the writer's perception of his homeland to the point of acceptance and reconciliation. To state that White was exclusively concerned with the quest for reconciliation with Australia, however, would be to limit the scope of his perceived interests to a degree that would preclude some of the deeper issues of his novels, issues that in many ways cannot be ignored. Principal among these is the search for some meaningful point of spiritual reference, a search that brought White to accept the existence of God. There are, then, two themes to this thesis, the first relating to White's apparent need to be 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Method of Nature,'' in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), I, i97-198. 2. D.H. Lawrence, "The Spirit of Place," in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), p.126. 3. Judith Wright, "Australia's Double Aspect," in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry {Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1965), p.xi. 2 wholly conciliated with Australia and the second concerns his search for religious faith. In both instances the landscape is used as a source of inspiration and the means by which the author can explore his interests through the responses of his characters to their surroundings. This thesis will not only analyse the use of landscape in relation to White's quests for faith and a sense of belonging, but will also seek to demonstrate the evolutionary nature of these quests. The roots of White's ambivalence regarding his identity as an Australian lie in the circumstances of his life. Prior to his decision to settle in Australia in 1948, at the age of thirty-six, he had spent twenty-one years elsewhere, principally in England. He was in fact born in England in 1912 and returned to Australia for the first time at the age of six months. He grew up in Australia but was sent to Cheltenham College, England, at the age of thirteen to complete his secondary school education. After a stay in Australia of approximately three years, he returned to England to attend Cambridge University. The emphasis on an education that was clearly weighted in favour of the English perception has influenced White in many ways. Something of this Anglicized or Europeanized vision of the world can be seen in Voss, for example, where the English Laura Trevelyan and the German Voss come into direct conflict with the Australian landscape. It was, however, at a more personal level that the English connection asserted itself most strongly. In his early years, White records that he had no sense of belonging either to Australia or to England. He remarks: "In spite of feeling an Australian in England, I was surprised to find upon my return that I had become anglicized" ,4 and: " ... at school in England I was accused of being a cockney or colonial, back in Australia, 'a bloody Porn"'. 5 Accord~ngly, White felt isolated in and alienated from both Australia and England and this might account for his apparent rootlessness prior to his return to Australia in 1948. The dilemmas incumbent upon this role of the unsettled outsider, together with the fact that he was unable to dismiss images of the Australian landscape from his mind, provided him with much of the impetus to write IW.

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