In Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Stephen Dedalus’s friend, Davin, is tempted sexually by a peasant woman. [i] He declines her offer, but is attracted by the strangeness of the encounter and the frankness of the invitation. Although an ardent nationalist and affectionately described by Stephen as a peasant, Davin finds the seductions of traditional Ireland resistable. To Stephen, the life of the peasantry is inscrutable and more than faintly repugnant. He fears the “red-rimmed horny eyes” of an ancient Irish-speaking peasant and feels he must struggle with him “all through this night till day come”. [ii] Yet pleasing images of peasant women he has seen from the college bus float through his mind.
In 1907 nineteen-year-old Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp went on a camping trip through the Urewera district and recorded in her diaries her impressions of Maori, whose distance from colonial bourgeois culture she found deeply attractive. She preferred the Maori of “the utter backblocks” to the Anglicised Maori whom she encountered nearer civilisation. [iii] Yet the same year, back in Wellington with her family, she had a love affair with a beautiful and decidedly sophisticated school-friend, Maata Mahupuku. In her early story, “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” (1912), Maori figure as a romantic other to the restrictions of colonial bourgeois life, sufficiently vague that the kidnappers of the white child might as easily be gypsies. [iv] Mansfield herself, in London, dressed in a fashion described as both Maori and gypsy.
There is a common ambivalence displayed by both writers in their depictions of “traditional” peoples, but romantic projection is more marked in Mansfield. The strongest feelings recorded in the Urewera notebook — involving fear, excitement, desire — are evoked by situations where the viewed subjects seem to represent the purest expressions of otherness. Both writers are able to stand back from and manipulate the associations of traditionalism, as when Mansfield experimentally substitutes Italians for Maori fishermen in a passage in her diary. [v] In Joyce’s case, the figurings are inflected by his reaction against the programmatic mythologising of the peasantry by Irish literary nationalists. It is difficult to prove conclusively that Mansfield was aware of the existence of the tentative New Zealand literary nationalism which was at that time busily mythologising Maori, but she was aware that Maori had been caught in a romantic haze. Like the Irish writer, she sees a highly self-conscious sense of literary style, not a romantic nationalism configured around a mythical landscape or past, as the solution to the problem of provincialism.
Were “native or distinctive traditions” wholly absent from the beginnings of literary nationalism known in Mansfield’s girlhood as “Maoriland”? [vi] Was Mansfield truly an exotic in the colonial garden, one who had to leave to become modern? To answer these questions we need to consider the specific and complex background that late-colonial New Zealand presented to her. We need to register not only her exaggeratedly negative responses to family and country, familiar from the diaries and letters, but also the ambivalence that underlay the stance she adopted as aesthete and superior outsider. In her ambivalence, her contrariness, her shifts between resentment and responsiveness, we find an image of the fractured world she inhabited, whose contradictions she internalised. Her context was not just a matter of family or landscape but also that of a society at once loyally colonial and proudly modern, and little troubled by the apparent contradiction.
Mansfield came from a country that, by the time she left it in 1908, saw itself, justifiably, as highly modernised — not a colonial backwater but an advanced society, a model for others. In terms of material prosperity, of the application of technology to its agricultural production and exporting, and especially in terms of the cultural conditions of modernity — progressive social legislation, the gaining of women’s suffrage in 1893, universal education — New Zealand was by the early 1900s a more modern society than was Britain in many respects, and had a reputation in America as well as in Britain for being advanced. [vii] In leaving her native land Mansfield was not seeking modernity but excitement; she wrote in a 1907 poem:
I know the bush is beautiful
The cities up to date
in life, they say, we’re on the top
it’s England, though, that’s late.
But I, with all my longing heart,
I care not what they say
It’s London ever calling me
the live long day. [viii]
Mansfield finally left Wellington for London in 1908, a year before Joyce’s sister, Margaret, joined a great tradition of Irish internationalism by entering a religious order and emigrating to New Zealand. It is generally accepted that in his years in Dublin Joyce collected the storehouse of memories and impressions which were to sustain all his subsequent creative work. The nature and extent of the impress New Zealand left on Mansfield is more contentious; if New Zealand popular biographers have placed her in the bright geography of her childhood, serious commentators have abstracted her from the dullness of local literary activity. In the standard modernist account of the development of New Zealand literature articulated notably by E.H. McCormick and usefully summarised by Jock Phillips:
[f]rom the beginnings of European settlement through the first three decades of this century, New Zealand high culture was largely provincial, imitative and undistinguished. In terms of literary quality there was only the lonely miracle of Katherine Mansfield whose genius was able to flower once she had left her native land. Of native or distinctive traditions there was little trace. [ix]
The problem with Maoriland in literary terms is that we tend to enter it by way of its detractors. Maoriland has figured as a kind of whipping boy for the generation that appeared in the 1930s and for subsequent narrators of local literary history eager to assert their distance from the legacy of colonial writing. J.C. Reid writes of “the hideous name ‘Maoriland’” in the writing of the first years of the twentieth century and describes this period as “a synthetic culture without a core”. [x] Keith Sinclair, as literary historian, expresses what he assumes to be a position too obvious to be questioned when he states: “It has been suggested that no major writer appeared until the 1920s, and no modern student of nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand literature has disagreed with this judgment”. [xi] To interrupt the monolithic confidence of this judgment is to seek to remove the filter through which we still see a significant part of New Zealand’s literary history. The crucial term in Sinclair’s dismissal is “modern”, by which he means an attitude rather than simply a period. The modern invokes the clean lines of a discourse about national meanings freed of colonial chatter, evasions and nostalgia; the word inherits the view shaped by the 1930s generation who smuggled high modernism into a nationalist cultural discourse so as to distance themselves from what they saw as the debased legacy of colonial writing.
Historians, including Sinclair, have been less dismissive than have literary commentators of a period which generated the main directions of New Zealand social, political and economic history until the late twentieth century, and which established New Zealand’s claim to be an exemplary modern society with advanced social legislation. They have also been less condemnatory of the cultural deference of colonial New Zealand. The poet Allen Curnow, castigating the settlers for their homesickness, [xii] is part of a literary consensus embracing nationalist, modernist and even postcolonial critics which assumes an evolution in which a dependency on English cultural forms, belatedly received and applied without sufficient attention to realities “local and special”, [xiii] was replaced by cultural forms arising out of a response to what was complacently figured as the actual conditions of place and being. But if the cultural forms of the Pakeha have “indigenised” over time, become acclimatized, at ease with their location, this has been a process of continually hybridizing the opposing terms — native and imported — rather than rejecting one at the expense of the other. At all stages of New Zealand’s history, from the colonial to the postcolonial, there has been a continual interaction between the imported and the immediate, the remembered and the noticed. The modernists effected an unbridgeable distance between themselves and the colonials by over-emphasising the dependency, belatedness and weakness of their precursors; they downplayed the continuities by positing a fatal link between colonial nostalgia and the production of bad art.
Phillips reinforces the view of the aesthetic failings of the writings of the Maoriland period: “The poetry and fiction of the Maoriland school was undeniably bad, and it was almost bound to be, because it did not grow out of the Pakeha’s experience. So much of the poetry and fiction was simply artificial and contrived”. [xiv] This view has achieved general status, being affirmed by critics as different as McCormick, Reid, and Patrick Evans. The problem is that it identifies literary merit with truth to location and hierarchises naturalness over artificiality. As Mansfield knew from her avid reading of Oscar Wilde, all literature is artificial and contrived by its very nature; her own experience as internal exile demonstrated that the tenuous, borrowed, and unfinished qualities of colonial society obliged colonial writers to be more, not less self-conscious about this.
The task, then, is not so much to recuperate Maoriland as to try to see it as part of a continuum of cultural activity in New Zealand, one of particular note because in it the impulses towards modernity and nostalgia, self-assertion and dependency are so visible. In rescuing Maoriland from its dismissive construction by modernism, it is important not to place a binary opposition between the two. Elements of each inform the other. The definitional struggle by which a modernizing literary nationalism launched itself in New Zealand in the 1930s and ‘40s required a simplifying of its own contradictory nature as well as that of what it supplanted. The story of New Zealand writing from late nineteenth century to the present is that of a continuous dialectic between colonial, indigenous and modernizing forces, which has thrown up successive nationalisms, each enlisting elements of the world elsewhere and of the world to hand. As Suzanne Clark observes of another context, “the modernist exclusion of everything but the forms of high art acted like a machine for cultural loss of memory”. [xv] Maoriland remains the hole in New Zealand’s historical memory. Yet postcolonial New Zealand/Aotearoa can get back to the contact and early colonial periods by no other route; nor can it understand its present cultural dilemmas while ignoring Maoriland. In the efforts of Maoriland writers to register their distance from both the world that presented itself to them and the available conventions in which to write that world are to be found the beginnings of a literature in English distinctively marked by its New Zealand provenance.
Two Maoriland writers, Jessie Mackay and Blanche Baughan, demonstrate the complex way in which this was played out, and the commonalties as well as the differences which exist between their work and Mansfield’s are indicative of a period governed by dynamic and unresolved oppositions that continue to shape New Zealand cultural thought and practice.
At the time of her death in 1938, Jessie Mackay was considered New Zealand’s pre-eminent poet, the first truly local writer. Alan Mulgan wrote, “Everyone who knew anything worth knowing about New Zealand poetry knew something of Jessie Mackay’s. She became an institution, was revered as a queen, venerated and loved.” [xvi] By the 1990s she had become a literary joke. Patrick Evans, affecting to be postmodern, recapitulates modernist strictures in his Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, when he describes her (with no discernible biographical evidence) as “Jessie Mackay, who declined marriage for good works and bad poetry”. His critical judgment of her work is confined to distinguishing between the “awful pseudo-Scottish stuff” and the material based on Maori legend where she “really lets her hair down”. [xvii]
Present-day historians, especially feminist historians writing at the centennial of the achievement of universal suffrage in New Zealand, treat Mackay more respectfully, but in terms of her political activism rather than her poetry. Yet in her dual capacity as poet and critic, she continually interrogates the relationship between place and origin, sets the modernity of settler culture against the inherited or invented “traditions” of home, plays considerations of empire against the local, and works towards a poetic rhetoric that will accommodate all of this. Her’s may not be a rhetoric that matches modern taste, but it is not, as Evans suggests, ridiculous. If it is, at times, highly coloured and figurative, this is in part because of the size of the task Mackay sets herself: the construction of a literary landscape of significance. A pared-down realist style in verse or prose, as in the familiar modernist hierarchy, is not the only means by which this may be achieved.
Mackay’s poetry accurately reflects the ambivalent attitude towards history and modernity characteristic of settler societies, but in more complex terms than has been allowed. Stephen Turner has written of “settlement as forgetting”, a process which involves a number of contradictory impulses:
The new country is a site of contradictory demands: the need, ultimately, to forget the old country, and the need to ignore people who already inhabit the new country. To resist the indigenous presence the settler must retain some sense of the old-country self to be able to draw on a strong and authoritative identity. But in order to settle in the new country, to find oneself at home, the settler must forget the old country and become acclimatised, that is to discover a new-country identity. [xviii]
Forgetting, acclimatisation, and discovery — these were central to the task of the writers of the Maoriland period. A generation after first settlement, their writing provided a means by which the achievements and conflicts of the emerging colony could be presented — to itself, and to the world. Mackay, born in the Rakaia Gorge in 1864 to Scottish immigrant parents, wrote a lament for Sir John McKenzie, land reformer in the Liberal Government, which works through this process. The poem, which appears in her 1904 book, From The Maori Sea, begins without any concessions to the antipodean location. This is the burial of a highland chieftain, and even the weather is Scottish:
They played him home to the House of Stones,
All the way, all the way,
To his grave in the sound of the winter sea.
The sky was dour, the sky was gray.
They played him home with a chieftain’s dirge
Til the wail was wed to the rolling surge!
They played him home with a sorrowful will
To his grave at the foot of the Holy Hill;
And the pipes went mourning all the way. [xix]
Behind the conventional rhetoric of mourning, wider claims are being advanced. McKenzie’s chieftainship is a literary conceit, but appropriate to a new place; old forms are not being discarded but rewritten. The “clan” of which he is chief — “A wider clan than ever he knew” — is an imaginary rather than actual community. The term is a metaphor conveying reassurance, locating the present in a romanticised past, co-opting the terms of a pre-modern community to make sense of a new kind of society. In other words, not only local but also imported imaginary pasts are being consciously accommodated to a world where neither exactly fits the purposes of the colonial writer. The rhetoric of Victorian verse, the myth-making of colonial writing — so distasteful to the modernists — are the subject rather than the debilitating condition of the verse.
In 1907, shortly before Mansfield departed for England, Mackay wrote, “Colonial writers should stay in the colonies and shape their work on lines natural to their lives and their surroundings”, contrasting the invigorating effect of such settings with the “levelling melancholy and influences of London”. [xx] This is an early form of Curnow’s attention to the local, albeit a local conjured in terms of Victorian Romanticism, the sublime located in the beauties of a rarified natural landscape. Suffused sunsets, glittering ranges of mountains, the echoes of a now departed savage history — all these become literary markers that can be fed into a specific literary nationalism of place:
Where indeed could patriotism find a fitter shrine than the land that contains the majesty of the sounds and the glory of Aorangi; the land that contains the wonders of Rotomahana and the tomb of Te Terata, marvellous even in its desolation? [xxi]
Curnow saw Maoriland’s efforts to indigenise itself as a false dawn, but Blanche Baughan, more modern in her poetic sources than Mackay and not given to Celtic Twilight myth-making, he regarded with some favour. She is a poet who notices the local, especially the physical landscape. But Baughan’s habitual modes of viewing landscape, amply illustrated in the series of guides she wrote as well as her verse, are inflected by Victorian habits of thought and response; the question is how she registers the disjunction between the Victorian and the colonial. Ruskin, in particular, taught Baughan to see landscape in painterly, constructed terms. In her 1913 guide book Forest and Ice she describes the Franz Josef glacier: “For all the outlook here is upon rock and snow, under an opened sky; a vast picture painted from a single palette, grey, white, blue — but deep blue, pure white, grand grey.” [xxii] Still, Baughan was aware that some adjustment was necessary.
Ruskin’s standard is that of Europe: in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), discussing the pathetic fallacy, he disparages the un-European landscape emphasising its remoteness and absence of meaning. If instead of a European landscape, he suggests, we envisage “a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent”, not just our response, but the place itself will be transformed — “[t]he flowers in an instant los[e] their light, the river its music; the hills [become] oppressively desolate [xxiii] — because “much of their former power has been dependent on a life that was not theirs”. Human association, human history is necessary not just for our perception of place, but for place itself. We, the readers, inscribe meaning in familiarity. Where there is no association, no history, there is no content. As the Maoriland writer, Alexander Bathgate winsomely observes, “Though Nature speaks, e’en in the wind’s sad wail/Who shall give meaning to Her voices all?” [xxiv]
It is a problem that colonial writers are highly conscious of, and solve — apologetically and assertively — in a number of often contradictory ways. The flaw can be turned to advantage: the New Zealand landscape, Baughan states, is quite unlike any other by virtue of superiority, “one of the purest places of old Earth; with a life of its own, no doubt, but one quite free from the accompaniments of life as we know it”, free from “the stain and the strain” of the old world; but also a memorialising recreation of it: “something like the Lauterbrunnen Thal […]the tropic light, jungle luxuriance, the snows of Switzerland, the safety of England — here they all are at once.” [xxv] Her short story, “The Mountain Track” (1912), is clotted with references back to the centre: the New Zealand landscape has “the charm of Italy”; the pasture is suggestive of Walt Whitman's “Leaves of Grass” and the birdsong reminiscent of Shelley’s skylark. Yet despite the insistence on familiarity, the story told is one of mal-adaption: Joel and Eva, from England, are unsuitable settlers and cannot take their place in this landscape. Joel drinks and Eva goes into a lonely decline when their daughter dies in an accident. To write the landscape in terms of European high culture produces an edgy dissonance when colonial actors are placed within it. Although Baughan quotes the poetry of Jessie Mackay in her travel guide, The Finest Walk in the World, [xxvi] the means to local literary denotation is as yet uncertain, and insufficiently authoritative.
Ruskin’s European landscapes are, of course, populated: “the deep colours of human endurance, valour and virtue” are part of their appearance. [xxvii] For the Maoriland writers, as Joel and Eva suggest, mountain scenery is most satisfactory when empty. Its transcendent beauty nullifies the problem of Ruskin’s “blankness and chill”. But sometimes — and Maoriland writing is characteristically contradictory in this, as in many respects — the mountains are underwritten with an awareness of the indigenous inhabitants, generally, in keeping with the heightened tone of the language, represented as ghost-like, inhabiting archaic space. Jessie Mackay writes:
… a dark gladness that is sweetly all but one with pain rises in the Northern heart when the mist wraps Ti-Marua suddenly by dawn or by day’s decline. For the mist loves Ti-Marua and swoops upon it eagle like many and many a time. Then the steep sides of it take another aspect; the great water scarred slopes are like the face of a giant old Maori warrior, seamed with the sacred moko and gashed in many a long-past fight. A passion of Ossianic melancholy glorifies the Northern soul with a nameless romance. Ti-Marua broods over the past; the river sings loud of ancient things. What a foolish conceited fancy it is to disdain the virgin hills of New Zealand because, forsooth! they have no history — because no bard has woven them into undying song! We atoms of a day, do we think these great Presences loom between heaven and earth to honour our petty wars, our ever repeating Empire games of check and counter check? Ti-Marua knows better, smiling darkly through the mist; Ti-Marua is as deep as the counsels of creation, as full of the primeval romance of earth and sun, cloud and rain, as Alp or Appenine. Ti-Marua has been loved of the storm wind, robed with the snow, crowned with the rainbow; can Ghaut or Grampian claim more? [xxviii]
In Maoriland, the landscape is both peopled by the ghosts of Maori and emptied of their actual presence as they are figured in terms of the “dying race” topos. “There isn’t a Maori left in the Bay now, as you know”, says the old woman in Baughan’s short story, “Grandmother Speaks”, “— not a full blooded one. Some they went to the North Island; most is dead ...well, well...!” [xxix] Two different landscapes — present and past, settler and Maori, historical and archaic — sit side by side. The land is thus simultaneously mythicised, and made available for settlement and colonisation. Only as a comical trickster figure can the rascally old woman in Baughan’s “Pipi on the Prowl” (1912) negotiate the distance between the two.
When Baughan, having previously visited, finally emigrated to New Zealand in 1903 she brought with her the literary language of sublimity, which was no longer entirely adequate to her objective surroundings. The colonial world was a little more obtrusively real than the aestheticised landscape of the European model, a little less fixed and iconographic. The landscape with which she was now constrained to work was not just disconcertingly strange, but was in the process of being re-formed as the settlers burnt the Bush (with matches and axes imported by Bannantyne’s, the importing firm of Katherine Mansfield’s father, Sir Harold Beauchamp) and sowed pasture. In her short story, “An Early Morning Walk” (1912), Baughan describes the clearance and re-figuring of the physical that the modern colonial project entails:
The great half-burnt skeletons of the forest, grey and black and bleached and piebald, stood gauntly up, as though in mute protest from tawny hillside and green flat. They were splintered and shattered; at their feet lay multitudes of their brethren — enormous rotting logs, and their mouldering black stumps, from which they had been severed; and it was only a question of time before they too would rest their ruins on the ground. [xxx]
The effort to record this process as prose becomes awkwardly self-conscious when poeticised. Poetic language tends to be conservative, and slips easily into what it knows and is comfortable. To describe the transition of the landscape — from exotic forest to productive pasture — the colonial poet has to restructure familiar language. Few choose to write about this moment of re-making. Most are happier with either native forest, nostalgically configured in terms of a past which is lost, or with Arcadian pastoral of a distinctly European flavour. Baughan’s 1908 poem, “A Bush Section”, is set at the exact point where the old has been obliterated and the new not yet risen. The fragmentation of the landscape is evoked by the disintegration of poetic diction:
Logs, at the door, by the fence; logs, broadcast over the paddock;
Sprawling in motionless thousands away down the green of the gully,
Logs, grey and black. And the opposite rampart of ridges
Bristles against the sky, all the tawny, tumultuous landscape
Is stuck, and prickled, and spiked with the standing black and grey splinters,
Strewn over its hollows and hills, with the long, prone, grey-black logs.
In this limbo is “a raw little farm on the edge of the desolate hillside”, the home of “Little “Thor Rayden, the twice-orphaned son of a drunkard”, a child who is only able to see his surroundings in terms of a limited and impoverished range of figurative language:
The sky is a wide black paddock, without any fences,
Here sparse and single, but yonder, as logg’d up for burning
Close in a cluster of light.
The strangeness of this image reflects the paucity of the expression available to the child — and to the colonial poet. Baughan even at this early stage is conscious of the need for a national literary discourse with a range of imagery of its own. The clumsiness and inappropriateness of the image of stars as logs in a burnt-out paddock is overt and challenging. To describe a new land is difficult, unless you simply replant the literary discourse of the old. Baughan realising the danger, settles for empty waste. Her world is largely silent, stuck between acculturation and language. The only direct speech in her poem is that of the morepork, the native owl, which calls to the child in, significantly, the Maori language: “Kia toa!” (Be Brave!) [xxxi]
What was Mansfield’s place in this “provincial, imitative and undistinguished” culture? For all her loneliness (or loftiness), she did spring from the same world Mackay and Baughan inhabited. The landscape she describes on the trip from Wellington to Napier by train in 1907 is marked by the ghosts of primeval forests in language very similar to that of Baughan: “Everywhere on the hills—great masses of charred logs—looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts.... And now again the silver tree trunks, like a skeleton army, invade the hills”. [xxxiii] She published early work in New Zealand and Australian magazines. She had assimilated the Maori myths and legends sufficiently to write stories in which familiar figures appear. [xxxiv] She visited the scenery, considered the limitations and possibilities of the place, reflected on the possibility of a New Zealand literary nationalism, and dismissed the view that it should derive from landscape. [xxxv]
What divides Mansfield from them is in part her privileged rejection of the optimistic expansiveness of colonial society. Mackay saw the enterprise and burgeoning prosperity of the new colony as a necessary condition for its writers. [xxxvi] Mansfield’s distaste for colonial increase is signified by the contrast in “Prelude” between Stanley Burnell, who echoes her father’s obsession with growth — Sir Harold even recorded the increasing tonnages of the ships in which the family sailed to Britain [xxxvii] — and Linda, his wife, who is deeply anxious about things that expand. But there was a more fundamental difference: Mansfield, for all her dandyish preference for the artificial over the natural found a way of responding in her youthful prose experiments to the unfamiliarity of the bush by converting it into symbolism and introjecting it into the consciousness of her autobiographical protagonists.
The idea that the land contains a mystery, that it refuses to be read, and that the Maori past holds one of the keys by which it might be read — “Read me the Rune”, asks Jessie Mackay, “for I faint in the mystery” [xxxviii] — is at the heart of Maoriland writing. Mansfield does not set about devising by way of compensation for this lack an elaborate interpretive key to the mystery derived from Maori myth; she acknowledges it as a fact in a passage in her notebook which looks forward to the opening sequence of “At the Bay”:
Mist over the distant hills, the fascinating valleys of toitoi swayed by the wind. Silence again, and a world full of the loneliness and the sweetness of the wild places. Kathie in the morning in the manuka paddock saw the dew hanging from the blossoms & leaves, put it to her lips & it seemed to poison her with the longing for the sweet wildness of the plains, for the silent speech of the Silent Places, the golden rain of blossom. [xxxix]
What is signalled in the notebook is not the retrospective glamour which surrounds New Zealand nature in “At the Bay” but a sense of immediate estrangement in its presence. She recognises the beauty of the “wild places”, but fears its poison. She is drawn to the unfamiliar land, but it resists her approach. She touches it, but it recoils from her. She puts it into words, but it remains silent. [xl]
Mansfield’s response is significantly different from Mackay’s: both use the idea of the sublime, but Mansfield internalises it so that it lies within the ironically observed mind of the protagonist (in this case, that of the authorial self recording her experiences in her diary). Thus she employs the symbolist techniques she had learned from Wilde and the Decadents while at school in London; however, she uses the symbolism not only to represent the dissatisfied consciousnesses of young female protagonists but also to add complexity to writing about a colonial landscape:
... right before them the lonely mountains outlined before a vivid orange sky. The colour is so intense that it is reflected in their faces, in their hair. The very rock on which they climb is hot with the colour. They climb higher, the sunset changes, becomes mauve, & in the waning light all the stretch of burnt manuka is like a thin mauve mist around them. A bird, large and widely[?] silent, flies from the river right into the flowering sky. There is no other sound except the voice of the passionate river. They climb onto a great black rock & sit huddled up there alone — fiercely almost brutally thinking — like Wagner. Behind them the sky was faintly heliotrope, & then suddenly from behind a cloud a little silver moon shone through. [xli]
At one level factual narrative describing the movements of the tourist party, this is also mood painting, using colours and effects of landscape and sky to convey the tumultuous emotions of the writer who sees herself and her party as possessed by Wagnerian passion and aloofness. Yet the consciousness that is evoked in the diaries and the early stories — at different times uncertain, curious, exhilarated — is continually modified by differently shaded relationships with the world through which it moves. By concentrating on the registration of the landscape by the moving consciousness of a protagonist at once engaged and dissatisfied, Mansfield has gone further than the others in modernising Maoriland. The landscape descriptions in the Urewera notebook or early vignettes are not merely juvenile exercises in symbolist writing, but experiments in how to convey a consciousness responding to an externality that is both invented and real, romanticised and ironised, pitched between the archaic and the modern.
Mansfield’s voice in the diaries, vignettes and stories is already “modernist” because it so continuously inflected by the author’s uncertainties, indecisions and evasions about subjectivity, [xlii] and because she presents her privacy, in all its complexity, so relentlessly. In contrast, Mackay, a more truly Victorian and public writer, positions the voice in her writing without Mansfield’s solipsistic edge and self-regard. Mackay writes from within a sense of community to which Mansfield is impervious. But this proto-modernism cannot be disentangled from Mansfield’s responsiveness to place and to colonial being. In Mansfield’s Maoriland writing, the natural has been made compatible with the discordant consciousness of the heroine, which David Spurr sees as a sign of the “intersection of colonial discourse and literary modernism” that occurs where the “movement into exotic geographical space is understood as an inner exploration of the boundaries of consciousness”. [xliii]
In the Ureweras Mansfield encountered not two wholly opposed worlds, modernity and archaism, but two partial and transitional worlds, the dominant one determinedly constructing the other as a curious relic and sign of its own success. If Mansfield, however uncomfortably, found herself a tourist in “darkest Maoriland”, [xliv] the Maori prophet, Rua Kenana, a few miles from where she stopped at Te Whaiti building his community at Maungapohatu was struggling against the net cast over Maori options and aspirations by that patronising term. [xlv] Rua was engaged in negotiating the terms tradition and modernity without privileging either. Like Te Whiti at Parihaka a few years earlier, Rua was asserting Maori sovereignty not by retreating into a version of the past but by assimilating and adapting modern knowledge to Maori needs. [xlvi]
But modernity requires its opposite: to establish and define itself it must advertise its difference from the pre-modern, the world before anxiety, time, atomization. Ancient traditions and ways of life, repugnant when accompanied by military capacity, as in the wars of the 1860s, become most poignant at the point where their disappearance is demanded. Hence societies constructing themselves as modern and prosperous require the adjunct of a traditional past. This process is not, of course, peculiar to Maoriland. In the late nineteenth century, at a time when Indians all over the American West were being forced by the military to abandon their lifeways and cultural traditions, the American public were demanding traditional Indian craft objects, which had become commodities isolated from their cultural context. In the 1870s, Caroline Frey Winne can collect Indian “fancy work”, read “a very interesting book [Edward Tylor’s] ‘Primitive Cultures’”, and describe the local Indians as “a very uninteresting race and a great nuisance hanging around the post. They are dreadfully dirty” — all without any apparent sense of contradiction. [xlvii] In the same way, Maoriland fastens on the decorative and collectable aspects of Maori culture, and incorporates it into the standard contemporary works of ethnology, just when the people it signifies seem, conveniently, on the point of departure.
Joyce fled a nationalism with which he felt sympathy but whose claims on his loyalties he felt would compromise his sacerdotal conception of art. He also fled the overwhelming presence in his Ireland of a mythical past. Mansfield fled a “little land with no history”, [xlviii] a country too much in the present. But its past, both real and imagined, had insinuated itself into her consciousness, and into her juvenile writing. For both, modernism lay elsewhere, but the modern was also a part of the world they left behind. The past in Irish nationalism served the purposes of creating a modern state, a nation freed of England. In New Zealand modernity was triumphant in obvious ways, yet it was coupled with a lack of desire for independence. Joyce’s Ireland, not a colony, was nevertheless colonized; Mansfield’s New Zealand, until 1907 a colony, was perturbed by no strong will towards independence. [xlix]
Inescapably a part of her father’s privileged colonial world, Mansfield felt an exaggerated need to establish her distance from her family and from the colonial society of her childhood. Where Maoriland writers tended to mediate the history of settlement by way of myth as a means of controlling its squalors, displacements and violences, Mansfield constructed an extravagant aestheticism by way of compensation for the frustrations and indignities of colonial life. Like that of another young aesthete, Stephen Dedalus, also seeking escape from the nightmares of history into the static realm of art, Mansfield’s aestheticism is always one of self-conscious gesture. [l] Both forms of escape indicate how closely imbricated are their subjects in the worlds they seek to transcend. Mansfield carried hers with her into exile, fashioning from the stratagems she devised there to control her contradictory impulses her particular species of modernism.
[i] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, pp. 182-3.
[ii] Joyce, Portrait, p. 252. For a related discussion of Irish and New Zealand literature see Mark Williams, “The Discriminations of Postcoloniality in Ireland and New Zealand”, in “Postcolonialism: Literature and Theory”, special issue of The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (India), XXI nos.1-2 (1998), edited by Chelva Kanagayakam, pp. 83-104.
[iii] The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks vol. 1, ed. Margaret Scott, Wellington, Lincoln University Press/Daphne Brassell, 1997, p. 138.
[iv] Antony Alpers has to point out that the kidnappers are not Maori; this would not have been obvious to English readers of the story, The Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Antony Alpers, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 552.
[v] In one experiment of early 1908 are three descriptions of the same scene, in which some fishermen, initially Italian, become Maori, then Italians again. Here are the two latter passages:
Across the blue sea a boat is floating with an orange sail. Now the Maori fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the wind. On the beach a group of them, with blue jerseys, thick trousers rolled to their knees. The sun shines on their thick, crisp hair, & shines on their faces, so that their skins are the colour of hot amber. It shines on their bare legs & firm brown arms. They are drawing in a little boat called “Te Kooti”, the wet rope running through their fingers and falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand.
And now the Italian fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the breeze — several come rowing in a little boat. They spring ashore. The sun shines on the crisp black hair. It shines on their faces, so that their skin is the colour of hot amber, on their bare legs and strong brown arms. They are dragging towards them the boat, the long black wet rope running through their fingers & falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand.
Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, p.157. The same passage appears, with Italian fishermen, worked into a vignette, “By the Sea”, Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, pp. 193-4.
[vi] “Maoriland” refers to the literature of incipient nationalism of late colonial New Zealand, roughly 1880-1915. The term originates in the Sydney Bulletin as a way of pointing to what distinguishes New Zealand from Australia: the Maori, who are figured as a “dying race” whose archaic and romantic past can thus be borrowed by Pakeha (European) writers to give their settler culture the authority of history.
[vii] The Reporter, the magazine of Wellington Girls’ College in which Mansfield published a story in 1899, printed in the issue for the third term of 1908 extracts from the Lady Principal’s report which cite Sir Arthur Rucker, Principal of London University: “I believe you have very advanced ideas about women in New Zealand”, p. 35. National Archives, Wellington, Wellington Girls Archive, AANB, Series 883, Item 4B. Jane Mander, arriving at Barnard College in New York City in 1912, found herself as a New Zealander “an object of inspiration”: “We were then leaders in social legislation.... We were utopia materialised!”, quoted in Rae McGregor, The Story of a New Zealand Writer: Jane Mander, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1998, p. 44.
[viii] Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, p. 86.
[ix] E.H. McCormick, New Zealand Literature: A Survey, London: Oxford University Press, 1959; J.O.C. Phillips, “Musings in Maoriland — or Was There a Bulletin School in New Zealand?”, Historical Studies, vol 20 no 81 (October 1983), p. 520.
[x] J.C. Reid, Creative Writing in New Zealand: A Brief Critical History, Auckland: the Author with Whitcombe and Tombs, 1946, p. 19.
[xi] Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity, Wellington: Allen and Unwin/ Port Nicholson Press, 1986, p. 54.
[xii] In the poem “House and Land” Curnow talks of the “great gloom” of “ a land of settlers/ With never a soul at home.” (1941) In An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, eds. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien and Mark Williams, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 399.
[xiii] Allen Curnow, Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse in Look Back Harder: Critical Writings, 1935-1984, ed. Peter Simpson, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987, p. 133.
[xiv] Phillips, “Musings in Maoriland”, p. 534.
[xv] Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 6.
[xvi] Alan Mulgan, Obituary in The Evening Post, Wellington, 3 September, 1938, p. 26. See also the discussion of Mackay in his Literature and Authorship in New Zealand , Wellington: P.E.N. Books 1943, pp. 18-21.
[xvii] Patrick Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, Auckland: Penguin, 1990, pp. 33, 46, 48.
[xviii] Stephen Turner, “Settlement as Forgetting”, Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, eds. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas and Hilary Ericksen (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), p. 21.
[xix] Jessie Mackay, “The Burial of Sir John McKenzie”, in From the Maori Sea, Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1904, p. 23.
[xx] Jessie Mackay, Otago Witness Christmas Annual, December 1907; quoted in Jessie Mackay: A Woman Before Her Time, eds. Margaret Chapman, et al., P.C.C.L. Services/Kakahu Women’s Division of Federated Farmers, Geraldine, N.Z., n.d., n.p.
[xxi] Mackay, Preface to The Spirit of the Rangatira and other ballads, Melbourne: George Robertson, 1889, n.p.
[xxii] Forest and Ice, Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1913, p. 42.
[xxiii] The Seven Lamps of Architecture, London: George Allen, 1899, pp. 322-3. This passage is discussed by John Newton in “Colonialism above the Snowline: Baughan, Ruskin and the South Island Myth”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol 34, no 2 (1999), pp. 85-96.
[xxiv] Alexander Bathgate, “Faerie” (1890) in Harvey McQueen, The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852-1914 ,Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1993, p. 69.
[xxv] The Finest Walk in the World, Whitcombe and Tombs: Auckland, 1923, p. 45.
[xxvi] “Headed each by a snow-crowned cirque, and filled with the deep green forest, theirs is the further enchantment of a veil of soft blue atmosphere — that hovering haze, that bloom of grapes, that Rich gloom of the air, Of velvet and vair, (as Jessie Mackay puts it in her beautiful ‘Valley of Rona’) which clothes the far mountain bush…”, The Finest Walk, p. 27.
[xxvii] Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 323.
[xxviii] Jessie Mackay, Otago Witness, 4 February, 1903, p. 70.
[xxix] “Grandmother Speaks”, Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, London: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1912, p. 23.
[xxx] “An Early Morning Walk” from Brown Bread, p. 119.
[xxxi] This poem was published in Baughan’s 1908 collection Shingle-Short and Other Verses which was, unusually, published in New Zealand by Whitcombe and Tombs. The tone and orientation of the piece may be effected by an awareness of the local audience.
[xxxii] John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1992), p. 183.
[xxxiii] Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, p. 136.
[xxxiv] In an early story in the notebooks, Marina and Himemoa are the heroines of a cross-cultural love fantasy, not uncommon in Maoriland writing, here with homoerotic suggestions. In a story full of native markers — tui song, the scent of manuka — the girls repeat (albeit in reverse) Hinemoa’s famous swim, conveyed in language redolent both of Maoriland and of Oscar Wilde:
They reached the island & lay on a long smooth ledge of brown rock & rested. Above them the fern trees rose, & among the fern trees a rata rose like a pillar of flame.
“See the hanging beautiful arms of the fern trees” laughed Hinemoa.
“Not arms, not arms. All the other trees have arms — saving the rata with his tongues of flame — but the fern trees have beautiful green hair. See Hinemoa, it is hair, & know you not, should a warrior venture through the bush in the night they seize him & wrap him round in their hair & in the morning he is dead. They are cruel even as I might wish to be to thee, little Hinemoa.
She looked at Hinemoa with half shut eyes, her upper lip drawn back showing her teeth, but Hinemoa caught her hand....
Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, p. 75.
[xxxv] Mansfield wrote in her notebook in 1906, “when N[ew] Z[ealand] is more artificial she will give birth to an artist who can treat her natural beauties adequately”, Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, 81.
[xxxvi] “I am convinced that the heart of young New Zealand, in these days, beats with a free untrammeled pulsation of enterprise — beats hopefully to the march of progress and intellect; side by side with the aspiration for culture goes the dawning of a national spirit that will we trust brighten into a noonday of national prosperity”, Mackay, Preface to The Spirit of the Rangatira, n. p.
[xxxvii] Sir Harold Beauchamp, Reminiscences and Recollections, New Plymouth: Thomas Avery, 1937, p. 99. Sir Harold provides a table of the growth in volume of shipping from the time he joined the Wellington Harbour Board in 1895 until 1936, ibid., p. 121.
[xxxviii] Jessie Mackay, “Phantom Ford”, in From the Maori Sea, p. 26.
[xxxix] Notebooks, ed. Scott, I, p. 144.
[xl] For a related discussion of the Urewera Notebook see Mark Williams, “’The Artificial and the Natural’: The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s Prose Style’, in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, Cross/Cultures, 47, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 357-78.
[xli] ibid., I, p. 145.
[xlii] Sydney Janet Kaplan, who argues cogently that Mansfield belongs among the major figures of English literary modernism, sees her as having worked out the constituent methods of a modernist practice before 1908. She cites the sketch, “Summer Idylle. 1906”, as evidence of Mansfield’s early breakthrough into a modernist method. Mansfield by this time, she claims, had already
reworked ‘90s artificialities of style into an early modernist piece full of elusiveness, indirection, and sexual innuendo. Many of the features of her later style are already in embryo, demonstrating that her emergence into “modernism” was not derivative of other twentieth-century writers, but a function of her own synthesis and imaginative reworking of late nineteenth-century techniques and themes.
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 47.
[xliii] David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 146.
[xliv] The phrase occurs in a newspaper cartoon recording the visit, four years earlier, of the Governor, Lord Ranfurly, to the Ureweras, collected in a scrapbook kept by Major Dudley Alexander, “The New Zealand Journals”, 1900-1904, Alexander Turnbull Library, Ranfurly Papers, MS-Group 0756.
[xlv] In Alexander’s scrapbook, a cartoon of the expedition is entitled “DARKEST MAORILAND”, Alexander, “The New Zealand Journals”, [p. 124].
[xlvi] Rua perhaps illustrates Martin Blythe’s observation that Maoriland can refer to not only the sentimental racism of settler culture but also “to those many Maori attempts at reaching a conciliation with the expanding British-Pakeha nation”, Naming the Other: Images of the Maori in New Zealand Film and Television , Metujen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1994, p. 17.
[xlvii] Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Frontiers of Westward Expansion, Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996, p. 139.
[xlviii] Katherine Mansfield, “To Stanislaw Wyspianski”, in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, p. 474.
[xlix] For discussion of this see Mark Williams, “Mansfield in Maoriland: Biculturalism, Agency and Misreading”, in Modernism and Empire, eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 249-74.
[l] Alpers notes Mansfield’s turning against self-conscious or “made up” writing towards the end of her life, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, New York: Viking, 1980, p. 336.