Hell for white men: masculinity and race in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

Abstract

As an historical work, Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, is embedded in the invocation, production and dissemination of cultural memory. Drawing on Peter Burke's discussion of social amnesia as the ‘adjustment of the past to the present’, this reading of a canonical Australian text points to the necessity of an active re-engagement with historical context in order to tease out suppressed or neglected narratives that run counter to, or intersect uneasily with, a later audience's assumptions about the past. The reading of the trilogy offered here examines cultural texts—both the trilogy and the texts from the period in which it is set—that allow us to understand the role of Chinese immigrants in the formation of white Australian narratives of settlement. Although the overt presence of Chinese in the trilogy is minimal, this reading will suggest that the debates their presence raised for white settlers, particularly when viewed through acclimatization theory and the cultural positioning of white women, are central to understanding Richardson's portrayal of Richard Mahony, a white settler who fails to adjust to settler life in Australia. An attention to the historical circumstances invoked by references to the Chinese in Richardson's trilogy sheds new light on the instability of Mahony's identification with Australia, which is so often read as inherent in Mahony alone, rather than as inherent in the historical and cultural conditions of the white settler in nineteenth-century Australia.