“Man Alone”: The demise of a cultural icon in the fiction of Maurice Gee

Abstract

As a model for white male identity in New Zealand, the figure of the Man Alone is particularly enduring. This familiar topos, its title originating from John Mulgan's novel published in 1939, has appeared in New Zealand literature in various guises, from “frontier hero, through social victim or rebel to existential agent and currently to a protean figure capable of multiple incarnations.” (Jones 331–332)’ While manifestations of the Man Alone character continue to appear in film, literature, television, and in the public image of real men, the novels of Maurice Gee express ambivalence towards this frequently celebrated model of New Zealand masculinity. Representations of the Man Alone figure begin tentatively in his first novel, The Big Season. But even in this early work, Gee's discomfort with the Man Alone as an ideal Kiwi literary hero surfaces. This paper examines Gee's constructions of the Man Alone figure from the loyal Bill Walters of the Big Season, to the pernicious Willi Gauss of Live Bodies, and how these constructions reveal the figure of the Man Alone as both mythical and unsustainable.