New Zealand Women Traveller Writers: from Exile to Diaspora

Abstract

This essay argues that white settler colonies like New Zealand can be interpreted as diaspora settlements by virtue of their close ethnic and cultural ties with the metropolitan homeland of England. Its focus, however, is on the ’alienated subjectivity’ of four women writers of the first half of the twentieth century who travelled back as returnees, from New Zealand to Europe, and it examines the way they trace through the upheavals of travel, doubled or changing identity structures, encounters with the unfamiliar and strange, and the desire for location. Distinguishing between the early writers, living in exile, Katherine Mansfield and Robin Hyde, who never returned, and the later ’diasporic’ writers, Janet Frame and Fleur Adcock, who did, the essay identifies in their work distinctive tropes that attest to the shifting subject position of the traveller writer and articulate a diasporic consciousness of alienation and alterity. These are: the refiguring of self-hood through metaphor and disguise, the construction of self and the other as stranger or foreigner, and the problem of belonging focused through the quest for a ’home in this world’. This diasporic reading, identifying a commonality in literary aesthetic and practice, points to the complex symbiosis of life and art created by dislocation and the accommodation in art to experiences of loss and liberation. Although the work of this group is too heterogenous and generically diverse to constitute a school, collectively their endeavour as diasporic traveller writers situates them elliptically in relation to literary traditions contingent upon a bounded territorial nationalism, giving them a certain cohesiveness. Finally I suggest that as artists in exile, and often transient subjects, they represent in heightened, poetic form responses to the states of dislocation and unbelonging that are associated with the formation of diaspora communities. To that extent, they might provide literary models for issues such as marginality, home and belonging, language and gender, encountered in diaspora.