Offshore Islands in Aotearoa New Zealand: Robin Hyde, Janet Frame and the “other” Tradition

Abstract

Islands offshore in Aotearoa New Zealand are locations for experimental fictions that approach the issues of exclusion/inclusion through “cast off” perspectives. This essay examines – from a historical materialist perspective – novels by writers from the mid-twentieth century: Robin Hyde (Wednesday’s Children, 1937) and Janet Frame (A State of Siege, 1966), whose island locations expand the national imaginary with interrogations of female subjectivity, landscape and society. Drawing on Etienne Balibar’s concept of homo nationalis (i.e. the national being or citizen as subject), it claims that islands are sites for new start-ups in their fiction: they enable alternative representations of the female artist within the nation-state that nevertheless show reduced connectedness to national frameworks that shape social identities. The isolated spinster hero interrogates her self-construction, undergoes loss of the boundaries of self/other, inside/outside, and belonging/non-belonging, leading to self-fragmentation and dissolution.