‘The wolf bane is blooming again’: Gothic desire in R. H. Morrieson’s The Scarecrow

Abstract

R.H. Morrieson’s fiction has received little scholarly analysis in New Zealand, but when it has, it has been common to consider it as part of a tradition emerging during the middle decades of the twentieth century that sought new modes of writing with which to best express the realities of a post-World War II world. Peter Simpson argues that as a post-provincial novel, Morrieson’s The Scarecrow (1963) ‘turns the typical pattern of provincial fiction – sympathetic individual versus hostile society – upside down. The isolated individual – the Scarecrow – is viewed as a threat to the community from outside’ (1982: 59). Yet the pattern that Simpson notes here as belonging to the post-provincial novel belongs to another mode of fiction: the Gothic, which frequently involves a communal effort to vanquish an evil threat, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). By considering The Scarecrow as a Gothic novel, post-provincial writing in New Zealand can be seen as not just building on a local tradition of literary realism, but as engaging with a popular international tradition as well.