Writing spaces: Robin Hyde’s The Godwits Fly as (Female) colonial Künstlerroman

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eliza Hannay, Robin Hyde’s protagonist in The Godwits Fly, finds the muse in the bottom hold of a boat. Taking a cue from that atypical location, this essay spotlights Hyde’s own edgy positionality as a colonial New Zealand writer to focus on the twin implications of the title phrase “Writing Spaces” – the spaces associated often with women’s writing, clandestine, underground, peripheralized, probed here in their most material manifestations – the page, the bookshelf, the bookshop. The other important impetus of this essay lies in exploring how the “of-yet-not-of” positionality of the colonial woman writer makes for a unique colonial take on the female Künstlerroman. The novel’s central metaphor of migration (the godwits) sets up this essay’s dialogism with contemporary debates centered around gender, domicile and migration, my focus being on female creativity and the un-housed condition. The photomontages of Eliza’s young life are viscerally rendered by Hyde to explore how these instabilities leave a mark on the “veins and marrow” of her protagonist’s being as an artist. The focus will equally be on material repositories like bookshelves at home and shelves in bookstores. The curatorial protocols that govern both and that then have an impact on the creative individual, whether as consumer or producer, will be my focus there.