Man Alone?: Changing Fate of the Myth of Masculinity, Individualism and Nationalism in New Zealand Literature
Man Alone?: Changing Fate of the Myth of Masculinity, Individualism and Nationalism in New Zealand Literature

Summary/Abstract: The New Zealand writers best known outside the country are women – Katherine Mansfield, Dame Ngaio Marsh, Janet Frame and Keri Hulme. However, when one opens a survey of New Zealand literature, one discovers a tradition that is male, associated with the masculine self-image of the nation that sees its cultural heroes in the All Blacks rugby team and celebrates the rugged discipline derived from the sometimes bleak but often breathtaking local landscape. In fact, New Zealand as a settler nation has sought to camouflage its frequently felt national inferiority complex under “blokish” simplicity, opposed to and elevated above the “effete” European/British refinement. This selfimage has been derived from the local terrain and male bodies. In this context, to use the words of Donald Hall (1994: 8), the male body “appears as a metaphor for social, national and religious bodies” and, as a site of struggle, it allows us to gain a better insight into cultural (self- )mythology. The fathers of New Zealand literary tradition (e.g., Allen Curnow or Frank Sargeson) also stressed the nationalism and masculinism of the attempts to hew out a local realist diction instead of the disparagingly feminised romantic tradition borrowed from Britain. According to these writers, if New Zealand was to create a national voice, it was to be a voice that was derived from the New Zealand landscape and spoke in the rugged masculinist idiom of the soil.

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