Along “the many‐stranded circle”: Narrative spiralling from isolation to homecoming in Patricia Grace’s Cousins

Abstract

This essay argues that narrative time in Patricia Grace’s third novel, Cousins, is constituted along the paths of multiple interconnecting spirals that not only interweave personal and historical time but also connect to extra‐temporal domains. The lives of the novel’s three cousins – Mata, Makareta and Missy – are made to collectively demonstrate how female disinheritance and isolation can be woven into a cultural homecoming through symbolic reconstructions spanning historical time. In specific terms, the isolation that Mata experiences ceases to be imprisoning because of the spiralling interventions of biculturalism, most potently represented through the agency of Makareta, and through the redeeming Māori maternal genealogy, most explicitly supported by Missy. Through the interweaving of temporal and extra‐temporal spirals, Grace overcomes historical fixity while also sustaining the spiritual essentialism that supports Māoridom’s integrity and her vision of its feminist renewal.

Keywords:

• spiral
• biculturalism
• dual gendered
• genealogies
• essentialism

Notes

1. Lacan declares himself not to be persuaded by the myth that “God is dead”. He suggests that “this myth [may be] simply a shelter against the threat of castration” (Four Fundamental Concepts 27). He thus implies that a myth of origin, perhaps even a myth of God, is pertinent to the construction of subjectivity as decentred and founded upon lack.

2. See Grace’s interview with Sarti for her interpretation of biculturalism: “The many races are here under the Pakeha signature of the Treaty. Biculturalism means Maori people on the one hand and all other people on the other” (44).

3. Grace’s recuperation into the cultural arena of mother–daughter ties corresponds with the projects by Rich and Irigaray for the acculturation of this relationship. See Rich 218–55 and Irigaray, je, tu, nous 45–50.

4. Salmond writes: “In general, however, women play a supporting role in marae rituals. Oratory is the central activity of the ritual, and in most tribes it is limited to men” (127). Rose observes that the value of the phallus is “a function of the androcentric nature of the symbolic order itself” (38).

5. There is here a parallel between Grace’s reconstruction of and support for dual‐gendered genealogies and Irigaray’s support for the same in je, tu, nous 16.