Inwardness, insularity, and the Man Alone: Postcolonial anxiety in the New Zealand novel

Abstract

Whereas the Man Alone theme in New Zealand literature has generally been seen as the expression of a heroic model of masculinity, this essay argues that it arose from identity‐threatening anxiety induced in men by an encounter with circumstances that negated the security imparted by the subjectification deriving from their originary culture. Writers discussed include Samuel Butler John Mulgan, Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, and Lloyd Jones.

Keywords:

• Man Alone
• Puritanism
• Maurice Gee
• Lloyd Jones
• Mister Pip
• John Mulgan

Notes

1. Curnow interprets this poem as “a rejection of the Mother (Mother Country?)” by a protagonist who must pursue his destiny “alone and uncomforted” (“Introduction” 43).

2. Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, ll. 85–86 (161).

3. I am drawing here upon an idea expressed in a different context by Joyce McDougall (395).

4. An Essay on Man: Epistle II, l. 3 (Pope 516).

5. For a detailed analysis of The Plumb Trilogy and other novels by Gee, see Fox, The Ship of Dreams.

6. See, in particular, the sequence describing Joe’s attempts to explain to himself his violence against Simon (Hulme 208–14).