Gothic Negotiations of the Boundaries of the New Zealand Farm in Settler Literature

This thesis examines the ways the Gothic, as an aesthetic mode, is used to manage the spatial and conceptual boundaries of the farm in New Zealand settler literature, predominantly from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. I argue that settler literature frequently uses the Gothic mode’s capacity to communicate instability to problematise the boundaries of the New Zealand farm in ways that challenge the ecophobic binaries that uphold New Zealand’s Arcadian myth.

The Theoretical Underpinnings section outlines New Zealand’s Arcadian myth, and the critical framework I use to consider how the Gothic management of boundaries interacts with it. I articulate the Arcadian myth surrounding the farm as partly constructed by binaries rooted in an ecophobic, Eurocentric opposition between wilderness and ‘civilisation’.

The second section, Establishing the Boundaries, examines how Edith Searle Grossman’s The Heart of the Bush (1910) proposes an Arcadian balance of nature and culture, only to undermine it in a feminist critique of the restrictiveness of New Zealand settler society through the Gothic corruption of idyllic spaces. The Heart of the Bush is a foundational demonstration of the centrality of the wilderness/civilisation binary in representing the farm and native bush, and its use in a Gothic critique of the Arcadian myth.

The third section, Instability, explores how Gothic instability is a powerful rhetorical tool for exploring the physical, historical, and cultural dynamics of the spaces of the farm and the bush. Gothic instability frequently undermines conceptions of the Arcadian farm and the wild bush in various ways to express settler anxiety about the security of pastoral progress.

The fourth section, Expansion, demonstrates the use of the Gothic to threaten the Arcadian myth by elevating the contradiction of pastoral expansion’s means and ends: productivity and destruction. I examine how Gothic representations of destruction of the bush, and the waste and emptiness that follows, exploit the spatial and temporal dynamics of the transitional phase of pastoral expansion to question its ethics and success.

The fifth section, Rot, explores how Gothic depictions of decay evoke interconnections and processes that disturb the spatial and conceptual binaries that uphold the Arcadian. Decay’s embodiment of cyclicality and interconnection undermine Arcadian notions of improvement, human exceptionalism and the ontological separation between nature and culture, human and non-human. Depictions of rot on the farm juxtapose Arcadian logic and its constituent binaries against a reality of slipping, slimy, unstable boundaries.