The unavailability of nature : anxieties of place and Pākehā identity in the writings of Pip Adam, Robin Hyde, and Blanche Baughan : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
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2020
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Massey University
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This thesis argues that the idea of nature is never fully available to Pākehā literature, and that is manifested as various kinds of anxiety and uncanny returns. It begins in the twenty first century with Pip Adam’s The New Animals (2017), which considers the effects of a consumerist society on not only the ecological state of the planet, but also the human psyche. From there it moves back to consider Robyn Hyde’s The Godwits Fly (1938), which offers a vision of Pākehā society as shaped by outdated sociological rules inherited from an idea of England, trapping both humans and animals in early twentieth century city streets with an existential awareness that native New Zealand, already, can no longer be located. Finally, Blanche Baughan’s “A Bush Section” (1908) is approached not simply as a vindication of the settler assault on nature, nor as a justification of bush clearing as a means to an end, but as an antecedent of both The Godwits Fly and The New Animals in its evocation of a sense of deep anxiety with regards to the preoccupation of imagining Pākehā belonging in relation to nature.