Literature and Politics

In the novels and unpublished manuscripts of Australian author, Eve Langley (1904-1974), ‘home’ is the locus of much desire. Langley’s narrator roams the countryside of rural Australia and the North Island of New Zealand seeking signs of belonging and constructing imagined spaces of ‘home’. The concept of home has a fluid nature, which is usefully compared with that of the nation. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson discusses the nation as having an unfixed state, a space within which one is constantly engaging with and enacting roles of belonging, as well as positions of alienation and dissociation. The home in Langley’s work is also a performative and enacted space, within which the narrator, Steve/Eve, negotiates codes of both belonging and otherness.

All Langley’s Australian novels are patterned with racist references to the male immigrants alongside whom Steve works. By repeatedly framing these men as foreign or other, Langley attempts to naturalise Steve, in contrast, as a ‘white’ Australian and ‘at home’. Bancroft House, chronologically the last of Langley’s unpublished manuscripts set in Australia, ends with a festive banquet on Christmas Day, 1930. The banquet consists of Italian dishes, prepared and presented by Steve’s Italian co-workers. Steve has lived in the eponymous Bancroft House for much of the year and for her it has become a site layered with imagined representations of home. This paper will explore the constructions of home offered by these particular Christmas Day festivities and will investigate the utopian suggestions for an alternative society contained in the festive tradition of a temporary inversion of the quotidian world.

I am currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Auckland. My thesis investigates the disjunction between representations of belonging expressed in Eve Langley's literary identifications and the sense of unsettledness revealed in the imagined spaces described in her novels.