Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand ed. by Tamara S. Wagner (review)

In her introduction to Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, Tamara S. Wagner claims, with some truth, that domestic settler fiction is a neglected genre, “easily dismissible,” “merely” tales of courtship and family life (6). While all eleven chapters are focussed on the domestic, this settler space is calibrated in a number of intersecting discourses: home, sexuality, gentility, capitalism, Englishness, and race. Wagner argues that the:

individual chapters work together to make a case that “antipodal domestic fiction” needs to be read and re-assessed as a distinct literary development that had a formative influence on nineteenth century literature in English.

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A bold claim indeed, and while this book clearly shows that “antipodal domestic fiction” is a richly layered category of fiction that can be grouped productively and that also can be a rich source of postcolonial analysis, these more assertive claims of status and influence may require a higher level of proof. Is it enough to show that Charles Dickens published emigrant letters, as Diana C. Archibald shows, and drew on them for his projection of the colonies? While representations of home take on a particular edge when home belongs to an emigrant, most nineteenth-century literature is engaged with the domestic as metaphor and metonym, and it is the large discursive questions which remain foundational to how we understand the imaginative formations of Victorians. As Wagner notes, the majority of settler authors addressed two readerships concurrently—the local and the metropolitan—and their narratives showed interconnections across the British colonial world, illustrating a commonality of preoccupations and uncertainties that characterize the state of being colonial. Stephen Turner has pointed out, in an influential essay cited by several authors, that the settler state of being was foundationally contradictory—to live in the new place required a repetition of home, but being at home there required forgetting the home left behind. It is these paradoxes that place the domestic at the heart of colonial enterprise.

The book has a roughly chronological structure, which may be why the essays are referred to as chapters, opening with Lesa Scholl’s examination of Harriet Martineau’s 1832 Homes Abroad. Scholl usefully emphasizes Martineau’s Malthusian vision and its generational differences, and points to the ways in which the stability of domestic space is threatened, not only if “Englishness” and “home” are transferred elsewhere, but also by poverty and crime at home (25). The collection reveals some groupings which could have been discussed in the introduction—the first three chapters focus on emigrant literature, but are narratively situated in Britain. Archibald’s charmingly readable account of the influence of emigrant letters on Dickens and Jude Piesse’s excellent chapter on serial settlement and Great Expectations (1860–61) form a cluster of essays focussing on actual and imaginary emigrant narratives. Piesse sets Great Expectations in the context of serialized Australian and Canadian emigration novels, which valuably highlights the gaps that Dickens’s novel leaves open, but also makes an interesting metonymic link between the pace of serial reading and the “gradual growth” of domestic settler place, what Piesse calls a “continual and oscillating retrograde movement through memory” (55). This insight could perhaps have been applied to the whole collection.

Grace Moore’s refreshingly novel chapter on incendiarism and the settler home introduces the second grouping, which is situated in Australia (a loosely composed shift from departure to arrival). Discussing Mary Fortune or “Waif Wanderer” and Anthony Trollope’s 1874 novella Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, Moore argues that literary representations of arsonists channelled deep rooted anxieties about the precariousness of settler life and connects the destructive use of fire to the ecological disruption of colonialism, which misunderstood pragmatic aboriginal fire practices. She highlights the symbolic ambiguity of fire as both the comforting campfire of innumerable illustrations and the raging inferno.

The next four chapters are more locally concentrated, focussing on the inevitably gendered space of...