Medievalism And The Gothic In Australian Culture

Stephanie Trigg

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522852479
• eBook ISBN: 9780522865844
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Part I
Re-writing Medieval and Gothic Literature

Marcus Clarke, Gothic, Romance

DAVID MATTHEWS

All Australians are familiar with the idea that their country lacks history and tradition, of the kind signalled by historic ruins and other traces of the past as conceived by a European settler culture. While this idea obviously lends itself to a certain kind of critique of Australia — and in the literary field, to anxieties about what there is to write about — it must also be recalled that Australian historical ‘emptiness’ has often been constructed positively. There have been few more dramatic examples of this than Joseph Furphy’s (or rather Tom Collins’s) vision of a ‘virgin continent’ waiting in ‘serene loneliness [...] while the primordial civilizations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan and Mongol crept out, step by step, from paleolithic silence into the uncertain record of Tradition’s earliest fable’, and waiting still longer as the ‘hard-won light’ of empire made its way around the globe. For Furphy, although Australia’s history was a ‘blank’ in its long waiting, this was positively conceived as conferring freedom on a ‘recordless land [...] committed to no usages of petrified injustice [...] clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols [...] cursed by no memories of fanaticism and persecution [,..]’.1

In his well-known 1856 essay, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’, Frederick Sinnett, albeit somewhat mockingly, pointed out the obvious ramifications for literature:

No storied windows, richly dight, cast a dim, religious light over any Australian premises. There are no ruins for that rare old plant, the ivy green, to creep over and make his meal of. No Australian author can hope to extricate his hero or heroine, however pressing the emergency may be, by means of a spring panel and a subterranean passage, or such like relics of feudal barons [...].2

The same issue provoked a querelle with a sharper edge in the 1930s between G. H. Cowling, professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne, and the critic P. R. Stephensen. Cowling, while professing as an expatriate Englishman in Australia to ‘love the country’, complained that ‘there are no ancient churches, castles, ruins — the memorials of generations departed. You need no Baedecker [sic] in Australia. From the point of view of literature this means that we can never hope to have a Scott, a Balzac, a Dumas [...].’3 Stephensen, in a vehement reply, spoke anecdotally of his own years in England and of his ‘yearning’, while there, ‘to be in a country without any castles or ruins, to be at liberty in a country in which there were thousands of square miles of ground not staled by history and tradition’. Like Furphy, Stephensen saw Australia as a primitive country and there was ‘a difference between a primitive country and a castellated country, a profound difference — but what an impertinence for a denizen of the castellated country to decry the other country when he is visiting it; what bad manners, what an example of castellated culture!’4

By comparison with Furphy these writings of Sinnett, Cowling, and Stephensen show a narrow and quite specific sense of historical lack. Whether positively or negatively, each of them is concerned not with Australia’s lack of history as such but the lack of a Middle Ages. It is castles and churches they are concerned with and, secondarily, the ruins of such buildings that, in the eighteenth century, contributed so substantially to the Gothic sensibility. Sinnett paraphrases Milton’s lines in ‘II Penseroso’, where ‘storied Windows richly dight, Casting a dimm religious light’ form part of a larger portrait of a ruined cloister. He mocks the narrative machinery of the Gothic novel, leading up to his rather gleeful conclusion ‘that Mrs Radcliffe’s genius would be quite thrown away here’.5 At the same time, via his reference to ‘feudal barons’, he shows his understanding of Gothic as being based on a reading of the relics of medieval culture. Cowling, too, makes it clear that it is medieval artefacts he misses while Stephensen’s riposte about ‘castellated culture’ shows that this is the way he has understood Cowling.

Early writers on Australia were just as likely to look to classical antiquity as the Middle Ages when defining Australia’s historical lack. In 1838 William Woolls, the man who taught Rolf Boldrewood, referred to the absence of the Australian equivalent of the ‘plains of Marathon, [the] pass of Thermopylae’, and its lack of ‘the triumphal arch, the high-raised battlement, the moated tower [...], 6 But later writers are more likely to appeal to medieval culture, reflecting the widespread rise of interest in medieval culture in Britain in the later nineteenth century and the consequent export of such interest to the colonies as medieval English texts became available as never before and the neo-Gothic architectural style reached its zenith.7

In an Australia that built its universities, cathedrals and many public buildings on neo-Gothic lines, writers located medieval culture as the bedrock of their own culture. In the 1900 poem by ‘Oriel’ in which a bushman asks why he is going to the war, his father gives him a stern history lesson about protecting freedom and democracy which looks back to Magna Carta, ‘When mail-clad fingers pointed and the trembling tyrant signed, The Charter that our liberty decreed’.8 Seeking, around the same time, to emphasize the lofty social origins of Sybylla Melvyn’s mother in My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin gives her an ancestor who sailed with William the Conqueror.9

The Middle Ages in Australia by the end of the century had become, just as they were in Britain, a storehouse of allusion and, as with all proverbial wisdom, could be drawn on to quite contradictory purposes. Stephensen’s own critique of Cowling gives a neat example. For all his scorning of ‘castellated culture’, Stephensen draws on a positive vision of medieval culture by comparing the situation of the Australian writer in the 1930s to that of Wycliffe and Chaucer in the late fourteenth century. Just as these two writers had to develop the English vernacular, so modern Australian writers must work with the emergent Australian vernacular. Cowling, Stephensen suggests, is like those Latinists ‘who [...] sniffed (no doubt) at the very idea of literature in English’. The situation of the late fourteenth-century writers is directly comparable with the Australian situation: ‘Here we are on the threshold of Australian self-consciousness, at the point of developing Australian nationality, and with it Australian culturef;] we are in our Chaucerian phase [...]’ (p. 211).

This juxtaposition, occurring within one paragraph, seems peculiarly selfundermining. In order to attack Cowling’s yearning for ‘castellated culture’, Stephensen makes a favourable comparison with perhaps the single most recognizable representative of that culture, Geoffrey Chaucer. A medieval comparison, in short, is used to demonstrate the invalidity of medieval comparisons. But the opposition makes sense as part of Stephensen’s dichotomy of primitive culture and castellated culture. Chaucer is primitive (but nobly so); his struggle with the vernacular is an authentic medieval moment. Like ‘Oriel’, Stephensen is happy to see Australian culture as rooted in English medieval culture: ‘Australian culture begins with a general background of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Herrick, Byron, Charles Dickens [...]’ (p. 205). Chaucer is not in fact a part of ‘castellated culture’, which refers to the secondary, belated yearnings after medieval culture of later periods. Chaucer’s struggle to refine the vernacular — reiterated in 1930s Australia — is an authentic and timeless writerly task.

This opposition between the authentic and the secondary is crucial to Stephensen’s vision of the lineages of Australian literature. To him, such writers as Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall, Price Waning, ‘and other melancholies’ form a bad, inauthentically Australian lineage (p. 230). On the positive side, there are Paterson, Lawson, Furphy, Miles Franklin, Steele Rudd, and the Bulletin school (p. 230–31). Clarke and the melancholies are obsessed with the notion of Australia ‘as a permanent colony’ and are responsible for perpetuating the theme of convictism (p. 230). They are ‘English-minded’ writers. Conversely, Stephensen’s positive lineage consists of ‘Australian-minded’ writers, which is a matter of disposition rather than birth: ‘Kendall, the Australian native, was as melancholy and English-minded as anyone English-born, in his attitude to Australia’ (p. 231).

It is on the face of it a peculiar move to establish melancholy as the primary artistic criterion of judgement. It involves Stephensen in some sleight of hand given that Lawson, no stranger to the blues, is an important member of the right lineage (the idea seems to be that if he was a melancholic, at least he was our melancholic). This odd literary criterion, melancholia, results not so much from the undoubted melancholia of some of these writers of the first group (Kendall, Gordon, Clarke) but from the set of substitutions that began with the motif of the absence of history. ‘History’, as we have seen, contracts to the Middle Ages; medieval castles and ruins, therefore, define England; Gothic derives from castles and ruins; and melancholy derives from the Gothic sensibility. The imposition of melancholy on the landscape by Clarke, Kendall, and others is therefore constructed as a peculiarly English thing to do and something that produces an unacceptable Gothic Australia.

Whether positively or negatively, Sinnett, Cowling, Stephensen, and Furphy have in common the notion of historical absence, an essential Australian lack. But it would be truer to say that the absence they describe is based on repression rather than a real lack. Furphy’s massive, empty longue duree can only be imagined by the forgetting of the continent’s indigenous inhabitants which is the condition of its becoming a virgin. Stephensen’s sense of consolation derived from a land not ‘staled’ by history requires a similar repression. In their context such repressions are hardly surprising when even today the great extent of indigenous history is often regarded as only an indifferent counter to the notion of historical lack. For many, Aboriginal tradition is the wrong kind of history, not a parallel history but a nonhistory. This was put very clearly by the then Reconciliation Minister, Philip Ruddock, in October 2000 when he told foreign newspapers that for all their long history in Australia, the Aborigines did not invent the wheel and did not have chariots.10

Fiction and ‘terra nullius’

In July 1870, writing an obituary of Charles Dickens in the Argus, Marcus Clarke showed a very clear sense of the difference between the literature of ‘castellated culture’ and modern realism. Clarke bestows some respect on Walter Scott, who ‘had cast the magic of his spells on tower and ruin, forest, moor, and fell. The knights had arisen and clanked in their stately armour through folios of commonplace; while distressed damsels and love-lorn squires outraged propriety with all the ease of fiction’.11 But it took Dickens, with a new kind of romance that Clarke called ‘the romance of reality’, to create a more durable literature when ‘the great London “public” recoiled before the mediaeval romance’ (p. 630). Dickens’s ‘fame lies in the fact that he painted men and manners, not as they should be, but as they are’ (p. 629) and he did more for England, Clarke concluded, than Scott had done for Scotland, precisely because he captured a real and present England while Scott, in effect, worked with castellated culture (p. 636).

Whatever else he is doing here Clarke, as a critic, is engaged in a form of ‘position-taking’ as a novelist, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, within the literary field of late nineteenth-century Australia. Cla...

Table of contents

• Medievalism AND THE Gothic IN Australian Culture
• Medievalism AND THE Gothic IN Australian Culture
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Medieval and Gothic Australia
• Part I Re-writing Medieval and Gothic Literature
• Marcus Clarke, Gothic, Romance
• Romantic Medievalism and Gothic Horror: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Kendall, and the Dilemmas of Antipodean Gothic
• ‘I See a Strangeness’: Francis Webb’s Norfolk and English Catholic Medievalism
• ‘Where No Knight in Armour Has Ever Trod’: The Arthurianism of Jessica Anderson’s Heroines
• Australian ‘Everymans’: Post-Medieval Spiritual Adventurers
• Medievalism and Memory Work: Archer’s Folly and the Gothic Revival Pile
• Medievalism as Heritage: Australian Children’s Books
• Part II Gothic Landscapes and Medieval Communities
• Passing through Customs: William Dampier’s Medieval Baggage
• Rebuilding the Middle Ages: Medievalism in Australian Architecture
• The Daughters of the Court: Women’s Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne
• ‘A Place of Horror and Vast Solitude’: Medieval Monasticism and the Australian Landscape
• A New Sort of Castle in the Air: Medievalist Communities in Contemporary Australia
• ‘The Only Limitation Is Your Imagination’: Quantifying the Medieval and Other Fantasies in Dungeons and Dragons
• The ‘UnAustralian’ Goth: Notes Towards a Dislocated National Subject
• Rituals of Nationhood: Medievalism, Neo-Traditionalism and Republicanism
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index