Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
11 - ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under
- 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad
- 2 ‘Hasten to the Land of Promise’: The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature
- 3 ‘Ever so Many Partings Welded Together’: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations
- 4 ‘The Heavens were on Fire’: Incendiarism and the Defence of the Settler Home
- 5 The ‘Australian Girl’ and the Domestic Ideal in Colonial Women's Fiction
- 6 Fugitive Homes: Multiple Migrations in Ethel Turner's Fiction
- 7 Devout Domesticity and Extreme Evangelicalism: The Unsettled Australian Domestic of Maud Jean Franc
- 8 ‘That's what Children are – Nought but Leg-Ropes’: Motherhood in Rosa Praed's Mrs Tregaskiss
- 9 The Antipodal House Beautiful: Louisa Alice Baker's Colonial Aesthetic
- 10 Antipodal Home Economics: International Debt and Settler Domesticity in Clara Cheeseman's A Rolling Stone
- 11 ‘What is in the Blood will Come Out’: Belonging, Expulsion and the New Zealand Settler Home in Jessie Weston's Ko Méri
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I know now what it is I am looking for. It is a home in this world. I don't mean four walls and a roof on top … I want a sort of natural order and containment, a centre of equipoise, an idea – not a cell into which one can retreat, but a place from which one can advance.
Robin Hyde's yearning for what she terms ‘a home in this world’ is a longing that many settler novelists share. Like Hyde, writing in the 1930s, nineteenth-century settler writers conceive of home in a variety of ways. At the most basic, literal level, ‘home’ is a physical, domestic place, the ‘four walls and a roof on top’ that Hyde describes. In settler fiction, home, or ‘Home’, is also a cultural space, the point of origin from which settlers move outwards to the new world, look back towards with nostalgia, try to replicate in the new land, and return to when possible. Home is also a metaphorical and ideological concept bound up with complex feelings of belonging and identity. For settler writers such as Jessie Weston, who is at the centre of this discussion of fictional representations of antipodal domesticity, home is ultimately about finding the place, or space, in which one can feel and be ‘at home’. In Weston's fiction the individual home, the physical space that settlers occupy, acts as a symbolic microcosm of the nation.
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- Information
- Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand , pp. 161 - 176Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014