Postcolonial Decolonisations: Dickens in Australian Neo-Victorian Literature.

Postcolonial Decolonisations: Dickens inAustralian Neo-Victorian Literature.

Jessica Hancock - October 2012Supervised by Professor Kieran Dolin

Bachelor of Arts (Honours)English and Cultural Studies

P o s t c o l o n i a l D e c o l o n i s a t i o n s | 1

University of Western Australia

Jessica Hancock 21080802


Contents

IntroductionAustralian Neo-Victorian Literature ………………….………………………………………2

Chapter OneThe Great Expectations of Jack Maggs ….….………………...………………………………9

Chapter TwoThe Civilising of Wanting ….…….….………………………………...…………………….20

Chapter ThreeBioluminescence in Sixty Lights ……….……………………………………….….….…….32

ConclusionPostcolonial Decolonisations ………………………….….….….….….….….….….………44

Bibliography ………………………………………….……………….….…...….….………47



Introduction: Australian Neo-Victorian Literature

There were, as in all crooked businesses, two sets of

books.

(Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, 109)

“You want the maculate, not the immaculate…”

“Yes”, said Lucy. “The world is like this, don’t you

think? Marked, and shadowed, and flecked with time.”

(Gail Jones, Sixty Lights, 146)

There exists in recent times a growing interest and

reengagement with the Victorian era. Products and fashions

ranging from interior design to clothing are drawing on

Victorian aesthetics, and historical romances, period dramas

and film adaptations of the Victorian literary canon abound

under the recently devised term of Neo-Victorianism. This very

term, ‘Neo-Victorian’, involves a necessary doubling, of the

past and the present. Moreover, for Neo-Victorian fiction

written in postcolonial countries such as Australia, there is

a spatial as well as temporal element of duality, with concern



for both the centre (of the Victorian empire) and the

antipodean. If indeed there are two sets of books in crooked

business, as Jack Maggs suggests, then Australian Neo-Victorian

literature is undoubtedly an enterprise concerned with at

least two sets.

The first, temporal, doubling is inherent in the very nature

of this ‘new’ Victorian interest. Neo-Victorianism is the

revived interest in the Victorian era that has been arising

since the 1960s, as the modernist reaction of anti-Victorian

sentiment gave way to a growing re-engagement and re-

evaluation with the era (Mitchell 2010: 43). This evaluation

brought about a doubling of conflicting attitudes, such as

expressed in discourses of sexuality: the Victorians were seen

as both sexually repressed, and yet, this coherency of their

perceived sexual repression was challenged (Kirchknopf 56).

Similarly, when the 1980s saw a growing momentum behind Neo-

Victorianism, it was divided along conflicting lines.

Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s

rhetoric of a return to idealised “Victorian values” of

thrift, enterprise and progress was juxtaposed against Labour



Party Leader Neil Kinnock’s own interpretation of these values

as cruelty, misery and squalor (Kirchknopf 56; Joyce 5).

Yet in spite of this duality, or perhaps because of the

plethora of interpretations it opens up, Neo-Victorianism has

continued to gain popularity and acknowledgement. For much of

this revival of interest, it has been known under a variety of

titles, from nostalgia to Thatcher’s return to Victorian

values. In fact, the online journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, first

published in only 2005, was opened with an article by Andrea

Kirchknopf that attempts to define the still vague terms used

in the new field, and concludes that the term “post-Victorian”

is actually the most appropriate. Nevertheless, the term Neo-

Victorian has continued gaining a self-perpetuating value

through its employment by academics, and is used to summarise

this revitalised interest in the Victorian era (which for

simplicity is defined by Queen Victoria’s reign of 1837-1901)

by the postmodern generation.

Neo-Victorian literature is an expression of this interest in

readdressing the Victorians through today’s media,



particularly the novel. Moreover, Neo-Victorian literature

adapts and appropriates not only the Victorian period, but the

literature and literary figures of the Victorians. This is a

form defined by Julie Sanders as “reinterpretations of

established texts in new generic contexts” (19), a borrowing

of original source materials and an employment of imagination

to create texts that often ‘speak to’ other texts, and

certainly other contexts. The Victorians themselves were

prolific adaptors and appropriators of material, and Neo-

Victorian fiction not only mimics this borrowing, but “returns

again and again to the scene of the mid-nineteenth century for

characters, plotlines, generic conventions, and narrative

idiom and style” (Sanders 121).

Neo-Victorian fiction applies this Victorian tendency for

adaptation, but also harnesses a postmodern consciousness to

this process, so that the borrowing process is often

critically self-aware. Such a postmodern consciousness is

driven by a scepticism of discourses and representation in

general, and often results in metafictional and self-aware

works. However, there are different theories of postmodernism,



and whilst Neo-Victorian fiction is postmodern, not all

postmodern theories are useful for interpreting Neo-Victorian

fiction. One such problematic theory of postmodernism is

proposed by theorists such as Fredric Jameson, who argue that

this intertextuality and self-reflexivity advance the

aesthetic without any specific agenda; that there is surface

aesthetic without any depth or overarching system or

structure. Jameson thus sees postmodernism as rejecting the

grand narratives of modernism in favour of the idea of

pastiche. For Jameson, this pastiche is both a parody and

satire, and yet one in a “dead language”, a “blank parody”

(17) of intertexts. Using the example of E.L. Doctorow’s

Ragtime, he argues that it is the “disappearance of the

historical referent. This historical novel can no longer set

out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’

our ideas and stereotypes about that past” (25). This idea of

pastiche is useful more broadly, but in its strictest sense it

is not applicable for much Neo-Victorian fiction. Blank

pastiche is too depoliticised, and removes the necessary depth

of history that makes the Neo-Victorianism significant.



An alternative way of interpreting postmodern Neo-Victorian

fiction is proposed by Linda Hutcheon in her theory of

historiographic metafiction. Historiographic metafiction is

“characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic

intertextuality”, and – significantly – an “equally self-

conscious dimension of history” (3). Hutcheon argues that

texts only create meaning through reference to prior

discourses, and that historiographic metafiction is

particularly driven by this construction in referring to both

historical and literary intertexts (10). This means that texts

can have self-reflexivity and intertextuality, yet not descend

into blank pastiche, because they are engaged in evaluating

both the Victorian and postmodern eras, rather than neither.

This theory is particularly useful for highly ironic and self-

aware texts. Authors of the recent Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in

the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn,

are strict in their definition of what falls into the genre of

Neo-Victorianism, proposing that “To be part of the Neo-

Victorianism we discuss in this book, texts (literary, filmic,

audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with

the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians”



(4, their emphasis). Here, historiographic metafiction

provides a valuable interpretation.

Nevertheless, historiographic metafiction does not help in

understanding all Neo-Victorian literature. Another way of

interpreting this genre of fiction in a way that does not

descend into blank parody is through ‘memory text’, as it is

theorised by Kate Mitchell. Rather than overtly politicising

and criticising the historical representation, memory texts

create cultural memory, replacing critical irony with

affective interest (Mitchell 2010: 27). Memory texts are

“constructed accounts of the past that emerge from and

participate in contemporary memorial practices” (Mitchell

2010: 32), thus engaging in the revived interest in the

Victorian era without having to ironically subvert it. The

focus shifts from the writing of the past, and the

problematisation of historical representation that this

entails, to the reading of the past, and the connections between

the Victorian era and our own (Mitchell 2008: 101). This

framework for interpreting texts allows for a much broader

range of media than historiographic metafiction – and



definitions such as that proposed by Heilmann and Llewellyn –

permits, and also allows texts to be interpreted from another

perspective.

These are useful frameworks for interpreting Neo-Victorian

fiction, and need to be considered alongside other frameworks

for interpreting specific forms of this fiction, such as

Australia Neo-Victorian fiction. The interpretation of

historical fiction in Australia has already been problematised

in other debates. As part of the Commonwealth of Nations,

Australia is necessarily informed by its continued

relationship with Britain, which builds on its past

relationship as part of the British Empire. For one hundred

and twenty-two years Australia was a set of colonies belonging

to Britain, and though although a century has passed since

federation and the republic debate grows, in many ways the

British heritage still defines the Australian culture,

especially literary culture. Postcolonial discourses are

necessarily acknowledged, and often employed, in different

ways and for different purposes: which leads to debates over

the representation of history. The ‘History Wars’ in Australia



concern the representation of the development of Australia

throughout this history, and though they tend to focus around

the representation of Aboriginals, they also extend into the

distinction between history and fiction. This was aggravated

by Kate Grenville, author of The Secret River, who argued that her

novel was “up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars,”

and that “The historians are doing their thing, but let me as

a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of

empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult

events” (Grenville).

Of course, the debate between history and fiction and their

differing representations of the past has existed since the

Victorian era itself, with history often viewed as ‘fact’ and

an unmediated window into the past, while fiction is seen as

imaginatively ‘making-up’ the past. Yet Grenville’s self-

aggrandisement has problematised Australian historical

fiction, including Neo-Victorian literature. There is now a

perceived need in a modern audience for a writer to draw a

line between fact and fiction, at least for authors such as

Richard Flanagan. “It's interesting that 200 years ago you



could invent a ridiculous memoir or you could tell your own

story and pass it off as a novel. Now people write a novel and

they have to pass it off as memoir to get it published,”

(Flanagan, qtd. in Steger). Further to this end, Wanting

includes a post story Author’s Note, opening with the words

“This novel is not a history, nor should it be read as one”

(255). Australian Neo-Victorian authors are very aware of the

debate between representations of the past in history and

fiction, and they treat their historical subjects accordingly.

These varying ways of treating history are explored in more

detail throughout this dissertation. Chapter One discusses

Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, a readdressing of Charles Dickens’

Great Expectations through the convict character of Maggs. This

novel is concerned with voicing a postcolonial perspective in

an imperial world, and it employs the historical figure of

Dickens himself as a character in order to engage debates

about authorship.

Similarly, Richard Flanagan also uses Dickens as one of his

central characters in Wanting, which will be explored in



Chapter Two. As the title suggests, Wanting is concerned with

the universality of human desire, set around the dual

narrative of Dicken’s love affair with Ellen Ternan in the

1850s and 60s, and of the Tasmanian Aboriginal girl Mathinna

in the 1840s. Flanagan politicises this, through critiquing

the false binary of the unrestrained desire of the savages

compared with the control of desire by civilised peoples.

Hutcheon’s framework of historiographic metafiction is highly

applicable to such novels as both Jack Maggs and Wanting, which

are written with political agendas, are concerned with the

construction of representations, and are ironic in their

delivery of this.

Yet Chapter Three is an exploration of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights,

which is better interpreted as a memory text as it is

theorised by Kate Mitchell. This is the story of a young

Australian woman’s life, as she moves through Australia,

England and India during the 1860s and 70s, developing her

photographic talent and passion for life. Jones proposes a

philosophy of bioluminescence – that life creates light, and

that light is connected with images, experiences and memories



– in a text that takes a less critical, though no less self-

reflexive or intertextual, approach to Neo-Victorian

representation.



Chapter One: The Great Expectations of Jack Maggs

Neo-Victorian literature seems to be an organic process,

growing out of the desire to readdress the Victorian era from

a postmodern perspective. This is particularly true of

Australian Neo-Victorian fiction, which often seeks to engage

with the issues arising from postcolonialism. In modern

Australia the interest in Britain and Britishness that has

possessed the country since colonial times is met with the

growing sense of a valid and distinctive Australian identity,

and there is a difficulty in balancing these conflicting

interests. It was out of this unsettled tension that

Australian author Peter Carey’s novel, Jack Maggs, came to

readdress the Victorians. In an interview, Carey explained the

origins of the novel:

Then one day, contemplating the figure of Magwitch, the

convict in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, I suddenly

thought THIS MAN IS MY ANCESTOR. And then: this is

UNFAIR! Dickens’ Magwitch is foul and dark, frightening,

murderous. Dickens encourages us to think of him as the



“other,” but this was my ancestor, he was not “other”. I

wanted to reinvent him, to possess him, to act as his

advocate. I did not want to diminish his “darkness” or

his danger, but I wanted to give him all the love and

tender sympathy that Dickens’ first person narrative

provides his English hero Pip. That’s where I started.

The journey itself is, of course, far more complicated.

(Quoted in Myers 456.)

This is the conceit of this early Australian Neo-Victorian

novel: that Australia can assert itself as unique from Britain

through a reengagement with and – significantly – a rewriting

of the Victorian era. This sentiment is displayed throughout

the novel, as well as in other Australian literature, and

suggests Australia’s continued reliance on and obsession with

the ‘Mother Country’ and the cultural products of Britain. Yet

according to Linda Hutcheon, rewriting the Victorian era and

Victorian literature does not and cannot reject the canon.

Instead, a work of historiographic metafiction such as Jack

Maggs “asserts its rebellion [against the canon] through

ironic abuse of it” (12). Historiographic metafiction is



intensively self-reflexive and intertextual, the latter of

which is particularly pronounced in Jack Maggs because it is an

adaptation of Great Expectations. According to Julie Sanders,

adaptations are revisionary works, talking to a source

material and an often new audience, “achieved most often by

offering a revised point of view from the ‘original’, adding

hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and

marginalized” (Sanders 19).

This is precisely what happens to that Victorian classic, Great

Expectations. Peter Carey’s 1997 novel Jack Maggs is a story that

speaks back to Dickens, but rather than a simple adaptation,

Jack Maggs is an intertextual parody of the original text. The

deliberately eponymous Jack Maggs is a convict who returns

from his sentence in New South Wales, in order to meet the

gentleman he has anonymously funded from the colonies. Having

made his fortune in Australia, and forwarded it towards the

prosperity and education of a young man who as a child was

kind to him, Maggs arrives in London and seeks out Henry

Phipps. This is a familiar plot to any reader acquainted with

Great Expectations, but a reader expecting a straightforward



adaptation of the original from the Australian perspective

would be disappointed. The characters of Dickens’ Magwitch and

Carey’s Maggs immediately have marked differences. Magwitch

returns to London in 1829 at the age of 60, and Maggs returns

to London at an earlier and more fashionable time of his life,

and in 1837 – the year of Victoria’s ascension to the throne

of the United Kingdom, emphasising Carey’s rewriting of the

Victorian era.

Moreover, these events all take place in the background of the

novel, and it is Carey’s own fictions that fill the

foreground. The liminal convict – a pivot for Great Expectations,

but nevertheless a sidelined character – is the protagonist,

and his plot is Carey’s re-writing of the novel. Maggs, like

Magwitch, attempts to go directly to his funded English

gentleman, but unlike Pip, Phipps is not at home, and the

whole course of their interactions is thus radically altered.

Instead, Maggs becomes a footman for the neighbour Percy

Buckle, a former grocer and now another gentleman ‘made’ by

the inheritance of a fortune. It is here that Maggs meets

Tobias Oates, a young author who seeks to mesmerise Maggs in



order to explore the ‘Criminal Mind’, in exchange for

providing Maggs with the man who he claims can track down

Phipps. The plot then follows these central characters, with

few (and entirely negative) portrayals of the debauched

Phipps.

Allusions to Great Expectations are recurring and complex, as when

Oates and Maggs talk about the story of Maggs meeting the

young Phipps, and the boy feeding the convict a pig’s trotter.

This scene recalls the moment in Great Expectations when Pip feeds

Magwitch the stolen pie, and Carey does not shirk from

representing his characters in ways sympathetic to the

originals. Maggs “gnaws” the trotter looking “fierce and wild”

(313) much as Magwitch ate with “decided similarity to the

dog’s way of eating” (19), and the young Phipps is as scared

and wary a boy as the young Pip was. Carey even borrows

dialogue, having Maggs say “I am much of your opinion” (313):

precisely the same words as Magwitch spoke. Yet it is these

invocations of sameness that make the differences that do

exist more potent. Just as Magwitch was touched by Pip’s

innocence, so too was Maggs by Phipps, and yet, when Phipps



rejects his adopted father’s affections much as Pip does, the

betrayal is so much deeper because the reader is in Jack Maggs

aligned with the father, not the boy. This is true even of the

dialogue: while Magwitch said “I’m much of your opinion, boy”

(18), agreeing with Pip that he had the “ague” (fever), Maggs

says that he is of much the same opinion as Tobias Oates in

thinking that the boy Phipps was kind. In the former, these

words are spoken derisively and off-handedly by a starving

convict, in the latter they are spoken contemplatively by a

reminiscing philanthropist. The sameness here too is used to

emphasise the difference, this time in the reader’s

perspective. These differences in perspective and focalisation

are at their most powerful when alluding closely to the

original novel, because the familiar becomes destabilised in

reading one event in multiple ways. This can be interpreted as

the philosophy of the novel as a whole: revisiting the

familiar territory of Great Expectations with a postcolonial

perspective, and thus destabilising it.

Not only is Great Expectations revisited, but Charles Dickens

himself is defamiliarised in Jack Maggs. The character of Tobias



Oates complicates the adaptation of Great Expectations, because

far from being based on a character, he is based on the young

Charles Dickens himself. Carey delves into and fictionalises

his private life, blending Dickens’ idealising relationship

with his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, with his adulterous

affair with Ellen Ternan. Notably, this use of literary

figures in Neo-Victorian fiction is a growing one. When Peter

Carey appropriated Dickens as a character for Jack Maggs, it was

summarised as “overt intertextuality” (Hassall 130) using a

historiographic framework. However, as Neo-Victorian

literature has developed since Jack Maggs and the appropriation

of literary figures as fictional characters becomes more

common, the ethical and aesthetic issues raised by this become

more prominent (Heilmann and Llewellyn 21-22). In an

interview, Peter Carey admits that because Dickens “knew the

truth but distorted it,” it took him “a long time to

complicate that character and to stop being hard on him and to

love him a little” (Carey, qtd. in Savu 128). Savu scrutinises

this, and concludes that Carey attempts to examine the process

of memory and history as much as to engage with the story of

Dickens. This confirms the place of Jack Maggs as



historiographic metafiction, a postmodern form that examines

the representation of representations and the construction of

texts. Furthermore, the trope of employing Victorian literary

figures in Neo-Victorian fiction emphasises the “historical

relativity and quasi-fictiveness of the Victorians to our own

period” (Heilmann and Llewellyn 22), for it not only draws

attention to the constructed nature of texts, but to the

convoluted nature of our relationship to the Victorians.

Novels such as Carey’s not only reconstruct the Victorian era

in the novel, but the range and extent of the novels construct

a familiarity with the Victorian for a modern audience.

Dickens is defamiliarised in Jack Maggs in order to critique

assumptions of the construction of fiction, just as Great

Expectations is defamiliarised to critique assumptions of English

identity.

The writing and style of Jack Maggs, especially the use of

caricatures, is intentionally reminiscent of Dickens. Much as

Peter Carey emulated the distinctive vernacular style of Ned

Kelly’s “Jerilderie Letter” in writing True History of the Kelly Gang,

he employs Dickens’ techniques for his own fiction. Dickensian



caricatures and elaborate, character-associating names abound,

in what is both an emulation and a parody of Great Expectations.

This is particularly overt in cases such as the name of Mrs

Halfstairs, who had her office “neither of the basement nor

the ground floor, but located like a hunter’s hide in the

branches of a tree” (13). Carey is also adept at creating

original, character-encapsulating paragraphs, as when he

describes Miss Mott as so “lean and sinewy [that] there was

nowhere much for such a violent shiver to hide itself.

Consequently it went right up her spine and disappeared inside

her little white cap and then, just when it seemed lost, it

came out the other side and pulled up the ends of her thin

mouth in a grimace” (18). Here, Carey is also employing the

comma riddled long sentence style that is seen as typical of

much of Dickens’ work. Similarly, there are also the stories

within stories in Jack Maggs, such as Maggs’ rewriting of his

past life, that mimic the subplots of Great Expectations. This

Dickensian style is an acknowledgement by Carey of his debt to

Dickens and the original story, but is also Carey’s way of

reinterpreting the story. Carey in Jack Maggs is appropriating

the original writer’s style in order to convincingly rewrite



him. Carey’s employment of Dickens’ own techniques work to

further his own parodic agenda and highlight the relationship

between the original and the appropriated text.

This parodic and especially postcolonial agenda can be seen

particularly clearly when examining the aptly named Ma

Britten. She is the adopted mother of Jack Maggs, and the

“allegorical figuration for Mother England… mirroring the

maternalism implied in the relationship between Britain and

‘her’ colonial outposts” (Janet Myers 460). The allegorical

relationship between Ma Britten and England is pushed by Carey

in their parallel treatment of Jack Maggs. These parental

figures of Maggs are equally exploitative: Ma Britten

initially rejects the adoption of Maggs until she is convinced

that the child’s induction into a life of crime will have

material gain, and Britain ‘adopts’ the Australian continent

in pursuit of material wealth and space. Similarly, they are

both what they were “raised to be” (125) – useful, but

ultimately criminal, and despised as different. To take the

analogy even further, Beverly Taylor (2009) likens Ma

Britten’s procurement of abortions to Britain’s figurative



‘abortions’ of its citizens to the penal colonies. Percy

Buckle emphasises the cruelty in this abortion in reminiscing

that his sister “suffered transportation to that same cursed

place… God help us all, that Mother England would do such a

thing to one of her own” (106). During his exile in Australia,

Maggs idealises his home country, yet both the individual and

the country forfeit him, for when Maggs is received by Ma

Britten she orders him not to “bring [his] trouble here” (5).

Britten and Britain deny their responsibility for Maggs’

trouble, yet just as Ma Britten beat Maggs (285), it is the

King who flogs Maggs in the colonies (378). Throughout the

novel, there is a conscious relationship between Ma Britten

and Mother Britain, mothers of Maggs and Australia, who

exploit, abort and deny their children.

The conclusion of Jack Maggs also mirrors Great Expectations, as

they are both in the style of the Victorian realist novel. As

Pip learns humility and to put aside his ‘great expectations’

in favour of making the best of his reality, so too does Maggs

accept his Australian heritage, and relinquish his “better

class of son” (378) for his real sons in Australia. There is



even the Victorian happy marriage and a swift, narrator’s

summarisation of the years following, including a death-bed

scene with “his weeping sons and daughters crowded around his

bed” (392). Though Anthony Hassall calls the ending “Doubly

unexpected, [in being] determinedly Australian and optimistic”

(129), it is entirely consistent with Carey’s Australian

emphasis in the novel, and his appropriation of the Victorian

novel. The ending, moreover, gives primacy to the colonial:

Jack Maggs dies “without ever having read ‘That Book’” (392)

in which Oates inscribes Maggs’ story, effectively

“‘dissolving’ the binary opposition between primal text and

sequel” (Janet Myers 470). Yet the ending is also problematic,

for in closing the novel in such a generic convention, Carey

is in essence perpetuating the same support for “the advance

of nineteenth-century capitalism through the spread of empire”

(Gribble 186) that Great Expectations conformed with. Maggs does

not embrace an Australian identity – there was no national

identity in these colonies which were yet to become a nation

(Janet Myers 468) – but replaces his dreams of English

domesticity for English domesticity within Australia. After

all, Maggs became president of the local cricket club (391).



Carey has spent the novel critiquing the imperial patriarchy

of Britain, only to replace it with an Australian version. The

ending, then, is typically Victorian, and confirms the power

of British culture in Australia.

This uncritical advancement of English domesticity is also

related to the uncritical perpetuation of Australian

mythology. For although Dickens may have constructed

‘Australianness’ for his own purposes and according to his own

time and society, Carey does not escape the same fate, as he

merely replaces the clichéd Victorian corrupted convict with

the clichéd Australian heroic convict. Carey has drawn on the

trope of the underdog convict, more sinned against than

sinning, which was formed towards the end of the convict

transportation era and driven by the need to create pride in

Australianness. Graeme Turner, in his work on Australian

national fictions, neatly summarises the depiction of this

early model of the Australian hero, which can easily be

applied to the convict Jack Maggs in Carey’s novel: “The

typical depiction of the authentic Australian in the past is

that of the common man of authentic values, who is constantly



oppressed and victimised by British imperialism or by

authority generally” (108). This was the myth perpetuated in

earlier Australian texts, such as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of

His Natural Life, in which the protagonist convict was wrongly

convicted. Yet by the 1980s, academics such as David Myers had

discerned a growing binary between the idealised myths of the

past – such as the mistreated, underdog convict – and the

ideology of dissatisfaction that was emerging with

postmodernism, and other broader movements challenging the

traditional forms of interpretation. In spite of this, Carey’s

Jack Maggs panders to the earlier Australian insistence on

removing the convict stain by victimising their convict

ancestry. Carey himself admits that whilst he considers

himself to have written a quintessentially Australian story,

he hopes that it reflects “the Australia of the past, not the

Australia of the future” (qtd. in Savu 128). Though Maggs has

a violent temper, he is ultimately the typical underdog,

oppressed by the British, and this sits awkwardly within the

Neo-Victorian context of the novel.



These concerns of perpetuating Australian myths and English

domesticity within an Australian setting can be at least

somewhat abated by examining the novel’s unsettling

conclusion. The ending is unsettling enough to draw attention

to itself, implying Carey’s metafictional intention in the

overtly Victorian ending. Great Expectations too was ultimately

given an overly optimistic ending, with the possibility of

redemption for the relationship of Pip and Estella, though

Dickens himself preferred the bleaker, and perhaps more

mature, ending, in which Estella is chastened by suffering

(Flint xx). Of course, as in Dickens’ eventual ending of Great

Expectations, the characters in Jack Maggs do not remain unscathed

by their pasts – “Mercy Larkin’s wedding finger was blown

away… the pair were finally matched in their deformity” (390)

before they settle in Australia, emblematic of the physical

and psychological scars inflicted by their experiences. In

spite of this, the conclusion has a “fairy tale, deliberately

unreal” sense, following the Dickensian precedent (Woodcock

137). As observed by Julie Sanders, the female protagonist

Mercy is first seen handling books in Percy Buckle’s library,

and is last spotted collecting Oates’ novel The Death of Maggs,



creating “a fictional, a literary, aspect, then, to this

ending which seems inescapable” (133). The metafictional

aspects of the novel, especially in its de-naturalisation of

the writing process by emphasising its role in the novel, is

at play in the ending itself.

The metafiction of the novel is particularly interesting in

its concern with writing, as the characters attempt to seize

control of Jack Maggs’ narrative. The reader is able to piece

together Maggs’ story through three different authorships: his

own, in letters written to his adopted son Henry Phipps, and

Tobias Oates’, who mesmerizes him in order to turn his life

into a story, as well as the narrator’s commentary.

Significantly, Maggs’ story is shrouded in hidden texts, as

when the convict authors his letters and watches the “fresh

lines fade, first to lilac, then to white until, that is, they

became invisible” (89). This is also true for Oates, who is

“stumbling through the dark of the convict’s past, groping in

the shadows” (109). Janet Myers argues that the convolutions

of both the writing and ‘reading’ of Maggs’ story suggest “the

liminality and inaccessibility of Maggs’ own narrative and the



degree to which ownership of his story is contested and

shrouded in secrecy” (458). Yet the motives for concealing

these hidden texts are telling, for while Oates’ “crooked

business” (109) consists of a book of truths for himself and a

book of lies for Maggs, the invisible writing by Maggs is a

subversive reclamation of the Australian story (Janet Myers

458). By drawing attention to the writing of stories,

especially hidden ones, Carey is also alluding to his own

agenda of validating the Australian narrative in writing the

Australian side of Great Expectations.

The struggle between Australia and England in the construction

of the Australian identity is neatly symbolised in the

struggle for authorship of reality: for control of the

fictionalising of it is fought between an Australian and an

Englishman. Tobias Oates employs imperialist discourse in his

interest in Jack Maggs’ memories, calling it “the Criminal

Mind… awaiting its first cartographer” (107). In this way he

mimics the English explorers of the Australian continent, who

justified their investigations through the rationale of

scientific discovery. Similarly, Jack Maggs’ narration mimics



the letter-writing of the early Australians, and his refusal

to accept his Australian heritage – “I am not of that race!”

(372) – is undermined by his own use of Australian cultural

markers, such as the word “mate” (278). Maggs also employs a

secretive writing style, penning his words backwards in an

invisible ink, which requires lemon juice and a mirror to

reveal the contents of the letters. This convoluted means of

communicating represents the double nature of the process of

writing the antipodean perspective: Maggs’ writing is liminal

and barely accessible, and yet, subversive, as it allows him

to express his emotions (Myers 458). In fact, Maggs is aware

that much of his own mind is authored by the English, for he

traces his idyllic view of English domesticity back to his

illegal entry into a genteel house, when he saw “that which he

later knew was meant by authors when they wrote of England,

and of Englishmen” (384). The construction of the Australian

identity may be fought by an Australian and an Englishman, but

even Maggs – and Carey – admits that Australians are indebted

to English authors.



Ultimately, this dual relationship of Australia with Britain,

of indebtedness and rebelliousness, is at the core of Jack

Maggs. Certainly, this novel is about the construction of

representations. Carey employs Dickens as a character in much

the same way that Dickens employed the people from his own

world, and the metafictional imagery (such as Mercy in the

library) of the novel further alludes to this self-conscious

and self-reflexive construction. However, the novel is more

concerned with critiquing the English canon through a

postcolonial perspective. Thus, Ma Britten acts metonymically

for Britain, and her treatment of Maggs read as the brutal

mothering and aborting of the Australian colonies. Similarly,

Oates and Maggs struggle with authorship in a metaphorical

duel between competing ideologies and discourses, of the

postcolonial against the imperial. Throughout the novel, Carey

makes it clear that a simple rebellion against the colonial

heritage is futile, for Australia is too indebted and

engrained with British heritage. Thus, we are left with the

conclusion of the novel, and the philosophy: that an

Australian identity, as Jack Maggs finds, is at once unique

from and yet utterly derived from a British one.



Chapter Two: The Civilising of Wanting

Although European settlement of Australia began half a century

before Victoria came to the throne of the United Kingdom, the

Victorian era saw much of the significant colonisation and

consolidation of European control of the country. The

establishment of Europeans in the colonies advanced from

meagre in the early 19th century to proven by the end of it,

and much of the displacement of the Aboriginal populations

occurred during this time. Just as Peter Carey wrote Jack Maggs

in order to readdress the Australian side of Great Expectations,

Richard Flanagan wrote his novel Wanting as a response to this

colonisation of Tasmania, and the effects that the

‘civilising’ process had upon the Aboriginal population of the

island.

The “Black War” in Van Diemen’s Land1 was a period of conflict

between the Europeans and Aboriginals, beginning with

heightened tensions in the 1830s, leading to martial law from

1828-1832 and the rounding up and relocation of the remaining

Aboriginals to Flinders Island by 1833. This marked the 1 Tasmania was known as Van Diemen’s Land until 1856.



decline of the Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, with the last

full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal, Truganini, dying in 1876.

Other recent Neo-Victorian fiction, including Matthew Kneale’s

The English Passengers (2000) and Rohan Whilson’s The Roving Party

(2011), has also focused on these years of conflict. In an

interview with Jason Steger for The Age newspaper, Flanagan

describes seeing a painting of a Tasmanian Aboriginal girl

called Mathinna, whose bare feet had been concealed underneath

the frame of the picture in order to hide them.

“It was this odd combination of the dress of the Age of

Reason over an Aboriginal child at the end of what I knew

had been this terrible war of extermination. Really, it's

the bare feet chopped off by the wooden frame” (Flanagan,

qtd. in Steger).

As a poignant denial of this artistic restraint, the first

image of Mathinna in the early pages of Wanting is of her

running barefoot through native wallaby grass. In the pages

before this scene, Flanagan sets out the situation: the

remaining Tasmanian Aboriginal population has been rounded up



by George Augustus Robertson, the Protector, and relocated to

Flinders Island, where they are all slowly dying. Mathinna is

then introduced: at “seven years old, the earth was still new

and extraordinary in its delights, the earth still ran up

through her feet to her head into the sun, and it was…

possible to be exhilarated by running” (9). This affecting

image is contrasted throughout the rest of the novel against

the insistence of Mathinna being “shod” (117), which makes her

feel “as if her body had been blindfolded” (119). The novel

emulates the painting in this, for much as Mathinna’s senses

are made to submit to shoes, the canvas speaks for Mathinna,

and the conventions of the frame are able to cut off her feet.

In these early pages Flanagan introduces the reader to Charles

Dickens as a man left distraught by the death of his daughter

Dora. The novel proceeds following these dual narratives, of

Mathinna’s life in Tasmania in the 1840s and 50s, and of

Charles Dickens’ love affair with Ellen Ternan in the 1850s

and 60s. Mathinna, at the age of seven, is adopted by the then

Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, the arctic explorer Sir John

Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. However, the



Franklins are forced to return to England when Sir John is

recalled, and Mathinna is sent to the St John’s Orphanage in

Hobart, where she is treated poorly. She is returned to

Flinders Island for several years, before the entire remaining

population of 47 Tasmanian Aboriginals is returned to an area

just south of Hobart in 1847. There, Mathinna falls into

prostitution and alcohol abuse, before her death at age

seventeen, when she is strangled and left in a puddle.

Meanwhile, in 1845, Sir John Franklin has set off leading an

expedition to chart the Northwest Passage, and never returned.

Lady Jane Franklin urges search parties, and nearly a decade

later, when Franklin’s crew are accused of cannibalism, she

asks Charles Dickens to clear her late husband’s name. Dickens

manages to help glorify Sir John through arguments that an

Englishman would never resort to the practices of savages, yet

the story remained with him. Emotionally estranged from his

wife, Dickens begins dedicating himself to his play with

Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, eventually hiring professional

actresses to replace his amateur family members. He falls in

love with the 18 year-old actress Ellen Ternan, and the last



image of him is on stage, in the midst of this revelation of

his desire.

These dual narratives allow Flanagan to explore a range of

voices and issues. The most powerful and unifying element

throughout the novel, however, is the humanity of the

characters, and – as the title suggests – the universality of

‘wanting.’ Richard Flanagan writes in the Author’s Note that

“the stories of Mathinna and Dickens, with their odd but

undeniable connection, suggested to me a meditation on desire,

the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power

in human affairs. That, and not history, is the true subject

of Wanting” (256). Certainly, the universality of desire is one

of the most cohesive and emotionally engaging frameworks of

the story (although there is a politicisation of this, which

is explored later in this chapter). The epigraphs that open

the novel are also telling. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is quoted from

his 1864 novella Notes From Underground:

“You see, reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is

unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies



only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a

manifestation of the whole of life.” (Part 1, Chapter

VIII, page 2.)

In a similar vein, there is a line from Ecclesiastes 1:15:

“That which is wanting cannot be numbered.”

Interestingly, the words translated as “wanting” in these

quotations can both have very different interpretations.

Dostoyevsky’s “wanting” can also be “will”, while

Ecclesiastes’ “wanting” can be “lacking” or “missing.” This is

also the case throughout the novel; the way in which the

characters want, desire or lack can be ‘translated’ in various

ways, while maintaining the sense that the characters all

share this feeling, in ways both unique to them and common to

them all. The way in which these characters experience and

interpret their wanting shall be explored further.

Just as the characters all experience wanting, so too do they

all attempt to deny it. Repression of desire is as much a



driving force in the text as the desire itself. The characters

justify these repressions to themselves in various ways. As

Dickens grows more obsessed with his role as Wardour in The

Frozen Deep and with Ellen Ternan, he attempts to suppress his

desire for the latter, to “behave nobly and selflessly, like

Wardour” (210). Mathinna, being transported alone to the St

John’s Orphanage after being sent there by Sir John, tells

herself “she was warm and safe… consoled by such necessary

untruths and with the comforting fullness of toasted cheese in

her belly to further the illusion” (184). Both these

characters find any repression inadequate: Dickens grows ever

more obsessed, and Mathinna vomits up the toasted cheese

(187). No matter how inconsequential the desire, the

repression of wanting is always inadequate, and often the

characters suffer for attempting the repression.

The repression of desire in Wanting is in many ways a

sophisticated extension of the Neo-Victorian cliché of the

sexually repressed Victorians. Matthew Sweet describes the

stereotype of prudish Victorian sexuality that has arisen in

the twentieth century, such as the myth of John Ruskin’s



repulsion at the sight of female pubic hair on his wedding

night: a “narrative of sexual ignorance that seems at odds

with the embarrassingly explicit public debate about the

progress of the marriage” (Sweet 218). Sweet argues that such

myths have arisen and continue to exist in order for us to

distance ourselves from the Victorians (231). Much modern

historical fiction set in the Victorian era is concerned with

a repressed sexual attitude and certainly, there is the

possibility of post-Victorian smugness and sexual liberation

in describing the perceived repression of that era. However

Sweet, when writing on the possibility of overcoming the

clichés about the Victorians, proposes that the same will

happen to our era, and that “there will be nothing we can do

to stop it” (230). While we are indeed in a post-Freudian

twenty-first century, and psychoanalytic thought has altered

the conceptions of the human subconscious, especially about

repression (Sweet 209), this is not to suggest that this

advanced thinking cannot help to re-evaluate the Victorians.

This is precisely what Wanting achieves, by demonstrating that

wanting and repression are parts of all societies and all

human experience. In the novel, repression of sexual desire is



undoubtedly associated with the ‘civilised’ cultural practices

of the English. Yet the conception of repressed desire is

extended beyond the sexual to all aspects of life, and beyond

the English to the Tasmanian Aboriginals. They are not

idealised, and they are shown to experience emotion in the

same way as the English, albeit within a different cultural

context. In this way, Flanagan employs the over-used myth of

Victorian sexual repression, and engages with it in a far more

sophisticated way than the cliché.

The novel is able to demonstrate the universality of wanting

by undermining one of the central binaries that is established

by the British: that desire separates the civilised people

from the savage ones. This is especially evident in Charles

Dickens’ defence of Sir John against the charges of

cannibalism. Dr John Rae, after talking with the Inuit tribes,

had written a report to the British Admiralty suggesting that

Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage had

resulted ultimately in cannibalism and the death of all the

crew. Lady Jane Franklin called on Dickens to defend her

husband’s honour, in response to which Dickens wrote a piece



“to sow doubt over every detail of Dr Rae’s account” (41).

Yet, more than questioning the scientific integrity of the

report, Dickens takes the opportunity to draw a line between

civilised men and savages, writing that “the mark of wisdom

and civilisation was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny

it and crush it” (47). This defence by Dickens is presented

ironically in Wanting, and demonstrates that although

civilisation may dress itself in the belief of its control

over desire, human desire is unconquerable. For Dickens is

writing less about cannibalism and more about his own struggle

with wanting, as the novel elucidates by placing it in the

context of his regrets over his past desires. The chapter ends

with the prediction that “the cost… of his ultimate failure to

discipline his own great undisciplined heart… would be the

price of his soul” (48). This undermines the binary between

civilisation and savagery that Dickens is furiously attempting

to maintain, and reminds the readers of the novel’s philosophy

that even the civilised cannot control their wanting.

This driving convention of separating civilisation from

savagery through the control of desire is done in an



interesting fashion in regards to Lady Jane Franklin. Lady

Jane was unable to bear children, and in Wanting, this becomes a

subconscious driver of her anguish and her decisions. The

power of denial of the subconscious for altering conscious

beliefs is alluded to when Lady Jane tells her friends that

“it had never been a burden, but was, in an odd way, a relief.

This was untrue, but over time, like all evasions, it created

its own truth” (49-50). Her adoption of Mathinna is explicitly

directed by maternal instincts, by the desire “to dress that

little girl up and tie ribbons in her hair, make her giggle

and give her surprises and coo lullabies in her ear” (118),

yet these are rigidly suppressed under the philosophy that

echoes Dickens’ own. If his inability to conquer his desire

“would be the price of his soul” (48), then for Lady Jane the

“risks of the heart… might confuse her; risks of the soul…

might undo her” (118). For Lady Jane, Greek education with

Christian preaching are the divisive markers of civilisation,

and with them, the ability to overcome the more primal

instincts in herself and others. The goals of the “experiment”

to civilise Mathinna overrides Lady Jane’s affection, and she

devises a strict education of arithmetic, rhetoric and



Catechism in order to overcome both her own repressed

mothering urges, and Mathinna’s perceived savage nature. This

further emphasises the distinction that the British make

between the civilised and the savage, and further proves this

binary false, by illustrating the universality of wanting.

Wanting does not attempt to devalue the powerful historical

personages within it. Certainly, their discourse and power is

questioned, and the way in which they exercise their authority

is criticised, yet they are also treated with humanity. This

does not subordinate the political to the personal, as is the

case in some other Neo-Victorian works of fiction. In relating

Mister Pip, a postcolonial examination of Great Expectations by New

Zealand author Lloyd Jones, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn

explore the phenomenon of subordinating the political to the

personal:

Interestingly, what seems to be desired in and through

Mister Pip is not the potential for a postcolonial critique

of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-61) but a re-assertion

of the themes of emotional authenticity and sincerity



within individual human relationships. It might be no

coincidence, then, that these very same themes are now

coming forth into a series of new debates within

Victorian studies too, and that feeling and the affective

are re-entering critical discourse on this period. (26)

Certainly, in Wanting, as with Mister Pip and other Neo-Victorian

novels, the emphasis is on the human experience, especially

the emotional. At times, political events, such as the Crimean

war (1853-56), are self-consciously downplayed for the purpose

of advancing the emotional intrigue, such as when Ellen Ternan

awkwardly says to Dickens that “I liked what you said to Mr

Huefer about the government and the war” (204). Here, even a

conversation about the war is only referred to in passing, and

it is immediately employed to further the sexual tension of

the scene:

Just as she went to withdraw her hand, he reached out and

the tips of their fingers touched. Dickens neither picked

the book up nor moved his fingers away.



‘It is not going well,’ said Ellen Ternan. Her body was

conscious only of his touch. But this time she did not

pull her hand away. She looked up.

‘The war,’ she said, ‘I mean.’

‘Wars,’ he said, ‘rarely do.’ (205)

The desire of Dickens and Ellen, as individuals, is not only

more important than Dickens’ writing and the acting of the

pair in the play, but subordinates even a war. As a story of

wanting, this novel emphasises the individual experience. It

is also a trait of some Neo-Victorian fiction, reflecting the

individualist agenda of modern western culture. In this

culture, the personal is pronounced, and this is reflected in

literature through the emphasising of the individual’s journey

or quest.

Yet unlike some other Neo-Victorian fiction, this is not a

novel of subordinating the political to the personal. Rather,

the personal is emphasised and explored as a necessary and

unavoidable part of the political. Charles Dickens’ own

repressed desire is his emotional fuel, and yet it drives



political change in the world around him. His role in

advancing the distinction between savage and civilised people

is critiqued, and not without a reference to the real-world

effects that such dogma enforces, as demonstrated in Van

Diemen’s Land. Not only does Lady Jane force shoes and

curriculum upon Mathinna as an ‘experiment’ of civilisation,

but she sends word to her sister in London requesting a

glyptotech (a museum for housing art, particularly

Mediterranean), denouncing the lack of culture on the island.

She draws on classical ideas of culture, decrying the lack of

“Ancients and Mythology” (103) in Van Diemen’s Land, even

whilst her rule over the colony systematically eradicated

Tasmanian Aboriginal culture. This makes explicit the link not

only between Dickens and Van Diemen’s Land, but even more

importantly, the link between the societal expectations and

binaries of the colonial powers and their impact on the

colonies, such as the struggle between desire and repression.

These affect characters on a personal level, as Wanting

explores, but as characters act on them, they affect and

influence other lives, especially of the less politically

empowered. Richard Flanagan is renowned as a politically



engaged author, and Wanting is no exception. In this novel he

is darkly ironic of the abuse of power, and scathingly

critical of those who wield it. The story is focalised through

the personal, but the political implication is clear,

especially when power is abused.

This is also true of the depiction of the Tasmanian

Aboriginals in Wanting, whose plight is described through the

personal in order to comment upon the political. Their woes

are treated with as much complexity and conflict as the

Franklins’ and Dickens’, and Mathinna is portrayed as a very

human character. Although Mathinna is certainly a victim of

circumstance, the novel suggests that all people are. Mathinna

is as human and prone to emotion as the other characters, and

particularly when she is embittered towards the end of her

short life, she is portrayed as fallible. She turns to

prostitution in Hobart, drinking away her few spare coins and

alienating herself from the European and Aboriginal

populations alike. Her mental tumult is explored as

fluctuating between apathy, repression and a poignant desire

to separate and make something of herself in an English



fashion: “I marry a whitefella, you watch, you see, I be big

lady” (246). The story is focalised through Mathinna’s

personal experience. Still, this is done in a highly ironic

way, and the narrator is further willing to politicise this

experience. When the colonists in Van Diemen’s Land find

Mathinna’s presence problematic, the narrator is able to put

this into words:

It was hard to know whether her seeming acceptance was

submission or simple-mindedness or the most profound

revolt, a contempt greater than any visited on her by

pox-raddled redcoats, shepherds or ticket-of-leave men.

(227)

The narrator speaks of the lack of understanding that the

colonists had about the Tasmanian Aboriginals, but it also

speaks to the unsettled guilt of the present day. This is also

the case of Lady Jane’s parting from Mathinna. Lady Jane has

the sudden realisation of her own maternal instincts, and that

she has “deluded herself that it was science, reason,

Christianity; that the ruse of a noble experiment might



somehow bring her the mystery that other women took for

granted” (194-195). Yet as she leaves Mathinna in the

orphanage, the narrator credits her with knowledge of the

consequences of discrimination: Lady Jane wished to “revel in

[Mathinna’s] difference and not seek to destroy it, because in

that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference

could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below,

and the white coffins below that” (195). Here, the narrator is

speaking in a voice of postcolonial criticism of racism, with

the narrator’s and the reader’s own knowledge of the decline

of traditional culture due to imperialism. The novel follows

the struggles of the individuals of the time, and the

characters, as fallible and human, are unable to articulate

what they want. This is accompanied by the ironic, postmodern

narrator, who is able to supplement and interpret the personal

through the political. This attempt to give a voice to the

voiceless of history is a recurring one in Neo-Victorian

literature. Julie Sanders, in her chapter on adapting the

Victorian era in Adaptation and Appropriation, says:



History, in this account, is a matter of perspective; it

is influenced and shaped by the agenda or subject-

position of the historian. Several of the adaptations we

are considering here that revisit the nineteenth century

or seek to voice marginalized or repressed groups suggest

something similar in their search to reveal ‘hidden

histories’, the stories between the lines of the

published works of fact and fiction. (123-124)

Throughout Wanting, there is a tension between the personal and

the political. Flanagan was inspired to write the novel by a

painting of Mathinna’s bare feet covered by the picture frame,

which spoke to him on both of these levels. This is reflected

in the novel, as the raw emotional focalisation of the

characters, and the ironic way in which they are inflected and

interpreted by the narrator. Ultimately, this is a novel

driven on an emotional level by desire and the repression of

this. Flanagan seeks to show the universality of wanting, and

the repercussions of civilising processes upon this.



Chapter Three: Bioluminescence in Sixty Lights

While Jack Maggs sought to critique a canonical English novel by

rewriting the story of an Australian within it, and Wanting

politicised colonial binaries of desire and civility, Gail

Jones’ novel Sixty Lights is engaged with the contemporary

fascination with the Victorian era. Like Carey and Flanagan,

Jones draws on Dickens and especially Great Expectations, as will

be discussed later in his chapter. Yet Jones, rather than

adapting the canonical text, or even adapting the author,

draws on Great Expectations and a wide variety of other texts to

create an appropriation, and affect “a more decisive journey

away from the informing source[s] into a wholly new cultural

product and domain” (Sanders 26). The Victorian era in

particular has “become the focus of a shared (re)creative

impulse” (Sanders 121), as authors not only romanticise this

period but work through postmodern concerns of representation.

Certainly, Sixty Lights is a text engaged with appropriating the

Victorians in creative ways, and it not only applies a

postmodern perspective, but creates a postmodern protagonist.



This protagonist is Lucy Strange, who opens the book as a

young and pregnant woman in India dreaming of death, and whose

death at age 22 is revealed to the reader on the second page.

This prologue is succeeded by the image of Lucy as an eight

year-old in the Victorian colony of Australia in 1860,

watching her mother’s pregnancy and death, followed in the

same chapter by her father’s suicide. The narrator says before

the imminent death of Lucy’s mother that “it is from this day

that [Lucy’s] life enters the mode of melodrama” (7), and she

is indeed thrown out into a wide and engaging world. Orphaned

with her brother Thomas, the children are taken to their

grandparents’ half Chinese family before embarking to England

with their uncle Neville. With Neville’s spiritual forays and

financial ruin, the children are sent to work, and later Lucy

to India, in order for her to marry Isaac Newton, an old

friend of Neville’s. Though Lucy has an affair with a married

man aboard the ship to India and falls pregnant, and the

marriage does not eventuate, Isaac still accepts her into his

home, and Lucy explores India for several months until the

birth of her daughter Ellen. Returning to London, Lucy finds

her uncle dead, her brother married, and herself terminally



ill, and her last few years are spent developing the

photography skills learned in India and her relationship with

the artist Jacob Webb. This storyline is interspersed with

images of the past, especially of Lucy’s parents Honoria and

Arthur, and though the chronology jumps around somewhat, it

remains mostly linear.

In the novel, light and life are inextricably linked. It is

aptly named, for Sixty Lights is a novel of sixty photograph-like

chapters, each with their own tone, shade and images. Photo-

graph, transliterated from the Greek as “light-writing”, is

precisely Jones’ concern. Her chapters are illuminated in a

variety of ways, from the candlelight and sunlight of

Australia to the gas-lamps and magic lanterns of London, as

well as employing flames and mirrors. These lights illuminate

not only the images of the world and the novel, but also the

lives within them. The implied philosophy of the novel is that

of bioluminescence: “The emission of light by living

organisms” (OED), or as Lucy thinks of it, “this elusive

capacity… [of] Every person [to be] a lighthouse, a signal of

presence” (171). Lucy sees a relationship between light and



life, where life encompasses the inevitable cycle of both

living and passing away. As such, each chapter not only

expounds different forms of lighting, but different forms of

living, and how they end. Reviewer Ion Martea notes that

“Almost everyone and everything dies at the end of each

chapter”, with Lucy losing herself, her mother and her father

within the first several pages. Lucy also sees the death of

many more abstract qualities of life: love, passion, hope, and

pain, loneliness and desire, only for these to be reborn in

other times, places and people. In her early search for

bioluminescence in death, Lucy examines the carcass of a dead

elephant, only to be repulsed that “There was no shine but

that of viscera; there was nothing lovely or bright. There was

no redeeming conversion of death into luminescent surface. It

was only a mass of putrescence, a butchered mess” (143). Yet

though this scene makes her “ashamed at the vulgarity of her

wish to beautify” (147), Lucy does learn that darkness is

necessary for light, and the “blotted cloudings in between”

(147) are just a part of life. These cycles of death and

living are repetitive, and yet uniquely highlighted in their



different chapters, and serve to inform the broader impression

of the novel as a photograph of light and life.

This idea of bioluminescence, of a romantic connection between

life and death, the past and the present, make this novel a

difficult one to theorise according to Hutcheon’s

historiographic metafiction. As has been demonstrated in the

previous chapters, Jack Maggs and Wanting are productively

analysed as examples of historiographic metafictions due to

their reflectivity and employment of various other texts and

discourses, as well as their overt concern with the nature of

textual construction and historical representation. Sixty Lights

is certainly self-reflexive, and highly intertextual, yet it

is also a highly nostalgic story that implicates emotion more

than irony. Instead, this much more neatly fits Kate

Mitchell’s model of a memory text. Here, the intertextuality

works not to critique the discourse of the time or even to

rewrite the past with a political implication, but to “re-

member it, as a séance of another time and experience into our

own” (Mitchell 2010: 176). Rather than searching for a truth,

or even complicating the idea of truth, Sixty Lights is a



collection of ‘images’ and ideas from both the past and the

present that are filtered together. The novel writes “the

Victorian period into our cultural memory, and suggest[s] that

the period has left a myriad of traces embodied in texts,

images and other material” (Mitchell 2012: 176). Moreover,

this novel could be used as an analogy for the function of the

Victorian in a Neo-Victorian time: images of the Victorian

abound alongside postmodern ones, and though the audience is

not focused on the problemisation of historical

representation, or critiquing these images, the images

nevertheless maintain their integrity to their own time (thus

avoiding the blank parody of Jameson’s pastiche). Sixty Lights is

thus concerned with imagining the past, rather than

deconstructing it.

These images permeate the novel literally and metafictionally,

through depicting the construction of images. Photography is

the most important trope in the novel, and it structures the

interpretation of the novel too. Like the mirror writing in

Jack Maggs, the photography in Sixty Lights is antipodean in its

ability to both reflect and invert. The daguerreotype camera



was the first commercially successful photographic process,

and much as Maggs’ writing is written backwards and read

forwards (in a mirror), so is the camera’s image projected

upside down in the finder, and rectified when it is developed.

This inverted logic allows the antipodeans Maggs and Lucy to

reclaim the world around them in their own personal way.

Lucy’s striking question “But what is art?” (156) fuels her

search for answers beyond the prescribed and traditional

methods and places. This is particularly evident in her

photography, when she rejects the view of photography as fake

that her teacher Victor expounds (142) and seeks instead to

find expression and capture her view of the world. Lucy thus

seeks to interpret the world in a way both reliant on her

heritage – using the technology of the camera – and unique

from it, establishing her arguably antipodean view.

Different theories of photography inform the text. In her

acknowledgments, Gail Jones cites Susan Sontag’s On Photography

(1979) and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

(1984), both of which discuss photographs and the macabre.

While Sontag wrote of the death’s head that peers from beneath



the photographed face, Barthes wrote of the tableau vivant,

beneath which the faces of the dead are visible. Yet in an

interview, Jones clearly states that she attempts to argue

against these two theorists of photography, especially in

their measured attempts to link photographs and photography

with death and absence:

In the 1870s, they [photographs] were a confirmation of

presence, of the self in history. Of the way we exist in

time. I wanted to return to that incredibly positive

moment when photography was full of the promise of

returning us to the world and lovingly inscribing us in

the world. (Jones, qtd. in Sugano 99)

For Sixty Lights is both deterministic, in seeing death as

inevitable and natural, and optimistic, in celebrating the

cycle of life and passing, and the ‘bioluminescence’ of both,

as described above. Photography, even more than writing,

collapses time, and Sixty Lights portrays this in a positive

fashion. A photograph is necessarily trapped in the past, in

the moment of its conception, and must be read from the



future. Moreover, photographs are a trapped and static image

of one particular moment. Yet the narrator states that

“Looking at photographs cracked open time” (233), for Lucy can

see images of birth, life and death, all of the same

individual, from one perspective. This is a novel for which

death and photography are linked only through death’s

association with life, and living.

This is not to deny the importance of death in the text. The

foregrounding of Lucy’s own death is introduced in the first

chapter, on the second page of the novel, and thus influences

the entire interpretation of the text. This reflects the

photographic mode of the text; necessarily, we always look at

frozen images of the past, often knowing what occurs after the

photograph is taken, and the novel sets up this precondition

of pastness through the use of this foregrounding, cemented by

the employment of the past tense. However, this technique also

refocuses the reader’s expectations and reading pattern.

Instead of wondering what will happen, the reader is curious

for many chapters as to why Lucy will die. Certainly, Lucy’s

escapades – including falling pregnant to a stranger on a boat



bound for a foreign country – seem to invite repercussions.

Yet the answer to why Lucy dies is given to the reader many

chapters before the finale – Lucy has pulmonary tuberculosis,

or “consumption” as it was called then, a common and fatal

disease of the Victorian era. The novel’s disinclination to

twists and surprises insists that the reader accept that this

will be the cause of her death, which then refocuses the

question again, onto the how, not only of Lucy’s death, but

more significantly of her life. The way in which she lives,

with the reader’s knowledge of when and how she will die, is

thus all the more poignant and significant. The foregrounding

of Lucy’s death is also a part of the novel’s philosophy of

bioluminescence, for like us, Lucy is aware of the

inevitability of death, and this allows her to appreciate all

the more the lights of life and the lives around her.

The philosophy of bioluminescence also informs Jones’ approach

to writing in a Neo-Victorian framework, as she embraces

anachronisms and a blending of thought rather than a strict

separation of the context of the story from the context of its

production. Sixty Lights does not attempt to perfectly accurately



reconstruct the Victorian style and setting, and is more

concerned with an overt – rather than implicit – supposition

of the relationship with the present. This relationship with

the present results in intentional anachronisms of language,

as well as predictions of the future. When Lucy first hears

the word “bioluminescence”, which becomes one of the informing

philosophies of the novel, she thinks that “It was a word that

sounded as if it had travelled from the future, from a

completely new knowledge” (110). Indeed, the earliest recorded

use of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1916, well

after the novel’s 1860/70s setting. Similarly, Lucy is a woman

outside of her time and influenced by the future of

photography, as summarised by her lover Jacob: “Photography

has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the

future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious,

unafraid to fall” (230). Lucy often fathoms about the future

technology of the photograph, and the reader of the novel

necessarily knows that a great many of these predictions –

such as cinema, ultrasounds and the x-ray – come to pass. When

she talks of this photography, Jacob hears Lucy speak “like

someone who was watching history unfold” (218), for as noted



by Kate Mitchell (2008: 102), Jones has Lucy describe her

aestheticism to Jacob using a phrase from the 1936 essay by

Walter Benjamin, “explaining what she called art-in-the-age-

of-mechanical-reproduction” (239). Mitchell argues that this

“evokes the logic of the ghost; it suggests the disruption of

linear time, the aberrant presence of the Victorian in our

culture. In a photographic reversal, that is, Lucy is able to

see us” (Mitchell 2010: 102). While for Jacob it is “unbidden,

he had glimpsed Lucy in another realm” (218), these

predictions of the future and the employment of its language

make sense in a Neo-Victorian context. Just as the Victorian

uncannily continues in the postmodern world, so too do these

anachronisms of the text exist in the Neo-Victorian one.

This necessary sense of anachronism in the Neo-Victorian text

can be further explored through the postmodern minds of Jones’

characters. Jones’ novel Sixty Lights was published in 2005 – in a

post-modern, post-feminist, post-colonial world of thought.

Much recent historical fiction set in the Victorian era is

concerned with the Victorian attitude towards sex, as explored

in the previous chapter. Not only do these texts of the



twentieth and twenty-first centuries perpetuate the myths of

sexually repressed Victorians, but they often entail explicit

sexual scenes (Heilmann and Llewellyn 8), and Jones is

certainly unafraid of writing about a “pink swelling penis”

(231). But Jones is doing more than creating a gratuitous

period drama, for in recognising that she is a Neo-Victorian

writer, rather than a Victorian one, Jones does not write her

character psychologies as a Victorian writer would have done.

Her overtly homosexual characters, Harriet and Isaac, are

narrated as such, and they easily admit to themselves their

love for Honoria (35) and Neville (137) respectively. Lucy in

particular thinks in a post-feminist and post-colonial

fashion, “respond[ing] with grateful enthusiasm” (111) and no

regrets to her affair with William Crowley, and “wish[ing]

herself Indian, part of this throng of purposeful, myth-

saturated, interconnected people” (136). Yet to have her

characters do otherwise would be against the grain of the

novel. Isaac accuses Lucy of preferring the maculate over the

immaculate, and Lucy agrees, stating “The world is like this,

don’t you think? Marked, and shadowed, and flecked with time”

(146). Lucy is “charmed” by her thumbprint on photographs



(199), recognising that in seeing them she is being honest

about the construction of them. This analogy can be applied to

the book as a whole: in allowing us to see the ‘thumbprints’

of the postmodern world, Jones is celebrating the maculate

nature of the world, and accepting the necessarily constructed

nature of art. This further reflects the convention of the

Victorian realist novel, of the intrusive omniscient narrator,

which was an intentionally artificially imposition upon the

‘real’ world of the text. Acceptance of these conventions of

construction encourages an embracement of the constructed

nature of the text as a whole, rather than a ‘window’ onto

reality, either through a realist novel or a photograph.

The relationship with Victorian novels extends beyond the

metatextual. The identification of the central characters with

Charles Dickens emphasises the relationship of Sixty Lights with

this Victorian novelist. Lucy and Thomas are introduced to the

serial of Great Expectations early in their life in London, and as

children of the romanticising bibliophile Honoria, it is only

when Dickens fictionalises London that the city can “seem

altogether more actual” (84) to them. It becomes part of the



familiar, domestic realm, and Great Expectations allows the

children to begin reconciling their Australian and English

identities. The whole family need books to complete their

experience, and they continue to irregularly associate with

the characters. Lucy and Thomas both “wanted to be Pip”, and

Neville aspires to “be Magwitch” (91). Although they already

emulate the convict’s Australian identity, Neville desires the

perceived agency that this gives Magwitch to construct his own

‘Great Expectations’. This is a stark contrast to Peter Carey,

who found he both empathised with Magwitch as an Australia and

reviled Magwitch as a reader focalised through the

consciousness of Pip. Unlike Carey with Jack Maggs, Jones does

not treat the representation of Magwitch critically, and has

her Victorian Australian characters contentedly see themselves

in the convict. Ken Gelder notes this somewhat perplexedly:

“It is as if Sixty Lights wants to channel itself through

Dickens's novel, although it isn't entirely clear why” (36).

Yet it is precisely because the affinity with Magwitch is not

remarked upon that it becomes important. Rather than find

their sense of identity conflicted, the antipodean characters

of Sixty Lights embrace their rich and multi-cultural heritage,



becoming “delighted that Dickens had mentioned Australia”

(84), and feeling their disparate lives validated by their

unification in fiction. Nationalistic agendas and identities

are subordinated by multicultural ones, reflecting the way

that Jones does not focus on nationalistic issues – as Carey

does – but is interested in exploring other issues, such as

memory and construction, in her novel.

Lucy and Thomas also associate the events of their lives with

those from Dickens’ story, being orphans sent to work in the

factories of London. Lucy describes the scene of exiting a

factory in a Dickensian fashion, with the women “sweeping out

in larger groups, appearing subdued and exhausted…” (89-90).

The characters read themselves and their world according to

Dickens, bringing Great Expectations into their everyday lives

through recurring jokes such as imitating Joe Gargarey’s

“partickler ghost” (85), which turns the mass-produced story

into a family joke that lasts the rest of their lives. They

also relate the people around them back to the author through

phrases as “They were, Lucy thought, like a family out of

Dickens” (175), or through dreaming about Dickens himself



(186). Most significantly, the novel ends with Thomas taking

to his bed to re-read Great Expectations, when only through being

“saturated with memories” (249) and reading the death of

Magwitch does he allow himself to move “beyond the vehemence

of sobbing… entering that state of calm and pause” (249). Lucy

and Thomas experience the world through their experience of

the author, which even extends to the coincided timing of the

deaths of Dickens and of Neville. Lucy’s return to London “was

a disturbing confluence of systems of doubling and

subtraction” (172), for she meets Thomas’ friend and to-be

wife, Violet Weller, and hears of the death of her uncle.

Thomas is only able to manage a few words about an accident

before “His voice petered and seized” (172). It is only later

that Thomas is able to speak of the death, and even then he

restricts himself to the bare details, preferring instead to

focus on the story of Charles Dickens’ death and funeral at a

similar time. This is “a small act of self-protection” (172),

a way of alleviating Thomas’ pain at speaking of his uncle’s

death by speaking of other matters. Still, it is more than

this, for it is no coincidence that details of Dickens’ death

in particular can alleviate Thomas’ pain, more than any other



possible conversation. Just as Thomas will one day read Great

Expectations again in order to deal with his loss of Lucy, so too

can he only cope with Neville’s death by describing the death

of Dickens.

Yet Dickens also exists as a symbol in the peripheries of the

novel. The author, already established by the time Lucy and

Thomas arrive in London, is writing his “brand-new serial,

Great Expectations… ‘his best yet!’” (84) as the orphans settle

into their new life. This text, as argued above, performs an

identity-forming and emotionally engaging role in the lives of

the characters. Other texts from Dickens, however, play

different roles. On her outbound journey from England to

India, Lucy explores the ship, and discovers “Dickens, George

Eliot, William Thackeray… the ship’s small library” (114).

Here, the texts of Dickens function in an imperial role, as a

symbol of empire. Historically, canonical texts were used to

concrete conceptions of British culture, and the English

passengers of the ship could have used this library to

establish their own sense of Englishness before disembarking

in the colony of India. Certainly, this is how Wanting



represented British literature, with authors such as Dickens

voicing imperial discourses that affected the colonies in

powerful ways. Nevertheless, while Lucy does not question the

English canon, she seeks to explore other forms of expression.

While looking at a pah-wallah surrounded by his spat betel

nut, Lucy thinks that “He was at the centre of a kind of

artwork. He was in a pattern of spat fluid” (144). Lucy is

able to appreciate the imperial texts, of Dickens, as easily

as the colonised texts, of the pan-wallah. In this way, Lucy’s

open-mindedness avoids critiquing Dickens’ texts as part of

the canon, by showing that they are not necessary to interpret

the world around her.

Interpretation and experience of the world are at the heart of

Sixty Lights. The images or lights of the novel show a variety of

experiences, and importantly, they show an enjoyment of and

engagement with the act of experiencing. This is suited to the

form of the novel, as an adaptation, which Julie Sanders

argues is a form that gives reading pleasure through

familiarity and originality, similarity and difference (14).

The philosophy of bioluminescence that runs through the text



is also reflected in the construction of the text. Jones is

self-reflexively playful, employing anachronisms in order to

create ‘ghosts’ of the past, present and future and

demonstrate how memory connects them all. Jones is also self-

reflexive in the construction of construction in the novel,

using Lucy’s thumbprints on photographs in much the same way

as the Victorians used an omniscient narrator. The novel is

engaged with ideas of empire, but only in so far as they

inform the multicultural identities of the characters, rather

than nationalistic agendas. This is a text about the

relationship between individuals and between individual

experiences, and the ‘bioluminescence’ that connects them.



Conclusion: Postcolonial Decolonisations

“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his

pen at the office floor, to express that Australia was

understood, for the purposes of the figure, to be

symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.

(Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 197)

Indeed, as the above quotation suggests, the construing of

Australia as in opposition to Britain was a convenient means

by which to define Britishness in Victorian England. Britain

was seen as imperial, Australia as colony; Britain is culture,

Australia is prison; Britain is centre; Australia is

periphery. Certainly, in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the

Australian Magwitch is reviled as ‘other’ by the English

gentleman Pip.

Yet as this thesis has argued, a distinct Australian identity

and outlook is being written in Australian Neo-Victorian

literature. This has been focalised through the three novels

examined; through not only the reassessment of the place of



Dickens in constructing the image of the antipodean, but

through the inclusion of Dickens as a fictional character

within each of the novels. As arguably the greatest writer of

the Victorian era, and certainly one of the most influential

and canonical of all British authors, Dickens has become a

symbol of the empire. Thus, in writing encounters between and

representations of Dickens and Australian characters,

Australian authors of Neo-Victorian literature are examining

the relationship between Britain and Australia themselves.

As was shown with Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, an Australian

identity is both rebellious from and indebted to its English

heritage. Carey wanted to write the Australian perspective

from his postcolonial standpoint, and thus he wrote back to

one of the canonical English novels Great Expectations, literally

giving voice to the liminal character of Magwitch. Moreover,

Carey gave Magwitch’s story temporal primacy, through writing

Dickens himself as the character Tobias Oates and thus

creating the events that inspired the story. This assertion of

the validity of Australian identity is central to Carey’s

purpose in re-writing Dickens, and while the novel constructs



it as an identity deeply and necessarily enmeshed with its

British past, it is one that is nevertheless worthy of

writing. Magwitch’s narrative may have been subverted in the

original Victorian novel, but through the Neo-Victorian, this

can be redressed.

Neo-Victorian novels can not only redress marginalised voices,

but present new interpretations and new discourses. This was

shown to be the case with Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, in which

the voiceless Tasmanian Aboriginals, especially young

Mathinna, are given a role in their own history. Wanting,

through the employment of irony and a postmodern narrator, is

able to offer a postcolonial critique of the effects that

settlement had on the Tasmanian Aboriginal population. This

narrator is equally apt at critiquing Victorian British

culture back in England, and by using Charles Dickens as a

central character in the novel, Flanagan is able to link the

colony with the imperial centre. The emotional core of the

novel is the universality and humanity of wanting, and the

false binary of the savage desire/civilised control expounded

by Dickens and the Franklins is shown to be hollow. Flanagan



uses the Victorian setting to explore the repressed narratives

of history, but also to reinterpret the Victorian era for a

postmodern audience with postcolonial sensibilities.

However, Australian Neo-Victorian works of literature are not

always so overtly nationalistic or politicised, as was

demonstrated through a discussion of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights. The

philosophy of this book is bioluminescence: the idea of light

produced by organic life, and the associated connotations of

light explored by the novel, especially regarding memory.

Light is the principle element in creating photographs, and

Lucy’s photographs (both literal and those that exist only as

experiences, potential “photographs not yet taken”) help her

to connect the past, present and future of the world around

her. She is a multicultural, multinational and anachronistic

character, whose psychology more accurately reflects the

postmodern rather than the Victorian. Yet this too is part of

Jones’ construction of the Neo-Victorian. After all, Jones is

necessarily removed from the Victorian era, and in writing a

‘new’ Victorian novel, she leaves intentional traces of the



construction of the text, much as Lucy leaves thumbprints on

her photographs.

These three novels have marked similarities: their concern

with writing the Australian experience into the Victorian era,

their appropriation of Dickens as a fictional character, and

their self-reflexivity in the construction of their texts.

Necessarily, these texts are all works of Neo-Victorianism as

well, for they are set in an aesthetically, culturally and

politically Victorian era, and written in a postmodern one,

with a postmodern consciousness and conscience. Yet, as has

been illustrated by this thesis, they each take different

approaches, with different meanings. Much as the postmodern

era contains similarities to and differences from the

Victorian one, so too is this reflected in the writings about

it. Ultimately, although in unique ways, these three examples

of Australian Neo-Victorian fiction offer an antipodean and

critical reengagement with the discourses of imperialism: a

postcolonial decolonisation of the Victorian era.



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