The Possibility of Love: Masculinities in the Novels of Maurice Gee

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the novels of Maurice Gee for an adult audience from his earliest The Big Season, published in 1962 to his most recent, The Scornful Moon, published in 2003. The study begins with an overview of male-authored writing in twentieth-century New Zealand and identifies Gee's place within the tradition that emerged from the literary nationalism of the 1930s. It then proceeds to an examination of four major subject areas that recur in Gee's oeuvre: the family drama that produces and shapes the puritan and/or post-puritan Pākehā male subject; the relationship between state and domestic violence, and between the perpetrators and victims of that violence; the relationship between the split masculine subject and the myth of mateship that dominates Pākehā culture and how the ambiguity that permeates Gee's work is both the cause and end-product of that relationship; and finally Gee's critique of the hegemonic masculinities that damage his male narrators and his construction of new ones that have the potential to nurture them instead. While the thesis evaluates most of the fiction Gee has published for an adult readership, the following novels are analysed closely: In My Father's Den, Crime Story, Loving Ways, Sole Survivor, Going West, Plumb and The Burning Boy. By exploring how these novels construct and narrate masculinity the thesis concludes that despite their initial bewilderment Gee's characters caught in the interstices of post-puritanism, postcolonialism and post-patriarchy are nevertheless capable of attaining and practising a new masculine ethics that includes the possibility of love.