Women by water: notes towards a New Zealand sublime

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of a variety of representations of the beach created by and of New Zealand women, primarily in the twentieth century. The project is interdisciplinary in approach, using examples from art, design, literature, photography and film. It sees itself as extending the traditional discourses of art history and literature in its attempt to configure a 'creative non-fiction' genre that allows for the validation of certain significant structures of feeling that facilitate a gendered unsettling of the existing New Zealand canon, and the character and role of women artists and writers within it. The thesis aims to be digressive in style, clustering ideas and images in order to disrupt existing histories and assert a life for alternative readings and methods of understanding and creating history. Representations of the beach are ubiquitous and central to New Zealand's historical memory and contemporary experience. Using representations of the beach as a theme central to New Zealandness makes central and visible realms of feeling and experience that I consider could form the basis of a new kind of history-making, and that this would be in part, a phenomenological project that would critically engage with concepts like the sublime and the beautiful. The beach distinguishes itself as a site that facilitates the radical, lyrical dreaming of creative Pakeha women. The work has a post-colonial character that is imbued with the problematics of being a white speaking subject in an ex-colony, where the most visible forms of the de-colonisation process tend to fit into a left-wing modernist framework that privileges realism over the lyric, at least for the descendents of the colonisers. Within a post-colonial framework, imported systems of representation, especially the classifications of the sublime and the beautiful as outlined in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, are interrogated to see how they make meaning in a New Zealand context. The concept of the sublime, a traditional Western structure of feeling, is useful in this respect since it offers influential cultural rules of engagement with the seen and felt world that were, and are, central to the creation of a post-contact 'national identity' in New Zealand. Burke's privileging of feeling and sensation in his writing about the sublime, I contend, can be part of a gendered reading of existing works of art and literature that goes some way towards deconstructing the modernist canon in this country.