Abstract
Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s fiction achieved considerable international success, particularly her novels Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960), which both reached Time magazine’s best books list. This achievement meant that Ashton-Warner was able to resign from teaching and focus on being a fulltime writer and she was eventually awarded an MBE in 1982. Ashton-Warner’s success in literature was matched by her work in education and over the past 50 years there has been a significant body of criticism from scholars in that field analysing her non-fiction as well as her novels. Ashton-Warner’s significance as a writer makes her continuing neglect by literary critics in her homeland of New Zealand all the more curious. This article argues that Ashton-Warner’s novels are neglected in New Zealand literary culture largely because they were published at a time when local criticism privileged a mode of masculinist realism and that their recuperation by feminist scholars keen to challenge the restricted canon has been problematized by their author’s divisive personality, as well as by the conventional conclusions of her novels that tend to involve a level of containment. By taking a feminist approach to two of Ashton-Warner’s most popular novels — Spinster and Incense to Idols — this article aims to demonstrate how they utilize, extend, and subvert modes of writing associated with popular female fiction in order to explore the contradictions of prevailing versions of mid-twentieth-century femininity.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner, although by no means as recognizable as New Zealand writers such as Janet Frame, Maurice Gee, and Katherine Mansfield, is certainly one of the country’s most internationally successful authors. Two of her novels — Spinster (1958) and Incense to Idols (1960) — reached Time magazine’s best books list, with the former proving so popular internationally that a Hollywood film version was made, starring Shirley MacLaine. The Saturday Review deemed Spinster the herald of a “fresh voice” capable of provoking in readers “an exhilarating sense of personal discovery” (Wilson Ross, 1960: 32), while the Commonweal described Incense to Idols as “truly memorable” (Cosman, 1960: 294), praising its convincing characterization and notable technical achievements. The New York Times Book Review was similarly complimentary, referring to “the romantic heart, robust spirit and compelling insight of this unique writer” (Dienstag, 1966: 5). Ashton-Warner’s international success allowed her to resign from primary school teaching and devote herself to being a fulltime writer. In 1982 Ashton-Warner received an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours list and towards the end of her life she assisted with the screenplay for Sylvia, a feature film based on her autobiographical writing that was released in 1985 shortly after her death. Further illustrating Ashton-Warner’s significance is the 1989 publication of Lynley Hood’s biography, Sylvia!, which won first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards.
Ashton-Warner’s fame as a fiction writer is accompanied by recognition of her work in the field of education. While teaching predominantly Māori children with her husband in remote rural areas, Ashton-Warner developed a scheme of teaching literacy skills based on “key” words that could help children express their deepest drives. During 1955 and 1956, accounts of Ashton-Warner’s literacy scheme were published in National Education, New Zealand Educational Institute’s magazine, and her approach was increasingly recommended to teachers and students open to new educational theories. Although the reception of Ashton-Warner’s educational scheme is commonly assumed to have been hostile, a view promulgated in the introduction to her 1963 book Teacher, as well as in the film Sylvia, recent scholarship has found this to be largely unfounded. 1 The novel Spinster, a fictionalized account of Ashton-Warner’s teaching experiences, and Teacher, a non-fictional account of her literary scheme, were received positively by educationalists in New Zealand and abroad. In 1970 she was invited to Aspen, Colorado to contribute to the establishment of a community school and briefly took up a post as visiting professor in Education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. From the end of the twentieth century, as teacher education moved into universities and with primary school teaching now requiring degree qualifications, Ashton-Warner’s work has generated interest from educationalists and from student teachers increasingly encouraged to theorize their teaching practice. Alison Jones and Sue Middleton’s The Kiss and the Ghost (2009) and Judith P. Robertson and Cathryn McConaghy’s Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education (2006) are just two of a substantial body of work from education scholars recognizing Ashton-Warner’s achievements in teaching and in literature.
Interestingly, in spite of the international accolades, films, biographies, prestigious awards, and a substantial body of educational scholarship generated over the past 50 years, not to mention the establishment of the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Library at Auckland University’s School of Education in 1987, more than one person has suggested that Ashton-Warner is a neglected writer in New Zealand literary culture. One New Zealand reviewer of Ashton-Warner’s biography I Passed This Way (1980) suggests that Ashton-Warner “has received little acclaim in her own country, but much overseas” (J. A. E., 1980: n.p.), an observation echoed by Miles Singe in the Southland Times, who notes that Ashton-Warner “has been hailed by critics and commentators overseas” but she remains “unrecognised in her own country” (1980: n.p.), and C. K. Stead who similarly observes that Ashton-Warner “did not receive her due in New Zealand” (2002: 93). What Singe describes as “the cavalier manner” (1980: n.p.) in which Ashton-Warner’s fiction has been received in New Zealand literary circles is borne out by the fact that she is largely undiscussed in local literary criticism. This neglect is particularly startling when held up against the large body of educational scholarship that frequently uses theoretical frameworks such as psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, and literary theory to investigate Ashton-Warner’s work. 2 In fact, when Dennis McEldowney published in the literary journal Landfall what is essentially one of just two sustained critical examinations of Ashton-Warner’s fiction by New Zealand literary critics (the other is Stead’s 2002 essay “Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Living on the Grand”) he was rebuked for it by the journal’s former editor Charles Brasch who declared Ashton-Warner unworthy of serious critical attention. 3 H. Winston Rhodes includes Ashton-Warner in his study of New Zealand fiction, but although he is sensitive to some of her literary achievements, noting that he is unwilling to dismiss Spinster or Incense to Idols as “inferior entertainments”, he is unable to finally accept either as “a great novel” (1968: 40). Fleur Adcock is far less equivocal, noting that Spinster “is, in fact, a good novel — which is more than can be said for any of her later ones” (1989: 47). Adcock labels Ashton-Warner’s 1970 novel Three “repellent” and argues that Ashton-Warner “was unable to write purely imaginative fiction; what she did was to falsify and fancify reality — a technique which is artistically (if not morally) defensible when the results justify it. Except in the case of Spinster they usually did not.” Adcock’s conclusion regarding Ashton-Warner is the scathing comment: “The kindest conclusion, perhaps, is that the poor woman was bonkers much of time” (1989: 47).
While it is true that Ashton-Warner’s fiction was not always positively received internationally, negative criticism in British and American publications was nowhere near as virulent as that which appeared in New Zealand. The Christian Science Monitor suggests that Spinster’s central character ultimately “fails to hold our sympathy”, but nevertheless admits that it is a novel of “singular literary quality and impact” (Blackman, 1959: 7). Incense to Idols is deemed “puzzling” by the Saturday Review, largely because of “the surprising and frequent ineptitudes of the author’s prose style” combined with a “turgid” plot, but the review also admits that “this strange novel” harbours “compelling undercurrents” (Wilson Ross, 1960: 32). Even when Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, a reviewer with the New York Times Book Review, labels Ashton-Warner’s work “second-rate” she excludes Spinster and Teacher (1963) from this description (1979: 16). International criticism tends to be balanced in a way that New Zealand criticism is not and there is certainly nothing to match Brasch’s wholesale dismissal or Adcock’s animosity. Ashton-Warner was so resentful of the treatment her work received in her homeland that in spite of being born and raised in New Zealand, she announced in a television interview, “I’m not a New Zealander!” (quoted in Barnett, 1978).
Stead suggests that the lack of recognition afforded to Ashton-Warner’s writing in New Zealand literary culture is the result of a “repressive malice” directed at those who rise above their place; “‘cutting him/her down to size’ it’s called” (2002: 95). While there are certainly ample examples in New Zealand of backlash against people deemed too successful, 4 the critical neglect of Ashton-Warner’s fiction in New Zealand literary criticism is largely the result of a patriarchal colonial context that similarly hindered writers such as Jean Devanny and Robin Hyde. Prior to the 1930s, women played a significant role in New Zealand writing, with writers such as Louisa Baker, Isabel Maude Peacocke, G. B. Lancaster, and Nelle Scanlan producing popular fiction, and poets such as Eileen Duggan and Jessie Mackay writing verse influenced by Victorian and Georgian modes. With the advent of a new generation of writers from the 1930s who were eager to break with European tradition in order to create a distinctly national literature, the perceived feyness of colonial modes of writing was frequently conflated with femininity and many women writers active during the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s found their work sidelined, overlooked, or disparaged.
Although the middle decades of the twentieth century saw writing by women focusing on female feeling flourish internationally — particularly in Britain where romance writers such as Maeve Binchy, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Barbara Cartland, Catherine Cookson and Daphne du Maurier consistently topped bestseller lists, building on a tradition as diverse as the novels of the Brontë sisters and the women’s sensation novel of the 1860s — in New Zealand such writing was met with disdain from an elite literary establishment that privileged a mode of masculinist realism. International critics were not averse to the heightened tone and romantic tendencies of Ashton-Warner’s novels, but extravagance of style and focus on female emotion are qualities ill-suited to the masculinist realism that marks mid-twentieth-century New Zealand literature, as exemplified by the work of John Mulgan, Bill Pearson, and the early stories of Frank Sargeson. Thus, what Virgilia Peterson for the New York Times Book Review calls Ashton-Warner’s “strange cadences and bright bursts of imagination” (1965: 40), are described by one of New Zealand’s most important literary figures, Allen Curnow, as “highfalutin and literary garnish” (1976: 107).
As New Zealand moved away from understanding itself as an offshoot of British culture, writers became dissatisfied with colonial modes of writing deemed to be derivative of British literary tradition and hence unable to constitute a truly national literature. What Ken Arvidson terms the “revolution in sensibility that transformed New Zealand culture” (2006: 160) during the 1930s was led by a new generation of writers who established themselves in opposition to the ornate prose and romance of their colonial predecessors. Echoing similar sentiments expressed in settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa, the writers associated with cultural nationalism in New Zealand, most importantly Curnow, Denis Glover, and Frank Sargeson, championed realist writing that was deemed capable of providing a truthful vision of local life. 5 Sargeson’s early stories and Mulgan’s novel Man Alone (1939) seemed to answer the need for an authentically national literature with their stripped-back realism, stoic protagonists and focus on the material world standing in stark contrast to the heightened prose of colonial romance. The dismissal of colonial writing by the generation centred on Curnow, Glover, and Sargeson was so complete that Jane Stafford and Mark Williams observe that “from the 1940s references to it in serious literary discussion are uniformly derogatory, a stance quite dissimilar to that of Australian and Canadian cultural nationalists who were eager to construct local nineteenth-century canons” (2006: 13).
Curnow’s insistence that in order to produce a national literature, “Our fictions are to be true […] Not exaggerated” (1987: 205; emphasis in original), meant that during the decades between the 1930s and 1960s when cultural nationalism was highly influential, heightened prose and non-realist genres remained largely outside the body of work commonly understood to constitute New Zealand literature. E. H. McCormick’s praise of Man Alone for containing “no idealization and no poetry” (1959: 129) clearly establishes a critical framework unreceptive to non-realist and heightened modes, as does James K. Baxter’s approval that “[w]ithout a trace of shrillness Mulgan lays bare the roots of social antagonism in our society” (1949: 376). The influence of the writers associated with cultural nationalism was so pervasive that in 1976 Cherry Hankin noted that “[t]he constant struggle of the writer to come to terms with his society has caused social realism to figure prominently” (1976: viii) in New Zealand literature produced since the 1930s, while “the concomitant struggle of the individual to come to terms with himself has given rise […] to some compelling psychological realism” (1976: viii). Realism, in its variety of guises, whether social, critical, or psychological, has been a significant mode in the development of a body of work recognizable as New Zealand literature and it is only relatively recently that writers have begun to react to this by producing experimental writing that questions the version of reality represented by mimetic art. 6
The privileging of realism and its focus on the material world of physical action by writers associated with cultural nationalism, which was a development that had its beginning in the Auckland University-based magazine Phoenix (1932–33) and was continued in the hugely influential literary magazine Landfall edited by the Oxford University-educated poet Charles Brasch, had profound effects for women writers whose experience and concerns lay outside these precepts and who often chose to work in popular rather than literary forms. A good example is Ngaio Marsh, whose detective fiction earned her considerable respect internationally, but little from New Zealand literary culture, with Mervyn Thompson’s poem written at Marsh’s death in 1982 and published in Landfall clearly illustrating the literary establishment’s biases:
[…] you accepted The given moulds and poured your talent in them You might have been a novelist You wrote thrillers You might have starved like Sargeson Gone mad like Janet Frame […] You drove a fiat sports, spent half your time away. Wrote for the penguined devil, took his pay. (1982: 443)
The marginalization of women’s writing during the middle decades of the twentieth century in New Zealand is also borne out by novels such as Devanny’s The Butcher Shop (1926) and Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children (1937), which utilize non-realist genre elements such as melodrama and fantasy, and emphasize subjective female experience. These works engage with language and attitudes that did not conform to the cultural nationalist project and its highly masculine realist aesthetic, so were rejected by critics such as Curnow, James Bertram, and E. H. McCormick. Although The Butcher Shop sold over 15,000 copies, McCormick’s only mention of it in his study of New Zealand literature is to dismiss it as “lurid”, and he was similarly hostile to Wednesday’s Children, which he deems to be “fantasy without ballast and a disaster” (1940: 148; 176). As Lydia Wevers points out, Wednesday’s Children represents a “complete lack of fit with the nationalist project” (2004: 167), with Stuart Murray similarly observing that on its publication Hyde’s novel, which focuses on the imaginary life of a lonely single woman, was “outside the parameters of the orthodox criticism of the 1930s” and it was met by “a bemused silence, if not a hostility” (1998: 187).
Furthermore, although the tone of A. R. D. Fairburn’s essay “The Woman Problem” suggests a certain amount of irony, his suggestion that “[i]t is of little use asking any woman what she wants, for her deepest needs are instinctive and not rational” and that “women’s minds are not designed for the purpose of making judgement on matters that call for objective consideration” (1967: 18) amply demonstrates the kinds of prejudice women faced in the middle decades of the twentieth century and that informs critical reaction to their work. A review in the New Zealand periodical Tomorrow deems Jane Mander incapable of providing a vivid description of “primitive physical nature” in her novel The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) because it seems “natural only to men” (1939: n.p.), while Curnow’s appraisal of Hyde’s poetry was that the talent it displays is undermined by the author being “too conscious of herself as an ‘ingénue’”, with her “habit of sentimental posturing” preventing her from becoming a significant poet (1946: 24). He would later characterize her writing as “near hysteria” (Curnow, 1960: 57). Even as late as the 1970s, Bertram felt the need to qualify his statement in “Towards a New Zealand Literature” on Katherine Mansfield’s status as a “first rate” New Zealand writer by acknowledging the “disconcerting” nature of this sort of claim for a woman “with ill-regulated passions and an ill-trained mind” (Bertram, 1971: 11).
The championing of masculinist realism during the decades influenced by cultural nationalism meant that Ashton-Warner’s fiction, like that of Devanny and Hyde, was generally rejected by New Zealand critics. Although Stead attempts to defend Ashton-Warner against those who have thought of her as “a woman all heart and of small intellect”, his advice to readers to seek out Ashton-Warner’s non-fiction, the “straight expository” quality of which reveals “a first-rate mind” (2002: 99), highlights a historical tendency in New Zealand to privilege a stripped-back realism over more heightened modes of writing since Stead conflates the use of exact exegetic prose with a “first-rate” mind, while writing that is “all heart” (presumably female) is associated with an inferior intellect. McEldowney goes even further, observing that the literary challenge of expressing emotion in
acceptable form […] would seem to be a characteristic difficulty for New Zealand women, as well as for New Zealand women novelists. If one may judge from statistics of mental illness, as well as one’s own observation, the volcano of the affective life rumbles most ominously in the female. (1969: 234)
In a literary climate that has historically privileged “highbrow” realism over popular fiction and the masculine world of physical action over the feminine world of emotion, it is perhaps not surprising that in New Zealand, Ashton-Warner’s novels, with their boundary defying tendencies and focus on female sensibility, were met with some ambivalence.
What is surprising is that Ashton-Warner’s fiction remains largely unexamined in New Zealand literary culture in spite of the concentrated attack during the 1980s on the restricted canon by feminists, postcolonialists, and postmodernists that brought the work of previously neglected New Zealand writers to widespread attention. The New Women’s Press was an important agent in the feminist recovery of Hyde’s work and Devanny’s The Butcher Shop was reissued in 1981 with an introduction by Heather Roberts, who would go on to write Where Did She Come From?: New Zealand Women Novelists 1862–1987 (1989). By 1991, Lawrence Jones was able to identify Devanny in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature as one of the most important novelists of the period between the 1890s and 1930s; Mary Paul’s Her Side of the Story (1999) brought sustained critical attention to the works of Hyde, Mander, and Mansfield; and there have been numerous books and scholarly articles focusing on previously underappreciated New Zealand women writers. Ashton-Warner’s fiction, however, has not met with the same attention. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams’ The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature (2012) does include some of her writing, but Ashton-Warner’s novels remain out of print and the majority of scholarly attention her work receives comes from the field of education.
When considering why Ashton-Warner’s fiction remains largely unexplored in local literary criticism, even when it would seem to offer fruitful opportunities for feminist recuperation, it is significant to note some differences between her work and that of writers such as Devanny, Mander, Mansfield, and Hyde, who have all received significant attention from literary scholars. All these women produce work that frequently focuses on female experience and utilizes a range of modes associated with popular fiction, but they are nevertheless writers associated with political engagement (Devanny and Hyde), an interest in processes of settlement (Mander), and modernist innovation (Mansfield), which positions their work more comfortably in the realm of literary fiction than Ashton-Warner’s bestsellers. While the eagerness of educational scholarship to engage with Ashton-Warner’s writing points to the breaking down of the hierarchy in educational establishments between theory and practice, the hierarchies between “low” and “high” cultural production are seemingly more entrenched in New Zealand literary culture. Sargeson’s dismissal of popular fiction such as the “Australian western”, which he deemed in 1950 to be something “that very few adults can be expected to give their attention to these days” (1983: 43), finds expression throughout New Zealand literary criticism, with Rhodes’s survey of writing produced since 1945 making no apology for the fact that “tales of the outback” and “accounts of adventure” have been ignored “in the same way as detective fiction and romantic entertainments” (1968: 57). In spite of the influence of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern theories that challenge notions of the canon and the high/low cultural divide, as recently as 1997 Albert Wendt suggests that the negative response meeting his novel Black Rainbow (1992) is due to the fact that “there is little respect for fantasy or science fiction writing in New Zealand” (quoted in Ellis, 1997: 84). Paul Cleave points out that although his crime thrillers are international bestsellers, his work is not stocked in local bookshops and, in spite of the thrill of “being in New York having lunch with my publishers, or in Paris talking to a movie producer […] it sucks not to get taken seriously” in New Zealand (quoted in Pellegrino, 2011: n.p.). The perils of popular success similarly affected Ashton-Warner, with Stead describing how the popular success of Spinster gave her a public profile that “among some academics and literary people […] produced a feeling that well, after all, she was just a popular item not to be taken seriously” (quoted in Connor et al., 2006: 160–1).
Another factor contributing to the exclusion of her fiction from literary criticism is Ashton-Warner’s persona, with Lynley Hood providing an illustrative example when she describes a friend’s response to reading Ashton-Warner’s memoir Myself (1967): “I see what you mean about not liking her. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the book!” (quoted in Hood, 1990: 23). Ashton-Warner’s divisive personality, which Alison Jones sums up as “self-opinionated, arrogant, deluded, badly behaved, self-pitying […] and intent on being a misunderstood victim” (2006: 15), along with statements such as her confession in a 1977 letter that “I can’t stand women for I’m made for men […] And men smell it” complicates the recuperation of her fiction, as do the rather conventional plots of her novels. Although there is significant debate as to whether orthodox romance plots are inherently conservative, the tendency of Ashton-Warner’s novels to conclude with some level of containment makes them a less obvious choice for feminist recuperation than other more explicit narratives, such as The Butcher Shop, with its overt concern with female sexuality and women’s roles in marriage. Devanny’s heroine Margaret chafes against the social and legal strictures that keep married women unfree, likening herself as a wife to the sheep on her husband’s farm, and the novel concludes with a shocking act of violence that expresses the novel’s radical ideologies. In contrast, Spinster deals with a woman who remains unmarried in the 1950s, choosing to focus on her work as a teacher and artist, but the protagonist’s explicit rejection of traditional gender roles is somewhat undermined by her obsessive thoughts about romance and the novel’s conclusion that sees her leave her profession in favour of a romantic relationship. Similarly, Incense to Idols offers a vivid portrayal of subjective female experience and its central protagonist’s promiscuity certainly challenges prevailing notions of middle class suburban femininity, but the protagonist’s suicide effectively neutralizes the subversive threat she potentially represents.
In spite of their seeming conservatism, however, both Spinster and Incense to Idols are important texts that attempt to articulate the experiences, desires, and anxieties of women, as well as anxieties about women. As Terry Sturm points out, one of the reasons why popular fiction is valuable is because it “so closely addresses what its authors perceive to be the fundamental values and behaviour (and often the wishes or needs) of their large readerships” (1991: 579). Popular fiction provides rich insights into society and its “sustaining myths” which Sturm argues are “often directly visible on the surface of popular texts, in ways that tend not to occur in the ‘serious’ texts of high culture” (1991: 579). Although The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature categorizes Ashton-Warner’s novels as literary fiction, Spinster and Incense to Idols are best approached not as “high art” offering a radical challenge to sustaining social myths, but as popular fiction registering prevalent ideologies associated with female experience in New Zealand during the 1950s and 1960s. Ashton-Warner was a primary school teacher who did not have a university degree, although she was very well-read, nor was she part of the male-dominated urban literary world, living as she did for many years in isolated rural settlements. Her fiction is thus not part of the intellectual elite as exemplified by figures such as Brasch and Curnow, but part of a popular fiction fuelled largely by a desire to escape the quotidian of New Zealand life and enter a world of European bohemian glamour. Both Spinster and Incense to Idols use the seemingly conservative plots of popular romance alongside sustained subversions of that mode that reveal not only prevailing notions associated with femininity but also a radical undercurrent challenging the restrictions concurrent with being a “spinster” or a “femme fatale”, both of which can be seen as identities alternative to that of the socially sanctioned “wife” and “mother”.
Informed by cultural nationalism’s privileging of the realist mode, Rhodes approaches Spinster as a realist novel, insisting that its central element is the depiction of pedagogy. “No one”, he writes, “has written a more authentic book about Maori children, and no one has succeeded in conveying so much from the point of view of the infant-room about the rhythms of being” (1968: 41). Rhode’s approval of what he deems the “significant plot” of Spinster is related to the way it enables him to describe the novel in acceptable realist terms, while he disapproves of what is termed “a kind of counterplot” — Anna Vorontosov’s subjective experience — because it is not describable in such terms. While it is true that Ashton-Warner’s novel is a fictionalized version of her experience teaching in isolated rural areas and developing a new method of teaching literacy to her predominantly Māori pupils, her treatise Teacher (1963) deals with this in a way that clearly foregrounds pedagogy as the “significant plot”. Teacher is largely made up of descriptions of Ashton-Warner’s Key Vocabulary interspersed with what appear to be diary entries, whereas Spinster is essentially the negative version of Teacher, with far more attention paid to the subjective experience of the teacher than to her methods of instruction. Rhodes’s interpretation of Spinster completely bypasses the fact that its narrative focuses not only on pedagogy but also on a virgin schoolteacher/artist who pines for a man in her past, drinks to excess and obsesses over a newly arrived teacher. By interpreting Spinster as a realist novel representing education, Rhodes misreads what is actually a genre-defying text utilizing and subverting elements of romance that is concerned not only with teaching, but with the depiction of intense female emotion associated with the conflicting desires of being a spinster or a wife.
The intensity of the text encourages D. H. Monro to describe Spinster in a review published in Landfall as “an almost hysterical monologue” (1958: 280), with McEldowney similarly finding fault with Ashton-Warner’s prose by referring to a “disintegration” in language that sees Anna sound like a New Zealander at the start of the narrative only to devolve into alien-sounding proclamations such as “I am the Vorontosov! My father’s home was on the steppes of Kazakhstan. He broke in that wilderness. By God I’ll break in your wilderness!” (1969: 238). Like Rhodes, both Monro and McEldowney apply the criteria of realism to Spinster, but the breathless pace and heightened tone are entirely appropriate in order to represent Anna’s interior experience since not only is she a passionate woman, but she also spends much of the narrative drunk. The subjective focus of the novel becomes particularly apparent when Anna attends a local dance and follows a “handsome rake out upon the floor” and, in spite of her partner’s lack of rhythm and breath that suggests a quick visit to the pub during supper, what Anna hears is “the thunder and lightning of other music within me and all I see before me is the eternal, the demanding male. Secretly and poetically I count one more pure moment of fulfilment to my store” (1958: 76). 7 In this episode, quotidian reality is embellished — a half-drunk local man becomes a “handsome rake” and “the lost child of God bowing extravagantly over me” — and the use of words and phrases such as “extravagantly”, “Mercilessly the rush of hot blood betrays the evening”, the “unfamiliar pulsing” in Anna’s throat, and “the eternal, the demanding male” (76), highlight the elements of Spinster that focus on intense female emotion.
Although Curnow dismisses the protagonist of Spinster as “sentimental stereotype” (1976: 108), Ashton-Warner’s characterization is not one-dimensional. Spinster counters stereotypical representations of unmarried women by creating a protagonist who is aware of her desires and in command of them. Anna’s thoughts regarding her fellow teacher Paul articulate the concern to remain autonomous in order to pursue work:
If only he could learn that, for me anyway, there can be interests other than men; that there can be romance outside desire; that with me, in spite of the reputations of the unmarried, relations with the male come second to my relations with my work; that the need for the physical engagement, the “trivial ritual of love”, so featured in the talk of New Zealand men as being the driving factor in the life of a spinster, can at my age, in some women and to a workable extent anyway, lift to the realm of the mind to be partially consummated there; if only […] he would get it out of his head that I am necessarily and automatically and always racked with physical tension; that I am, in that stock phrase “starved, hungry and bitter”; that my mind, as the Head and the Reverend apparently see, is able to conceive and bear fruit as cheerfully as any body of a smug married woman and that my heart, in spite of the insubordinate response of my person, can be ineffably gayer. (53)
Here Ashton-Warner represents an unmarried woman’s satisfaction with her work and attempts to counter conventional notions about a spinster’s sexual frustration and desire to marry.
Yet Anna’s explicit championing of life as a spinster is accompanied by conflicting desires expressed primarily through her preoccupation with romance. Although Anna insists when she first meets Paul that she dislikes him, many of her thoughts are devoted to him and even though she insists she does not care for men, she spends a significant amount of time in front of a mirror improving her appearance. When Anna sits down to tea with Paul and her school’s headmaster Mr Reardon, she pays particular attention to the younger man’s good looks:
He is tall and young and apparently perfect. His dark hair is brushed back from a wide forehead; his broad eyes, like framed delphinium petals, are darkly lashed and browed, the lids flickering eloquently while his mouth says everything in immobility. As for his nose and the wonderful lower jaw, they are straight off a magazine cover. Now what chance has a spinster against this? (16–17)
Anna’s interpretation of Paul as a tempting hero from romance, complete with fluttering eyelashes and strong jawline, extends to her married headmaster, whom she terms “a glamorous irresolute thing” whose presence has the effect of making Anna want to cry. “Married men”, she explains, “are so pleasant to weep to. But my cosmetic wouldn’t take it. My age would show up” (19).
Anna’s concern about her appearance is particularly evident in her relations with Paul, yet although she is self-conscious about their age difference, she nevertheless becomes convinced that he is in love with her. When Paul does not appear at work for several days, Anna assumes that she is responsible — “I drove him from me after all. But I didn’t dream he would leave school” (81) — but what she fails to realize is that the young man is having an affair with the underage Whareparita. When Anna contemplates the young girl’s beauty, she is amazed that Paul has been able to resist and wonders, “Has his inclination for me been the reason he hasn’t required her?” (157). Even when it becomes widely known that Whareparita is pregnant, supposedly to a white man, and in spite of Paul turning up at Anna’s house drunk and distressed after Whareparita miscarries twins, Anna still does not put two and two together. Instead, she thinks that Paul’s emotion indicates that he is about to propose to her. Anna is so caught up in a fantasy romance that even when Paul is laid to rest following his suicide in the same grave as Whareparita’s dead twins and the grieving girl attempts to clamber into the grave with them, Anna still believes the young man has been driven to kill himself over her. But Anna’s fantasies about being the object of a grand passion are not entirely delusional. As befits a romance, Ashton-Warner’s spinster schoolteacher ends up happy in love when she is reunited with Eugene, the man she regrets rejecting and whom she has not had contact with for years.
On the one hand, Ashton-Warner’s representation of a passionate and original woman who inhabits a world of “phantasy” (16), performs thunderous renditions of Beethoven on the piano, draws images in brilliant colours, and longs to free herself from “the tyranny of traditional thinking” (41) represents a version of femininity different from prevailing notions regarding desperate and sexually frustrated spinsters. On the other hand, a large portion of Anna’s thoughts are devoted to men and romance, revealing not only a sense of conflicting desire but also exposing a social structure that complicates women having both professional and domestic lives. Anna’s desire to be autonomous and to pursue her work free from domestic distractions is accompanied by a desire for romantic attachment, and the fact that Ashton-Warner’s protagonist must retire from teaching in order to enter a relationship registers the difficulties facing women who desire both professional and domestic lives. The idea of being a teacher, artist, wife, and mother seems not to occur to Anna as a viable option, in spite of the fact that her school’s headmaster is married with children. Spinster thus deals with domestic life as much as pedagogy, highlighting prevailing notions regarding the role domesticity plays in women’s and men’s lives. It is perhaps not surprising then that Rhodes should avoid exploring in any detail the “more than fragmentary truth” that he senses in the “the absurd poses”, “histrionics and quivering sentiment” of Ashton-Warner’s female protagonists (1968: 41). By focusing on the “significant plot” of pedagogy rather than Spinster’s depiction of female emotion, Rhodes avoids acknowledging the discrepancies between expectations for men and woman regarding professional and domestic life, as well as the fact that there may be women who do not easily conform to traditional roles such as “spinster” or “wife”, but who might inhabit more ambiguous identities in a range of worlds that outstrip and exceed the quotidian realm of realist representation.
New Zealand literary criticism of Spinster tends to focus, as Emily Dobson points out, on “stylistic deficiencies associated with women’s writing” (2009: 90), a tendency only intensified with the publication of Incense to Idols. While Ashton-Warner’s first novel contains a focus on teaching in a rural settlement that connects it with the regionalism predominant on its publication, there is nothing about Incense to Idols designed to appeal to a local literary establishment still influenced by cultural nationalism. The narrative focuses on Germaine De Bauvais, a French concert pianist in exile in small-town New Zealand, who is the object of desire for several men and who is herself completely obsessed with the local minister, in spite, or perhaps because of, her own lack of religious belief. The novel is almost defiantly unrealistic, which reviewer Nancy Wilson Ross draws attention to by wondering what the motivation is for “the heroine’s compulsive use of the word ‘Ooh’ which appears every few pages” (1960: 32). Similar to McEldowney’s comments regarding the disintegration of prose in Spinster, Wilson Ross suggests the repetition of this word is the result of Ashton-Warner’s inept prose style, but when other repetitions are noted, it becomes clear that this is part of the novel’s structure. In addition to Germaine’s habit of prefacing statements with “Ooh”, there is the repetition of the phrase “People like me”, which occurs in various incarnations, such as “People like me are just as likely not to find themselves going to church on a spring morning, supported by a preliminary cocktail, of course” (1960: 6), 8 “People like me who live by music recognise quality in sound” (10), “People like me can take it” (13), “people like me don’t grieve” (19), and numerous others. Similarly repeated is the phrase describing men looking at Germaine “in the way they do” (30; 37; 96) and the minister’s habit of starting a sentence with “Anyway”, which Germaine adopts and which is repeated at least 11 times throughout the novel.
These repetitions do add up to an artificial tone, but they are not indicative of Ashton-Warner’s ineptitude as a writer; rather, they are the recurring notes that make up the architecture of the novel. When the fashion-obsessed Germaine complains about the fragmentation of her wardrobe she is also articulating the governing structure that lies behind her own musical compositions as well as Ashton-Warner’s narrative. Germaine laments that her outfits have “no master idea informing them. No basic dominating colour, no one commanding style. A wardrobe should be inspired by one idea alone, even I can see that, like the composition of a concerto” (9). The one commanding idea in Incense to Idols is passionate emotion and all of the most obvious repetitions are related to Germaine’s feelings: her “Ooh” is an expression of subjective experience that defies language; the repeating references to “people like me” foregrounds her unconventionality; and the “Anyway” that peppers the novel is the catchphrase of a man whom Germaine is obsessed with. As a melodramatic narrative about a sensual devotee to fine clothes, wine, and men who makes a series of decisions that result in a family breaking up and a young man being killed, the recurring notes add up to a composition inspired by one idea alone: the passionate emotion of a woman who not only inhabits a world of fantasy, but is a fantasy for the male protagonists unable to resist her charms, as well as for her author.
In his discussion of Incense to Idols, Stead suggests that Germaine’s Frenchness is “not convincing”, largely because of her tendency to speak in the manner of a New Zealander rather than a Parisian, but rather than see this as a fault of Ashton-Warner’s characterization he suggests the reader consider Germaine “in the context of the whole oeuvre as another incarnation of the Ashton-Warner persona” (2002: 104). The majority of Ashton-Warner’s fiction is based to a certain degree on her own experience (hence Adcock’s accusation regarding her inability to write imaginative fiction), but the various versions of her own persona that appear are wish-fulfilment fantasies rather than realistic representations of a middle-aged schoolteacher and artist. Ashton-Warner’s central female protagonists are invariably passionate geniuses who are irresistible to the opposite sex, which leads one commentator to assume that Ashton-Warner is “[o]ne of those throbbingly esthetical creatures” (Haskell, 1985: n.p.). In a letter written to friends in 1974, Ashton-Warner explains that she writes “wholly from fantasy, light-hearted and amusing to make me laugh as well as to remove myself from this nightmare”, clearly establishing a mode of fiction that is intended to remove its author from the everyday into a realm of fantasy rather than accurately reflect reality. This helps explain what Wilson Ross refers to as the “inordinate amount of attention” that is paid to Germaine’s clothing, which “sound much more like clothes from a provincial main street emporium than from the wardrobe of a chic young Parisian” (1960: 32). Just as Stead is unconvinced about Germaine’s Frenchness, Wilson Ross finds it “impossible to believe that Germaine is a sophisticated Parisian, or for that matter a gifted artist […] the heroine seems more a frustrated suburban housewife than a free-wheeling young widow” (1960: 32). One might reasonably fault Ashton-Warner for not having done the research required to make her protagonist convincingly speak and dress like a Parisian femme fatale, but only if the criteria of realism are applied. As an escapist fiction, verisimilitude is not the novel’s main aim and there is certainly nothing convincing about the devastatingly beautiful, wealthy French concert pianist adored by every man who meets her, with one smitten admirer confessing to Germaine, “You’re too lovely to be endured. You are sheet lightning in my brain” (67). This is the stuff of fantasy and wish-fulfilment, and Incense to Idols offers its readers a vicarious enjoyment of fashion and passion, but it also registers social anxieties about female desire.
The heightened tone caused by the repetition of “Ooh” that Wilson Ross highlights is an expression of Germaine’s passion, which finds outlet not only through her piano-playing but also through her numerous affairs with men. The cumulative effect of Ashton-Warner’s hyperbolic prose lends the narrative a hallucinatory air, in keeping with the heroine’s habitual state of inebriation, and occasionally approaches the absurd. Ashton-Warner’s “strange cadences” (Peterson, 1965: 40) frequently achieve sublime levels in this novel, such as in the following excerpt in which Germaine insists that
People like me need reality and dare not question it. We believe in the flesh and the appetites, and the senses are our miracles. It is I who am divine, inside and out, and I make holy whatever I do. The scent of my hair is finer than prayer and my face more wonderful than churches, Bible or any creed. If I worship one thing more than another it is my own bamboo body. I’m mad on myself I’m so luscious. (75)
This is certainly an expression of Germaine’s hedonistic approach to life, but the absurdity of her self-worship and the ridiculousness of a phrase such as “bamboo body” raise the question as to how seriously we are supposed to take such an utterance. Similarly, when he is kept waiting for a rendezvous with Germaine, her French lover Monsieur Montigny erupts in a passionate outburst:
I know the inside of a furnace! Mon Dieu, I know the furnace! I know its icy-white heart! I know its snowy-white coals! … and the blazing white of its agonies! Why have you been sent to torture me? Why has this beauty exploded before me? For inspiration? For fulfilment? For love? SPEAK! Or are you another white furnace! . . . Speak! Why do you wear white tonight! What are you to me but a slender white voluptuous agony! Speak, Torment, speak! (57–8)
The extravagance of expression matched with the repeating exclamation marks are appropriate to romance, as is the scenario of a handsome European musician with his “dark Hollywood eyes and the black brows and deep features straight from a box-office film” (19–20), but Ashton-Warner’s register here tips very close to that of comedy, suggesting that Incense to Idols is at least in part a parody.
The novel’s tendency to veer into something approaching comedy is particularly evident in the episode when Germaine miscarries. Stead is particularly struck by this incident and similarly senses its comedic qualities, writing that “I’m sure a lot which comes to Ashton-Warner as comic is taken as melodrama because her readers are not prepared to believe she is black-hearted enough to be asking them to laugh at matters so grim and serious” (2002: 105). A miscarriage is certainly serious, but Ashton-Warner’s treatment of it is darkly comic. When Germaine comes to consciousness and discovers one of her lovers (who is a doctor) wielding a wine glass containing her miscarried foetus, she is far from shocked or dismayed. The doctor notes that the wine glass is “all I could find handy at the time” and Germaine responds with, “Give it to me … I want to see it! Oooh! But where’s its hands and feet? Is that blob its head? I thought they … It’s not complete is it. I thought they’d be babies at once. It looks more like … a wounded shrimp or a … what d’you call those things … a tadpole” (136). Germaine even goes so far as to tell her concerned lover, “Ooh don’t be so gloomy” and she insists that they are “awfully clever” to have been able to create such a “cute wee Baal” (137).
The inappropriate use of comedy in this episode lends events an air of unreality and Germaine becomes less a recognizably human character than a monstrous caricature. This is related to her role as a woman who transgresses prevailing notions of femininity since although the narrative invests Germaine with a significant amount of glamour, it also shows her to be a selfish woman whose actions cause significant disruption in her community. Germaine is the catalyst for the doctor’s divorce, just as she causes the death of another lover who is engaged to be married. Her threat potentially extends to the bastion of community values, the minister, who exerts a mysterious attraction for the non-religious Germaine. The central protagonist’s promiscuity, blasphemy, inebriation, pregnancy outside of wedlock (possibly to a married man), and violent impulses clearly establish her as a radical threat to the middle-class notions of femininity that mark her suburban milieu. The narrative ultimately contains this dangerously radical female figure, showing her to be immoral and misguided, and finally killing her off. As the novel’s title suggests, Incense to Idols is about false worship and Germaine eventually realizes the error of her hedonistic ways, confessing that “[m]y whole life I’ve burnt incense to idols when I could have burnt incense to Love” (282). The repeating Biblical references to Baal and the whore of Babylon, and Germaine’s strange fascination with the minister, are all a part of the novel’s concern with one woman’s realization that her path in life has been wrong. Ashton-Warner’s femme fatale comes to an appropriately sticky end thus eliminating the threat she poses to prevailing notions of female behaviour.
Yet it is a mistake to position Incense to Idols as a conservative text because of its ultimate neutralizing of a female character whose sexual desires are represented as excessive and whose attitudes transgress those of middle-class suburbia. Ashton-Warner’s use of heightened tone, romance, melodrama, tragedy, and comedy serve to highlight the non-realistic aspect of the narrative, which has the result of highlighting the non-realistic quality of Germaine and, by extension, the figure of the femme fatale. The unconvincing quality of Germaine’s characterization registers the fantastical nature of the stereotype of the dangerously seductive women at the same time as it works to promulgate it. Incense to Idols reproduces the contradictions associated with female desire deemed excessive — its simultaneous appeal and threat — and also reworks them by suggesting that any essentialist notions about women, whether “spinster”, “wife”, or femme fatale, are finally constructs that are incapable of defining women’s experiences.
While Ashton-Warner wrote nine novels in addition to a substantial body of other writing, both published and unpublished, Spinster and Incense to Idols provide a compelling case study for understanding why Ashton-Warner’s fiction has been neglected in New Zealand literary culture and why her fiction warrants further attention from literary critics. Writing at a time when women authors were sidelined and disparaged, and producing popular fictions that defy genre categorization, Ashton-Warner is a unique writer whose style and subject matter, while polarizing, is certainly powerful. Spinster and Incense to Idols both utilize, extend, and subvert modes of writing associated with popular female fiction in an attempt to find a form that articulates the experiences, desires, and anxieties of women, while also exploring anxieties about women, particularly in terms of desire and social order. Anna’s role as a spinster who channels her desire into her work sees her focus her energies away from the traditional family structure and Spinster’s conclusion that sees Anna enter a romantic relationship registers the pressures experienced by women to identify as wives and mothers. For Germaine, her role as a femme fatale represents a radical threat to social order and her suicide shows something of the difficulties facing women who attempt to express their sexuality outside of the sanctioned area of marriage. Although Ashton-Warner’s heightened, often arch tone, can generate alienating effects on readers, this is precisely the reason these novels possess a certain power. Stead refers to this when he describes the “peculiar lift” of Ashton-Warner’s prose, which at its best elevates “the most commonplace domestic or rural events” and lends them “the excitement you expect only special and obviously thrilling events to have” (2002: 102). The gripping quality of Ashton-Warner’s novels involve an escape into the heightened realms of fantasy, but reading her work is also a way of gaining rich insights into female experience and the norms that shape those experience.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.