LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

national identity in convict literature as it arose at least by the middle part of the century. Works considered authentically Australian, though some were written by English immigrants and others by expatriate Australians, were a necessary precursor to the more strictly defined nationalist works that arose in the last decade of the century as an accompaniment to aspirations for an actual nation separate from England.⁴²

      This evolving Australian identity, like England’s, included notions of social class, but in a somewhat different way. Because colonial Australia was, especially at first, mostly a land of people who had failed, in one way or another, in England, class status there was somewhat more fluid, with social mobility common and English status—particularly the lack (or loss) of it—often disguised or deemphasized. For one thing, because such a large percentage of the population were or had been convicts, they and their children had to be assimilated there. As in England, there were conflicts and negotiations between different social groups, especially between former convicts and settlers who had come free to the colonies, with different models of Australianness arising and competing. On one hand, the rough, independent, and resourceful bushman became a symbol for Australianness among many, especially the former convicts and the laboring classes. On the other hand, the large-scale cattle and sheep station owners tried to reinvent themselves as an Australian pseudofeudal gentry with convicts as their serfs.⁴³ Once the convicts’ sentences expired, however, they did not often stay with their masters unless they were paid a good wage, so this model was not overly successful in the long term, especially at defining the “squatters” as the national subject. The majority of the population of Australia lived in the cities along the east coast of the continent, and this urban society exercised the most power both economically and politically; significantly, it included both former convicts and free settlers, not necessarily in the same class configurations one might expect based on their former positions in England.⁴⁴

      One apparent contradiction between the literary history and the historiography of nineteenth-century Australia is that most of the convict literature, especially the novels, did not see print until convict transportation had already been ended or was about to be abolished. Because the whole point of settling Australia in the first place was to get rid of convicts and not hear from them again, there seems to have been not much interest among the British public in reading about these mostly working-class banished people, except among the lowest classes, until free emigration became more common; this came to a head with the advent of the Australian gold rush in 1851. The broadsides, a couple of convict autobiographies, and a few novels were published before that, but for the most part, Australia in English literature before the 1850s appeared as a joke about “Botany Bay.” In the 1850s, however, both journalism and novels about and even set in Australia began to emerge with more regularity. Many of these works featured transported convicts, either freed or still under sentence. By that time, many readers would have been more interested in Australia because they were more likely to have family, friends, or acquaintances who had emigrated or were considering it. Such readers needed reassurance that the Australian colonies were no longer only depots for English felons but desirable places to settle.⁴⁵ The convicts needed to be portrayed as having died, returned to England, or reformed into respectable or even rich prospective neighbors and citizens for Australia to seem like an appealing place for emigrants to resettle.⁴⁶

      Of course, some of the convict narratives published after 1850 featured convicts, like Abel Magwitch, who still felt themselves to be English and whose greatest desire was to return to their native country.⁴⁷ However, other material about transported convicts portrayed them as finding a home in Australia. By at least the 1840s, fictional convicts, as well as free settlers, were taking pride in Australia as their homeland. Thus, the novels and other types of writing that featured Australian convicts had two functions: they helped reinforce a notion of Englishness by its difference from convict-ridden Australia, but they also began to construct a positive sense of Australianness, including its former convicts, as distinct from England and the English. This feeling of Australianness was only embryonic at first; even many children born in Australia who had never been to England referred to the mother country as “home.” Nonetheless, the idea that Australia could be its own homeplace did gradually take root, and popular novels and other narratives about transported convicts played a role in this change. In fact, narratives written and published in England held out the promise of a new Australian identity before this was actively imagined in Australia; initially it was England that most needed this new identity for its unwanted subjects. Yet the books published in England were also read in Australia, and Australians, too, began to be proud of their own identity.

      Although historically the transported convicts were overwhelmingly male, outnumbering women six to one, in the literature the issue of gender was crucial in forming both English and Australian national identities that included social class as a key component. Gender is relevant to this project in several ways. One is that although women were relatively few in number historically, there are several important literary representations of transported female convicts. Like their male counterparts, they faced the threat of losing their Englishness and their place in the English class system when they were exiled to Australia. However, since female convicts were usually portrayed as fallen sexually, their place in the English social system was even more complicated than for male convicts, though Australian society was somewhat more forgiving, especially for working-class women. Another way that gender is important both historically and literarily is that women are crucial for creating families, which were seen by authorities from the very early days to be the surest way to reform male convicts. In fact, convict authorities pleaded with the English government to send more women convicts. Further, because most female convicts were assigned as servants once they reached Australia, they are usually represented in the context of the domestic sphere of the home, defining the femininity and social status of their mistresses and masters—sometimes themselves former convicts. Domesticity was an important marker of social status for male convicts as well, and their treatment of women and the men’s desire—or lack of it—for a properly domestic home was a measure of their fitness for return to England or for social mobility in Australia.

      Many other literary critics who have written about English national identity have addressed the ways that the indigenous peoples of the various colonies constituted an Other against which the English could define themselves.⁴⁸ This was of course particularly true in Australia, where the indigenous people arguably suffered even more at the hands of English conquerors than they did in many of the other colonies; the Aboriginal people in what is now called Tasmania, for example, were almost exterminated in the Black War of the late 1820s and early 1830s.⁴⁹ The English tended to view the Australian indigenous people as the most backward and least civilizable of all their subject peoples.⁵⁰ Perhaps because of this, in most of the nineteenth-century literature about Australia, the Aborigines are not represented as particularly threatening; even more than in other settler colonies, claims David Pearson, they were simply invisible (31). Rather, the convicts are more often portrayed as the alarming Other of the respectable English. The existence of two major but distinctly different oppressed groups, one of them technically British, makes Australia and literature about it unique in imperial and colonial studies (America, of course, had both Native Americans and African slaves, but neither of these were British, as the convicts were).

      While there were a few attempts to equate the convicts and the indigenous Australians, some English administrators believed that even England’s criminal rejects were civilized enough to model European behavior and attitudes toward the “savage” Aborigines. In the twenty-first century, the historically prior and continuing existence of the Australian indigenous people is a fact that cannot be ignored, but overt racism virtually erased their existence in many of the nineteenth-century texts I examine. Despite the fact that many of these texts do not mention the indigenous people, the presence of the Aborigines underlies and informs all of them and points to settler guilt about the conquest and slaughter—amounting to genocide in places like Tasmania—of the original inhabitants of the land. Relations between Aborigines and convicts varied in different places and at different times, of course. There are numerous stories of convicts “going native” but an equal or greater number of accounts of convict hostility toward the indigenous Australians. Some of this hostility may be traced to convict anxiety about being likened to the native people. For instance,

Скачать книгу