‘Only Connect’:
Text and Theory
What We Read
Children’s Literature
Sci-Fi
The Canon
Shakespeare
Detective Fiction
Milton
Tennyson
Wordsworth
Keats
Thriller
Dickens
Jane Austen
Popular Culture
Chick Lit
What We Read
Hamlet
Batman
Atonement
Harry Potter
Survivor
The Reader
Whale Rider
Pride and Prejudice
How We Read
Author
Text
Reader
•Stable meaning
•Task of reader to work out author’s intention
How We Read
‘The death of the author is the birth of the reader.’
Roland Barthes
Background
Author
Text
Reader
Ideology
•Reader Response
•Meanings – fluid, flexible, multiple
Society
Culture
How We Read
Literary Theory:
 Different ways of approaching, looking at
text
 Fashions come and go, new theories and
approaches invented
Examples:
 New Historicist
 Post-colonial
 Marxist
 Psychoanalytic
 Feminist
Advantages
Reader centre stage
 Multiplicity
 Different voices heard
 Connections between texts: links,
commonalities, divergences,
intertextuality

BUT:
 Still need textual analysis, support
How We Read Texts
New Historicist:
 Text in historical context
 Text shaped by cultural, political,
ideological world in which produced
For Example:

Hard Times – 19th trade union movement,
education act
 The Tempest – exploration and discovery
 The Captive Wife – convicts, cultural
contact, 19th attitudes towards women
How We Read Texts
Post-colonial:
 Examine representations of race, Empire,
power imbalance
 Indigenous voice/perspective
For Example:

The Tempest – Ariel and Caliban
indigenous, Prospero as coloniser
 Mansfield Park – Edward Said –
society/wealth founded on slave trade
(Antigua)
 Salman Rushdie, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia
Grace
How We Read Texts
Marxist:
 Class struggle key feature of history,
human interaction
 How do texts represent society, class?
For Example:

Wuthering Heights – Heathcliff’s
pursuit of wealth and power
 Jane Eyre – Jane a ‘lady’, inheritance
secures her class position
How We Read Texts
Psychoanalytic:
 Freud – loss experienced upon separation
from mother’s body, id versus ego
 Jungian archetypes, collective unconscious
 Jacques Lacan – structure of self and
relation to the social, mirror stage
For Example:
 Bruce Wayne and Batman – ego and id,
chaos and order
 Bertha in Jane Eyre – the suppressed self
 Goblin Market – sexuality and desire
How We Read Texts
Feminist:
 Representation of women in literature
 Desire to recover ‘silenced’ writers
 Patriarchal structure of society and
language
For Example:
 Jane Austen – predicament of 18th Century
women
 Aphra Behn, Dorothy Wordsworth, Louisa
Baker, Dorothy Parker
 John Donne – ‘she is all states, all Princes
I’; ‘Ah my America, my new found land’ –
male conqueror critiqued
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Charles Darwin Origin of Species
(1859)
Evolutionary Scale: Natural Selection
‘Civilised’ Man
‘Savage’
Ape
Atavistic Criminal
Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (1876):
Ears of unusual size, standing out
from the head as do those of the
chimpanzee
 Nose twisted, upturned, or flattened
in thieves, or aquiline or beak-like in
murderers, or with a tip rising like a
peak from swollen nostrils.
 Lips fleshy, swollen, and protruding
 Chin receding, or excessively long, or
short and flat, as in apes.
 Abnormally hairy
 Excessive length of arms, extra fingers
and toes

New Historicist Reading
Jekyll: Genial Doctor
-‘a large, well-made, smoothfaced man of fifty, with something
of a slyish cat perhaps, but every
mark of capacity and kindness…’
Hyde: Ape-Like, Deformed,
Atavistic Criminal
-‘impression of deformity…hardly
human…something troglodytic…’
-‘ape-like fury’
-‘like a monkey’
-‘animal terror’
-‘face…great muscular activity…debility of constitution’
-‘hand…corded and hairy’
-‘ape-like tricks’, ‘ape-like spite’
Post-Colonial and Marxist
Readings
Superiority/Evolved
Nature of ‘Civilised’ Man
an Illusion
Crimes of a
Middle Class Man
Jekyll/Hyde
‘Primitive’
Lurks Within
No Sense of
Evolutionary Progress
Hyde: Middle Class,
Hyde Described
As ‘Gentleman’
Sigmund Freud Studies on Hysteria,
1895

Id – instinctual self , location of desires,
repressed because socially unacceptable, a threat
to the ego (pleasure principle)

Ego – conscious self (reality Principle)

Superego – conscience (internalisation of
punishments and warnings) and ego ideal
(shaped by rewards and positive models)

Return of the Repressed – can never banish id,
will emerge at some point
Psychoanalytic Reading
Ego Ideal:
Respected,
Charitable
Doctor
Conscience:
Wrong to
Indulge Desires
Superego
Ego: Jekyll
The Return of
The Repressed…
AntiCalvinist
Allegory
Id: Hyde
‘his wonderful
selfishness and
circumscription to
the moment…’
‘his every act and thought centred on self;
drinking pleasure with bestial avidity…’
Study in Addiction
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Attraction of altered state (Hyde)
Dependency on/ enslavement by Hyde
Illusion of self-control, belief can be free
of Hyde when choose
Concealment, manipulation of others
Compulsive behaviour
Despair, retreat into pathological
reclusiveness, underworld
Inability to achieve desired effect
Triumph of Hyde
Jekyll compares self with ‘drunkard’
Feminist Reading?
‘Weeping like a woman or a lost soul…’
 Hyde as the Repressed Feminine?
 Hyde as Product of Male Environment

Queer Studies Reading?
‘…the more it looks like Queer Street, the
less I ask’
 The Back Door
 A Warning: Text and Context

Belonging or
Alienation?
Settler Indigenity

‘It is only by going native that the European
arrivant can become native.’ (Terry Goldie)

‘To surrender the furnishings of a culture
both European and bourgeois is to come into
the sensuality of a “natural occupancy” of
the new land. The pleasure afforded by these
fictions is that they allow the heirs of a
settler society to imagine our unhistoric
origin as the possibility of the making of a
settlement without a colony.’ (Linda Hardy)
‘Colonial Being’ (Stephen
Turner)
Colonial


New Zealander


To be at home/of the new place
To be indigenous
fantasized history
 illusory continuity; historical
discontinuity
 myth-making

Colonial Being
New place like home
Eliminate indigenous population
Becoming Māori
Language and Affection
 Rechristening
 Symbolic Wedding Night
 Moko
 Baptism

Displaced Woman
Sacrifice of Self
 Voice-Over – ‘Sadness’ and ‘Despair’
 Dissolving Words
 Ocean – Symbolic Separator
 Celtic Theme Tune

Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones
Post-Modern Power to Reader:
Liberation and Transformation
 Post-Colonial? Exploitation and the
Culture of Violence
 Dickens Appropriated; Oral and
Written, Feminine and Masculine
 Cultural Colonisation?
 Masculine Voice?

Katherine Mansfield, How
Pearl Button was Kidnapped
Anne Estelle Rice, Katherine Mansfield,
1918
Nigel Brown, Names Painting Katherine
Mansfield, 1985-93, Private Collection,
Photograph Nicola Topping.
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped
New Historicist Reading:
 Written 1910
 New Zealand female suffrage 1885
 Maori – fatal impact, assimilation
 Puritan society – tradition of literary
critique of Puritan mindset –
Mansfield attacks the ‘box’ mentality
of early 20th century New Zealand
secular Puritanism
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped
Feminist Reading:
 House, ‘box’, domestic space of conformity
and traditional female domestic drudgery
‘In the kitchen, ironing-because-itsTuesday’
 Pearl – rebellious, desirous of new
horizons and experiences
 Shedding of ‘shoes and stocking, her
pinafore and dress’, freeing from female
constraint, expectation
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped
Psychoanalytic Reading:
Ego Ideal:
•mother at home
•Boxes = order
Conscience:
•‘nasty things’
•policemen
Archetype:
•Socialisation of individual
•Fantasy of escape
Freud:
Journey away
from Mother
Super-Ego
Ego: Pearl
Id: Instinctual Self
Escape
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped
Post-Colonial Reading:
 Cultural encounter – Maori culture seen as
warm, communal, loving, spontaneous;
Pakeha culture as restricting, sterile and
claustrophobic
 Maori stereotypes – ‘fat’, ‘dusty’, ‘naked’,
admiring of Pearl’s ‘yellow curls’
 Witi Ihimaera’s ‘The Affectionate
Kidnappers’ – ‘a tamariki all alone – no
good’, ‘gone into darkness, gone into the
stomach of the Pakeha …eaten up by the
white man’
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped
Marxist Reading:
 Bourgeois Pakeha society: individual
ownership = conformity, alienation,
‘nasty things’
 Maori society: communal, warmth,
laughter
 Pearl instinctively Marxist in outlook
and preferences
Bibliography:
Literary Theory
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Gregory Castle, The Blackwell Guide to Literary
Theory (2007)
Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford UP 1997)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Minnesota UP 1996)
Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism:
An Oxford Guide (2006)
Bibliography:
Mister Pip, River Queen
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John Lovell, Mister Pip Teacher’s Guide (Longman, 2008)
Jennifer Lawn, ‘What the Dickens: Storytelling and
Intertextuality in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip,’ in Floating Worlds:
Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction, ed. Anna
Jackson and Jane Stafford (Victoria University Press, 2009)pp
142-63
Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’ NeoVictorian Studies 1:1 (2008) pp. 177-180 on Mister Pip
Bruce Babington, ‘What Streams May Come: Navigating
Vincent Ward’s River Queen’ Illusions Winter (2008) pp. 9-13
Kirstine Moffat, ‘The River and the Ocean: Indigenity and
Dispossession in River Queen’ Moving Worlds, Special Issue:
New New Zealand, 8:2 (2009) pp. 94-106