An imagined space: The dynamics of home in Eve Langley’s novels

Abstract

This thesis sets out to examine the nature of imagined spaces described in the novels and unpublished manuscripts of Eve Langley (1904-1974), set in Australia and New Zealand from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Specifically, it explores those spaces representative of "home" and those where enactments of “being-at-home” take place. Critical to formulations of the space of the imagined home in Langley’s novels are her narrator's representations of a coexistent and covalent sense of both belonging and "unbelonging". This study shows that, paradoxically, a sense of belonging for Langley’s narrator relies on an equally strong sense of “unbelonging”. Langley’s evocations of home and being-at-home, unsettledness, and marginality are explored with regard to their implications for the concept of settlement as home, imagined community, nation. In this thesis, the alignment of imagined spaces of home with specific colonial locations in Langley’s texts is considered paradigmatic of the settler narrative. When read as a settler narrative, Langley’s novelistic oeuvre works to reveal many of the complex negotiations inherent in the concept of a settler colony as “home”. Langley’s narrator is considered representative of the settler subject, occupying the ambiguous, in-between position typical of that figure, and as such, is frequently concerned with the sense of being “in place” and “out of place” at the same time. Lefebvre’s classifications of social space are employed to explicate the complex dynamics of the imagined space of home in Langley’s novels, and thus to illuminate the strategies at work in the construction of that space. By investigating the evocations of home in Langley’s novels, this thesis shows that not only is “home”, in all its varied and contradictory manifestations, a key concept in Langley’s novels, but also that Langley’s novels work to produce and cultivate an imagined space of home beyond textual representation.