Breaking into the Middle of the Story: Reading Lydia Syson’s Mr Peacock’s Possessions as a Neo-Victorian Robinsonade

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Lydia Syson’s Mr Peacock’s Possessions as a neo-Victorian Robinsonade. In order to assess the contemporary pertinence of the format, I organize my discussion around the notion of un/settlement, a concept which applies to both the frustrated process of colonial domestication of the island depicted in the novel and to the author’s project of writing back to the narrative and ideological codes of the Victorian Robinsonade. The term “un/settlement” is also useful to explore the novel’s engagement with the violent colonial history of the region, which resurfaces in the present forcing the characters (and the author) to recover and narrate those stories and thus settle their debt with that past. The article starts by contextualizing Syson’s novel in relation to a long tradition of castaway narratives, and then moves on to discuss the novel in the light of neo-Victorian and postcolonial preoccupations with the possibilities and limitations of historical revision and reparation.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Carolina Fernández Rodríguez for her valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sunday island, the largest in the Kermadec Group, was annexed by New Zealand in 1887, after the Bells had been living there for some years, and divided into several leases, which prompted the arrival of new settlers. Thomas Bell was allocated one lease, but continued to claim ownership of the whole island. In 1914 the island was evacuated and the Bells left reluctantly. Sunday Island was renamed Raoul Island in 1939. (See Nathan 2012, Utton 2018).

2. Theorizations of haunting in neo-Victorian fiction commonly depart from Derrida’s notion of “hauntology,” developed in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994).

3. Well-known postcolonial revisions of Robinson Crusoe include the novel Moses Ascending (1975) by Sam Selvon; the play Pantomime (1978) by Derek Walcott; and the short stories “The Wind and a Boy” (1977) by Bessie Head or “Friday’s Footprint” (1960) by Nadine Gordimer.

4. In Masterman Ready, for instance, this topic is illustrated through the contrast between William, the eldest and obedient son, and Tommy, the troublesome and undisciplined brother, who is eventually brought to respect the rules so that the reader becomes aware of the dangers of rebelling against parental authority (Maher 1988, 172).

5. Neo-Victorian readings of the crypt generally draw on Abraham and Maria Torok’s works, The Wolf’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1976). See Arias and Pulham (2009).

6. A derogatory term employed at the time to refer to Pacific Island workers.

7. The history of Pacific slavery has been explored, among others, by Australian Solomon Islander filmmaker Amie Batalibasi, whose short film Blackbird (2015) tells the story of two Solomon Islander siblings kidnapped and taken to Queensland (see https://amiebatalibasi.com/blackbird/); or artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby, a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander artist, whose great-great grandparents were taken from Vanuatu to Australia in 1899. For a discussion of Togo-Brisby’s work, see Teaiwa 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER, UE under Grant PID2021-122249NB-I00

Notes on contributors

Paloma Fresno-Calleja

Paloma Fresno-Calleja is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). Her research focuses on New Zealand and Pacific literatures.