“ ‘How shall we construct her here?’: Assessing Some Recent Readings of Robin Hyde” [1]

Megan Clayton

“I know thee, all thou art— / A dream has told me”: Leggott’s textual inferences.[2]

Michele Leggott, a poet and academic, first encountered Hyde’s writing when A Home in this World was published in 1984.  As Mary Paul explains, Leggott “first read Hyde as a university teacher, and grew so interested in her poetry that she incorporated lines and echoes from Hyde in her own series ‘Blue Irises,’ only later coming to write on her in a more academic context”(147).  This combination of the personal, the creative and the academic is the defining triad of Leggott’s appropriation of Hyde, whose literary and critical style has become, by its textual rhetoric and authorial charisma, a methodological and stylistic ur-text for Robin Hyde criticism since the mid-1990s.  How Leggott’s analysis works needs to be explained, along with a mapping of its influence and its limits.

Leggott’s writerly interest in Robin Hyde came to prominence in 1994-95, with the appearance in 1994 of her third collection of poetry, DIA, which included the sequence “Blue Irises.”  In the same year, an article by Leggott was published in the women’s studies journal Hecate, entitled “Opening the Archive: Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and the Persistence of Record.”  By the time this article was reprinted the following year in a volume which Leggott co-edited, Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, her reputation as a Robin Hyde scholar was established in the academy.  It was also in 1995 that Leggott, with her student Lisa Docherty, re-catalogued for the Auckland University Library the collection of Hyde poetry manuscripts which Gloria Rawlinson had prepared in the 1940s—creating an “Inventory of Poetry Manuscripts” which clarified and expanded the work Rawlinson had already done.

            What, then, is the thesis which Leggott argues, and why has it had so much influence on Robin Hyde studies?  At its heart, Leggott’s argument calls for a return to reading, of Robin Hyde, of women poets, of manuscripts and of poetry itself.  This call is consistent across her work of this period, in both poetry and prose:

I want heart but I want scope too.  Big projects for poetry, like raiding and rewriting its androcentric history.  I am not interested in the one-page poem unless it is a constituent of something bigger, unless its brevity is a training ground so I can read to marathon length.  This is where complexity comes in, and I welcome it.  Complexity is about endurance, about surviving over time and distance to ask old questions in new places.  (DIA 1994, 26)

After 1939 the fight was lost along with Hyde’s life and the intervention of the second war.  What remains to us are the poems and their codings, plus the orientations of Hyde’s essay journalism, letters and autobiographical prose.  A selection of that journalism is currently in print; the poems, letters and autobiographical material are out of print or still in manuscript.  Why are we so slow to read the poet who most disrupts the orthodoxy set up by the contents and introduction of A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-1945?  (“Opening the Archive,” 276)

Now we should turn to the manuscripts collected with utterly partisan care by Julia McLeely and Grace Burgess [of Eileen Duggan’s writing], by Bill Edge, Gloria Rawlinson and Derek Challis, and begin to read.  (290)

We can see two things here: that Leggott’s argument has more than a hint of a long-term project about it, and that this project is grand in scale: to return Robin Hyde’s poetry to the reading public, with the subsequent re-orienting of Hyde’s status as a writer that this implies.  To this end, Leggott is a powerful and indeed forceful rhetorician, writing in a manner that reorganises the focii of Robin Hyde research, so that Hyde appears not merely as a figure who wrote well in many different genres, but as the Poet-Artist she herself aspired to be.  Thus, in Leggott’s analysis, the project of the scholars associated with the New Women’s Press becomes the background to her own work of bringing the distant past into the immediate present:

When Gillian Boddy in 1991 quotes Pat Lawlor in 1935 quoting Jessie Mackay several years previously on the subject of her younger contemporaries Eileen Duggan and Robin Hyde, the voice on the wind seems impossibly distant.  To ground Mackay’s statement and its original context is one search among many that might alter the sense we presently have of all three writers as peripheral to the founding of a canon of New Zealand poetry.  (266)

These redistributive aims are also present in Leggott’s poetry, as she explains in her “note” to DIA:

It is time we listened in other places in order to draw some of those shadowy figures back into the conversation about language and place.  To this end I have practised a kind of ventriloquism, picking out white-hot lines from the poems of (among others) Robin Hyde and Eileen Duggan and recombining them with an ear for the heart, complexity, and engagement with which they were written.  This is homage.  (26)

These general attributions leave the reader to engage in the research and reading which Leggott herself has already done, engaging in a game which is an unusual mixture of the academic and the playfully postmodern.  The poems of “Blue Irises” thus become a sequence of cryptograms; word puzzles which force the reader to “begin to read”(1995, 290) in the fashion that Leggott has instructed.

            In this manner, Leggott not only reconstructs literary history, but also writing itself.  She uses images of discovery and construction alongside each other, so that her work reads as both an archaeology and an architecture of Robin Hyde, rather than a more fully postmodern exercise in historiography.  Thus, after the assertion in DIA that her “ventriloquism” of Hyde et al’s “white-hot lines” is not plagiarism but “homage,” Leggott explains that this homage has “also shown me how to make a matrix where none was visible or audible.  It is a kind of speaking together, problematic but full of possibilities”(26).  In “Opening the Archive,” however, she argues for the necessity of discovering, rather than “mak[ing]” this “matrix”: “There is a lost matrix of women poets whose presence in our literature needs urgent reappraisal.  How it was lost, and why, are absorbing questions; but more important still is the matter and nature of matrix, with its suggestions of support, nurture and numerousness”(267).

            Elsewhere, Leggott’s approach to the tension between the roles of researcher and inventor is more irreverent; indeed, she goes to the extent of laying literary traps for the unwary dilettante, as the next extracts show:

Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.  The rest is the madness of art.  —Henry James

I am working in the dark, trying to bridge the distance between their tradition and my standpoint, convinced these women have something to say that I need to hear.  I am moving by a kind of textual infra-red, looking for places that make light of historical distance or heat up connections to the present.  (1995, 269)

We can all write heart poems, the ones that take breath away or make tears and laughter come.  Sometimes they step from the shadows when you were thinking about something else entirely.  You ignore the tearing sound at your peril; they always have something to say.  We work in the dark, they say, we do what we can.  We give what we have.  Our doubt is our passion.  Our passion is our task.  The rest is the madness of art.  You can quote me.  (1994, 26)

There is throughout Leggott’s writing a tension between the unreliability of language and the passion of its speaker, between textual unreliability and emotional truth.  Her turning away from critics such as Gillian Boddy, whose approach in Disputed Ground produces only a “voice on the wind” which “seems impossibly distant”(266), means that her own work necessarily takes a new prominence in Robin Hyde research.  Leggott makes apparent in her text a sense of working alone, outside of a community of research, which is in notable contrast with the earlier collaborative efforts of Phillida Bunkle, Linda Hardy, and Jacqueline Matthews in their reviews of the film on Robin Hyde, Iris.  By such assertions as “I am working in the dark” or “I am moving by a kind of textual infra-red”(269), Leggott’s present-day is ironically emptied of the very literary community whose work precedes her own.  It is clear that in attending Hyde’s poetry, particularly the many poems that remain unpublished, Leggott in “Opening the Archive” feels that she is travelling alone.

            Despite this sense of isolation, Leggott’s re-reading of Hyde’s poetry introduces to the reader much that is new and important.  Most famously, Leggott identifies, specifically in the sequence “The Beaches” from the longer series “Houses by the Sea”, a series of revelations “[f]olded into it, by enigma and double coding”: “the narratives of emergent female sexuality, something coming the other way, determining contemporary possibility against a dream of history”(270).  What Leggott seems to mean by this last sentence is that it is possible to find in the present day references to a genital femininity that is both anatomical and metaphorical.  Once Leggott has identified the former, as a vulval image “masked for propriety”(271) in the lines “What makes the sweethearts quarrel? / Third mouth, pink as coral”(270), the metaphorical becomes easier to elucidate: “Hot cream flood, peaks and shouts, coral pink mouth.  Hyde hides what androcratic society will not countenance: sexuality celebrated and inscribed by a woman”(271).  These specificities then enable Leggott to define her wider poetics of Hyde, woman and writer:

Hyde is about hiding, about surviving by hiding, and she stamps the exigency as a personal signature in every part of her work.  It starts with the deliberate androgyny of the assumed name but it travels also through endless references in her poems to rainbows, prisms, bridges and arcs.  The rainbow is the sign of Iris, she who connects heaven and earth; Iris Wilkinson elaborated the clue of her given name, producing an exquisite tension between presence and concealment of herself in her work.  (271)

            There seems no reason to disagree with Leggott’s poetic schema; her subsequent description of what she calls Hyde’s “baby poems” as “deeply hidden and obliquely expressed”(288) and thus evoking the loss of Hyde’s first son, is both literary and wise: “Ghosts like Hyde’s never leave entirely though they may be made over”(289).  Despite Leggott’s assertion of her textual isolation, the insights her argument presents for the reader can be read as achieved by an analytical means which has more in common with her feminist precursors than she suggests.  A constituent part of Leggott’s feminism seems to be its inversions of masculine equivalents; thus we should read Hyde because she “most disrupts the orthodoxy set up”(276) in Curnow’s 1945 poetry anthology, or because her poems contain not the singular, masculine phallus, but multiple hips and thighs, breasts and genitals.  Of the lines “rose afterglow / In endless stillness: prowling to the crests / Of great bare hills, upthrust like goddess-breasts”(277-8) from the poem “Zoological,” Leggott suggests that “[t]he juxtaposition of goddess-breasts and local hills is strange only until vision doubles and we see what is before us—the geomorphic body of Papatuaanuku”(278).  And Leggott situates her own research within the tracing of what Patrick Evans has called “the distaff line,”[3] that “lost matrix of women poets”(Leggott, 267) whose recovery gives us “a capacity for shaping New Zealand poetry in the first half of the century as a politically alert, humanitarian enterprise, diverse in its subjects and styles but run on sympathetic and highly reticulated energies that took as their point of departure the socially progressive atmosphere of the late colonial period”(267-8).

            The problem here is the dialectical relationship between Leggott’s reconstructed poetics and the “cultural nationalism inimical to previous competences”(266) whose influence she wants to refute.  In the pairings I have identified—orthodoxy/unorthodoxy, phallus/vulva, “the colonial dilemma”(Bertram 1953, 191) / “the socially progressive atmosphere of the late colonial period”(Leggott 1995, 268)—we can see the way in which Leggott’s approach is similar to the feminism of Bunkle et al, which was itself locked in dialectic with the masculinism of the cultural nationalists.[4]   In such a dialectic, feminism functions as a kind of “better” masculinism, matching the dominant discourse’s concerns with a tit-for-tat offering of feminine equivalents.  Leggott does not, in her 1995 article, identify any difficulty in this particular dialectic, nor does she signal explicitly any alternatives.  By 1999, however, she is pursuing another line of Robin Hyde research, and we find in a volume by Mary Paul, published in that year, a rehearsal of the problem I have just identified.  Paul’s Her Side of the Story: Readings of Mander, Mansfield, & Hyde and Leggott’s editing of The Book of Nadath provide the final touchstones of my analysis of the Robin Hyde critical tradition.

            Leggott’s edited edition of The Book of Nadath was published in 1999.  This project had occupied Leggott and Auckland University Press for some time, drawing on existing fragments of the long poem in manuscript and typescript, some in the Auckland University Library Collection, some held by Hyde’s son, Derek Challis.  The editorial introduction to the reconstituted Book is as much an exposition of Leggott’s critical thinking as it is a guide to the text.  The construction of textuality remains Leggott’s primary focus; like her own poems in DIA, she has assembled Nadath piece by piece from disparate locations.  Here, however, she makes a necessarily emphatic case for textual unity and the authority of her edition, which implicitly addresses the problem of the tension between discovery and construction that exists in “Opening the Archive.”  The Book of Nadath, Leggott suggests, is best read not as a postmodern assemblage but as an act of historical retrieval:

If The Book of Nadath stretches over a good two-thirds of 1937, its manuscript tells the first part of the story.  It is a powerful tool for reckoning up the beginning of Nadath, because for over half of the handwritten poem the narrative order is Hyde’s, and because 30 of those pages are written on Exquisite Bond, a paper she reserved for handwriting, and on which she drafted a number of the poems written at Whangaroa early in 1937.  Considered alongside the northern ambience of “Nadath and the Master of Wheels”(AU Ms #4) and “The House of Woman”(AU Ms #5), the 30 pages of Exquisite Bond draw Nadath physically closer to Hyde’s three-week sojourn at Whangaroa in February 1937.  A stack of paper or a writing pad may be carried from one place to another and used anywhere, but if that is the case it is still revealing that the poem follows in the settings of some of its sections Hyde’s own journeys in early 1937.  (xiii)

In her introduction to The Book of Nadath, Leggott conditions Hyde’s extant manuscripts to form a publishable, analysable whole, as we see in her detailed case for the importance of the manuscript to the other material Hyde wrote in 1937: “the completion of The Godwits Fly at Whangaroa, the writing of A Home in This World at Waiatarua in March and the winter composition of Nor the Years Condemn at Castor Bay and Milford”(xiii).  In making a case for The Book of Nadath as “Hyde’s 1937 metatext”(xiii), and as a metatext more generally for Hyde’s cultural times, Leggott returns to that staple of Hyde criticism, the writer’s biography.  The “Introduction” to her edition of Nadath has a much stronger biographical element than “Opening the Archive,” providing, if not revelations, then new inferences about the young writer’s life.

            In keeping with the tone of “Opening the Archive,” these inferences are tied up with female sexuality, in particular, the nature of Hyde’s relationship with her Avondale doctor, Gilbert Tothill.  It is not so much the issue of the role of Hyde’s biography in considering her work that Leggott considers, but rather the question of which incidents in Hyde’s life should be subject to literary-critical probing, and for what purpose.  The section in “Nadath Speaks to His Love” where “Nadath hears the voice of the [lost] beloved issuing from his own lips, counselling peace, and decides not to let love go out of his heart”(xvii) is linked by Leggott to a number of extant poems by Hyde: verses edited out of a 1937 poem whose expunged lines include “The guest is gone / Seen but set free, partaken and with-held, / And in this dream to last this day, Forever”(xviii) and three short poems (including one placed by Rawlinson in Houses by the Sea as “The Miracle of Abundance”), whose evocations, suggests Leggott, provide “compounding senses of layered reality”(xix), a reality whose constituent factors are loss and dream: “Yet I remembered not whose lips lay late upon / My eyes, nor felt the dark disturbed by my lover — / He that had been and passed”(xx).  The historical problem for Leggott is here the way in which Hyde has positioned her speakers; should we read these verses as biographical revelation or the projection of a wish?  Leggott’s textual consideration of this concern is evocative and elliptical, chafing at the edges of euphemism as she attempts to decipher the narrative intentions of a writer who once referred to her craft, squid-like, as “Squirting Ink.”[5]

            In “Opening the Archive,” Leggott identified the figures around whose loss Hyde constructs a number of narratives as Hyde’s first son, Robin, and her friend, Harry Sweetman.  Here, her attribution is different, and not without controversy:

The person Hyde lost and who seems to stand at the back of these and other poems she wrote 1934-37 [including Nadath] is the doctor at Avondale who restored her health and self-esteem, Gilbert M. Tothill.  [....] The Book of Nadath, the unpublished 1934 Autobiography and 1935 Journal and now the poetry archive itself make Gilbert Tothill unavoidable in Hyde’s post-1933 work.  That she struggled with her feelings for him is in no doubt.  That in her writing she turned him into a saviour, a healer whose counsel is always peace, is also apparent.  (xxi)

Leggott in her introduction thus grapples with the oblique but identifiable causality that exists between Tothill and Hyde’s writing; Hyde’s relationship with Tothill is not merely a starting point for her literary thinking, but rather something that she “turned into” the reveries and romances of her poetry.  The question of whether there was any historical reality behind these reveries and romances, and what its nature might have been, is one Leggott here addresses in a similar manner to her consideration of Hyde and sexuality in “Opening the Archive,” by initiating a reading of the sexual signposts that Hyde’s poetry manuscripts offer up.  Citing a letter from Hyde to “her Dunedin benefactor W. Downie Stewart and his sister (9 September 1937)”(xxiii), Leggott argues of Hyde’s remark “I saw [Tothill] on Sunday last for the first time in months—he just arrived without notice” that “[w]hat lay beneath the cheery account of that day as Hyde describes it is the distance between what she called ‘spruce record’ and manuscript poems with all their verses intact”(xxiii).  Ultimately, Leggott’s analysis must end where it began, gesturing towards Hyde’s narrative games while at the same time highlighting the present inability of the critical community to answer the “did they or didn’t they” curiosity that reading Nadath and other poems from this period necessarily piques.

            In such gnomic sentences as “Great art in the balance with social transgression?”(xix), Leggott mimics the way in which Hyde’s poems both gesture to and obscure the possibility of a reading that throws some biographical light on the dark days of Hyde’s 1937 subsistence and the bright lights of her writing at this time.  Leggott nonetheless engages in a modicum of biographical attribution, claiming that “in her writing [Hyde] turned [Tothill] into a saviour”(xxi), but the rest, it seems, is silence: “Looked at autobiographically, the passage is a feat of mirror-imaging and gender reversals carried out with shifting pronouns worthy of a sick man’s (woman’s) vision”(xxii).

            Part of what makes Leggott’s analysis reflect in its composition the complexity of the questions she is addressing is the way in which her introduction is primarily grounded in a limited context: the writing and movements of Hyde herself.  Leggott’s work on Hyde to date is thus characterised by a return to textuality through an epistemology which is still feminist but detached from the many historical referents which we see in Bunkle et al.  In this way, Hyde often reads as a construction of Leggott’s own literary imagination as a figure who shares, in another “feat of mirror-imaging,” the imaginative and creative concerns of Leggott herself.  In this manner it is sometimes difficult, when reading Leggott’s criticism, to imagine the figure of Hyde as historically independent from Leggott’s literary imagination.  Just as Leggott’s tendency to use sentence fragments to make her most emphatic assertions (“The difference between cleverness and magic”(1995, 269), “Destruction?  Knowledge?”(1999, xxxii)) reminds the reader of her vocation as a poet, Leggott’s own verses, in the “Blue Irises” sequence, are infused with fragments of Hyde’s writing:

Leaf, leaf, how can I be sane enough
or mad enough to touch or leave untouched
what silence has to say?  Had I your eyes
your eyes I loved this lifetime, wonder’s eyes
and the sun’s voice against the nights of eaten moons
would my oppressions be healed?  Sometimes
fighting and dying are better than anything else
(“Blue Irises” 27, 1-7)[6]

Leaf, leaf, how can I be sane enough or mad enough to write to you—to touch or leave untouched—to say how much there is to say—or let silence have her shape?  I don’t know, it is all so difficult. “Sometimes fighting and dying are better than anything else”  (Hyde to Rawlinson, 21 August 1939)

            In The Book of Nadath, then, we see Leggott take a more conservative editorial position in order to focus attention on her particular interest in the relationship between Hyde and Tothill.  This is a regression from her more postmodern, playful position in the complementary projects of DIA and “Opening the Archive,” but it cements Leggott’s scholarly authority over her material in a manner that is at times surprisingly akin to James Bertram in his 1953 article, “Robin Hyde: A Reassessment”.  Though Leggott’s criticism is not, like Bertram’s, overdetermined, there remain few points of exit for the reader who seeks to find in it a Leggott outside of Hyde, or a Hyde outside of Leggott.  Thus, the words Rawlinson cites as Hyde’s closing the door on her life become part of Leggott’s assembling of her own poetic and academic identity.[7]   While I do not presume to tell another critic how to do their job, it is important to note here that such a method is closed rather than open ended, in its epistemology at least.  Despite Leggott’s assertion that “[t]here are always two versions”(1999, xxxiv), the close and complex relationship between Hyde’s textual presence and her own suggest that sometimes, there is only one.

“[E]xpressing the radical impulse of the period”: Mary Paul’s new historicism

Scholars are not automatons, and despite the beguiling nature of Leggott’s Hydian univocality, it is possible to read and appreciate Leggott’s work on Hyde without being fully drawn into her critical orbit.  The critic who demonstrates this is a friend and one-time colleague of Leggott’s, Mary Paul.  Paul’s two chapters on Hyde in her critical volume Her Side of the Story adopt an explicitly revisionist, experimental approach, whose results approximate a new historicist reading of Robin Hyde in her times; an attempt to restore an historical and political context to Hyde’s writing.  In “Robin Hyde: From Incoherence to Immersion,” Paul accounts for Robin Hyde criticism according to a two-camp model, examining the tensions and the limits of the critical points of view espoused first by the cultural nationalists, then by the 1980s feminist retrievalists.  Thus, Paul suggests of “The Dusky Hills” (a poem which Leggott also analyses in “Opening the Archive”):

This is the kind of short poem that was seen as tripping easily off Hyde’s tongue and pen as if her facility were a liability.  The theme of this poem is familiar—strength coming from the hills as in the biblical psalm—and her poem could therefore be seen as conventional in its ideas as well as its language.  (131)

Paul then goes on to rehearse a feminist reading of the same text, similar to Leggott’s summation that “[c]onventional landscape imagery is reversed.” “The lines evoke the image of a baby’s head, gently tucked in against its mother and receiving its mother’s kiss, as well as a baby’s mouth tucked over her nipple.  In these terms the images are unconventional and intense”(Paul, 141).  Through this method, Paul attempts to restore to the text a sense of its existence over time: the several ways in which it has been interpreted and the way these interpretations have been contested.  Similarly, she reminds us how

[James K.] Baxter found [Hyde’s] discourse very limited because [he felt] she dealt uneasily with the explicit aspects of her own material.  He saw personal timidity and outworn feminine conventions of gentility getting in the way of the national and personal project which he regarded as needing more earthy openness, more sensuality.  His position was close to that expounded by Curnow. (133)

            Paul’s analysis of other critics is deliberately detached, withholding the kind of direct attack other feminist writers such as Bunkle et al and Leggott have made on earlier commentators.  Indeed, such is her ability at paraphrasing existing points of view that it is sometimes difficult to locate her own authorial position.  In this, and in initiating the process of constructing an historical framework for Robin Hyde criticism, Paul’s intentions are postmodern: to examine the critical heritage as a series of intersections between discourses.  Thus, Paul attempts to reconstruct for the reader the assumptions behind the male orthodoxy which Leggott and Bunkle et al identified in their work, without taking the dialectical position implied by a strictly feminist response:

Once again we see a discourse of value (about what is modern or what is good writing) affiliated with a nationalist discourse.  This has been done in several ways.  In terms of the theme, the debate about New Zealand identity is valorised.  It seems that there is a prescription that the writer needs to be obsessed with New Zealand to be driven to write well or break through to a kind of truthfulness.  For the new generation the idea of nation was creative because it was seen as a problem rather than a solution, so that restlessness combined with the struggle to express local and personal experience put a pressure on the individual that caused the kind of transformation that makes for good poetry.  (134)

This detachment provides Paul with enough leverage to examine the tenets of feminist readings of Hyde in the same manner as she does the cultural nationalists.  Thus, she notes that “[i]nstead of seeing Hyde as a victim of ‘booksy vulgarity’ and ‘guided by impulses she barely understood,’ she was seen as sharp and self-aware, highly conscious of the problems of being a woman and a writer”(135).   Paul’s concern here is over the way in which “[t]he ‘involved’ feminist view reveals a wealth of ways in which female experience constructs the work but it tends to categorise the past in terms of the present.  It has the effect of reinforcing gender oppositions by not exploring their historically specific aspects”(147). 

            The consideration of “historically specific aspects of generational experience” is, as I have already noted, Paul’s point of departure from the existing tradition.  Her chapter “Robin Hyde: A Political Reading” attempts to fill in the critical blanks she has identified.  Her project, which she acknowledges as experimental, is to reconstruct Hyde as a figure historically different from our own time, a writer whose focus was as much on internationalism as nationalism, and one whose feminism was indebted to that movement’s first wave.  Thus, argues Paul, we may read Hyde as engaged in

expressing the radical impulse of the period, to find a way to record the precise shape and texture of life as she knew it, particularly life lived differently than ever before.  This is not to forget that collage and imagist methods were also used by writers central to the nationalist tradition.  But Hyde’s particular use is best understood by relating her to overseas writers with a strongly political—or what at the time was sometimes described as journalistic—emphasis.  (157)

            Paul finds in the American John Dos Passos a writer suitable for comparison with Hyde.  Her subsequent analysis of Hyde’s feminism prioritises a point she considers is missing from early analyses: “There has not been a simple continuity (or even a progressive advance) in women’s lives from then to now”(170).  This assertion effectively deconstructs earlier feminist attempts, both by Bunkle et al and by Leggott, to encode their work and Hyde’s as part of a continuous, though chthonic, feminine tradition.  Through positing a view of women’s history, and the history of women’s writing, as discontinuous and internally divided, Paul relieves of their dialectical pressure those points at which Hyde’s views seem so different from the present day:

            Because of the depression of the 1930s and Hyde’s own experience of both wage-earning and poverty, as well as of supporting a child, it seems that her primary concern was the economic inequality faced by women, where later feminists have stressed “reproductive choice,” often particularly choice not to have a child.  It also seems as if she shared the common belief of her time that abortion was a sign of general social failure.  A useful way of summing up her kind of 1930s feminism, as compared to the feminisms of earlier and later women, would be to say that for Hyde a woman needed not only the wherewithal to have “a room of her own” (to think and write) but also the wherewithal to have (and be able to take care of) a baby of her own.  (170)

            These points of difference and distance which Paul introduces between Hyde’s time and our own are an important contribution to the Robin Hyde critical tradition, as is the way in which Paul’s prose is self-consciously reticent, making a case for authorial caution in a manner that lacks the pomposity demonstrated by Bertram in his exposition of his own uncertainties about Hyde.  Paul’s emphasis on the idea that “[e]vents have a different significance at different times and thus are treated in different ways by the people that they ‘happen to’”(178) is a timely redirection of the trajectory of feminist readings of Hyde.  Such a historicisation of Hyde as different from, as well as similar to, women and writers in our own time, has a rebound effect in that it reminds the reader that readings of Hyde are also historical and do not exist outside culture; not Leggott’s, not Paul’s, nor my own reading.  Hyde, Paul claims, is “interested, not so much in subjectivity for its own sake, but in sites where social ideologies and forces were busy playing out their effects.  In the service of this I have already suggested Hyde blurs documentary, journalism and fiction so that her novels and poems spill out undefinably into the tide of ‘history’”(157).  My own analysis in my thesis, “Iris, Read and Written: A New Poetics of Robin Hyde,” is necessarily more textually based than Paul’s, since it deals with much material not so far discussed, and thus returns to the notion of subjectivity, here presented in a reflexive relationship with writing itself.  But Paul’s historical model has provided me with an important counter to the temptation of analytical flights-of-fancy; in many ways it is the “ballast” for Robin Hyde criticism that E.H. McCormick claimed was absent from the “fantasy” of Wednesday’s Children (1940, 176).

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