J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

Abstract

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence. The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer. I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society. Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society. Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history. In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>