Abstract
Since the 1980s, revisionist scholarship on the New Zealand poet, novelist, and journalist, Robin Hyde (1906–1939) has argued that her experience as a woman is pivotal to her work. Her experience of disability has received far less attention. Informed by modernist disability studies, this thesis argues that disability plays a significant role in Hyde’s writing; that her lived experience as a physically disabled woman informs the worldview developed across her work. Across genres, Hyde mobilises disability to represent what I term a relational worldview: her sense of the intimacy between all peoples in a world increasingly connected by media communication networks and escalating international conflicts. Through an analysis of Hyde’s autofictional disabled female protagonists in The Godwits Fly (1938) and two unpublished short stories, "Townie" and "Pity," I first demonstrate how Hyde depicts alienation from the European, able-bodied, masculine paradigm of human experience. She finds in this alienation a privileged, emotionally charged position from which to observe human relations. Next, I show how Hyde’s intimate experiences of trauma and objectification as a disabled woman writer inform her assessment of the relations in her local community, relations she sees as marked by self-interest and a violent pity towards disabled people, women, and Māori. Analysing Hyde’s journalism on disabled people and Māori, a short story about the arrival of settler colonisers, and "Pity," a section of her long poem The Book of Nadath (1999), I reveal how disability informs Hyde’s deeply emotional explorations of what it means to relate to others in a patriarchal, ableist, settler-colonial society. Finally, I examine Hyde’s approach to China in Dragon Rampant (1939) (her book on her travels through the country during the Second Sino-Japanese War) and in her contemporaneous journalism for China-based English-language periodicals. In experiencing the war first hand, Hyde becomes sceptical about the power of words to convey her sensorial and bodily experience of China, its people, and their pain. Instead, Hyde comes to see the embodied experience of disability as key to understanding her position in an intensely connected modern world. Ultimately, Hyde’s disability experience, already explored through her autofiction and her writings about New Zealand, compounds in her China work, where she puts forward the possibility of a new world order, one where our commonly fractured bodies might inspire a constructive relational consciousness of global proportions.