Making (Non)Sense of the Sea, Sand and Self in The Boy in the Bush by D.H. Lawrence and M.L. Skinner

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss how Lewis Carroll’s Alice narratives, and in particular his so-called nonsense poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (from Through the Looking-Glass, 1871), can read as subtexts to the opening chapters of The Boy in the Bush by D.H. Lawrence and M.L. Skinner. First I consider how the dialogue with Lewis Carroll’s texts conveys both Freemantle’s geographic features and its unfamiliarity to new arrivals and how, as a result, Lawrence and Skinner’s narrative subverts geography and chronology creating its own (nonsense) chronotope, a useful Bakhtinian concept to examine anachronisms and anageography.I show how language is reorganized to assert national identity thanks to puns, Australianisms and syllogisms which often re-echo Alice’s experiences in Wonderland or the other side of the looking-glass. Besides these linguistic games, I highlight how the competing voices in this powerful novel, that of the Australian, Mollie Skinner, writing in the romantic tradition of bush adventures also illustrated by Katharine Prichard’s novels, and that of D.H. Lawrence, the Britisher, who infuses the narrative with his own vision of “the spirit of place,” create a tension that nonsense may resolve.