"Tell Us, Irma, Tell Us" : (Re)fashioning neo-Victorian memory in Joan Lindsay's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1967)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Neo-Victorian literature has drawn a great deal of attention in the past forty years due to its tantalizing ways of negotiating the interplay between history, memory, trauma and nostalgia. Even though Joan Lindsay’s "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1967) partakes in many of the issues that characterize neo-Victorian aesthetics, it has hardly been examined under the critical light of neo-Victorianism. The argument of the article assumes that the (re)presentation, scrutiny and (re)enactment of Victorian culture in the novel defies or at least transcends received readings of Victorian culture and engages in an active, yet permanent search for memory as fiction, the re-enactment of the past as a revealing dimension of the present and, last, but not least, a permanent negotiation with / of nostalgia as a creative and transformative force. The analysis will help interpret Lindsay’s novel as an archetypal neo-Victorian novel, arguably a foundational one.