Margaret Mahy, New Zealand’s most celebrated children’s writer, is renowned for her warm-hearted authorial persona and playful writing style, says Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington PhD graduate Dr Yuanyuan Liang. But trauma underlies many of her works for teenagers.
“Mahy’s characters suffer traumatic events ranging from death of someone close, to bullying and abuse, to excessive parental expectations, living in a broken family, and sibling rivalry. Many of her novels are so rife with trauma that not only the main characters, but also their relatives and even enemies, are traumatised,” says Dr Liang.
A particular focus for many of Mahy’s works is intergenerational trauma, says Dr Liang, which is often seen through her depiction of “missing, impotent” fathers and “problematic” grandparents.
“While Mahy dealt with many kinds of trauma, there are two types of trauma she noticably didn’t engage with in her work,” says Dr Liang.
“The first one I noticed was she didn’t tackle the trauma of repressing one’s sexuality, whether homosexuality, or gender-related identity, head-on.”
Partway through her study, Dr Liang published a paper identifying the “camp aesthetic” among many of Mahy’s characters, where she noted that while many of her characters were camp, none identified overtly as homosexual—for instance the theatrical Richard Potter, the older brother in The Catalogue of the Universe. Mahy herself had stated she liked endowing young adult (YA) fiction with theatrical components, “because it’s often a more florid and melodramatic and less ironic time of life”.
The second type of trauma Mahy didn’t tackle head-on is “colonial” trauma as it pertains to people. “Of course Mahy at the time was trying to gain an audience both in the UK, and in her own country—perhaps that played a part.”
“Mahy’s treatment of colonial trauma is often through anthropomorphising nature, which is then brought into focus as a victim of colonisation,” says Dr Liang. But, she says, two of Mahy’s final novels, Maddigan’s Fantasia and The Magician of Hoad, delved into “collective trauma,” representing the horrors of Nazism and war-induced turmoil in the twentieth century.
“I think there might be an analogy between Mahy’s works and the Harry Potter universe. Harry Potter is dealing with the aftermath of World War II and the totalitarianism of Hitler; and Mahy similarly explores collective trauma in the high fantasy world, so it isn’t too overwhelming for children to confront.
“Even for adult readers, dark histories can be overwhelming. And they can be a way to pass the trauma on, inadvertantly, to the audience. Generally speaking, literature is a veiled device, a device of defamiliarisation to make you look at the history with something in between—with a mask. It can invite us to reflect upon the issues in a different way,” says Dr Liang.
While her research took her into the darker spaces of Mahy’s work, Dr Liang acknowledges the author’s lighthearted writing style meant she did a lot of things to redirect people’s attention from trauma—“but it’s lurking around”.
Dr Liang moved to Aotearoa New Zealand from Beijing to study Mahy’s works, citing New Zealand’s safety as a drawcard. “I found children’s literature as my passion for my Master’s, for which I analysed Oscar Wilde’s fairytales. He’s always my man—and Mahy’s my lady!
“Children’s literature was a very interesting field to explore in English. In Chinese young adult literature, lighter themes are covered—you wouldn’t expect the darkness you see in other YA, though this has changed recently,” says Dr Liang.
Her research hit an unexpected roadblock when she visited home partway through her study, only to get stuck in China due to COVID-19-related border closures. While she was cut off from both physical and digital research materials, she had good supervisors who emailed her chapters, photocopied articles, and so on. “I couldn’t have done it without Professor Kathryn Walls and Associate Professor Anna Jackson, as well as Dr Geoff Miles, when Kathryn retired.”
This is the most wide-ranging academic study that has acknowledged the trauma aspect of Mahy’s work and expanded upon it analytically, and Dr Liang is interested to see what aspects future scholars of literature will pick up on.
Yuanyuan currently works for Te Herenga Waka as a Chinese language tutor and as a research assistant to Reader Marco Sonzogni from the School of Languages and Cultures.
As Yuanyuan concludes in her thesis: “It is storytelling that serves as the ritual of exorcism in every day life and helps us defeat the demon of trauma.”
For more information, contact Senior Communications Advisor Sarah Forster on sarah.forster@vuw.ac.nz or 021 176 7684
