Apartheid, liberalism, and romance : a critical investigation of the writing of Joy Packer

Abstract: This is the first full-length study of the writing of the South African Joy Packer (1905-1977), whose 17 works of autobiography and romantic fiction were primarily popular. Packer’s writing, which appeared mainly between 1945 and 1977, blends popular narrative with contemporary social and political discourses. Her first main works, three volumes of memoirspublished between 1945 and 1953, cover her experience of a wide area of the world before,during and after the Second World War: South Africa, Britain, the Mediterranean and theBalkans, and China. In the early 1950s she also toured extensive areas of colonial "DarkestAfrica." When Packer retired to the Cape with her British husband, Admiral Sir Herbert Packer,after an absence of more than 25 years, she adopted fiction as an alternative literary mode. Hersubsequent production, ten popular romantic novels and a further three volumes of memoirs, isnotable for the density of its sociopolitical commentary on contemporary South Africa.This thesis takes as its starting-point the dilemma, formulated by the South African critic Dorothy Driver, of the white woman writing within a colonial environment which compels herto adopt contradictory, ambivalent and oblique discursive stances and strategies. The pragmaticintention of this thesis is, then, to (re)read Packer for her treatment of that problematic in thecontext of South Africa.The approach adopted centres on the reciprocity within Packer’s writing between itsgeneric conventions and its discursive environment, broadly defined here as pre-1950 imperial Britain and, in the main, colonial and apartheid South Africa. Within a critical-biographical frame, attention is paid first to formal aspects of the popular memoir and the popular romanticnovel. Their discursive function vis-à-vis their apartheid environment is then examined withina series of comparative studies. The burden of the analysis rests, in part, on the identity of Packer’s fiction as politicised romans à thèse and, in part, on her personal identification withpolitical liberalism in South Africa, most notably the Cape liberalism of her youth and thevarious manifestations of liberalism under apartheid. By focusing on differing motifs—Packer’sprofessed adherence to political liberalism, her treatment of race within the idealising constructions of popular romance, the metonymy of the fictional family and the patriarchal state,and her portrayal of women held hostage by the racial and masculine other—the study discussesthe extent to which the contradictions predicted by Driver’s analysis exist within the apparentlyseamless fabric of Packer’s narratives.The investigation concludes by recentring its focus on the narrativised identity of the white woman in a colonial environment, at the same time seeking confirmation of the several reasons for Packer’s writing to have gained only contemporary rather than lasting approval.