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'Richard Flanagan employs literary allusions in his 2009 Miles Franklin award-winning historical novel Wanting (2008) to play out themes of power and privilege in a contrapuntal composition that dramatizes links between connecting and precursor texts. Alternating narrative lines follow Mathinna, an Indigenous Tasmanian girl adopted by Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, and Charles Dickens' infatuation with actress Nelly Ternan. He interrogates apocryphal historical events, such as the extinction of Tasmanian Indigenous people. This chapter argues that Flanagan's intertext exposes the savagery of his ageing male protagonists and the patriarchal society they represent. His author's notes describe Wanting as a "mediation on desire," anticipating and summarily dismissing criticism of his depiction of a Zeus-like Sir John Franklin figuratively or actually raping Mathinna after ball. But does he go too far, debauching Mathinna's historical character in the process? Dickens' love affair with Ellen Ternan, the young female lead in his play The Frozen North (1859), becomes a variation on the father/daughter incest paradigm. Employing archetypal dramas and postcolonial theory, Flanagan ensures that every note plays on others, creating riffs. This surely demonstrates his confidence as an established writer, increasingly popular in the United States of America, perhaps more so than in his own country. Flanagan's novel is intent on discord rather than historical re-inscription.' (23)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 Sep 2012 11:02:55
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Intertextuality as Discord : Richard Flanagan's Wanting (2008)