AustLit

'In the opening pages of Eve Langley's best-loved work, The Pea-Pickers (1942), Eve and her sister June adopt male names, showy masculine attire, and "[u]nder the dark interest of the travellers around [them]" board the train for Gippsland (11). The theatricality and performativity of "Steve's" actions in these pages is maintained at a high pitch throughout the novel and, in fact, throughout Langley's novelistic oeuvre. Steve (and Eve in the later novels set in New Zealand) is a highly theatrical character, and as such, her representations often suggest those acts and practices most typical of theatricality: "role-playing, illusion, false appearance, masquerade, facade, and impersonation" (Davis and Postlewait 4). The contradictory manifestations of excess and emptiness are frequently associated with the theatrical; theatricality is often defined as an excess of expressive means (that may need containment), but it is also commonly viewed in terms of an artificiality that invokes that which may not exist, or may not be true (Davis and Postlewait 4). In her well-known formulation of performativity, Judith Butler argues that repetition of a discourse actually produces the phenomena that it seeks to control (xii). In Langley's novels, the performativity of her narrator is expressed not just in speech acts but also in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the "minimal, in fact non verbal, performative utterance" (xvii). (Author's abstract)