Why the glass church crumbled: a semiotic reading of <i>Oscar and Lucinda</i>

Abstract Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a product of the “rethinking history” trend of the 1980s in Australia. The novel adopts a dual temporal perspective spanning two centuries, in which the twentieth-century Australians, the descendants of both white settlers and Australian Aborigines, narrate what happened to their ancestors back in the mid-nineteenth century, showing the impact of the colonial expansion of the British Empire in the Victorian era on the material and spiritual lives of people from different backgrounds. The novel is filled with abundant symbolic elements that fit into some core semiotic frameworks, such as Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of signs, Roland Barthes’s “myth”, and Susan Petrilli’s “semioethics”. On the basis of semiotics, this essay analyzes the novel from three perspectives: meaning, myth, and connection, exploring the inevitability of the glass church’s “crumbling” and its semiotic implications, Australians’ feelings about “white heritage” in general, and how the descendants of white settlers shape their identification by reflecting on and revising history.