Private and Fictional Words (Routledge Revivals)

Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s

Coral Ann Howells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317637981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987, this is an introductory study of the most widely read Canadian women novelists of the 1970s and 1980s. At its centre lies the question of how the search for a distinctive cultural identity relates to the need for a national cultural identity in the post-colonial era. Coral Ann Howells argues that Canadian women's fiction throughout the period of study represents how the Canadian cultural identity exceeds its geographical limits, and those traditional structures of patriarchal authority need revision if women's alternative views are to be taken into account. Including short biographical sketches and a complete list of the books published by the authors under discussion, writers examined include Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Margaret Laurence.

1

Canadianness and women’s fiction

‘Right, Jane,’said Professor Lotta Gutsa. ‘Now, first of all we need a title … I’ve got it. We’ll call it Wilderness Womb: The Emergence of Canadian Women Writers – that’s a no-loser. Women’s Studies, Canadian Literature, the whole Bit.’

(Clara Thomas, ‘How Jane Got Tenure’¹)

Canadian writing has always been pervaded by an awareness of the wilderness, those vast areas of dark forests, endless prairies or trackless wastes of snow which are geographical facts and written into the history of Canada’s exploration and settlement. Throughout the Canadian literary tradition wilderness has been and continues to be the dominant cultural myth, encoding Canadians’ imaginative responses to their landscape and history as an image of national distinctiveness. Professor Lotta Gutsa’s comic suggestion of the fertility of the wilderness myth for Canadian women writers points up the consistent feminization of a national myth from its nineteenth-century occurrence in pioneer women’s tales to contemporary women’s fiction, undergoing some modifications in writing which is responsive to specific historical and social circumstances but retaining its original power as an image of female imaginative space in texts which both mirror the outside world and transform it into the interior landscape of the psyche. If we are looking for distinctive signs of Canadianness in women’s novels of the 1970s and 1980s, I suggest that the most important of these may be found in the wilderness which provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of Canadian women writers.

An important aspect of this study is the relationship of these contemporary women to their literary and cultural inheritance, where the historical resonance of wilderness cannot be neglected. All these stories scrutinize ‘traditional cultural dependencies’, a phrase Canadian critic Robert Kroetsch used to describe the efforts of the ‘best Canadian artists’² and which may be used equally well of the ‘best Canadian women writers’ for it points up the feminine analogy with the colonial mentality through which Margaret Laurence described women’s condition when in 1978 she said:

These developing feelings [re Third World cultures] related very importantly to my growing awareness of the dilemma and powerlessness of women, the tendency of women to accept male definitions of ourselves, to be self-deprecating and uncertain, and to rage inwardly. The quest for physical and spiritual freedom … run[s] through my fiction.³

This colonial inheritance is there to be both recognized and resisted in postcolonial Canadian literature, which registers change and slippage from historical origins in its language and literary forms. Arguably this national sense is exacerbated in women’s fiction by their sharpened gender sense of marginality and cultural dispossession. As we might expect in a society like Canada’s where there are no single origins but multiple European and native inheritances, modern writers’ relationship to tradition is extremely ambivalent, registering both awareness of displacement and the urge towards the definition of an independent identity. All these stories are crisscrossed by allusions to European and Canadian history, so signalling the traditions within which they are written just as they all attempt to revise these traditions to accommodate more adequately women’s experience and knowledge. What we find are fictions that delight in the interplay of multiple codes of cultural and literary reference. The stories are structured through the interrelatedness of these different codes, not one of which may be taken as authoritative but all of which have to be taken into account for a more open reading of the complexity of reality.

Such multiplicity together with the refusal to privilege one kind of discourse or set of cultural values over others is characteristic of women’s narratives in their urge to shift the emphasis and so throw the storyline of traditional structures of authority open to question. Shifts and questionings involve disruption, which is a common characteristic of all these fictions with their mixed genre codes as well as their chronological and narrative dislocations. Most of them look like realistic fictions registering the surface details of daily life, yet the conventions of realism are frequently disrupted by shifts into fantasy or moments of vision so that they become split-level discourses when alternative ways of seeing are contained within the same fictional structure. They are fictions characterized by their indeterminacy, a feature confirmed by their frequent open endings. The emphasis is on process and revision so that truth is only provisional and writing is not transparent but something to be decoded and reconstructed through the reader’s collaborative efforts. As Margaret Atwood warns her readers:

The true story is vicious

and multiple and untrue

after all. Why do you

need it? Don’t ever

ask for the true story.⁴

Within this context of multiplicity and the rejection of fixed categories it is worth considering further the historical and imaginative significance of wilderness in the work of Canadian women writers. When the first Europeans came to Canada in the sixteenth century they confronted an alien landscape of silent forests in what is now Quebec and Ontario. Inevitably those first European responses were male ones recorded through the accounts of explorers and trappers, soldiers and missionaries. Canada was a hostile terrain with an implacable climate and filled with hidden dangers from indigenous Indians and wild beasts, where the European settlers felt their existence to be a heroic struggle for survival against multiple natural threats. The male response was either one of fear and recoil (which found its expression in Northrop Frye’s famous ‘garrison mentality’) or an adventurous challenge to the unknown in journeys of exploration and later colonial exploitation and settlement. Gaile McGregor’s recent book The Wacousta Syndrome offers an analysis of the Canadian myth of wilderness as alien and ‘other’.⁵ This is arguably the male myth of wilderness, but if we look at women’s writing we find some important differences in female versions of the wilderness reflecting their very different experiences of colonization. Small numbers of European women came to Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Frenchwomen as early as 1604 to Acadia and 1617 to Quebec) and then they came as military wives, settlers, temporary visitors or, in the case of some Frenchwomen, as missionary nuns. It is however only with the best known nineteenth-century records of English women’s pioneer experiences that I am concerned here and their stories of settlement as they rewrite male pioneer myths from the woman’s point of view. The differences in many respects conform to stereotype gender differences, focusing on women’s domestic and private experiences as they tried to establish homes for their families under harsh pioneer conditions. Their letters, journals, fictions and emigrants’ guides written for those ‘back home’ record the facts of settlement with its privations and dangers and their responses to the challenge of the wilderness. Certainly terror of the unknown trackless forests is an important component in their accounts, like the nineteenth-century pioneer Susanna Moodie ‘surrounded on all sides by the dark forest’ which she sees as ‘the fitting abode of wolves and bears’ in Roughing It In The Bush.⁶ Yet there is also a surreptitious kind of exhilaration, and we find in Mrs Moodie’s anxieties, as in other texts by nineteenth-century women, an interesting doubleness of response to the wilderness. For the vast Canadian solitudes provided precarious conditions of existence where women were forced to redefine themselves and where the self was discovered to be something far more problematical than feminine stereotypes from ‘home’ had allowed women to believe. The wilderness of environment seems to have evoked a corresponding awareness of unknown psychic territory within, so that the facts of settlement provided the conditions of unsettlement as the wilderness became a screen on to which women projected their silent fears and desires. The wilderness was internalized as metaphor remarkably early as Marian Fowler shows in her book The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada:

These five women had to tramp through dense bush, travel by canoe, sleep in tents and hovels, cope with sudden emergencies, improvise and adapt in a hundred ways. On an imaginative level the wilderness offered a mirror for the psyche, for all five discovered images there reflecting repressed areas of consciousness … Their psyches began to run wild along with the forest undergrowth and its furtive inhabitants. Now these women began to identify with white water, forest fires, giant trees, bald eagles. These images crowd the pages of their journals.⁷

The wilderness as the pathless image beyond the enclosure of civilized life was appropriated by women as the symbol of unmapped territory to be transformed through writing into female imaginative space. It provides the perfect image for the ‘wild zone’, the ‘mother country of liberated desire and female authenticity’ which Elaine Showalter projects as the repressed area of women’s culture in her essay entitled ‘Feminist criticism in the wilderness’.⁸ Showalter suggests Atwood’s Surfacing as one of the novels which create a feminist mythology on matriarchal principles ‘at once biological and ecological’, so directing attention towards this paradigmatic wilderness text and pointing the way towards the transformations that wilderness has undergone in twentieth-century Canadian women’s writing.

The wilderness is still there in contemporary urban and small-town fiction as a feature of environment and available as metaphor or symbolic space for the exploration of female difference. Surfacing with its transitions between Toronto and the backwoods of Quebec exploits both the environmental and mythic aspects of wilderness in its story of a female psychic quest, and Marian Engel’s Bear as another quest narrative journeys from a library in Toronto back to an island in northern Ontario where the protagonist finds in her close contact with a wilderness creature the necessary source for her own psychic renewal. In both these novels the wilderness remains deeply symbolic, never becoming a literal alternative to civilized living as it does in Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground, but a place of refuge and rehabilitation which the protagonists leave when they are ready to return refreshed to the city. Both are feminized versions of the authentically Canadian ambivalence towards city living and survival in the wilderness. Pockets of wilderness survive in many of Atwood’s urban fictions, where Toronto’s ravines provide a wilder dimension to that city’s neat lawns and ordered spaces in The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle and the short story ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’. What is true of Toronto is even truer in fictions about small towns like Margaret Laurence’s prairie town of Manawaka or Alice Munro’s southwest Ontario towns of Jubilee and Hanratty, where the enclosed community defines itself against the surrounding wilderness and where the edges of town signalled by the spots where the sidewalks and streetlights cease provide that wasteland occupied by the more marginal members of the community and by the public rubbish dump. Munro’s and Laurence’s heroines are brought up in such borderland territory and they retain their doubleness of vision in their adult lives. Their perceptions that the wilderness as place/state of mind is not something that can be entirely shut out are written into their stories, resulting in those moments of instability where cracks open in the realistic surface to reveal dark secret places within social enclosures. Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women knows that the memory of the wilderness lies beneath the solid brick houses and neat streets of her town just as surely as it is still there underneath the bridge or down beside the Wawanash river, so that her stories begin to look like mosaics of secret alternative worlds that coexist with ordinariness as everything presents a double image of itself. The same kind of doubleness exists for Morag Gunn in The Diviners, where coming to terms with the past as an adult involves a journey through the wilderness of memory to a homecoming in a log farmhouse in Ontario far from the prairie town where she grew up. As she knows, wilderness living should be updated to fit the needs of women in the late twentieth century. The updating of wilderness as myth or metaphor includes the imaginative transformation of Toronto itself into ‘unexplored and threatening wilderness’ in Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie and Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, of Montreal in Marie-Claire Blais’s Nights in the Underground, and perhaps most deviously in Anne Hébert’s Héloïse where the underground of Paris becomes the world of the past which disrupts and destroys the world of the living.

Continuities may be seen in the way that Janette Turner Hospital uses wilderness in her Indian novel The Ivory Swing as symbolic space for the exploration of unknown regions of the female self. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan as the history of the dispossession of Japanese-Canadians uses a hostile prairie wilderness as its setting so that this novel looks in many ways like a revision of nineteenth-century Canadian immigrants’ experiences of solitude and unbelonging in the New World. However, in both these novels, as in Surfacing and Bear, wilderness is not presented as an alternative to twentieth-century existence but rather as a place to be emerged from with strength renewed. Such a variety of treatments not only illustrates the transformations of the wilderness myth in women’s fiction but also signals women’s appropriation of wilderness as feminized space, the excess term which unsettles the boundaries of male power. These are not fictions which aspire towards androgyny but rather towards the rehabilitation of the feminine as an alternative source of power; wilderness provides the textual space for such imaginative revision.

The rehabilitation of the feminine is an important feature of Canadian women writers’ sense of their relation to literary tradition, and a quotation from Marian Engel’s novel No Clouds of Glory aptly focuses these concerns:

Those of us who operate from bastard territory, disinherited countries and traditions, long always for our non-existent mothers. For this reason I devilled five years – six? When did I start? how many? – in the literature of Australians and Canadians, hoping to be the one to track her down.⁹

Engel has feminized the whole question of inheritance in colonial and postcolonial cultures by conflating mother country and literary tradition, so focusing on the sense of unbelonging and the search for origins which is a general characteristic of Commonwealth writing as well as a specific characteristic of much women’s writing. Though my main interest is in the feminine literary traditions within which contemporary Canadian women are working, the question of literary inheritance relates to wider concerns of Commonwealth and women writers’ perceptions of their relation to history. It was Virginia Woolf writing within the English tradition who said, ‘As a woman, I have no country’, a statement about unbelonging which is strikingly elaborated in the 1970s Canadian context by Atwood:

We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here: the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we move in fear, exiles and invaders. This country is something that must be chosen – it is so easy to leave – and if we choose it we are still choosing a violent duality.¹⁰

This statement pushes beyond Woolf and Engel as it demonstrates clearly how being a Commonwealth writer and a woman problematizes one’s sense of cultural identity and demonstrates dilemmas of allegiance. There is a complex of attitudes here relating to lack of historical depth and continuity of tradition in a New World society, and much postcolonial fiction is preoccupied with finding substitutes for this lack. The substitution comes partly through a quest for the past or indeed the creation of a past in legends of the new country and of the mother country (or ‘mother countries’ in Canada, where inheritance is multiple); partly it is achieved by taking up the languages and literary traditions of the ‘lost’ mother cultures and modifying them into discourse more appropriate to a place outside the original discourses.¹¹ The aim of both these endeavours is to establish possibilities for the coexistence of multiple cultures within oneself which are perceived ...