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Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn Macewen, and Phyllis Webb

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Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn Macewen, and Phyllis Webb iii WILKINSON, MACEWEN, AND WEBB iv ASPECTS OF THE SPIRITUAL IN THREE CANADIAN WOMEN POETS: ANNE WILKINSON, GWENDOLYN MACEWEN, AND PHYLLIS WEBB E.A. POTVIN, B.A., M.A. A Thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University, May, 1991 copyright ~E A Potvin, 1991. Doctor of Philosophy (1991) McMaster University (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Aspects of the Spiritual in Three Canadian Women Poets: Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Phyllis Webb AUTHOR: Elizabeth Ann Potvin, B.A. (University of Calgary) M.A. (Queen's University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Joan Coldwell NUMBER OF PAGES: iv, 202 Abstract This thesis examines recent theories in feminist mythopoeic reconstruction and in contem­ porary theology, and considers their application to three English-Canadian women poets: Anne Wilkinson, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Phyllis Webb. It compares gendered theories about heroic and spiritual quest paradigms, concluding that the work of all three poets illustrates the difference of women's spiritual journeys. These journeys follow a pattern distinct from the male heroic quest of the divine, one of a dialectical series of encounters with the world of nature whereby the heroines resist normative restrictions to their spiritual liberty by imitating Daphne's retreat into the green world, following the model defined by Annis Pratt (1981). Writing both within and outside of the Canadian literary tradition, MacEwen, Wilkinson, and Webb challenge the struc~ tures of androcentric belief -- literary, spiritual, political, mythical. All three poets refute the validity of the manmade version of Paradise because they find it too abstract and impoverished. Instead of the ascetic approach to the divine, each substitutes her own aesthetic approach; poetry, spirituality, and a love of what Wilkinson calls the Green World become inseparable. MacEwen connects the poet giving birth to herself with the rebirth of nature. All three poets are suspicious of the transcendent artist-god, replacing him with an immanent deity. All employ metaphors of engulfment and resistance to suggest interiority and a sense of connectedness between nature, their bodies, and themselves, denying disembodied concepts of the divine. Each of the three poets elevates the private domestic sphere, debased as a result of the sexual division of labour. By shifting the discursive centre, they publicize and politicize the domain of women, embodying and elevating everyday experience, and simultaneously redefining the sacred. To break with the ideological habits of our society results in marginalization. This thesis examines "the extent to which all or some women, by virtue of their marginalized relation to discourse, also write as feminists" (Meese 6). Each poet develops a strategy for imagining herself ii as powerful and nurturing, elevating some aspect of her experience as a woman living on earth. For Wilkinson, the symbol of the divine is not the god-man of the Gospels, but a nursing mother who sings lullabies to her children. For MacEwen, the body is given new strength and eroticism, enrobed in vivid colour and sensual texture. For Webb, the encounter with suicide and despair yields a new understanding of the creative force of destruction. MacEwen and Webb elevate the domestic and the personal above the universal. Canadian women poets articulate their spiritual difference and describe their visions from an original perspective, arguing for the recognition of a female mystical tradition in Canadian poetry. iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank, most of all, Joan Coldwell for her endless patience and instructive criticism. I also want to thank Sylvia Bowerbank, Tom Gerry, and Lorraine York for reading several rough drafts and adding their comments. There were many women who offered their support and encouragement: Deb Hudson, Marie Loverod, Malka Kaufman, Lil Bayne, Maroussia Ahmed, and Jude Bursten, to name but a few. Special thanks to Jay Hodgson for computing time. iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION . • . • . • . • . • . • . • . 1 CHAPTER ONE . • . • . • . • • . • . • . • • . • • . • . • 18 CHAPTER TWO . • . • • . • . • . • . • . • . • . 69 CHAPTER THREE ........•.....•.....•............•..••..••....•...•.. 125 CHAPTER FOUR . • . • . • . • • . • . • . 178 BIBLIOGRAPHY . • . • • . • . • • . • . • • . • . • . 189 1 INTRODUCTION There was a time when you were not a slave, remember .... Or failing that, invent. - Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres (89) I began writing this thesis out of a need to reconcile an intense spiritual desire with strong feminist convictions, which seemed at first to me to be mutually exclusive -- even contradictory -- aims. In my study of women poets, I have simultaneously been influenced by my reading of recent theological debates and by feminist theory. I begin with the premise that there are enor­ mous differences in perspective between male and female thinkers, writers, and readers. Since how we view the world depends so much on how we read signs, reading itself is a symbolic act. Many feminist critics, notably Fetterley, Gilbert, Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous, have challenged our belief that reading is a transparent act whereby male cultural paradigms and signifiers are taken as "universal" norms. Feminist criticism challenges the notion that sexual inequality is ei­ ther a biological, linguistic or divine mandate, and instead examines it as a social construct by which women have been historically devalued (Greene & Kahn 1). The social devaluation of woman as "other", as Simone de Beauvoir observed (1952), has deep roots in patriarchal religion and myth. Historically, the formation of spiritual ideas suggests female inferiority; the resulting dogma is evident in scholastic curricula, where the God of male­ oriented, Caucasian "religion" is elevated above the divinities of "primitive" or "heathen" "others". We are assured that, if the moral and social structures of a particular culture were deeply influenced by female leadership, there is only scant, and therefore inconclusive, evidence to support such a claim. Other, more subtle, forms of coercion exist. Those who seek a positive 2 image of women may prefer to secure a secular source in order to deny the impact that pr~sent male-oriented religions have had upon women who no longer believe in or practise them. 1 Thus, we are robbed of a rich history of matristic symbolism.2 The history of religion describes a linear progression from evil to good, and the rise of patriarchy and monotheism are seen as advances over the more backward, polytheistic, womanly cultures of the past. Yet, as Simone Weil reminds us, religion and history are "nothing but a compilation of the depositions made by assassins with respect to their victims and themselves" (225). What I am referring to as spirituality. as opposed to institutional religion, is that inner life of the spirit which exists quite apart from social organi­ zations. And women's spirituality is based upon an ethos which undermines androcentric assumptions about the universe and the way we live in it presently. A female ethos is central to the work of many women writers, but I have chosen to concentrate on poetry because it is traditionally a more sacred form of writing. Its emphasis on invocation, rhythm, and divination links it to ancient chants, magic rites, and the mysteries of many oral traditions. Poetry is, according to one critic, "the language most emphatically denied to women [because it] is the most concentrated form of symbolic language" (Kaplan 21). When Northrop Frye distinguishes poetry as an older form of expression than prose, he describes the latter as sequentially organizing its material in conformity with a casual logic, while poetry takes us "back to a world of undifferentiated energy" through metaphor. Because poetry depends upon metaphor to create a sense of "continuous presence", it constitutes an inherently synchronous and universal form (1980:68). By its very subjectivity, poetry undermines the Merlin Stone makes these points in her introduction to Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, and offers a plethora of myths. stories. and legends from hundreds of cultures which give substance to the argu­ ment that women have had sacred female images for many centuries, and that gynolatric spirituality is a cross-cultural phenomenon (Stone 1979). 2 ''Matristic". means ·•mother-oriented" and should not be confused with "matriarchal", ·'mother­ dominated". No historical evidence suggests that women-centered societies had dominating female leaders; rather. power seems to have been shared equally between the sexes in matristic cultures. 3 insistence that reality as we know it is factual, objective, rational, linear, and of the highest order. Women writers, conscious of their subjectivity, often attempt to subvert that order. Domna Stanton writes that "the act of speaking and, even more, of writing as a female represents a fundamental birth drive which will destroy the old order of death" (78). Adrienne Rich describes this order as the "death-culture of quantification, abstraction, and the will to power" (1976:292). And Luce Irigaray claims that only a conceptualization emerging from women's bodies can transform the masculinist3 death culture: "Women's desire most likely does not speak the same language as man's desire, and it probably has been covered over by the logic that has dominated the West since the Greeks" (101). In looking at poetry, I want to emphasize both
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