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Gender and the Search for Identity in Gwendolyn Macewan's Julian And Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) 1990 Gender and The Search for Identity in Gwendolyn MacEwan’s Julian and Noman Stories Anne Marie Martin Wilfrid Laurier University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Martin, Anne Marie, "Gender and The Search for Identity in Gwendolyn MacEwan’s Julian and Noman Stories" (1990). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 1593. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1593 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Gender and The Search for Identity in Gwendolyn MacEwen's Julian and Noman Stories by Anne Marie Martin B.A., York University, 1972 Thesis Submitted to the Department of Religion and Culture in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree Wilfrid Laurier University 1990 (S) Anne M. Martin 1990 Property of the Library Wilfrid Laurier University UMI Number: EC56419 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation PuWinhing UMI EC56419 Copyright 2012 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. uesf ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis looks at the theme of gender and the search for identity in three fictional works of Canadian poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen. The works considered are her first novel Julian the Magician (1963) and her two collections of short stories Noman (1972) and Noman's Land (1985). The thesis examines the way self-identity is characterized and considers the way gender is presented in relation to the self. The work shows the development of MacEwen's idea of self from a creative eternal force equivalent to the Christ image in Julian the Magician to an eternal force that finds its expression through the ability to grasp the experience of the essential human aspect of loneliness, in her two collections of short stories. MacEwen's portrayal of women, however, remains consistent throughout these works. As her work progresses the gender question becomes more clearly articulated. MacEwen portrays women primarily in terms of the body while men are characterized in terms of the mind. The self is identified with the intellect, thereby indicating that men by nature are predisposed to redemption. Female identity is based on a woman's role as mother and helpmate to help a male to find his own identity. MacEwen does not provide an understanding of human nature that overcomes the mind/body dichotomy, which leaves women marginalized and disempowered. Contents Introduction 3 * • ^.y.i.i.a.D._t!lf._!la.£i.Ei.E!Q.* •••'••• 12 2 . Noman , . 46 3 • Noman J^s_ Land 87 4. Conclusions 121 Sources Cited 127 9 Introduction Poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen once explained her reason for writing as wanting to communicate joy, mystery, passion...not the joy that naively exists without knowledge of pain, but that joy which arises out of and conquers pain. I want to construct a myth.* MacEwen is not only a self-professed mythmaker; within the Canadian literary scene she is recognized as a writer with a propensity for mythmaking. Ellen D. Warwick describes MacEwen as a mythopoeic writer.2 Margaret Atwood talks of MacEwen as a poet who is not interested in "turning her life into myth; rather, she is concerned with translating her myth into life, and into the poetry which it is a part of."3 As a Canadian writer, MacEwen is not alone in her concern for myth and mythmaking. Nevertheless, it is not easy to describe her place as part of the Canadian poetic imagination. Jan Bartley suggests that even though her roots are well known and her position in Canadian literature well established, MacEwen is often seen as outside, or at least on the periphery of, the mainstream 1 In Gary Geddes and Phyllis Bruce, eds., 15 Canadian Poets, p. 280. 2 Ellen D. Warwick, "To Seek a Single Symmetry," p. 21. 3 Margaret Atwood, "MacEwen's Muse," p. 31. 3 of the Canadian poetic imagination.4 MacEwen was born in Toronto, in 1941. Her formal education came to an end at the age of eighteen when she finished Western Technical High School and dedicated herself to writing. By the age of seventeen she had published her first poems in Canadian Forum. She wrote Julian the Magician, her first published novel, when she was nineteen. In her late teens she also wrote three other novels, one of which became the short story, "Day of Twelve Princes." From 1960 to 1962 MacEwen lived in Montreal, where she worked with poets, Al Purdy and Milton Acorn, to edit the magazine Moment. Acorn and MacEwen5 were married and later divorced. MacEwen was remarried to Nikos Tsingos in 1971. She travelled in Egypt, Israel, and Greece. She was writer-in- residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1984-1985. MacEwen died in Toronto in 1987. Over the course of her career MacEwen wrote ten volumes of poetry, two novels, two collection of short stories, a travel 4 Jan Bartley, Invocations: The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen, p. 4. 5 In his review of her first privately published book of poetry, The Drunken Clock (1961), George Bowering comments that to her credit: "The wife of Milton Acorn, Miss MacEwen has nevertheless escaped the instinctual proselytizing of the middle Toronto group, and already writes better poetry than does her husband." ("The Canadian Poetry Underground," Canadian Literature 13:66-67.) 4 guide to Greece, several radio plays and documentaries,6 two collections of children's poetry, and a theatrical work. She received various Canada Council awards, the 1969 Governor General's Award for her collection of poetry, The Shadow Maker, and the 1973 A. J. M. Smith Poetry Award for Armies of the Night. As an active creator of the Canadian imagination MacEwen partakes in a process that engages her in the making of what Northrop Frye calls "a mythological universe": Man [sic] lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize.7 In spite of the attention given to her explicit mythmaking Bartley, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Her Works, p. 2. 7 N. Fry, The Great Code, p. xviii. Frye's notion of the unconscious recognition of mythic elements may be what Joseph Sherman is speaking of in his review of MacEwen's book of poetry, Armies of the Moon: "I am not at all sure why it is that I like and admire [MacEwen's] poetry. Perhaps because she is so magnificently obscure, and that has always invited something like admiration. She casts such a thick and strangely woven cloth over her work that it is at the best of times, translucent. But so skillful is she in her poetic craft that the reader is attracted again and again to her work, partly because so little can be fathomed at first reading, and partly because what is, at one moment, clear, shifts in the next moment to a further extension of meaning, or even to a new meaning." (The Fiddlehead, Spring 1972 94:119) 5 intentions8 little work has been done to discover what MacEwen's myth is. Only one major work has been done on MacEwen, Jan Bartley's Invocations: The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen (1983). Bartley presents an overview of all of MacEwen's poetry and prose to that date. While Invocations provides groundwork for the study of MacEwen's work, it is limited by its generality. Bartley recognizes this limitation of her study, attributing it to "the lack of criticism concerning Gwendolyn MacEwen" and the need to make up for what is missing.9 Other than book reviews there is no new criticism to add to that which Bartley had available when she wrote Invocations, and most of that criticism, as Bartley correctly notes, "is little more than superficial reviews, with the exception of five publications which attempt to For example, Frank Davey speaks of a particular aspect of MacEwen's writing as "kinetic myth:" The most outstanding technical feature of these novels and stories is that the various myths seldom appear merely superimposed on the action. The leading characters— Akhenaton, It Neter Ay, Julian, Noman, Kali--are all convincingly drawn figures, with plausible motivations and realistic and colloquial dialogue. The artistic effect is not one of stories contrived to parallel myths, but of characters who discover themselves reliving myth involuntarily and often unprofitably...one finds kinetic myth--myth alive and re- enacted in the spontaneous actions of real people. Frank Davey, "Gwendolyn MacEwen: The Secret of Alchemy," p. 12. 9 Bartley, Invocations, p. vii. 6 consider some aspect of her writing in detail."10 Bartley wrote Invocations to try to open up the discussion of MacEwen's work.11 In this thesis I intend to investigate one aspect of that discussion in relation to MacEwen's myth.
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