Canadian Women Poets and Poetic Identity : a Study of Marjorie
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CANADIAN WOMEN POETS AND POETIC IDENTITY: A STUDY OF MARJORIE PICKTHALL, CONSTANCE LINDSAY SKINNER, AND THE EARLY WORK OF DOROTHY LIVESAY Diana M.A. Relke B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1982 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English 0 Diana M.A. Relke 1986 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY July 1986 All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy, or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name : Diana M.A. Relke Degree : Doctor of Philosophy Title of Dissertation: Canadian Women Poets and Poetic Identity: A Study of Marjorie Pickthall, Constance Lindsay Skinner, and the Early Work of Dorothy Livesay. Examining Committee: Chairperson: Chinmoy Banerjee Sandra,,Djwa, Professor, Wnior Supervisor -------a-=--=--J-% ------- b -------- Meredith Kimball, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, S.F.U. --------------. ------------ Diana Brydon, ~ssociatklProfessor, University of British Columbia Date Approved : ii Canadian Women Poets and Poetic Identity: A Study of Marjorie Pickthall , Constance Lindsay Skinner, and the Early Work of -_______^_ -- ----.^ . _ -.___ __ Dorothy Livesay. ---- ---..--- .-------- -.---.----- --- ---- Diana M.A. Re1 ke --- -- ---. ----- - ---* - -.A -- Abstract This study is an examination of the evolution of the female tradition during the transitional period from 1910 to 1932 which signalled the beginning of modern Canadian poetry. Selective and analytical rather than comprehensive and descriptive, it focuses on three representative poets of the period and traces the development of the female poetic self-concept as it is manifested in their work. Critical concepts are drawn from several feminist theories of poetic identity which are based on the broad premise that poetic identity is a function of cultural experience in general and literary experience in particular. Their narrow premise is that because both culture and literature are patriarchal, women poets are confronted with a definition of the poet as male. The purpose of the study is to investigate how each of the three poets reconciles the conflict between her identity as a woman and her role as poet. Chapter I begins with a reconstruction of the life and times of Marjorie Pickthall and demonstrates the way in which her conservative middle-class upbringing and her equally conservative readers and critics delayed her development as an artist. Her struggle for poetic self-realization is traced iii through her early poetry, which imitates the male Ronantic poets, to her more successful later verse which exhibits the influence of female precursors. Chapter I1 examines the poetry of Constance'Lindsay Skinner, a transitional poet who combines Victorian diction and sentiment with the free-verse and imagism of early Modernism. It investigates her use of fictions derived from North American Indian lore as a device for integrating female experience and art and examines her ambivalence about female power and her inability to reconcile her gender with the traditionally male role of poet. Chapter I11 explores the early Modernist poetry of Dorothy Livesay, who liberated the female poetic voice by identifying the conflict between the roles of woman and poet as an extension of the larger conflict between nature and culture. It examines her investigation of male-devised literary conventions and the Iimits of poetic language and demonstrates Livesay's indebtedness to Emily Dickinson and Marjorie Pickthall. (350 words) For A.P.L. Abbreviations BR Lorne Pierce. Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance. Toronto: Ryerson, 1924. CP Marjorie Pickthall. Collected Poems. Ed. by Arthur C. Pickthall. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1927. GP Dorothy Livesay. Green Pitcher. Toronto: Macmillan, 1928. LPC Lorne Pierce Collection. Queen's University Archives. Figures following "LPC" indicate Box and Folder number. MA Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979. MPC Marjorie Pickthall Collection. E.J. Pratt Library. Victoria University. Figures following "MPC" indicate Box and Folder number. NFF Suzanne Juhasz. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition. New York: Colophon- Harper, 1976. SCD Constance Lindsay Skinner. Songs of the Coast Dwellers. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930. Dorothy Livesay. Signpost. Toronto: Macmillan, 1932 Dorothy Livesay. Collected Poems: The Two Seasons. Toronto, Montreal and New York: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1972. WWP I Margaret Homans. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1980. Table of Contents Approva 1 ii Abstract iii Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 Chapter I : Killed into Art: The Poetry of Marjorie Pickthall Chapter 11: Constance Lindsay Skinner and the Indian Fictions Genre Chapter 111: The Task of Poetic Mediation: Dorothy Livesay's Early Poetry Conclusion Bibliography: Primary Sources Secondary Sources vii Introduction According to Louis Dudek and Michael ~narowski,editors of The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, the earliest evidence of a shift away from the conventions of late Victorian Romantic verse was the publication of Arthur Stringer's Open Water in 1914. In his preface to the volume, "Stringer pleaded the cause of free verse and created what must now be recognized as an early document of the struggle to free Canadian poetry from the trammels of end-rhyme, and to liberalize its methods an2 its substance'."l Over the next fifteen years Canadian poetry underwent such a radical change in method and substance that critics and literary historians of subsequent decades have had difficulty establishing anything more than tentative links between the mature work of Bliss Carman, Charles Roberts, and D.C. Scott, the chief practitioners of the old tradition, and the early Modernist poetry of W.W.E. Ross, Raymond Knister, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith. E.J. Pratt may be seen as the exception: he has been called a "transitional figure" because he and Roberts share several thematic concerns. 2 The work of women poets writing during this period of transition can also be seen as conforming to the conventions of either the old or the new tradition. E.K. Brown maintains that the Romantic tradition found "a final phase of great refinement in the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall,"' while Dorothy Livesay is generally considered the first Canadian woman poet to write in the Modern idiom. The West Coast poet Constance Lindsay Skinner, like E.J. Pratt, can be seen as a transitional figure: her first group of poems on Indian themes, published the same year as Stringer's Open Water, combines Victorian diction and sentiment with the techniques of free verse and imagism. But unlike their male counterparts, these three women exhibit an affinity with one another that goes beyond the themes which inform their work. While all three poets differ radically from one another in terms of their relationships to the traditions struggling for dominance during this turbulent period, their individual stryggles t~ identify themse?ves with the role of poet a.re remarkably similar. Pickthall, Skinner, and Livesay are representative women poets of the period in that their poetry exemplifies the problems experienced by nany Canadian women poets operating during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their careers follow one another in rapid succession, each poet demonstrating greater awareness than her predecessor of the problems involved in and the strategies required to transcend the social and literary conventions which deny women literary authority. This rapid evolution of female poetic consciousness is perhaps not surprising, for it was not just literary conventions which were being challenged by a new generation during the early decades of the twentieth century. The conventions which' governed the social and political existence of women were also being questioned. The first wave of feminism began in Canada in about 1890, and although it got off to a slow start, it did eventually climax in the federal Women's Franchise Act of 1918. The degree to which Pickthall, Skinner, and Livesay were involved in this consciousness-raising4 enterprise correlates positively with the degree of female self-awareness exhibited in their work. Born in Victorian England and raised in rigidly conservative Toronto, Pickthall was initially contemptuous of women activists. But as the poetry and letters written during her last years suggest, she eventually became aware of herself as a victim of patriarchal social conventions. Skinner was not brought up in conservative Central Canada but rather at a remote trading post in northern British Columbia. She was a newspaper journalist and short-story writer in her teens, became a novelist and historian in her twenties, and a poet and essayist in her thirties. Although much of the writing from all these Periods is characterized by a certain ambivalence about female Power, it does suggest that she was very much aware of current feminist concerns. Livesay, the daughter of a relatively liberated father who encouraged his adolescent daughter to read women writers and attend lectures on feminism and birth control, became a feminist when she was still at high school. Her first book of poems was published when she was just eighteen, and many of the poems contained in it are clearly generated by serious