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HUNTER, ADULT ADOLESCENT, AND WOUNDED WARLOCK HUNTER, ADULT ADOLESCENT, AND WOUNDED WARLOCK: IMAGES OF MEN IN ENGLISH-CANADIAN WOMEN'S FICTION (1960-93) JANINA CAMILLE HORNOSTY, M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University Copyright by Janina Camille Hornosty, May 1994 ii. Doctor of Philosophy (English) McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada TITLE: Hunter, Adult Adolescent, and Wounded Warlock: Images of Men in English-Canadian Women's Fiction (1960-93) AUTHOR: Janina C. Hornosty, 8.A. (McMaster University) M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Joan Coldwell NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 259 iii. Abstract Although the fiction written by women in English-Canada since the 1960's has experimented widely with literary form, a remarkably consistent set of - literary archetypes of masculinity emerges from their work. I have named the three particularly vivid and pervasive images of men on which I focus, the Hunter, the Adult Adolescent, and the Wounded Warlock. My project is essentially a sketching out of these beings, a contouring of their recurring literary reality. Tori! Moi rightly criticizes the project of evaluating literary images of women in terms of their true or false relation to 'real life' as one that "resolutely refuses to consider textual production as a highly complex, 'over­ determined' process with many different and conflicting literary and non­ literary determinants" (Moi 45). In looking at the images of men that dominate Canadian women's writing, I do not wish to claim that these images are 'true' or 'false', but simply that they exist in the literature. My critical approach here is essentially one of description. My descriptions are original in that they are not applications of previously-defined archetypes of personality as in, for example, the work of Carl Jung. No description is, however, free of context, and in describing the images of men that emerge from this fiction, I draw repeatedly upon several feminist and philosophical texts for inspiration and clarification. Susan Griffin's exploration of the iv. 'pornographic mind', Martin Buber's religious ontology of the "I-Thou", Jean­ Paul Sartre's articulation of the meaning of the Look, and Christopher Lasch's discussion of narcissism, have been particularly useful. Although my dissertation does not attempt to engage directly the large question of the relation of the artistic image to life, I do suggest indirectly, by drawing upon thinkers whose subject is not primarily literature, but indeed 'the real world', that the images of men I define have some connection with that real world. My conclusion briefly raises, therefore, some ethical as well as aesthetic questions about the implications of their existence. v. Acknowlegements I wish to thank Dr. Joan Coldwell for her very helpful suggestions and criticisms -- and her patience -- throughout the writing of this paper. I also want to acknowledge Dr. Hyman and Dr. Ballstadt, the other members of my Committee, for useful comments made on an earlier draft of this project. O.G.S. and S.S.H.R.C. scholarships have assisted the writing of this thesis. I owe many thanks to Karen Gorosh for her generous help with computer difficulties. I have greatly appreciated my husband, Steven Whittaker, for his unfailing support, and for his intense intellectual curiosity and clarity. I have also been heartened by our son Shane's "brisking about the life". Finally, I want to acknowledge my parents, Roy Hornosty and Cornelia (Dee) Hornosty, for their abiding encouragement, support, and interest. vi. Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter One ..................................................................................... 11 Chapter Two ..................................................................................... 101 Chapter Three ................................................................................... 167 Conclusion .........................................................................................248 Works Cited .......................................................................................253 INTRODUCTION: WHO IS HERE? The fiction written by English-Canadian women since the mid-1960's is eclectic in terms of its literary features: individual writers and individual works differently exploit possibilities of narrative structure, linguistic self­ consciousness, and of that project Linda Hutcheon describes as "enter[ing] into a dialogue with history" (Hutcheon 23). However, emerging from this diversity is a remarkably consistent set of literary archetypes of masculinity. I have named the three particularly vivid and pervasive images of men upon which I focus here, the Hunter, the Adult Adolescent, and the Wounded Warlock. My dissertation is essentially a sketching out of these beings, a contouring of their recurring literary reality. The figures I have chosen to discuss and elevate, by naming them using capital letters, to the status of archetypes, do not encompass all male characters in all English-Canadian fiction written by women in the period with which I am concerned. Some male figures in this fiction, for example Alice Munro's Ross ("Monsieur Les Deux Chapeaux"), a Bartleby-esque character who wears two gratuitous hats, are delightfully recalcitrant to categorization. However, the figures I have identified as the Hunter, Adult Adolescent, and Wounded Warlock loom very large in these writers' imaginings of men. I think 1 2 that this pervasive presence of male "types" is connected to the fact that much of the fiction written by English-Canadian women since the mid-1960's is writing that explores closely not only the famous issue of Canadian identity, but the issue of women's identity. Canadian women writers in the period with which I am concerned are in the process of mapping out a new geography of women's experience, of creating new, female answers to Northrop Frye's famous Canadian question, "Where is here?" (Frye 220). These writers are actively defining their subjectivity, or at least, in good postmodern form, troubling the waters of traditional reflections of them. Such troubling has not necessarily, as Hutcheon has remarked, "led to the discovery of Woman" (Hutcheon 108), but to complex and differing literary evocations of female experience. However, despite, or perhaps very congruent with these truths, is the fact that in evoking a sense of where it is to be here--female, English-speaking, Canadian--these writers, in their portrayal of men, have collectively imagined some startlingly similar landmarks. While female protagonists journey in and out of selves they might wear--trying on, putting off--, the Hunter, Adult Adolescent, and Wounded Warlock stand relatively still on the road. It is as if the chaotic speed of these protagonists' own journeys requires that something be fixed--large, identifiable, thickly-outlined. My focus on women's images of men will inevitably give rise, in readers' minds, to the related issue of images of men in Canadian men's fiction. A 3 comparison of men and women's depictions of masculinity in Canadian literature would be a fascinating study, but beyond the scope of my present project. My general sense of the answer to the question, "are there Hunters, Adult Adolescents and Wounded Warlocks in Canadian men's fiction?" is: not as women describe and evoke them, and therefore not at all. This is not to say that there are not characters in men's fiction who bear superficial resemblences to the archetypes I describe. Duddy Kravitz, for example, the opportunistic protagonist of Mordechai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, may be momentarily compared to the grasping Adult Adolescent whom I describe in terms of his basic stance of consumerism, his "gobbling [the world's] goodies-­ people, sensations, experience". But Richler's depiction, at once affectionate and ruthless, of Duddy, grants him precisely the kind of highly individuated, substantial interiority that is not just missing from women's depiction of the Adult Adolescent, but denied. As I argue in my second chapter, the Adult Adolescent is depicted as not real, as having no significant interiority, as a passive existential blank, an ontological vaccuum filled up only with what it has consumed and leaving a bloody trail of those it has disemboweled and "sucked dry". ( By connecting women's images of the Adolescent with Buber's philosophical and Raymond Williams' Marxist meditations on the phenomenology of, and social matrix for, substantial human being, I have suggested that this vision of ontological unreality does not--or not always and 4 entirely-- arise from a literary failure to imagine the "insides" of an unpleasant, hurtful character.) More detailed specific comparison between individual men in men's fiction and the archetypes of men I have identified in women's fiction, is not appropriate here, as the reader has not yet been properly introduced to those archetypes. Such comparisons are, of course, not without interest, and are connected to the larger question of whether there are dominating archetypes of men in Canadian men's fiction. My descriptions of male types in Canadian women's fiction may provide a starting point for such a discussion. It is in keeping with my sense that images of men in the fiction with which I am concerned tend to be broad sketches rather than subtly-drawn evocations

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