Textile Crafts in Canadian Fiction Since 1980
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Rag Bags: Textile Crafts in Canadian Fiction since 1980 Pauline Morel Department of English, Faculty of Arts McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada August 2008 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Pauline Morel 2008. All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of persons participated in planting the seeds of this project and carrying it to fruition. First and foremost, I thank my supervisor, Professor Nathalie Cooke, for her invaluable help, and for showing me that academia and children and canoe trips are not necessarily incompatible. I am also very grateful to: Professor Nigel Thomas, for his feedback on sections of this project, and for the stimulation he provided during and well beyond my master’s studies at Laval University; Professor George Elliott Clarke at the University of Toronto for his generous correspondence in the investigative stages of this project; Professor Berkeley Kaite at McGill University for her feedback on my compulsory research project; Professor Robert Lecker from McGill University for his advice and for getting me to read The Polished Hoe (and Ferber’s sleep solutions for toddlers!); and Professor Allan Hepburn for his faith in our cohort, his brilliant example, and inspiring class on Material Culture, that got many things started for many of us. His authentic friendship throughout the years has been primordial in keeping me on track. I also wish to thankfully acknowledge the institutions and groups that funded this project: McGill University’s department of English, under the directorship of Professor Dorothy Bray, offered me a fellowship at the start of my doctoral programme, and enabled me to travel for the purposes of research and knowledge sharing; two Faculty of Arts awards helped fund the first and last years of my programme (undeniably the most difficult!); the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) funded two years of this research; and The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada offered me an Anthony Hampson award. Finally, my thanks go to the Department of English for providing teaching and research appointments, and to Professor Nathalie Cooke, again, and McCord Museum Director Victoria Dickenson, for enabling me to work in iii the captivating field of museum and cultural studies, while helping to support myself through my years as a doctoral student. Truly, I would be nowhere without my cohort – Robin Feenstra, Stephanie King, Jason Polley, Liisa Stephenson, and Erin Vollick – it is your presence, friendship, and solidarity that made me feel I was just where I needed to be when estrangement would have been more likely. And last but not least, I thank my family: Jocelyne, Christine, and David for believing in me; Joe, Kathy, and Michael for their loving presence; Uschi and Lucien for their invaluable support; my husband, Yan, for his unfailing encouragement, his patience over the years attempting to improve my computer skills and saving many lost documents, and quite simply, for making all of this possible. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to my infinite source of motivation and inspiration – and distraction! – Loïc and Emmy, who somehow managed to learn to walk, talk, and ride bicycles throughout all of this. This is for you. iv ABSTRACT The very impetus of this study — to examine the representations of craft in literature — defies the functional binaries so long attributed to art and craft. This study examines the literary formulations of textile crafts and their makers in Canadian works of fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. Included are three Canadian novels published after 1990: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002) and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995). Through close analysis of these patchwork novels, I suggest ways of reading quilts and other textile crafts as a recontextualization of the forms of the past (through the workings of displacement and parody) in Canadian literature. Chapter One proposes theoretical reconceptualizations of crafts culminating in the 1990s and establishes three paradigms that structure my analysis in each of the chapters: the relations of textile crafts with (a) narrative, (b) trickery, and (c) a dehierarchical and plural aesthetic. In the subsequent chapters, each one dealing with a single novel, I explore the reassembled quality of the narratives and variations of the spider-weaver archetypes they represent, both of which I consider fundamental to the patchwork novel. In Chapter Two, I posit the patchwork quilt in Atwood’s Alias Grace as a model for the processes of recollection and v fragmentation involved in historiographic metafiction. Chapter Three establishes the crafted object in Clarke’s The Polished Hoe as a site of struggle and an embodiment of the collective and composite nature of heritage in the neoslave narrative. Chapter Four focuses on the way the “sordid quiltings” (379) of Mistry’s A Fine Balance make new out of old and, rather than embodying what has been preserved, often reveal and reflect upon what has been obscured by historical records. I view textile craft as departing from its affiliation with a nostalgic female aesthetic and lineage mystique to be involved here instead, in novels of turn of the twenty-first century, in mutations, making and remaking, and manipulation and invention proper to a postcolonial politics of recycling. vi ABRÉGÉ Cette étude contribue à remettre en question la célèbre dichotomie entre l’art et l’artisanat en se penchant sur les représentations de l’artisanat dans la littérature. Plus spécifiquement, cette étude vise à explorer les représentations de l’artisanat textile et de la figure de l’artisan dans le roman canadien au tournant du vingt-et-unième siècle, à travers trois romans publiés après 1990 : Alias Grace (1996) de Margaret Atwood, The Polished Hoe (2002) d’Austin Clarke et A Fine Balance (1995) de Rohinton Mistry. Une analyse de ces trois romans-patchwork et du rapiéçage qui en informe leur structure et leur contenu nous révèle une nouvelle façon de conceptualiser l’artisanat tout en remettant en contexte des formes traditionnelles du passé (tels que tissage, tressage, couture) dans la littérature canadienne contemporaine. Le premier chapitre, explorant les théories transdisciplinaires autour de l’artisanat apparues vers 1970 et atteignant leur apogée dans les années 1990, propose trois paradigmes structurant mon analyse dans chacun des chapitres, à savoir, les relations entre l’artisanat textile et (a) le récit, (b) la ruse, et (c) la transformation et la pluralité. Chacun des chapitres suivants explore les récits rapiécés et les variations autour de la figure mythique du (de la) fileur(euse) rusé(e) (la figure du « trickster » vii dans le mythe nord-américain) qui constituent un ensemble caractéristique du roman patchwork. Le deuxième chapitre propose le patchwork présent dans Alias Grace comme un modèle de processus de récupération et de fragmentation propre au roman historique (ou ce que Linda Hutcheon nomme « historiographic metafiction »). Le chapitre trois analyse l’objet textile « fait main » dans The Polished Hoe de Clarke comme un site où s’inscrivent la résistance et la nature collective et composite de la notion de patrimoine dans le nouveau récit d’esclavage, ou le « neoslave narrative ». Le quatrième et dernier chapitre, portant sur A Fine Balance de Mistry, attire l’attention sur les rapiéçages « sordides » (379) dans le roman, qui signifient ce que l’Histoire a obscurci plutôt que ce qu’elle a préservé. L’artisanat textile se défait donc ici de son affiliation traditionnelle à l’esthétique féminine nostalgique et généalogique pour s’associer plutôt, dans le roman canadien des années post-1990, a des processus de mutation, de récupération, de manipulation, et d’invention propres à une politique postcoloniale du recyclage. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS..................................................................................................... ix List of illustrations............................................................................................................... xi Introduction: “Rag Bags” ..................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Craft............................................................................................................. 34 1.1 Crafts in the Contemporary Context................................................................ 34 1.1.1 Crafts in Art.................................................................................................. 37 1.1.2 Crafts in Literature: Text and Textile ........................................................... 43 1.1.3 Explaining the Renewed Interest in Crafts .................................................. 46 1.2 Defining and Theorizing the Crafts.................................................................. 53 1.2.1 Defining Craft .............................................................................................. 53 1.2.2 Defining Textile Crafts ................................................................................. 62 1.2.3 “A radical new phase”: Demarginalisation and Transdisciplinarity in Contemporary Craft.................................................................................................. 64 1.3 Crafts in Literature ..........................................................................................