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Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood Eric Hornsby A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood Copyright © by Eric Hornsby. All Rights Reserved. Contents Attribution vii Key to Abbreviations of Books viii Introduction 1 1. Chapter 1 7 2. Chapter 2 18 3. Chapter 3 32 4. Chapter 4 57 Bibliography 67 Attribution A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English Literature. Eric Hornsby 1986 The University of Queensland vii Key to Abbreviations of Books Books by Margaret Atwood: CG – The Circle Game AC – The Animals in that Country PU – Procedures for Underground PP – Power Politics YAH – You are Happy SP – Selected Poems THP – Two Headed Poems TS – True Stories Books by Gwen Harwood: P – Poems P2 – Poems Volume 2 SP – Selected Poems LB – The Lion’s Bride viii Introduction In the foreword to a seminal work of comparative Australian and Canadian literary criticism – J.P. Matthew’s Tradition in Exile – Claude Bissell observed that “comparisons are most effective and helpful when they deal with divergences from 1 a strong common base”. His comment (and its context) provides a pertinent point of entry into a discussion of the lyric poetry of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood. In being women (and mothers), in writing out of the recognisably analogous psychic and cultural environments of ‘post-colonial’ Australia and Canada; in having achieved positions of eminence in the critical acclaim of the literary establishments of their respective countries, the two poets would seem, superficially at least, to share ‘a strong common base’ in the circumstances of their artistic production. Equally obvious, in this initial cursory glance, would be the apparently great differences, or ‘divergences’ between the 1. C. Bissell: Foreword to Tradition in Exile, by J. P. Matthews, Cheshire Publishing Ltd, Melbourne, (1962), pp. v-vi 1 ERIC HORNSBY stylistic and formal aspects of their work, the voices employed and the mythopoetic worlds given expression in their poems. Typographically, their poems look different. Where 2 Margaret Atwood’s poetry is recognisably modern, eschewing the structural conventions of traditional prosody, Gwen Harwood not infrequently writes sonnets and often uses regular stanzaic patterns, metres and rhyme structures. Atwood’s characteristic laconic, often apophthegmatic voice would seem to contrast sharply with much of the almost romantic voicing of Harwood. The overtly political nature of Atwood’s explicit analyses of the post-colonial dilemma in Canada; of the feminist dilemma and of the schisms they produce in perception, identity and human relationship, seems, at a glance, quite divorced from the reflective, often elegeic or pastoral tone of many of Harwood’s poems and their fascination and intimate engagement with the music, art and philosophy of a European cultural heritage. Perhaps a clue to these ‘divergences’ may be found in a comparative cultural context. Beryl Langer, in a paper delivered at the inaugural conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Canadian Studies, held in Sydney in 1983, called Presence and Absence: Women and Cultural Creation in Canada and Australia, argues persuasively that historically and geographically explicable differences in the conception of national identity in the two countries 2. I will be mainly concerned with Atwood’s longer collections beginning with The Circle Game in 1966, mentioning only briefly her earlier, more traditionally conventional work – none of which appears in her Selected Poems. 2 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood promote a difference in the cultural status accorded to writing by women. She concludes that the greater ‘presence’ of women writers in contemporary Canadian literature compared to that in Australian, is due to the fact that “while women’s search for self is constructed as outside the bounds of legitimate culture in the Australian context, and perceived in an essentially adversary way, in the Canadian context it becomes a metaphor for the national quest, and takes its place 3 within the cultural mainstream”. The greater popular awareness that this would suggest exists in Canada of the metaphorical connection between women’s exploration of the concept of identity and an examination of the problematic axiomatics of post-colonialism suggests, perhaps, an explanation for the more explicit treatment those axiomatics receive in Atwood’s work compared to that of Harwood. Similarly, the suggestion that legitimation is more problematic for women writers in the Australian cultural context, and there are certainly none given the status of Atwood or Margaret Lawrence in Canada, may partially explain Gwen Harwood’s preoccupation with formal structure – making her poems look more like poems – and certainly helps us to understand some of the insecurity about her work that drives her to constantly test herself against 3. B. D. Langer: Presence and Absence: Women and Cultural Creation in Canada and Australia, in Theory and Practice in Comparative Studies: Canada, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Peter Crabb, from the first conference of ANZACS, Sydney, (1983), Macquarie University, 287-298, pp. 296 (Langer’s emphases). 3 ERIC HORNSBY the critical establishment with her various pseudonyms. I will have more to say about Harwood’s use of pseudonyms and poetic personae later in this thesis, but at this point I merely wish to point out that there may be culturally explicable reasons for some of the differences between the two poets’ work. In the ensuing examinations of their poetry, my general thesis will be that, despite the inevitable differences of their individual approaches to their poetry and of the cultural contexts in which they make those approaches, they share a number of characteristics and intrinsic, especially thematic, preoccupations that facilitate a comparative perspective on their work and justify the view that, just as the cultural contexts of Australia and Canada can be seen to be ‘divergences from a strong common base’, so too can the very different poems of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood be seen to be ultimately derivative of a similar source – individual but related manifestations of the same difficult, schizophrenic Muse of female, post-colonial and (subsuming these metonymically) human dilemmas of existence. This compression of terminology perhaps needs some further clarifying explanation – some kind of de-elaboration. In a more exploded view (hence the fragments) I believe that the quests for meaning in the work of these two poets reflect their heightened consciousness of the dichotomies intrinsic to living as a human being in the Western World. The inevitably schizoid Weltanschauung of feminism: a recognition of the political implications of the ‘self’ being defined as ‘other’ in a phallogocentric universe; and of post- 4 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood colonialism: the awareness of the disjunctive consequences of a dislocation of one’s cultural heritage (the identity crisis encapsulated in Northrop Frye’s ‘Who am I / Where is here?’ 4 reframing ) – these perceptions of schisms in identity, and their inevitable problematization of the inherited language that embodies and therefore propagates them, can be seen to be part of and figures for, more general apprehensions of dichotomy. This thesis will attempt to broadly outline some of these dichotomies as they appear in and inform the lyric poetry of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood. In doing so, it will try to avoid what I consider to be the artificiality of comparing the poets too closely – trying to force them to conform to the expectations of similarity adumbrated by the comparative context. Ultimately, I seek merely to juxtapose the two poets’ work in the belief that in doing so, the very real correspondences between them will make themselves apparent all the more validly for their life-like uncertainty and inconsistency. 4. In his 1971 book, The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye mused: "It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question 'Who am I?' than by some such riddle as 'Where is here?'" 5 1 It is no longer possible to be both human and alive. 1 – Atwood The dualities of human existence have been a central concern throughout both these poets’ work. Even the titles of some of Atwood’s collections reflect her preoccupation with a bifurcated reality: Double Persephone, The Animals in that Country, Procedures for Underground, Two-headed Poems. For Atwood, this duality is explicitly linked to the schizophrenia of female experience and of the post-colonial position in Canada. Her first major collection, The Circle Game, published in 1966, presents a world in which landscape functions as a metaphor for ‘self’. The first poem in the 1. Margaret Atwood, Power Politics, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, (1972), pp. 30. Future references to quotes from the two poets are cited in the text in parentheses. Titles of collections are abbreviated in accordance with the Key to Abbreviations of Books given earlier. 7 ERIC HORNSBY collection, This is a Photograph of Me, introduces and explains the way this metaphor will function. It begins with a desription of the photograph – “smeared / print : blurred lines and grey flecks / blended with the paper”. The reader is led, as the description continues, through the surface of the photograph into the landscape it depicts – “slope, a small framed house.// In the background there is a lake, / and beyond that, some low hills”. The precise matter-of-fact voice in the poem makes the lake in the picture as accessible as the sea in A Descent Through the Carpet”, until the characteristically parenthetical disclosure of the fact that “the photograph was taken / the day after I drowned”.
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