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Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature

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Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature In compliance with the Canadian Privacy Legislation some supporting forms may have been removed from this dissertation. While these forms may be included in the document page count, their removal does not represent any loss of content from the dissertation. POSTHUMOUS PRAISE BIOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCE IN CANADIAN LITERATURE By RICHARD ALMONTE, B.A., B.ED., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Richard Almonte, September 2003 POSTHUMOUS PRAISE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2003) McMaster University (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Posthumous Praise: Biographical Influence in Canadian Literature AUTHOR: Richard Almonte, B.A. (Toronto), B.Ed. (Western), M.A. (Concordia) SUPERVISOR: Professor James King NUMBER OF PAGES: vii, 250 .. \\ Abstract This dissertation explores the phenomenon whereby a number of deceased Canadian women writers have had their lives utilized in subsequent works of fiction, drama, poetry, film, and biography. The dissertation gives this phenomenon a name-biographical influence-and argues that it represents a challenge to traditional literary canonicity in the Canadian context. Whereas literary canonicity has traditionally been the domain ofliterature professors, the phenomenon of biographical influence may be read as a writer-enacted substitution for traditional canonicity. This writer-enacted canon is comprised of literary heroines who have been elevated to their status not, as is traditional, because of the value oftheir work. Rather, entry to this new canon is reserved for writers whose lives often come close to eclipsing the value ascribed to their work. This is an ironic canonicity that valorizes the writer's life, while claiming to valorize the writer's work. Recent critiques by Lucasta Miller of the Bronte myth, Jacqueline Rose and Janet Malcolm of Sylvia Plath's posthumous status, and by Brenda Silver of Virginia Woolfs iconicity are a manifestation of the cross-pollination of Cultural Studies discourse with English Studies that this dissertation seeks to emulate. While Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" comes closest to providing the language with which to name the phenomenon this thesis describes, his theory 11\ does not account for three important differences in the Canadian context. First, instead ofre-writing precursors' works, in Canadian literature, writers re-write their precursors' lives. Second, instead ofthis re-writing coming from a defensive position, in Canadian literature the intention is to aid the precursor's reputation, in many cases to solidify it. Finally, Bloom's theory cannot explain why it is that in Canadian literature, most "precursors" are women and not men. In the foreshortened female literary careers of Gwendolyn MacEwen and Pat Lowther, as well as in Susanna Moodie's life, the dissertation argues that some contemporary Canadian writers have found, among other things, a metaphor for expressing the large odds against literary success in this country. To explain the metaphor, the dissertation elaborates an argument based on Nancy Armstrong's reading ofthe rise of the novel that sees literary desire as the basis of biographical influence in Canada. It then uses close readings of works in which Susanna Moodie, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Pat Lowther appear as characters, as well as Carol Shields' Swann and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assasin-novels where biographical influence is fictionalized-as evidence for the phenomenon of biographical influence. IV Acknowledgements I would like to thank the professors with whom I have studied Canadian literature. At the University of Toronto, Elspeth Cameron, Lally Grauer, Magdalene Redekop and Germaine Warkentin; at Concordia University, Mary di Michele, Bina Freiwald and Laura Groening; and at McMaster University, Donald Goellnicht and James King. A special thanks is reserved for my dissertation committee, Daniel Coleman, James King and Lorraine York. I would be hard­ pressed to come up with three more talented writer/editors than the members of my committee. I am especially grateful to Jim King for his conscientious and much-appreciated efforts as my advisor. I would also like to thank my boss and my colleagues at Insomniac Press. Their willingness to indulge my academic obligations over an almost three-year period made it possible for me to complete this dissertation while holding down a full-time job. From them, and from the numerous authors I have worked with as editor, copy-editor, proofreader and marketing coordinator, I have likewise learned a lot about Canadian literature. My final thanks go to Peter, whose love, support, enthusiasm, and patience over the past two years have given me reason to smile every day. v Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction: Theorizing Desire into Canadian Literature 8 Chapter Two The Virtues of the Female Literary Myth Explication Monograph 46 Chapter Three Biographical Influence as Theme in Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Carol Shields's Swann 70 Chapter Four Manufacturing Moodie 99 Chapter Five The Triumph of Life Over Art: The Case of Gwendolyn MacEwen 147 Chapter Six The Haunting of Pat Lowther 185 Conclusion 231 Notes 235 Works Cited 244 v\• But they're melting to myth, every year harder to believe in, and the further we travel away the more we require in the form of proofs. - Carol Shields, "Pioneers: Southeast Ontario" Please die I said So I can write about it - Margaret Atwood, "Their attitudes differ" v i\ PhD Thesis - R. Almonte McMaster - English 8 Chapter One Introduction: Theorizing Desire into Canadian Literature 1. This dissertation offers a theory to explain an important phenomenon in recent Canadian literature, the repeated use of some deceased Canadian women writers' lives as subject matter in contemporary Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, film, and biography. I call this trend biographical influence, and postulate it as evidence of an argument I make implicitly and explicitly throughout the dissertation. The argument is that a particular type ofliterary desire, conspicuously manifested by creative writers, is replacing traditional critic-centred canon-making to become a dominant mode of understanding Canadian literary tradition. While seemingly a benign phenomenon that might be explained away by invoking the argument that recent Canadian literature is postmodern-a genre that revels in using writers as characters-the dissertation argues that something more motivated and systematic than generic concerns is at stake in the phenomenon of biographical influence. At stake is the question of who has the ability, the need, and the power to create a Canadian literary canon, the critic or the author? Theorizing desire into Canadian literature, understood as an unconscious, unmediated form of attraction, is my way of suggesting that the more compelling explanations for PhD Thesis - R. Almonte McMaster - English 9 why we read who we read are now being produced by creative writers and not by sometimes logic-encumbered critics. The conjunction of literary influence and Canadian literature is by all counts a strange one. Perhaps no other national literature in the world is as devoid of public claims of influence as is Canada's. In fact, the notion of influence has been actively derided within Canadian literature, without strenuous opposition. l While it is true that in the 1880s the poet Archibald Lampman memorably claimed Charles G.D. Roberts' book of poems Orion as an important influence in his becoming a poet, it is not until the late twentieth century and the often remarked-upon influence exerted by the critic Northrop Frye on the early poetry of his students Margaret Atwood, Jay Macpherson and James Reaney, that we find another notable example ofliterary influence on Canadian writers by Canadian writers. In the strict definition formulated by Harold Bloom, literary influence-the poet awakening "to his calling when irresistibly seized upon by one or more poems of a precursor or father-poet" (Abrams 445)-is a rare occurence in Canada. This dissertation argues, however, that there is an analogous kind of literary relationship that Canadian literature exhibits in a pronounced fashion in several important cases. This relationship we will call biographical influence, defined as the influence of one writer's life on another writer's art. The theory this dissertation puts forward is not confined, however, to the identification of cases where unconscious biographical influence (as in Bloom) is at work. It will be primarily argued that biographical influence is self-consciously utilized PhD Thesis - R. Almonte McMaster - English 10 by a number of Canadian writers as a way of furthering specific politico-literary ends, namely, the achievement of canonicity and tradition, where these things do not previously exist. Specifically, biographical influence entails the usurping of the critic's function by the novelist, poet, dramatist and biographer. This process is best captured in the relationship between Margaret Atwood and her precursor (to borrow a term from Bloom), Susanna Moodie. Over a career spanning more than thirty years, Atwood has in several of her literary works re-written the life of Susanna Moodie, the nineteenth-century Canadian writer, in the process enabling and ensuring the canonization of Moodie as an early Canadian writer. Yet Atwood's use of Moodie is clearly not a Bloomian instance of influence, where battle is done between the precursor and the later writer,
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