University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2012-10-25 On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction Ram, Véronique Dorais Ram, V. D. (2012). On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27175 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/312 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Véronique Dorais Ram A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA October, 2012 © Véronique Dorais Ram 2012 Abstract This dissertation ponders how deformity acts as an index of resistance to the conventional family saga; it challenges the authority of the genre, which perpetuates conformity to affirm the existence of a national identity. I open with a history of the trope of deformity and a theory on its applicability to questions of the nation in Canadian fiction. Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House begins the literary analysis and considers how Daphne’s asymmetrical face exemplifies the novel’s overarching deformation of the domestic realist text. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees rereads Victorian conventions to demonstrate the perversity of power and the purity of individuality as the characters contest hegemonic cultural projects. The giants and runts that make up the Hervé family in D. Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love rewrite the traditional roman de la terre and exhibit how the trope of deformity underscores an indefinable Canadian identity – one that possesses roots only by seeking to disavow those roots. Anna’s body in Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World resists all acts of colonization, including historical proofs, and performs a parody that reverses the ideal of the female body as a trope for the mother nation. Lastly, the stories of Fielding and Smallwood in A Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise destabilize the formulation of a collective unconscious based on historical writings. Their symbolic deformities reveal how Newfoundland’s status as a nation is both fact (as historically represented by Smallwood) and fiction (as imagined by Fielding). The deformed bodies in these texts are non-compliant disruptions of national discourses that enable national identity through exclusive ideological frameworks; they destabilize centralized myths of the nation frequently employed by supporters of the ii classical canon to reaffirm a sense of cultural existence. Though they criticize the superficiality of kinship, they nonetheless highlight a still prevalent need for roots, physical and historical, as they reconstitute a more flexible sense of community. iii Preface: Why Deformity? I spent the summer months of 2007 reading the texts on my minor field examination list in postcolonial theory and literature. Less than halfway through I started to notice a trend: the numerous peculiar and deformed figures that haunt Azaro in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road; Lenny’s crippled body, the result of contracting polio, in Bapsi Sidwa’s Cracking India; Baba’s physical and mental disabilities in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day; Puli, deformed by disease, in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in the Sieve; the one armed man in a key scene of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and Saleem’s distinctive nose in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I perceived this pattern as a common trope employed by postcolonial writers to portray fractured nations under imperialism and colonialist discourses. As I interspersed my reading requirements with readings for pleasure, I began seeing deformed characters everywhere – in short stories, in fiction, in poetry, on television, in film, and to my surprise, in my own creative writings. I became obsessed with this haunting presence, covering my office wall with post-it references, keeping lists on napkins, and starting numerous unfinished notebooks with ideas on the significance of these deformities in general, and more specifically in Canadian literature. Then I read Vandal Love, a novel I both appreciated and despised. I appreciated the text because of its successful representation of deformed bodies as symbolic of the dilemmas inherent in the search for what it means to be Canadian with a Québec ancestry, but I despised it for forcing me to acknowledge that I longed for a similar understanding of my roots as did the characters. As a French-Canadian raised on an American military base in Belgium, I spent the majority of my life avoiding any visible iv manifestation of my heritage for fear of being marginalized by my loud and dominant American peers. Not only was I one of a handful of Canadians at my school, but I was definitely one of the few French-Canadians. Being away from Canada and Québec for so long, my ancestry seemed more mythical than real, and the opportunities advertised by the American dream were easy to accept as actual possibilities. I must admit I spent several years yearning for the strong sense of identity offered by American discourse rather than the dispossession I felt with regard to Canada. Even once I had returned to Canada to attend McGill, I avoided my ancestry, rarely connecting with my extended family members (of which there were too many for me to recognize at that point), studying English literature and Hispanic studies, joining an English choir, and surrounding myself with English-speaking peers. I even walked out of a job interview after my prospective employer, hearing about my background, stated that I was a perfect example for the existence of Bill 101. My visceral antagonism toward my heritage quickly proved a hindrance as I began my research and studies in Canadian literature, and I found myself gradually incorporating Québec literary texts into my repertoire. As I became better read in contemporary Canadian and Québec literature, I noticed a trend to deform characters, often children, to articulate a sense of dispossession equal to my own; one that reveals a struggle with family and heritage. Hence I decided to focus on the trope of deformity as a reflection of the contemporary development in writing to destabilize traditions of the novel as “an incipiently hegemonic expression of modern middle-class interests” (Armstrong 169). Still drawn to family sagas, I drew on my foundation in postcolonial theory to reconsider the tropic significance of the home and the model family in its v relation to representations of the nation. Though I knew the concept of the family as a model for the nation was nothing new to literary studies, I felt that the interpretation of the family as deforming the nation provided a complex lens through which to debate questions of Canadian national identity as explored by contemporary writers. Richard White argues that countries such as Australia and Canada “were commonly thought of as the children of Britain or Europe, as strapping sons, or dutiful daughters or juvenile delinquents” (48). The image of Canada as the child of Britain amplifies the trope of the deformed offspring as contesting colonization and the narrative of a nation as a healthy and cohesive body. Deformity presents a body that questions the advocates for a unified national model because it not only expresses difference, but affirms the possibility of transgression. Thus by resisting the emblematic portrayal of the nation as a familial, unified, and often feminized body, the texts under study here deform the nation. What do I mean by “deform the nation”? Put bluntly, I use the phrase to encompass how conventional family narratives, once employed to further nation-building rhetoric, are challenged by a physically deformed offspring that refutes the secure hegemonic control of the nation. The family proves a threatening trope because the “valorization of the family, when is becomes the ruling class ideology, can lead to the repression of individuality” (Shahani 82). The domestic and nation-state ideals can entrap and marginalize the weaker members, often conceived as the child or the female. Not surprising, the majority of the characters that sport deformities are children or women, or both at once, for they resist objectification by adult concepts to which they are forced to conform. Deformity becomes a resistant power, critiquing the model of the family and nation, confronting the stereotypical roles entrenched by a conservative vi culture. In Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry notes, “Nowhere in the world has nationalization worked” (38), but in fact this supposed failure is beneficial. Nationalism requires a subsuming of the individual for the good of the collective; what these authors argue, however, is that plurality – recognizing deformities, that is various forms – composes a different type of nation, and one that escapes the cliché of collapsing difference under the umbrella term “identity.” Although many critics employ the terms diversity and pluralism interchangeably, I perceive diversity as a more problematic term. Diversity implies the existence, in a space, of various different bodies. For example, in Montréal, one can find Chinatown, little India, little Italy, etc. This, of course, suggests a diverse city – whether the bodies intersect with one another or not. In a way, however, they still “belong” to one city. Pluralism, however, promotes the interaction of these bodies so that they may converge comparatively rather than assimilate or exist separately. Yes, diversity implies difference, but it continues to carry negative connotations, such as “[c]ontrariety to what is agreeable, good, or right” (“Diversity” 3) and “a point of unlikeness” (1b).