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DS: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women's Poetry University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 1999 GREENWOR(L)DS: Ecocritical readings of Canadian Women's Poetry Relke, Diana M.A. University of Calgary Press Relke, Diana M. A. "GREENWOR(L)DS: Ecocritical readings of Canadian Women's Poetry". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49342 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com GREENWOR(L)DS: ECOCRITICAL READINGS OF CANADIAN WOMEN’S POETRY by Diana M.A. Relke ISBN 978-1-55238-665-1 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. 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For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ / IPaetio C®n&cwu&ne&& This page intentionally left blank 1 Double Voice, Single Vision: Ecopoetic Subjectivity and Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie n 1985, the American feminist critic Sandra Gilbert i 'ji Ilamented the decline of the poet-critic in Anglo-Ameri- Lvnw«Mw»vw«v«vJ Ican literary tradition. "I've come to the tentative con- clusion," she said in an interview with Gerald Graff, "that the special structures of the university have fostered a schism be- tween the right brain (the creative writer) and the left brain (the critic), which leaves both halves of the communal mind engaged in activities that often seem partial, passionless, even pointless" (Graff 111). Virtually anyone working in the field of Canadian literature at the time would have seized on this lament as quin- tessentially American. Canadian literature in English has been dominated by poet-critics since at least Confederation, and their work, though "partial" in the ideological sense, has been any- thing but "passionless" or "pointless." From Charles Roberts and Charles Mair in the nineteenth-century, to Frank Davey and Robert Kroetsch in the late twentieth, Canadian writers have been regarded as not only our most important poets but also our most influential critics of literature and Canadian culture generally. Gilbert's observation is applicable in one respect, however — at least, as pertains to Canadian poet-critics since the sixties. Most have been obliged to earn their bread in universities, and this may well account for the huge dislocation between their poetry and their theories of poetry. Any naive critical attempt to apply the latter to the former is fraught with danger. 41 GREENWOR(L)DS As a poet-critic of the seventies, Margaret Atwood was some- thing of a rarity: she was female and she was not an academic. Nevertheless, her theories as presented in Survival, her thematic guide to Canadian literature, led many critics of her poetry and fiction astray, as did some of her commentary on her own work. Survival was one of several important books that drew on Northrop Frye's structuralist and mythopoeic theory, especially his "deep terror" myth of nature in Canadian poetry. Atwood thereby inherited the suspicion and hostility of both feminist and postmodernist critics opposed to Frye. For example, at a Vancouver conference in the summer of 1982, Barbara Godard contrasted what she called Atwood's "retreat from the logos and the word into sensation," her "nostalgia for origins," and "her desire for a transparent language" with the presumably more up-to-date post-structuralist features of Quebec women's writ- ing, which was characterized by "puns, ellipses, changes in gen- der and spelling, neologisms, typographic variants, the use of the white page . ." (Godard 123). Perhaps also affected by this need to read Atwood's language as if it were transparent, Jennifer Waelti-Walters chose to ignore the feminist irony and grim sat- ire of Atwood's writing in her novel Bodily Harm, concluding that the book was a "piece of overt misogyny" (Waelti-Walters 121). The view of Atwood held by many male critics also tended to run the gamut from indifference to hostility. Frank Davey, for example, unfavourably contrasted what he saw as "the Atwoodian world of imminent and ubiquitous danger" to the lively and ludic postmodernist poetics of West Coast regionalists (1974 33). What is interesting about all these critics is that they were — and continue to be — renowned for their ability to focus on tex- tual particularities. Their blindness to the particularities of Atwood's texts may well be a feature of the extent to which they were influenced by Atwood's Frye-inspired criticism, which hardly ever worked as a satisfactory explanation of her poetry and fiction. Frye's views may have been a starting point — one of many — for Atwood; after all, she was his student at the Uni- versity of Toronto, where she completed her undergraduate de- gree. But her poetry was by no means the fulfilment of his critical vision. She was under no illusions about the masculine bias Frye failed to notice in the poetry he considered emblematic of Cana- dian attitudes vis-a-vis nonhuman nature. Having come of age 42 i POETIC CONSCIOUSNESS as a poet during the earliest years of the Women's Movement, Atwood wrote her first books out of an increasing awareness that patriarchy was not just a handy label for an era in biblical times. Like all good poets, she did not/o//ow critics — Frye or anyone else. Rather, like the excellent poet she was from the beginning, she anticipated the critics who, during the seventies were major figures in the establishment of North American femi- nist critique as a legitimate field within literary studies — critics such as Suzanne Juhasz, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and also Grace Stewart, who was herself trained at the University of To- ronto, and whose early work had a mythopoeic focus. Many of Atwood's early poems, written in the late sixties, extend the difficulty men have in coming to terms with women to the difficulty man has in coming to terms with nonhuman nature. Her landscape poems often featured an opposition be- tween man and nature, between male idealism and the land- scape upon which it is imposed. In Atwood's "Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer" (Selected Poems 60), the male pioneer's failed attempt to impose culture's rigid order upon nature re- sults in madness: Things refused to name themselves; refused to let him name them, The wolves hunted outside. On his beaches, his clearings, by the surf of under- growth breaking at his feet, he foresaw disintegration and in the end through eyes made ragged by his effort, the tension between subject and object, the green vision, the unnamed whale invaded. (Selected Poems 63) 43 GREENWOR(L)DS Unlike Adam, the first patriarch, naming the newly made world in order to take possession of it, this pioneer experiences the failure of Adamic language to possess and define the New World. Atwood's pioneer fails to resolve the negative "tension / between subject and object," a tension which emphasizes the persistent alienation of nature from culture, denies the pioneer possession of "his beaches, his clearings," and consequently causes the "dis- integration" of his mind.
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