"I"'S: Figuring the Female Subject in Linking Narratives by Anna Jameson, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Mavis Gallant
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Telling "I"'s: Figuring the Female Subject in Linking Narratives by Anna Jameson, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Mavis Gallant by Jane Leslie Sellwood B.A. Hons. English, Carleton University, 1978 M.A. Canadian Studies, Carleton University, 1981 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English We accept this dissertation as conforming to the required standard _____________________________ Dr. Misao Dean, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Stephen Scobie, Departmental Member (Department of English) Dr. Nelson Smith, Dep^'tmental Member (Department of English) W.D. Valgardson/yOutside Member (Department of Creative Writing) Dr. Carole F. Gerson, External Examiner (Department of English, Simon Fraser University) (c) JANE LESLIE SELLWOOD, 1995 University of Victoria All rights reserved. Dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. 11 Supervisor: Dr. Misao Dean Abstract The linking short narratives explored in this study— Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert and Mavis Gallant's Home Truths— employ first-person narrators to both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered female subject. In addition, these representative linking narrative texts demonstrate that choices to do with form, as well as subject and theme, may both support and subvert the discourses of the time and place in which they are written. My exploration of these three representative texts draws from W.H. New's fragmentation theory of short narratives, Gérard Genette's narrative theory of voice and mood, Paul de Man's problematiration of generic distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory of the speaking subject as text in process and vice versa. Jameson's Romantic "I" uses the miscellany's flexible form of linking short narratives autobiographically to both reify and recuse nineteenth-century genre conventions of travel narrative and the gendered position of women in Ill Europe and Canada. As the Recusant "I," first person narration in Duncan's quartet of stories figures splits not only between female desire and gender codes, but also betv;een creative imagination and conditions of exile. With a psychopoetics of the unsaid, the Remembering "I" of Gallant's linking narratives figures female subjectivity as a process of both psychology and history. These women-authored linking narratives challenge assumptions that first-person narration is univocal, and therefore problematize distinctions between autobiography and fiction. In their uses of the linking narrative form, they also challenge aesthetic criteria that privilege wholeness and unity— of the novel, for example— in concepts of mimesis dominating representations of reality in their respective periods. These first-person linking narratives use the voice of the "I" subversively, telling the doubled position of the female subject in the discourses of genre and gender. Examiners: _____________ D r . Misao Dean, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. Stephen Scobie, Dejjpr^mental Member (Department of English) IV Dr. Nelson Smith, Departmental Member (Department of English) W.D. Valgard^c^, Outside Member (Department of Creative Writing) Dr. Carole F. Gerson, External Examiner (Department of English, Simon Fraser University Table of Contents Abstract ii Table Of Contents V Acknowledgements vii Dedication viij Introduction 01 Writing the Subject 10 Stories of Genre 19 Notes 25 Chapter One Canadian Linking Narratives and the Female ” I ^ 28 The Fragmenting Form 28 Subjects and Texts 42 Figuring the Female ”1" 47 The Splitting "I" 54 Notes 57 Chapter Two The Romantic "I": Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada(1838) 60 The Salonière Text 70 A Feminine Journey 72 A Feminist Romantic 77 A Picture of Mind 82 Winter Melancholy 89 Summer Delight 108 Notes 123 VI Chapter Three The Recusant "I": Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert(1903) 132 New Realism's Pool 140 Stories of Exile 155 The Face In the Pool 163 A Dream of Coolness 17 4 Pas femme-artiste? 191 Notes 200 Chapter Four The Remembering "I": Mavis Gallant's Home Truths(1981) 210 Un mensonge 213 The Unsaid 224 The (M)other At Home 233 Paterfamilias Abroad 236 The Bird of Talent 24 8 Notes 297 Conclusion 304 Worlcs Cited Primary Sources 313 Secondary Sources 315 vil Acknowledgements Several people have aided my completion of this dissertation. Firstly, I thank the members of my dissertation committee, particularly Dr, Misao Dean, whc<e tenacity and critical insight provided scholarly support and guidance on a journey that otherwise often would have seemed mapless. I thank the staff of Special Collections and the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria for their assistance in locating materials and for providing a much-needed space in which to research and write. In particular, Dietrich Bertz in Special Collections gave valuable assistance with the German translations for Chapter Two. For their support, I thank my children Bruce Baskerville, Brian Baskerville, Shannon Baskerville Woodland, and their families. I am grateful also to Judith Terry and Dr. Reg Terry for their generous kindness, humour and accommodation. Lastly, I acknowledge Dr. Jeff Wooder's assistance in navigating the rockiest road of all. V I 11 This dissertation is dedicated to my parents Alfred Leslie Sellwood 1911-1958 Nelsie Myra Reading Sellwood 1914-1994 Introduction The conclusion to J.R. Struthers' study of contemporary Canadian story cycles notes that this "flexible form has often been a suitable vehicle for expressing two of the strongest traditions in Canadian literature: the impulse towards autobiography and the impulse towards documentary" (291). Nineteenth-century linking short narratives— such as Thomas McCulloch’s The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (I860), which first appeared as sketches in the Acadian Recorder; Susanna Hoodie's sketches and tales, which appeared first in the Literary Garland and the Victoria Magazine, and then were published as Roughing it in the Bush (1852); and Catharine Parr Traill's epistolary The Backwoods of Canada (1846)— drew on autobiographical and documentary forms of the sketch, essay and letter, and are rich antecedents of contemporary Canadian story cycles (Struthers 291). While the most common term for the form in recent critical usage is "story cycle," linking short narratives have been also designated "story sequence" and "open form." 2 Critical and theoretical discussions have stressed the relation of linking short narratives to the fictional forms of both the short story and the novel. As a result, definitions of the "story cycle" have taken for granted modernist assumptions of organic unity.^ Attempts at definition raise problems of categorization and classification, that is, the occlusionary process which Jacques Derrida persistently challenges in his project to deconstruct the binary oppositional basis of Western thoughtMy definition of linking narratives by Canadian women writers in English is fluid, and takes into account the historicity of genre and deconstruction of its laws. By linking narratives I mean any fragmentary, sequentially arranged, discontinuous ensemble of prose— sketches, essays, anecdotes, journal entries, stories— that is presented as a cluster but derives its signification from paradoxical juxtaposition rather than unified resolution. I use the present participle, "linking," instead of the past participle, "linked" because the latter implies a completed series, and with that, attributes of linearity and closure; the former implies the opposite, that is, an ongoing series with attributes of spatiality and openness. Linearity and closure ascribed to the novel and to androcentric representations of the subject take for granted the 3 structure of beginning, middle and end. Spatiality and openness, on the other hand, may be figurations of the text that not only foreground discontinuity with androcentric, or status quo, representations, but also ascribe to experience the presence of the past in the present, so that events are represented as a synchronic non-completing pattern rather than as a diachronic series of completed causes and effects. Linking narratives by women have the potential to subvert these androcentric criteria by their speaking position in relation to the symbolic order of culture and language, which includes hierarchical assumptions of genre. The linking narratives explored in this study employ a first-person narrator to both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered female subject. Furthermore, these linking short narratives demonstrate a splitting image of subversion and reification in views of what is continuous and what is discontinuous with assumptions of reality that stress unity, linear progress and causality. The serial fragmentations of linking short narratives by Anna Jameson, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Mavis Gallant are representations discontinuous with laws not only of imperial/colonial culture but also realism, genre and gender. 4 Linking narratives display "amazing possibilities" (Hood 1) of combining both fictional and non-fictional forms of story, sketch, anecdote, tale and essay. The flexibility of linking narratives is demonstrated in their mingling of "genres and conventions" and "fact and fiction," as well as in their accommodation of autobiography's "documentary