Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 181-89.
Abstract
Canadian women's position of being a colony within a colony enables women writers to be both separate from and united to a larger Canadian identity. Margaret Laurence's Manawaka texts, and The Fire-Dwellers in particular, construct feminist and nationalist myths that provide women with versions of themselves so they might recognize, and therefore strategize, methods of empowerment. Furthermore, The Fire-Dwellers is a novel that is concerned with issues of modernity. This novel contains a modernist aesthetic that is based upon a rejection of dominant structures and is defined by stylistic and ideological features which share concerns with feminist aesthetics in their transgressive, nonhegemonic critique of culture. Situating The Fire-Dwellers as a modernist text, Stacey Cameron's struggle becomes a struggle within a modernist mythical "quest" for a "new" value structure.
Growing above "older," powerful, southern neighbors, Canadian literature reacts against a movement of nineteenth-century American Romanticism that privileges an "American Dream" of heroism, freedom, happiness, and capitalism. Canadians were, and are, still recovering from the debilitating myth of the "American Dream," which we borrow in lieu of the myths we conceal from our own history. In this borrowing, Canadians have come to possess destructive, confining, and homogenizing social conventions. In this context of American cultural colonialism, we need to search for our own myths, define a modernism that happened in Canada, and look to Canadian stories to reconstruct a diverse national identity that speaks to a strategy of unity in difference. For women, the rewriting of myths has become an important feminist project. For Canadian women, a gendered modernism arising from feminist aesthetics is crucial to the process of defining a nation to itself through storymaking.
Before proceeding, I would like to clarify the way in which I am using the terms "modernity," "modernism," and "postmodernism." I define modernity as a socioeconomic condition that is concerned with breaking from tradition through a reordering of space and time. Modernism is a cultural movement that explores issues of modernity through the use aesthetic techniques that, as Linda Hutcheon in The Canadian Postmodern claims, have much in common with postmodern techniques, such as fragmentation and parody. However, modernism is concerned with a search for revolutionary reconstruction (order in chaos), whereas postmodernism is concerned with an urge to question and disturb, "to make both problematic and provisional any such desire for order or truth."
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln