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innsbruck university press

Doris G. Eibl, Caroline Rosenthal (Hrsg.)

Space and Gender

Spaces of Difference in Canadian

Women's Writing

E spaces de différence dans l'écriture canadienne au féminincanadiana oenipontana 10

SERIES

canadiana oenipontana 10

Series Editor: Ursula Mathis-Moser

iup innsbruck university press

© innsbruck university press, 2009

1 st edition.

All rights reserved.

Coverdesign: Gregor Sailer

Coverphoto: © Robert Saucier (Montréal, Québec), A Face in th e Glass (2009)

Layout: Carmen Drolshagen

Printed by: Fred Steiner, Rinn

www.uibk.ac.at/iup

Hypo Tirol Bank,

bruck.

Doris G. Eibl, Caroline Rosenthal (Eds.)

Space and Gender

Spaces of Difference in

Canadian Women‘s Writing

E spaces de différence dans l‘écriture canadienne au féminin

Table of Contents

Préfac

e ...................................... 7

Introduction

The Difference Space Makes

.... 9 I Nature-Culture Paradigms: Pastoral and Urban Iconographies

Florian Freitag

Ladies in the Bush and Paternal Soils: Gender and Space in Early

Canadian Farm Novels

............ 23

Andrea Oberhuber

Le gynécée urbain d'Élise Turcotte

................................................................. 41

Andrea Strolz

Spatial Practices, Representations of Space, and Spaces of

Representation in Margaret Atwood's Novels

.................................................. 53

Nora Tunke

l Mapping the Glass Labyrinths of the Past - Re/Constructing Identities in

Jane Urquhart's A Map of Glass

...................................................................... 73 II

Space and Difference: Gender-Ethnicity-Space

Marlene Goldman

Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand ........................................................................ ........................... 95

Eva Grube

r Changes in Relative Space": A Reading of Body, Nation, and Relation in Tessa McWatt's

Dragons Cry

............................................... 109

Table of Contents

Markus M. Müller

Coming Across: Aging Female Bodies & Liminal/Other Spaces in

Suzette Mayr's

The Widows and Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms

........ 125 III In-Between: Transcultural, Translational, and Counter-Spaces

Doris G. Eib

l Les espaces hétérotopiques dans Les enfants du sabbat d'Anne Hébert .... 145

Jessica Gever

s Reconfiguring Urban Spaces: Montreal as "Lettered City" in

Marilú Mallet's Journal inachevé

Elisabeth Tutsche

k Espace/Space': Gender and Translation in Nicole Brossard's

Le désert mauve and Gail Scott's My Paris ................................................... 179

IV

Public Women: Space, Sex, and Corporeality

Isabelle Boisclair

Le lieu de l'échange prostitutionnel dans trois romans québécoi s contemporains: Putain de Nelly Arcan, Salon de Marie Lafortune et

Pute de rue

de Roxane Nadeau ................................................................ 199

Julia Breitbach

A palimpsest of loss"/"The place of pain": Self and Place in Catherine Bush's Urban Novels The Rules of Engagement and Claire's Head ............. 213

Caroline Rosenthal

Transgressing the 'poetics of the anglicized city': The Figure of the Flâneuse in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For ................................ 231

Julie Spergel

Seamstresses, Prostitutes and Mothers: London's East End as a Jewish

Chronotope in Lilian Nattel's The Singing Fire

.............................................. 247

Table of Contents

7

Préface

En novembre 2007, la section "Études de femmes et du genre" de l'Association des études canadiennes dans les pays germanophones et le Centre d'études canadiennes de l'Université d'Innsbruck ont organisé un colloque interdisciplinaire et bilingue portant sur le thème "Space and Gender. Urban and Other Spaces in Canadian Women's Fiction - Espace et genre. Espaces urbains et autres dans la née quelques années auparavant lors d'une réunion des membres de la section des années 1980 en termes littéraires et en fonction de la caté gorie "genre". Ce livre présente les résultats de discussions engagées et fructueuses dans un contexte a priori complexe parce que bilingue. Nous remercions particulièrement Nicole Brossard et Danielle Fournier qui, lors du colloque, nous ont honorés de leur présence et d'une soirée de lecture inoubliable. Leurs nombreux commen le point de vue de celles qui écrivent et qui, depuis quatre décennies, s'engagent dans la cause féministe. et last but not least du Centre d'études canadiennes de l'Université d'Innsbruck actes - Marcel Laqueur, Corinna Assmann et Claudia Schwarz. Marcel et Corinna ont assumé un travail rédactionnel fort exigeant, et Marcel, s'étant familiarisé avec le programme de mise en page, s'est patiemment chargé des détails et problèmes de dernière minute qui, inévitablement, se présentent au cours de la réalisation d'un manuscrit.

Préface

9

Introduction: The Difference Space Makes

Caroline Rosenthal, University of Constance

Doris G. Eibl, University of Innsbruck

Situating or locating gender [...] requires both a cultural and a geographical imagination: it requires that we attend to particular contexts, and it problematizes conceptualizations of space as well as gender. Liz Bondi/Joyce Davidson, "Troubling the Place of Gender", 325 Space has become a highly politicized concept in our time. The theoretical approaches of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, or Edward Soja have emphasized that space is not materially given, but rather is the product of social practices, of power formations, and of ideologies. Space does not precede social relations and symbolic orders but results from them and in turn shapes and sustains them. Spatiality has thus become a key factor in cultural studies for analyzing difference as a society's and a nation's gender, race, or class patterns manifest themselves in the organization of spaces. The essays in this collection look at how gender differences - often in correlation with differences of race, class, age, or ethnicity - manifest themselves in space and in spatial representations. The authors examine, for example, how the dichotomy of nature versus culture has served to legitimize gender and sexual difference or how the opposition of private versus public space has sustained gender patterns in society. The essays not only look at how spatial dichotomies create and maintain differences, however, but also investigate the excess of such dichotomies. Various authors in this volume investigate liminal, hybrid, third, or supernatural spaces that not only lie in-between oppositions but that call into question oppositions such as woman-man, nature-culture, or private- and for the strategic re-inscription of space. Many articles also turn to the body as an intimate space and contested terrain of gender and sexual identity. The body, as critics like Judith Butler or Elizabeth Grosz have pointed out, does not exist as a tabula rasa onto which gender as a cultural construct is inscribed, but the body always already has a history and is immersed in discursive contexts that construct claims for example, the body is made to appear as a biological or given entity in

Introduction: The Difference Space Makes

10 order to naturalize and legitimize sexual identity. To the same extent, geographical places, the feminist geographer Doreen Massey states, always already have a history, and because they are populated by subjects whose identity has also arisen on the sutures of various discourses, Massey speaks of "the double articulation of place". Differences do not simply become inscribed onto space but spaces and spatial practices play an active part in making difference. As Sherene Razack, among others, has shown, racial and spatial practices often coincide, for example when black youths are stopped in fancy shopping malls simply for being the wrong race in the wrong place. To the same extent slums or housing development projects sustaining them. Gender and sexual identity is also made in spatial practices. Gender identity is the effect of repeated acts, Butler has claimed; it is created in performances that have to be continuously reenacted in order to stabilize an individual's gendered identity. The potential for change and subversion lies in slightly altered gender performances, in deferrals of the gendered act. Not only symbolic and social, but spatial practices - the way spaces are used by whom - are a powerful way to maintain identities. Spaces are gendered by the activities taking place in them, as Liz Bondi for instance has illustrated, and by changing such spatial activities, the underlying social norms for constructing gender, sex, and sexuality are also called into question. Many essays in this collection focus on representations of urban space and on the multilingual, multicultural contact zone of the contemporary metropolis. It is here that comparative approaches between English Canadian and French Canadian texts become especially fruitful. The city has played a minor role in English Canadian of the United States, and instead claimed the wilderness and the small town as the metropolis has always loomed large in the cultural imaginary as a means to establish a Francophone identity within the Canadian nation. Since the 19 th as a negative and since the late 1960s increasingly as a positive space. Because

Caroline Rosenthal, Doris G. Eibl

11 faith. Only in the late 1960s, after the so-called Quiet Revolution, when a majority of Québec citizens distanced themselves from traditional discourses and called for a modern laical society was the city perceived as a living space, admitting plurality and offering equal opportunities to the Francophone population. More recently, the representations of urban space in Canada's two major literary traditions seem to converge in the face of globalization, increasing pauperization, and various facets of what the French philosopher Étienne Balibar calls "néo-r acisme". Iconographies", consists of four essays that look at how the dichotomy of rural, natural, or wild spaces versus urban, cultured, and civilized spaces is used to construct and sustain gender, ethnic, or national differences. Florian Freitag takes an intra-national comparative approach by looking at the Canadian "farm novel", an umbrella term he coins for English-Canadian prairie novels and the French-Canadian "roman du terroir", both genres that deal with agrarian issues and use nature-culture paradigms for the constitution of a distinct cultural identity. He concentrates especially on Patrice Lacombe's La terre paternelle and on Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush. The texts are similar, Freitag claims, in how they deviate from the success narrative of U.S.-American farm novels and the kind of cultural identity they try to preserve by respectively claiming or setting themselves off from "wild" spaces. In both texts, rural space plays a decisive role in staking out an ethnic identity. La terre paternelle, in Freitag's opinion, uses "a rigid system of coded spaces (wilderness, farm, and city) and place-based la terre ) as the unique site of French-Canadian cultural identity". The land, Freitag illustrates, serves as a means of securing a collective Francophone identity as much as it is used to fashion a male identity by creating images of the French-Canadian farmer, lumberman, and trapper. In

Roughing It in the Bush

, in contrast, rural or wild space is perceived as a threat to both gender and class identity. As a Victorian woman of the upper class, Moodie feels alienated and shocked by the rough ways of Canadian rural society and consequently clings to her Britishness and to her role of being a lady. What is at stake in Roughing It, Freitag points out, is the loss of an individual's cultural identity rather than, as in La terre paternelle, the constitution of a collective intra-national identity. Both novels, however, use the representation of dichotomous spaces and spatial practices to establish a self against an Other. In Freitag's reading, La terre paternelle renders rural space as "paternal soil" while in Roughing It in the Bush it appears as a "prison-house".

Introduction: The Difference Space Makes

12 Andrea Oberhuber examines the question of dichotomous spaces in the novels of Québec writer Élise Turcotte. In her work, the clichéd juxtaposition of rural and urban spaces, as known from much of the Québec literary canon, is replaced by a tension between interior and exterior space, between the private home and the voracity of urban life. In Le Bruit des choses vivantes (1991) and La Maison étrangère (2002), the female protagonists, both representing "sujets surmodernes" as coined by Marc Augé, recuperate from separation, solitude, and aimless wandering through a radical, though only temporary, retreat into the sphere of homely intimacy (Le Bruit des choses vivantes) or the realm of the past (La Maison étrangère). By distancing themselves from the chaotic, aggressive, and and human identity and to realize modes of positive existence in an urban living space doomed to catastrophe and chaos. In their quest for mental and sentimental recovery maternity and writing reveal themselves as key-experiences: They re-root the female protagonist in a nourishing and reassuring matrix. Oberhuber shows how the exclusive moments of giving, loving, and rememoration in Turcotte's novels revaluate the restricted space of everyday life and increase the space of personal experience while the endless and uncontrollable space outside tends to corner the individual and reduces its capacity to act.quotesdbs_dbs41.pdfusesText_41

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