Narrative Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt, and Louise Erdrich (European Studies in North American Literature and Culture)

Narrative Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt, and Louise Erdrich

By analyzing the works of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through the lenses of subjectivity, gender studies, and narratology, Caroline Rosenthal brings to light new perspectives on their writings. Although all three authors write metafictions that challenge literary realism and dominant views of gender, the forms of their counter-narratives vary. In her novel Intertidal Life, Thomas traces the disintegration of an identity through narrative devices that unearth ruptures and contradictions in stories of gender. In contrast, Marlatt, in Ana Historic, challenges the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality. She offers her protagonist a way out into a new order that breaks with the law of the father, creating a “monstrous” text that explores the possibilities of a lesbian identity. In her tetralogy of novels made up of Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrich resists definite readings of femininity altogether. By drawing on trickster narratives, she creates an open system of gendered identities that is dynamic and unfinalizable, positing the most fragmented worldview as the most enduring. By applying gender and narrative theory to nuanced analysis of the texts, Rosenthal’s study elucidates the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. Caroline Rosenthal is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Constance, Germany.

European Studies in American Literature and Culture Edited by Reingard M. Nischik (Constance)




     



  
 
 


  

   

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2003 Caroline Rosenthal All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2003 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620 USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ISBN: 1–57113–267–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenthal, Caroline, 1969– Narrative deconstructions of gender in works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt, and Louise Erdrich / Caroline Rosenthal. p. cm. — (European studies in American literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–267–8 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Canadian fiction — Women authors — History and criticism. 2. Canadian fiction — 20th century — History and criticism. 3. Women and literature — Canada — History — 20th century. 4. Women and literature — United States — History — 20th century. 5. Thomas, Audrey, 1935– Intertidal life. 6. Marlatt, Daphne. Ana historic. 7. Erdrich, Louise — Technique. 8. Sex role in literature. 9. Narration (Rhetoric) 10. Deconstruction. I. Title. II. Series. PR9188.R675 2003 813'.54099287—dc21 2003001572 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

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Abbreviations

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Introduction

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1: Framing Theories

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2: “Alice Hoyle: 1,000 Interlocking Pieces”: Identity Deconstructions in Audrey Thomas’s Intertidal Life

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3: “You Can’t Even Imagine?”: Monstrous Possibilities of Female Identity in Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic

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4: “Her Laugh an Ace”: Narrative Tricksterism in Louise Erdrich’s Tetralogy

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Conclusion

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Works Consulted

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Index

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Chacun a ses raisons: pour celui-ci, l’art est une fuite; pour celui-là, un moyen de conquérir. Mais on peut fuir dans un ermitage, dans la folie, dans la mort; on peut conquérir par les armes. Pourquoi justement écrire, faire par écrit ses évasions et ses conquêtes? Jean-Paul Sartre

Writing and storytelling allow us to escape our own predicaments in this physical world and free our minds to go beyond it. Alootook Ipellie

Preface and Acknowledgments

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my choice of epigraphs, I consider writing and storytelling as chances to imagine concepts, oneself, or life differently. This also applies to the writing of this book which has been an eyeopener in more than an academic sense. While it has been challenging at times, I am grateful for having had the opportunity to “conquer” new spaces and “to go beyond my own predicaments.” I would like to thank the Association of Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries as well as the Verein der Ehemaligen der Universität Konstanz for their generous printing subsidy, and the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York for a summer grant which enabled me to do research for this monograph and which made possible many intriguing talks with Canadian academics. I especially want to thank Dr. Barbara Godard for her inspiring criticism and suggestions on how to approach the topic of gender and narrative. I am grateful to Professor Reingard M. Nischik for stimulating talks and factual advice. Thanks are also due to Lisa Roebuck and Florian Freitag for proofreading as well as to my friends for many intriguing discussions, critical readings, and for seeing me through this with encouragement and understanding. All translations of German quotations are mine unless indicated otherwise. C. R. October 2002 S SUGGESTED BY

Abbreviations

T

HE FOLLOWING ABBREVIATIONS

novels:

AH

Ana Historic

BP

The Bingo Palace

BQ

The Beet Queen

IL

Intertidal Life

LM

Love Medicine

TR

Tracks

are used for frequently quoted

Introduction Beginnings gather those dilatory moments when you hesitate, evaluate. Beginnings are when you need to locate where you are, with people or places. Introductions, mappings, initiations. Novels and life open cautiously. Aritha van Herk, Places Far from Ellesmere

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VER THE LAST few

decades, the concepts of “gender,” “identity,” and “narrative” have received growing attention in nearly every field of academic study. Gender has become an important analytical tool in many disciplines because of the insight it gives into the cultural orders underlying representations. Theories of subjectivity have illustrated that identity is not something we achieve and possess but something individuals must consistently reestablish in various social contexts and through a number of symbolic practices. One such symbolic practice is narrative. Through a coherent structure, and by drawing on familiar forms, narrative both constitutes and naturalizes concepts at the same time. The realization that gender and identity are not described by, but are constituted in, signifying practices has engendered a greater awareness for how texts perform gender, sex, or sexuality, for instance. As feminist critics and writers have shown, narrative not only consolidates gender but can be a strategic tool in dismantling stereotypical representations of gender. This book explores the correlation between gender identity formation and narrative. While drawing on feminist as well as cultural studies theories, part of my methodology will be the close reading of key passages in the texts of three women writers who in their narrative style deconstruct the fiction of a factual, a given, gender. They disrupt linguistic and narrative structures not to unearth a true female identity hidden within patriarchal structures, but to bring to the surface a multiplicity of unrepresented possibilities of women’s identities. The authors distort familiar narrative frames to render the ideological conditions for apparently real or natural representations of female identity, and by adopting a distinctly feminist perspective perform other potential gender identities in their texts. The authors chosen for this study show how

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narratives, which are informed by ideology, frame women in specific ways. As gender identity resides within and not outside of representational strategies, the authors forge different tales of gender in their own narratives by challenging the means, manner, and matter of traditional representation. They break smooth narrative surfaces down to show that in suppressing contradictions and ruptures, narrative produces and also naturalizes gender identity. In an attempt to counteract such naturalizing gestures, each of the chosen texts transcends gender codes in its linguistic and narrative techniques. The novels render the conditions for and the mechanisms of the fictional process as well as their ideological standpoint. I will be looking at texts of two Anglo-Canadian writers, Audrey Thomas’s Intertidal Life and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, as well as at the tetralogy Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace by Native American writer Louise Erdrich. Thomas and Marlatt are both writers of fiction as well as literary critics. Their work is highly acclaimed in postcolonial, Canadian, and feminist studies as their texts mix genres and as their experimental style questions cultural concepts such as gender or identity. I have chosen their texts as an example for how unruly narratives can destabilize notions of gender because they both deal with hybridity and the in-between of cultural categories, which also is a dominant theme in the work of Louise Erdrich. Whereas Thomas shifts meaning but stays within a traditional frame of representing femininity, as a lesbian writer Marlatt transcends this frame and explores the “monstrous” possibility of a lesbian identity outside the heterosexual norm. Thomas’s and Marlatt’s narrative tech1 nique can be described as shape shifting. In their texts they deconstruct traditional subject positions for women without offering any definite new ones as their texts resist finite readings. In a similar fashion, Erdrich draws on the trickster figure both in the creation of her female characters and as a narrative device where the trickster becomes a wandering sign in the text that defies unifying and naturalizing gestures. All three authors skew the familiar perspective, the frame in which the meaning of feminine is usually constituted, to include what is normally out of view and to question the conditions for realistic or normal frames. Audrey Thomas is currently living on one of the Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada. She was born in Binghamton, New York State, in 1935 and emigrated to Canada in 1959. Thomas lived in Ghana for a few years, an experience that, along with a miscarriage, has had a strong influence especially on her early writings such as Mrs. Blood (1970) or Blown Figures (1974). She is best known for her novels and short stories

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that all experiment with language and its relationship to the subconscious. Intertidal Life, her novel that will be closely examined here, was published in 1984. Another Anglo-Saxon Canadian writer from the west coast, Daphne Marlatt was born in 1942 in Melbourne and lived in Malaysia and England before coming to Canada in 1951. Because her parents both came from British colonial families, during their life in India and Malaysia they fiercely held on to English tradition and habits. Marlatt grew up with an ambivalent sense of belonging, a fact that early on shaped her poetic sensibility. In an interview Marlatt claims that early on in her life writing becomes a means for bridging conflicting cultural experiences. In her first book Frames of a Story (1968), Marlatt mixes prose and poetry, and this shifting of genres will become a characteristic of all of her works. A recurring theme in her work is the mixing of historical accounts and fiction. She first explores this in her highly acclaimed volume on the Japanese fishing village Steveston (1974). Marlatt has published various volumes of poetry as well as novels but is also well known as a feminist critic, theorist, and editor, especially of the feminist theory journal Tessera, which publishes the experimental and theoretical texts of Quebec and English Canadian feminist writers and critics. In her critical, as well as fictional, writings Marlatt explores the connection between text, subject formation, and ideology. Like Thomas, her style is highly experimental and metafictional. A close reading of her novel Ana Historic, published in 1988, reveals that by challenging the heterosexual imperative of our culture, Marlatt questions certain codes of femininity. Louise Erdrich was born in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1954 and is of half German-American and of half Chippewa-American descent. Her work deals with the hybridity of cultural identities and rejects clear cut categorization. In contrast to many other Native American writers, Louise Erdrich’s work is read and received as Native and as mainstream American literature. Her novel Love Medicine (1984) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her books have made it to the top of bestseller lists in various countries. Erdrich breaks with the prevalent pattern of the Bildungsroman in Native fiction and instead tells stories from a multiplicity of different perspectives to emphasize cultural heterogeneity rather than unity. As a mother of six children, Erdrich — like Thomas and Marlatt — repeatedly deals with themes of pregnancy, motherhood, and the difficulty of finding artistic expression as a mother and woman. Chapter 1 delineates the theoretical framework for the ensuing three text analyses. The text analyses in chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore the individual author’s approach to destabilizing gender, sex, and sexuality

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through unruly narratives. The concluding chapter discusses narrative as a strategy for rewriting gender. Whereas most critical studies focus exclusively on one — ethnic, sexual, or national — group, I have chosen diverse contemporary women writers who in various ways disrupt familiar tales of gender in their narratives. Although approaches that focus exclusively on Native, Canadian, or Lesbian writers are vital to make them visible as a group with distinct literary characteristics, this often enforces rather than dissolves their marginalized position. Marlatt’s and Thomas’s works have rarely been studied outside a Canadian context. Erdrich’s work has been looked at either in the context of ethnic women writers or Native American literature. This book wants to shift the critical framing of Thomas’s, Marlatt’s, and Erdrich’s texts to produce other readings of the novels and to show that categories such as gender or identity are bound to specific cultural discourses. Whereas Erdrich’s text reflects an understanding of a personal identity which is closely bound to the community, the Canadian texts put an emphasis on individualism. On the one hand, I draw on the productive differences of these authors and, on the other hand, I emphasize the themes and techniques they share in deconstructing stereotypical representations of female identity. Their differences are not leveled, on the contrary, I explore the plurality and multiplicity of the narrations of self offered by the texts, as well as their different strategies in disrupting gender patterns. In Intertidal Life, Thomas uses etymologies to unearth ruptures within seemingly smooth concepts. She also exposes the sexist content in everyday texts, news, children’s songs, and fairy tales to raise awareness of how women are taught to read themselves as women. Her text exhibits a lust to trace ironies and to destroy romantic notions. Thomas deconstructs concepts, but she offers no alternatives. Her protagonist, who has been left by her husband after fourteen years of marriage, is caught in opposing discourses and cannot let go of positions such as wife and mother that she desperately wants to abandon. The text follows these contradictory movements. Whereas Thomas shows that “over” is already contained in “lover” and “other” in “mother,” and thus points to their inherent contradictions, she does not leave the frame of reference in which such concepts are situated. Her narrative offers no soothing coherence or new perspectives to the readers who have to bear the chaos and, as the title indicates, the intertidal waves of the text. Like Thomas, Marlatt disrupts linguistic and narrative structures to distort familiar images and structures. In her playful poetic style, she emphasizes the materiality of language and uses syntax as a rhythm modeled on the female body in order to subvert the symbolic order. Marlatt

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also breaks surfaces to get at “what lies beneath words”: ideology. She transcends concepts by calling into question the heterosexual matrix that limits the choices of gender positions. In that respect, although her methods are similar to those of Thomas, Marlatt does not only point to the ruptures in concepts but moves beyond them. In Ana Historic, the narrator, a contemporary historian, imagines the possibility of a lesbian relationship in nineteenth-century Victorian British Columbia. By exploring this monstrous — because ab-normal — possibility, the narrator comes to realize how she herself has been made into a heterosexual woman. The protagonist gradually comes to imagine different roles for women in a space different from the patriarchal order. The textual proceedings reflect the plot because the narrative itself is “monstrous” in its disobedience to linguistic and narrative convention. In her tetralogy, Erdrich resists definite representations of women’s identities altogether. She transcends realistic frames by creating female trickster figures who step out of restrictive Western gender frames. Erdrich not only evokes the shape-changing trickster figure of Indian mythologies in her characters but the stories themselves are driven by what Gerald Vizenor has termed “trickster discourse.” Just like the cunning trickster who is hero and loser, saint and devil, jester and villain, Erdrich’s narratives defy fixture in content and form by playing with oppositions. Trickster-like qualities allow characters to escape the usual story, but the trickster is also used as a textual device, a “comic trope” (Vizenor 1989) that breaks finite limited patterns. Erdrich’s intricate identity webs, woven by the countless different stories individuals tell about each other in the tetralogy, demonstrate that the trickster is a sign for both individual and collective identity. In my analyses, I show different ways in which the texts deconstruct gender identities. In Thomas’s text, I trace the shredding of an identity, in Marlatt’s novel the process of externalizing internalized gender patterns and their subsequent transformation. Erdrich’s texts serve as an example of how the comic trope of the trickster can defy definite gender classification. Because the texts reflect their underlying agenda in their style, part of my method is to follow the metaphors and playful narrative of the novels. Through a close reading of the novels, I explore how the deconstruction of narrative patterns leads to a reconfiguration of gender. While the narrative deconstruction of gender, sex, and sexuality is an aim the authors share, their techniques and strategies differ; hence different theoretical frames are needed for the understanding of each text. Whereas I am drawing on theories of mapping, intertextuality, and trauma in my analysis of how Thomas brings repressed images and

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meanings to the surface in Intertidal Life, I look closely at écriture au féminin and fiction theory in the analysis of how Marlatt resignifies the monstrous as a viable other identity. Erdrich’s writings are examined with respect to theories of cultural anthropology, of semiology, and with reference to deconstructive feminism.

Notes 1

See Linda Hutcheon’s essay: “Shape Shifters: Canadian Women Novelists and the Challenge of Tradition,” in Neuman/Kamboureli 1986, 219–27.

1: Framing Theories Identity Identity as a concept is fully as elusive as is everyone’s sense of his own personal identity. Anselm L. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity

I

all-pervasive and fundamental aspect of human life, and yet identity as a concept is one of the most hotly debated — contested and defended — concepts of our time. The term identity has its roots in developmental psychology and has only been the subject of critical debates since modernism. The notion of identity as a psycho-social entity only dates back about 100 years to the psychology of William James who differentiated an outer perspective, the “social self” (me) as the self recognized by others, from an inner perspective, the “continuous, inner self” (I) that denoted the self as experienced by the individual. The term identity gains significance in Erikson’s psychoanalytical I-psychology. Erikson defines “psychological identity” as being at once objective and subjective, individual, and social. For Erikson, psychological identity is formed through crises, primarily during adolescence. A person has achieved an identity when s/he has successfully synthesized various identifications during adolescence with the hierarchical roles society offers to the individual. Although Erikson concedes that adults also suffer from crises after losses, or other major changes in their lives, these are minor compared to the crises during adolescence because the individual 1 has already achieved a fair degree of continuity and coherence. Discussions since have circled around the question whether identity, or more precisely the agency of the subject, is dependent on the parameters of continuity and coherence. Continuity refers to the temporal aspect; we stay the same person over time, while coherence refers to a sameness of character and behavior. Whereas in a legal definition of identity those parameters are imperative, in discussions on identity as a psycho-social phenomenon, they are called into question. We are neither born with an identity nor do we ever finally achieve it. Recent theories DENTITY IS AN

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claim that identity is something we consistently have to work at, and therefore call into question notions of continuity and coherence. Over the last few decades, the conceptualization of identity has changed from an ontological to a constructed category that is always temporary and fairly fragile. The de-essentialization of identity has given rise to questions of moral agency and responsibility. Since the subject is temporary and since identity is alterity rather than sameness, some critics argue that measures must be found to hold a subject responsible for its deeds and to make political action possible. Others dismiss the autonomy and stability of the subject as an illusion. In order to retain some kind of stability, critics arguing within the framework of late modernism still perceive the subject as being defined by continuity and coherence. Continuity is no longer seen as given, however, but as self-reflexively achieved by the subject, which interprets itself in terms of her/his mem2 ory or biography. Critics arguing within a postmodern frame dismiss the modernist alignment of identity with continuity and coherence. They claim that modernism constructed the individual as an autonomous person, capable of self-reliant agency with its preconditions of continuity and coherence. This autonomy of the individual implies that external, social forces cannot completely determine human beings. Postmodern theories brand this discourse of liberal humanism an illusion and state that the autonomous position of the individual is a discursive construction rather than a mirror of reality. Instead of focusing on the autonomy of the subject, more recent discussions of identity put an emphasis on the 3 analysis of systems of power. Marginalized groups have analyzed systems of power and discourses that propose universal conceptualizations of the subject, which are, however, modeled on white, male, or heterosexual parameters. Discourses on difference like feminism(s), cultural studies, or postcolonialism have challenged supposedly universal notions of identity by showing that since modernism the constitution of subjects has relied on excluding the other. Not only have these new cultural criticisms called for making visible formerly excluded identities, but for rendering the very processes and discourses that constitute subjects in systems of power and significa4 tion. However, the notion that (gender) identity is constructed, discursively and socially, does not deny the real effect it has on the lives of human beings. Although notions of homo- and heterosexuality, or of black and white, are constructed in discourses on sexual and ethnic difference, these categories have far-reaching consequences for an individual’s actual position in society. Marginalized groups make use, but are also critical, of poststructuralist theories that propagate the end of the

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subject. After all only those who had been granted the privilege of a visible subject position could deconstruct it. Feminists have criticized that women had been denied independent subject positions in patriarchy for the longest time and that at the very moment the possibility came within reach, postmodernist and poststructuralist theories declared the 5 death of the subject. The notion that identity is a fragile and temporary category, and that agency can no longer be determined by continuity and coherence, has given rise to new understandings of identity and agency. With an emphasis on the discursive aspects of identity, agency is located in constantly changing and overlapping narrativizations of the self. The term “narrativization” refers to the variety of fictional processes involved in constituting the self. Linda Marie Brooks, for instance, proposes that “if we assume the constructedness or narrativity of the self, we can posit a working model of identity and of moral agency that can continually accommodate the multiplicity of ethnic and cultural groups that constitute a global culture” (1995, 9, her emphasis). She goes on to suggest that in narratives that revise American tradition, formerly excluded groups achieve performance and thus presence in historical time. In trying to relinquish old notions of identity while retaining the terminology, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay draw on Derrida’s deconstructive approach which puts concepts “under erasure” instead of trying to supplant them with “truer” ones. Erasure indicates that these concepts are no longer serviceable in their unreconstructed form. But since there are no other concepts to replace them, we have to continue using them so that “the line which cancels them, paradoxically, permits them to go 6 on being read.” For Hall and du Gay, identity operates in what Derrida has termed the “interval between reversal and emergence”: we cannot think of identity in the old ways, but we cannot abandon the concept either, because we still need it for questions of agency and politics. Hall and du Gay understand agency not as a theory of the knowing subject but as one of discursive practice. Like many other present day critics, Hall and du Gay refer to Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” to elucidate the relationship between discursive practices and the constitution of the subject. In his influential essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser argues that subjectivity is constructed across the various discourses in 7 which an individual participates. Because discourses are enmeshed with ideology, which tries to suppress the role of language in the constitution of the subject, the subject appears natural: “As a result, people ‘recognize’ (misrecognize) themselves in the ways in which ideology ‘interpel-

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lates’ them, or in other words, addresses them as subjects, calls them by their names and in turn ‘recognizes’ their autonomy” (Belsey 1980, 61). Subjects are constituted in the process of being solicited by textual apparatuses. Returning to Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Hall and du Gay suggest that identity is constituted on the meeting point, or what they call the “sutures” between the discourses that speak to us, and the processes that construct us as subjects that can be “spoken.” They understand identity not as a unified or singular concept but as being constructed across various intersecting and often antagonistic discourses and practices. It is on these intersections or sutures that identities come into being as strategic and positional, rather than essential entities. Identity is a discursive construct, and subjects are constituted temporarily at the meeting points of discourses that give us a position to speak from and to be spoken about. However, as the subject speaking knows that these positions are representations, according to Hall and du Gay, there is no historical or ontological essence. There is no true self outside of discourse. Identities become, in discursive processes, what we recognize them to be. Identities “arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity, even if the belongingness, the ‘suturing into the story’ through which identities arise is, partly, in the imaginary (as well as the symbolic) and therefore always, partly constructed in fantasy, or at least within a fantasmatic field” (Hall and du Gay 1996, 4). If identities are constituted across various discourses, it is vital for marginalized groups to constitute their own discourses and narrativizations of self in order to create other meeting points or sutures. By crossing dominant discourses with other discourses, which the groups themselves constitute, the possibility for other subject positions arises. The texts in this study create other narratives of self and offer different subject positions to women by going back and forth between dominant and feminist discourses. They also deconstruct narrative to expose the conditions that must hold for the constitution of subjects within patriarchy. Patriarchal discourses address women in certain ways and hail them into specific subject positions under the premise that woman is always the negated other to man. The term “woman,” as I am using it in this study, does not denote an essence of women, but indicates that I am talking about women as a historical, social, and cultural category, as well as a specific position in the symbolic order. By disrupting the surface structure of language and narrative, all three authors externalize patriarchal ideology. They turn tales that lead to the internalization of feminine

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roles inside out and narrativize gender identity in alternative ways. Although I will use the term “role” occasionally to stress that narrative offers models to men and women, the term is problematic in connection with theories of gender and identity because it seems to imply that there is a person or essence behind a role. In my literary analyses, I want to look at the discursive and narrative aspects of the self, at how men and women construct themselves in, and are constructed by, narrative. Cultural narratives inform our imagination of possible identities, they provide us with role models and behavior patterns for viable subject positions. Moreover, by reading stories, and in telling/imagining stories, we give shape to interpretations of the self. Our life gains coherence in stories, because through narrative we apply a certain interpretation to random events. We also live our life like a story because a latent meaning and overall interpretation already shapes the events as we live them. Narrative is a vital aspect for the temporary construction of identity, and we also need it to make sense of our life in retrospect. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has commented on the correlation between fictional stories and real life by saying that each person has a “story of my life” that he or she is constantly rewriting. According to Atwood, people consistently fictionalize themselves, and reading fiction helps them to 8 gain a deeper understanding of these processes in real life. Paul Ricoeur claims that what he calls “narrative identity” is not only a vital aspect of identity formation but offers “a solution to the aporias 9 of personal identity.” According to Ricoeur, narrative identity bridges the tension between what he perceives as the two poles of personal identity: “idem” denoting sameness, and “ipse” meaning selfhood. Narrative identity as experienced in the “thought-experiments enhanced by literature,” according to Ricoeur, enables us to test out “a whole range of combinations between sameness and selfhood” (in Johnson 1993, 115– 16). The intermediary category of narrative identity can account for instances of a self without sameness. When literary texts explore a self in search of itself, for instance, this self emerges at the very moment that the sameness slips away. The narrative self might be in quest of a different identity, but whereas we are often tempted to speak of a loss of self in such instances, this fractured or lost self emanates within the very act of the person asking and seeking. Precisely in the process of searching for who they are, the subject states its existence. Narrative identity is “the kind of identity that human beings acquire through the mediation of the narrative function. [. . .] Self-knowledge is an interpretation; selfinterpretation, in its turn, finds in narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged mediation [. . .]” (Ricoeur in Wood 1991, 188).

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Among other symbolic systems, literature is the primary place to find possible interpretations of the self. We turn our lives into different stories that obey culturally available narrative patterns: a life story can be a historiography, a biography, or a fiction, and in that it can be a romance, tragedy, or comedy. We not only apply a certain narrative form to our lives, but we live our lives through the latent meaning implied by such a story line. The pattern can, of course, change in the course of a life, but when we designate the overall story a tragedy, we will interpret and experience events in that light. Literary stories teach us the patterns for turning our own lives into stories of a particular kind, and a variation of literary stories enlarges the imaginative realm of the self. Because a text only makes sense through the reader’s interpretation, it is in the act of reading that the reconfiguration of life by narrative becomes possible. Life and narrative are inextricably linked. Of course life exists independent of narrative, but a life only becomes intelligible in the narrative process. Narratives can also exceed life because they can recount impossibilities, but these are only intelligible if they offer reference points to our own lives. Ricoeur acknowledges the pre-narrative quality of life, but defines life as “an activity and a passion in search of a narrative” (Ricoeur in Wood 1991, 29). Yet life does not only emerge from the stories we tell, but also from the repressed stories, from what we do not dare to imagine, tell, or live. These suppressed stories, which lurk in the background as possibilities, are just as much a part of our identity as those which we do actually enact. Although Ricoeur’s category of a narrative identity is useful in looking at how stories influence our identity constitution in general, he completely leaves out the aspect of gender. Since our understanding of self, our narrative identity, is mediated through stories we read and apply to our lives, it is significant that stories portray men and women in certain ways. In narrative processes we establish an identity, but narratives are also gendered.

Gender Es gehört zur diskursiven Konstruktion des Geschlechts, daß es als völlig natürlich erscheint. It is part of the discursive construction of sex/gender that it appears to be entirely natural. Barbara Vinken, Dekonstruktiver Feminismus

Gender is not only an integral part of everyone’s personal identity, but a category that structures cultural and critical discourses. Parallel to

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present day theories on identity, gender studies focus on the analysis of systems of power and of signifying practices that constitute the male or female subject. Gender studies explore the relations between the sexes; they look at how sexual difference is constructed and analyze structures that attribute value to this difference. Originally a term for the description of lexical and grammatical features, the sex-gender differentiation in cultural studies aims at distinguishing gender as a sociocultural construct from the “biological” category of sex. The sex/gender distinction wants to counteract theories which since the Enlightenment have posited sexual difference as a given disposition, hence legitimizing the social inequality of men and women as natural. Gender studies, in contrast, view sexual difference as the result, not the origin, of material conditions, social interaction, and symbolic practices that account for differences in the status of men and women. The relationship between the sexes is no longer thought to follow from a natural order, but gender relations are seen as representations of cultural sign systems, and are regarded as the effect of discursive practices. Instead of examining the difference between the sexes, gender studies look at structures and mechanisms that attribute value to this difference. Although the distinction between gender as a sociocultural construct and sex as a biological category has been important to counteract theories that propagated femininity or masculinity natural, this too has proven to be an oversimplification. Various critics, most notably Judith Butler, have pointed out that the sex-gender dichotomy invents sex as a natural category, and implies that sex and gender are independent of one another. The sex/gender distinction is based on a series of presuppositions that are problematic. One of them, as Butler has shown, is the assumption that the body (sex) is a tabula rasa onto which cultural constructions (gender) are inscribed. In recourse to Foucault, Butler claims that rather than being a blank space for gender inscriptions, the body already has a history that mediates a specific cultural understanding of that body. Through the sex-gender dichotomy, sex appears to be real and factual. By separating sex and gender, and by claiming that gender is fictional, whereas sex is given, the dichotomy creates natural male or female bodies.10 Sex and gender produce and stabilize one another. The very binary structure of the sex/gender opposition produces a supposedly natural sex as it manifests itself on an allegedly natural body. Whereas gender appears as culturally made and thus reversible, sex becomes the “container” for everything truly biological and hence immutable. Yet, sex, sexuality, and bodies are far more gendered/culturally constructed than the sex/gender dichotomy indicates. In order to de-

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stabilize notions of gender, sex has to be understood as a variable category as well. Therefore, gender is not to be understood as the opposite to sex, but as the apparatus that first produces the sex/gender distinction and then renders it natural. According to Butler, the body functions as a sign proclaiming the naturalness of identity and sexuality. The gendered body is produced in discourses that proclaim it to be a given and that use the thus naturalized body to legitimize gender identity and sexuality in certain (heterosexual) ways. She suggests that rather than seeing gender and sex as two separate categories, the dichotomy itself should be seen as an effect of discursive practices where gender is the discursive/cultural means by which natural sex is produced and established as prior to cultural inscriptions. In her work Gender Trouble, Butler proposes that the categories of sex, desire, and gender are effects of specific formations of power. The categories exist neither before their performance nor independent of it: “there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 1990, 25). Butler elucidates this on a by-now famous example. When the midwife announces at birth “it’s a girl,” she, according to Butler, performs a gender act that repeats already socially established meanings of gender. The statement “it’s a girl” inevitably triggers expectations of femininity, of specifically shaped and functioning bodies, and of heterosexuality. Because these (arbitrary) categorizations appear to be connected to a natural body, they themselves are naturalized. “It’s a girl,” Butler claims, has to be understood as a speech act that attributes a gender identity to a body that is born into specific cultural frames. The body becomes a sign for a natural gender in the very act of gender performances. What if the midwife were to exclaim “it’s a lesbian”? The body would be the same but it would be framed in a different way because the narrative attributed to this body would lie outside the heterosexual matrix. Gender, Butler claims, is not produced independently of, but outside of bodies; it is not tied to a real or essential subject as there is no subject behind the expression of gender. Gender is not a stable entity that arises from the body, but “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1990, 140, her emphasis). Although gender significations are enacted by individual bodies, they become stylized into gender modes by which the individual act becomes public action. Saying “this is a girl” seems to describe an individual body, but at the same time it categorizes this body in an already established class or field of gender. Gender enactments take place in an

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exterior space because “as a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations” (10). If gender thus marks a shifting position established by the intersection of various discourses about femininity, and if the gendered subject is formed on the meeting points of overlapping stories, it is plausible that by constructing new narratives and discourses, other gender identities can be (temporarily) obtained. Butler understands gender as the effect of repeated acts, and it is precisely in these repetitions that gender identity can be consolidated or that subversions can take place. Because no repetition is identical to the previous one, subtle change takes place in discontinuous gender performances. These disrupted performances are not only individual rebellious acts, but they challenge the gender matrix, the socially established meanings of gender. The texts in this study subvert gender identities in that they create female characters who challenge assumptions of motherhood, (hetero) sexuality, or female desire. The narratives render the constructed nature of femininity and offer chances for re-thinking gender identity by disrupting performances. Not in the sense of new roles being offered, but in that the texts disclose gender as a convergence of different discourses on gender rather than a real category. By recycling language as well as familiar cultural tales, Marlatt, Thomas, and Erdrich repeat the signifying practices of language and narrative that lead to constructions of gender, but insert new elements. The question is where these new elements are found. Since we are enmeshed in ideology and are inevitably involved in narrative processes, where and what is the outside to these contexts? Feminist critic Teresa de Lauretis claims that the subject of feminism can access both the hegemonic and marginal discourses that provide the 11 materials for different gender significations. In Technologies of Gender, de Lauretis appropriates Althusser’s notion of ideological interpellation for her theory on gender representation. According to de Lauretis, what Althusser describes as “interpellation” signifies “the process whereby a social representation is accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation, and so becomes, for that individual, real, even though it is in fact imaginary” (1989, 1). For Althusser, ideology is a system of representations that, through a variety of different social apparatuses, solicits men and women to take up specific places in social formations, and to regard these positions as inevitable and natural. De Lauretis argues that the subject of feminism is at the same time inside and outside of what Althusser calls state ideology, and of what de Lauretis calls the social technologies of gender. Whereas these technologies

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install dominant gender ideology, feminists create other discourses to which the subject of feminism has access. De Lauretis understands this subject as multiple rather than unified. In her work, de Lauretis theorizes gender beyond sexual difference and understands gender as the product of various social technologies. Like Butler, she regards gender as being constituted outside the body: “gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings but ‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations,’ in Foucault’s words, by the deployment of ‘a complex political technology’” (3). Gender representations and selfrepresentations are the product of various special technologies such as cinema, institutionalized discourses, and everyday life practices with the power to control a field of social meaning. However, according to de Lauretis, different constructions of gender exist in micropolitical practices and in other discourses on the margins of a culture, outside the heterosexual social contract (18). Different constructions of gender become possible through discourses that are situated on the margins of a field of representations operating through a binary gender system. In this field, women are often misrepresented or are missing from the picture altogether, but these blind spots of representation can nonetheless be found in the cultural margins and on the cracks of power apparatuses. In the cultural productions of women who cross back and forth between the boundaries of what is being represented and what is repressed, de Lauretis states, lie the means for gender subversion. This movement is not one from within a discursive, cultural representation to a space outside this representation that would then be thought of as real. The movement is to be understood as one going back and forth between what gender represents and that which this representation leaves out, and not as a movement from the discursive to the real. Women who in their art intersect dominant gender discourses with discourses from the margins, and thus retrieve the blind spots of femininity, not only insert other elements into the social technologies of gender, but they change these technologies themselves as “the construction of gender is also effected by its deconstruction [. . .], by any discourse, feminist or otherwise, that would discard it as ideological misrepresentation. For gender, like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation” (3). Gender can be destabilized by inserting difference into homogenous representations. For de Lauretis, this difference is found largely outside the heterosexual contract and outside a binary gender system.

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All three authors in this study surface in their texts the excess of representations of gender. Thomas brings to the surface suppressed elements in notions of motherhood and femininity in order to confuse gender identity and to disturb clear images. Marlatt destabilizes gender by exceeding a heterosexual framework. She inserts the “monstrous 12 other” to queer gender identity. And Erdrich resists stereotypical representations of Native women by making her trickster figures cross back and forth between the discourses of different cultures, thereby pointing out that gender is never an a-historic or essential quality, but is dependent on cultural contexts and narrative frames. The authors not only demystify feminine roles, but challenge how the female body is constructed by patriarchal discourses. They often write about exclusively female experiences such as the menses or giving birth because these topics have been excluded in traditional representations of women. In their narratives, the authors establish counter-discourses on the female body. Both Canadian authors emphasize sexual difference and resituate specifically female experiences in a positive frame of reference. Giving birth or the menses become noteworthy events that counteract the effacement of the female body in medical, literary, or historiographic discourses. Marlatt, for instance, shows that the word “lady” represents bodyless women: they do not sweat or bleed. In her own narrative style, which is closely modeled on an écriture féminine, Marlatt inscribes the female body onto the page. By referring to the transsexual trickster figure, Erdrich creates an imaginative possibility for transcending both traditional representations of the body and of restrictive gender roles. Her female characters exhibit characteristics of the liminal, taboobreaking trickster figure that allows them to transcend traditional representations of feminine behavior patterns and female bodies. The authors stress sexual difference but try to sever it from hierarchies and from lesser value being attributed to women. It seems paradoxical, on the one hand, to strive to disclose sexual difference as the effect of discourses and to emphasize specifically female experiences on the other hand. However, rather than trying to naturalize the female body, the authors want to create other (cultural) representations of the female body. When Thomas, for example, tells of how all the women in the intertidal zone bleed synchronically with the lunar cycle, she describes a culturally shaped ritual, not a natural fact. Moreover, she ironically undercuts any notions of a better or more natural community of women by showing that this community is nonetheless governed by patriarchal values as all the women bleeding together still compete for the same man. The authors want to reinscribe the female body in ways independent of the male gaze.

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Their rewritings are not attempts to surface the natural female body hidden by patriarchal structures, but to find different frames for representing gender, sex, and sexuality. Such other representations of the female body or of feminine fates often function as ironic reappropriations of patriarchal discourses on the female body. Thomas and Marlatt correlate specific features of the female body with women’s ability to create and to write differently from man. By connecting a specific style of writing to the female body, the authors ironically undermine the mythical equation of pen-penis, which has reserved the role of writer and creator to man while excluding woman on 13 the grounds of sexual difference. Erdrich’s strategic play with different representational frames, which turns familiar stories of women’s victimization and passivity into stories of revenge and empowerment undercuts notions of man as creator and woman as his creation. Both revisionist mythmaking and ironic inversions are used as powerful tools for representing “woman” in different ways. By quoting intertexts that state a history of oppression and mutilation of the female body, the novels present and undermine textual strategies that have configured the female body as negated other. Marlatt, for example, quotes medical discourses on the excision of the womb as a cure for hysteria, and in her own narrative renders the female body an assertive presence. Marlatt, especially, 14 draws on theories of an écriture féminine, because it is a writing from the body, leaves traces of that body on the page. Although écriture féminine is sometimes misread as a purely essentialist theory and is seen in opposition to constructivist approaches such as those elaborated by Butler and de Lauretis, theories of deconstructive feminism developed out of écriture féminine. Such a “feminine writing” assigns fundamentally different ways of thinking and of expression to men and women. These are not, however, based on biological difference but are seen as a consequence of sociocultural formations. As a result, for écriture féminine there arises the necessity for a feminine aesthetics that differs significantly from male forms of expression because it is modeled on the female body. Whereas male discourses also draw on sexual difference to posit woman as negated other to man, écriture féminine reevaluates sexual difference from a feminist perspective. The strategies of feminine writing have to be read in the context of, and as an answer to, male critical discourses, as well as a revision of male myths such as, for example, the pen=penis equation where the phallus becomes the signifier. While in male critical discourses, for instance of psychoanalysis or structuralism, the phallus serves as an unequivocal signifier, écriture féminine develops a style of writing that is modeled on the female body

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and that hence is perceived as flexible, multivocal, and indefinite. By using concepts of psychoanalysis as well as methods of deconstruction, écriture féminine wants to un-cover contradictions and ruptures in language. It challenges phallogocentrism by initiating a play with signifiers that results in a shift of linguistic meaning as well as in destabilizing definite notions of the subject. Although écriture féminine regards feminine and masculine as metaphors that result from traditional discourses and have no referential status beyond the text, critics have observed that often this metaphorical use blurs with an ontological one. It is then that écriture féminine runs the risk of becoming essentialist because a feminine aesthetic is bound to a material female body. Deconstructive approaches have been critical of theories of feminine writing for not questioning radically the construction of sexual difference, whether it be defined as natural or metaphorical. Deconstructive feminism thus looks more closely at the systems, practices, and mechanisms that construct sexual difference. Nonetheless, rather than regarding écriture féminine and constructivist approaches as oppositional, thus creating a new dichotomy, they should be seen as different strategies to resignify sexual difference. In Canada, écriture féminine has early on been translated into écriture au féminin. A theory of writing in the feminine stresses the provisional and constructed stance of such a style. Écriture au féminin largely discards the psychoanalytical foundations of écriture féminine and stresses deconstructive aspects as well as political implications of a feminine style of writing. It underlines the self-reflexive aspect as well as the sociopolitical engagement that had already been an integral part of écriture féminine. In my analysis of Marlatt’s text especially, I look at how she puts concepts of écriture féminine like voler or jouissance into writing practice while also drawing on writing in the feminine and on positions of the related fiction theory, an approach she helped to develop in critical theory and writing practice.

Gender and Narrative With more and more audacity feminists have constructed new genres: stories about gender from women’s point(s) of view. In these stories expectations about plotting, the central characters, and acceptable morality have radically shifted. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments

Narratives inform us of possible identities, and they give shape to (interpretations of) the self. My main concern in examining the correlation

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between gender and narrative is to show how authors dismantle stereotypical representations of women as well as underlying gender codes 15 through unruly narratives. I am not implying that by simply telling another story of gender, or by plainly stating that gender is a construction, dominant ideologies of gender disintegrate and lose their force. However, by telling different tales of gender, the authors resist familiar, and thus apparently natural, stories of gender, and they open up other possibilities for gender performances. Narratives not only preserve gender models over time and distance, but they make them appear real. The texts I have selected for analysis reverse these naturalizing processes in their self-reflective narratives by making visible the ideological underpinnings within narratives. They externalize tales of gender that we internalize through cultural narratives. I want to look at narrative strategies informed by feminist theory that destabilize notions of gender by deconstructing familiar narrative frames and structures of emplotment. By challenging the means, manner, and matter of representation and by breaking down coherent plotlines, the authors chosen present gender as a constructed category that can be re-narrativized. By drawing on feminist strategies of deconstruction and reevaluation, Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich disturb traditional narrative structures and call into question the gendered parameters underlying the order of narrative. Hayden White has exemplified how narratives not only order events into a specific plot line, but how narrative is always already imbued with meaning by drawing on extant mythoi and linguistic 16 tropes. History, literature, and myth all have in common that they tell 17 “a story of a particular kind.” Events are embedded in a semiotic and discursive context, they are framed in a specific story. One condition of such a framing, of the way events are emplotted, is the notion of sexual difference. Narratives not only pattern the ways in which we think of ourselves as man or woman, but the narrative structure itself reflects gender codes. Feminists have claimed that the parameters for narrative are modeled on a male narrative subject and on a binary gender system. 18 In her study on feminist uses of generic fiction, Cranny-Francis has shown how the notion of plot is not neutral but is caught up in patriarchal ideology and a binary gender system. It is in the analysis of narrative that ideological structures can be surfaced and subverted. Counternarratives or counter-discourses that lie outside of the patriarchal framework, use narrative as a tool to dismantle familiar stories and to render ideologies (Cranny-Francis 1990, 10). All novels discussed in this study can be considered as historiographic metafictions, a genre that is defined by writing counter-

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discourses to traditional discourse formations. As Linda Hutcheon has shown, historiographic metafictions explicitly destroy the illusionist effect of narrative (1988b). Metafictional devices comment on the process of writing, but, moreover, historiographic metafiction is characterized by an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” towards any unifying myths of 19 a culture. Feminists have made use of this genre to point out that universal assumptions in historiography are often gendered. The genre is defined by a critical return to history because it questions how we achieve historical knowledge. In contrast to historical novels, which use history to authenticate literature, historiographic metafiction uses litera20 ture to question historiography by showing that all narratives hide just as much as they reveal. In this genre, Hutcheon claims, the act of reading and the act of textual production coincide because the texts bear the 21 traces of their own construction. The texts in this study are historiographic metafictions not only because they question historical knowledge, but because they make the readers aware of the conditions underlying narrative. Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich explore how gendered subjects are constituted by narrative and how narrative structures can be subverted in order to forge other subject positions from given cultural materials. All three revise the representational repertoire of a culture, thereby making other identities possible: “Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from,’ so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within not outside representation” (Hall and du Gay 1996, 4). By challenging the means, language, the manner, narrative, and the subject matter of traditional representation, the authors construe other possible subject positions. Rendering the conditions for narrative becomes a tool for cutting through narratives that we have learned to accept as real or natural. Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich specifically attack factual or realistic narratives. Realism is shown to be a discursive formation, relying on power structures and on the privilege of those who have control over the means, manner, and matter of literary representation. This control is not the conscious act of individuals, but refers to systems of power and signification that privilege certain groups over others. As Belsey has cogently stated, realism does not work because some subject matters are more real than others, but because they are more familiar to us: “the classic realist text installs itself in the space between fact and illusion through the presentation of a simulated reality which is plausible

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but not real” (1980, 117, her emphasis). Realism performs the work of ideology not only by representing a familiar and consistent world, but by presenting consistent and continuous characters, and in offering this subject position to the reader: “Classic realism is characterized by illusionism, narrative which leads to closure, and a hierarchy of discourses which establishes the ‘truth’ of the story” (1980, 70, her emphasis). In their fluid, multilayered narratives, Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich defy notions of coherent and continuous subjects as well as the notion of true representation. Godard has shown that feminist writers use reading and writing as forms of “cultural resistance,” in order to “turn dominant discourses inside out and challenge theory in its own terms of a semiotic space constructed in language” (Godard 1997, 115). Narrative becomes a strategic tool with which to construct other subject positions for women through the acts of reading and writing. In feminist fictions, narrative representation serves to reveal patriarchal ideology and sexism by show22 ing how “woman” has been posited as negated other to “man.” Godard falls back on Althusser’s concept of ideological interpellation to show how patriarchal discourses summon people into gendered subject positions. She claims that “narratives interpellate the reader-subject into the encoded ideologies of everyday life, defining that life through apparently incontrovertible mimesis. Established (conservative) ideological discourses with which the reader is familiar, comfortable (usually), and to which s/he gives unquestioning assent inhabit the text so thickly that the narrative transformation appears altogether ‘natural’” (in Rutland 1997, 117). Ideology works by suppressing the mechanisms of its own construction. We appear free to choose a position in discourse and are often, especially in fiction, unaware of the processes at work because they seem to constitute a reality: “Sexism as a discourse is effective to the extent that its premise, the unequal distribution of power between women and men, appears to be ‘natural’ or universal” (117–18). Feminists therefore try to uncover the ideological conditions of patriarchy underlying supposedly neutral narratives, and try to create alternate positions. In those texts, narrative also becomes a means for repositioning woman as an affirmed and present self. Feminists who rewrite cultural stories and accepted genres go back and forth between dominant and marginal discourses, between unraveling mechanisms underlying familiar tales and constructing new narratives. These double movements allow for new possible subject positions and write the suppressed into being.

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In the novels of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich, fictional and supposedly factual narratives of a culture are “read” against the grain through the authors’ own narrative structures. Each of them shifts the lens for construing images and the narrative frame for telling stories differently. By rewriting institutionalized genres, and by repeating narratives with slight variations, the authors not only disrupt narrative, but call into question underlying assumptions about identity or gender. In Intertidal Life, Thomas disputes the genre of the Bildungsroman or developmental novel. Although she describes her protagonist’s awakening process and emotional growth, she rejects the unity of the subject usually implied by this genre. She also rereads the genre of Harlequin Romances in her novel. Thomas dismantles romantic images propagated in these texts and starts her own narrative with the breakup of marriage and the subsequent process of demystification. She reveals patriarchal ideology in narratives, for instance when she reads “The Princess and the Pea” as yet another story that teaches women that they must sacrifice their physical integrity for love. Ana Historic is a deconstructivist reading/rewriting of supposedly documentary materials. Marlatt questions claims to truth and authenticity in historiographic and medical discourses as well as in realist fiction and reclaims the suppressed female body in her “monstrous narrative.” She challenges medical discourses on hysteria, and shows how their supposed scientific method led to the mutilation of women’s bodies. She unearths culturally repressed stories of femininity and the female body in historiography. Furthermore, Marlatt reads realist narratives, such as Grainger’s Woodsmen of the West, as texts that have constituted masculinity at the cost of excluding women. Erdrich evokes everyday myths of “fallen” Indian women, for instance the drunken prostitute stranded in a white man’s world, only to transcend these stereotypes by changing the inevitable ending. She questions what is real, and who has the authority to decide on what is a true representation. Besides drawing on inter-cultural and intertextual devices, Erdrich also uses intra-cultural and intratextual techniques to question the unity of gender representation by mixing various Chippewa myths in the constitution of her characters. Myths work through mechanisms of simplification; any archetype, 23 old or new, suggests a “reductive universalism.” In her work, Erdrich counteracts this reductionism by blending mythologies, and by blending 24 myth with realism. By re-visioning cultural narratives of authority, the authors in this study fulfill a double task. They challenge the authority of history, science, myth, and tales by pointing to the underlying ideology. At the same time, however, the authors use the authority of these established cultural discourses by re-appropriating them for their own

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ideological purposes. The texts propagate a distinct feminist agenda, yet, because the narratives reflect the mechanisms of their own construction, they deliberately destroy the illusion of reality that narrative usually procures. Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich show how the female subject is framed in conservative narratives and by disrupting narrative deframe the subject without definitely re-framing it. I understand frames to be devices that constitute specific symbolic fields and limit the production of meaning. Frames fix certain representations by excluding all other possibilities. Frames can be understood as the context in which representations are situated and become possible. I have chosen the word frame instead of context because it more clearly renders that narrative represents as much as it misrepresents and excludes. A frame is “the apparatus” that determines the production of gender, sex, and sexuality in culturally specific ways. As Marlatt would put it, frames are the conditions for and the tools for selecting one “still-photo” from the “cinerama” of possibility. The term frame also points out that gender identity is constituted within representations, within the frame a representation constructs, and does not exist prior to representation. By making readers aware that narratives constitute frames for the production of gender, the authors in this study remind us that gender is not an essence but emerges in the act of “framing.” Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich have a clearly feminist agenda that frames their narratives and the subjects they depict. Those frames are neither better nor truer than patriarchal frames but shift the commonly held perspective to constitute other possible stories and identities. Unlike in conservative narratives, the authors reflect on the conditions of their framing through metafictional and poetological elements in their texts. They escape final, authoritative, or naturalizing narrative gestures by writing narratives that render their own ruptures. In all the texts examined here, imagination becomes a powerful means with which to transcend given frames. I therefore claim that the three authors write factional narratives and constitute factional identities. I understand factional not only as a blurring of the boundary between fact, the given, and fiction, the invented, but as a strategy, a narrative principle, that shifts meaning and blurs the boundary between context and text. Factional is a destabilizing strategy as it debunks the natural as constructed and shows us how and why such constructions work in the first place. By inserting possibility, fiction, into authoritative, unifying, factual narratives, the authors mobilize frozen images. In a literal sense of the word, the authors also write factional tales because they are trouble makers within a culture. They make “gender trouble” by creating

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factional tales that constitute counternarratives to received stories of gender. By deconstructing coherent linguistic and narrative structures, the authors deframe the female subject. Thomas’s novel deals with how Alice Hoyle is framed into conservative notions of motherhood that she wishes to change but cannot abandon. Thomas reflects this double movement — the protagonist’s wish to hang on to and abandon conservative models of femininity — in her narrative technique. Thomas points out the “contra-diction — the diction that ‘speaks against’ convention” (New 1997, 176, his emphasis) within linguistic and narrative frames without, however, transcending them. By pointing out that “mother” derives from moldiness, Thomas does not fundamentally challenge notions of motherhood. She ridicules the pristine image of motherhood by unearthing the grotesque and ugly in the term. In her text, Thomas shows that “motherhood” can be a reductive patriarchal frame because it excludes female desires and limits women to the private sphere by denying them more public roles. Grotesque and carnivalesque associations in Thomas’s text serve as means with which to exceed frames by surfacing what has been repressed in order to establish a certain frame. Thomas offers no new coherent readings of femininity but disturbs everyday myths that summon women into supposedly natural subject positions. Just like her text abounds with images of mutilated bodies and severed limbs, Thomas tears apart common sense and coherent identities. Her intertextual techniques disrupt one definite narrative frame and question coherent identities by situating them on the sutures of various cultural discourses. Marlatt’s text explores how women are framed into a “feminine act” by a compulsory heterosexuality. She traces how such a framing works through internalization. By “sounding out” words and stories for the Other, she surfaces a possible lesbian identity. Because such an identity exceeds the norms for gender, sex, and sexuality as established by a patriarchal heterosexual frame, Marlatt renders the assertion of a lesbian identity as a “monstrous leap of imagination.” Marlatt explores how words and hi(stories), which are informed by patriarchal ideology, frame women into lack and absence. Marlatt not only traces the emergence of a lesbian identity but shows how a compulsory heterosexuality with its binary structure frames all women in reductive ways. “Lady,” Marlatt claims, looks like a deferential term that privileges women but, in fact, dispossesses them from their bodies and desires. In the story of Ana Richards she explores how a gendered perspective locks this historical woman into the story of marriage while excluding all other possible imaginations. In the characters of June and

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Fleur, Erdrich investigates how Native women are framed in a male Western symbolic field. In such a field, they appear as other, as tragic, and as lack. Erdrich shows how we read Native women through certain conventional literary frames. Whereas June’s death in the opening vignette appears real, Erdrich undercuts such familiar readings by rendering June a contradictory figure that can be read in different ways. By referring to diverse mythological and cultural contexts, Erdrich presents June and Fleur as liminal figures who exceed frames. While in her depiction of June Erdrich superimposes intercultural frames by making her a Christ-like figure as well as a trickster, Erdrich blends intracultural myths in her depiction of Fleur. Fleur becomes her own text, a text woven from many Native myths. June and Fleur do not only function as female trickster figures who exceed stereotypical representations of Native women but they function as wandering signs in Erdrich’s narrative tricksterism resisting finite representation and advocating fluid identities. Each of my ensuing text analyses traces the specific narrative technique of one author in deframing the female subject. Part of my method is to follow specific structural patterns, which are reflected in the puns, anagrams, or quotations taken from the texts and used in my own chapter headings.

Notes 1

Erik H. Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” in Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: International UP, 1959), 101–64. For an excellent overview of the concept of identity, see Jürgen Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität: Zur Analyse eines theoretischen Begriffs,” in Assmann/Friese 1998, 73–104. 2

See, for example, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 52–55.

3

See, for example, Peter Wagner, “Fest-Stellungen. Beobachtungen zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskussion über Identität,” in Assmann/Friese 1998, 44–72. 4

Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, ed., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996); Linda Marie Brooks, ed., Alternative Identities: The Self in Literature, History, Theory (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Identities (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995).

5

Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13.31 (1988): 405–36; Seyla Benhabib, “Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism,” in Benhabib 1992, 203–41. 6

Hall and du Gay 1996, 1. For applying Derrida’s techniques of deconstruction to new conceptualizations of identity also, see Edward E. Sampson, “The Decentralization of Identity: Toward a Revised Concept of Personal and Social Order,” The American Psychologist 40 (1985): 1203–11.

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7

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–73. 8 Atwood in an interview with Metzler 1995, reprinted in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, ed. Reingard M. Nischik (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 277– 86. For the relationship between life and narrative since modernism, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), 285–302. 9

Ricoeur in Wood 1991, 192. On “narrative identity,” see the following essays by Paul Ricoeur: “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in Wood 1991, 20–33; “Narrative Identity,” in Wood 1991, 188–200; “Self as Ipse,” in Johnson 1993, 104–19; “The Text as Dynamic Identity,” in Valdes/Miller 1985, 274–93; as well as Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). 10

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 11

Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989). 12

“Queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability — which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect — queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire.” Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory (New York: New York UP, 1996), 3. 13

See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Queen’s Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity,” in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), 3–44. 14

Although the theoretical approaches of the French philosophers Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and the French-Bulgarian Julia Kristeva are quite heterogeneous, they are summed up under the term écriture féminine because all of them advocate a style of writing which evokes a place/space outside the symbolic order. 15

Approaches of feminist narratology explore how gendered narrative devices reflect gender conditions in society. See, for instance, Susan S. Lanser, “Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology,” Style 22.1 (spring 1988): 52–60; Susan S. Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style 20.3 (fall 1986): 341–63; Mieke Bal, “The Point of Narratology,” Poetics Today 11 (1990): 727–53; Ansgar Nünning, “Gender and Narratology: Kategorien und Perspektiven einer feministischen Narrativik,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 42 (1994): 101–21.

16

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27. 17 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History,” New Literary History 4 (1973): 285.

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Cranny-Francis looks at feminist rewritings of genres like romance, detective fiction, science fiction, and fantasy/utopia. Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990). 19

In The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), Lyotard characterizes postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Hutcheon adopts this concept in her essay “Incredulity Towards Metanarrative: Negotiating Postmodernism and Feminism” (Tessera 7 (summer 1989): 39–43), which describes salient features of historiographic metafiction. See also Anne Marie Musschoot, “The Challenge of Postmodernism: Representation — Historiography — Metafiction,” Dutch Crossings: A Journal of Low Country Studies 41 (summer 1990): 3–15.

20

Linda Orr, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18 (1986–87): 1–22. 21

Linda Hutcheon, “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction,” Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (winter 1984/85): 228–38. 22

I understand “feminist fiction” as a form of writing with a clearly political agenda, the main object of which is to point out that patriarchal society works to the advantage of men and contributes to changing this framework. 23

Anja Müller, Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997), 59. 24

Textual authority, in a feminist understanding, is neither established by the perceived virtue of the text’s author, nor established through the reader in hermeneutic processes. Literary authority is understood as always being ideologically charged. It serves to promote the interests and perpetuate the dominance of certain groups. See Marta Straznicky, “Authority,” in Makaryk 1995, 509–10.

2: “Alice Hoyle: 1,000 Interlocking Pieces”: Identity Deconstructions in Audrey Thomas’s Intertidal Life Introduction: Beachcombers in the Intertidal Zone I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore [. . .]. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

A

S THE TITLE Intertidal Life suggests, Audrey Thomas’s 1984 novel depicts the story of a woman who is caught in-between the erratic tides of convention and difference. In an attempt to construct a new identity for herself after a severe rupture in her life story, Thomas’s protagonist, Alice Hoyle, oscillates between traditional, socially accepted positions for women and new identities she imagines for herself. The title not only points to the plot but also to the textual devices of Thomas’s narrative that moves back and forth between fixture and fluidity, fact and 1 fiction. The laws and features of the intertidal zone are the underlying structural device of the novel. Much in the same way that the protagonist wanders through the tidepools to observe different creatures, Thomas guides the reader through a textual landscape that vacillates between fixed forms such as etymologies and dictionary entries, and new, fluid forms created by Alice such as anagrams and puns. There are two narrative strands in the novel that create a double vision on the same events. The inner story recalls the waves of pain, anger, and devastation that washed over Alice after her husband, Peter, left her and their three daughters after fourteen years of marriage. After her divorce, Alice — like the intertidal creatures she observes on her wanderings through the tidepools — tries to “hang on,” to survive while looking for a new frame of reference. On her quest for a new subject position, Alice discovers, on the one hand, that the traditional roles offered to women no longer work for her but, on the other hand, she is not ready entirely to let go of them either. Like the starfishes and crabs

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with missing limbs she encounters on her strolls through the tidepools, she feels mutilated by the exclusiveness of gender frames. She still wants to be a wife and mother but not at the cost of being de-sexualized and passive. As Intertidal Life is set in the early 1970s on Galiano Island, the counterculture of the sixties at first seems to offer an alternative route to conventional paths. However, although the hippies change social as well as linguistic conventions, Alice realizes that their newly-implemented norms turn out to be just as dogmatic and sexist as the ones they were striving against. The frame story relates Alice’s return to the island ten years later when she retrospectively wants to put away her memories to prepare mentally for imminent cancer surgery. However, within the narrative strands time levels change as abruptly as the points of view. As the character Alice is a writer and is herself writing a novel about her experiences, Intertidal Life becomes a narrative puzzle. After her divorce, Alice feels like her namesake, Alice in Wonderland, who tumbled down a rabbit hole into a world where none of the known conventions holds any longer. Whereas the disruption of narrative structures serves to make Alice’s emotional disorientation palpable, Thomas also wants to insert doubt and difference into familiar representations of female identity. Contradictions are an inherent part of the novel’s structure as Alice wants to keep and transcend traditional notions of femininity at the same time. Just like Alice finds treasures and observes creatures on her strolls through the intertidal zone, some whole, some mutilated, the reader is 2 a beachcomber in Thomas’s textual landscape. The textual strategies force us to make new sense of wor(l)ds and to search for new reference points. Thomas makes Alice’s emotions tangible, not in a descriptive but in a performative way. Her feelings of disorientation and her need for revenge is reflected in mutilated linguistic and narrative forms. The tidepools of the intertidal zone are as disconnected as Alice’s recollections or the textscraps she compiles. They are all random findings, linked only by association. In order to come to terms with her emotions and memories, Alice decides to write a common sense book. The attempt is doomed to fail for various reasons. Alice says: This was to be a commonplace book, where I would finally bring together all the words and definitions and phrases I have copied out for years on scraps of paper. But I need it now for something else, I need it to stay sane. [. . .] I need to sprawl, to scrawl, to pull out from myself the great glistening sentences so full of hate and fury and fling them, 3 still wet and steaming onto these white pages.

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Alice is literally spilling her guts. The process of trying to remember her past is described as painstaking and revolting. After all, writing the common sense book proves to be impossible not only because Alice cannot put her emotions in linear order but because most of the texts that convey common sense, no longer make sense to her. Alice feels abandoned, like an outcast on the island, because she no longer fits into either the mainstream or Hippie community. Alice’s exile on the island could be seen as a rewriting of the Crusoemotif. Lane claims that in Canadian literature Robinson Crusoe serves as the archetypal figure of the self-sufficient explorer who improves himself on a deserted island that he turns into a new Eden (Lane 1992–93, 1– 11). In Canadian rewritings of the Crusoe motif, the exile becomes a means of learning through self-discovery where home really is. The transformed island epitomizes the search for a place of self-realization and integration of identity. Clara Thomas has shown that Crusoe’s maleoriented linear narrative contrasts with cyclic and female oriented paradigms in Crusoe narratives by women (Clara Thomas 1972–73, 58– 64). In Intertidal Life Thomas draws on the tradition of female rewritings of the Crusoe-motif as her disrupted narrative mocks the linear narrative of male exploration accounts quoted in the text. With various references to her garden as well as to the Persephone myth, Thomas seems to evoke Edenic images. However, her paradise is troubled as she doubts the gender patterns underlying culture. Like Crusoe, Alice wants to come to terms with her past through self inspection in exile. Whereas Crusoe’s development aims at his integration into the codes and norms of society, Thomas’s protagonist wants to destroy familiar subject positions. The female subject, who no longer fits into the places society assigns to her, is questioned and deconstructed through linguistic and narrative devices. Thomas uses narrative to shift perspective. By making her protagonist a writer who writes a novel within a novel, she doubles textual frames. Thomas’s shape shifting applies to textual structures as much as to subjects. The protagonist in Intertidal Life is a subject in search of an identity that she tries to construct from textscraps. The boundary between fact and fiction blurs as in her factional tales Thomas shows how the female subject is framed by both fact and fiction. The intra- as well as intertextual techniques in Intertidal Life open up one authoritative narrative frame for many, often contradictory, narratives of femininity. I refer to this strategy as factional because the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction challenges assumptions of objectivity, truth, and authority. In Intertidal Life this is most palpable when Thomas uses excerpts from exploration accounts to head every section of the novel

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and then correlates them with Alice’s private explorations of gender codes. However, in my understanding of the term, factional also applies to the blurring of boundaries between words and between texts. By quoting etymologies, dictionary entries, proverbs, tales, or songs, Thomas creates minuscule factual and fictional narratives. By using various intertextual techniques, Thomas denounces the coherence of the narrative and opens up a textual space. Just like life in the intertidal zone initially looks beautiful and harmless, yet later proves to be full of violence, Thomas brings to light the pitfalls in texts that look familiar and harmless on the surface. In each divergent text form, Thomas exposes cultural structures in apparently natural concepts such as motherhood, romantic love, marriage, or the family unit. This is where the second usage of factional comes in, namely, as a strategy discloses the ideological structures behind seemingly natural concepts. Factional debunks the given as culturally and linguistically constructed. In my analysis I want to show how Thomas deconstructs stereotypical images of, and conventionalized roles for, women by subverting cultural narratives, and by disrupting language as well as narrative structure. My hypothesis is that Thomas demystifies concepts by dismembering the corporeality of language and by remapping textual spaces. I will start by looking at the smallest units of meaning, words, and gradually move up to the many intertexts underlying Intertidal Life.

Mutilating the Corporeality of Signs: Hidden Meanings in Words Words, words, words. Sometimes it all gets on top of me and I feel like the monster made out of words in The Fairy Queen. I can’t leave them alone; I am obsessed. Audrey Thomas, “Basmati Rice”

From beginning to end, Thomas correlates Alice’s emotional turmoil with the form of her narrative. In the inner story, Alice feels threatened by the loss of Peter’s love and the loss of her role as wife, and in the frame story her body is literally eaten away at by a cancerous tumor. These attacks on her physical as well as psychological integrity in turn lead Alice to fantasies of violence, decay, and death throughout the text and are reverberated in the actual destruction of words, phrases, and texts. The text, like Alice’s world, resembles a minefield. The very corporeality of signs that construct reality and the self in certain ways is de- and

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reconstructed in the numerous blends and anagrams of the text. This deconstruction shows the tension of perceiving language as a prison house on the one hand, and as a creative source for alternative visions on the other hand. In her pain, anger, and desperation (“Rage, rage, rage. So full of it,” IL, 30) Alice voices her feelings of being muted and mutilated by destroying the textual space that no longer is home to her. Words are her enemies and words are Alice’s only weapons that she wields wildly in destroying words and texts. To the same degree that Alice feels she is being destroyed by oppressive discourses, those discourses are taken apart. Thomas creates and dismembers a textual body that performs the images of mutilation in Alice’s narrative. In the various intertexts, Thomas identifies basic elements of our cultural narratives such as romance, altruistic mothers, happy families, eternal love and discloses them as everyday collective myths, as reductive simplifications that individuals have a hard time living up to. However, reading stories and words against the grain not only points to Alice’s inner state but on a more abstract political level it disrupts stereotypical images of femininity by surfacing their suppressed other side. Moreover, the destruction of coherence in Intertidal Life not only expresses pain and devastation but has to be read as a humorous resistance to making sense. On the level of plot, destroying images and inserting the grotesque and horrifying into everyday life helps Alice to feel better in her distorted world. Her sarcasm and dark humor assist her to let go of her husband whom she had idealized as “Peter, the rock” (IL, 60). In the frame story Alice seems to make fun of her over-emotional and dramatic self during the first months of the separation. Intertidal Life not only depicts the destruction of an identity that is mirrored in the body of the text but questions the whole concept of coherent and continuous identities because it traces the process of disillusionment Alice undergoes. Love, friendship or lasting marriages were concepts Alice somehow naively took for granted, and she can only gain control of her situation by questioning these concepts. Alice’s dilemma is that she still wants to be married but under different conditions. The narrative reflects this movement back and forth between tradition and rebellion, between keeping and destroying concepts. In anagrams and puns, Thomas dismembers the bodies of signs to disclose different readings and inherent contradictions. Anagrams refer to the rearrangement of letters in order to create new sense or nonsense. Either all letters are resolved into a new word, or words beneath words are uncovered in an attempt to defamiliarize meaning. One of the masters of anagrammatical word play was Lewis Carroll, most memorably in

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his poem “Jabberwocky” but also in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass which are both subtexts in Intertidal Life. Carroll’s texts serve as models for making nonsense throughout the novel. Greber points out that anagrams can decipher as well as hide meaning (1993, 39). Since structuralism, anagrams have been understood as a text ordering technique that unravels a latent second meaning already in4 scribed in the text. In her anagrams, Thomas discovers “words beneath words” and unravels an inherent but repressed second layer of meaning: “‘LOVER,’ [Alice] wrote. Then drew a line across the L” (IL, 137). Whereas all the popular folk and children’s songs quoted in the text evoke a promise of eternal love, marriage, passion, and happy families, Thomas suggests that “over” is already inscribed in “lover.” The painful process of cutting Peter out of Alice’s life is mirrored in the destruction of the sign “lover.” The suggestion that the end of love is inherent in the concept from the start, subverts the romance motif that is elicited in Intertidal Life by numerous references to the genre of Harlequin Romances. After having lost Peter as a lover, Alice wants to avoid the romantic traps of the past and becomes an expert in detecting the hidden messages in words and the concepts they denote. When Peter calls, Alice braces herself against the upsurge of love: “‘Hello old friend,’ he said, in his soft, caring voice. But I’m not stupid, I could hear the ‘end’ in ‘friend’ and the rust in trust” (IL, 30, her emphasis). Trust can be exhausted and friendships, as Alice experiences extensively, end all the time. Alice can neither trust people nor words any longer and thus demystifies key terms for human relationships. She unravels the inherent contradictions, the second voice, in order to brace herself against more pain. Thomas mocks the exclusively romantic undertones of “love” by pointing to yet another meaning of the word: “‘Love’ — in scoring in various games, as tennis, rackets, etc. > No score, nothing: l. all, no score on either side. 1742” (IL, 166). “Love” in athletic terms denotes no scores. Once more, a re-contextualization of the word shows that love can also mean “void,” “trivial,” or “meaningless.” Thomas uses this quotation shortly after Peter, who presents himself as utterly serene, has hit Alice and blackened her eye. Afterwards he claims he hit her when he realized that he still loves her. This kind of love, however, which physically and psychologically mut(e)ilates her, indeed is meaningless for Alice. Another example for anagrammatic wordplays that aim at recovering a possibly different story occurs towards the end of the novel. Only after her marriage is over Alice, who is a professional writer, realizes that Peter, who is a much admired painter, might have envied her power to

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create wor(l)ds. He blames her for not picking up the phone when she is writing her “bloody book” (taking the novel’s many images of atrocity and mutilation into account, “bloody,” of course, is ambiguous) and Alice says that “it had not occurred to her that Peter might be jealous of her writing” (IL, 21). While people respect Peter’s artistic space, they intrude upon Alice, who is working at home, all the time. No one seems to respect that with three daughters to raise she has to be very disciplined in making time for her writing. Thomas points to the asymmetrical treatment of male and female artists. Years later Alice says to a friend that in comparison with men “the woman artist has an even harder time. [. . .] If she is to move forward at all she has to develop a layer of selfishness — self-is-ness — that traditionally has been reserved for men” (IL, 173). Alice develops this new layer by uncovering a positive second meaning within the conventionally negatively connotated term selfishness. She discovers that it could mean: “the self is necessary,” and thus uncovers an affirmative subject position in the word. In an interview, Thomas says that “there is a phenomenon [. . .] called ‘halation’ and it refers to the spreading of light beyond its proper boundary. [. . .] I think words can do that too, or perhaps I should say that I would like to think that there is no ‘proper boundary’ for words” (Thomas 1984, 317). By dissolving the proper boundaries of words, Thomas uses language to point to other possible realities and subject position. Thomas creates minuscule factional narratives by inserting sensationalist headlines in the novel. For instance, “MURDERER SET WIFE ADRIFT ON RAFT” (IL, 78) or “TIGER BITES TRAINER TO DEATH (HORRIFIED WIFE LOOKS ON)” (IL, 165). These syntactically incomplete news bits do not really inform people but satisfy their need for a glimpse into the tragedy of other people’s lives. They are modern forms of miniature gothic tales, grotesque fictions disguised as fact. Alice is keen on collecting these gruesome facts because they acknowledge her disillusionment and counteract romantic images. Alice and Peter hurt each other to the bone and the gruesome news bits express Alice’s topsy-turvy world. One night, Alice is listening to the radio when the announcer reading about a man who murdered and buried his wife, slips and says “murried” instead. Alice laughs and says that “murried” sounds more like “married” and “murdered” to her. Unlike her hippie friends, Alice still believes in the institution of marriage. When her friend Trudl, for instance, says that “marriage seems to be a fatal mistake” (IL, 213), Alice vehemently disagrees. That is why Alice becomes very dramatic when Peter, following the trend, ceases to believe in marriage and leaves her. As the wedding ceremony includes the formula “until death parts you,” Alice feels that

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Peter first married and then murdered her. This killing is symbolically repeated by destroying the corporeality of the word “married,” which in the neologism “murried” incorporates the similar sounding words “buried” and “murdered.” “Murried” plays with both dimensions of the linguistic sign by suggesting that similar sound bodies imply contiguous meanings. This is an example for how Thomas renders through linguistic processes, the subject’s struggles with her past and her identity. Thomas’s protagonist revels in her pain and anger, but by making it palpable in every day language, she also gains an ironic distance to past events and to the emotions they provoke. Greber — with reference to Baudrillard — claims that in destroying the corporeality of the sign, anagrams can be interpreted as symbolic killings. Baudrillard claims that not the need to reconstruct sense but the need to destroy sense is expressed in the selfconsuming structure of anagrams (Greber 1993, 39–45). Alice wallows in tragedy but the countless puns and blends involve a lot of self-deprecating humor that allows Alice to rise above tragedy. She ridicules the severity of the situation as well as her graven image of “Peter, the rock.” Alice is wounded by Peter’s departure and in turn has a craving to destroy. Her fantasies of violence and mutilation permeate the novel. She imagines maiming Anne-Marie, Peter’s new lover, for instance. While making kindling for the stove, Alice fancies she is chopping off every single one of Anne-Marie’s beautiful fingers. They grow back each time and Alice enjoys chopping them off again and again (IL, 63). Alice is amused by headlines that depict mutilations and abnormalities, for instance about “a man who caught a shark and inside was a human leg, complete with sock and shoe” (IL, 79). Or she is delighted by the facts surrounding Captain Cook’s death “who had been hacked to bits (and presumably eaten) by those nasty natives. Brave George Vancouver managed to retrieve some of the bits and pieces. A thigh bone, for instance” (IL, 140). While Alice dramatically feels she is being consumed by her pain, she favors images of anthropophagi and relishes in the symbolic killing of words and any scrap of horrifying news. The dark humor and sarcasm help her to transcend her pain and to ridicule Peter whom she gradually ceases to idealize. The headlines are examples of the grotesque which subverts accepted forms by playing with the polyvalence of meaning. As Bakhtin has pointed out, grotesque and carnivalesque folk traditions demystify dominant ideological images and ideas and yet stay within the boundaries of what is allowed and authorized by cultural institutions (1968, 1–58). When Peter leaves Alice after fourteen years of marriage, he tells her that he never loved her, which hurts Alice to the bone. Nonetheless, they

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still have sex, apparently because Peter is impotent with his new lover, Anne-Marie. After one of their sexual encounters, Peter tells Alice that with Anne-Marie he has “something higher.” Peter, of course, is referring to an elevated understanding of love and emphasizes the spiritual rather than the physical elements of the relationship. Alice responds “you mean newer,” and when he insists that he means higher, Alice says: “higher, [. . .] what do you do, stick it in her eye?” (IL, 41–42). Whereas Peter creates another lofty, romantic image by insisting that his new love is beyond the physical, Alice deflates the image by taking the word literally. By returning “higher” to the physical realm, she ridicules and undercuts Peter’s apparently romantic but in the given context actually mean remark. He elevates his new love at Alice’s cost, and her piercing sarcasm enables Alice to take some control of the situation and shield herself from getting hurt even more. In an interview, Thomas states that “all the eulogies to Peter are meant to be laughed at, he’s screwing around and being Mr. Bigshot and the whole idea that he is some ideal is nonsense” (Wachtel 1986, 59). Although there is a lot of brutality in Intertidal Life, there is also much humor and wit that is directed at a traditional set of values as much as at the new hippie norms. The images of mutilation do not only reflect Alice’s devastation but her lust in destroying words and texts. Thomas uses etymology to defamiliarize concepts, and this defamiliarization seems to be even more bizarre because it is within the history of language itself. In “Musing With Mothertongue,” Marlatt states that “etymology can refamiliarize the reader with a network of verbal signification: in etymology we discover a history of verbal relations (a family tree if you will) that has preceded us & given us the world we live in” (Marlatt 1984b, 53). Just like she unravels the “over” in “lover,” or the “self” in “selfishness,” Thomas’s protagonist detects the “other” in “mother,” that part which is not covered by traditional notions of motherhood. Alice feels suffocated by the traditional role of mother, not because she is not a caring mother to her three daughters, but because the traditional notion of mother demands a fulfillment of the role with an exclusiveness that Alice finds devastating. She looks up the etymologies of “mother” and “mummy”: Mother (1), a female parent. (E.) M. E. m
der. A. S. m
der, modor, a mother; the change from d to th is late, after A. D. 1400 + Du. moeder, Icel. mosir, Dan. Swed. moder, G. mutter; Irish and Gael., mathair; Russ. mate, Lithuan. moté, L. mater, Gk. Utnp, Pers. mdar, Skt. mt, mtr-. Orig. sense uncertain.

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mother (2), hysterical passion. (E.) In King Lear, ii. 4.56. Spelt moder in Palsgrave, and the same word as above. + Du. moeder, a mother, a womb, hysterical passion’ cf. G. mutter-beschwerung, mother-fit, hysterical passion. Mother (3), lees, moldiness. (E) A peculiar use of Mother (1). Mmmy c. 1. Body of human being or animal embalmed for burial; dried up body. 2. Pulpy substance or mass, esp. beat (thing) to a ~ . 3. Rich brown pigment. (f. F. momie f. med. L. mumia f. Arab. mumiya (mum, wax.)). 2

mummy , n. Mother (nursery form of MAMMA) (IL, 136).

Alice feels mummified in her role as mother because it does not give her room for her own desires and for a personality other than that of being mother. She asks herself: “[w]ho can see the ‘other’ in mother?” (IL, 136). When Alice phones the school, she realizes that she refers to herself as “hello, this is Hannah’s mummy.” The image of words as “wordrobes” (Marlatt 1988, 9) that entangle women is evoked when Alice muses about her identification as “Hannah’s mummy”: “All wrapped up in her family” (IL, 136). On the one hand, Alice wants to leave her family wrapper and find a new position, and on the other hand she wants to stick to these concepts. Although she fears the loss of individual desires and the exclusiveness of the role, she also sees the necessity for motherhood and is appalled by the hippies’ attitude. She cannot smoke a joint with them at night “because somebody had to be the parent” and she is worried about her three daughters. Alice then comes to realize that although everybody seems cool and relaxed in the hippies’ Neverland, there is only one role being offered to women, that of Wendy, the eternal mother. Thomas deconstructs “mother” by reverting to an authorized form of language. Literally, etymology is the science of the true origin of a word. The Greek word “etymon” means real or true. Throughout the novel, Thomas questions what is real and true, and by showing that the root word of mother also means moldiness, she ironically plays with real or true surfaces. The forgotten meanings she excavates in the word “mother” are grotesque and subvert the concept of motherhood in a standardized form. Etymologies, like anagrams, dig beneath the surface structure of language and reveal inherent contradictions. Hutcheon claims that Thomas uses “etymological word play, in order to analyze the history of women’s literal ‘inscription’ into language and thus to reveal

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the gender bias encoded in the language we so unself-consciously use every day” (Hutcheon 1988a, 9). Motherhood is demythologized by defamiliarizing the word. Thomas destroys the shining surface of the term mother by connecting it to decay and death. She also reveals how the mystification of the term deprives women of their desires. Alice says: “The minute I became a mother, [Peter] was unable to love me any more. Romantically, I mean” (IL, 154). Alice wants to be a mother but she also still wants to be desired. Disclosing that “mother” also meant moldiness of course is no serious attempt to deconstruct the traditional notion of motherhood. Thomas offers no solutions to the dilemma of women as both mothers and lovers. Playing with historical meanings of “mother” again exhibits Alice’s lust to destroy and distort. She wants to show the ugly in the beautiful, the grotesque in the normal, and the harmful in the apparently safe because she undergoes a process of disillusionment. Tongue in cheek, Thomas reveals shocking contradictions that are already part of the symbolic system. Thomas’s technique to revert to fixed, existent linguistic forms is not only traceable in etymologies but also in proverbs and dictionary entries. By pouring inexpressible observations into authorized forms, Alice’s emotions are objectified. They seem to become more manageable but Thomas defeats these taming gestures at the same time. On the one hand, definitions make it possible to utter what Alice cannot otherwise put into words, and on the other hand, Thomas questions categories of objectivity and subjectivity because the objective dictionary entries seem misplaced and ironic within the context of private emotions. In the interior landscape they seem to be absurd obstacles, deliberately put up to make the reader stumble over facts. Many times the hidden meanings in words empower Alice and help her to distance herself from situations that seem to force her into playing a certain part. Alice redefines her part in the action by unraveling bits in the word allowing her to transcend a passive state. After Alice and Peter made passionate love, Alice — being well trained by then — hastily says: “I know it didn’t mean anything [. . .] but it certainly was nice.” Peter ruffles Alice’s hair in response, like that of an obedient child. She has learned her lesson and hides her feelings. In the text, a dictionary entry is juxtaposed to this scene: “(L. volupt-as, pleasure. — L. volop, adv. agreeably. — L. vol- o, I wish.)” (IL, 32). The present day usage of voluptuousness as being sexually alluring is evoked a few pages before when Alice comments on Peter’s paintings: “Peter painted nudes with loins of irresistible attraction, breasts like bloated

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wineskins, bursting to be touched and tasted, smelled and sucked. Waiting, voluptuous, lying on their backs and sides, with heads or faces hidden. Flesh so real it smoked. But passive, faces turned away, waiting to be penetrated. People always marveled at Peter’s nudes” (IL, 31). Peter paints seductive but faceless and passive women, their bodies are reified in a stereotype. In his paintings, women are the objects, not the subjects of desire. In their love making, Peter also treats Alice like an object of his, and not as a subject of her own desires. Alice is hurt but because sex is the only communication that still partly works between them, Alice keeps silent. The juxtaposition of the etymology of “volupt” serves to surface Alice’s wish for pleasure which she does not dare voice when she is with Peter. Hidden in the word, which Peter in his paintings interprets as passive surrender, is an active desire. Fixed definitions seem to imply that words are static and reliable entities, however, Thomas cunningly exposes the impossibility to control language. It not only changes all the time, it is full of inherent contradictions that jut out of the smooth surface. The dictionary entries exhibit Alice’s attempt to put her memories and emotions in order and at the same time show that this undertaking is futile. The pseudo scientific elements exhibit how difficult it is to put emotions into ordered and ordinary language. Alice’s process of recognition, her growing awareness that Peter is ridiculous is reflected in how she redefines words for herself. When Peter leaves her, Alice feels stranded and left behind but towards the end tells her friends: “I was looking up ‘abandon’ the other day and discovered it, literally, means to ‘set at liberty.’ I say Peter abandoned me, and mean ‘poor me,’ when maybe I should be feeling ‘he has set me free’” (IL, 171). The potential for reevaluating her situation is unraveled in the second layer of meaning the word harbors. Just like a shift of her perspective renders the same facts in a different light, words have different shades of meaning.

Passed on by Word of Mouth: Songs and Fairy Tales Interpretation is not simply emotion recollected in tranquillity but the collecting of reactions shaped and reshaped into reductions of fictive worlds, in other words, private models. Helmut Bonheim, “Models of Canadianess”

Thomas illustrates in her narrative how gender codes are handed down to the next generation by oral texts. Songs, tales, and proverbs are all folkloristic texts that capture mythological elements, common sense, and

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folk wisdom. They are minuscule narratives that all contain fact and fiction. These texts encapsulate and pass on a culture’s conscious and subconscious wishes, expectations, and values. Because they are passed on orally, they are very accessible. Although they are dependent on the respective culture, within it they cut across space, time, and class in their simple structure and usage. On the surface, folkloristic texts seem only to convey certain values, wishes, and role models of a culture while excluding a whole range of others. In her narrative, Thomas digs up the counter-romance and the anti-role models that, on a deeper level, are also already inscribed in fairy tales. Thomas deliberately falls back on traditional narrative forms such as tales, songs, and proverbs to show that if read against the grain each myth or romance already includes its own deconstruction. As she inserts difference into the familiar, she retains concepts but opens them up from the inside. Songs are a prime medium for Thomas to point out derogatory attitudes towards women in apparently harmless and funny texts. Alice sings many songs to her daughters that through rhyme and rhythm are memorized easily. They are fun, they are simple in structure, they romantically recall your own childhood, they are easy to memorize and thus all the more harmful because they are passed on from generation to generation without much reflection. Thomas exposes sexist contents in camp songs, and also once more shows that they lure men and women into specific positions by evoking the mantra-like imagery of eternal love and happiness. Whereas Alice used to like the lyrics, she has now grown critical of them because those very songs led her to believe unquestioningly in love. Now that love has failed her, she realizes that there are hardly any alternatives being offered by cultural tales. What do people do when romance fails them? Thomas exposes that the children’s songs portray just one exclusive role model. Consequently, s/he who does not attain this standard feels like a failure, an outcast of the human race, or like Alice, mad. It is interesting that although Alice dimly reflects the harmful nature of the songs, she keeps singing them to her daughters. The songs voice her longing to return to more innocent and less troubled times as well as her longing to return to exactly that which she tries to transcend: the family model. Alice contemplates the wicked messages of the lyrics in songs and muses “is it right to teach them [her daughters] such rubbish?” but deceives herself at the same time by thinking “oh, well it was only a song. It is the singing that was important, not the song” (IL, 108–9). As a mother, she participates in passing on to her daughters the very songs and stories that have led her into specific understandings of femininity. This again shows Alice’s dilemma: She still wants

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to believe in the very myths and romances she tries to transcend. She is caught in between asserting and deconstructing them, and this double movement is reflected in the narrative structure of Intertidal Life which moves back and forth between evoking and destroying familiar texts. Alice still fools herself by saying that “a song is only a song” although she knows that the lyrics are harmful and that texts perform certain gender patterns rather than describing them. Thomas, however, exposes this contradiction, and for the readers the harmful contents of the texts become even clearer because Alice reflects upon, but denies them, and continues singing them to her daughters. Alice introduces a song by saying to her daughters: “Listen [. . .] here’s a silly one.” The silly song in fact is sexist, reduces women to available sexual objects and wraps the content in a game: “She waded in the water and she got her toes all wet. [. . .] But she didn’t get her [clap, clap] WET YET” (IL, 109). The clapping sound of the hands omits the word vagina as “wet” refers to sexual arousal. On the other hand, “clap” is the slang term for the venereal disease gonorrhea which is “characterized by discharging pus from 5 the genital organs.” “Wet” thus ambiguously refers to both sexual arousal and the disease. The line sarcastically points to what a woman can expect from the fulfillment of her sexual desires: disease. Later in the novel the readers learn that Alice has to keep feeding her anger and revel in her emotions in order not to grow numb. Alice wants to keep from freezing in the “icy waters of Peter’s rejection,” and she wants to avoid a trauma like the one she experienced after a miscarriage before she met Peter: And if he [Peter] had understood about her frozen heart? Or frozen shell, really, for her heart was a little fish swimming vainly to and fro, to and fro, beneath the ice. [. . .] But no. “She is cold,” he had said to Anne-Marie, to Selene, to Stella, to Trudl, to whoever would listen to him. “She was destroyed before I ever met her.” Not understanding how fear and pain and all those vast quantities of blood, and the little dead thing in the basin had frozen her over, had tossed her out beyond her depth, where only the sea gulls mocked her cry of “me me me.” So that when she returned to life, was flung back in, she had suffered a sea change of the most terrible sort and was dumb to tell about it. (IL, 189–90)

The miscarriage is described as a sea change and is thus connected to the water imagery and the marine metaphors that abound in the novel. Peter’s departure also exhibits a “sea change of the most terrible sort,” but, Alice intends not to freeze in the trauma and be “dumb to tell about it.” This time, she writes down her emotional tumult to stay sane. Al-

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though at some point Alice is exhausted and just wants to melt into the landscape, “could I please for the next little while just be a stone, washed by the sea, warmed by the sun, unmoving?” (IL, 263), this time she wants to stay mobile. Therefore, she tortures herself incessantly by evoking memories and by wanting to hear every detail about Peter’s new relationships. She says: “It helps to feed my pain, which I now see as a dog with an enormous bright red mouth, a mouth like a fiery furnace, demanding to be stoked” (IL, 205). Alice’s burning pain is the main trajectory for her narrative. She has to talk about her emotions to avoid getting traumatized. Aleida Assmann distinguishes “affect,” “symbol,” and “trauma” as three key terms in the stabilization of personal memory. A presymbolic “affect” intensifies memories and preserves them vividly. In contrast, turning personal memory into “symbols” requires distance from events as symbolization requires that the past is interpreted in a specific frame of reference. Symbols preserve memory by retrospectively ordering and making sense of events. Trauma, in contrast, states the impossibility of translating personal memory into narrative. The remembered event never reaches the status of a sign. Yet, precisely because of that, it cannot be dealt with and hence be forgotten. An affect is either translated into a symbol through narrativization or, when the affect is too intense, it turns into a trauma. The affect preserves certain memories as “micronarratives” that are stored disconnectedly in our mind. Such prelinguistic and protonarrative kernels of memory, according to Assmann, are positioned in between physical inscription and symbolic encoding. Affects form the material for secondary processes of narrative stabilization (1998, 152). Very often, this is what happens to Alice in Intertidal Life. Her memories are still so vividly mixed up with emotions that she lacks any distance to transfer them into symbols. Rather she spills out “micronarratives” that capture her memories in disconnected ways. In the frame story, which is told with emotional and temporal distance, a narrative pattern sometimes emerges. Yet, the main purpose of the narrative is to document Alice’s turmoil, and the narrative resists any soothing coherence. Trying to narrativize her emotions seems to be the only possibility for Alice to rise above her pain and put her world back in order. As disrupted as her narrative sometimes is, talking is a cure. The two different strands of the narrative show how gradually Alice makes sense of her memories by telling them over and over again. Assmann claims that memories become polished in the repeated act of narrativization so that gradually the affect gives way to a linguistic formula (1998, 152). As I have elucidated in the introductory chapter, identity is to be found in the ability to keep a

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particular life story going and to be able to tell it. Assmann states that if the affect in a certain memory is too strong, narrative fails and the person becomes traumatized. Alice wants to avoid a trauma like the one she experienced after the miscarriage, which made her mute but entered her memory in a deeper and inaccessible way. Her attempt to turn her pain and humiliation after Peter leaves her into narrative, can be understood as an attempt to turn affective memory into ordered, narrativized memory. The narrative form of Intertidal Life oscillates between these two movements: the attempt to turn emotions into symbols, into narrative forms, and the inability to do so. Thomas’s protagonist reverts to fairy tales to relate her personal experience as a woman to texts that preserve cultural memory as well as gender patterns. Fairy tales serve as stories of initiation, they keep us in line as well as nurturing dreams, wishes, and nightmares. Thomas demystifies tales that disguise violence against women as a natural sacrifice for 6 love by counteracting them with Alice’s narrative of disillusionment. When Peter, who has adopted the conventions of the hippies and consequently never raises his voice, can no longer bear Alice’s sarcasm with forgiving smiles, he hits her and blackens her eye. Afterwards, he cries and says that in hitting her he knew he still loved her. Ironically, whenever they made love after their separation, Peter was eager to point out that he never really loved Alice and that their relationship was now meaningless. Alice is terribly hurt by his remarks and is longing for a sign of love. However, it takes physical force against her to wrench that statement from her ex-husband. A few evenings later when reading the tale of “The Princess and the Pea” to her youngest daughter, Alice establishes a connection between the tale and Peter hitting her: “Even princesses have to pass the test [. . .] if you’re covered in bruises you’re sensitive enough to marry the prince. And the old mother cheering him on” (IL, 89). The quoted passage is exemplary for the reading and rereading of texts in Intertidal Life. Thomas quotes the tale because it is widely known, and then defamiliarizes the familiar text. Alice demystifies the romance of the tale and ridicules it by connecting it to her own experience which sheds a new light on a familiar text. In the tale, the romantic quest for a wife takes shape in a test case: only if the woman bruises easily enough is she worthy of the prince. Alice reflects on the role of the mother who by implementing the test participates in the 7 fortification of traditional roles for women. While Alice herself participates in passing the tale on to her daughters without comment, the readers are confronted with a counter reading of the tale — which like the messages in etymologies or the contradictions within words — is

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already inscribed in the story. Alice delineates a tradition of texts in which romance and a happy ending are achieved at the expense of women’s physical integrity. The presumably childish tales Alice reads to her daughters are exposed as sticky identity traps by inverting and subverting familiar themes and symbols. After signing the final divorce papers and saying goodbye to Peter, Alice thinks: “She was bleeding everywhere, couldn’t he tell? Like the Little Mermaid, she would leave a trail of blood” (IL, 156). With Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid,” Thomas evokes yet another tale where a woman relinquishes her well-being and accepts dreadful physical pain to be with her prince: “the diabolic bargain requires that the heroine lose 8 her tongue for ever in return for human shape and life on earth.” She not only exchanges her siren’s voice for human form but on earth has to bear the pain of slicing knives with every step she takes. The only remedy to her pain would be to kill her prince, an act that would restore her to her original form and the sea. Yet, unable to murder her beloved, she throws herself into the ocean and dissolves into air. Woman literally becomes nothingness in the tale. This tradition of sacrificing the body for the sake of love is disrupted in Intertidal Life by exposing romance as the very tool of mutilation. Thomas ridicules the romantic implications of the tale. In this, as in many other instances, the destruction of the textual corpus reflects Alice’s injuries but it also offers Alice a chance to stay whole or at least to survive her mutilation. The rereading and reinterpretation of cultural texts helps her to divine a temporary position for herself. Deriding cultural images opens up a discourse for Alice and provides her with a subject position, however fragile. Alice mocks the tales to stay within and, at the same time, be outside familiar textual territory. Intertidal Life exhibits a narrative case of, in Ricoeur’s terms, a self without sameness. Alice is lost and seems no longer to know who she is because the “sameness” of her former self is broken up. However, it is through her search for another self, and in her rage over an identity lost, that her self emerges. This explains why, on the one hand, the narrative structure of Intertidal Life seems disrupted and incoherent, and why, on the other hand, we have a very clear sense of who is speaking. Narrative assists the character in the novel to attain a temporary sense of who she is and allows her to connect past, present, and future. Ricoeur claims that:

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the imaginative variations generated by the topos ‘narrative identity’ and supported by the thought-experiments enhanced by literature make it possible to display a whole range of combinations between sameness and selfhood: at one end of the spectrum, we find the characters of fairy tales and of folklore with their stiffness and stability through time; in between, we have the complex balance of stability and change of characters in the nineteenth century novel; at the other extremity, we encounter the characters of some contemporary novels [. . .] whose identity seems threatened to such an extent that we are inclined to say it has been lost. (Ricoeur in Johnson 1993, 115–16, his emphasis)

Thomas plays with the different configurations of narrative identity in her text. She rattles the stability of characters in fairy tales and folklore because they no longer hold as role models for her protagonist who is a subject in quest of narrative.

Recharting Cultural Textscapes: Intertexts The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Thomas’s constant use of irony, sarcasm, and parody, as well as her need to point out the contradictions in language itself can be seen as a cultural strategy of resistance: “Contrast and contra-diction — the diction that ‘speaks against’ convention — serve as techniques to resist the past and to reshape the present by suggesting alternative ways of reading the cultural ‘landscape’” (New 1997, 176, his emphasis). Thomas remaps discursive spaces that are part of our cultural memory. The folkloristic as well as canonical texts Thomas calls upon work to preserve values and attitudes from generation to generation. Thomas, however, exemplifies that the cultural memory, although it lives on through tradition and communication, does not exhaust itself in these forms but also lives on in the rifts and contradictions of established sense (Assmann 1997). In her text, Thomas creates an individual “Erinnerungsraum” for Alice’s personal recollections but through intertextual devices she also creates a “Gedächtnisraum” for cultural discourses. Various text relations, of implied or explicitly quoted intertexts in Intertidal Life, challenge the totality and unity of the textual body as well as that of the subject. Not only is the deconstruction of Alice’s identity emulated in the fractured

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corporeality of linguistic signs, it is reflected in the disrupted textual and narrative structures. There is such an abundance of intertextual references in the novel, it is literally impossible to follow them all up. There are references to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to John Donne’s poetry, Alice’s daughter Flora reads Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as a kind of antidote to the Harlequin Romances that she reads with her mother for fun. There are quotations from the journals of Horatio Nelson, references to Greek 9 myth and — with prominence — to the Bible. I want to concentrate on three salient intertexts in the novel: epigraphs from a Spanish Voyage to 10 Vancouver as well as references to other exploration journals, references to Harlequin Romances, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The exploration excerpts inform the novel in general, they provide the imagery of mapping, the theme of ordering experience into facts, the quest motif, and they interrelate patriarchy and colonialism. Harlequin Romances serve as yet another example of a seemingly harmless text genre that proves to be filled with oppressive role models. Both genres are demystified; they are used and subverted to question traditional gender patterns that are established in factual and fictional cultural discourses. Carroll’s texts, in contrast, provide a positive model for Thomas and her character Alice, because they perform the rearrangement of linguistic as well as narrative territory. Alice in Wonderland occupies another textual space: conventions can be broken, wordscapes recreated, narrative patterns reinvented. In Intertidal Life, the individual text gives way to a textual space in which meaning is established and subverted. Intertextual procedures transform the fixture of structures into a dynamic interchange by showing that a culture has many contradictory ways of making sense. In her chaotic narrative, Thomas undercuts the great Western narrative of progress as it is propagated by the exploration accounts: Alice’s journey makes sense in itself although there is no progress. The intertextual tides also mirror Alice’s oscillation between tradition and rebellion which is reflected in the transformation of cultural texts, the affirmation and dismissal of cultural patterns. As the epigraphs from exploration accounts heading each section of Intertidal Life indicate, Alice is also on a journey or quest: Intertidal Life remaps wordscapes, explores textual landscapes and takes the reader on a quest for polyvalent meanings in familiar texts: some specks on the map are overwritten, rewritten or defamiliarized, others may serve as reference points. The topic of exploring landscape is closely intertwined with the topic of recharting familiar texts in Thomas’s novel. The world is regarded as

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text, and Thomas’s protagonist re-examines textscapes in order to establish a new subject position. Identity representations in everyday texts, texts women especially deal with, are destroyed. By quoting canonical texts like King Lear, Macbeth, and the Bible, a long tradition of women’s misrepresentation is tracked down on the textual map. Studying Intertidal Life is like putting on different glasses while reading familiar texts: a whole new perspective on the word, and world, is opened up. Quotations from and allusions to contexts of travel, cartography, and exploration serve various purposes. Each of the three sections of Intertidal Life is headed by an epigraph from A Spanish Voyage to Vancouver, the book Alice is reading on Galiano Island. They, on the one hand, serve as a structuring device for Alice’s narrative but, on the other hand, their pseudo scientific and linear way of ordering experience is undercut by calling into question their factual nature. Exploration narratives are exemplary for factual discourses that have fortified the distribution of roles according to sex. Finally, they summon the theme of mapping, which is not only a prominent topos in Canadian literature in general but 11 has been applied to women’s writing especially. One function of the exploration epigraphs is to point to the process of ordering events and experiences into a narrative form. The first section of Intertidal Life is introduced by the following quotation: Part of the following day was employed in arranging and setting in order our records of observations, charts and calculations, and the notes made on all matters which have been jotted down on board ship in the midst of toil and labour required to be systematically expanded in order that they might be in good order and not convey a confused idea of the information gained (IL, 2).

On the one hand, the epigraph familiarizes the reader with Alice’s intention to put her memories in order before her surgery. Like the Captain’s notes, her experiences were gathered during emotional “toil and labour.” After the separation “a great tidal wave [. . .] of hatred swept away Alice and all her common sense” (IL, 75). Alice’s aim in the inner story, which depicts the first years after the separation, is to hold on, to survive. She returns ten years later to arrange her recollections with emotional and temporal distance. On the other hand, the quotation from a Spanish Voyage to Vancouver immediately points to the main difference between Alice’s way of delivering her story and the allegedly objective method of the explorers. Alice wants to convey an idea of her confusion after the separation; her text is performative rather than descriptive in its methods and succeeds in conveying a very clear picture of chaos. Whereas the

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captain aims at hiding the confusion by ordering it into facts, Alice makes chaos the ordering principle of her narrative. Rather than following an argumentative linear mode of narration, Alice follows the associative rhythms of the tides of her memory. A closer look at the captain’s sentence reveals it to be a quite nonsensical run on sentence that states the wish for obtaining order without getting closer to that goal. Thomas raises the readers’ awareness that any narrativization of events will inevitably contain a subjective interpretation, and will be caught in a cultural as well as ideological frame of reference. Any experience has to be translated into language and be transmitted in a narrative form that underlies conventions. The historian Hayden White has distinguished between “real events” and “narrativized facts” and claims that historians have to relate events as “a story of a particular kind.” Referring to Northrop Frye’s typology in The Anatomy of Criticism, White claims that this particular story can be narrated as a romance, tragedy, satire, or comedy (White 1973; 1980; 1981). Following White and Frye, the Canadian literary critic MacLulich has argued that exploration documents underlie narrative conventions as well. Like the historian, the explorer has to select certain given events, put them in a special order, and decide how to represent them. MacLulich claims that exploration narratives can be encoded as quests, ordeals, or odysseys. Which narrative order the explorer chooses is dependent upon the declared goal of the exploration. If the success of the journey is to be emphasized, the narrative will be structured like a quest and only those events and people will be selected which fit this narrative scheme. In a quest narrative, the explorer appears as a hero, the narrative is straightforward and linear. If disaster outweighs success, the narrative will depict an ordeal rather than a quest. The chosen facts will focus on the human capacity to survive, and on the circumstances under which the survival is secured. The climax will be the rescue or a final scene of disaster. A third possibility is the odyssey where the goal of the journey is less important than the desire to discover unknown territories. MacLulich relates the forms of quest, ordeal, and odyssey to Frye’s typology of narrative forms. Quest corresponds with romance; ordeal with tragedy, and the odyssey with the form of the novel. MacLulich stresses that these are not absolutely distinct categories but convenient labels and that “quest and ordeal are the extreme points, polar opposites. An account emplotted as a quest emphasizes the explorer’s success in attaining his goal; an account emplotted as an ordeal stresses the difficulties and sufferings which are not redeemed by success” (1979, 75–76). MacLulich’s distinction between quest and ordeal is useful for pointing to the contradictory movements in Intertidal

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Life as well as for illustrating how the novel disrupts the boundaries between fact and fiction. Intertidal Life oscillates between a quest and an ordeal, between the extreme poles of success and failure, unity and fragmentation, fate and self-determination. Whereas I see quest and ordeal as the main poles in-between which the narrative takes shape, the form of the odyssey is also frequently called up on a more abstract level. Just as there are many shapes but no definite and lasting structures in the intertidal zone, the narrative retreats from taking any definite form. This is exhibited by two scenes that overlap at the end of the novel. The final scene depicts how Alice, before her cancer operation, drifts into anesthesia. Whereas this certainly can be read as a scene of disaster and death, a positive ending is also implied. The doctor says “she’s under now. Let’s go” (IL, 281), thereby repeating the line from a play song that has served as a positive parole of survival for Alice throughout the novel. Also, when Alice drifts into anesthesia, which she sarcastically refers to as “the dead man’s float” (IL, 280), she is definitely leaving the intertidal zone behind and moving on. Buckman has suggested that “a critical feminist rereading of the ending suggests an alternative interpretation whereby ‘floating’ refers to Alice’s transcendence of the contradictory positions posed by the patriarchal order. Instead of floating to her death, she drifts down into an open space that, untrammeled by masculine laws and conventions, opens the possibility of creative renewal” (Buckman 1996, 85). A second scene overlaps with this last scene of potential disaster. As a kind of epilogue, when Alice is out of the story, the omniscient narrative voice relates how Flora and Peter go out in a rowboat. Flora is thinking of her mother’s operation and starts crying. In order to distract her, Peter asks her whether she wants to row: “She nodded silently and [. . .] they carefully changed places” (IL, 282, my emphasis), and this is how the novel ends. Although Alice drifts off into uncertainty, Thomas seems to imply that women of the next generation will take a more active part in charting discursive territory. Considering that the main topic of the novel is the distribution of roles according to sex, it is significant that Flora and Peter change places and that Flora is in charge. The heading of Section II reads: “At every turn we encounter new obstacles” (IL, 131). Thomas deliberately puts obstacles into the text. One obstacle is set up by the different time levels in the novel. The reader only knows that in the inner story Alice is relating the first years after the separation. References to certain months structure the narrative flow but because there are no reference to years, they turn out to be pseudo references. Furthermore, it is difficult for the reader to determine

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which part of Intertidal Life is the novel within a novel, the commonplace book that Alice is writing, and which part just refers to memories and diary entries. There are three different narrative voices: the inner story is narrated by a first- as well as a third-person narrator, both of which are framed by an omniscient third-person narrator in the outer story: “As a character who is a writer, Alice is a character-within-acharacter who narrates her own story, which is reproduced as the novelwithin-the-novel that forms Intertidal Life” (Tuende 1989, 28). The voice of the narrator and that of the character Alice are hard to distinguish sometimes: Although it appears that the character of the thirdperson narrative is relating the story in the first person, it could also be the other way around. The different narrative points of view allow Alice as a narrator to voice things that the character Alice is unable to say. Alice’s narrative is organized solely by the tidal waves of grief and anger: Her circular narrative mode counteracts the linearity of the explorers’ narrative accounts. Section III is introduced: “We put out our oars, endeavouring with them to counteract the current, but alas the efforts of the sailors were in vain” (IL, 245). Apparently, the explorers do not succeed on their quest, their linear ordering devices have failed. Currents cannot be counteracted, you have to go with, not against, them. Another set of intertexts that serve as role models because they favor a current-like approach over the explorers’ linearity are Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (IL, 125), as well as A Room of One’s Own and Mrs. Dalloway. As subtexts they serve a dual function. On a thematic level they introduce the theme of 12 woman as artist, and on a textual level Thomas reverts to Woolf’s narrative techniques. In To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, external events are mirrored in the protagonists’ consciousness rather than being presented by an outside narrative voice. The novels do not have a conventional plot structure but rely on a tapestry of images, impressions, and memories. Like Woolf, Thomas shows that reality cannot be adequately explained by a causal relationship and cannot be grasped by logic but by the deeper reality of chaotic impressions, the whirlpool of emotional human experience. In Intertidal Life, as well as in Woolf’s texts, a chronological way of relating real events is given up in favor of a representation of the mind’s reality, which is rendered just as viable as external 13 reality. The main parallel to Woolf’s text, though, seems to be that both depict female relationships and explore the roles of mother and artist for women. A Room of One’s Own (significantly, Alice remains writing her novel at the kitchen table because she does not have her own study and is always mother first and writer second) serves as a model for the condi-

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tions of the female artist. “Self-is-ness,” becomes Alice’s parole to defend her writing space, her private sphere besides being mother to everybody. In an interview, Thomas expresses how much of a role model Woolf has been for her and how much she herself wants to encourage women to break literary conventions and canonical traditions. On being asked whether she considers herself a feminist writer, Thomas answers: Yes. Absolutely. What I am saying is women have a voice and they ought to be heard. I’m also saying, you can write your book any damn way you want to as long as it works and don’t let men tell you that it has to have the larger scene. I’m so fed up with hearing that. You know, you’ve got to write War and Peace, you’ve got to write this great diorama of history. [. . .] I think that women get very scared by that because they think this is not good writing because it doesn’t. [. . .] And I’d like to demonstrate through my literature that you can do whatever you like. If you want to have seventeen points of view, have them, if you want to chop your thing in the middle, do it. Virginia Woolf was doing that sort of thing all the time, she didn’t care” (Wachtel 1986, 45–46).

Whereas the explorers represent experience in a conventional linear way, Thomas tries to represent exactly those currents they try to counteract.

Mapping the Female Subject: Exploration, Romance, and Wonderlands what’s happening to men and women today is just as exciting and terrifying as the discovery that the earth was round, not flat [. . .] we all need new maps, new instruments to try and fix our new positions. Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life

Another context called up by the exploration accounts is that of cartography. Thomas uses the topos of “mapping” to rechart cultural textscapes and to put spaces on the map that have not been charted by dominant discourses. In her study on Canadian Women’s autobiography Helen Buss employs the metaphor of mapping to better understand the complexity of women writing themselves into literature and history. She uses mapping in contrast to Lacan’s “mirror stage” as an intermediate position between poststructuralist theories that no longer believe in stable subject positions and which claim that identity is existent only in language, and between so called essentialist positions that claim that identity exists before and outside of language. For Buss “the word ‘mapping’ and attendant terms [. . .] can be used as analogues for the ways in

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which humans use language to know themselves and the world and to know also that the world as they know it and those selves are the language (the maps) that produces them” (Buss 1993, 11). Buss uses the term “mapping” to delineate her theory of the constitution of the female subject in writing processes. Whereas traditional maps imply fixture, Intertidal Life depicts a territory that cannot be charted. In the intertidal zone, no structure is fixed, everything remains temporary, fragile, and disconnected. Mapping in the traditional sense does not apply to Alice’s identity (de-)formation either. She remains fragmented and is unstable, caught between conflicting roles and discourses, as well as the wish to 14 transcend and to stick to tradition. Thomas uses the topos of mapping in Buss’s sense as well as in the way it has been appropriated by postcolonial literary theory. In the context of postcolonial literatures, “mapping” is ironically reinterpreted as the epitome of the inflexibility of colonial attitudes, but is also celebrated “as an agent of cultural transformation and as a medium for the imaginative revisioning of cultural history” (Huggan 1995, 407). In this light, mapping denotes flexibility, not fixture, and transience as well as reversibility. In contemporary Canadian literature, map making has been used to go beneath surfaces to reveal underlying cultural patterns in texts. Mapping in this understanding captures the reinvention of structures within a given territory which is undoubtedly what Thomas does in recharting discursive territory and traditional gender patterns. The topos of mapping allows for tracing the contradictory movements in Thomas’s narrative because the map is understood as “a shifting ground between alternative metaphors rather than [. . .] the approximate representation of a ‘literal 15 truth’” (Huggan 1995, 409, my emphasis). In this sense, mapping reverses the original sense of cartography, namely to fix things and to make a territory reliable and familiar. Mapping denies stability by stressing the subjective, culturally constructed, transient, polyvalent, arbitrary, and imaginative aspect of maps. Mapping also serves as a means to explore and shift gender patterns. Thomas connects colonizing gestures of claiming and naming the land to women’s position in patriarchal society. Whereas men have been cast in the active role of explorers, women traditionally have been associated with the landscape that is to be named and conquered. Alice admits to her friends that although she disagrees with certain aspects of the traditional role division, she felt secure in her status as a married woman: “I loved being ‘Mrs. Hoyle.’ Then everybody knew I was married, you see. I had status” (IL, 172). Alice tries to break with the few status roles culture offers to women, namely those of wife and mother. Although she

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feels “mummified” in them and cannot see how to combine those traditional role expectations with her role as a writer, Alice felt secure in those roles and does not see a whole lot of other choices. In Section II, however, she attacks women’s inertia, their willingness to comply and to accept certain roles: “Women have let men define them, taken their names even, with marriage, just like a conquered or newly settled region, British Columbia, British Guiana, New Orleans [. . .]” (IL, 171, her emphasis). Alice asks herself whether women will forever stay in the traditional role division that John Donne already evoked: “She is all States/and all Princes I” (IL, 70). She sometimes cannot see how she could switch roles and become an explorer rather than being explored because she is weighed down with responsibilities: “But one went on a true quest alone. [. . .] One didn’t bring along three kids, a lame dog and a spiteful cat” (IL, 141). She wonders whether as explorers, women would take their children along, and would their lovers faithfully wait for them at home, keeping the home fires burning like good old mom? At other times, Alice is determined that women have to divine new roles for themselves and in a treatise-like speech to her friends calls for “some kind 16 of mutiny.” As quoted in the epigraph above, Alice states that “[. . .] what’s happening to men and women today is just as exciting and terrifying as the discovery that the earth was round, not flat [. . .]. We all need new maps, new instruments to try and fix our new positions” (IL, 170–71). One instrument for mapping out a new transitory and shifting position for herself that deviates from her status-role as “Mrs. Hoyle,” is for Alice to write her novel. Alice’s creative abilities counterbalance the images of mutilation, death, and decay in the novel. The island is often pictured as Edenic, and Alice incessantly works to make her garden fertile, blossoming, and blooming. However, even here images of death creep in when, for instance, Alice is disgusted that many people naturally fertilize their gardens by burying starfish in the soil alive (IL, 212). Alice’s gardening and her role as mother could be read as creative, nurturing, and positive reference points that counterbalance images of cruelty and destruction. However, those homey images stand against Alice’s wish to go exploring herself. They do not really offer a new space because — however positive — these are the very characteristics that have tied women to certain roles. Alice neither wants to give up her old positions nor forfeit a new role that would add an active part in the making of culture to the more passive strands of preservation. These two contrary movements, the urge to switch roles and go out exploring and the urge to keep the home fires burning, are left side by side in Intertidal Life. Alice wants to hang on to

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things and transcend them at the same time. She remains fragmented and “these fragments reveal a multiplicity of roles that together form the character, ‘Alice,’ rather than the ‘either/or’ construction of Woman favoured by patriarchal discourse, which allows women to be ‘mother’ or ‘sex kitten’ or ‘wife’ — Madonna or whore, never both at once” (Tuende 1989, 27). In her writing, Alice seems to be able to combine the urge to stay in one place and build a home but also to go out exploring the textual landscape. Thomas’s novel not only recharts gender, but explores the conceptualization of the category sex by showing that male or female bodies are produced in gendered discourses. By traversing the colonial signifying practices of the explorers with the dispossession of women from their bodies and desires by patriarchal discourses, Thomas exposes the natural body as another discursive construct. As has been delineated in the first chapter in the explication of Butler’s theories, gender is an apparatus that first produces gendered bodies and then renders them natural. In discursive practices, the body becomes a sign for naturalness, which is why Thomas makes a connection between the female body and charted landscape. Maps do not only represent something, but they inscribe a then authorized vision into the landscape. Naming things, places, and people is one of the most effective tools for installing power structures. The power to name is a very important aspect in Intertidal Life, and it is telling how Thomas has named her protagonists. All of the names are significant, some of them are anagrams hiding a second layer of meaning. Peter is ironically identified with Christ’s disciple when Alice calls him “traitor” (IL, 39), or when she describes him as a fisherman, or as “Peter, the rock” (IL, 60). The more Alice lets go of Peter, the more she identifies him with his other namesake, Peter Pan. The name “Alice” — as has been pointed out before — recalls Alice in Wonderland; Flora is the Greek goddess of flowers, Selene the Greek goddess of the moon. Moreover, Alice renames things and institutions by changing language, by undermining dictionary definitions and etymologies: “‘Naming’ is a powerful linguistic act, formerly reserved for patriarchal figures from Adam to the makers of modern dictionaries” (Buss 1993, 13). Intertidal Life connects the imperial claiming of the Natives’ land through the European explorers with man’s determination of woman. Alice sarcastically aligns herself with everyday things that have been named by others:

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Alice started making a list of people who had given their names to things. She called it ‘Household Words’: Lord Cardigan Quisling The Earl of Sandwich L. Von Sacher Masoch The Marquis de Sade M. Guillotin Mr. Condom (nationality unknown) Mr. Hoyle (IL, 146–47)

The list mixes fact and fiction by listing people who really gave their names to things and fictitious connections. By including her husband on the list, Alice communicates that she felt reified in the role of “Mrs. Hoyle” although it gave her status. By marrying Peter, she achieved a definition and became a household item, as it was taken for granted that she would keep the home fires burning. Nonetheless, Alice is not ready to let go. She dramatizes her situation because she does not really want to be someone else, and at times is terrified of having to take charge instead of blaming others. Alice sings a supposedly funny song to her daughters: Her back was BRAZIL Her breast was BUNKER HILL and just a bit Below was BORNEO. (IL, 70)

Earlier, Alice tells her daughter that as a teenager she used to tape the initials of her boyfriend to her back while sun tanning so that afterwards they would stand out on her back. There are many places in the novel where she points to her, and generally to women’s, participation in their own oppression. The above quoted song once more renders the female body as landscape, to be explored and conquered, and as a passive space for patriarchal inscriptions. On her quest through the misrepresentations of female identity, Thomas covers new ground and reclaims the female body. She includes tabooed and therefore unrepresented areas on the map by writing about menstruation, women’s sexual pleasures, giving birth, abortions, and miscarriages. Thomas puts the reality of these experiences onto the page, the positive as well as the threatening aspects. When Peter — now that it is fashionable — says he regrets not having been present at any of his

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children’s births, Alice mercilessly destroys his romantic notions and confronts him with the facts: “‘There is a lot of blood,’ Alice said. ‘The whole room smells of blood.’ Peter stared politely across to the other shore. He did not like it when she became ‘dramatic.’ ‘Blood everywhere. Blood blood blood blood blood. All over the white sheets. Like an accident in the snow” (IL, 252). Thomas tries to counteract that “one of the most consistent silent presences in women’s accounts in the past has been caused by the absence of any language of conception, pregnancy, labour, and delivery” (Buss 1993, 24). Thomas mutinies against these silences and puts them on the literary map. Section II of Intertidal Life deals with female friendships, and the intertidal zone no longer only stands for life without Peter, but also signifies the realm of women. Besides Alice and her three daughters there are several women on the island, who like Alice are intertidal creatures: all of them try to hang on and survive sea changes in their lives. Stella, whose lover died of cancer, Trudl who left her husband, Selene who in the Hippie community tries to find peace and happiness after a difficult relationship with her controlling mother. Alice connects the moon ruled rhythms of the tides to women’s menses (IL, 194), and describes abortions or miscarriages as sea changes that interrupt the rhythms of the female body. Because the moon, in contrast to the sun, changes shape all the time, it also stands for the ability to give birth (IL, 167). For a short time, the intertidal zone becomes an exclusively female territory where women share experiences about their bodies: “‘I get terribly depressed just before I get my period,’ Trudl said. Alice agreed. ‘So do I. Horribly. Very moody.’ ‘I get very horny when I’ve got it,’ Stella said” (IL, 195). I find these passages problematic because they fortify notions of woman=nature and man=culture and thus emphasize sexual difference which earlier Thomas detects as the root of all trouble. Such passages 17 seem to evoke a form of essentialism that undercuts notions of the body as a cultural construct. However, Thomas destroys the illusion of a female community in harmony with nature herself. The female zone is transitory and breaks up because the women all search for a new man in their lives: “Herself. Selene. Stella. Trudl. The girl children. Connected by femaleness and by blood and by the moon. Yet, can’t do without Adam” (IL, 92). The “moon ladies” (IL, 206) are only illuminated by the sun, man, and thus are again condemned to passivity and dependence. One after the other of Alice’s female friends leave the intertidal zone. Each and everyone of them has an affair with Alice’s charismatic ex-husband: “Peter was the sun, the hub” (IL, 239) they all revolved around, Alice reflects later. The women view each other as potential

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competitors and thus cannot establish a new framework. At one point in the novel, Alice makes love with Selene. She later says to Trudl that it was not passionate but that “we met on this deep plane of utter despair. It was — it was a conversation” (IL, 168). Alice suggests that the encounter replaces words and consoles the two women who both suffer from broken relationships. However, their sexual encounter replaces something rather than creating a new space; there is no independent sexual desire between them. Love and sexuality between women is not portrayed as an alternative to the patriarchal order here, quite to the contrary, it supports it as the two women only console each other while waiting for their men to return to them. The women in the intertidal zone do not come up with any viable alternatives to the traditional distribution of gender, sex, and sexuality. In the end, they still all want to be with a man. The same one as it turns out. Thus, the positive female zone is demystified as a romantic image. The women abandon Alice just as Peter abandoned her. A feminine space neither becomes an alternative to the patriarchal order nor does it offer a new subject position to Alice. By looking at Harlequin Romances Thomas looks at another text form besides the exploration accounts that recharts gender patterns. They serve as paradigmatic examples for texts that disguise women’s loss of an active subject position as romance. Thomas shows that the linear romantic plot with its dogma of a happy ending can be seductive and addictive for female readers. The editor’s guideline for writers of Harlequin Romances explicates that “the plot should not be grounded in harsh realities — Romance readers want to be uplifted, not depressed [. . .]” (Thomas 1986, 7). In an essay Thomas points out that in the US alone, there are 20 million Harlequin Romance readers. In Canada Harlequins account for 28 percent of all paperbacks sold, they are translated into twelve languages and sold in ninety-eight countries (7). Women who are addicted to Harlequin Romances read as many as sixty of them a month in order to achieve mental absence, and to escape from “the harsh reality” of their lives. Whereas initially she thought the books were simply funny, Thomas later realizes their dangerous potential because through the act of reading, those texts offer subject positions to women that freeze them in passivity. In an interview Thomas explicates: “It worries me that millions of women are buying the violence and abuse, the humiliation, along with the happy ending. He didn’t really mean it; I drove him to it anyway” (1986, 11, her emphasis). In the frame story of Intertidal Life, Alice and her youngest daughter start reading Harlequin Romances “as a joke” because while awaiting Alice’s operation they feel they cannot do much else. Alice names some of the key features of the

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genre and observes how these books coerce women into clichés: “These girls are good girls with hidden fires” that of course only erupt after they have married the “physically flawless” Harlequin hero. Falling in love always deprives the Harlequin girls of their independence: “They often had careers at the beginning of the book but never at the end” (IL, 16). At the end of the novel, Flora realizes that Harlequin Romances “always end at the beginning of ‘real’ marriage.” Afterwards she asks her mother whether she would ever marry again. Alice says yes, “if somebody would come along who could just accept me as I am” (IL, 261). Although she wants to avoid romantic traps and although she demystifies traditional conceptualizations of love, marriage, and partnership, Alice has not abandoned them. She is waiting to combine partnership and self determination, a combination which is not depicted in the Harlequin Romances: “After all, most metaphors based on romantic love have the implied assumption that someone gives up identity, consciousness, in the merging” (Buss 1993, 22). Harlequin Romances are referred to at the beginning and at the end of the novel. In the rest of the novel Alice dismantles the romance of her marriage and romantic texts in general. Thomas seems to write a reverse Harlequin Romance because her tale does not end in marriage but begins with the end of marriage. However, rather than writing a complete reverse Harlequin Romance, Thomas shifts back and forth between romance and the destruction of romance. Alice longs for romance that can be trusted. This points to the double movement of reconstructing and deconstructing traditional gender in Intertidal Life. In order to renew romantic concepts, Thomas wants to reveal the snares in them. In an interview with Bowering she says: “Well, I’m a romantic. I’m only realist in that way that I write” (1979, 15). Writing becomes a tool for destroying romance: the dissection of language and texts deconstructs romance without destroying it. As has been pointed out before, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are subtexts in Intertidal Life. They serve as a paradigm for the deconstruction and reconstruction of new meaning in words. Carroll’s text crops up throughout the novel because language as well as the self become a maze of representation and misrepresentation. Not only is identity constructed through language but language is the only way to reflect upon the construction of self and the world. Thomas dissects language to show how Alice dismembers her former identity, but also to get at the general underlying attitudes and values that coerce us into gender strait jackets. It is as polyvalent, multifaceted, and transient as personal identity itself. Language is dependent on con-

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ventions and power structures, and as Humpty Dumpty says in Through the Looking Glass “the question is [. . .] which is to be master — that’s all” (Carroll 1981, 169). Thomas picks up on how words change fashion depending on time and context. She relates how the hippie community at Coon Bay changes linguistic conventions. Suddenly words like “relate” and “far out” are in vogue, and the voicing of negative emotions like anger or pain are outlawed. Alice observes, though, that gentleness often serves as a cover for accumulated aggression and an unresolved violent past. Selene, one of Alice’s friends who lives with the Coon Bay community, never raises her voice but almost suffocates during one of her frequent asthma attacks: “what was she trying so hard not to say?” (IL, 180), Alice wonders. Although Alice is very eloquent, in an attempt to win Peter back, she tries to stick to the new conventions reflected in language. As long-term relationships have momentarily gone out of fashion, love declarations to one person have also become unacceptable. Alice tries to remember that: “she must not say, ‘I love you,’ knowing that would spoil it all. Saying over and over in her head, like a rosary, all the things she must not say” (IL, 83). Yet, Peter is allowed to say things that hurt her to the bone. After Peter has told her that he never loved her, she says: “People shoot me down with words. [. . .] It’s the hunting season” (IL, 63). Words are Alice’s enemies but as Thomas once said in an interview: “Well, language was my enemy for a long time, so, what do you do with your enemy? You wrestle it to the ground” (Wachtel 1986, 39). Alice uses language to empower herself, she is “using the master’s tools [. . .] to destroy the master’s house” (Goldman 1997, 32). Her piercing sarcasm and verbal wit enable Alice to attack romantic images in a playful way. She makes fun of them and thus deflates the seriousness. Intertidal Life depicts a subject that has lost “sameness” as determined by continuity and coherence, but the novel creates a strong sense of “selfhood” by creating a writing subject in the act of writing, of searching, and of exploring. As a writer, Alice twists common sense and standardized metaphors. Carroll’s text also serves as a subtext for blurring the boundary between imagination and reality. Throughout the novel, Alice identifies with her cat Tabby who has a litter every summer. Although Alice is exasperated because she no longer knows what to do with the kittens, she respects tabby’s motherly instincts and frequently denotes her own daughters as her kittens (IL, 17). Towards the end of the novel, Alice is driven to drown a litter of kittens because nobody wants to take them and Alice is tired of being responsible. The experience is horrifying to Alice and she feels devastated afterwards: “I dare not sleep. I dare not

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even close my eyes. I want to be held and comforted; I want to be told I did the right thing, the only thing” (IL, 191). Shortly after the incident Alice “came across this phrase: ‘If you are sane, you know that the word ‘cat’ cannot scratch you’” (IL, 191). Once more, Thomas points out that linguistic meaning is not ahistorical or universal but dependent on contexts. Of course, the word cat scratches Alice in this context, and she doubts her sanity throughout the novel. She quotes the Cheshire-Cat from Alice in Wonderland: “We are all mad, or we wouldn’t be here.” Like her namesake, Alice is caught in a maze of self-recognition and distortion, in a world where concepts are turned on their head and conventions no longer hold.

Conclusion: Leaving the Intertidal Zone And remember, the best revenge is writing well. Audrey Thomas, Latakia

Another intertext frequently referred to is a book on intertidal creatures that Alice is reading in the frame story. Alice compares herself to the critters in the tidepools and uses them as metaphors for her emotional state. In the beginning, the starfish, barnacles, and crabs remind her that she has to “hang on,” which refers to both, hanging on to romantic ideals as well as to surviving her trauma. The references to intertidal creatures reflect Alice’s development in coming to terms with her past. Initially, she admires the creatures for their ability to hold on, but realizes in the end that they are forever fixed in one spot, whereas she wants to move on. The creatures Alice finds in the tidepools seem to teach her a lesson in the beginning. She quotes from a book on intertidal creatures: “‘The muscular foot is so powerful that limpets are found in wave-swept areas where few other forms of life can survive’” and muses “we could all learn a lesson from limpets [. . .]. They really know how to hang on” (IL, 59–60). She admits that “part of me is so convinced that [Peter will] come back, that I must hang on, stay here [. . .]” (IL, 87). In the beginning, Alice clings to her hope that Peter will return, but her changing attitude towards the intertidal zone indicates that she gradually lets go of “Peter, the rock.” When towards the end of the novel she goes down to the tidepools again, she realizes the beautiful variety but also limited choices in the intertidal zone:

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all this wealth of life in the intertidal zone. Small fishes, not much bigger than large exclamation points, swim back and forth in the shallow pools. Crabs relax in the warm water. Bits of seaweed sway graceful as hula dancers. Everywhere there are minute snails and chalky barnacles, fixed forever in one spot, condemned to spend their adult lives standing on their heads kicking food into their mouths with their feet. (IL, 269, my emphasis)

Soon after, Alice and Flora catch a fish that still has three little crabs inside its stomach and Flora asks “does everything just go around eating everything else?” (IL, 270). The initial positive implications of the intertidal zone are destroyed. Suddenly, Alice sees that these creatures are stuck and that they cannot escape mutilation and death either. She observes starfish and crabs with missing limbs, “testimony to narrow escapes from whatever it is that eats them” (IL, 268). Whereas crabs stay mutilated for life, Alice observes that “starfish [. . .] are capable of growing them [missing limbs] back again. Not the same legs, of course, new ones. But in the same places” (IL, 268). Earlier Alice wonders whether she can grow back the trust in a relationship and whether she will ever be a whole person again: “[. . .] she remembered also a sign she had seen in Victoria, ‘War Amps.’ (Anne said, ‘Even their name has been amputated.’) Were there love amps too, people who wandered around with parts of themselves, let’s take the heart, for example, permanently missing?” (IL, 242). Alice has survived the sea change of her divorce although her friends have left her one by one. She is, however, mutilated, and now, facing a cancer operation, reflects on her chances for survival. The image of “love amps” — amputated and mutilated survivors of love relationships — connects all the topics I have touched upon in my analysis. “War Amps” once more mirrors physical mutilation in the textual sign itself. Throughout the text, Alice’s identity deconstruction is reflected in the linguistic and narrative structure of the text. “Love amps” recalls the demystification of romantic love by connecting it to violence and mutilation. The novel depicts how Alice lets go of the rock, the fixed structures she used to hang on to, and how she moves into uncertainty. The readers leave the tidal territory not with a clear sense of direction, but with deepened insight into the associative tides of human memory and into cultural role patterns. Thomas’s novel traces the violent tearing apart of an identity, and the jigsaw puzzle is not resolved in the end. The readers have to bear that this text offers no solutions, and that narrative not only establishes coherence and continuity but can also explode an identity. Alice strives for stability as her world is turned upside down, and at the same time

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disrupts coherence. Her dilemma is that she liked being married, and that she wants to question the institution at the same time. Thomas depicts how an identity is taken from Alice and how difficult it is for her to imagine any new subject position for herself and win approval for it. In contrast, in Ana Historic, Marlatt depicts how the protagonist, Annie, chooses to abandon certain roles. Thomas’s protagonist undergoes a process of disillusionment during which she surfaces contradictions in familiar concepts. However, unlike Marlatt’s protagonist who in the end finds a different frame of reference and transcends concepts, Alice Hoyle remains caught in-between rebellion and tradition. Thomas shifts meaning within a symbolic field to point to ruptures and contradictions that destabilize established meaning. Whereas her piercing sarcasm and biting irony do not construe new concepts, they do destroy shining, familiar notions of love, the family, or femininity. Thomas calls into question the real nature of femininity by exposing the real as an effect of representational strategies. She de-constructs gender by taking apart narrative structures and social conventions that frame femininity, the female body, and female sexuality.

Notes 1

Irvine has pointed out that “Intertidal Life metaphorically situates itself somewhere between sea and earth; its structure reflecting a content that ceaselessly shifts between fluid, apparently formless description, dialogue and commentary and fairly controlled and plotted narrative.” Lorna Irvine, “Sailing the Oceans of the World,” New Directions in Canadian Writing 7 (spring/summer 1987): 285. 2

Tuende describes the reader’s role in Thomas’s textscape as that of a “temporal beachcomber.” Nemeth Tuende, Taboo, Silence and Voice in Women’s Writing: Intertidal Life as a Case in Point (Ontario: The CRIAW Papers, 1989), 30. For Thomas’s views on reader involvement, see Eleanor Wachtel, “An Interview with Audrey Thomas,” Room of One’s Own 10.3–4 (1986): 7–61. 3

Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life (Toronto: General Paperbacks, 1986), 30. All further quotations refer to this edition and are cited in the text using the abbreviation IL and page number. 4

Schahadat points out that in present day theories of intertextuality, anagrams are the smallest units of intertexts (in Pechlivanos et al. 1995, 366–77). For a detailed discussion of the function of anagrams, see Jean Starobinsky, Words Upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979). 5 6

New Webster’s Dictionary (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 411.

In her article “Sex and Violence: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales,” Maria Tatar points out that even adults “will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest that fill the pages of these

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bedtime stories for children” (1987, 3). She elucidates how the Grimm brothers gave prominence to certain facts in folk tales and repressed others. Sexual relationships and pregnancy were eliminated when the tales were translated into written form. Incestuous relationships as well as other illicit sexual encounters were glossed over by Christian imagery in the editorial zest of the Grimm brothers. In certain tales, the devil seduces the daughter instead of the father as the folkloristic version tells. Tatar says that the Grimms “found it easy [. . .] to reintroduce the devil by mutilating the folkloristic text whose authenticity they so admired. [. . .] The facts of life seemed to have been more disturbing to the Grimms than the harsh realities of everyday life” (10–11). 7

For female stereotypes in fairy tales, see Röhrich 1986 and Stone 1986. Margaret Atwood’s rewriting of the popular story of “The Little Red Hen” is another example of a feminist rereading and inversion of popular tales and wisdom. See Atwood in Nischik 1994, 141–44, as well as Nischik’s analysis of the story in the conclusion to the same volume, 167–70. 8

See Marina Warner’s comments on the history of “The Little Mermaid.” From the Beast to the Blonde (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 397–407, here 397. 9

For the use and subversion of Christian imagery and Greek mythology in Intertidal Life, see Goldman 1997, 60–61; Coldwell 1986, 140–49; and Irvine 1987, 284–93. 10

In his review of Intertidal Life, Grady claims that the epigraphs are from Captain George Vancouver’s journals which are also quoted throughout the novel (1985, 33). My own research led me to assume that the quotes are taken from: Josef Espinosa y Tello, A Spanish Voyage to Vancouver and the North-west Coast of America: Being the Narrative of the Voyage Made in the Year 1792 by the Schooners Ituil and Mexicana to explore the Strait of Fuca, trans. from Spanish and with an introduction by Cecil Jane, London 1930. However, Thomas mixes her sources, and sometimes the epigraphs taken from Espinosa y Tello appear as if taken from Vancouver’s journals.

11

For a discussion of “mapping” in Canadian women’s writings, see Buss 1993; Howells 1991; and Goldman 1997. 12

For an exploration of Intertidal Life as a Künstlerroman, see Buckman 1996, 71– 87.

13

Various critics have claimed that Intertidal Life operates with light and darkness and that the moonlight stands for the female zone whereas the lighthouse represents the male territory of exploration. Coldwell 1986, 140–49; Irvine 1987, 284–93. 14

For the topos of mapping in Canadian women’s literature, see Aritha van Herk 1982, 75–87; Howells, 1996, 115–26. For further reference, see footnote 37. 15

Huggan quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on the wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action and as a meditation” (Deleuze and Guattari as quoted by Huggan 1995, 409).

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16

Although “mutiny” is to be taken literally as rebellion, Thomas might be extending the pun on “mute” and “mutilation” here which runs through the whole novel. Mute points to women’s position as silent other in the symbolic order, and mutilation to the violence hidden in romantic contexts. Mutiny would be a rebellion against being muted and mutilated by discourses, a way of finding a voice. 17

See my discussion of essentialism and feminist theory in the introduction, and in the chapter on Marlatt.

3: “You Can’t Even Imagine?”: Monstrous Possibilities of Female Identity in Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic Introduction: “a monstrous leap of imagination” “This is a child! [. . .] We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!” “I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?” [. . .] Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!” “Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” “Yes, if you like,” said Alice. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

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OR DAPHNE MARLATT’S 1988 book Ana Historic, Lewis Carroll’s writings are also important subtexts as they question conventions and playfully illustrate that what is real depends on cultural frameworks and individual perspective. As another contemporary Canadian woman writer who breaks down linguistic and narrative structures, Marlatt seems to share a lot of Audrey Thomas’s aims and strategies. Like Thomas, Marlatt disrupts surface structures to defamiliarize accepted notions of femininity and to question the coherence and continuity of gender and sexual identity. Both authors mirror the process of identity (de)formation in the narratives of their protagonists who are both writers themselves. This makes the novels self-reflective, they tell stories just as they contemplate the conditions of storytelling and the correlation between storytelling and identity formation. Just like the protagonist of Thomas’s novel, Alice Hoyle, the main character in Ana Historic, Annie Anderson, remodels her life story drawing on traditional images as well as on new possible identities she imagines for herself. The boundary blurs between what is remembered and what is imagined in the minds of the protagonists who

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through their use of intertexts also render the boundary between factual and fictional accounts of experience an arbitrary one. Alice starts doubting the linearity of exploration narratives and Annie starts doubting the objectivity of historiography. Both protagonists counteract these discourses with their own private, autobiographic recollections. Whereas exploration accounts and historiography create the effect of realism and objectivity through a teleological narrative structure, Thomas and Marlatt convey experiences in unruly and self-reflective narratives that render the mechanisms of their own construction. And yet, there are fundamental differences between the two texts. While in Intertidal Life the reader witnesses the tearing apart of an identity with no new subject position being offered, in Ana Historic another identity emerges from the fragments. Thomas offers no substantial shift in her protagonist’s frame of reference, whereas Marlatt takes apart the very frames that “freeze” her protagonist into a specific “feminine act.” Hence, while I argued in the previous chapter that Thomas mutilates the corporeality of language to make palpable the implosion of Alice’s identity, I will argue in this chapter that Marlatt deconstructs linguistic and narrative structures to make possible the realization of Annie’s lesbian identity. Whereas Alice Hoyle remains caught up in the traditional images of love, marriage, and motherhood until the end, which she criticizes but never abandons, Marlatt offers her protagonist another possibility. Annie not only destroys traditional images of femininity but exposes the mechanisms of this image making as entirely relying on a male gaze and on a heterosexual imperative. The other possibility that emerges in the text is a homosexual perspective that undercuts binary notions of femininity and masculinity. Through her textual devices Marlatt shows that heterosexuality is a regulatory fiction, which “frames” men and women into one story by ruling out more complex constructions of gender and sexual identity. She not only interrogates the heterosexual matrix but generally calls gender into question as a stable category by surfacing the discontinuities within constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Her assumption is that in the interest of patriarchy, men and women are lured into apparently stable gendered subject positions. This requires the repression of all other desires in order to uphold the matrix of heterosexuality. Marlatt presupposes that language is organized around the phallus as signifier, and that patriarchy — which literally means the law of the father — is not only reflected in, but consistently reaffirmed by, language. Her “monstrous,” because unruly, language and narrative style aim at surfacing female desires suppressed by a patriarchal system that constructs woman in certain ways.

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Marlatt’s novel is a trying text. Trying in that it presents a challenge to the reader and trying because in its highly experimental style it attempts to create other realities. Rather than being subservient to the plot, language becomes a creative substance for Marlatt with which “to salvage the wreckage of language so freighted with phallocentric values it must be subverted and re-shaped [. . .]” (Marlatt 1991, 10). Punctuation is not used syntactically but — similar to the pauses in a musical score — aesthetically to set a rhythm: sometimes sentences run on without a period while at other times a period is set after every word creating a staccato rhythm. Marlatt also experiments with the appearance of text on the page: dense wordfields are contrasted with almost blank pages, various intertexts appear in italics, and the narrator’s printed voice lacks capital letters because Annie wants to break with the law of the father epitomized in “all these capital letters to convince themselves of its [his1 tory’s], of their [men’s], significance.” In my analysis of the text I follow prominent linguistic and narrative devices that capture how Marlatt surfaces homosexuality as a repressed possibility in her text. Ana Historic is a “monstrous,” because unruly, text in form and content. As such, it reflects in its narrative and linguistic strategies the emergence of a monstrous, because rule-breaking, possibility of lesbian identity. Marlatt creates a textual labyrinth to defamiliarize familiar paths and to prepare the ground for another possible identity.

“Who’s There?”: Entering the Labyrinth The labyrinthine structure of the text, which may be entered but not easily traversed — text whose passageways pose no easy passage, wind back on each other and forward, or end abruptly in confining walls — text a woman is finding her way through, hesitant which way to proceed, glancing at images off walls which offer dubious reflections at best — maze of dead ends (in which she finds herself?) Daphne Marlatt, “Her(e) in the Labyrinth: Reading/Writing Theory”

The initial sentence of Ana Historic “Who’s There? she was whispering. knock knock. in the dark” (AH, 9), directly addresses its readers and draws them into the labyrinthine structure of a text that indeed “may be entered but not easily traversed.” The urgency of the question is conveyed by the capital letters, and, like the protagonist, the readers feel lost in the dark, as we neither know the speaker nor the addressee of the sentence. At the same time, we feel like intruders into a textual space.

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Throughout the text, Marlatt plays with personal pronouns and subject positions, so that often the reader feels like s/he is being summoned by the text. Marlatt confuses identities; she questions the positions of characters, readers and author by saying “[. . .] she who is you/or 2 me/‘i’/address this to” (AH, 129). Ana Historic opens by asking: who is reading this text and who is writing it out of which interest? The text consistently deals with the conditions for and the process of fiction making and renders its own ideological impetus. In order to externalize how women are drawn into gendered subject positions, the text discloses patriarchal ideology encoded in linguistic and narrative structures, and at the same time bares its own feminist underpinnings. The imitated sound “knock knock” in the first sentence recurs throughout Ana Historic and is paradigmatic for Marlatt’s poetic style. It describes her project of sounding out linguistic and narrative structures for other realities hidden within. This search for other realities does not imply that a (better) feminist ideology would be able to find coherent identities under a (bad) patriarchal surface structure but defamiliarizes what we have been trained to perceive as real or natural. Marlatt shows that reality is always discursively constructed and that language can never represent a reality but always encodes somebody’s reality while excluding others. The other realities or imagined possibilities she makes visible are not truer, better, or more coherent but are what has been suppressed in a language governed by patriarchal images and structures. In contrast, Marlatt employs a linguistic style that defies the rational teleology and linearity of patriarchal language. It instead flows into the cracks and fissures between oppositions and circles back in puns, anagrams, and homonyms to create new, unfamiliar contexts. Marlatt propagates a language where “[. . .] sound will initiate thought by a process of association. words call each other up, evoke each other, provoke each other, nudge each other into utterance” (Marlatt 1984b, 53–54). This language is modeled on the female body and evokes meaning through association and play rather than through definiteness and linearity. Marlatt shows language to be a confining material, on the one hand, and a creative substance, on the other hand. “Knock knock” stands for the search for other possible identities already inherent in the language 3 system. The initial “knock knock” furthermore points to the text’s strategy of ironic inversion as it echoes Freud’s lecture “On Femininity”: “Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle 4 of the nature of femininity.” Marlatt un-riddles the nature of femininity by unraveling the discursive mechanisms that first construct femininity

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and then render it natural. She knocks on the verbal surfaces of concepts that prescribe a specific feminine identity in order to question their discontent. Whereas Freud tried to elucidate the riddle of femininity through a male gaze in which woman is always the deviation from the male norm, Marlatt shifts the frame from an androcentric to a woman centered perspective. On the level of plot, the opening question introduces the reader to the protagonist’s search for other identities outside of and within herself. At the beginning of the novel, the adult Annie is awoken at night by her own “fear-defiant child voice carried still in her chest” (AH, 9). She remembers how as a child she searched her home for an ubiquitous threat and would whisper in the dark “Who’s There?” Her awakening to her own searching voice as an adult signifies her interrogation of past and future identities as well as her emerging lesbian desire. She begins a foray into her past to understand better what coerced her into the roles she is finding herself entangled in as a grown-up. Annie is the research assistant of her husband, Richard, a renowned history professor who condescendingly dedicates his books “[. . .] to my wife without whose patient assistance this book would never have been completed” (AH, 79). Annie dropped out of her graduate program to marry her history professor and now does the groundwork for Richard’s books. The novel sets in with Annie’s awakening and her wish to abandon her roles as dutiful wife and dedicated assistant. Another thing Annie is grappling with at the beginning of the novel is her mother’s recent death. Annie thinks that Ina, her mother, committed suicide because she got stuck in stereotypical notions of femininity and lacked the imagination for other possible lives. Because Annie fears that her life might veer in a similar direction, she tries to break with stereotypical patterns of femininity and to find ways out of that “[. . .] cultural labyrinth of our inheritance, mother to daughter to mother . . .” (AH, 24). The staged dialogues Annie imagines/remembers between her mother and herself serve to trace how Annie learned to become a woman. Rather than portraying a single character, the novel introduces different voices that are all part of and at the same time lie outside of the protagonist’s consciousness. On the one hand, Ina is a real person and the text partly reconstructs her life story. The initial “Who’s There?” also refers to Annie’s attempt to re-member her mother’s life and her psychic struggles. Annie recalls that the omnipresent fear she sensed in the house as a child emanated from her mother. The phrase “my mother who . . .” appears soon after the entry quote and links Annie’s search for other identities to finding out more about her mother’s fate. Annie knocks on

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the facts she knows about her mother to find out what or who else was hidden under the stern Garbo face her mother painted on every day. On the other hand, Ina is not a real person but her voice is an intrinsic part of Annie’s own attempt at constituting an identity. Her mother’s voice serves as the mouthpiece of tradition and embodies the regulatory practices that have kept Annie within certain boundaries of femininity because Ina had utterly internalized those standards. Ina frequently interrupts Annie’s musings and reprimands her whenever she wants to leave conventional paths. Their dialogue spells out Annie’s struggle with conventional notions of femininity where women have to be either “ladies” or “tramps” with no other option. Annie is in search of a foremother, the question “Who’s There?” also refers to her desperate need for a role model. In the course of the novel, Annie creates a possible role model for herself out of the fragmented story of a historical woman. During her research for her husband, she stumbles upon the name of a Mrs. Richards in the Vancouver city archives. The few known facts are that Mrs. Richards, a young widow, came to British Columbia in 1873 as a school teacher, bought a piano — quite a noteworthy event at the Western logging frontier — and later married a Mr. Ben Springer. With that, history wrote her off, as after her wedding she disappeared from the public records into the private life of a married woman. For lack of facts, Annie starts imagining Mrs. Richards’s life by inventing a journal she might have kept. By reverting to the form of journal writing, Marlatt cunningly points to a possible alternative history of women’s writing that could be underlying and counteracting the factual, official version of historiography. Because Mrs. Richards in the historical records “has only the name of a dead man” (AH, 37), Annie baptizes her “Ana/ that’s her name:/back, backward, reversed/again, anew” (AH, 43). In Ana Historic, this sentence appears in the form of a poem on an otherwise almost empty page, the name Ana handwritten. In an interview, Marlatt points out that the prefix “ana” “is very contradictory. It means upwards and forwards as well as backwards. It has a whole cluster of meanings associated with it” (Bowering 1989, 102). “Ana” literally veers in all directions. At the same time that the name “Annie” is an anaphonic version of “Ana,” because it imitates only certain syllables of the word, it is a palindrome of “Ina,” as it exactly reverses the letters. The similarity of the names Ana, Ina, and Annie indicates that the three life stories overlap and that they are different narrative versions of the same story, namely of how women learn to become women. Ana’s name is anacyclical because her story not only belongs to the past but increasingly helps Annie to forge a new identity for herself in the future. When in the

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diaries of a contemporary Annie finds evidence that Mrs. Richards at some point had a room in Gastown where she gave piano lessons, her imagination is stirred. She shifts the narrative frame from creating the traditional image of a woman who was a schoolmarm and stopped working as soon as she got married to create the possible story of a woman who made herself economically independent. Annie pictures that, rather than getting married, Ana met Birdie Steward a “historic” person who arrived on the same ship as Ana and became Gastown’s first saloon keeper. In Annie’s version of the story, the two enter into a love relationship and support themselves financially by giving piano lessons, thus stepping out of repressive gender roles in a twofold way. Annie takes what she calls “a monstrous leap of imagination” (AH, 135) by picturing a lesbian relationship in Victorian British Columbia. Imagination increasingly becomes a method in its own right: it counteracts the closure of fact, historiographic fact as well as apparently factual gender roles, and it opens up fate for new possibilities of constructing gender and sexual identity. Ana’s imagined diary entries become the third voice in the text, and again she, on the one hand, is a “real” person whose life story Annie tries to reconstruct but, on the other hand, she is an imagined and u-topic voice for Annie’s own possible future. The “Who’s There?” of the beginning broadens into a search for the other possible identities of women in the course of the novel. Annie asks: “who’s there? (knock, knock). who else is there in this disappearing act when you keep leaving yourself behind the next bend. given that ‘yourself’ is everything you’ve been, the trail leading backwards and away from you behind your feet. evident. named. recognizable in fact” (AH, 46, her emphasis). As the quote illustrates, Annie is searching for other identities within herself as well as for role models that would encourage other paths in the past and future. Toying with the emerging other life of Mrs. Richards encourages Annie to abandon the feminine behavior patterns she learned from her mother and to let her imagination “run wild” instead. Annie comes to question her sexual identity as well as the mechanisms that coerced her into being woman. The novel ends with the love making of Annie and Zoe, an activist feminist she met in the archives, and suggests that Annie frees herself from Richard and from a patriarchal frame of reference by writing her own story about Ana Richards and by entering into a relationship with Zoe. “Who’s There?” exemplifies Marlatt’s play with her characters’ identities and furthermore points to her rhetorical style. Marlatt searches for the other possibilities within words, stories, and sign systems. That language can conceal and reveal identities at the same time is most palpable

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in Marlatt’s anagrammatic play with her characters’ names. The anagrams connect the plot to Marlatt’s underlying agenda because anagrams question de Saussure’s notion of the synchronic sign by surfacing forgotten or repressed other meanings of a word. Anagrams rearrange letters of a word into new (non)sense and thereby reveal words within words. They are used as cryptographic procedures to obscure meaning. Marlatt uses anagrams in her text to show that identity is never fixed but always shifting. The fact that Annie, Ana, and Ina are made from the same letter material once more points out that they are facets of one and the same person. Simultaneously, they are same and other and make unifying notions of identity impossible from the start. Ana and Ina differ by a letter only because they both serve as test spaces for Annie’s identity constructions. Annie muses: “Ana/Ina/whose story is this/(the difference of a single letter)/(the sharing of a not)”(AH, 67). Sharing a “not” linguistically points to woman’s position as negativity and absence in the symbolic order, and, on the level of narrativity, to the lack of choice women have had in creating their own life stories. In contrast to Ina, Ana’s story, not only signifies a “not” but her name is Janus-faced. For Annie, Ana becomes a narrative mode of transition from a patriarchal to a different order. “Who’s There?” refers to the detection of other possibilities within names, which are the place holders for life stories. This is palpable in the names of two other female characters in the novel who stand inside but also outside of the patriarchal order: Zoe and Birdie. When Annie meets Zoe, the “nots” of the patriarchal order dissolve: the “forbidden” lesbian love as well as woman as lack and absence in the symbolic order turn into affirmative entities because “within a feminist frame of reference and address, the zero of phallogocentric system becomes ‘Zoe’” (Goldman 1997, 119). Annie turns from a preoccupation with the past and the dead to the present as “Zoe” means “living” 5 (Scheel 1996, 107). Read as an anagram, Birdie contains two possibilities as the word can be reconfigured to mean “bride,” woman situated within the patriarchal system, or “bird,” free to step outside of those conventions. Jones claims that the name Birdie evokes Hélène Cixous’s punning play on the French word voler as meaning both “stealing” and “flying.” In Cixous’s theory the double meaning refers to a “transgressory feminine stealing of language, as well as taking off from the solid ground of fact as it is established in male discourse” (Jones 1993, 159– 60). “Birdie” denotes an imaginative possibility apart from the usual story and stands for a style of writing that inscribes this option onto the page. Shifting the male gaze and breaking a heterosexual imperative for Marlatt is closely intertwined with shifting meaning in the sign system. Her linguistic style is transgressive and associative rather than linear and

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linguistic style is transgressive and associative rather than linear and it surfaces other possible meanings by exploring the gaps in-between oppositions, most fundamentally the opposition of male versus female. In her text, Marlatt explores the closures of language as well as the creative potential of a different language.

“Wardrobes/Wordrobes”: Closeted Female Identities Daß das Geschlecht eine Verkleidung ist, heißt nicht, daß man sich richtig anziehen kann. The fact that gender is a masquerade does not imply that you can dress properly. Barbara Vinken Dekonstruktiver Feminismus

One metaphor that is introduced early on and that trickles through the whole text is “wordrobes.” The pun calls up the image of words as robes or as dressing up ideas, as well as the image of words as wardrobes, as structures that closet off and exclude other possible meanings. When Annie in the beginning is awoken by her own child voice she remembers how she would try to fight the lingering fear in the house by “stealing at night into the basement with the carving knife toward those wardrobes at the bottom of the staircase. wardrobes. wordrobes. warding off what?” (AH, 9). Taking the ward in wardrobe literally, and correlating it with words, Marlatt implies that wordrobes also guard limitations and install restrictions. The pun spells out Marlatt’s assumption that language is imbued with patriarchal structures that dispossess women from their bodies and desires by voicing only one prescriptive reality. Words guard the interests of patriarchy, and “ward off” claims to other realities or desires that would transcend the system. Words are like wardrobes in that they closet off certain meanings and identities while protecting others. Wordrobes hide ideological implications. Marlatt wants to surface the warded off other possibilities of gender and sexuality by employing an unruly syntax and narrative structure. The image of closeted off identities also calls up the notion of suppressed homosexuality, of the lesbian in the 6 closet. Part of the novel traces Annie’s remembrance of her childhood and of how repression was taught to her through language. The restrictions and limitations encoded in language, that her mother passes down to Annie as a teenager initiate her into a deeply gendered world. In that

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world, words constitute a reality where girls are passive and boys are active. In her adolescence, Annie learns many words that transport unspoken dangers and serve to keep women within passive behavior patterns: “skid row was a name we learned. rape was a word that was hidden from us. ‘but what would he do?’ ‘bad things you wouldn’t like’” (AH, 7 19). “Skid row” circumscribes violence against women, the lurking danger in dark alleys, without naming an aggressor. Not only are women victimized but de-sexualized as sex appears as a threat while leaving their own desires unspoken. Rather than being taught to confront their fear, women are taught to adjust their behavior accordingly: proper women avoid dark alleys. The monster lurking in the wordrobe “skid row” is the fear of sexual acts that Ina passes on to her daughter without further explanation. Marlatt carefully tracks processes of internalization and of women’s unwilling participation in their own oppression. Later in the text, we learn that Ina deeply internalized the dichotomy of Whore/Madonna as two exclusive behavior patterns for women with no other options. Against this background it becomes clear why she thinks the responsibility for what happens in skid rows, for unwanted sexual acts, is found in improper feminine behavior rather than in a system where women are made the objects of sexuality in various ways. When Annie behaved in unfeminine ways as a girl, her mother would call her a “tomboy.” As an adult, Annie reflects on the deeply gendered structures discernible in language: “tom, the male of the species plus boy. double masculine, as if girl were completely erased” (AH, 13). Linguistically a tautology because doubly marked, “tomboy” denotes a girl who unnaturally behaves like a boy. The word reveals a gender apparatus that creates the notion that gender necessarily and naturally follows from sex. Girl is erased in the word because spirited behavior is unfeminine. Annie remembers the many things she was not allowed to do because they were too spirited for a girl: “Soul: generic feminine. it is the man who has Spirit. what does Soul, what does a woman do with her unexpressed preferences, her own desires? (damned up, a torrent to let loose.) and this is what you [Ina] were trying to live up to. the neuter” (AH, 35). Gender is not only the opposite to sex but the very apparatus that constructs gendered bodies: binary gender oppositions present man as active and woman as passive, and these concepts are inscribed onto bodies that must behave accordingly. The “torrent to let loose” refers to repressed desires and identities as well as to a torrent of speech that has to be released. Annie concludes: “it wasn’t tom, or boy, it wasn’t hoyden, minx, baggage, but what lay below names — barely even touched by them” (AH, 13). What lies “below names” is the ideology of gender

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that posits boys and girls as polar opposites and attaches specific characteristics to them that not only reflect difference but hierarchies. However, hidden in the wordrobe “tomboy” is another monstrous third option that explodes binary gender oppositions as well as a system that pairs gender, sex, and sexuality. In the early nineteenth century, “tomboy” denoted physical wildness associated with unruly women but “by 1888, the tomboy became linked to those who show other girls ‘uncouth signs of affection’” (Butler 1993, 155). What can be etymologically unearthed in “tomboy” is a lesbian identity that would transgress the boy/boyish, girl/girlish division. The example of “tomboy” shows that wordrobes not only closet off identities but can open doors to a different order. How wordrobes have the effect of expropriating women by locking out their desires, is explored in the text by looking at the implications underlying the word “lady.” In the novel, all three women are alienated from their bodies by trying to achieve the status of a lady because “lady” prescribes a certain feminine behavior excluding real bodies and sexual desires. In Ana Richards’s time, “lady” illustrates how gender differences are inevitably grounded in material differences as women are economically dependent on marriage. Annie imagines how one day Ana wrote in her diary: “I cannot keep only to drawing rooms and the School! I am not a Proper Lady perhaps” (AH, 32). Ana’s statement exposes the confinements of “lady” because it prescribes a passive life of decorum. Moreover, in Ana’s time, not being considered a proper lady posed a tremendous economic threat, as only being considered a lady increased her chances of marriage, one of the few ways for a woman at the time to enhance her livelihood. In an interview, Marlatt points out that the world of Ana Richards, a logging community, is especially governed by men, and that women only had the limited choices of becoming school teachers, wives, or prostitutes (Bowering 1989, 98). Thus Ana’s statement that she can neither keep to drawing rooms (wife) nor to school rooms (teacher) only seems to leave one other option in the narrow gender grid of her time. Annie muses about Ana’s fear to deviate from the norm: “Proper, she says, Lady capitalized, and it is barely sounded, the relationship between proper and property” (AH, 32). Property and propriety are indeed linked in a patriarchal society because only proper ladies are valuable commodities, and proper ladies had to suppress their own desires. Only prostitute, the other option to wife/teacher, spells out the sexuality that “lady” rules out. Yet, prostitute offers a position as objects, not subjects of desire to women. With “lady,” the old division

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of either Madonna/Lady or whore is evoked. In Ana’s time, either women assume the position of lady with hardly any agency or selfpossession or they are relegated to the margin of society. “Lady” turns out to be an identity trap because it promises status at the cost of suppressing the body. Annie concludes: “words, that shifting territory. never one’s own. full of deadfalls and hidden claims to a reality others have made. Lady, for instance. a word that has claimed so much from women trying to maintain it. [. . .] a certain way of walking, of talking. and always that deference, that pleased attention to the men who gave them value, a station in life, a reason for existing” (AH, 32). “Lady” is a discursive formation that regulates the female body as ladies have to walk and talk in appropriate ways. Ladies act not on their own account but to serve somebody else’s image. The apparent status turns to selfeffacement as “lady” closets off the realization of other life stories because “lady” is “— [. . .] a figurehead, and having nothing” (AH, 116). Annie realizes that she has a decorative rather than an active function in her marriage. When Richard’s students come to visit them at home, they say to Annie “he’s such a wonderful prof, you must feel so lucky,” as if she attained status through his fame. She answers “yes,” but at the same time thinks of her marriage as: “the lie. the defensive lie our lying together is. the small space desire gets backed into. boxed. off.” The defensive lie not only refers to the facade of their marriage but to the absence of sexual desire between them because lying — in the double sense of the word — together in bed they both try getting around making love: “‘want to?’ ‘(yes, no, yes) do you?’” (AH, 59). In order to keep her status, Annie is ready to negate her sexual desires and stay within her unhappy marriage. When Richard finally takes her work on Ana’s story seriously and offers to transfer Annie’s research duties to one of his graduate students, Annie is: “dying to offer my time again, so as not to be left out of the book, the marriage, history” (AH, 147). Annie is still afraid to take “the monstrous leap of imagination” that would take her into the unknown and out of an oppressive yet status giving system. Annie recalls how hard her mother strove to be a lady. As a British immigrant who grew up in a colonial setting in India, Ina felt alienated in “uncivilized” Canada and tried to hold on to the rigid role of a lady she had utterly internalized. She suppressed her own desires and dreams and with a stiff upper lip lived up to “women’s lot” (AH, 79), thinking she had no other choice. Ina stuck to the correct gender choreography not realizing that “the ‘right track’ is full of holes, pot-holes of absence” (AH, 17), and finally went “off the deep end”(AH, 93). In hospital, her hysteria was treated with electroshock therapy; her thoughts were erased,

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not understood or re-membered. Ina committed suicide because she could not abandon her ideal of “lady” but could not lower the stakes of what “lady” demanded from her either. Annie says: “. . .i didn’t realize the only alternative to lady you knew, was tramp [. . .]” (AH, 34). When “tramp” is the only other option to “lady,” the range for constituting an identity is indeed a narrow one. Ina is caught in a rigid opposition that leaves no imaginative space for other identities. She is imprisoned in a story without variation and in a symbolic order that rests on binary oppositions. Wright has pointed out that: “The Symbolic Order is based on nothing but the principle of a splitting, a binary yes/no which any subject has to accept in order to emerge from the Real” (Wright 1989, 143). We can only understand the world in terms of binary oppositions because they enable us to constitute reality. However, whereas the notion of difference is inevitable for our perception of the world and of human beings, the danger lies in setting these oppositions in absolute and universal terms: “Under such circumstances language is no longer a proper game, with others having places equivalent to one’s own, but a manipulation by others, whereby the subject is placed in a field of force within which it is compelled to adopt a false identity” (Wright 1989, 143, my emphasis). One could object to Wright’s notion of a “false identity” because it seems to imply that there exists a “right or correct” identity. However, “false” refers to a lack of choice in an order that inevitably identifies women with the term of lower status. Language ceases to be a “proper game” when oppositions go rigid and become bound up with hierarchies because women cannot achieve an independent status. As proper also means “one’s own” or “belonging to oneself,” the expression proper lady is a contradiction in terms because in the symbolic order a lady can never achieve a status of her own but is always dependent on the male gaze. Rigid oppositions lead to the exclusion and persecution of whatever is other. Deviant women are marked as outsiders, as Annie remembers from her own schooldays: “tramp was a word nice girls used to brand those outside their group — tramp, slut, bitch” (AH, 34). Women participate in denouncing those who do not fit the gender norm because they have internalized strict oppositions and the fear of being considered ab-normal. Marlatt time and again explores the lack of support among mothers and daughters. In another staged dialogue Annie says to her mother: “you taught us your fear, you taught us what you knew about a world where even uncles were not to be trusted. you grew more afraid as our sexuality came budding to the fore — [. . .] ladies keep to the background. ladies are the soothing background their men come home

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to” (AH, 34–35, her emphasis). “Lady” encapsulates a story of fear and taboos as well as a story of internalized shame: “pride on the outside, and on the inside — shame. [. . .] sweaty socks in the laundry cupboard (ladies don’t sweat), bloody panties. blood” (AH, 61). With the initiation into the world of ladies, Annie has to hide the facts of her body to serve a fictive image. Annie wants to liberate herself from stereotypical behavior patterns and from negative notions of the female body that are “handed down from friend to friend, sister to sister, mother to daughter. hand-me-downs, too small for what i really felt” (AH, 62). Marlatt further explores the correlation between proper and property in her play with the “proper” names of her characters. A name “legislates viable subjects through the institution of sexual difference and compulsory heterosexuality” (Butler 1993, 152). Names confer gendered identities onto people and establish power structures. Name-giving in our culture is based on the Law of the Father because it is the names of men that are passed down to the next generation and that indicate belonging to the same family. Butler therefore calls patronymic names “nominal zones of phallic control” (Butler 1993, 153). Women, in contrast, enter into the patrilinear organization by giving up their name: “For women, then, propriety is achieved through having a changeable name [. . .] which means that the name is always dependent on the social exigencies of paternity and marriage. Expropriation is thus the condition of identity for women” (153). The proper name does not bestow an independent position on women but marks them as somebody’s property. Annie notes that she is her husband Richard’s Annie. Before entering into a relationship with Zoe at the end of the novel, Annie renames herself. The question “knock knock, who’s there?” is posed once more, and it is then that Annie can abandon the test spaces she created through the stories of Ina and Ana, and write her own name and story: Annie Richards. the sound of a door closing. i want to knock: can you hear? i want to answer her [Zoe] who’s there? not Ana or Ina, those transparent covers. Ana Richards Richard’s Anna. [. . .] Annie/Ana — arose by another name, whole wardrobes of names guarding the limitations — we rise above them. Annie isn’t Richard’s or even Springer’s. Annie Torrent, i said. (AH, 152, my emphasis)

The “other name,” as well as “wardrobes of names guarding the limitations” refer to a language imbued with patriarchal ideology and shaped by a heterosexual matrix. By entering into a relationship with Zoe, Annie arrives at the possibility of a different subject position. Ina and Ana are “transparent covers” because their voices really are part of

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Annie, but at the same time situate her in a frame she wants to transcend. Annie no longer wants to be “Richard’s Annie,” part of a patrilinear order and gives herself her own last name: “Torrent.” By renaming herself, Annie releases the torrent of speech that her mother Ina kept damned up inside, and simultaneously releases the torrent of her own desire. From a patriarchal frame of reference where women acquire an identity precisely by giving up a name/identity and subjecting themselves to the Law of the Father, she shifts to a female centered frame of reference by meeting Zoe. A(nnie) arrives at Z(oe) and at a different form of 10 entrustment. Annie “Torrent” denotes unruliness and movement; instead of denoting a stable and coherent identity, her name becomes a shifting sign for “queering” sexuality. In looking at the phrase “proper lady,” Annie’s initial question “wardrobes. wordrobes. warding off what?” seems to be answered. The content, the monster hidden in the word “lady” is a conglomeration of male projections that disown women from their bodies and desires. Against this closure of language that excludes physical realities and experiences of women, Marlatt tries to set a style of language that is closely connected to the female body, as will be explicated in the last part of this chapter.

“(F)act”: Narrative Frames, Gender, and Fiction Theory Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Through the metaphor of words as “wordrobes,” Marlatt illustrates how patriarchal language closets off identities by legitimizing some while disparaging others. With the pun: “what is fact? (f)act. the f stop of act. a still photo in the ongoing cinerama” (AH, 56), Marlatt further explores how femininity really is a selective and imperative story while purporting to be natural. Fact stops the act(ion) and reifies people and events into specific stories while bracketing off other possibilities. Whereas “wordrobes” primarily captured the linguistic devices Marlatt uses to question gender and sexual identity, “(f)act” will point to the narrative devices used in the novel. The image “(f)act” works in a twofold way in my reading: The bracketed f, on the one hand, captures how patriarchy freezes women into what Marlatt calls “the feminine act,” and, on the other hand, it represents how the female has been bracketed in historical

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and other factual discourses that have suppressed women’s stories, bodies, and experiences. The “feminine act” refers to stereotypical stories of womanhood that reify women in a set of specific feminine roles, and bracketing the female alludes to the fact that women’s experiences and realities are often omitted in historical and other official discourses. In the pun, “what is fact? (f)act. the f stop of act. a still photo in the ongoing cinerama,” Marlatt relates facts as components of (historiographic and other) discourses to still photos as elements of documentation to show how both capture just one moment in an ongoing story. This one instant, however, becomes authoritative because it is taken to represent the whole story. While apparently documenting reality, the one selected “still photo” constructs an illusion of reality and cuts out all other images. To the same extent, facts are selective narrative frames that capture one version of an event only. In the same way that Marlatt’s own employment of language counteracts the closure of wordrobes by reinscribing suppressed elements of the feminine and of the female body, her chaotic narrative defies frames that either exclude or rigidly define the feminine. Marlatt frequently superimposes two different narrative frames to confuse clear cut gender divisions. Marlatt looks at how patriarchal ideology factualizes gender identities by making them appear natural and stable like a still photo while “the cinerama,” the range of other possibilities outside this frame, remains changing and moving. Marlatt presupposes that women are framed into a “feminine act” because the camera lens, the gaze, is patriarchal and is aligned along a heterosexual imperative. Using her marginalized position as a woman and a lesbian, she not only interrogates normative gender codes but selects other moments from the cinerama of history. This procedure is an ironic and self-reflexive inversion as she remains aware that her selection is just as unreal and incomplete as selections made through a patriarchal lens. Marlatt does not try to represent the whole picture but she radically accentuates other details that are frequently excluded from the historical picture, such as the possibility of a lesbian relationship in Victorian British Columbia. Whereas facts frame people into stasis, the word “cinerama,” presumably a blend of cinema and drama, evokes a myriad of other possible emplotments and images. Whereas “still photos” allude to processes of documentation and factualization, cinema/drama is related to imagination as a transgressive force. Imagination/fiction becomes movement out of claustrophobic life stories into new possibilities. Jones points out that “the ‘f stop,’ literally [is] a photographic gauge for calculating the opening of the lens aperture, which regulates the

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amount of light reaching the film, thus predetermining the ‘obscurity’ of its subject, just as conventional history prescribes what constitutes the ‘significant’” (Jones 1993, 155, her emphasis). Marlatt investigates who selects the frame and pushes the shutter in photos/facts and on which grounds. By pointing out the ideological mechanisms at work in the creation of an image/story, she destroys the illusion of reality that photos/facts try to maintain. Moreover, patriarchy is shown to be just one lens. One we do not recognize as such because patriarchy is the unmarked, the norm, whereas otherselective lenses such as (feminism), (queer), or (colored) are marked as abnormal. Reality is always subjectively constructed through the eye of the beholder who selects moments from an ongoing story and who decides on the whole picture. When Annie meets Zoe, she enters another framework and the whole picture changes. Marlatt shows gender to be an ideological apparatus that — like the camera — produces gendered bodies and identities. She traces how Annie is made into a woman by being framed in the “feminine act.” Narrative plays a major role in this framing, as women internalize dominant stories of femininity and make them part of their reality. Because narratives — historical as well as family stories — interpellate subjects into gendered positions, Marlatt takes apart familiar narrative structures. 11 In her contributions to fiction theory, Marlatt shows how she questions conventional image making and narrative framing, and how she changes the narrative lens to create other images in her own fiction. In collaboration with other writers and editors of the feminist theory magazine Tessera, Marlatt embellished what Nicole Brossard originally termed fiction thForetic. Closely connected to écriture au féminin, fiction theory denotes a postmodern, self-reflexive, and personal form of writing that is informed by a feminist understanding of political and linguistic theory. It is “a fiction in which theory is woven into the texture of the creation, eliminating, or trying to, distinctions between genres, between prose essay, poetry, between fiction and theory” (Mezei as quoted by Kelly 1995, 69). Besides blurring the boundaries between critical and fictional discourses, fiction theory must be understood as a feminist reading and writing practice that aims at providing readers with the critical tools to cut through ideological concepts. In her editorial statement in “Theorizing Fiction Theory,” Marlatt defines fiction theory as: a corrective lens which helps us see through the fiction we’ve been conditioned to take for the real, fictions which have not only constructed woman’s “place” in patriarchal society but have constructed the very “nature” of woman. [. . .] fiction theory deconstructs these fictions while fiction theory, conscious of itself as fiction, offers a new angle on

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the “real” [. . .] this is not to say that fiction theory is busy constructing a new ideology, a new “line” [. . .] this is where vision in that other sense enters in, that which is also and could be. (Marlatt with Godard et al. 1986, 9, their emphasis)

The corrective lens shifts the gaze from a patriarchal selection to that “which is also and could be”; it envisions other potential constructions of femininity. Fiction theory provides a different outlook on woman, on the body, and on sexuality by disrupting stereotypical images and representations of women and by offering alternatives. It inverts and subverts structures, and it tilts the normal perspective to render it ridiculous and artificial. Examining the correlation of gender and narrative is at the heart of fiction theory writing which is “a narrative, usually selfmirroring, which exposes, defamiliarizes and/or subverts the fictional and gender codes determining the re-presentation of women in literature and in this way contributes to feminist theory” (Marlatt with Godard et al. 1986, 10). Marlatt breaks the still photos created through narrative frames in order to capture other representations, not realities of female identity. Throughout Ana Historic, Marlatt traces how Annie is made into a woman to expose the mechanisms that coerce women into restrictive gender roles. One aspect of this socialization is that girls learn the feminine act from their own mothers. Annie contemplates how Ina taught her “the great cover-story women inherit in fashion and makeup. you taught me how i was supposed to look, the feminine act” (AH, 60–61, her emphasis). Annie remembers how her mother practiced the learned look of femininity every day as she hid behind “the perfect implacable Garbo face” (AH, 58). Annie not only watches her mother put on makeup in front of the mirror but witnesses how Ina vanishes into the very image she wants to create. Ina is lost in the mirror because she reflects men’s wishes and desires, not her own. The face Ina puts on is not a mask, as she can no longer imagine herself without it. The Garbo face is the suit of armor Ina puts on to face the world. It is not an ironic play with identities because she has no other choice. Ina reverts to a given image because she has lost control over her own life story and acts out a stereotypical image with no variation to it. Annie realizes in retrospect: “my fear began when i realized you never saw [. . .] the you that was you, invisible in the mirror, look out at last” (AH, 58). This could be misread as implying that there is an essential identity, a true you beneath the role of femininity that can be retrieved. Yet, true you, in my understanding, again refers to other potential identities that are lost and suppressed by one imperative image. Ina does not

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search the mirror for her self-reflection but rather looks into the looking glass of patriarchy and constructs her image according to the male gaze that she has internalized. Marlatt tries to deconstruct this look, the feminine act, by making visible the layers that have been cut out by focusing the gaze in specific ways. She breaks Ina’s “implacable Garbo face” into pieces by taking apart the word implacable. Annie does not want to look behind the Garbo face to discover the true Ina, but wants to cut through the one cover-up story of femininity that paints over all other possibilities. She unravels layer by layer what is hidden by the one frame or look: im- not / plak- to be flat. layer, coating, floe(ice). flatfish, flake. to be calm (not). to please (not). placebo, placid, pleasant. none of these. a raging fire underneath, a tumult, sharp tongue, an inability to coat with sugar, please (dissemble), to fit in, no matter how you tried (AH, 58, her emphasis)

The first part of the word, “im,” indicates a negation, and the repeatedly bracketed word not in this wordfield illustrates how woman is always posited as lack and negativity in the symbolic order. The binary gender structure of this order freezes Ina’s agency, her “raging fire underneath” or her “tumult,” into one invariable, implacable act. Women’s fires and tumults are absent in this order because it is man who is Spirit and woman who is Soul in the binary system. Marlatt brackets the negatives (not) to invert this order and render the raging fire present. The “floe (ice)” stands for how Ina is “caught in the ice of representation” (Marlatt 1990c, 13) that freezes her into the stereotypical image of a Garbo-lady face. The bracketing of negations turns words into their antonyms; it alters meaning by a small device. In an essay, Marlatt says about binary oppositions: “only by altering them infinitesimally, undermining what they say, bending them into knots, into not’s and un’s, can we break the rigid difference between figure and ground which preserves 12 that figure’s hegemony, his ‘truth’” (Marlatt 1990c, 16–17). Marlatt shifts meaning within the system and digs up contradictions already inherent in words to keep the notion of difference but sever it from rigid structures and hierarchies. Words like “layer,” “coat,” and “placebo” in the wordfield again exposit “the feminine act” as a cover-up story. “To be flat” juxtaposes what happens to Ina in the end when in the psychiatric ward her assumed hysteria is treated with electroshock therapy. When Ina returns from the hospital, Annie says that her mother’s eyes were “empty, flat [. . .] you’d gone flat [. . .] it wasn’t just your memory they took. they took your imagination, your will to create things differently” (AH, 149). Ina is

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“flattened” into an image when the will to imagine herself differently is irrevocably taken away from her. As Felman states in her study on “Women and Madness”: “From her initial family upbringing throughout her subsequent development, the social role assigned to the woman is that of serving an image, authoritative and central, of man: a woman is first and foremost a daughter/a mother/a wife” (Felman 1975, 2, her emphasis). Marlatt shows that Ina lost control over her life story and “died of reason” (AH, 17), because reason was the standard she was measured against, a standard she could not meet because reason excluded large parts of what she felt and experienced. Within the narrow frame of lady versus tramp, Ina found no source to imagine herself any other way. Marlatt also suggests that Ina was unable to communicate her reality in a symbolic order that inevitably assigned her the position of negated other, because “how can one speak from the place of the Other? How can the woman be thought about outside of the Masculine/ Feminine framework, other than as opposed to man, without being subordinated to a primordial masculine model? How can madness, in a similar way, be conceived outside of its dichotomous opposition to sanity, without being subjugated to reason?” (Felman 1975, 4, her emphasis). Marlatt shows that madness or hysteria are also frames, looks imposed on women, and that madness lies in the eye of the beholder. When Ina exaggerates her role as lady as the last possible measure to break out of this role, she is branded a hysterical woman. With the depiction of Ina’s hysteria and her subsequent medical treatment, Marlatt exposes another discourse that has framed women in certain ways. Various factual intertexts, which throughout the novel appear in italics, document the medical history of the treatment for hysteria: Mechanical devices were invented for compressing ovaries or for packing them in ice. In Germany, Hegar (1830–1914) and Friederich (1825–82) were using even more radical methods, including ovarectomy and cauterization of the clitoris. The source of hysteria was still, as in Plato’s time, sought in the matrix of the female body, upon which surgical attacks were 13 unleashed. (AH, 89)

Historical texts, like this one, point to the long history of the mutilation of the female body. From a contemporary point of view, the methods not only seem barbaric but unscientific and arbitrary. Marlatt explicitly correlates hysteria and history because she sees both as gendered frames imposed on women and their bodies:

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hystery. the excision of women (who do not act but are acted upon). hysterectomy, the excision of wombs and ovaries by repression, by mechanical compression, by ice, by the knife, because we were “wrong” from the start, our physiology faulty, preoccupied as we are with the things of the flesh. spiritless — except for our rages — [. . .]. (AH, 88)

Both hysteria and history are discourses of regulation and repression. History cuts women out of the “cinerama” creating pictures that omit women, and hysterectomy cuts out the sexual difference in female bodies, which is seen as the source of hysteria. Both discourses, Marlatt purports, repress, silence, and mutilate the female body. She inserts quotations from scientific discourses showing that hysteria is constructed as a female disease and legitimized by physical and psychological differences from the male body and from “male reason.” Past medical discourses on hysteria constituted powerful tools to construct women as the Other and to marginalize them as ex-centrics. Present day theories no longer connect hysteria to the body but define it as a disorder in representation and self-representation. People suffering from hysteria experience a difference in self-representation, and they are recognized differently by other people (Mentzos 1980, 75). Hysteria stages a role; it is primarily a play with representations and a distortion of self-representation. Ina acts out a role when she puts on her Garbo face, probably in an attempt to break out of a specific representational frame by distorting it. She wants to exceed the feminine act, the still photo, but as she sees no other choices to “lady,” she exaggerates this role. Annie understands in retrospect why her mother put so much energy into constructing her lady face: “looking smart was part of your identity, evidence of the only job you had, not ‘just a housewife’” (AH, 57). Bronfen examines the correlation of photography and hysteria since both exhibit a staging of the self. She claims that in photography’s very attempt to fix the self, the self is imitated, distorted, and is hidden rather than revealed. The rise of photography, according to Bronfen, coincides with the “discovery” of a psychological disorder that also reproduces the self in a distorted manner: hysteria (Bronfen 1998, 242). Marlatt traces the double movement of unraveling and covering up identities throughout her text in the puns and anagrams she creates and in the histories she traces. She also correlates “the feminine act” with photography to show how femininity is staged rather than natural. Bronfen continues to explore the mingling of fiction and reality in both photography and the assessment of hysteria by looking at the work of neurologist Jean Martin

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Charcot. The photographs Charcot took of female hysterics in 1870 had a major influence on contemporary surrealist painters, but it is noteworthy that the hysterical poses were taken from art to begin with. Charcot made his patients simulate hysterical fits for the photographs, and they drew on images and roles available to them from theatre, literature, or art. Bronfen suggests that one should speak of the invention of hysteria because it was made up from available roles and artistic images rather than being a clearly definable medical phenomenon. Ina’s act of staging herself as Garbo, can be read as a subversive and excessive act aimed at distorting stereotypical representations. Although some of the methods described in the intertexts on the treatment of hysteria, such as excision of the womb, are no longer inflicted on Ina, her hysteria is “resolved” with shock treatment. When she comes back from the hospital, her daughter observes that “under the role or robe was no one. [. . .] they erased whole parts of you, shocked them out, overloaded the circuits so you couldn’t bear to remember. re-member” (AH, 148). Ina had gone to pieces because she was no longer able to assemble (and remember) events and emotions into a life story. In the process of creating a new identity for herself, Annie, however, remembers her mother’s story. Marlatt suggests that hysteria is another historical and gendered frame that arrests women into a specific feminine act. Madness lies in the eye of the beholder, and Marlatt implies that even normal women are framed through the male gaze. Annie recalls how learning the “feminine act” estranged her from her own body because she entered the realm of the male gaze: “she was walking her body as if it were different from her, her body with its new look. (o the luck, to be looked at. o the lack, if you weren’t. o the look. looking as if it all depended on it)” (AH, 50). Annie is talking about her body as though it were something separate from her when she says that “she was walking her body.” The new look, in the sense of her changed body in adolescence, is correlated with being newly looked at. Everything in this passage seems to turn from the active into the passive. Not that the new look as such is problematic to the teenager, but how suddenly “to be looked at,” or not, determines her value. The interplay between the similar sounds of “look, luck, and lack” opens up a social context and a discursive field in which women are judged and evaluated according to their looks. They are objectified by a gaze, and because in a patriarchal frame they gain status only through the look, everything seems to depend on it: it is tough luck if you lack the good looks. Furthermore, “lack” again points to women’s position in the symbolic order.

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Marlatt takes the patriarchal gaze, which creates woman, literally and relates how it was Annie’s father who first approved of her new body as she was becoming “another (the other) woman in the house” (AH, 50). Unwillingly but inevitably she starts competing with her mother and other women for the “approval of male eyes” (AH, 50). She no longer defines herself through her own impressions but through the impression she makes on others. Marlatt claims that although the incest taboo is one of the stabilizing forces of gender roles in western society, “incest is always present, it’s there in the way we’re trained to solicit the look, and first of all the father’s, Our Father’s. framed by a phrase that judges (virgin/tramp), sized-up in a glance, objectified. that’s what history offers [. . .] but when you’re so framed, so caught in the act, the (f) stop of act, fact — what recourse? step inside the picture and open it up” (AH, 56). Through her experimental linguistic and narrative style, Marlatt opens pictures and narrative frames from the inside. Frames that fix women into either/or, lady or tramp. Marlatt wants to break these dichotomies by adding other options in general and specifically the “third” option of homosexual relationships. For Annie, femininity is not a choice but a competence she has to master. It all depends on doing it right and she remembers herself as “trying. a trying child. trying it on for size. the role. all that she had been told would make her a woman. (knock, knock.) would she ever be one?” (AH, 49). The motif of wordrobes as well as the theme of knocking on the riddle of femininity (as constructed by men) is evoked once again by the “knock, knock” in this phrase. Moreover, gender is shown to be a story and a learned act. Looking at family photographs, Annie realizes that only those moments were captured that fit the “whole picture” of a certain definition of femininity. But the grown Annie says: “it’s not that i want to remember, how we looked or thought we ought to look, learning so fast this other looked-at image of ourselves. but how it felt to be alone unseen in the bushes of the canyon [. . .]” (AH, 52–53, my emphasis). Marlatt alludes to repressed female desires, to that which is unspeakable and unrepresentable because it does not fit the grid of the whole picture. “Unseen” refers to that which exceeds the patriarchal frame. In passages like the one quoted above, women are equated with nature, “unseen in the bushes of the canyon,” where a femininity can be found that disobeys patriarchal structures. Such equations seem problematic as they reinstall old dichotomies by associating women with the land, na14 ture, and men with culture. The connection of women with the land and nature is portrayed as a positive and fruitful one throughout Ana 15 Historic. However, “unseen in the bushes” does not refer to a truer, but

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to an untold version of femininity; it refers to moments that exceed and thus destabilize a definite gender frame. Marlatt suggests that the male gaze constructs the supposedly natural female body by teaching women how they ought to move. Annie says about her growing into a woman: “attaining the sort of grace i was meant to have as a body marked woman’s. as if it were a brand name. as if there were a standard shape (as remote as the stars’) to trim my individual lamp to, gain the stamp of approval for: ‘feminine’ [. . .]” (AH, 52). The gaze is prescriptive not descriptive. Like countless cover photographs of women on glossy magazines, it creates the illusion of perfect female bodies, which, to the teenager, becomes a threatening reality. Her body suddenly has to fulfill certain standards. Caught in the male gaze, Annie has to perform a certain act. Marlatt looks for ways to break the rigid codes of femininity from within, she steps into the historical frame and opens it up by adding repressed stories. Annie uses the story she writes about the historic person Ana Richards as a test space for herself. She literally experiments with shifting the gaze to create another narrative version of Ana’s life. She further explores the possibility that Ana Richards found ways out of restrictive gender patterns. Annie needs a foremother and fancies that Ana met Birdie Stewart who — in historical fact — arrived on the same boat with Ana from England to Vancouver and became Gastown’s first saloon keeper. For a woman at the time this was probably not the most respected, but certainly a fairly independent position. Birdie offers a transcendence of the frame “lady,” which Ana is caught up in. Marlatt shows how her protagonist imagines a different identity for herself by testing it out in a third-person narrative first. When Annie imagines another encounter between Birdie and Ana, she muses: “you reflected differently in Birdie’s eyes. you see yourself, or a part of yourself you hadn’t known before” (AH, 108). Annie imagines how Birdie teases Ana with daydreams of travel and thus with different possible identities for women. When Ana looks unbelievingly Birdie says: “‘you can’t even imagine?’” Imagination is stressed as the primary force out of oppressive life stories. By stirring her imagination, Birdie makes Ana step out of the male gaze. Annie tells of how Ana in response to her question turns to Birdie “caught in the act, you have caught yourself turning in Birdie’s eyes” (AH, 109, my emphasis). Ana is framed in a different act, in this very instance. She is reflected in and acknowledged by another woman’s gaze. With her narrative, Annie adds a new possibility to her and the reader’s imagination. Constructing this other story helps Annie to transcend internalized attitudes. Rutland has pointed out that narratives

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constitute information in the sense of that which in-forms — gives shape and direction to or programs — behaviours. The outcome of the telling/hearing (or reading of) stories is action, including the action of internal dispositions, judgment of one’s self and the world. [. . .] In other words, narrative is performative in the speech act theory sense: it posits that to which it refers, and that to which it refers, has no being apart from acquiescence with the narrative assertion. (Rutland 1997, 4)

In other words, stories do not only describe but create identities as they make new actions, new gender performances possible. Annie widens the scope of Ana’s story because she does not want to erase the potential other life stories. She refuses to finalize Ana’s story into one of marriage. Annie thinks: what if that life should close in on [Ana] like the lid of a hope chest? [. . .] if all the other selves she might be were erased — secret diarist, pioneer pianist, travelling companion to Birdie Stewart — unvalidated, unacceptable, in short. because they weren’t the right words. try artist, try explorer — prefaced always by lady, no, it wasn’t a choice anyone sane would make. to fly in the face of common sense, social conventions, ethics — the weight of history. to fly. . . . (AH, 146)

This quotation evokes the two most prominent puns in the novel, “wordrobes,” the linguistic means, and “(f)acts,” the narrative means, of compressing the many possibilities of self into one master narrative. “Lady” is the convention through which Ana is framed, which determines her body and behavior, and limits the possible selves she might be, as it brackets the potential of an explorer or artist. Entering a lesbian relationship would be “to fly in the face of common sense, social conventions, ethics.” The structure of the last sentence “to fly . . .” evokes a longing and opens a gap for other desires. Moreover, it echoes the structure of the earlier discussed wordfield on wanting that opens with: “I want . . .” Fly once more calls up Cixous’s notion of “voler,” which involves “that writing should subvert the accepted conventions of narrative, should “fly” above them, stealing fragments of discourse and putting them to scandalous uses” (Shiach 1989, 159). Marlatt takes one piece of information, the fact that Ana Richards gave piano lessons for a while and puts it to scandalous or monstrous use by creating the story of a lesbian relationship on the male dominated logging frontier in the nineteenth century. So far, I have examined the pun (f)act as denoting how women are reified into a specific “feminine act.” The “f stop of act” referred to codes of femininity that “stop” different enactments of female identity.

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Yet, “(f)act” not only shows petrifications of femininity but points to the erasure of the feminine, of women’s stories and experiences. Photography and historiography both create supposedly factual evidence, both capture traces of the past by framing some people and events and excluding others. Not only does someone decide who is represented and who is not but someone also determines how people and events are being represented. The process of putting events into a narrative sequence involves selection, interpretation, and the choice of a narrative and lin16 guistic form. Marlatt questions the ideological grounds of this selection as well as who is behind the shutter. She asks “whose history survives” in photographs, discourses, and narratives, and whose does not although it happened just the same? In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon formulates “whose history survives” as one of the central questions behind the genre of historiographic metafiction which interrogates how historical truth is consti17 tuted and how we learn about historical facts. Ana Historic is a historiographic metafiction because it explores how facts become facts and on which grounds. The novel looks critically at historical knowledge by stressing the selective and narrative element in historiography. Marlatt looks at historical frames from a gender perspective, and asks why the deeds of men in Ana Richards’s time were recorded and why the deeds of women were omitted. For that, she looks at what the historical picture was supposed to be like because individual facts are selected based on that picture. In Ana Richards’s time, the whole picture, as depicted by historians, was that of a western logging frontier. Such a picture leaves little room for women. Marlatt mirrors the investigation of historiography in the mind of her protagonist who, as her husband’s research assistant for historical facts, starts to grow uneasy with how facts do not only reveal, but also conceal, stories. Annie quotes her husband Richard in saying that “history is built on the groundwork of fact” and that “one missing piece can change the whole picture” (AH, 134). However, “the whole picture” or final master narrative is decided upon before the facts are selected. Annie realizes that Richard does his research in a patriarchal frame of reference that completes narratives a certain way. She therefore resolves: “i’m no longer doing my part looking for missing pieces. at least not missing facts. not when there are missing persons in all this rubble” (AH, 134). Annie no longer sees history as the true voice but as “the voice-over” just like femininity is a cover-up story that hides other possible realities. The missing persons are those which are left out of the story altogether. Ana is looking for the stories that do not exist in official history rather than

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looking for more facts to complete the official version. In Annie’s view, history threatens to silence Ana Richards because it exercises a narrow narrative frame: “the lid is closed firmly and finally shut. that was her. summed up. Ana historic” (AH, 48). Ana becomes “history,” not in the official sense of the word, but in the colloquial sense of becoming obsolete. Excluded from the records, she becomes another missing person: Ana is framed into absence. Ana Historic plays with genre characteristics of detective fiction. The novel’s opening phrase “Who’s There?” as well as the setting of someone staggering in the dark looking for missing people call up the genre. The “framing” of people refers to people being fixed in narratives as much as to criminological evidence. Annie is searching for “missing” pieces in historiography and for “wanted” people. People who have “violated” gender behavior because they exceeded the gender codes of their time. “Missing people” also refers to Annie’s search for people who have fallen victim to crime. The crime she detects lies in how narratives realize the stories of certain people and murder the life-stories of others and how patriarchal ideology naturalizes gender stories. Marlatt at the same time subverts genre conventions of detective fiction. Whereas detectives usually solve a problem by applying rationale, Annie’s work as a detective is to demystify reality as an illusion and to doubt any hard facts and evidence as reality effects. In her introduction to Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (1990) CrannyFrancis claims that “feminist generic fiction is not simply masculinist generic fiction with female heroes telling stories of oppression [but] is a radical revision of conservative genre texts, which critically evaluates the ideological significance of textual conventions and of fiction as a discursive practice” (9–10). In the context of feminist detective fiction she states that “the female detective [. . .] leads the way in the appropriation by feminists of a genre which deals primarily with the process of discovery, of finding out, of demystification.” Marlatt not only comments on missing people and missing individual stories but refers to historical photographs and to realist fiction to show that gender is a historically constituted category. She elucidates how in the nineteenth and early twentieth century masculinity was constructed as active and heroic against the polar opposite of domestic, docile, and passive women. Marlatt, for instance, comments on the countless photographs of logging men in Ana Richards’s time when British Columbia was a western frontier to be conquered and mastered: “logging photo caption: Bull puncher and oxen relax momentarily, sullenly conscious of their ability to get any job done, no matter how tough” (AH, 56). These photographs do not document, but construct, masculinity. The photo

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caption interprets, tells, the picture in a specifically gendered way. The whole picture, the frontier to be conquered, is completed here by referring to men’s relentless courage, perseverance, and strength while excluding everything else from the picture: fear, frustration, failure. Marlatt also explores how realist narratives, like photographs, function as gender frames. She repeatedly inserts passages from Allerdale Grainger’s Woodsmen of the West, which on the book jacket is praised as “one of the finest examples of local realism in Canadian writing” of the 18 early twentieth century. Grainger’s book, a fictional autobiography of an Englishman who came to work as a logger on the frontier, is also illustrated with photographs that construct masculinity in a certain way. The first photograph in the book, for instance, shows a man towering on a high single rock at ebb tide, and the caption reads: “The Conqueror” (viii). In the editor’s preface, Woodsmen of the West is described as a “first-hand experience in the coastal forests” and as being “a highly original description of the frustrations and struggles of the West Coast logger at the turn of the century” (i). The book tells us as much about the frontier as it does about how masculinity was constructed in the nineteenth century at the Canadian western frontier. The quotations from Woodsmen in Ana Historic illustrate how narratives shape landscapes, bodies, and realities. Marlatt uses Grainger’s account to show how — just like photographs of the time — the narrative captures only certain aspects of the work on the frontier, one of which was the conquering and mastering of the land. In his analysis of Grainger’s Woodsmen, Misao has pointed out that although Marlatt is right in seeing masculinity at the heart of Woodsmen, she fails to acknowledge that in his narrative Grainger himself inserts doubt into this omnipotent and coherent masculinity. An analysis of the narrative devices in Woodsmen shows that the author is quite aware that 19 the demands of masculinity and the lived reality are worlds apart. Misao’s main goal is to show that Woodsmen is not an authentic, historically accurate and monolithic account of masculinity in nineteenthcentury British Columbian logging camps but that the narrator’s own ambivalence to male gender codes of the time is discernible in the text. The masculine culture, Misao claims, is not rendered natural but constructed in the book. He criticizes that by using the novel as a historical document of masculinity and of an exploitative economy, Marlatt unifies masculinity and does injustice to the text’s double perspective. The narrator observes the masculine codes of behavior, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, ironically distances himself from them. Misao argues that the text develops strategies with which to “create the illusion of a

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universal masculine gender identity, a project demanded by the turn-ofthe-century ‘crisis of masculinity’” (Misao 1996, 76), and names the emerging women’s movement, the romanticizing of the frontier, and homophobia as reasons for this crisis. In my opinion, Marlatt is not using Woodsmen of the West as a unified account of masculinity but sees the crisis of masculinity in the book for what it is. Marlatt quotes from Woodsmen to elucidate how the masculine romanticizing of the frontier necessitated the exclusion of the feminine, on the one hand, and women’s petrification into a feminine passive act, on the other hand, as the polar opposite to male heroic deeds. For this purpose, any femininity that emancipates itself from this scheme has to be marked monstrous and abnormal. This is also where homophobia originates because homosexual relationships among women or men would threaten the male-female economy at the heart of attempts to stabilize gender codes through binary oppositions. History is shown to be a fundamentally gendered discourse in Ana Historic, as the selection of what is noteworthy and what is not is made along gender lines. Historiography records the public, male sphere, and excludes the private, female sphere. Annie observes: “i learned that history is the real story the city fathers tell of the only important events in the world. [. . .] so many claims to fame. so many ordinary men turned into heroes. (where are the city mothers?)” (AH, 28). The city mothers are missing in the accounts, their stories are bracketed off but, as Marlatt shows, are nonetheless underlying the stories of the city fathers as the polar opposite against which the story of male heroism is constructed on the frontier. Marlatt frequently weaves unofficial stories of women into the fabric of official history. She de-frames narratives and blends them, for one in order to ridicule the authoritative voice of history, and secondly in order to rewrite history and include the omitted stories of women. She, for example, cunningly intertwines two events that both really took place in Ana Richards’s time: a boat race that is widely documented in the city archives and in the local newspapers of the time, and a birth that Annie/Marlatt only learns about through diaries of contemporaries. Annie finds out about the first white birth at Hastings Mill in Vancouver from the diaries of Alice Patterson, the daughter of a contemporary of Mrs. Richards. Those diaries become the source for alternative histories. They tell how Jeannie Alexander gave birth to the first white child at Hastings Mill without any doctoral assistance but with the aid of the women in the community. Susan and Alice Paterson were present, and Annie imagines that Mrs. Richards might have been there as well. The historical

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plaque that is attached to the house later on (and that can still be seen there today) only says: “‘Hastings Sawmill. First dwelling of R. H. Alexander, afterwards manager. Later occupied by office men as bachelors hall . . .’” Annie asks herself “and where is Jeannie Alexander in all this?” (AH, 120). Marlatt again raises awareness for the narrative frame, which turns only some events into factual stories depending on what the whole picture is supposed to document. In this instance — as Marlatt shows by superimposing the birth onto the accounts of the boat race — the whole picture is that of heroic male deeds. Such a picture necessarily excludes heroic deeds of women such as giving birth without medical aid. Masculinity once more is constructed against the polar opposite of passive, domestic women. The birth, at which Marlatt/Annie imagines Ana Richards to have been present is described as “women’s work”: Jeannie’s “laboring” and the women’s joint efforts at helping her to give birth are portrayed as an island in a men’s world of work. The birth scene explores a possibility of women’s bonding at a time and in a setting when it was rare for women to do so. Whereas this could be read as limiting women to reproductive capacities, and as portraying an emphasis on sexual difference as the only escape route from invisibility, I think Marlatt ironically superimposes the importance and the hard work of the birth onto the accounts of the boat race, which is pompously described as an important event. One could of course argue that historiography at the time never recorded anything private whether in the male or female realm, but the activities of men were in the public field whereas women’s heroic and noteworthy deeds were always in the private realm. Juxtaposed to the birth scene are the preparations for the boat race on Dominion Day between the ships “Annie Fraser” and “Pearl.” Superimposing the frame of the birth scene on that of the boat race functions to question women’s role as passive vessels of birth. The scene Annie imagines defies all passivity: “— the sheer work of giant muscle moving underneath the sheet” (AH, 124). Annie describes the birth as “a monstrous assertion in the world” (AH, 116). This reference to “monstrous” plays on the fact that the female body has been constituted as the deviation from the male norm in philosophical and psychological discourses. Freud referred to the perception of the female genitals as monstrous from a male point of view. He asserted that for an adolescent boy the female naked body is horrifying and fear inspiring because it raises the anxiety of castration (Moers 1976, 90–121). In the birth scene, Marlatt plays with the notion of trace as a mark of personal as well as collective memory. Whereas the traces in historiography are marked by facts, Marlatt uses the female body as an active

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instrument for an alternative inscription of presence. Annie imagines how Ana, who felt discouraged by so many things, felt encouraged at the birth by “this assertive flesh distended — beyond reason — pushing out to declare itself in the world” (AH, 117). The birth scene becomes an alternative to historiography in that it turns women’s absence from the records into a presence in the world. The newborn baby turns the negative space that woman inhabits in the symbolic order into an assertion. The monstrous assertion of the female body has to be read as a counter discourse to the long history of the effacement of the female body, which Marlatt documents in her novel, for instance, by looking at the history of hysteria.

“Scribbling” Desire: Rewriting the Female Body — that certain space where words turn from abstraction [. . .] in the world you read or listen in on, and then in a flash wing in to the core of your being and you recognize all that they stand for and that you have a stake in them, a share as speaker/writer/reader/listener, all of you there in that active complex. Daphne Marlatt, “Difference Embracing”

In her poetic language, Marlatt imitates the cyclical rhythms of the female body to counteract the teleology of historical documentation. Whereas the boat race relies on competition — there is a heated dispute in the newspaper over which boat came in first — in the birth scene the women work together: “woman a rhythm in touch with her body its tides coming in not first nor last nor lost she circles back on herself repeats her breathing out and in two heartbeats here not winning or losing labouring into the manifest” (AH, 125). The absence of any punctuation in this quotation conveys the impression of an ongoing, repeated cycle. Marlatt implies that following a rhythm different to the linearity and finality of documentation, at birth the woman nonetheless labors towards a manifest presence. Through her narrative style, Marlatt herself sets a different rhythm and establishes a new order in that giving birth is rendered a heroic act of female creation. Whereas this may seem like an act of mystifying the female body and of limiting women to their reproductive abilities, Marlatt most of all wants to represent the female body in ways different from traditional discourses. Rather than assuming a universal or essential notion of a specifically female body, Marlatt wants to reframe this body from a perspective that lies outside a symbolic field

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ruled by patriarchy. Throughout the novel Marlatt shows how female bodies have been constructed by a male gaze. In the birth scene, she ironically subverts discourses on male deeds that configure male bodies as present, strong, and active against the background of passive and absent female bodies. Marlatt correlates suppressed stories with suppressed bodies, and through the act of writing wants to “physically” reinscribe the female body onto the page, into literature, and into cultural memory. While throughout the text Marlatt points to discourses that have constructed the female body as lack and negativity, and that have taught Ana, Ina, and Annie to be ashamed of bodily functions, in her own language and narrative Marlatt renders the female body an assertive presence by celebrating sexual difference. Marlatt’s attempt to create a language that draws on and makes present the female body is closely connected to theories of écriture féminine as developed by, for example, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Both advocate a feminine aesthetic to evoke a space outside the symbolic order that positions men and women in specific ways. As outlined in my chapter on “Framing Theories,” unlike purely deconstructivist theories, écriture féminine emphasizes sexual difference but reevaluates it. Écriture féminine propagates a style of writing that is marked by fluidity, infinity, and diversity because it no longer relies on the phallus as signifier. Al20 though often normatively labeled as essentialist, écriture féminine has to be understood as an ironical subversion and appropriation of male critical discourses. As a “strategic choice” it hopes “to escape the patriarchal straitjacket of sexual difference through an emphasis on the positive worth of either biological, linguistic or philosophical female essence” (Waring 1995, 544). Écriture féminine reacts to critical discourses which have rendered the male body as the norm for theoretical assumptions and thus acts out a “parodic reappropriation of the feminine which performs as a playful parody of essentialism” (Kelly 1995, 71–72). Marlatt seems ironically to counteract Freud’s notion of the Penisneid (penis envy) by pointing to the power of giving birth. And while male myths of creation have equated pen and penis, menstrual blood becomes a signifier in Marlatt’s text. In Ana Historic in the process of “coming to writing” the female body is reshaped on the page. The expression “coming to writing” refers to a book by Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays (1991). The book explores how another style of writing could shift meaning in the patriarchal frame of reference. Godard claims that “coming to writing for women involves the deconstruction of the norms and conventions of narrative; it is subversive of received genres” (Godard 1997, 119). Coming to writing is

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a vital topic and important act in Ana Historic as all three women try to find a voice and language to write down their experiences. Annie remembers her mother’s shamed attempts at writing: “how it hurts to think of your ‘scribblings’ under the bed (the bed!) in a language which was not yours” (AH, 133). The language was not Ina’s because she was utterly entangled in a patriarchal framework which inescapably positioned her as other and less. The fact that the scribblings are hidden under the bed intertwines women’s repressed sexuality with their muted position in a patriarchal order. Both the repressed desire and the repressed voice are released in the “torrent” that Annie releases at the end of the novel, when in the love making with Zoe the act of speech and the sexual act come together. Annie reevaluates the word “scribbling,” that usually denotes childish, inept writing by looking up its etymology: “scribbler. scribbling. i look it up and it means writing. why do we think it so much less? [. . .] scribe is from the same root, skeri, to cut [. . .]” (AH, 81). Significantly, Annie discovers a very physical dimension in the word “scribbling” which, derives from “to cut.” Writing is associated with the body and with a craft rather than an intellectual activity only. The word “scribbling,” in my opinion, also calls up processes of canon formation and of attributing value to works of literature on the grounds of sexual difference. As Marlatt deals with the nineteenth century and with women’s exclusion from textual representation, it does not seem far fetched to hear an echo of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enraged statement that a “a mob of scribbling women” was taking over the literary market in nineteenth-century America. Whereas nowadays we value the works of such writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville, in their time these writers were not held in high esteem. Ironically, the “scribblings” of sentimental novelists were highly esteemed and widely read. Only when F. O. Matthiesen in 1941 wrote his seminal book The American Renaissance which, canonized the five above mentioned authors, the tables turned. Matthiesen’s book did not only define and name a, or rather the, period in American literary history, but the publication of his book went hand in hand with the institutionalization of American Studies, a discipline based on a certain canon and approach to the function of literature. The writings of women, which had been so popular at their time, were excluded from the canon largely because their fiction, or “scribbling” was now labeled escapist and regarded as not dealing with reality. Rather than accounting for how the realities of men and women differed at the time, critics excluded sentimental novelists from the canon. Marlatt tries to counteract this ten-

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dency to efface women’s writings by presenting the texts that Ina wrote 21 in her gothic confinement. Towards the end of the novel, “scribbling” becomes a writing style in its own right, a writing that is physical, arises from the body, and that in its erratic rhythms defies teleological, linear, and rational writing. Annie says: there is still even now the innate pleasure of seeing on a fresh white pad the first marks of red, bright red when the bleeding’s at its peak. innate because of a childish astonishment, i made that! the mark of myself, my inscription in blood. i’m here. scribbling again. writing the period that arrives at no full stop. not the hand manipulating the pen. not the language of definition, of epoch and document, language explaining and justifying, but the words that flow out from within, running too quick to catch sometimes, at other times just an agonizingly slow trickle. the words of an interior history doesn’t include . . . that erupts like a spring, like a wellspring of being, well-being inside. . . . (AH, 90)

This is a perfect example of how Marlatt reappropriates the female body by subverting patriarchal discourses. Marlatt’s statements that the menses are traces of a different history have to be read as ironic inversions of dominant discourses that have rendered the female body as lack or absence. The phrase “i made that!” is set in italics just like all the historical quotations and intertexts in the novel. Marlatt suggests that to the same extent that men pose for countless photographs on felled trees, taking silly pride in their various achievements, Annie proudly says about the mark of her menstrual blood: “i made that!” Whereas history excludes the presence of women as private, Annie claims that she left a sign of her presence in the world, “in the words of an interior history does not include.” The words of the interior refer to a style of writing that physically arises from taking pleasure in the body. The quotation also intertwines three homonyms as the word “period” means “menses,” “epoch,” and “full stop.” Marlatt proposes that an assertive writing in the feminine does not stop at the period (full stop) as a mark of order and dominance. Throughout the book, Annie rejects capital letters and uses the full stop as a pause rather than as a syntactic marker. She exceeds the limits of the sentence and of dominance. The meaning of period as epoch is also exceeded because the novel intertwines the lives of three different women. Marlatt implies that both full stop and epoch are artificial divisions that contribute to constructing a specific order and rendering it natural. For Marlatt, the rhythms of the menstrual period set a model for a kind of writing that neither follows the rules of history nor phallogocentric language.

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Cixous understands écriture féminine as the expression of a feminine principle that can be defined as excessive, slippery, and vital. As a form of automatic and associative writing it is meant to surface ruptures and contradictions in linguistic signs, and by pointing to the materiality of language it renders the body present on the page. Marlatt’s associative language, which springs into wordfields and puns abandoning a linear syntax, can be illustrated with her play on the verb “to want.” Against the closure and dispossession of “lady,” Marlatt employs a style of writing that voices desire: but i don’t want history’s voice. i want . . . something is wanting in me. and it all goes blank on a word. want. what does it mean, to be lacking? empty. wanton. vanish. vacant, vacuum, evacuate. all these empty words except for wanton (lacking discipline, lewd). a word for the wild. for the gap i keep coming to. i keep pointing out to you, Ina, as if it could somehow have stopped your dying. your going. gone. your one wanton act (“rebellious,” even that is obsolete). (AH, 48–49)

Marlatt plays with the two implications of the verb “to want,” which means both “to wish for” and “to lack.” When Annie abandons the authoritative and definite voice of history, which stands in for all factual discourses, what is “wanting” in her no longer marks a lack, a deviation from a male norm, but her own awakening desire. Marlatt once more recurs to theories that posit women as lack and as an object of male desire. The beginning of the quote points to the cultural ways in which female sexuality has been constructed in patriarchal society. The “gap” the protagonist repeatedly comes to stands for the absence of a signification of female desire in this order. Yet more and more Annie fills this gap and gives voice to her own desire. The automatic writing, which shifts meaning in the frame of reference, leads from words that signify “wanting” passively as vacuum or void to “wanton.” In a patriarchal frame “wanton” has negative connotations especially when referring to a woman where it means lewd and promiscuous. As such it reinstalls the dichotomy of “lady,” a woman lacking desires, and “tramp,” a lewd woman. Whereas this “lady-tramp” opposition seems exclusive, Annie keeps “coming to” the gap. This gap offers a third option outside the dichotomy. Through an automatic, associative writing that draws on the pleasures of the female body, Marlatt reappropriates “wanton” as a word for the wild, for a desire that is unrepresentable in the patriarchal order. “Wanton” does not denote a lack but stands for the unruly, nonlinear, the slippery, and excessive. Marlatt draws on feminist reinterpretation of Lacan’s concept of jouissance as female pleasure in contrast to male de-

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sire: “Jouissance is a word rich in connotations. ‘Pleasure’ is the simplest translation. The noun comes from the verb jouir, meaning to enjoy, to revel in without fear of the cost; also to have an orgasm” (Jones 1985, 375). Interesting in the context of Ana Historic is that the term connotes “to revel in without fear of the cost.” Marlatt points out that “lady” describes a commodity in a male-female economy where women are “the silent tokens of exchange” (Gubar 1985, 301). Jouissance transgresses this economy because women signify their own pleasure. Jouissance denotes pleasure outside a male-female economy and refers to a joy of tasting, testing, and sounding of words. Throughout the novel, Marlatt shows how women are dispossessed 22 from their bodies by patriarchal discourses. The formerly unspoken and unspeakable are voiced in a language of a different order when Annie and Zoe make love. The novel ends with a final awakening and rebirth: we give place, giving words, giving birth, to each other — she and me. you. hot skin writing skin. [. . .] it isn’t dark but the luxury of being has woken you, the reach of your desire, reading us into the page ahead. (AH, 153)

The last sentence in the novel, “reading us into the page ahead” opens a white space for new inscriptions. The pronoun “you” invites the readers to take “monstrous leaps of imagination” themselves. Despite its experimental style, the novel follows a very conservative plot line: Annie’s whole awakening process in the novel strives towards and culminates in a love relationship. This is, however, another ironic inversion. Ana Historic follows the scheme of a developmental novel in which the protagonist searches for another identity, and in which the heroine, after many struggles, is in the end rewarded by finding the perfect match. Marlatt uses this traditional structure only to subvert it because this time the story does not culminate in the perfect match of a heterosexual marriage but in a lesbian relationship that opens up a different order.

Conclusion: “the real monster” there is a monster, there is something monstrous here, but it’s not you. Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic

I would like to come back to the “monstrous possibilities” evoked in the title of this chapter because “monstrous” is a topos for Annie’s development as well as for the argument Marlatt is trying to make in Ana Historic. As I have frequently shown in my analysis, the word monstrous and

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allusions to monsters, most prominently Frankenstein, are repeated throughout the text but with changing implications. Monstrous in the beginning stands for what is fear inspiring because outrageous, abnormal, and excessive. Annie is afraid of monsters in real wardrobes and verbal wordrobes, and what she denotes with monsters is a fear that is omnipresent but elusive. Marlatt plays on another stereotypical image here, namely that women who deviate from the gender norm in any way are seen as monsters. At first, Annie is afraid of transgressive gender acts because she inherited the fear from her mother. When Annie once more points to the repetitive vicious cycle of “the cultural labyrinth of our inheritance, mother to daughter to mother . . .,” Ina’s remembered voice interrupts her: “— and i suppose you see me as the monster hidden at the heart of it?” Annie replies “there is a monster, there is something monstrous here, but it’s not you” (AH, 24, her emphasis). Gradually Annie realizes that what is monstrous is the very ideology which keeps women within bounds by evoking terror of the unknown and abnormal. Annie comes to transcend her fear by writing the imagined story of Ana Richards who encourages her to take the “monstrous leap of imagination.” When Annie starts imagining the other possibility of Ana Richards’s fate, namely a lesbian relationship, she says to Zoe, who encourages her, “but this is a monstrous leap of imagination, i protest. (whose voice is that?) so be monstrous then, [Zoe] says. but the monster is always someone/something else. the real monster is fear, or the monster is what i always feared as real” (AH, 135). The monster in the beginning stands for the fear to transgress given notions of femininity, but the more Annie realizes that these notions are illusions which are only constructed as realities, the more she can let go of them. In the novel, Annie is coming to writing in her fictive autobiography, and she is coming out as a lesbian. Allusions to the monster Frankenstein refer to the monstrosity of assertive femininity and to what Johnson has called the “monstrousness of selfhood” in women’s writing. In her essay “My Monster, My Self,” Johnson reads Shelley’s Frankenstein as a parable for autobiographies written by women: “What is at stake in Frankenstein’s workshop of filthy creation is precisely the possibility of shaping a life in one’s own image: Frankenstein’s monster can thus be seen as a figure for autobiography as such” (Johnson 1987, 146). Johnson claims that for women the notion of selfhood is a monstrous idea because “the very notion of a self, the very shape of human life stories, has always, from Saint Augustine to Freud, be modeled on the man” (Johnson 1987, 154). What Annie is grappling with in writing her own story is to imagine stories against the grain, to model a life story that runs counter to histo-

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riography, to fact, and to the heterosexual matrix she grew up with. In the course of the novel, she comes to embrace the monstrous possibility of a lesbian relationship in British Columbia at the turn of the century. She comes to accept the excessive not as a threat but as a choice and chance. Annie early on realizes that she is not looking for monsters but for hidden other possibilities, especially for the possibility of lesbian love that would shift the frame of reference from an androcentric to a woman centered perspective. She says to herself: “it isn’t Frankenstein you’re looking for but some elusive sense of who you might be: she, unspoken and real in the world, running ahead to embrace it. she is writing her desire to be, in the present tense, retrieved from silence” (AH, 46–47). Annie wants to affirm and voice the monstrous other possibility of female selfhood. She gets over her fear by writing Ana’s story, and by “untelling the real.” At the end of the novel Annie finally realizes: “actually Frankenstein was the man who created him. [. . .] and now we call the monster by his name. a man’s name for man’s fear of the wild, the uncontrolled. that’s where she lives” (AH, 142). Marlatt implies, that just like narrative hides its ideological impetus, the notion of abnormal or monstrous femininity is an ideological fiction. Frankenstein is man-made and hides “man’s fear of the wild.” Annie understands that the fear she sensed is not her own but man’s fear of the excessive and the wild, the space where “she lives.” “She” presumably is the homosexual other who would threaten the extant order. In her changing use of monstrous, Marlatt queers the norm. “Queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability — which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect — queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire” (Jagose 1996, 3). Just like the term queer originally was a negative, sometimes even homophobic term that was reappropriated by the gay and lesbian movement to describe a theoretical model, monstrous changes from an exclusive term to a term of self-identification. In its excessive and slippery language as well as its subversive narrative structures, Marlatt’s text wants to queer gender and sexual identity. And in its confusing structure the text mirrors the notion of monstrosity explored in the novel. In contrast to Thomas, Marlatt offers a narrative escape route, her protagonist does not remain caught up in the same structures she aims to destroy, but leaves the patriarchal frame of reference. One could argue however, that although there is a shift of refer-

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ence and meaning, the frame is not another one altogether because homosexuality is defined as the excess of and other to heterosexuality. Thus, homosexuality continues to be defined in contrast to heterosexuality. Although “lesbian” becomes a “monstrous” third option in Marlatt’s text, which exceeds the binary gender structure, this third option is still defined against the other two. The next analysis, and this is why Erdrich comes last in this study, will show how, in contrast to Marlatt, Erdrich keeps the frame of reference moving and resists definitions. In her trickster narratives she switches frames of reference frequently and thus avoids definite framing.

Notes 1

Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic (Toronto: Coach House, 1988), 28. All further quotations are taken from this edition and are cited in the text using the abbreviation AH and page number. 2

Slashes indicate that the sentence appears on the page in the form of a poem. “Knock knock” also calls up “knock, knock/who’s there?” jokes which initially pose a riddle and derive their humor from surprising answers based on puns. Marlatt, in my opinion, evokes that aspect of “knock knock” as well because one of her subversive strategies is to shift meaning playfully and to revel in a language free of limitations. In a letter, Marlatt notes “knock-knock jokes for Ana — Ana Colutha/Ana M. Nesis/Ana Chronistic.” Readings from the Labyrinth (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998), 58. 3

4

Freud as quoted in Goldman 1997, 35. Also see Sigmund Freud, “Die Weiblichkeit,” in Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke XV (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940), 119–45. 5

For a further exploration of the etymology of the name Zoe, see Goldman 1997, 119. 6

See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990).

7

In Margaret Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale the protagonist ponders the expression “date rape” and muses: “Date Rape [. . .] It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date Rapé” (Atwood 1985, 35). Atwood ironically points out how words can play down the violent realities they denote. 8

For a further exploration of how “lady” can be a sexist term, see Reingard M. Nischik, “Nomenclatural Mutations: Forms of Address in Margaret Atwood’s Novels,” Orbis Litterarum 52 (1997): 329–51. 9

Marlatt is well familiar with Barbara Johnson’s writings and I think it possible that she directly draws on Johnson’s essay “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?” (Johnson 1998). See my discussion of the essay in chapter 4, in the analysis of Erdrich’s tetralogy.

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10

See Pamela Banting, “Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic” (in Barbour 1991, 123–29), who claims that the novel moves from A(nnie) to Z(oe). By referring to de Lauretis’s Milan group of women Goldman explains how a women centered form of entrustment can counteract a patriarchal order by establishing a female genealogy. See Goldman, “Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic: A Genealogy for Lost Women,” Resources of Feminist Research 21.3–4 (1992): 33–38. 11 Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott, “Theorizing Fiction Theory,” in Godard 1994, 53–62; Peggy Kelly, “Fiction Theory as Feminist Practice in Marlatt’s Ana Historic and Scott’s Heroine,” Open Letter 9.4 (1995): 69–98. 12

Marlatt once more seems to draw on Johnson’s essay “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?” See note 9, above. 13

All intertexts on madness, on the effects of electroshock therapy, and on the treatment for hysteria in Ana Historic are taken from Leonard Roy Frank’s The History of Shock Treatment, a source Marlatt acknowledges in the novel. Jones points out that Frank’s book, like Ana Historic itself, may be considered an example of the documentary-collage: “Frank is an ex-psychiatric patient who lost two years of memory through electro-shock treatment. His book pieces together conflicting perspectives on shock treatment from a variety of sources and discourses covering a wide span of years. It includes, for example, excerpts from psychiatric journals (both defending and attacking electro-shock therapy), cartoons, the personal accounts of psychiatric patients, correspondences, and newspaper articles and advertisements for medical products: it is, in other words, a therapeutic text on/of (the treatment of) ‘madness’” (Jones 1993, 145).

14

Davey criticizes the, in his opinion, oversimplified equation of woman and landscape versus man and cultivation of the land in Ana Historic. Frank Davey, “The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic,” in Davey 1993, 195–209. 15

One of the many subtexts underlying Ana Historic is Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978). The opening epigraph in Ana Historic, “‘The assemblage of facts in a tangle of hair,’” is taken from Griffin’s book. In her text, Griffin describes women as “those robbed of language” (xiv) and claims that women can best articulate themselves “by going underneath logic, that is by writing associatively” (xv). 16

See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27; and “Interpretation in History,” New Literary History 4 (1973): 285.

17

Hutcheon’s question “whose history survives” as a characteristic of historiographic metafiction could be read as a continuation or transformation of Margaret Atwood’s 1972 hypothesis that “survival” is the typical motif of Canadian literature. 18 Martin Allerdale Grainger, Woodsmen of the West (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1996, first printed 1906). 19

Dean Misao, “The Construction of Masculinity in Martin Allerdale Grainger’s Woodsmen of the West,” Canadian Literature 149 (summer 1996): 74–87.

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20

On essentialism, see also my comments in the introduction, as well as Waring in Makaryk 1995, 544–45. 21 See Charlene Avallone, “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse,” PMLA 112 (October 1997): 1102–20; Jane P. Tompkins, “The Other American Renaissance,” in Michaels/ Pease 1989, 34–57. 22

It would be interesting to look at Marlatt’s text in the context of theories which explore strategies of “sexual decolonization.” Watson defines sexual decolonization as referring to “a recurrent debate among feminists about whether women are ‘colonized’ by compulsory heterosexuality in ways that only decolonizing strategies and the practice of critical consciousness can undo. Such critiques of heterosexuality need not inevitably point outside it to a primary ‘lesbian continuum’ or a lesbian refiguring of sexuality [. . .] But the rhetoric of sexual decolonization has been employed primarily by lesbian writers in the context of their ‘unspeakable’ to argue that the situation of women in patriarchy is in some way analogous to that of colonized people.” Julia Watson, “Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women’s Autobiographies,” in Smith/Watson, 1992, 139–68. 23

Allusions to Frankenstein serve as intertextual references to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and to the genre of female gothic fiction in general. Stan Dragland reads Ana Historic as a “feminist teasing or deconstruction of the gothic genre represented by Mary Shelley’s no-outlet tale, Frankenstein,” because Ina’s story abounds with “images of gothic confinement,” and is “a quicksand story, a nightmare story, with no rescue and no awakening” (Dragland 1991, 173). For an exploration of gothic elements in Ana Historic, see also Kathleen M. Scheel, “Freud and Frankenstein: The Monstered Language of Ana Historic,” Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (spring 1996): 93–114.

4: “Her Laugh an Ace”: Narrative Tricksterism in Louise Erdrich’s Tetralogy Introduction: Narrative Tricksterism There are times when I control who I’ll be, and times when other people decide. I’m not all anything, but I’m a little bit of a lot. My roots spread in every direction, and if I water one set of them more often than others, it’s because they need it more. [. . .] “Caught between two worlds,” is the way it’s often put in clichéd prose, but I’d put it differently. We are the catch. Louise Erdrich/Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus

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Canadian writers discussed in the previous chapters, Erdrich disrupts stereotypical representations of women and creates other potential life stories. However, Erdrich’s approach as well as her narrative technique distinctly differ from the other texts. As a writer of mixed ancestry, part Chippewa and part German-American, Louise Erdrich writes from a vantage point in-between two cultures. In interviews, she has emphasized that both her German as well as her Native backgrounds have influenced her writing and kindled her need for storytelling. For Erdrich, storytelling is a tool for coming to terms with her mixed ethnic background: “One of the characteristics of being a mixedblood is searching. You look back and say ‘Who am I from?’ You must question. You must make certain choices. You’re able to. And it’s a blessing and it’s a curse. All of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from” (Bruchac 1987, 101). In another interview she adds that this search is inevitably bound up with telling your story in whatever variation: “A person can only end up writing — in order to resolve it. You can even throw in the French part of the background — the wanderers, the voyagers, which my people also come from. There is just no way to get away from all this, and the only way to resolve it, without IKE THE TWO

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going totally crazy looking for a home, is to write about it” (Pearlman in Pearlman/Henderson 1989, 152). Erdrich accentuates in these statements that, on the one hand, part of being mixed blood involves having a choice — to a certain extent — over which ethnic group you want to be part of. On the other hand, your ethnic background is a shaping force of your existence, which you cannot simply walk away from. What makes her fiction so intriguing is that she evokes both cultural backgrounds in the content as well as narrative mode of her stories. She draws on traditional Chippewa materials and narrative devices as well as on postmodern narrative techniques to create patchwork identities in her texts; her “narrative tricksterism” frequently shifts from one cultural context 1 to another. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter is taken from The Crown of Columbus, a novel Erdrich co-wrote with her husband Michael Dorris. It is not part of the tetralogy that will be analyzed in this chapter, but illustrates Erdrich’s belief that a position in-between two cultures is enriching, not depriving. Rather than being “caught” between two cultures, the Native character in the novel defines her people as “the catch” in the double sense of the word. The “catch” is the gain, the profit from cultural contact, not the pitfall. As a good catch exceeds the expected and carries hope for new beginnings, catch stands for a chance, an opportunity. Whereas “to be caught” signifies a victim position, to be “the catch” indicates a subject position with agency. Yet, “catch” also denotes a trick or snag, something we trip over, that challenges the normal flow of things. To be “the catch” also could mean being a productive obstacle in what we usually perceive as normal or real. In her texts, Erdrich makes us stumble over familiar images by calling up and transcending stereotypes, and she points to the problems as well as chances a culturally mixed perspective enhances. Erdrich’s fiction is about negotiating differences, about setting up and subverting binary oppositions, about playing with stereotypical representations of woman and Indian in order to represent fluid identities. Whereas Thomas and Marlatt disrupt the smooth surface of language and narrative to defamilarize stereotypical notions of femininity, Erdrich breaks the usual story by denying (master) narratives their power to define, limit, and reduce. Thomas and Marlatt challenge typical representations of femininity by defamiliarizing and demystifying concepts that language and narrative render natural. Erdrich’s fiction, in contrast, seems to adhere more to traditional storytelling. However, whereas the surface structure seems less disrupted than in the other texts, Erdrich plays with literary conventions of realism. Realism, as Belsey has pointed

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out, does not work with what is more real than other subject matters but with what is more familiar to us: “The classic realist text installs itself in the space between fact and illusion through the presentation of a simulated reality which is plausible but not real” (Belsey 1980, 117, her emphasis). Erdrich ironically plays with what we usually perceive as real in contrast to what we consider fantastic or utopic. She switches back and forth between those two codes to raise our level of awareness of the constructed nature of all reality. Some critics have described Erdrich’s writing as a form of magic realism. I am critical of the term magic realism because it implies that there is a cross-cultural, coherent, and definite notion of what is real and what is magic. Asked in an interview whether she sees herself as a “magic realist,” Erdrich answers: “Probably your word unpredictable is more accurate. [. . .] The thing is, the events people pick out as magical don’t seem unreal to me. Unusual, yes, but I was raised believing in miracles and hearing of true events that may seem unbelievable” (Chavkin/Feyl-Chavkin 1994, 221). Erdrich, in my opinion, plays with what is deemed magical or real in respective cultures, and she challenges literary conventions of realism. Erdrich mocks and tricks us as readers in our attempts to ultimately understand a story or character. There are no finite readings of her characters or the stories she tells. Erdrich defies racial as well as gender stereotypes in her fiction by breaking certain storytypes: her narrative tricksterism moves beyond the limitations of one reading. Erdrich not only evokes the shape-changing trickster figure of Native mythology in her characters, but her narrative mode has trickster qualities as well. Just like the cunning trickster, who is hero and villain, saint and devil, jester and savior, Erdrich’s narratives defy fixture in content and form by playing with oppositions. As the trickster is a comic figure who humorously transcends one reality to enter another, Erdrich’s narrative technique resists finite (serious) signification and appropriation. As a textual device, trickster distorts the plausible and transcends tragic plotlines. Literature has often imposed tragic readings on Native characters, curtailing their multiplicity to one repeated image. With her narrative tricksterism, Erdrich humorously rises above the limiting repre2 sentations of Woman, Native, Other. As representation always works via reduction and absence, in her imaginative tales Erdrich widens the scope of what we deem possible. She calls into question conceptualizations of “coherent cultures” as well as “continuous identities,” as in her texts the survival of individuals as well as the community relies on their ability to incorporate difference and change. The trickster figure enables Erdrich to,

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on the one hand, document sexism and racism, and, on the other hand, to playfully transcend rather than reinscribe those stories. 3 Although critics have looked at Erdrich’s “trickster aesthetic,” or at 4 how she transgresses gender boundaries, no attempt has been made to analyze how Erdrich uses “trickster discourse” (Vizenor 1989) to point to the artificiality of gender constructions while at the same time showing the very real effects that gender has on the lives of her characters. Trickster discourse enables Erdrich to represent the real problems of Native women without trapping them in those plotlines. In my analysis, I will show how Erdrich uses the trickster as both figure and rhetorical principle to challenge gender stereotypes. Just like Erdrich is interested in the in-between of cultures, she is interested in what does not fit the norm of traditional gender codes. In her fiction, Erdrich practices what could be called transgenderation: Only those characters who draw on feminine as well as masculine gender codes and incorporate one code into the other, survive in the novels. Characters cross from one novel to the next, and the intratextual references between the novels of the tetralogy create a volatile net of individual and collective identity. I derive the term transgenderation from Pratt’s notion of “transculturation” as a phenomenon of “contact zones.” Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991, 34). Transculturation refers to processes in these contact zones where subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subordinated people cannot control what emanates from the dominant culture, to varying extents they can control what they absorb into their own and what they use it for. Female tricksters in Erdrich’s fiction draw on masculine attributes and reappropriate them. Erdrich creates an intricate web of collective and individual identity in her text. The understanding of ethnic as well as gender identity as something fluid is emphasized through Erdrich’s narrative technique as characters appear in more than one novel. This is why in this chapter I will be dealing with 5 all four novels of Erdrich’s tetralogy. Rather than focusing on each novel in the tetralogy and on the whole array of characters, I have chosen to look closely at two female trickster figures. The stories of June and Fleur not only open and close 6 the tetralogy, they are both pivotal figures for the plot as well as the narrative technique of Erdrich’s tetralogy. Both figures transcend tragic representations of the Native woman and break up monologues into

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polyphonic, multifaceted stories. June’s story in the opening vignette of Erdrich’s first novel Love Medicine is a paradigmatic example of the way in which she resists serious signification and fixed representations by offering a multiplicity of different readings.

“Easter Sunday”: June’s Story Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

We first encounter June, “a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved” (LM, 1), the day before Easter Sunday in the oil boomtown Williston, where she drinks at a bar with yet another mud engineer. She is hungry, dead tired, and penniless, because she had spent the money “the man before this one had given her” (LM, 2) on a bus ticket to go home to the reservation. June wants to kill time before the bus arrives to take her home and accepts the man’s invitation for a drink. He taps on the window from the inside of a “Rigger-Bar” and invites June, who is standing at the bus stop, to come inside. The reader sees June for the first time framed in a male gaze. When June enters the bar, what she sees are cartons of colored eggs on the bar, each glowing like a jewel in its wad of cellophane. He was peeling one, sky blue as a robin’s, palming it while he thumbed the peel aside, when she walked through the door. Although the day was overcast, the snow itself reflected such light that she was momentarily blinded. It was like going underwater. What she walked toward more than anything was that blue egg in the white hand, a beacon in the murky air. (LM, 2)

June’s frailty and destitute condition as well as her imminent sexual exploitation are made explicit from the start by connecting the basket of colored Easter eggs sitting on the counter of the bar to June herself. June enters the bar because the color of the egg, which the man is holding up to her, seems to promise a transcendence of her situation. Yet the way the man is peeling the egg when she enters indicates that he regards her as cheap and easy prey. When June sits down, he starts peeling a pink egg for her saying that it matches the turtleneck she is wearing. June corrects him: “She told him it was not a turtleneck. You called these things shells. He said he would peel that for her, too, if she wanted, then grinned at the bartender and handed her the naked egg” (LM, 2). The

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third-person narrative with hardly any dialogue creates a cold and distanced gaze through which the reader witnesses June’s story. She abandons her plans for going home, making herself believe that “the bus ticket would stay good, maybe forever.” She follows the man to another bar convincing herself that “he could be different” (LM, 3). Her loss of orientation and her frailty are stressed again when on her way to the washroom June was afraid to bump against anything because her skin felt hard and brittle, and she knew it was possible, in this condition, to fall apart at the slightest touch. She locked herself in the bathroom stall and remembered his hand, thumbing back the transparent skin and crackling blue peel. [. . .] But as she sat there, something happened. All of a sudden she seemed to drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone. [. . .] She felt that underneath it all her body was pure and naked — only the skins were stiff and old. Even if he was no different, she would get through this again.” (LM, 4)

June seems to accept “the story to come” in which she, like the egg, will be cracked, and peeled, but it is also indicated that she will survive and transcend that story. Later on when June and the man are having sex in his car, June is wedged between the driver’s seat and the door and feels like “she was lying stretched out before a great wide mouth” (LM, 5). Too drunk to have sex with her, the man just moves his hips against her moaning: “Oh God, Mary. Oh God, it’s good” and then falls asleep on top of June. She holds still beneath him “until she felt herself getting frail again. [. . .] And then she knew that if she lay there any longer she would crack wide open, not in one place but in many pieces that he would crush by moving in his sleep” (LM, 6). June manages to slip out of the car into the snowy cold: “It was a shock like being born” (LM, 6). While walking, she imagines that she is going back to her uncle Eli’s “warm, man-smelling kitchen” (LM, 6) where she grew up. She walks with an air of confidence and certainty: Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. [. . .] The heavy winds couldn’t blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.” (LM, 7)

The opening of Love Medicine ends with June’s death, and yet she remains a powerful presence throughout Love Medicine and reappears in the tetralogy’s last novel, The Bingo Palace, to help her son Lipsha win

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at gambling. The first chapter in Love Medicine, entitled “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” is subdivided into four parts that foreshadow the narrative design of the whole tetralogy. Four is a sacred number in Chippewa mythology as it alludes to the seasons and stands for completion and returning cycles. The vignette “Easter Sunday,” which constitutes the first part of the first chapter, provides the engine of narrative for the whole novel. In the remaining three parts of the first chapter, we encounter all the main characters of the novel who in some way or other are all connected to June and tell different stories about her. June’s life and the enigma of her death are the driving forces behind the narrative throughout Love Medicine: She rises from the stories the community tells about her in the same way the community defines itself through her. In an interview, Michael Dorris, at the time Erdrich’s husband and closest adviser, relates how “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” won a short story contest: “We said, if it’s that good maybe we ought to think about expanding this and telling that same story, because there are many stories in that story, from other points of view [. . .] basically this [Love Medicine] is the story of the reverberation of June’s life even though she is the one character who does not have her own voice. Bringing her home is finally in fact resolving her life and death in balance” (Interview with Coltelli 1990, 43–44, my emphasis). June not only initiates the storytelling of the community, but by making June cross the snow like water, Erdrich transcends stereotypical representations of the doomed Native woman or the Vanishing Indian. June steps out of the usual story and opens a whole realm for other possible imaginations. Each novel in Erdrich’s tetralogy is connected to one of the four elements. In Love Medicine, water imagery abounds as a symbol for 7 transcendence. As finding a cultural as well as individual identity is the central theme of the novel, “crossing the water” or drowning — literally as well as metaphorically in tears, alcohol, or sorrow — are central images for the failure or success of individuals in finding their sense of belonging within the community. Water not only stands for the transformation of individual identity but symbolizes connection as many rivulets spring and return to one source; individual lives are all connected in the larger scheme of the community. Once we have heard all the variations of June’s story in Love Medicine, her unacknowledged son Lipsha finally “bring[s] her home.” In the beginning of the novel, Lipsha does not know that June was his mother and that Gerry Nanapush is his father. Like so many other children, he was taken in and raised by Marie Kashpaw. In the course of the novel, Lipsha learns who his biological parents are, but only reaches a true understanding of self and community

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when he realizes that “belonging was a matter of deciding to” (LM, 348). In the last chapter entitled “Crossing the Water,” Lipsha helps his father Gerry, who has escaped from prison once more, by taking him up to the Canadian border. Lipsha drives the car that the two of them have won in a trickster-like fashion in a card game. In the game, Lipsha “dealt [himself] a perfect family.” Concerning the card game, by dealing a 8 “family” he beats his half brother King at poker and wins the car. On a symbolic level, he decides on his identity, family, and his place within the community, at that very moment. Families are constructions throughout the tetralogy, and belonging is a matter of choice. Close to the Canadian border, after his father has left him, Lipsha stands by the river in his car, musing: It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. The bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. [. . .] I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.” (LM, 366–67)

This is how the novel ends and where June’s story comes full circle. Lipsha’s statement that he had to bring “her” home could refer to June as well as to the story itself. It also implies that the dry land stands for cultural alienation and an increasing loss of connection. His remedy, the love medicine he tries to concoct earlier in the novel, could be June’s story, which teaches to imagine beyond the known and usual. June stands for both a new beginning as well as a connection to tradition. And she is more than a story, she symbolizes a shift in frames of reference. In the last part of the first chapter, June’s niece, Albertine, cannot believe that “June was gone — not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like the sudden snow” (LM, 7). Later, when Albertine is lying in the grass outside on a starry night, she muses: “As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall. And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. [. . .] She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls. Her long legs lifting and falling. Her laugh an ace. [. . .] Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons” (LM, 37). Smith has pointed out that in Chippewa mythology “the joyful dancing of the dead in the afterworld creates the northern lights” (Smith 1997, 75). By dancing and laughing, June not only creates the northern lights,

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but guides some characters, some “wandering souls,” in the tetralogy out of fateful and fatal life stories.

Deframing the Usual Gaze: Various Readings of June’s Story Writing and storytelling allow us to escape our own predicaments in this physical world and free our minds to go beyond it. Alootook Ipellie

By inserting diverse images and symbols into the opening vignette, Erdrich offers a multiplicity of readings of June’s story and avoids finite representation. Images from Christian mythology as well as allusions to the trickster figure open up alternate possibilities for June’s story. Cunningly, like a trickster herself, Erdrich uses traditional materials from both cultures and re-appropriates them. I suggest that Erdrich in her creation of the character June overlaps two different cultural myths in order to avoid definite readings. A third, feminist reading of June’s story illustrates how Erdrich not only undermines oppositions by playing with them but how she resists signification altogether. June opens the tetralogy, and she opens up certain frames. Through a close reading of the opening vignette I will introduce the main themes and techniques in the tetralogy as June is a character but also a sign in Erdrich’s shape-shifting narrative. Certain textual keys make it possible to read June as a Savior-Christ figure. Read through the lens of Christian mythology, June’s disappearance on Easter Sunday suggests her resurrection after death. The chapter’s title “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” as well as the phrase that she walks over snow like water further imply that June is a Christ-like figure. Indeed, June transcends a merely physical state of being at the end of the story and is spiritually resurrected in the stories of her people. Telling June’s life-story has a double function: the community reverberates June’s life and thus creates an identity for June, but at the same time, the community imagines itself by telling June’s story. The remembrance of June’s life builds community at a time of cultural alienation and loss of traditional knowledge. Thus, June could be read as a savior, as someone who gives an identity to her people. By walking off into the snow, she gives them something to talk about and a reason to resurrect the past. June’s transcendence of a physical state of being and her role as savior is also suggested in the phrase that “the pure and naked part of her

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went on” because the separation of spirit/soul and matter/body is one of the fundamental dichotomies underlying Christian myth. Even June’s frequent comparison to the Easter eggs could have religious undertones. At Jewish Passover, hard-boiled eggs remind the religious community of the Israelites’ release from Egyptian slavery. Eggs were taken on the long journey from Egypt to the promised land. At the end of her story, June also embarks on a journey, and she guides her people out of unpromising life stories imposed onto their lives from the outside. Erdrich undercuts the image of June as a savior and Christ-like figure by also portraying her as a bawdy, funny, sexed, and contradictory character. Purdy claims: “Given all the obvious Christian references here, one might feel the urge to consider June a ‘Christlike’ figure, one who has been sacrificed to the sins of history. This dramatic revision of the ‘drunken prostitute’ image may be a useful line of inquiry at first, but it makes her — oddly enough — a much too simple character, the text too didactic” (Purdy in Maitino/Peck 1996, 87). Rather than recreating June as a Christ figure, I think Erdrich evokes Christian images — and they recur throughout the tetralogy — to instill “catches” into one version of her story. June’s story functions as an introduction into the main themes and techniques of the whole tetralogy. By inserting Christian images into June’s story, she raises awareness that cultures are never authentic, pure, or static. In an interview, Erdrich says that “you never change once you’re raised a Catholic — you’ve got that. You’ve got that symbolism, that guilt, you’ve got the whole works and you can’t really change that. That’s easy to talk about because you have to exorcise it somehow. That’s why there is a lot of Catholicism in both books [Love Medicine and Jacklight, a volume of poetry]” (Bruchac 1987, 100). The countless Catholic references in the novels show how Chippewa culture has not only been dominated by, but has incorporated, Christian myths. Incorporation in Erdrich’s understanding not only means acculturation or combination but mutual change. Erdrich shows how cultures inevitably draw on each other, and how culture is only established on the permeable border of peoples in contact. A recurrent theme in all of Erdrich’s novels is the incorporation of difference. Characters’ spiritual and physical survival as well as the cultural survival of the whole community depends on whether they succeed in incorporating the Other rather than rejecting it. As a return to the old ways is impossible, incorporation becomes a means to preserve as well as reinvent cultural identity: “The value Erdrich places on incorporation and her understanding of ‘home’ as a mental inhabitation suggest that she views tradition not — as it is often understood — as a static, origi-

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nary inheritance, but as flexible, mutable entity, ceaselessly evolving through a dynamic process of incorporation” (Brogan 1996, 173). June’s story symbolizes Erdrich’s transgressive cultural approach as she meditates between tradition and change. At the end of her story, June is going home, and indeed, home stands for the return to a changing tradition. June inaugurates a line of powerful female (trickster) figures and incorporates old elements into new readings. By making June the beginning of a new tradition in her textual universe, Erdrich also subverts myths of male primacy like god the father and namer of things in Christian mythology. June transforms into something more powerful than herself, a quality she shares with many female characters in Erdrich’s novels. The way June walks off into the snow with a clear sense of self and direction defies notions of the tragic and victimized Indian woman. Erdrich calls up conflicting characteristics in the character of June in order to move “beyond the stereotype of the ‘doomed Indian,’ helplessly trapped between the two cultural codes of Native American beliefs and Roman Catholicism. In her fiction such intercultural conflict is not necessarily destructive, but rather is available as an ambiguous source of both strength and powerlessness” (Bak in Versluys 1992, 146). Erdrich depicts both June’s helplessness and her strength. June is a symbol for the post-contact period in Chippewa history in which the challenge is to negotiate the new and the old without losing a sense of home or belonging. Set in the 1980s, Love Medicine depicts the struggle for keeping tradition and nonetheless incorporating the new and other. Erdrich achieves this by inserting symbols with a double meaning throughout the tetralogy. June’s beads are an example for how an object shifts meaning constantly and becomes a symbol for how the two different cultural contexts overlap. After her mother dies, June is left to fend for herself in the woods. When she is found and taken to her aunt, Marie Kashpaw, June wears a necklace of beads. The Lazzares claim that the Cree put them around her neck as a charm because they were afraid of a girl who had survived alone in the bush living on tree sap. They were convinced that June had magic powers and slung the beads around her neck to protect themselves. In Tracks, however, we learn that years earlier, Pauline, who envisions Napoleon as the devil, strangles him with her rosary and then drops it in the woods. June could have picked up the rotting rosary, both a symbol of prayer and of religious fanaticism. As a teenager, June leaves Marie’s house to live with her uncle Eli deep in the woods. After June has left, Marie keeps her beads in a coffee tin almost like a religious

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symbol. She says: “I don’t pray, but sometimes I do touch the beads” (LM, 96). After Lipsha fails in concocting the love medicine that would bring her husband Nector back to her, Marie presses the beads into his hands. Lipsha does not understand their significance as he knows neither that they belonged to June nor that June was his mother. Nonetheless, tears shoot up in his eyes as he feels the beads. Now they have become a symbol of June’s ambivalent powers, for her independence and love, her defeat and reckless victory. The beads evoke different cultural contexts and connect various people and stories. Besides evoking Christian imagery, there are several keys in the opening vignette which suggest that June could be read as a trickster figure, an observation that is supported by her reappearance at the end of the tetralogy, where she cunningly manipulates the bingo game to help her son Lipsha. Albertine’s vision of June at the end of the first chapter introduces a few trickster characteristics: “Her laugh an ace. [. . .] Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory” (LM, 37). Like trickster, June knows how to gamble. Her humor is an ace because it enables her to survive and transcend limitations. She tricks people, but gets into terrible scraps herself. June is both a loser and a winner, a savior as well as a fool. After June’s death, the community tells trickster tales, and laughter is shown to be a love medicine. Sayre has pointed out that “of all the white man’s injustices to American Indians, one of the worst has been the stereotype of the solemn victim, the ‘granite-faced grunting redskin,’ and the image prevails, to a large degree, because of a refusal to notice Indian humor” (Sayre 1985, 68). The very act of portraying Native characters as well as the plot in a humorous, rather than tragic mode is an act of subversion and of breaking with stereotypes. The first chapter of Love Medicine, which introduces us to the community right after June’s death, abounds with trickster tales, and the memory of June is resurrected through a typical trickster tale. June’s 9 family exchanges tales about fox, for instance, and they tell each other jokes that are funny as well as cruel and taboo breaking. The women tell the story of “June’s hanging” as a child. One of her sisters comes running into Marie’s kitchen saying that the other children are hanging June. When Marie runs out and saves her, scolding the other children, June is terribly upset. She says that she was not scared and that Marie had spoiled the game. Marie is baffled, and instead of being grateful, June calls her a stupid bitch. The women laugh while remembering this story in the kitchen after June’s death. The story is grotesque because not spoiling the game would have killed June. The story is typical for the

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trickster, who is often the laughing stock of the community because his stupidity gets him into absurd situations. Trickster figures are found in different shapes and textual versions in almost all world mythologies. In the introduction to his famous collection The Trickster: A Study in American Mythology, Paul Radin states that “few myths have so wide a distribution as the one, known by the name of The Trickster. [. . .] The Trickster myth is found in clearly recognizable form among the simplest aboriginal tribes and among the complex. We encounter it among the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese and in the Semitic world. Many of the Trickster’s traits were perpetuated in the figure of the medieval jester, and have survived right up to the present day in the Punch-and-Judy plays and in the clown” (Radin 1972, xxiii). Radin’s collection focuses on “The Winnebago Trickster Cycle.” He collected the tales from his informant Sam Blowsnake who first obtained them from an elderly tribal man living near Winnebago, Nebraska in 1912. In these tales, as Sayre states in his essay on Radin’s collection, “trickster or Wakdjunkaga, was a combination of giant, boogie-man, alter ego, and fool. He was a historical figure but also someone who might occasionally bewitch children or whom misbehaving adults, as well as children, occasionally resembled. Thus he had different roles — enemy, naughty friend, legendary hero, teacher, shadow, clown — depending on the audience, the references made, and the motifs of the teller” (Sayre 1985, 72–73). Sayre criticizes that Radin arranged trickster’s adventures into a cycle because this imposes a certain order on them and furthermore implies a didactic aspect that was optional depending on the intention of the teller. Trickster tales could be tales of warning or encouragement, they served as entertainment and education. Trickster stories vary between cultures and within cultures, but there are a few characteristics all have in common. Tricksters are able to alter their shape and can transcend spatial as well as temporal boundaries. They are restless wandering figures, seeking human community. Most tricksters have no definite gender, and in fact many of trickster’s adventures draw 10 on gender ambiguity and on cross-gender behavior and appearance. Nonetheless, most trickster tales have male protagonists. He is a cultural hero, a healer, a teacher, and at the same time he is an ignoramus. As such, trickster is the figure for the essentially human, and at the same 11 time transcends humanity. Trickster is “the kind of figure who might be isolated from any human community, reviled and stoned, and yet he is constantly welcomed back in. And this is not just because his mistakes and idiocy may ultimately instruct, control, and civilize; it is also because he makes us laugh and thereby recreates the very human community he

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appears to deny or deviate from” (Sayre 1985, 78). June splits the community in their different opinions of her, but also reunites it in the laughter about her. The dominance of humor in trickster tales serves to entertain people, but also functions to show the out of bounds: “Because the trickster’s appetites are enormous, incessant, and unrestrained by tribal taboos, myths about the mischievous acts of the culture herotrickster-transformer provide outlets for socially unacceptable feelings and impulses and teach the consequences of unrestrained or taboo behavior” (Ruoff 1990, 47). Humor distorts familiar images and transcends limiting stories. As many tales of the trickster abound with images of abnormal bodies as well as graphic sexual and excremental imagery, they come close to European traditions of the grotesque. The trickster’s stories teach the listeners about existing taboos and in the same breath provide outlets for imagining the breaking of those taboos. June breaks several taboos. She was taken in by Marie Kashpaw and grew up among Marie’s other children with her stepbrother Gordie. She breaks a taboo by running off with him as a teenager, secretly marrying him. However, the trickster is not simply a didactic figure, his stories entertain and some of them simply make no sense: “Trickster can be tracked to the source of all confusion, humor, puzzlement and pain, riddles, problems, losses and gains — anything in the world that keeps on going on” (Lincoln 1983b, 134). Trickster is a polyvalent figure that can never be grasped in a single reading as he always also is the excess of this reading. Trickster narratives rely on chaos, luck, and chance. In Chippewa mythology, the trickster is called Nanabush or Nanabozho: “Nanabozho is the central figure of Ojibwa narrative. A protean shape-changer, he is the hero of the Ojibwa creation myth and the ceremonies of the Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society), mediating between human society and the realm of the manitous or spirits. Sometimes beneficent, sometimes malevolent, Nanabozho is both guardian and troublemaker, bringing both order and chaos, making rules and breaking them. Embodying the pleasure of humor as well as the humor of pleasure, Nanabozho is also a playful trickster, sometimes gentle and self-mocking, sometimes mean-spirited and cruel” (Friedman 1988, 111–12). The character Nanapush in Erdrich’s Tracks is the most obvious trickster figure in her fiction. His sly humor, abundant sexuality, his ability to heal through storytelling, and his function as the memory of his people definitely signify Nanapush as the Chippewa trickster Nanabozho or Nanabush. Erdrich also creates powerful female trickster figures, who like Fleur Pillager, are recreated from many different mythological texts. Erdrich uses trickster figures in all of her novels; sometimes a figure is

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definitely a trickster, sometimes characters exhibit just some trickster qualities. Because trickster is a failure and a champion at once, the figure allows Erdrich to tell of the injustices her characters experience without getting stuck in these stories. Her characters transcend the limitations of one plotline. Racism and sexism are related in Erdrich’s tales, but at the same time she points to imaginative escape routes. Her tales tell the same story differently, and in this varied repetition lies the chance for change. Yet Erdrich’s use of the trickster figure is never a romanticized return to Native oral traditions. Fleur Pillager with her wolf-like grin, her ability to survive drownings by making somebody else take her place, with her slippery figure reminiscent of the water monster Misshepeshu, with her uncanny talent at playing cards, and her ability to bewitch people, is a female trickster. Although the most powerful character in Erdrich’s fiction, she can neither escape being gang raped by a group of white men nor help losing her land. Even Nanapush in Tracks can escape neither humiliation nor save his tribe from the loss of land and cultural alienation. Erdrich does not smooth over harsh realities, but she does not reinscribe tragic life stories either. She offers both, tales of suffering and empowerment in her trickster narrative,. In her abundant sexuality, humor, and transformative energy, June inaugurates a series of very powerful female trickster figures in Erdrich’s work. They cannot be limited to one reading and most of all defy gender stereotypes. Erdrich recycles cultural materials between and within cultures, and June is a wandering trickster as well as a wandering sign. In the following I want to further explore the aspect of June as a wandering trickster sign.

Vanishing From a Symbolic Field So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

The opening of Love Medicine inevitably calls up stereotypical images of a Native woman. June’s story could be read as a variation on the literary theme of the “Vanishing Indian,” who, although pure and good, is severed from her/his traditional lifestyle and fails to survive in a corrupt white man’s world. American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a myriad of texts that pictured the indigenous people 12 of America as a good and noble but dying race. Those texts identified Indian with nature, unspoiled and uncultured, but incapable of adapting

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to the modern ways of industrialization and urbanization. Many discourses have represented Natives either as “noble savages” or “brutish savages,” yet, according to Vizenor, both stereotypes are expressions of Western needs and issues at the time more than accurate representations of Native Americans. He asserts that “these stereotypes and several others, such as idiotism and ‘genetic code’ alcoholism are hypotragic impositions that deny a comic world view [. . .]” (Vizenor 1989, 11). With “hypotragic” Vizenor means tragic readings that were imposed on life stories of Native Americans from the outside. Those stories not only interpret Native culture in specific ways in retrospect, but they have a performative aspect for the future as they shape the readers imagination. In the variations of June’s story, as in the rest of the tetralogy, Erdrich plays with conventions of realism and claims for authenticity and makes her readers aware that “the Indian in today’s world consciousness is a product of literature, history, and art, and a product that, as an invention, often bears little resemblance to actual, living Native American people. It is at this disjuncture between myth and reality that American Indian novelists most often take aim, and out of which the material of their art most often arises” (Owens 1992, 4). Erdrich not only situates June’s story on the suture of myth and reality but she questions the very distinction of real and mythical. The image of June as a broken prostitute seems to represent a reality but, as Erdrich shows, it seems real because it is familiar to the reader. She also implies that the other unrepresented part of the story, June’s trickster abilities, are just as real but less familiar and less visible in a cultural frame that is more familiar with readings which portray Indians as victims. Vizenor asserts that postmodern consumer society produces absolute fakes in its search for authenticity. Borrowing Eco’s term of “hyperrealities” he claims that in the need for the real, tribal cultures have been produced as absolute fakes. Erdrich constantly plays with claims for authenticity in her fiction. At the end of Love Medicine, for instance, Lyman Lamartine sets up a “tomahawk factory” that produces tribal souvenirs for tourists “competitive with low-priced Taiwanese goods” (LM, 303). These articles are not authentic, but offer the illusion of authenticity at a cheap price, they fake the real which the tourists want to take home. Because those tourists have a certain expectation of what Indians are like, which has been trained through images and stories, they buy the illusion of a reality that is utterly invented. Erdrich shows that the real or authentic depends on a certain perspective and cultural frame. In June’s story, Erdrich also questions what is real. She suggests that

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June’s magic disappearance at the end of the story is just as real or fake as the supposedly real tragedy we read into her life. June’s disappearance in the snow, without having left any tracks, can be read as Erdrich’s attempt to resist an ethno- as well as phallocentristic framing of June. June is not caught in a certain image, she is the catch. By fading from the page, June also vanishes out of a symbolic field. In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford has pointed out that “whenever marginal peoples come into a historical or ethnographic space that has been defined by the Western imagination [. . .] their distinct histories quickly vanish. Swept up in a destiny dominated by the capitalist West and by various technologically advanced socialisms, these suddenly ‘backward’ peoples no longer invent local futures. What is different about them remains tied to traditional pasts, inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce it” (Clifford 1988, 5). Clifford argues that in a symbolic field that inevitably posits Native as Other there is no room for independent signification. Rather, the body of the Other becomes a site of symbolic appropriation. The oilboomtown Williston, in which June is stranded, is not only a capitalist Western setting but a male territory that calls up images of the frontier and the exploitation of the land as much as it does the exploitation of women. In this space “defined by Western imagination,” there is no room for a representation of a Native woman that would not render her as other, as the deviation from the male or white norm. Therefore, Erdrich makes June walk out of this symbolic field because she neither wants to represent her as the romanticized Vanishing Indian nor as a broken prostitute. June remains a present absence throughout the tetralogy. Her disappearance leaves the ending of her story blank, however, this blank is not a negative absence but an assertive space that actively resists further inscription, and at the same time makes all endings possible. June’s story has no ending as she “walks over the snow like water” and vanishes into the landscape leaving no tracks. Rather than reproducing the stereotypical image of the dying Vanishing Indian, June vanishes from a reductive symbolic field. She does so in a trickster-like fashion, “her laugh an ace,” transcending hypotragic readings. Her own story, which is invisible in a symbolic field that inevitably puts her as the negated other, emerges as a myriad of possibilities at the end of the opening vignette. Her disappearance yields the Native stories the community tells. The ensuing stories are tales of defeat and victory, tradition, and cultural alienation. In their diversity and paradox, they build a collective identity. By consistently switching frames of reference, Erdrich blurs the image of the

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“typical Native woman” until June fades into the white landscape. To the same extent that June vanishes into the landscape without leaving tracks, she vanishes from the page, leaving it blank. The blank page not only resists signification and makes new readings possible but collapses the opposition of man as creator and woman as creation. The topos of the blank page calls up several issues discussed in 13 contemporary feminist theory. In her essay “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?,” Barbara Johnson shows how man in western art traditionally has been “figure” whereas woman has been “ground,” a “blank page, the raw material on which the pen-penis of male creativity inscribes its figures, the negative space surrounding what is presented as truly interesting” (1998, 20). Johnson gives several examples of this relationship in literature and concludes: “The cost of their [women’s] attaining a valued status in the world is to become an object in someone else’s reality and, hence, to have, in fact, no status in the world. If woman’s value is only assured by the place assigned to her by patriarchy, then the alternatives can only be u-topian” (1998, 28, her emphasis). June vanishes from the page, leaving it blank to make all stories possible in the denial of one definite story. Starting with a framing of June in a male gaze on male territory in the oil boomtown Williston, where the cowboys of the West have been re-placed by “mud engineers,” Erdrich ends the vignette by letting June open up a new symbolic realm. She opens the floor for oral, circular stories from another perspective. Erdrich makes June leave a field that is defined in the terms of somebody else’s reality to open up a creative space. Erdrich plays with notions of the real and opens up a utopic space for June’s story. This space is u-topic in the literal sense of the word as “nowhere” because June cannot be located or fixed. By disappearing into the landscape she is nowhere and thus everywhere at the same time. She becomes the wandering sign in the narrative. June fades into the background to escape patriarchal as well as colonialist inscriptions, and she also collapses the opposition of ground versus figure. Whereas figure corresponds with active and creative, ground corresponds with passive and with being the object of creation or the ground for inscriptions. June is neither creator nor creation, she is the gap for other stories. June not only leaves the scope of what is representable, she vanishes from the realm of the written word and only leaves traces in the oral stories of her people. It is, of course, problematic to speak of “orality” in a work of literature. Yet, there are many oral markers in Erdrich’s fiction that indicate a “fingierte Mündlichkeit” (staged orality) that, according to Hochbruck, never simply arises from oral traditions but

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from cultural conflict (Hochbruck 1991, 251). Erdrich not only uses various voices in her fiction, she directly addresses an implied listener, uses slang, and most of all gossip and rumors as typical forms of oral speech. Goetsch states that “fictive gossip may be one of the most important instruments which authors use to lessen the distance between themselves and the reader. By introducing chatty characters and narrators, they create for the reader the illusion of proximity and intimacy” (Goetsch 1988, 150). Erdrich creates such “chatty” characters in Lipsha and Nanapush who draw us into the community. June and Fleur leave gaps to be filled with speculations, rumor, gossip, and a theoretically never ending array of contradictory stories. The community on the reser14 vation “imagines” itself from June by gossiping about her. Some see her as a slut, others as a heroine, but the gossip about her unites people. Her death in a snowstorm is so unlikely, that there is room for many speculations. Sands has pointed to the importance of gossip as a force of community building in Native tribes: Gossip affirms identity, provides information, and binds the absent to the family and the community. [. . .] The gossip tradition within Indian communities is even more elliptical, relying on each member’s knowledge of every individual in the group and the doings of each family. [. . .] Moreover such anecdotal narration is notoriously biased and fragmented, no individual privy to the whole story. The same incidents are told and retold, accumulating tidbits of information. There is, after all, no identifiable right version, right tone, right interpretation. It is only from all the episodes, told by many individuals in random order that the whole may be known [. . .] .” (Sands 1985, 14–15)

In the tetralogy that June inaugurates, Erdrich creates a community web by criss-crossing different versions of individuals’ life stories. June’s story is told by 14 different narrators. Throughout the tetralogy, people’s histories are being told with different undertones and implications, out of different interests and with different outcomes. Erdrich’s identity webs are airy, prone to constant change, relocations, breakdowns, and reweavings. Nonetheless, they establish a sense of community. The cultural identity Erdrich creates is not real or authentic, but remains bound to the individual’s self-reflexive acknowledgment of belonging to a culture. She asserts a Native identity, but keeps it open to change and to incorporating the other. The volatile nature of collective and personal identity that Erdrich propagates is reflected in her narrative tricksterism. In the beginning, June walks out of a definite narrative frame and becomes a wandering sign in the text; a sign for fluidity and paradox that allows Erdrich to create identities that are flexible. Erdrich splits a

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monologic representation into a multitude of contradictory stories as June triggers the stories of the whole book. Instead of meeting a dead end, June opens up an array of new possibilities. Erdrich resists a definite plotline for June because narrative is always a taming gesture that serves an interest. In contrast, as a trickster figure June symbolizes freedom and choice: “freedom is a sign, and the trickster is chance and freedom in a comic sign; comic freedom is a ‘doing’ not an essence [. . .]” (Vizenor 1989, 13). With “her laugh an ace,” June escapes serious and reductive signification. At the beginning of Love Medicine, June cleans the slate off past inscriptions for an imaginative realm that incorporates the u-topic into the real and vice versa.

Trickster Sign: Fleur’s Function in the Tetralogy Stories are like ropes, they pull you to incomprehensible places. [. . .] a story can tangle you up so badly you start to think differently. Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers

Fleur Pillager is the only character to appear in all four novels. Like June, she never tells her own story, but has a pivotal function in the narrative design of the whole tetralogy. Fleur’s ambiguous character and her unusual behavior spawn gossip in the community: she gives people a subject to talk about. Because she is talked about all the time but never has her own voice, Fleur literally appears larger than life. She feeds the imagination of the community. She is feared and respected by her people because she still knows “the old ways,” but remains an outsider her entire life. Fleur is at the center and at the margin of the community at one and the same time. Fleur is same and other simultaneously because she is the definitive force behind the community as well as a contrastive element. One of the narrators in Tracks, Pauline, says about Fleur: “She was the one who closed the door or swung it open. Between the people and the gold-eyed creature in the lake, the spirit which they said was neither good nor bad but simply had an appetite, Fleur was the hinge” (TR, 139). Because she survives drownings, people believe that she is favored by Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster in Lake Matchimanito. Fleur exceeds all definition, yet her shape-changing figure runs through all four novels. She is the leitmotif that keeps the narrative as well as the community together. She is “the hinge” between the Chippewa spirits and her people, between reality and fantasy, as she inhabits the space in-between. With her “skin of lakeweed” (TR, 22), her thin

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“old green dress,” and her “glossy braids” (TR, 18), she at times seems to be Misshepeshu herself. Fleur spawns myths, and she is made out of that fabric. Right from the start, Fleur is described as a powerful but dangerous figure. She survives her drownings by making the man who pulls her out of the water take her place on death road, the passageway between life and death: “Men stayed clear of Fleur Pillager after the second drowning. Even though she was good-looking, nobody dared to court her because it was clear that Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster, wanted her for himself. He’s a devil, that one, love hungry with desire and maddened for the touch of young girls, the strong and daring especially, the ones like Fleur” (TR, 11). More than her uncanny powers, Fleur’s consistent breaching of gender codes is disturbing to the community’s order. After her whole family perished in the small pox epidemic that wiped out a substantial part of the Chippewa nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, Fleur continues living on her own in her family’s cabin deep in the woods and “a young girl had never done such a thing before” (TR, 8). Pauline says that in the woods Fleur “messed with evil, laughed at the old women’s advice and dressed like a man. She got herself into some half-forgotten medicine, studied ways she shouldn’t talk about” (TR, 12). Fleur not only knows about old medicines and magic, she is an excellent hunter and trapper, both unusual activities for a woman. The community is suspicious of Fleur because she is a being in-between with no fixed identity. She goes out hunting “not even in her own body. We know for sure because next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang out. The pad broadened and pressed into dirt. By night, we heard her chuffing cough, the bear cough. By day her silence and the wide grin she threw to bring down our guard made us frightened” (TR, 12). Some community members are so unnerved by Fleur’s exceptional behavior that they demand she should be driven off the reservation. Erdrich shows how Fleur’s “abnormal” gender behavior tests the limits of the community and poses a threat to its order. Fleur outlives everybody. We meet her as a young girl in Tracks and watch her walk away as an old woman at the end of The Bingo Palace. Nanapush calls her the “funnel of our history” (TR, 178), and Fleur certainly stands for the old traditions of the Chippewa. Smith describes 15 Fleur as “the emblem of precontact Anishinabe culture” (1997, 24). Although Fleur does represent the old ways, in my opinion, she stands chiefly for a flexible and changing cultural tradition as well as the concept of fluid personal and collective identity. She is a historical reference point for the community in Love Medicine, but she also points to a — however

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uncertain — future as she walks off into the snow at the end of The Bingo Palace, the last novel in the tetralogy. As a rhetorical device, Fleur has an intertextual as well as intratextual function in the novels. In the character of Fleur, Erdrich mixes many different Chippewa stories — Fleur is fox, wolf, and bear in one — and draws on fairy tale traditions — the cabin in the woods, Fleur’s witch-like appearance — to create a character who is not bound to one cultural text but roams a textual universe. At the same time, Fleur connects the different novels and the characters within them and thus creates a community. Fleur is “the hinge” that opens both ways. She is the most powerful and most ambiguous character in Erdrich’s fiction. The whole tetralogy is a polyphonic reverberation of Fleur’s identity. As such, Fleur is a trope as much as she is a character. She shifts meaning, breaks the linearity of stories, and is chaos impersonated, but she also is the ordering principle in the novels. Fleur appears in all four novels because she connects the community. Furthermore, as I will argue in the following, Fleur epitomizes the predominant theme of each novel. In Love Medicine, Fleur works like a subtext. Fleur Pillager is first introduced to the readers by rumors as an omnipresent absence. Although she makes no appearance in Love Medicine, the readers’ curiosity is piqued as we participate in the gossip and speculation about her. In almost every chapter, a character refers to her uncanny powers and her unusual way of living. Rumor has it that Fleur can work magic, that she is favored by the water monster Misshepeshu, and that she owns that land by the lake Matchimanito. As Lipsha’s clumsy attempt to concoct a love medicine shows, the younger generation has lost the knowledge of the old traditions. The central chapter of Love Medicine is a story by the same title. Set in 1982 and told in the funny voice of Lipsha Morrisey, it pinpoints the dilemma of the Chippewa in the 1980s. Lipsha muses that “God’s been going deaf. Since the Old Testament, God’s been deafening up on us. [. . .] Now there’s your God in the Old Testament and there is Chippewa Gods as well. Indian Gods, good and bad, like tricky Nanabozho or the water monster, Misshepeshu, who lives over in Matchimanito. [. . .] Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do a favor if you ask them right. [. . .] That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewa once the Catholics gained ground” (LM, 236). As June Morrisey’s and Gerry Nanapush’s son, Lipsha is believed to have the healing touch and tries to prove his abilities by concocting a love medicine for his grandparents Marie and Nector Kashpaw. Nector cannot make up his mind whether he wants to live with his wife or with Lulu

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Lamartine, his long time lover, and Lipsha answers his grandmother Marie’s request for a love medicine that would make her husband return to her whole-heartedly. Lipsha schemes that because geese mate for life, shooting a pair of geese and feeding a heart each to his grandparents must do the trick. Shivering in the reed, he waits for the geese for hours and when they finally appear he turns them away by a missed shot. Frustrated and cold, he figures that turkey hearts from a supermarket would do just as well and numbs his doubts about whether turkeys mate for life by going up to the convent to get the hearts blessed. The priest turns him away saying “I have duties,” and Lipsha blesses the hearts himself with “holy water” on his way out. Ironically, he reenacts what he described as the Chippewa dilemma earlier: He has forgotten how to practice the old medicine and the Catholics at the convent will not listen to his requests. The chapter culminates in a tragicomic scene: Nector refuses to eat his turkey heart and when Lipsha and Marie try to force it down his throat, he chokes to death. In contrast to Lipsha, Fleur still knows the old ways and is called up throughout Love Medicine whenever magic or the old traditions are involved. In Love Medicine Fleur serves as a subtext for the forgotten yet lurking powers of the Chippewa. In Tracks, Fleur serves as the trace of a history different from official written historiography. Whereas Love Medicine spans fifty years between 1934 and 1984 and is told in eighteen different voices, Tracks only spans the years 1912–24 and is told by two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline who enter into a dialogue about Fleur. The two narrators provide very different perspectives, and their narratives pursue different ends. Nanapush, whose very name signifies him as the Chippewa trickster 16 Nanabozho, stands for the traditional ways of the Chippewa and tries to preserve tribal tradition in the stories he passes on to the next generation. In contrast, his mixed-blood narrative counterpart Pauline embraces Catholicism in an attempt to negate her own Indian identity. Pauline is a marginal figure in the tribal community with very low social standing because she comes from a family of skinners “in the clan for which the name was lost” (TR, 14). Pauline desperately wants to escape her position as a no-name to which the Catholic convent on the reservation seems to offer a perfect escape route. As only non-Indians are allowed to take the vows, Pauline tries to suppress and deny the Native part in her. She literally tries to exorcise any Native blood by castigating her body. She wears underwear made of scratchy potato bags on her bare skin, wears shoes on the wrong foot to make her feet blister, and only allows herself to use the toilet once a day to make “the dark one” leave her body. She not only is driven by the urge to turn herself into some-

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body else, but becomes obsessed with converting Indians to Christianity. Because she has lost touch with her own Native background, the only progress and future she can envision for the tribe lies in Catholicism. Her name, reminiscent of Paul, foreshadows her conversion: she becomes a member of the convent and is re-named Sister Leopolda. Despite her aspiring sainthood, Pauline is a diabolic character in the novel who works dark magic and harms her people. Erdrich does not simply set Catholicism and Chippewa mythology in opposition, but exposes where they blend and overlap. Deep down, Pauline believes in traditional Chippewa medicines, and Nanapush in the end makes use of some of the things he learned in Catholic school. Whereas Pauline has completely internalized 17 the racism and missionary attitudes of the contact period, Nanapush cunningly uses and incorporates the new culture into his trickster schemes. His sexual appetite and sly humor, but primarily his ability to tell stories that heal and save, signify him as trickster. During a famine, he spiritually guides Eli on a moose hunt, guiding him safely home with his song. Stories have a performative character in Tracks, and talking is a cure as well as an instrument of survival. One of Nanapush’s salient characteristics is that he outtalks anyone. He says, “during the year of sickness, when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story. [. . .] I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on” (TR, 46). After a long winter, during which he and Fleur almost died, the priest finally gets to them with food, and Nanapush remembers: “My voice rasped at first when I tried to speak, but then, oiled by strong tea, lard and bread, I was off and talking. [. . .] I gathered speed. I talked both languages in streams that ran alongside each other, over every rock, around every obstacle. The sound of my own voice convinced me I was alive” (TR, 7). Significantly, he talks in both languages to get back to life. Tracks relates the tribal history at a time when the governmental allotment policy robbed Indians of most of their property, and when small pox and consumption severely diminished the population. Metaphorically, the disease consumption also signifies the loss of Chippewa culture. In the end all government policies strove to assimilate Indians by trying to turn them into (white) settlers and farmers. In order to keep their land, the tribes were forced to pay tremendous taxes to the government. Tracks is set in a period when the General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly known as the Dawes Act, became effective. The act’s aim was to allot tribally owned land to individuals. The general goal was to assimilate Natives by making them give up their nomadic cultures to become

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settled farmers: “In the forty-five years following passage of the Dawes Act, Native Americans lost ninety million acres of what had previously been reservation land” (Berninghausen 1998, 200). In 1906, Congress passed the Burke Act, which speeded up allotment by shortening the trust period, turning Natives into independent land owners sooner, letting “every ablebodied man and woman of the tribe [. . .] work out 18 his own salvation” (Janus as quoted in Camp). Berninghausen explains that “the combination of hard work and individual landownership — cornerstones of American manhood — were clearly understood as keys to assimilation and therefore to ‘salvation.’ The use of the term ‘salvation’ suggests that allotment was conceived of as a not altogether secularized version of missionary work, the federal government’s companion plan to the Catholic Church’s attempt to convert the Chippewa” (Berninghausen 1998, 200). The government land policy threatened the Chippewa’s traditional lifestyle because their land claims became so small that hunting, trapping, and fishing became almost impossible. Moreover, they had to find ways of making money in order to pay the taxes. In Tracks, the tracks of the official documents, the written word, are counteracted by Nanapush’s oral account of the Chippewa’s history. More than any other novel, Tracks explores the relationship of oral storytelling and written documents. Tracks opens with the narrative voice of Nanapush who addresses Fleur’s daughter Lulu as he relates the tragic events of the small pox epidemic in the 1920s that wiped out thousands 19 of Chippewa. Although Lulu is not Nanapush’s biological kin, he calls her granddaughter as she is his daughter in spirit. When Fleur gives birth to Lulu, a priest comes around to register Lulu in the government files. As her father is unknown and as Nanapush wants to create a line for himself, he signs up as her father. This trick later helps him to beat white bureaucracy at its own game. When Lulu is locked up in a government school, Nanapush manages to prove through the registration files that despite his age he is officially her biological father and thus entitled to bring her home. Although Fleur doted on her daughter, she has to leave her behind when she loses her land and becomes a wandering peddler. Lulu never forgave her mother for abandoning her and for forcing her to leave the reservation and attend a Catholic school. When Nanapush brings Lulu home to the reservation, she sullenly rejects “the old ways,” and dresses in high heels and fancy clothes instead. With his narrative, Nanapush wants to guide Lulu home spiritually by explaining her mother’s behavior as well as the tribal history and culture to her. Because he addresses Lulu as “you,” the reader also feels drawn into the storytelling situation.

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Although published later than Love Medicine, Tracks is set earlier and provides the readers with background information on the people and events in Love Medicine. Whereas Love Medicine depicts the time of postcontact, Tracks depicts the clash of the two cultures. This is illustrated by the chapter headings in Tracks which consist of a date, indicating chronological time, and a Chippewa title (with an English translation) that refers to the seasons and exhibits a cyclical understanding of time. In the first chapter of Tracks, titled “Winter 1912/Manitou-geezisohns/ Little Spirit Sun,” Nanapush walks from cabin to cabin looking for survivors of the small pox epidemic but finds only one among her perished family members: Fleur Pillager. Tracks is about the survival of Chippewa culture for which Fleur becomes a symbol. As official documents, fictional images, and government policy misrepresent or extinguish the tracks of the culture, different traces are retrieved in the oral stories of the community. Whereas in Love Medicine Fleur stands for the roots of the community and signifies a counter space to the loss of connection and tradition, in Tracks she is the emblem for Chippewa history. However, as such, she is defeated at the end of the novel when she loses her land. Only in The Bingo Palace, when Fleur has realized that in order for cultural survival the new has to be incorporated into the old she does get back her land. In The Beet Queen, Fleur becomes the essentially unessential. The Beet Queen leads the reader away from the reservation to the small town of Argus, North Dakota, and mostly depicts the stories of Americans of German or Scandinavian descent as well as of mixed-bloods and Chippewa. Spanning the years 1932–72, at the core of the novel again lies the quest for a way of belonging. In The Beet Queen, we encounter Fleur as a wandering trickster-like peddler who helps the injured Karl with her potions and magic. After Karl fled from the town of Argus and from a stable life and identity, he badly hurt himself jumping off a freight car, and Fleur heals his broken feet as well as the pneumonia he caught on the train. Karl says about her: “She was an Indian, a Pillager, one of a wandering bunch that never did take hold. She made her living by peddling whatever came her way to sell” (BQ, 50). As Fleur does not have her own voice in the tetralogy, she is only represented through others. Karl’s first impression creates a rather pitiful and slightly derogatory image of Fleur. However, when Fleur puts him in a sweat-house, he has a powerful vision: “A bear rose between the fire and the reeds. In the deepest part of the night, the biggest animal of all came through in a crash of sparks and wheels” (BQ, 51). As Fleur often changes into the shape of a bear, which throughout the tetralogy represents her excep-

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tional powers, she exceeds Karl’s initial image of her: “Bears, according to the anthropologist Ruth Landes, were highly respected among traditional Chippewa for their mysterious qualities. [. . .] Moreover, a bear’s life cycle, moving from hibernation in winter to reemerge in the spring, made him seem at once a symbol of both death and life” (Clarke 1992, 33–34). The way she survives drownings, gambles on “death road” (the transitory route from life to death), and survives starvation and epidemics, Fleur consistently walks the border between life and death. When she gives birth to her daughter Lulu, a powerful she-bear appears at the door of the cabin. When Margaret Kashpaw tries to drive the bear away (after that she will be called Rushes Bear), and Nanapush fires a bullet at it, they realize that it must be a spirit bear because it disappears without being wounded. In The Beet Queen, despite her restless life, Fleur is feared and respected: “Fleur’s customers were wary and approached her with a hint of fear, as if she were a witch or maybe a saint cast off to wander” (BQ, 52). It is not surprising that it is Karl who meets Fleur, because of all characters in The Beet Queen, Karl comes closest to being a trickster figure himself. Like Fleur, he remains wandering and is highly ambiguous. When his sister Mary has an accident with a slide at school, she leaves an imprint of a face on the ice that makes the local news because everybody at the Catholic school is convinced that it is the face of Jesus Christ. Except for Mary who clearly sees the face of her brother Karl. Whereas this instance associates Karl with Christ, his brother Jude, without knowing who he is, says to Karl: “You are the devil” (BQ, 82). Asked in an interview whether Karl is Christ-like or diabolic and which final judgment of him the reader should make, Erdrich answers: “There is no reason to come to a final decision about whether he is one or the other. He incorporates both. We all have a little of both” (Erdrich in Chavkin/Feyl-Chavkin 1993, 220). Karl is a liminal figure which is further emphasized by his bisexuality. The novel’s opening vignette, “The Branch,” juxtaposes how the whole novel deals with the breaking and making of families. Whereas water is the dominant element in Love Medicine and land dominates the plot of Tracks, air rules The Beet Queen. Not only does Adelaide Adare fly off with an artist and leave her children behind at the beginning, but characters are up in the air, uprooted, and wandering in search for a place of belonging. After their mother has left them, and their baby brother Jude is taken away by a stranger, Mary and Karl Adare take the train to their only relative. When they arrive on a freight train in Argus, where aunt Fritzie has her butcher shop, they pass “a string of houses”

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and “one tree, weak, a scratch of light against the gray of everything else, tossed in a film of blossoms.” Whereas Mary does not even look at the tree, Karl is drawn to its “delicate perfume” and “like a sleepwalker [. . .] he floated to the tree and buried his face in the white petals” (BQ, 2). When the garden’s proprietor threatens to unleash her dog, Karl tears a branch off the tree. When the dog comes running at them, Mary and Karl start running as well, but in opposite directions. Mary continues to her aunt’s, and Karl runs back to the train with his branch. As “it was such a large branch from such a small tree [. . .] blight would attack the scar where it was pulled off” (BQ, 2). Mary will create a new family for herself, but Karl will remain for ever wandering, unable to trust anyone after his mother abandoned him. When the following spring Mary passes the tree from which Karl had torn the branch, “it bore no blossoms” (BQ, 2). Just like the tree in one of the yards in Argus, the Adare family tree is attacked by blight. People create new families in the novel that are not held together through blood ties but that are volatile and temporary constructs. These new families do not have the strong roots of trees or bear blossoms but they are intricate works of art, more flexible but less stable. They are aptly described by Celestine when she watches a spider making a nest in her baby’s hair: “It was a delicate thing, close to transparent. [. . .] It moved so quickly that it seemed to vibrate, throwing out invisible strings and catching them, weaving its own tensile strand. [. . .] A web was forming, a complicated house [. . .]” (BQ, 176). The metaphor of the web refers to the stories as well as to personal and collective identity in Erdrich’s novels that are woven from many threads. There is a correlation between gender construction and the constitution of new families: “To effect the reconstitution of family, gender will be constructed in an unconventional way since the dissolution of the family unit necessitates the redefinition of family roles” (Flavin 1995, 18). Mothering, for instance, is a quality that men assume, just like women abandon their families. More than any other novel, The Beet Queen deals with the in-between, challenges gender stereotypes, and shows how sex, gender, and sexuality are cultural constructs. Although Fleur is a marginal figure, her shape shifting and restless wandering are a structuring device underlying the plot. In The Bingo Palace, Fleur reappears and wins back her land in a poker game with the Indian land agent. The chapter entitled “Fleur’s Luck” is told in the narrative voice of the community. Significantly, she returns to the reservation for the “fourth and last time” (BP, 139). As the number four stands for healing and completion, Fleur seems to win back the land for good. She is dressed in “stark white” with “spotless

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high heels,” and a “short-brimmed hat” (BP, 139). Considering that Fleur usually dresses in the traditional and practical clothes of a hunter, her appearance is startling. As the gossipy “we” telling this story reveals, her dress is only a disguise: “Those of us who dared to notice saw that her braids had grown thick as tails and hung long down her back, bound together with a red strip of cloth. The oldest people frowned when they heard that detail, remembering how in the old days the warriors arranged their hair, tied back when they prepared to meet the enemy” (BP, 139). Fleur’s car is white as well, and “she moved in a glare, a shield of new light” (BP, 139). But most surprising, she has a white boy with her. The narrative “we” stresses Fleur’s outsider status and her more mythical than real appearance again: “Everyone knew and did not know her. There were no cries of greeting [. . .] no one offered her bread and tea” (BP, 139). She is not a part of the community but at the same time forms its heart and core as she feeds the community’s imagination. She generates gossip and stories: “Only sharp-eyed gossipers already hurried to build story onto story, jumped to wonder at the white suit of foreign cut, the luxury car, the boy” (BP, 139–40). She is “a presence that did not stand to reason” (BP, 140). Whenever Fleur is around, strange things are said to happen: “Or did they happen all of the time, perhaps, and was her presence a way of putting order to the random way death struck?” (BP, 141). Throughout the tetralogy, Fleur stands for ambiguity and chaos, but chaos as an ordering principle, as an opposition to the usual order. The watchful community notices that the white boy does not cast a shadow in the sun and must thus be “bait” (BP, 142). After Fleur lost her land in Tracks, it was stripped bare by a logging company and then bought by the former Indian Agent Jewett Parker Tatro. When he sees Fleur’s car, he decides that he wants to own that too. Fleur, Nanapush, and the boy sit down in front of the house to play cards, the agent joins the game but watches the wrong person. He keeps an eye on Fleur whereas the community sees the boy’s “strong, spidery and rough” hands, which signify power and gambling abilities. They surmise that Fleur has taken the shape of the boy to fool the agent. Killings and catastrophes are consistently attributed to Fleur’s powers. Maybe the community exaggerates and Fleur simply won, maybe she truly possesses supernatural powers: Erdrich keeps the readers in the dark as Fleur inhabits the space in-between reality and fantasy. The agent loses his land and all his possessions to Fleur. This time she wins by pretending to have adopted a new lifestyle and to have lost her connection to the old traditions, whereas what she really does is use the new as a Trojan horse to practice her old magic.

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In The Bingo Palace, the old very often returns in the disguise of the new. Lyman builds a bingo hall to subvert a system that exploits Natives. At the end of Love Medicine, he muses: “He’d [. . .] teach Chippewas the right ways, the proper ways, the polite ways, to take money from retired white people who had farmed Indian hunting grounds, worked Indian jobs, lived high while their neighbors lived low, looked down or never noticed who was starving, who was lost” (LM, 327). Whereas Lipsha, Marie, and Lulu see the future of the Chippewa in the preservation of tradition, which means going against capitalism and preserving the traditional lifestyles, Lyman “saw the future, and it was based on greed and luck” (LM, 328). The Bingo Palace continues where Love Medicine leaves off, it deals with luck and chance and with how old traditions are incorporated into a modern world. By building the bingo hall, which draws white people and their money, Lyman cunningly uses the Chippewa 20 tradition of gambling to get even with historical injustices. This novel performs narrative tricksterism in content and form in its exploration of narrative chance and personal luck more than the other books. The Bingo Palace has an indeterminate ending which leaves room for speculation as it points to the uncertain future of the Chippewa. Lipsha has once more helped his father Gerry escape the police, and at the end of the novel is sitting in a stolen car with a baby in his lap in a snow storm facing death while his father races off in a car with June who miraculously appeared with the snow. Both of Lipsha’s parents, June, and the only man she ever loved, Gerry Nanapush, disappear into the snowy northern landscape in a roaring blizzard. The final chapter “Pillager Bones” tells how Fleur takes Lipsha’s place on death road to save him from freezing. The way Fleur walks off into the snow at the end of The Bingo Palace echoes the tetralogy’s beginning where June vanishes in a snow storm, except that Fleur does leave tracks.

Tricking Gender Patterns It [the story] comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. Louise Erdrich, Tracks

By way of two close readings, I will illustrate how Fleur is paradigmatic for Erdrich’s narrative tricksterism, which allows her to depict and transcend reality. Erdrich reproduces typical stories but supplies them with surprising endings. As a shape shifter, Fleur resists definition and opens up imaginative spaces. In Tracks, one summer, Fleur Pillager disappears

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from the reservation to work at a butcher’s shop in the small town of Argus. Her male co-workers are all of Scandinavian descent, rough workers who “had carved about a thousand carcasses between them” (TR, 13). Pauline comes down there to work as well and she relates the story of how Fleur “almost destroyed that town” (TR, 12). Pauline envies and fears Fleur and because with her poor looks the men do not notice her, she becomes Fleur’s shadow, the silent observer of the terrible events that happen that summer. At the butcher’s shop, Fleur is hired for her strength and admired for her looks. Pauline observes that Fleur “knew the effect she had on men. [. . .] She swayed them, sotted them, made them curious about her habits, drew them close with careless ease and cast them off with the same indifference” (TR, 16–17). Fleur has the knowledge and power of the old Pillager clan. Power travels in the blood lines and comes down through the hands “which in the Pillagers are strong and knotted, big, spidery and rough, with sensitive fingertips good at dealing cards” (TR, 31). Whereas Pauline recognizes Fleur’s magic and strength, the men are oblivious of her power, “they were blinded, they were stupid, they only saw her in the flesh” (TR, 18). The very fact that Fleur as a woman is working at a meat plant is an intrusion into a male dominated space, but one evening when Fleur wants to join the men in their favorite pastime, poker, she certainly breaches the existing gender code. After they have recovered from their first “shock of surprise” the leader throws down his cards saying “‘gotta see a man,’” and the other players follow him. From the start, Fleur uses their certainty of unquestioned superiority against them. With “the white wolf grin a Pillager turns on its victims” Fleur schemes the next step, borrows money from Pauline and puts it on the table. Drawn by the bait, the men all come back, apparently to poke fun at Fleur and to shake her off balance: “They shot each other small glances, stuck their tongues in their cheeks, burst out laughing at odd moments, to rattle Fleur” (TR, 20). Fleur, however, cannot be bothered by this display of old boys solidarity and concentrates on her game. She plays steadily and wins a little, but never has a spectacular hand, she feeds the men their own stereotypes and strengthens their feeling of superiority. When Fleur takes a card and then slightly shakes, the men presume that, typical for a woman, she does not have the nerve to play poker properly. They throw in their money to see her hand and according to their expectations, Fleur has nothing there. One of the men triumphantly announces: “Well, we know one thing [. . .] the squaw can’t bluff” (TR, 20). As in June’s case, Erdrich shows how racist and sexist discourses intersect. The word “squaw” illustrates that the men discriminate against

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Fleur because of her race as much as her sex. Fleur leaves the game after she has won exactly one dollar. For one week she plays poker with the men, winning exactly one dollar each night. Fleur slowly reels them in, she makes their “brains hum” (TR, 18) until they are “lit with suspense.” The men are irritated that Fleur wins with small cards, never with a full or a flush, and that she wins although she never again tries to bluff. They are also disturbed because they instinctively feel that Fleur’s behavior poses a threat to the male order that grants them their superiority. They “couldn’t believe, first of all, that a woman could be smart enough to play cards, but even if she was, that she would then be stupid enough to cheat for a dollar a night” (TR, 21). Assuming that she lacks the one essential quality for poker, the ability to bluff, the men blindly walk into Fleur’s trap. The tension rises as they want to regain control and are determined to end the uncanny game by making Fleur get away with anything but a dollar. One night, when the men have all saved their full pay, they sit down to play poker again and try to rattle Fleur by increasing the stakes. The game continues as usual until “they all rode on one last card” (TR, 23). When Fleur picks up her last card, she draws a long breath, shakes slightly but stays in. This fits the men’s stereotypical image of a woman too nervous to carry through a bluff. And because Fleur set them up in the beginning, the men throw in all their money to see Fleur’s hand. However, their self-assured expression soon changes into disbelief: this time Fleur bluffed a bluff and wins all their money. With a wolf’s grin, Fleur takes the money and gets up from the table yawning. She offers no explanation, shows no regret, and in a self-confident way walks off. Afterwards the men sit silently and are shell shocked. Then they start drinking while they “planned with their eyes things they couldn’t say aloud” (TR, 24). They later gang rape Fleur, not because she has won all their money, but to assuage their humiliation and rage over the fact that “a squaw” had outsmarted them at playing cards, an activity that they had staked out as male territory. The fact that a Native woman strategically and cunningly planned for a week to get them, threatens them on many levels at once and uproots each and every one of their stereotypes. At the very moment Fleur proves to be capable of bluffing, an ability any good (male) card player should possess, the men turn against her. Fleur’s rape is clearly insinuated but not graphically depicted. The whole scene is a brutal yet carnivalesque description of how much the prevailing order has been shaken. Illuminated by the moon, the men approach Fleur, and in the ensuing struggle a sow ready to be slaughtered escapes from the pig pen and enters a bizarre, dancelike fight with one of the men. Besides drawing on grotesque and carni-

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valesque imagery, Erdrich also uses Native gambling myths which “all contain an element of violence and border on the macabre. They explore the predatory-prey cycles, territorial rights, body functions and fluids, slavery, sacrifice, and violent death — the usual human fixations” (Gabriel 1996, 23–24). Within those gambling myths, “Native storytellers know the gray areas represent paradox, the meat closest to the bone” (29). Erdrich also draws on paradox in the figure of Fleur to disrupt familiar representations and gazes. The next morning, Fleur is gone. At noon, a storm is building up and the men hide from the storm in the meat lockers. They do not let in the children, Pauline and Russell, a protégé of Fleur who tried to, but could not help her that night. They are standing outside and hear a cry building up in the wind that augments to “a shrill scream” reminiscent of a war cry. In her narrative, Pauline leaves it open whether she, Russell, or the wind close the iron bar of the meat lockers, trapping the men inside. A hurricane sweeps over Argus that smashes and wrecks the whole town. Miraculously, no one is harmed except Kozka’s Meats, the plant where Fleur worked, which is smashed to pieces. Only the backrooms, home to the Kozka’s, who had always been kind to Fleur, were left intact. In the chaos, no one misses the three men, and only after three days a search party sets out. They are found in the meat lockers “hunched around a barrel where the game was still laid out” (TR, 30), solidly frozen to death. Significantly, they die in the posture they so often assumed while playing cards with Fleur, and they are wrapped in shaggy bear furs, which they had used as protection against the cold. Considering that Fleur is often described as “bear,” with her laugh reminiscent of a bear cough and the bear tracks she leaves when hunting, it looks like she has met her prey in the meat lockers. Whereas the men tried to frame her in the stereotypical cliché of a “squaw,” Fleur takes revenge by locking them in one deadly position in the meat lockers. The word “squaw” is not only derogatory but resounds western frontier myths of masculinity. The word points to a racist fantasy, a story imposed on Native women, and Fleur breaks with this plotline. From the very beginning, Fleur can see through the men’s prejudices and uses them to suit her own plans. She fools them by using their sexist and racist notions against them. Only one man, called Dutch, survives, but only to slowly rot in his bedroom watching how limb after limb falls off his body from frostbite. As the community says later on in The Bingo Palace: “Fleur was never one to take an uncalculated piece of revenge. She was never one to answer injustice with a fair exchange. She gave back twofold” (BP, 145).

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Only later in the novel, we learn that Fleur desperately needed the money made in the card game to pay “the annual fee on every Pillager allotment she had inherited” (TR, 36). Making that money was actually a matter of life and death, as only the possession of land ensured the physical as well as cultural survival of the Chippewa in their traditional lifestyle. Back at her cabin on lake Matchimanito, Fleur gives birth to a child and spawns more stories about herself. The girl, Lulu, “whose green eyes and skin the color of an old penny” generates rumors because no one can determine whether the child is mixed blood or not. Pauline observes that Lulu “is bold, smiling in her sleep” (TR, 31), and certainly has inherited her mother’s powers, whereas the child’s father is unknown and irrelevant. He could most plausibly be one of the rapists, or, as the community gossips, the water monster Misshepeshu or Eli who soon after has a passionate relationship with Fleur. The only certainty is that Nanapush, the trickster, officially signs as Lulu’s father. And to her he addresses the story of her mother and her people, which really is one story because as Nanapush tells Lulu, Fleur is “the funnel of our history” (TR, 187). The identity of Lulu’s father remains unknown and this ambiguity empowers Lulu as it does her mother. Fleur stays in-between all versions of her story. Pauline comments on the circulating rumors about Fleur and her child: “It [the story] comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don’t know anything” (TR, 31). Fleur herself is the story that shifts shape at every turn, as she is not only a powerful avenger but also a victim. Erdrich however, opens up the imagination for a story that moves beyond this victim position. Fleur shifts positions just like Erdrich switches narrative codes, as the natural and apparently realistic depiction of the card game switches into the narration of supernatural elements. This variation of the story neither mystifies nor romanticizes Fleur, but creates another story that allows for the contemplation of “counterfactual possibilities” (Giddens 1991, 29). Erdrich discontinues a tradition that has portrayed Native women as helpless victims, and she changes the ending of a well known story. Fleur’s very body is a sign not for the natural but for a constructed body as her physical features are a conglomeration of different mythological beings: her hips are “fishlike, slippery, narrow,” her “glossy braids were like the tails of animals,” her teeth are “strong and sharp and very white,” and her “fifth toes were missing” (TR, 18). Erdrich recreates Fleur as a powerful female trickster figure by transforming different myths: Fleur’s body resounds the features of the water-monster Misshepeshu, of wolf, and of bear, all protagonists in Chippewa stories. She

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is not only a mixed being but a new text as she is woven from different oral traditions. Fleur is the meeting point for several intertextual and intratextual discourses, and consistently shifts meaning. She makes the ironies and inconsistencies of voices in the novels palpable. In her changing body form as well as her unusual behavior, Fleur incorporates a fluid identity. She — as well as the text — can never be fully grasped. Clarke has cogently argued that Fleur’s ambivalence can be compared to Butler’s notion of gender subversion, where perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that gives room to new possibilities for signification and contextualization (1992, 34). Erdrich achieves a shift in signification by perpetually displacing typical representations of women in her stories of female identity. June, Fleur, Marie, and Lulu are all normal women in some ways and are extraordinary beings in other ways. In her fiction, Erdrich creates an array of strong women, who, like trickster, are essentially human but transcend humanity at the same time. They do suffer and they are caught up in certain frames, but they also transform and rise above stereotypical stories. Nonetheless, Erdrich resists mythologizing female power or the female body because her stories always strive against closure and her characters embody paradox. The female characters are loving and mothering as well as cruel and diabolic. Erdrich counteracts one-dimensional readings and oversimplifications. She recreates women as powerful female tricksters because trickster per definition is a liminal figure that can never be wholly defined and consistently walks the border. In the figure of Fleur, Erdrich unites several myths and traditional Chippewa stories and thereby changes the cultural materials as well. In Stealing the Language, Ostriker emphasizes that revisionist mythmaking is a powerful agent in cultural change because accepted and official materials are recycled for altered ends. Myths lie on the crossroad of public and private discourses because they are imbued with official authority and at the same time are “intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation — everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable” (1996, 213). According to Ostriker, through revisionist mythmaking, feminists instill the other, unfamiliar, and absent into the center. Ostriker concludes that “since the core of revisionist mythmaking [. . .] lies in the challenge to and correction of gender stereotypes embodied in myth, revisionism in its most obvious form consists of hit-and-run attacks on familiar images and the social and literary conventions supporting them” (1996, 216). Erdrich uses traditional mythological figures and creates Fleur, who does appear demonic rather than defeated at the end of the story and who

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irrevocably changes the traditional stories. Bear, wolf, and Misshepeshu are now connected to female power and survival. Clarke claims that “by absorbing and transforming traditional Chippewa stories [. . .] and then reembodying them in a new pattern to create Fleur, Erdrich generates a new pattern, a new text. Within the space of her novel, she allows traditional Chippewa myths of transformation to meet, contradict and relativize each other” (1992, 32, my emphasis). Fleur breaks existing gender patterns by becoming a sign for paradox. Erdrich, however, not only establishes a new pattern or text in the figure of Fleur, but new strategies for reading this text because Fleur resists being interpreted in any definite way. Whereas June’s blank page opened a creative gap to resist stereotypical readings, in Fleur, Erdrich creates a new shape shifting gender story. Fleur is in-between gender codes, just as she is in-between myth and reality. Both, the text Tracks, with its two diverse narrators, and Fleur, the trickster figure change shape at every turn of the story. Chronologically, Fleur opens the tetralogy because Tracks depicts events prior to Love Medicine. And it is also Fleur who ends the tetralogy in the closing chapter of The Bingo Palace, titled “Pillager Bones.” The opening and closing chapters of The Bingo Palace are told in the voice of the community. A collective “we” narrates how Fleur leaves her cabin to take Lipsha’s place on death road. In The Bingo Palace, Lipsha continues his quest for personal identity and for his place within the community which began in Love Medicine. The tribe has largely lost faith in him as a guardian of tradition but also tells us at the beginning of the novel that Fleur is “waiting for a young one, a successor, someone to carry on her knowledge. [. . .] Lipsha Morrissey” (BP, 7). Although Lipsha gets from one squabble into the next in his crazy love for Shawnee Ray and his futile attempts to counteract Lyman’s capitalist plans for the reservation, he seems to be the chosen one. Fleur usually makes people take her place on death road, but when Lipsha is stuck in a snowstorm in the end, she goes out “into a day of deep cold and brilliance [. . .] thinking of the boy out there. Annoyed, she took his place” (BP, 272). Fleur only takes those possessions with her that have accompanied her all her life. Significantly, she leaves anything written behind: She didn’t take the written walls, she didn’t take the storehouse facts. She didn’t take the tangled scribe of her table or the headboard, the walls, the obscured and veiny writing on the tampered logs and her bed. She didn’t take the yellow newspaper, brittle as the wings of butterflies, scrawled in the margins, or the bound railroad ledgers or the

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linen sheets or scribbled mats. No, all of the writing, the tracked-up old cabin, she left for the rest of us to find. Fleur Pillager only took those things she carried with her all her life. (BP, 272)

Throughout the tetralogy, Fleur is a symbol for (oral) tradition and connection to the old ways, and when she goes on her last journey, she leaves anything superfluous behind as she carries the story with her. She herself is made from dream stuff because her whole identity is created from different myths as well as by the gossip of the community. Fleur as a figure is woven from oral wisps of narrative that create a fleeting sense of identity. As Fleur is walking, she tires and often has to rest. She can already see her deceased family members in the afterworld, but “it was then that the old strength that had served her in her hardest times seized her, lifted and set her again on the unmarked path. In later days, there would be some who claimed they found her tracks and followed to see where they changed, the pad broadened, the claw pressed into the snow” (BP, 273, my emphasis). At the beginning of the tetralogy, June does not leave tracks in the snow/on the page because Erdrich wants to open up a space for new images. At the end of the tetralogy, Fleur Pillager does leave tracks in the snow that testify to a presence. Tracks are documents, they make people traceable and identities readable. At first, this seems to contradict Erdrich’s main purpose to create fluid identities that cannot be definitely read. The closing image of Fleur walking off into the snow, however, perfectly captures Erdrich’s whole narrative technique because the tracks document a being that shifts shape. The community comments on Fleur’s tracks: There is enough we can’t account for, however, we need no more. Her tracks should have been obscured. Her tracks should have filled with snow. They should have blown away with these rough songs from the wild dead we cannot hush. Somehow, we should have learned not to tamper with what’s beyond us. And yet on clear and brilliant days and nights of black stars they are sometimes again left among us, Fleur’s tracks, once more, so it is said that she still walks. (BP, 273)

Fleur remains a present absence within the community, a symbol for tradition that will be carried into the future as a burden and as a chance. Sometimes the traces of the past are still visible, and sometimes they are obscured. The communal voice closes the tetralogy by saying that Fleur still watches them “as we drown our past in love of chance, as our money collects, as we set fires and make personal wars over what to do with its weight, as we go forward into our own unsteady hopes” (BP, 274). Fleur

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is no longer part of what is happening, but she accompanies her people, not as a guiding force but as a symbol for survival, endurance, and “a recalcitrant subjectivity” (Shaddock 1994, 108). Her presence remains ambiguous till the end. Although her bear laugh can be heard unmistakably, “no matter how hard we strain to decipher the sound it never quite makes sense, never relieves our certainty or our suspicion that there is more to be told, more than we know, more than can be caught in the sieve of our thinking” (BP, 274). Fleur, like the text, cannot be fully deciphered, she exceeds what we can predict or imagine. Fleur’s tracks lead nowhere and explain nothing. Fleur signifies a present absence, she is physically and spiritually present in all novels but can never be defined or limited to one interpretation. Like June, she escapes signification.

Fleur’s Tracks: Authenticating the Inauthentic The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative. Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces

Fleur’s appearance in all four novels points to her importance for the whole narrative design. She stands for an underlying agenda that I have called Erdrich’s narrative tricksterism. Fleur is a wandering sign that allows Erdrich to represent the suppressed, other, and marginal without fixing a representation. Vizenor claims that in what he calls “trickster discourse,” trickster becomes a wandering sign in a language game, where the author, narrator, characters, and audience become the interlocutors (Vizenor 1989, 191). Trickster discourse relies on dialogism, on the relation of diverse utterances within and beyond one text. The intratextual correspondences between the four novels in Erdrich’s tetralogy open up a space for the convergence of contradictory voices. As a sign, trickster serves to uncover the distinctions and ironies between narrative voices. In my reading of Erdrich’s texts, the trickster is used as both a mythological figure and as a textual strategy that denies fixture, breaks with oppositions, and draws its force from paradox. The trickster cuts across cultural discourses, not as an archetypal figure, but as a mechanism to demystify categories without destroying them. In Erdrich’s narrative tricksterism, trickster is a fluid sign that breaks open gender and racial stereotypes. The term stereotype originates from printing technology where a stereotype could be used for thousands of identical impressions and was later adopted by sociologists to denote unchanging and abstract mental

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representations of groups and people. The main characteristic of social stereotypes is that they are not achieved through direct experience. Stereotypes are abstract mental representations of social groups, and become necessary to order a complex reality into a familiar pattern. In the context of Erdrich’s work, it is quite interesting that the term derived from printing because Erdrich varies plotlines to break the stasis of 21 stereotypes. Stereotypes by definition are immutable so that information can be easily stored and reproduced. Erdrich imagines different possible tales and thus challenges stereotypical images, for instance that of the Vanishing Indian. If stereotypes are understood as miniscule identity narratives, as fixed plotlines we apply to people’s lives, then Erdrich disrupts stereotypes by breaking with certain storytypes. By instilling other possibilities into the usual story, Erdrich attacks racial but also gender stereotypes. According to Butler, gender is a set of repeated acts, and it is in the varied repetition of these acts that change can take place. Erdrich slightly changes and transcends stereotypes by advocating movement over narrative stasis. As the function of stereotypes is to simplify a complex reality, the disruption of a stereotype causes the disruption of an underlying order and a specific perception of the world. The tracks Fleur leaves are not readable in any definite, stereotypical way. Rather, she is a trickster sign for an affirmative, yet fluid and forever changing cultural identity. Fleur connects the community through stories, but also by giving birth to Lulu who later spins an intricate net of tribal relations by having eight children by eight different fathers. This convergence of stories and kinship terms is no coincidence because, according to Greenblatt, “a culture’s narratives, like its kinship arrangements, are the crucial indices of the prevailing codes governing human mobility and constraint” (Greenblatt 1995, 229). Greenblatt states that cultures operate between the poles of mobility — the ability and necessity to incorporate new elements — and restraint — the need to establish a system of cultural values. Literature plays a crucial role in cultural change because it moves symbolic materials within a culture and links it with other materials thus changing text as well as context (230). Erdrich uses Fleur to transform cultural myths and to recycle traditional stories by transporting cultural materials to different zones. This points to a conceptualization of culture and tradition that is fluid and in constant need of reconstitution and revision. June’s story opens the tetralogy to deframe the usual gaze and to defamliarize the reader with stereotypical representations of Indians as transmitted by traditional texts. Erdrich tries to defamiliarize all too familiar images. June escapes a specific reading, by vanishing out of a

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symbolic field that is organized by binary oppositions with corresponding hierarchies, where woman is always the other, the lack, the deviation from a male norm, and Native is always the other compared to white standards. Fleur, on the other hand, becomes a symbol for an alternate gaze and an alternate historiography. At the end of the novel cycle, Fleur gives testimony to the multifaceted, ever changing story of the Chippewa. Her footprints in the snow attest to a presence that cannot be fixed or limited. The tetralogy nonetheless comes full circle: June’s story with its absence of an ending promises an array of different stories, and Fleur’s stories fulfill this promise. She stands for all the stories, diverse histories, the failures and successes, the victimization as well as the heroic survival of her people, for the connection to as well as the alienation from tradition. The tracks she leaves are the traces of the stories told, the inscription into cultural memory that runs counter to the official records that picture Indians as a noble but dying race. June breaks the tragic limitations of a monologic story, and Fleur leaves the tracks that signify a chorus of voices. The Bingo Palace opens and closes with the narrative voice of the community speaking as one, not in the sense of one authoritative voice, but as a chorus of differing voices that are united only by their differences. Fleur cannot be “read” in any definite way, she remains a wandering, shape shifting sign that epitomizes the polyphony of voices in the novel. Erdrich’s narrative design requires the readers to go back and forth between novels. The reader, like the characters, has to incorporate new information into knowledge gained earlier. Gradually, more and more is revealed to us about a character, and the new knowledge often challenges information received earlier. The readers also have to wander between the texts and constantly revise what we thought we knew or understood. Like the characters, we are caught in-between because we never know which voice or story to believe, as there is no ultimate authority in the text. We have to make sense of the events and contradictory stories ourselves by entering into a dialogue with the characters. Only by listening to all of them, by questioning their versions, interests, and positions within the community, can we piece together a picture, albeit a blurred one. The narrative structure of Erdrich’s novels mirrors her understanding of collective as well as individual identity as something that constantly has to be recreated. Fleur becomes a textual sign for this delimitation as she transcends the boundaries of story as much as she defies gender boundaries and becomes the epitome of a fluid identity that is not limited to one narrative. Fleur’s marks are readable but her tracks change from a footprint to a bear claw, and give proof of a being

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that changes shape frequently. Fleur’s identity is not decipherable in any conventional or realistic way. What Erdrich makes intelligible is the very unintelligibility of her characters’ identities. Erdrich consistently changes back and forth between what we perceive as real and what we deem supernatural. She uses narrative to play with conventions of realism, not only by intertwining supernatural events with realistic description, but by questioning how we come to take some representations for real. Erdrich is a trickster author in the way she makes the reality of stories shift: “I think it is me, the writer, who in the end is unreliable and continually searching for the truth of an imagined story, a truth which changes with each consciousness and each point of view. [. . .] There is no quantifiable reality. Points of view change the reality of a situation and there is a reality to madness, imagined events, and perhaps something beyond that” (Erdrich in Chavkin/Feyl-Chavkin 1994, 224). Tongue in cheek, Erdrich plays with claims for authenticity. In the final image of the tetralogy, when Fleur walks out into the snow, Erdrich authenticates the inauthentic. She documents an utterly constructed, imagined identity rather than using tracks to authenticate identity as the residue of originality or essence. Erdrich’s play with authenticity has been interpreted by some as a lack of political consciousness. In her article “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf,” Leslie Marmon Silko, herself a prominent Native American writer, criticizes Erdrich for failing to authentically and realistically represent Native Americans. Silko dismisses Erdrich’s novel The Beet Queen because it leaves open whether some characters are mixed blood, Indian or white, and also criticizes Erdrich’s postmodern, self-referential style because it negates a political stance necessary to defend Native issues: “Erdrich’s prose is an outgrowth of academic, post-modern, so-called experimental influences. [. . .] Self-referential writing has an ethereal clarity and shimmering beauty because no history or politics intrudes to muddy the well of pure necessity within language itself” (Silko 1986, 178–79). Silko closes the article by saying that: “Good fiction need not be factual, but it doesn’t obscure basic truth” (180). Silko’s statements are surprising because in her acclaimed novel Ceremony she herself mixes postmodern technique and Native oral traditions. Whereas Silko argues that Erdrich is apolitical because she creates characters with no clearly discernible racial identity, I would claim that this is exactly the political stance Erdrich takes. The Beet Queen deals with Erdrich’s white American background, but “the fact that she chooses to focus on that facet of her ancestry [. . .] can hardly be construed as a betrayal of her Chippewa roots” (Castillo 1991, 288). I think The Beet Queen is vital for the rest

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of the tetralogy, which is mostly set on the reservation, to show that although the struggle for identity of some of her Native characters is specific, their problems and struggles are experienced by all human beings in modern times. By leaving open who is Native and who is not, Erdrich not only avoids new stereotypes, but dismisses all notions of an essential ethnic or gender identity. In an interview, Erdrich states: “I don’t think American Indian literature should be distinguished from mainstream literature. Setting it apart and saying that people with special interest might read this literature sets Indians apart too. [. . .] I was thinking ours contributes to literature as a whole in a way that any book would. You have a view into someone’s life that you could not have had without this particular book and its vision. [. . .] I never expected to get a letter back about this book [Love Medicine], and there have been letters you would not believe; people just baring their souls. I think they really felt some kind of kinship with people in the book. People who are not Indians are writing these letters, too; it doesn’t matter to me [. . .]” (Coltelli 1990, 47–48). In response to Silko’s statements, some critics have tried to “redeem” the novel and have in return shown the “Indianness” of The Beet 22 Queen. Those approaches are the other side of the same coin: they try to attach value to the novel by rating its ethnic authenticity. Yet the whole novel is an ironic play with notions of gender and sexual identity. Erdrich playfully subverts any fixed categories. In my opinion, The Beet Queen, more than any other novel in Erdrich’s tetralogy, challenges gender and racial stereotypes by pointing out that fixed identities are deadly traps, whereas the ability to imagine oneself differently opens new escape routes. Silko is further annoyed that Erdrich leaves out some important ugly realities in her depiction of rural North Dakota in the 1930s where being white or Indian, male or female, hetero- or homosexual made a crucial difference in what your life was like and in how you were treated. Although this is true, literature has the liberty not to represent these facts but rather transcend these realities. The Beet Queen is about the psychological struggles of human beings — Native, mixedblood, non-Native — to form communities and to attain a identity within this community however fragile and temporary. This does not negate a political stance, but opens up room for discussion. Ethnicity is not seen as the repository for authenticity, and literature not as a means to represent realistically an ethnic group. Ethnic groups are not immutable entities and texts are not mirrors of reality. Fleur’s tracks at the end of the tetralogy, which document a changing identity, are a subversive play with authenticity. They are a sign

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for paradox itself, Erdrich authenticates or documents the constructed rather than the natural. Rather than advocating a stable, definitely readable cultural identity, the closing image of the tetralogy demands a cultural tradition that remains flexible and incorporates difference and change. Instead of depicting an authentic Native culture, Erdrich renders authenticity a dangerous illusion that leads to limitations. In her tales, she transcends cultural and gender boundaries and explores the space inbetween oppositions.

Conclusion: Trickster as Figure and Sign In trickster discourse, the trickster is a comic trope, a chance separation in a narrative. Gerald Vizenor, Narrative Chance

In my analysis, I concentrated on two figures out of the wide array of characters in Erdrich’s fiction. I decided on June and Fleur because the two are the most spoken about, but never tell their own story in their own voice. They are the engines of narrative as their lives spawn all stories and they are signs for Erdrich’s trickster narratives. They are present and absent at the same time, and epitomize major themes and techniques. Both are recreated in “oral” stories and remain forever changing. In her other characters, Erdrich illustrates instances of gender tricksters who succeed in moving out of stereotypical framings, and yet others who in their attempt to identify with an image, get stuck in stereotypical gender notions. Erdrich questions, transcends, and transforms stereotypical gender stories in various ways. She, for instance, induces fantastic elements into tales of women’s defeat and victimization, thereby turning these stories into both tales of victory and revenge. Furthermore, she breaks rigid oppositions such as whore and saint, for instance, in the stories of Marie and Lulu, by inserting elements of one image into the other. Only characters who have traits of what we conventionally recognize as either female or male attributes survive, like Gerry, Celestine, or Mary, whereas those who fulfill stereotypical gender expectations fail, like Sita, Gordie, or Henry Jr. Characters with a fluid identity — who very often exhibit trickster traits — survive, whereas characters who identify with a fixed stereotype fail. Erdrich uses the trickster as a form of narrative movement in order to break the fixture of stereotypes. Trickster is a rhetorical device for Erdrich’s transcendence of supposedly realistic tales of gender.

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Erdrich uses the trickster figure to create female tricksters who by walking the borderline escape definite signification and gender stereotypes. Erdrich moreover uses trickster as a rhetorical device as she shifts meaning, perspective, and voices throughout the tetralogy. By breaking with certain storytypes and narrative conventions, Erdrich disrupts representations of women and offers other narrative possibilities. Storytelling becomes a means for creating a different reality, a place of belonging inbetween, a matter of survival. Her stories are intertwined and infinite, as Nanapush says: “They’re all attached, and once I start there is no end telling because they’re hooked from one side to the other, mouth to tail” (TR, 46).

Notes 1

For the interrelation of postmodern and Native storytelling techniques, see, for instance: Nancy J. Peterson, “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” PMLA 109.5 (October 1994): 982–94; Kathleen Brogan, “Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” Prospects 21 (1996): 169–92; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Identity Politics, Syncretism, Catholicism and Anishinabe Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” Religion and Literature 26.1 (spring 1994): 107–33; Nicholas Sloboda, “Beyond the Iconic Subject: Re-Visioning Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” SAIL 8.3 (fall 1996): 63–79; Hans Bak, “Toward a Native American ‘Realism’: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” in Versluys 1992, 145–70. 2 The title refers to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s book Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). 3

In her 1997 study Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literatures (Berkeley: U of California P), Smith uses trickster as a rhetorical principal and as a “framework for analyzing narrative structure” in novels by contemporary American women writers of color because trickster “fabricates believable illusions with words — and thus becomes author and embodiment of a fluid, flexible, and politically radical narrative form.” In her understanding, “trickster aesthetic” challenges “an ethnocentric as well as phallocentric tradition” (Smith 1997, 11). Smith claims that “the political value that the trickster aesthetics places on multiple languages resembles features of écriture féminine” because both place multivocality over monolingual hierarchies and laughter over authority (12–13). However, out of a “political need,” Smith chooses “trickster aesthetics over a feminine language for analysis of narrative form,” thus establishing a new hierarchy and implying that écriture féminine is apolitical. 4

See, for instance: Julie Barak, “Blurs, Blends, Berdaches: Gender Mixing in the Novels of Louise Erdrich,” SAIL 8.3 (fall 1996): 49–62; Louise Flavin, “Gender Construction amid Family Dissolution in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen,” SAIL 7.2 (summer 1995): 17–24; Susan Meisenhelder, “Race and Gender in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen,” Ariel 25.1 (January 1994): 45–57.

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5

Erdrich’s tetralogy consists of the novels Love Medicine (New York: Holt and Company, 1984, new and expanded version 1993), The Beet Queen (New York: Bantam, 1986); Tracks (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); and The Bingo Palace (New York: Harper Collins, 1994). All quotations refer to these editions and are cited in the text, with page numbers, using the abbreviations LM, BQ, TR, and BP. 6

In terms of chronology, Tracks depicts events prior to Love Medicine although Love Medicine was published earlier. As it is part of Erdrich’s narrative technique to withhold information which is later on provided, I have chosen to look at the novels in the sequence of their publication rather than chronologically.

7

Image clusters and symbols in the respective text suggest that one of the elements is central to each novel: whereas water imagery dominates Love Medicine, in The Beet Queen air is the predominant element, and whereas Tracks is strongly associated with earth, images of fire run through The Bingo Palace. 8

Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace abound with scenes where cars play a crucial role at dramatic moments when life hangs in the balance. Magalaner has noted that the car is the American symbol for progress which almost replaces a religious god in its iconic position. He claims that Erdrich uses cars to show how her characters get along in the white man’s world (Magalaner 1989). I would say that cars are modern symbols for transience. They are one of the many symbols of mainstream American life which Erdrich incorporates into her fiction. Cars are used as symbols for crossing worlds as well as life periods in Erdrich’s novels. 9

“The culture hero-trickster-transformer takes many forms, most of which are animals: Coyote in the Southwest and Plateau, Raven in the Northwest and Arctic, Hare in the Great Lakes and Southeast, Old Man among the Blackfeet of the Northern Plains, Spider among the Sioux of the Dakotas, and Wolverine and Jay in Canada” (Ruoff 1990, 47). 10

See Barak 1996 for cross-gender behavior and the figure of the berdache.

11

For the function of the trickster in Native mythologies, see: John S. Slack, “The Comic Savior: The Dominance of the Trickster in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,” North Dakota Quarterly 61.3 (summer 1993): 118–29; Jay Cox, “Dangerous Definitions: Female Tricksters in Contemporary Native American Literature,” Wicazo Sa Review 5.2 (fall 1989): 17–21. 12

Owens has pointed out that “the famous Vanishing American has always been in the best interest of this country’s ‘prevailing social order.’ Works that both resuscitate the beleaguered and maltreated original inhabitant — who was supposed to have disappeared along with the passenger pigeon — and provide a countertext to the national meta-narrative of westering and millennial materialism are not likely to be selected into the canonical tradition” (Owens 1992, 17). I agree with Owens, however, as in recent decades multiculturalism as a social phenomenon and postmodernism as a literary phenomenon have called into question the great master narratives of the West, counter narratives have an appealing force. Although Erdrich is providing a powerful countertext, each and every one of her novels has made it to the top of best seller lists in the US. 13 See Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issue of Female Creativity” (in Showalter 1985, 292–313).

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14

By saying that the community imagines itself from Fleur, I am referring to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities.” Anderson argues that with the break up of aristocratic order in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, communities needed to create a cohesion through the “reverberation” of texts. Because the new sense of community arose from the reverberation of texts, Anderson calls these communities “imagined.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1985). 15

In English, the terms Ojibwa and Chippewa are used interchangeably. Both were attributed to the nation by outsiders. The nation’s own term in the old language is Anishinabe. Chippewa writers such as Erdrich or Gerald Vizenor, however, use the term Chippewa in English, as I will throughout the book. 16

Nanapush recalls his father naming him: “Nanapush. That’s what you’ll be called. Because it’s got to do with trickery and living in the bush. [. . .] The first Nanapush stole fire. You will steal hearts” (TR, 33). 17

Friedman claims that Pauline “represents the colonized subject.” Referring to Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks she concludes: “Fanon theorizes that in colonized peoples, the internalized caste system of value results in racial neurosis and psychopathology. This colonization of the mind produces the desire — often expressed symptomatically — to be white as a response to the racist imperative to ‘turn white or disappear.’” Friedman points out that a Fanonian reading of Pauline “would stress the power of internalized racism to induce psychopathology, to prevent, in other words, an emergent racial subjectivity” (Friedman 1994, 112). I would add to this that Erdrich also shows in all of her novels that internalized gender stereotypes lead to destruction and self denial, to alienation and subsequent death. 18 Gregory S. Camp, “Working Out Their Own Salvation: The Allotment of Land in Severalty and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band,” AICRJ 14.2 (1990): 19–38, here 32; Tom Berninghausen, “‘This Ain’t Real Estate’: Land and Culture in Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa Tetralogy,” in Roberson 1998, 190–203; Sidner Larson, “The Fragmentation of a Tribal People in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” AICRJ 17.2 (1993): 1–13. 19

The first sentence of Tracks: “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall” (TR, 1), seems like a memoir, which starts, however, with death, not birth. Nanapush counteracts this image of a vanishing race later by saying: “We Indians are like a forest. [. . .] The trees left standing get more sun, grow more thick” (TR, 184). 20

For an assessment of how present day gambling halls owned by Indian Tribes try to right the historical injustices, see Kathryn Gabriel: “Gambling continues to be of great economic and social significance to Indian peoples — presumably a four to six billion dollar annual business. Since the Seminoles opened their first bingo parlor in Florida in 1974, roughly 200 tribes in twenty states have banked on gambling ventures in the attempt to gain economic independence. [. . .] Success has not come without struggle, however, and the battle is far from over. The opening of reservation casinos has been embroiled in controversy, locked up in courtrooms, and argued in Congress. The main conflict has been between individual states and the reservations within them. In part, it is a battle between sovereign entities, each determined

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to decide for itself what is to take place within its borders. [. . .] Through their casinos, many tribes are today turning the tables on their historical adversaries, and the irony has not been lost on them. The once-feared Mashantucket Pequots, for instance, were down to 280 members before they began operating the richest reservation casino in the country. Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota tribal members went from earning $1.95 an hour stripping copper to netting nearly a million dollars each since opening their Mystic Lake casino at Lake Prior, Minnesota. The casino itself was named after the tribe, ‘dwellers at spirit lake,’ but the holding company for the tribe’s casino is named after Little Six, the Sioux leader hanged in 1862. Pojoaque Pueblo in New Mexico named its casino Cities of Gold after the search for the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cibola (Spanish for buffalo) conducted by Spanish conquistadors of the sixteenth century. Early in 1996, the governor of Pojoaque was the first to threaten to close down state highways if the state legislature failed to ratify gaming compacts with the tribes. If this action were joined by the other reservation casino operators who line the major freeways, the state could virtually be shut down, a possibility reminiscent of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish.” Gambler Way: Indian Gaming in Mythology, History, and Archaeology in North America (Boulder, CO: Johnson, 1996), 3. 21

The word stereotype derives from Greek stereos meaning solid, and tupos, meaning image or impression, from tuptein, to strike. 22

See, for instance: Dennis M. Walsh and Ann Braley, “The Indianness of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: Latency as Presence,” AICRJ 18.3 (1994): 1–17. Friedman, in my opinion, offers a helpful perspective in the discussion about whether Erdrich’s novels are political or not: “I do not believe that Erdrich’s representation of the political in Tracks resides in any greater or lesser narrative inscription of historical ‘fact.’ Rather, the political vision of the novel emerges out of its complex, often hilarious, and ultimately indeterminate play with questions of identity and spirituality as these are constituted in culture and history” (Friedman 1994, 108).

Conclusion Knowing that this story, all that is written, can be un/read, uninscribed. The words are stirred, mixed, like pieces of a jigsaw, broken up into their separate shapes and the whole picture lost, left to be reconstructed by another, a different hand. Aritha van Herk, Places Far from Ellesmere

A

has shown, narrative can be both a prison house that enforces gender stereotypes, and a tool for imagining gender differently. Gender identity is informed by narrative that hides its ideological impetus by concealing the conditions for, and mechanisms of, its own construction. The texts chosen for this study render those mechanisms and thus reverse the naturalizing gestures of narrative, thereby also calling into question constructions of gender. They make possible different narrative constructions of gender that remain, however, visible as constructions because the novels are self-reflexive in their make up. If, as I argue in the framing theory part, identity is a process rather than a trait we achieve and possess, and if gender, sex, and sexuality are the effects of discursive practices and power apparatuses, rather than given categories, different tales of gender offer other imaginative spaces to the reader/subject. Literary stories teach us the gender patterns that shape our lives. The authors in this study show that all stories are gendered in themselves and break down narrative patterns to question underlying assumptions of gender. Gender identity is the effect of formations of power that manifest themselves in narrative. The chosen texts aim at unraveling the power structures that shape notions of gender, and at changing those gender patterns. The authors show how certain narratives render gender as real and natural, and they reverse those processes. What emerges from a close analysis of the texts is a range of narrative strategies for disrupting gender stereotypes. The common feature linking all of the texts is that they question familiar images of femininity by surfacing other possibilities already encoded in cultural discourses. By challenging the means, matter, and manner of representation, all three authors use, but modify, cultural materials. They not only write different tales of gender but change the gender matrix underlying such materials. S THIS STUDY

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In representing the blind spots and the excess of usual representations, they queer the norm. Ruptures and instabilities in allegedly stable relations of sex, gender, and sexuality become visible, and re-imaginations of such relations possible. As identity is constituted within, not outside of representation, the texts demonstrate not only how women have been misrepresented, but, by representing different possibilities, who they might become. The texts do not offer new role models to women but — often tongue in cheek — render gender as a construction that relies on specific framings. Those frames are shifted to destabilize notions of gender and to open up a range of other possibilities. Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich deconstruct stories and words by reading them against the grain. Familiar role models or images are questioned by distorting the familiar through linguistic and narrative techniques that expose inherent differences. As ideology “in-forms” narrative (Rutland 1997, 4) and gives shape to subjects, the authors deform narratives in order to break the illusionist effect of narrative and make other realities possible. My approach reframed the texts of Thomas, Marlatt, and Erdrich through feminist theory to show how despite their differences they all use narrative as a tool to disturb relations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Because they write from different standpoints, which reflect their ethnic, sexual, and national characteristics, the authors display a whole array of different strategies for rewriting gender. The novels, however, not only differ in their textual techniques, but in their understanding of gender and identity. Thomas’s text traces the explosion of an identity. As no new frame of reference emerges, the protagonist’s identity remains disrupted, and the text offers no solutions. Thomas’s text ridicules and distorts familiar images. It creates non-sense and exposes a lust to destroy coherence. Intertidal Life can be read as a criticism of how women participate in their own oppression by not letting go of romantic notions. In her own narrative, Thomas depicts a process of disillusionment that resists romance. She traces how traditional texts teach women to become a woman. What women learn from fairy tales and children songs, Thomas suggests, is that they have to be vulnerable, and sacrifice aspirations as well as their bodies to gain the prince/status. Paradigmatic for romantic images, which lure women into giving up independence, is the genre of Harlequin Romances, which Thomas deconstructs through her own narrative. She sarcastically takes romantic images apart, but also shows how her protagonist cannot really let go of them as she can neither imagine other identities for herself nor finds a different frame of reference. Alice is caught up in conflicting discourses and cannot imagine spaces beyond them. Thomas stops at debunking the given as con-

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structed, and tearing apart language in her writing is motivated by wanting to convey chaos instead of order, and non-sense instead of common sense. In contrast to Thomas, Marlatt not only discloses patriarchal ideology in words and texts, but goes beyond those predicaments. A patriarchal ideology is substituted by a women-centered perspective, and a heterosexual framework by a homosexual one. Of the three authors, Marlatt has the most overt political agenda. Her text draws on fiction theory and écriture au féminin, both theories that blur the boundary between theory and fiction as well as text and context; it calls for, and contributes to, social change. Marlatt radically breaks with a patriarchal frame of reference because women are inevitably constructed as negated other within this frame. As an alternative, she offers a space independent of the male gaze, where women acknowledge one another through forms 1 of entrustment. Like Thomas, Marlatt exposes how idealized images of women lead to the effacement of the female body. By looking at the word “lady” in different historical contexts, she shows that although apparently a deferential term that elevates women, the enforcement of the status “lady” discriminates women as it puts restrictions on their behavior and bodies. Ladies do not have desires of their own. As “lady” is situated in a rigid binary system, where woman is either whore or Madonna, not being considered a lady points to a social abyss. Marlatt demonstrates that a patriarchal frame of reference left women in Ana Richards’s time no choice: either they were ladies or socially unacceptable. Her own protagonist overcomes the fear of the unknown or monstrous other and dares to step out of a binary gender frame that naturalizes sex, gender, and sexuality according to heterosexual parameters. Marlatt’s text offers a possibility that Thomas does not consider: to step out of a patriarchal frame of reference and rewrite gender from a different perspective. In their linguistic and narrative techniques, Thomas and Marlatt both play with the corporeality of words as bodies of sounds. Thomas mutilates the corporeality of signs to the same extend that her protagonist feels mutilated by the exclusivity of gender roles. The body/text parts are not put back together: Alice remains a puzzle of 1,000 interlocking pieces. Intertidal Life ends with a cancer operation which suggests that the destruction of the text/body continues. In contrast, Marlatt correlates a repressed textual body with a repressed female body. She also breaks up surface structures to retrieve forgotten stories, repressed representations of femininity, and different tales of the female body, but she puts the pieces back together in a different referential

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frame. For her protagonist, coming out as a lesbian means working through supposedly given assumptions of femininity in order to imagine herself differently. The “torrent” uttered at the end of Ana Historic breaks with the symbolic order and ends the mutilation of the female body that Marlatt traces in historiographic and medical discourses. Through the act of speaking in a different language, the female body is written onto the page as an assertive presence. Whereas the Canadian texts both depict the struggle of one individual to define a new identity, which certainly stands in the tradition of 2 Western individualism, Erdrich’s texts explore individual identity within the larger framework of the community. Whereas Thomas and Marlatt destroy language and disrupt narrative to the same extent that they question the continuity and coherence of identity, Erdrich seems to be more committed to traditional storytelling. However, in her blending of tales from different cultures she confuses the readers and defamiliarizes concepts as well as frames. In a trickster-like style, she incorporates difference and change into tradition. She thereby continues Chippewa culture without limiting it to specific and static readings. All three authors shift the normal perspective. Yet whereas Marlatt and Thomas distort the familiar by inserting the grotesque or abnormal into everyday words and texts, Erdrich plays with conventions of realism. She shows that realism works through what seems more familiar to us, although what appears familiar and real is dependent on the cultural context. Erdrich superimposes different cultural frames. By blending the real with the implausible and by mingling different myths, she blurs familiar images and resists fixture. The analysis of Thomas’s, Marlatt’s, and Erdrich’s texts marks a gradual progression from being caught in frames constituting femininity to an imaginative transcendence of frames. Thomas remains within the very structures she wishes to destroy. Marlatt shifts the frame of reference, but in the end, homosexual is always defined against heterosexual, and a woman-centered perspective is the opposition to the male gaze. Erdrich’s texts close my text analyses because, on a textual level, they demonstrate the most radical form of constructivism. Erdrich uses literature as an imaginative space that gives us a chance to rethink concepts by going beyond the plausible. As I suggested in the preface, stories allow us to go beyond cultural predicaments. By imagining women as powerful avengers, capable of resorting to magical powers, as well as victims, Erdrich deconstructs stereotypical images without denying the daily realities for Native women, such as victimization or racism. In her representations of Native women Erdrich propagates that the powerful

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magical aspects of their lives are just as real as the victimization that appears more real because it is such a familiar image, reproduced again and again in texts. In contrast, Erdrich offers an array of different possible representations that render women as demonic or docile, as victims or aggressors. By saying that there is a progression from one text to the next I do not mean to imply a hierarchy between them. The way I have arranged the texts simply reflects a movement from re-mapping the female subject to ceasing to represent it. Whereas this may be less political and less connected to social change, as a textual strategy to destabilize notions of gender it is effective to resist finite representation. Marlatt’s novel definitely is the most politically effective of the three, while Thomas most convincingly conveys the daily catches women are caught in. I have chosen to end my analysis with Erdrich because she most radically resists any new definite framing. Her work has been criticized for what critics have perceived as sacrificing political stances to postmodern play. I would claim, however, that the political statement precisely lies in the refusal to adopt any taming gestures of a definite representation. Life informs stories, and stories give shape to a life. We find an identity in self-narration but this narrative process is twofold. Our life-story is the result of a narrative arrangement of events. The narrative form not only puts events into a certain order, but suddenly these events seem to be causally connected, and this renders them natural or inevitable. However, we not only arrange events into a story but this story is latently 3 there from the start. In other words, although we tell about it in retrospect, we live our lives through a story that is already underlying the events. If we conceive the overall story of our lives as a drama or romance, we will interpret events in that light. Life, as Ricoeur has put it, is in quest of narrative, and the examined novels offer different narrative 4 encodings. By writing different tales of gender, the authors in this study make different realities possible. And as texts become meaningful only through the act of reading, it is up to us, the readers, to imagine different stories from the texts: which is not the end. the story is “only a story” insofar it ends. in life we go on. Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic

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Notes 1

For an elaboration of the concept of “entrustment,” see Goldman 1992, 33–38; and Teresa de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle or Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U. S. and Britain,” in Schor/Weed 1994, 1–39. 2

Both Canadian texts can be read as fictional autobiographies. I have left out this aspect in my analysis because it does not apply to Erdrich’s fiction. For studies which approach Marlatt’s and Thomas’s work as postmodern autobiographies, see: Helen M. Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (Montreal and Kingston: McGill—Queens UP, 1993); Frank Davey, “Autobiographic Metafictions in some Texts by Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott,” in Dvorak 1997, 127–34; Lynette Hunter, “Standpoint Theory Approaches to Recent Canadian Autobiographic Text,” in Dvorak 1997, 67–75; Annette Lönnecke, AngloKanadische Autobiographien der Postmoderne: Radikale Formen der Selbstporträtierung von John Glassco bis Kristjana Gunnars (New York and Vienna: Peter Lang, 1999). 3

See Charles Taylor, “The Culture of Modernity,” in Taylor 1989, 285–304.

4

See Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in Wood 1991, 20–33.

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———.“Musing With Mother Tongue.” Room of One’s Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism 8.4 (1984b): 53–56. ———. Ana Historic. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1988. ———. “Correspondence: Selected Letters.” Line 13 (spring 1989a): 5–30. ———. “Territory & Co.” Line 13 (spring 1989b): 107–16. ———. “Difference (Em)bracing.” In Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English, edited by Libby Scheier, Sarah Sheard, and Eleanor Wachtel, 188–93. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990a. ———. “Lesbera.” Tessera 9 (fall 1990b): 123–25. ———. “Self-Representation and Fictionalysis.” Tessera 8 (spring 1990c): 13–17. ———. Salvage. Alberta: Red Deer, 1991. ———. “Her(e) in the Labyrinth: Reading/Writing Theory.” 1992. Repr. in Readings from the Labyrinth. 183–99. NeWest, 1998. ———. Ghost Works. Edmonton: NeWest, 1993. ———. Taken. Toronto: Anansi, 1996. ———. Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998. Marlatt, Daphne, and Betsy Warland. “Reading and Writing between the Lines.” Tessera 5 (September 1988): 81–90. ———. “‘In Companionship With Another Voice.’” In Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers, edited by Janice Williamson, 195–99. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989. McGuirk, Kevin. “From the Moment Outward: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Windsor Review 27.1 (spring 1994): 76–84. Misao, Dean. “The Construction of Masculinity in Martin Allerdale Grainger’s Woodsmen of the West.” Canadian Literature 149 (summer 1996): 74–87. Moyes, Lianne. “Writing the Uncanniest of Guests: Daphne Marlatt’s How Hug a Stone.” In Beyond Tish, edited by Douglas Barbour, 203–21. Edmonton: NeWest, 1991. Rosenthal, Caroline. “Re-membering the (M)other in Language and History.” In Selbst und Andere/s: Von Begegnungen und Grenzziehungen, edited by Doris Eibl and Christina Strobel, 135–48. Augsburg: Wißner, 1998. Scheel, Kathleen M. “Freud and Frankenstein: The Monstered Language of Ana Historic.” Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (spring 1996): 93–114. Shiach, Morag. “‘Their ‘Symbolic’ Exists, It Holds Power — We, the Sowers of Disorder, Know It Only Too Well.’” In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan, 153–67. New York: Routledge, 1989.

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Steenman-Marcusse, Conny. “British Columbia. Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic: Mrs. Richards versus Annie Anderson.” In Re-writing Pioneer Women in Anglo-Canadian Literature, 129–55. Rotterdam: n. p., 2001. Strobel, Christina. “Sexual Identity in North-American Feminist Fiction.” In Reconsidering Conventions: Jane Rule’s Writing and Sexual Identity in North American Feminist Theory and Fiction, 206–96. Beiträge zur Kanadistik Bd. 9. Augsburg: Wißner, 1999. Tiffin, Helen. “The Body in the Library: Identity, Opposition and the SettlerInvader Woman.” In The Contact and the Culmination, edited by Marc Delvrez and Bénédict Ledent, 213–28. Liège: n. p., 1997. Tostevin, Lola Lemire. “Daphne Marlatt: Writing in the Space that Is Her Mother’s Face.” Line 13 (1989): 32–39. Vautier, Marie. “Canadian Fiction Meets History and Historiography: Jacques Poulin, Daphne Marlatt, and Wayson Choy.” Colby Quarterly 35 (1999): 18–34. Whitlock, Gillian. “White Diasporas: Joan (and Ana) Make History.” Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 12 (1994): 90–100. Williamson, Janice. “Speaking in and of Each Other.” Fuse 8.5 (1985): 25–29. ———. “Sounding a Difference: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Line 13 (1989): 47–56. Zwicker, Heather. “Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic: Queering the Postcolonial Nation.” Ariel 30.2 (April 1999): 161–75.

Louise Erdrich Babcock, Barbara. “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered.” In Critical Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 153–85. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1985. Bak, Hans. “Toward a Native American ‘Realism’: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” In Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Kristiaan Versluys, 145–70. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Barak, Julie. “Blurs, Blends, Berdaches: Gender Mixing in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 8.3 (fall 1996): 49–62. Barnett, Marianne. “Dreamstuff: Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” North Dakota Quarterly 56.1 (winter 1988): 82–93. Barry, Nora, and Mary Prescott. “The Triumph of the Brave: Love Medicine’s Holistic Vision.” Critique 30.2 (1989): 123–38.

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Bataille, Gretchen M. “Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: Images of the Grotesque on the Northern Plains.” In Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard Fleck, 277–85. Washington: Three Continent’s Press, 1993. Beidler, Peter G. “The Bingo Palace: A Review.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18.3 (1994): 271–74. Beidler, Peter G. “Three Student Guides to Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16.4 (1992): 167–73. Bennett, Sahra. “Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.1 (spring 1995): 112–18. Berninghausen, Tom. “‘This Ain’t Real Estate’: Land and Culture in Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa Tetralogy.” In Women, America and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, edited by Susan L. Roberson, 190–203. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998. Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing In.” In Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 580–620. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Bowers, Sharon Manybeads. “Louise Erdrich as Nanapush.” In New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, edited by Regina Barreca, 135–41. Berkshire: Gordon and Breach, 1992. Breinig, Helmbrecht. “(Hi)storytelling as Deconstruction and Seduction: The Columbus Novels of Stephen Marlowe and Michael Dorris/Louise Erdrich.” In Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, edited by Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller, 325–46. Schöningh: Paderborn, 1994. Brogan, Kathleen. “Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Prospects: Annual of American Cultural Studies 21 (1996): 169–92. Bruchac, Joseph. “Whatever is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich.” In Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, edited by Joseph Bruchac, 84–104. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987. Camp, Gregory S. “Working Out Their Own Salvation: The Allotment of Land in Severalty and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 14.2 (1990): 19–38. Castillo, Susan Perez. “Postmodernism, Native-American Literature and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy.” Massachusetts Review 32.2 (1991): 285–94. ———. “The Construction of Gender and Ethnicity in the Texts of Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich.” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 228–36.

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———. “Women Aging Into Power: Fictional Representations of Power and Authority in Louise Erdrich’s Female Characters.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 8.4 (winter 1996): 13–20. Chapman Mary. “‘The Belly of this Story’: Storytelling and the Symbolic Birth in Native American Fiction.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.2 (summer 1995): 2–15. Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl-Chavkin. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. Clarke, Joni Adamson. “Why Bears Are Good to Think and Theory Doesn’t Have to Be Murder: Transformation and Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4.1 (spring 1992): 28–48. Coltelli, Laura. “Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, edited by Laura Coltelli, 41–52. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Cox, Jay. “Dangerous Definitions: Female Tricksters in Contemporary Native American Literature.” Wicazo Sa Review 5.2 (fall 1989): 17–21. Erdrich, Louise. Jacklight. New York: Holt, 1984. ———. The Beet Queen. New York: Bantam, 1989, first printed 1986. ———. Tracks. New York: Harper & Row, 1989, first printed 1988. ———. Baptism of Desire. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. ———. Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. New York: Holt & Co., 1993. ———. The Bingo Palace. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. ———. Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. New York: Harper, 1996, first printed 1995. ———. Tales of Burning Love. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. ———. The Antelope Wife. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999, first printed 1998. Erdrich, Louise, and Michael Dorris. The Crown of Columbus. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1992, first printed 1991. Flavin, James. “The Novel as Performance: Communication in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.4 (winter 1991): 1–12. Flavin, Louise. “Gender Construction amid Family Dissolution in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7.2 (summer 1995): 17–24. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Identity Politics, Syncretism, Catholicism and Anishinabe Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Religion and Literature 26.1 (spring 1994): 107–33.

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Gabriel, Kathryn. Gambler Way: Indian Gaming in Mythology, History, and Archaeology in North America. Boulder, CO: Johnson, 1996. Gleason, William. “‘Her Laugh an Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 11.3 (1987): 51–73. Goetsch, Paul. “Orality and Literacy Events in English Fiction.” Komparatistische Hefte 15–16 (1988): 147–61. ———. “Die Rolle der Mündlichen Tradition bei der Literarischen Konstruktion sozialer Identität.” In Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, edited by Paul Goetsch, 289–302. Tübingen: Narr, 1990. Gorham-Sarvé, Kristan. “Power Lines: The Motif of Twins and the Medicine Women of Tracks and Love Medicine.” Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences 39.1 (1995): 167–90. Hessler, Michelle R. “Catholic Nuns and Ojibwa Shamans: Pauline and Fleur in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” The Wicazo SA Review 11.1 (spring 1995): 40–45. Hochbruck, Wolfgang. ‘I Have Spoken’: Die Darstellung und ideologische Funktion indianischer Mündlichkeit in der nordamerikanischen Literatur. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. Hornung, Alfred. “Ethnic Fiction and Survival Ethics: Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, David H. Hwang.” In Ethics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn of Postmodernism, edited by Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung, 209–20. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996. Kloppenburg, Michelle R. “The Face in the Slough: Lipsha’s Quest for Identity in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace.” Native American Studies 11.1 (1997): 27–34. Larson, Sidner. “The Fragmentation of a Tribal People in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17.2 (1993): 1–13. Lee, Robert A. “Ethnic Renaissance: Rudolfo Anaya, Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston.” In The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature Since 1970, edited by Graham Clarke, 139–64. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Lincoln, Kenneth. “Native American Literatures.” In Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann, 3–38. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1983a. ———. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983b. Magalaner, Marvin. “Of Cars, Time, and the River.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 95–112. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989.

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Manley, Kathleen E. B. “Decreasing the Distance: Contemporary Native American Texts, Hypertext, and the Concept of Audience.” Southern Folklore 51.2 (1994): 121–35. Maszewska, Jadwiga. “Functions of the Narrative Method in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” In Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, 317–21. Tübingen: Francke, 1993. Matchie, Thomas. “Love Medicine: A Female Moby-Dick.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 30.4 (summer 1989): 478–91. ———. “Louise Erdrich’s ‘Scarlet Letter’: Literary Continuity in Tales of Burning Love.” North Dakota Quarterly 63.4 (fall 1996): 113–23. McCay, Mary A. “Cooper’s Indians, Erdrich’s Native Americans.” In Global Perspectives on Teaching Literature: Shared Visions and Distinctive Visions, edited by Sandra Lott-Ward, Maureen S. G. Hawkins, and Norman McMillan, 152–67. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. Meisenhelder, Susan. “Race and Gender in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen.” Ariel 25.1 (January 1994): 45–57. Niatum, Duane. “On Stereotypes.” In Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 552–62. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Pearlman, Mickey. “A Bibliography of Writings about Louise Erdrich.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 110–12. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. Pearlman, Mickey. “Louise Erdrich.” In Inter/view: Talks with America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson, 143–48. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. Pellerine, Simone. “The Epitome of Erdrich’s Art: ‘The Names of Women.’” Native American Studies 11.1 (1997): 35–38. Peterson, Nancy J. “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” PMLA 109.5 (October 1994): 982–94. Purdy, John. “Crossing the Waters to a Love Medicine.” In Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays, edited by John R. Maitino and David R. Peck, 83–100. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1996. Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62.3 (September 1990): 405–22. Rayson, Ann. “Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.4 (winter 1991): 27–36.

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Reid, Shelley E. “The Compound I: Narrative and Identity in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich and Amy Tan.” Ph. D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1994. Roemer, Kenneth M. “Native American Oral Narratives: Context and Continuity.” In Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann, 39–54. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990a. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Redefining American Literary History. New York: MLA, 1990b. Ruppert, James. “Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Love Medicine.” North Dakota Quarterly 59.4 (spring 1991): 229–41. Sanders, Karla J. “Healing Narratives: Negotiating Cultural Subjectivities in Louise Erdrich’s Magic Realism.” Ph. D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Sands, Kathleen Mullen. “Untitled.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9.1 (winter 1985): 12–24. Scheick, William J. “Structures of Belief/Narrative Structures: Mojtabai’s Ordinary Time and Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37.4 (winter 1995): 363–75. Schneider, Lissa. “Love Medicine: A Metaphor for Forgiveness.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4.1 (spring 1992): 1–13. Schwenninger, Lee. “A Skin of Lakeweed: An Ecofeminist Approach to Erdrich and Silko.” In Multicultural Literatures through Feminist/Poststructuralist Lenses, edited by Barbara Frey Waxman, 37–56. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. Sergi, Jennifer. “Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” World Literature Today 66.2 (spring 1992): 279–82. Shaddock, Jennifer. “Mixed Blood Women: The Dynamic of Women’s Relations in the Novels of Louise Erdrich and Leslie Silko.” In Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, edited by Susan Ostrov-Weissner and Jennifer Fleischner, 106–21. New York: New York UP, 1994. Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 10.4 (1986): 178–84. Simons-Brandom, Lisa. “Smoked Jerky vs. Red Pottage: Native American Tradition and Christian Theology in Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace.” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 21.2 (1994): 59–69. Skow, John. “An Old Bear, Laughing Once Again: Louise Erdrich Examines the Cross-Cultural Muddle of the Indian Reservation.” Time Domestic 143.6 (Feb 7, 1994): 1.

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Slack, John S. “The Comic Savior: The Dominance of the Trickster in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” North Dakota Quarterly 61.3 (summer 1993): 118–29. Sloboda, Nicholas. “Beyond the Iconic Subject: Re-Visioning Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 8.3 (fall 1996): 63–79. Smith, Jeanne. “Transpersonal Selfhood: The Boundaries of Identity in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.4 (winter 1991): 13–26. Stripes, James D. “The Problem(s) of (Anishinaabe) History in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich: Voices and Contexts.” The Wicazo SA Review 7.2 (fall 1991): 26–33. Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1983. Tanrisal, Meldan. “Mother and Child Relationships in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” American Studies International 35.3 (October 1997): 67–79. Towery, Margie. “Continuity and Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16.4 (1992): 99–122. Van Dyke, Annette. “Questions of the Spirit: Bloodlines in Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa Landscape.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4.1 (spring 1992): 15–27. Van Winkle, Barrik, and Pauline Turner Strong. “‘Indian Blood’: Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity.” Cultural Anthropology 11.4 (1996): 547–76. Walsh, Dennis M., and Ann Braley. “The Indianness of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: Latency as Presence.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18.3 (1994): 1–17. White, Sharon, and Glenda Burnside. “On Native Ground: An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” The Bloomsbury Review 8.4 (July/August 1988): 16–18. Williams, Shirely. “Women’s Role in Ojibway Spirituality.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27.3 (fall 1992): 100–104. Wong, Hertha D. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” North Dakota Quarterly 55.1 (winter 1987): 196–218. ———. “Adoptive Mothers and Thrown-Away Children in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” In Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, edited by Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, 176–92. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

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———. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Sequence.” In Modern American Short Story Sequences, edited by Gerald J. Kennedy, 170–93. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Woodward, Pauline G. “Chance in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: New Ways to Find a Family.” Ariel 26.2 (April 1995): 109–27.

Index Althusser, Louis, 9–10, 15–17, 22, 27n Ana Historic (Marlatt): 3, 5–6, 23, 157, 158 anagrams in, 69, 71–73, 86 Annie Anderson (character) in, 66, 70, 77, 80–81 and comparison with Intertidal Life, 63, 66–67, 155–57 idea of the monstrous in, 2, 5, 17, 23, 25, 68, 72, 76, 90, 94, 95–96, 100–104 puns in: (f)act, 80–82, 88, 90–91; knock knock, 68–71, 79, 88, 104n; lady, 17, 25, 76–79, 86, 87, 89, 90, 100– 101, 156; proper-property, 76, 78–79; wardrobes/ wordrobes, 74–76, 79, 80, 88, 90 representation of hysteria in, 18, 24, 77, 84–87, 105n scribbling in, 96–101 anagrams, 26, 29, 33–34, 55, 63n, 69, 71–73, 86 Assmann, Aleida, 43–44 Assmann, Jan, 46 Atwood, Margaret, 11, 64n, 104n, 105n Bak, Hans, 117 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 36 Bal, Mieke, 27n Banting, Pamela, 104n Baudrillard, Jean, 36 Belsey, Catherine, on ideology, 9– 10; on realism, 21–22, 108–9

Berninghausen, Tom, 131, 152n Bildungsroman, 3, 23 Bonheim, Helmut, 40 Bowering, George, 29, 71, 76 Brogan, Kathleen, 117 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 86–87 Brooks, Linda Marie, 9 Bruchac, Joseph, 107, 116 Buckmann, Jacqueline, 50, 64n Buss, Helen, 52–53, 55, 159n Butler, Judith, 13–16, 18, 55, 76, 79, 141, 145 Butler, Judith, works by: Gender Trouble, 14–15 Camp, Gregory S., 131, 152n canon, 98 Carroll, Lewis, 33–34, 59–60, 66 Carroll, Lewis, works by: Alice in Wonderland, 30, 34, 47, 59, 61, 66; “Jabberwocky,” 34; Through the Looking Glass, 34, 59–60 Castillo, Susan Perez, 147 Charcot, Jean Martin, 86–87 Chavkin, Allan, 109, 133, 147 Cisneros, Sandra, works by: The House on Mango Street, 111 Cixous, Hélène, 73, 100; voler, 73, 90 Cixous, Hélène, works by: Coming to Writing, 97–99 Clarke, Joni Adamson, 133, 141– 42 Clifford, James, 123 Coldwell, Joan, 64n Coltelli, Laura, 148 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 20, 28n

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INDEX

Cranny-Francis, Anne, works by: Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction, 92 Davey, Frank, 105n de Lauretis, Teresa, 15–16, 18, 105n, 159n de Lauretis, Teresa, works by: Technologies of Gender, 15–16 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 73 deconstructive feminism, 6, 18–19 Deleuze, Gilles, 64n Derrida, Jacques, 9 desire, 14, 15 developmental psychology, 7 Dorris, Michael, 107, 108, 113 Dragland, Stan, 106n du Gay, Paul, 9, 21 écriture au féminin, 6, 19, 82, 156 écriture féminine: 6, 17, 18–19, 27n, 97–101, 150n; and coming to writing, 98–99, 102, 150n; voler in, 19, 73, 90; jouissance in, 19, 100 Erdrich, Louise, 3, 107–8 Erdrich, Louise, works by: The Beet Queen, 132–34, 147– 48; The Bingo Palace, 111, 151n, 126–28, 132, 134–36, 139, 142, 146; The Crown of Columbus (with Michael Dorris), 107, 108; Jacklight, 116; Love Medicine, 111–18, 122, 126, 128–29, 136, 142; Tracks, 117, 120, 126, 129–32, 135, 136– 40, 152n; Catholicism in, 115– 18, 128–30, 131, 133; Chippewa mythology in, 114, 128, 130, 132–33, 137–42; ethnicity in, 147–49, 123–24, 137–40, 145, 147–49, 153n; Fleur (character) in, 25–26, 121, 126–49; gambling in, 137–40; gossip in, 125–26, 127, 128, 135, 140,

143; June (character) in, 25– 26, 110–26, 145–46, 149; land claims in, 130–31, 152n; motif of the Vanishing Indian in, 113, 151n, 121, 123, 145; orality in, 121, 124–25, 131–32, 141, 143, 147; treatment of racism in, 110, 121, 130, 153n, 157. See also stereotypes; trickster Erikson, Erik H., 7, 26n Espinosa y Tello, Josef, works by: A Spanish Voyage to Vancouver, 47, 48, 64n essentialism, 19, 53, 57, 97, 106n “factional” identities, 24–25, 31– 32, 35 Felman, Shoshana, 85 female body, 14, 17–19, 23, 55– 56, 69, 77, 79, 81, 85, 89, 95– 97, 99–100, 140–41, 156 feminist narratology, 27n Feyl-Chavkin, Nancy, 109, 133, 147 fiction theory, 19, 82–83 Flax, Jane, 19 Foucault, Michel, 13, 16 Frankenstein, 102–3, 106n Freud, Sigmund, 97 Freud, Sigmund, works by: “On Femininity,” 69–70 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 120, 152n, 153n Frye, Northrop, works by: The Anatomy of Criticism, 49 Gabriel, Kathryn, 139, 152–53n gender: 1–2, 12–22, 154–55; in Erdrich’s work, 110, 119, 134, 136, 141–42, 145, 149; in Marlatt’s work, 67, 69, 72, 75– 76, 80–83, 88, 92–94, 103; and narrative, 19–26; and sexgender dichotomy, 13–14, 55, 75, 103, 134, 155; in Thomas’s

INDEX

work, 40, 42, 44, 47, 53, 55, 58–59, 63. See also Butler, Judith gender studies, 13–14 Godard, Barbara, 22, 82–84, 97 Goetsch, Paul, 125 Goldman, Marlene, 60, 64n, 73, 104–5n, 159n Grainger, Allerdale, works by: Woodsmen of the West, 23, 93 Greber, Erika, 34, 36 Greenblatt, Stephen, 145 Griffin, Susan, 105n grotesque, 25, 35–36, 38–39, 118, 120, 138–39, 157 Guattari, Félix, 64n Gubar, Susan, 101, 151n Hall, Stuart, 9, 21 harlequin romances, 34, 58–59, 155 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 98 heterosexual matrix, 2, 5, 8, 14, 16–17, 25, 67, 72, 79, 103, 106n historiographic metafiction, 20– 21, 91 historiography, 21, 67, 86, 91– 92, 94–95, 99, 102–3, 129, 130, 146 history, 20–21, 23, 52, 71, 85–86, 92–93, 99, 117, 130, 131, 132 Hochbruck, Wolfgang, 124–25 homosexuality, 14 Huggan, Graham, 53 Hutcheon, Linda, 6n, 21, 39, 91, 105n hysteria, 84 identity: 7–12, 125, 143–44, 146, 154; and alterity/sameness, 8; collective identity, 5, 113, 122, 127, 134; and continuity and coherence, 7–8; as discursive construction, 8–10, 87, 154;

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and idem/ipse and sameness/ selfhood, 11, 45; and imagination of possible other identities, 11, 15, 24, 25, 70, 72–73, 80, 89–90, 101–2, 113, 122–23, 126, 140, 155; and narrativization of self, 9, 10–11, 20, 43, 158; personal identity, 4, 11, 12, 59, 125, 134; and subject positions, 2, 9, 11, 21–22, 29, 31, 35, 41, 48, 58, 67, 69, 108; textual deconstruction of, 5, 10–11, 20, 33, 41, 46, 59, 62, 98. See also narrative identity ideology, 5, 9–11, 15, 21, 22, 69, 74, 79, 81, 83, 92, 154–55 intertexts, 18, 25, 33, 46–48, 63n, 68, 85, 87 intertextuality, 5, 23, 25, 31–32, 46–47, 128, 141 Intertidal Life (Thomas): 3–5, 29–65, 155–56 Alice Hoyle (character) in, 25, 29, 53, 56 anagrams in, 29, 33–35, 55, 63n and comparison with Ana Historic, 63, 66–67, 155–57 Crusoe motif in, 31 destroying the corporeality of signs in, 32, 36, 47, 67, 164 etymologies in, 37–39 exploration accounts in, 31, 49–59 fairy tales in, 40, 44–45, 63–64n female artist in, 35, 51–52 folkloristic texts in, 40–41 headlines in, 35–36 intertexts in, 46–52 intertidal zone in, 29–30, 57– 58, 61–62 songs in, 41–42, 56 textual landscape of, 29–30, 47–48 theme of mapping in, 52–55. See also harlequin romances

192 E

INDEX

Ipellie, Alootook, vi, 115 Irigaray, Luce, 97 Irvine, Lorna, 63n Jagose, Annamarie, 103 James, William, 7 Johnson, Barbara, works by: “Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?,” 20; “My Monster, My Self,” 102 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 73, 101 Jones, Manina, 81–82, 105n Kelly, Peggy, 97 Lacan, Jacques, 52, 100 Landes, Ruth, 133 Lane, Dorothy F., 31 Lanser, Susan S., 27n Leonard, Roy Frank, works by: The History of Shock Treatment, 85, 105n lesbian identity, 2, 5, 22, 25, 58, 68, 73–74, 76, 81, 90, 157; as monstrous, 5, 25, 67–68, 76, 94, 103–4. See also queer Lincoln, Kenneth, 120 Lyotard, Jean François, 28n Mac Lulich, 49 magic realism, 109 male gaze, the, 17, 67, 70, 73, 76, 87–89, 97, 111, 124, 156, 157 mapping, 5, 32, 47, 48, 52–55, 64n, 158 Marlatt, Daphne, 3 Marlatt, Daphne, works by: Frames of a Story, 3; “Here(e) in the Labyrinth: Reading/ Writing Theory,” 68; “Musing with Mothertongue,” 37; “Self-Representation and Fictionalysis,” 82–83, 84; Steveston, 3; “Theorizing

Fiction Theory,” 82–83. See also Ana Historic Matthiesen, F. O., works by: The American Renaissance, 98 Mentzos, Stavros, 86 metafiction, 21 Metzler, Gabriele, 27n Mezei, Kathy, 82 Michaels, Anne, 29, 46, 144 Minh-ha, Trinh T., works by: Woman, Native, Other, 109, 150n Misao, Dean, 93–94 Moers, Ellen, 95 motherhood, 15, 17, 25, 37–39 narrative, 1–2, 19–26, 49–50; counter-narratives, 20, 25, 41, 49; “factional” narratives, 24, 31–32; and genre, 2, 3, 12, 19, 21, 23, 92, 98; and identity formation, 11–12, 19, 66, 90, 107, 121, 150, 158; as monstrous, 5, 67–68; narrative and ideology, 2, 10–11, 20, 69, 82, 83, 90, 91, 103, 154–55, 158; narrative frames, 20–22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 72, 80–81, 87– 88, 92, 94–95; unruly narratives, 2, 4, 20, 67, 74 narrative identity, 11–12, 45–46 New, W. H., 25, 46 Nischik, Reingard M., 64n, 104n Nünning, Ansgar, 27n Ostriker, Alice, works by: Stealing the Language, 141 Owens, Louis, 122, 151n Pearlman, Mickey, 108 pen-penis, 18 phallogocentrism, 19, 73 Pratt, Mary Louise, 110 Purdy, John, 116

INDEX

queer, 17, 27n, 103, 155 Radin, Paul, works by: The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 119 realism, 21–22, 24, 32, 51, 67, 69, 75, 77, 81, 82, 93, 108–9, 122, 147, 157–58 representation, 2, 16–17, 21, 24 Ricoeur, Paul, 11–12, 45–46, 158 Rutland, Barry, 22, 89–90 Sampson, Edward E., 26n Sartre, Jean-Paul, vi Sayre, Robert F., 118, 119–20 Schahadat, Schamma, 63n Scheel, Kathleen M., 73, 106n Shelly, Mary, works by: Frankenstein, 102, 106n Shiach, Morag, 90 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 147–48 Silko, Leslie Marmon, works by: Ceremony, 147; “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf,” 147 Smith, Jeanne Rosier, works by: Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature, 150n. stereotypes, 107, 108, 109, 122, 137–39, 144–45, 149, 153n, 154, 157 Straub, Jürgen, 26n Strauss, Anselm L., 7 Tatar, Maria, 63–64n Taylor, Charles, 29n, 159n Tessera, 3, 82 Thomas, Audrey, 2 Thomas, Audrey, works by: “Basmati Rice,” 32, 35; Blown Figures, 2; Latakia, 61; Mrs. Blood, 2. See also Intertidal Life Thomas, Clara, 31

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trauma, 42–43 trickster, 5, 118–21, 151n; Chippewa trickster, 120–21, 129, 130, 152n; as comic trope, 5; and ethnicity, 123–24, 137– 40, 145, 157; and gender, 17, 110, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123– 24, 136–42, 145, 149, 150n; as narrative device, 104, 108–9, 115, 121, 136, 140, 144; and shape-shifting, 2, 115, 134, 142; as textual sign, 121–26, 141–42, 144–49, 157; trickster aesthetic, 110, 150n; trickster discourse, 5, 110, 144 Tuende, Nemeth, 51, 55, 63n van Herk, Aritha, 1, 154 Vancouver, George Vinken, Barbara, 12 Vizenor, Gerald, 110, 121, 126, 144, 149 Wachtel, Eleanor, 37, 60 Waring, Wendy, 97 Warner, Marina, 64n White, Hayden, 20, 49, 105n Wiebe, Rudy, A Discovery of Strangers, 126 Woolf, Virginia, 52 Woolf, Virginia, works by: Mrs. Dalloway, 51, A Room of One’s Own, 51; To the Lighthouse, 51 Wright, Elizabeth, 78