Telling "I"'s: figuring the female subject in linking narratives by Anna Jameson, Sara Jeannette Duncan and Mavis Gallant
Date
2018-06-14
Authors
Sellwood, Jane Leslie
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Abstract
The linking short narratives explored in this study--
Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,
Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert and Mavis
Gallant's Home Truths— employ first-person narrators to
both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered
female subject. In addition, these representative linking
narrative texts demonstrate that choices to do with form,
as well as subject and theme, may both support and subvert
the discourses of the time and place in which they are
written. My exploration of these three representative texts
draws from W.H. New's fragmentation theory of short
narratives, Gérard Genette's narrative theory of voice and
mood, Paul de Man's problematization of generic
distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and Julia
Kristeva's theory of the speaking subject as text in
process and vice versa.
Jameson's Romantic "I" uses the miscellany's flexible
form of linking short narratives autobiographically to both
reify and recuse nineteenth-century genre conventions of
travel narrative and the gendered position of women in
Europe and Canada. As the Recusant "I," first person
narration in Duncan's quartet of stories figures splits not
only between female desire and gender codes, but also
between creative imagination and conditions of exile. With
a psychopoetics of the unsaid, the Remembering "I" of
Gallant's linking narratives figures female subjectivity as
a process of both psychology and history.
These women-authored linking narratives challenge
assumptions that first-person narration is univocal, and
therefore problematize distinctions between autobiography
and fiction. In their uses of the linking narrative form,
they also challenge aesthetic criteria that privilege
wholeness and unity— of the novel, for example— in concepts
of mimesis dominating representations of reality in their
respective periods. These first-person linking narratives
use the voice of the "I" subversively, telling the doubled
position of the female subject in the discourses of genre
and gender.
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Keywords
Jameson, Mrs. (Anna), Duncan, Sara Jeannette, Gallant, Mavis