Text 4 : Margaret Atwood Flashcards
Margaret Atwood
- Important literary production.
- During the early stage of her career she quickly became one of the most important mythographers of Modern Canada.
→ Survival
→ The Journals of Susanna Moodie
⇒ Those 2 texts are a product of their time : 1970s in the Canadian Context = the centinial decade
Survival
a thematic guide to Canadian literature → She argues that the prevalence of English Canadian writers predominantly view nature as monstrous and aliens. of the natural world. In this book she uses the term “death by nature” = one of the defining English Canadian motif literature.
The Journals of Susanna Moodie :
re-interpretation of a colonial text written by Suzanna Moodie who was a British immigrant and who published 2 accounts of her life in Canada. In her poetic sequence, Moody becomes the poetic person who becomes haunted by the wilderness. This haunting manifests itself in the poems in the Psychological dislocation of the poetic voice.
The centennial decade
(1/07/1967 : 100 anniversary of Canadian confederation. The Canadian gvt organised huge festivity.) 1970s were marked by cultural nationalism. There was the idea that Canada was being marginalised by the US and by Europe. Triangular relationship : The former imperial power : Britain and the new one : US → cultural imperialism → American mass culture (music, tv shows..)
When Wilderness Tips was out, how was seen English Canadian cultural nationalism ?
as achronistic
Why English Canadian cultural nationalism was seen as anachronistic
2 reasons :
- 1980s : canada 1st country to include multiculturalism in their constitution
- Increase of Indigenous voices (Writers like Thomas King but also Political activist). 1980s 1990s : relationship between indigenous with federal state is surrounded by the notion of land claims → they demanded the gvt to recognize their right on lands. ⇒ 1999 : creation of Nunavut (north east of canada) : territory that the federal gvt recognized as being governed by the Inuit peoples.
Aboriginal VS aboriginal
Aboriginal = Indigenous VS aboriginal = autochtone= from the land = original occupance of the land. ⇒ Atwood plays on the 2 ways of understanding the word.
Paintings
Paintings are described in the frame narrative : beginning and end
1st ref : 2nd paragraph
Ekphrasis
Description détaillée et imagée, plus spécifiquement d’un objet ou d’une oeuvre d’art.
The gothic
Gothic comes from Architecture. One of the topoi of the Gothic Genre is ruins. The Genre appeared in late 18th, 19th century ⇒ The Castle of Udolpho, The Castle Of Montranto, The Monk, Lewis. It’s a British genre : those 3 novels have in common the motif of the ruins of the very old castle that are usually set in a non-british environment (rance, italy.. Catholic countries).
In the first phases of the genre, there are fairly define genres :
* The damsel in distress is usually kept in the castle at the mercy of the sexual appetite of her captor.
* Unspeakable / unspoken : what they are depend on the novel and is closely associated with sexual taboos. Ex : the monk was considered as a cronographic book because a priest rape women after having slept with Satan who happened to be a woman
Examples of Gothic that don’t follow these rules
- The picture of Dorian Gray* : idea of the unspeakable / unspoken but also change of settings, from mediaeval settings to an urban setting where Dorian goes.
- Dracula : we have 2 elts of the Gothic, Dracula’s castle but when we reach London it’s more linked with industrial century
- Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde *
⇒ The site of haunting is no longer a castle
- Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde *
Bathos
Bathos : when you take sth that is supposed to be elevated and you bring it into sth material.
Gothic Wilderness
- Bathos
- Shift from wilderness as a sight of haunting to wilderness itself doing the haunting. What is haunting Louis is the Wilderness itself.
- You’re the observing subject and landscape painting is the observed object but here the binary opposition between object and subject is somewhat unsettled.
- Lucie disappearing is the traumatic experience on which the entire short story hinges. This idea of the trauma // idea of the unspoken or unspeakable in the gothic genre. However, the question of what it is that haunts the painting cannot be entirely settled : is it just Lucie or is it something else ? Atwood plays on this ambiguity.
- The conclusion of the short story arches back on this idea of haunting and presence of an absence.
Atwood refuses to give us a definite explanation. We are given a few possible alternatives :
Louis might have pushed Lucy (this is what Capri is thinking),
Lucie might have slipped,
or she might just have been transformed into a tree, swallowed by the wilderness
⇒ In maintaining this ambiguity doesn’t resolve this question of haunting and it maintains the anxiety and the fascination with the overness of the natural environment.
Analepses / Prolepses
Analepses : flash back
Prolepses : flash forward
Wilderness Park
- Domesticated nature : The first paragraph describes Louis Condominium, the text insists on her desire to shut out nature or to contain nature in domesticating it, by having it framed.
⇒ Atwood plays with conventions of 19th literature : idea that the otherness of nature feds a sense of anxiety but Louis lives in a n apartment in an urban setting so her anxiety is nothing compared to the genuine horrors experienced by European settlers and explorers when confronted to wilderness. Louis is not so much concerned by dying of cold starvation but rather squirrel and harve. Her concerns are comically trivials. - Irony : The wilderness being just for fun= rupture between the pioneering days of Luis’s ancestors and what happen at the camp.
- Wilderness is a cultural construct
- The canoe trip : from just being a background, the natural environment becomes an actor in the plot. no path, no signs of human presence. BUT it is not really trackless wilderness: they are path that tourists follow : “as Cappie put it” => This fetishisation of wilderness is transferred to the summer camp
- fantasy of indigenisation. It is about legitimacy. Louis’s ancestors are settlers invaders and the second issue is that of belonging to a place although “she wanted to be an Indian. She wanted to be adventurous and pure, and aboriginal”
- For Wilderness to become a recreational park, Wilderness has to be denied or erased. Indigenous presence is only acceptable in the Wilderness park if it’s part of it’s recreative dimension. What haunts the wilderness is the presence of the absence of the Indigenous people. Indigeneity that is absent not from the land but from the system of representation that wilderness is.
