Writing by women

CORAL ANN HOWELLS

 The early
1970s: addresses the double issue of women’s
writing and its relationship
to wider feminist questions of women’s literary
and political entitlement.
This chapter will focus on
Canadian women’s fiction in English since the
late 1960s, the period when
Canadian writing achieved high visibility at
home and abroad.
 At the present time
Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro,
and Carol Shields,
who all started publishing
in the 1960s and 70s, are names that are
synonymous with Canadian
writing internationally.
 In addition, since the early 1990s
a constellation of
new women writers, including many from a wide
range of ethnic and racial
backgrounds, has enormously diversified
Canada’s literary image, and these
women’s novels and short stories feature in
increasing numbers on international publishers’
lists.
 To begin with the question of why women’s
writing in Canada should
have suddenly leapt to prominence since the
1970s, the answer would seem to lie in a
confluence of factors, which might be summed
up as the rise of Canadian cultural nationalism in
the late 1960s and 70s, coinciding with
the rise of North American second-wave
feminism.
 New writing by women
is located at the intersection of postcolonial and
feminist perspectives, as women have sought to
renegotiate their positions through the
imaginative
dimensions of creative writing, the most popular
form of which has been
the novel.
 The “Canadian Lit boom,” a remarkable
period which generated a new cultural self-
consciousness and encouraged
writers in formerly marginalized areas, such as
women, multicultural communities,
and Aboriginal peoples. Though government subsidies
decreased
significantly during the 1990s, these policies have
ensured a flourishing literary
culture as new writers’ names continue to proliferate
in the multinational
publishing world.
 The
first Canadian novel in English was written by a
woman: Frances Brooke’s
The History of Emily Montague (1769), an
epistolary novel set in the newly acquired French
colony of Quebec. Brooke’s combination of
sentimental plotand exotic location was
immensely popular with late eighteenth-century
readers and was translated into French and
Dutch.
 In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries a number of books by
women were widely read
in Britain and Canada, many of them written by
British immigrants for
readers back home. The two best known were
Susanna Moodie and her
sister Catharine Parr Traill, who wrote about the
wilderness and pioneer
settlement from a feminine perspective as wives
and mothers.
 L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of
Green Gables (1908), together with the Emily
trilogy of the 1920s, remains
enduringly popular. These novels are pastoral
idylls underpinned by sharp
realistic insights into life in the Maritimes,
though their chief appeal lies in their adolescent
heroines.
 Canadian women writers of the late 1960s and
the 1970s and 80s were very concerned, as was
feminism at that time, with exposing the
power politics of gender in
heterosexual relations and with
women’s quests to discover their individual
identities by
finding their voices and reclaiming their rights
over their own bodies.
However, significant changes were already under
way in the 1970s and
80s in relation to demography, nationalist
ideology, identity politics, and the First Nations
cultural revival. Multiculturalism had existed as
official
government policy since 1971 and
was codified in the 1988
Canadian Multiculturalism Act,
which affirmed ethnic and racial diversity as a
fundamental
characteristic of Canadian society.
 As policy and social reality, multiculturalism
has played a crucial role in radical refigurings of
identity concepts which
have been increasingly evident during the 1990s.
 Together with a new liberalism
which included the representation of alternative
sexualities as well
as shifts from a rural small-town ethos to the
urban, the cosmopolitan, and
the global, there has been a historical movement
away from Canada’s white colonial inheritance
to a redefinition of postcolonial contemporary
Canadian
identity and a remapping of the nation space.
 There are overlaps
in time just as there are thematic continuities and
a continuation of
narrative experiments within the allusive
framework of traditional genres, though
negotiations over issues of identity have become
increasingly complex
as factors of race, sexuality, and hybridized and
transcultural identities
are highlighted by many of the new writers of the
1990s.
 These “daughters”
are mapping fictional spaces for new versions of
Canadian identity of which
their “mothers” could not have been aware in the
1960s and 70s.
The generation of women who began publishing
in the 1960s were mothers in more than the
literary sense, just as they recognized themselves
as daughters of foremothers who were Canadian,
British, and American.
White middleclass women, most of them
followed traditional social patterns, married and
had children before they or anyone else began to
see them as writers.
 Atwood’s career was the exception,
for having won her first Governor-General’s
Award for poetry while still a
graduate student, she had published three novels
by the mid-1970s when her daughter was born.
Margaret Laurence, the oldest of this group and
often referred to as the
“godmother” of contemporary Canadian
women’s writing, described her awareness of
women’s double colonized position as arising
from her experiences as a wife and mother in
colonial Africa in the 1950s.
 Alice Munro’s fictions are set mainly in her
home territory, the rural communities
and small towns of southwestern Ontario, in that
quietly rolling
countryside,
“back where nothing seems to be happening,
beyond the change
of seasons.”
Munro is Canada’s greatest short-story writer.
 Like Laurence, Munro is fascinated by local
history and geography and the details of small-
town life,
though unlike Laurence she sees provincial
ordinariness as only a surface layer covering
over a darker
secret world of scandal, violence, child abuse,
and sudden startling deaths.
This double vision, where realism is juxtaposed
with fantasy
and romance, is the distinctive quality of
Munro’s fiction.
 By the time Atwood won the Booker Prize for
The Blind Assassin in
2000, she was an international literary celebrity
who had collected numerous
honorary degrees and awards, and her work has
been translated into
more than thirty languages.
 Her fiction features on school and university
syllabuses worldwide,
there is a
thriving academic Atwood critical industry,
and her publicity tours for every new book are
sellouts around the world.
Singlehandedly, Atwood has established a high
profile for Canadian writing generally and for
Canadian women’s writing in particular.
She has always shown a genius for codifying and
indeed for
predicting popular cultural trends, and she has
worked in a dazzling range
of fictional genres, continuously experimenting
across genre boundaries, exploring
the political and ideological significance of such
revisions:
“What art does, it takes what society deals out
and makes it visible, right? So you can see it.”
 From the beginning Atwood’s voice has been
remarkably distinctive –
witty, self-ironic, politically and morally
engaged – as her female narrators
have responded to what is actually going on in
the world around them.
Though her emphases have shifted over four
decades, her major thematic
preoccupations are recognizably there in her first
four novels:
 gender politics
and the representation of women’s lives, their
bodies, and their fantasies,
questions of Canadian identity and Canada’s
international relations, human rights issues,
environmental concerns.
 Van Herk’s restlessness and her ambitious project to
expand the imaginative
territory for feminist fiction sets the tone for women’s
novels in the 1980s,
where suddenly “transgression” supplants
“subversion” as the key motif.
Many of these novels introduce topics new to fiction,
such as women’s exploration
of alternative sexualities or issues of racial difference,
frequently crossing national borders to move beyond
Canadian locations.
 As Atwood commented:
“The writer retains three
attributes that power-mad regimes cannot
tolerate:
a human imagination,
in the many forms it may take;
the power to communicate;
and hope.”
In the 1990s there continued to be a flow of new
fictions by established
women writers, with major novels by Atwood
and Shields.
 However, what is most significant in
this period is the sudden proliferation of
novelists from previously marginalized minority
groups, which has resulted in an unprecedented
diversification of the Canadian literary scene as
race and ethnicity, sexuality and nationality have
all assumed new importance in the representation
of identities in fiction.
 Those changes which reflect much wider cultural
shifts in Canadian society (together with more
hospitable policies towards “ethnic writing” by the big
publishing houses) have meant that
the old questions about national identity
and what constitutes Canadian literature are being
renegotiated, and even
the questions themselves are under revision in the new
era of multinationalism,
multiculturalism, and globalization.
 In 1993 Carol Shields leapt
to international fame with The Stone Diaries,
winning both the Governor-
General’s Award in Canada and the American
Pulitzer Prize, followed by the 1998 British
Orange Prize for Larry’s Party (1997).
 An American who came
to Canada on her marriage, Shields never subscribed
to cultural nationalist
versions of Canadian identity and her novels cross
national borders as easily
as they cross genres and genders, moving between
Winnipeg, Chicago,
Toronto, and Florida. Indeed, she uses the genre of
fictive biography to question
the very notion of fixed identity, revealing instead the
instabilities within
her male and female subjects.
 This is the period when Canadian women’s
fiction becomes insistently pluralized, as a new
generation produced their first novels (though
many of them had already published short-story
collections, poems, and plays with small
independent presses), laying down new
coordinates for mapping identities
by highlighting issues of race, ethnicity, and
alternative sexualities.
 These “Unbecoming Daughters,”
many of whose mothers and grandmothers did
not come from Canada, continue the tradition of
women’s revisions of history though frequently
from the position of being “others” in Canadian
society, and the stories they tell are stories of
diaspora, immigrancy, racial
and cultural hybridity, and transculturalism.
 By a curious logic of history the Canadian identity
question so dear to the
cultural nationalists is still the central question in the
new wave of multicultural
novels, though questions of identity have become
more complicated.
The old question “Where is here?” is transformed into
“Where am I?” or
“Who am I?”
as the daughters’ searches for location, identity,
and origins are
driven by their awareness of slippage from
origins, motherlands,
mother cultures,
and mother languages.
 1996 was the year
when the new wave peaked, with new
multicultural novels being published
by the big international presses, symptomatic of
the shift in Canadian fiction away from national
to international focus and marketing.
Looking at fiction by women since 2000 is like
looking into a swirl of
crosscurrents:
 Beside these established voices, new voices are
emerging who speak neither
from the center nor from immigrant positions, but
from other socially
marginalized groups – an Aboriginal community in
British Columbia,
economically deprived communities in the Maritimes,
and a small black
community in southwestern Ontario, which is perhaps
the most underrepresented
group in Canadian fiction.
 It seems appropriate to end this chapter with a novel
which positions itself
on the threshold between the twentieth and the twenty-
first centuries:
The Blind Assassin, published at the beginning of the
new millennium and told by a voice from beyond the
grave. Atwood’s narrator is an old woman writing
her memoir in 1999 as a legacy for her granddaughter
who is away traveling
in India, and who will not read it till after her
grandmother is dead.
 Like her duplicitous
old narrator’s tale, Atwood’s storytelling holds
out possibilities of escape from the imprisonment
of the past, opening up new spaces for women to
write their identities while in the process
remapping the boundaries of what constitutes
Canadian fiction.