Female and national identities: Laurence, Atwood, and Engel, 1965--1980 (Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel)

Female and National Identities: Laurence, Atwood and Engel---1965--1980 responds to Fredric Jameson's encouragement of 1980s critics to find meaning in literature even as they abandon the bourgeois notion of individual identity.; I open with a review of literary criticism that expressed interest in realist portrayals of identity in Margaret Laurence's work. Laurence's representation of identity issues becomes most plausible when displaced to the point where the symbolic characters and happy endings associated with romance give way to what Georg Lukacs' has explained as typicality in realism, the understanding of individual consciousness as bound to the representation of history. While Laurence's fictional impetus may have been to construct characters that represent women and Canadians as symbolically inclusive, in the end, their inherent contradictions work to cast doubt on the plausibility of these characters as integrated entities. Similarly, critical commitment to shared female and national interests in her work cannot account for the tensions between identity issues that eclipse a sense of mutual support.; I then turn to Atwood, noting that her fiction sparked controversy among critics, who were confused about whether or not her endings were to be understood as happy. The predominant conclusion among her contemporaries was that they were to be read this way, thus extending hope that female and national identities might eventually be workable. I explore a consistently realist interpretation to ascertain what other meanings might be possible if these characters and plots are seen as displaced from mythic narrative patterns to the point where meaning shifts from successful identity quests to explanations of characters and events in terms of social forces. Attempts to resolve social contradictions can be understood not only through utopian pictures of resolved identity, as would be expected in romance, but also through realist portrayals the historical forces producing particular people in particular circumstances. Mythic story patterns suggest more optimistic expectations of identity success than do those narrative conventions that give a sense of verisimilitude. In the latter instance, realist solutions contribute to a vision of what an individual character needs to do to resolve a social contradiction.; Atwood's work marks the midpoint in a range of critical responses characterized at one end by approval of Laurence, perhaps because she offered the most evidence for interpretation according to romance, and at the other by disappointment in Engel, arguably because she offered the least. Still recognized as a canonical writer who addressed female and national issues, Engel nevertheless seemed the least likely of the three writers to accommodate readers with evidence of romance, no matter how displaced that romance might be. Despite her one atypically successful novel, she seemed most determinedly realist in her marriage of characters to their historical preconditions, and least likely to envision success as a possible outcome of identity quests. Instead of individuals transforming reality, her characters appear to be products of the social world and therefore very much rooted in limitation. Realist explanations for why things have to be as they are focus on what needs to be done in the historic world to change circumstance. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...