The politics of self-narration: Contemporary Canadian women writers, feminist theory and metafictional strategies (Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Margaret Atwood)

This dissertation focuses on the politics of self-narration and the use of visual images and strategies in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners , Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye. I argue that these authors are reworking the metafictional form by using visual strategies (such as reflection, distortion and point of view) to explore the complex relationship that us created when the woman narrator when she is both subject and object of her own fictional autobiography.; I use the artistic form of anamorphosis as the overriding metaphor for discussing this relation and its manifestation in these texts. Paintings and drawings in which the anamorphic form is used depend upon strategic distortion, indirect viewing and perspective for their effect. Anamorphoses present exploded, fragmented images which, through the strategic positioning of the viewer, are reconfigured into recognizable forms. The emphasis in these works of visual art is upon the moment at which these images are reconfigured. In literary works, I argue, the emphasis is on the process of creating a distorted image and on that which is contained in the spaces that are revealed through the process of exploding that image. This metaphor allows me to explore the interdependence of the visual and written elements of self-representation in these novels and the simultaneous, shifting, mutually informing relation between a narrating, subjective "I" and a narrative "eye" (with its emphasis on the visual, on perspective, and on point of view).; The resistant, reinscriptive and interrogative strategy of "literary anamorphosis" moves these novels beyond the confines of linear, literary forms to create a distinct, feminist, narrative space in which women writing in Canada can articulate the complex politics of their positions in but not of the masculinist Master Narratives that have historically defined and controlled them.