| This study examines the images of exploration and mapping in the works of four Canadian women writers: Audrey Thomas, Susan Swan, Daphne Marlatt, and Aritha van Herk. I argue that the presence of these images signals an interest in subverting traditional representations of female identity. The first chapter canvasses several reasons which could account for the prevalence of these images in the works under consideration; reasons include Canada's historical connection to the explorers; the country's status as a colony; parallels between Canada's colonial experience and women's experience under patriarchy; and, finally, the significance of maps and map-making within postmodern theories. The second chapter analyses Thomas's novel Intertidal Life, concentrating on its treatment of the quest motif. I assert that this motif is used both to foreground the genre of romance and to subvert its hierarchical structure, specifically its representation of women as monstrous obstacles. The third chapter examines Swan's novel The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, focusing on the way in which the images of map-making and exploration can be read as a critique of representations of women within a set of nineteenth-century cultural discourses, including modern science, industrial capitalism, and American nationalism. The fourth chapter analyses Marlatt's novel Ana Historic. Here, the notion of mapping is augmented to take into account the text's emphasis on the necessity of mapping ancestral trajectories, and to show how the text offers a strategy for revising official history to contest women's erasure and/or misrepresentation. In the fifth chapter, the study examines the works of Aritha van Herk; her novels are read in the light of the theories of Deleuze and Guattari to contextualize their emphasis on the breakdown of established identities and their celebration of the process of deterritorialization. In the final chapter, the various strategies for subversion are reviewed, and reasons why distinctions should be drawn among feminist, post-colonial, and postmodern strategies of subversion are offered. |
