Constructing A "Myth" In Canadian Literature

Margaret Lawrence enjoys the reputation of "godmother of contemporary Canadian literature" and "an excellent modeler of Canadian literature after the Second World War".Her Manawaka Cycle exerts great influences on the fictions in Canadian literature in the 1960s and as well the subsequent decades. It is viewed as a representative of Canadian national literature.The Manawaka Cycle consists of five texts, The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, A Bird in the House,The Fire-Dwellers,and The Diviners.The texts are set in the same fictional town-Manawaka. The Manawaka Cycle illustrates Canadian women's confusion, stress and compromise, and analyses female's awakening, rebellion and independence, as well as probes into the universal theme of survival in Canadian literature. Lawrence's creation of the five distinctive protagonists challenges the portrait of men as hero in literary tradition. Every heroine in the Manawaka Cycle confronts with the difficulties of survival, and ultimately achieves self-awakening. The innovation part of this thesis exists in the following point of view:the heroines refuse to submit patriarchal right, and husband authority, and pin great hope on their children in order to maintain self-identity and independent spirit that can be explored as Canadian literature's relationship with British colonial literature and the mighty American literature, and that can also be generalized as Canadian writers'hope on the heritage and continuity of indigenous literature.The Manawaka Cycle is the most significant achievement of Laurence, which not only leads a trend of literary creation about "survival" in the 1960s, but also constructs "a unique summit and a myth in Canadian literature".