Wandering women: The emergence of the picaresque in postmodern, feminist Canadian literature (Margaret Atwood, Susan Swan, Aritha van Herk)

The picaresque genre developed as a result of class disparity in Spain during the sixteenth century. Successive generations of authors have adapted the defining characteristics of the picaresque genre in order to subvert the social structures most pressing during their eras and the latest generation of authors to take up the tenets of the picaresque are postmodern feminist Canadian authors writing in the late twentieth-century. Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and The Robber Bride, Susan Swan's The Biggest Modern Woman of the World and Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey are all examples of this new transformation of the picaresque tradition. Until this thesis, only Lady Oracle and No Fixed Address had been identified within critical discourse as picaresque novels; and while these four novels are dramatically different they all share a series of picaresque characteristics. It is through careful study of the sexuality, relationships to family and to society in general of these four picaras that any conclusions are reached about the purpose of adapting the picaresque genre by contemporary Canadian feminist postmodern authors. The original writers of the picaresque sought only to highlight and subvert the power structures of social class without presenting a viable alternative to the current social model and the new Canadian postmodern feminist authors of these picaresque novels follow suit. They present and subvert the relationships between gender and power without creating an alternative model on which to base society. A simple inversion of gender binaries would not be postmodern and when Joan, Zenia, Anna and Arachne attempt this inversion they find that they are no better off than before their travels. It is their journeys, and not their eventual destinations, that matter to theorists and the ambivalent resolutions of these four picaresque novels suggest that although these four women did not ultimately succeed, they at least made the attempt at a different type of life and had an exciting journey in the process.