Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

In writing this scholarly study, Susan Knutson examines the oeuvre of
two of Canada’s leading postmodern, feminist writers. Daphne Marlatt
and Nicole Brossard are poets, novelists, and theorists. Both are
identified with the women’s movements in Canada, are writers of
genius, and have made significant contributions to literary form.

On one level, each writer represents the official language groups of
Canada, and each works within and transgresses the gender-bound
limitations of her mother tongue. Each woman expresses the merging of
theory—an intellectual construct—and art. Each writes out of an
experience of being woman in a patriarchal civilization, of being
feminist in an anti-feminist world, and of being lesbian in a homophobic
society.

Both Marlatt and Brossard owe much to French feminism, particularly to
écriture feminine, a concept chiefly developed by Hélиne Cixous that
advocates an experimental discourse that challenges and subverts the
phallocentric symbolic order. Brossard reaches beyond Cixous in an
effort to escape accusations of essentialism, creating what she names
écriture au feminin. American and British feminists are wary of charges
of essentialism, seeing in any woman-identified behaviors or utterances
the positioning of woman as not only different from man but inferior.
Their fears have justification given the account of western civilization
over the past 2000 years. Both writers seek to place woman as whole
subjects of language and history.

Brossard dominates women’s writing in French in this country, daring
to claim the romantic traditions of western writing to praise her
beloved, yet employing the most progressive literary and feminist theory
in her texts. Marlatt’s work is equally disruptive, creating in
English a subtle universe that foregrounds the experiences of women
while avoiding prescriptive feminist writing. She embraces narrative as
a strategy for survival and does so with splendid courage, employing
Kristevan intertextuality and in so doing transforms history,
experience, canonical texts, and cutting-edge theory into art.

Narrative in the Feminine is for the specialist in literary theory, and
provides a fine scholarly reading of these two leading Canadian writers.