A Retrospective Futurity: Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge

Abstract

A Retrospective Futurity: Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge Linda Revie (bio) Recent theorizing about diaspora focuses on the etymology of the word (to scatter; to sow; to inseminate) and on the biological, reproductive Oedipal logic that inevitably shapes the core of its conventional formation. For example, Julia Emberley’s analysis of archetypal blood-and-belonging literary diasporas as patrilineal accounts of father/son inheritances provides a standard of how maleness and heterosexuality function in many texts.1 Kinship and belonging are also central themes in Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge, but his drama about three complex women has nothing to do with their relationships with men. Instead, MacIvor’s play challenges the heterosexuality of the family tree that typically structures diasporic narratives, and it proposes alternatives based not only on the mother/daughter line but also on sexual diversities and diverse identities. A two-act play produced in 1998, then published and nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 1999, Marion Bridge2 consists of a series [End Page 51] of short, chronologically ordered scenes, each containing a monologue delivered by one of the three main characters. The MacKeigan sisters, all in their thirties, have gathered in the family home to be with their gravely ill mother. Agnes, the eldest hard-living sibling, has left a faltering acting career in Toronto to come back to Sydney, Nova Scotia; Theresa, a cloistered nun, has taken a leave of absence from a religious community in New Brunswick; and Louise, the unemployed perennial “outsider,” has never ventured beyond Cape Breton. They fall into familiar patterns of behaviour: Agnes and Theresa argue and bicker while Louise watches television. As they all act out, their dying mother (unseen throughout the play) is upstairs, still exerting her will. Eventually, she commands her daughters to visit their neglectful father. This stirs up more resentment, for he represents the dangers of the past. While they are making that call to him, their mother dies. Each sister grieves the mother’s passing in her own fashion, then, in a plot twist worthy of Louise’s favourite soaps, find ways to reconnect with Joanie, the daughter Agnes placed for adoption fifteen years before. By the end of the play, the sisters have decided to bring Joanie “home.” En route, they also find a way to honour the memory of their deceased mother by detouring to a place she had loved: Marion Bridge.3 Because their mother had loved it so well, Marion Bridge holds a mythic place in the imaginations of the three main protagonists. Their stories about how they remember a family trip to this small community about twenty kilometres from Sydney invoke what Stuart Hall calls “a narrative of displacement” that recreates “the endless desire to return to lost origins” (402). Further, for Igor Maver, Marion Bridge would stand in for the MacKeigan’s nostalgically invested and contested “home,” and, [End Page 52] paradoxically, it would be “a place of no return” (“Introduction” x). In the play, glimpses into how the three sisters reimagine Marion Bridge map an intense longing for events that have been lost, perhaps not even experienced. What this “homeplace” comes to represent is a profound state of turning backward in time, of being temporarily en route to a displaced self and destination. All of this resonates with the diasporic condition as it is theorized by Smaro Kamboureli. Like Hall and Maver, Kamboureli analyzes the diasporic state as a journey toward an origin that one is “never destined to return to …” (132). Kamboureli also notes that a shift or change often occurs during a subject’s “becoming” diasporic, specifically at the moment of realizing that the “otherness” of identity is defined by something “foreign” or outside the self. Kamboureli calls this a “self-identification by negation” and postulates that this process sets up a binary of the “I” and “not-I” selves. Within that paradigm, the subject realizes identity cannot be found through a relation to some remote place that s/he is attached to, but it must be discovered in the context of self-negation in present place and time (139). This essay examines each sister’s individual and collective journey back...