Genre and Gender: Autobiography and Self-Representation in The Diviners

Abstract

RECENT FEMINIST CRITICISM of Margaret Laurence's Diviners explores representation of female subjectivity and politics of textuality. Clara Thomas, for example, has identified novel's perspective as not only distinctively Canadian, but also distinctively female (14). Helen Buss, among others, identifies Laurence's project as a revision of Bildungsroman or Kunstlerroman (149). Emphasizing contradiction, Christl Verduyn analyzes Laurence's use of language and for female self-representation: The text includes a struggle against itself as formalized written language, with techniques like use of memory-bank movies and snapshots, and questions about meaning of words, challenging formalities of genre (67). More recently, Barbara Godard and Gayle Greene have shown that Diviners alludes to canonical texts, such as William Shakespeare's Tempest or John Milton's Paradise Lost, as well as modernist texts, such as James Joyce's Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, to revise male literary models. Also addressing question of genre, Jon Kertzer and David Williams identify confessional in Laurence's work, with its retrospective point of view and need to invent an autonomous [female] (Williams 30). While these critics lay groundwork for political and analyses, further analysis is necessary to demonstrate Laurence's use of to represent gender. confessional genre, as she employs it, becomes a narrative strategy for female self-representation, for a is not only a signifying system, but also a signifying practice and means by which text employs narrative structure to emphasize certain values over others (Cohan and Shires 78). (1) Further examination of Diviners will reveal that novel is a hybrid of realist, autobiographical and confessional genres to construct a female subject and establish authority of a female perspective. In last line of Diviners, implied author suggests that Gunn finishes her life story as Margaret Laurence completes her novel: Morag returned to house, to write remaining private and fictional words, and to set down her title (477). This ending invites a reading of novel as a fictional autobiography, implication being that novel in its entirety represents process of Morag's construction of fiction of her life story. interior monologue resembles editing of a narrative or film: A popular misconception is that we can't change past--everyone popular misconception is that we can't change past--everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it (Laurence 70).The text therefore problematizes narrative to emphasize female subjectivity (McLean 97), particularly provisional nature of self, for designates no lexical entity, but rather a dialectic reality within text's language (Benveniste 225). Christian Bok remarks that Laurence remains aware of degree to which subjects are produced ... by discursive system within which they operate, and she participates in a project of feminist rewriting, an adaptation of masculine genres to a project (87). In studies of women's autobiography, critics have emphasized an understanding of self as a fictive persona which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, is constructed from polyphonic voices of discourse (Smith 48).Leigh Gilmore argues that even fictional autobiography bears mark of autobiography: the always problematical deployment of I (6-7).Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenke add that women's writing often differs in this respect from (masculine) tradition of autobiography beginning with Augustine [that takes] as its first premise mirroring capacity or universality of autobiographer: female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation --social and political as well as psychic. …