‘The Inner Geography of Home’: the ecofeminist ethics of Daphne Marlatt’s Taken

Eva Darias Beautell

doi:10.14198/fem.2005.5.11

Abstract

The research conducted for this essay has been possible thanks to the generous help of the Government of Canada, who awarded me with a Research Faculty Grant, with which I was able to work at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2004. I am also indebted to the Consejeria de Educacion, Cultura y Deportes (Gobierno de Canarias), for its funding of the three-year research project «Revisiones del canon en Canada y Estados Unidos: Literatura, Cultura y Genero (1975-2000)».

Highlights

Being the product ofcolonial circumstances, it has always been aware of how gendered structures affect and are affected by the traditional alliance between patriarchal and imperialist discourses, and of how the issues pertaining to the body, sex and sexuality are always related to the social perception of space and place
Of all the recent novels that offer suggestive explorations of the ways in which gender intersects with space, Daphne Marlatt’s novel Taken (1996) openly denounces the violence of spatial constructions of subjectivity and proposes, at the same time, alternative connections that may counteract the uneven effects of traditional alliances between identity and place
In this essay I wish to examine the imprints of that feminist ethics in Marlatt’s Taken, a text that rethinks the subject’s relation to territory, place and space, and puts forward a form of maternalism defined at the junction between feminism and ecology

Summary

Introduction

Eva Darias-Beautell and produce new ones4. Such a realization, in turn, has pushed feminist criticism further into interdisciplinary arenas, from which «to undertake new cartographies, to trace the ways writers inscribe gender onto the symbolic representation of space within texts, whether through images of physical confinement, of exile and exclusions, of property and territoriality, or of the body as the interface between individual and communal identities»5.

Results

Conclusion