Healing, Self-Knowledge and Speech : Narrative Re/Construction in the Fiction of Julia O'Faolain and Lee Maracle

Abstract

Designed more as a parallel than a comparative project, this thesis has developed out of a combination of post-colonial theory and post-structural ethics. Working from Ron Marken's notion that sharing a commonality can be "restorative," my thesis considers how both the Irish writer Julia O'Faolain and the Native Canadian writer Lee Maracle contribute to the restoration of the localized, internal and domestic realms of both Ireland and Native Canada.

Ron Marken, in his essay "'There is Nothing but White between the Lines': Parallel Colonial Experiences of the Irish and Aboriginal Canadians" (1999), identifies a key motif (and the title) for the thesis in the "connected metaphors of healing, self-knowledge, and speech" located in both Irish and Native Canadian writing (Marken 158). Drucilla Cornell's ethical feminism, which I define in greater detail in my Introduction, is the basis for my understanding of re-writing myth and, more generally, what I have called "narrative re/construction" in contemporary women's writing. As Cornell argues, quoting Hans Blumenberg, though myths are "'distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their narrative core,"' they also have a "'pronounced capacity for marginal variation"' (172). With this in mind, I will also consider the multiple meanings of "myth."

In O'Faolain's and Maracle's fiction, female characters struggle both to regain and reshape traditional ideas of femininity, many of which are bound up with their respective cultural mythologies and the regressive reproduction of myths surrounding women's role in history-making as well as familial (re)structuring. In O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men and Maracle's Sundogs, women peel back the suffocating layer of history that has kept them under heel and driven their families to political recumbency and self-abuse in the context of the 1980s and 1990s. Healing and self-knowledge thus begin when the wounds are opened afresh and speech finds currency in the voices of women. vi