This paper examines the way in which two contemporary Canadian women writers, Anne Carson and Gail Scott, integrate subjective theory into two of their respective texts (Carson's Men In the Off Hours, and Scott's Main Brides). This study rejects the presentation of a single protagonist and instead focuses heavy emphasis upon the presentation of subjective experiments. In this paper the subjects in Men In the Off Hours and Main Brides are examined through the desires they exhibit for the absent other---that which the subject perceives he/she does not have---as central to his/her own conception of him/her self. The paper first acknowledges that subjective theory, the quest for the self, has maintained a central position in scholarly studies. It then proceeds to disseminate and critique Lacanian subjective theory thereby setting the stage for close readings of Carson's Men In the Off Hours through theorist Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection, and of Scott's Main Brides through Jacques Derrida's theory of the borderline. The paper closes by questioning the possibility of a fully realized subject.

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