My dissertation provides the first full-length study of representations of domestic material culture in contemporary Canadian women's fiction. The first chapter presents two metaphors, the elephant in the living room, and the open secret, and indicates their usefulness in explaining the cultural and critical tendency to overlook the meanings communicated by contemporary domestic material objects and spaces. Drawing on cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken's research into the role of consumption in the preservation of hopes and ideals, the second chapter examines gendered patterns of consumption in Joan Barfoot's first two novels. I suggest that Barfoot's female protagonists reject their suburban homes out of an awareness of the ways these spaces function as repositories of values with which they can no longer live. In the third chapter, I situate my discussion of the Hardoy, or "butterfly chair," in Marion Quednau's novel of the same name, against the backdrop of twentieth-century design debates between modernists and traditionalists. The chair is the object in which the novel's main tensions, which relate to notions of comfort, history, and authority, are embedded. In the fourth chapter I maintain that the central concerns of Diane Schoemperlen's fiction are couched in her representations of domestic material culture. Interpersonal relationships are consistently represented in her fiction as mediated through domestic objects and spaces. Her characters' struggles over issues of control, and the ambivalence characteristically associated with these struggles, often materialize in their manipulations of their domestic environments. Such manipulations make explicit the process of self-fashioning via material culture which every individual engages in on a daily basis, albeit at the level of the tacit.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English Language and Literature, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-192).