Since Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro do not frequently employ experimental or overtly metafictional forms, they are often read as realist writers in contradistinction to postmodernists. In fact, the assumptions upon which their work rests have little in common with the assumptions underlying realism, and they are as resoundingly post-realist as their postmodern counterparts. One of the key characteristics of realism is an assumption that language can be a neutral, transparent medium in which life can be rendered without distortion. Yet in the work of Atwood, Munro, and Gallant language is never transparent. Language creates reality, and this creation is always connected to power. The three writers share anxieties about the paradoxical nature of women's relationship to language: women must use language in order to assert their existence in the world, yet language exerts disturbing control, especially over women. This control is insistently depicted as a form of violence. Realism, to use Bakhtin's terms, is essentially monologic--its narrative strategy depends on a single unifying view, which the reader is encouraged to share. These writers, by contrast, parody the monologic view offered by society's master narratives--often depicted as largely male discourses--and expose it as absurdly limited. They explore the heteroglossia of the contemporary world and insistently expose the ways in which discourses exert power, especially over women. Many of their texts are mis-read as closed realist texts when in fact they remain unresolved and dialogic. Realism encourages a view of character as coherent and unitary, capable of undergoing development and reaching maturity. These writers depict the female self as lacking coherence. Often the boundaries between self and others, especially other women, are confused. Emphasis is placed on the importance of how the self is constructed in the eyes of others rather than on any sense of internal development. For these writers the female self is not a stable entity but a construction. Atwood, Gallant, and Munro do not construct fictions that attempt to mirror life--they recognize the power of voice to construct the world. They are therefore not the naive or conservative "realists" they are sometimes read as. In fact, their work, like that of the postmodernists, challenges and deconstructs the assumptions of realism. However, whereas language for the postmodernists has become little more than a play of empty signifiers, for these women writers it is still vitally allied to power.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6822 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Sexton, Melanie. |
| Contributors | Staines, David, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 484 p. |
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