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Living rooms : domestic material culture in fiction by Joan Barfoot, Marion Quednau, and Diane Schoemperlen

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36586
Date January 2000
CreatorsElmslie, Susan.
ContributorsLecker, Robert (advisor)
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageDoctor of Philosophy (Department of English.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001763741, proquestno: NQ64555, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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