Throughout history, women have suffered from the mind/ body dualism, a major
component of Western patriarchal ideology, which has consigned the body to women and
the brain to men. Women's role is relegated to procreating, a "natural" act of the body
that produces offspring, while men create, a conscious undertaking of the mind that
brings something new into being. Women artists frequently confront continuous
challenges to their creativity having to choose between mothering and artistic creation.
Theorists like de Beauvoir saw the two as incompatible, three novels by Nancy Huston:
La Virevolte (1994), Instruments des tenebres (1996) and Prodige (1999), seem in some
ways to confirm that dilemma. Yet elsewhere this bilingual author affirms not only the
possibility of combining them, but the importance of doing so to produce works that are
feminine.
Her work challenges the view of motherhood as metaphor in French feminist
theory, as Huston relates that theory to practical concerns more often associated with
anglophone feminist theory. A range of feminist works on maternity will be employed to
examine the changing positions adopted in these novels, where the division between
creation and maternity is primordial, but this split implies different results in each case.
Instead of the traditional or feminist figure of motherhood, based on maternal love or
instinct, the reader is confronted with specific types of conflict between mother and child. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/12039 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Chabot, Heidi |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 3977807 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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