Hamfisted

The following thesis is a partial novel excerpt and five short stories. It is an exploration of the modern woman navigating a problematic and patriarchal system. Western Canadian society is relatively fixed and flawed but women are often challenged to be mutable and desirable at all costs. This fiction attempts to understand what it means to be a complicated woman under the guise of contemporary life. It is the misadventures of so-called unlikeable women navigating their assumed roles as wives, mothers, step-mothers, daughters, sisters and lovers. Grief is the most prominent theme and the subsequent emotional ramifications of loss echo throughout. This is a world where broken people deal with extraordinary tragedy honestly and rather terribly. These are not lives well lived, this is a place of scars. The juxtaposition of the large beauty of the Canadian Pacific and northern province of British Columbia against the messy lives of women echoes the ridiculousness of contemporary female roles and mores. Woman are still raised to be pretty and pleasant but that is neither fun nor is it sustainable. This attempts to peer into that life. The profound unsatisfactory existence of women on the edge. When an unexamined life is challenged with violence, abuse and loss, tragedy occurs but also lessons are learned. The animalistic will to live, coupled with the modern will to live in freedom produces tense and interesting situations. These female characters are as tangled as men and striving to be unapologetically so. In these specific places and times there is an attempt at the universality of human experience.Arts, Faculty ofGraduat