Re-writing women into Canadian history: Margaret Atwood and Anne Hébert

This thesis focuses on two twentieth-century Canadian female authors of distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds: the Ontarian Margaret Atwood, and the Québécoise Anne Hébert, and seeks to address the central role they give to Canadian history, and to actual Canadian historical figures, in their fictional writings. This will provide a means of assessing the ways in which each author attempts to ‘re-write’ Canadian history and to create a specifically female historical space in which traditionally oppressed female figures are given an opportunity to make themselves heard. Because of the importance given to history and to types of historical narratives in the works selected, it seems relevant to begin with a brief historical outline of Canada and Quebec, as well as with an overview of the current storiographical debates in both: this will be the object of Chapter One. Chapter Two will examine Margaret Atwood’s 1970 poem cycle The Journals of Susanna Moodie, where the poet explores the issues of alienation and displacement she associates with the pioneering experience of the nineteenth-century female settler. Atwood would later re-visit the writings of Susanna Moodie, as will be shown in Grace, Atwood’s unpublished play, while Chapter Two ends with the study of two poems and a short story in which Atwood also finds inspiration in the life stories of female characters from the past. Chapter Three will be dedicated to the study of Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace, and will illustrate the ways in which the narrative adopts a ‘limited identities’ approach to the re-writing of the life of a nineteenth-century handmaid accused of murder. Chapter Four will be concerned with the examination of Anne Hébert’s 1970 novel Kamouraska, in which notions of historical narratives and private past will be challenged. Chapter Five will explore Hébert’s two plays La Cage and L’île de la Demoiselle, published jointly in 1990, and will address the author’s attempt to re-interpret Quebec’s history and to alter Québécois women’s destinies. Finally, Chapter Six will examine Hébert’s 1988 novel Le Premier jardin and assess the ways in which the author manages to establish a Québécois ‘herstory’