Gender and Narrativity

268 Pages·1996·13.225 MB·English

by  Barry Rutland

GENDER AND NARRATIVITY
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GENDER AND NARRATIVITY
TADAC PAPERS/CAHIERS TADAC
II
EDITED BY BARRY RUTLAND
Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture
Carleton University Press
© Individual Authors, 1997
Published by Carleton University Press
Printed and bound in Canada
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Gender and narrativity
(TADAC papers = Cahiers TADAC ; 2)
ISBN 0-88629-298-0
1.Gender identity in literature. 2. Narration
(Rhetoric) I. Rutland, R. N. (R. Barry) II. Series:
Papers (Centre TADAC) ; 2.
PN56.S52G45 1997 809'.923 C96-900720-5
Cover Design: Your Aunt Nellie
Typeset: Mayhew & Associates Graphic Communications, Richmond, Ont.
in association with Marie Tappin
Front Cover: Eve, the Serpent, and Death by Hans Baldung (called Grien),
c. 1510-1515. Oil on linden, 64.0 x 32.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa.
Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its pub-
lishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario
Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian
Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the
Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: Telling Difference
Barry Rutland i
1 Toward an Epistemology of Gender
John Verdon 19
2 Telling the Feminine
Robert Richard 47
3 Sex, Lies, and Photography: Reading Detective Fiction as
Psychoanalysis in Timothy Findley's The Telling of Lies
Barbara Gabriel 87
4 F(r)ictions: Feminists Re/Writing Narrative
Barbara Godard 115
5 The (W)rite of Passage: From Childhood to Womanhood
in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily Novels
G.A. Woods 147
6 Writing Toward Absence: Frances Gregg's The Mystic Leeway
Ben Jones 159
7 Parsifal and Semiotic Structuralism
/ Iain Prattis 175
8 Androgynous Realism in Heinrich von Kleist's Die
Heilige Cdcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik (Eine Legende)
Arnd Bohm 199
9 Clough, Claude, Arnold, and Marguerite: Male
Heterophobia in Victorian Poetry
Barry Rutland 221
Notes on Contributors 252
Index 255
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PREFACE
TADAC, the Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture, was
established in 1984 as an Organized Research Unit of the Faculty of
Arts of Carleton University, Ottawa, in what has since become the
School of Modern Languages and Literatures and Comparative
Literary Studies. Its mandate was to coordinate research among faculty
members and graduate students interested in the study of world liter-
ature within the broad context of general cultural theory and cultural
history, both at Carleton and other institutions in Canada and abroad.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, TADAC evolved into a national
organization and in 1993 was registered as a Learned Society.
Gender and Narrativity, volume 2 of TADAC Papers/Cahiers TADAC, is
one of two collections of thematically related essays to emerge from
the research project of the same name, the other being volume 3, Isak
Dinesen: Reassessments for the 1990s, edited by Gurli A. Woods and
published by Carleton University Press in 1994. Volume 1 is Text and
Ideology / Texte et ideologie, edited by R.B. Rutland and A.W. Halsall,
published by TADAC in 1988. (The numbering of volumes in the series
relates to the succession of research projects rather than to dates of
publication.)
The project "Gender and Narrativity" was initiated in 1987 with
an International Colloquium at Carleton. The present volume draws
on papers presented at that conference or written subsequently by con-
ference participants. The first category includes the essays by John
Verdon, Iain Prattis, Barbara Godard, Gurli Woods, Arnd Bohm, and
Ben Jones, the latter four revised since original presentation. The sec-
ond includes the contributions of Robert Richard, Barbara Gabriel,
and Barry Rutland. Iain Prattis's paper has appeared in substantially the
same form in Anthropological Poetics, edited by Ivan Brady (Rowman
and Littlefield, 1997: 111-31); Barbara Godards in considerably dif-
ferent forms in the Croatian journal, IZRAZ 2(3) 1990 (in Serbo-Croat)
and in Signature I (Summer 1989); Ben Jones' article provided the
basis for the introduction to his edition of Frances Gregg's autobiogra-
phy, The Mystic Leeway.
Exploration of the gender-narrativity nexus was relatively imma-
ture when the TADAC project was initiated a decade ago. The abiding
pertinence of several of the contributions to the 1987 colloquium to
developments since that time, and ongoing interest in the issue that
resulted in the writing of new essays, led TADAC and Carleton Univer-
sity Press to publish Gender and Narrativity.
I wish to thank on behalf of TADAC all who participated in the pro-
duction of this volume, especially colleagues at Carleton and elsewhere
who refereed contributions, and graduate students who helped to pre-
pare the text, particularly Gail Anderson, who did much of the electronic
editing, and Christine Mains, who undertook the electronic typesetting.
I also thank John Flood and the staff at Carleton University Press for
bringing the project to completion. I acknowledge my gratitude to the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which
supported the 1987 conference and contributed to the costs of publi-
cation, and the Dean of Arts of Carleton University, who provided
additional funding.
Barry Rutland
Director, TADAC
General Editor, TADAC Papers /Cahiers TADAC
INTRODUCTION: TELLING DIFFERENCE
Barry Rutland
Gender is a fundamental constitutive category of culture, narrative is a
basic cultural practice. It is impossible to conceive of a human com-
munity that is not ab initio divided into two (at least) gender groups;
it is equally impossible to imagine a human community that does not
tell/enact stories. What is the relationship between the category and
the practice? The nine essays that follow broach this question in terms
of current theories of meaning and text.
Gender is a secondary formation grounded in biological reproduc-
tive sex but distinct from it, as a building is distinct from and het-
erogenous to the land on which it stands. In Constructing Men and
Women Marilyn Mackie observes:
"Sex" refers to physiology and "gender" to the sociocultural elaborations upon
physiology. To go a step further, sex roles (behaviors stemming from biological
sexual differences) may be distinguished from gender roles (socially created
behaviors differentially assigned to men and women). (Mackie 1987, 3)
Although erected on the ground of biological givens, gender is sym-
bolic and discursive rather than natural. There is, arguably, a radical
discontinuity between biological reproductive sex and cultural gender
that dissolves the binary male/female. One can go further than Mackie
in severing the connection between anatomically determined bodily