Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction: Girls' Own Stories [1st ed. 2022] 3030941256, 9783030941253

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Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction Girls’ Own Stories

Jeannette King

Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction

Jeannette King

Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction Girls’ Own Stories

Jeannette King School of Language, Literature, Music & Visual Culture University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-94125-3    ISBN 978-3-030-94126-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

And last, but by no means least To Valentina Wishing her a life full of adventure

Acknowledgements

I would like to start by thanking Palgrave Macmillan’s readers for their comments on the first draft of this book, which helped me to turn it into something much better. It becomes increasingly difficult to find new ways of saying thank you to the people who have been prepared to keep reading early, revised and ‘final’ drafts of my books without admitting to any sense of tedium or strain. Pam Morris and Flora Alexander have once again borne the main burden, continuing to find ways to diagnose and/or solve problems when I felt at a loss. Their encouragement and loving support have sustained me over a period of writing far longer than was intended. I am particularly grateful to Flora, whose knowledge of Canadian women’s writing and its context was invaluable. I also owe her a debt for introducing me to the field when we taught a course on the subject together. Other debts are harder to identify and acknowledge fully. This year in particular I have benefitted from support of all kinds from family and friends to help me finish this project without the person who had been my lifelong support. Thank you, in particular, Olivia, Jo, Christine and Liz for listening and loving. Thank you Christine, Linda and Lorraine for walking Lenny, and Lenny himself for being my best pal. Above all, I have to thank my family, Jane and Steven, Kit and Anna, Daniel and Valeriya and Vali, for giving me a reason for joy and delight even in the saddest times. If this book makes you feel a fraction of the pride I feel in all of you, I shall be very happy indeed. And finally, of course, to Jon—Thank you for the days. Aberdeen, October 2021 vii

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History: Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, Or The Stargazer 29 3 Domesticating the Wilderness, a Woman’s Mission: Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton 43 4 Women and an Uncivil War: Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women 57 5 Adventures of Body and Soul: Audrey Thomas, Isobel Gunn 67 6 Home and Away: Jane Urquhart, Away: A Novel 79 7 The Female Epic: Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie 91 8 Conquistador’s Moll or Mother of the Nation? Laura Esquivel, Malinche107 9 The Female Conquistador: Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul121

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CONTENTS

10 The Legacy of the Conquistadors: Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora133 11 Conclusion147 Bibliography151 Index159

About the Author

Jeannette  King is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Aberdeen. A graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, she moved to Aberdeen and taught for many years for the Open University and in Further Education while bringing up her two children. In 1995 she became Lecturer in Women’s Studies at Aberdeen University, where she taught till her retirement. Publications include: Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (2012), The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005), Women and the Word: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Bible (2000), Doris Lessing (1989) and Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (1978).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Genre and Gender Historical fiction has a long history, as have the debates regarding its nature and its purpose. Is it a nostalgic escape from present reality, or is it a reliable source of information about the past? How does it relate to other popular fictional forms and genres? What is its attraction for women writers and readers? Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) is often regarded as the first historical novel, in so far as it engages directly with the documented history of public life. In this sense it was implicitly a masculine form, since most women were excluded from that life. Before Scott, reviewers regarded the predominantly female genre of fiction, confined to the private life and written for a predominantly female readership, as a degraded form compared to the eighteenth-century male canon. But with Waverley, Ina Ferris has argued, Scott was seen to restore masculinity to the novel, re-­ establishing fiction as a male domain and novel reading as a ‘manly practice’.1 That view was perpetuated into the twentieth century, notably by Georg Lukacs, whose book The Historical Novel (1962) also credited Scott with creating the genre. Scott’s characters, ‘in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces’,2 unlike novels which are ‘historical’ only in theme and costume. Central to Lukacs’ view of Scott as the originator of historical fiction is Scott’s ability to make the reader ‘re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_1

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reality’ (Lukacs, p.  42). Addressing serious political, economic, cultural and sociological concerns, and using historical facts with accuracy, Scott established a new benchmark for realism. Lukacs emphasises the novelist’s power to contribute to the reader’s understanding of history in new ways. And yet in spite of further arguing that the historical novel ‘in its origins, development, rise and decline follows inevitably upon the great social transformations of modern times’ (p.  13), Lukacs fails to anticipate the impact of the women’s movement upon the historical novel. His canon is entirely male. The contemporary woman writer whose work most obviously exemplifies the Lukacs model is Hilary Mantel, once described as ‘the woman who made historical fiction respectable again, who […] freed it from the […] bodice-ripping romps of Philippa Gregory et al.’,3 just as Scott ‘rescued’ the novel from the associations of women’s domestic fiction. Her first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), demonstrates the shaping of men by their historical circumstances by introducing the reader to three key figures in the French Revolution—George-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins—before they became inextricably associated with the terror. But while she provides a meticulously researched historical context for these characters’ actions, the novel is not intended as the overview of the Revolution which a historian might attempt, as Mantel states in her introduction. Instead it adds the individual, personal perspective, presenting events as seen through the prejudices and feelings of her three key figures, only intermittently shifting to an impersonal narrator using the historic present to set the scene. Taking what is known about them, she fills the gaps with inventions, utilising the novelist’s freedom to imagine their thoughts. In that way Mantel makes it possible for the reader to understand how the idealistic young Robespierre who did not believe in capital punishment, and was influenced by Rousseau, grew to regard such violence as necessary for the achievement of his revolutionary ideals, as well as—more cynically—for self-preservation. Reminding the reader that Robespierre himself said in 1793, ‘History is fiction’,4 she indicates the degree of uncertainty in the historical record which gives her own fictions their legitimacy. A different way of ‘supplementing’ the historical record is particularly relevant to novelists dealing with women’s history, and often has a strong basis in documented history. That is to take one of the ‘footnotes’ of history and make that central, rather than peripheral to the narrative. The idea for A. S. Byatt’s novella The Conjugial Angel (1992) grew out of a footnote in the letters of Arthur Hallam, beloved friend of the poet Alfred

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Lord Tennyson, and the dedicatee of ‘In Memoriam’. Byatt explains that the original impulse behind the novella was ‘revisionist and feminist. It would tell the untold story of Emily Tennyson, as compared to the often-­ told story of Arthur Hallam, her fiancé, and Alfred her brother, in which Emily is a minor actress’.5 Emily’s overwhelming private grief after Arthur’s death is overshadowed by the very public display of grief that is ‘In Memoriam’, where Tennyson usurps her role as grieving ‘widow’. Using Tennyson’s own words, Byatt suggests the damaging, even humiliating effect the poem had on his sister while making his name with the Victorian public. Bio-fiction of this kind can redress the imbalance created by the lack of attention paid to women’s lives as too private and domestic to be considered of interest. Where Mantel and Byatt can be said to supplement the historical record, other writers are ready to challenge it. Even Scott showed a readiness to ‘interrogate official history’ through his focus on the experiences of individuals. But, as Diana Wallace has shown, historical fiction has proved a particularly productive genre for women writers aiming to explore women’s lives, and issues surrounding female authorship, and thus to challenge received wisdom.6 Unsurprisingly such interrogation became a driving force for women’s historical fiction of the 1970s and after, part of the wider project of second-wave feminism, reinserting women into history not just as victims but as agents, giving them the voices they had been denied in the official records. When citing her sources for The Wild Girl (1984), for instance, her novel about the life of Mary Magdalene, Michèle Roberts acknowledged her debt to the feminist academic research of the 1970s and 1980s. Refuting for once and for all the idea of serious historical fiction as an inherently masculine genre, Sarah Waters, one of its most successful practitioners, has argued that women have in fact dominated the genre of historical fiction since the 1920s, using it to ‘map out an alternative, female historical landscape’ which often ‘constitutes a radical rewriting of traditional male-centred historical narratives’.7 If, according to Fredric Jameson, using history responsibly means bringing to the surface of the text the ‘repressed and buried reality’ of class struggle,8 it surely also means bringing to the surface the reality of women’s struggle for a voice, particularly the struggle of those oppressed by gender and/or class or race. The history of women’s sexuality has been a particularly rich area for contestation by feminists, fully explored in the novels of Sarah Waters who made the genre of lesbian historical fiction both a popular and critical success. Waters suggests that lesbians have a special affinity with historical

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fiction which enables them to ‘queer’ official versions of history by incorporating those figures previously excluded, and suggesting same-sex relationships where they had not previously been recognised (p.  176). As Terry Castle points out, lesbianism had been manifest in the Western literary imagination primarily as an absence. She suggests that in Victorian fiction, for instance, lesbians appear only as ghostly, spectral presences.9 Novels like Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and The Night Watch (2006) bring those shadowy presences into the light, making it possible to explore what lesbian lives may have been like, in the absence of mainstream historical evidence. Several of Waters’ novels engage with the Victorian period, contributing to what has become one of the most important sub-genres of historical fiction. The period obviously lends itself to the exploration of gender issues, since the concept of separate spheres for men and women established at that time, and the codification of ideas of sexual difference, draws attention to the historicised nature of gender itself.10 Given that the private life designated as women’s ‘proper sphere’—and above all their sexuality—was largely hidden from public view, many women writers have used the genre to bring those hidden experiences to the fore, as well as to illustrate the ability of some women to subvert patriarchal gender discourse and the control it exercises. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is arguably the literary progenitor of this trend. In telling the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rhys carried out a feminist and post-colonial reading of Brontë’s canonical original which has itself become almost canonical. Bertha’s ‘madness’ is shown to be largely Rochester’s own construction, the product of a patriarchal and imperialist ideology which identifies his wife’s sexuality as a sign of degeneracy, always liable to slide into madness, and furthermore associated with the colonised ‘Other’ she represents. Novels like Rhys’s which focus on women’s dispossession and oppression belong equally to the genre of post-colonial fiction when they add race to the marginalising elements of gender and class. Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) foregrounds the problematic nature of historical testimony through the earthy and forthright narrative of July, a freed female slave, which is framed by the attempts of her son Thomas to edit and sanitise it. As the genres of post-colonial fiction and women’s historical fiction often overlap in this way, many of the current debates concerning historical fiction apply equally to both. These are the issues on which the following section focuses.

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Realism and Metafiction What historical novels have in common is that they satisfy the apparently insatiable appetite for knowledge of the past, hence the prominence and prestige of historical television series, and the popularity of history and biography with the reading public. But for some readers and writers, fiction and knowledge are not easily reconcilable. If the purpose of historical fiction is to give voice to what has been silenced, to bring hidden stories to light, then the veracity of the ‘knowledge’ they represent is more open to challenge than that contained in the ‘official’ historical record. The further a novel’s narrative departs from the consensual account, the more problematic become its claims to ‘truthtelling’. This is obviously relevant not only to feminist fiction but to post-colonial fiction, which equally aims to supplement and contest the historical record. A readiness to give credence to hidden histories can be related to the changing nature of historiography itself. Postmodernists argue that ‘history’ is not an objective truth, but fragmented, subjective and plural, made apparently coherent by the use of narrative techniques borrowed from fiction itself. If historians must rely on someone’s narrative—oral or written—history can only ever be contested versions of the past, one tale among many. If this is the case, then an imaginative construction of a life of which little is known, but which has a basis in documented fact, may have its own claim to a kind of truth. Byatt puts it with typical clarity: ‘The idea that “all history is fiction” led to a new interest in fiction as history’ (p. 38). Historical fiction plays with what we think we know about past times and places. In addition to throwing new light on old stories, or opening up new stories, it makes possible the exploration of the very meaning of history and narrative, and asks who has the power to shape them. Postmodernist historians and novelists have a particular interest in adopting marginal perspectives on events and in decentring recorded history, which directly intersects with the concerns of feminist writers. Margaret Forster’s Diary of an Ordinary Woman (2003) foregrounds the ‘textualisation’ of history by playing with traditional ideas about historical authenticity, presenting itself as that most ‘authentic’ of documents, a diary by Millicent King covering most of the twentieth century. Its ‘editor’ calls it a ‘social document’ with additional researched material providing ‘bridging work’. The text’s status as historical document is further reinforced by Millicent’s recruitment by Mass Observation, whose goal is to record ‘ordinary’ lives to create a ‘picture of our society’.11 The impression

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of historical veracity is, however, subverted by the Author’s Note, which reveals that the ‘editor’ neither met Millicent nor read her diaries. Seen from this perspective, as Novalis says in Penelope Fitzgerald’s epigraph to her novel about his life, The Blue Flower (1995), ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history’.12 Many women novelists have seized the opportunity to make up for such shortcomings. They may provide a new perspective on historical figures, such as Hilary Mantel’s presentation of Anne Boleyn in her Cromwell trilogy or Janice Galloway’s of Clara Schumann in Clara, or imagine the lives of fictional characters within a historical context which explains their victimisation or rebellion, such as Waters’ representation of lesbian lives in the Victorian period. The potential collision of fiction and knowledge often emerges in discussion of the question of narrative form, specifically of the relative merits of Realism and Post-modernism in historical fiction. Such debates have in recent years focused in particular on the considerable body of fiction set in the nineteenth century. I suggested at the outset that Realism was originally considered to be a defining characteristic of historical fiction, the means by which the genre most faithfully recreates the past. Many neo-­ Victorian novels recreate the familiar, realist forms of nineteenth-century fiction. As Kate Mitchell puts it, ‘imitation becomes an “authentication” strategy: we “believe” or “yield to” the image of the Victorian period it offers because we recognise it from Victorian fiction’.13 Extensive research makes possible the verisimilitude most often associated with the genre, and characters are presented by an omniscient narrator with a completeness less evident in more modern styles of fiction, or by a first-person narrator whose voice adds authenticity to her account. Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Ahab’s Wife (1999), to be discussed later in this study, is an outstanding example of this kind of imitation. Supporters of realist modes of historical fiction argue that it is never a matter of the mere recreation of forms. As Louisa Hadley points out, such fiction ‘requires an understanding of the historical conditions to which these forms are responding’,14 going far beyond surface verisimilitude. Byatt has called her attempts to ‘hear the Victorian dead’ ventriloquism. In her defence of the ‘truth-telling’ capacity of historical fiction Byatt goes on to say that her intention was to rescue ‘the complicated Victorian thinkers from modern diminishing parodies’ and from ‘disparaging mockery’ (Histories and Stories, p. 79). In The Conjugial Angel, for instance, she gives as much weight to Swedenborgianism as to Emily Tennyson’s personal drama. Her Morpho Eugenia (1992) similarly suggests the

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complex intellectual background to nineteenth-century natural history and exploration in a narrative about male and female aspiration, sexual relationships and class. As Byatt points out, it is as much about pheromones as about Romantic love. Such novels engage fully with the discourses of nineteenth-century scientific and cultural life, conveying to the reader something of the period’s complex mind-set, rather than simply its changing fashions. A more recent and equally robust defence of historical fiction’s claims to truth-telling is presented by Tegan Zimmerman, who adopts an explicitly feminist approach. She argues that the woman’s historical novel assumes ‘a historical reality and a gendered reality that extends beyond the text’.15 For Zimmerman the central theme of contemporary women’s historical fiction is the maternal, crossing national boundaries in order to emphasise the commonality of the theme, but also demonstrating how differently women experience the maternal in different national and historical contexts, challenging any idea of the maternal as a universal experience. From different perspectives, these critics are restating Lukacs’s argument that the historical novel is not defined by its verisimilitude alone, but by its recreation and engagement with the social, political and intellectual life of the period. Linda Anderson argues however that reclaiming history for women through neo-Victorian forms simply results in reproducing the ‘history’ with which that fiction has made us familiar, without challenging the ‘conceptual limits’ which excluded women from history in the first place. She concludes that we cannot ignore ‘how that existence is textually mediated’,16 and the imperatives of genre itself. Fredric Jameson similarly argues that neo-Victorian fiction participates in postmodernism’s ‘nostalgia mode’, creating the past through the recreation of its surfaces, without any genuine interest in its substance. The particularity of apparently gratuitous detail identified by Roland Barthes as contributing to the ‘reality effect’ (1968) is merely an ‘effect’. 17 Postmodern nostalgia, as defined by Jameson, is the collective social desire to appropriate an idealised past through aesthetic representation.18 For Jameson neo-Victorian fiction is mere pastiche, imitation eclipsing the original. Casting further doubt on the value of realism in historical fiction, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn suggest that the best historical fiction is by definition metafiction.19 Careful to distinguish neo-Victorian fiction from historical fiction simply set in the nineteenth century, they define it as texts which in some respect are self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)

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interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians (p. 4). At the core of neo-Victorianism, therefore, is ‘metafictionality’, meaning work which ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’ (p. 18).20 This involves a ‘self-consciousness’ about the writer’s and by implication reader’s own subject positions. In their self-­ conscious use of Victorian material, these novelists are involved in a critique not only of Victorian practices and assumptions but of the period’s attraction for our own culture. In using the term metafiction, Heilmann and Llewellyn are drawing on the work of Linda Hutcheon, influential in establishing the concept of ‘historiographic metafiction’ for novels which are ‘both intensely self-reflective and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’.21 Often playfully combining historical figures and events with characters and tales which escape the confines of realism, such novels draw attention to marginalised and peripheral figures such as women and the working class in order to foreground the failure of the historical record to include them. Heilmann and Llewellyn carry out compelling analyses of a wide range of media, as well as fiction, but I remain resistant to the idea that the term Neo-Victorian fiction should be restricted to metafiction, preferring the more encompassing view proposed by Kate Mitchell. Mitchell takes issue with the idea that metafiction is the defining characteristic of Neo-­ Victorian fiction, returning instead to the idea of historical fiction’s role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Exploring the way that contemporary novelists use the Victorians’ own vocabulary of history, memory and loss, she argues that such fiction can best be understood through the use of what she calls memory discourse: ‘Positioning neo-Victorian novels as acts of memory provides a means to critically evaluate their investment in historical recollection as an act in the present; as a means to address the needs and speak to the desires of particular groups now.’22 Rejecting the assumption that nostalgia is necessarily inauthentic, she demonstrates in her textual analysis that contemporary novelists can create a Victorian world in their fiction which is informed by twentieth-­ century knowledge without this being dramatised in the novel itself. While not denying the problematics of representation, she argues that these novels, laying claim to historical recollection, enable readers to ‘remember’ the nineteenth century today, and that that is their primary appeal for us. Dealing both with novels like Byatt’s Possession, which ‘dramatizes the process of reconstructing an earlier time’ (p.  1) and others like Waters’

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Affinity, which recreate the Victorian world without any reference to the present day, Mitchell is more concerned with ‘the ways in which fiction can lay claim to the past, provisionally and partially, rather than the ways that it can not’ (p. 3). Her approach brings out strongly the revisionist impulse of neo-Victorian fiction which is so central to my own analysis, giving due credit to realism’s faith in the past’s availability for factual representation. A more positive insight offered by Heilmann and Llewellyn is their suggestion that a further defining feature of neo-Victorianism ‘resides in the acknowledgment that we must recognise the Victorian past in order to engage with the contemporary present’ (p. 245). The relationship between past and present is self-evident in a novel like Possession, which moves between them. Where the present is not evident in the text, the author may nudge the reader to make the connections. Rose Tremain’s introduction to her novel Restoration (1989) makes it explicit that her novel is as much about the present as about the past, since she saw Charles II’s reign as an analogy for Thatcher’s Britain, embodying ‘all that was shallow, showy, excessive and distracting’.23 Whether through meta-fiction or realist forms therefore the best historical fiction is characterised by a historical perspective which foregrounds the contingent nature of institutions and ideologies, encouraging readers to reflect on their own. Women’s historical fiction is not merely carrying out an exercise in historical mimicry, but exploring what that period can add to the modern reader’s understanding of gender. In allowing for other versions of the past, these alternative histories also enable the reader to conceive of alternative futures: in Lynn Pykett’s words they constitute an attempt to recover ‘a usable past’, what J.  H. Plumb calls ‘the past as a weapon in the battle for the future’.24 Writing specifically about neo-Victorian fiction, David Glover and Cora Kaplan argue that modern feminist writers ‘use the Victorian period to revisit the unresolved issues of what kind of opposition gender is, and what kind of ethics and politics can be assigned to “traditional” femininity’.25 The crucial term here is ‘unresolved’. Gender is as politically charged an issue now as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to be debated in every one of today’s media. If we are in the middle of another shift in what we know or think about gender, we need to know how our beliefs came about, and how much has been excluded or forgotten in what we know. My own approach aims at actively engaging with these debates, and in some cases deals with the same texts. Zimmerman’s chapter ‘Revisionist

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Writing: Mother of the Americas’ includes discussion of some of the novels I have selected, but her focus is firmly on the thematic element, paying less attention to the question of form. Dalley’s focus on postcolonial fiction is clearly relevant to my own writing on fiction of the Americas, since the process of contestation he sees as central to postcolonial fiction is equally central to the issue of gender. I did not come across Cooper and Short’s collection, The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (2012)26 until I had finished this monograph, but was particularly interested in their contribution to the debate about what historical fiction tells us about the present. My own particular interest, however, is in how the novels I have selected for discussion relate to literary texts and traditions, as well as to historical tradition. Their authors may adopt the forms of nineteenth-century fiction, or more loosely be described as metafiction; they may be described as realist, or may incorporate elements of the supernatural. But all are aware of not only contested archives, but of a contested literary domain. In rewriting history, they are also rewriting literary history. The selection of novels was dictated obviously by how well they filled the brief of dealing with female adventurers in the Americas, how well they lent themselves to fairly detailed analysis, and sometimes, as always, by serendipity. My initial inspiration came from Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), a strikingly effective example of feminist historical fiction which led me to think about novels of this type published on the other side of the Atlantic, and to consider in what ways their very different historical contexts might shape the interventions of their writers. For there were few places more likely to make historical female adventure possible than the New World. These territories offered the opportunity to enter into the unknown, whether on land or sea. Nor was the space that was opened up simply geographical, but also spiritual and psychological. The new societies established in the New World offered the possibility of new roles and opportunities for women, allowing them to define themselves away from the constraints of gender and the domestic sphere. Each of the novels discussed in this study uses women’s journeys in or to the New World to expose them to adventures which force them to confront what it is to be a woman. In order to survive in this dangerous territory, they have to negotiate with and modify received ideas of womanhood. The novelists’ representations of women’s place in the Americas give rise to various common themes in addition to those of gender, including the part played by women in forging national identity, and the idea of

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nationhood. A recurrent trope in American historical fiction by women, as in their British equivalent, is the cross-dressing woman. She epitomises the more widespread desire of any woman who wants to be able to live like a man, to have the same aspirations, to be afforded the same freedom to pursue those aspirations and to be judged by the same standards. As in an important British example of the genre, Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry (1999), based on the true story of a woman who succeeds in living as a surgeon in the British army, a woman who cross-dresses is the ultimate form of gender subversion, foregrounding the extent to which gender is a social construction, or ‘performative’, to use Judith Butler’s terminology,27 and moreover allows women to usurp men’s privileged place. But a consequent theme is the danger of pursuing male goals at the expense of values traditionally conceived of as female, but which are an essential part of what it means to be fully human. This often manifests itself as the kind of individualism which runs counter to the collective, woman-centred ideals of feminism as a movement dedicated to the liberation of all women, rather than the exceptional few. Each of the writers included makes a unique and important contribution to this historical female adventure genre, but also shares certain characteristics distinctive of the particular parts of the Americas to which they belong: North America, Canada and Latin America. In responding to the different histories of these regions, these novelists engage with both the historical record and the literary tradition to create a new female-centred adventure genre. The structure of this study is therefore intended to emphasise those differences, spelled out in more detail in the rest of this introduction, while paying due attention to the individuality of each.

Putting Women Back into the Story of the Americas From 1855 to 1920 there were over a dozen periodicals with Boys Own in the title being published in Britain. The first, The Boys’ Own Magazine, established a pattern copied by the others, providing both education and entertainment, primarily in the form of stories about public school life and adventure. The ethos of these papers was spelled out in the longer lasting Boys’ Own Paper, published in Britain by the Religious Tract Society from1879 to 1967: it was intended to instil Christian morals and to promote the British Empire. American and Canadian versions followed: The Boys’ Own in 1873 and Boys’ Own Paper in 1880 respectively. Their contents were identical to the British original apart from a cover featuring

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advertisements for local enterprises. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Girls’ Own Paper followed in 1880, lasting until 1956. Gender-specific in the topics it covered, it nevertheless also contained adventures of a true-life kind, serialising the exploits of the explorer Kate Marsden in the 1890s. Joseph Bristow notes that it was also in the 1880s that adventure stories for adult readers became popular, but this genre was dominated by male authors and intended for a male readership. As Bristow points out, these novels were ‘unassailably masculine’, featuring ‘courageous actions supported by the physical hardiness that enables the best adventurers to survive out of doors’.28 There is, unsurprisingly, no equivalent tradition in women’s nineteenth-century fiction, which tends towards domestic realism rather than romantic derring-do. While it may have been acceptable for girls like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March to be ‘tomboys’, the consequences of gender transgression in women would have breached both social and literary convention. Even Bristow’s own collection of adventure stories, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contains 21 stories by men and only two by women; only one centres on a female protagonist, although two include adventurous wives. In recent years, however, a number of women novelists have attempted to fill this gap, with novels of female adventure grounded in history and featuring intrepid women of great courage. Unlike the protagonists of Boys’ Own Adventures, however, they rarely travel in pursuit of treasure or wealth, but for love, freedom or an idea of home different from that they have left behind. In contrast to the Boys’ Own stories which set out to promote Christianity and the British Empire, modern stories of female adventure are more likely to expose what lay behind Empire, and the crimes it committed in the name of Christianity. Their position with regard to ‘the domestic spaces so carefully policed by the maternal authority’ (Bristow, p. xvii) is also differently inflected. They might share Andrew Lang’s view of the universal appeal of the adventure story: ‘Whatever the merits of modern English romance, one thing is certain. It is now undeniable that the love of adventure, and of mystery, and of a good fight lingers in the minds of men and women’. But when Lang continues, ‘Not for nothing did Nature leave us all savages under our white skins; she has wrought thus that we might have many delights, among them “the joy of adventurous living”’,29 neither female nor male writers today are likely to agree with his implication that the ‘white’ savagery they expose is justified by the pleasures of a good read.

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North America Boys’ Own Stories and The Resisting Writer ‘Classics’ in literature tend by definition to identify themselves. Choosing books for a graduate course called ‘Five in American Literature’ in 2003, the critic Denis Donoghue ‘assumed’ his chosen five were classics.30 His choice of novels, unsurprisingly, included Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter. To explain his choice, however, he defines the canon ‘as a list of books that writers have found inspiring’ (p. 16), and that make available a ‘shared cultural experience’ (p. 19). It hardly needs pointing out that in the past those responsible for compiling such lists have been predominantly male, as has the experience shared. Leaving aside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as early as 1959 Leslie Fiedler argued in his influential study that American fiction consisted largely of boys’ adventure stories.31 Herman Melville is more explicit, stating that he wrote Moby Dick for ‘the discriminating male reader’ (see Fiedler, p. 225). The novel’s Americanness lies above all in giving literary shape, literal or metaphorical, to the discovery and exploration of the new continent, what Richard Chase defines as not only a new place, but a ‘new state of mind’.32 More precisely, Richard Poirier argues that the greatest American books ‘carry the metaphoric burden of a great dream of freedom—of the expansion of national consciousness into the vast space of a continent and the absorption of those spaces into ourselves’ (quoted Baym, p. 137). From defining the canon as male, it is a short step to defining American identity itself as male. In order to differentiate American literature from its European rivals, Melville advises: ‘no American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American’.33 From this perspective the defining American experience is the adventure of a male hero, intent on escaping the domesticity and world of women which threaten to impede his freedom. For, in Nina Baym’s words, ‘from the point of view of the young man, the only kind of women who exist are entrappers and domesticators’. She goes on to describe these women as those ‘whose mission in life seems to be to ensnare him and deflect him from life’s important purposes of self-discovery and self-­ assertion’ (p.  135). The marginalisation of women in canonical North American fiction is thus justified. Furthermore this opposition of the sexes extends to the writing world. What Hawthorne calls the ‘damned mob of

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scribbling women’,34 for all their productivity and popularity, could remain firmly excluded from the newly emerging American canon of novels inspiring to male writers, since they were preoccupied with the domestic and female world. Baym goes so far as to see what she calls the ‘melodramas of beset manhood’ which constitute the canon as representative of the authors’ literary experience: their struggles against the female bestseller. Predating both the scribbling women and the authors of the North American canon is, however, a body of work that is written by women, about female experience: the Indian captivity narrative. Often accounts of real events, these narratives provide insight into both the captive woman’s ordeal, and the alien society in which they find themselves. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in 1682, sets the pattern for such narratives, which remained popular until the closing of the frontier in 1890, and have been described as ‘one of the few distinctively American literary genres’,35 appearing to offer a rather different conception of American identity in the female captive. Annette Kolodny argues, however, that these texts seek to justify the domination and ultimate extermination of the uncolonised inhabitants of the New World. They depend for their meaning and effect on the central figure of a captive woman whose experiences and sufferings motivate the male rescue, acting as the object of the quest. They do not, therefore, ultimately challenge the dominance of the gendered male narrative of heroic adventure. Cathy Rex nevertheless argues that these narratives and the novels that followed are ‘intimately connected to the process of nation building and the construction of a nation’s identity’, an identity which includes the female. She suggests that the first such novel, Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle, published posthumously in 1793, challenges the gendered infrastructure of America, ‘suggestively writing the feminine into national existence’.36 Examining how men manage or mismanage their own families and homes, it critiques the masculinity which finds itself wanting in the domain of the Indian wilderness by failing to fulfil the role of protector of the family. Another important predecessor of contemporary writers of women in the West is Willa Cather. Writing in the early twentieth century, Cather reverses the gendered values of the male canon. In her second novel, O Pioneers (1913), an immigrant father bequeaths his land to the care of his daughter on his deathbed, rather than to his sons, because he sees that her love of the land and her spirit are strong enough to survive the harsh reality of the plains. The eponymous hero of My Antonia (1918) survives the tragedies

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that take place around her, along with the hardship of life in a sod house, and remains on the land, a solitary matriarch. Nor does Cather identify women as ‘entrappers’, since in her fiction the female protagonists face men who seek to socialise and domesticate them. In this world love has to take second place to the demands of the land. And her novels never fail to take into account the history, characteristics and traditions of the Scandinavian and European immigrants who form so large a part of the pioneer world. Her work, therefore, falls outside the parameters of the myth of American identity central to the canon, and was ignored by the theorists of American literature mentioned above. As she observes, she wrote O Pioneers for herself, and so ‘ignored all the situations and accents that were then generally thought to be necessary’.37 In her eyes, ‘The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman’ (p. 65), rather than in the story of their adventures. Consequently she herself believed that with My Antonia, she had made a contribution to American letters, in spite of her exclusion by the critics. Fiedler’s critique of the American canon, outlined previously, was developed from a feminist perspective by Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader, one of the most influential examples of second-wave feminist criticism. As Fetterley puts it, ‘the figure of “the boy” has been at the centre of our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture in the United States. Boy characters like Tom Sawyer […] have been seen as crucial metaphors for numerous kinds of male-centred literary, political, social, economic and moral value systems’.38 She insists: ‘American literature is male’: ‘to read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male’ (p. xii), specifically to identify with the male protagonist on the run from civilisation, domestication and marital responsibility. This has consequences for the woman reader who is therefore interpellated into a position from which she must identify against herself—unless she becomes the resisting reader of Fetterley’s title. While writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have transformed the canon which Fetterley so deplores, others have responded to her challenge by becoming ‘resisting writers’. They have exposed the male bias in American literature which ‘neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate. It insists on its universality at the same time that it defines that universality in specifically male terms’ (Fetterley, p. xii). Although Fetterley argues that ‘women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality’ (p. xxiii), this is in a sense what some contemporary women novelists have

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done, creating female counterparts to the freedom-seeking hero of classic American fiction. These novelists have put women firmly back into history, as Cather had done, engaging with the concept not only of female identity but of a national identity which includes the female. In doing so they also challenge generic literary conventions, and the myths sustaining the American canon.

Canada Stories of Survival In 1949, Canadian novelist and academic Edward McCourt published The Canadian West in Fiction,39 the first written attempt to take the literature of the prairies seriously. While tracing the development of the literature through the chronicles of traders, explorers and missionaries, McCourt makes no comment on the absence of women from these narratives. Writing in 1984, the novelist Aritha Van Herk sees this as in some ways inevitable: ‘Face it. The west is male. Masculine. Manly. Virile. Not that it had much choice, the prairie lying there innocent under its buffalo beans, its own endlessness’. She goes on to argue that the sheer power of the prairie has contributed to ‘its perversion in the world of Canadian literature; the art that has defined it is masculine and it appears to have defined its art as a masculine one. […] So where, in this indifferent landscape, are the women?’40 Van Herk is identifying a problem similar to that posed for women writers by the tradition of the Great American Novel, and like their American counterparts, many contemporary Canadian women novelists are intent on putting women back into this historic landscape, establishing their contribution to the exploration and settlement of their country. The continuing need for such reinstatement in the twenty-first century is evident from such publications as the Dear Canada series published by Scholastic Canada from 2001 onwards. These diaries of a fictional young woman living during important events in Canadian history invite readers ‘into the intimate world of girls’. A companion series for boys, published from 2010 onwards with the grandiose title I Am Canada, in contrast invites readers to read these ‘stories of adventure and exploration’ to ‘experience Canada’s past through the eyes of young men who lived it’.41 But while the female protagonists of contemporary Canadian fiction may seek the same kind of freedom sought by these young men, their ultimate challenge is often sheer survival, both physical and

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psychological. What is demanded from them are powers of endurance and self-­belief which make survival possible against terrible odds. Rather than needing to engage with a masculine literary tradition, however, like American women novelists, Canadian women novelists have had a female literary tradition to build on which McCourt overlooked. This tradition conveys women’s awareness of their importance in the settlement of the new colony, and nineteenth-century women writers are now recognised as central to any kind of Canadian canon. Even earlier, English-­ born Frances Moore Brooke’s epistolary novel The History of Emily Montague (1769) is agreed to be the first novel to be written in Canada, although Brooke only lived there from 1768 to 1783. This fairly conventional Romance nevertheless depicts the emotional, social and moral constraints on women’s lives against a North American background for the first time. Of more lasting significance, Susanna Moodie’s accounts of her life in Canada, like those of her sister Catherine Parr Traill, established a tradition of settlement narrative that has directly influenced writers like Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood, whose place in the twentieth-century Canadian canon is undisputed. In the novels to be discussed in this section, moreover, forms radically different from their American counterparts are evident, with emphasis less on revising the historical narrative than on questioning the very possibility of a truthful historical record, more in accord with historical metafiction than with ideas of realism. The question of truthfulness is nevertheless often raised even in connection with nineteenth-century non-fiction. Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush, or Life in Canada (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853), and Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Female Emigrant’s Guide (1854) are non-fiction Bildungsroman, chronicling what Coral Ann Howells calls their ‘emergence from the stereotype of the proper lady into the Canadian pioneer of energetic initiative’.42 Even earlier, an English visitor to Canada rather than a settler, Anna Jameson, author of Winter Sketches and Summer Rambles (1838), recounts similar experiences which she describes in a letter home to her mother: I am just returned from the wildest and most extraordinary tour you can imagine, and am moreover the first Englishwoman—the first European female—who ever accomplished this journey. I have had such adventures and seen such strange things as never yet were rehearsed in prose or verse. (Quoted Howells, p. 24)

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Rather than intending their narratives to evoke a sense of excitement, however, both Moodie and Traill intended their accounts to discourage women in particular from coming to Canada without at least understanding what they faced. As Moodie puts it in the epigraph to Roughing It, ‘I sketch from Nature, and the picture’s true’. Although both also wrote novels drawing on their experiences,43 their non-fiction has remained more popular for combining these first-person experiences with the pleasures of novelistic form. With their rich sources of material, encompassing both the colonial experience and the culture of the Native Canadians, these narratives of emigration and settlement combine grim accounts of cold, hunger and exhaustion with conventional descriptions of nature’s sublimity. Remarkable in all accounts is the absence of the images of savagery and sexuality found in male writing about the Native Canadians, as none of these women writers shows any fear or distaste for their new acquaintances. Instead they show an awareness of the freedom experienced by First Nations women compared with their own lives. Sadly this element of truthfulness was disregarded in favour of John Richardson’s novel Wacousta (1832), which depicted the Native people using literary stereotypes representing them as crafty and deceitful, but was regarded as an authoritative source.44 Recent criticism has, however, pointed out how Moodie added drama to her narrative, Margaret Atwood, for one, considering the work more valuable for its psychological than its socio-historical truth.45 Atwood’s poetry sequence The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her response to Moodie’s Roughing It, gives life to the ‘unconsciouses’ of Moodie’s text, not least in the haunting illustrations with which she accompanies the text. Her powerful description of the immigrants, in the poem of that name, conveys the physical horrors encountered in this ‘adventure’: I see them coming up from the hold smelling of vomit, infested, emaciated, their skins grey with travel.

More importantly, much as Moodie has tried to dissociate herself from these poor, predominantly Irish immigrants, she shares their vision of creating a new order, and the despair at its failure, wishing she ‘could forget them/and so forget [herself]’ (pp.  32–3). To readers outside Canada, however, Moodie is probably best known for her account of her visit to Grace Marks, the alleged murderess, thanks to Atwood’s novel, Alias Grace.46 The novel’s main narrative is so contained by the static world of

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19

the prison, where Grace is required to ‘confess’ to a visiting psychiatrist, and so much of its emphasis is psychological as Grace continually evades any such confession, even to the reader, that it is easy to forget Grace’s own travels, both before and after the murder. Her account of emigration from Ireland, during which her mother dies, recalls the horrors that Atwood’s Moodie has seen. And finding her own way alone on a new continent, as many poor Irish immigrant women did, clearly constitutes an example of the survival which Atwood elsewhere identifies as the main theme of Canadian literature. But the drama of these travels never competes for the reader’s attention with the psychological drama of Grace’s battle to keep her identity—including the question of her innocence or guilt—elusive. Atwood challenges the authority of every external view of Grace, including contemporary written documents such as newspaper cuttings, through Grace’s own oral narrative, confusing, elliptical and contradictory as it is.47 Such is Atwood’s control of Grace’s voice, and the subtlety of both her spoken words and the narrative of her thoughts, that the very concept of ‘truth’ is proven to be elusive. Even the apparently central question of whether Grace is or is not a murderer comes to seem, ultimately, irrelevant, although it is clearly central to her literal survival. If survival, as Atwood has argued, is a theme that characterises Canadian Literature, twentieth-century Canadian women’s fiction is as concerned with psychological as with physical survival. Where the frontier may have offered external obstacles to nineteenth-century women immigrants, the obstacles to spiritual and emotional survival become more important in later work. As Howells points out, even women’s writings in the 1950s through to the 1980s about apparently uneventful private lives are ‘inner adventures’ (p. 5). In relation to No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), a contemporary novel built around a woman’s exploration of her country as a travelling saleswoman, Aritha Van Herk comments: ‘Men map the territory of place, history and event [while] the female fiction writers of Canada map a different territory […] the country of the interior’.48 Even those fictions set in the past show this same preoccupation with the internal journey. What, in the American myth of the West, is envisioned as what Howells calls a ‘massive exercise in aggressive male confrontations in the wilderness’ (p. 22) is in Canadian women’s fiction a more feminised view of the wilderness, an ‘image of female imaginative space’ (p.  11), often a place for ‘refuge and rehabilitation’ (p.  76). Nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth century had been predominantly male-dominated and Anglocentric, justified by God and Natural Law, the

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wilderness providing a space for the test of manliness. The critic Northrop Frye in his influential account of Canadian literature, written in the 1960s, talks of the ‘garrison mentality’ of early Canadian fiction, in which Canadians (male?) must fortify themselves physically against the encroaching wilderness, and figuratively against the unknown.49 But in the twentieth century the question of Canadian national identity becomes more problematic, as does indeed the idea of identity itself. Smyth Groening argues that male writers were involved in nation building in forms which ignored the existence of the first nations (p. 61). Women’s writing, according to Howells, thus comes to ‘highlight Canadian dilemmas about national identity’, inviting readers to consider that identity as a far more dynamic construction, continually changing in response to changing conditions, and the growing recognition of the country’s multicultural diversity.50 In the twentieth century that consciousness of multiple and unstable national identities is pervasive enough to be shared by women and men. From this perspective so-called identity can only be reductive, what Howells calls ‘a signature’ (p. 5). Where the wilderness is, therefore, for the female emigrant a place of exile, where she must attempt to recreate the old country, and a human order, for the novelist it can be something more positive, if disturbing. Similarly, where the female heroes of American historical fiction are motivated by the desire to reach home and those they love, the female protagonists of Canadian literature have a much more ambivalent relationship to the idea of home. The same ambivalence attaches to the wilderness, both hostile and a site of authenticity. Faye Hammill suggests that this early tradition of wilderness writing, the idea of authenticity often centred around animals, is reinvented from a female point of view so that the forest becomes a gendered space,51 although this concept is often challenged by contemporary writers who feel that such a view creates a false sense of a coherent singular identity for a multi-ethnic, bilingual country and its diverse geography. The ambivalent status of wilderness for the writers discussed here, therefore, results in a very different form from that found in the fiction of the United States discussed in this study. Instead of using the nineteenth-century realist tradition as that does, these writers are more likely to explore myth and legend introducing elements of fantasy, or to interrelate the present with the historical past. The wilderness does not represent the reality with which Moodie and Traill contend but a mythical force. The distinctions between wilderness and ‘civilisation’ are, moreover, broken down.

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While historical fiction was, according to Howells, popular with Canadian writers from the beginning, ‘symptomatic of Canada’s need to consolidate the sense of national identity through reference to a shared history’ (p. 134), contemporary women novelists are more conscious of the problems of establishing any such identity—or even of the validity of such a concept. Howells suggests that there are parallels between the historical situation of women and Canada itself: ‘women’s experience of the power politics of gender and their problematic relation to patriarchal conditions of authority have affinities with Canada’s attitude to the cultural imperialism of the United States as well as its ambivalence towards its European inheritance’ (p. 2). Atwood makes a similar connection when she describes women’s lives as ‘submissive territories colonised by men’.52 Contemporary women novelists therefore problematise the written historical record by incorporating neglected oral traditions shaped by speech, inherited from ancestors who are enlivening presences, not simply part of a dead past. Reclaiming the past from any single interpretation, and rejecting any final authority on matters of interpretation, these novelists reveal the potential gap between recorded historical events and the subjectivity of the individual’s sense of history, particularly that constructed by their own memories. Their work is more likely to end in speculation than in even the tentative closure of their North American peers. The novels discussed below, therefore, belong more to Hutcheon’s idea of historiographic metafiction than to the tradition of nineteenth-­ century realism adopted by their North American counterparts. Even where they initially look like realistic fiction in so far as they register the material conditions of everyday life, these narratives are disrupted by excursions into fantasy, or moments of vision embodying different ways of seeing. Instead of novels quoting from historical texts to validate their own, Canadian women writers are more likely to juxtapose a variety of versions of events, in a variety of voices, none of them given authentication by the authorial voice. As Howells puts it, ‘There is always another voice from the margins, seeing things from a different perspective and resisting classification’ (Signatures, p.  17). Frequently these disrupted narratives reflect the dislocation in the lives they describe.

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Latin America Women and Conquest The Conquistadors who travelled from Spain to invade and settle in South America have proved a valuable resource for three Latin American women novelists writing about women and conquest. Isabel Allende’s novels are both critical successes and bestsellers in Spanish and in English, while Laura Esquivel will be most familiar to English-speaking readers through her 1993 novel Like Water for Chocolate, made into a feature film. Esmeraldo Santiago is probably less familiar to British readers, but her novel Conquistadora became a bestseller in the United States. Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel are both known internationally in translation, while Esmeralda Santiago, although born in Puerto Rico, now lives in the United States and writes in English, so that comparisons with English language novels are not inappropriate. Both Allende and Esquivel chose to base their novels on the true stories of women whose lives became irretrievably tied up with the Conquistadors who invaded South America in the early sixteenth century. Santiago’s novel is also a historical work, but centres on a fictional female protagonist and is set in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, this young woman’s determination to follow in the steps of her Conquistador ancestor offers a thematic continuity with those novels focusing on the beginning of the Conquest. One of the major differences between those novels dealing directly with the Conquest of South America and the North American novels discussed previously is the focus on a much earlier historical period, the actual process of conquest in all its violence as opposed to the continuing processes of settlement centuries later, although they too have their heritage of violence. And while race and the indigenous populations are issues also present in the North American fiction, they tend to remain at the margins of the experience of immigration they depict, since the central emphasis is on gender, and the ‘girls’ own stories’. Moreover many of the lives featured in the North American novels are, or have been, the victims of violence and oppression, rather than its perpetrators, not least because they are women. In contrast, even the female protagonists of these Latin American novels are, or become allied to, the possessors rather than the dispossessed. What this emphasis on conquest gives to these Latin American novels is a sense of the masculinisation of Empire as opposed to the more domestic and feminised narratives of the British and French colonies. This

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masculinisation has an impact in turn upon the women involved with the Conquistadors since, as Sara Mills has pointed out, ‘women explorers were always confronting a way of doing and thinking in which they had to “alter” their femininity’.53 When conquest developed into settlement, however, women’s traditional qualities were called upon to help in the ‘civilising’ process, and women’s emigration became central to the concept of Empire as community rather than Empire as domination and subordination, in theory if not in practice. Even in the early and bloodiest phase of conquest, Allende’s Inés finds skills traditionally termed masculine and skills traditionally termed feminine both need to come into play to enable the transition from conquest to settlement. The same is true of Esquivel’s Malinche, even though as one of the indigenous tribes she occupies a very different position in relation to the conquerors from that of Spanish Inés. The use of women to introduce a note of familial, even loving, domesticity into the image of subdued territories has its roots in the way that the image of the Virgin Mary has been used throughout Christianity.54 The central role of the Catholic religion in particular in Latin America may explain the lasting power of such images alongside images of proud but pitiless masculinity. The title of La Conquistadora was attached to the first statue of the Madonna to be brought by Europeans to the New World, arriving in New Mexico in 1626. The title was given to all such statues by Don Diego de Vargas in the belief that this would prove helpful with the Amer-Indians who originally held the land. The statues continued to be carried by the Spanish on their travels, yoking the Conquistador warriors to the religious ideal that justified their actions. The title Our Lady of Conquering Love persists today, suggesting how deeply the language and legacy of the Conquest still run through the spiritual and cultural life of Latin America. Novels dealing with the Spanish conquest of the Americas cannot, however, ignore the pre-existing cultures which have to be overcome and crushed in order for the conquistadors not only to establish their own colonies but to also carry out their mission to convert the heathen. Such narratives are in some ways comparable to the earliest novels published in North America, the so-called captivity narratives usually dominated by women’s experience, in which Europeans were held captive by indigenous people represented as uncultured if not barbaric. The purpose of such narratives was usually to justify the imposition of white settlement and the relocation of the native tribes. Where direct confrontation with the

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indigenous people is central, therefore, it raises crucial issues about the role of women attached, whether actually or emotionally, to the Conquistadors, opening up the central problem for feminism of women in relation to power, and especially in relation to the most brutal forms of power. One might expect that the female protagonists in these Latin American novels would be the main voice for a critique of the process of conquest, seeing themselves in a position of subordination to men analogous to that of the native populations in regard to the white Europeans. And yet racial difference means that the white woman is in a superior position to any of the Amerindians, female or male. And the degree of identification these women feel with the Conquistadors introduces an element of at least ambiguity into their feelings for these male conquering heroes, if not actual complicity with their actions. The machismo so long associated with images of Latin American culture seems to retain its glamour, marking a distinct difference between these female adventurers and their North American fictional equivalents. Susana Reisz suggests that Allende’s and Esquivel’s novels provide ‘an alternative representation of colonial Chilean and Mexican history as it would have been seen through women’s eyes’,55 deconstructing the rhetoric of the Spanish Empire, but their female protagonists often stand in an ambiguous relationship to that rhetoric. For Santiago’s Ana too the power of that relationship makes any such deconstruction elusive and personally painful. The seductive appeal of the Conquistadors for these women becomes deeply problematic when considering whether the novels can be called feminist texts. That term may be relevant in so far as each author is giving women their rightful place in South American history. But in so far as these characters attach their aspirations to masculine role models, and yearn to be the equals of men, their proto-feminist credentials become questionable, in spite of their determination to live free of the traditional constraints of femininity. Feminism requires women to distance their ambitions from those of men by placing them in a political, collective context which will differentiate them from imitative roles which simply preserve male values. How far these Latin American protagonists finally succeed in finding such alternatives will be the subject of my final chapters.

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1. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 80. 2. The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983), p. 34. 3. Stuart Jeffries, ‘The History Woman’, G2, The Guardian, 18 October 2012, p. 6. 4. A Place of Greater Safety (Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 29. 5. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (Chatto and Windus, 2000), p. 104. 6. The Women’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 7. ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Meagher’s The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’, Women: A Cultural Review, 7 (1996), 176–88 (p. 176). 8. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 20. 9. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10. In The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) I have examined at greater length the role played by religion, science, politics and culture in the construction of ideas of sexual difference at this time. 11. Diary of an Ordinary Woman (Chatto and Windus, 2003). 12. Mariner Books, 1995. 13. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 118. 14. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 45. 15. Writing Back through our Mothers: A Transnational Feminist Study on the Woman’s Historical Novel (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2014), p. 11. 16. Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Edward Arnold, 1990), p. 134. 17. ‘The Reality Effect’ in Tzvetan Todorov, French Literary Theory, translated by R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 11–17. 18. Quoted in Dana Shiller, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29 (1997), 538–60 (p. 539). 19. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-first Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. 20. Patricia Waugh, quoted by Heilmann and Llewellyn, p. 174.

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21. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 5. 22. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. 23. Introduction, Restoration (Vintage, 2001), p. 1. 24. ‘The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History’, Critical Quarterly, 29 (1987), pp. 71–7 (p. 76). 25. Genders (Routledge, 2000), p. 18. 26. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (eds.), The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 27. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 140. 28. The Oxford Book of Adventure Stories, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xiv. Quotations are taken from the paperback edition, published in 1996. I am indebted to Bristow’s collection for a very useful introduction to this subject. 29. ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review (1887). 30. The American Classics: A Personal Essay (Yale Scholarship Online, 2005), p. 2. 31. Love and Death in the American Novel (Paladin, 1970). 32. Quoted by Nina Baym, ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’, American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123–39 (p. 137). 33. ‘Hawthorn and his Mosses’, The Literary World, August 1850. 34. Letter to William Ticknor, January 1855, quoted by James D. Wallace, ‘Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered’, American Literature, 62 (1990), pp.  201–222 (p.  204). While acknowledging that a late letter from Hawthorne apologizes for his original ‘vituperation’, Wallace argues that Hawthorne was specifically hostile to women’s writing which violated the privacy of the domestic world. 35. Annette Kolodny, ‘Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 21 (1993), pp. 184–95 (p. 186). 36. Cathy Rex, ‘Revising the Nation: The Domesticated Nationalism of Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle’, Women’s Studies, 42 (2013), 956–978 (p. 960). 37. Quoted by A.S. Byatt, ‘Afterword’, Willa Cather, O Pioneers (Virago, 1983), p. 310. 38. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), p. xi. 39. See C.S.  Marcusse, Re-Writing Pioneer Women in Anglo-Canadian Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 81.

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40. ‘Women Writers and the Prairie: Spies in an Indifferent Landscape’, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture, 6 (1984), 15–25 (p. 15 and p. 18). 41. Publisher’s website: Scholastic Canada: I Am Canada. 42. Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (Methuen, 1987), p. 23. 43. Moodie, Flora Lyndsay, or Passages in an Eventful Life (1854) has been described as a ‘prequel’ to Roughing It, covering as it does a lengthy period before departure for the New World. 44. See Laura Smyth Groening, Listening to Old Woman Speak: Natives and alterNatives in Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGill UP, 2004), p. 52. 45. The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970). 46. See Moodie, Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (Richard Bentley, 1853), pp. 215–232. 47. I have written at greater length about this novel in The Victorian Woman Question. 48. ‘Mapping as Metaphor: The Cartographer’s Revision’, A Frozen Tongue (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), 54–68, p. 63. 49. ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1975), 213–51. 50. Canadian Signatures in the Feminine (Canada House, 1991), pp. 4–5. 51. Canadian Literature (Edinburgh UP, 2008), p. 64. 52. Quoted in W.H. New, A History of Canadian Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 293. 53. Quoted in Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 144. 54. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Oxford UP, 1976). 55. ‘A Spanish American Scheherezade?: On Isabel Allende and Eva Luna’, in Contemporary Women Writing in the Other Americas: Contemporary Women Writing in Latin America, Vol. 1, ed. by Georgiana M. Colville (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 3–25 (p. 13).

CHAPTER 2

Revisiting the Canon, Rewriting History: Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, Or The Stargazer

The first resisting writer I want to discuss takes on perhaps the greatest challenge of all, that giant of the American canon, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The American bestseller Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer (1999)1 by Sena Jeter Naslund constructs a richly imagined life for the woman briefly referred to in Melville’s epic, engaging intertextually not only with his novel but with Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket (1821),2 the true story which inspired Melville. In the process, Naslund illuminates areas of experience which ‘resist’ the male orientation of the classic American canon and engages in the ‘demythologising business’ made popular in Britain by Angela Carter.3 Describing her daughter’s enthusiasm for Melville’s novel, Naslund nevertheless records her own disappointment that ‘there was no wonderful woman character […] with whom she might identify’.4 By placing a woman at the centre of Ahab’s Wife, which builds on Melville’s original in so many ways, she as it were fills the gap left by this absence. The extent of Naslund’s engagement with that American giant is evident from the moment the reader opens Ahab’s Wife and finds what appears to be a facsimile of a nineteenth-century novel, complete with

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, ed. by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 182–94. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_2

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etched illustrations and with echoes of its predecessor in the layout of its contents page and the series of ‘Extracts’ which preface both novels. As suggested previously, this kind of imitation acts as a guarantee of ‘authenticity’. The style similarly echoes Melville’s syntax, imagery and cadences, and in the chapters set in New Bedford, allusions to the opening of Moby Dick come thick and fast: to the pulpit in the Chapel which the minister enters via a rope ladder, pulling it up behind him; to Mrs Hussey’s chowder and the Try Pots Tavern, and to the brindled cow who feeds on fish remains and wears a cod’s head on each foot. Naslund’s heroine is, moreover, conceived not just as Ahab’s wife but as his mirror image. When Una Spenser first sights Ahab, she experiences a flash of recognition, seeing his scarred cheek as a sign that he too ‘has stood next to lightning’ (p. 178), as she did on the balcony of her uncle’s lighthouse. She calls him ‘a male version’ (p. 291) of herself, since he too has achieved insight only through experiencing horrors. More surprisingly, perhaps, Ahab also recognises his likeness in Una, a woman less than half his age: she is ‘a girl-child … with his spirit’ (p. 18). He tells her, ‘Thou art as I am, though we be female and male’ (p. 358). By establishing this equivalence between male and female, Naslund foregrounds the way that, in contrast, the reader of Moby Dick is encouraged to identify with experiences constructed as exclusively male. Naslund recasts the classic adventure narrative in female terms, simultaneously jettisoning the conventional narrative of nineteenth-century womanhood. Cutting off her hair to disguise herself as a cabin boy represents Una’s deliberate rejection of the constraints of femininity, and that domesticity which she wishes to escape just as much as any nineteenth-­ century American boy. As Melville’s Ishmael puts it, ‘every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him’5 wants to go to sea, a rite of passage towards male adulthood in the nineteenth-century whaling communities in which Ahab’s Wife is set.6 Una’s success at carrying out such a deceit challenges the rigid sexual distinctions inscribed in nineteenth-century gender ideology. Able to climb the mast like a man and as sharp-sighted as any of the men sent aloft to sight whales, Una’s achievements close the gap between male and female aspiration and experience. Her decision to go to sea marks her break with her destiny as a young woman, which she accurately identifies as marriage and motherhood, associated with the pain and loss of childbirth and miscarriage. Una is conscious of rewriting history, determined not only to live a life different from that of other women, but to be able to tell a different tale. She wants no more ‘uniquely female’

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stories (p. 142). Once she has ‘begun to see [her] own life as a story and [herself] as the author of it’ (p. 158), she claims a degree of autonomy and self-determination not usually associated with women of the time. Even marriage, when it comes, is not for her the end of the story, as it is for so many nineteenth-century heroines. Naslund’s challenge to the male adventure narrative is not, however, confined to her representation of Una’s dramatic life at sea, for she suggests that there is also adventure to be found in the more traditional patterns of a woman’s life. Although the difficulties may be mental rather than physical, Naslund finds equivalents for male experience in female lives. Una speculates on her mother’s sewing: ‘Had her needle trudged, as a man’s foot might trudge, over a journey of a thousand miles? … And when one stitches, the mind travels, not the way men do, with ax and oxen through the wilderness, but surely our travelling counted too, as motion’ (p. 70). Una does not need therefore to crossdress to prove herself the possessor of ‘masculine’ courage. After she returns to Nantucket, and her ill-fated shipboard marriage to Kit comes to an end, she experiences a kind of rebirth into identification with the female at the hands of Mrs Macy, who bathes her with glycerine and rosewater, so that Una emerges feeling both ‘new and clean’ and yet ‘her own old self again’ (p. 349). Una is in effect being prepared for her marriage to Captain Ahab, which results in pregnancy and appears to reinsert Una into the traditional woman’s narrative. But these experiences result in further trials of her courage, awakening her to an understanding of the heroism inherent in those ‘uniquely female’ stories. Naslund’s language draws attention to the analogies between male and female experience of being tested. When Una returns home to Kentucky to have her child, she and her mother seem ‘a little ship of sorts’ (p. 403). In labour she ‘circled without progress on a sea of pain’ (p. 405), but does not reach ‘the port of motherhood’ safely (p. 4). Una has to endure not only the agonies of birth in a snowbound log cabin, helped only by a young escaped slave, but also the death of her child and her mother, who heroically attempts to seek help. Although this event occurs relatively late in Una’s life, Naslund opens her novel with it, in order to establish the nature of female heroism and tragedy firmly in the reader’s mind before introducing the more familiar world of masculine adventuring. Naslund emphasises, moreover, that Una is to be regarded as a representative rather than a unique figure. Responding to a reader’s suggestion that Una is a twentieth-century woman placed in the nineteenth century,

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Naslund explains that she ‘flanked’ Una with the historical figures Maria Mitchell and Margaret Fuller specifically ‘to suggest that there were women of tremendous intellect and courage and curiosity at that time’, and to counter any suggestion that women like Una did not exist.7 Mitchell, a pioneering astronomer and abolitionist, tells Una that Nantucket is ‘famous for [its] independent women as well as for [its] intrepid whalers’ (p.  600).8 Lisa Norling points out that since whalers’ wives were alone for up to five years at a time, they took sole responsibility for the family, often protected their husbands’ financial and business interests and sometimes took paid work themselves (pp. 148–54). Some historians have argued that the domination of colonial Nantucket by Quakers, who insisted on spiritual equality for all, further enabled women like the pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott to develop an assertiveness unusual for the period. Una’s adventures therefore have their roots in a local tradition of female independence which undermined traditional notions of sexual difference. When Una meets Fuller, this influential American feminist sums up her book’s argument for women’s emancipation with the words, ‘Let them be sea captains—if they will!’ (p. 381).9 Although Una’s time at sea anticipates Fuller’s dream, it is historically authentic, according to Norland’s research into the diaries and journals of nineteenth-century women who went to sea in whaling ships. Nor is Una’s disguise as a boy unique. As David Cordingly writes, in relation to female sailors and pirates: We will never know how many women went to sea as men because the only cases we have any evidence of are those in which the woman’s sex was revealed and publicized in some way, or those cases where a woman left the sea and had her story published. […]. What is striking about the genuine cases of female sailors is how they were able to fool the men on board for weeks, months, and in some cases, several years.10

When therefore Fuller says to Una, ‘You are the American woman’ (p. 591), she is asserting that women, too, are part of the American tradition so firmly identified as male in nineteenth-century fiction. Presenting Una as the female counterpart to the freedom-seeking hero of classic American fiction, Naslund engages with the defining features of that fiction as identified by Fiedler, for whom it is essentially about heroic quests undertaken by men in a natural setting from which women are excluded. In such fiction, beasts are ‘monstrous embodiments of the

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natural world in all its ambiguous and indestructible essence’ (p.  334), which the hero must overcome. Like Angela Carter, Naslund responds to masculine myth-making by suggesting the material practices reflected by those myths. While demolishing the polarity which excludes women from the natural world, Ahab’s Wife nevertheless suggests that men and women have a different relationship with nature. Una’s father defends killing her dog with the words ‘The Lord has given man dominion over the creatures of the earth’ (p.  22). But Ahab’s injury by the white whale appears to prove God’s promise of dominion false, so that he must pursue and destroy the whale to prove he retains ‘sovereignty’ in himself (p. 510). His role in Ahab’s Wife can also be interpreted in the light of another canonical narrative alluded to by Naslund—Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Giles Bonebright, Una’s first love, is the first to link Una Spenser with her namesake, the lady of the Red Cross knight—‘pure of heart, steadfast, and clear of mind’ (p. 110). He offers to slay dragons for her and does indeed save her life when they are both shipwrecked, but it is Ahab who most obviously embodies the dragon slayer, the great white whale being ‘the King of Dragons’ (p.  512), who has devoured too many young Nantucketeers. But while the harpooners remind Una of stories of knights and dragons, she does not confuse the whaler’s role with that of the quest hero, finding nothing but ‘sad blood’ on the whaling ship, since the dragons in those stories had never been female, leaving behind a frightened ‘chick’ (p.  183). And where Spenser’s Una represents truth, Naslund’s actively pursues it. The novel’s subtitle, ‘the Stargazer’, draws attention to her search for solace in the night sky and the knowledge that she is made of the same atoms as the stars: ‘We are kin to stars’ (p. 502). Where Ahab is driven by the desire to dominate Nature, Una hopes only to achieve a sense of oneness with it. According to Fiedler, dominion over nature is, moreover, linked with a denial of the female which is also characteristic of nineteenth-century American fiction. As Naslund’s Ishmael puts it, ‘When we kill [the sea’s] mightiest creature, […] surely we show that we hate the oceanic mother’ (pp. 644–5). Where Una experiences the breaching of gender boundaries as liberation, most of the men in the novel perceive it as a threat. When Kit tells Una, ‘They’ve made a man of you, and they’ve tried to make a woman of me’ (p. 187), he implies such feminisation is a source of shame, even a signifier of his madness when he becomes ‘unsexed’ (p. 273). The threat to masculinity is felt even more strongly by Ahab. Losing his leg to the white whale inevitably makes him feel himself ‘unmanned’ (p. 513) by this

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threat to a way of life which epitomises the manly virtues of courage and adventure, and by a symbolic castration rendering him unable to give Una another child. To retrieve his manhood he vows to beget a new ‘Justice’ (the name of his only son), ‘not with any woman. With the sea. She shall open her thighs and yield up the whale to me’ (p. 513). But the concept of fatherhood—another defining element in traditional constructions of masculinity—is also feminised by the novel. Ahab ultimately fails in the role of father because, Naslund suggests, the ‘good’ father, as opposed to such bad fathers as Una’s, combines traditionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities. Captain Fry of the Sussex, for instance, has in Una’s view ‘the eyes of a true father’ (p. 151), ‘as though he were [her] mother but invested with power’ (p. 153). When his ship is destroyed by the white whale and the survivors take to the boats, Fry sacrifices his own life to save his son’s, unaware that the blow intended to render the child unconscious, sparing him the sight of his father’s suicide, has killed him. Giles describes this act as an ‘answer to Christianity’, since it replaces the father’s sacrifice of his son, central to the Christian tradition, with an act which instead belongs in the tradition of self-sacrificial love more often associated with motherhood. In contrast, in an incident borrowed from Moby Dick, when the Captain of The Rachel asks Ahab, as another father, to join his search for his son, adrift in a whaling boat dragged away by the white whale, Ahab refuses to interrupt his hunt for the whale. His rejection of this appeal to his paternal feelings is also a rejection of the ‘feminine’ qualities of compassion and self-sacrifice which signifies the loss of his humanity. In the classic American tradition, this denial of the female is also articulated in the substitution of what Fiedler calls ‘the Holy Marriage of Males’ (p. 355) for the heterosexual marriage central to the nineteenth-century European novel. He cites the relationship between Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg as a love ‘which develops on the pattern of a marriage: achieving in the course of a single voyage the shape of a whole lifetime shared, and symbolizing a spiritual education’ in contrast to the ‘spiritual death implicit in fleshly marriage with women’ (p. 355). This ‘innocent homosexuality’ (p. 344) is evident when Ishmael describes the crew working on the whale’s spermaceti, where the ambiguity of the word ‘sperm’ and the ‘loving feeling’ generated when the men squeeze each other’s hands by mistake all conduce to the homoerotic feeling of the scene. Naslund similarly describes Kit’s hands becoming soft because ‘spermaceti is like a ladies’ emollient’ (p. 186). She, however, makes the fear of the feminine

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more overt, and the homoerotic becomes explicitly sexual and violent when Giles forces anal intercourse on Kit, an act Kit in turn forces on Una, venting on her his sense of degradation at being made a substitute for a woman. The exclusion of the feminine from classic American fiction is, moreover, justified by what Fiedler cites as the corollary of that exclusion: the assumption that women are the guardians of a constricting domestic order, which is always a hindrance to male freedom. Naslund contests this demarcation between private domestic space and the wider, unexplored world which represents freedom by showing that Una first experiences freedom in her uncle’s lighthouse, the most confined of spaces. Here she learns to reject the ‘tyranny of religion and paternity’ (p. 53) because here no one wishes ‘to constrain or define’ her (p.  37). In Ahab’s Wife, as in Jane Smiley’s The Life and True Adventures of Lidie Newton, and Paulette Jiles’s Enemy Women, woman no longer represents constraint but is herself actively involved in the struggle for freedom. From the maternal side, Una inherits a tradition of free thinking and living deeply connected, as already noted, to its historical and cultural context. She remembers her mother tearing down a poster offering a reward for the return of an escaped slave while reciting the opening of the Declaration of Independence. Una’s initial desire for freedom of thought becomes absorbed into the struggle for female emancipation, as she resorts to living as a man in order to achieve the kind of freedom so readily available to Kit and Giles. Ahab’s Wife further suggests that freedom is too complex a concept to be identified simply with running away from constraint. The story of Una’s son, who travels to Europe in a ship called the Liberty, enacts the classic American view that freedom is only to be found away from home. Not long before, however, the drowning of Liberty, the child of Una’s cousin Frannie, like the stillbirth of Una’s first child, also called Liberty, warns that true freedom is not so easily achieved; it has to be pursued with steady persistence, particularly by women. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the story of Susan, the escaped slave who helps Una through that first birth. Susan voluntarily returns to slavery out of love for her mother, having decided that freedom ‘was Nothing’ (p. 535), if nothing in the free world meant anything to her. She too names her child Liberty out of her sustained conviction: ‘We will have freedom, and we will have it right this time’ (p. 661). In her penultimate letter to Una, she describes herself as Una’s ‘shadow self’ (p. 538), and signs herself Susan Spenser, adopting Una’s maiden name. Her readiness to identify with another woman’s

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quest for freedom, across the racial divide, suggests a close identification between female and racial emancipation, such as is found also in Lidie Newton. Fiedler acknowledges that even in the classic American novel the rejection of female ties seems a rejection of life itself, a kind of suicide (p. 325), a suggestion for which there is some historical underpinning. Naslund engages with Melville’s mythmaking by recuperating the material, historical conditions underlying his creation of the symbolic quest for the white whale, particularly in relation to the role of women in that history. In her study of women of the whaling community, Norling argues that, while seafaring was traditionally a highly gendered world, ‘an aggressively masculine world of “iron men in wooden ships” that marginalized and objectified real women while feminizing the sea, ships, and shoreside society’ (p. 2), in the period in which Ahab’s Wife is set these divisions were reinforced by new ideas of sexual difference imported from Europe, which defined men and women as fundamentally different beings belonging to two separate spheres. Central to this ideology was the ideal of domesticity, of the home as a private and spiritualised haven where men could be renewed after their brutalising voyages. Women therefore assumed an enormous symbolic importance, in addition to their practical responsibilities. For Una, this importance is embodied in the red square, representing the hearth, at the centre of the log-cabin pattern on her mother’s quilt. Giles also stresses the happiness to be found ‘in the hearth and in the heart’ (p. 123), two words with the same Greek root, while insisting on his need to travel, and this ‘pushpull rhythm of movement between land and sea, home and work’ (Norling, p. 140) is even more evident in Una’s relationship with Ahab. Where Melville’s Ahab admits he would rather look into Starbuck’s eyes where he can see the ‘bright hearthstone’ (p. 507), than at the sea or sky, Naslund constructs the life this ‘hearthstone’ represents, the female ties which could have been his salvation. She turns Ahab into a hero in the Romantic tradition which celebrated emotional intensity in love, another tradition which Norling argues had a radical impact on perceptions of sexual relations in America in this period. At sea, Ahab writes that Una ‘completes’ him for the first time: he feels ‘full of life, not madness’ (p. 453). Returning home, he says farewell to his ship as to a ‘seducer’, who has kept him from his true wife. The ‘soft glow reflecting the hearth’ on his face is contrasted to ‘the demonic burning from the try-pots’ (p. 473), likened to the fires of hell. The ambiguity of this central metaphor of fire is, however, addressed by Ahab himself when

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fire breaks out in Nantucket: ‘The fires of hell, the fires of creation—they are all one’ (p. 358). He feels, moreover, that he needs to be purified by fire till ‘fit for hearth and home’ (p. 358). Ahab here asserts the indivisibility of the passions which drive him—the intensity of his love for Una and the ‘rapture’ he experiences in his hunt for the whale, also ‘a kind of marriage’ (p. 453)—at the same time as their essential incompatibility. This conflict is the source of both Ahab’s tragic nature and the inevitably tragic outcome of his story. The significance of Naslund’s decision to oppose Una’s story of survival to Ahab’s tragic obsession with the white whale becomes clearer if we compare her engagement with her historical source with Melville’s. Both Ahab’s Wife and Moby Dick are partly inspired by the true story of the whaling ship, the Essex, as written by Owen Chase, the first mate, in 1821. Chase describes how the whale, a creature ‘never before suspected of premeditated violence’ (p. 27), ‘appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect’ (p. 21) and deliberately rammed the ship twice, destroying it and forcing the survivors to take to the whaling boats, and ultimately to resort to cannibalism. Melville ignores this final dramatic episode in the Essex’s story in order to maintain his focus on Ahab’s quest, but his novel nevertheless abounds in references to cannibalism—literal and metaphorical. Literal cannibalism is embodied only in the non-Europeans of the whaling community, the ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ who haunt New Bedford, some of them joining the crew of the Pequod. Such savagery is projected onto the ‘Other’ races, obscuring the possibility that white Americans might resort to eating each other, in spite of the evidence in Melville’s source. Metaphorical use of the term is more pervasive. The Pequod is described as ‘a cannibal of a craft’ (p. 82), because she uses the bones of her enemy, the whale, in place of wood. And in both Ahab’s Wife and its precursor Ahab refers to himself as ‘cannibal old me’ (p.  433 and Moby Dick, p. 507). Routinely described by Melville as black, Ahab is associated both with the ‘savages’, the dark races, and with the night which represents the darkness within. Ishmael, Moby Dick’s narrator, equates the eating of any creature’s flesh with the eating of human flesh, asking ‘who is not a cannibal?’ (p. 293) when he compares Fijian islanders eating a missionary to survive famine with those who torture a goose before eating its liver as a luxury. Is Ishmael’s analogy an admission that the hunting of the whale is an act of brutality equal to human cannibalism? Could it also be a tacit acknowledgement by Melville that his projection of this ‘savagery’ onto the black races is a falsification of maritime history? If Melville chose

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not to incorporate the story of the Essex’s survivors into his narrative, this is perhaps because that story of man’s ultimate helplessness in the face of nature, and their readiness to kill each other to survive, runs contrary to the story of heroic action and male bonding that Fiedler identifies as defining elements in the American tradition. In contrast, Naslund bases a significant part of Una’s story on that of the Essex’s survivors. Like the men of the Essex, the men of the Sussex refuse their Captain’s advice to head for the nearest land, because they fear meeting cannibals there, heading instead for South America, two thousand miles away. They too are in consequence reduced to cannibalism themselves: as Giles points out, ‘They should have feared the cannibal within’ (p. 214). But cannibalism is the only means of survival, a reality confirmed when the remaining boat is found full of ‘bones and human rot’ (p. 309). Chase’s narrative endorses their behaviour as acceptable in survival situations, a view reinforced by Philbrick’s research,11 and explains that the generally agreed procedure was to cast lots, in keeping with ‘biblical sortilege—the dependence on what looks like chance to know the will of God’ (p. xxv). Even the youngest of his crew, Owen Coffin, whose name was first to be drawn, faced his ‘lot’ with stoic acceptance, as does Naslund’s first victim, Chester Fry, echoing Coffin’s words with his own: ‘It is as good a fate as any’ (p. 25). But Giles breaks with this tradition, abrogating to himself the divine authority to choose who is to die. He is, in a sense, given this power when the dying Captain Fry passes his sword to him, in the hope that Giles will then protect his son. The sword clearly suggests the phallus, itself a signifier of the power that accrues to masculinity in a patriarchal society. While I have suggested that Fry’s suicide belongs to the tradition of self-sacrificial maternal love, it is also possible, therefore, to see it as a patriarchal act, since Fry acts ‘in the name of the father’, both in protecting his son and in passing on his phallic power, embodied in an instrument of force, to Giles. It enacts the principle of ‘women and children first’, which is one of the more benign consequences of patriarchal ideology. Una is further protected from the full horror of cannibalism because Giles feeds her, allowing her to keep her own eyes closed. But although Kit and Giles justify the deaths of the others in the boat as an act of love, the only means of preserving the ‘knot of love’ (p. 232) between the three friends, Giles takes the Captain’s place not in any spirit of self-sacrifice, but driven by a belief of his own superiority which entitles him to assume the godlike power of life and death. Ultimately, Giles pays the price for his arrogance, meeting Icarus’s fate by

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falling—or more likely jumping—from the masthead of the ship that rescues them. After such knowledge, for him there can be no forgiveness. For Kit, madness is the escape route from guilt. Both Giles and Fry prove their masculinity in the terms in which patriarchal ideology defines it, by acts of violence in the name of love which ultimately prove self-destructive. Una can, however, be seen to be complicit in patriarchal ideology in so far as she is saved from both death and madness by her friends’ murderous acts. She does not avoid the guilt of the survivor, although she is able to live with it. For Naslund’s narrative is essentially about survival and the powers of endurance and belief which make survival possible against terrible odds. In Ahab’s Wife, moreover, survival is gendered as ‘feminine’, if not ‘female’. The power to endure passively has traditionally been associated with woman, rather than man, who has the prerogative of heroic action, and Una’s survival at sea is secured by the men who love her. But she is not the novel’s only image of survival. The other, inherited from Melville, is male—Ishmael. Ishmael is also saved symbolically by love— floating to safety on Queequeg’s raftlike coffin. And as Fiedler notes, Ishmael has been feminised by his relationship with Queequeg, which functions as a kind of marriage. After Ahab’s death, Una’s free union with Ishmael satisfies her desire for freedom while enabling the two to become truly ‘one’ (p.  651), because in each the traditional gender boundaries have been broken down. The fruit of their union is appropriately named Felicity. Ishmael, quoting Melville’s original (p.  271), tells Una that ‘in the soul of man there lies his one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life’ (p. 643), and that if men turn away from their Tahiti, they risk becoming savages. This is the fate of both the crew of the Sussex and Ahab. In contrast, Ishmael and Una ‘rejoice in the hearth’ (p. 663), and are saved by it. Both Una and Ishmael are survivors of extreme situations, who live to tell the tale and see their writing as a continuance of that tale, a means of continuing the search for truth and of dealing with their demons. As Una asks, ‘Could the narration of pain, and of what had been of sustaining value in difficult times, be in itself redeeming?’ (p, 418). She and Ishmael are in a sense writing ‘the same book’ (p. 663). Ishmael’s book about his experiences, about ships and whales, will become Moby Dick, which Una invokes in her final paragraph, echoing Melville’s riveting opening, ‘Call me Ishmael’, with the words, ‘I shall call Ishmael’ (p. 666). But Una is also conscious of writing a story which provides a female alternative to the traditional American male-centred narrative:

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And if one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with the universe? And how might a woman live such a life? (p. 417)

Together, the two narratives of Melville and Naslund constitute a more complete, more ‘universal’, story of Ahab and his wife, the Romance as well as the epic adventure. When Tim Cahill, in his 1999 introduction to Chase’s narrative, comments that it ‘inspired one of the great masterpieces of American literature, and even today, one can hardly read it without imagining that there is at least one more great novel buried, gemlike, somewhere in its wonderfully stiff and stoic prose’ (p. ix), he has clearly not had the chance to read Ahab’s Wife.

Notes 1. Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer was first published by William Morrow in 1999. All further references to the novel will be to the paperback edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) and will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 2. See Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, ed. by Tim Cahill (New York: Lyons Press, 1999). Nathaniel Philbrick has added to Chase’s account that of Thomas Nickerson, the Essex’s cabin boy, found in 1960; see In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 3. See ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in On Gender and Writing, ed. by Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), p. 71. 4. See interview on Kentucky Educational Television’s Bookclub (http:// www.ket.org/bookclub/books/2000_jul/) downloaded January 2005. 5. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The White Whale (New York: New·American Library, 1961), p. 23. 6. See Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p, 140. 7. See online interview. 8. Maria Mitchell (1818–l889) discovered a comet with her telescope at the age of twenty-eight, and became the first woman to be admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the first Professor of Astronomy at Vasser College. See Susan Raven and Alison Weir, Women in

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History: Thirty-five Centuries of Feminist Achievement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), pp. 236–8. 9. Margaret Fuller’s exact words were: ‘let them be sea-captains, if you will’. See her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Larry Reynolds (New·York: Norton, 1998), p. 102. 10. David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History (New· York: Random House, 2001), pp. 60–61. Cordingly confirms that a number of young women were, like Una, capable of working aloft and succeeded in their disguise because they were able, given the dress of the time, to look like adolescent boys. 11. By the early nineteenth century, in Philbrick’s words, ‘cannibalism at sea was so widespread that survivors often felt compelled to inform their rescuers if they had not resorted to it’ p.  164), since the assumption would otherwise be that they had.

CHAPTER 3

Domesticating the Wilderness, a Woman’s Mission: Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

‘If I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply: IT IS TO MAKE THE WHOLE WORLD HOMELIKE’.1 With this statement, Frances Elizabeth Willard, president of the National Woman’s Temperance Union, lay down the challenge faced by American women pioneers and settlers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Armed with such popular guides as Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School,2 many young women began their married lives charged with their traditional duty to create and run a home, but within very untraditional parameters. Their challenge was to combine this traditional role with a readiness to encounter totally new worlds, in which the concept of domesticity must at times have seemed laughable, if not also so tragic, including as it did so many maternal and infant deaths. They needed the courage and spirit of adventure more often associated with manliness. This is clearly signalled by Smiley’s title for her novel, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Set in the 1850s, the novel recounts Lidie’s journey from Quincy, Illinois, into ‘Bloody Kansas’ at a time when that territory was ‘torn by violence over whether it should be admitted to the Union as a free state’.3 It is a traditionally male adventure cast in female terms which restore women to the historical picture. Quotations from Beecher throughout the novel suggest the conflicting imperatives experienced by women whose attempts to settle in the mid-­West were under constant

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_3

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threat from bloody conflicts over slavery and national identity. The novel also illuminates areas of experience overlooked by the American literary tradition to which the novel constantly gestures. As Nina Baym has pointed out, that canon defines the American literary subject as ‘the struggle of the individual against society [in which] the essential quality of America comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature’ (p. 134). In doing so, the canon not only dismisses domestic fiction and women’s writing, but also ignores the reality of those women who were likewise trying to find their own identity in the wilderness. Engaging with such sources, historical and literary, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton also therefore challenges the concept of national identity so strongly associated with that literary tradition. Like so many nineteenth-century heroines, Lidie is orphaned and forced to find her own way in life, a situation which is both frightening and liberating. When on her arrival in St Louis, she is told by a well-­ meaning female fellow-traveller, ‘The adventure is for the men, my dear; that’s the way of it here in the west’,4 she agrees while privately disagreeing. Lidie is more suited to adventure than the traditional female path of marriage and domesticity. Her talents are distinctly unwomanly: by the time the novel begins, she admits to having reached ‘a pitch of uselessness that was truly rare, or even unique, among the women of Quincy, Illinois’: ‘I could neither ply a needle nor play an instrument. I knew nothing of baking or cookery, could not be relied upon to wash the clothes on washing day nor lay a fire in the kitchen stove’ (p. 5). Above all, she is plain. Highly conscious that marriage is a largely commercial choice, Lidie sees herself as ‘an odd lot, not very saleable and ready to be marked down’ (p.  4). Instead, however, she has ‘masculine’ skills in abundance, being able to ride—with or without a saddle—walk for miles without tiring, swim the width of a river, fish and hunt. Shooting gives her a very unfeminine pleasure, aside from its usefulness for provisioning the larder. When her young cousin Frank calls her ‘hardly a female at all’ (p. 26), he regards it as the highest compliment. Even her encounters with violence provoke ‘unwomanly responses’ (p. 242), evinced by a lack of sentimentality and a strong sense of justice. Such attributes equip her for her ‘adventures’ as a pioneer better than any domestic talents. Her complete adaptation to frontier life and its ethos are evident when she undergoes that most female of experiences, pregnancy: when the baby is stillborn prematurely, she

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reflects that ‘in K.T. […] women didn’t put too much stock in a child, even a born child, until it showed its powers of survival’ (p. 350). But in spite of the frontier aphorism—‘This country is all right for men and dogs, but it’s hell on women and horses’5—life as a pioneer woman offers a degree of freedom Lidie might never otherwise have known. Her first real married friend in the West, Louisa, claims that ‘back in Boston, the lives of women and those of slaves were not so much different’ (p. 170). An ardent feminist, she insists that a woman ‘should not be subject to male whim […] but should live in full exercise of her capacities’ (p. 170). When Lidie is widowed, while concurring that ‘if it was hard for a man to be without a wife, it was all the harder for a woman to be without a husband’ (p. 268), Louisa warns her not to return East, because ‘even with the dangers, K.T. is the only place for a woman, especially a woman of verve and imagination’ (p. 274). They are both ‘western women now’ (p.  275). Lidie has learned the value of that essentially American ideal: ‘freedom was all, wasn’t it?’ Nor is Lidie historically speaking an isolated example of a woman adapting to the West. For all the women who suffered greatly, there were others who responded as she did. Responses like Lidie’s and Louisa’s are well documented. Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell’s Women of the West observes that, although death rates were 22% higher than for men, even higher in some places, women enjoyed a degree of relative freedom that they never had previously.6 Many of them enjoyed sharing work with their menfolk, in contrast to the enforced idleness that they had endured at home, however hard it might initially have seemed. Beecher, indeed, sees physical labour as a character-building experience, deploring the ‘aristocratic feeling that labor (sic) is degrading’ (p. 55). She is equally admiring of those mothers who ‘teach their boys most of the domestic arts which their sisters learn’ (p. 158). Lidie’s life in the West, with her new husband Thomas, also introduces her to a new view of marital relationships. Initially she feels subjected to a very traditional separation of spheres—with the exception of the final item on her list: ‘Everything about K.T. seemed to conspire to keep couples apart: him in a man’s world of riding here and there, going to meetings and conventions, taking up arms and drilling, working with other men at building or hauling or farming or clearing land or hunting; her in a woman’s world of knitting and sewing, talking and cooking, cleaning and mending, making cartridges’ (p. 269). But she challenges these divisions. Once in their own log cabin on their own claim, the couple work together in a much more companionate marriage. Lidie is surprised and delighted

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to find herself alone with Thomas all day and all night, whereas ‘everywhere else in the world, men and women avoided one another’s company except in groups’ (p. 103). Exploring the ‘mysteries’ of Thomas’s nature is a dimension of their relationship, ‘a treasure’ (p. 104), which her sisters apparently ignored or dismissed in their marriages. She aspires to share all aspects of his experiences, asking Thomas not to leave the women out of his thinking (p. 204). As the country drifts closer to war, and the couple move back to town, Lidie finds herself part of a female community where the Victorian division into separate spheres nevertheless fails to hold, since women too are involved in discussion of national and political matters. Here the domestic life intersects with the public sphere traditionally conceptualised as masculine. At the same time the quotations from Beecher that preface every chapter of the novel act as a constant reminder of woman’s domesticating mission. Lidie’s bid for ‘freedom’, her journey into the wilderness, is not an escape from domesticity, as it is for Huckleberry Finn and other nineteenth-­ century heroes, but an immersion in its realities. In this situation the domestic is essential to the survival of the family. Discounting notions of equality as equally ‘frivolous and useless’ (p. 150) as an interest in ornament, Beecher’s book is dedicated to ‘American Mothers’, central to the family’s survival. It is a remarkably practical guide, dealing with everything from the anatomical knowledge necessary for medical care to the most suitable layout for the parlour, and to making a kitchen oilcloth. At every point, women are assumed to be capable, intelligent and literate. Her advice on what we would now call time management requires women to pay as much attention to their own and their family’s intellectual and moral development as to their material wants. Lidie is particularly eager to follow Beecher’s advice regarding the importance of good health, in body and in mind, which demands adequate exercise, physical and mental, fresh air, warm clothing and the avoidance of tight clothing, particularly stays. Lidie had previously experienced the ‘enjoyment of free bodily movement’ (p. 31) as a young woman under Miss Beecher’s supervision at the Quincy Female Seminary, and acquired a knowledge about her body that filled her with excitement. In Kansas she quickly learns the value of simpler unrestricted clothing, a view reinforced by Louisa, who regards the corset as the equivalent of a bridle for troublesome slaves. And Miss Beecher’s advice on purchasing a stove gives Lidie her first opportunity to demonstrate her ability in such negotiations as buying a horse. While the Beecher quotations sometimes stand in ironic counterpoint to Lidie’s experience

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of life on a new claim, Lidie quickly adapts to the settler philosophy of ‘making do’ in a spirit of enterprise of which Miss Beecher would have been proud. Male and female roles become increasingly blurred, however, as the couple grow closer together and identify each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and as it becomes apparent that Thomas is lacking those masculine skills which Lidie possesses. While her ‘ineptitude’ with sewing is a major cause of annoyance on Lidie’s part, she proudly asserts, ‘There were any number of things I could do better than he could, starting with riding a horse and shooting a turkey and running right through splitting firewood and building a fire’ (p. 127). When Missourians build a home on the claim belonging to Mr Jenkins, one of the settlers, Thomas’s preference for poetry and peace makes him unsuited to the ensuing conflict, which eventually kills him. Clearly not all men are suited to the patriarchal, martial role expected of them in wartime, leaving women to fill the vacuum. In consequence, as Cathy Rex writes in relation to a much earlier woman’s novel, The History of Maria Kittle (1793): once the domestic realm is left ‘vulnerable and without patriarchal attendance, [the author] Ann Eliza Bleeker authorizes an active feminine response that does not need masculine validation, and consequently, can act independently to preserve the sanctity of the home, family, and ultimately the nation’.7 And whereas masculine agency is at the centre of the conventional revenge and/or rescue plot of the captive woman narrative, Thomas’s death leaves Lidie as both her own rescuer and avenger, and later as a would-be rescuer of a slave. Lydia’s enforced adoption of a masculine role is manifest in her cross-­ dressing. After putting on trousers in their initial confrontation with the Missourians, she quickly gets used to them, finding them easier for riding. After Thomas’s death, she adopts male disguise in order to be able to travel in search of his killers without drawing unwelcome attention to herself as a lone female traveller. Cutting off her hair and putting on Thomas’s clothes, she becomes Lyman Arquette. Her disguise emboldens her and brings a new realisation: ‘as long as I was a man, I would be able to do whatever I wanted, and that I would have a taste of freedom such as no woman […] had ever had’ (p. 295), even in the West. She realises she is impersonating her younger cousin Frank but unlike him steps straight ‘into manhood’ (p. 296); she is also, unlike him, realistic enough to know she is stepping into a world of violence and danger. When she becomes a reporter, her change of role is complete: she now has ‘the prerogative to

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watch without being watched’ (p. 340), as women usually are. ‘They all said that K.T. coarsened a woman, but there was nothing for coarsening a woman quite like having her become a man!’ (p. 312). The concept of masculinity is further problematised by the character of Frank. Where Lidie ironically finds adventure through the conventional route of marriage, Frank chooses adventure, running away to the West. ‘K.T. was a boy’s adventure’ (p. 181), acknowledges Lidie. Her description of Frank—‘as wild as an Indian and twice as self-sufficient’ (p. 219)— calls to mind the ‘classic’ American boyhood of Huckleberry Finn. When Frank joins one of the bands of boys, Lidie reassures herself by imagining it as ‘a kind of elaborate freedom—hunting, camping, doing a bit of mischief’ (p. 253), as if he had joined Tom Sawyer’s gang. This is a world in which, to use Fiedler’s terms, ‘delinquency is a declaration of maleness’ (p.  252). In contrast, Frank observes of Thomas’s incompetence as a handyman that ‘it’s like he wasn’t ever a boy’. Lidie is forced to agree in her own mind: ‘It was very much as if Thomas had never been a boy but had always been a man. This was what set him apart from the other men’ (p. 149). Such a discrimination clearly challenges those gender stereotypes associated with the American West, where ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’, and what he’s gotta do usually involves fighting and even killing, demonstrating the toughness of body and mind required to ‘tame’ the West. To Lidie, however, Thomas is a man because he has never indulged in the irresponsible lack of concern Frank shows for the feelings of others, his wild and unregulated lifestyle and his distaste for education. Thomas trusts in words to persuade others, not violence, however mistaken he may be in this new world. Encounters with reality do, however, reveal to Frank the less than romantic truth. His ‘band of boys’ turns out to be a gang of ‘guerrillas’ who raid farms and steal animals and goods. Frank returns home to Quincy disillusioned at having discovered that the gang lacks his enterprising spirit: ‘They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They never even looked around for anything to pick up to trade and sell’ (p. 447). He is eventually only too happy to exchange the ‘starvation and boredom’ of guerrilla life for an education and a commercial future. Now ready to become a man, he goes to war at the age of 23, and returns looking 40. In his case, the passage from boyhood to manhood is brutally clear. This interrogation of masculinity is also an interrogation of the figure of Huck Finn. Smiley finds readers too ready to invest in Huck’s ‘freedom as a kind of icon of American boyhood—one’s right to live on the river

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and be unwashed and charming’.8 Critical of the elevation of the novel to the American canon in the post-war period by critics such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler and T. S. Eliot, on account of what they see as its profound insight into the American character, she argues that ‘to invest The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with “greatness” is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is’ (p.  63), since that desire for freedom said to be at the heart of that (masculine) character ignores the facts of slavery and race that she believes are the real heart of the American experience. She expresses a preference for Uncle Tom’s Cabin9 ‘in its role as discourse on the American dilemma of slavery’ (p. 67), because of its frank and open discussion of slavery. Lidie Newton is, in part, a response to Twain’s novel. Huck’s view of freedom, ‘lighting out for the territory’,10 into the wilderness, to evade being civilised by Aunt Sally, seems to be very much what Frank aspires to, but for him it proves to be a fantasy. In contrast, Lidie’s desire for freedom leads her into a world fraught with danger and responsibility. Hers is an adult experience of Huck’s world. Lidie’s encounter with slavery initiates a complex process of learning and change. Where Huck finally places his affection for Jim above the law regarding slavery, being prepared to go to hell for it, he never learns to question the morality of slavery, finding it much easier to understand the concept of property and theft. The freedom so dear to him has apparently no relevance in Jim’s case. When Lidie gets to know a slave for the first time, she is confronted with what Smiley calls ‘a question with three sides’ (p. 8): what the abolitionists want, what the southerners want and what the slaves themselves want. This proves to be a challenge beyond her capacity to resolve. At Day’s End plantation, Helen Day, the owner’s daughter, introduces Lidie to a benign version of the southerners’ view of slavery as a state of mutual dependency, of slave and owner as a ‘family’, what her father calls the ‘virtue’ (p. 380) of the institution. The outrage they express at slaves being stolen and torn away from ‘their’ families is shared by Huck. Having never heard such arguments from her abolitionist friends and Thomas, Lidie is driven to ask the slave Lorna why she should not be a slave, and whether the Southern preachers could be right about it being the Lord’s will. But Lorna, rather than Lidie, is the heroic adventurer. Only when Lorna ‘claims’ her (p. 403) is Lidie herself empowered to leave the plantation. Lidie’s attempt to help Lorna escape ends in what she herself recognises as ‘a tragedy’ (p. 441). Ultimately Lorna is helpless against ‘the institution of servitude, against Missouri and Kansas and guns and horses and catchers and dogs and lack of funds and chance’ (p. 443).11

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Lidie’s intervention only makes the slave’s position far worse. Regretting having failed to beat Lorna’s ‘foolishness’ out of her at a young age, Papa Day sells her ‘down South’, with all the implications that carries. The moral dilemmas Lidie experiences are similar to Huck’s but leading to a far more nuanced questioning of the conflicting moral positions. Lidie’s first encounter with a slave seeking help had been no more gratifying to her self-image. Having read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her hatred of slavery is strong, but theoretical, and she has had no real contact with Negroes themselves. She resists a twelve-year old child’s plea to help her escape—‘Massa Ablishinist! Save me! Tak’ me long, Massa Ablishinist! Don’ leave me with Massa Philip!’ (p. 337)—not out of Huck’s Southern morality but what she describes as feminine cowardice. The incident with Master Philip makes her realise that she ‘hadn’t many instinctive feelings about slavery. [She] had been slow to act because [she] had been slow to feel. Master Philip and the child had played out a little scene for [her], and even in [her] fear, [she] had watched it as comic rather than as tragic’ (p. 343). She hears the child’s desperation ‘with Lidie Newton’s ears’, not Lyman’s, but that female sympathy is not empowering. She only learns to feel real sympathy through hearing the story of slavery—familiar to her from abolitionists—in ‘Lorna’s own voice’ (p.  421), and understanding the precarious nature of this so-called mutuality which allows even the most ‘benign’ of owners to sell a one-year-old slave child to satisfy his wife’s jealousy of her mother.12 But unlike Huckleberry Finn, Smiley’s novel suggests a good heart is not in itself enough. After the earlier incident with the child slave, Lidie’s reflections on the difference between Northern and Southern attitudes to slavery, and the motives that drive them, are similarly unflattering: Surely Master Philip had heard the same desperation that I heard, the same hatred of himself […]. Would he have then turned on the child and beaten it senseless, beaten it to death, beaten the hatred out of it? […] In this far western territory, […] southerners in particular couldn’t stand to be made to seem mean or dishonourable in their own eyes, [so] that they would commit any aggression to efface that feeling. New Englanders like Thomas, acted on that they called conscience, which made them seem self-righteous but also allowed them to turn away without a fight from those who disagreed with them. (p. 338).

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Neither honour nor conscience save the child. Too late Lidie reflects of herself too: ‘that child’s voice come back to me as the voice of my conscience’ (p. 343). While Lidie may have absorbed from Thomas the principles of abolition, she has never previously confronted the reality of slavery, and the dangers and difficulties of attempting to put those principles into practice. Her internal conflict mirrors Huck’s in reverse. His feelings are trustworthy, but the voice of his conscience is not. Her conscience tells her slavery is wrong, but her feelings are not strong enough to empower her to act. A major cause of such differences between Lidie’s experience of slavery and Huck’s is generic: where the earlier novel is essentially a Romance, Lidie’s story is embedded in reality, unlike Huck’s world of the raft. Reality confronts her at every stage of her ‘adventure’ in fact. When she sets out with Thomas, she has an idealised vision of the West, of which she is quickly disabused: I didn’t expect to find vast, solitary places here in Kansas. I meant to find pleasant new towns with all manner of services that had sprouted out of the prairie like mushrooms. That’s what all the bills in Horace’s store promised. Space enough for all mankind, but no inconvenience. (p. 65)

It appears that Miss Beecher has misled her as to the nature of her duties as a wife in this new world. Its ‘inconveniences’ include a male readiness to kill for little or no reason, and women burying babies in every state they pass through, and the longed-for log cabin is little more than a draughty shack.13 For many poor white women settlers, whatever their principles, having a slave is a longed-for dream to alleviate endless working hours, and endless childbearing to maintain the only other provision of free labour. Prepared to some extent for frontier life, Lidie is in no way prepared for violence. After the first encounter with the Missourians, she reflects: ‘I was not pleased with my adventure. I felt as Pandora must have done: there was an undeniable thrill to opening the box—the thrill of action, perhaps, which was much opposed to the customary routines of a woman’s life—but the consequent evil was plentifully mixed with chagrin’ (p, 126). In the subsequent Wakarusa war, an army of Missourians lay siege to Lawrence, where Lidie and Thomas have taken refuge, and here she comes to admire the courage and ingenuity of the other women. She is never tempted to become a Romance heroine. After reading the copy of Pride and Prejudice that Papa Day lends her, she wonders how Elizabeth

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Bennett can ‘transform herself from a girl into the representative of an institution so large and public that strangers could appear there and ask to be shown around’ (p. 399). Papa’s marriage proposal has made the realities of such a life as unappealing as that alternative life in Kansas Territory. Lidie’s life does not belong in the Romance tradition: she neither marries and lives happily ever after, as the female Romance requires, nor escapes into the wilderness as Huck does. The novel’s ending finds her returned home a widow, to pick up her old life. Lidie’s story adds, moreover, to the issue of slavery addressed by Huckleberry Finn the issue of sexual equality. Historically there were strong connections between the two, many of those involved with the women’s movement also being involved with the civil rights movement.14 Lidie’s untheorised desire to escape her female destiny becomes bound up with Lorna’s desire to escape her destiny as a slave. Lidie’s mentor Beecher offers slightly confusing advice on this matter. While she declares, ‘it is in America, alone, that women are raised to an equality with the other sex, and that, both in theory and practice, their interests are regarded as of equal value’ (p.  27), this statement of principle is hedged around with various strictures about the need for clear hierarchies to ensure the smooth and orderly running of both family and society. There is, therefore, no need for women to take ‘any part in voting, or in making or administering laws’ (p. 23). Happy, nevertheless, to invoke the ‘true principles of democratic freedom and equality’ against aristocratic models to argue for the value of labour, for women as for men (p. 118), Beecher’s project remains an argument for the role of women in nation building. From the opening chapter, ‘The Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women’, Beecher engages in the creation of a model of American womanhood whose responsibilities include the maintenance of the idea of civilization in the West. Observing the difference between the town of Lawrence and the more rapidly thrown together Kansas City, Lidie notes that ‘in Lawrence there were women, which meant families, homes, farms, gardens, teacups and a lending library (or plan for one). In Kansas City it didn’t look like there were women, which meant a lack of all these same things’ (p. 298). Even on Sundays there is little quiet, little respect for the Sabbath, since ‘there were few women around to present the claims of conscience’ (p. 332). The new kind of femininity embodied in Lidie and others like her, combining this more traditional role as guardian of the family’s morals with that of the hardy adventurer, needs to be accommodated in the emerging national character if that character is to be complete.

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The principles of liberty and equality from which the American Union and its character was born have often been cited as the basis of the American novel itself, a novel equal to the challenge of this new nation, establishing a literary tradition totally different from its European antecedents. Seeing freedom as the basis of the American character is, however, to overlook the differences between North and South, which disrupt that concept of a singular character, as well as overlooking the differences between male and female. That tradition therefore contributes to the creation of the myth of America as an essentially male world in which self-­ definition is not only desirable but possible, whatever a man’s entrammelling historical and social context. Baym calls this ‘melodrama of beset manhood’ the means by which the idea of Americanness is subsumed into what is alleged to be the ‘universal male psyche’ (p. 18). If stories about women cannot contain the essence of Americanness, then ‘the matter of American experience is essentially male’ (p. 9). Although feminist criticism of the 1970s brought this sleight of hand into the open, the limitations of such representations were noted much earlier. In 1888, Frances Elizabeth Willard, the women’s rights activist, pointed out the need for women to be included in any fiction that purports to represent Americanness: The ‘American’ novel will not be written until the American woman, a type now to be found in Michigan, Boston, Cornell, and other universities, shall have taken her place […] beside the best survivals of young men in similar institutions, and wrought out the Home, the Church, and State that are to be. (p. 51)

While Willard focuses her attention on the woman of the East, later to become Henry James’s ‘American Girl’, to complete the portrait of Americanness the women of the West will need to be taken into account, as she is in the novels of Willa Cather. Meanwhile, as Willard rightly recognised, the existing ‘American’ novel was incomplete, since in them the female was only present, either in person or figuratively, to represent those forces which threaten to entrammel the self-defining male—the world of domesticity and/or the natural landscape. The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton can be seen as an attempt to complete the story of America by both encompassing female experience and embedding it in a social and historical reality. The ease with which reality can be subsumed into myth is evident, however, when

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on Lidie’s return East she briefly gains entry to the public arena by lecturing on her experience of trying to help a slave to escape, at once challenging both racist and sexual ideology. The reality of her failure strikes her audience less, however, than the myth of rescue, familiar from the captive woman novel: ‘Giving testimony was more important than the testimony given’ (p. 451). Lidie returns to Quincy and a world in which she still does not fit. Her failure may seem to represent the failure of the female voice, but more significantly it points to the omissions and fractures in that notion of nationhood embodied in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition. No sense of unity emerges from these pages, either of male and female, North and South, slave and free. Nevertheless, like Bleecker before her, Smiley writes ‘the feminine into national existence’, in the process drawing attention to its prolonged absence.

Notes 1. How to Win: A Book for Girls, 5th edition (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1888) p. 54. 2. Boston: Webb, 1841. 3. Interview with Jane Smiley, The Atlantic Online, May 28 1998, p. 1. 4. Jane Smiley, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Flamingo, 1998), p. 42. All further references to this novel will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 5. Quoted by David Potter, ‘American Women and the American Character’, Stetson University Bulletin, 63 (1962), pp. 1–22 (p. 5). This description of frontier territory seems to have been commonplace from early in the nineteenth century. 6. Women of the West (New York: W.W.Norton, 1982) is dedicated to those women ‘whose stories will never be told’, the 800,000 who also went West but are absent from history. 7. ‘Revising the Nation: The Domesticated Nationalism of Ann Eliza Bleeker’s The History of Maria Kittle’, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 42 (2013), 956–78 (p. 974). 8. ‘Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s “Masterpiece”’, Harper’s Magazine (January 1996), 61–67 (p. 64). 9. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel, published in 1851. 10. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 2014), originally published in 1884. 11. Although part of the Union, Missouri was still a slave-owning state at this time.

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12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin begins with the sale of a beloved slave child away from his mother to satisfy his ‘benign’ owner’s debts, foregrounding the central reality of the slave as commodity which results in the denial of all family ties. 13. See Miriam Davis Colt’s account of her early days as a settler in Kansas (Luchetti and Olwell, pp. 79–97. 14. A number of the organisers of the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 were active abolitionists, including Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martha Wright. See Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007).

CHAPTER 4

Women and an Uncivil War: Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women

As a fictional account of the American Civil War, Steven Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a classic of the American canon. Tightly focused on a young man’s first experience of battle, it has become famous for its psychological realism. What it does not attempt to do is to look beyond the battlefield itself to the impact of the war on non-combatants. In Enemy Women (2002) Paulette Jiles adopts this different focus, so that the novel occupies what Geraldine Brooks calls ‘the backroads of the American Civil War’.1 Set in the period following almost immediately after that of Lidie Newton, Enemy Women is firmly grounded in Jules’s research into the period towards the end of the Civil War, when South-Eastern Missouri was under martial law, with the constitution suspended, and the populace subjected to the brutality of guerrilla warfare.2 Her emphasis on the female part of the populace not only puts women back into the historical picture, but introduces generic elements absent from its classic nineteenth-­century predecessors, and once again requires the reader to adjust received ideas about the American novel, and indeed of American identity itself. Jiles is clearly familiar with Crane’s depiction of battle. While the bulk of her story is narrated from the perspective of her young Confederate protagonist Adair Colley, there is an abrupt shift to that of Adair’s beloved Major William Neumann of the Federal army as he approaches and engages in the battle of Spanish Fort. Neumann’s experience of battle echoes that of Crane’s young recruit Henry Fleming, as terrified of being proved a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_4

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coward as of being killed. After the battle Neumann, like Fleming, feels relief and gratitude that not only is he alive, but he ‘has not run or cowered’;3 he wears the ‘red badge’ that testifies to his willingness to fight and suffer for his cause. After battle, although injured, William feels ‘immensely alive’ (p. 164), ‘elated and alive in a peculiar and contingent way’ (p. 166). This unusual focus on an episode in the hero’s experience unshared by Adair gives the experience of actual warfare its due value. This episode is nevertheless only part of Jiles’s narrative, unlike Crane’s account. In this novel Spanish Fort is a single episode, emphasising that although battles may be lost or won, civil war is relentless and boundless. Suffering in such wars is endlessly self-perpetuating: whether committed by the brutal Union Militia, uncontrolled by the regular army, or Confederate guerrillas, atrocities on non-combatants always provide justification for revenge. Both sides are prepared to burn homes and lay waste to farmland to force families to persuade their menfolk to surrender, condemning those left behind to starvation. Nor is neutrality any defence. Adair’s father, arrested in 1864, when she was 18 years old, is a man of law, a Justice of the Peace, a teacher, but nevertheless brutally attacked, arrested for disloyalty and taken away by the Union militia. The guiding words of Justice Colley to his family have always been ‘be kind to one another’ (p. 7), a statement of Christian values destroyed by the ensuing war. Jiles’s quoted primary sources are devoted primarily, therefore, to observations on the suffering of the non-combatants, those caught between the two armies. Likewise, if Jiles’s focus is on women, this is not the effect of partiality but of historical reality. As the narrator puts it in the opening chapter, by the third year of the Civil War, in the Ozark mountains, ‘there was hardly anybody left in the country but the women and the children’ (p. 4). And all the women become by definition ‘enemy women’, accused of sustaining the enemy troops and therefore liable to be shot, as is confirmed by the quotation Jiles uses to preface the first chapter: There will be trouble in Missouri until the Secesh (Rebels) are subjugated and made to know that they are not only powerless, but that any attempts to make trouble here will bring upon them certain destruction and this …must not be confined to soldiers and fighting men, but must be extended to non-­combatant men and women. [Emphasis in the original]—Barton Bates to Edward Bates, St Louis, October 10, 1861.4

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As its title indicates, this novel is to explore the female experience of war, in the process indicating what is so often left out of fictional chronicles of wartime. Even when free from the presence of the enemy soldiers, under such circumstances the normal difficulties facing women become the stuff of horror stories, of women dying unattended in childbirth, and/or watching their children die of starvation, powerful refutation of the platitude that wars are fought by men to protect women and children. Clearly a critique of war, the novel is equally ready to question the concept of the just war—even the idea that the war was fought primarily to end slavery. As one old man caustically suggests, the Union could have bought and liberated ‘all the niggers’ (p. 268) with the money they spent on the war. William Neumann believes this end provides an irrefutable defence against Adair’s criticism of his side’s behaviour, since nothing experienced by the Confederates could equal the suffering inflicted by slavery. But he admits to Adair that this argument is an attempt to ‘drown her in guilt’ (p. 76), suggesting his defence is an ideological pretext rather than a moral imperative, even though his heart lifts when he observes bands of liberated slaves, ‘singing though scarred’ (p. 161) just before the battle. Under the guise of patriotism, and their sacred cause, the Union Militia can be a law unto themselves, as he is ready to acknowledge. Ultimately Adair sees the war as being to the advantage of none. The narrator suggests it is rather a license for those of a violent disposition to torture and kill at will, and as offering opportunities for excitement and power even for the unexceptional man. When Adair’s brother is recruited by the Confederates, in spite of his initial unwillingness, John Lee admits to finding it ‘exciting. […] Hunting people. […] I shot a man for these shoes’ (p. 36). There is a further implication that such reactions are inherent in masculinity: ‘He was a tall young man manned by great silent forces that worked in him like noiseless machinery. He had turned himself and these inchoate forces over to Colonel Reeves’ Fifteenth Missouri Cavalry’ (p. 35). Similarly the predominantly masculine achievements of technology, with their potential for advancing civilisation through the triumphs of human ingenuity, have been directed instead towards the service of war, enabling it to be fought on an even more brutal and comprehensive scale. Telegraph wires provide communication and control over vast areas, while the repeating rifle makes killing possible in much greater numbers. The technology of ‘civilisation’ seems at its heart allied to barbarity. As Griffin Frost writes in one of the prison journals Jiles quotes: ‘The wonders of this progressive age continue to announce to an

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astonished world similar brave feats. […] Women wearing balls and chains, as political offenders’ (p. 37). In contrast, John’s parting advice to his sisters typifies the reinforcement of gender differences in wartime: they must at all costs avoid being with ‘women that fall into bad habits in refugee camps’ (p. 35) and, ironically, stop fighting with each other. Sexual morality and reputation continue to rule women’s choices and behaviour, however far they—like their menfolk—are confronted with matters of life and death, pain and horror. In reality, much more than sexual continence and ladylike manners are required of women if they are to survive in this world. Like Lidie Newton, therefore, Adair is represented as unfeminine, and glad of it. She notices her handwriting is strong in comparison with the ‘unsure hand’ (p. 83) of her mother, who died when Adair was six. Her consequent unconventional upbringing prepares her well for an unconventional life. Like Lidie, she has ‘few skills at weaving and cooking’ (p. 8) but can ride and is highly literate. Her ambition is to go West, the goal of so many young men, and breed horses, but she has been told this is not for ‘ladies’. Jiles has created a heroine destined for and capable of adventure, embedding an adventure story in a novel about war. Adopting the classic shape of the quest narrative, Jiles sends Adair out on an epic quest, walking 120 miles to the Yankee Garrison to rescue her father after his arrest. As in Lidie Newton, however, the traditional rescue story is reversed, a woman setting out to rescue a man, the male adventurer being replaced by a young woman. When Adair puts on her father’s clothes after his arrest, she overtly takes on a male role, acting in her father’s absence as the family patriarch, the protector of her younger sisters. The ingenuity, inventiveness and ‘reserves of strength’ (p. 141) she draws on are qualities more often associated with the male hero. Her experiences now require as much ‘masculine’ courage and fighting spirit as are required of the Major. When her quest fails, and she is imprisoned as a suspected spy, Adair’s unfeminine anger sustains her and enables her to do battle, physically and emotionally, with Cloris, the head prisoner. Rhoda, one of Adair’s fellow prisoners, warns Adair that with such behaviour she is complicit with the Yankees, who are out ‘to destroy Southern womanhood’ (p. 59). But in spite of Rhoda’s view that ‘ladies do not help themselves’ (p. 59), Adair sees that such attitudes invite victimhood, and hers is the story of those who refuse to remain victims. Eschewing the role of the mythic Southern belle embodied in Rhoda, she is very much the modern woman, abandoning women’s traditional roles to survive a world at war. It is not the male

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hero, the Major, who rescues her: she has to ‘recover herself’ (p. 134 and p. 263). For many of Adair’s battles are of a different, internal kind from those with which the Major is familiar. Her imprisonment leaves her with a life-­ threatening consumption, which becomes her own battle: ‘her enemy lay inside her’ (p.  240). Her ‘recovery’, moreover, is more than physical, involving the question of identity which becomes increasingly problematic because of its relationship to gender. She is rescued as much by her ability to tell stories and to create new identities for herself as through her physical courage. Her discomfort with her female identity is evident in her initial unwillingness to exploit the identity most obviously available to her: that of the educated lady. Well aware of the protection this identity can offer, on her journey home she gives up her usual habit of riding astride, knowing that to appear to the Union soldiers ‘as a woman of low degree’ (p. 226) would rob her of any rights they might otherwise respect. Even in prison, once the Major registers she is a woman of education and culture, Adair’s status as a ‘Lady’ rather than just a ‘secessionist gal’ (p. 77) provides some protection. And she understands the rules of this particular game, the protection that class offers, asking whether he would treat her better if she quoted poetry, or did watercolours (p. 68). When faced with the demand for a confession, therefore, like Margaret Atwood’s Grace Marks, instead of taking refuge in memory loss as Grace does, she evades her interrogator’s desire to know who she really is, and what she has done by creating fantastic tales which respond to his own sense of her, as romanticised as Dr Jordan’s view of Grace Marks. On first sight Major Neumann feels Adair looks like she belongs to ‘an ancient race of savages who had invented a terrible tale called Snow White’ (p. 67), and she instinctively responds to his sense of her by constructing ‘a world of high romance and innocence, innocence above all, to show him who he held in this place and melt his heart and make him let her go, as the Huntsman had paused in the snowy woods of Grimm and said to Snow White, Run for your life’ (p. 83). Her written confession begins with the warning phrase, ‘Once upon a Time’ (p. 86), so that William has no difficulty in recognising her strategy, and what she has done to her lifestory: ‘She had changed it all to a shining tale without stillbirths or floods or parasites or deformed people’ (p. 87). But the narrative beguiles him as much as it frustrates him. There is a complicity here, which suggests a shared understanding of the sexual power game more profound than that of the victimhood offered by Rhoda’s view of the Southern lady.

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And yet, from the moment that Adair meets Major Neumann, the reader is made aware of the shift from an adventure story to another literary tradition. Even as she debunks his Romantic notions, she is participating in yet another staple of Romantic literary tradition—the type of badinage which characterises the love-making of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy. Blessed, like Elizabeth, with ‘remarkable eyes’ (p.  85), her insolence in the face of William’s superior status is a ‘talent’ shared by numerous such heroines. Like her other narrative creations, these too are part of the strategy which enables her to survive. She defuses her interrogator’s real power by turning him into a stereotypical villain of melodrama: ‘She drew a black braid under her nose and twisted it as if it were a mustache [sic]. And now I have you where I want you, my redskinned beauty’ (p. 104). Undermining his authority with laughter and the slipperiness of her identity proves to be her salvation.5 For if William is ready to see Adair in such passive roles as the sleeping Snow White waiting to be brought to life by her prince, and the ultimately passive Romantic heroine, The Lady of Shalott drifting to her death, she espouses a much more active role. Describing the mezzotint he has in mind as ‘the one where she’s wallowing around in that tiny boat’ (p. 126), Adair debunks William’s Romantic notions, sure and proud of her own agency: when she reaches the Wilderness on her way home, she tells the witch Jessie Hyssop, ‘I put myself into the telegraph line letter by letter and come (sic) out at Iron Mountain and was reassembled’ (p. 263). To be more precise, confident of her own agency, Adair rescues and re-­ assembles herself. Even when younger, able to see nothing in her future except marriage, and searching superstitiously for the face of her intended in the fire, she had instead received her ‘message’ in the cold air outside: her breath ‘was the smoke of her internal fire and her soul. Every breath was a letter to the world. These she mailed into the cold air’ (p. 10). Even at this early stage of her life, she constructs herself. But what is ‘reassembled’ is something different from that young self. When she finally reaches home, comparing past and present, ‘it seemed to her at that time she had been a very pure person and had not wanted anyone to die nor led anyone to their death, nor had she stolen anything or lied or hated as she had hated. But now her name was written in the Book of Dirt’ (p. 293). Having already dismissed literary images of herself as a Romantic heroine, she recognises herself as being at the end of the journey from innocence to experience which characterises the traditional

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Bildungsroman, finding herself with a more complex and dark identity, as well as a more active one. Ceasing to be simply a victim inevitably involves the loss of prelapsarian innocence. But if this is an American Bildungsroman in one sense, it is a specifically female Bildungsroman, in which the inevitable ending is marriage. Nor, in spite of her reluctance, has she ever considered that there was to be any other option. Even as a girl of fifteen, her pleasure in the acquisition of her horse, Whiskey, is all the greater since she knows she has to enjoy the last years of freedom before she becomes ‘trapped by domesticity’ (p. 7). This is not a matter simply of literary convention but of reality and probability. Her return to the house where William is waiting for her allows for the possibility of such a conventional ending: before going into the house she sits watching him with ‘her long hair flying loose and the silver brush in her hand’ (p. 299) as in William’s long ago vision of their future. But this ending is veiled in a kind of unreality as she watches him from a distance, ‘as ghosts watch from the other side of a looking glass, come from a distant place of being and not of the same world’ (p. 299). The old Adair is dead even though William thinks he has now found her. Whatever future they may have together must be built not on the fairy stories with which she seduced him, but on the sober reality of their post-war inheritance. And in spite of her pleasure in spinning fairy tales and romances, Adair has always been aware of the darker side to the Romantic representation of male-female relationships. She is well aware of where the real power, as opposed to the games of courtship, lies within marriage: ‘the wrong man could shut you up in a house, he could take your horse away from you if he proved to be cruel, and put him to a plow, and beat you with a broom handle and no one could rescue you’ (p. 11). Where the boy heroes of classic American fiction fear marriage and domestication as the essential sign of maturity and compromise with society, here that fear inhabits the young female with legitimate cause. In her reinterpretation of the Snow White story, the prince who restores Snow White to life is revealed to be the huntsman, her original rescuer, who ‘harries us away from the mirror, where we stand mesmerized with what lies behind that mirror and the dark realms’ (p. 88) of Death. The implication seems to be that the rescue by the lover is also an evasion of the deeper realities of life, of what William calls ‘the world as it was’ (p.  89), which Romance can only mask for a time. Jiles’s narrative unmasks Romance just as Lidie Newton unmasks the reality behind Huck’s Romance on the raft.

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The reality is, moreover, a far more nuanced view of home and domesticity than can be found in what I am calling ‘boys’ own stories’. Although as a young woman Adair dreams of the ‘waste places and its silences’ (p. 7) where there are no domestic responsibilities, after her imprisonment the wilderness and home merge as ideals. That merging is symbolised by the first place of refuge she comes to after her escape from prison, ‘a small town called Wilderness’ (p. 262). Represented by her mother’s Log Cabin quilt, with its pattern centred around a hearth, home becomes an idea that can be carried with her for protection and warmth, rather than something restrictive. Meanwhile Neumann’s experience of war develops in him a similarly more complex view of civilisation than simply the antithesis of freedom so feared by Huck: ‘Civilization was not in the natural order but was some sort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds.[…] But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid’ (p. 276). This kind of Pascalian wager is all that holds human life together. Jiles’s focus on a female protagonist, therefore, creates not only a female adventure story, with another protagonist equivalent to the male adventurers of nineteenth-century fiction, as are Ahab’s wife and Lidie Newton, but stands as a critique of masculinity and the violence it sustains. For all the suffering endured in the Civil War depicted in this novel, Adair can see nothing and no-one changed for the better. Even the underlying motivation of the opposing sides is called into question. As Edmund Wilson suggests, while slavery may have provided a moral pretext for the Union side, the more vital issue was to preserve the Union between the slave-owning Southern states and a rapidly industrialising North so distinct from one another as to be ‘virtually two different nations’ (p. xv). Southerners meanwhile saw themselves as ‘rescuing an ideal of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society’ (p. 438), the myth of the Old South. A. N. Kaul argues that the ‘Civil War dispels the vision of community’ once and for all.6 From then on, Americans were divided into mutually antagonistic classes. The split between the northern and southern states makes the very concept of an ‘American’ identity problematic. As was more indirectly hinted in Lidie Newton, the Americans of the North and the Americans of the South stand for totally divergent values, for which the ‘freedom’ and pursuit of individual destiny embodied in the adventures of the canon can only be an abstract and ambiguous shorthand.

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Enemy Women brings to the American adventure story not just a female perspective, but the love between women and men which is so strikingly absent from the classic American novel, in contrast to its European peers. As Fiedler puts it, ‘Our great novelists […] tend to avoid the passionate encounter of a man and a woman’ (p. 24). Their heroes are in flight from woman and home. Where Ahab’s wife and Lidie Newton begin their adventures after the death or disappearance of their loved ones, Adair’s adventures continue in parallel with her emotional life, her love for the Major. If the masculine canon of American literature has been seen as playing a vital role in the construction of American identity, these twentieth-­ century contributions to American fiction highlight the absences from those constructions. Through bringing together men and women, adventure and romance, they construct a more complete view of historical American identity, as well as a completely modern American genre.

Notes 1. Geraldine Brooks, quoted in inside cover of paperback edition of Enemy Women. 2. This is evident not only in Jiles’s epigraphs, but in her acknowledgements and interviews. Her account of the siege of Spanish Fort, for instance, as experienced by her hero is based on the letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers. See Interview on Good Morning America, 25 July 2002. https:// abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=125053&page=1. 3. Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women (Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 166 (first published by Harper Collins in 2002). All further page references will be to the paperback edition, and follow the relevant quotation in the text. 4. But according to Edmund Wilson, Adair is typical of the ‘proud and spirited’ Southern women that regularly behaved insolently to the Union troops, refusing to be cowed by their threats. See Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Oxford: OUP, 1962), p. 265. 5. Ironically, on her way home after her escape, Lidie employs her story-telling powers to different effect, telling the dullest story she can, to lull Rosalie and her mother to sleep, so that she can steal back her horse Whiskey. 6. The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-century Fiction (New Delhi: OUP, 2002), p. 82.

CHAPTER 5

Adventures of Body and Soul: Audrey Thomas, Isobel Gunn

On the surface, the story of Isobel Gunn, Audrey Thomas’s eponymous protagonist, appears to be a classic tale of cross-dressing adventure. The Canadian novel contains a plot similar to the North American adventures discussed previously. Like Lydie Newton, Una Spenser, and Adair Colley, Isobel resorts to cross-dressing in order to embark on the kind of perilous journey which normally only men undertake. Where their motivation is clear, however, Isobel’s is open to many interpretations. For whereas the American adventurers tell their own story or dominate the focalised narrative, Isobel’s adventure is almost always refracted through the eyes and words of others, all male. Only the occasional phrase of dialect, expressing deep emotion, can be assumed to come directly from Isobel. Such an element of mystery underlying the few historical facts draws the reader’s attention to the idea that Isobel’s inner life, rather than her extraordinary adventure, forms the real heart of the narrative. Like the other novels discussed so far, the novel problematises both the ‘facts’ of history and its interpretation by male commentators, offering only a variety of perspectives. Isobel Gunn1 eschews the hierarchy of discourses characteristic of classic realism, and instead of aping the style and structure of the nineteenth-­century novel as Ahab’s Wife and The Life and True Adventures of Lydie Newton do, Thomas uses an experimental narrative structure to highlight the equally fictitious concept of woman. Caroline Rosenthal suggests that ‘by re-writing institutionalized genres’, the novelist ‘not only © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_5

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disrupt[s] narrative, but call[s] into question underlying assumptions about identity and gender’.2 As Thomas herself has said, ‘I like to tell a good tale, and at the same time I like to make the reader work. I assume my readers will want to run a bit for their money’.3 Like the North American female adventure stories, Isobel’s has its foundation in a fully realised historical context. Unlike them, it also has a basis in historical fact. The novel is prefaced by a quotation from the 1807 journal of Alexander Henry, who ran the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post at Pembina in what was then known as Rupert’s Land in Canada. The entry records the birth of a son to someone known till then as John Fubbister, who had signed up as a labourer with the Company back in Orkney. Thomas heard ‘whispers’ about Isobel’s story when travelling in Scotland and Orkney in the 1980s, but the only documentation she was able to track down was Isobel’s birth certificate and obituary, a census entry and the Company’s log entries. In addition to these few biographical facts, however, contemporary speculation as to Isobel’s motives is also recorded. Most attribute her journey to love of a man, John Scarth, who travelled on the ship with her and fathered her child, positioning her story firmly within the romantic quest narrative such as is found in Ahab’s Wife, or allied with a young woman’s search for another loved one, as in Enemy Women.4 Magnus Inkster, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s minister who befriends her in Rupert’s Land, cannot conceive of any other motive than that she had decided to ‘gamble everything for love’ (p. 57). Isobel, however, rejects this as a typically male interpretation, a view endorsed by the narrative which depicts Scarth as a rapist bully. Speculation that sheer poverty might have driven Isobel to leave everything she knew is given considerable substance by Thomas’s depiction of her life. That poverty is, moreover, exacerbated by her sex. From her earliest years Isobel knows that her life would be better if she were male. Born Isobel Fubbister in 1781, at the age of three or four she is made brutally aware that daughters are unwanted by her father’s rage over the birth of another female child, and her mother’s subsequent incarceration in the asylum for infanticide. The relative worthlessness of women’s lives can be measured by the discrepancy between women’s earnings and men’s earnings, even if doing the same work. Isobel’s greatest fear is that she might become one of the ‘surplus’ women of Orkney, reduced to destitution and beggary. Identification with other women is impossible, since as her mother’s daughter she feels ‘branded…forever an outcast from the world of women’ (p.  36). When her mother subsequently drowns herself, Isobel

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asks herself whether this sequence of events would have occurred if she had been born a boy. Magnus, on hearing her story, attributes it to such material factors: ‘Isobel became a boy because she had to’ (p. 35). Wearing her hair like a sailor, and dressing like a boy, she takes on a son’s role in running the farm. Disfigured by smallpox, she is disqualified from the traditional woman’s role of marriage, but is nevertheless expected to take on the daughter’s role of looking after her drunken father till he dies. While her brother George is free to sign up with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), she has to remain at home. The fate of both Isobel and her family makes a powerful comment on the power of gender difference as well as class. And yet, when Isobel decides to become the son her father wanted, she appears to be driven not only by need but by a desire for adventure that identifies her as ‘masculine’ within the gender-rigid structures of nineteenth-­century society. Even as a girl she has a physical strength and courage gendered as masculine, joining the rope walkers collecting birds’ eggs from treacherous cliffs in times of hunger, a job undertaken by ‘only the bravest men and boys’ (p. 30). When John Scarth comes to help out on the farm, his tales of Rupert’s Land both appal and excite her, although it is made clear to her that white women are not allowed there: ‘The life was too hard’ (p. 40). Adopting male dress, she signs up for the HBC as John Fubbister, inscribing her male identity into the only public forum open to her. When she finally leaves home dressed as a man, therefore, she feels ‘free’ (p. 46), entering a life which she recalls with laughter and shining eyes when speaking to her niece Nellie after her enforced return to Orkney. Her success in taking on the male role is self-evident. Morton, the chief factor at Albany Fort, explains to Magnus why no-one suspected her true sex: ‘If someone is presented to you as a man, works as hard as any man, does nothing whatsoever to make you doubt he is a man, why on earth would you suspect he is a woman in disguise? Especially here’ (p. 55). But such an essentially performative view of gender is a challenge to the deterministic ideas of sexual difference which dominated nineteenth-century Britain and her colonies, and must therefore be resisted. Isobel’s adoption of the male role and its privileges must not only be ended but punished. Her relegation to the role of washerwoman means a reduction in both pay and status. The removal of her gun is a further, obviously phallic, indication of her reduced status, although she is secretly able to retain another, into which is burned ‘John Fubbister His

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Gunn’ (p. 130). The mis-­spelling identifies the gun with the name that she takes after her exposure, another attempt to write herself as male. Her success in the male role is both a challenge to assumptions of masculine superiority and a denial of her female status. Once exposed as a woman, the strength and courage which were admired in her male form merely become evidence of her status as a freak. She is forever to be regarded as an ‘unnatural’ woman, and therefore to be denied the protection that her sex might otherwise warrant. Her status is indeed seen as justification for her rape by Scarth: after behaving in such an ‘unfeminine fashion’ she ‘got what was coming to her’ (p. 93). Even after her return to Orkney, she is unfit for respectable female company, so yet again deprived of the means of a reasonable livelihood. Isobel therefore suffers from a psychic split, proving her ‘manliness’ in her actions as John Fubbister, but unable to deny the reality of her womanhood as Isobel Gunn. For it is her body that finally betrays her, as she feared it might. Twice the victim of her body, both events—her rape and the birth of her son—mark her as a social outcast. The ambiguity of her gender is mirrored in the figure of the Berdash, a HimHar as he/she would be called in Orkney. His story enacts a reversal of Isobel’s, which again demonstrates the performative nature of gender. Not a hermaphrodite, he simply wants to be a woman, a desire so demeaning in a world where ‘the traditional values of manliness hold sway’ (p.  75) that he is treated as a whore. The only witness to Isobel’s rape, he is the repository of her truth, and an embodiment of the outsider’s role into which she is forced once her sex is revealed. That role is reflected not only in the Berdash, but in the only other women in the colony. In its depiction of the First Nations women, the narrative takes on a post-colonial perspective, further highlighting the constructed nature of both gender and racial difference. Thomas has spoken of her horror at the Europeans’ attitude to the First Nations, without whom they could not have survived.5 Greed and competition drive these attitudes in the same way that they drive attitudes to the Scottish poor. Reflecting on the activities of the grave robbers Burke and Hare, supplying the endless demand for more bodies, Magnus makes the connection explicit when he remembers the trader McTavish ‘wondering if it would have been better for the Natives if the Company of Adventurers had never come to Rupert’s Land’ (p. 207), although he (or Thomas?) is misremembering the speaker, who was in fact MacNeil, the surgeon (p. 106). First Nation women, in particular, were essential to the Company’s success, not

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simply by satisfying the men’s sexual needs in the absence of white women but by providing survival knowledge: ‘how to make … moccasins, how to dress meat and prepare pemmican, how to lead us through forests and rivers’ (pp.  63–4). Designated as the Home Guard, their skills align them with the world of men, while their bodies provide the commodified sexuality required of them. ‘Unnatural’, therefore, like Isobel, they are the people she identifies with, living in a tipi with the Cree woman Mary, her ‘sister’, and learning their language and ways of nurturing. Mary indeed becomes a second mother to James, Isobel’s son, suckling him after his natural mother’s departure. Isobel effectively becomes one of the colonised herself. The reality of white men’s dependence on these racial ‘others’ is concealed in the ideology which justifies the virtual enslavement of the men, largely made possible by exposing them to alcohol, and the relegation of the women to a category quite distinct from that of white women, since ‘women’ are not allowed in the colony. These are not the women the doctor friend of Magnus’s father had in mind back in Orkney when he described women as being ‘made of finer clay than men’ (p. 68). In the colony racial ideology collides with gender ideology and displaces it, without there being any realisation that in so doing it questions the idea of essential sexual difference on which that ideology is based. In identifying with the colonised, Isobel becomes vulnerable both to patriarchy and to racism. The HBC’s chief factor Morton, adhering rigidly to the ideology of both, is as anxious to remove James from the world of women as from the world of the First Nations, to rescue him from living as ‘a savage’. In his worldview, patriarchy and white superiority reinforce each other. Once unmasked and re-inscribed as female by the male world, Isobel is subsequently judged for her ‘unnatural’ sexuality, and for being as much of an ‘unnatural woman’ (p.  7) as the HimHar. Even her second life-­ changing decision to leave her son behind when she is forced to return to Scotland is misjudged as evidence of her lack of true womanhood. And yet it is Morton who persuades her to give the child James to him for adoption, by encouraging her to disregard her instinctive desire to keep the child, and to fulfil instead the ideal of self-sacrifice associated with the institution of motherhood. Knowing the realities attached to life as an unmarried mother, she is aware that no-one would be ready to help a woman ‘who deserved to suffer’ (p. 212), with or without a child. Magnus is well aware that Isobel would have a better life with James: when she is with her son he notices:

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her laugh was the laugh of pure unselfconscious pleasure. Was it the child who had done this for her? […] At what point had she put all that behind her—the drunken father, the mad mother, the attack? […] She, outcast that she was, had friends and a sort of family here; she made the best of things. (p. 111)

But this choice is not available to her. Her tragedy is not inevitable, but the result of ‘rules’ based on ideas of what is appropriate for white women, according to gender and racial stereotypes. Years later she is judged harshly by Captain Hanwell, captain of the ship that goes between Orkney and Rupert’s Land, who argues that a life of poverty where love exists is preferable to a life without love. Lacking that experience of love, Isobel learns too late to question a decision determined by the material factors that have shaped her life. If men judge her decision to give up James, it takes a woman—Magnus’s wife who has herself lost a child—to make Magnus understand ‘the full weight of Isobel’s decision’ (p. 215), and that ‘being a man, [he] could not imagine the struggle that went on in Isobel’s breast’ (p. 215). Isobel does have another option, another female role which would have enabled her to keep her son James in financial security. Her refusal of Magnus’s offer of marriage therefore is as complex in its motivation as her original decision to become a man. The reasons she offers Magnus for her refusal are both pragmatic and psychological: marriage to her would make it impossible for him to get a living, she does not want to be married out of pity, and she does not want to be touched. But allied to these explanations is an unspoken fear of her own violent nature, inherited she believes from her parents, which would make her kill him if he did touch her. Such an act would once and for all identify her as an ‘unnatural’ female, whose latent ‘masculine’ fury and skill with a knife had been unleashed. But Thomas unexpectedly draws attention to a similarity between Magnus’s offer and Morton’s, noting that both leave her with the words ‘Think about it’ (p. 151) which implies an equity between the two choices. Isobel finds it easier to conceive of the fairy-tale-like ending in which her ‘fine chiel’ (p. 155) returns to thank his mother for her sacrifice than to accept rescue from any other man, and the socially constructed role of wife. Isobel is faced with an impossible choice, each a denial of part of herself. Indeed later in life she turns on Magnus with a furious ‘nivver talk to me of choices’ (p. 209). While he may doubt the idea of Predestination which

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is a tenet of faith in his church, the gender and social roles of the time constitute a powerful form of predestination for women like Isobel. Isobel’s cross-dressing makes her a legend in her own land. Further afield she gains a certain notoriety as the first European woman in Rupert’s Land, the HBC’s website still referring to her with some pride as one of their first true adventurers.6 And yet that adventure is not really the heart of the novel, or the most significant experience Isobel endures. At its heart instead is a uniquely female narrative—Isobel’s inability to escape either the female body or the deterministic conditions consequent upon it. Magnus accepts that it is impossible to imagine any situation for a man similar to that of living with the fear of being ‘unmasked’ by something growing inside (p. 79). Here Isabel’s dual gender identity is at its most blatant, her body performing as a man, while waiting silently to reveal itself as female. With the birth of James comes the death of John Fubbister. The historical record states that Isobel returned to Scotland with her child, but by rejecting the historical facts in this way, Thomas emphasises the complexity of Isobel’s sense of gender. While having proved herself to be ‘manly’, according to conventional ideas of sexual difference, Isobel’s tragedy is a uniquely female form of loss and severance, with childbirth itself constituting an essentially female adventure. Beginning and ending in Orkney, the novel’s structure emphasises the circularity of Isobel’s journey, and the impossibility of escaping the life of a poor woman. The novel begins in 1810 with a Prologue announcing the arrival at Hamnavoe of the Company’s ship, the Prince of Wales, where Captain Hanwell is accosted by Isobel, begging for news of her son. Although instructed by Morton to say nothing, out of compassion he finally whispers to her ‘Alive and Well’. These words begin the novel proper and are Isobel’s unique motivation for the next twenty years, so that the novel’s primary emotional drama is that of a woman waiting, that most traditional of female roles, part of the binary by which woman is passive and man active. For all those waiting at the quayside, ‘the women had no say in the matter’ (p. 2). But in Isobel’s case it is not for the return of her lover that she waits, but for the return of her male child, that part of herself—like her male self—which has been torn from her, and can never be returned. The passage of time is indicated in concrete form by the stockings she knits for her son, which grow longer each year to match her imagination of her child, but this change only emphasises the element of stasis in Isobel’s situation. Recorded by Magnus in 1862, the year of Isobel’s death, this story exists in direct contrast to the story of her

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adventurous and active life as a man. The novel’s emphasis, however, is less on the famous cross-dressing adventurer than on the mother. Its circular narrative is structured so as to emphasise this interiority. The script of gender difference is nevertheless clearly challenged, and Isobel’s deliberate resistance is mirrored—if less consciously—in Magnus. He also regards himself as being in disguise, a church minister without belief, increasingly inclined to reject the doctrine of Predestination that is central to his church. Moreover he consistently adopts positions and attitudes more stereotypically associated with women. As a married man back in Edinburgh, he is readier to play the role usually taken by the minister’s wife, that of ministering. He is happier to ‘comfort and console’ than to ‘frighten (or flatter) [his] congregation with talk of predestination and the fires of hell’ (p. 192). It is Magnus who takes the role of comforter when Isobel is dying, and sits with her body throughout the eight nights of her wake, ‘a woman’s task’ (p. 21). While the people of Edinburgh are only interested in the tales of Isobel’s life as a man, he remembers her hands caressing her child. His response when James calls him Father shows a depth of affection far removed from Morton’s patriarchal desire to take and mould the child, as is evident in  Morton’s rage and jealousy that James will use such a word to Magnus but not to him. For Magnus the word is a reminder of his own strong filial attachment, as powerful as Isobel’s for her son. It is appropriate then that Magnus should be the vehicle for Isobel’s story. Her story is, moreover, partly his story, since his empathy for women grows out of his childhood, specifically the night he attends ‘the madwoman’, Isobel’s mother, with his father and the doctor after the birth of Isobel’s youngest sister. Rejected by her father as another useless female child, the baby is thrown into the fire by her mother, subsequently convicted of infanticide and sentenced to life in the asylum until her death by suicide. This traumatic moment shared with Isobel shapes Magnus’s life as it shapes hers. Magnus’s account of his own life in the colony is essentially a vehicle for Isobel’s story too, the novel’s chronology dovetailing those two accounts. On his return to Scotland, their lives are again intertwined when a letter reaches him from Isobel. His last recorded thoughts are of Isobel, as he records her last thoughts, and his regret that he could do no more for her. Like hers, his real adventure in life will not be the journey to the New World but his emotional and spiritual journey, as he reflects on her memories. Constantly besieged by requests for ‘stories of the great fur trade’ (p. 221), the reality for him consists of a few vivid images of hands,

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and his meeting with Isobel. Denying that the life of adventure is the true reality, he too stakes his identity on his life in Scotland, and his encounter with Isobel Gunn. There are moments when other voices break through Magnus’s narrative. Possibly the least expected is the voice of Mr Morton, on his first encounter with Isobel after the news of her true identity has been revealed. Primarily dialogue, the passage establishes the inability of each to understand the other. His prejudices are registered clearly as he regrets that ‘such glorious hair was wasted on such a creature’ (p. 143). Governed by his conventional sense of gender difference and the rules of the bay, Morton is unable to accept her argument that she is no different from when she was John Fubbister, and that there is still a place for her at the Bay. Isobel, in turn, can only regard his offer to adopt James as ‘daft’ (p. 141). In other passages, italics are used to herald a shift towards an omniscient point of view, and effectively dramatise the scene. This is the case when Magnus offers marriage to Isobel, the perspective drawing away from the tipi and the scene as viewed by the other women to focus on the two main protagonists in dialogue, before drawing back again to record the cynical comments of Morton and the Doctor. The use of italics here also connects Magnus’s offer with Morton’s, as suggested above. In an interview with George Bowering, Thomas writes that she believes her later prose is close to poetry, ‘meant to be read aloud’,7 and that sense of oral performance is evident throughout the narrative, giving a real presence to all voices, reinforcing the structure of feeling that contains and undermines the marginalised voices of Isobel and Magnus. The reader is bound to ask, however, where in all this is Isobel’s voice? Why is she not the narrator of her own story? The reader is nevertheless given insight into Isobel’s interiority through Thomas’s complex narrative strategy. At times the third-person narrative, ostensibly part of Magnus’s recounting of the story she has told him, achieves a vividness which suggests the author has shifted into a focalised narrative registering Isobel’s’ most intimate feelings, but retaining the style of the narrator. The reader is alerted to such moments by the use, again, of italics, such as in the description of James’s birth. There is even a degree of uncertainty as to whether these feelings are shared with Magnus, their intensity evoking the ‘flames of hell’ (p. 118) associated with her ‘mad’ mother and the death of her baby sister. The most notable such moments are the italicised fragments from Isobel’s letters written long after the events Magnus is recounting, which reproduce her own dialect and spelling, and which in their

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brevity and simplicity speak to the reader of Isobel’s anguish. Only in the final pages is there a more extended glimpse into the experience of her final years, unmediated by Magnus. An omniscient narrator reports both the facts of the case—her reduction to the beggary she had always feared and the taunting of the local children chanting ‘Isobel Gunn’—and her inner life, consisting of her memories of her happiness with the women of Rupert’s Land, a relationship which existed without language, and her persisting conviction that James is still alive and will return. Isobel does not, however, lack the fluency to convey her own experiences. Given her difficulty in learning to read, Magnus is shocked to find ‘how fluent she was when talking’ (p.  131), her language retaining the vitality of some of the ‘old words’ (p. 132) which his education has eliminated from his own speech. Her story comes to him in what he calls ‘scenes’ (p. 132), conveying something of this vitality. When they meet in Rupert’s Land they are able to communicate freely, since she regards him not as a man, but as a minister, and he does not see her as a woman. His knowledge of her past grows with his intimacy with her in the present, building gradually towards the revelation of what the reader already knows about her relationship with Scarth. His own first-person narrative and position as an outsider and critic of the worst of his society’s religious and economic practices establish him as a sympathetic mediator of Isobel Gunn’s life story. Even when he confesses to feeling both ‘shocked and excited’ (p. 93) by her account of her rape, his admission suggests an honesty that lends reliability to his account. As she holds back from Magnus the extent of her involvement in Scarth’s death, any potential diminution of either his sympathy or the reader’s is delayed. Only after her death are both forced to consider whether there were ‘other things [she] forgot to mention, or only this?’ (p. 113). Forced to piece together this life story, both narrator and reader are reminded that our knowledge of another can only ever be a partial construction. Since Isobel only learns to read and write while in Magnus’s school, is the reader to assume that the only block to her telling her own story is this simple lack of literacy, that she does not have the tools at her disposal for her own narrative? A more profound rationale for Thomas’s approach is surely that it demonstrates the extent to which Isobel is silenced throughout her life. She effectively silences her female self when she becomes John Fubbister. His ‘birth’ is her death. On re-emerging as Isobel Gunn, her attempts to express her own desires, as in dealing with Morton, fail to carry any weight or authority. During the scenes recounting the two

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‘proposals’, Morton renders her ‘speechless’ (p. 145), and she runs from Magnus in silence. Even when she returns to Orkney, whether begging at her neighbours’ doors, or writing to her son, she will receive no response. It will be as if she had never spoken. Nor is Isobel alone. Throughout the novel, the voices of humanity and warmth are silenced. When she begs Captain Hanwell for news on his return from Rupert’s Land, he is only able to whisper a response, since he has been forbidden by Morton to speak to her of James. Even Magnus’s letters to her are confiscated, and he too is repeatedly silenced by Morton, not least when Morton takes from him the role of schoolmaster. Magnus’s voice, the voice identified by the toddler James as the familial ‘father’, is not to be heard. Magnus’s marginalisation confirms his position as a more ‘female’ voice, identified with Isobel’s own, silenced by the voice of institutional patriarchy. As George Woodcock writes of Thomas, the reader ‘lost in her worlds, […] must pay attention to not only that which is visible and present, but to the non-text as well, the unknown that is always being conquered and always conquering, to that which lies beyond the boundaries of society, the silences’ (Room of One’s Own). Neither Isobel nor Magnus, however, has the final word in the narrative of her life. That goes to James, who, like Magnus, is another male who has been silenced. After his anguished cries on separation from his mother, his voice goes unheard until the final chapter when the reader hears through a focalised narrative that his subsequent experiences of loveless parenting ‘left him more silent, more alone’ (p. 224). All he has left of his mother are his dreams of ‘a shabby woman scarred by smallpox’ (p.  224), who rejects him. In effect he is deafened as well as silenced in that he is not allowed the letters from Magnus and Isobel which would have reminded him of his true identity. Something of the mother tongue, however, survives in the voice of his great-granddaughter, who even as late as 1938 recalls her grandfather using the term ‘bonie words’ for prayers (p. 226). This Epilogue completes a further tragic cycle, as her son the Pipsqueak leaves his home in Winnipeg to go to sea to fulfil his dreams of adventure, only to die in Orkney among the many victims of German torpedoes at Scapa Flow. Shifting to a perspective distant in time from Isobel’s story, yet returning to her final location, Thomas requires the reader to be attentive to both the expectations and disruptions of genre. Ending the novel with yet another adventure story, this time in traditional boys’ own mode, she nevertheless shifts the point of view in the final paragraph to that of a woman,

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the boy’s mother, waiting at home for his return. Her memories of her son’s childhood, and above all her possession of his only letter to her, throw a poignant light on the absence of both from Isobel’s life. Adding yet another point of view to her narrative, Thomas carries out her stated determination to show that in literature ‘you can do whatever you like’, using multiple points of view and discontinuous chronologies. George Woodcock argues that Thomas’s women characters dissent from the traditional roles of women: their ‘resistance is always a double game where denials provoke unexpected yearnings for what they are losing/have already lost’.8 The complexity of this response, articulating both women’s frustration with the only choices allowed them, and the price they may have to pay for rejecting those choices, is reflected in the formal experimentation of the novel, challenging literary conventions as much as her narrative challenges gender constructions.

Notes 1. Audrey Thomas, Isobel Gunn, first published by Penguin Canada, 1999. All references are taken from the British Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: 2000) and follow the relevant quotation in the text. 2. Caroline Rosenthal, Narrative Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt. And Louise Erdrich (New York: Camden House, 2003), p. 23. 3. ‘Critical Studies: Audrey Thomas Issue’, Room of One’s Own, 10 (1986). (http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4780/Thomas-­Audrey-­Grace.html) 4. This is the view taken by Stephen Scobie, in his narrative poem The Ballad of Isabel Gunn (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1987). Scobie challenges the idea that Isabel was a victim of seduction, allowing her to voice her own powerful desire for John Scarth, attributing to young Orkney women a physical strength and emotional autonomy co-existent with the more familiar image of Orkney as a ‘land where the men go to sea/and the women wait, and the women grow old’ (p. 9). 5. Profile by Linda Richards, September 2000, January Magazine. (http:// januarymgazine.com/profiles/athomas.html). 6. See http://hbheritage.ca. 7. ‘Songs and Wisdom: An Interview with Audrey Thomas’, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, 5 (1979), 7–31 (p. 25). 8. ‘Audrey Thomas’, in Robert Lecker and Jack David (eds.), The New Canadian Anthology (Scarborough: Nelson, 1988), p. 410.

CHAPTER 6

Home and Away: Jane Urquhart, Away: A Novel

Mary O’Malley is away with the fairies. This is the general opinion held of her by the inhabitants of Rathlin island in 1842, when the central narrative of Jane Urquhart’s novel Away begins.1 Having grown up on the island, off the coast of Ireland, Mary’s mind is saturated with the mythology of her homeland so that when she finds a young sailor dying on the seashore, she assumes he is a ‘faery-demon lover’ (p. 13) from an ‘otherworld island’ (p.  8). Even after his death, his ghostly presence on the beach tells her ‘secrets she had known for centuries’ (p. 24), suggesting the continuity of those legends passed on between generations. Such is her affinity with the youth that she experiences a psychic transformation signified by the changing of her name from Mary to Moira, which she believes he renames her with his last breath.2 A pre-Christian form of Mary, this new name signifies a Trinitarian figure, at once spinner of the thread of life, its nurturer and its cutter.3 It derives from the Celtic myths and language to which Mary turns for explanation. But it also derives from Greek mythology, meaning fate or destiny, which accurately identifies the transformative significance of this naming for Mary. A more mundane explanation is that Moira is the name of the sailor’s wrecked ship, ironically heading for Canada, Mary’s final destination, but in this world multiple meanings coexist. By emigrating to Canada herself, Mary later goes ‘away’ in the more commonly understood sense, but through the more mythical and mystical dimensions of her journey Urquhart radically modifies the pioneer genre of her predecessors. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_6

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Unlike the young American hero driven by the imperative ‘Go West Young Man’, in search of freedom, Mary and her people are driven out of their homeland by famine: going West to Canada spells exile. Working with the history of her own Irish family, Urquhart follows the historical pioneers Moodie and Parr Traill, whose work she regards as the beginning of a continuum of Canadian writing, in writing about pioneer life on backwoods farms North of Lake Ontario. 4 In addition she makes use of the more public history of the Irish radical Thomas D’Arcy McGee, instrumental in creating the Canadian Confederation of 1867. Her novel appears then to contain at its heart a historical fiction set in the nineteenth century, enclosed by a framing narrative recorded by a contemporary Canadian woman. But the recurrent elements of Celtic Mythology through which Mary’s experience is to be understood mark a shift of genre away from nineteenth-century realism. Both landscape and journey have an additional spiritual dimension. In the four generations of Mary’s family the experience of being emigrants lingers long after the original displacement, in haunting memories, individual and collective. Urquhart therefore evades what she calls the ‘unidimensionality’ she believed was currently being espoused by the Canadian literary scene, searching instead for ‘resonance of a metaphoric nature’ (Vancouver Observer, p. 2). Such metaphoric resonances are achieved through the presence of different languages in the narrative, and the mythology inscribed in them. Although narrated in English, the novel constantly reminds the reader that this language has been imposed on the Irish by their colonial rulers, threatening the very existence of their native Gaelic. This language is at once a living source of meaning, and the vehicle that keeps alive their mythology—the ‘rich cloak of imagination and invented worlds’ (p. 44) which protects from and transcends reality—providing a form of escape from the grinding poverty of their lives. The mythological world it conjures up embodies in metaphorical terms the people’s history and values. The critic Libby Birch has suggested that once Mary has inscribed the dying sailor into her native mythology, she escapes into a faery world akin to that invoked by Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’ (p. 115): Come away, O human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

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Away from us he’s going. The solemn eyed. (ls 38–43)

Urquhart’s use of metaphor further emphasises the extent to which myth and the otherworldly permeate the islanders’ lives: the shipwreck that brings the sailor also brings ‘streams of golden tea poured from silver teapots’ (p. 22), the stuff of future legends. To the other islanders Mary has become a changeling. Sharing her belief in ‘the others’ (p.  22), the credence the islanders  give to Mary’s metamorphosis is evident in their fear of being led ‘astray’ (p. 20) by her, becoming ‘away’ like her, since there was ‘often one of [them] away’ (p.  23). Mary’s experience of a psychic, if not supernatural, vision of another world, the world of Ireland’s green and heroic past, ultimately leads her far away from her own community. While Celtic mythology can be seen as an escape for them all from the impoverished reality of their lives, for Mary it is not only a means of fulfilling her romantic dreamy nature, but a total change of identity as she moves from being the Mary named for the central icon of the Catholic church, so vital to the islanders’ lives, to Moira, who represents the ancient Mother Goddess. ‘Away’ is not therefore a ‘word that belongs to her alone’, as Mary believes. On the occasion of a wedding, the starving community turn themselves into the shape of a boat, calling ‘Away, boys, away’ (p. 112). Here is language made concrete, the longing for escape enacted in the only way possible. And yet to get ‘away’ is an experience full of ambiguity, inherent in the experience of emigration: escape can become exile, a continuing source of loss and grief. Urquhart has spoken of being ‘intrigued by the idea that immigrants are “away” in that they bring only replicas of themselves to the new land, leaving their old self behind’, in limbo between here and there (quoted by Birch, p. 115). Margaret Atwood goes further, describing all Euro-Canadians, as opposed to the First Nations, as in a sense immigrants, whose new country is ‘a place of exile in which the old country must be recreated, a desire which reflects a vision of the universe in which order is inherent’.5 But the ‘home’ which must be recreated is not necessarily a shared vision. If ‘home’ is where we start from, and wish to return, Mary’s discovery of Lake Moira enables her to be reborn as Moira, an accident of naming being enough to confirm her belief that her demon-lover has followed her. But her unique vision destroys any hope of a home together with the rest of her family. Her demon-lover had taught her ‘new words’ (p. 37), so that ‘home’ is no longer home as she once

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knew it. Her son Liam is too young to have strong memories of his Irish home: his harrowing memories of the journey from Ireland are suppressed by a vision of home embodied in the white house on the lake, the first sight to impress itself on him in the new land. This is his ‘remembered birth’ (p. 136), another reality transformed into the stuff of myth when years later the renamed Sailors Arms is floated down river to its original location, its ‘home’. ‘Home’ and ‘away’ are slippery terms, constantly shifting in meaning. Mary’s husband Brian, the schoolmaster from the mainland, has a more prosaic understanding of home. In Ontario he dreams of recreating an Irish home, but is frustrated by the sectarianism which follows the emigrants from their home, as much as by the massive Canadian Shield, the bedrock of Canadian stone that prevents his farming from ever being a success. Although he shares Mary’s belief that the magic and legends embodied in the ‘people’s poetry’ contain ‘great truths’ (p.  74), which will be lost if the old language is silenced, his feeling for the Gaelic language is that of the educated rational man. He attempts to teach Gaelic to his students at the risk of losing his job, because it carries within it the history and above all the poetry of his homeland. Refusing to accept that anyone can be ‘away’, after their marriage he teaches Mary the English language and the geography of a world outside her fairy world, and is temporarily able to bring her ‘home’, to the domestic world to which a young woman of her time and place rightly belongs. But Brian’s denial of everything fundamental to her belief system is indicative of the gulf between them, and he cannot ultimately provide a defence against the pull of the mythological world on Mary, which remains a constant, as nothing else does. Motherhood temporarily grounds her. After Liam’s birth, ‘the child alone was universe enough for Mary’ (p. 63), and, combined with her new ability to read, creates a bulwark against the call of the sea. Her second pregnancy also destroys for a time ‘the awful power of memory’ (p. 153), engaged as she is in the process of creating a new life. But even the birth of her daughter Eileen is not enough to keep her ‘home’ when the other world once more calls her away. Mary’s discovery of Lake Moira, and the ‘spirit of this lake’ (p. 181) which tells her that her spirit guide has followed her to Canada, compels her to join her faery lover, leaving the new baby. Staying ‘away’ for the rest of her life, Mary can only live in the new world as long as she can also inhabit the mythical world of the past. In spite of the challenging physical and emotional adventure involved in leaving everything she knows in Ireland for the totally unknown world

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of Canada, Mary’s greatest adventure begins here at Lake Moira, and she risks everything to complete it. Where Brian attempts to become a settler, Mary remains a true explorer, roaming the forest in search of the spirits that possessed her in Ireland, like the heroes of male adventure stories endlessly engaged in their quest, whether for a white whale or an ideal of freedom. Handing her role as mother over to her son Liam, whom she has prepared for this departure, she discards all societal and familial ties. She finds what she regards as her true self again—her Moira self—in the wild natural world that is the visible presence on earth of the mythological past. The first-nation Ojibway, Exodus Crow, whom she meets by Lake Moira, teaches her the ‘concealment, accuracy, and endurance’ (p. 184) she needs if she is to deal with the harsh physical realities of life alone by the lake. But of even more importance is his unquestioning belief in the ‘truth’ (p. 191) of her native stories. This establishes an understanding between them which remains beyond the reach of her own family. He makes possible her continuing spiritual exploration and growth, even at the cost of her bodily life. Returned to her family as a frozen corpse, mysteriously retaining her ‘red-gold hair’ (p. 173), by a ‘tall man with crow feathers in his hat’, she is not, unlike Snow White, to be returned to this world by the touch of those who love her. Mary’s death inscribes her firmly back into the world of mythology. Unlike, therefore, the British pioneers who sought to recreate the English world they had left behind, Mary finds the spiritual home she left behind in the spiritual world of the First Nations people of Canada, and in the Canadian wilderness. She immerses herself not only physically, but into a living mythology which exists in a continuity of belief and feeling with that of her Irish past. Disappearing into the forests, she seems to Liam to become one of the silver birch trees. There Mary feels a kinship with Deirdre of the Sorrows. Her continuing immersion in the mythological world of her ancestors paradoxically makes her more receptive to the history and landscape of her new world. Exodus Crow, festooned in black feathers evoking the feathered Irish poets of her past, becomes Mary’s spirit guide, the meaning of crow in Ojibway. The myth of the wilderness all around her, so powerful even for immigrants, is made manifest in his belief in the Manitou, the spirit which is everywhere. The continuity of his belief system with hers allows for the further evolution of her spiritual identity even at the cost of her physical life. Such connections further complicate the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘away’.

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There is, moreover, a dark historical reality underlying this sense of connection, since both the First Nation Indians and the Celtic Irish were threatened by British power, losing their lives and land along with their culture. Theirs is the affinity of the colonised. As Exodus tells Liam and Brian, the ‘same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our peoples’ (p. 184). Where Mary and Exodus see an order in the universe that exists in and for itself, the coloniser seeks to impose a new agricultural order which affirms human—specifically white—supremacy and need over that of the land. The resistance of the land is demonstrated through Brian’s failure to farm the land over the hard rock underlying his property, but modern technology enables later generations to exploit even that same rock by dynamiting and quarrying it. Mary’s desire to preserve the wilderness is related to her resistance to the domestic, to being tamed by family life, the domestication of woman being analogous to the conquest and ‘civilisation’ of the wilderness, as Atwood has suggested. Her life alone in the Canadian wilderness and her psychological immersion in the world of myth emphasise how far she has moved ‘away’ from women’s usual domestic sphere, even if that sphere is wider in the New World than in the Old. The identification of women with Nature has a very long history, as Anne Carson reminds us: ‘Women, in the ancient view, share this [uncultivated] territory spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a “natural” female affinity for all that is raw, formless and in need of the civilising hand of man’.6 But they are frequently—ironically—tamed by the very act of taming the natural world itself: as Elizabeth Brewster puts it in her poem ‘Local Graveyard’, ‘we…have broken the soil for you’.7 The immigrant’s view of Nature is always ambivalent, faith in the divine mother beloved of the Romantics being easily shaken by the land’s hostility to the human invader and to  the intruder’s attempts to reshape it. Traditionally women have similarly embodied both the potential satisfaction of human desire and potentially threatening hidden forces. In the process of settlement therefore, Atwood suggests, ‘something vital is killed, often Nature in the form of a woman’ (Survival, p. 123). In Away, however, women also play a central role in something culturally constructed, that is in perpetuating Irish mythology; the women concerned see it as a vital means of preventing Ireland from becoming alienated from its own history. The novel’s narrative structure provides a frame for Mary’s apparently unique story which draws out and together the history and memory which construct the identity inherited by its female characters. Its beginning unites the women of the O’Malley family

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in their tendency to extremes. The central figure in the novel’s present, Esther O’Malley Robertson, is ‘the last and most subdued of the extreme women’ (p. 3): ‘in this family all young girls are the same young girl and all old ladies are the same old lady’ (p. 325). Having inherited the farm from Mary’s daughter Eileen, her grandmother, Esther resembles her grandmother both as an old woman and as a child. Her red-gold hair is the force that draws yet another young man with ‘his dark curls, his pale hand and his bright green eye’ (p. 354) to swim to her shore to take refuge from a storm. The poetic use of the singular ‘hand’ and ‘eye’ underlines the mythic quality of these visitations, which re-enact her great-­grandmother’s history told to her so often by Eileen. It is this young man’s final absence, rather than his presence, which will ‘complete’ the story, repeating the past. If the integrity of personal memory constitutes the self, then Esther’s memory of her ancestors’ stories is also part of that self. As Atwood argues, ‘memory, history, and story all intersect’ at those moments when one ‘remembers’ an event at which one had not been actually present.8 ‘The moment when knowledge is passed from one mind to another’ (p. 127) occurs both through Brian’s teaching Mary about the world and through the spiritual truths she receives through ‘the dark darling one’ (p. 126), the young man from the sea. Similarly, when the emigrants leave their homes in Ireland, memories are perpetuated both through the poems of farewell they compose to their old landscape and through the groans of those left behind, a ‘long eulogy that those who survived would never tire of passing down to their children and their children’s children’ (p. 129). Memory, history and identity are, it appears, inseparable. The deep-rooted myths of the islanders which represent a version of their history stand in contrast to the folklore beloved of the Sedgwicks, their Anglo-Irish landlords, much of it made up by islanders not wishing to disappoint them. Osbert Sedgwick intends his poetry to give ‘voice to the sorrows of Ireland’ (p. 103), while his brother Gilbert draws the hedge school Brian has been forced to close in order to preserve it for posterity. The language they both use is what Susan Johnston calls ‘the sociolect of the educated class […] predicated on material prosperity which, interestingly enough, is often founded on property: the ownership and cultivation of land’.9 Different perceptions of the landscape represent different world views, that of the coloniser differing from that of the colonised. Both Sedgwicks want to commune ‘with the spirit of their country’s past’ (p. 39), but their immersion in the culture of the past blinds them to the present reality of a living, starving people. Similarly swept up in ‘the myth

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of the desire for freedom’ (p. 44), the brothers have no interest in the reality of Irish politics which speaks in freedom’s name. Observing the life of the tidepools under his microscope before painting them, Osbert finds that the miniature world vanishes as it evaporates, as will the world of his tenants in spite of his artistic homages. The collecting activities of the two brothers signify the power to own and control that belongs to the landlord and coloniser. Once the tidepools are exhausted, Osbert continues his search for ‘this forest tidepool of quivering life’ (p.  225) by following Mary to Canada, conflating two vanishing worlds in his mind. There his stories of Puffin Court, the ancestral home, conjure up a world so alien to the boy Liam as to sound like mythology itself, but his sister  Eileen sees the reality: Osbert is still the landlord. The tension between myth, history and perceived reality is, however, complex to negotiate for the colonised as well as the colonisers. Teaching the children of Irish immigrants, Brian is determined to expose the truth concealed by the official histories contained in the schoolbooks, teaching them instead ‘an entirely different history of the British Empire’ (p. 202), full of Ireland’s sorrow and misery. But he teaches the forbidden Gaelic words for famine alongside those for ‘harp’, ‘warrior’, ‘poet’ (p. 206), the line between history and myth blurring. It becomes even more blurred when myth is utilised to explain a real but unfamiliar present. Resistant though she is to Osbert, when he follows the family to Canada Mary’s daughter Eileen is fatally drawn to the myth of freedom that he purveys. When she, like her mother, falls in love with a mysterious stranger from the sea, Aidan Lanighan, she fatally misinterprets his purpose, fitting him into her father’s Celtic sagas, ‘translating from myth to life the songs her father had taught her’ (p. 296), imagining ‘mythical journeys’ with him (p. 322). Like the Sedgwick brothers she tries to take on the sorrows and grievances of her people, to become ‘the Patriot’s Bride’ celebrated in poetry. Following Aidan, the ‘patriot’ (p. 292), to Griffintown, where he is meeting a group of Fenians, Eileen believes she is one of the band of patriots she invents, which gives her ‘a role in the theatre of their lives’ (p. 293), but the real men Aidan apparently joins fail to match up to her vision of ‘warriors’. In attempting to make the myths her father taught her real, she enters ‘an inner theatre where a girl could build a prison’ (p. 296). The grim discovery that Aidan is a spy, infiltrating the Fenians in order to protect the politician D’Arcy McGee, turns her imagined world upside down. Imagining she was led by the truth, she has yet to realise that politics is the most graphic example of truth’s partiality. And her

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self-deception is as much personal as political. Aware that Aidan is the embodiment of her dream, she must imagine his words of love, since he never gives her any. When she gives him a lock of her hair, repeating her mother’s action, he leaves it behind him. In his absence, she tries to retain ‘a trace’ of him (p. 292), forgetting the one Gaelic verse which could have warned her, the words on her father’s dying lips: ‘Rian fir ar mhnaoi’ (p. 205): ‘the trace of a man on a woman’, as short-lived as ‘the trace of a bird on a branch’ or ‘the trace of a fish on a pool’ (epigram). Other kinds of relationship around Eileen, more grounded in reality, heighten the sense of unreality that surrounds her love affair with Aidan. Caught up in that fantasy world, Eileen forgets the real ‘branches that had often supported her’ (p. 292). Her relationship with the elusive Aidan is contrasted with the flourishing relationship between her brother Liam and Molly, the neighbour’s daughter ‘who loved the actual’ (p. 302) and gives birth to their four children. Unlike Eileen, immersed in the mythic past, Molly carries in her ‘the cells of both the old world and the new’ which will enable her to build a future. It is, therefore, appropriate that she should become the ‘real’, if not biological, mother of Eileen’s child by Aidan: Deirdre, so-called because of the sorrows. Abandoning her baby just as her mother abandoned her children, Eileen rejects the potential anchor of motherhood, the life of the body, which tethered even Mary ‘to the earth’ and home (p. 58), if only temporarily. Even the apparently more rooted relationship between Liam and Molly is, however, imbued with irony. For the colonised can easily become the coloniser. Having acquired land at Loughbreeze Beach with money from their former Irish landlord, Liam tries to evict Molly’s father, a squatter, from his land. Eileen therefore accuses him of becoming a landlord himself, with all their sense of ownership and rights: ‘the English took the land from the Indians same as they took it from the Irish. Then they just starve everybody out, or […] they evict them, or both’ (p. 279). Like her mother she identifies with the colonised, and insists on seeing the cycle of exploitation, the exploited turned exploiter, as well as the continuity of oppression. Some critics have, moreover, accused Urquhart herself of a form of literary colonisation, in so far as she appears to appropriate the experience of the First Nation peoples to validate the status of her white Europeans. The critic Marlene Goldman argues that the links established between Mary and Exodus Crow assert a spiritual kinship which consequently legitimises the Irish claim on the New World.10 Liam’s marriage to Molly, part Irish and part Ojibway, serves the same purpose, she suggests, further

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legitimising his claim on the land. Atwood too observes with some scepticism the recurrence of this ‘curious phenomenon, the desire among non-­ Natives to turn themselves into Natives; a desire that becomes entwined with a version of wilderness itself, not as a demonic ice-goddess who will claim you for her own, but as the repository of salvation and new life’.11 Regarding it as a form of nostalgia, she sees such attitudes as a consequence of the ‘greed and rapacious cruelty of white civilisation’ so that ‘living like the Natives to survive in the wilderness was translated into living like the Natives in the wilderness in order to survive’ such barbarity (p. 44). Persuasive as I find these arguments about the ‘indigenisation’ of the Irish settlers, I would argue that Urquhart is herself aware of the ironies involved here. The brutal effects of capitalism and industrialisation are clearly demonstrated in the final pages of the novel, with the ‘curse of the mines’ (p. 351) and the ensuing wealth of the Irish settlers. Rather than finding salvation and a new life in the wilderness, Mary and Brian both die young, unable to escape the far-reaching effects of colonisation even after crossing an ocean. Mary indeed becomes Atwood’s ‘ice-goddess’, the ultimate victim of the mythology which takes her ‘away’. When Eileen’s fantasy about Aidan is destroyed, it is moreover her mother’s voice she hears warning her, ‘this is what it is to be away[…].You are never present where you stand’ (p.  345). Eileen in turn warns her granddaughter Esther that there are many ways ‘of giving yourself away’ (p. 351). Her final message is in turn to not go ‘away’, but to ‘stay where you are, be where you are’, for she has ‘been away all [her] life’ (p. 351), still haunted by Aidan’s face, as her mother was by her sailor. In spite of the visits of her own young man from the sea, Esther appears to learn the lesson her grandmother’s narrative was intended to teach her and breaks the cycle. She is ‘claimed’ not by any man, but by the land destined to be hers: ‘the centre of the world, the ground on which she stood’ (p. 353) and is determined ‘never to go away’ (p. 9). It is nothing touched by the mythical, but cruel reality which finally forces her to leave Loughbreeze Beach, named for the place from which Mary’s story began. The development of the quarry crushes ‘into powder’ ‘the fossilized narratives of ancient migrations’ (p. 356), leaving space only for the present. For the Irish past has to take its place among other narratives, rather than becoming a master narrative, if this new country is to flourish. While Brian accuses D’Arcy McGee of betraying the revolutionaries, Aidan understands McGee’s desire to end the sectarian hatreds that have been

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imported from Ireland into Canada. He dreams of a unified country, wishing that ‘the new generation […] would inherit wholeness’. While Barbara Bruce argues that McGee’s vision depends on a ‘historical amnesia’ that is simply not realistic, erecting yet another myth, his legitimate concern is for the fate of the Irish in Canada in the present, putting the horrors of famine and immigration behind them. In contrast, like her foremothers, Esther is determined to preserve the history she has inherited from the collective memory, along with the responsibility to remember and pass it on, even though there is no one else left to listen. She believes in ‘the strength of memory, putting aside ephemeral, destroyable books’ (p.  134). As she recalls the old stories, she sees the merging of past and present, causing ‘one circle of experience to edge into the territory of another’ (p. 133), like a Venn diagram. The gold watch case she inherits from her mother contains not a timepiece but locks of golden hair in a circle, and a black crow’s feather, representing that continuity. Esther’s role as story-teller is, however, as full of ambiguities as the myths she has inherited. The apparent continuity is deceptive. The regretful but necessary break with the past is epitomised in Deirdre, Eileen’s child, whose presence in—or virtual absence from—the narrative belies the notion of continuity. Esther’s otherwise detailed family history remains silent on this child’s life, as if Deirdre’s mythical sorrows have themselves been silenced. The connection with the female line appears to be broken: all Eileen can tell Esther about her mother is that ‘she does not lean towards extremes’ (p. 355). Inheriting nothing from her parents, Eileen and Aidan, her life becomes absorbed instead into the narrative of Liam, Eileen’s brother, who suppresses all memories of the famine and maintains instead that his life began with his arrival in Ontario, and his sighting of the White House on the lake that ultimately becomes his home. Detached from the governing myths of her Irish ancestors, Esther enters a new world which itself has become mythicised. Urquhart’s use of this narrative framework creates a narrative therefore full of the past and sense of loss, while acknowledging the need to engage with the creation of a new world, and a new Canadian identity. The pain involved in such a process is symbolised by ‘the scream of the machinery’ (p. 356) used to demolish all signs of the immigrants’ original habitation, and the arrival of the cement company’s ship, The New Dominion. The history of Mary and the later generations of women like her is enclosed within the account of this destruction. Where the works of nineteenth-­ century settlers like Susanna Moodie are filled with nostalgia for the

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English countryside they cannot recreate in their new homeland, Urquhart’s novel is filled with the memory and desire for a less tangible world, equally impossible to recreate. While Mary attempts to transport the old world imaginatively rather than practically, she does so by identifying with the already doomed native people. Mary’s frozen corpse, in her buckskins, cannot be revived like a real-life Snow White. Beautiful but dead is the world that takes its women ‘away’ into a richer but unreal existence. Urquhart’s achievement in this complex and haunting novel is to contain within it an implicit critique of its own seductive mythology.

Notes 1. First published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, 1993. All references to this text will be taken from the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: 1995) and follow the relevant quotation in the text. 2. In the interests of clarity, however, I shall continue to use the name Mary throughout this essay. 3. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the name Moira, see Libby Birch, ‘The Irish female presence in Jane Urquhart’s fiction’, Canadian Woman Studies, 17 (1997), p. 115. 4. Interview, ‘VIWF: Jane Urquhart, author of Sanctuary Line’, The Vancouver Observer, 17 October 2010, p.  2 (http://www.vancouverobserver.com). 5. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972), p. 121. 6. ‘The Gender of Sound’, 1995, p. 124. Quoted Smyth Groening, p. 18. 7. Quoted Atwood, Survival, p. 129. 8. ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’,  AHR Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions (1998), 1503–1516 (p. 1505). 9. ‘Reconstructing the Wilderness: Margaret Atwood’s Reading of Susanna Moodie’ (www.uwo.ca?english/canadianpoetry/epjm/vol31/johnston. htm), p. 9. 10. ‘Talking Crow: Jane Urquhart’s Away’, in Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, ed. by H. Daziron-Ventura and M. Dvorak (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 110–41 (p. 133). 11. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 35.

CHAPTER 7

The Female Epic: Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The Return to Acadie

Tales of Canadian female adventurers are not only to be found in Anglo-­ Canadian historical fiction by women, since the tradition of female writing is equally strong in French-Canadian culture. Georgiana Colville suggests that women have always done the writing there, referring to the work of early settlers, travelogues, settler narratives and historical reports.1 In 1979 the French-Canadian novelist Antonine Maillet published such a novel which went on to be the first foreign work to win France’s most coveted literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. Originally titled Pélagie-la-charrette in both French and English editions, the English translation was republished as Pélagie: The Return to Acadie in 2004 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Acadie, also celebrated by the debut of the novel’s musical adaptation, Pélagie: An Acadian Odyssey.2 The title of the musical, like that of the new translation, places the emphasis on the Acadian history which is such a central element of the novel. The original title, however, places the emphasis on Pélagie herself, identified with the cart with which she leads the return home. And in so far as the novel explores what the narrator calls ‘a dialectic between life and death’,3 she herself, representing the forces of life, is also the force that dominates and drives this female epic. Pélagie’s journey, lasting ten years and beset with danger along the way, is epic by any standards. In 1755, in modern-day Nova Scotia, Grand Pré, the centre of the French colony of Acadie, which had existed peacefully for 150  years, was destroyed by the British, who accused the Acadians of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_7

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treason and shipped them into exile in the American South. This became known as Le Grand Dérangement, or the Great Deportation. The novel chronicles the northward journey made between 1770 and 1780 when Pélagie gathers up the survivors and heads home. It conforms to what Janet Giltrow and David Stouck describe as the typical ‘epic in the twentieth century […] more frequently a mode for stories of groups of people who remain politically oppressed, economically disadvantaged […]. And epic is at last a mode available to women to tell their stories’.4 The journey’s goal, nevertheless, remains heroic. From the first day of their Deportation, when they arrive in Georgia, Pélagie swears ‘to her ancestors to bring back one full cradle to her own country’ (p. 12). The passage of time and her own ageing make her original vow impossible to fulfil. But the narrative, like all epics, depicts the transforming of the hero into someone who embodies shared cultural memories, which grow into what W.  H. New calls ‘legends and myths of persistence and circumstance’.5 Paul Socken, discussing the links between Pélagie-la-charrette and the Bible, points out that it is only through the journey itself that the disparate group of travellers, ‘pas encore un peuple’ (p.  101) become a people, more specifically Pélagie’s people, when they join together to save the cart, turning themselves into ‘human stepping stones’ (p. 213).6 Both the identity of the people and their sense of home are created through the journey home itself. The novel therefore is yet another of Margaret Atwood’s narratives of survival. Maillet’s novel is, moreover, like the North American novels previously discussed, a response to a male-authored narrative, Henry Wadsworth Longellow’s narrative poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, published in 1847.7 The poem was inspired by an Acadian legend of a girl who was separated from her lover in the Dispersion, and spent her life looking for him only to find him dying in a hospital. After its initial success, selling 5000 copies in the first twelve months of publication, the poem retained its popularity, going through 270 editions and some 130 translations over the following 100 years.8 Longfellow seems to have been initially attracted by the stereotypically female qualities of Evangeline: ‘the best illustration of faithfulness and constancy that I have ever heard of or read’.9 The greater part of the poem, however, concerns the history of the Acadians, the lovers’ tragedy coming to represent the suffering of the people as a whole. And it is this aspect which seems to have accounted for the poem’s lasting popularity.10 Once translated into French, in 1865, it gained wide currency among Acadians, quickly establishing a connection between the

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poem and the struggle for survival of Acadian identity.11 Seeking to preserve their customs and language within an Anglophone world, so as to legitimise their claims to a distinct identity, as well as to improve their living conditions, the Acadians seized on Evangeline as a potent expression of their virtues and their suffering. This male writer’s attempt to speak for women gives way, however, to Maillet’s expression of the writer’s role to articulate the multiple suppressed voices of history. Long before starting to write Pélagie-la-charrette, Maillet expressed her distaste for Longfellow’s image of the Acadian woman, and her desire to replace it: ‘Cette nouvelle Evangeline …offrira á son homologue le contraste amusant d’une femme d’un certain âge, mère de six-sept enfants, á l’allure d’une Mére Courage’.12 Although Maillet ultimately dispenses with most of the children, and the comparison with Brecht’s Mother Courage is, I shall suggest, relatively superficial, Pélagie is totally unlike Evangeline in embodying all the traditional qualities of the heroic male leader: courage, endurance, a sense of purpose and a devotion to ‘her’ people are all strong within her. Her hair is likened to a lioness’s mane, suggesting her determination to ‘neither show fear nor take flight’ (24, 59). She also shows more autonomy than Biblical heroes like Moses, to whom she is sometimes compared.13 Throughout the account of the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land depicted in Exodus, verses begin, ‘And the Lord said unto Moses’, with the verses that follow describing how Moses instructs his people to carry out the Lord’s command.14 Pélagie makes her own decisions and tells her people what to do. ‘She is driven by the cry of the wild geese and a sense of ancestry and community, and a feeling for Life as opposed to Death’.15 The world of Evangeline is one in which individuals have no power against the larger forces of war, famine and disease. For Pélagie, however, there is no question that individual courage can defeat—or at least challenge—the forces which crush Evangeline and her lover. She never falters from pursuing her destiny of single-handedly bringing her people home, unlike Evangeline’s wanderings in pursuit of her lover, which end in the poor-house in Philadelphia. Pélagie’s is also a love story, the story of her love for Beausoleil-Broussard, who repeatedly re-enters her life and tempts her with the prospect of their reunion. But that love has to be sacrificed to her mission, and the people with whom she is totally identified: ‘In Charleston and Philadelphia, Beausoleil’s rival had been Acadie; in Salem, as he grew to understand, it was the cart’ (p. 221). Her story refutes both Longfellow’s gender assumptions and his view of a colonised people. She both embodies the values of

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her people and defends them against everything that threatens chaos or oblivion. But Pélagie’s sense of identity is also inseparable from her sense of place, of Grand Pré as her home. Naming is for her not a matter of appropriation, of labelling to assert discovery or possession, but of recall, of reiteration of the familiar names in danger of being forgotten once the Acadians are separated from their homes. Her own story as an individual is imbedded in a narrative that uses proper names as cultural markers, identifying each character, each place, each moment in terms that are instantly memorable and relate the individual to its wider narrative signification. The name of Grand Pré sounds as a kind of incantation throughout the narrative, not only a destination but a holy grail. The history of the people is unforgettably summed up in three terms: the Great Disruption, the Deportation and the Dispersal. Pelagie’s journey will provide the narrative for the Return. The people themselves are identified by names which both locate them genealogically as part of a line, but also differentiate them from previous family members with the same name in terms of their characteristics. Both continuity and individuality are thus insisted upon. These appositional noun phrases capture knowledge which could otherwise be lost. Pélagie LeBlanc herself, ‘first-of-the-name’ (p. 8), becomes indissolubly linked by name with the cart which is central to the main purpose of her life. Little before ranks of the same importance. Pélagie-­ the-­Grouch, ‘third of the name’ (p. 7) and distinguished by her temperament, is nevertheless the central repository of the cart’s history since she is Pélagie-the-Charrette’s descendant. For it is lineage, and the stories passed between one generation and the next, that validates such a history. These identifiers imprint themselves through repetition in the reader’s mind, and, by implication, on the collective memory of the Acadian listeners, deploying these and other conventions of epic form noted by Giltrow and Stouck: ‘genealogical enumeration, census-taking, and narrative set-­ pieces like the ritual slaughter of an ox or the description of a wedding feast, strategies for telling the story of a whole people, a story that will be rehearsed over generations as heritage’ (p. 742). For while recounting the story of Acadie, Maillet is simultaneously showing us its re-creation. In this novel story-telling is no mere entertainment, for the storyteller is the link between a people and its past. It not simply records a people’s history; it creates it. It does indeed have a vital role to play in preserving and sharing the memory of brutal acts carried out against the dispersed Acadians, such as that reported by Agnés Dugas

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Landry one hundred years later: ‘the massacre at Cap-de-Sable was the last shameful act the English could swallow, because six generations of storytellers and rootdelvers vowed to pass on the true story from forebear to father to offspring, which means that Major Prebble’s descendants will have to stay clear of Cap-de-Sable for a long time to come’ (p. 116). But it is above all the means of creating a people and a nation anew. As the people of the cart discover, none of those they meet on their journey have heard of Acadie (p. 158), so it is up to them to restore it to the common history. Their recurrent cry, ‘And shit to his British Majesty’ (p. 224), is both a battle cry against their oppressors and an expression of communal purpose and identity as powerful as any national anthem. It is part of the answer to those who, like the critic L.  Thériault in 1868 criticised the Acadian claim to a distinctive identity, because one cannot grant nationality to a people unless they stand for something, and unless they have ‘une vie propre, un caractére distinctif…un ensemble d’idées, de moeurs, de faits politiques, d’historie, de direction vers un but nettement défini et clair pour tout le monde’.16 Pélagie-la-charette demonstrates the creation of an Acadian identity centred less on the Deportation than on the epic return, displacing the image of Acadian victimhood with a more forceful image of courage and resilience embodied in Pélagie herself. Just as the world-famous Longfellow had through Evangeline brought the fate of a struggling minority into public view, so Maillet shows the Acadians doing it for themselves, with Pélagie earning herself a privileged place in Acadian history through her leadership. Like all such histories, it also acquires the status of myth. As the small group who started out on the epic journey are joined along the way by others, new stories are added, with their own ritual and folkloric elements. The homeliest words and acts become, through repetition and context, invested with a meaning that accrues to the myth of Acadian identity. More than simple ‘facts’ are needed to create the history of a nation. The use and repetition of ritual invest the mundane and quotidian with something of the sacred. When a group of three hungry Marylanders ask for help, Pélagie offers them a drink from ‘the so-called cup of hospitality, a ritual cup saved from the Great Disruption’, accompanying it with the ‘ritual’ words, “Make yourselves at home”’ (p. 155). When an ox is killed for food, the act takes on the character of a religious sacrifice, a ‘sacrifice within the rites’ (p. 158). Nor are the more fantastic or supernatural types of material missing from this history. While the story’s credibility is established on a historical level, the novel’s Rabelaisian and satiric elements,

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using earthy humour, caricature and bold naturalism, combine with the fantastic including folkloric details which free the imagination from the strictures of realism and affirm the compatibility of spiritual and political goals.17 Beausoleil himself ‘sprang from a people of storytellers’ (p. 148), and his description of his ship’s experience of ice, in which his crew become literally frozen stiff, so that time stands still for a quarter of a century (p. 149), combines with whiskey to entrance his English captor, the Lord Commander of the Garrison in Charleston. Since the ship was believed to have sunk with all her Acadian crew in 1755, such a tale sits easily with the concept of a ship of ghosts, so that the Englishman is inspired to refit the ship of his former captives and release men and ship, the narrative thus deploying a common trope in mythical tales. Once spun, the tale of ‘the ship of ice’ (p. 143) becomes part of the shared history of the travellers, passed down to the Grouch and her circle. Almost as a verification of such unlikely events, every storyteller in the Grouch’s circle ‘raised the ante with his own sea visions and apparitions’ (p. 143). Music and song similarly contribute to the mythic significance of the otherwise ordinary, as well as counteracting the squealing of the cart’s wheels. They therefore both ameliorate the grim reality of life on the carts and possess almost magical qualities. When the ‘Three Robin Hoods of the Seas’, the sailors left behind by Beausoleil to assist the travellers, fall into an Iroquois trap while attempting to catch up with the wagons, the seductive and evocative sounds of Maxime Basque’s reed flute cast a kind of spell on their captors and save their lives (p. 164). Even when the travellers have to surrender their last remaining instrument, a violin, as a form of barter in exchange for a ferry crossing, the musical tradition is not abandoned, since at the Acadians’ first wedding feast without instruments, the bodies of the exiles themselves provide music, on spoons and thighs, with a bass line created by Célina’s clubfoot, establishing a new tradition, ‘the Clubfoot reel’ which has ‘enlivened accordionists’ repertoires from that day to this’ (p. 181). The violin has to be surrendered in order to save the only other item with enough potential value to be accepted as barter— the chest of the Bourgeois family. The chest carries particular symbolic force since its contents are never revealed, although later generations of storytellers use their imaginations to fill it with precious goods. The unidentified contents of the chest are given precedence over the material specificity of the violin by Pélagie, because, although unspecified, the contents represent all that remains of the family’s former life. Carried with them for six years, the chest’s outward structure contains a quasi-religious

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space so that it becomes ‘an oratory, a church, a cathedral’ (p. 168). To surrender it now would mean abandoning everything that unites the Bourgeois and gives them their identity. As always, therefore, Pélagie chooses that intangible ‘life’ represented by the chest. When the chest does have inevitably to be surrendered to preserve life, its mythical status is only enhanced, so that it turns into ‘a paradise lost’ (p. 169). Maillet’s use of such traditions and motifs creates a symbolic structure for the epic journey home which has caused it to be compared to the Odyssey, and to the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land, both redolent of their own central symbols and motifs.18 The sacrifice of the violin is only one of the symbolic acts which are peripheral to the overarching conflict which provides the narrative’s central myth, yet serve to reinforce its potency: the conflict between Pélagie’s charrette, the Cart of Life and the Cart of Death, a ‘sombre contraption, with neither doors nor lamps, drawn throughout the world by six spanking black horses since the beginning of time’ (p. 11). Pélagie’s life-saving charrette has its dark shadow in old man Bélonie’s phantom cart. In spite of being a phantom—or rather because of its phantom status, intangible and therefore indestructible—the Cart of Death exercises a very real power over the people of the cart, since it embodies the fear and suffering they have endured for so many years, including the many deaths they have seen—and still see—since their exile. It also embodies the fear that the dream and reality of Acadia will inevitably become extinct. For the conflict between the carts not only represents the conflict between hope and despair, but also between two conflicting versions of history. Generations later, as the novel’s outer narrative frame demonstrates, Pélagie-the-­ Grouch’s claims to be the repository of the nation’s history will be challenged by those of old Bélonie’s great-grandson. This conflict between Life and Death is also gendered, since Pélagie— often described as ‘la mère Pélagie’ (p. 66)—is presented as a mother both to her own children and to the group as a whole, and she also refers to her cart as ‘she’ (p. 253). Some critics have compared her to Brecht’s Mother Courage, references to the play being common in early reviews of the novel,19 both characters obviously embodying both motherhood and courage. But while Mother Courage is a victim of history, Pélagie is determined to change its course, repeating in reverse the historical journey that took her people south. The courage of Brecht’s Mutter is never in doubt, but she is driven above all by self-preservation, always putting business first, even above her children. Her maternal instincts are thus partially

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suppressed, while Pélagie’s merely expand to encompass every addition to the column of exiles, welcoming every stray. Her dedication is nowhere more apparent than in her sharing her breast milk with the newborns in Georgia, even though this puts her own daughter’s life at risk (p. 17). Her responsibility for her ‘children’ will not be relinquished until she reaches Acadia once more, and can pass it on to her daughter Madeleine. Pélagie is not the only heroic woman in the novel, since ‘Jeanne Aucoin of the great moments[…]had righted an overturned boat in the icy waters of the French bay, had revived the drowning’ (p. 125). But even she loses her nerve during moments when Pélagie stands firm. Women in general are represented as being essential to the survival of the group: ‘If Acadie hadn’t perished body and soul in the Great Disruption, it was thanks to women’ (p, 120), acting as mothers and carers. Apart from Pélagie herself, ‘Celina, healer and midwife’ (p. 21), stands out. She is the first to take care of the orphan Catoune, when the child is found in the wrong ship during the Great Disruption, while Pélagie takes over the responsibility, sending her daughter off in search of milk for Catoune when she reappears in the road before the cart. Celina later works ‘miracles’ in the seventh year of the journey, when the wagons are hit by all the diseases following freezing rain and floods in New England. The roles played by Pélagie and the other strong women of the carts inevitably stand in contrast to the narrative of the male-led wagon train which has become so familiar through the genre of the Western. The idea of a return to a promised land which is an old land differentiates the narrative clearly from the explorer narratives of men like Alexander Mackenzie and David Thompson which record the opening up of new territories.20 Nor is there that repudiation of home and family in favour of freedom so common in the male-oriented canonical novels of the United States discussed in the first part of this study. Instead the emphasis is on the survival of the group and ensuring its return home. Men are more likely to be perceived as a threat to the safe return home. This is true even of Pélagie’s beloved Beausoleil. Beausoleil-Broussard’s return home by sea is a distinctly male adventure, driven in part by the desire to rescue and be reunited with the woman he loves. Where she has only an old cart, he is captain of the Pembroke, renamed the Grand’Goule, after he overwhelms the British crew transporting him and other deportees into exile. He sails in parallel to Pélagie’s wagon trail, repeatedly appearing to assist in the exiles’ return, and crucially saving Pélagie’s cart from the swamps of Salem. But even he unwittingly threatens the survival of the group by desiring to

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remove Pélagie to safety. Where Pélagie’s quest is rooted firmly in the endurance and tedium of day-to-day reality, his sporadic appearances belong rightly to the realm of legend, embodied in his ‘phantom ship’, so that his quest appears to be detached from the everyday and to become a search for something more intangible and timeless. Once he reaches his ostensible goal, and discovers Pélagie has not survived the journey, he sails off into the proverbial sunset: ‘he set to sea again […], with his giant and his fool in his four-master without flag or home port, absurd, intrepid, heroic, swooping like an albatross over the scud of the waves, flying toward impossible horizons, toward lost kingdoms, entering upright into the legends of his land’ (p. 254). He does not ultimately share Pélagie’s identification with her people. Beausoleil’s phantom ship, therefore, for all its promise of salvation, inevitably reverberates to the more overt threat represented by Bélonie’s phantom cart, his cart of death. No hero, the ageing raconteur is a constant reminder of the impending death that threatens them all. He embodies furthermore the symbolic authority of patriarchy, while the matriarchy that evolves through the journey is created out of practical necessity, and develops into a tangible presence challenging patriarchal authority. When Pélagie’s daughter marries Charles-Auguste doing a period of respite in Philadelphia, Jean-Baptiste Allain, who has rescued the crucifix from the burning church before being deported, assumes the authority invested in the cross and prepares the traditional litany requiring the wife to ‘love, honour and obey’. Pélagie’s response is sardonically dismissive of this out-­ of-­date philosophy: Pélagie cocked an eyebrow at this authority […]. Her daughter Madeleine hadn’t known the old ways before the Great Disruption. Most family chiefs had perished in the catastrophe, carrying their batons of authority received in the Garden of Eden with them to the depths of the woods or seas. As a result, the women had to face the enemy and adversity alone and wield the sceptre of the head of the family. As posthumous child of her father and ancestors, Madeleine knew only this regime. Pélagie could count on her to continue the line. (p. 177)

This is the novel’s most explicit declaration that a new female-centred society has been founded based on principles which challenge those of the old patriarchy.

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While the patriarchs are therefore anxious to preserve the history in which their status is inscribed, the women are more concerned to preserve lives. And in doing so they become responsible for the creation of a new myth—the myth of the Cart of Life—which challenges the ancient myth of the Wagon of Death. And in the final ‘combat of the carts’ (p. 211), a battle of epic proportions, the Cart of Life wins. Yet this is only achieved through the joining together of male and female members of the group, since it is through the sheer physical strength and courage of the giant P’tite Goule, Beausoleil and the rest of the men that the women are rescued from the Cart of Life embedded in the swamp, and the Cart itself is retrieved. But there is a second metaphysical conflict also at play here, since everyone present is aware that ‘Death in person had entered the lists’ (p. 211). While the brave sea captain is warned against tempting Fate and Death by re-entering the swamp for the third time to save the cart (p. 211), Bélonie, uttering his first cry since the Great Disruption, abandons his allegiance to the Wagon of Death and is seen to be ‘entering the fray like the rest’ (p. 213). Debating with Death, he delays the Wagon long enough for the men to save the Cart of Life. And when Bélonie’s own life seems to be threatened, the Wagon of Death is finally dispatched by Pélagie’s single cry of ‘Life’ (p. 215): ‘it was the grandest moment in the heroine of Acadie’s life. For the first time, her cart had vanquished the other’ (p. 217) In this moment the usual gender boundaries seem to be unsettled, since throughout this epic contest, Old Bélonie has referred to the Wagon of Death as female: ‘the old hag’, ‘the dirty slut’ (pp. 216, 217). But these terms recall the triple goddess of Greek mythology: maiden, mother and crone, or indeed the three roles traditionally allotted to women of virgin, mother and whore. In her role as Mother of the Carts, Pélagie finally displaces the negative aspects of womanhood which have been so fundamental a part in patriarchal thought. Although it takes a hundred years for the Acadians to recover sufficiently to recall that history, its retelling perpetuates the original gendered conflict between the carts. Those listening to the stories in the 1880s reconstitute the community created by the journey itself, while the descendants of Bélonie and Pélagie battle for control of the narrative. The novel’s very complex narrative is framed by the Prologue and Epilogue, spoken by an unnamed cousin of Louis à Bélonie. Louis claims to have inherited his story through an oral tradition extending uninterrupted back to Old Bélonie, who accompanied the original Pélagie on her journey. The version of this ‘official’ storyteller, responsible for retaining and passing on

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the old history, is, however, repeatedly contested by the voice of Pélagie-­ the-­Grouch, a descendant of Pélagie herself, whose storytelling often conflicts with that of the Bélonie line, enabling an antiphonal voice to counterpoint that of Bélonie’s story. On the one hand, Bélonie, ‘storyteller and chronicler by trade’ (p.  8), claims a knowledge of names and details that verify the truth of his tale, while Pélagie-the-Grouch knows herself to be the rightful owner of their history by virtue of her maternal inheritance, her bodily connection with the original Pélagie. To these later generations, each would-be keeper of the group’s history insists on their own version of events, shaped by different and gendered motives. While Bélonie puts his faith in the power of the patriarchal word, names being passed on through the father’s line, Pélagie-the-Grouch’s rests in the indisputable existence of the maternal body. But together they constitute the totality of the Acadian heritage: the names which indicate genealogy, distinctive forms of the French language, together with customs and rituals created from necessity, link the present to the past in a vibrant oral storytelling tradition.21 The constant bickering and challenging within and between families are an important source of the novel’s humour, turning the historical narrative of ten years into a living issue. In this contested history, the female preoccupations with the mundane but crucial physical necessities and life cycles act as a constant corrective to masculine claims of authority. Similarly, Pélagie is only too aware of the pains experienced by the individual body and mind, and will not allow Bélonie to turn the death of the little boy Frédéric into an abstraction, a parable about ‘the childhood of our people’ (p. 44), The novel’s narrative is repeatedly punctuated by picaresque tales, often marking pauses on the journey and delving into the recent lives and experiences of the travellers, as well as the real historical events taking place as they pass through America. Pélagie does not learn Beausoleil’s complete story until well after the event, since his ship is caught up in the American War of Independence. The rescue of a black slave in Charleston, the discovery of an Acadian colony thriving in Catholic Maryland and the clash with hostile loyalists in Boston, and even the unfinished stories, such as that of the mystery of the LeBlanc hidden treasure (p. 145), all serve a dual function, fleshing out the reader’s sense of the living community while also adding to its history. As other families join the cart, their stories are added to those of the other deportees in such a way that not only do the boundaries between past and present become blurred, but also the boundaries between time and place: the arrival of young Cormier,

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representing a group of deportees scraping a miserable existence in the place they have christened Beaufort, is situated not in time so much as in the place of Port-Royal, since that is the place that Bélonie’s history of the journey has reached. Catoune’s role as delver, searching for healing herbs, also signifies her role as ‘delver of lineages and relationships’ (p. 25), suggesting the role she and others play in recalling the past in order to recuperate significant events. As well as contributing to the epic qualities of the novel, all such tales disrupt its linear thrust, acting as a reminder that the narrative is not simply that of a journey but that of the rich variety of lives lived out over the ten years it takes, lives nurtured by the women of the wagons. Conflicting as they often do, these different narratives seem to have little claim to historical status. Each speaker accuses the other of fantasies. Pélagie-the-Grouch and Louis-Bélonie disagree as to whether his ancestor travelled in her ancestor’s cart, or pulled his own, and Louis-à-Bélonie at moments claims to have seen the ghost ship himself (p. 21). The complexity with which the narrative passes from one time-frame to another, from one speaker to another, challenges the reader’s constantly shifting sense of the narrative’s status. The unnamed framing narrator, identified only as the cousin of Louis-à-Bélonie, engages explicitly with this problem at times, admitting the difficulty of identifying sources for instance for the ‘story of the miseries and glories of the Grand’Goule in that terrible year 1774’ (p.  141). And yet, as that narrator, cousin of Louis-à-Bélonie, observes a century later, sometimes history is preserved and passed on only through such oral traditions (p. 9). Using an educated language in the past tense to bind together different stages of the journey, this narrator also succeeds in representing the whole range of Acadian dialect either through free indirect speech, or through dialogue itself. Although related to the Bélonies, this ‘child of the cart’ (p.  7) is able to incorporate the stories of both competing factions into a single narrative, retaining its contradictions and uncertainties. Maillet’s narrative technique therefore repeatedly draws attention to the presence of multiple voices and views, as well as the underlying narrative that binds and ultimately creates a people. Her novel is polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense, assimilating multiple voices into a coherent narrative.22 The idea of any more authoritative history is rendered laughable, as different versions of past events collide, often playfully, with each other. The apparent unreliability of oral history paradoxically affirms the individual truths that constitute any history, written or otherwise.

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The very idea of an undisputed version of the past is all the more questionable when dealing with the history of the oppressed and marginalised: it has become a truism that written history is the preserve of the conqueror, the coloniser. This being the case, a dispossessed people may have to rely on their oral inheritance to keep their story alive. Memory, however fallible, may be its only repository. Over generations individual memories coalesce to become the collective memory of the people. As Giltrow and Stouck put it, ‘whereas the powerful conserve the past in the interest of hegemony, the overpowered maintain the past in the interests of resistance’ (p. 739). They concur with Maillet’s own view: ‘Nous avons survécu parce que nous refusions d’oublier’.23 As her narrator observes, ‘without these story-tellers […] history would have rolled over and died at the end of every century’. The narrator concludes the novel’s Prelude with a note of satisfaction: ‘After all that, just try to tell me, who every morning shines up my sixteen quarters of cart, that a people who can’t read can’t have a history’ (p. 9). By drawing attention to the existence of differing voices, Maillet further challenges the possibility of a definitive version of events. Pélagie’s final act in the creation and salvation of her people is her most direct challenge to the symbolic patriarchal order. Nothing is to be written, but she stuffs in her apron pocket ‘a stock of words, ancient words, words sprung naked from her grandsires’ gullets’. These are not to be appropriated ‘as a heritage for foreign throats’, but are to live in Acadie. Also into her pocket go ‘all those legends and tales …that her line had been passing on since the beginning of time’, ‘beliefs and customs hung round her neck like a family jewel’ together with ‘the history of her people’ (p.  250). Finally she adds her own family history and her beloved Beausoleil. There is no separation between the language of the everyday and that of the ritual, between the experience of the individual and the experience of the many. Through this process Pélagie comes to the realisation that the disparate families and individuals who completed the journey home have ‘become a people’, ‘her people’ (p. 251). The physical journey is inseparable from the narratives that have accompanied it and defined it. Her second realisation is that although the Acadie they left behind is gone, and they must move on to more habitable land, it does not matter, since ‘it’s men who make the land and not the land who makes the men’ (p. 251), so that wherever they make their final resting place will become a new Acadie. This distinction between people and place marks a significant change in attitude, since the physical goal which once drove the

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travellers has been replaced by their acquired sense of cultural and social identity. The writer’s role, as Maillet sees it, is to make articulate such suppressed voices, placing herself at the juncture of the oral and the literary: ‘je me situé la jointure de la tradition orale et de l’écriture … Dans un sense, je me dis que j’arrive trop tard. Je reste plus á l’aise avec ma gueule, avec mes mains, avec mes yeux, enfin tout mon comportement’.24 And yet although she is a successful dramatist,25 she chooses in this case to use written form to reach a wider audience, even though the novel itself consistently disparages the notion that only the written word can secure memory. As Giltrow and Stouck put it, ‘Maillet invokes the context of performance and tradition for her narrative of the Acadian people, repositioning those conventions in a modern literary genre’ (p. 743). If the representation of the oral narrative in written form hovers at a ‘juncture’ between two systems of representation, it further defies the hegemony of literary culture and the ‘history’ of the conquerors. Rejecting the idea of a central narrative authority, Maillet sees even herself not as ‘a spokesman’ but as ‘speech’, a single word in the whole language of Acadia.26 In doing so, she writes in the tradition of feminist historiographic metafiction as defined by Linda Hutcheon.27 Just as the novel’s characters and plot celebrate matriarchy and female values against the symbolic but often deadly authority of patriarchy, its narrative structure and style deploy similarly subversive techniques. By escaping the confines of Realism, and allowing for alternative histories which challenge the very concept of historical authority, such fiction constitutes what Lynn Pykett calls an attempt to recover a ‘usable past’, fit to take its part in the novelist’s struggle against dominant ideologies.28 While Longfellow’s Evangeline focuses on a male-defined ideal of woman, romanticised in relation to her lover, and a similarly passive view of Acadians as innocent and voiceless victims, Maillet’s Pelagie centres upon an unidealised middle-aged woman given to foul language, argument and aggression. Her Acadians are more robust and proactive than Longfellow’s, since she extends his focus on the exile to cover their epic return. Her challenge to her predecessor is both historical and deeply personal. By dedicating the novel to her mother Virginie Cormier, Maillet connects the world of her novel, including the birth of the child of that name born on the journey, directly to her own heritage, the present and the ongoing struggle for Acadian identity. Her novel asks not to be taken as the truth, only as a succession of memories jostling for the right to be heard, which even in their contradictions demand a place in the ‘history’ of Acadia.

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Notes 1. ‘Expats or Not’, Contemporary Women’s Writing in the Americas, Vol 3 (Lewiston: E. Mellen, 1996), pp. 349–65 (p. 355). 2. The drama was a co-production by Vincent de Tourdonnet (book and lyrics) and Allen Cole (book and music) and first performed in Toronto. 3. Antonine Maillet, Pélagie: The return to Acadie, trans. by Philip Stratford (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1988), p. 118. The novel was first published in French as Pélagie-la-charette (Montreal: Leméac Editeur, 1982). All further page references will refer to the English edition, and will follow the relevant quotation in the text. 4. ‘“Survivors of the Night”: The Language and Politics of  Epic in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-charrette’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 71 (2002), 735–754 (p. 741). I am indebted to this excellent article for some of my thinking about epic in this novel.  5. A History of Canadian Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 46. 6. ‘The Bible and Myth in Antonine Maillet’s Plagie-la-Charette (sic)’, Studies in Canadian  Literature, 12 (1987). https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index. php/SCL/article/view/8065. 7. See J.W.  Bowker and J.A.  Russell, ‘The Background of Longfellow’s Evangeline’, Queen’s Quarterly, 1932, p. 489 for an account of the conversation with Nathaniel Hawthorne which is said to be the origin of Longfellow’s interest. 8. See Naomi Griffiths, ‘Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend’, Acadiansis, 28–41 (p. 28). 9. Quoted in F.A. Landry, ‘The historical origin of the poem Evangeline’, La Societé Historique Acadianne, 23 (1969), p. 114. 10. But see A.C. Higgins, ‘Evangeline’s Mission: Anti-Catholicism, Nativism, and Unitarianism in Longfellow’s Evangeline’, Religion and the Arts, 13 (2009), 547–568 for the ways in which Longfellow interprets that history so as to hint at a justification of the Expulsion on the part of the colonial troops, and to portray the Acadians in Louisiana not as refugees but as immigrants with a potentially bright future. 11. See Griffiths for a detailed account of this process. 12. Quoted by Michele  Lacombe, ‘Narrative, Carnival and Parody: Intertextuality in Antonine Maillet’s  Pélagie-la-Charette’,  Canadian Literature, 116 (1988), 43–56 (p. 49). 13. See Socken. 14. Chapter 19 provides a particularly good example. 15. Flora Alexander, correspondence 26 April 2018. 16. Quoted in Griffiths, p. 37.

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17. In her PhD, later published in book form, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (1971), Maillet argues that the Medieval traditions on which Rabelais drew are alive and flourishing in the folklore of Acadie, and that her rural Acadien world would be recognisable to him. 18. See, in particular, Socken. 19. See Michael Cardy and Dulcie M. Engel, ‘Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-­ Charrette: An Acadian Mother Courage?’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 157–169, for a fuller consideration of this issue. 20. Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal, on the River St Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; In the Years 1789 and 1793; and David Thompson, Travels in Western North America 1784–1812. 21. In their excellent analysis of the novel’s epic qualities, Janet Giltrow and David Stouck suggest that Pélagie-the-Grouch, in her insistence on the primacy of Pelagie’s genealogy, is attempting to create a more closed epic, one of Bakhtin’s Grand Narratives, as opposed to the fluidity and generosity afforded by the inclusion of the alternative voices Antonine Maillet (p. 745). 22. The Russian critic Mikhail  Bakhtin argues that all novels are polyphonic by nature, employing multiple voices through narrative and dialogue, but that what he calls the ‘dialogic’ text draws attention to the polyphony rather than creating the sense of a unified view characteristic of monologic texts. See ‘The Dialogic Imagination’, The Bakhtin Reader, ed. by Pam Morris (Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 114–22.  23. Interview with Liano  Petroni, ‘Histoire, fiction et vie: langue, forme, mémoire: Un entretien sur  Pélagie-la-Charrette, Francofonia, 2 (1982), 3-17, p. 14.  24. Quoted by Giltrow and Stouck, p. 742. 25. Her plays include Evangéline Deusse (1976), Maillet’s earliest confrontation with Longfellow’s poem, in which her witty and aggressive heroine scoffs at his heroine’s passivity and weakness. 26. ‘The Search for a Narrative Voice’, Journal of Popular Culture, 2000, p. 12. 27. See A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 5. 28. ‘The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History’, Critical Quarterly, 29 (1987), 71–7 (p. 76).

CHAPTER 8

Conquistador’s Moll or Mother of the Nation? Laura Esquivel, Malinche

‘Five hundred men and a single woman versus an army of one million warriors’: Colin Falconer’s summary of his bestseller Aztec: The Story of Cortés and La Malinche 1505–1529 undeniably grabs attention.1 And yet this single woman, La Malinche, is little known outside Latin America, even among feminist readers and historians, judging from the reactions of my colleagues. In her native country Mexico, however, she is still a controversial and much discussed figure. For acting as a translator for Hernán Cortés at the head of his Conquistadors, she has been accused of betraying the native population, many of her accusers exploiting the similarity between the Spanish word for translator—traductor—and that for traitor—traidora to make their point. Her name has been turned into an epithet— Malinchista or Malinchismo—designating someone who joins the enemy against their own people. Santillana, the publisher who first suggested that Laura Esquivel should fictionalise the life of this controversial figure, nevertheless only felt able to publish Malinche in Mexico after it had been published in North America, first in Spanish and then in English.2 In her account of Cortés’s conquests in what was then the Aztec Empire, Esquivel presents events from the perspective of Malinalli (La Malinche’s birth name), whose interior life could only be guessed at from the existing histories of the period. Her role as she saw it was ‘to imagine Malinalli’s personality and how she interpreted what she saw and experienced. … Before you judge a person’s behaviour you have to analyse their beliefs’.3 Seeing Malinalli’s primary motive in overthrowing the Aztec Empire as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_8

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the restoration of the spiritual legacy of her Nahuatl ancestors, Esquivel proceeds not only to rehabilitate a much denigrated individual, but to explore conflicting forms of belief. The novel dramatises the defeat by patriarchy of matriarchal religions based on a Mother Goddess, while at the same time suggesting the possibility of its rebirth. Historically speaking, little is known of La Malinche’s life. Biographer Lopez de Gomara published a version of the conquest which one of Cortés’s footsoldiers, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, felt the need to refute.4 Diaz became the main source for La Malinche’s biography, although some of her words and actions were also recorded by Cortés himself in letters. The ‘facts’ of Malinche’s life available to Esquival are therefore few. Even her name is problematic since it is routinely changed by others. Born as Malinalli, she was sold to the Mayans as a slave and later given to the Spanish, who baptised her as Marina. Those, like Diaz, who respected her, usually referred to her as Dona Marina. He affirmed her noble Indian lineage in order to make her a worthy founder of the new country. Marina became Malintzin, an Aztec corruption, which was in turn corrupted into Malinche, or La Malinche as she is more often known in popular literature. Esquival, however, calls her novel simply Malinche, focusing on her individuality and her unique felt experience as opposed to the symbolic figure she became. Throughout the novel itself she uses the more personal Malinalli, again refusing the multiple meanings attached to La Malinche historically. For these minimal ‘facts’ have subsequently been interpreted in many ways, according to the bias and motivation of the interpreter. The title of Sandra Messinger Cypess’s scholarly study, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From history to myth, makes clear the purpose of her study: to demonstrate how various apologists for very different causes have used the meagre facts of La Malinche’s life as the framework for narratives which could be used to support different ideologies. A heroine for the Spanish conquerors became a traitor and temptress to the Nationalists once Mexico won its independence from Spain. More sympathetic interpreters attempt to reconcile these two opposing views by seeing La Malinche as a scapegoat, made to carry all the blame for the conquest of the Aztecs. Esquival makes it clear that the pre-Columbian Amerindian world was composed of many nations, in addition to the Aztecs, and that the pre-Hispanic sociopolitical system was composed of tribal groups with complicated alliances. It is these which enabled Cortés to amplify his small band of warriors by recruiting others hostile to the Aztecs, such as those conquered by them

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who were also compelled to pay a heavy tribute. Malinche’s role as traitor is therefore questionable since the Mexican nation which later reviled her was not yet in existence, and she herself belonged to a people (the Nahuatl) who had been defeated by the people who called themselves Mexicans after settling in Mexico, although we know them as the Aztecs. Actively positive views of La Malinche are those promulgated most famously by the author Octavio Paz, who sees her as the Mother of the Mestizos, the race descended from the union of the Spanish and indigenous Amerindian culture.5 Moving on from the earlier stages of the myth’s formation in which Malinche is Eve, she thus becomes the semi-divine Mother. More recently she has become part of the cultural heritage of Chicana women and a focus of feminist revisioning, in reaction to the negative representations of La Malinche which are seen to reflect badly upon all Mexican women, seen as sexual objects and inferior moral beings. In this reading the conquest itself is seen as gendered, Amerindian women like La Malinche being used, abused and discarded, according to the needs of the male conquerors. The woman Malinche herself disappears behind signs reflecting changing cultural agenda. Although in this process this Mother of the Mexican people becomes a figure of veneration, the reality of Malinche’s individual experience is expunged from the record, or remains absent from it. The importance and longevity of these signs are evident in the number of popular and serious literary works in which La Malinche features. Apart from writers interested in her cultural and historical significance, a number of contemporary writers of popular fiction have inevitably found her story, together with that of Cortés, an appropriate basis for an adventure story, while a number of plays have represented her as a victim in an uncomprehending patriarchal system (see Cypess, pp. 98–122). Cypess argues that this more positive refashioning as a literary icon reflects real changes in social relationships and attitudes in Mexico, particularly regarding gender roles and stereotypes. Esquivel was not therefore the first novelist to represent Malinche, but was the first to restore her integrity and her voice. Where Malinche had been captive within the confines of the historical and mythological discourses of patriarchy, Esquivel embeds the narrative of her life in a world replete with spirituality and invisible forces which break their way through those confines. Esquivel is moreover able to exploit such facts as there are as the basis for a novel about a woman unique in her time, with all the qualities of the typical male hero, enduring gruelling marches and the ever-present threat

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of torture and death. Diaz is the first to establish this heroic quality: ‘Dona Marina…possessed such manly valor that though she heard every day that the Indians were going to kill us and eat our flesh with chilis (sic) and though she had seen us surrounded in recent battles and knew that we were all wounded and sick, yet she betrayed no weakness but a courage greater than that of a woman’ (quoted Cypess, p. 28). She becomes partner to Cortés, himself the typical male hero. The conquistador is the quintessential embodiment of machismo, a pre-Columbian term more recently associated with aggressive masculinity, but also a source of ethnic pride and endurance. In her brief account of Cortés’s early life, Esquivel depicts a young man whose ‘adventurous spirit was a prisoner within the parental walls’ (p. 10). Fired with both the desire for liberty and the desire for adventure, he initially gains the trust of his rulers by designing routes and roads, as well as by quelling native rebellion, asserting Spanish ownership of both the land and its people. He is sent by Governor Velasquez ‘on a voyage of exploration, not of conquest’ (p. 48), but Cortés exists only to conquer. Even when his feelings for Malinalli are at their most intense, she is only ‘an instrument of conquest’ (p. 154). Driven by the desire for gold, and above all by a sense of his destiny as ‘the greatest of all men, the most powerful, the most immense’ (p. 154). Cortés epitomises the destructive power of male ambition, which leads him to reject love and family. Nor is Malinalli immune to the conquistador’s heroic appeal, giving herself over to the ‘delirium of conquest’ by a man who leads her to act against her own wishes, and her love of her children, ‘an absurd conquest that had been a failure and broken her inside’ (p. 162). Malinalli’s betrayal of her children for the sake of a man echoes her own betrayal by her mother, a woman whose identification with patriarchy leads her to put all her hopes and ambitions into her sons, and to see her daughter as simply a form of exchange currency, selling her in order to ensure her son’s succession. She asserts that ‘everything is forgotten in this life’ (p. 30), that she will have a new lord and new children, discarding the idea of individual and cultural memory so important to her daughter. Esquivel shows that Malinalli’s powers of endurance and courage, and the values underlying them, derive instead from a female tradition represented by the fictional character of her grandmother, who cares for her when her mother abandons her. At her granddaughter’s birth, she shouts ‘like a warrior’ that ‘a great fighter has been born’ (p. 5). She takes the umbilical cord wound round the baby’s neck ‘as a message from the god Quetzalcóatl … in the form of a serpent’ (p. 4), locating the child within

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the many ancient matriarchal systems of belief in which the snake is sacred.6 Thanks to her grandmother’s love, Malinche is able to make her own ‘conquests’, overcoming her fear of the unknown and growing up resourceful enough to cope with the dramatic changes that confront her. When handed over to the Spaniards as one of twenty slaves, she identifies with ‘Cihuacoatl, the snake woman, the goddess also known as Quilaztli, mother of the human race’ (p. 18), weeping because she cannot protect her children or her harvest. Throughout the novel, Malinche is shown to have also inherited from her grandmother her profound responsiveness to the natural world as the embodiment of all spiritual forces. As Esquivel puts it, Grandmother represents ‘the wisdom of the indigenous culture and their powerful vision of the spiritual life’ (SPLALit interview). To her new Spanish owners, however, more important than Malinalli’s cultural inheritance is her linguistic skill. At home Cortés has been proud of his command of language, a mastery seen as a male attribute ever since God gave Adam the power to name the animals over which God had given him dominion. Cortés recognises that without mastery of the Mayan language, ‘his weapons were useless ; […] there was no mission, and with no mission, no conquest’ (p. 37). In a world where women are not expected to take speaking roles, Malinalli therefore find herself in the unique position of possessing the power of the word. Having learned to speak Nahuatl as a child and Mayan as a slave, she quickly learns to speak Spanish, thus displacing Jeronima de Aguila, the Spaniards’ original translator. Able to communicate both with the ambassadors of the emperor Moctezuma (more familiar to the English-speaking world as Montezuma) and the tribes already conquered by him, who would become allies of the Spanish, she soon finds that ‘whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power’ (p. 65). Cortés therefore gives her yet another name: ‘The Tongue’ (p. 61). Diaz is clear on the importance of the historical woman: ‘Without the help of Dona Marina’, he writes, ‘we would not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico’, a view confirmed in Cortés’s own correspondence.7 In the Florentine Codex, where the first meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma is depicted, the two military leaders are in the margins, while La Malinche is central, dominating them both.8 For many generations of Mexicans, however, these deviations from desirable female behaviour, including her role as Cortés’s mistress, merely reinforced her image as emblematic of female transgression. However crucial La Malinche’s role in the Spanish conquest, there is in the historical record no first-hand account from her own mouth. This is

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the absence Esqivel tries to fill, in the process suggesting how problematic La Malinche’s mastery of tongues might have been. The power that Malinalli’s voice grants her is both ambivalent and conditional. Her voice primarily functions to convey the commands and wishes of others, rather than her own. As Cortés reminds her, her ‘mission is simply to be [his] tongue’ (p. 154). So closely identified are the two that he becomes known to the Indians as El Malinche, because he is apparently speaking through her. This reversal of the usual Western pattern by which a woman takes a man’s name is evidence in itself of the unique position of the person Diaz calls this ‘most excellent woman’ (Cypess, p. 26). She remains nevertheless a slave, illustrating the real exchange of power from one culture to another. To what extent then can she be said to possess a power of her own? As a slave she always knows that she will ‘have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished’ (p. 18). She becomes increasingly aware that ‘she had to see things in the way the Spaniards did. Her life depended on it’ (p. 100). This is the fate of the colonised, not the coloniser. Malinalli nevertheless retains a certain power in so far as only she can know whether she is translating any of the speakers correctly, an uncertainty which Esquivel is able to exploit by entering imaginatively into her point of view, exploring the full potential of the unspoken. Esquivel thus suggests that Malinalli’s motivation is complex, and not to be summed up in the simplifications of either betrayal or heroism. The novelist attributes her protagonist’s motives to a complex and changing series of socio-­ political, religious and personal realities, embedded in gender and race. Her meeting and association with Cortés are presented through Malinalli’s own eyes as the primary events in her life, but her view is not simply that of a besotted woman. Initially she, like Moctezuma, genuinely believes that Cortés may be the returned god Quetzalcóatl, whose return will mean the end of the Aztec dominion over her people, and an end to the culture of human sacrifice she abhors. The arrival of ‘bearded white men … pushed by the wind’ accords with the belief that Quetzalcóatl can only be seen when the wind blows, while their golden hair is itself ‘propitious’ (p. 22), symbolising the gift of corn that the god has given his people as sustenance. The religious symbols and rituals of the Spaniards echo those of her own people: the Christian cross is like the cross of Quetzalcóatl, a reminder that ‘one is planted in the centre of the universe, lit by the Sun and covered by the Four Winds, the Four Directions, the Four Elements’ (pp. 41–2). She too achieves ‘communion’ with her grandmother’s beliefs

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by eating the bread of tortilla, and the symbolic drinking of Christ’s blood seems to her a worthy substitute for the human blood required of the Aztec gods. The ritual of baptism too is as important for Malinalli’s people as for the Spaniards. Although she hates the image of the crucified Christ as an image of human sacrifice, she is persuaded that the concept of a merciful god ‘could be none other than the Lord Quetzalcóatl, who in new garments was returning to these lands to reinstate his kingdom in harmony with the cosmos’ (p. 46), and by the image of the Virgin, ‘a universal mother’ like the lady Tonantzin (p. 47). Malinalli’s linguistic distortions therefore err in the direction of diplomacy, and derive from a knowledge of the Amerindian peoples which Cortés lacks. This enables her to negotiate more effectively on his behalf, but also in the hope of bringing about what he requires by peaceful rather than bloody means. As her fictional father tells her as a child, ‘Your word will have eyes and will see, will have ears and will hear, will have the tact to lie with the truth and to tell truths that will seem like lies’ (p. 9). It becomes increasingly obvious to Malinalli, however, that she has been misled, that the values and beliefs that motivate her are very different from those which drive Cortés. Although he listens intently when she shares with him her people’s version of creation, his motives are simply to be able to use this information ‘for his own personal objectives of conquest’ (p. 90). While he is momentarily seduced into accepting his promised rebirth as a god, if he agrees to be baptised in the bathhouse with Malinalli, that moment of pure spirituality is destroyed by the carnal desires aroused by her material body. She is mistaken in believing that he has been ‘purified, reborn, changed’ (p. 92), since his belief in his ‘sacred mission’ provides justification for the horrors of the massacre at Cholula, where Cortés accused the inhabitants of treachery then ordered his men to attack them. Malinalli’s belief that ‘the Spanish god was the true god and that he was nothing else but a new manifestation of Quetzalcóatl’ is destroyed by such brutality, when she has to ask herself ‘what kind of god would allow so many innocents to be slaughtered in his name’ (p. 97). For Cortés, ‘the conquest was a struggle of good against evil, of the true god against the false gods, of superior beings against inferior beings’ (p. 95). Sharing his guilt by association, Malinalli becomes aware of the materialism underpinning this allegedly spiritual mission, realising that the Spaniards are driven primarily by their lust for gold, a lust she cannot understand since it is a lust for what her people regard as ‘the excrement of the gods’ (p.  71), worthless compared with the golden corn which

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provides their sustenance. All the new religion actually brings is the concept of Hell, a place created, as Malinalli puts it, ‘to eternally damn everything that lives’ (p. 178). This struggle between Cortés and Malinalli does not simply represent a conflict between Christianity and Mayan culture, however, but a more ancient one between patriarchal and matriarchal systems of belief. Although initially Cortés feels connected to Malinalli by ‘a maternal spark’ which indicated that she ‘could help him as only a mother could: unconditionally’ (pp. 49–50, his feelings for womankind are complex, encompassing both devotion and fear. Woman is represented for him, as for earlier cultures, by the snake. The vision of a snake which haunts his delirium after being bitten by a scorpion appears to endow him with a ‘new power’, suggesting he has ‘been reborn’ (p. 13). And since the plumed serpent is a representation of Quetzalcóatl, there is a suggestion here of Cortés acquiring a new power associated with the Mayans, along with the military power of the Spanish. He associates it with the power of naming passed on to him by Adam, comparable to women’s power to give birth: ‘The things that he named were born in that moment and began a new life because of him’ (p. 48). His ‘desire to create a life’ (p. 146), instead of destroying it, drives him to Malinalli, but these creative impulses are constantly thwarted by the even stronger desire to conquer and destroy. Even when his daughter is born, Cortés is unable to give up his sense of destiny in order to become, with Malinalli, ‘one being’ (p.  154) and to create, rather than simply procreate, a family. The uniquely female power to give birth is even symbolically beyond the reach of his virulent masculinity. His later fear of losing control and losing himself in Malinalli scares him into withdrawing from her and leaving the ‘womb’ of the bathhouse (p. 92) to return to his mission of male conquest. And the snake ultimately remains for him the creature that tempted Eve, rather than a symbol of spiritual rebirth. Malinalli’s attitude to masculine power is similarly ambivalent, since Cortés provides for her the protection that only a man can provide in their world. In acting as Cortés’s ‘tongue’, Malinalli can be seen as usurping male power, an act which for many historians made her responsible for the deceit and conquest of the indigenous people. But this power can easily be taken from her. When Cortés finally penetrates her in an act of violent anger, she ceases to be a voice, reduced to being ‘a woman, silent, voiceless, a mere woman who did not bear … the enormous responsibility of building the conquest with her words’ (p. 79). The relief she finds in her

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submission is the relief of reverting to her traditional passive role as woman in patriarchy, and a reminder of the dangerous and contingent nature of her ‘power’. She had taken on that role in the belief it could lead to a unity of male and female: ‘The mouth, as feminine principle, as empty space, as cavity, was the best place for words to be engendered. And the tongue, as masculine principle, sharp, pointed, phallic, was the one to introduce the created word, that universe of information, into other minds in order to be fertilized’ (pp. 65–66). Making explicit the sexual basis of these principles, Malinalli’s article of faith is, however, violently destroyed in her own final phallic act, the destruction of her own tongue with an agave thorn. Recognising her own complicity in the Spanish conquest, she promises herself that her tongue ‘would never again be the instrument of any conquest’ (p. 159). Malinalli’s rebirth as a non-speaking woman is associated with the female experience of giving birth to her second child, a daughter, which reinforces her sense of the redundancy of words to express the spiritual and the infinite: With her tongue paralyzed by emotion, Malinalli took her small daughter and offered her breast to her, so the she might drink milk, drink the sea, so that she might feed from love, poetry, the light of the moon, and so doing she understood that her daughter should be called Maria. Maria, like the Virgin. In Maria she would renew herself. (p. 160)

Malinalli’s traditions recuperate the Virgin from the Catholic tradition to reconnect her to much older mother goddesses, such as the lunar goddess Tlazolteot (p. 109) who combines in herself sexuality and motherhood, rather than maintaining the patriarchal division between the Virgin and the Whore, Mary and Eve. Malinalli’s salvation comes from her realisation of the power she has inherited from the matriarchal tradition represented by her grandmother, and the recognition of how far her identification with Cortés and patriarchal power has diverted her from it. The understanding she then achieves is non-verbal, ‘for there was no language to name it’. This Kristeva-like sense of unity between mother and child refers back to the waters of the womb, and the pre-verbal communication of the chora.9 She forgives the mother who abandoned her because she too abandoned her son at this most important time in his life, depriving him of ‘the silence of her gaze, where words weren’t necessary’ (p. 162) in order to be ‘different, unique, and special’ (p. 153) as Cortés’s partner.

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In giving birth, moreover, Malinalli creates much more than a single family, since her children represent a new people. Once pregnant, she knows that ‘in her womb there was beating the heart of a being that would unite two worlds. The blood of Moors and Christians with that of the Indians, that pure unmixed race’ (p. 146). She is able to create ‘a new race on the earth. A race that would contain them all’ (p. 173), because she is uniting the children of her Indian body with the culture of the Spanish. Her son Martin will be one of the first mestizos, people of mixed European and indigenous Amerindian ancestry ‘who have inherited the best of both races and can be proud of their heritage’.10 Esquival’s Malinalli can thus be seen as mediating between the Spaniards and the Mexicans, rather than as being responsible for the destruction of Mexican culture by the Spanish. Where some historians have seen the Virgin of Guadalupe as the most important image for cultural reconciliation of the Spanish conquerors and the native peoples, Esquivel’s Malinalli is associated with both this Virgin and her opposite, Eve.11 As in so many other myths, a culture is both destroyed and reborn through the rape of a woman.12 Esquivel sees in this new race, moreover, the restoration of the spirituality Malinalli inherits from her grandmother, rooted in the cycles of Nature and the cosmos, and represented by the image of Mother Earth. Malinalli’s own body is in tune with this cycle, the lunar cycle coinciding with her menstrual cycle. In this tradition blood represents fertility, not sacrifice. And she consistently experiences this tradition as female, as if she were ‘part of a united feminine mind’ (p.  115), and ‘outside of time’ (p.  117).13 As already suggested, this tradition has its roots in ancient mythologies: like the Snake Goddess of Minoan Civilisation, in Mayan culture woman is identified with the snake as ‘Tonantzin, the snake woman known as “Our Mother”’ (p. 142), just as Eve is identified both with the Serpent in Judeo-Christian theology and as the mother of the human race. These traditions are rooted in a philosophy more collective than individual, the antithesis of that sense of individual destiny which drives Cortés and his men to advance in historical time, and of the patriarchal religions which underwrite their actions. To be outside of time, however, is for Malinalli to surrender the life of adventure and travelling which gave her a place in the male epic. She cannot show female agency when following Cortés, acting as his ‘shadow’ (p. 155), as she could during her long walks with her grandmother: the adventure of journeying means nothing if it is not self-driven. Malinalli’s final ‘journey’ is a journey home far more meaningful than the ‘heroic’

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journeys undertaken so far, since ‘the search for the gods … is the search for oneself’ (p. 178). Her experience has led her to the knowledge that Cortés represents her dark side, which she must confront. She must ‘take the same journey that Quetzalcóatl had taken through the inner earth, through the underworld, before becoming the Morning Star’ (p.  179). She wishes to see Tonantzin, ‘the feminine deity, the Mother’ (p. 179), which can only be achieved through silence. Malinalli can only therefore experience her spirituality to the full in repose. This she achieves through her marriage to Juan Jaramillo, a marriage ordained by Cortés but which is based on mutuality and a love for home and family. The symbol of their happiness is the home they build, ‘a small Eden’ (p. 142) in a garden shaped like a cross, not as a symbol of blood sacrifice but centred around water according to Muslim traditions, waters serving as a reminder of the waters of the womb from which all life flows. Growing food with the corn that she had received years earlier from her grandmother, Malinalli both perpetuates that ancient tradition and consolidates the new one of fusion, growing Mexican plants along with plants of European origin. This concept of fusion is also inherited from her grandmother, who taught that ‘there is always a third possibility hidden that unites the two’, and instructs her granddaughter to ‘find it’ (p. 55). Other crafts requiring the patience which is ‘the science of silence’ lead her, together with her family, to achieve ‘inner peace and spiritual richness’ (p. 174), rather than the gold which Cortés had killed and destroyed to acquire. Malinalli nevertheless continues to be vulnerable to the judgments of patriarchal societies. Married to Jaramillo she becomes accepted and respected by the Spaniards, but is still reviled by Amerindians. This reflects the reality of changing attitudes to Malinche in history. As her figure becomes appropriated by the colonial history in which patriarchy is so firmly inscribed, the matriarchal tradition continues to be suppressed. While her death as narrated by Esquivel conforms to the simple traditions of her childhood, the novelist also notes the coincidental Mass held to celebrate the Spanish victory over the natives. As if to underline alternatives to such patriarchal ways of thinking, in particular the emphasis on the Word of the Spanish God which has proved to be a tool of deceit, betrayal and conquest, each chapter of the novel is prefaced by a codex, a form of visual narrative used by the early civilisations of the Amerindians to contain their history. Malinalli acquires her ability to draw codices from her grandmother, who describes them as an

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aid to memory, which is ‘seeing things from the inside. […] Without images, there is no memory’ (p. 31). The Amerindians’ ideas of god were shaped by images, Esquivel explains in an Author’s Note. She goes on to say that she felt it essential to include ‘the codex that Malinche might have painted. The codex would represent what the words narrate in another fashion[…] to try to conciliate two visions, two ways of storytelling—the written and the symbolic—two breaths, two yearnings, two times, two hearts, in one’ (p. viii). The codex thus makes possible a reconciliation between these alternatives. Representing Malinalli’s vision of events they are nevertheless open to being read and interpreted diversely, less vulnerable to the imposition of single authoritative meanings such as are said to reside in the text of the Spaniards’ Bibles. The first codex depicts this attempt at conciliation, the mother giving birth overseen by the serpent but surrounded by representations of tongues; the last represents the harmony engendered by her marriage to Jaramillo, with the children who embody the union of Mexico and Spain. Together the lyricism of the novel and the pictorial narrative construct the creation myth of the new hybrid culture, in which Malinalli chooses colonial civilisation, but ensures its roots are in the world and beliefs of the people who gave birth to her. The matriarchal traditions of her past have survived the destructive power of patriarchal thought, while acknowledging and building on its more positive achievements.

Notes 1. Published in 1997 by Cool Gas, the novel was on the bestseller lists in Mexico for four months. 2. First published by Simon and Schuster in Spanish and in Ernesto Mestre-­ Reed’s English translation in 2006, the novel was published in Britain in paperback the same year. All references to the novel will be taken from this edition and follow the relevant quotation in the text. 3. ‘Interview with Laura Esquivel’, SPLALit: Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture, March 7th, 2006. http://splalit. blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/interview-­with-­laura-­esquivel.html. 4. Historia Verderada de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana (The True Story of the Conquest of New Spain) is the most comprehensive of eye-witness accounts, but written in Diaz’s later life in 1568. See Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From history to myth (Austen: University of Texas, 1991), p. 1.

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5. ‘Los hijos de la Malinche’, translated as ‘The Sons of La Malinche’, The Labyrinth of Solitude and the Other Mexico, trans. by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1985). 6. The most famous examples are to be found in Minos and Egypt. See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: OUP, 1986), pp. 148–9. 7. See Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986). 8. The Florentine Codex, or the Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain), is a unique manuscript from the earliest years of Spanish dominance in the New World, created by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar. 9. Julia Kristeva, ‘The Semiotic Chora’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 93–98. 10. Oleg Zinam and Ida Molina, ‘The Tyranny of Myth: Dona Marina and the Chicano search for ethnic identity’, Mankind Quarterly, 32 (1991), 5–7 (p. 6). 11. As such, as Luis Leal points out, ‘Malinche constitutes one of the two major female archetypes in Mexico, along with the Virgin of Guadalupe’ (quoted by Cypess, p. 6). 12. Readers will no doubt be familiar with such examples as the founding of Troy through the rape of the swan by Zeus, so memorably figured as a sexual encounter in Yeats’s poem ‘Leda and the Swan’. 13. This view can be compared with Kristeva’s concept of ‘Women’s Time’, where she argues that because woman is identified with cyclical time rather than the linear time of history, she risks being ‘outside time’, excluded from historical time and history itself. See ‘Women’s Time’, The Kristeva Reader, pp. 188–213.

CHAPTER 9

The Female Conquistador: Isabel Allende, Inés of My Soul

Isabel Allende is not only one of the world’s best-selling Spanish language authors, but has made a significant mark on the development of Latin American literature by giving a female emphasis to a culture more commonly known for its machismo. Her more recent historical novels, Daughter of Fortune (1998) and Inés of my Soul (2006), while retaining that emphasis, turn away from the magical realism and the use of autobiographical material with which she is often associated. The second of these, like Esquivel’s Malinche, draws on historical records for its representation of Dona Inés Suárez of Santiago de Nueva Extramadura, the first Spanish woman to travel to Chile, but adopts an innovative structure which articulates the novel’s amalgamation of subjective memoir, love story and women’s history with an epic chronicle. Having described herself as a lover of adventure books read in secret as a young person, when she wanted to be the hero, Allende presents Inés as just such an adventurer as Allende aspired to be.1 Although Inés’s active involvement in the conquest of Chile is only recorded by some chroniclers,2 four hundred years later Suárez has become a feminist icon, a symbol of Chilean womanhood standing up to male authority, and figures in the popular imagination in both fiction and song.3 Where this novel differs significantly from Esquivel’s Malinche, however, is that Inés is a European conquistadora, closely identified with the values and culture of the Spanish invader, unlike Malinche, whose roots in Indian culture constantly re-emerge through any veneer of European culture she acquires. Where the tension for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_9

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Malinche derives from the conflict between her natural affiliation with her own people, and her enforced complicity with their conquerors, Inés’s internal conflict derives from her ambivalent position within a complex series of oppositions: war and love, male and female, coloniser and colonised. In negotiating these oppositions, her position is always unstable. That instability is conveyed in a radical narrative structure in which different subject positions subvert each other. Inés’s ostensible purpose as narrator of the novel is to act as chronicler of the journeys of the Spanish conquistadors sent to conquer and settle Chile in 1534. This male-centred narrative of conquest, epic in its geographical and historical sweep, takes the reader from the Old World to the New, from 1500 to 1580, and primarily deals with men of destiny. A postscript to the novel states that the Chronicles were given to the Church in 1580, after Inés’s death, by her stepdaughter Dona Isabel de Quiroga. This gives them the status of venerated objects. The different stages of the conquest are clearly signposted in the novel with chapter headings giving place and date. But the epic qualities only emerge with the introduction of Pedro de Valdivia on page 18, whom Inés insists is her main subject.4 His is undoubtedly a ‘life of legend’ (p.85), in which she shares. His life has all the trappings of a legendary man of destiny, coming from a line of dragon-­ slayers, with sword and coat of arms as proof. Leading his soldiers under the banner of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, his is a divine mission, although he is ultimately ready to ignore the Emperor’s more humane edicts regarding the treatment of the Indians. He is inspired to travel to the Americas by his friend Francisco de Aguirre’s advice that ‘noble endeavours’ (p.35) only exist in the New World. Motivated by the colonising impulse rather than sheer greed, as most of his men are, de Valdivia regards the Incas, the first indigenous people he meets, as ‘civilised people’ (pp. 38, 40), although this does not interfere with the Spaniards’ assumption of racial superiority, combined with a taste for violence. This is the ‘epic’ story which Ines wishes to pass on to Isobel, claiming that the only reason for telling it is ‘the conquest of Chile, which [she] shared with Pedro de Valdivia’ (p. 85). The source of this account of de Valdivia’s early years, delivered as an impersonal third-person narrative, is never made evident, unless it is assumed that they were passed on to Inés by the man of destiny himself. Godlike in stance, it goes otherwise unexplained. And yet this chronicle comes embedded within Inés’s first-person narrative, written at the age of seventy or more, and consisting of a jumbled series of memories. She writes that ‘now everything is subjective. Memory

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is also coloured by vanity. Even with Death sitting in a chair near my table, waiting, I still am influenced by vanity, not just when I rouge my cheeks if visitors are coming, but when I am writing my story. Is there anything more vain than an autobiography?’ (p. 43). But she simultaneously claims that in regard to the narrative of conquest, her personal involvement is a guarantee of the truthfulness of her account, the irrefutable view of someone who was there in person. Inés acknowledges the contradiction: ‘Chronicles must follow the natural order of happenings, even though memory is a jumble of illogic’ (p. 5). But the disruption of the orderly Chronicle by the act of memory adds to its immediacy and poignancy. Pedro’s ‘martyrdom’ (p. 312) at the hands of the Mapuche is described by the serving girl of the Inca Princess Cecilia, wife of one of the Conquistadors. The girl has run away from the Spaniards to join her lover, the terrifying legendary ‘epic Lautaro’ (p. 269), and the tortures inflicted on de Valdivia are conveyed far more graphically than they are in the poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga’s ‘gentler version’ in his epic, La Aracauna (1578), because Inés’s intensity of feeling for Pedro means that, although not physically present, she experiences it with him in the form of horrendous nightmare images, ‘violent vomiting and burning fever’(p. 313). More often, as a witness to the Conquest, her account lays claim to an authenticity lacking from later accounts, so that her presence enables her to reveal a reality missing from Alonso’s. As she points out, the young poet, ‘in his eagerness to make his lines rhyme, is not always faithful to the facts’ (p. 65). Nor does Inés’s narrative only include the bestiality of the Indians, since she aims to reveal the greed and violence, the rape of both land and women, underlying the grand ideals of the epic, and which always prevented the New World from being a better world. Inés’s first-person perspective therefore offers a more personal view of de Valdivia, revealing a side to his story unknown to the chroniclers in what is effectively a series of love stories. The novel’s title, ‘Inés of my Soul’, appears to prioritise an alternative to the narrative of warfare and conquest, using as it does words from the mouths of the two most important men in her life, de Valdivia (p.  204 and p.  312) and Rodrigo de Quiroga (p.  296), one of de Valdivia’s most important captains, whom Inés marries, and with whom she shares thirty years of her life. Although Inés denies that her love for de Valdivia is the reason for her story, her love affairs determine the shape her life takes, and are her prime reason for existence, even if she feels they are not the stuff of epic with which her chronicle should concern itself. This stance can be seen as her final act of

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self-effacement, as a woman whose love can never be as important as the wars of men. Unlike Allende herself, Inés never appears to wish to be the hero of her tale. The novel’s title typifies its narrative ambiguity, putting her at the novel’s centre, but giving the voice and the power of naming to the men who have given her that appellation. Nevertheless, as not simply a participant in the conquest but its chronicler, Inés is usurping the male word. The arts of reading and writing are not thought necessary to a Spanish housewife, but Inés acquires them in Chile, where she is taught by a priest. And her assumption of authorial agency is evidence of a yearning for the male power responsible for the gendered dimension of the conflicts she experiences. That power is made visibly present to the reader by the novel’s illustrations depicting Inés in full armour. Here she is the heroic conquistador described by Spanish and Chilean historians. In his Cronica del Reino de Chile (1865) Pedro Marino de Lobera (1528–94) describes how Inés fought alongside her lover Pedro de Valdivia. Inés’s retrospective narrative, begun in 1580 at the age of seventy, gives considerable emphasis to this, the more sensational aspect of her life. Like those violent women who usually arouse both fear and horror, whether it be in Greek Myth, ancient history or the Bible, Inés challenges gender stereotypes and restrictions placed on women in the most dramatic sense, demonstrating attitudes and attributes historically marked as masculine. Her legendary courage and endurance derive from her total identification with the conquistadors. In this she too is shown to display that machismo that has become such a traditional part of the image of Latin American manhood. Driven by the same desire for fame, the same desire to leave a memory of her name, as de Valdivia, she sets out sharing their aims and ideals. As she tells her stepdaughter Isobel, the recipient of her narrative, ‘We were alike: both of us strong, domineering, and ambitious. He wanted to found a kingdom, and I wanted to be part of that with him. What he felt, I felt’ (p. 102). Nor does she embark on such a life blindly, making no attempt to gloss over the Spaniards’ previous history of violence in Europe, notably demonstrated in the Sack of Rome in 1527. Inés’s own first act of violence takes place on her first night in South America, when she kills Romero, the sailor who tries to rape her. This action is in part caused by her belief that no woman can trust to male justice. Her violence is thus framed by both her recognition of women’s vulnerability in patriarchal society, and her determination not to accept that situation. Adopting male clothing and armour when she fights alongside Pedro de Valdivia is simply the most visible expression of those beliefs.

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Even the other conquistadors are forced to acknowledge, if reluctantly, her contribution to the conquest when de Valdivia grants her the best land of the new colony, together with the Indians to work it, stating that she ‘had confronted as many dangers as the bravest of his soldiers and had saved the expedition on more than one occasion’ (p. 167). The habit and acceptance of violence as a necessary tool of colonisation appear to be consolidated over her years with the conquistadors. The climax of her role as warrior is described much later with characteristic ambiguity. In 1541 the Spanish settlement of Santiago de Nueva Extramadura is attacked by Michimalonko, leader of the Mapuche, and his warriors, the dominant indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile. In the absence of de Valdivia and his most faithful captains, who have left the settlement hoping to fend off the attack before it starts, the settlement is on the verge of total destruction until Inés orders the Mapuche leaders held hostage to be killed. Taking the lead herself, she beheads the first, throwing his head back into the attacking force, an action repeated with the other hostages, causing the attackers to retreat. The critic Katherine Karr-Cornejo argues that in this act Inés ‘embodies colonial violence. She is the conquistador’.5 But the contradictions evident in the gendering of Inés are nowhere more apparent. Acting out the male hero by saving the Spanish certainly consolidates her status as legend, and the episode is described by the Spanish as a ‘miracle’ (p. 286). But she continues to be categorised as female, so that her behaviour can only be explained in terms of madness or witchcraft, a fate that has befallen violent women throughout history. Even Inés sees herself as ‘a tangle-haired demon’ (p. 201), so deeply is the language of patriarchy inscribed in her vision of herself. When De Valdivia is later tried for assuming and abusing excessive power, Inés is implicated in his fall, once again seen as a witch who has used ‘potions to madden men’ (p, 246), and drunk the blood of babies to preserve her youth. Her exceptional nature condemns her to be suspected of sorcery as often as to be admired for her ‘masculine’ bravery. Nor, even in her own subjective representation of herself, is she entirely able to distance herself from these judgments. Inés never, however, lets the reader forget that she was, like Allende herself, ‘raised to be a woman’. Allende clarifies, ‘that is a limitation. Women of my age were formed to be seconders, to second a man’.6 Inés’s innate disobedience and independence of thought had always been perceived in her society as a barrier to marriage, but her life ultimately depends on male sponsorship, whether following her first husband from Spain to

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the New World, her lover in the conquest of Chile or her second husband in the establishment of Santiago, Chile’s capital. Inés admits that her own life only began, in any meaningful sense, once she was freed by the death of her first husband and decided to stay in Peru alone. Even before his death, while Inés was left alone in Spain, she is able to exploit her female talent for making empanadas in order to take Juan’s place as breadwinner. The meaning of gender categories is thus continually subverted throughout the narrative. Even Inés’s sexuality is ambivalently gendered as both woman’s original sin, inherited from Eve, and as an unwomanly kind of power, for the men with whom she travels have been educated to believe, like De Valdivia, that ‘passion is not a proper emotion for a decent and religious woman’ (p. 32). Seeing herself as the victim of her own body and her powerful desires, her earliest sexual experiences with her first husband Juan are characterised as acts of ‘surrender’—‘another identical cycle: seduction, promises, submission, the bliss of love, and the suffering of a new separation’ (p.11). But, in contrast, society sees her as all too powerful, viewing any influence a woman has over a man as a kind of ‘sorcery’. Many accuse her of using ‘spells and aphrodisiac potions’ (p. 133), although she explains her influence over de Valdivia as the result of her highly rational powers of persuasion, and her subtlety, the same powers of ‘wit and firmness’ (p. 133) that enable her to maintain order over the city, even in the most desperate of times. Male reasoning refuses to accept what Inés sees as the reality: ‘At times, all a woman has to do is dry the sweat from the brow of a weary man and he will eat from the hand that caresses him’ (p. 253). Three times she finds herself implicated in the death of a man who desires her, making even Inés ask herself whether it was her fault. When the young boy Escobar, whose only crime is to make de Valdivia jealous, is driven out of the camp to face almost certain death, she wonders whether she is responsible for having tempted an innocent boy. And yet she is able to sum up the situation dispassionately: ‘I find no fault in myself other than being a woman, but it seems that is crime enough. We are blamed for men’s lust, but does the sin not belong to the one who commits it? Why must I pay for another’s lapse?’ (p. 141). In a Catholic patriarchy, where a woman can only be a chaste virgin, or a whore, she epitomises all the dangers inherent in the female body as well as society’s fear of strong women, evident in its relish over ‘seeing strong women…humiliated’ (p.  264). Her decision from this point on to dress in men’s clothes, as a matter of practicality,

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rather than obscuring her female sexuality merely provides the soldiers with further evidence of her aberrant nature. Yet Inés also draws attention to the many traditionally female attributes she embodies that are most valued by patriarchal societies. Famed from her early years in Spain for her readiness to feed the poor and hungry, she also possesses the power to dowse for water, saving the expedition from dying of thirst when crossing the desert, although this apparently miraculous act also increases the suspicion that she is a sorcerer. Her ability and readiness to heal and care for the sick, using every skill she possesses, including those Inca remedies she learns from her servant Catalina, become essential to the conquistadors’ survival of both hostile conditions and attacks by the indigenous tribes. Over the course of her life in Chile, Inés creates both a sense of community and actual communities, including indigenous and mestizo women. Unable to satisfy her ‘deepest need’ (p. 78) to be a mother, once she finds herself looking after the would-be settlers of Chile she feels ‘maternal love’ (p.  214) for her people. Her inability to become a mother is indeed what she later perceives as the ‘Virgin’s true blessing’, enabling her to ‘fulfil an exceptional destiny’ (p. 14). Although she sees this destiny as being conqueror of Chile, again aligning herself with the world of masculinity, it is arguable that her real destiny is to become the powerful maternal figure who ensures the survival of the Chilean settlements. This figure problematises the division between revered Madonna and vilified Eve. For Inés is only enabled to take on the role of mother to her people by accompanying her lovers on the most perilous of missions, consequently challenging all traditional female stereotypes and restrictions to take on a rare degree of agency. At the same time as underlining Inés’s agency, her role as chronicler gives her control of the narrative which enables Allende to put women back into history, not simply as passive accessories to men but as actors in their own right. In telling her own story, and her version of the conquest, Inés asserts a control and authority beyond the usual limits imposed by her gender, and beyond the freedom which the legal, social and economic ideologies of the time grant her. She feels ‘obliged’ to relate her version of events to record and honour the work of ‘the hundreds of brave women who founded the towns while their men fought the wars’ (p. 66). With an ironic degree of understatement, she observes that the women ‘tend to be overlooked by the chroniclers, however informed they may be’ (p. 67). When De Valdivia speaks from the familiar masculine perspective, telling her that ‘women cannot think on a grand scale; […] they lack a sense of

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history; they concern themselves only with domestic and immediate realities’, he is forced to revise his opinion when Inés recites the list of everything that she and the women have contributed ‘to the mission of conquering and founding’ (p.  191). The content of her narrative spills over and outside the chronicle of male conquest to include the women and the work which turned mere conquest into settlement and colonisation. The activities, skills and strengths she describes make survival possible, while simultaneously emphasising the inadequacy of conquest alone. The home, usually gendered as feminine, is shown to be only a single unit in the greater whole which is the city, the public world which can only grow from the collective of homes. Inés sees herself as involved in a different kind of conquest: she attempts to tame, control and own the unknown and hostile places and peoples of the New World. She observes that ‘the men built temporary towns in order to have a place to leave us with their children while they continued the endless war against the Indians’, while ‘the challenge of building a community’ was a task which ‘in the New World was left to women’. It is the women as well as her Yanacona slaves who make ‘tables, chairs, beds, mattresses, ovens, looms, pottery, kitchen tools, corrals, henhouses, clothing, mantles, blankets … all the indispensable items needed for civilized life’ (p. 164). Identifying with the women alongside whom she works, Inés shares their sense of being an oppressed group, which she experienced even while living in Spain. The indigenous women around her are in effect slaves to the European overlords. When the soldiers choose a woman for sex, they speak of ‘conquest’, using that familiar romantic trope to disguise what is in reality rape (p. 142). Even Inés herself is effectively raped by de Valdivia in what she recognises as in part an attempt to ‘establish authority’ (p. 150), dragged to his tent in full view of everyone, and being made to feel like a whore. Yet her identification with the women is compromised by her loyalty to her male lovers, which sets her apart from the other women. These ordinary women remain figuratively in the cellar in which they hide during the siege, while Ines strides the battlements. Allende has remarked that most of her characters are outsiders, ‘people who are not sheltered by society, who are unconventional, irreverent, defiant’.7 As an outsider from the beginning, Inés derives much of her power from the sexual relationships which give her entry to the inside of the conquistador’s world, so that she is in effect complicit with patriarchy, an unwitting champion of the very machismo which is so destructive of women’s lives and freedom. Her sense of women’s oppression is contained and diluted in the manner

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implied by the fate of her manuscript. While she passes it to Isobel, Inés’s stepdaughter, as if to create a matrilineal history, it is then passed to the Church, to be absorbed into patriarchal religion and history. Moreover, while Inés identifies with the oppression suffered by the women on account of their gender, she is less able to identify with what they suffer on account of their ethnicity. Inés’s willingness to learn many of the skills needed for survival from the Indians, including their methods of sowing and irrigating, appears to offer the possibility of just such an identification. She acknowledges, moreover, that the men who land in the pre-Genesis paradise of Peru with Pedro de Valdivia are driven by their greed, as they dream of El Dorado, the golden land. Like all colonisers, they find ample justification for their mission in the barbarity and perceived immorality of the Incas, but Inés also records the shameful behaviour of the Spanish army, who abuse the native women and brutalise the men. Chile, ‘an innocent territory’ (p. 71), offers another paradise, where de Valdivia dreams of creating a Utopia, ‘a just society based on hard work and cultivating the land, not on the ill-gotten wealth bled from mines and slaves’ (p.  104). The Spaniards who preceded him under Diego de Almagro have, however, left behind the memory of ‘atrocities that were not worthy of a Christian’ (p. 110). Admitting that the Indians were better off before the arrival of the Spaniards, Inés is nevertheless aware that her own freedom is dependent on this state of subjugation, in which she has indeed played a part. This ‘scrambled society’ (p. 3) has given her a title and her status. Her complicity in the bloody conquest is demonstrated in the starkest terms in the horrific beheading incident, however much she attempts to displace the reader’s attention onto her role as carer, betraying how deeply conflicted her attitude to the conquest is. Inés’s awareness of her own complicity is evident in her attempts to make narrative reparation for these crimes. Just as she challenges women’s exclusion from the narrative of conquest, so she shows some linguistic respect even for the Spaniards’ most defiant enemies, the Mapuche. Left out of the chronicles, and lacking a written language of their own, these people rely instead on memory to record their history. By learning their language, Mapudungu, Inés makes it possible to give them a presence in the narrative on their own terms. In addition to describing their ceremonies and their Creation myth, she devotes several pages to recounting the betrayal of the Spaniards by Lautaro, the brilliant leader who had previously pretended to befriend them and had lived with them. She narrates this event from his own point of view and in the present tense, giving it a

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heroic flavour and immediacy. She records that to the Mapuche the Spanish are huincas, meaning ‘lying people and land thieves’ (p.  118). Driven only by the desire to be free, the Mapuche cannot understand, let alone accommodate, the Spaniards’ colonising impulses. Such different systems of values make mutual understanding impossible. And she points out that the result of Spanish theft is to drive the Mapuche to cannibalism during the famine caused by the wars between the two races: ‘Lack of food is what led them to eat the flesh of their fellows. God must know that those miserable people did not do it to sin, but because they had to’ (p. 216). Combining these memories as well as her own with the semi-­ official record, she implies more than one version of the story of conquest, challenging discursive, as well as actual, power within the text. As Allende said of herself in an interview, ‘All a writer can do…is to preserve the hidden memory that is not in the textbooks’.8 Nevertheless in the very act of writing what is ultimately her own memoir, although ostensibly a chronicle of the great warriors in her life, Inés articulates the individualistic values which separate the Spanish from the more communitarian Indians. She cannot easily accommodate the values of the indigenous people into her worldview. As a narrative that combines the story of the conquest and a fictional autobiography, Inés’s experience and perceptions become the vehicle through which the reader encounters the colonised peoples, who are inevitably represented as Other. Whatever her sympathy for the abuse they experience, Inés never challenges the authority underlying the conquest, or her right to partake of its acquisitions. Commenting on God’s providence in providing the space for a Spanish settlement, she does not question the justice of the displacement of its original inhabitants. The Spaniards’ Eden can only be achieved through the expulsion of the Mapuche from theirs. Inés sympathises with the Mapuche’s fight for their land, a fight which will last for forty years, because she knows that in their place she would be doing the same thing, yet she remains firmly allied to the Conquistadors’ cause, and her own position as a coloniser. In spite of the plentiful evidence of mixed-race children around her, unlike Malinche Inés does not explore the possibilities of a future race of mestizos which could offer a peaceful and productive future, although even de Valdivia envisions such a possibility as the only means to long-term peace, as long as these people are ‘united by Spanish law and tongue’ (p. 101). Ines’s subject position is thus complicated by the multiple versions of her identity the narrative offers the reader, from her early life as a

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subjugated female to her final powerful role as Governor’s wife. The psychological and emotional difficulties experienced by Inés are derived from these multiple identities as she shifts from identifying according to gender to identifying according to ethnicity. Struggling to create an identity which challenges her biological and cultural conditioning, Inés can only raise herself to the level of her male peers by identifying as a Spanish conquistador. As a woman, she is inferior, but as a Spanish woman in Chile, superior. Being placed at opposing ends of these binaries often leads to an ambivalence she herself can scarcely acknowledge. Inés does appear to place some hope of resolving these conflicts in shifting gender boundaries. Just as she achieves a degree of role reversal in her own person, so she aspires to breaking down rigid gender distinctions in the men she loves. She is attracted to men who are not only soldiers but sensitive lovers, combining the traditionally male and female qualities in themselves, thus freeing her to explore her own more masculine side. Alienated by de Valdivia’s new machismo as he extends his conquests by ever more brutal means, Inés finds in Rodrigo de Quiroga the balance of gender attributes to which she herself aspires. As Susana Reisz suggests, Allende is fondest of ‘struggling or resisting women and those sentimental or sensitive men’ capable of reconciling ‘the binary activepassive or intellectual-emotional opposites’ (p.  14). Allende gives her female narrator the power of the male gaze, carrying with it female subjectivity and agency, to maintain her precarious control of her ambiguous situation, however much ambivalence it also projects. Inés’s writing is ultimately her only uncontested authority and means of controlling her life and that of others. Her lovers, supremely powerful in life, are powerless to amend her representation of them in her chronicle. Like Allende herself, Inés uses writing as a weapon of female and political subversion, giving voice to those who have historically been silenced. Yet while she retains the final word on her own life, she is unable to erase the conflicts inherent in her different subject positions, as woman and as conquistador, so that her critique is compromised by her interpellation into the patriarchal ideology of the conquistador. The subjectivity she offers as a unique and vital perspective to be added to the chronicles of great men constantly reaffirms her position as victim of conflicting identities. While going some way to undermine the European conquest narrative of masculine domination, at the end of her life Inés declares herself ‘Dona Inés Suarez, a highly placed senora, widow of the Most Excellent Gobernador don Rodrigo de Quiroga, conquistador and founder of the kingdom of

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Chile’ (p. 3). She is finally unable to stand outside either the gender or racial ideology into which that language inscribes her, reaffirming a position of privilege which derives from her acquiescence with both. In consequence, the novel is not ultimately a post-colonial novel, as one might expect from Allende, embedded as Inés’s discourse is in the glamour of male conquest embodied in that image of herself resplendent in armour. Inés is what Allende herself wanted to be, the ‘hero’ of an adventure story from which she cannot entirely distance herself emotionally and aesthetically, however repugnant it might be intellectually. Allende herself admits to the double-edged nature of the linguistic tools she has inherited: ‘What a beautiful tongue we inherited from the fierce conquerors’.9

Notes 1. ‘Musings’, Isabel Allende website (http://www.isabelallende.com). 2. Jeronimo de Vivar’s Cronica y relacion copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile (Chronicles of the Kingdoms of Chile) 1558 and Pedro Marino de Lobera’s Cronico del Reino de Chile (Chronicle of the Kingdom of Chile) 1598. 3. For example, Jorge Guzman, Ay Mama Inés (Santiago de Chile: Andrés Bello, 1993). 4. Isabel Allende, Inés of my Soul, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Harper Collins, 2006). All further references will be to this edition and follow the relevant quotation in the text. 5. ‘Imagined Worlds and the Gendered City in Chilean Historical Fiction’, Cincinnati Romance Review, 44 (2018), 1–18, p.  7. Karr-Cornejo writes very persuasively that the narrative uncertainty with which this episode is described is the result of Ines’s desire to distance herself from the action reported, rather than describe it in her usual first-person voice, wishing to draw attention instead to her care for the injured and other nurturing acts coded as feminine. The beheadings therefore can be contained and explained as an act of aberration which barely figures in her own memory. 6. Quoted by Susana Reisz, ‘A Spanish American Scheherezade?: On Isabel Allende and Eva Luna’, in Contemporary Women Writing in the Other Americas: Contemporary Women Writing in Latin America, Vol. 1, ed. by Georgiana M. Colville (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 3–25 (p. 4). 7. ‘Writing as Therapy’, Isabel Allende Website. 8. Interview at the University of Northern Colorado, February 14, 1990, Confluencia, 6 (1990), 93–103 (p. 93). 9. Said by Allende at a conference in 1985. Quoted by Reisz, p. 13.

CHAPTER 10

The Legacy of the Conquistadors: Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora

Although set 300 years after the original conquests of Latin America, and on the margins of that empire in Puerto Rico, Esmeralda Santiago’s bestseller Conquistadora nevertheless demonstrates their enduring and pernicious legacy.1 Unlike those in Malinche and Inés of my Soul, the central characters here are not based on historical figures, but the fiction is firmly embedded in historical reality, including the continued existence of slavery on the island even after its abolition in Spain, and most of its other colonies in 1811.2 The legacy of the Conquistadors is vividly demonstrated through the central protagonist, a young Spanish woman of good family, whose ambitions are inspired by their example. Presenting Ana through a variety of narrative perspectives, Santiago maintains a fine balance of sympathy with more critical judgment of her charismatic yet ruthless heroine. For Ana’s aspirations for freedom from the constraints of traditional femininity, which marks her out in some ways as a proto-feminist, ultimately lead her to deny the freedom of others. The novel thus creates a tension between sexual and racial equality which gives the novel its central power, raising questions about the very nature of feminism. While the bulk of the novel takes place in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, its opening chapter, ‘El Encuentro The Encounter: November 19, 1493’, describes the first Spanish encounters with the native people, in this case the borinqueños, in terms which recall both Malinche and Inés of my Soul. Here is the same use of the cross to justify the use of the sword, the same Indians offering peace but suffering rape and pillage in return, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_10

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the same obsessive lust for gold: ‘The borinqueño culture, traditions and history were chronicled by the conquerors who called them savages, who misinterpreted their customs and rituals, who told them that if they didn’t renounce their own gods, they would live in flames in the next life’.3 The later importation of African slaves to work the plantations that produced sugar, the true gold for the colonisers, brought misery and degradation to yet another people. This introduction therefore makes clear the brutal reality behind the idealistic aims vaunted by Ana’s Conquistador ancestors. And yet this heritage is the driving force in Ana’s life. Immediately following El Encuentro, the section entitled Conquistadores: 1826–1849 explicitly asserts the continuity of past and present, while its first sentence identifies Ana as ‘a descendant of one of the first men to sail with the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, don Cristobal Colón’ (p.  9). After finding the journals of her ancestor, don Hernán Cubillas Cienfuegos,4 her imagination is fired by his description of the landscapes and peoples he finds, and she feels ‘his hand reaching across the centuries towards her’, leading to initial despair ‘that she was born female and centuries too late to be an explorer and adventurer like her ancestors’ (p. 16). She nevertheless determines to somehow continue his work, and to extend his lineage, marrying Ramón Argoso, the son of a plantation owner set on fame and fortune in the New World. As soon as Ana reaches Puerto Rico, she feels the ‘spirit of [her] ancestors’ (p.  83), and her goal becomes to ‘tame a wilderness’ (p. 85). One of Santiago’s first reviewers found Ana’s ‘unflinching devotion to her dream of living with the valor and beauty of her conqueror ancestors … compelling’,5 but others have found Santiago’s characterisation more problematic, since, as Ana herself later acknowledges, the wealth of the conquistadors is ‘erected upon corpses’ (p. 312). But the reader’s initial sympathies for Ana are solicited by her feelings of frustration at the constraints which condemn her to a life of passivity and obedience. These are conveyed through the narrative’s focus on her point of view in these early chapters. Like most Spanish women of impeccable pedigree, Ana is expected to preserve the family’s fortunes by marrying well. But these opening pages also demonstrate how temperamentally unsuited she is to such a role. She constantly fails to live up to the image of the ideal female embodied in her mother, who ‘was everything Ana was not—devout, humble, and demure’ (p. 11). Ana is no ‘typical senorita’ (p.  13), unable to dance, play an instrument or engage in small talk, instead preferring to ride like a man. Nor is she inspired to be like her cousin and first sexual partner Elena, ‘silent and distant in muslin with a

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perpetual servile smile, eyes cast down humbly’ (pp.  156–7), however much she loves her. The lack of strong and active female role models in her family or her society leaves a gap in her development which is filled by her male ancestors. Throughout her girlhood she has been fired by rage that, because she was not a man ‘she wasn’t in control of her own destiny’ (p. 13), but her knowledge of her ancestry gives her the sense of destiny which enables her to overcome all perceived obstacles, and contributes to her charisma. Like Inés, therefore, in order to escape the constraints of her gender and class, Ana develops the conventionally masculine attributes of bravery and physical strength. Under her grandfather’s influence she delights in practical crafts like animal husbandry, forming attachments to the world of work which scandalise her parents. Once in Puerto Rico, she works as hard as any man, in spite of the climate and the primitive conditions of her new home, compared with the wealth and comfort she was used to. In making her so central to the survival of the Hacienda Los Gemelos, named after her husband Ramón and his twin brother Inocente, Santiago not only reinforces the reader’s admiration for Ana, but puts women back into the history of Latin America, emphasising how many of the colonists were accompanied by their wives. Ana may be exceptional, but she is not alone. Her mother-in-law, Dona Leonor, accompanied her soldier husband into difficult and alien territory before becoming the more conventional Spanish mother. Dona Faustina Moreau de Morales, Ana’s neighbour, states that they are ‘all pioneers in this wilderness and must adjust to circumstances’ (p. 103), although her ideas of the role of a female colonist do not coincide with Ana’s. For her part, Ana’s lack of empathy for any of the other plantation wives hints at the limitations of what I suggested were proto-feminist aspirations, since her individualism precludes any fellow-­ feeling, failing to consider what pressures may have led these women to different adjustments. Ana’s aspirations towards equality with men are nevertheless shown to be achieved through an admirable combination of determination and hard graft. Even when the narrative perspective of these early chapters shifts to that of the Argoso twins, Ramón and Inocente, it celebrates Ana’s strengths, reinforcing her vision of herself as the equal of any man. Reversing the more usual pattern in which women like Inés are inspired to share the life of a man of destiny, the brothers are inspired by Ana to see themselves as men of destiny: ‘She’d used every artifice to ensnare Ramón and Inocente into believing that they were as capable and as entitled as conquistadores.

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She flattered and coaxed them even though she knew that they were irresponsible and immature’ (p. 163). As it is so difficult to tell the brothers apart, it is tempting to see them as half men, interchangeable, an effect emphasised by their expectation that Ana will take each of them to her bed once she marries Ramón. In Puerto Rico, they struggle more than Ana with their new life, remaining weak, shadowy figures, never firmly rooted in the land as she is. After Inocente is ambushed and murdered by slaves, Ramón becomes an emaciated and spectral figure in white, the cause of superstitious fear in the plantation slaves: ‘He’d been dead a long time, had become a ghost, “El Caminante”’ (p. 408). He can only account for his weakness in comparison with Ana’s strength by accusing her, in time-­ honoured fashion, of bewitching him and his brother, of filling them like her with a ‘conquistador delusion’ (p. 157). When, in his frustration he comes close to killing her, his behaviour demonstrates that Ana is, in spite of all her strength of character, a physically vulnerable woman. This episode contributes to the image of a young woman bravely trying to make her way in a man’s world. While Santiago here reminds the reader that Ana is physically the weaker sex, her emotional and sexual life constitute the total rejection of the expectations associated with female biology and the roles of wife and mother. Unlike Malinche and Inés, whose love for a man is a driving force in their lives, for good or ill, Ana displays no such feeling. In her first marriage, she sees sex only as ‘a bargain’ (p. 131), a view sustained by Ramón’s failure to understand that Ana has sexual needs, or what they are. As young gentlemen of their time, Ramón and Inocente have learnt to use prostitutes and slaves for pleasure, wives primarily for procreation, so that her sexual life with both twins is ‘lacklustre or even at times brutal’ (p. 53). Again Ana is positioned as the victim of male views of women, and specifically of female sexuality. In contrast, she had found complete satisfaction in her earliest sexual experiences with Elena, the cousin with whom she lives as a sister, and whom she hopes to retain as her lover after her marriage to Ramón, and Elena’s planned marriage to Inocente. This lesbian relationship represents yet another challenge to the ideas of female sexuality deemed acceptable in this society. The pleasure and emotion she experiences with Elena are not presented as deviant, but as evidence of a passionate nature stigmatised by her society, as was Inés’s. In this instance, rather than aspiring to be like a man, Ana aspires to an alternative sexuality which excludes men. Her love for Elena offers briefly the possibility of fulfilment in a women’s world, which her obsession with the Conquistadors

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leads her to betray, so that even in her second more sexually satisfying marriage she still feels the force of those earlier feelings. Ana’s resistance to traditional female roles in favour of ‘masculine’ ambitions extends to the biological and emotional bonds of maternity. Desolate when she feels that her son ‘didn’t love her’ (p. 154), she is nevertheless aware that Ramón is the more ‘maternal’ (p. 129), continuing the role reversal fundamental to their marriage. She is, moreover, ‘resentful’ (p. 119) of the baby’s demands, longing to get back to business matters, but repeatedly told these are ‘men’s affairs’ (p. 119). Not knowing what to do with this tiny, helpless creature, and feeling not love so much as doubt as to who the baby’s father is, she only knows that this child gets in the way of her ambitions. She tells herself that her work is ‘for him, and for future generations’ (p. 121), as if investing in the patriarchal pursuit of patrimony, feeling the pull of her ancestors more than the pull of her child. Her priorities are made clear when, after Ramón’s death, she ‘trades’ (p. 216) her four-year-old son Miguel, giving him up to his grandparents in order to safeguard her position on the plantation. The legalistic negotiations into which she enters with Eugenio, the child’s grandfather, and the casuistry with which she expresses a desire to continue what his dead sons ‘stood and died for’ (p. 214), almost obscure the fact that it is her small child she is bartering. Even though Ana’s offer gives Eugenio what he wants, his reaction, ‘There’s something wrong with this’ (p. 217), puts into words an unease this episode generates around Ana’s values. Even in her second pregnancy with Severo, the plantation overseer she grows to love, Severo fears their child will have difficulty penetrating Ana’s ‘hard heart’ (p. 371). The connection between Ana’s sexual and maternal life, her relationship with her husband and her relationship with her son, is brought tragically and dramatically home by the event which ironically frees her from them both. A series of chapters devoted to Miguel’s life in San Juan conveys how little the son shares with his mother, and a sense that he shares more with his more loving, though weaker, father. And yet the life the youth admits to being ‘rosy’ has one dark cloud over it: ‘the fading memory of a wild and distant place with an insistent female voice’ (p. 328). It is never made clear whether this voice is Ana’s, or that of the slave who effectively mothered him, but his longing for what he believes constitutes maternal affection leads to his death. Miguel’s return to the plantation after a sixteen-year absence coincides with a slave rebellion, inspired by the news of Emancipation in the United States and led by one of the slaves

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from Hacienda Los Gemeles. Although the approach to the Hacienda has been set on fire, Miguel risks his life in order to reach his mother: ‘He had to ask the question he’d never dared ask in the hundreds of letters he’d so grudgingly written over the last sixteen years. […] He knew that if he saw her eyes, he’d know the truth’ (pp. 402–3), that is whether or not she had traded him for the plantation. When dying, he finally experiences the maternal warmth he sought, while Ana experiences the bitter irony of feeling that love only to lose the object of it. What adds to her bitterness is the sense that she has been responsible not only for his death but for Ramón’s, and that her son’s death is a kind of haunting revenge for his father’s death: ‘Like his father, he was trapped in her life’ (p. 408). This feeling is reinforced for the reader by Miguel being mistaken by the slaves for another young man in white, El Caminante, his father’s ghost, introducing a powerful sense of judgment on Ana’s motivation. The guilt that Ana experiences regarding her deficit of feeling towards her husband and son is never, however, matched with regard to her slaves; she is instead implicitly condemned by the insight Santiago gives into their perspectives through a series of episodes entirely from their point of view. In addition to putting women back into history, Santiago puts slaves back into history, specifically into the development of Puerto Rico as a sugar producer. Patricia Montilla argues that the novel makes a major contribution to Puerto Rican literature by ‘demonstrating the essential role that slaves on the island […] held in the production of sugar, which was a crucial sector of the economy, while simultaneously revealing the terrible violence and oppression that so many endured long after slavery was abolished in other parts of Latin America and despite codes created by the Spanish Crown to regulate owners and minimize abuse’.6 The slaves’ perspectives are doubly valuable, since in addition to what we learn of their lives, past and present, they cast knowing eyes on their white owners, providing a very different perspective from those parts of the novel experienced from Ana’s point of view. Their health and survival depend on such knowledge. The first to pass judgment is Ana’s house servant Flora, who asserts that the Europeans are ‘an indolent but violent race’ (p. 93), and has a keen understanding of the realities of her situation: ‘so that she wouldn’t be beaten, Flora did what she was told’ (p. 99). She also understands the power relations and sexual relations of the three new arrivals at the Hacienda—Ana, Ramón and Inocente—immediately recognising Ana as the real patrone (p. 96). And it is Flora who sums up the brutal reality

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of slavery in a way which gives the lie forever to Ana’s claim that a life of slavery can be better than the life of the impoverished free blacks: Flora knew that half the negritos chasing each other around the batey wouldn’t live to be adolescents, their bodies unable to withstand tropical anaemia, paludismo, measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, meningitis. Half the girls who reached puberty would die in childbirth or soon thereafter, and the boys who grew to manhood would die by their early forties from overwork, disease, and accidents in the fields. A few would be maimed or crippled, another one or two would commit suicide. And there was always the possibility that any of them, child or adult, could be sold for money or to settle debts. (p. 167)

Other female voices are heard at intervals throughout the novel, frequently recounting the death of a child. One of the most telling is that of Severo’s mistress, Consuela, abused by men from the age of eleven, who gives her latest baby away rather than watch it die like all the rest. Her motives stand in direct contrast to those Ana has for effectively giving away her son. What is totally lacking on Ana’s part is any sense that these are women like herself, that if she has felt constrained by her sex, they have suffered grievously because of it. Any sense the reader might initially have had of Ana as a proto-feminist is hard to sustain when reading how readily she performs the role of patrone. One male slave’s voice is heard briefly before he kills himself. Artemio, the son of Sina Damita, a freed slave who acts as healer and midwife for the plantation, would rather die than return to slavery. Such evidence weighs heavily against Ana. These are the voices of those torn from their mothers or children, so that unlike Ana their heritage is fragmented and interrupted. But they too are motivated by ancestral voices, kept alive in memories, even though their memories include the horrors of the sea journey which brought the slaves from Africa to the Caribbean. They too are desperate to pass on something of their lives to those who follow them, even if only a name. Jacobo, the slave who eventually destroys the plantations, finds the only way to resist captivity and oppression is by remembering his village in Africa, and the others who were captured: ‘In his mind, they continued to walk, lead and prowl because if they didn’t, he’d never existed, never been but a slave with a machete in a foreign land’ (p. 364). His memories, and the repetition of his true name Idowe, are all that enable him to preserve his sense of identity, and his humanity. Even Nena

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La Lavandera, violated at the age of twelve by one of the Argoso twins and charged with the most menial of tasks, is determined to ‘remember her story because someday she’d tell a living child from her womb that her name was not Nena, and not La Lavandera’ (pp. 281–2). Her greatest fear is to die nameless: ‘My name is Olivia’ (p. 299). This may not be true, but it is hers. Noting the names of those who have died of cholera in the ledgers of ownership, Ana honours this desire, writing Olivia instead of her slave name. But for her even ‘Olivia’ remains essentially a statistic, one of the ‘31 muertos’ (p. 299) in the debit column. The stories that form the slaves’ only inheritance include a sense of the supernatural which persists in spite of the Christian education which Ana attempts to instil into them, in order to fulfil the requirements imposed on slave owners by the Spanish Crown. And while the Europeans dismiss such beliefs as primitive superstition, even they are unable to escape their power. The existence of El Caminante in the minds of the slaves begins as an expression of their superstitious fear of the surviving twin, then becomes a psychological reality for Ramón, who feels ‘as insubstantial as a ghost, as transparent, as useless’ (p. 193). The apparent reappearance of Ramón in the form of Miguel both signifies Ana’s guilt towards father and son, and becomes the cause of the boy’s destruction, since the two men he sees in the burning fields, who could have helped him escape the fires, instead run away in fear of El Caminante. Conciencia has a similar dual function. Ana decides to keep, rather than discard, this ugly hump-backed black baby abandoned on her back stairs, naming her Conciencia, as a reminder that she gave her own child away. As the child grows, this psychological function merges with the supernatural in the visions she experiences which act as forewarnings of the disasters that are to occur to the Hacienda, so that she functions not simply as a reminder of the past but as a prophet of the future. The one inheritance which the slaves share with Ana is ironically the love of freedom, the great motivator for which many are ready to sacrifice their lives. Jacobo would ‘fight to the death if he had to, because there was nothing left for him but what he had when he started so many harvests ago, Freedom’ (p.  365). It inspires Danita to whisper in her own language, Mandingo, into the ears of every newborn the word ‘freedom’ (p.  263). But what they ostensibly share with Ana merely throws into dramatic relief the aridity of her own ambitions, since her freedom comes ultimately at the cost of theirs. However admirable her aspirations to be free from the constraints of both gender and class, they cannot legitimate

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her power over the lives of others. Those she calls nuestra gente (p, 297), ‘our people’, are ‘property, necessary to accomplish her goal to tame a wilderness’ (p. 89). She has no qualms about punishing them since ‘that’s what it means to be a hacendada’ (p. 94), the role which now consumes her. Aware that she has ‘undisputed power over others’ (p, 93), she wonders whether controlling the slaves is ‘in her blood’, yet another aspect of her Conquistador inheritance. And yet, that phrase ‘our people’ is open to a more generous interpretation, sometimes implied by Santiago’s representation of Ana’s conflicted inner life. Without authorial comment or judgment, Santiago allows Ana to speak, or rather to think, for herself, recording the complex tensions within her: the pangs of conscience she sometimes feels about the lives of her slaves, set against the demands of the Hacienda. She grows to feel some affection for her house slaves, as is evident in her grief over Flora’s death, the only death she has mourned up till that point, a fact she finds impossible to understand since Flora is only a slave. She therefore differentiates herself from Severo on the grounds that she, unlike him, feels the suffering of the slaves, although she is forced to admit that she too has the ‘ability to set aside compassion in the service of a single-minded goal’ (p. 311). For Ana’s feelings are never allowed to win out over the decisions and actions she feels she needs to make in order to fulfil her ancestral destiny. The land remains paramount. While she grieves over the suffering of the slaves when cholera breaks out, she is also thinking that their deaths leave ‘fewer for the cane’ (p. 286). There is in Ana none of that identification with an exploited people which is felt by both Malinche and Inés, while her identity is bound up with that of her ancestors. Ana does nevertheless gradually become more aware of the true nature of her inheritance, and to question what she herself will pass on. Reflecting on her life in Spain, she remembers ‘believing that Puerto Rico meant freedom, but it now seemed like the long-ago dream of a naïve girl’ (p. 355). She now recognises the reality of the Conquistadors: the history of the conquest was strewn with their atrocities, their false promises, rape, their bastards, plunder and murder. They lost their moral center (sic), compromised their faith in the New World. They then erected gold-­ encrusted cathedrals in the Old World to turn humanity’s eyes toward beauty and away from their sins. (p. 407)

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The inheritance she will pass on to her son Miguel will not be any such monument, but the plantation she has managed in his name, at the cost of much blood, sweat and tears: ‘Miguel and his children and his children’s children would be her cathedral’ (p. 408). But it is Miguel who bequeaths an inheritance to Ana, an inheritance which emphasises how totally he rejects the Conquistador legacy Ana had once wished for him. Growing up with his grandparents in San Juan, Miguel develops political and social sympathies diametrically opposed to hers. His instincts are to join the fight for emancipation, both of the slaves, and of the colony itself, rejecting the path of his ancestors. He is presented as everything that Ana is not, a youth with strong feelings, but weak in resolve. While providing funds for the campaigns, his feelings for his mother, in spite of their years apart, will not allow him to act against her interests and free his slaves, since that would leave her without workers. He lacks her strength of character: ‘The minute his easy life was endangered, his integrity crumbled’ (p. 347). But the slaves are ironically freed by his death, giving an unexpected twist to the pattern of inheritance which has provided Ana’s driving motive. He also leaves her the ownership of Los Gemeles, a fact which comes shockingly into her mind even as he lies dying. Ana’s unanticipated legacy contributes to a pattern of change which drives her still further from the Conquistador inheritance she has already betrayed by marrying a man like Severo, the son of a cobbler. Their marriage constitutes a significant element in the novel’s historical and political structure, opening up a colonial future that will no longer belong only to the aristocratic elite. The novel ends with the suggestion of a new order replacing that elite, an order in which the couple will have to face the new challenge of employing free men rather than slaves, so that Ana will be forced to put into practice her son’s vision, whether she wished to or not. This changed world will be inherited in turn by Segundo, her son by Severo, who symbolises the fusion of these two very different worlds. If Ana’s second marriage is more successful, some of its success seems to be down to certain female qualities in a man who ‘made love like a woman’ (p.  260). The introduction of Severo, immediately on Ana’s arrival in San Juan, the island’s capital, marks him out as a character destined to be of significance to the plot, and in particular for Ana, who immediately shows an interest in him. Devoting the chapter ‘A Voice in His Head’ entirely to Severo’s point of view, the author suggests a man driven by the same ambition as Ana, the same dreams of the New World

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and the same sense of a destiny greater than that marked out for him at birth. In his case, however, it is class, rather than gender, that sets the limits. He recognises Ana as a kindred spirit, equal to him in temperament. He in turn is presented as a man as untamed and hardworking as Ana herself. Their social inequality is central to the relationship. She responds to a man who shares her affiliation with the land and readiness to devote his life’s work to it, admirably disdaining the distinctions of class which name him her inferior, just as she has disdained the constraints of gender. For his part Severo longs to marry a lady, whose status would have put her far beyond his reach before he came to Puerto Rico, and who will bring the ‘woman’s touch’ to his household. In another of the ending’s ironies, he dreams of retrieving the Ana she has so firmly left behind in order to satisfy her ambitions. When the home he has built for her is ready, he literally creates such a figure by laying out the clothes she has brought from the city but never worn again: He lifted the embroidered silk and lace clothes and spread them on the floor. He laid a corset underneath a bodice with short sleeves, its edges frilled with lace. He butterflied a skirt below it and placed gloves where Ana’s hands would be. He arranged a mantilla to frame an invisible head, and posed delicate stockings inside dainty kid shoes with satin bows ready to dance. (p. 296)

Severo nurtures that love for the female ideal so lacking in Ana herself. And yet Severo in a sense ties her to the Conquistador mentality. However different he may be in breeding from Ana’s ancestors, he is equal to them in ruthlessness. His brutality is first revealed in his treatment of Inocente’s murderers, who are tortured to death in acts of gratuitous violence which Santiago describes without comment at the end of a chapter, leaving the scene to resonate in the reader’s mind as a chilling insight into Severo’s character. Ana is aware of his being even more ruthless than herself, and his influence enables her to squash any scruples she may have about the treatment of the slaves. After the cholera epidemic, with fewer workers surviving, when Severo determines to push those that remain ever harder, she fails to intervene to protect them: She was the patrona, and could have insisted that pregnant women be given less demanding tasks. […] So far, three women had already miscarried. She didn’t protest that children were doing the work usually performed by

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adults. She didn’t exempt elders, who had toiled all their lives, […] whom the slave codes expressly required that owners allow to sit quietly in the shade for the last years left to them. (p. 307)

She continues, that is, to be attracted to men who, like the Conquistadors, are ruthless in the exercise of power to achieve their goals. When Severo names the house he builds for her ‘El Destino’ (p. 303), it suggests that he, rather than her ancestors, is now dictating her destiny. Rather than humanising her therefore, her love for a man serves the same function as her Conquistador inheritance, informing her actions, if not all her feelings, with the toxic masculinity that lets nothing stand in the way of ambition and greed. The main obstacle, however, to Ana feeling as keenly as she should about the suffering of her slaves is that she is blinded by her racist ideological inheritance. She cannot identify with the slaves since she does not recognise them as human beings like herself. In spite of the compassion and energy she shows in caring for the slaves during the cholera epidemic, she continues to be in denial about the importance of their lack of the freedom she holds so dear. She genuinely believes she can show her son ‘the other side of slavery’, telling herself they are better off with ‘good’ masters like herself and Severo than the ‘libertos and freed slaves […]. She brushed aside that they were locked in barracks at night, that they worked to exhaustion, that they could be whipped, that family members could be sold away from one another’ (p. 367). Even her father-in-law Eugenio, a slave owner himself, observes with shock the treatment of the slaves at Hacienda los Gemelos, but realises that this is possible for Ana because ‘she didn’t see them as human beings’ (p.  218). The child Conciencia, whom she treats like a daughter, remains in her mind ‘an object to be used’ (p. 372). Having designated the child her conscience has enabled her to objectify her and to distance herself from any feelings of guilt, until she becomes aware that her ‘conscience’ is a sentient being passing judgment on her. She chooses, however, to ignore it, since ‘a conscience at this stage in life was too great a burden’ (p. 372). Although the trauma of the slaves’ revolt and the fire awaken a sense in Ana of the damage she has done to her husband and child, any similar feelings of guilt with regard to the slaves are suppressed by her ideological conviction that their only function is to ensure the survival of the plantation. So does Santiago expect her readers to view Ana herself as a victim of colonial ideology? Are her protagonist’s views on slavery, however

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abhorrent to the modern reader, simply to be blamed on the historical context which Santiago has created with such care? Although the violation of the Spanish code on slavery by her and Severo is presented as common practice (see Montilla, p. 65), this cannot extenuate Ana, for the forces of history are against her. The American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves frequently enter the narrative as potent factors inspiring the liberals of San Juan, including her own son. Ana’s infatuation with her ancestors has led her to live by an increasingly outdated colonial ideology, whatever pride she might feel in having freed herself from ideologies of class and gender. And her ability to extract herself from it remains uncertain, since her moral centre, like theirs, has been at best compromised, at worst, destroyed. Even as she stands by her son’s grave she consoles herself with the idea of what she has created on his behalf, refusing to hear ‘the voices of men and women, of children, of creatures and trees and every living thing’ whispering in protest, ‘You did not do it for him; he made this possible for you’ (p. 414). The last two chapters of the novel use two different narrative perspectives to highlight those aspects of Ana that have contended for prominence throughout, juxtaposing gender with racial issues. The penultimate chapter is given over to the views of Mr. Worthy the family lawyer, who admires Ana for her achievements: ‘What an extraordinary woman!’ Even as a girl she had ‘conveyed spirit and energy. She’d endured the subsequent tragedies with admirable grace and unswerving vision’ (p.  410). Seeing Ana and Severo faced with their biggest challenge so far: ‘five hundred cuerdas of cane to be cut and processed with a nearly nonexistent workforce’ (p. 411), he is nevertheless confident that the two of them will succeed. Although Worthy would not use such terms, this is the proto-­ feminist Ana, who considers herself equal to any man and is determined to pursue paths forbidden to women of her class. The final chapter, however, which takes place at Miguel’s funeral, as Ana stands at her son’s grave, suggests the cost of pursuing that vision. While comforted by the thought of the life that goes on outside the cemetery gate, showing the optimism which Worthy so admires, her final thought is ‘We’re all walking on corpses…but this too is life’ (p.  414). Santiago leaves the reader to decide whether this is a stoical philosophy wrung from hard experience, or a final piece of self-justification which suggests no yielding in her beliefs, only an acceptance of as brutal a view of life as that embodied by her Conquistador ancestors—so be it, Amen, as the chapter’s title suggests. Ana’s desire for a life beyond the constraints

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imposed on women of her class leads her not to become aware of what she shares with other women, but to attach herself to the most negative aspects of masculinity. Seduced by the false glamour of the Conquistadors, she frees herself from the contemporary ideal of womanhood only to become locked into a racial ideology which serves her ambitions. Santiago has created a character and a life which demonstrate how easily what we might call feminist individualism can become absorbed into the aspiration simply for self-fulfilment through masculine means and ends. Patriarchy cannot be defeated by complicity with it, and a woman’s quest for emancipation is meaningless unless it aspires to change the position of all women. The concept of freedom is meaningless unless it is inclusive.

Notes 1. The English edition was first published in New  York in 2011 by Alfred Knopf (Random House), the Spanish edition in the same year in Madrid by Suma publishers. 2. The exceptions were Brazil and Cuba, where slavery was not abolished till 1886. 3. Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora (New York: Vintage paperback, 2012), p.  5. All further references to the novel follow the relevant quotation in the text. 4. Santiago invented the figure of Cienfuegos as one of the Conquistadors who went with the real-life Juan Ponce de Léon on his first official expedition to San Juan Bautista in 1508. 5. Bookpage, one of the reviews quoted as frontispiece to the paperback edition. 6. ‘(Re)Writing Women’s History and the Slave Experience in Nineteenth-­ Century Puerto Rico: Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora’, Afro-Hispanic Review, 14 (2015), 57–68 (p. 60).

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion

Womanhood and Nationhood While working on women’s neo-Victorian fiction, I came across American novels set in the same historical period, but very different in character. Historical novels written by British writers might have involved their protagonists in sexual adventures as in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, or intellectual adventures in such novels as Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity, but the female protagonists of fiction by American women were adventurers in the more familiar sense of travellers, people moving into unfamiliar and potentially dangerous territory. Here I found protagonists who vied with men in their journeyings, often cross-dressing to do so, and embarked on adventures more usually associated with men of the period. Central to all these novels are questions about sexual difference and the nature of gender, not simply emphasising the limitations experienced by women but raising the possibility that masculinity is a concept equally worth challenging and modifying. I became aware, however, that in each of  the three parts of the Americas—Canada, the United States and Latin America—the focus of the novels was different, unsurprisingly given the size of the continent and the varied histories it encompasses. While all shared the preoccupation with gender, the novels differed in the ideas they explored about national identity and race, and its relationship to gender. While some female fictional adventurers are involved in the process of settlement which is the first step to nation building, all those women © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. King, Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94126-0_11

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settlers ultimately ask questions about nationhood, about the nature of the nation they are building and questions relating to their relationship to the ‘Other’ among whom they settle. Othered themselves as women, they have the choice of identifying with that racial Other, or with the male power embodied in the dominant racial group. At some point, therefore, they find themselves confronting the nature of their relationship, as incoming Europeans or their descendants, to either the indigenous populations or to the African slaves later imported into the New World. The female North American novelists I have discussed all challenge the idea so central to the nineteenth-century American literary canon that American identity is essentially male. They also implicitly or explicitly challenge the very concept of a single American identity, raising the issue of the obvious differences between North and South that are serious enough to cause a war, but also those between East and West, where going West is what men should do, while women look after the homestead. Slavery is clearly at the heart of the North/South divide. The civil war fought over the emancipation of the slaves is central to Enemy Women, the cause of Adair’s journeys, but this avowedly neutral woman has little direct experience of slavery. Ahab’s wife, Una, and Lidie Newton, on the other hand, experience direct confrontations with female slaves which form part of their journeys of self-discovery. Susan, the escaped slave who helps Una through the ordeal of her stillbirth, becomes Una’s ‘shadow self’. Una’s readiness to identify with another woman’s search for freedom across the racial divide suggests a recognition of the link between female and racial emancipation which is both historically accurate and central to the concept of freedom offered by the novel, as opposed to that of the classic male American quest for freedom from the home and the domestic. Smiley similarly challenges the Huck Finn concept of freedom in Lidie Newton, where the conflicting demands of the abolitionists and the southerners are central concerns which Lidie is unable to resolve. Although her reading of Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has engendered a hatred of slavery, her feelings about the rights of slaves are undermined by what she sees as the conflicting ‘rights’ of owners, rather like Huck. Her first close encounter with a female slave brings to a head her awareness of how untested her principles are. Throughout the novel, however, Smiley plants the suggestion that women and slaves have much in common, and Lidie’s own education in the academy of Catherine Beecher, Beecher Stowe’s sister, again serves as a reminder of the shared history of emancipation for women and for slaves. In all three North American novels, the presence of the civil war

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and/or slavery calls into question the very idea of a single American identity, while these women without their ‘natural’ protectors demonstrate how essential this new kind of femininity will be to the building of the nation. The quotations from Beecher’s book, quoted at the beginning of every chapter of Lidie Newton, endorse the role of women in nation building, as wives, mothers, working partners and homemakers. What each novel makes clear is that the kind of femininity embodied in these female adventurers must be accommodated in any emerging national character. In the Canadian novels discussed, the protagonists’ identification with the indigenous people or slaves is even stronger, so that they effectively become colonised people themselves. Isobel Gunn, coming from one of the most impoverished parts of the British Isles, has to travel far into the British Empire to find a home, living with the Cree women deemed as ‘unnatural’ as herself. When, after Isobel’s enforced departure from Canada, her child is suckled by one of the Cree women, this act both emphasises the sense of kinship she has experienced with them and is a reminder that the Europeans could not have survived without these First Nations. Both Urquhart’s Mary O’Malley and Maillet’s Pélagie are victims of colonisation, forced to leave their homes and carrying that experience with them throughout their journeys, but neither is prepared to become a coloniser in turn, as those intent on settling in Canada have done. Mary, growing closer to the Ojibway Exodus Crow than her own husband, ultimately rejects her settler family for a spiritual home in the Canadian wilderness. Feeling strongly the connection between Canada’s First Nations and the Celtic Irish as victims of British power, she is only the first of succeeding generations of women in her family to remind their menfolk that, once colonised themselves, they have all too easily shifted into the role of coloniser. While Pélagie seeks to establish a distinct identity for her people, she never forgets she is one of the colonised, which makes her welcoming to the escaped slaves they meet on their way. Having no land of their own, there is a sense in which all these colonised peoples substantiate their existence in the stories they tell. Mary O’Malley also feels the domestication of women is akin to the conquest and taming of the wilderness, reinforcing her sense of identification with that wilderness. This identification is implicit in the other Canadian novels discussed, so that the female protagonists find it hard to identify with those who have come to tame the wilderness and create a new world out of it. In contrast, in the Latin American novels discussed, the European women who come to the colonies with their men see

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themselves as taming the wilderness. The colonising Spanish, male and female, take and retain their sense of national identity to the New World with them. This is the case even when Allende’s Inés and Santiago’s Ana, seeing themselves as the oppressed sex, recognise a certain affinity with the oppressed Amerindians or slaves. But potential feelings of identification with the oppressed are generally suppressed in the interest of remaining in control as conqueror or owner. For Esquivel’s Malinche, the situation is more complex since she herself belongs to the oppressed race, and her identification with the overlords does not prevent her consciousness of her deeper spiritual and physical affinity with her tribe and her land. Her identification with the colonisers is the survival mechanism forced on so many of the colonised. The Latin American novels place their hopes for the future on the birth of mestizos, people of mixed European and indigenous American ancestry, offering a new sense of nationhood. These novels bring about a new perspective on the complicated relationship of women’s identity to the formation of national identity. Reading them has brought me to interrogate my initial assumption that because these were all stories of women resisting gender expectations by following—sometimes literally—in men’s footsteps, often engaging in cross-­ dressing to do so, they were equally by definition feminist fiction. In them I found a tension between identification with men—often a necessity of the women’s situations—and identification with the oppressed, with whom they felt an affinity. This tension is at its strongest in the Latin American fiction discussed, dealing with either the reality of women tied to the Conquistadors, or its legacy. Although Santiago’s Conquistadora is set in the same period as the Canadian and North American novels, this novel above all highlights the dangers for women of excessive identification with male ideals and purposes that effectively destroy any sense of common purpose with other women. This goes against the defining feature of solidarity that underwrites twentieth-century feminism. This book aims to introduce readers to an exciting and expanding field of women’s writing, which also encompasses British and Commonwealth historical fiction. It is a field well worth further exploration. As a brief indication of the range of possibilities, I have included some suggestions in a list of further reading. I very much hope that readers of this book will be encouraged to undertake further exploration themselves.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Allende, Isabel, Inés of my Soul, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). ——— ‘Musings’, Isabel Allende website. http://www.isabelallende.com. ——— ‘Writing as Therapy’, Isabel Allende Website. ——— Interview at the University of Northern Colorado, February 14, 1990, Confluencia, 6 (1990), 93–103 (p. 93). Atwood, Margaret, The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems (Toronto: OUP, 1970). Beecher, Catherine, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (Boston: Webb, 1841). Bristow, Joseph (ed.), The Oxford Book of Adventure Stories, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Cather, Willa, My Antonia (Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1918). ——— O Pioneers, ed. by A.S. Byatt (London: Virago, 1983). Chase, Owen, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, ed. by Tim Cahill (New York: Lyons Press, 1999). de Lobera, Pedro Marino, Cronico del Reino de Chile (Chronicle of the Kingdom of Chile) (Santiago: Imprenta del Ferrocaril, 1865). de Vivar, Jeronimo, Cronica y relacion copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile (Chronicles of the Kingdoms of Chile) (Berlin: Colloquium-Verlag, 1979). Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, Historia Verderada de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana (The True Story of the Conquest of New Spain) (Barcelona: Castalia Ediciones, 2019).

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Esquivel, Laura, Malinche, trans. by Ernesto Mestre-Reed (New York: Simon and Schuster: 2006). ‘Esquivel, Laura, Interview’, SPLALit: Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture, March 7th 2006. http://splalit.blogspot.co. uk/2006/03/interview-­with-­laura-­esquivel.html. Fitzgerald, Penelope, The Blue Flower (London: Mariner Books, 1995). Forster, Margaret, Diary of an Ordinary Woman (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003). Fuller, Margaret, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Larry Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1998). Guzman, Jorge, Ay Mama Ines (Santiago de Chile: Andrés Bello, 1993). Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Jiles, Paulette Enemy Women (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). ——— Interview on Good Morning America, 25 July 2002. https://abcnews. go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=125053&page=1. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, ed. by Mary Harriott Norris (Norderstedt: Hansebooks, 2017). Mackenzie, Alexander, Voyages from Montreal, on the River St Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; In the Years 1789 and 1793 (T. Cadell, J. and W. Davies, Strand; Cobbett and Morgan, Pall-­ Mall, 1801). Maillet, Antonine Evangéline Deusse (Montreal: Lemeac, 1992). ——— Pélagie: The return to Acadie, trans. by Philip Stratford (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1988). Mantel, Hilary, A Place of Greater Safety (London: Harper Perennial, 2007). Melville, Herman, Moby Dick or The White Whale (New York: New American Library, 1961). Moodie, Susanna, Flora Lyndsay, or Passages in an Eventful Life (1854), (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2014). ——— Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (London: Richard Bentley, 1853). Naslund, Sena Jeter, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Parr Traill, Catherine, Backwoods of Canada (London: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1836). ——— Female Emigrant’s Guide (Toronto: Maclear, 1854). Philbrick, Nathaniel, In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Rex, Cathy, ‘Revising the Nation: The Domesticated Nationalism of Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle’, Women’s Studies, 42 (2013), 956–978. Santiago, Esmeralda, Conquistadora (New York: Vintage, 2012).

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Scholastic Canada, Dear Canada series, publisher’s website. Scholastic Canada: I Am Canada. Scobie, Stephen, The Ballad of Isabel Gunn (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1987). Smiley, Jane, Interview in The Atlantic Online, May 28 1998. ——— ‘Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s “Masterpiece”’, Harper’s Magazine (January 1996), 61–67. ——— The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (London: Flamingo, 1998). Thomas, Audrey, Isobel Gunn (Toronto: Penguin, 2000). Thompson, David, Travels in Western North America 1784–1812, ed. by Victor Hopwood (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971). Tremain, Rose, Restoration (London: Vintage, 2001). Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn (London: Penguin, 2014). Urquhart, Jane, Away (Toronto: Penguin, 1995). Urquhart, Jane Interview, ‘VIWF (Vancouver International Writers Fest): Jane Urquhart, author of Sanctuary Line’, The Vancouver Observer, 17 October 2010. http://www.vancouverobserver.com. Willard, Frances E., How to Win: A Book for Girls, 5th edition (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1888).

Secondary Sources Anderson, Linda, Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990). Atwood, Margaret, ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’, The American Historical Forum: Histories and Historical Fictions, 103 (1998), 1503–1516. Atwood, Margaret StrangeThings: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ——— Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972). Barthes, Roland, ‘The Reality Effect’ in Tzvetan Todorov, French Literary Theory, translated by R. Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Baym, Nina, ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’, American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123–39. Birch, Libby, ‘The Irish female presence in Jane Urquhart’s fiction’, Canadian Woman Studies, 17 (1997). Bowering, George, ‘Songs and Wisdom: An Interview with Audrey Thomas’, Open Letter, 5 (1979), 7–31. Bowker, J.W. and J.A Russell, ‘The Background of Longfellow’s Evangeline’, Queen’s Quarterly, 1932.

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Bruce, Barbara, ‘Collection, Canadian Nationalism, and Colonial Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Away’ in Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, 109–128. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Byatt, A.S., On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). Canadian Signatures (Canadian High Commission, 1991). Cardy, Michael and Dulcie M. Engel, ‘Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-Charrette: An Acadian Mother Courage?’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 15 (2002), 57–69. Carter, Angela, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in On Gender and Writing, ed. by Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983). Castle, Terry, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Colville, Georgina, ‘Expats or Not’, Contemporary Women’s Writing in the Americas, Vol 3 (Lewiston: E. Mellen, 1996), pp. 349–65. Cordingly, David, Women Sailors and Sailors' Women: An Untold Maritime History (New York: Random House, 2001). ‘Critical Studies: Audrey Thomas Issue’, Room of One’s Own, 10 (1986). Domosh, Mona and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: Guilford Press, 2001). Donoghue, Denis, The American Classics: A Personal Essay (Yale Scholarship Online, 2005). Ferris, Ina, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Fetterley, Judith, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976). Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin, 1970). Fitzpatrick, Marjorie, ‘Antonine Maillet: The Search for a Narrative Voice’, Journal of Popular Culture, 1981, 4–13. Frye, Northrop, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1975). Giltrow, Janet and David Stouck, ‘“Survivors of the Night”: The Language and Politics of Epic in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-charrette’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 71 (2002), 735–754. Glover, David and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000). Goldman, Marlene, ‘Talking Crow: Jane Urquhart’s Away’, in Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, ed. by H. Daziron-Ventura and M. Dvorak (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010), 110–41. Griffiths, Naomi, ‘Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend’, Acadiansis, 11 (1982), 28–41.

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Hadley, Louisa, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Hammill, Faye, Canadian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Heilmann, Ann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-first Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Higgins, A.C., ‘Evangeline’s Mission: Anti-Catholicism, Nativism, and Unitarianism in Longfellow’s Evangeline’, Religion and the Arts, 13 (2009), 547–68. Howells, Coral Ann, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (London: Methuen, 1987). ———, Canadian Signatures in the Feminine (Canada House, 1991). Hudson Bay Company website. http://hbheritage.ca. Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Jeffries, Stuart, ‘The History Woman’, G2, The Guardian, 18 October 2012. Johnston, Susan, ‘Reconstructing the Wilderness: Margaret Atwood's Reading of Susanna Moodie’. www.uwo.ca?english/canadianpoetry/epjm/vol31/johnston.htm. Karr-Cornego, Katherine, ‘Imagined Worlds and the Gendered City in Chilean Historical Fiction’, Cincinnati Romance Review, 44 (2018), 1–18. Kaul, A.N., The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-century Fiction (New Delhi: OUP, 2002). Kentucky Educational Television's Bookclub. http://www.ket.org/bookclub/ books/2000_jul/. downloaded January 2005. King, Jeannette, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Kolodny, Annette, ‘Among the Indians: the Uses of Captivity’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 21 (1993), pp. 184–95. Kristeva, Julia, ‘The Semiotic Chora’, The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). ——— ‘Women’s Time’, The Kristeva Reader, pp. 188–213. Lacombe, Michele, ‘Narrative, Carnival and Parody: Intertextuality in Antonine Maillet’s, Pélagie la Charrette’, 116 (2015), 43–56. Landry, F.A., ‘The historical origin of the poem Evangeline’, La Societé Historique Acadianne, 23 (1969). Lang, Andrew, ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review (1887). Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Luchetti, Cathy and Carol Olwell, Women of the West (New York: W.W.Norton, 1982). Lukacs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983).

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Maillet, Antonine, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1971). Marcusse, C.S., Re-Writing Pioneer Women in Anglo-Canadian Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). Melville, Herman, ‘Hawthorn and his Mosses’, The Literary World, August 1850. Messinger Cypess, Sandra, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From history to myth (Austen: University of Texas, 1991). Mitchell, Kate, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Montilla, Patricia, ‘(Re)Writing Women’s History and the Slave Experience in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora’, Afro-­ Hispanic Review, 14 (2015), 57–68. New, W.H., A History of Canadian Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). Norling, Lisa, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Paz, Octavio, ‘The Sons of La Malinche’ (‘Los hijos de la Malinche’), The Labyrinth of Solitude and the Other Mexico, trans. by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Potter, David, ‘American Women and the American Character’, Stetson University Bulletin, 63 (1962). Pykett, Lynn, ‘The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History’, Critical Quarterly, 29 (1987), pp. 71–7. Raven, Susan and Alison Weir, Women in History: Thirty-five Centuries of Feminist Achievement (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). Reisz, Susana, ‘A Spanish American Scheherezade?: On Isabel Allende and Eva Luna’, in Contemporary Women Writing in the Other Americas: Contemporary Women Writing in Latin America, Vol. 1, ed. by Georgiana M.  Colville (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 3–25. Rex, Cathy, ‘Revising the Nation: The Domesticated Nationalism of Ann Eliza Bleeker’s The History of Maria Kittle’, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 42 (2013), 956–78. Richards, Linda, ‘Profile of Audrey Thomas’, January Magazine (2000). http:// januarymgazine.com/profiles/athomas.html. Rosenthal, Caroline, Narrative Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlatt and Louise Erdrich (New York: Camden House, 2003). Shiller, Dana, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29 (1997), 538–60. Sklar, Kathryn Kish and James Brewer Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Smyth Groening, Laura, Listening to Old Woman Speak: Natives and alterNatives in Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2004).

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Socken, Paul, ‘The Bible and Myth in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-Charette’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 12 (1987). https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index. php/scl/article/view/8065/9122. Van Herk, Aritha, ‘Mapping as Metaphor: The Cartographer’s Revision’, A Frozen Tongue (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), 54–68. ——— ‘Women Writers and the Prairie: Spies in an Indifferent Landscape’, Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture, 6 (1984), 15–25. Wallace, Diana, The Women’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Wallace, James D., ‘Hawthorne and the Scribbling Women Reconsidered’, American Literature, 62 (1990), pp. 201–222. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Waters, Sarah, ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Meagher’s The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’, Women: A Cultural Review, 7 (1996), 176–88. Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Woodcock, George, ‘Audrey Thomas’, in Robert Lecker and Jack David (eds.), The New Canadian Anthology (Scarborough: Nelson, 1988). Zimmerman, Tegan, Writing Back through our Mothers: A Transnational Feminist Study on the Woman’s Historical Novel (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2014). Zinam, Oleg and Ida Molina, ‘The Tyranny of Myth: Dona Marina and the Chicano search for ethnic identity’, Mankind Quarterly, 32 (1991).

Further Reading Adamson, Gil, The Outlander (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). Allende, Isabel, Daughter of Fortune, trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden (London: Flamingo, 2000). Chevalier, Tracy, The Last Runaway (London: HarperCollins, 2013). Davies, Carys, West (London: Granta, 2018). Duncker, Patricia, James Miranda Barry (London: Serpents Tail, 1999). Elphinstone, Margaret, The Voyageurs (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003). Grenville, Kate, A Room Made of Leaves (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2020). ——— Sarah Thornhill (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). Kidman, Fiona, The Captive Wife (New York: Vintage, 2005). Laurence, Margaret, The Diviners (London: Virago, 1989). Marlatt, Daphne, Ana Historic (Toronto: Anansi, 1988). McMahon, Katherine, The Rose of Sebastopol (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007). Penney, Stef, The Tenderness of Wolves (London: Quercus, 2006). Tremaine, Rose, The Colour (London: Vintage, 2004).

Index1

A Abolition, 51 Abolitionist, 32, 49, 148 Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer (1999), 6, 10, 29, 40n1, 67, 68 Alias Grace, 18 Allende, Isabel, 22–24, 27, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130–132, 132n1, 132n4, 132n6, 132n7, 132n9 The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, 43, 53, 54n4 American Civil War, 145 American identity, 57, 65 Amerindians, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 150 Anderson, Linda, 7 Atwood, Margaret, 17–19, 21, 61, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90n7, 90n9, 92 Austen, Jane, 62 Autobiography, 123, 130 Away, 79, 81, 84, 90n10

B The Backwoods of Canada (1836), 17 Bakhtin, 106n21, 106n22 Barthes, Roland, 7 Bates, Barton, 58 Baym, Nina, 13, 14, 26, 44, 53 Beecher, Catherine, 43, 45–47, 51, 52, 54n9, 148, 149 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 148 Berdash, 70 Bible, 92, 105n6, 124 Bildungsroman, 17, 63 Birch, Libby, 80, 81, 90n3 Bleeker, Ann Eliza, 14, 26, 47, 54n7 Bowering, George, 75 The Boys’ Own Magazine, 11 Boys’ Own Paper, 11 Brecht, Bertolt, 93, 97 Brewster, Elizabeth, 84 Bristow, Joseph, 12, 26 Brontë, Charlotte, 4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Brooke, Frances Moore, 17 Brooks, Geraldine, 57, 65n1 Bruce, Barbara, 89 Butler, Judith, 11 Byatt, A.S., 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 26 C Cahill, Tim, 40 Canadian Confederation, 80 Captive woman, 47, 54 Captivity narrative, 14 Carson, Anne, 84 Carter, Angela, 29, 33 Castle, Terry, 4 Cather, Willa, 14, 53 Chase, Owen, 29, 37, 38, 40, 40n2 Chase, Richard, 13 Christianity, 114 Civil war, 148 Clara, 6 Colonisation/colonised/colonial, 84–87, 93, 112, 135, 142, 144, 149, 150 Colonised peoples, 130 Colville, Georgiana, 91 The Conjugial Angel (1992), 2, 6 Conquistadora, 133, 146n3, 146n6 Cooper, Katherine, 10, 26 Cordingly, David, 32, 41n10 Cortés, Hernán, 107–117, 119n7 Crane, Steven, 57, 58 Cross-dressing, 11, 47, 67, 73, 74, 147, 150 D D’Arcy McGee, Thomas, 80, 86, 88 Dalley, 10 Daughter of Fortune (1998), 121 de Ercilla y Zuniga, Alonso, 123 de Gomara, Lopez, 108

de Quiroga, Rodrigo, 122, 123, 131 de Valdivia, Pedro, 122–126, 128–131 Dear Canada, 16 Deirdre of the Sorrows, 83, 87, 89 Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, 108 Donoghue, Denis, 13 Duncker, Patricia, 11 E Electricity, 147 Emancipation, 148 Empire, 11, 12, 22, 24, 86, 149 Enemy Women (2002), 57, 65, 65n1, 65n3, 148 Epic, 29, 40, 60, 91, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102, 104, 106n21, 121–123 Esquivel, Laura, 22–24, 121, 150 Evangeline, 92, 93, 95, 104, 105n7, 105n8, 105n9, 105n10 Eve, 126, 127 Exodus, 93 F The Faerie Queen, 33 Falconer, Colin, 107 Female captive, 14 Female Emigrant’s Guide (1854), 17 Feminism, 3, 11, 24 Feminist, 3–5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 24, 32, 45, 53, 104, 133, 135, 139, 145, 146, 150 Ferris, Ina, 1 Fetterley, Judith, 15 Fiedler, Leslie, 13, 15, 32–36, 38, 39, 48, 49, 65 First Nations, 70, 71, 81, 83, 149 Fitzgerald, Penelope, 6 Florentine Codex, 111, 119n8 Forster, Margaret, 5

 INDEX 

Freedom, 2, 11–13, 16, 18, 32, 35, 39, 45–48, 52, 53, 63, 64, 98, 127–129, 133, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148 Fuller, Margaret, 32, 41n9 G Gaelic, 80, 82, 86 Galloway, Janice, 6 Giltrow, Janet, 92, 94, 103, 104, 106n21, 106n24 Girls’ Own Paper, 12 Glendinning, Victoria, 147 Glover, David, 9 Goddess, 81, 100, 108, 111, 115, 116 Goldman, Marlene, 87 Grand Pré, 91, 94 Gregory, Philippa, 2 H Hadley, Louisa, 6 Hammill, Faye, 20 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 13, 26 Heilmann, Ann, 7–9, 25 Henry, Alexander, 68 HimHar, 70, 71 The History of Maria Kittle (1793), 47, 54n7 Homosexuality, 34 Howells, Coral Ann, 17, 19–21 Huck Finn, 48, 50–52, 54n8 Huckleberry Finn, 13, 46, 48–50, 52, 54n10 Hudson’s Bay Company, 68, 69 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 104 I I Am Canada, 16, 27 Inés of my Soul (2006), 121, 123, 132n4, 133

161

Infanticide, 68, 74 Isobel Gunn, 67, 70, 75, 76, 78n1 J James, Henry, 53 James Miranda Barry (1999), 11 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 7, 17 Jiles, Paulette, 35, 57–60, 63, 64, 65n2, 65n3 Johnston, Susan, 85 The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 27 K Kaplan, Cora, 9 Karr-Cornejo, Katherine, 125, 132n5 Kaul, A.N., 64 Kolodny, Annette, 14, 26 Kristeva, Julia, 115, 119n9, 119n13 L La Aracauna (1578), 123 La Conquistadora, 23 Lang, Andrew, 12 Laurence, Margaret, 17 Legend, 92, 99 Lesbian, 3, 6, 136 Lesbianism, 4 Levy, Andrea, 4 The Life and True Adventures of Lydie Newton, 67 Life in the Clearings (1853), 17, 27 Like Water for Chocolate, 22 Llewellyn, Mark, 7–9, 25 Longfellow, 92 Luchetti, Cathy, 45 Lukacs, Georg, 1, 2, 7 The Historical Novel, 1

162 

INDEX

M Machismo, 24, 110, 121, 124, 128, 131 Mackenzie, Alexander, 98, 106n20 Maillet, Antonine, 91–95, 97, 102–104, 105n3, 105n4, 105n6, 106n17, 106n19, 106n21, 106n25 Male role, 60 Malinche, 121, 130, 133, 136, 141 Mantel, Hilary, 2, 6 Mapuche, 123, 125, 129, 130 Marks, Grace, 18 Marriage, 30, 31, 34, 37, 39, 44, 45, 48, 52, 62, 63, 69, 72, 75 Marsden, Kate, 12 Maternal, 137 Matriarchy/matriarchal, 99, 104, 108, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118 McCourt, Edward, 16, 17 Melville, Herman, 13, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 40n5 Memory, 82, 84, 89, 90 Memory discourse, 8 Messinger Cypess, Sandra, 108, 118n4 Mestizos, 116, 127, 150 Metafiction, 7, 8, 17, 21, 104 Mills, Sara, 23 Mitchell, Kate, 6, 8, 9, 25 Mitchell, Maria, 32, 40n8 Moby Dick, 13, 29, 30, 34, 37, 39, 40n2, 40n5 Montilla, Patricia, 138, 145 Moodie, Susanna, 17–20, 27, 80, 89, 90n9 Morpho Eugenia (1992), 6 Morrison, Toni, 15 Mother, 127, 134–137, 142 Mother Courage, 93, 97, 106n19 Motherhood, 30, 31, 34, 71, 82, 87, 115 Mott, Lucretia, 32

My Antonia (1918), 14 Myth, 15, 19, 20, 53, 81–86, 89, 95–97, 100, 108, 109, 118, 118n4, 124, 129 Mythology, 79–81, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90 N Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket (1821), 29 Naslund, Sena Jeter, 6, 10, 29–40, 40n1 National identity, 10, 16, 20, 21, 52, 147, 150 Nationality, 95 Nationhood, 11, 148, 150 Natural world, 111 Nature, 84, 116 Neo-Victorian, 6–9 New, W.H., 92, 106n27 Norling, Lisa, 32, 36, 40n6 O Ojibway, 83, 87, 149 Olwell, Carol, 45, 55n13 O Pioneers (1913), 14, 26 Orkney, 68–73, 77, 78n4 P Parr Traill, Catherine, 17, 18, 20, 80 Patriarchy, 71, 74, 77, 99–101, 103, 104, 108–110, 114–117, 124–129, 131, 137, 146 Paz, Octavio, 109 Pélagie-la-charrette, 91–93, 105n4, 106n21 Performative, 11, 69, 70 Picaresque, 101 Pioneer genre, 79

 INDEX 

Poirier, Richard, 13 Possession, 8, 9 Post-colonial, 4, 5, 70, 132 Post-modernism, 5–7 Predestination, 72, 74 Pride and Prejudice, 51 Prix Goncourt, 91 Puerto Rico, 133–136, 138, 141, 143, 146n6 Pykett, Lynn, 9, 104 R Racism, 71, 133, 144–146 Realism, 2, 5–12, 17, 21, 26, 57, 67, 80, 104 Realist, 6, 9, 10, 20 Red Badge of Courage (1895), 57 Reisz, Susana, 24, 131, 132n6, 132n9 Restoration (1989), 9, 14, 26 Rex, Cathy, 14, 26, 47 Rhys, Jean, 4 Richardson, John, 18 Roberts, Michèle, 3 Robespierre, 2 Romance, 51 Romantic, 62, 63 Rosenthal, Caroline, 67, 78n2 Roughing it in the Bush, or Life in Canada (1852), 17 Rupert’s Land, 68–70, 72, 73, 76, 77 S Sack of Rome, 124 Santiago, Esmeralda, 22, 24, 133–136, 138, 141, 143–146, 146n3, 146n4, 146n6, 150 Scarlet Letter, The, 13 Scobie, Stephen, 78n4 Scott, Walter, 1–3 Separate spheres, 46

163

Shields, Carol, 17 Short, 10, 26 Slave(s), 47, 49–52, 54, 54n11, 55n12, 64, 134, 136–145, 148–150 Slavery, 35, 44, 49–52, 59, 64, 133, 138, 139, 144, 146n2, 148 Smiley, Jane, 35, 43, 48–50, 54, 54n3, 54n4, 148 Smyth Groening, 20, 27 Socken, Paul, 92, 105n13, 106n18 Spenser, Edmund, 30, 33, 35 Stouck, David, 92, 94, 103, 104, 106n21, 106n24 Supernatural, 140 Survival, 16, 19 T Tennyson, Emily, 3, 6 Thériault, L., 95 Thomas, Audrey, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75–78, 78n1, 78n2, 78n3, 78n7, 78n8 Thompson, David, 98, 106n20 Tipping the Velvet (1998), 147 Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, 43 Tremain, Rose, 9 Trilling, Lionel, 49 A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), 14 U Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 49, 50, 55n12, 148 Urquhart, Jane, 79–81, 87–90, 90n3, 90n4, 90n10, 149

164 

INDEX

V Van Herk, Aritha, 16, 19 Victorian, 3, 4, 6–9, 25–27, 46 Virgin, 113, 115, 116, 119n11, 127 Virgin Mary, 23, 27, 79–81, 87, 90n2 W Wacousta (1832), 18 Walker, Alice, 15 Wallace, Diana, 3, 26 Waters, Sarah, 3, 4, 6, 8, 147 Wilderness, 14, 19, 20, 62, 64, 83, 84, 88, 134, 135, 141, 149

The Wild Girl (1984), 3 Willard, Frances Elizabeth, 43, 53 Wilson, Edmund, 64 Winter Sketches and Summer Rambles (1838), 17 Woodcock, George, 77, 78 Y Yeats, W. B., 80 Z Zimmerman, Tegan, 7, 9