National and Female Identity in Canadian Literature, 1965–1980: The Fiction of Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Marian Engel by Cinda Gault (review)

In 1976 the Globe & Mail critic William French commented, ‘the surge of women writers coincided with the nationalist revival of the late 1960s’ (p. 38). It is that close connection between issues of national and gender identities that Cinda Gault examines in her study of novels by the three most significant Anglo-Canadian women writers of the decade when cultural nationalism and second-wave feminism were at the top of the political agenda. Her approach is historical, as she treats these novels and the contemporary criticism related to them as phenomena to be reassessed in a radically changed sociocultural context nearly fifty years later.

Questions of identity – individual and collective – are central as she challenges the notion of unified identities and of critical interpretations which read these novels as versions of romance ‘able to achieve solutions that could not in the real world be so readily resolved’ (p. iv). She proposes reading from a different angle through conventions of realism, arguing that such a reading reveals ‘more sustained questioning of female and national identities than has been conventionally assumed’ (p. 3). The book is structured as an in-depth analysis of five novels by each of her three writers, Laurence, Atwood and Engel, using parallel chapter designs to highlight her thesis: ‘Contradictions of female identity’, ‘Contradictions of national identity’ and ‘Contradictions between female and national identities’. That analysis is supplemented by detailed accounts of contemporary critical responses and debates as she rehearses questions of alternative reading strategies which highlight different aspects of the fictions. With Laurence for example, Gault suggests that readers’ expectations of romance patterns simplified her texts, whereas the realistic reading offered here emphasises irresolvable tensions in Laurence’s female protagonists between personal and national identities. She adopts a similar strategy with Atwood and Engel, preferring to focus on their female protagonists’ engagement with historical and gendered circumstances which militate against any triumphant resolutions of identity crises.

Certainly Gault persuades us to look carefully again at these novels, but my problem with this study is that her critical lens, focused as it is on thematics and generic differences between romance and realism, is too restrictive. It neglects considerations of language and narratology, which would nuance the differences she notes in these three writers’ treatment of identity issues. And though she points to the necessary link between literary criticism and prevailing ideologies, there is no mention of current critical discourses of postcolonialism and feminism which have reshaped concepts of identity and nationhood. It is, as the author acknowledges, ‘only a beginning step in re-reading Canadian fiction for its relevance to new generations of readers’ (p. 251); as such it usefully indicates directions for future revisionist readings.