The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies by Tanis MacDonald (review)

The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies is a definitive feminist contribution to the field of elegy studies through a thorough critical and poetically written examination of contemporary Canadian women’s poetry. Tanis MacDonald argues that the Canadian women poets of her study find a productive and creative space by “refus[ing] resolution” in the mourning process in a bold stance that opposes the cultural mandate for closure proposed by Sigmund Freud as the “work of mourning.” This study further builds on and challenges the critical paradigms of mourning proposed by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Sarah Mills, and Jacques Lacan, among others, through a series of readings informed and shaped by the imperatives of women’s elegiac poems.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 includes an extended “introduction” entitled “Who Could Not Sing: Elegy and Its (Female) Discontents” and chapter 1, “Elegy and Authority: The Daughter’s Way.” Part 1 gives at once a literary history of the elegy and the work done to date on women’s elegiac form, a critical context of theories of mourning, and a feminist critique through elegies that refuse the daughterly positions of obedience or victimization but rather “examine the range of modalities between these two positions.”

Part 2, “Daughters of Jove, Daughters of Job: Canadian Modernism’s Bloody-Minded Women,” begins with chapter 2, “Jove’s Daughter: Dorothy Livesay’s Elegiac Daughteronomy.” This section explores a range of Live-say’s poetry and the autobiographical elements that show the tensions with her father as an exacting critic and financial supporter but finally find the “modernist daughterly duty to arrive at a feminist re-visioning of the daughter’s mourning self as a political entity.” Chapter 3, “‘So Much Militia Routed in the Man’: P.K. Page’s Military Father,” gazes at the debilitated body of the father in the returning war hero and sees the daughter coming to terms with the strength of the cultural construction of the war hero alongside the aging and sometimes fragile body of the man. Chapter 4, “‘Absence, Havoc’: Jay Macpherson’s Rebellious Daughters,” investigates the necessity of the daughter rebelling against the father to prove her place as inheritor, reader, and creator of Western literature, thus defining her own subjectivity “beyond the father’s influence.”

Part 3, entitled “Differently Conceived Nations: The Mourner’s Journey,” starts with chapter 5, “‘Do What You Are Good At’: Margaret Atwood’s Authorizing Elegies,” which looks particularly at Morning in the Burned House (1995). MacDonald attempts to negotiate the “astonishing output” of Atwood’s career and the readings that position her as national elegist, alongside the personal quality of Morning in the Burned House. Chapter 6, “The Pilgrim and the Riddle: Anne Carson’s ‘The Anthropology of Water,’” notes the classical mythological “Oedipal and Antigonal tensions of father-daughter kinship” and sees the daughter as “haunted by myths of demanding fathers and vengeful daughters”; however, MacDonald shows how Carson attempts to use anthropology and pilgrimage to ask her many questions about love, kinship, and women’s subjectivity. Chapter 7, “Gateway Politics, Grief Poetics: West Meets West in Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour,” explores the metaphor of her father’s death as a bomb in a poem that attempts to resist the limits of genre or the demands for closure.

The two chapters of part 4, “Furies and Filles de la Sagesse: Language and Difference at Century’s End,” look at the poetry of Lola Lemire Tostevin and Erin Mouré. In chapter 8, “Signature, Inheritance, Inquiry: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches,” MacDonald “proposes that a daughter’s inheritance involves delineating her difference from her father” and that the key is the “alterity” of the daughter as “transfigurative elegist.” Chapter 8 gives some attention again to Derrida, but as with the introductory section I was surprised at the absence of any substantive discussion of Derrida’s “Archive Fever.” I waited throughout The Daughter’s Way to...