Narrative in the Feminine: Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard

12 In the Feminine

images religieuses, des médailles en plâtre sont là comme pour souligner que la foi restera préservée.’’37 (108) To the fully aware irony of a prostitution that takes for itself the names of the angels, Brossard adds an association between angels and two little girls who lived in dormitories, and who grew up to become M.V. and Danièle Judith. Danièle Judith allongeait avec précision sa main vers la bouteille de vin, ses yeux bleus-bleus, d’autant plus que les larmes ce soir, lui donnaient un air d’ange et cela me renvoyait à mes cahiers d’ecolière, aux premières journées d’octobre, penchée sur mon pupitre, petite main d’artiste à l’oeuvre. Los Angelitas, celles qui écrivent dans les internats, signes pubiens, clair-obscur, à genoux, en pénitence, celles qui écrivent leur raison, leur instinctive révolte sur les médailles en plâtre.38 (111) The text reclaims the image of the angel by reinvesting it with the emotions of characters who embody human aspiration in feminist terms, solidarizing with girls coming face to face with the damaging effects of gendered socialization, and with women caught by prostitution who yet privately harbour laughter and innocence in their beds. In this way, Brossard is able to weave very traditional images into a metanarrative framework of feminist and spiritual liberation, using particularly Dante’s version of a spiritual relationship in which the love of a woman is guide. Brossard juxtaposes traditional images, replete with cultural memory, with the nearly empty symbols of virtuality, laser light, the hologram. She reinvents the baroque, with its spiralling curves, displacing classical restraint by an outrageous exuberance and reliable intellectual virtuosity. In Picture Theory, the love between Michèle and Claire, like that of 37 In the cafés and clandestinos ‘‘an entire fierce world that owes nothing to anybody, who comes there with mad hope and despair, distresses and passions that sometimes set these nights on fire’’; later, the women were called Lola la Petisa, Maria la Tero, la Mondonguito, la China Benececia and Madame Yvonne. Women’s names living as though in boarding schools; the most expensive room was called Los Angelitos ‘‘above the bec, the crucifix, some religious images, some plaster medals are there as if to underline that the faith will be maintained’’ (79-80). 38 Danièle Judith stretched out her hand with precision towards the bottle of wine, her blue, blue eyes, all the more so since the tears this evening gave her the airs of an angel and that sent me back to my school books, to the first days of October, hunched over my desk, artist’s little hand at work. Los Angelitas, the girls who write in boarding schools, pubic signs, clair-obscure, on the knees in penitence, the girls who write their reason, their instinctive revolt on the plaster medals (83). 188 Narrative in the Feminine Dante and Beatrice, opens into a experience of paradise, so that the lesbian is signified within the dominant Western spiritual tradition, from a perspective that is no longer vulnerable to the charge of negativity. Like Daphne Marlatt, Brossard works out of an epistemology grounded in women ’s actual lives, and writes intertextually to refashion Western cultural histories for life in the next millennium. Intertextual Metanarrative 189 This page intentionally left blank P a r t F o u r Afterword This page intentionally left blank C h a p t e r 1 2 In the Feminine Lorsque nous parlons de culture, il nous faut nécessairement parler de codes, de signes, d’échanges, de communications et de reconnaissance . — Nicole Brossard, ‘‘De radical à intégrales’’ ÉCRITURE AU FÉMININ, as Barbara Godard specifies in her introduction to The Tangible Word, ‘‘confronts the symbolic’’ and disrupts the binary oppositions structuring normative discourse. The term itself and the writing it has come to represent can be distinguished from feminist writing, defined by France Théoret as ‘‘manifestory, aiming at communication,’’ and from écriture féminine, ‘‘characterized by stereotypes of femininity’’ (15). For these and other reasons, the expression au féminin constitutes a discursive acquisition of the feminist movement in Québec and, to a more limited extent, in English Canada. The capacity of the term to express symbolic confrontation—in fact, the mechanism for such...