The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies

The Daughter’s Way investigates negotiations of female subjectivity in twentieth-century Canadian women’s elegies with a special emphasis on the father’s death as a literary and political watershed. The book examines the work of Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Kristjana Gunnars, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré as elegiac daughteronomies—literary artifacts of mourning that grow from the poets’ investigation into the function and limitations of elegiac convention. Some poets treat the father as a metaphor for socio-political power, while others explore more personal iterations of loss, but all the poets in The Daughter’s Way seek to redefine daughterly duty in a contemporary context by challenging elegiac tradition through questions of genre and gender.

Beginning with psychoanalytical theories of filiation, inheritance, and mourning as they are complicated by feminist challenges to theories of kinship and citizenship, The Daughter’s Way debates the efficacy of the literary “work of mourning” in twentieth-century Canadian poetry. By investigating the way a daughter’s filial piety performs and sometimes reconfigures such work, and situating melancholia as a creative force in women’s elegies, the book considers how elegies inquire into the rhetoric of mourning as it is complicated by father-daughter kinship.

Introduction

Introduction: Who Could Not Sing: Elegy and its (Female) Discontents

Tanis MacDonald

A daughter’s duty to care for her dying father and properly mourn his death is a commonly assumed cultural and familial obligation. If, as W. David Shaw suggests, we “want elegies to fit our desires,” the desire that drives the female elegist is the desire to delineate, and perhaps dismantle, the fidelity demanded by the father’s death.

1

Elegy and Authority: The Daughter’s Way

Tanis MacDonald

This chapter debates the elegiac function of a daughter’s inheritance of knowledge, focusing upon the value and service of such knowledge. Do elegies articulate knowledge that remains subservient to desires, or pinpoint a more rigorous challenge to patriarchal beliefs? This section examines the application of psychoanalytical theory to the limits and functions of genre, and questions the ways in which a female elegist considers her own feminist subjectivity in the watershed moment of the father’s death. 

2

Two Jove's Daughter: Dorothy Livesay's Elegiac Daughteronomy

Tanis MacDonald

By examining Dorothy Livesay’s struggle to situate the rebellious daughter as a good mourner for her conservative father, this chapter explores the intersections of the autobiographical/confessional mode within the cultural criticism of Livesay’s socialism.  

3

“So much militia routed in the man”: P.K. Page’s Military Fathers

Tanis MacDonald

Post-World War II, P.K. Page writes the paternal body as ironically debased by its own military authority. Page’s mourning daughter figure, trapped between duty and a longing for peace, is an eloquent witness to paternal authority in crisis, both individually and on a socio-cultural level.

4

“Absence, havoc”: Jay Macpherson’s Rebellious Daughters

Tanis MacDonald

Locating a demanding daughter persona in her mourner figure, Macpherson challenges the romantic figure of the anagogic man as father figure to arrive at what she calls “Square One”: the beginning of contemporary feminism, in which writing her way out of a labyrinthine masculine literary ideology imaginary and into a feminine subjectivity become important parts of the daughter’s mourning practice.

5

“Do what you are good at”: Margaret Atwood’s Authorizing Elegies

Tanis MacDonald

How do conceptions of nation and region influence our readings of Canadian elegiac daughteronomy? Considering Atwood as a catalyst for introducing the problems of reading national literary force along with the paternal elegy, this chapter shows the mourning daughter completing her task of inheritance through transfiguration that chooses “incandescent” rather than “transcendent” transfiguration.

6

The Pilgrim and the Riddle: Anne Carson’s “The Anthropology of Water”

Tanis MacDonald

The line of daughterly inheritance becomes further complicated in Anne Carson’s prose-poem sequence “The Anthropology of Water.” In this text, the melancholic daughter asks, in an effort to find a way of mourning her father’s death, “what is it that others know?” This chapter emphasizes Carson’s use of the riddle to describe the tension between mourning and consolation
7

Gateway Politics, Grief Poetics: West Meets West in Kristjana Gunnars’ Zero Hour

Tanis MacDonald

The mourner’s journey in Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour offers a look at the nation’s role in defining contemporary paternal mourning as part of diasporic post-prairie elegiacs. Asserting that writers of her generation inherited “the post-war language of crisis that comes with the nuclear age,” Gunnars describes her struggle to write two kinds of psychological and linguistic estrangement: “the ‘permanent’ alienation” of modernism and a post-Hiroshima “social alienation” from “the company of the living.” 

8

Signature, Inheritance, Inquiry: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches

Tanis MacDonald

Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches grapples with the paternal dynamic by considering the deaths of the biological father, the literary father, and the critical father. Working with bp Nichol’s concept of “the paternal as outlaw,” Tostevin uses her elegies as philosophical and spiritual inquiries into the vicissitudes of filial devotion.

9

Elegy of Refusal: Erin Mouré’s Furious

Tanis MacDonald

The risk of reading Mouré’s work as a struggle with the paternal elegiac mode lies in examining the literary role played by patriarchal demand in this lesbian feminist text without compromising the integrity of the text’s politics. Considering the limits of patriarchal language and the possibilities for feminist poetics, Mouré engages with the conventions of mourning and consolation and reveals the violence beneath the expectation of sorrow.