"A Bedtime Story for You, Ina" : Resisting Amnesia of the Maternal in Daphne Marlatt's 'Ana Historic'
Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: Une histoire pour toi Ina": la lutte contre l'oubli de la mere dans Ana Historic de Daphne Marlatt Projet: stratigie fiministe de risistance, de rivision.C'est ce double mouvement dont Ana Historic suit la trace, et dans lequel Annie rejette les scinarios qu'on lui a donnis -h propos de femmes emprisonnies dans la tyrannie du regard -au profit de ses propres projections: mdres,filles, amantes.Annie tourne son regard vers la relation dzficile entre 1'Histoire du P2re et l'hystirie de la mdre, afin de dicouvrir ce qui se trouve h l'extkieur de l'image.C'est en retragant la rndre, par le souvenir et la recomposition que la narratrice produit unfutur.Ces rivisions risistent h l'amnisie maternelle et h l'iffacement de la mdre duns la mimoire collective et forcent ainsi la lectrice h imaginer u n autre hiritage.Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic participates in the feminist project of writing women's lives into the "ongoing cinerama" of official history (31).Annie discovers the journal of Mrs. Richards, a nineteenth-century schoolteacher who emigrated from England to Vancouver, while she is researching in the local archives for her husband Richard.As Mrs. Richards' journal has received no attention from historians, Annie decides to write a novel based on this woman's life-writing.The discovery of this literary and historical foremother propels the text, leading Annie to christen Mrs. Richards as Ana.Although exploration into the past to uncover a foremother might be considered a return to an essentialized prelinguistic maternal economy1, I would argue that Annie conceives the maternal as herstory, as that which has been erased from Canada's colonial history.The naming of Ana foregrounds Annie's feminist writing project, a project which counters the exclusion of women's lives/texts from historical documentation.Annie 'remembers' this foremother, writing her back into our imaginations and our memories.Annie's revisionist strategy enables the projection of women's lives and texts out of the past and into the present.Questioning
Source: Tessera
Author: C. Annette Grisé
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1520202011