Canadian Female Gothic Literature

Abstract

<p>Although the novels seem rather disparate at first glance, both Susan Musgrave's The Charcoal Burners and Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic share a gothic tendency. Gothicism textures these novels, and I would argue, textures many other works of Canadian fiction. Gothicism remains, however, an unstudied angle of Canadian literature, as it remains a critical blind spot in the studies of Musgrave' s and Marlatt' s novels. By exploring the gothicism of The Charcoal Burners and Ana Historic, I simultaneously recenter the gothic genre in both the texts at hand and indirectly in Canadian literature. This study focuses on what we can call female gothic. Female gothic refers to gothic literature written by women, with women-centered agendas. Female gothic is based on the experiences of women who suffocate under the culture's patriarchal construction of gender and sexuality. Women writers have long used the gothic form to explore issues specific to women's lives, issues that are currently being politicized and are circulating in feminist theoretical debates. In many female gothics, writers show how "woman," as a being who is sexually constructed, is defined and limited specifically by her reproductive capacity: her "nativity" is a source of horror. The trope of "nativity" operates in Musgrave and Marlatt through women's reproduction and sexuality, but also, in a strange, perhaps specifically Canadian gothic twist, through the figure of the indigene, who is also constructed with "nativity."</p>