When I began to read the autobiographical accounts of women who visited or settled in pioneer Canada, my repeated reaction was one of sudden recognition of figures from my own childhood. These women were like my Newfoundland grandmothers and their peers, the women who, to my childhood’s eyes, seemed busily in charge of the village communities in which they ran small mixed farms, worked as midwives, supervised the activities of large extended families, and acted as moral arbiters and spiritual guides in the lives of their contemporaries, both male and female, and as beloved but unchallengeable authorities shaping the lives...

In describing the history and characteristics of the diary’s development as a genre in English, Harriet Blodgett notes four focuses: the diary as record of daily travel and business, a sixteenth-century development; the public diary focused on public events and persons, a popular seventeenth-century use; the appearance in the seventeenth and eighteenth century of the formulaic diary of conscience; and the continuing presence during this time of the “diary consisting of brief entries of personal memorabilia and family records,” the form that became the “germ of the diary proper” as we understand it today. Blodgett also notes the influence after...

For some pioneer women, the sense that they were living in a once-in-history conjunction of event, place, and self was extremely strong. The need to write of such a conjunction, to rescue the old self that existed before the pioneer enterprise, to re-create the structure and depth of the unparalleled settlement of the new place, as well as the changes it wrought in themselves, and to project into the future the view of life that such an experience had given them, led them to the most accommodating form for the expression of their lives - the memoir. It is the...

I begin this chapter with these three quotations in order to lay the framework on which I can trace rny model of the generic map of early Canadian women’s autobiography. To even use the word “model” in these poststructuralist times is suspect. But in terms of discovering the terrain of female subjectivity, I believe it is necessary to take risks, to enter the labour as de Lauretis advises feminists enter the master narratives of our culture, with suspicion, but also with a need to understand our attraction to them and thereby begin to “shift the terms of representation.”¹ In order...

When Anna Jameson was leaving the Great Lakes, Queen Victoria had just come to the throne. Jameson mused on what effect a woman in that position might have. Her observations regarding the young queen show a view of womanly possibility as well as an awareness of the patriarchal setting it must survive: “If she be but simple-minded, and true-hearted, and straightforward, with the common portion of intellect - if royal education have not blunted in her the quick perceptions and pure kind instincts of the woman - if she has only had fair play, and carries into business plain distinct...

The “father” of academic theories of autobiography, Georg Misch, observed that such personal writing flourishes in times when people find themselves seeking “to regain the harmony and inner tranquility” of a right relationship with all of existence, and in such times “actual personal experience” becomes the “driving force” which leads “an insight into those deep layers of human existence in which passion and suffering and the feeling for the infinite” obtain “the character of positive values.”¹ The present can be considered such a time, since we live in a society where so many past patterns have been overturned without our...

The expression “the words to say it,” which forms part of the title of this chapter, is taken from Marie Cardinal’sThe Words to Say It (Les mots pour le dire),in which Cardinal describes how she overcame “debilitating sexual and racial stereotypes” and learned to write herself out of a subjugated position. What Cardinal has to free herself from is the debilitating form her female subjectivity has taken because of a dreadful mother/daughter relationship in which Cardinal is the object of her mother’s “murderous contempt,” a state of affairs that has existed between them since the mother tried to...

In writing of the dialogic nature of language, Mikhail Bakhtin observed that “Understanding [an ‘active’ process] is in search of a counter-discourse to the discourse of the utterer,”¹ and as I read my own “utterance,” my introduction to Part 2, entitled “Becoming a Twentieth-Century Woman,” I immediately find a new understanding of myself in dialogue with that self-script written only a few months ago. In the time since I wrote those words, I have written two chapters on Canadian women autobiographers of my own century and tried to map their negotiations of selfhood in language. In doing so I have...

In 1987, Patricia Claxton’s translation of Gabrielle Roy’s autobiography,La Détresse et I’enchantement (Enchantment and Sorrow),was published; in 1989Dance on the Earth,Margaret Laurence’s memoir, was released. The books, like the women who wrote them, offer great differences. Roy’s autobiography, constructed as a narrative of her early years as a Franco-Manitoban, her youthful adventures in North America and Europe, her decision to move to Quebec and begin her long-time French-language writing career, is preoccupied with personal development, the angst of the outsider, the problems of a French-language writer in a North American English milieu. Laurence’s book, less chronologically...