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Characters and Strategies in Audrey Thomas's Feminist Fiction

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SOURCE: "Characters and Strategies in Audrey Thomas's Feminist Fiction," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 47, Fall 1992, pp. 43-50.

[In the following essay, Quigley analyzes Thomas's depiction of men in her fiction, as well as her use of a wide variety of ethnicities in her secondary characters.]

Probably more than one reviewer has commented that he is tired of all the negative male characters that populate Audrey Thomas's work, but, if the reader can get past them, there are also a lot of interesting female characters and strategies in her fiction. And, if patriarchy was not institutionalized in our private and public lives, there would be no reason for feminist struggles, which are numerous, so a feminist critique of men should not be dismissed lightly.

Most of the men in Audrey Thomas's collection The Wild Blue Yonder seem misplaced; they are nonfunctional or downright disgusting in their human relationships, at least with women. Larry, in "A Hunter's Moon," is a misogynist, self-centred fool. Charlie, from "In the Groove," is a self-absorbed macho man. Danny and Fred, in "Trash," are thugs who come and go, while Peter, in "The Happy Farmer," is a presumptuous, superior, male chauvinist who mentally harasses the female protagonist. The crowd of male football fans in "The Survival of the Fittest" cause a sick, elderly woman great distress, perhaps threatening her life by undermining her ability to survive her fearful journey. "Compression" contains images of a mass murderer, a male stripper as the Grim Reaper, and threatening, invasive, male technology, while "Blue Spanish Eyes" is a first-person account of how a woman meets, courts, and is courted by her murderer. The young murderer charms her, presents himself as innocent and trustworthy. Images and references to trust appear throughout the story. But the trust becomes an illusion, a game. Are there any trustworthy men at all? In "The Slow of Despond," Gordon never really appears, but we see the way Sarah distorts herself to conform to his image and interests; we see the way male power rules. Michael, in "Roots," the first story of the collection, has no psychotic tendencies, but he does walk "around with his head in the clouds," translating reality into the esoteric etymologies found in the dictionary, leaving Louise to deal with the shitload of daily life, and paying little attention to her feelings unless she explodes. The title story and last in the book is a young woman's attempt to reconcile her thoughts and feelings about her father, who comes back from World War II as a kind of misplaced person, unable to function in the world to which he returns. He is almost a heroic, romantic figure. These two stories, the first and the last in the book, act as a kind of buffer, as parentheses around a collection of horrible men. Äse and Fred in "Breeders" are the only two main male characters who appear normal. They are homosexual, so social alienation is implied, and Corinne is uncertain that she can trust them enough to tell them that she is pregnant.

Males are portrayed briefly in positive roles in "The Survival of the Fittest" (Joe is gentle and loving, and Phil and David come to the elderly Mrs. Hutchison's rescue) and in "A Hunter's Moon" (Sven is a good lover). But these stories largely centre on women who are drawn toward destructive men by their need for sexual relationships ("A Hunter's Moon," "Blue Spanish Eyes"), for protection ("The Survival of the Fittest"), for definition ("The Slow of Despond"), and for family ("Roots"), as well as women who are just trying to live their own lives only to have them rudely interrupted by male privilege ("The Happy Farmer"). These have been recurring concerns in Audrey Thomas's work from Mrs. Blood (1970) on.

Beginning perhaps with Alice's relationship with her daughter Flora, in Intertidal Lives (1984), or, formally, with female definition of the romance form in Latakia (1979), Audrey Thomas also centres on the woman, her perspective, and her life. The characters, preoccupations, and, in some cases, the structures of "Compression," "Ascension," "Sunday Morning, June 4, 1989," and to some degree "The Survival of the Fittest" and "A Hunter's Moon," have strong female definition.

"A Hunter's Moon" is thematically pivotal. Larry is perhaps one of the most repulsive misogynist males Audrey Thomas has ever sketched. The story is about Annette's relationship with him and the other mother-hating men who surround her. At the same time, there is some woman-centred refocusing of energy in the description of the strong and ritualistic relationship between Annette and Zöe. They bathe outdoors under a full moon, putting fragrant herbs and oils into the steamy bathwater. When Larry appears with wine, Annette calls him "Ganymede," indicating his position as servant to the women. Still, Annette's feelings for Zöe are tinged with jealousy because of Larry's attraction to Zöe, even though she fights against this, and the narrative is bracketed and interrupted by the present, physically and metaphorically speeding crazily along, as Larry drives dangerously through the mountains with Annette. Their relationship is psychologically as dangerous as the drive is physically. The only way for Annette to maintain equal ground is to become equally abusive.

In her earlier work, especially Blown Figures (1974), Audrey Thomas concentrates on the protagonist's pain and disjuncture, often stylistically represented by fragmented narrative—words, signs, advertisements flying about on the page and interrupting continuity. In "The Survival of the Fittest," the protagonist has the least control of anyone in the collection over herself and her environment. Signs ("CONTROLES"), slogans ("MINI MINI MINI LOOK AT ME"), "rude songs," shouts, and a "disapproving voice from behind her left ear" intrude upon her, breaching the line that protects her privacy and the line that distinguishes the world of formal narrative from unframed chaos. The protagonist sees eyes and flashes of colour everywhere because of her hallucinatory fever, but no one can really see her, see her pain and illness. Sound and noise "bounced off the walls," there are "shouts [and] a babble of French and English," but no one will listen to her pleas for help. Still, the flashbacks and disruptions are worked fairly smoothly into the fibre of the narrative as it progresses from when the protagonist's daughter settles her on the train in Paris, through the turmoil of her journey, to when she is put on another train bound for her home in London.

The stories in The Wild Blue Yonder are most often compact, self-contained, short narratives. There are few loose ends or uncontrolled influences flying about. The writer controls the environment. "Roots" is about "smithereens"—a broken teapot—but the relationship of the couple that the story is concerned with is not broken, the two are just having a quarrel. The narrative moves gently in and out of fragments of memory (we learn how the couple came together and why they are being torn apart and that things that originally drew them together are also often those that cause tension and argument). The many, many "roots" of the couple's marriage, their lives, their loves and hates are explored. The story is balanced; at the end we return to the image of a teapot, but this time there is unity, reconciliation for the couple, and the teapot is new and unbroken. Because Audrey Thomas employs narrative structures such as this, many of the stories are more traditional than some of her earlier work, for instance Blown Figures. They are also more accessible to the general reader.

Latakia differs from the early work in that its structure is more explicitly female defined. While exploring the male-female struggle and the ways in which men have usurped the role of defining women, the protagonist reaches a formal romantic unity—in her movement from unity, through dissolution, to a higher unity that is traditionally tied to social identity and marriage—in that she becomes able to define herself, but, paradoxically, only with the traditionally tragic means of disjuncture and separation. "The Slow of Despond" is very similar in structure. We are introduced to the protagonist as a single woman. She completely alters her life so that she will be noticed and accepted by the man she wants to marry. She marries only to find that her life is no longer her own; she has become completely passive. Although she suffers depression after each of her two miscarriages, when the third foetus comes to term, she murders the baby and leaves her husband, thus effecting a traditionally tragic disjuncture. Yet in the last paragraph she is described contentedly playing the piano, in a room of her own, her own self-defined space. She has achieved a formal romantic unity.

Murdering the baby and leaving her husband are disruptive elements that in traditional male definitions of literary genres would end in tragedy. In Audrey Thomas's female definition of literary form, Sarah's life becomes distorted by the various changes she undergoes to fit Gordon's definition, culminating in the child they beget. In traditional male definition, marriage and a baby would indicate the final higher unity of the romance form. Here (ironically combining male and female definitions of love and romance with definitions of form) they indicate dissolution of self and barriers to happiness. The murder and separation are the heroine's acts of intervention that facilitate her integration with herself, and she becomes the hero of her own story. When Audrey Thomas writes that Sarah tells Gordon she is going to the "Ladies" (so she can get away to commit her crime), perhaps she is punning with us on the formal transfer from male-to female-defined literary forms.

The most experimental story in The Wild Blue Yonder is "Compression," with its stream-of-consciousness structure. Veronica, who has a "stone-skipping mind," tries to deal with her anxieties and fears about a mammogram and the possible results. What starts for her as a game generated from bp Nichol's The Martyrology ends in the contemplation of "St Ag," "The Stag at Even," "St Agatha with her breasts on a platter holding her other symbol, the dreadful pincers which had cut them off." The word-particles separate and multiply, paralleling the lopped-off body parts and cancerous growth: What if the answer is cancer? What if the cells split? C-answer. "Cancer. An ugly word. It began with a shape like a sickle or a breast with a big bite out." The particles compress language, revealing conglomerate thoughts in parts of words. Similarly, Veronica's breast is compressed by the X-ray camera, causing her to remember images and stories of death ("Death as a male stripper") and mass murder at a picnic site in Hungerford—hunger-for-d(eath). She sees the breast as a source of food, with the clinic as the restaurant: "… today's special was always the same at the Atomic-Paradise Café." She is aware of the irony of carcinogenic X-rays entering the body to probe for tumours.

"Compression" employs right and left body and brain imagery. When Veronica's right breast is being X-rayed, she uses mental exercises to distract herself: "Veronica was a woman who dealt with scary situations by telling herself jokes or by talking too much." While her left breast is being X-rayed, she thinks of sexual energy, death, and murder. She has to come back to have the left breast, the "sinister breast," X-rayed again, and so certain questions arise: Why? Did she move? Did they see a tumour? The combination in the story of images of right and left sides, of verbal and emotional components of self, acts to identify the breasts as complete or inclusive signifiers, like a name: "'Ma Ma,' the breast, a doublet, like what it signifies."

Although the narrative imagistically comes full circle when Veronica is served "a single poached egg" at Norma Jean's Restaurant, reminding us and Veronica of the Atomic-Paradise Café and of a breast with a lump in it, the results of the exam have not yet been received. This story awaits completion while the text spirals off toward another circle, another story, in the brief last paragraph where Veronica waits fearfully for the bus. This lack of closure is typical of a spiralling structure in which one story continues into another and is highlighted by the ironic perspective from which we see the egg. Women have commonly been associated with circular structures of death and birth because of our gender function of bearing children. Eggs are typical symbols of this cross-species gender role. Veronica orders the egg, a life symbol, when she is contemplating death, evoking the traditional search for life beyond our mortality. But this time Audrey Thomas clearly notes that the egg is poached, which destroys any true life-giving function. The ironic perspective on the poached egg that looks like a breast with a lump in it also symbolically indicates the life-saving benefits of mammograms and the hazards of accumulated low-level radiation (slow cooking, "poaching") from frequent exposure to X-rays, especially of the breast and chest area. This is one of the most interesting and creatively structured stories in the collection, as it explores a woman's mind and its wanderings.

Most of the stories are written in the third person. Three are first-person narratives. This technique works well in "Trash," where social comment is made without preaching. At the end of this short, uncomplicated, linear narrative, the narrator writes,"… I stepped out onto the porch and did something I've always been ashamed of. I shouted at her, as loud as I could, so the whole neighbourhood could hear, 'You're trash, that's what you are, just trash!" We wonder why the narrator is so ashamed, when the woman at whom she yells (and to whom she rents a suite of rooms) has just torn her house apart. She is understandably a little embarrassed at the cliché she uses, but why does she continue to feel ashamed? This has to do with class, class prejudice, and gender restriction. The narrator has family, friends, a part-time job, an education, a husband who partly supports her…. She has a lot of support systems, but many of them are, in turn, financially dependent upon her husband. Audrey Thomas rarely makes a blatant social comment. She sketches a character complete with racial, cultural, gender, sexual-orientation, or class prejudices, and leaves the reader to infer the comment. In "Breeders," Corinne's mother says, "At least Corinne's normal," referring to her heterosexuality; in "The Survival of the Fittest," Mrs. Hutchison has flashbacks to "Mammy cloth," which "Against their skin … and in that setting … really looks quite nice"; Peter, in "The Happy Farmer," is a male chauvinist; Frances's mother, in "The Wild Blue Yonder," entertains classist ideas ("If you are born to a certain 'station' in life … you don't need to be a snob").

The central characters of these stories are white, which makes sense, given Audrey Thomas's cultural background. But it is refreshing to see such a variety of cultures and races represented by her minor characters. It permits the stories to present a more accurate picture of the world in which we live. Too often, white anglophone writers only seem to conceive of white anglophone characters. None of Audrey Thomas's Black, francophone, Greek, or Scandinavian characters are evoked in the first person, nor are they main characters, so we do not get the sense of cultural pre-emption. In "The Slow of Despond," there are several nonspecific and alienating references to "Africa" as a homogenized whole and a reference to "heathen," among other culturally demeaning statements. Always, this is in relation to Gordon, Sarah's missionary husband, who plots and defines her life, her role in society. In Sarah's terms, we see specific and concrete references to the talk by "Reverend Gordon MacLeod and his wife" that is to be held in "Zambia," and to the "rich, moist, sweet, excessive, smell of West Africa" that is evoked for her in the Palm Houses, an arboretum in Edinburgh. Throughout, Audrey Thomas balances specifics of Sarah's own Scottish culture (she reads "The Scotsman," and has "lessons in Scottish country dancing" and "weekly ceilidhs," for example) with details of life in the mission. Her young friend Comfort sends her an "Akua'ba" fertility doll, and she reciprocates by giving Comfort "a book of Celtic fairy tales and enough blue checkered gingham for a new school dress." This is not cultural appropriation in the trivial use of ethnic ornament, but a unique exchange of cultural items. This white reviewer thinks the portrayal of the connections between language and ideology works in this story that describes a white man's racist, imperialist culture, and its control over other people's lives, and a woman's struggle to remove herself from such definition.

Even though most of the stories in the collection are not written in the first person, we always have the sense that we are receiving the perceptions of white anglophone characters. One of the characters who is not a WASP, and who is sketched in the most detail, a character we almost come to know, is Fotula Papoutsia (in "Ascension"), and we have a very clear sense that we are seeing Fotula through Christine's eyes, or, more precisely, through the narrator's perception of Christine's reality. We are never given information gained from an omniscient perspective, only a third-person account of what the central character sees, hears, remembers, does. This is a very simple, lovingly created story of a friendship. A rite of passage is expressed in its governing metaphor. Christine attends to the rising and kneading of Fotula's Greek Easter bread, the "staff of life." Christine does not presume to know how to make the bread; she uses the lessons she has learned from Fotula, takes hints from the items Fotula has already prepared, and guesses. This is not Audrey Thomas's presumptive creation of a working-class woman's Greek culture; it is filtered through Christine, an agnostic, middle-class WASP: "She tried to imagine God as Mrs P must see him…."

The metaphors in this story draw strongly on Christianity, which also notes that "In the beginning was the Word … and the word was God" (John I.I). To imagine God is to imagine language, and to imagine language is to imagine culture. As Fotula dies, her soul is metaphorically described as yeast: "fragrant, spicy, lighter than air, gradually rising up through the April skies." She is the leavening agent in Christine's befuddled life and one of the many fascinating secondary women who now populate Audrey Thomas's fiction.

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