Novelist of memory, Audrey Thomas has hewn from autobiographical momenta both stable and unstable narrative foundations for her houses of fiction. That fiction, thematically and structurally, is recognizable by its continuous delight in repetitions. Also characteristic of Audrey Thomas is her successful delivery of and flair for what I would here call a legend of self-projections; British Columbia's answer to Colette, Thomas is a writer of very specific witness whose world is bounded by family, flora, fauna, and that intertidal life whose symbolic soundings resonate especially distinctly for women and upon whose meanings she has both predicated and titled one novel. Part of her interest (possibly even a large part) lies in her public invitation to have the heroines of her prose be identified with the author of that prose.

This may well have been the Canadian response to its women writers in the sixties and seventies. Like Margaret Atwood and Marian Engels, Thomas was first patronized by reviewers as a kind of latter-day 'scribbling lady' at the same time as her readership (like theirs) grew because of the emerging interest in Canadian writing. Born of middle-class New England parents in a dissolving domestic and economic unit, she was to propel herself away, traveling from and to places: out of New York state to England, to Canada, to Africa. With the birth of three daughters and a separation and then divorce from her husband, her connection to British Columbia's Galiano Island, (a ferry ride away from the city of Vancouver) and the Canadian West Coast grew to be a firm and felt commitment. Yet the voyaging impulse in her has remained strong, the outward and visible counterpoint to those inward journeys of the creative imagination. Looking through the fiction, we can see figured the landscapes to which she has traveled, their contours frequently distorted by a questing, self-conscious, and distracted narrator. From work to work, one kind of female protagonist recurs, as do the reiterative narrative episodes she inhabits.

"Everything Thomas writes is a companion piece to everything else," observes a fellow Canadian, Margaret Atwood. "More than most writers, [Thomas] is constantly weaving and reweaving, cross-referencing, overlapping, even repeating her materials." In the linked narratives, we meet the presiding figure of the author's imagination—a woman longing for the pastoral domesticity of husband, children and island life, yet bolted into voyage and action by sexual love and an equally uncontrollable passion for words, words as puzzles, words as refrains, words as wizards. We also encounter the presiding preoccupations that surface, fleshed or told from various vantages in the various books: the lost child, the madhouse, the male abandoner, the process of female creativity, the act of writing with its dislocatory distortions.

Audrey Thomas is never the inventor; having little of the fabulist in her, she seldom spins the kinds of plots that, for instance, Margaret Drabble, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Laurence, or Iris Murdoch can create. Rather she is a storyteller who filters a good part of her fictional world through the retrospective consciousness of her chief creation: a narrating self. "Your books are absolutely self-centered," accuses Latakia's Michael, charging that novel's prolific writer Rachel with the very insularity critics have ascribed to Thomas. Fictively self-indicted as she may be, the novels and shorter fiction alike seem to slide across each other's borders as stories are told and retold with slightly different emphases. Thomas's attraction to the etymology of words and her pointed play with puns, nursery rhymes, literary refrains, and intertextual allusion add to the overall sense of the fiction's narcissistic circuity and its dissolution of conventional boundaries between what has actually happened and what is being imagined. "Writers are terrible liars," as the first line of the story "Initram" (from Thomas's ironically titled second collection Ladies and Escorts) willfully announces.

All in all, hers is a narrative technique that relies on disrupting the linearity of sequence as well as sentence. My argument in this essay is that Audrey Thomas's "transgressive" method amounts to more than mannered and self-indulgent experiment. Rather, its very discontinuity allows the random movement of memory its own depiction. Conversely, memory shapes method, a point underscored by one of the voices in "If One Green Bottle …" (the title—and important—story from Thomas's first collection, Ten Green Bottles), who observes: "the whole thing should have been revised … rewritten … we knew it from the first." What makes these memory works especially intriguing is the author's way of burrowing into a female "I" that navigates sight as well as site. To explore the geography of the inner life is to reach the shores not only of identity but its place in space. For Thomas believes what she has her writer/heroine in Intertidal Life determine when—reading the "voyages of exploration, about the search for the Northwest Passage, about brave bold men in their rickety boats"—she wonders: "The turn of women, now, to go exploring?"

For Thomas, writing about self inevitably embraces the metaphor of exploration, its trajectory of search shaping the interrogations of her consuming interests: female identity, female sexuality, female socialization, female physiology and—above all—female creativity. Insight also inevitably embraces sighting the site where domestic sphere can become powerful female space.

The mothers don't need mirrors—they have created creatures in their own image. [Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island]

My first "real" story … had to be written, it seemed … the only way I could organize the horror … of a six-months long … miscarriage in a hospital in Africa. ["'My Craft and Sullen Art': The Writers Speak—Is There a Feminine Voice in Literature?"]

A prolonged miscarriage is the central event in Thomas's first shorter fiction, "If One Green Bottle …", (in Ten Green Bottles, 1967), just as a horrific mummified homunculus on public display in a Mexican museum is the central symbol in a later story, "The More Little Mummy in the World," from her second collection, Ladies and Escorts, 1977. Similarly, Thomas's first novel, Mrs. Blood (1970), and her third, Blown Figures (1974), are requiems for the lost child, retelling the painful experience from the fractured perspective of Isobel Carpenter, the narrator of each novel. The same Isobel Carpenter also narrates Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973), the trilogy's first volume and one that chronicles its protagonist's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in New York state during the forties and fifties. In what appears to be a conventional first-person female bildungsroman (divided chronologically into the "Songs of Innocence" of childhood and the "Songs of Experience" of adolescence), the book sketches Isobel's efforts to elude the conventional world offered to her by her embittered mother, a departure successfully embarked upon in the narrator's seventeenth year when she takes a job as an aide in a lunatic asylum. There she rids herself of her "mind's virginity" at the same time as she shakes off her body's innocence through sexual initiation.

Any examination of Songs My Mother Taught Me, Mrs. Blood, and Blown Figures must begin (as one critic suggests) "with the strong centre of consciousness or perspective which is characteristic of them. This centre is either Isobel's own voice, the 'I' of personal communication and dream-thought intelligence, or the more limited narration used in Blown Figures where the narration moves away from the character infrequently while remaining in the third person." Two voices predominate in Songs My Mother Taught Me—the narrator referring to herself as "I" as well as "she"—and this strategic doubling will again be adopted by Thomas in Mrs. Blood, the novel whose narrative action involves an unnamed narrator seeing herself in two figures: Mrs. Thing, Feminine Mystique wife of an Englishman teaching at the University of Ghana, and Mrs. Blood, Female Eunuch memory-mordant, reliving past erotic adventures and the guilt attached in that epoch to female sexuality. A miscarriage forms the bloody base of this novel, the memory of which propels a solitary Isobel some five years later back to Africa in the trilogy's third volume, Blown Figures. Thematically situated somewhere between the adolescent longings of Songs My Mother Taught Me and the maternal disintegrations of Mrs. Blood, the Isobel Carpenter of Blown Figures has several mutating personae, their multiplicity contributing to her unreliable witnessing of her own unraveling. Miscarriage, maternity, sexuality: each remembrance blows the protagonist further into Africa and through a psychic journey, whose steps are less actual and material than overcharged and psychological.

However determined are the novel's ambitions to infect its imagined world with a disease of contending points of view and a plague of contentious interpolated plots (newspaper articles, cartoons, billboards, personal columns, recipes, nursery rhymes, African chants and rituals, advertisements), Blown Figures exhausts. "Epitome of [the] narrative mannerisms Thomas has used and would use" [Louis MacKendrick, "A Peopled Labyrinth of Walls: Audrey Thomas' Blown Figures," in Present Tense: A Critical Anthology, 1985], its failure as an engaging and affecting novel seems aptly enough summarized in the comments of another of Thomas's female protagonists: Rachel, the writer who narrates the novel Latakia (1979). "Yes, the pain is there and very real, but where is the organization? She is at the beginning of a long, long road."

Latakia and its earlier companion, Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island (1971), are novels distant from the Isobel Carpenter trilogy to the degree that each is a kunstlerroman, or portrait of the (female) artist. Both Latakia's Rachel and Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island's Miranda are writer/narrators whose shared obsession with the nature of writing focuses on how storytelling can go about telling the truth. Both are islanded (and eye/I-landed): Rachel in Crete is writing "the longest love-letter in the world" to her departed lover, and Miranda is spinning her diary/novel on the West Coast's Magdalena Island. Each discovers that the site set aside for their creativity offers insight into that creativity. Though neither Miranda nor Rachel extrapolates the fact from her worried work with words, doubling—both as fictional device and as imaginative response to experience—lies at the very heart of the creative process. The "artist almost always lives in a Double Now," Rachel comments: in two places at once, two characters at once, two different times at once.

A quick sampling of Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island illustrates how much in evidence are Thomas's favored doubling techniques for reflecting memory's transformation of fact into imaginative artifact. These include interleaved diaries, interpolated dreams and fantasies, echoes of episodes from other of Thomas's stories, labyrinthine echoes of and allusions to other literatures. (Miranda's name and the book's title, for example, becomes the wedge through which Shakespeare's interrogations of art and reality in The Tempest are rewoven.) Dominating is the strategy of the story told and re-told, a narrative doubling so subtle here that the novel is divisible into two novella: Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island, the latter being Miranda's diary about writing a novel. Toward Prospero's conclusion, we discover that the novel Miranda is writing is Munchmeyer—a novel about a male writing a diary about trying to write a novel. Thus female/male doubling in Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island ends with the jest of a female author, Audrey Thomas, dissolving conventional gendered oppositions at the same time as she so inverts conventional male/female relations by having a fictional female writer invent (and so control) the character's fictional male counterpart.

Textual analyses involving this degree of formal explication reward only to the extent that they underscore how tenacious in Thomas's work is what she has called "this terrible gap between men and women." Intertidal Life (1984) is ship of such a state, wonderful by way of its marriage of Thomas's pervasive themes to her persistent narrative strategies. Again, we are introduced to a familiar: Isobel has shifted to Alice, but the latter constructs the same stories in silence, mirror-doubling herself between journal entries in the first person and a novella in the third person where Alice represents herself as "she". In retrospective memory of her husband's departure seven years before, Alice "writes a story of abandonment, of island isolation, of water, of the moon, of maps and guides and learning to read—in short, a story of exploration." It is not just the geography of her life that needs remapping, caught as she is between the tides of past and present, marriage and divorce, mothering and writing. There is a compulsion to reexplore that topography delineated by the ancient relations between men and women and to rename under the flag of female its once conquered continents. As Alice observes, comparing women's estate to the imperial colonization of countries:

Women have let men define them, taken their names … just like a … newly settled region: British Columbia, British Guiana … New Jersey, New France…. I understand African nations taking new names.

The female landscape most repatriated in Intertidal Life is that of family life. Here a single mother's generative relation to her three daughters is realized in such rooted detail as soup making, wood cutting, fire stoking and garden planting. Though motherhood pulls as strongly on Alice Hoyle as moon on tide, its psychic space is never enclosure but rather expanding sphere. Indeed, her island-encircled house is likened not to a marooned circlet of female restriction but to a forging ship, a resolute metaphor in a novel filled with references to voyage, tide, and sea change. Intertidal Life teaches that explored-female and female explorer are mirrored-doubles, not warrior-antagonists, and the novel's celebratory spirit marks a new departure in the Thomas oeuvre. To borrow from Thomas's habit of truthtelling through pun[s]manship: no more should memories be mummified; nor too should mothers be others.

Who can see the "other" in mother? Calling the school—"Hello, this is Hannah's mummy." "This is Anne's mummy."… All wrapped up in her family.

                              [Intertidal Life]

Why must I always search for similarities?

     [Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island]

Audrey Thomas's craft has always been guided by an ironic shifting of boon, a maneuver never so apparent as in her shorter fiction. A look at one story can perhaps convey how characteristic is the wry ridiculing of gendered roles and codes. Some might typify as feminist her exposure of inherited conventions; she would amplify such scrutiny so as to include men as well as women—and especially the daughters of mothers. As the incantation from one story sings: "'Let her be strong,' [the mother] thought. 'Let her be strong and yet still loving.'"

"Crossing the Rubicon" is the final story in Thomas's collection of fiction, a volume titled almost tautologically as Real Mothers. Among a handful of shorter fictions by Thomas—and one must include here "Natural History" with its anticipatory rehearsal of the themes and landscapes of Intertidal Life—"Crossing the Rubicon" has an almost spend-thrift capacity to combine Thomas's flair for the self-projective with a set of narrative moves that enhance the blurring of autobiography and fiction: doubling and memory's mapping of sight through site.

The shorter fiction's outward plot seems disarmingly simple. An unnamed narrator tries to write a story, which "I do not particularly want to write. But it nags at me, whines, rubs against the side of my leg, begs for attention." At the same time, the narrator places that story's writing in her here and now, here being Canada's West Coast and now being one day before Valentine's, 13 February 1980. As for the story's here and now, they are Montreal on a fine October morning. "My story … will begin with a woman on a Number 24 bus, heading East along Sherbrooke Street. She is on her way to meet a man who used to be her lover."

The weaving together of the twinned tales—that of the unnamed narrator ("I") and that of her central character ("She")—is set in motion by Valentine's Day rituals, as a single mother helps her daughter make cupcakes for the boys at school. "'KISS ME' … 'BE GOOD TO ME' … 'LOVE ME,'" sigh mottoes on the heart-shaped candies, voicing the very scripts and romantic codes against which the narrator wants her character to fight.

Appropriately enough in a story whose title and first line initiate two among several allusions to Julius Caesar, "Crossing the Rubicon" is a declaration of war, committing its heroine by way of an irrevocable gesture in defiance of romantic enslavement to Caesar's fate: that of conquering or perishing. As a text about memory, "Crossing the Rubicon" also declares war against chronological narrative, the narrator crossing through (by my count) seven layers of the past—in sites as distant as Rome, Vancouver, Montreal, and upstate New York—to bring their booty back to the present and the task of writing (so righting) the embattled story. "Right now, I want to play soothsayer and call out to her, 'Beware, beware,'" muses the narrator as she imagines her fictional double at a crucial point in her encounter with her former lover. "Walk away. Run. Leave well enough alone," she warns.

Doubled as the "I" and the "she" most certainly are, the narrator's second self here enacts what secret sharers from Conrad down have done: like others of Thomas's doubles, she performs those unconventional acts the more compliant self cannot. "Crossing the Rubicon"'s final paragraph shows a woman walking away from her lover, then exuberantly running. Traffic signals command in an imperial and foreign tongue: "Arretez." She defies this ruling too, crossing—as Caesar did—her own rubicon. Such a turning away by this woman in love from the old codes for the woman in love is summed up by the I/Eye of Thomas's autobiographical projection in three—limpidly simple—final sentences. "And she doesn't look back. In my story, that is. She doesn't look back".

She doesn't look back. Audrey Thomas certainly does, looking back on literary lineages just as she looks back on her own life. From her first book, Ten Green Bottles (1967), to her more recent work, The Wild Blue Yonder (1990), Thomas has depicted both the privileges and the privations of mothers, wives, and lovers. Like "Crossing the Rubicon"'s narrator—indeed, like Thomas herself—each realizes she cannot wholly reject traditional roles; the foundations of custom and belief still stand sturdy. However, they can be enjoined by their author to revise conventional fictions of femininity and so transform women's future relations to their inheritances.

Routing his first enemies, Caesar trumpeted Veni, Vidi, Vici. His fabled boast seems suitable script for closing comment. Novelist of memory and triumphant Eye/I of sight and site, Audrey Thomas might herself say, "I came. I saw. I conquered." And my bet—based on the practice of a novelist who can twist "ménage à trois" to a ribald "ménage à twat" ("Crossing the Rubicon")—has it that she would no sooner say Caesar's sentence than start playing with the male pun.