ESC: English Studies in Canada

QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY AND SUBJECTIVITY: AUDREY THOMAS’S INTERTIDAL LIFE JACQUELINE BUCKMAN Trent University We haven’t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity. To do that is to speak improperly. Of course, we might— we were supposed to? — exhibit one “truth” while sensing, withholding, muffling another. Truth’s other side— its complement? its remainder?— stayed hidden. Secret. ... Stretching out, never ceasing to unfold ... all of us everywhere, even in our gaps, that all the time there is will not be enough. We can never complete the circuit, explore our periphery: we have so many dimensions. (Irigaray 210, 213) A u d r e y Thomas’s Kiinstlerroman, Intertidal Life, presents the reader with an artist-heroine whose identity becomes the site of a battle among competing discourses, many of which are concerned with issues of feminist subjectivity, and which must be organized and reorganized as they fight for supremacy. This discursive struggle suggests questions pertaining to contra­ dictory epistemological and subject positions as well as to the problem of feminist agency. For example, a struggle takes place between humanist and postmodernist conventions pertaining to the representation of the subject. Representational strategies in the novel include a liberal humanist discourse that is concerned with questions of authenticity and truth, and the struggle to reinstate a coherent unified subject with Cartesian powers of agency, re­ sistance, and control. However, formal experimentation in the novel, which includes the textual gaps, fragments, and word play of a postmodernist dis­ course, problematizes the stability ofthese humanist categories and redefines identity in terms of conflicting subject positions whose incompatibilities ex­ ert pressure on individuals to find new ways of being and seeing. As a result of this struggle between conflicting epistemes, the novel is sometimes troubled by an epistemological eclecticism. Linda Hutcheon legitimizes this kind ofepistemic struggle by arguing that the postmodern paradoxically installs and subverts conventions pertaining to the representation of the subject. She has speculated that “it is the feminist need to inscribe first—and only then subvert—that I think has influenced most the postmodern complicitously critical stand ofunderlining and undermining received notions ofthe represented subject” (Politics 39). English Studies in Canada, 22, l, March 1996 Consistent with the preceding beliefisHutcheon’sargument concerningwhat she claims isa “radical critique offemale subjectivity”presented in Intertidal Life. In her discussion of the novel, she asserts that what interests Alice is women’s willingness to accept such roles. She tries to understand the part the women themselves play in their subjection to patriarchy’s myths of romance. She mercilessly studies her own and other women’s needs to define themselves in terms of their men, and also their shared yearning to seek stability, security, and guidance from men, rather than from themselves. The radical critique of women’s subjectivity, or sense of self, here, is the equal of any poststructuralist-feminist theoretical one available today. (Canadian 114) In this analysis of the novel, Hutcheon discusses its extended intertextuality and its use of parody, a device that, as she claims, enables women novelists to “address their culture directly, without risking co-option by its values” (Canadian 121). This argument presupposes that the critical detachment necessary for ironic double-voicing as well as for Alice’s study of her own complicity with patriarchal structures of domination is consistently main­ tained; however, I do not think this is the case. In opposition to this view, I would suggest that the conventions of clas­ sical realism are deployed in this novel to reinforce traditional structures of domination and allow for the artist-heroine’s submission to patriarchal interpellation. However, the novel’s postmodernist discourse, characterized by formal experimentation, permits her to reposition herself in relation to patriarchal ideologies and to challenge their values by means of feminist re­ focussing. Consequently, the oscillations in the text between feminist and patriarchal stances again produce contradictory epistemological positions that undermine the credibility of the feminist critique. Nonetheless, this disagreement about the way postmodernist aesthetic conventions function in the text questions the possibility ofa postmodernist feminist subjectivity. This is the central question debated in feminist theory today, with the post­ structuralist feminists arguing for the decentring ofthe unitary subjectivity of liberal humanism and with...