Girlhood, Disability, and Liminality in Barbara Gowdy’s <i>Mister Sandman</i>
Résumé
Barbara Gowdy’s 1996 novel Mister Sandman centers on the mysteriously silent figure of Joan Cannary, a mentally disabled child who yet does not become a spectacle of the grotesque in the mode quite standard for representations of the disabled female figures, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson noticed in her magisterial study Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. In her disability Gowdy’s Joan does not constitute a metaphor of the condition of her family, either, despite the transgressions they are prone to devote themselves to. The novel offers an open-minded outlook on transgression as a means of liberating oneself from the social constraints and from the self-imposed limitations. Joan’s eternal girlhood makes her a lens for the family members’ tendency to transgress against the norms, which is ultimately received with affirmation. Her figure offers a valuable commentary on other texts by Gowdy, which present a discourse on the liminality of human body and on the boundaries of identity.
Key words: Barbara Gowdy, Canadian novel in English, disability, body, gender.
Références
Atwood, Margaret, 1991: “Hairball”. Wilderness Tips. New York, Bantam Books: 41—62.
Black, Maggie, 1993: “Girls and Girlhood”. New Internationalist. Vol. 240. Available HTTP: (accessed 20 March 2008).
Bromberg, Pamela S., 1988: “The Two Faces of the Mirror in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle”. In: Vanspecken, Kathryn, Castro, Jan Garden, eds: Margaret Atwood Vision and Forms. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press: 12—23.
Butler, Judith, 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London, Routledge.
Chivers, Sally, 2006: “Margaret Atwood and the Critical Limits of Embodiment”. In: Moss, John, Kozakevich, Tobi, eds: Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press: 385—396.
Connelly, Frances S., 2003: “Introduction”. In: connelly Frances S., Childs, Elizabeth C., eds: Modern Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1—19.
Dickinson, Peter, 1999: Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto, Buffalo and London, University of Toronto Press.
Edwards, Justin D., 2005: Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton, Alberta, University of Alberta Press.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 1997: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York, Columbia University Press.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 2004: “Integrating Disability: Transforming Feminist Theory”. In: Smith, Bonnie G., Hutchinson, Beth, eds: Gendering Disability. New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press: 73—103.
Gowdy, Barbara, 1992: We So Seldom Look on Love. Toronto, Harper Perennial Canada.
Gowdy, Barbara, 1996: Mister Sandman. South Royalton, Vermont, Steerforth Press.
Kowalczyk, Izabela, Zierkiewicz, Edyta, 2003: “W poszukiwaniu małej dziewczynki”. In: Kowalczyk, Izabela, Zierkiewicz, Edyta, eds: W poszukiwaniu małej dziewczynki [In Search of a Small Girl]. Poznań, Konsola: 11—22.
Lerena, María J.H., 2003: “ ‘The business of invoking humanity’: Barbara Gowdy and the Fiction Gone (A)stray”. University of Toronto Quaterly, Vol. 72, No 3: 715—735.
Monk, Katherine, 2001: Weird Sex and Snowshoes and Other Canadian Film Phenomena. Vancouver, Raincoast Books.
Saxton, Ruth O., 1998: The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. New York, St Martin’s Press.
Sikora, Tomasz, 2008: “ ‘Meat On Display’: (In)Humanity and Corporeality in Barbara Gowdy’s Gothic Stories”. In: Durczak, Joanna, ed.: Canadian Ghosts, Hopes, and Values. Lublin, Uniwersytet Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie: 171—181.
Szatanik, Zuzanna, 2006: “Crisis House: Metaphors of Queer Depression”. In: Ferens, Dominika, Basiuk, Tomasz, Sikora, Tomasz, eds: Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies. Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Press: 56—67.
White, Barbara A., 1985: Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction. Westport, Connecticut and London, Greenwood Press.
Wilson, Natalie, 2001: “Butler’s Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection”. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, No 1—2: 109—121.
University of Silesia
Anna Czarnowus is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philology at the University of Silesia, Katowice (Poland). She teaches in the English and French program in the Institute of Romanic Languages and Translation Studies. She is a lecturer of English literature, literary theory, and British and American culture and history. She has recently published the book version of her doctoral dissertation, Inscription on the Body: Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2009).