Portraits of the Artist as a Mother: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Maternal in Modern and Contemporary Canadian Literature

Since the advent of second-wave feminism, Canadian women writers have grappled with the multitude of personal and creative conflicts that emerge when they attempt to mother their children with the attention and intensity they desire, while simultaneously actualizing themselves creatively. My dissertation explores this paradoxical nexus of (pro)creativity through shifting lenses of impossibility, possibility, corporeality and subjectivity. The chapters that follow illuminate the modern and contemporary emergence of the mother-artist as a powerful creative presence in Canadian literature by women, a literary motif which evolves alongside and is informed by feminist theory. Furthermore, discourses of the mother-artist enact a feminist transformation of the mother from the traditionally silenced maternal figure of psychoanalytic paradigms to an empowered, active and creative agent in her own right. The mother-artist ultimately explodes the limitations of motherhood by insisting on artistic and creative space for her experiences of mothering, and likewise refuses Romantic and essentially masculinist notions of the artist as solitary, isolated and autonomous. Instead, the figure of the mother-artist reveals herself to be interrelated and intertwined with both her art and her children. In order to capture the breadth of cultural and literary discourse around feminism, maternity and artistry, the following chapters address fiction and poetry that feature a mother-artist as their central protagonist and capture the nexus of maternity and creativity. In exploring this intersection of motherhood and artistry, my analysis draws attention to both form and content, highlighting the similar ways in which the mother-artist is articulated in poetry and fictional narrative representation. The thematic continuity of the mother-artist throughout allows for a cohesive consideration of a variety of formal and generic expressions which capture texts across seventy years of Canadian literature, from the 1940s into the present. I conclude that while the myth of the impossibility of the mother-artist persists discursively and thematically, the mother-artist is ultimately a figure of radical potentiality and possibility. Rather than functioning as a hindrance to her work, the mother-artist's reproductivity adds richness and nuance to her life and, most importantly, to her literary creations.