Paths of desire: images of exploration and mapping in Canadian women's writing

Abstract

Marlene Goldman's book, Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Women's Writing, is a beautifully written, carefully structured, and critically thoughtful book that brings to my attention a number of important insights into white women's writing.Paths of Desire is a series of postmodern readings of images of exploration and cartography -- more specifically, of way in which those images apply to plotting of language and to plotting of representations of female identity -- in writings of 5 women. Countering Coral Ann Howells's assertion that Canadian women writers [adopt] traditional narrative structures ostensibly for purposes of questioning these structures, while, in fact, leaving basic elements and underlying ideologies intact, thereby reifying conservative attitudes and falling short of true revolutionary writing, Goldman argues that texts are in fact radical and subversive writings, that the nature of texts' self-conscious and parodic appropriation of traditional narratives precludes replication of these structures and their ideological underpinnings (p.4).In her introduction, Goldman plots her own map of relevant fiction, criticism, and theory, and then navigates carefully but decisively a number of slippery paths, among them, paths and intersections between feminist theory and postmodern theory, between patriarchal discourses of exploration and settlement and subversive feminist rejections and/or rewritings of those discourses, and between historical and contemporary legacies and discourses of exploration and settlement. I find this map to be particularly useful for perspective it provides, first, on historic tensions between feminism and postmodernism, and, second, on pivotal role colonial discourses of exploration have played in literary history and literary representations of women.In each of subsequent chapters, Goldman discusses work or works of a woman writer. Drawing on a different postmodern theorist to discuss each writer, she devotes a chapter to each of following works: Audrey Thomas's Intertidal Life, Susan Swan's The Biggest Modern Woman of World, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool, and fictions of Aritha van Herk. Her lively analyses of these works show that these writers do not entirely reject language and traditional literary forms; instead they appropriate colonial exploration discourses and traditional literary forms in order to write against and do violence to conventional colonial constructions of Other, constructions which depend upon a binary of the male hero-human, on one hand, and female monster-obstacle, on other (p. …

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