Searching the Female Text in Sinclair Ross, Denise Boucher and Pol Pelletier

Mythologists like Joseph Campbell, Barbara G. Walker, Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, J.E. Cirlot and Northrop Frye have identified the existence of myths detailing the exploits of goddesses and their repeatedly sacrificed and reborn sons and consorts. These stories can be found, often in inverted form, in patriarchal texts like the Bible and Greek myths. The goddess legends are also extensively alluded to in the Canadian works examined in this thesis, which comprise Sinclair Ross's novels As For Me and My House, The Well, Whir of Gold, and Sawbones Memorial; Denise Boucher's play Les fees ont soif; and Pol Pelletier's play La lumiere blanche. Sacrifice of a god, the son/consort of the goddess, is central to the goddess myths; creation, according to Cirlot, is sacrifice's ultimate aim. In Ross's novels, sons, aided by wives or mothers, replace husbands and fathers. However, Ross's works also allude to the patriarchal palimpsest in which mythologists find the goddess legends: despite their mythically ascribed capabilities, wives and mothers in these novels remain mired in patriarchal roles, their talents sacrificed. Similarly, Les fees ont soif hints at the goddess origins of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; in so doing the play recalls the suppression and inversion of such origins in biblical and church texts. Indeed, church and court conspire against the play's Mary Magdalene figure in a symbolic re-enactment of that suppression. The stakes are again raised to a metatextual level: the stories of the goddesses come to represent stories of female power and experience erased from the patriarchal canon. In Pelletier's La lumiere blanche, goddess allusions again abound, and patriarchy's limitations are once more painfully met; as in Les fees ont soif, a female character is openly sacrificed. However, the play refuses to pit patriarchy against matriarchy, seeking rather to deconstruct both ideologies, to break apart and re-examine gender roles: those assigned both to patriarchal heroes and to goddesses. Writing emerges from this iconoclasm. Indeed, the production of texts serves as a measure of renewal in all of the works studied in this thesis. In La lumiere blanche, in nearly all of Ross's novels and in Les fees ont soif, female-created texts detailing womanly experience take form alongside, or indeed out of, stories of repression, indicating that sacrifice's drive towards creation has not been futile.