Caliban’s Revolt

Abstract

‘Writing is parricide.’ In the circulating of minority voices in The Diviners, its sign crime enacting and exposing the hierarchies and contradictions of the dominant discourse, the voice of women is the most audible one in open critique of the Great Tradition. In one of many mise en abyme Laurence dramatises her textual strategies when she shows Morag rewriting Christie’s Piper Gunn tales in the feminine: from stalwart helpmate of a hero, she becomes a cultural hero in her own right, appropriating the piper’s ‘strength of conviction’ and mighty Chuchillin’s winged chariot as her heroic attributes. The Diviners, like the fictions of Alice Munro, Audrey Thomas, Margaret Atwood and others, is an example of parodic rewriting of canonical texts which exposes the phallocentrism of the tradition by displacing the hero. It revises Milton’s Paradise Lost to show Eve making her own way through the world once the gates of paradise have been closed behind her. It rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest to attack the possessive paternalism of the tyrannical father on behalf of independent and active daughters who, like Miranda with Caliban, have a high linguistic competence and can become facilitators, of exchange among different cultures, so shaping a new world through dialogue, not power and magic.