A Question of Inheritance: Canadian Women’s Short Stories

Abstract

Canadian women’s fiction explores women’s relation to their literary and cultural inheritance within a distinctively postcolonial context which both highlights and problematises many of the issues facing the ‘determined women’ of this collection. The three stories I have chosen — Alice Munro’s ‘Heirs of the Living Body’, Audrey Thomas’s ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ — were all written over the past twenty years.¹ They scrutinise ‘traditional cultural dependencies’, to borrow Robert Kroetsch’s phrase.² While he used it in a nationalist sense to describe the efforts of the ‘best Canadian artists’, we may use it in a gendered sense of the ‘best Canadian women writers’, for it points up the analogy with the colonial mentality through which writers have described women’s sense of their own condition.³ The Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence described it as ‘the tendency of women to accept male definitions of ourselves, to be self-deprecating and uncertain and to rage inwardly’.⁴ This colonial inheritance is there to be resisted in postcolonial Canadian fiction written by both men and women, though arguably women’s awareness is sharpened by their gender sense of marginality and dispossession. So, a question of inheritance becomes a questioning of inheritance in stories that express a very ambivalent relation to tradition and history.