Moving into awake : Daphne Marlatt's re-vision of women in Ana historic, Double negative, and Salvage

Abstract

In her books Ana Historic, Double Negative, written with Betsy Warland, and Salvage, Daphne Marlatt penetrates the silence surrounding women's experiences in history, poetry, and fiction. This thesis analyzes how, in her recent writing, Marlatt negates depictions of women as passive objects of desire. At the same time it explores how Marlatt creates a new relationship between women and words while she opens up her writing to others, beckoning them to join her in naming themselves, their realities, and their desires from their infinitely varied perspectives. Drawing the reader's attention to the power of language to include or exclude, Marlatt poses questions and invites responses from her reader whom she envisions as an active co-creator of meaning. Based on her own experience of desire, the rhythmic flow of Marlatt's writing abandons subject - verb - object sentence structure for a fluid form. The dialogue between her characters in Ana Historic and the reciprocal writing exchanges between Marlatt and other writers in Double Negative and Salvage provide examples of ways in which women, marked by their absence or misrepresented in writing, can represent themselves.