Margaret Steffler is Professor of English Literature at Trent University. She is the editor of P.K. Page’s Mexican Journal (2015) and is editing selected children’s literature by Page. She has published on the work of Miriam Toews, Carol Shields, Alice Munro, L.M. Montgomery, and Sylvia Fraser. Her current research projects focus on the work of Miriam Toews and on narratives of Canadian girlhoods.
Article
“Breaking Patriarchy through Words, Imagination, and Faith: The Hayloft as Spielraum in Miriam Toews’ Women Talking”
Abstract
Published during the #MeToo movement, Miriam Toews’ 2019 novel Women Talking focuses on the importance of listening attentively to women’s words. I argue that the novel’s hayloft functions as a contact zone and more specifically as what Magdalene Redekop in Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art (2020) terms a Spielraum, a dialogical space in which interchanges between genders, generations, time periods, and continents play out, not in forceful movements reaching resolution and closure, but with an acknowledgement of the persistence of differences between many forms of “us and them.” I concentrate on spatial and temporal intersections of language, from the words of Wordsworth to those of Irigaray, arguing that the “wild female imagination,” accused of fabricating stories of rape, works instead in the world of “us and them” to reimagine future spaces as places of love.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.