CANADIAN WOMEN POETS AND POETIC IDENTITY: A STUDY OF MARJORIE PICKTHALL, CONSTANCE LINDSAY SKINNER, AND THE EARLY WORK OF DOROTHY LIVESAY

This study is an examination of the evolution of the female tradition during the transitional period from 1910 to 1932 which signalled the beginning of modern Canadian poetry.Selective and analytical rather than comprehensive and descriptive, it focuses on three representative poets of the period and traces the development of the female poetic self-concept as it is manifested in their work.Critical concepts are drawn from several feminist theories of poetic identity which are based on the broad premise that poetic identity is a function of cultural experience in general and literary experience in particular.Their narrow premise is that because both culture and literature are patriarchal, women poets are confronted with a definition of the poet as male.The purpose of the study is to investigate how each of the three poets reconciles the conflict between her identity as a woman and her role as poet.Chapter I begins with a reconstruction of the life and times of Marjorie Pickthall and demonstrates the way in which her conservative middle-class upbringing and her equally conservative readers and critics delayed her development as an artist.Her struggle for poetic self-realization is traced iii through her early poetry, which imitates the male Ronantic poets, to her more successful later verse which exhibits the influence of female precursors.Chapter I1 examines the poetry of Constance' Lindsay Skinner, a transitional poet who combines Victorian diction and sentiment with the free-verse and imagism of early Modernism.It investigates her use of fictions derived from North American Indian lore as a device for integrating female experience and art and examines her ambivalence about female power and her inability to reconcile her gender with the traditionally male role of poet.