Abstract

Designed more as a parallel than a comparative project, this thesis has developed out of a combination of post-colonial theory acid post-structural ethics. Working from Ron Marken's notion that sharing a commonality can be “restorative,” my thesis considers how both the Irish writer Julia O'Faolain and the Native Canadian writer Lee Maracle contribute to the restoration of the localized, internal and domestic realms of both Ireland and Native Canada.

In O'Faolain's and Maracle's fiction, female characters struggle both to regain and reshape traditional ideas of femininity, many of which are bound up with their respective cultural mythologies and the regressive reproduction of myths surrounding women's role in history-making as well as familial (re)structuring. In O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men and Maracle's Sundogs, women peel back the suffocating layer of history that has kept them under heel and driven their families to political recumbency and self-abuse in the context of the 1980s and 1990s. Healing and self-knowledge thus begin when the wounds are opened afresh and speech finds currency in the voices of women. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)