Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

IJCS/RIÉClives, having discovered the healing power of fantasy when experiencing thepain of humiliation in real life. Nelly “is lying deliberately [...]. The liar alwaystriumphs” (MC 115). Already as a small child Del decides to exchange hermother’s “straight lines” for the infinitely more alluring innuendoes and halftruthsof Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace, though “with some slight pangs ofdisloyalty” (LG 31). The ambivalence Del has adopted in dealing with hermother is reflected in her first friendship with a boy: “He was truthful [...], I hadno intention of being so with him” (LG 163).As representatives of our century’s first generation of women, the portrayals ofboth Charlotte and Ada are exemplary: proud and ambitious, yearning tocontinue a life of independence which they briefly enjoyed before gettingmarried, then struggling heroically to survive, physically in the dour years ofthe depression, emotionally in a still unmitigatedly patriarchal society, theseonce beautiful women age prematurely, becoming frustrated, escaping intoindefinable states of ill-health:With a strange satisfaction, almost as if she’d been waiting for it,Charlotte learned that she had to rest quietly: because of a danger ofembolism, because of blood clots that might break loose; perhaps oneof them was on its way to the heart even now. You see, my child,that’s how fast it can happen, she said, still with the same, almosttriumphant, satisfaction that Nelly resented [...]. (MC 152, myemphasis)Del resents the first symptoms of her mother’s illness in much the same way asNelly does, and feels repelled by the “petulant, childish voice” (LG 152) whichher suffering mother puts on when demanding to be kissed. In an extension ofthe portrayal of Ada Jordan, namely in the depiction of the suffering mother inAlice Munro’s short story “The Ottawa Valley,” we find an interpretation of amother’s illness, conveyed through the eyes of an intuitive and sensitive child,that parallels Christa Wolf’s observation in its felicity of form and profundityof feeling:“Are you going to have a stroke?”“No. I have low blood pressure. That is just the opposite of what givesyou strokes.”“So, are you not going to get sick at all?” I said, pushing further. I wasvery much relieved that she had decided against strokes[...]. For I didfeel it was she who decided, she gave her consent. [...] For her ownpurposes, I felt she did it: display, of a sort, revenge of a sort as well. 17Both Wolf’s and Munro’s I-narrators feel that their mothers have willed theirillnesses for the purpose of gaining a strange satisfaction, a form of revenge forall the deprivations in their lives. Yet the daughters do not want to end up with adiminished self and will resist being threatened by their powerful mothers who72