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

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented Pastsee them as extensions of themselves. “You’re so much like me, if only youknew!” Whenever Charlotte Jordan says this, Nelly feels an urgent need toprotest. Yet, growing older, she “catches herself at imitations she would neverhave thought possible” (MC 90).“I did not want to be like my mother” (LG 150), says Del, resenting AdaJordan’s “stubborn hopefulness” when projecting her own unfulfilled hopesinto Del’s future:“There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But itis up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has beentheir connection with men [...]. No more lives of their own, really,than domestic animals [...]”. (LG 146 f.)But Del, who cannot bear to hear her mother express her dissatisfaction withher own life, is “set up to resist” her mother’s advice. She decides “to go out[like men] and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what [she] didn’twant and come back proud” (LG 147). And yet, no less acutely than Nelly, sheis aware of the eternal problem of daughters, namely that of being torn betweenthe mother image which they have internalized and their need to develop andassert their own individual identity: “I myself was not so different from mymother, but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were” (LG 68).Nelly and Del decide to shape their own lives, to work to attain a physical andemotional independence their mothers have striven for in vain. John Moss’judgement on Ada Jordan also applies in the case of Charlotte Jordan: “She istoo conditioned by the values she rejects to successfully rise above them.” 18Attempting to shape their daughters’ imaginations, both mothers refer toexemplary exponents of male ideology within their respective nationalliteratures, namely, to Tennyson and Schiller. (For telling examples, see LG146 f. and MC 93.) Like Ada Jordan, Charlotte Jordan “knows her poetry (MC93). Like Nelly, Del feels an irresistible impulse to resist anything [mother]told me with such earnestness, such stubborn hopefulness” (LG 147). Both“artist-daughters” transform the inescapable body of the mother into a poeticcorpus generating both acceptance and rejection “of a language to be learned.”The message transcending the boundaries of fiction is obvious: if the twomothers are valid examples of our century’s first generation of women, theirdaughters are classic representatives of its second generation. As emergingwriters, they are set on transforming the raw material of their lives into art: bothfirst-person narrators use the mother-daughter conflict as a point of departurein the search for their own identity, as women and artists alike: they aredaughters “who will have a room of [their] own” (MC 35).For Nelly and Del, breaking the boundaries of the maternal territory impliesapproaching the territory of men, tentatively trying to find out what sex is allabout. Having been sheltered by their prudish and protective mothers far intoadolescence, both girls have their first visual experience of sex when73