Articulating The Female Subject: The Example of Marian Engel's Bear
Abstract
The article proposes to use fiction about women by women writers to investigate the nature of the contemporary female subject. Lou, the heroine of Marian Engel's Bear, confronts the difficulties that she has with male domination in an intense relationship with a tame bear. She imports the categories of the patriarchy into this relationship, and, although she succeeds in solving some of her personal problems, ultimately she cannot resolve her problems with male domination in isolation because the female subjectivity is socially constructed. Thus the resolution of the novel is deformed by contradictions.Metrics
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