In Calamity's wake
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2012
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Abstract
In Calamity's Wake is a feminist Canadian Western about a woman who hunts across the badlands of Alberta to the badlands of South Dakota for the mother who gave her up for adoption - the infamous cross-dressing frontierswoman Calamity Jane. With this novel I construct a "meta-historiographic" fiction in the tradition described by Linda Hutcheon in her book, The Canadian Postmodern. Rather than attempt to restore Calamity Jane to coherence, with this book I try to create through Calamity Jane a discursive construct that explodes the linear, coherent narrative of a mostly white, mostly male Old West. I do this to create a new Western that promotes the resistance of violence as a form of heroism and suggests that what women owe to each other, what the feminist/maternal legacy really is, is stories of women's diversity. These stories do not constitute a coherent or a linear tradition, but their circulation helps women to navigate themselves within a wider context. Highlighting diverse precedents contextualizes a broader array of women within the discursive construct of "woman" in history and, in giving women stories against which they may measure their own actions, this novel seeks to provide a mode of redress to the historic exclusion of alternate narratives by gesturing towards the multiplication of stories through the technique of pastiche. The novel is followed by a critical exegesis in the form of an afterword in which I provide critical context for the creative work arranged around the central questions I asked myself as I was writing: Why a Western? Why Calamity Jane? Why a feminist text? Why a mother/daughter story? Each of these questions provides a framework for discussing the history of the novel's production, an exploration of its critical and aesthetic influences, and some explanation of the purpose behind many stylistic decisions.
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Bibliography: p. 262-269
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Citation
Caple, N. A. (2012). In Calamity's wake (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/4733