Representations of the return to "Mother" in Canadian and Australian settler-invader women's writing

This thesis focuses on the representations of mothers in Australian and Canadian settler-invader women's writing. The thesis is primarily informed by post-colonial theory, but it intersects with feminist theorizations of mother/daughter relationships, and feminine language and writing. Mothers have particular currency in these post-colonial literatures because of the dependence and autonomy that characterizes mother-daughter relationships, but also because they can be read as metonymic of the mother/daughter relationship that exists between an Empire and its colonies, often reflected in imperialist rhetoric as Mother Country and daughter colony. Mothers are also metaphorical of the motherland of the Old World and the potential of the New World of the colony. The thesis begins by examining the roles of women, as daughters, wives and mothers within the colonial project, and then situates this debate within current Second World and settler-invader theory. The first two chapters deal with nineteenth-century writers: Australian, Ada Cambridge and Canadian, Susanna Moodie. The attention to nineteenth-century texts provides a historical grounding for the later discussion of twentieth-century women writers, and indicates how motherhood and maternity were perceived and represented in some early Australian and Canadian women's literature. Because the colonial project was heavily invested in the reproductive capacity of the settler woman in Australia and Canada, Victorian ideologies regarding mothers circulate in these two women's writing, although not without ambiguity. Focusing on these maternal roles opens questions about the female colonial setter-invader's relationship to the New land and its inhabitants, as well as how an investment in Victorian maternal ideologies manifests itself It also raises the issue of the female colonial settler-invader's negotiation of identity in the colony, and, because female identity formation is closely tied to the mother, feminist and post-colonial theories converge here. The thesis then moves on to explore the works of four twentieth-century writers, Olga Masters, Barbara Hanrahan, Audrey Thomas and Daphne Marlatt, in order to trace the legacy of nineteenth-century patterns regarding maternity, mothers and country established in Cambridge and Moodie. These four chapters show the increasing difficulty of settler-invader subject formation as the settler subject becomes increasingly distanced temporally from imperialism. These chapters also broaden the questions of representing maternal experience in language, and the ways in which the relationship between mothers and daughters is inflected by the imperial, colonial and post-colonial histories of Australia and Canada. The research establishes the importance of unpacking maternal imagery, discourse and symbology of Australian and Canadian settler-invader women's writings, as a means of displacing imperial binaries, and recovering women in/from imperial history.

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