Writing the Other Self in Aritha Van Herk's Novels

Contemporary Canadian female authors' novels explore how and notions of identity are differently construed according history, time, class, race, and community. Because impulse toward self-representation connected milieu of Western Civilization, subjectivity-or one's emerging identity--begins with a person's awareness of her physical and emotional self that expresses itself in or story. Too often girls or women are defined as other. These notions manifest in Aritha van Herk's unique early childhood in which her unrelenting eagerness unpack her family's basic languages of Dutch and English became source of her female imagination. In 1949, with three small children, her parents emigrated from Holland settle on a farm in Alberta, Canada, learning English by studying their son's first grade reader. Van Herk was born in 1954. Speaking Dutch and English until she began elementary school, she admits cultural effect on immigrants is enormous. Recognizing her parents' and siblings' honest difference, she feels that immigration is much more profound, a displacement so far-reaching that it only vanishes after several generations. At least it was for me. I learned that was and was refuge (Frozen Tongue 46-47). With that insight, she later wrote that Alberta's prairie country was peopled by characters who have abandoned their setting and who seek plot their own in a new way. They choose displace themselves, surrender familiar, rearranging it suit story. Curiously enough, effects of displacement only begin appear in children or grandchildren. In other words, inter-generational family members experience loss of homeland, without necessarily understanding why they are unable adjust the custom of learning a language (46-47). From childhood she sensed a gap between what she considered her childhood identity and that of her siblings, parents, and later other school children. Bridging different female and male identities continues be a consistent trope in her essays and fiction. One difficulty resides in fact that woman subject of her language. Her hers. She therefore speaks and represents herself in a her own, that is, through categories of of other.... Discourse carries in itself sign of subject, speaking subject who in discourse speaks himself and speaks starting from himself (Adriana Cavarero qtd. in de Lauretis 16). During that childhood of knowing and knowing Dutch, van Herk explores a sense of displacement that requires its own best fiction (InVisible Ink 173). Developing verbal acuity and a sometime irreverent use of English allows van Herk an imaginative and affective way express her sense of otherness. Knowing she both Canadian and Dutch, and Dutch and Canadian, suggests that out of a love of lies and a desire for truth [she becomes] a writer of fiction (Frozen Tongue 47). She makes it clear that struggling with emotions found in story of migration verifies why the content of language not for truth but for fiction (Frozen Tongue 47). Realistically, she links imaginative self such a good that characters believe it themselves (InVisible Ink 174). Thus, she thinks feminist writers need to refuse be contained, restrained, [and] handcuffed as they discuss how invent a women's world (InVisible Ink 274). In her novels and commentaries, van Herk explores a youthful tension arising from her childhood's formatted beliefs that are modified and changed through fictional discourse, educated reading, and finally her choice of career: teaching and writing about how capable of disabusing culture's phallocentric dominance. Nevertheless, van Herk understands she can only creatively develop character formation or subjectivity after she has attained her own identity (Hutcheon 5). …

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