Writing Women into History: Margaret Atwood’s and Dionne Brand’s Interrogation and Relocation of Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the relationship between ancestral women and their arrival in a new landscape as represented in Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and Dionne Brand’s “No Language is Neutral” (1990). Atwood’s poems focus on Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant who left behind written sketches of her life in Canada. Meanwhile, Brand’s poem centers on an emigrated speaker who weaves oral stories of her ancestor Liney, who had been enslaved in Trinidad, and the story of her own arrival in Canada. Working with Jeff Weingarten’s Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry (2019), this essay argues that Atwood and Brand question an uneven power dynamic of control and authority, between a formidable alien landscape and a dislocated foremother. But they relocate power in different ways. Atwood writes from a colonial perspective and relocates control to the speaker Moodie through her personification and conquering of the Canadian landscape. Contrastingly, Brand writes from an African diasporic perspective and her speaker struggles to relocate authority to Liney due to unreliable memories displacing Liney from the speaker. However, the attempted resurrection of Liney empowers Brand’s speaker on her similar journey into an alien landscape. By analyzing the relocation of power, this essay argues that Atwood and Brand disrupt historical representations of women to demonstrate Moodie’s and Liney’s strengths within histories of pioneering and enslavement. Additionally, Brand expands Weingarten’s argument to consider the challenges non-colonialists face when writing and empowering women who are exempt from history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".