Abstract
Gil Adamson’s debut novel The outlander (2007) is set in 1903 and presents a nineteen-year-old Mrs. Mary Boulton, a widow by her own hand, who starts her rebirth with an act of violence. Adamson’s heroine incites change and fashions her life as a process of transformation at the cost of transgressing visible as well as invisible boundaries to self-realisation. Fleeing from the external dangers, the widow confronts the overwhelming darkness of her own mind, which provides this remake of the western and a Canadian romance with a Gothic dimension. Haunted by the nightmares of the past, the enormity of her crime, the dead within her as well as the phantom of her former married Other, Mary Boulton learns survival skills, communes with nature, sides with other misfits she encounters on her way, and saves herself from hanging. Enlightened as well as strengthened by her traumatic experiences, pursued while pursuing, abandoned but herself abandoning, the widow stakes out a new territory with a promise of life inside her. She travels towards ultimate liberation, acceptance, and independence to the North, the romanticised place for renegotiating her identity and final erasure of constraints. In the peculiar detective story the widow’s revengeful pursuers are joined by the reader who from the mosaic of fragments and memories reconstructs the story of the villainess’ life. Evading easy categorisation and liberating herself from the gender stereotypes the murderess echoes the subversive heroines of such Canadian writers as Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Herk.
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Notes
- 1.
The novel has received several literary awards, such as the 2007 Drummer General's Award, the 2007 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the 2007 International Association of Crime Writers’ Dashiell Hammamett Prize, and the 2007 ReLit Award. It was nominated for the 2009 Canada Reads Award, and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book, Canada and Caribbean and the Trillium Book. Additionally it was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and long-listed for the International IMAC Dublin Literary Award.
- 2.
Van Herk believes that this masculine view masquerades
a world view for women and men, [and is] a selective realm where women are portrayed as mothers, saints or whores, but never people in their own right. Women as victims, cripples, betrayers, servants, objects, bitches. Female characters consistently maimed or killed for their rebellion. Or ignored for their acquiescence (1992, p. 83).
In her own novels, Aritha van Herk joined other Canadian women writers in appropriating the West and the western as women’s space, and infiltrated the “kingdom of the male virgin” with her spies in the “indifferent landscape” (van Herk 1992, pp. 139–151) in such novels as The tent peg (1981), No fixed address (1986) and Places far from Ellesmere (1990).
- 3.
Compare, for example, Hulan 2002.
- 4.
Adamson’s heroine is not the only example of the pioneer woman in Canadian literature, of course. In her study Thompson discusses several literary characters who adhere to the pattern, and also enumerates the 20th century writers (prior to the year 1991) who, according to her, use the character type in their fiction (Thompson 1991: 113). She gives only a few examples and does not mention the remaining books by van Herk which contain this type of heroine, such as No fixed address (1986), for example, or several heroines from Margaret Atwood’s fiction, which, I would argue, are also modelled on the pioneer woman archetype.
- 5.
The sentences ringing in the widow’s ears were spoken by her husband after the death of her baby to cheer her up.
References
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Urbaniak-Rybicka, E. (2013). Transgressing Boundaries to Metamorphose: The Outlander by Gil Adamson. In: Fabiszak, J., Urbaniak-Rybicka, E., Wolski, B. (eds) Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_11
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