Gender Identities in the Wilderness & Small Town Canada

1. Gender Identities in the Wilderness & Small Town Canada The Company of Strangers and “The Found Boat”

2. Outline • The Company of Strangers • Alice Munro • “The Found Boat”

3. The Company of Strangers (1990) • 7 women between the ages of 67 and 88, stranded in the Quebec countryside; with their bus driver, a 29-year-old woman of colour; • Produced as an “Alternative Drama” in Studio B (Alternative Drama: the use of non-professional actors performing themselves in loosely scripted drama.

4. The Company of Strangers (1990) • Mary Meigs In the Company of Strangers (1991) • Beth, 80-yr-old – “the film was the best thing in my life” • Meig: “for the first time we are separated from our mirror-images, the ones we can control, and have become Others”; surprised at how old she looks; • Winnie: “Nothing happens.” • Meig: “ I tell her that we are happening.” (Russell 217)

5. Starting Questions 1. Documentary and Feature Film --Do you find the film interesting? Why? --After seeing the final product, the actresses in the film find that ”nothing happens” in the film, unlike the Hollywood films they are used to seeing. Do you agree? What do you think are the purposes of combining documentary interviews and a fictional plot?

6. Starting Questions 2. Aging and Survival -- When the old ladies cry outloud, ”we are alive!” is there anything significant? -- What are the signs of their age? How do they deal with them? 3. Individual stories --What do we get to know of each lady through the glimpses we have of their lives?

7. The characters • Constance (gloomy depression) • Winnie (a former belly dancer)

8. The characters • Catherine (a nun, who tries to fix the bus and, when that fails, hikes 20 miles on arthritic ankles for help) • Cissy ( a survivor of a heart attack)

9. The characters • Alice (a Mohawk Indian) • Mary (an artist and a lesbian) • Beth –least adapted to old age and existence in nature

10. The characters • Michelle Sweeney-- as Michelle (the only one under 60 and with professional theatrical experience; the young black bus driver) • Beth Webber-- as Beth (passive and unaccustomed to the wilderness)

11. Their common concerns A. Family vs. “career”– • Constance: gives up her art when her first child was born; (clip 1) • Cissy: afraid of losing her only son; • Beth: her son died as a young man; • Alice: hates her ex-husband, loves her grandson.

12. Their common concerns • Family vs. “career”– their lives in glimpses

13. Their common concerns B. Food, activities & their interest in Nature -- leftovers -- Catching Fish, frog, -- watch and imitate bird singing -- dancing -- card games

14. C. Aging, Death & Survival -- Constance afraid of death; -- Beth –concerned with her appearance -- envy the young people; Alice -- Fear of loneliness & death -- Cissy -- Send out signals to show that “[they] are alive.”

15. Survival • Human vs. nature

16. The role of Michelle • Younger, livelier, an “interviewer” but without telling her own past

17. “The Found Boat” Alice Munro

18. The strength of her fiction arises partially from its vivid sense of regional focus, most of her stories being set in Huron County, Ont, as well as from her sense of the narrator as the intelligence through which the world is articulated. Alice Munro

19. Lake Huron Toronto

20. About rural southwestern Ontario. • "'I don't think it's very different at all from the Midwest,' she says. 'There are nice old-looking towns, substantial towns, with big brick houses and big shade trees, large churches - many large churches -and factories that tend not to be operating any more. There's good farming land, and the lake - Lake Huron, 10 miles from where I live. And there's a kind of ritualistic wildness - pretty wild, self-destructive driving, a whole culture of sports -hockey is the big thing. . . . “

21. Alice Munro: Themes and Style • Gender Issues 1. the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to terms with family and small town 2. the problems of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. • Style • Emphasis on an explosive moment—a moment of revelation or a turning point. • ''I don't understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. . . . I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.''

22. “The Found Boat” Five Parts: • Discovery of the boat • Fixing the boat • Rowing the boat down the river • The Pedder Train Station • Truth or Dare

23. “The Found Boat”--Questions • What is the “explosive moment” in the story? • How do the boys and girls relate to each other differently in these five parts? How does Eva feel about Clayton? • Do you find the girls too daring in taking off their clothes? • Symbolic meanings of (p. 135) • debris, river, the forsaken train station, Clayton’s action, the names of Eva and Clayton.

24. Gendering process in “The Found Boat” • The division of boys and girls in the beginning of the story • Their joining efforts in the process of boat-fixing—though still there is a gender distinction. • Initiation story: the five of them are no longer children engaged in child games.

25. Transgressing Social/Gender Boundaries • The trip as a trip of transgressing gender boundaries. • The trip ends up re-confirming gender boundaries, since women’s bodies are vulnerable to rape and in need of protection. • Ironically, it is the boy, but not God, that give “Eva” (Eve) her sense of shame. • Ending – ambivalence, the girls in between shame and scorn.