SOURCE: Scheel, Kathleen M. “Freud and Frankenstein: The Monstered Language of Ana Historic.” Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (spring 1996): 93-114.

In the following essay, Scheel explores Marlatt's critique of Freudian pyschosexual theory, particularly Freud's postulations about the female body and hysteria, in Ana Historic. According to Scheel, Marlatt's novel reveals how patriarchal language and history projects the misogynistic anxieties of male-dominated culture onto women, who in turn are rendered silent, aberrant, and without independent identity—a condition shared by Frankenstein, a manmade gothic monster.

In Daphne Marlatt's book Ana Historic: A Novel her character Annie writes: “(caught in a fix, castrated—what is the female word for it? i mean for the psychological condition?)” (35). This parenthetical remark encapsulates the struggle of woman as the silenced other to speak herself as subject against the dominant discourse of Sigmund Freud's psychosexual theories of female development. Annie's recollection of her experiences of...