SOURCE: Goldman, Marlene. “Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic: A Genealogy for Lost Women.” In Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women's Writing, pp. 101-32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Goldman examines Marlatt's feminist revision of patriarchal linguistic, historical, and symbolic constructs in Ana Historic.

I do not think we can live as human subjects without in some sense taking on a history; for us, it is mainly the history of being men or women under bourgeois capitalism. In deconstructing that history, we can only construct other histories. What are we in the process of becoming?

(Mitchell, 294)

As the analyses of the novels in the previous chapters suggest, various strategies have been adopted in an effort to challenge established representations of female identity generated within a variety of patriarchal cultural discourses. Intertidal Life [by Audrey Thomas] subverts the traditional literary representation of...