SOURCE: Godard, Barbara. “‘Body I’: Daphne Marlatt's Feminist Poetics.” American Review of Canadian Studies 15, no. 4 (winter 1985): 481-96.

In the following essay, Godard examines Marlatt's exploration of female subjectivity and self-identity in her writings, including her effort to deconstruct patriarchal hierarchies and masculine discourse through alternative feminist language, storytelling, and adaptations of cultural myth and history.

The title is borrowed from Madeleine Gagnon.¹ It underlines the “drive to connect” with the other,² a holistic blurring of boundaries that is the source of Marlatt's poetic. Simultaneously, the title enacts a feature of contemporary feminist discourse, its tactics of marked appropriation, its flying away with language.³ It is a poetics of excess of signification. Through parody, feminist discourse draws attention to the materiality of the signifier. By disrupting our desire for a transparent language, it calls into question the possibility of representation. One word leads only to another, words interconnect. As...