The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Qupperneq 14

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #2
The Woman Who Reappeared
by Elin Thordarson
Canadian Letters has always had the
good fortune of being a literary realm pop-
ulated by the works of women.
Consequently, it has never been difficult in
my lifetime, to be able to rattle off a sizable
list of women from Canada known for
their contribution to literature. Take for
instance: Margaret Atwood, Margaret
Laurence, Nellie McClung, Gabrielle Roy,
Beatrice Mosionier, Carol Shields, Miriam
Toews, Jane Urquhart, Ann-Marie
MacDonald, Lucy Maud Montgomery,
Alice Munro, Emily Carr . . . etc. But, as of
late, it has begun to concern me that there
is at least one name missing from my per-
sonal, rapid fire, Can. Lit. mash-up: Laura
Goodman Salverson.
In 1939, in fact, the very year our cana-
dienne bien-aimee Margaret Atwood was
born, Salverson’s autobiographical account
of growing up a woman, of an ethnic
minority, in poverty, at the dawning of the
Twentieth Century was awarded the
Governor General’s Literary Merit for
Non-Fiction. Nowadays the Governor
General’s Award could be considered
Canada’s pre-eminent “feather in cap”. So
how can it be that this celebrated writer has
become a relative unknown to the modern
Canadian reading public? Well, in addition
to the Icelandic plumage her Confessions
of an Immigrant’s Daughter is rumoured to
have ruffled, another reason for her unpop-
ularity may be the “universal feminist”
criticism her autobiography garnered from
scholars in the late twentieth century. It is
through my presentation of Salverson’s
autobiographical first wave feminist stance,
and the subsequent second wave “universal
feminist” criticism it received, that I intend
to pull Confessions of an Immigrant’s
Daughter from its abyss of silence through
a third wave rhetoric.
Feminism, in the Western and patriar-
chal context, has come to be referred to in
metaphor. It has been a social movement
that has “washed” over our political con-
sciousness in a wave-like pattern since the
late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. That is also to say, when dealing
with a wave analogy, that the movement
has had a tendency to ebb away from pop-
ular discourse. Three of these waves have
crashed upon Western society thus far,
each qualified by its own distinct tone and
unique temper.
Western Icelander, Laura Goodman
Salverson, born in Winnipeg in 1890, wrote
in contemporeinity with feminism’s first
wave. This wave, of course, is dominated
by the political crusade of the women suf-
fragists who sought not only political
autonomy for women, but also a subse-
quent improvement in women’s social cir-
cumstances. Confessions of an Immigrant’s
Daughter is ripe with Salverson’s impres-
sions of the conditions under which
women lived, in particular, the iniquitous
estate bestowed on non-Anglo women
during these early episodes of urban prairie
life.
She writes:
“For girls like us the dice were loaded
from the start. The ensign of the mop and
dustbin hung over our cradles. No wonder
thousands of us married any old fool! Bed
and board! Was that the answer? Was that
all of life? Was there no room in this iron
world for the quickened sensibilities? For
the white fire that raced along the edges of
the mind at the beautiful, swift soaring of a
bird? No meaning to the strange, insistent
yearning for a deeper fulfillment of purpos-
es? Just to eat and sleep, propagate your
misery and die!” (323).
Indeed, this is one of Salverson’s cen-
tral confessional/autobiographical themes,
the way in which women can experience
poverty - namely through demeaning
labour coupled with the sentiment that