Witches, bitches and moms: a search for empowering women's subjectivity in the works of Canadian and Lithuanian women writers

ENSituating women's literature in the contexts of globalization, the adoption of capitalism, and the appeal of democracy, this analysis navigates the distinct pressures and difficulties of female subjectivity formation in Eastern Europe in relation to female identity formation in Canada. Focusing on fictional women's attempts to construct a fluid sense of self, my thesis provides a comparative analysis of Lithuanian and Canadian women's writing between the 1970s and the 1990s, in terms of self-formation in relation to mothering experiences, the interaction between language and perception of the female body, as well as constructing the feminine self in the context of patriarchal globalization. The first chapter traces the development of subjectivity theories, examining how the notion of self transforms from the classical view of predestined subjectivity into the notion of a transformable rational self. Connecting the philosophies of marginal self, this chapter critically examines a historical development of feminist subjectivity theories. Building on Kristeva, Butler and Deleuze, this chapter sets the concept of sujet en proces, a fluid sense of subjectivity which is used throughout the following study. Examining the complexities of feminist theorizations of maternal experiences, the second chapter focuses on the comparative analysis of Gabrielle Roy' La route d'Altamont, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, as well as the Lithuanian Vanda Juknaite's Sermenys (The Wake) and Ugne Barauskaite's Desimt (Ten).The study of these works traces the constraints of spiritual, medical and intellectual discourses surrounding femininity, demonstrating the lack of a positive model of maternal subjectivity. Drawing heavily on the feminist criticism of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, the third chapter examines how Jurga Ivanauskaite's Ragana ir lietus (The Witch and the Rain) and Nicole Brassard's Le Desert mauve employ a feminine language in the writing of the female body, as well as the overall significance of the corporeal language in the process of subjectivity creation. With this analysis, I demonstrate how the binary paradigms of feminist theories fail to provide women with possibilities of constructing a positive sense of self. Finally, comparing Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride and Jurga Ivanauskaite's Miegancii{ drugelin tvirtove (The Fortress of Sleeping Butterflies), the fourth chapter, demonstrates how women's subjectivities are trapped by the patriarchal colonizer within the globalized and arguably democratic world.