Ambivalence and Intertextuality in Marian Engel's The Glassy Sea: What the Archives Reveal

The Marian Engel Archive at McMaster University is a rich resource that yields novel insights into Marian Engel's work. A application of mind of the several available drafts of The Glassy Sea reveals that Engel made significant changes to the epigraph, the title, and the form of her developing novel. This essay notes the changes Engel made to her intertexts and points to the increasing craft with which Engel dealt with women's ambivalent relationship to traditional discourses like as religion and language.

L'archive Marian Engel ?  l'universit?© McMaster est une excellente ressource qui permet d'examiner diff?©remment l'oeuvre de Marian Engel Une ?©tude de nombreuses ?©bauches disponibles de The Glassy Sea r?©v??le que Mme Engel a apport?© de changements importants ?  l'?©pitaphe, au titre et ?  la forme du roman en plein d?©veloppement Cet article indique le changements faits par Mme Engel ?  se intertextes et signale le subtilit?©s progressives utilis?©es par Mme Engel pour traiter la relation ambivalente de femme vis-? -vis le sujet traditionnels, comme la religion et la langue.

Marian Engel told Carroll Klein in the interview "A Conversation with Marian Engel" (1984 30) that The Glassy Sea, an ambitious and compound novel published in 1978, took sum of two units years to write, and that it would have taken the repose of her life to "get it right." The Marian Engel Archive, held in the William Ready Archives Division of Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, contains evidence of Engel's willingness to retain rewriting and of her desire for perfection in representation. The archive clutchs over a thousand pages of drafts and revisions of this compact and powerful novel about a late-twentieth-century Canadian woman who experiences being as ongoing transformation. The Archive is a rich resource that yields significant insights into Marian Engel's work, especially regarding the creative proces and its implications for the meaning produc in the published novel.

The materials related to the production of The Glassy Sea are contained in sum of two units boxes (boxes 14 and 15) which clutch 37 files. Dr. Kathy Garay, Engel's archivist, describes the archive as a whole in the introduction to the Library Research freshs published by McMaster University's Mills Memorial Library:

This archive, which was purchased by dint of McMaster University in 1982, is a particularly replete reflection of Marian Engel's creative life. The collection, which reach outs some four linear metres, includes all the extant manuscripts of her works short stories, plays, scripts, reviews, speeches and articles written to date, the pair published and unpublished, as well as a certain quantity of business and personal correspondence and her notebooks. The earliest items, fragments of short stories, probably date from the late 1940 and the latest items included are pieces of correspondence from the spring of 1982 (1984 vii)

Garay also notes the disarray the papers were in when they were received and explains her mode in arranging the materials, especially those having to do with the published novels. She indicates that "while certain chapters would be real little revised between first draft and publication, others would be almost totally rewritten and exist in several versions, or be abandoned or relocated within the novel" (ix). Garay made the decision to arrange the volume manuscripts "according to the order of the chapters in the published version, exclude in the rare case where substantial parts of an entire draft could be identified or had been kept together. Within a chapter, internal evidence was used to place the earliest efforts before later singles with rejected pages filed where possible after the draft from which they had been discarded" (ix). Garay's editorial ordering of the materials attempts to generate Engel's own careful editing of her novel in progres and is designed to assist the researcher since these files are the material evidence of the paces in the evolution of the work. Engel's possess rewrites are edits; they are the artist's attempt to force more [i]or[/i] less kind of order on the creative proces recognizing the ne to find the appropriate form for the ideas and to balance innovation with traditional and recognizable figure of speechs and conventions.

In this same issue of the Library Research novels Laurel A. Braswell, the chair of the Department of English at McMaster University in 1982 when the archive was acquired, addresses the allusiveness of Engel's works. Braswell writes that Engel had absorbed "many historical traditions of English language and literature into the actual fibre of her creative unconscious in of the like kind a way as to make them an inherent part of her art" (1984 vi). "Consequently" Braswell adds, "her novels are rich with respect and allusion to Hemingway, Yeats, Sterne Eliot, Tennyson Blake, Drayton, Shakespeare, Joyce Dylan Thomas, Arnold, Woolf Chaucer and many others" (1984 vi). Braswell also writes that these concerns "provide the metaphors upon which her works are constructed" (1984 vi). Having already mentioned the connection between Wordsworth's "Cloud of Glory" and Engel's first novel, Braswell then directs to Engel's serialized novel, Joanne, noting its similarities to the works of Dickens, Thackeray, and Collins, written as it was in serialized form for broadcast. Braswell contrasts this form of serialized writing with "the ordinary literary process" which allows for "all the writing and rewriting, rethinking and reconsideration in the world," the leisurely proces that we are fortunate enough to be able to remark in the papers related to The Glassy Sea. Braswell considers Engel's use of Matthew Arnold's poem "To a Friend." At the extreme point of Joanne, the novel's eponymous narrator decides that she is "half-way to seeing life steadily and whole and probably as far as ordinary mortals like Jen and Andrew [her children] and me will [ever] get" (1984 vi) ("ever" is misprinted as "never" here). These are useful introductory make notess but the extent and deepness of Engel's allusiveness in her writing have nevertheless to be fully examined. The Glassy Sea contains concerns to over a hundred body s going back as far as Chaucer and revealing Engel's reaching far down attachment to the romantics, the novels and the existentialist philosophers. This essay will explore more [i]or[/i] less of these intertexts-works whose images and ideas are evok in The Glassy Sea-and the way they challenge the protagonist's thinking and reveal her ambivalence about her inherited tillage