The (Pro)Creators of Culture: Women Artists as Daughters and Mothers in Brazilian and Canadian Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation examines the female artist fiction produced between the 1960s and the 1990s in Brazil and Canada to show how women artists, particularly mothers, have challenged the economic, political, religious, and social constrains that prevented their predecessors from succeeding as artists. Although Brazilian and Canadian women writers celebrate women’s increasing participation in the arts in the second half of the twentieth century, I argue that they question any simplistic resolutions to the conflict that women still perceived in their private and personal lives during that period. A woman’s ability to combine her female and artistic identities depends on the maternal and artistic roles she inherits from her female ancestors and the discourses of motherhood and art that society imposes on her during the time she pursues a career. Specific cultural patterns in Brazil and Canada also influence these two factors. Brazilian and Canadian women have conveyed particular discourses of femininity and female art across generations while their societies and artistic communities have produced unique responses to women’s identities and cultural productions. As I will show, these two developments affect the images of woman/mother and artist that Brazilian and Canadian writers create in their texts, leading their protagonists to overcome the conflicts between art and life in strikingly different ways.