Border Crossings? Elizabeth Smart and Elizabeth Hay Writing About Mexico

Year 2015, Issue: 42, 165 - 186, 01.10.2015

Shoshannah Ganz

Abstract

By examining the work of two Canadian writers, Elizabeth Smart and Elizabeth Hay, living fifty years apart, this article looks at how these women write life on the border and what this tells them about their own identity. In the case of Elizabeth Smart, the identity she is exploring is primarily that of being a woman and a writer. Elizabeth Hay, on the other hand, meditates more explicitly on what it means to be a Canadian abroad and a Canadian writing about Mexico

Keywords

Border, women writing, Canadian identity, travel literature, Mexico

References

• Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. Tucson: U. of Arizona P., 1997. Print.
• Bohls, Elizabeth A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.
• Braham, Persephone. “Adventures in the Picturesque: Voyage and Voyeurism in the Tourist Guidebook to Mexico.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos 26.3 (Spring 2002): 379-94. Print.
• Bus, Heiner. “‘I too was of that small corner of the world’: The CrossCultural Experience in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986).” Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 21.3-4 (1993): 128-38. Print.
• Curtis, James R. and Daniel D. Arreola. “Through Gringo Eyes: Tourist Districts in the Mexican Cities as Other-directed Places.” North American Culture 5.2 (1989): 19-32. Print.
• Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. Toronto: Penguin, 1970. Print.
• Delpar, Helen. “‘Everything’s So Goddamned Pictorial”—North American Autobiographers’ Impression of Mexico, 1919-34.” Autobiography Studies 3-4 (Summer 1988): 48-59. Print.
• Dudek, Louis. En México. Toronto: Contact Press, 1958. Print.
• Eduardo, Santa Cruz. “Chicano Literature: Mediator of Discordant Borders.” Voices of Mexico 70 (Jan.-Mar. 2005): 116-120. Print.
• Ellis, RJ. “Big John drunk in Mexico”: Jack Kerouac’s Failed Traveller in Tristessa.” Studies in Travel Writing 2 (1996): 128-43. Print.
• Espinoza, Herberto. “The garden revisited: Mexico and Malcolm Lowry’s under the volcano.” Southeastern Latin Americanist 44:2 (1986): 75- 86. Print.
• Findley, Timothy. The Butterfly Plague. Markham: Penguin, 1969. Print.
• Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies 13.1 (Spring 1987). Port Elgin Ontario: Committee for Women’s Studies. Print.
• Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. Print.
• Ganz, Shoshannah. “Canadian Literary Representations of HIV/AIDS.” HIV in World Cultures: Three Decades of Representations. Ed. G. E. Subero. 1-11. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Print.
• ------. “‘Learning to live on the border”: Elizabeth Smart’s Mexico Writing.” Women Reading and Writing 2.3 (Winter 2008): 18-20. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
• Greenee, Graham. The Lawless Road. 1939. Toronto: Heinemann, 1960. Print.
• Gunn, Drewey Wayne. American and British Writers in Mexico, 1556-1973. Austin: U. of Texas P., 1969. Print.
• Gutierrez, Laura. “Deconstructing the Mythical Homeland: Mexico in Contemporary Chicana Performance.” Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities (2003): 63-74. Print.
• Hay, Elizabeth. The Only Snow in Havana. Dunvegan: Cormorant, 1992. Print.
• Hooper, Glenn and Tim Youngs, eds. Perspectives on Travel Writing. Studies in European Cultural Transition 19. Farnham: Ashgate, 2004. Print.
• Hoppenstand, Gary. “Hollywood Cowboys and Confederates in Mexico: Andrew V. McLaglen’s The Undefeated (1969).” Popular Culture Review 14.1 (2003): 121-8. Print.
• Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 2002. Print.
• Islam, Syed Manzurul. The Ethics of Travel from Marco Polo to Kafka. Manchester: Manchester UP., 1996. Print.
• Lawrence, D.H. Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places. 1927. London: William Heinemann, 1956. Print.
• Lennon, John and Malcolm Foley. Dark Tourism. London: Continuum, 2000. Print.
• Mycak, Sonia. “Divided and Dismembered: The Decentered Subject in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee 20.3-4 (Sep.- Dec. 1993): 469-78. Print.
• Quintana, Angel Gurría. “Travelling Through Discourse, Discoursing on Travel: Recent Writing on Travel Literature and British Travellers in Mexico.” Studies in Travel Writing 5 (2001): 172-188. Print.
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1993. Print.
• Simmen, Edward, Ed. Gringos in Mexico. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP., 1988. Print.
• Smart, Elizabeth. The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals. London: Jonathan Cape and Polytantric Press, 1978. Print.
• ------. Autobiographies. Ed. Christina Burridge. Vancouver: William Hoffer/ Tanks, 1987. Print.
• ------. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. 1945. London: Panther, 1966. Print.
• ------. The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Smart. London: Paladin, 1992. Print.
• ------. Necessary Secrets. Toronto: Deneau, 1986. Print.
• Travern, B. The White Rose. 1929. London: Robert Hale, 1965. Print.
• Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 1990. 2nd ed. London and Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 2002. Print.
• Vacani, Wendy. “D.H. Lawrence’s Perception of Mexico: A Meditation on Consciousness.” Swansea Review 102 (1994): 535-48. Print.
• Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas (American Borders). Toronto: Coach House, 1993. Print.
• Walker, Ronald G. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel. Berkeley: U. of California P., 1978. Print.