"Lacking an Emotional Country...": Motion, Instability, and the Female Cosmopolitan in the Fiction of Mavis Gallant

Abstract

Twentieth century Canadian expatriate writer Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) explores the lingering effects of authoritarian power on social instability through themes of transnational migration, displacement, and loss. A prolific author who published extensively in The New Yorker, Gallant writes stories that are exquisite yet disturbing reflections of life, many set in post-World War II Europe where travelers, migrants, expatriates, and exiles have been set adrift by the inhospitable conditions of social and political collapse. This thesis examines images of motion and instability that situate Gallant’s work as the cosmopolitan condition that both responds to globalization and, most importantly, resists the standardization of Westernized global culture. I address the question Rebecca L. Walkowitz asks in Cosmopolitan Style, “Do the unsettling methods of cosmopolitan art serve to resist the adverse realities of cosmopolitan culture? Or do they facilitate them?” in order to argue that women in Gallant’s fiction bear more of the weight of these “adverse realities” in their roles as mothers, daughters, and wives, entangled as they are in the continuing gender disparities of Western culture, and also in the more intimate power dynamics of marriage and family social structure (23). This thesis demonstrates that instability requires a broader awareness of the consequences of displacement as well as the abuses of authoritarian control.