Canadian Women Authors and Antiquity
An article by ©DrAlexandraMeghji
Canada has never been able to tell a simple story about its identity. As it reckons with a vast geography, a troubling colonial past, the historical influence of imperial Britain and the cultural dominance of the United States, Canadian nationhood can be, as political sociologist Mildred Schwartz writes, ‘an enigma and a cause for concern’ (2022). Unlike nations that anchor their identities in singular revolutionary moments or ancient, linear histories, Canada exists as a site of ongoing negotiation.
The Canadian Parliament was not built in a neoclassical fashion but in Gothic Revival or Canadian Gothic, unlike other nations whose government buildings incorporate classical architecture.
© Mark Lautenbacher / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
This identificatory aporia is brought into sharp relief when we compare Canada to other nations that have mobilized and politicized the Graeco-Roman classics to consolidate their power and scaffold their national discourse. The British Empire, for example, exported classical education as a tool of imperial domination, while the USA incorporated into itself classical imagery and vocabulary to solidify its identity and cultural authority (Quint 1993). Antiquity was crucial in securing narratives of legitimacy for both these powers.
And while Classics has been taught in Canadian education systems shaped by the British Empire, they do not constitute a unifying or founding Canadian myth. Instead, Canada’s relationship to antiquity is quieter, more uneasy. This tentative inheritance has shaped the presence of antiquity in Canadian literature, especially in the work of women writers who turn to Greece and Rome not to reinforce Canadian power but to explore themes of colonial history, patriarchal oppression, and cultural fragmentation in the Canadian context. This exploratory use of antiquity is manifest in the writings of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, three of Canada’s most influential authors. In their work, antiquity is a mechanism for asking the enduring question of what it means to be Canadian, rather than a legacy upon which to construct identity or project authority.
Margaret Laurence is a pillar of Canadian literature. She never received a formal classical education but she was interested in the Greek world. She names Antigone as her favourite play and reflects in her memoir about her encounters with antiquity during her travels to Greece. This interest figures prominently in her fiction, where her subtle engagement with Classics becomes a mechanism for postcolonial and feminist critique in Canada.
Laurence makes her opposition to imperialism clear in her memoir: ‘my feeling about imperialism was very simple – I was against it’ (Laurence 1960). She cites her upbringing in Canada as a source of this opposition when she writes that she ‘had been born and had grown up in a country that was once a colony, a country which many people believed still to be suffering from a colonial outlook’ (1960). But Laurence’s understanding of antiquity’s role in political struggle and postcolonial critique emerged in the 1950s, a time which she spent living and writing in Somalia and Ghana. In Long Drums and Cannons (1968), a work of Nigerian literary criticism, Laurence observes how Nigerian authors John Pepper Clark and Wole Soyinka engaged with Greek literature. Through this criticism, Laurence notices that the British Empire used antiquity as a means of consolidating colonial power in Nigeria and in their broader imperial project, but that Clark and Soyinka also engage with Greek epic and tragedy in their own way, bringing it into dialogue with Yoruba and Ijaw mythology to reclaim antiquity and loosen its imperial ties (1968). Laurence thus recognizes that Graeco-Roman literature has a kind of dual relationship with the imperial project.
Laurence brings the recognition that antiquity can both assist and resist colonization into her Canadian fiction, which she wrote upon her return from Africa. Her subtle engagement with antiquity allows her to interrogate what it means to be at home in a settler-colonial state marked by historical and identificatory fragmentation. Laurence’s The Diviners is an example of this dialogue. The journey of the protagonist, Morag Gunn, follows a pattern hat evokes the Odyssey, but Laurence uses this evocation of epic to expose the contingency of Canadian identity rather than to fashion her heroine as a contemporary Odysseus. Morag’s departure from and return to the Canadian prairies is marked by dispossession and persistent unease, rather than the triumphant restoration that Odysseus experiences upon his return to Ithaca. By mustering the Odyssey only to subvert its conclusion, Laurence highlights that the ancient world brings to the Canadian context a frame through which to reflect, but not to resolve, the anxieties and ambivalences of Canadian identity.
Alice Munro’s short fiction treats antiquity as a site of introspection on gendered experience in Canada. In her ‘Runaway’ trilogy, Juliet is a young classicist who interrupts her doctoral research at the University of Toronto to teach Latin at a girls’ school in Vancouver. Juliet’s professors value her talent and appreciate her passion for Classics but fear that her womanhood and the domestic pressures placed upon women will lead her to abandon her studies for marriage, which would ‘waste all their hard work and theirs’ and ensure she ‘los[t] out on promotions to men.’ The tension between traditional femininity and classicism highlights the persistent limits imposed upon women’s ambitions in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Canada, where being a classicist was viewed as an eccentricity tolerated more easily in men. Juliet knows she cannot ‘slough off that prejudice’ of her classicism, a discipline known for its ‘irrelevance and dreariness,’ as a man could because ‘[o]dd choices were simply easier for men.’ Her academic pursuits are even blamed for her ‘inability to run a sewing machine’ or ‘wrap a parcel neatly,’ two tasks that emblematize the feminine domestic sphere.
This tension between femininity and intellectualism reaches its zenith on the train to Vancouver, where, while reading E.R. Dodds’ landmark The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), Juliet is interrupted by a young man. While Juliet wants to read, she feels a gendered obligation to be polite and engage with the man. In this portrait of the classicist as a young woman, so to speak, Munro critiques the patriarchal dynamics that endure in the discipline and in Canadian society at large.
In the ‘Runaway’ trilogy, antiquity is not a scaffold for Canadian national identity but a lens for understanding Juliet’s personal experiences, relationships, and affect. Juliet views her relationship with her husband’s ex-girlfriend through that of the Iliad’s Briseis and Chryseis, and uses the Aethiopica to make sense of her complicated relationship with her daughter, Penelope. Classical knowledge thus shapes Juliet’s perspectives but it does not grant her a sense of social or identificatory certainty. The authority once associated with classicism is shaken when placed in the hands of a young woman navigating professional uncertainty and vulnerability. Munro therefore transforms the ancient world through the context of ordinary lives, where the loftiness of Classics is thwarted by the contingencies of private experience.
Margaret Atwood © Rudolph H. Boettcher / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood retells the story of the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and the twelve enslaved women who are executed in Odyssey 22. While Atwood does not transplant antiquity into the Canadian setting like Munro and Laurence, she does offer a critique of gender politics relevant to the Canadian context. Atwood casts Penelope as an agent of patriarchy by exposing her abuses of aristocratic power and complicity in the exploitation of the enslaved women. This approach evokes Atwood’s claim that the liberal feminisms dominant in Canada are often overly reductive, insufficiently intersectional, and inadequately cognizant that ‘women are human beings with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours that entails, including criminal ones’ (2018). Atwood, further, has criticized Canadian literature for reducing women characters to tropes and motifs rather than developing them as ‘real’ and ‘individual.’ In her retelling of the Odyssey,Atwood disrupts the longstanding characterization of Penelope as a patriarchal paragon of virtue and critiques the literary and political tendencies to oversimplify women characters and acquit women of the capacity for wrongdoing. Furthermore, Atwood shows how the voices of the enslaved women evoke the tragic chorus but refuse a narrative of restored order, and how this tension between speech and silence intersects with histories of marginalization in Canada. The murdered enslaved women unsettle epic closure and expose the costs of patriarchal restoration, thereby transforming antiquity into a relevant mechanism for contemporary critique.
Antiquity in Canada has not functioned as a secure foundation for national myth, as it has in Britain or the United States. Instead, it has been inherited with ambivalence, shaped by colonial history and by the presence of older Indigenous sovereignties. Canadian women writers reveal how Greece and Rome can be reworked in such a context: not as guarantors of empire, but as resources for thinking about gender, memory, and responsibility. Their work expands the field of classical reception by showing what happens when antiquity travels north and is asked to respond to a different set of histories.
References
Atwood, Margaret (1972). Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
— (2018). Am I a Bad Feminist? The Globe and Mail. <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/>. Accessed 2nd March 2026).
Laurence, Margaret (1963). The Prophet’s Camel Bell: A Memoir of Somaliland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— (1974). The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
— (2001). Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Munro, Alice (2004). Runaway. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Quint, David (1993). Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schwartz, Mildred A. (2022). Public Opinion and Canadian Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
