Strong Women among ‘The Defenseless Christians’ : la place des femmes dans les romans mennonites Sweeter than all the World de Rudy Wiebe et A Complicated Kindness de Miriam Toews

Résumé 0

Rudy Wiebe (b. 1934) and Miriam Toews (b. 1964) embody two generations of Mennonite writing in Canada. Although their works differ greatly in terms of style and content, both have written novels reflecting on the place of women in Mennonite society and their submission to patriarchal authority. This article proposes an analysis of Wiebe’s Sweeter than All the World and Toews’s A Complicated Kindness centering on the stylistic and generic strategies each novel deploys to address the topos of female victimhood. Wiebe relies on pathos to test the limits of sentimentalism and involve his readers in a community of feeling. As for Toews, she aims her wry humor at the unique apartness of the Mennonite community, using the incongruous as a discursive weapon to instill a sense of solidarity with the displaced and the marginal. Both novels are consequently fully resonant with the anxieties of a national culture that endeavors to conjugate within the same space the claims of its minorities with the ethical aspirations of an increasingly diverse majority.