Universität Siegen
Sommersemester 2004
Contemporary Scottish Writers
2. Semester

Janice Galloway′s protagonists: Women in Foreign Parts
discover that The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

by: Nadine Schneider

I. Introduction

1. Janice Galloway: Life and Vision
2. Contents of the Term Paper

II. Textual Strategies: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts

1. Narrative Structure and Point of View
2. Text- in-text Concepts

III. The Outsides and Insides of Joy and Cassie

1. Exploring the Protagonists

a. Outer Appearance
b. Behaviour
c. Trauma and Identity

2. Analysing the Surroundings

a. Men
b. Mother
c. Friends
d. Freedom

3. Finding the Tricks to Survive

a. To Keep on Breathing
b. To Enter Foreign Parts

IV. Summary

Bibliography

I Introduction

“Women writers are in the worst position. They do less well with publishers′ advances. They are shortlisted for and win fewer prizes – not because they′re less talented, but because of entrenched patterns of how to see and read literature, what subjects may be considered ′serious′”.¹ Janice Galloway′s words are a sad fact: In spite of last century′s female emancipation there is still an imbalance of literature by men and women. The majority of published authors are male, only a few women writers are well-known as producers of strong literary work (or rather known at all).

1 Janice Galloway: Life and Vision

Janice Galloway is one of the women who have found public acknowledgement. By now she published three novels, two anthologies of short stories and several articles. Furthermore, she participated in other projects like audio plays. Her first novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing was published in 1988 and deals with the problem of lost identity: After the deadly drowning accident of her lover Michael 27- year-old Joy Stone′s life is destroyed – she cannot cope with loneliness and guilt, loses all her courage and falls into a perilous way of living.

The problem of not being able to deal with the absence of a man is also the issue of Janice Galloway′s second novel Foreign Parts, published in 1994. On a journey through France middle-aged Cassie reflects about her ambivale nce of desiring the bodily closeness to men while simultaneously disgusting the men′s lack of sensuality and love. It is obvious that gender issues are important to Janice Galloway who, according to Do uglas Gifford, has “a more immediate sense of the absurd and a keener eye for banal detail than either Gray or Kelman”².

Although her texts mean hard criticism on the predominance of men in society, she does not feel like a feminist authoress: “No, I don′t regard myself as a ′feminist′ writer. I regard myself, if at all, as a writer trying hard to get things, states of mind, as clear as I can make them. And that means to come from the middle of characters – not standing apart.”³ Born in Saltcoats in 1956⁴, as the youngest of three children, the age difference of almost twenty years might have caused the divergent opinions about literature and gender of Galloway and her older sister Nora: Nora was convinced that “women canny write”⁵. The reading of books by male authors presenting women as a nice negligibility and not as equal human beings as well as her university tutor′s statement that “girls often give up [and that] it′s nothing to be ashamed of”⁶ emphasised her wish to write books about the dilemma of women in a male-dominated society.

She writes about thoughtful women in existential crises, suffering from paranoia and depression. Galloway describes it like this: “I have always written about intense states of mind, and about loneliness and how creative the human head can be in its attempts to survive.”⁷

2 Contents of the Term Paper

In the following chapters I will have a closer look at the protagonists of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts, Joy Stone and Cassie. Therefore I am go ing to compare the narrative strategies of the texts and analyse similarities of the characters′ inner and outer life. Furthermore, I am exploring Joy′s and Cassie′s discoveries of how to survive. At the end of the examination I will present a summary of the analysis results.

II Textual Strategies of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts

1 Narrative Structure and Point of View

[...]

1 Janice Galloway in: Cristie L. March, 109

2 Douglas Gifford, 607

3 http://www.galloway.1to1.org/Buchkultur.html

4 http://www.galloway.1to1.org/Background.html

5 Janice Galloway in: Cristie L. March, 108

6 Janice Galloway in: Cristie L. March, 108f.

7 http://www.galloway.1to1.org/Buchkultur.html