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

Contents

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 ambivalence 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 Douglas 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 1956^[4], 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 going 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

Joy Stone is the narrator of The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and at the same time the main character of the story.

Relating to this a first person narrator with an internal point of view is used - the reader gets insight into Joy's feelings, conditions and actions.

As Joy is not an omniscient but autodiegetic narrator, she consequently is not able to examine the minds of others, but often reflects about other characters and what they could think:

“She knew how I felt. Did I think doctor hadn't given her case notes? She knew all about my problems. Did I want her to tell me a true story? Her niece had an accident on her bike once. And she thought, what'll happen? But she prayed to God and the family rallied round and they saw her through to the other side. That's what I had to remember. She knew how I felt; she knew exactly how I felt.” (Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 23)

Conversations with superiors or men of high recognition, like doctors and bosses, are structured as dialogues to underline Joy's lacking self-esteem as well as her inability to talk about her emotions instead of merely presuming that her dialogue partner knows about them. Accordingly, the conversations are ineffective:

“Health Visitor So, how are you / how's life / what's been happening /anything interesting to tell me / what's new?

Patient Oh, fine / nothing to speak of.”

(Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 21)

Moreover, Joy's narrative strategy mainly is a continuing alternation of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Sometimes, Joy does nothing else than reflecting or rather talking with herself, e.g. about the control of her body:

“I have to concentrate: one finger at a time, releasing pressure and rebalancing in the chair to accommodate the tilting, adjusting, redistributing pieces of myself. Hands are bastards: so many separate pieces. The muscles in the thighs tightening as the feet push down and the stomach clenching to take the weight then I'm out the chair, shaky but upright. My knees ache. I move, ignoring the carpet as it tries to nudge through the soles.” (Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 8).

At other moments she mixes up her thoughts with perceptions:

“Square window on the landing, flat royal blue. Shadows of trees on the wall. It's always a good idea to stop here, looking up at the window before you start on the stairs; steady yourself and work out tactics. Sometimes I get the notion I have to take the stairs in one or something terrible might happen. Other times I take them one at a time and count, making sure they're all still there. Tonight, there's nothing. I haul up with the handrail for a rope and get filthy from the upstairs skirting. Strings of oose shelter in corners, waving ghost arms. It's time I got this place clean.” (Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, 8).

While The Trick Is to Keep Breathing is told by a first person narrator, Foreign Parts has a more complex narrative structure.

[...]

^[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