Janice Galloway's Short Stories

Janice Galloway’s short stories (Brown Bag) ‘Gender and Nation: Women’s Short Fiction in Contemporary Scotland’ aims to show how contemporary Scottish women writers address the issues of nation and gender and to evaluate their contribution to the short story as a genre, exploring the ways their themes and narrative techniques help to reshape the form. In my project I analyse in depth the work ofthe Scottish writers Laura Hird, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Janice Galloway. In the 1990’s the popularity of the Scottish writing increased considerably. Male Scottish authors such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh made the working-class urban writing one of the characteristic forms in the Scottish literary system and experimented with narratives which helped them explore the Scottish identity.Scottish writing acquired a meaning that, in Janice Galloway’s words, ‘seemed to be about being blokey’. My aim in this project is to explore the ways women writers contributed to the literary tradition; and to examine whether or not national identity and gender identity are some of their concerns and how these two notions interrelate, if they do, to create a ‘gendered national identity’. WhereasLaura Hird, for instance, has in a sense followed the tradition of the working-class urban fiction and language as assertion of the Scottish identity without focusing particularly on gender, Ali Smith’s short fiction, although often set in Scotland, raises questions about gender and sexual identity leaving national identity aside. On the contrary, A. L. Kennedy and Janice Galloway deal both withnation and gender in their short fiction. Whereas Kennedy’s short stories explore the ways women are oppressed in contemporary society, focusing particularly on marriage and religion, and addresses the notion of national identity in a quite subtle way, Galloway’s work is more directly concerned with gender structures within the patriarchal Scottish society.

Today, I will focus on JaniceGalloway’s work, analysing some of her stories from the story collections Blood (1991) and Where You Find It (1996). Janice Galloway’s work is much more openly engaged with gender and the connections between Scottish national identity and female identity than Hird’s and Kennedy’s work. Galloway was brought up by Scottish women (her father died when she was six); however she was told that ‘women cannywrite’1 and that the Scottish accent ‘was ignorant and common’.2 This, along with the obstacles she encountered when she tried to know more about literature written by women and start writing herself –her mother set fire to the first novel she wrote-, is probably one of the reasons why she has tried to break with the apparent and misleading homogeneity of the Scottish literature. Although she shares withcontemporary male Scottish writers an interest in asserting Scottish national identity, particularly in her urban writing and use of language; her main concern is to depict a gendered identity and give voice to marginalised women in Scottish society. One way in which Galloway explores Scottish gendered identity is through her depiction of dangers women are exposed to in contemporary society. In‘Last Thing’ the narrator, a young girl, is attacked by a man when she is walking home with a friend; in ‘Fearless’, the narrator’s mother is verbally attacked by another male when she is walking on the street; and in ‘Test’ Mharie sees on the news that a woman was ‘raped by a SAFE HOME AT NIGHT taxi driver’ (p. 216). Other stories show the obstacles women encounter in everyday life just for beingfemale. In ‘A Proper Respect’, for instance, Alice’s doctor compels her to tell her mother about the abortion she is about to have patronising her and refusing to let her decide.

1

Janice Galloway, ‘Objective Truth and The Grinding Machine’, Janice Galloway: A Web Archive (1998) [accessed 17 May 2010] (para. 3 of 13). 2 Galloway, ‘Objective Truth and The Grinding Machine’, (para. 1 of...