Celebrity and passing in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The T.E. Lawrence Poems

Bibliographic Data

ID9002525
AuthorsJoel Deshaye (McGill University, Montreal, Canada, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume46
Issue3
Pages531-550
Publication date2011-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0021989411409810
OpenAlexW2122687436
LanguageEN
References cited18

In The T.E. Lawrence Poems ( 1982 ), the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in the voice of the man also widely known as Lawrence of Arabia to consider the extent of her identification with him and to raise questions about their relative cultural standing. Identifying with Lawrence both as a fan and as a celebrity of lesser degree, she implies in the end that both of them owe their celebrity to appropriation of Middle Eastern culture. She accomplishes her critique through artistic passing. She could not pass as Lawrence in the flesh, but by imitating his voice so accurately, and by using many uncredited phrases from the historical Lawrence in her book, MacEwen begins to pass for him. When she modifies his descriptions, the extent of her identification with him becomes more apparent than it was. Ultimately, she asserts her difference from him in a postcolonial feminist critique related to her identity as a Canadian poet in the 1970s, when some Canadian poets had recently emerged as celebrities

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Identification (biology · Identity (music · Literature · Poetry · Sonnet · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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