Profile: "A Purple Sort of Girl": Sheree Fitch's Tales of Emergence

Abstract

Résumé: Les oeuvres de Sheree Fitch nous parlent de l'affirmation de la féminité. Cette dimension est particulièrement perceptible dans ses oeuvres récentes et, surtout, dans son ouvrage en cours de publication,There's a Mouse in My House. Ses héroïnes, souvent de très jeunes filles, paraissent, dans l'ensemble, impuissantes devant des forces supérieures, psychologiques ou sociales, qu'elles perçoivent comme incontrolables. Néanmoins, elles parviennent à s'imposer par la découverte de l'imaginaire et la maîtrise du langage. Sheree Fitch établit elle-même une relation entre ses personnages et son expérience en tant cine romancière qui a dû lutter pour imposer sa voix. D'où une relation complexe entre l'oeuvre et l'existence, le "sexe" de l'auteur et la création littéraire. Summary: Sheree Fitch's poetry-narratives tell stories of female emergence. This pattern is particularly apparent in Sleeping Dragons All Around, There Were Monkeys in My Kitchen, I am Small, Mabel Murple, and her new book, There's a Mouse in My House. Her child-protagonists are typically females who,for the most part, initially feel voiceless and powerless when confronted with forces larger than themselves— '"forces" which may be internal/psychological or external/societal, or both, but which are, in some way, seemingly uncontrollable. Fitch's young heroines contend with these forces by embracing language, imagination, and creativity. A conversation with Sheree this summer revealed parallels between her female protagonists' emergence and her own development as a woman writer discovering her voice. Fitch's work, then, exhibits a rich interplay between biography and art—an interplay subtly expressive of the problematics around gender and creativity, and how these problematics figure, in an enabling way,in her writing for children.