Foreign Parts Janice Galloway
Characters:
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Trapped within institutionalised and contradictory discourses
Delineated & often oppositional characters
Operate using Guidebook ‘Potted France’ – offers containment, control, order (contained within box
although narrative intrudes at times and box not always complete). BUT – hopelessly inappropriate
& hectoring in tone, has little relevance to own experiences (This and other discourses of order are
made to seem ridiculous and undermined through their overuse and juxtaposition with reality.
Use inadequate maps (or none at all)
Confronted with markers of history but appear to have little significance for them.
Novel ‘takes apart’ mechanisms which oppress and contain
BUT ALSO
‘Reconstructive’ fictions – offer refashioning of concepts of identity (material shapers of subjectivity =
gender, class, nationality)
BRICOLAGE = description of technique of building from fragments – making something out of bits – forcing
reader to move between discourses and participate in act of reconstruction.
‘Rough Repair’ – unsteady movement towards assembling anew e.g. Rona ponders restoration of ancient
buildings (p254)
Cassie’s story/character – (making up through fragments) piecing together new way to live: piecing together
a place through snippets/visits (foreign parts); piecing together past through photos; realises she pieces
together Rona through parts (how we all learn about others)
Challenge to heterosexual conventions of lifestyle = new form of relationship
 Opportunities of leaving the past, saying what has hitherto been unsaid
 Puts things back in new way
 Hopeful Ending = glimpse of new possibilities – way of living not determined by old discourses
Map reference to another country – way encouraged to read
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Political and cultural agenda =’making do’ with & ‘remaking’ of myths of gendered & national
identity
New mappings of territories
Women operating within systems of oppression
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Challenge structures of ‘patriarchy’ in three formal ways:
1. Reluctance to endorse systems of binary oppositions
2. Use of humour
3. Typographical Experimentation
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Challenges binary oppositions that characterise linguistic structures but also determine &
determined by hierarchies of power – operate by oppositions but then breaks them down
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Cassie and Rona
Rona and Cassie – not interchangeable as text formation suggests – have capacity to surprise each
other
Initially: Cassie = paralysed by thinking, uncertainty, sense of chaos – prevents from acting
Rona = ready for anything, exasperating
‘Zodiac Labour Sign’ – Cassie = sitting by the fire; Rona = mowing hay
BUT Binary opposition does not hold:
Rona – Tells Cassie to ‘Shut up’ (p190); finds unexpected and creates novel’s small epiphanies
(puppy in store, field of roses, garden of sunflowers)
Cassie – Was once able to cope (p22); broken by past but nevertheless moves into the present
through constructive ordering of snapshots – those with Rona become part of narrative; finds own
way in end (p132)
Humour
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More overtly funny – mischievous, subversive laughter of women – offer distance
Rona – ‘dirtiest laugh in the world’ (p12)
Shared laughter ‘Rona and Me’ – offers hope at the end (p262)
Dangers of women functioning as symbols rather than subjects
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Exponents of art = men
Depictions = women
Venturing Abroad
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Not ‘laids o pairts’ traversing world with confidence in a cohesive national identity
These ‘heroines’ = lasses both ‘in parts’ fragmented & dislocated in their social roles & in ‘foreign
parts’ = unknown lands (p150)
Explore new regions with out-of-date, unhelpful maps – product of gender & ethnicity (p63-4) –
coordinates which attempt to plot journey are inappropriate
Come from a ‘small’ country & also from a ‘we(e)’ country
Women with specific & singular experiences who in the end might find some common ground
between themselves – commonality emerges from differences between each other & from grand
narratives of Geography and History
Finding themselves & way in foreign place
Mastering discourses of European History and grand narratives of WWI – Cassie and Rona shown in
an uneasy relationship to larger cultural patterns & ‘own’ Scottish History
Cassie’s response to Archivolts of Chatres (p94) = ‘Enough’
War cemetery = alienation (p50)
Can’t locate within Scottish History (p165)
Deepens analysis of tension between gender & national identity
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Patriarchy and postcolonial culture represented through Chris
Relationship becomes more threatening and controlling
Takes Cassie to increasingly non-European locations
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Money & status as white male correspondingly more forcefully asserted
Distancing self from an ‘effeminate’ less powerful Scotland (p179)
Structures of Colonisation lead patriarchy to assert itself more forcefully in men whose political context
has disempowered them
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Cassie – ‘power’ gained by asserting Scottishness is that it weakens her already diminished status by
its association with supposedly ‘emasculated’ culture forcing her to align herself with a nation &
history she does not necessarily feel is her own
Cheneceau Visit
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Raises further questions about ways in which certain narratives retain meaning while others oppress
and exclude
‘Hame’ carved into wall of room that housed Scots guard of Mary Queen of Scots – German tourists
leave without seeing (p227)
Resistant word of a ‘dead man’ speaks to Cassie (slept through trip to Bannockburn maybe p234)
Feminine motherland or masculine narrative of struggle = equally disempowering
‘Hame’ connotations of self & familiar
‘Heimlich’ = an antithesis of expansion & war speaks to her
Novel acknowledges (also questions) desire to belong – need to make stories and histories
Witness in Cassie as she remakes her own history through seemingly ‘insignificant’ photographs
(p232)
Seems overwritten (detailed descriptions) – Is Cassie really as rubbed raw by life & holiday as all that?
OR is Galloway dramatizing the thoughts that stray through a mind during any break from routine – fact of
writing gives a strange sense of permanence.
Glean information about Cassie & Rona slowly
THEME: Terrifying gulf between even closest friends and lovers (account interspersed with Cassie’s musings
on holiday photographs – mostly of unsatisfactory male companions)
Cassie – Reads from preposterous guidebook
Rona – Translating, mineral water, kettle, driving
Sense delicate shift in Cassie’s consciousness: Growing realisation that she’s dissatisfied with men &
attempts not to fall out with lovable, but baffling, companion – provides best emotional sustenance
Blind alleys – How old? First holiday? Lesbian novel?
Cassie worries about inability to appreciate some of medieval masterpieces – more subtle than mere lack of
education.
Shock = veteran travellers (not very sophisticated)
No matter how many times done something or been somewhere – humiliation is as burning, pleasure as
sharp as ever
Brief, mistrustful contact with French
Remains = bittersweet record of an imprisoning consciousness trying to escape from itself
If feminist tract – sympathy with characters means it barely matters
Insignificant foggy field = ‘historical’ meaning
Marks Cassie’s own transformation from passive to active; viewed to viewer; object to subject
Foggy field, ancient graffiti – acquire counter-discursive power
Technique of ‘Bricolage’ – subversion & transformation of cultural artefacts & objects
Fiction goes beyond idea of spatial traversal
Calls into question models of history & national identity based upon such grand narratives
Questions the extent to which they can speak to women of ‘hame’
Rather than filling in ‘gaps’ in history novel problematizes predominant & confining notions of history &
identity
Ending – Cassie and Rona looking at channel, throwing stones (p262)
Galloway’s women & Scottish women in general – more positive reading of ‘fraudulent mooching’ – seems a
welcome alternative to discourses of national identity.