Toews's 2011 novel Irma Voth is perhaps one of her lesser-known novels; she has won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in Canada for A Complicated Kindness (2004), and two of her novels have been made into films--Women Talking has recently won an Academy Award in the category of Best Screenplay (2023). Yet, it is with Irma Voth that Toews achieves the stature of an art-novel. It celebrates the birth of the female artist in cruel circumstances; the novel is a portrait of two young women who give up everything for art. More precisely, Irma and her sister Aggie are forced to give up everything, for the women are shunned or excommunicated from their small Mennonite community in Mexico; they must flee in order to live. In part, the patriarch of the family shuns his daughters for their participation in the making of an art-film. In this paper, I view Irma Voth through both as a genre of art-novel and a feminist theological lens; the leaving of the trauma and forced silencing of domestic violence leads to a life-giving celebration of individual expression in art. Art becomes the sisters’ redemption.

Authors:
Rita Dirks, St. Mary's University, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Rita Dirks is Associate Professor of English at St. Mary's University, Calgary. Her reserach and publishing interests include Decadence/Modernism; her latest publication is a book enttiled Silence and Rage in Miriam Toews's Mennonite Novels (2024)

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-dirks-32792258/

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