The Gloriously Ugly in Marian Engel's No Clouds of Glory (Sarah Bastard's Notebook)

Abstract

This article discusses how the protagonist of Marian Engel’s first novel, No Clouds of Glory (1968) revises her roles in her past relationships to reimagine her future possibilities. The conversation in Engel’s novel, retitled Sarah Bastard’s Notebook when it was republished in 1974, reflects the author’s own anxiety about being a woman but also lends itself, almost sixty years after its first publication, to ongoing conversations about female bodies, gender identities, and sexuality. Scholarship about the novel has generally touched on nationality, gender and identity, and writing and feminism. More recent scholarship discusses the female professor trope in Canadian fiction written by women and imposter syndrome. Building on these conversations, this essay shifts attention to how romance in the novel attaches to what Engel’s protagonist experiences as “the ugly.” Engel, through her mode of critique and the novel’s irritated aesthetic, decentres beauty and patriarchal femininity as a woman’s sole measure of value. Moreover, Sarah’s abortions function as a ritual cleansing of the female-coded self, removing the sterile and potentially dangerous material of romance’s reproductive mythology from the body.