ABSTRACT
This chapter explores changing representations of the city and urban experience through two novels by white Anglophone women writers: Phyllis Brett Young's The Torontonians and Maggie Helwig's novel Girls Fall Down. The original Canadian book cover gives the reader several clues, for it features the profile of a woman with fashionably short hair holding a martini glass in one elegantly manicured hand, with a sketch of Toronto's proposed new City Hall in the background. It is a sophisticated feminized image of modernity, and Karen Whitney, the middle-class protagonist, claims that Toronto is 'very much her city'; Rowanwood symbolizes the Good Life of prosperity, the white middle-class nuclear family, and home ownership. 'Downtown Toronto' becomes emblematic of the shift in conceptualizing the city between The Torontonians and Girls Fall Down: no longer is there one dominant narrative, but the city has evolved into a discursive negotiating space of extreme complexity and diversity.
