Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity (review)

S. Leigh Matthews rightly observes that in the study of Canadian women’s literature of settlement, “the western half of that tradition has largely been lost, from academic attention, at least, if not from the popular imagination” (p. 122). In the teaching of Canadian literature and in the academic publishing that supports that teaching, prominent nineteenth-century women memoirists of settlement, such as Susanna Moodie and her sister Catherine Parr Traill, have stood in, metonymically, for women writers from other regions of Canada and from other historical moments as the ur-women-settlers. Working against this well-worn tradition, Matthews embarks on an examination of Canadian prairie women’s memoirs written in the mid-twentieth century in response to the heightened interest in producing tales of white settlement, itself a response to that moment’s investment in narratives of nation-building, particularly as the centennial of Canada’s confederation approached in 1967. The texts Matthews explores, then, are not written by writers whose names would be familiar to scholars of Canadian literature for the most part, with the notable exception of Nellie McClung, a leading figure in Canadian first-wave feminism and one of the leading activists in the “Persons Case” in 1929 that successfully appealed the Supreme Court decision that women could not be appointed to the Canadian Senate because they did not qualify as a “person.” Methodologically, Matthews relies upon copious quotation from her source memoirs, and though the practice does become a bit cumbersome at times, the motivation is, understandably, to provide readers with a fuller view of these materials.

Matthews challenges what she calls the “Traill/Moodie” binary characterization of white prairie settler women as either “cheerful helpmates” or “reluctant immigrant” (p. 123). She convincingly reads these memoirs for the complexities of women’s reactions to the considerable challenges of homesteading rather than for the purposes of categorizing their subjects as either willing or unwilling daughters of Empire. Where this preference for complexity does suffer some relapse, however, is in Matthews’s handling of the question of complicity with Empire. Although at several points in the study she maintains that her purpose is to “illustrate . . . that the authors of these texts make abundant space in which to negotiate between representing acts of complicity with cultural norms and also constructing personal experiences that ‘confront’ those norms,” by far the greater emphasis in the book falls upon confrontation and subversion of norms (p. 386). The memoirists challenge belated Victorian standards of dress, for example, by breaking out of regulation in order to perform the necessary labor of settlement, and, Matthews argues, they also challenge conventional notions of agriculture through their smaller-scale cultivation of gardens. The terms “re-envisioning” and “confrontational” abound, but we do not gain nearly as much in the way of active tension between complicity and resistance to these cultural norms.

One strand of the analysis that is particularly nuanced, though, is found in the chapter “The Precarious Perch of the Decent Woman” (pp. 207–96). Matthews takes her cue from a fascinating episode in one of the memoirs in which the author’s mother, Sally Pinder, needs to straddle the growing walls of their new dwelling in order to pull up the logs that will be placed on top of one another and secured, but she cannot do so because of her voluminous skirts. Her daughter, recounting this scene decades later, refers to this “precarious perch”: a term that Matthews subtly takes up to describe this and other memoirs’ negotiation with and crossing between culturally acceptable and resistantly discordant forms of adapted European women’s dress on the prairie homestead (p. 207). Here, complicity and resistance seesaw, and resistance is not a stable outcome and horizon of analysis.

A final caveat has to do with the study’s engagement with indigeneity: there is too little of it. In the final chapter...