The Tree of Life by Fredelle Bruser Maynard (review)

166 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 clearer relief. Keefer's reading thus improves my reading, and this is surely the end of genuine literary criticism. We need more books of this provocative and challenging character. (w.J. KEITH) Fredelle Bruser Maynard. The Tree of Life Penguin Books. xxi, 245· $9.95 paper Autobiographical writing works in strange ways. One of the first critics who attempted to explain the manner in which such writing often hides whereit wishes to reveal and reveals where it most would hide found that at the centre of every autobiography was a 'darkness,' a place where the reader may seek what the writer has not realized (Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography). More recent theories concerning subjectivity and its expression in language describe the way in which the attempt to construct the self in language displaces the self in its very representation, driving the part of subjectivity which we feel to be the 'true' self underground, so that every autobiographer appears to be in some way hiding. For some poststructuralist theorists, for example Paul de Man, autobiography is impossible, because in trying to write the self the autobiographer produces, not a series of self-revelations, but a series of self-defacements. Happily, theorists of women's autobiography have not yet given up on the genre. They find that the kind of displacement women write of, the dispersal of the self in the 'other,' is nota defacement, but an imaginative shaping of the self by its identification with significant others. Recent autobiographical works by women in Canada, all tending more towards the memoir style than towards traditional spiritual autobiography , have shown a tendency to highlight the first 'significant other,' the mother, and to trace the development of the life, the imagination, the achievement in terms of that special relationship. Gabrielle Roy's Enchantmentand Sorrow and Margaret Laurence's Danceon the Earth confirm this trend. But Fredelle Bruser Maynard would seem to be an exception, for in her first autobiographical work, Raisins and Almonds, she foregrounds her father, while in the second, The Tree ofLife, her husband is often centre-stage. Butwoveninto what Maynard calls the 'chiaroscuro, less lyrical, less blithe' language ofher more recent memoir, which features her marriage to the failed academic and frustrated artist Max Maynard, is a shadowed but powerfully shadowing presence: the women with whom Maynard's account is obsessed, including her mother, her sister, and her daughters. Maynard explores the ambiguous bonds of 'love,' as our culture defines it, that hold women in roles which limit them. She also introduces these mother/daughter concerns into chapters on other women as she reworks situations very similar to her HUMANITIES 167 own, situations in which women are caught - through their love for others and their loyalties to ethnic, cultural, social, medical, and academic beliefs that demand the limitation of their self-development - in situations of victimization. '"I Keep the Joy": The Death of Mary Ellen Cann' describes the way in which an educational establishment that demands strict conformity from its young women, an uncaring medical ethic, and a hostile police force are implicated in Mary Cann's death. 'Writing for Lile' describes how Maynard, eminently qualified for the academic world, but excluded because of her position as wife and mother, resorts to writing for popular magazines to prop up the family budget and make some expression of her intellect. The subject of one of her pieces for Redbook is the victim not only of the medical establishment's confident prescription of diet pills to women in the middle decades of this century but also of her own naive belief in doctors and her desire to be the stereotypical slim woman. Although Maynard senses the responsibility that cultural and genetic factors have in this sad case, she is forced by her editors to exclude them and concentrate on 'a fat girl who goes overboard on dieting.' But her editors' censorship of her writing is symptomatic of a more serious limitation that Maynard puts on her own voice. At times she describes with power and feeling the dilemma of herself, her sister, and her mother, in which her sister is pushed into the role of 'pretty...