A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing ed. by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli (review)

142 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, editors. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing Longspoon/NeWest Press. xi, 427. $19.9.5 paper To establish a sense of cohesion within this bewilderingly large assortment of essays, Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli's preface to A Mazing Space takes the form of a manifesto. While acknowledging the diversity of theoretical directives, the editors claim a unity within the thirty-eight essays collected which moves beyond their common concern with Canadian women writers. These essays 'signal their divergence from our received literary history,' some through their subversion of historical and thematic approaches to Canadian literature and all by their attempt 'to transform and reappropriate' this literature through the· accommodation of a feminist perspective (ix). In part this goal involves the dismissal of hegemonic modes of criticism which marginalize certain writers and writing. Although each essay approaches this concern with varying degrees of radicalism, the editors perceive an 'overlap' through the 'intertextuality' generated by feminist tradition and theory (x). Shrewdly placed at the forefront of this collection is Sarah Murphy's essay-story 'Putting the Great Mother together again or how the cunt lost its tongue.' A hybrid of theory and anecdote, it is a brilliant realization of the iconoclasm promised in the preface. What follows are more conventional essays emphasizing marginal authors and genres: black, native, and francophone women; writers like Phyllis Webb,. Daphne Marlatt, and Sharon Pollock previously consigned to the outer limits of the canon; paraliterary forms such as travel writing, autobiographies~d performance texts. There is much of merit here. Bina Freiwald fn 'Femininely Speaking' provides an excellent reintroduction to the writing of Anna Jameson through an analysis of the interrelation of the epistolary mode and feminist theory. Claire Harris's 'Poets in Limbo' reveals the experience ofblack poets in Canada. Particularly engrossing is her discussion of the attempts to 'detoxify ... the English language' in the search for 'an authentic black sensibility' (121). Pauline Butling, Heather Murray, Linda Hutcheon, Jeanne Perreault, and Donna Bennett (despite the silly fantasy framing her essay) all make noteworthy contributions. Bennett's 'Naming the Way Home,' with its assured survey of Canadian feminist criticism, occupies the literal and figurative centre of this collection. While these and several other critics display a relaxed and informed attitude towards current theories, in other works one detects an undercurrent ofapprehension. Perhaps prompted by editorial guidelines, there are attempts to elevate minor authors and genres through uneasy co-presentations with Saussure, Lacan, and Barthes. Some resort to what Bennett aptly calls 'a babble of jargon and self-referential language' or trendy prose replete with sentence fragments and free-form punctuation (231). To be just, this self-consciousness is understandable, given these HUMANITIES 143 critics' endeavours to negotiate a path for themselves and their subjects through the varied and at times contradictory areas of feminist and deconstructionist thought. Yet, what is of more concern than these uncertainties of theory and style is the distinction, drawn in accordance with the model of centres and margins, between 'matriarchal' and feminist writers. To ignore Atwood's, Laurence's and Munro's work because of its stature within the literary establishment, as most critics here have done, is a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. While I concede that such a measure has given the impetus for a refreshing consideration of the possible breadth of the canon, it does not provide what is most needed in Canadian criticism: a rereading of the works at the centre of our literature. (CATHERINE GRIFFITHS) Coral Ann Howells. Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970S and 1980s Methuen. 229..$18.95 paper A book about Canadian women's fiction written by an Australian academic teaching at the University of Reading and published in New York and London by Methuen signals a new phase in the reception of Canadian literature. Coral Ann Howells directs Private and Fictional Words to lay readers and students as well as to her colleagues. She also clearly addresses a non-Canadian audience, providing occasional capsule summaries of background material Canadians could be assumed to know. Because its publication by Methuen assures it a...