The Legacy of Northrop Frye ed. by Alvin A. Lee, Robert D. Denham (review)

HUMANITIES 371 and old Sigurdsenin Settlers oftheMarsh is never examined. Twice Gammel refers to the 'Manitoban' farm of John Elliot in Our Daily Bread, though Grove tmambiguously places it in Saskatchewan. In the discussion of The Master of the Mill Maud Fanshawe's surname is misspelled, and Odette Charlebois is once called Ottilie. Gammel's concludmg generalizations about the women in Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese are untrue for the morose and indignant Ellen Gare; and the author fails to acknowledge the intriguing issue of Ostenso's collaboration with Douglas Durkin in the writing of this book - clearly a factor that complicates her view of the novel as written solely by a female writer. Although most German citations in Sexualizing Power in Naturalism are translated, some are noti and only rarely is an English text provided for material cited in French (a sign of the author's optimistic faith in thebilingualism ofCanadianreaders?). Gammel never fully explains why she does not use the unexpurgated 1981 PeIUlsylvania edition of Sister Carrie for much of her study; and the passing references to 'Dreiser's sublimated desire for cross-dressing' and Grove's 'obsession with underclothes' are too brief to be informative or convincing. Similarly, her casual allusions to Marilyn Monroe (not Munro), Madonna, and Donald Trump strike a jarrmgnote. The few anomalies in spelling and form are all the more surprising in a text so carefully prepared: 'cord' for 'chord/ Thomas Saunders' name, the date 1998-1947 in Ernst Hardt's title, 'principle' for 'principal,' the spelling of 'Sproxton' and 'Mitchell' in the index, errors in the titles by Blodgett and MacGregor in the Grove bibliography, and the omission of the city of publication from some titles. In Settlers ofthe Marsh Ellen Amundsen says to Niels, 'You speak of your mother.... How she used to work and to slave. Probably you know anIy the least ofwhat she had to go through. You know the outside. You were a boy. Only a girl or a woman can understand another woman.' While readers of Dreiser and Grove are unlikely to embrace such a view without reservation .(for what, then, would male readers make of Irene Gammel's views on characters such as George Hurstwood and Niels Lindstedt?), Ellen's words remind us how challenging it can be to bridge the gender gap. Fully cognizant of such difficulties, Gammel has succeeded admirably in her investigations of female and male characters in Grove and Dreiser. All readers stand to learn a greatdeal from the many fine insights in Sexualizing Power in Naturalism - whether or not they can 'stand"either man. (JOHN J. O'CONNOR) Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham, editors_ The Legacy ofNorthrop Frye University of Toronto Press 1994· xxxviii, 354· $55.00, $24·95 The Legacy ofNorthrop Frye is a collection of twenty-nine essays, an 'auditory masque/ and a poem, all ofwhich were originally presented ata conference 372 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 in Toronto in 1992. As Alvin Lee notes in his introduction to the collection, both the conference and the book aimed 'to address two questions. What is the legacy left by Northrop Frye? And what might, or should, be done with this legacy?' Given the extent, range, and significance of Frye's work, answering these questions is not an easy task. His influence on literary theory in this century has been enormous} but he also has had a major influence in other disciplines, from historiography to biblical studies, in addition to his role in Canada as a kind of latter-day Victorian sage. The contributions to The Legacy ofNorthrop Frye provide an excellent first step towards an assessment of Frye's career. It is a noteworthy collection for at least two reasons: first, many of the contributions are individually of a very high order, and second, the wide range of topics means that many important aspects of Frye's work are discussed} from his religious thought to the influence of E.J. Pratt on Frye to an 'Eastem-European reading' ofThe Modern Century. The cumulative effect of the contributions manages to convey something of the breadth of Frye's own interests. The contributors to The Legacy of Northrop Frye are a...