Censorship in Canadian Literature by Mark Cohen (review)

472 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 to redefine. For Kate Chopin=s Edna Pontellier, for instance, meals are >beckoning, erotic, sensual, liberating ... and a part of the patriarchal structure which Edna is trying to escape.= For Katharine Mansfield and Edith Wharton, inclusion and exclusion from dinner rituals signal a sort of social homelessness, a mark of belonging or exile from class and family structures, that is also about the author=s liminal relationship to the Victorian era, whose passing their writing marks. McGee=s book offers a series of chapters on each author, in which she deftly and elegantly offers close and structural readings of the place of dining, entertaining, and domestic work in modernist women=s fiction. The dining-room, she points out, >may form the central focus of an architectural model or metaphor that is used as a primary structuring device of the novel.= Writing about food, she says, is >an exploration of what it means to be a woman, and beneath that, of the tension between the woman and the artist.= While this is indeed apparent, McGee fails to demonstrate why food and eating, more than anything else, is a marker of these thematics. Feminist interpretation of Woolf and Mansfield has demonstrated repeatedly the centrality of these issues to their work. Dining, as one more quotidian activity in novels about the grind of early twentieth-century women=s creative and social existence, should of necessity enact the larger dramas of the novel. One is slightly wary of some of McGee=s larger claims. Is the provision of a meal > a B perhaps the B crucial moment in the fictional world=? Is >rank ... a creation of food=? Is it true that >cooking can be viewed as the basis of thought=? What McGee does show us, however, is that the very writing into fiction of female daily existence is a crucial feminist contribution to the twentieth-century novel, a trope that marks the changing social constructions of what it means to be female. McGee lets us know, in her conclusion, that >women have always had a room of their own B the kitchen or dining room.= But because she is largely concerned with Euro-American writers B with a gesture at African American writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen B McGee=s argued book is by definition more concerned with the former than the latter. However, by acknowledging the powerful creative B and restrictive B forces located in the domestic lives of these women, McGee=s book nudges the fields of food studies, and women=s studies along, towards a more nuanced, even flavourful, reading of what has been previously characterized as domestic and unimportant in the history of twentiethcentury art. (KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS) Mark Cohen. Censorship in Canadian Literature McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 206. $55.00 humanities 473 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 In this thoughtful study, Mark Cohen adopts a broad, if inelegant, definition of censorship: >the exclusion of some discourse as the result of a judgment by an authoritative agent based on some ideological predisposition .= In this sense, which goes beyond government suppression of literature (with or without legislative authority), censorship >has not been eliminated in liberal democracies= and remains, therefore, a prevalent and problematic issue in literary practice and discourse. Cohen sets out to demonstrate, first, that >there exist, in our society, a whole range of censors B from government to agents in the private sector to the writers themselves,= and, second, that censorship >is an activity that we must practise not less frequently but more carefully.= The first five chapters of the book focus on the work of Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Beatrice Culleton, and Marlene NourbeSe Philip. In a concluding chapter, Cohen also discusses the lengthy legal disputes concerning the seizure by Canada Customs of shipments of books to the Little Sister=s gay and lesbian bookstore in Vancouver in the 1990s, and the furore caused by readings from Lynn Crosbie=s Paul=s Case, a fictionalized account of the crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, at a 1999 PEN...