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162 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 woman, but Lady Macbeth, who asks the spirits to tmsex her. Macbeth's wife wants a woman to be more like a man, so as more persuasively to engage in murder, a job as stritable as detecting. James had already invented Adam Dalgleish. Cordelia Gray is central to two ofher novels and in one she encounters Dalgleish, the supremely rational and attractive Super whom her suicidal boss, Bernie, cites as the paradigm of detection. Dalgleish, with a tragic past and an occasional relationship with a woman, would not agonize, as Cordelia does, over the plight of the hero of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Wimsey has return fits of his wartime nervous breakdown when he comes to the end of a case, but his judgments about villains never waver - and he has Bunter to prop him up. The female detectives are still caughtin a classic bind. James, in my view the most gifted writer of them all, is as perceptive a student of character as she is a brilliant stylist. Writing detective novels may be a suitable job for a woman, for all the reasons of powerful transference any analyst would find. Being a detective is different. Near the end of An Unsuitable Job, Cordelia and Miss Learning are walking near the Cam. 'The great lawn lay unshadowed in the sun, a quintessence of greenness staining the scented air. A frail and elderly Don in gown and mortarboard was limping across the grass; the sleeves of his gown caught a stray breeze and billowed out so that he looked like a winged and monstrous crow struggling to rise. Miss Learning said, as if Cordelia had asked for an explanation: "He's a Fellow. The sacred turf is, therefore, uncontaminated by his feet." 'Just afterwards she asks Cordelia if she thinks that she will make a success of the Agency and offers advice, with the sourness of a person who has existed on the margins in every way. James's image of the Don (the capital is hers, so far as I know) is an echo of another menacing donnish figure in A Room of One's Own, keeping his turf sacred by keeping women off the grass. James experiments with a young detective heroine, but returns, after one more outing, to Dalgleish, the upper-class poet turned civilized detective, courteous to his occasional female subordinate, as solitary as Dexter's Morse, whose sexism is written out by the BBC. What the literature may eventually acquire, now that the turf and mores are freer, is a detective heroine able to achieve and to live with the solitude her currentsisters seem not to be able to endure or sustain. (PATRICIA C. BRUCKMANN) Lynette Hunter. Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing Talonbooks. 312. $19.95 This is a book difficult to classify, since it attempts to encompass so many different topics and situate itself .with reference to a heterogeneity of HUMANITIES 163 cultural debates. Briefly, the book purports to be a critique of hegemonic Canadian culture constructed as emanating from a tmified nation-state and is interested to pursue the interrogations of such monoculturalism (mostly anglophone) from the perspective ofthose who have been marginalized by or excluded from it. The most appealing aspects of the book are its energetic and wide-ranging efforts to achieve this task, and there are, for me at least, some excellent readings of individual texts, particularlyof bpNichol. However, the wide scope of the book is perhaps also its greatest weakness , signalled even by the lengthy subtitle. Even attempts to summarize the concerns reveal the difficulty of doing so neutrally or without exposing some fWldamentally question-begging assumptions. For example, culture is made synonymous with print culture, but no rationale for this is offered - and this in an age where the proliferation of media and new technologies has arguably marginalized print culture, indeed, has almost rendered it obsolete. And why, throughout, is the primary bearer of 'ideology' restricted to the nation state? The influential Althusserian notion of ideology as (all) people's imagined relations to their material conditionsin other words, that ideology permeates all our lives and...

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