Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers ed. by Kathy Mezei (review)

HUMANITIES 157 Postmodern Condition The translators of 'metanarrative.' The moments of a can indeed mediate between what is recounted and the and communicable as the last article in the on the of K<:1""'t'\"" ..,,, Harlow's David Thomas on the Banff is reduced to a pure fusion of attains the stature of a social ora,ctu:e and on. Mezei, editor. Am!ln~U0l4s Discourse: Feminist and British Women Writers Universit:v of North Carolina Press. XI 286. paper 158 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 of narrative and in the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character, and reader.' In short, this volume is committed to exploring possibilities. The fact, th~n, that the essays focus only on British authors, and then primarily on Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, is both the volume's strength and its weakness. On the one hand, the collection feels random, the choices of essays governed by the essayists' particular interests rather than any attempt to be comprehensive or wide-ranging among women writers. As a Victorianist, I would have welcomed at least one essay tackling a writer in the period, but that over sixty-year span is entirely unrepresented. On the other hand, the individual essays are, by and large, very good: full of provocative theoretical insights and compelling readings. Essays byRachel Blau du Plessis, Linda Hutcheon, Lanser, and Robyn Warhol are reprinted in this volume, but their appearance here is welcome; their significance warrants the wider exposure guaranteed' by their inclusion, and the context of this volume helps to illuminate their importance for fernirrist narratology. The essays collectively do a good job of illuminating subtle ways that women's texts revise and challenge gender. Some essayists tease out their insights through deft analysis of classical narratological aspects of texts exemplifiedbyWarhol 's compelling reading ofPersuasion, which examines focalization in the novel and the narratological textual elements that generate a complex interplay of looking and reading looks. Or Kathy Mezei's examination of free indirect discourse as an ideal site to query authority. More commonly, the contributors take up a concept, often with metaphoric implications -like conversation or spatialization or the parenthesis - to focus the narratological and feminist innovation in the novels they examine. For example, Susan Stanford Friedman's postulation of a spatialized strategy of reading narrative as a way to gain access to a 'text's literary and historical resonances' is wonderfully suggestive. As is Denise Delorey's exploration of Woolf's use of parenthetical narrative structures to signal the end of the imperial subject. Welcome, too, is Blau du Plessis's essay on Mina Loy, the only one that analyses poetry rather than prose, comparing Loy with D.H. Lawrence in representing sexual orgasm. Finally, Hutcheon's illuminating coda concludes the volume by thinking through the differencesbetweenferninisms and postmodemism,emphasizing , finally, their fundamental incompatibility as cultural enterprises. Feminism is a politics; postmodernism is not. For Hutcheon, because postmodernism is confined to deconstructing metanarratives, it cannot effect I a real transformation of art that can corne only with a transformation of patriarchal social practices.' But this is an ironic coda to the volume because the politics of a collection of feminist essays is also tenuous. Whereas it may be willing to commit itself to a metanarrative - the truth of HUMANITIES 159 women's oppression under patriarchy - it only gestures to the way . oppressive social practices might be transformed without, in fact, transforming them. At best, as here, it points the way. (ELIZABETH LANGLAND) , Brenda Lea Brown, editor, with a foreword by Rosemary Brown. Bringing It Home: Women Talk about Feminism in Their Lives Arsenal Pulp Press. 348. $21.95 ' When Brenda Lea Brown attempted to write a personal. essay called J A Feminist Education,' she realized she had no real political analysis despite the fact that she had identified herself as a feminist for twenty years. Her path to feminism had been via Ms., not through activism or serious study. She lacked the credentials, she felt, to write about feminism. Jolted by journalist Susan Crean's question, 'What is it about women like you who think there's some big feminist judge out there?/ Brown got to work. She asked other women to write about their 'feminist educations.' She wanted to find out how women became feminists and how they integrated their feminism with their personal lives. While Brown wanted to solicit thereflections of 'ordinary',women, many ofthe twenty-four contributors to BringingIt Home are well known. Readers will recognize names such as Ursula Franklin and Mary Meigs. And while Brown did not want a focus on activists, the fact is that the essays by activists are the most interesting in the book. Raminder Dosanjh, for example, talks about the difficulties of organizing to stop violence against women within the Vancouver South Asian community when the media constantly constructs the issue as a 'cultural' problem of immigrants. Larissa Lai reflects on questions of identity in contemporary Canadian feminism. Brown has made some effort to include material from a diversity of women. Ofthe twenty-fourwriters, one quarter are FirstNations orwomen of colour. A handful are lesbian, and/or living with disabilities. The regional distribution reflects Brown's West Coast -base, but there are contributors from across Canada. There is some representation ofthe young feminists who arecreating feminism's third wave- what Toronto's Fireweed magazine calls the 'girl revolution.' But the majority of the essayists are from middle-classbackgroundsand theyhave remained in thatsocial class. Indeed, the absence of working-class women's contributions represents a huge gap in the collection. While some writers (including Mary Meigs and Denise Nadeau) reflect on how class has shaped their lives and their feminism, others appear to be quite oblivious to such questions. Lyndsay Green, for example, talks about her 'partnership' with her nanny, thereby obscuring the real employer-employee power differences. Class and race distinctions are also evidentin the pathways to feminism. For example, white, middle-class women speak about the influence of Ms. ...