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500 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 Edition has been examined, with new results. And the basic story has been told here more clearly than before. But from beginning to end1 Mahony travesties Freud's procedures, distorts the mode of his analysis, and conducts an unremitting, if quixotic/ vendetta against the very text itself, and this on behalf of a sentimentalized Dora; and a self-aggrandizing view of the motives of his own authorship, One example of distortion will have to serve for many. Mahony often refers to the moment where Freud, in the course of the analysis of the second dream, momentarily appears to urge upon Dora that she marry Herr K., her aggressor and abuser, since, in Freud's words, such a maniage 'would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned.' Mahony rmderstands Freud to be stating, in the form of advice to his patient, that Dora should sacrifice herself. But the mode of Freud's reported speech involves an obvious rhetorical exaggeration of the past, typical of analysis. lt is a performative attempt to reveal and clarify Dora's emotions, her fancies, hopes, and fears, not a proposal meant to goad her into an action that Freud kn.ew could not have provided a solution of any sort for those adults. Mahony, in the hystericized grip of what Freud's text itself analyses as the 1 lU quoque arguments of children'- you're a liar; you're one too - throws back abuse on the 'Freud' of the text in response to this 'Freud's' 'abuse' of Dora. Faced with such a slanging match, aphonia seems preferable to more writing. (JULIAN PATRICK) Frances Rooney. Workillg Light: The Wandering Life of Photographer Edith S. Watson Carleton University Press and Images Publishing 1996. 124. $}5ยท95 In 1977, Frances Rooney was shown a photocopy of a photograph taken by Edith Watson in 1916 and urged to find out more about who made it. Since the image- a softly backlit profile of a beautiful young woman working at her loom- was made in Quebec, and its original published in a Canadian journal, Rooney assumed that the photographer was Canadian. But all her attempts to trace Watson through Canadian sources were frustrated until one of Rooney's contacts, an unnamed woman working 'in the basement of the Smithsonian/ traced Edith Watson to New England. Chasing down this lead brought Rooney to the door of Lois Watson, a distant relative, who, recognizing the quality of Edith's work, had twenty years earlier rescued most of it from the trash. Rooney's three-year quest ended with the discovery of Edith's diaries, scrapbooks,manuscripts,letters, photographic prints, and negatives. Born in 1861, Edith Watson spent her entire adult life as a roaming freelance photographer. Between 1894 and 1928, she travelled by rail and ship from Newfoundland to British Columbia documenting this country and its people. Watson easily sold her photographs and companion articles HUMANlTIE.S 501 to Canadian and American newspapers and magazines untit with the Depression, her commissions dwindled to nothing. She refused to have her work published in photographic "art' journals - an obvious venue considering the1r quality- because the journals didn't pay. At the same time her attempts to publish books ofher photographs -'Romantic Canada' was one- met with failure. Watson barely survived the 1930s by selling handpainted photographs and writing obituaries, and by the time of her death in 1943, both she and her work were almost completely unknown. Watson was an extraordinary figure, however, in more ways than one. A woman with unconunon business acumen, she was able to make a successful living, most unusual for a woman of her time, as a freelancer. A photographer of great talent/ she introduced her camera rmobtrusively into the daily Jives of Canadian immigrants, settlers, workers, Natives, artists, and children, to convey their experience directly, without any trace of condescension or sentim.entality. A lesbian (a fact given glancing attention by the author, although it could provide an interesting gloss on the pictures), Watson lived openly with her lover, the Bermudian journalist Victoria Hayward, surrounded by a large and aristocratic New England family, travelling and working with her for...

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