Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s by Coral Ann Howells (review)

HUMANITIES 143 critics' endeavours to negotiate a path for themselves and their subjects through the varied and at times contradictory areas of feminist and deconstructionist thought. Yet, what is of more concern than these uncertainties of theory and style is the distinction, drawn in accordance with the model of centres and margins, between 'matriarchal' and feminist writers. To ignore Atwood's, Laurence's and Munro's work because of its stature within the literary establishment, as most critics here have done, is a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water. While I concede that such a measure has given the impetus for a refreshing consideration of the possible breadth of the canon, it does not provide what is most needed in Canadian criticism: a rereading of the works at the centre of our literature. (CATHERINE GRIFFITHS) Coral Ann Howells. Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970S and 1980s Methuen. 229..$18.95 paper A book about Canadian women's fiction written by an Australian academic teaching at the University of Reading and published in New York and London by Methuen signals a new phase in the reception of Canadian literature. Coral Ann Howells directs Private and Fictional Words to lay readers and students as well as to her colleagues. She also clearly addresses a non-Canadian audience, providing occasional capsule summaries of background material Canadians could be assumed to know. Because its publication by Methuen assures it a distribution that works publishedwithinCanadacannothopefor, herbookdeservesspecialscrutiny. Its critical discussion of fourteen novels by eleven novelists circulates around three terms: 'wilderness,' 'Canadianness,' and 'women's fiction.' The wilderness in which some nineteenth-century women writers found themselves, Howells argues, 'became a screen on to which [they] projected their silent fears and desires' (15). She reads Canadian women writers of the 1970S and 1980s as internalizing that metaphor. A Great Lakes island (Bear), a dystopia (The Handmaid's Tale), a marriage and a murder remembered in an insane asylum (Dancing in the Dark), a lesbian bar (Nights in the Underground), twelfth-century lovers haunting the Paris metro (Heloise) trace 'an unfamiliar journey into the wilderness of ... [the heroine's] psyche' (109). The 'Canadianness' of these experiences is diverse and elusive, leading to the conclusion that '''Canadian Fiction" cannot be categorically defined.' What connects this 'women's fiction,' Howells asserts, is 'a collaborative effort of revision and resistance' which 'unsettle[s]' the encoding of gender distinctions in traditional literary genres. Gender and nationality, she hypothesizes, are interrelated in that these novels are 'responses to the pressures of colonial history and the contradictions within a colonized mentality where one's self-image is 144 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 split between imposed traditional patterns and authentic experience which reveals the incompleteness or falsity of tradition' (184). Between the introduction and"conclusion, Howells reads individual works such as Lives of Girls and Women, The Diviners, Obasan, and Home Truths. Occasionally, her rapid survey oversimplifies as, for example, when she neglects to note that there are two Canadian women whose lives change (or don't change) differently as a consequence of their Indian friend's death in The Ivory Swing, or indeed, when she reads that novel simply in terms of the heroine's superficial experience of the country and neglects to note that the 'wilderness of the psyche' in Turner Hospital's work always expresses itselfin terms of paired women, one who survives her experiences in the world and one who succumbs to madness or death. While some readers might ask of such readings a more rigorous attention to formal concerns, this is to demand what Howells has not set out to do; what she has given us is coherent, intelligent, and clearlywritten thematic readings. ~onetheless, the problems of this book lie not with what it does do but with what it does not do. The connection Howells wishes to establish between gender and nationality, for example, rests on an unargued assertion that 'the power politics of imperialism and ofgender have much in common' (3-4). The considerable theory which would back up this assertion goes uninvoked; questions of nationality simply do not figure in some of the readings such as those of...