E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose ed. by Carole Gerson, Veronica Strong-Boag (review)

humanities 255 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 Although written and published after the 1890s, The Pool in the Desert is recognizable in relation to earlier fin de siècle >New Woman= fiction B Duncan=s own, as well as others= B in the degree to which it problematizes normative conceptions of marriage, relationships, and motherhood within the frameworks of national and imperial identity. The story >A Mother in India= critiques the imperial ideology of biological imperative and reproductive duty. The title story, >The Pool in the Desert,= draws attention to the circumstances of desire in conflict with social pressures of the same kinds that are evident in >A Mother in India= B wifely duty, social acceptability , economic necessity. >The Hesitation of Miss Anderson= pivots on the same idea of potential lawlessness on the imperial frontier that in part underpins the narrative of the later novel, Set in Authority, as well as focusing on white women in motion in the space of empire. >An Impossible Ideal= is less clearly engaged with questions of movement and agency: this is the story of an American artist of >mongrel= identity who is taken up by a middle-class young British woman in Simla because she perceives his representations of India to be more >authentic.= There are only four stories in this collection, all almost more like novellas than stories in their density, length (with chapter divisions), and narrative complexity B all important texts of Duncan=s and of Anglo-imperial literature. (CECILY DEVEREUX) Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag, editors. E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose University of Toronto Press. xliv, 344. $65.00, $25.95 E. Pauline Johnson (a.k.a. Tekahionwake) was a part-Mohawk, part-English writer and stage performer who captivated Canadian, British, and American audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the editing of any writer is mediated by the editor=s cultural assumptions, Johnson=s work has been more heavily mediated than most because of her status as a self-identified Native woman writer. A virtue of Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag=s book over earlier collections of Johnson=s work is their self-reflective openness about their sociopolitical agenda. They not only promote Johnson (as earlier editors did), but do so from an overtly feminist, postcolonial, and contemporary nationalist perspective. Their selections reflect their view of Johnson as a mixed-race advocate of the First Nations, of the New Woman, and of a more inclusive definition of Canadian identity. Whereas previous non-Native editors often reduced Johnson to non-threatening stereotypes, Gerson and Strong-Boag try to present her as a complex woman who tested boundaries of race and gender in a racist, patriarchal, and imperialist culture. The collection falls into two parts: poetry and prose. A strength of the book is the unique comprehensiveness of the poetry section. Flint and Feather (1912) B the only other edition of Johnson=s poetry to claim 256 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 completeness B contains only slightly more than half of her poetic output. For example, the editors of Flint and Feather omitted a number of love lyrics as being >too personal.= Gerson and Strong-Boag not only restore these poems, but also include hard-to-find published and unpublished ones recovered from obscure periodicals and Johnson=s personal papers. The result is a broader, more complicated picture of a poet often stereotyped as either an >exotic Indian maiden= or a >nice Victorian lady who wrote sentimental nature poems.= In particular, Johnson=s radical portrayal of passionate, female sexuality comes through in this new collection. The poems are presented chronologically and divided into three major sections: >The Early Years: Beginnings to 1888,= >The Prolific Years: 1889B1898,= and >Later Years: 1899B1913.= By not grouping the poems according to subject matter, the editors avoid reducing Johnson=s work to simplistic stereotypes, but make more sophisticated thematic comparisons a little bit harder. The chronological approach also makes it easier to see certain developments in Johnson=s work (e.g., changes in tone or quality) and to consider possible biographical...