Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History and Identity (review)

Critic S. Leigh Matthews blends literary and historical analysis to yield insights from a set of memoirs, many of them now out of print, that usually garner as much attention as leftover preserves in a cold cellar. Memoirs by prairie women have languished on shelves in archives and libraries and have managed to evade literary analysis for a few reasons. First, memoirs, as a form, have generally engaged fewer scholars because they are a less personal, less intimate mode of life writing which seems to offer fewer ‘private’ details; they do, however, allow the memoirist to modestly situate her life within a historical context. The value of that for those farm women who hold modesty as a virtue is evident, but it does not necessarily allow for revealing stories. Second, memoirs escape easy literary generalizations because there is such a wide spectrum of techniques and narrative styles used by individual writers depending on their idiosyncratic talents and on cultural contexts that implicitly urge them to write one kind of story or another. Finally, it has not always been clear what, if anything, these memoirs will add to our understanding of prairie settlement, especially when the narratives refuse to align neatly with preconceived notions about the pioneer woman as victim or as the ‘dauntless optimist.’ Matthews acknowledges all of these potential limitations but deftly turns them to her advantage to unspool a lengthy and richly detailed analysis of women’s experiences in the years between 1870 and 1950 as explained in their memoirs. Matthews does an admirable job in letting the memoirists speak for themselves. She quotes liberally from the texts under discussion, and this is necessary because many of these memoirs will be inaccessible to readers.

The advantages of this study are numerous; primarily, this is one of the lengthiest and most detailed explorations of an overlooked genre and an overlooked set of stories. Its pioneering spirit is not to be discounted. However, given the scope of what Matthews has decided to tackle, readers are left to wonder a little at the principles of organization. In a study like this one where so much new sod is being turned over (the ‘untilled fields’ named in Matthews’s opening chapter), readers might hope for better tools to envision the corpus being discussed. Finely theorized chapters (and they are finely theorized) befit literary ‘fields’ that have been harvested a few times. What I am asking here is whether or not the thematic arrangement of texts in this study allows interested readers to find their way through the texts using alternate means: can we identify the memoirs by place or by period? How would those trajectories through the texts allow for further acts of recovery (and surely that is one of the rhetorical aims of the study)? What if the author included a map to plot the place of each memoir discussed? What if she included a timeline to indicate when individual memoirs were written and when published? (She makes an insightful observation, for instance, that publications of these memoirs responded to historical trends and events such as the centennial of Confederation.) These might be usefully disseminated in a website that could allow for multiple paths through the information about the material; such a site would only further reveal the extent of the information that Matthews has been able to unearth. This study, and any further illuminations it will produce in the coming years, will stand as a comprehensive and acute critique of prairie women’s memoirs and honours those hard-working, self-effacing, courageous women of the west who took the time to leave a record of their lives.