Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction by Carol Fairbanks (review)

154 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 from those typically used on other kinds of writing? Does language in these texts tend more to closure or lack of closure in comparison to other kinds of texts? Formally, is there a tendency towards conservatism or experimentation? Exile and the Narrative Imagination by Michael Seidel has recently argued that real and imagined exile are indispensable to the novelistic tradition. Seidel attempts to chart the relations between narrative and exile as both fact and allegory. And finally, if, from Ovid on, exile has created a tension between centre and periphery, would it make sense to deal with that conception alone as the shaping thesis ofa further study? In conclusion, while Dahlie's book raises as well as settles issues, it will probably be most used by all those students of Canadian literature who have been sent away to write essays on any of the more than twenty writers he discusses. They will find a considerable amount of useful material in the sections on these individual writers even if the whole is not a complete success. (D.B. JEWISON) Carol Fairbanks. Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction Yale University Press. xi, 300. us $22.00 When [wrote Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction [ did not discuss differences in perception between men and women. As Carol Fairbanks reminds me early in her book, my approach tended to put Margaret Laurence in parentheses, not at the centre. To try to change my emphasis in a short review is hardly possible. But the need to change emphasis is a primary impetus for Fairbanks's study: 'Fiction by women writers poses a strong challenge to male interpretations of the prairie landscape' (p 34). To support this claim Fairbanks describes some 120 fictions from as many years of North American fiction. Many of these are forgotten works which will now attract new readers:Fairbanks points out the importance of minor female characters in Helen Clark Fernald's Plow the Dew Under (1952), 'a novel about German Mennonites in Kansas,' and shows how an eight-year-old girl learns from an eastern European immigrant woman's singing in Mary Ann Seitz's Shelterbelt (1979). The most impressive feature of Prairie Women is the thoroughness with which Fairbanks recovers invisible books in order to redefine the canon, and to record the earliest appearance of various familiar figures in prairie writing . Fairbanks discusses roughly equal numbers of American and Canadian works, generally without acknowledging the 49th parallel (although the conclusion mentions some of the main arguments which have been made to differentiate the two literatures). [was occasionally annoyed that [did not know which country's writing was being discussed. But then [ became interested in the possibility that definition of prairie writing may depend less on national ideology (typically, and understandably, Amer- HUMANITIES 155 ican critics emphasize similarities between Canadian and American writing , while Canadian critics search for differences) than on gender. Could it be that Fairbanks's approach implies that women writers and prairie women were interested in land for its fecundity and not for its value as territory and property, that therefore national boundaries do not figure largely in the consciousness of her subjects? Fairbanks's critical approach is more elusive and less satisfying than her reconstruction of canon. Often she concentrates on redefining heroism , arguing that the 'worn and resigned, but determined' (p 5) prairie pioneer woman has been far more prominent in the criticism of prairie writing than is justified by the 'energetic, strong, self-sufficient, inventive , far-sighted' (p 5) female heroes she finds in her sample. Her broader objective is to show the way 'prairie women's fiction serves as a useful supplement to historical documents' (p 119). Fairbanks wants to tell us what women did on the prairie, and when and how; her complementary discussion of painting, several excellent photographs, poetry, and public statuary affirms this intention. Looking at fiction as a supplement to documents means Fairbanks is more interested in the women behind the books - the authors, and the real women who are in some way represented by fictional characters - than she is in the ways women write. Women do...