Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women by Roxanne Rimstead (review)

humanities 427 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 ed account that deserves to be read by those with an interest in women=s imprisonment, both past and present. (HELEN BORITCH) Roxanne Rimstead. Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women University of Toronto Press. x, 348. $65.00, $24.95 Throughout this study, the political and literary intentions of its author are made clear: to redress the exclusion, erasure, and negative representations of the poor in the Canadian national imaginary, through oppositional readings of what Roxanne Rimstead calls >poverty narratives.= But for a few exceptions, Rimstead=s main focus is women=s writing, and she foregrounds issues of gender and class, along with questions of racial and ethnic identities, in a number of texts written in English and one in French. Poverty narratives are looked at from two points of view, that of domination and that of resistance. The strength of this book indeed lies in its juxtaposition of a hegemonic discourse on poverty with a more marginal, oppositional representation. The former, according to Rimstead, stems from an exclusive, bourgeois construction of the wealthy nation that erases the poor by situating them elsewhere in the world or marginalizing them through blame, shame, and a belief in meritocracy, while the latter challenges the ideology and power relations behind negative images of poverty. Rimstead=s analysis of the ways in which the poor are represented in literature, cultural theory, and popular culture also insists on retrieving the voices of the poor, which can speak their own constraints by positing resistance and agency, but can also reinscribe limited or false interpretations about poverty. That >poverty narratives= is a category of analysis that includes stories about and by the poor makes the generic scope of this work wide-ranging, as it includes canonized and non-canonized fiction, autobiography, oral history, essay, and reportage from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of Rimstead=s goals as a self-proclaimed >populist critic= is to show how the canon of Canadian literature can be read differently as well as oppositionally when juxtaposed with non-canonical writing. Writers under study include such well-known authors as Susanna Moodie, Gabrielle Roy, Alice Munro, Maria Campbell, and Margaret Laurence, lesser-known writers such as Nelly McClung and Nancy Holmes, and ordinary women as the authors of oral and written testimonials. Some readers may be surprised by a study of one of Munro=s short stories, which is said to reproduce the social boundaries it depicts through its aesthetic detachment. Rimstead also turns to women characters and autobiographical subjects who manage to resist poverty from within the social order under scrutiny. Others are shown to move from shameful constructions of poor and xxxxxxxxx 428 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 classed identity into more positive racial and ethnic identifications; or, rather than resist poverty, some erase it from their narratives in the name of individual recovery, reinscribing the same order that suppresses poverty from the ideal of the wealthy nation. The most extensive reading is of Laurence=s The Diviners, which, when reread as a poverty narrative, is shown to reimagine the nation as an inclusive concept that can inscribe the poor, the silenced, the classed, the gendered, and the ethnic, as well as various (high and low) forms of artistic and cultural expression. As Rimstead brings issues of poverty to the centre stage of literary criticism, the theoretical implications of her analysis are made clear. She sets out to reveal and fill gaps in Marxist, feminist, and other forms of criticism concerned with class that, according to the author, have not dealt adequately with the subject of poor women or how gendered and poor conditions work together to form their narratives. A look into the political efficacy of theoretical discourse, and of the field of cultural studies itself, is the object of the book=s final chapter. Rimstead also insists on the absence of one overarching methodology in her readings. As her analysis of textual constructions of poverty as well as theoretical reflections on cultural and national imaginaries reveal, she draws from a number of literary...