Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899 by Reinhold Kramer, Tom Mitchell (review)

insists on “a direct correspondence ... between internal and external reali­ ties,” a stance creating a more intimate relationship between “the human incapacity to love” and the “darkened vision of the natural environment’ (159). Albion’s division generates divisive “acts of anthropomorphic pro­ jection” that colonize “the natural realm” (162). When this approach is applied to the complex character of Vala (usually seen simply to symbolize Nature), she more accurately is described as “Western humanity’s dis­ cursive conceptions of the natural world” (175). Imagining Nature carries much corrective force, a strength on display in the exemplary discus­ sion of the much misunderstood Apolypus, which “symbolizes a kind of death-in-life” (180) associated by Blake with the lowest human state of nonentity. Hutchings’ detailed reading of the concept connects Blakean cultural analysis to contemporary ecological thought and ethics: “ethics can be thought and practised only in the context of a relational interaction between integral entities” (197). The “Coda” that concludes this fine work returns to the more personal voice with which it began, providing a relevant and necessary vector of connection to any motivated ecocritical endeavor. The observed tendency of Blake’s works to question “their own human-centred textual biases” pro­ vides a pragmatic model for enhanced awareness of “how self-interested modes of discursive practice lead inevitably to the philosophical devalu­ ation, physical domination, and ultimate desolation of the Earth, its eco­ systems, and its living creatures, both human and nonhuman” (206). In his multivectored reassessment of the multitudinous functions of nature in Blake’s work, Hutchings has, with intelligence and intensity, corrected the misprisions of past criticism, better integrated present ecocritical concerns with Blake Studies, and identified numerous paths of future inquiry. MarkLussier Arizona State University Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell. Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy o f Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899. The Canadian Social History Series. Don Mills, O N : Oxford University Press, 2002. 318 + viii pp. $19.9y paper. On 27 December 1899 twenty-one-year-old Emily Hilda Blake was hanged in the Brandon prison yard. The only woman to be executed in Manitoba, she was one of two female murderers who went to the gallows during the 178 |Lussier half century from 1873 to 1922. Blake was largely forgotten, although she did occasionally receive token mention in stories about Canadian crime. Then, in 1993-1994, historian and archivist Tom Mitchell published an article in the Journal ofCanadian Studies, and in 2002 produced this book with co-author Reinhold Kramer, an English professor. The work is a richly textured study, indeed, a happy marriage of two sets of multi-faceted skills and perspectives. They describe their effort as fraught with “epistemologi­ cal challenges” (5), but meet them successfully— or as successfully as one can in today’s prickly world of scholarship. In the hands of Mitchell and Kramer the story of Hilda Blake (she never used Emily) becomes a riveting narrative that casts a wide net. The young woman, state the authors, “was— sometimes unintentionally— an outrageously indiscreet witness to her own life and times” (4). Mitchell and Kramer unearthed a plethora of original sources, and have judiciously used them in conjunction with recent scholarship. Detail piles upon detail, the result a meticulous study of female murder and late nineteenth-century Canada. The authors tell, intentionally, two stories: “a biographical study as well as an exploration of late Victorian culture, gender, and class in Canada” (5). In fact, they explore far more. Although the detailed accounts of context— cultural, political, economic, social— sometimes overshadow the tragic narrative of a murderer, the “read” is nonetheless worth it, for the authors have so much to tell us about the world of the late nineteenth century. As for Blake’s story, it is fully told— or as fully as possible given the lacunae, the authors providing a fascinating account in which they inter­ weave fact and conjecture, carefully distinguishing between the two. The basic facts about Blake suggest a difficult life too soon ending in tragedy. She was English-born, and orphaned at age nine. Soon becoming a disposable burden to her eldest sister and the local gentry, she was shipped off in 1888 to distant...