Stories Subversive: Through the Field with Gloves Off. Short Fiction by Nellie L McClung by Marilyn I. Davis (review)

294 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Within the considerable range of her inquiry, Walker establishes some crucial emphases. The book has much to say about genre definition, but its key focus and accomplishment are its sustained feminist accent, and its deep interestinbiography's 'intrinsic religious dimension.' Walker presents the theory of gender and genre adeptly and succinctly, although the final chapter, perhaps in its urgency to get all the rest in, especially extra history, becomes a little cluttered, the argumentsometimes toppledby a precariously stacked syntax. The notes sounded in my own opening contextspoint up the most neglected topics - or topics onlybriefly mentioned, which deserve development. First the whole area of the absent First Nations voice/aesthetic. Walker touches on this matter, in reference to Robert Fulford's polemical article in Canadian Artand GertaMoray's recentre-visioning ofthe subject. But given the enormity of issues of div~rsity and appropriation in current cultural life, it is surprising this context can pass quite so quickly. Is Walker's book, and this review, a monologic discourse, as my student would claim? Nancy Pagh's article (not cited byWalker) points to a second dimension I longed to know more of. Despite Walker's introduction of a promising concept she calls 'the sayability of a life,' she gives very little attention to the context of writing itself. How did Carr, and her biographers and critics, come to write the way they did? I mean, in detail: their choices of form, of phrases, of pronouns, and verb moods? I wanted to know more about nonsense and jouissance. And, come to think of it, why, given Walker's constant reference to postmodernism's freedom of undecideability, is her own study so very very systematic, both in whole, and in part? The· marvellous promise of her proposition thatbiography and person are each an archive might have led to more of an archival accumulation, rather than to the linear argument which dominates. Such an archive might too have taken us to the streets of Chemainus. To a town that has made a commercial success of public art, of 'historical' panoramas and bright murals on the walls of dozens of public and commercial buildings. What of the view of art there embodied? And how does Carr, as poster artist and as tourist icon, fit and not fit with the art that many of the travellers on the BC Ferries most want to see? (LAURIE RICOU) Marilyn I. Davis. Stories Subversive: Through the Field with Gloves Off. Short Fiction by Nellie L. McClung University of Ottawa Press. X, 228. $21.00 In her lifetime Nellie McClung wrote some four hundred pieces of short fiction and commentary for publications such as Chatelaine, Maclean's and Saturday Night. When she died in 1951 it was her writing, rather than her political activism,ior which she was best known and loved. It is thus fitting HUMANITIES 2.95 to have a sampler of McClung's shorter fiction made available to contemporary audiences. Both her humour and her keen observation of human interaction and character are evident in these pieces, adding richness and depth to the profile which most will have gleaned from McClung's widely available collection of political writings, In Times Like These. Marilyn Davis has done a service in bringing forth this volume. She rightly notes that literary critics of the past several generations have misunderstood McClung, dismissing her work as 'didactic' and 'romantic' when in fact the main thrust of McClung's writing is decidedly antiromantic . While McClung clearly intended to write 'sermons in disguise,' Davisstresses, againrightly, thatMcClung'sliterature was inextricably tied up with her agenda for social change. Fiction provided one more forum for McClung to engage issues ofsocialimportance, and to portray dramatically their effects on women's lives. However, the selections in this volume' should not be read as politicallecrures, but as windows into a time, not long ago, when the Canadian west was developing the narratives which would shape its future. The one exception, 'Banking in London,' is a humorous piece which more than equals Stephen Leacock's 'My Financial Career,' raising important questions as to why only the latter is widely known. Davis's introduction is of variable...