Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature by Di Brandt (review)

190 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 hide 'of the enforcement of a new "cult of true womanhood." , Despite its claims to the contrary and its valuable scholarship, this study does not escape this epistemological trap. (MARLENE GOLDMAN) Di Brandt. Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadia11 Literature University of Manitoba Press. ix, 188. $17.95 paper In the past two decades, mothering has become an appropriate, even compelling, feminist issue, as is instanced by numerous conferences, courses, books, and specia1 issues of journals, as well as an annotated feminist bibliography on the topic. In response to the disabling conjunction of 'real' and symbolic circumstances in which discourse of and about mothering has been enmeshed, feminists now are concerned to rewrite the old story, to imagine maternity differently. Wild Mother Dancing, Oi Brandt's revised version of her 1992 PH D dissertation, is a provocative study of the absence of maternal narrative in Canadian literature and an analysis of contemporary women's fiction from a 'maternal' point of view. I have much sympathy with Brandfs call for the transformation of current paradigms through which we read maternal narratives and the invention of frameworks that allow us to go beyond patriarchal myths about and perceptions of mothers. As Brandt states in her prologue, her intention is to 'undercut the traditional metaphors of the lnaternal body and maternal activity, insofar as they re-enact the silencing and absenting of the mother as human subject with her own story' and to 'look at maternal metaphors that extend the mother's subjectivity.' What I find particularly suggestive about Wild Mother Dancing is that, like much recent feminist theory and especially that which attempts to redefine the maternal, this book is a confluence of tensions. Brandt's question - 'how can i be both & not fly apart?' ('Three Poems') - although written with reference to her double position as contemporary woman writer and traditional Mennonite, seems an apt question with regard to the difficulty of living as and theorizing about the mother. Following in the tradition of books like Cathy N. Davidson's The Lost Tradition and especially Marianne Hirsch's The Mother/Daughter Plot, Brandt argues that even in women's accounts of motherhood maternal perspectives are often absent, and that when they are not, critics and readers tend to suppress the centrality of mothering. Brandt takes as her point of departure the importance of the specificity of the mother as distinct from the daughter} a distinction displaced even in Adrienne Rich's well-known book Of Woman Born, which serves in many ways as a paradigm for Brandt's own text. It may well be in response to such broad and (perhaps overly) inclusive definitions of motherhood that Brandt defines the mother as the biological HUMANITIES 191 mother who is also the caretaker. That childbirth is, for Brandt, the privileged site of the maternal narratives she examines is nowhere more apparent than in the last chapter, which reads the transcripts of Katherine Martens's interviews with several Mennonite women on their experiences of childbirth. There is a tension, however, between this definition and the fiction Brandt discusses which seems, at times, to resist such biologism. Margaret Laurence's point, she argues, is that the activity of parenting is what is important. Similarly, Brandt maintains that Daphne Marlatt follows Sara Ruddick in separating the 'activity' of mothering from the mother as 'symbolic figure: Brandt's biological definition of motherhood is also in tension with her foregrounding of racial and sexual differences. Each chapter, despite a focus on very different writers, traces the same trajectory: a movement from (maternal) absence to a more 'tangible' presence. Brandt argues that all these writers share the political/artistic struggle to bring the mother back into the story as presence. This reclaiming of suppressed voices revolves around acts of retrieval, moments of recovery. The lost suppressed 'maternal feminine' which makes an '(amazing) comeback' as 'insist[ent] ... presence' in Laurence becomes in Marlatt a Lrecoverable reality.' Despite an acknowledgment of postmodernism's influence on Marlatt, Brandt argues that her language is not characterized by lack but by 'presence, experienced first of all as sound,' and that for Marlatt reclaiming maternal subjectivity involves recreating the mother...