Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English

Thomas M.F. Gerry is an English professor at Laurentian University.

The editors invited a number of Canadian women who had published at
least one book to contribute their perspectives on the relation between
feminism and writing to this collection. The editors posed such
questions as: What have been feminism’s effects on writing and
publishing? Has a distinctly female/feminist point of view developed?
What influences has feminist literary theory had on writers and readers?
Can a writer authentically take on a voice other than her own? (Paulette
Jiles quotes the questions in her essay.) While academics, critics, and
journalists have publicly articulated some answers to these questions,
novelists, poets, dramatists, and biographers generally had not; so the
editors offered the latter group the opportunity. The resulting book is
bound together, the editors write, by its “readability, wit and
candour.” I agree with this characterization, but at the same time
would point out the anthology’s engaging diversity. Even without the
Québécoise, the variety of outlooks is remarkably wide. The items are
arranged alphabetically by the authors’ last names: Margaret Atwood to
Helen Weinzweig.

Atwood sets forth a characteristic double bind. She is alarmed about
the “dangers of dictatorship by ism”—the tendency to decree for
women writers what are acceptable styles, voices, forms, and politics.
Meanwhile, she fantasizes that no matter what she says, younger writers
may see her as the “Goodyear Blimp, floating around up there in an
overinflated and irrelevant way.” Jiles also expresses her relief at
having stopped worrying about whether her writing was “feminist
enough.” From a different perspective altogether, Kathy Mezei’s
essay, “A Tension of Isms,” describes her needs to be both marginal
and part of the feminist collectivity. Janette Turner Hospital briefly
addresses a similar problem in the context of reviews of women’s
writing.

Mary di Michele, Lee Maracle, and Himani Bannerji deal directly with
their experiences of coming to terms with cultural difference in the
Canadian setting. Bannerji’s essay is especially striking. She
presents a text written as if in Bengali, and follows it with a
meditation on the text, questioning how a Canadian reader might approach
its unfamiliar background, allusions, and structures.

Some lesbian writers, Daphne Marlatt, Mary Meigs, Jane Rule, and Betsy
Warland, explain their theories on writing and gender. Also interesting
to read are the personal responses of such writers as Roo Borson, June
Callwood, Sandy Frances Duncan, Barbara Godard, Linda Hutcheon, Dorothy
Livesay, Janice Kulyk Keefer, and Phyllis Webb. Finally, to further
enhance the collection’s usefulness as a means of listening to
contemporary English-Canadian women writers’ conversation, the editors
reprint such influential essays as Erin Mouré’s “Poetry, Memory and
the Polis” and Gail Scott’s “A Feminist at the Carnival.”