Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiography

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Helen Buss deals with a wide variety of Canadian women who have written
diaries, journals, and autobiographies or memoirs, beginning with
Elizabeth Simcoe and continuing through to Margaret Laurence and
Gabrielle Roy. She is concerned not simply with the works of stars in
this considerable firmament, but with such less-well-known works as
Elizabeth Licthenstein Johnston’s Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist,
Mary Hiemstra’s Gully Farm, and Susan Allison’s A Pioneer
Gentlewoman in British Columbia, to mention only a few.

Mapping Our Selves is comprehensive in its coverage, but extremely
specialized in its approach. Buss describes herself as “a different
kind of reader, one who reads not for literary product, but for the
attempt to inscribe subjectivity. I read not as one interested in the
way in which women are as good as, or the same as, men, but as one
interested in female difference, and the many possible modes of the
expression of that difference, given that the formal arrangements of
genre, language and social structure forbid that difference (except in
the way that ‘difference’ may be defined as ‘lack’ or by its
service to male needs).” In other words, Buss is interested in the
texts she considers insofar as they concern the “mapping of the
personal [female] self.”

Not surprisingly, many of her subjects fall short in expressiveness.
Mrs. Simcoe’s failure to discuss her pregnancy in her diary (though
not in a personal letter) is attributed to the patriarchal culture she
lived in. Nellie McClung , who cannot find words to tell of the suicide
of her son (“the greatest calamity of Nellie’s life,” according to
a close associate), also suffers from the constraints of patriarchy, for
the memoir style implicates her “in established societal
structures.”

Buss’s work is clearly influenced both in substance and style by
contemporary feminist criticism, commonly but not invariably American,
and it will appeal especially to feminist academics. Less professionally
committed readers are most likely to enjoy Buss’s own small portions
of autobiography. These are offered so that the reader can assess her
personal context, and yet, paradoxically, they seem most clearly to
escape from the constraints of feminist discourse; that is to say, they
are vivid and readable.