Bottled Roses

Janet MacArthur was a freelance writer in Calgary.

This collection charts the usual transitional course of the awakening feminist sensibility, but with a difference. Instead of displaying a cool detachment or alienation from traditional values represented by home and family, the female characters in these stories operate within the context of their closely knit Italian-Canadian families. “Famiglia” (in the words of Pasquale DiMarko, the gently satirized paterfamilias who presides over the uneasy house-hold featured in the second story) creates special problems for women whose allegiance to family is called into question when they decide to live independent lives. Family is intimately involved in the territory usually reserved for the self-exploration and solitary evolution of the contemporary female: the aftermath of broken marriage. Aunts, uncles, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, all part of this comfortable family mesh, generally become involved.

But few of the women depicted seek to escape completely, for many of them are writers — that is, eavesdroppers but insiders — who relish the material to which they have privileged access. In a very effective piece, “The Namesake,” the narrator recounts and comments upon her Granny Giuseppina’s story about her taciturn niece Pina. Granny Giuseppina’s ability to create Gothic fairy tales out of the circumstances of her own life, and to create a victim of herself and a witch of Pina, subtly explores the darker side of the art of storytelling. Another grandmother, Grandmother Nicolina, figures largely in the title story “Bottled Roses.” A highly manipulative individual, she can be seen as a personification of famiglia as it imposes the same story on women of every generation. This force is vested in and maintained by the belief in the superior position of males and the contingent status of women. In “Instructing the Young,” Madott uses the occasion of a hospital visit to an exhausted new mother to explore the tensions created by the collision of the traditional values of the Italian family and those of women who question whether or not they can live by them.

Fathers play an important part in the lives of the female characters in this book, even if they are far away and only faintly adumbrated. Yet they and their wives are presented as benevolent, loving individuals who become identified with all that is positive about family and conventional relationships. Though Madott’s heroines walk a thin, tortuous line, they manage to draw upon the strengths of their backgrounds while they are drawn to the freedoms held out to them by our new culture myth of female independence. With some important qualifications and some major revisions, however, this collection ultimately endorses the conviction expressed by Pasquale DiMarko: “Itsa the blood. Famiglia.”