Baker's Dozen: Stories by Women

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

Baker’s Dozen is a collection of thirteen stories by women from across Canada. Described as “a pot-pourri of fiction,” it reflects a wide variety of concerns, perspectives, and writing styles, ranging in focus from politics to human relationships and in style from humour to myth.

The relative effectiveness or success of the stories as stories (rather than as polemic or psycho-drama) ranges just as widely. The introduction observes that a “feminist consciousness does not guarantee a good story” and this is unfortunately all too clearly demonstrated by a number of the stories in this collection. Some of these stories just don’t work. The message has so completely dominated the authors that the stories themselves become merely transparent and totally unconvincing vehicles for a point which could be made better in an essay. The characters and plot possess no real life of their own; they seem contrived and wooden and, like any form of propaganda, they fail — not because their message is unsound, but because the art necessary to lift them beyond the level of argument is absent.

Some of these stories, however, do work and they work so extremely well that they throw the flaws of those less successful efforts which surround them into sharper focus. The collection opens with one of the best stories, “Guilt,” a wonderfully moving and funny piece about a woman who begins to teach English at a penitentiary after her husband leaves her for the inevitable younger woman. The story charts Martha’s transformation from a self-effacing, entirely supportive drab to an interesting, witty, and very appealing woman. It ends with Martha’s unrestrained expression of 15 years of pent-up emotion, not the hostility of which her mother suspects her, nor even the frustration born of 15 years of suppressing her personality, but rather: “Fifteen years of held-in laughter. She hiccoughed, she brayed, she spewed, she vomited laughter.”

The story which follows, “The Virgin’s Ball,” is a powerful, mythic exploration of the nature and history of misogyny which reads like an incantation. Yet the central persona remains a vividly realized individual. There are nice touches in “The California Aunts” and in “Cat Fights,” which describes a lesbian relationship with warmth and humour.

Others of the stories come very close to succeeding. I am left feeling that their authors need to trust their stories to communicate their message and to resist the temptation to step in and direct the reader to the appropriate political conclusions.

Baker’s Dozen is maddeningly uneven. The voices represented here range from the embarrassingly amateurish to the highly accomplished. Yet, for the sake of the latter, and for much which falls in between, it remains an interesting and valuable collection.