Wrestling with the Angel: Women Reclaiming Their Lives

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

The editors of this collection of women’s life-writing have been
rather daring in choosing to publish novices beside the likes of
Margaret Atwood, Sharon Butala, Sandra Birdsell, Myrna Kostash, and Gail
Scott. As with many attempts to cross the grain, the results are uneven
but intriguing.

It is no surprise that Atwood’s selection is topnotch. However, it is
refreshing to find her writing in a more personal voice, examining her
family’s Nova Scotia heritage and its delicate connections to the life
and art of Ernest Buckler. Butala appears in a different light too, her
essay being one from 1980 that examines her divorce, when one might have
expected more of her extraordinary contemporary work explicating the
mystic power of the prairies, such as Wild Stone Heart.

The editors, each of whom includes one essay of her own, present the
collection as a celebration of “women who must start over,” with
sections titled “Re-evaluating Relationships,” “Reclaiming Our
Bodies,” “Reconstructing Rituals,” and so forth. The implication
is that, in maturity, women have to revisit their lives with feminist
consciousness in order to snatch those lives from the tyranny of a
received wisdom that specifies acceptable women’s behaviors. Perhaps
such exercises will be unnecessary for women coming of age in the 21st
century; however, they remain essential for contemporary women as these
essayists demonstrate.

Among the works by less-well-known writers in the collection,
Marguerite Watson’s “Symptoms” is both subtle and sophisticated in
its cool, unflinching narrative of the tumor that has always lived in
this woman’s throat, both curse and companion, impinging on her life
and animating her story. Jan Semeer’s “The Wall,” an intense,
brief take on gritty resistance to maternal brutality and gendered
limitations, conveys in the authentic voice of the crone admirable
health and certainty in maturity.

Respected novelist Sarah Murphy contributes a text of violence, a
breathless utterance of one long sentence, that expresses the
disbelieving, floating time experience of imminent death. She is a
writer who takes postmodernism by the tail and twists it.