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• W1997420400 abstract "Reviewed by: Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity Alison Calder S. Leigh Matthews. Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2010. 418 pp. $39.95. Looking Back, S. Leigh Matthews’s study of Canadian women’s prairie memoirs, is valuable both for what it reveals about the memoirs and for what it suggests about limits of the field of prairie literary studies. As a genre, memoirs are poised between fact and fiction, combining documentary qualities with literary arrangement. Critical treatments of memoirs tend to pick a side, reading them either as historical documents or as self-consciously literary works. In this study, Matthews comes down on the side of literature, emphasizing the ways in which these memoirs conform to and/or challenge social and literary conventions when relating women settlers’ experiences. In “aim[ing] to read them as points of intersection with idealistic images of white, English-speaking women’s participation in prairie land settlement” (14), Matthews seeks to render a more nuanced understanding of these women’s experiences than literary criticism generally describes. What her study also demonstrates is that these texts have fallen entirely outside the purview of prairie literary criticism. In showing their value, Matthews’s study also suggests the value of revisiting some of prairie literary criticism’s long-held tenets. [End Page 113] Many of the memoirs Matthews examines have not received critical attention before. Most were composed retrospectively by settler women, being published between 1950 and 1980, and at least one was written about a settler woman by her descendant, incorporating original material and reminiscences. Matthews suggests two main reasons for the neglect of these texts by critics: the fact that ideas of settlement privilege nineteenth-century experience and thus critical attention may be concentrated in Ontario, with Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill providing paradigmatic texts, and the fact that these prairie women often focused on the domestic aspects of farm life, aspects subordinated to an ideology that emphasized heroic and masculinized agricultural expansion to which women’s contributions, although absolutely essential, were viewed as secondary. Additionally, some of these memoirs had very small-scale publication and distribution. Very few authors were professional writers in the way that Moodie and Traill were; for some writers, these memoirs are the only work they produced. Contrary to views that would see them as unmediated representations of experience, Matthews emphasizes the literary intentionality underlying these memoirs. All were written in expectation or hope of publication. As Matthews points out, that settler women produced these memoirs means that they saw their experiences as unique and valuable. “The very act of writing and seeking publication for such a text,” she writes, “indicates the female author’s assumption of personal importance as a participant in settlement history in her own right” (7). Such an assumption counters dominant views of settler women as mere helpmates to their husbands. Matthews argues that in their articulation of individual experiences within broad cultural patterns, these texts reveal a spectrum of women’s understandings of and participation within the settlement project. It is important to note that Matthews’s study is confined to memoirs by white, English-speaking women; the range of experiences depicted is actually quite narrow. Within that narrow range, however, Matthews is able to make a number of interesting observations that may be applicable to women’s settler memoirs from other communities as well. Matthews argues that critics have categorized women settlers in one of two ways: as cheerful helpmates, typified by the “dauntless optimism” of Catherine Parr Traill, or as glum complainers, as in many depictions of Susanna Moodie. Clearly, these categories involve value judgments: the optimist is the “good” settler, with the pessimist occupying the “bad” seat. Matthews argues that the pressure on women to be good settlers can be seen in their memoirs, as description of hardship after hardship [End Page 114] is almost invariably followed by a hasty resolution to buck up and get on with things, as next year is bound to be better. These resolutions, often short passages tacked on at the end of chapters..." @default.
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• W1997420400 title "<i>Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity</i> (review)" @default.
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