To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Reading poems by Marlene Philip, Dionne
Brand and others, Mukherjee argues that
"irony ... is a way of speaking that creates
exclusionary communities" which in
Canada constitute themselves frequently
along colour lines. Similarly well done is
Karen Smythe's close reading of Mavis
Gallant's ironic preface to Home Truths. The
other contributions on Canadian literature
(on novels by van Herk and Findley, feminist
poetry, and found poems) are rather
less convincing, because the expected connection
to irony is often rather vague.
Postmodernist and deconstructive practices
have led to an increasing consideration
of other art forms beside literature,
and so it is only logical that Double-Talking
devotes some space to visual art. More than
the pieces on literature, these three essays
are concerned with products from the
canon's margin. One essay, in particular,
"The Writing on the Wall: The Ironies in
and of Lothar Baumgarten's 'Monument
for the Native Peoples of Ontario, 1984-85"
by Julie Beddoes, raises—voluntarily and
involuntarily—questions about the ironic
mechanics of artistic and critical production.
According to Beddoes, Baumgarten's
piece becomes, mostly as a consequence of
its geographic environment, involuntarily a
monument for the natives' enemies. This
reading may be possible, but the question
remains how much sense it makes.
The various approaches to the function
of irony in contemporary Canadian art
provoke questions that the essays collected
in Double-Talking do not address sufficiently.
Wendy Waring refers to "that troublesome
self-referentiality which undoes the
masterful premise of irony." Irony can hence
only function properly if it is not unmasking
itself. But what if the irony has masked
itself so well that it is not being recognized
as such? And what if the irony rests with
the critic who has found what isn't there?
Somehow the book leaves one dissatisfied.
This may partially be due to the lacking
coherence that had been promised. But more
likely the reason lies in the fact that the
topic itself is far too ambiguous to make
possible the kind of analysis we traditionally
expect from scholarly study. The irony lies
in the fact that its meanings are far too
manifold to reduce it to just Double Talking.
Company of Strangers
Marta Weigle
Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology
U of New Mexico P. n.p.
Gloria Feman Orenstein
The Reflowering of the Goddess. Pergamon Press.
Mary Meigs
In The Company of Strangers. Talonbooks, n.p.
Reviewed by Lynne Masland
Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology
is a collection of mythological material
about women drawn from the Americas,
Europe, and the Greco-Roman/Judeo-
Christian myths which underlie Western
culture. Marta Weigle, a professor of
anthropology, English, and American studies
at the University of New Mexico, has
drawn from a variety of sources, including
anthropology, folklore, literature, comparative
religion, theology, and Freudian and
Jungian psychology in her multi-cultural
study of the portrayal of women through
sacred symbols, texts, rites, social beliefs
and customs.
Weigle contends that we know more
about how women figure in men's
mythologies, narratives, philosophies and
analyses than we do about women's
mythologies themselves. The goddesses and
other mythical figures are archetypal
images of human females as envisioned by
males. The mythological imagery reflects
men's fears and desires, embodied in religious
concepts. The narratives have often
been collected by male scholars researching
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