Culture Watch – What We Aren’t Told and That Salandar Woman

Predictably, their stories aren’t equally well told. A few may raise eyebrows and others hackles among readers. There are conclusions with which not all readers will agree, and which some readers won’t understand, probably to some extent, depending on their ages. Some stories are told with great skill, some forthrightly, some as if the reader were being kept at a polite distance.  But, each story is interesting.

A few authors’ names will certainly be familiar to American readers, like Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields; others might make a reader want to become familiar with the women who wrote them. Not all are professional writers. Several hail from rural western regions, some from the Maritimes, some from larger cities like Vancouver or Toronto.

Their perspectives reveal academic careers, or law and politics or journalism; a very few come from lives spent in conventional ways, according the customs of the fifties and sixties.

A reader’s reactions will probably be as varied as her own personal experiences. There are one or two pieces that reiterate the rallying cries of the women’s movement, but by and large, the analyses of their writers’ lives arise from very different questions about women’s places in society from those of employment equality and legal gender discrimination. These discussions really are about how the fact of being female makes the lives of women differ from the lives of men at a deeper level. If there’s a common plea, it is for all forms of recognition despite one’s gender, but also because of it. And there are discussions of aspects of feminine life, as opposed to all the distinctions between the sexes.

Elizabeth Huggan writes about aging as much as about being female. She refers to herself as a child whose aim was to please. Which of our readers won’t relate to that?  She claims to have hidden herself inside a shell that hides the same child she used to be, and quotes Yeats via Annie Dillard: All virtue is a form of acting. The essay continues on the theme of the futility of passing on information to someone who is without the experience even to recognize its value. A few masterful anecdotes attest to her talent as a writer (which is her profession). Her prose is humorous and poignant. She speaks of herself and some friends as adults who don’t realize that they’re only girls dressed up as ladies, pretending.

Jaqueline McLeod Rogers is a professor of writing and literature. She uses the Psyche myth as an engaging metaphor for her own youthful inability to see the forest for the trees. She argues for the fact that the quotidian has a tendency to dominate women’s lives, not always to their detriment. If a woman can stop trying to see problems in a masculine way — that is, as wholes with single solutions — and can learn to accept their resemblance to the laborious task Psyche accomplished (separating millions of seeds from one another), she will gain new self respect. That understanding of feminine talent will enable a woman to perceive her importance in the larger picture. Rogers also addresses the time it takes just living before once can learn to be satisfied. She tells how she apprehended the limits of control over events through the near death of her child.