ESC: English Studies in Canada

features as representing the pioneer woman theme, rather than dealing with the texts as wholes in their own terms. The strongest evidence for an affin­ ity between Laurence’s heroines and those of Catherine Parr Traill is Morag Gunn’s conjuring up of Traill’s spirit at various points in The Diviners. It should be noted, however, that Morag sees Traill as an impossible ideal of strength, competence, optimism, and moral certainty, a figure that repre­ sents her sense of her own inadequacy; once she has come to terms with her own life, Morag dismisses Traill. Thompson argues that the protagonists of Laurence’s novels, and those of other modern women writers, are “clearly the literary descendents [sic] of Traill’s Catherine Maxwell,” even though “perhaps none of these writers has read Traill’s work.” She goes on to suggest that “no such direct relationship needs to be established,” because “the pioneer woman is accepted both as a literary character and as a social ideal, certainly owing a debt to Traill, but having gone far beyond Traill’s original conception” (114). Again, lack of evidence is offered as evidence and the terms “pioneer” and “frontier” are defined so broadly they lose significance. Thematicism has been generally discredited in recent years; Thompson’s study reinforces one’s perception of the inadequacy of a thematic approach to Canadian writing. l i n d a l a m o n t -s t e w a r t / York University Donald Beecher, ed., His Farewell to Military Profession, by Barnabe Riche. Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society, 1; Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 91 (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions; Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992). 336. $28.00 cloth, $12.00 paper. It is all very well to reiterate the formula that Elizabethan imitation of the Italian novella led the English towards the stronger literary realism which was the precondition for their greatest fiction. But actually the narratively particularist novella was also “recidivous” in the sense that it harked back to the mythos of romance: “the specific events of social history” were re­ opened to “the elements of myth.” And it is precisely in this reinvestiture of the individual, “historical” act with generalist romantic motifs that bén­ éficient social prescription enters the picture. In a sense each of Barnabe Riche’s stories in this collection is a social laboratory testing the success of items of social behaviour. Of various mythic patterns here, those involving female action and passion are the most frequent. A Persephonian narrative of imminent violation, resistance through self-mastery and female cunning, and regularization of male violence through marriage unrolls repeatedly, “in which the woman is rewarded for her civilizing role in the management of sexual energy.” “The politics of chastity in Riche’s stories is ultimately the 384 politics of female dominion.” A number of other, less gendered patterns repay attention, but a similar preoccupation returns in the study of Riche’s authorial stance towards the “gentlewomen both of England and Ireland” : no matter how the matter must be qualified, his solicitation of the female reader’s favour remains in her mind, so that she must “read as a woman, bringing to bear in her relationship with the author and his text all that she would bring to negotiations with a suitor.” The preceding is the gist of Donald Beecher’s appealing reformulation, in his lengthy introduction, of what is most important about Riche’s collection of eight tales. Furthermore, Beecher sees in a new, favourable light the aspect of Riche’s fictions that has been most investigated and reprobated: his overstepping of expectable intertextuality, his systematic interweaving of motifs, narrative strands, and whole phrases and passages from other closeby English writers. “The author,” says Beecher, “is the medium whereby old structures are given new incarnations and passed on to other imitators,” and the work of “the mannerist artist” rises to “the height of its affetti only when it is received in relationship to the textual tradition from which it was born.” Not simply the reality of the mimetic fictions but the relationships to other fictions is a chief pleasure of Riche’s collection. This reader finds it perfectly...