Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English by Helen M. Buss

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Helen M. Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). x, 237. $19.95 paper, $39.95 cloth. In recent years, autobiography has enjoyed renewed interest as a field of lit­ erary research and criticism. Several factors account for this development, including the new perspectives of feminist scholarship and the emergence of life writing as both genre and critical practice. In Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English, Helen Buss draws on feminist theory and life writing alike to produce a valuable study on autobiography. A feminist analysis frames Buss’s focus on women’s (as opposed to men’s) autobiography, while a reflection on life writing allows her to inject new meaning into the word autobiography. For Buss, the term designates writ­ ten texts ranging from “diariesthat seemnaiveofanyliterary considerations, through accounts hardly distinguishable from novels, to sophisticated and subtle texts by women who have studied the productions of postmodern lit­ erary masters” (14). Life narratives, personal narratives, autogynographies, autographs, life writing, all terms used by other contemporary scholars, are embraced by Buss’s understanding of autobiography. Beyond its particular understanding of autobiography and its feminist framework, Buss’s study presents several additional distinguishing traits, each contributing in a unique way to literary criticism in Canada. To begin, the corpus under study is entirely Canadian. While comparisons are made to the personal documents ofinternationally-known writers such as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, Buss’s focus is on Canadian autobiographers. This comprises one of the major contributions of her study. Readers are in­ troduced to a wealth ofCanadian writers, many ofwhom are not well enough known given the interest or significance of their writings. To the reasonably familiar list of Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Simcoe, Anne Langton, and more recently, Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Kristjana Gunnars, and Aritha van Herk, Buss adds new and welcome names such as Mary O’Brien, Mary Hiemstra, Susan Allison, Melinda McCracken, and others. By examining these writers’texts, Buss not only boosts the efforts of life writing to expand the boundaries ofthe literary domain; she also extends the list of Canadian women writers whose work researchers might justifiably investigate. Another distinctive feature ofBuss’sstudy is its central metaphor ofmap­ ping. Buss provides an in-depth and compelling explanation for choosing maps over other metaphors of self-reflexive writing, including the mirror, or its Irigarian version, the speculum. As a means of self-knowledge and selfexpression , Buss believes that mirrors are limited by their dependency on the sense ofsight. Maps, on the other hand, involve a complex ofintellectual 100 and practical skills, including language as well as the visual. Map making thus offers a dynamic metaphor preferable to passive mirror-gazing. Her mapping metaphor allows Buss to ground psychoanalytic models of identity firmly in cultural/historic contexts, and thereby to show “howmapping iden­ tity for females can partake of that [psychoanalytic] world of first language mappings in a way that culture does not encourage for men” (12). Mapping Our Selves is further distinguished by Buss’s unique reading model. Proceeding from reader response theory and its recognition of the reader’s role in the literary act, Buss proposes a reading wherein she in­ teracts with the texts from three varying positions, each arising out of the institution of the family. “Since this is the context in which my subjec­ tivity as reader was first formed,” Buss argues, “it is a suitable metaphor for my reading” (26). Buss’s critical reading moves between readerly po­ sitions of mother/daughter/sister to the texts under study. Clearly gen­ dered, Buss sees her reading as a highly responsible one as well, for as mother/sister/daughter, a reader shares “common cause with the text” (26). In theoretical terms, Buss locates her critical position “somewhere between the rock and hard place ofhumanism and poststructuralism” (28). She seeks neither a Barthesian romance of reading or erotics of the text, nor Adrienne Rich’s intimate but polite engagement. “I seek ‘(m)othering,’” Buss asserts. “By this bracketed version of mothering, I mean to imply the configuration of three relationships with significant others that I know in actual...