Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History

Abstract

This article sets out to argue that Walter Benjamin's angel of history is Mavis Gallant's angel of fiction, and, accordingly, it will attempt to define and analyse that 'historical sense' which, though it is perhaps the most significant feature of Gallant's fiction, has either been disregarded or only indolently mentioned by the bulk of Gallant's critics. The imaginative power and the sheer persistence of the historical in Gallant's oeuvre will be discussed as something which both sets Gallant firmly in the main current of contemporary literature and gives her a unique position among Canadian writers, who, by and large, make a deliberately domestic use of history and politics in their fiction. Finally, I will argue that without a conception of how history structures Gallant's vision of reality, her oeuvre can easily be misrepresented as a minor triumph of technique and style, or else censured for what would appear an obsessively grim and selective presentation of human experience.