SOURCE: Clement, Lesley D. “Mavis Gallant's Stories of the 1950s: Learning to Look.” American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. 1 (spring 1994): 57-73.

In the following essay, Clement evaluates Gallant's stories written during the 1950s for their use of narrative techniques adapted from the visual arts to elicit responses from readers and characters alike.

At a static moment in “The Picnic,” one of the first stories Mavis Gallant wrote after arriving in France in 1950-1951,¹ a photographic image is developed of a harmonious scene in which the grande dame of a “typical” French town is surrounded by five attentive American children (117-118).² This is a precisely rendered composition, similar to those that the camera will capture throughout the day to serve as visual evidence in an American magazine that the picnic is “a symbol of unity between two nations” (106); nevertheless, this photographic image is, as Gallant describes in another story...