SOURCE: Schaub, Danielle. “Spatial Patterns of Oppression in Mavis Gallant's Linnet Muir Sequence.”¹ Studies in Canadian Literature 18, no. 2 (summer 1993): 132-55.

In the following essay, Schaub addresses the ways in which spatial patterns affect memory in Gallant's Home Truths.

A wealth of references to spatial constituents charges the atmosphere of Mavis Gallant's Linnet Muir sequence [in] Home Truths (HT 217-330).² As those stories are the sublimated product of memory,³ numerous crucial images call on spatial polarities.⁴ These terms combined with other stylistic devices expose local cultural phenomena with precision: laying out the stories' fictional landscape amounts to determining what Linnet, the protagonist/narrator, senses as the social, religious and cultural limitations imposed on all the characters. This reality emerges from her recollections of her life in Montreal as a child and then as a late teenager, that is, in the nineteen-twenties and forties.⁵ A fictionalised projection of Gallant at...