SOURCE: Clement, Lesley D. “Mavis Gallant's Stories of the 1950's: Learning to Look.” The American Review of Canadian Studies 24, no. 1 (spring 1994): 57-72.

In the following essay, Clement contends that the stories Gallant wrote during the 1950s provide insight into her coherent and vivid imagery and “are particularly good guides for readers learning to see her fiction and hence read it responsively.”

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...