SOURCE: “Mariposa Revisited,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp. 167-76.

In the following essay, MacLulich responds to the critic Ina Ferris's assessment of Sunshine Sketches of Little Town, arguing that the collection does not show that Leacock lacked faith in his imaginative power as Ferris claims.

In her article “The Face in the Window: Sunshine Sketches Reconsidered” (Studies in Canadian Literature, 3 [Summer 1978], 178-85), Ina Ferris draws a provocative conclusion. She argues that the ending of Sunshine Sketches shows that Leacock lacked faith in his own imaginative powers:

Throughout Sunshine Sketches … the operation of the imagination is identified with fantasy, retreat, delusion. … The train of the imagination may be “the fastest train in the whole world,” but it can offer no sustaining insight into the narrator's existential condition. … Indulging in the freedom and release that the imagination offers, Leacock yet exposes these as illusory. The view...