SOURCE: "Thomas and Her Rag-Bag," in Canadian Literature, No. 102, Autumn, 1984.

In the following essay, Butling argues that Thomas's use of autobiographical details in her short stories allows her to create female characters who are more "real" than those of other women writers in that they resist falling into paradigmatic female categories.

Many recent women writers have worked at re-defining the images of women in fiction—Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Jane Rule, to name a few—but because they haven't changed the form in any significant way, because the traditional structures of fiction frame the story, the character types inherent in those forms remain. A cause-effect structure, for instance, requires certain set functions of the characters.

Yet we know the traditional images of men and women no longer apply, where the woman is defined primarily in terms of her relationship to men, or at least in terms of her...