can you give a critical analysis of real mothers

Any doubt as to whether Thomas is one of our major writers should be dispelled in this new collection of short stores [Real Mothers]. Containing some unpublished works like "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" and some which have appeared in periodicals like The Capilano Review (such as "Timbuktu"), it also includes three prize winning stories: "Harry & Violet" (1980 National Magazine Awards), "Natural History" (1980 CBC Radio Literary Competition) and "Real Mothers" (1981 Chatelaine Short Story Contest). Though signalling excellence and attracting a wider audience for Thomas, prizes are far from the whole story. Her old readers will find here their familiar rewards in Thomas' carefully rubbed jewels of language.

Thomas plays on the duplicity, the multiplicity of language, its paradoxes and overlays opening up the space of the book, demanding an active participation on the part of the reader. The story is not in the words but in the space between them and around them. In contextualizing her narratives, Thomas makes her language performative. This strategy is announced in the epigraph to "Galatea": "A picture must be built up by means of rhythm, calculation and selection." Thomas' stories evolve through such modulation, plane grafted onto plane, perspective piled onto perspective. Much of the rich complexity as well as the surprise develops from the sudden shifts between perspectives—between the child's story and the mother's in "Real Mothers," between the husband's story of his life and the wife's in "Galatea": "Two swans went down the river, but only one came back. The phrase kept repeating itself, over and over, the opening sentence of a fairytale or the beginning of some problem in algebra: Swan A and Swan B, moving at different speeds." And Thomas' stories oscillate between these modes—between the timeless, fantastic world of the tale and a pattern of infinite regression, Godel's theorem. In "Crossing the Rubicon," there are many levels of narrative: the story the narrator is trying to write in a self-reflexive narrative, enfolded within the story of her own life evoked through childhood memories, and counterpointed against those of her daughter's life and the present interaction with the daughter as they bake cupcakes. Both of the first stories focus on the break up of a love affair, that of the story trying to write itself being projected into the future tense, contrasting with the weight of trivia from her "rag bag mind." In the story being composed, the woman doesn't look back when she says good-bye to her lover. However, the story we actually read is about Lot's wife and the function of memory.

Characteristically, clashes between perspectives are signalled by disjunctions in language. In Montreal, where the affair ends, the sign "Arretez" is ignored by the woman, who runs into the road. Other abrupt switches into a foreign language underline the difficulties of comprehension between individuals, "PAIN DORE. 'Golden pain' is the first thing that comes to her; then 'golden bread'. She stops to look it up. 'Canada: Pain doré. France: pain perdu. French Toast'." Even within the French language there is no agreement; golden break wars with lost bread. The implication is that any relationships constructed on the basis of linguistic communication are bound to falter; this is so because so much noise or static is registered between sender and receiver. The ironies of confused messages are underlined in the Italian word for double bed, "letto matrimonale." Although the lovers sleep there on their travels in Italy, he is married to someone else.

This technique is a familiar one from Thomas' other books. One of her most common metaphors for the problematic nature of language is travelling in foreign countries, adrift on the cross—cultural confusions and the multiple meanings of words. As the stories intercut, the enfolding of story within story underlines these inadequacies of language. In brackets here, the daughter interjects that this lover who is idolized in the mother's story is not even nice. Expanding here on Henry James' principle of reflectors but accentuating the breaks, Thomas illustrates a facet of perception only recently being taken into account by feminist sociologists. What is clear is that there is no single story of family life or marriage; there are as many stories as there are individuals involved. Each character brings his or her story with him or her. Emphasis consequently is not on description but on the act of telling, characters becoming grammatical beings embedding their stories in the narrative as it grows through accumulation in the manner of The Arabian Nights. To speak is to live; such is the magical power of the narrative act, a power which Thomas foregrounds in "Out in the Midday Sun" where the man writes "swiftly and easily," "automatically," with a black pen "magic, like the broom of 'the sorcerer's apprentice.' " But as this allusion makes clear, while Thomas believes in the power of language—a life giving, fantastic power—this makes her all the more aware of the lie that is narrative. In this clash of perspectives is located Thomas' analysis and judgement of truth and lies, memory, private and public story telling—all potentially fallible. The artist's work is based on "illusion" and "trick," as she writes in "Natural History":

To slide it all—moon, blind girl, rat, the apple tree, her father's fingers tilting the pencil, her own solitude, the cat, the eyes of the deer, her daughter, this still moment, back/forth, back/forth, back/forth, until "click"

until "click"

until "click"—

there it was: wholeness, harmony, radiance; all of it making a wonderful kind of sense, as she sat there under

the apple tree, beneath the moon.

And it works, this magic underneath the moon. However, the narrator points out about the beauty of her moonlit house, night is the time to sell it—not under the cruel, truthful light of the sun. Harmony and beauty are generally deceptive in Thomas' world.

Another of Thomas' images foregrounds the clash that lies between stories, between perspectives—that of the stereopticon which the narrator remembers playing with as a child, taking two photographs at different angles which take on depth at "the right distance from everything." Memory becomes an important distancing element and the characteristic Thomas' narrator mulls over the past in an effort to attain the "illusion of solidity." Everything, however, is open to new interpretation as another viewpoint is injected.

In two stories Thomas highlights this process as she rewrites well known stories and inverts them. In "Galatea" the wife claims she has fallen in love with the river and asks her writer-husband—a devourer of dictionaries and encyclopedias—where there are any myths about this. Inverting the story of the classic Galatea, he replies that it is usually the River God who pursues the nymph. His ignorance here is a key element in underlining the untold story. It is his wife who is the artist in the family; she is the one who has moulded his stories, eavesdropped on conversations for him, developed the settings in which to locate his characters. The collaboration is conveyed through another allusion, inverted and changed in a new context. The word "incarnadine," so famous to readers of MacBeth, is translated here from being a reference to the blood, death and madness created by an ambitious woman, to having an association with the Incarnation, the Word made flesh (the couple's "literary" offspring). In his deployment of the word, we become aware that the husband has absorbed her painterly eye. Context and word play off ironically against each other; such is this structure of loss.

A similar story unfolds in "Out in the Midday Sun" which despite its reference to Noel Coward is a pastiche, a rewriting from an inverted female perspective of Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The name of the mountain tells it all—the violence of an American bitch undoing a man. Here a series of allusions to Hemingway—Papa and Mama, they call themselves; The Green Hills of Africa; and Hemingway's pastiche of his literary father, Sherwood Anderson—sets the scene for the revelation that the woman is going to make to her husband. She has been his brilliant student whom he has married. Although she loves him, she has lived in this house under false pretences. Not content to be there when he has wanted her (did he marry her to shut her up, she wonders), she has been writing in secret and the book is about to be published. Her husband has had two wives before her, she interjects into her thoughts in the midst of a conversation about Hemingway's many wives, and, by implication, he is chasing the same fear of creative impotency as the American writer. As the story unfolds in Thomas' hands from the female perspective, the woman is not the destructive force. Rather the problem lies within the male who cannot bear to have his dominancy challenged by the black pen of the apprentice sorcerer.

The play on edges occurs not just between one art form and another—between the narrative of one sex and another—but also between art and life. This is made clear in "Déjeuner sur l'herbe." In the famous impressionist painting alluded to here, there is a sharp incongruity between nude figures and pastoral landscape. In the story, platonic friends visit Paris. Their lack of involvement with each other—their twin beds—reflect their tourist disinterestedness and their non-involvement in the human suffering they witness about them. On their last day, they look for a place to picnic, deciding to eat in a cemetery, thereby flaunting their detachment. As the woman is posing with a wreath of artificial poppies for yet another tourist photo, a woman comes along empty-handed, having abandoned the kitten she had earlier been carrying. The photo is interrupted; the woman reacts by looking for the kitten while the man says there is nothing they can do. At this point she "snaps" and calls out tauntingly to him to end the artifice of their lives, inviting a realignment of foreground and background, a breaking of the pictorial codes by which they have been living. She throws back at him the slogans they have been seeing on walls: "Don't touch! .. . Don't get involved." Aestheticism divorced from human emotions and from human relationships is destructive, Thomas implies. But within the story there is no solution offered. In the final line, the man throws back another question: "'And what if you do?' ( . . . ) 'What then?'" What then indeed? As I have been suggesting, the collisions of perspective in Thomas' work are conveyed through a series of images of perception and through linguistic devices which open up the gap between language and feeling. These include the lost child—word not incarnate—the foreign word—slippery indeterminate in translation—the ironic or inverted allusion—working explicitly on convention to explode meaning. Working to effect a similar disjunction and interrogation of the hermeneutic process are cliché, ambiguity, and definition. Cliché, like allusion, points to the fact that the impact of Thomas' fiction rests on its deployment of conventions and "realistic" expectations which are then frustrated by the next section or sentence or word. Her syntax is like Camus'écriture blanche which Sartre described: "there is a small death between each sentence"—indeed, between each word as "real mothers" demonstrates. Here the word "real" is an equivocal word situated at the point where two sequences of semantic or formal associations intersect. The one set of associations comes from the sign's immediate context, its syntactical position, and relates to the issue of being a true mother—loyal, self-sacrificing, carrying out the tasks to assure her children's well-being (all that goes with the cliché "motherhood"). The other set of associations comes from a wider context, from another text within the text which develops from the mother's quest for authenticity. Her first steps toward a life of her own where she is involved with school work and a lover to the exclusion of her children's demands raises the question: "How can one be real and be a mother?" The children's understanding of the word clashes with the mother's understanding of the word. Increasingly they are involved in a classic triangle—children and lover in a tug-of-war for mother. Within the story the differing concepts of reality are reflected in the mother's changing language as she moves to a new sense of self. "Coping" is "one of her mother's new words," as is "separated." The latter word opens a wider gap, for as the daughter Anne-Marie reflects, no one ever heard of "separated" children (though the word more appropriately describes her psychological state than it does her mother's). In "Crossing the Rubicon," the clichés of married and family relationships (those "real mothers") are underlined in the clichéd phrases of the candied hearts being put on the birthday cupcakes—phrases like "Be My Sugar Daddy" or "You're a Slick Chick."

Ambiguity—present, in fact, in most stories—is highlighted in "Ted's Wife." This occurs even in the opening description of this woman where Phyllis (known for her "mots justes") describes her as "the alternate selection." The story is immediately focussed into a broader context—ultimately into the story not told—in an attempt to elucidate an answer to the implied question: "alternate to whom?" In most stories, the narrators or characters resort to dictionaries in an attempt to stop the drift of words, seeking out the precise meaning of a term. How futile an exercise this is is revealed in the unusual definitions the Concise Oxfordyields for the narrator of "Crossing the Rubicon." She discovers that "idiot" means a private person, while the "idea" of February are on the 13th, not the 15th as Shakespeare scholarship might have us think. But the greatest onslaughts on received meanings or the conventions of speech is revealed in the child's answer to her father in "Natural History." "And what are strangers?" asked her father gently. The child's reply was very serious: "Strangers are usually men." Social context, questions of dominance or difference, leave their mark on language. It is as much a well of private experiences as it is a vehicle for public communication. One function is continuously intersecting with another. That Thomas thinks of language as a paradigm is clear in "Timbuktu" where in referring to the West African custom of respecting women and not harassing them because they have power and status she uses the term "lingua franca." Here the paradigmatic level intrudes ungrammatically into the level of syntax.

If, as I have been suggesting, Thomas specializes in this ungrammaticality and creates structures of loss, she does offer her readers presents in compensation. There are, for instance, the joys accompanying the rediscovery of an obsolete word, a dinosaur eliminated by cultural evolutions. Such, for example, is the word "leggings" dredged from the narrator's memory in "Crossing the Rubicon." It sent my memory spinning outside the text into visions of the green roughness that swathed my childish legs in the days when girls always wore skirts. What a struggle it was to get the straps up under the back of the skirt and bodice of a dress, over the shoulders and buttoned onto the front waistband! Thomas' polishing of such lost linguistic jewels opens the texts up beyond the mimetic level to involve the reader's life story as well as those of the characters.

Again, her use of allusion invokes the same mechanisms of recall and textual explosion, though operative not in the gap between text and life, but in that between one text and another. Intertextuality, as in the direct quotation of an interchange from Durrell's Balthazar in "Harry & Violet," as well as calling forth memories of reading the Alexandria quartet, foregrounds Thomas' narrative model. For Durrell's intersecting, conflicting personal visions of a chain of actions—written to illustrate, as the epigraph informs us, that E = MC2—are reflected in the spatial and temporal relativity in Thomas' work which makes story, the narrative unfolding of an action, the only reality.

If I have focussed on the semiotic delights of Thomas' texts, it is not to deny there are any mimetic ones. On the contrary, the carefully selected and polished language is the foundation on which is built an examination of the present realities of women's lives as they struggle for a sense of selfhood ("Timbuktu"), wrestle with conflicting demands of children and husband/lovers ("Harry & Violet"), or deal with the complex web of miscomprehensions which are the conventions of relationships between members of the opposite sex ("In the Bleak Mid Winter".) In all these situations, conflicting emotional demands or role expectations are threatening to split women apart. These are the very areas where the struggle of contemporary women to redefine conventions is at its sharpest, because conventions here coincide with our deepest emotional bonds. The dangers of not being involved leads one into the grammar of family life which in "Real Mothers" seems to deny authenticity to women. Only in the intersecting paradoxes of Thomas' narratives can these conflicting demands be reconciled. Fiction becomes a strategy for reinforcing wholeness and integration in a world that threatens to come apart. But it is a trick, this "illusion of depth and solidity," a trick of the distance and the multiple frames. Nonetheless, the illusion of careful surfaces that Thomas has created ensures that there is an appeal to the heart in these stories, just as the self-reflexive nature of the narratives offers the mind the consolation of form.