Review of In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women\u27s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen

Bartlett, Joshua

English

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 13 | No. 2 Article 6
1-20-2015
In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island
Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-
Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-
Rissanen
Joshua Bartlett
University at Albany, State University of New York
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
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This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Bartlett, Joshua. "In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing
by Mary McDonald-Rissanen." The Goose, vol. 13 , no. 2 , article 6, 2015,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/6.
Many “Perfect” Days 
 
In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward 
Island Women’s Nineteenth- and Early 
Twentieth-Century Life Writing by MARY 
MCDONALD-RISSANEN 
McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014 $95.00 
 
Reviewed by JOSHUA BARTLETT 
 
In the Interval of the Wave begins by 
invoking the familiar presence of PEI’s most 
iconic literary figure: Lucy Maud 
Montgomery. Rather than dwelling in 
Montgomery’s considerable shadow, 
however, author Mary McDonald-Rissanen 
“peer[s] into the spectacle of very ordinary 
lives” via dozens of unpublished diaries. 
Considering the intimate nature of this 
archive, it’s fitting that McDonald-Rissanen, 
an Islander herself, cites the discovery of 
the “Line A Day” diary kept by her own 
grandmother, Amy Darby Tanton Andrew, 
as the project’s initial inspiration. But her 
study is more than a general introduction to 
these unfamiliar stories. By combining 
careful textual analysis with historical 
context, In the Interval of the Wave 
explores how women used writing to 
negotiate both the “transplanted 
Victorianism” of nineteenth-century PEI and 
the regular tensions of their everyday lives. 
Some of the diaries span hundreds 
of pages, charting daily routines over the 
course of a lifetime; others, such as Mercy 
Ann Coles’s account of her trip to the 
Quebec Conference in the fall of 1864, 
focus on significant moments and events 
within those lifetimes. Via the apt metaphor 
of sandstone, “the only stone PEI knows,” In 
the Interval of the Wave reads these diaries 
as heteroglossic—“a collection of pieces, 
big and small, unevenly shaped and fused 
on the page, like the sandstone taking its 
form from nature’s force on the beach”—
and cleverly organizes the diarists, eighteen 
in all, into broad types: the “pioneer 
subject,” the “urban bourgeois,” the “farm 
wife,” and so on. In some cases, a chapter 
will focus on a single diarist such as 
“modern professional woman” Lucy Bardon 
Palmer, a teacher in the Island communities 
of Bonshaw and Malpeque from 1884 to 
1890. At other times, McDonald-Rissanen 
combines several texts within the same 
section; a fascinating chapter on “travelling 
women,” for example, juxtaposes the 
“escapades” of five diarists who, at various 
points in their lives, journey across Canada 
and throughout the British Empire, from 
Toronto to Ottawa and from London to 
Bermuda. Although In the Interval of the 
Wave is somewhat limited by the nature of 
its archive itself—McDonald-Rissanen notes 
that “these diarists represent a select group 
of women of Protestant faith who cannot 
speak for their Catholic sisters or for 
women from the Native and Acadian 
communities”—the breadth of its survey is 
nonetheless impressive. 
Throughout In the Interval of the 
Wave, McDonald-Rissanen argues for the 
“subversive” potential of these diaries. In 
one sense, she claims, diaries offered 
discursive spaces in which PEI women could 
both experiment with personal identity and 
assert individual agency. But the act of diary 
writing itself could also be subversive. 
Within a society delineated by a rigid sense 
of propriety and restrictive demands of 
convention, “the moment of inscription,” 
with its implicit assertion of a right to 
privacy, was “one of the precious intervals 
during a woman’s daily routines,” one of 
the few instances when a woman’s time 
was almost her own. 
Because the “life writing” of the 
book’s title refers in particular to these 
1
Bartlett: In the Interval of the Wave
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
original unpublished manuscripts, rather 
than to the broader genre of autobiography 
alone, McDonald-Rissanen specifically 
privileges “the idiosyncratic material 
qualities of diary, paper, and handwriting” 
in her analysis. With attention reminiscent 
of recent work on Emily Dickinson, each 
chapter of In the Interval of the Wave is 
deeply invested in “the pressure . . . put on 
the pencil . . . sketches of birds in the 
margins, the empty space here and there.”1 
Sometimes a question of materiality will 
focus on the diary’s construction itself. Amy 
Darby Tanton Andrew’s “Line A Day,” for 
example, was designed to hold five years of 
diary writing, with each page divided into 
five sections of five lines each. Thus, in 
addition to the spatial constraints for the 
diarist herself, the physical form of the 
“Line A Day” suggests multiple reading 
strategies with unique interpretive 
implications—reading chronologically, for 
example, as opposed to tracing the history 
of a single date over several years. At other 
times, reading a diary poses particular 
graphological questions. In the case of Lucy 
Palmer, the diarist fond of sketching birds, 
McDonald-Rissanen contrasts the “free-
flowing” script of her early diaries with the 
“hurried handwriting and abrupt entries” of 
the 1890s, the decade in which Palmer gave 
birth to her five children. 
McDonald-Rissanen also pays 
careful attention to the interactions 
between her diarists and the natural world. 
“Nature,” she writes, “represent[ed] one 
significant sphere for the woman subject to 
work and play within” and offered “access 
to a vocabulary and a process of diary 
keeping that otherwise couldn’t be 
articulated.” In the Interval of the Wave 
continually stresses this influence of nature 
on “daily rhythms . . . moods [and] 
feelings,” noting, for example, the frequent 
recording of the planting and harvest 
patterns essential to PEI’s agricultural 
economy and highlighting the curious case 
of Maud Jones, who filled her early diary 
entries with lists of bird sightings: “First 
Robin,” “Yellow Hammer,” “Blackbirds.” 
One of the most compelling aspects 
of McDonald-Rissanen’s discussion of the 
natural world is her careful attention to 
what she calls “the subtle nuances of 
weather discourses.” Many of the diary 
entries begin with a brief account of the 
weather: “Lovely fine day” or “Very wet 
day, raining heavy from noon until evening” 
or “One of the veriest cold days.” But rather 
than indicating a generic convention or 
signifying detachment from the 
particularities of the natural world, this 
commonality demonstrates how “[n]ature, 
in spectacles big and small, gives the 
woman writer a point of departure for 
recording her stories.” Even “for urban 
women,” for whom “the weather was at 
best an impediment” to social functions, 
“still the weather gives an opening and 
closing for [the] diary voice, just as the rural 
woman’s agrarian rhythms and diary 
records flow with the climate.” An example: 
Multiple diarists, rural and urban, regularly 
characterize weather as “perfect.” But 
“perfect” weather doesn’t have a defined 
content; as such, describing a day as 
“perfect” is always already speaking in 
relational, not absolute, terms. “Perfect” 
means simply that natural conditions are 
appropriate within a seasonal context, 
suitable for particular agricultural needs, 
amenable to personal preference, and so 
on—a sunny summer afternoon is just as 
“perfect” as a cold winter morning. 
In her conclusion, McDonald-
Rissanen argues that present-day 
idealization of PEI’s Victorian past both 
excludes Island women’s voices and 
2
The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 6
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/6
obscures the actual conditions of 
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 
Island life. One of the major contributions 
of her study, then, is its offer of a critical 
narrative “beyond . . . Confederation, the 
Northumberland Strait, and Anne of Green 
Gables.” In its attention to the materiality of 
writing, as well as its focus on the daily 
presence and challenge of the natural 
world, it offers an interdisciplinary 
approach to the genre of “life writing.” And 
through its archive of unpublished diaries, 
In the Interval of the Wave explores the 
unique experiences of PEI women—as 
“urban bourgeois” and “farm wives,” as 
mothers and teachers, as pioneers and 
travelers—while insisting on the 
importance of each “ordinary” voice and 
the value of each “ordinary” life. 
                                                        
1 See, for example, Susan Howe’s My Emily 
Dickinson (1985), Sharon Cameron’s 
Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s 
Fascicles (1993), Marta Werner’s Emily 
Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, 
Surfaces of Writing (1995), Jen Bervin’s The 
Dickinson Composites (2010) and The 
Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s 
Envelope-Poems (with Marta Werner, 
2012), and Alexandra Socarides’s Dickinson 
Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (2012). 
 
 
 
JOSHUA BARTLETT is a doctoral candidate 
in early American literature at the 
University at Albany, State University of 
New York. 
 
3
Bartlett: In the Interval of the Wave
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015


In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women\u27s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 13 | No. 2 Article 61-20-2015In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward IslandWomen's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-RissanenJoshua BartlettUniversity at Albany, State University of New YorkPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeBartlett, Joshua. "In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women's Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writingby Mary McDonald-Rissanen." The Goose, vol. 13 , no. 2 , article 6, 2015,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/6.Many “Perfect” Days  In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by MARY MCDONALD-RISSANEN McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014 $95.00  Reviewed by JOSHUA BARTLETT  In the Interval of the Wave begins by invoking the familiar presence of PEI’s most iconic literary figure: Lucy Maud Montgomery. Rather than dwelling in Montgomery’s considerable shadow, however, author Mary McDonald-Rissanen “peer[s] into the spectacle of very ordinary lives” via dozens of unpublished diaries. Considering the intimate nature of this archive, it’s fitting that McDonald-Rissanen, an Islander herself, cites the discovery of the “Line A Day” diary kept by her own grandmother, Amy Darby Tanton Andrew, as the project’s initial inspiration. But her study is more than a general introduction to these unfamiliar stories. By combining careful textual analysis with historical context, In the Interval of the Wave explores how women used writing to negotiate both the “transplanted Victorianism” of nineteenth-century PEI and the regular tensions of their everyday lives. Some of the diaries span hundreds of pages, charting daily routines over the course of a lifetime; others, such as Mercy Ann Coles’s account of her trip to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1864, focus on significant moments and events within those lifetimes. Via the apt metaphor of sandstone, “the only stone PEI knows,” In the Interval of the Wave reads these diaries as heteroglossic—“a collection of pieces, big and small, unevenly shaped and fused on the page, like the sandstone taking its form from nature’s force on the beach”—and cleverly organizes the diarists, eighteen in all, into broad types: the “pioneer subject,” the “urban bourgeois,” the “farm wife,” and so on. In some cases, a chapter will focus on a single diarist such as “modern professional woman” Lucy Bardon Palmer, a teacher in the Island communities of Bonshaw and Malpeque from 1884 to 1890. At other times, McDonald-Rissanen combines several texts within the same section; a fascinating chapter on “travelling women,” for example, juxtaposes the “escapades” of five diarists who, at various points in their lives, journey across Canada and throughout the British Empire, from Toronto to Ottawa and from London to Bermuda. Although In the Interval of the Wave is somewhat limited by the nature of its archive itself—McDonald-Rissanen notes that “these diarists represent a select group of women of Protestant faith who cannot speak for their Catholic sisters or for women from the Native and Acadian communities”—the breadth of its survey is nonetheless impressive. Throughout In the Interval of the Wave, McDonald-Rissanen argues for the “subversive” potential of these diaries. In one sense, she claims, diaries offered discursive spaces in which PEI women could both experiment with personal identity and assert individual agency. But the act of diary writing itself could also be subversive. Within a society delineated by a rigid sense of propriety and restrictive demands of convention, “the moment of inscription,” with its implicit assertion of a right to privacy, was “one of the precious intervals during a woman’s daily routines,” one of the few instances when a woman’s time was almost her own. Because the “life writing” of the book’s title refers in particular to these 1Bartlett: In the Interval of the WavePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015original unpublished manuscripts, rather than to the broader genre of autobiography alone, McDonald-Rissanen specifically privileges “the idiosyncratic material qualities of diary, paper, and handwriting” in her analysis. With attention reminiscent of recent work on Emily Dickinson, each chapter of In the Interval of the Wave is deeply invested in “the pressure . . . put on the pencil . . . sketches of birds in the margins, the empty space here and there.”1 Sometimes a question of materiality will focus on the diary’s construction itself. Amy Darby Tanton Andrew’s “Line A Day,” for example, was designed to hold five years of diary writing, with each page divided into five sections of five lines each. Thus, in addition to the spatial constraints for the diarist herself, the physical form of the “Line A Day” suggests multiple reading strategies with unique interpretive implications—reading chronologically, for example, as opposed to tracing the history of a single date over several years. At other times, reading a diary poses particular graphological questions. In the case of Lucy Palmer, the diarist fond of sketching birds, McDonald-Rissanen contrasts the “free-flowing” script of her early diaries with the “hurried handwriting and abrupt entries” of the 1890s, the decade in which Palmer gave birth to her five children. McDonald-Rissanen also pays careful attention to the interactions between her diarists and the natural world. “Nature,” she writes, “represent[ed] one significant sphere for the woman subject to work and play within” and offered “access to a vocabulary and a process of diary keeping that otherwise couldn’t be articulated.” In the Interval of the Wave continually stresses this influence of nature on “daily rhythms . . . moods [and] feelings,” noting, for example, the frequent recording of the planting and harvest patterns essential to PEI’s agricultural economy and highlighting the curious case of Maud Jones, who filled her early diary entries with lists of bird sightings: “First Robin,” “Yellow Hammer,” “Blackbirds.” One of the most compelling aspects of McDonald-Rissanen’s discussion of the natural world is her careful attention to what she calls “the subtle nuances of weather discourses.” Many of the diary entries begin with a brief account of the weather: “Lovely fine day” or “Very wet day, raining heavy from noon until evening” or “One of the veriest cold days.” But rather than indicating a generic convention or signifying detachment from the particularities of the natural world, this commonality demonstrates how “[n]ature, in spectacles big and small, gives the woman writer a point of departure for recording her stories.” Even “for urban women,” for whom “the weather was at best an impediment” to social functions, “still the weather gives an opening and closing for [the] diary voice, just as the rural woman’s agrarian rhythms and diary records flow with the climate.” An example: Multiple diarists, rural and urban, regularly characterize weather as “perfect.” But “perfect” weather doesn’t have a defined content; as such, describing a day as “perfect” is always already speaking in relational, not absolute, terms. “Perfect” means simply that natural conditions are appropriate within a seasonal context, suitable for particular agricultural needs, amenable to personal preference, and so on—a sunny summer afternoon is just as “perfect” as a cold winter morning. In her conclusion, McDonald-Rissanen argues that present-day idealization of PEI’s Victorian past both excludes Island women’s voices and 2The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 6https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/6obscures the actual conditions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Island life. One of the major contributions of her study, then, is its offer of a critical narrative “beyond . . . Confederation, the Northumberland Strait, and Anne of Green Gables.” In its attention to the materiality of writing, as well as its focus on the daily presence and challenge of the natural world, it offers an interdisciplinary approach to the genre of “life writing.” And through its archive of unpublished diaries, In the Interval of the Wave explores the unique experiences of PEI women—as “urban bourgeois” and “farm wives,” as mothers and teachers, as pioneers and travelers—while insisting on the importance of each “ordinary” voice and the value of each “ordinary” life.                                                         1 See, for example, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985), Sharon Cameron’s Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (1993), Marta Werner’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (1995), Jen Bervin’s The Dickinson Composites (2010) and The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-Poems (with Marta Werner, 2012), and Alexandra Socarides’s Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (2012).    JOSHUA BARTLETT is a doctoral candidate in early American literature at the University at Albany, State University of New York.  3Bartlett: In the Interval of the WavePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015

https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1041&amp;context=thegoose

In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women\u27s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen

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