Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

tories" (14). Ever optimistic, McClung expresses her hope that the future
will bring an end to one-sided representations of history and literature:
Some day . . . there will be new histories written, and they will tell the story of the
years from the standpoint of the people, and the hero will not be any red-handed
assassin who goes through peaceful country places leaving behind him dead
men looking sightlessly up to the sky. The hero [sic] will be the man or woman
who knows and loves and serves. (16)
Never one to complain without proposing an alternative or positing a solution,
McClung herself takes up the task of "talking back," as bell hooks puts
it, to the "official," male-dominated histories and stories of war which traditionally
exclude women's voices and experiences. In 1917, she publishes The
Next of Kin, a collection of woman-centered stories which radically reverse
the notion of who speaks with authority in war; she displaces the voices of
soldiers, of fathers, brothers, sons, renders them almost "missing" by
putting their stories on the margins. Further, McClung refuses to write a
conventionally plotted novel, her text calling for a re-definition of what
constitutes a war story: The Next of Kin is a series of short stories, a chorus
of women's voices, McClung's testament to her belief that "counter" stories
of ordinary citizens and their experiences (especially women) are worthy of
the telling. 11 In her text, she gives voice to mothers, wives, urban women,
rural women, young women, middle-aged women; those who encourage
men to go to war, those who prevent them; those who cope well with adversity,
those who do not. And, as if to underscore the multiplicity of women's
stories, at one point in her fiction, McClung situates her narrator at a train
station, where she watches troops depart for war. What strikes the narrator
is that "men in uniform look much the same" (193) (thereby implying that
soldiers' stories are "uniform"), whereas the people waving goodbye af the
station—Ukrainian women; heavily veiled women; sad-faced mothers;
tired, untidy women; brave little girls and boys; babies; chattering young
people; brides of the day—are "from every station in life" (emphasis added
193). All, she intimates, have stories to tell, and in The Next of Kin, she tells a
range of them. 12
In Rilla oflngleside (1921), Montgomery, too, challenges the traditional
concept that a war story is monolithically comprised of a hero in the trenches;
she re-writes the term "total war" by arguing that war is a catastrophic event
which affects every living creature. Like McClung, she does not allow men's
voices to drown out women's, or men's deeds and experiences to efface
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