Quote:
"Anchoring her critique of colonial patriarchy in relationships between women and relationships between men, [Anne] Wheeler is able to employ, with justifiable ease, melodrama's major tropes. While the private sphere is certainly investigated in Wheeler's melodramas, she does not obey the genre's historically defined limits of hearth and home. [...] Wheeler opens the genre to race relations, homosexual and homoerotic narratives, feminist narratives of solidarity and flourishing; and in so doing, she devises a radically liberal vernacular for the Canadian imaginary."
-- Susan Lord

Source:
Lord, Susan. "States of Emergency in the Films of Anne Wheeler." In North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980, edited by William Beard and Jerry White. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. (p. 324)