Canadian Gothic

Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention

Cynthia Sugars

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783160778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book explores the Gothic tradition in Canadian literature by tracing a distinctive reworking of the British Gothic in Canada. It traces the ways the Gothic genre was reinvented for a specifically Canadian context. On the one hand, Canadian writers expressed anxiety about the applicability of the British Gothic tradition to the colonies; on the other, they turned to the Gothic for its vitalising rather than unsettling potential. After charting this history of Gothic infusion, Canadian Gothic turns its attention to the body of Aboriginal and diasporic writings that respond to this discourse of national self-invention from a post-colonial perspective. These counter-narratives unsettle the naturalising force of this invented history, rendering the sense of Gothic comfort newly strange. The Canadian Gothic tradition has thus been a conflicted one, which reimagines the Gothic as a form of cultural sustenance. This volume offers an important reconsideration of the Gothic legacy in Canada.

1

Here There Be Monsters: Wilderness Gothic and Psychic Projection

In these distant solitudes, Men’s minds seem to partake of the wildness of the country they live in.

David Thompson, Narrative of Explorations in Western North America, p. 89

Thus a large tract of vacant land may well affect the people living near it as too much cake does a small boy: an unknown but quite possibly horrible Something stares at them in the dark.

Northrop Frye, ‘Canadian and Colonial Painting’, p. 199

One of Northrop Frye’s more famous pronouncements about Canada was to delineate the ‘originary’ Canadian drama as a terrifying psychic allegory that describes the landscape as an engulfing Leviathan. As Frye expressed it, ‘The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence … [T]o enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent’ (‘Canadian and Colonial Painting’, p. 824). Frye’s description, appearing in his ‘Conclusion’ to the 1965 Literary History of Canada, is written in direct reference to the chapters on exploration literature that open the literary history, but he envisions in these early works a prototypical statement about Canadian culture and identity that would inform a Canadian Gothic sensibility thereafter, a characteristic that he would later describe as a ‘strangled articulateness’ (p. 826), ‘a terror of the soul’ not in response to the landscape itself, but to something in the self that this occupation of the landscape provokes (p. 830)1.

Frye’s acuity in perceiving an originary Gothic sensibility in early writings about Canada is instructive. Indeed, from very early on, writings about the place that we now call Canada were integrally caught up with discourses of the Gothic, which sometimes took the form of rejections of the Gothic, as I will argue in chapter 2. One might say that Canada learned to ‘read’ itself through a Gothic lens. The maps of early explorers to North America, with illustrations representing grotesque beasts and sections labelled ‘here there be monsters’, evoke the proto-Gothic nature of Europeans’ early encounters with the unknown elements of the ‘New World’, which, paradoxically, was faulted for being at once too ‘new’ (uncivilized, unhistoried) and too ancient (primeval, wild, barbaric). Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘World Map’ from 1532 decorates the edges of the then uncharted Americas with pictures of cannibals and winged serpents. Matthaeus Merian’s seventeenth-century etching entitled New World Landscape reproduces a primeval landscape that is outside historical time, including pictures of exploding volcanoes, scorpions, serpents, crocodiles and an array of strange beasts, including the mythical figure of the ‘su’, a giant squirrel that was said to carry its young on its back and cannibalize them (Dickenson, Drawn from Life, p. 42). Such expressions of historical disjuncture are a frequent motif in Gothic writings, which often project anxieties about present social and cultural contexts into a distant past. Jerrold Hogle’s explanation of the Gothic’s location in ‘antiquated space’ (‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, p. 2) is in terms of a dynamic that is played out on Gothic terrain ‘between the attractions or terrors of a past’ once controlled by figures of authority ‘and forces of change that would reject such a past yet still remain held by aspects of it’ (p. 3). As I will argue in chapter 2, this discourse of historical dissonance would inform the particular ways the Gothic would be reconfigured in a Canadian context, particularly as the identification of an adequately ‘antiquated space’ became more problematic with settler anxieties about colonial priority2.

There are several features of European exploration and colonization that helped to bolster the pervasiveness of subsequent Gothic expression in discourse about the North American colonies. First, it is important to recognize the radical epistemological disparity between European colonizers and the Indigenous cultures they encountered. This meeting resulted in such a profound clash of epistemological, cultural and spiritual systems that the ability or willingness of Europeans to comprehend Indigenous perspectives, trained as Europeans were within dichotomous models of relating to difference, was barred from the outset. Aboriginal epistemologies were easily dismissed as retrograde, primitive, barbaric, pagan and, eventually, invisible. If Aboriginal peoples inhabited a holistic world flush with spiritual and magical presence, Europeans constructed Aboriginal people as demonic and threatening ‘others’ who needed to be conquered, contained and converted. Early French and British explorers’ descriptions of the vast and sublime landscapes of North America and the Indigenous peoples they encountered there were thus often characterized by aggression and resistance. Indeed, Native peoples were equated with the landscape as a monstrous presence that threatened to overwhelm the European colonizer from without (as an external threat) and within (as an intrapsychic threat to civilized mores and rational sanity). When later writers turned to the Gothic to generate terror or dread, it was frequently to textualize a form of White history which cast colonized or invaded peoples and the colonial landscape as a ghostly or monstrous threat to the civilised (White) world.

Second, European encounters with the New World were marked by what American literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt has described as an encounter with the ‘marvelous’, which then became converted into a knowable possession. ‘The marvelous’, Greenblatt writes, ‘is the whole complex system of representation … through which people … apprehended, and thence possessed or discarded, the unfamiliar, the alien, the terrible, the desirable, and the hateful’ (Marvelous Possessions, pp. 22–3). The response was either to convert the experience of the ‘strange’ into the familiar – an early expression of the uncanny – or to regard the New World as something foreign and therefore threatening (and hence, in need of being subdued). The resulting occlusion of the history of invasion and colonization into narratives of settlement, White nationhood, and ‘indigenization’ contributes to a literary history that consistently elides the ways in which the very notion of ‘Canada’ is premised on what Diana Brydon has called the slippage from invader to peaceful settler (‘Canada’, p. 57). Since Canada ‘covered over the violence of its origins by naturalizing itself as a nation’, as Roy Miki argues (‘Inside the Black Egg’, p. 4), the nation opened itself up to a haunting from within, a form of instability that requires a repeated and increasingly urgent insistence on White legitimation, authenticity and, by extension, historical antiquity.

The supposedly monstrous qualities of the ‘New World’ were one of its early defining features, aligned, via an uncanny inversion, with the desire to identify a new, unspoiled Eden. As a journey into the unknown, travel to North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, for many, experienced as a descent into psychic disarray which was recontained via highly structured depictions of European rationality and supremacy. Allegorical representations of ‘America’ typically present the figure as primitive, naked and ‘savage’ – an encapsulated embodiment of Western projections of the psychic anxieties that accrued around the Americas: at once threatening and conquerable (and, by extension, needing to be conquered expressly because they were threatening). Depictions of a demonic and barbaric ‘America’ abound in early allegorical figurations. Nicolaes Berchem’s depiction in Allegory of America from the mid-1600s represents America with her foot on top of a severed male human head (with features that resemble a European explorer). In Jan van der Straet’s etching of Vespucci’s Voyage to America (~1589), monstrous sea creatures surround the ship and prefigure what he will find once he hits land. A siren wearing an ‘Indian’ head-dress stares into the explorer’s boat and clutches a severed and speared human arm, while Vespucci gazes back, swinging his talismanic quadrant. One of the most famous emblematic renditions in this tradition is van der Straet’s engraving of Amerigo Vespucci ‘discovering’ America (~1575). The illustration shows the European explorer protected by the fetish objects of ‘discovery’ (armour, imperial flag, astrolabe, sword, crucifix) as he confronts ‘America’, naked in a hammock while her cannibal minions prepare a human feast in the distance. Terry Goldie’s ground-breaking discussion of representations of Indigenous peoples in Canadian literature delineates the semiotic cluster of the sexual, the savage and the anachronistic in colonialist accounts of New World peoples. One can recognize in this an almost proto-Gothic rendition, supplemented in this context by an emphasis on the ‘prehistoric’ nature of Aboriginal peoples and cultures (Fear and Temptation, p. 17). As Indigenous scholars Marie Battiste and James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson explain, Eurocentric constructions of Indigenous peoples imposed a dichotomy in which ‘Europe, at the center (Inside), is historical, invents, and progresses, and non-Europe, at the periphery (Outside), is ahistorical, stagnant and unchanging’ (Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, p. 22). Paradoxically, this construction of the New World as a primeval place situated outside historical time – a common figuration of colonized spaces – would lead to subsequent figurations of the New World as a de-gothicized space, which lacked a sufficiently antique culture and lineage to grant it an adequately haunted legacy.

Northrop Frye is famous for his comment that early Canadian literature is marked by a ‘deep terror in regard to nature’ (‘Conclusion’, p. 830). As he puts it, ‘It is not a terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest’ (p. 830). Frye’s account echoes descriptions of the sublime, made famous in Romantic landscape aesthetics since Edmund Burke, but for Frye the Canadian experience has an additional element, since the terror in regard to nature is a repressed sensation that one does not, in effect, belong there. This is not because the individual is confronted with the ‘numinous’, which aligns with the concept of the Gothic sublime as explicated by Vijay Mishra, but rather because the individual is confronted with his inarticulate illegitimacy with regard to the space he inhabits. Ignoring the perspective of Indigenous peoples, who did not experience the same ‘terror’ in their surroundings, Frye was nevertheless perceptive in his account of the Gothic nature of first contact and subsequent settler experience, in which the European had nothing but his civilized presumptions to cling to when confronted by ‘the vast unconsciousness of nature’ which seemed ‘an unanswerable denial of those values’ (p. 830).

This dynamic is evident in many early exploration narratives, which corroborate Greenblatt’s explication of appeals to the ‘marvelous’ – and, one might argue, the Gothic – as a tool for appropriation and possession. Processes of entrapment (including literal kidnappings), by which many Europeans sought to ‘civilize’ Aboriginal peoples, became projected onto the people and landscape themselves, whereby the European felt himself to be vulnerable to treachery and terror at the hands of Native people and the environment. Metaphors of the ‘sinister north’ or ‘engulfing wilderness’ are part of this dynamic, but forms of psychic projection are even more clearly manifest in the paranoia that is evident in numerous exploration accounts, from Samuel Hearne’s suspicion, in the 1770s, that his Aboriginal guides are trying to deceive him, to John Franklin’s constant fear that the Métis translators and voyageurs on his 1819–22 journey are plotting mutiny. One of the best examples is Jacques Cartier’s account of his 1534 exploration of the St Lawrence seaway, which relates his proto-Gothic adventures in what he christened ‘the land God gave to Cain’ (The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, p. 10). His narrative reveals his increasing bafflement at what he gradually interprets as the threatening behaviour of the Iroquois peoples he encounters. Cartier begins by assuming that he fully comprehends the people and that they ‘would be easy to convert to our holy faith’ (p. 23). Part of his method is to perform his supremacy through the use of flags, crosses, weapons, trumpets and other regalia as a means of bedazzling his would-be subjects. However, when Cartier returns from France in 1535 with two Iroquois captives he had abducted one year earlier, he perceives signs of distrust among the people who he believes are behaving ‘suspiciously’. This reaches a peak when he witnesses the ‘great ruse’ that the Iroquois attempt to trick him with to stop him from continuing his explorations up-river to Hochelaga (Montreal):

They dressed up three men as devils, arraying them in black and white dog-skins, with horns as long as one’s arm and their faces coloured black as coal … And as they drew near, the one in the middle made a wonderful harangue, but they passed by our ships without once turning their faces towards us, and proceeded to head for the shore and to run their canoe on land. (p. 55)

This theatrical performance takes on a kind of dramatic irony when the remaining Iroquois, having watched their fellows in the canoe, perform for Cartier’s benefit the role of fearful Christians, ‘lifting [their] eyes toward heaven’ and calling out ‘Jesus’ and ‘Maria’ to convince Cartier that something fearful is about to transpire (pp. 55–6). This is a form of Gothic colonial mimicry par excellence, unsettling, as a form of distorted uncanny doubling, in the very ways Homi Bhabha described it. Readers realize that the Iroquois have interpreted Cartier’s activities (including his prior erection of a giant cross before which they were forced to kneel) as a performance no different in kind from their own dressed-up ‘devils’ – hence the play-within-a-play that they perform for his benefit. The Iroquois are perceptive enough to use a dual performance here: the ‘devil show’ in the canoe alongside an acted response to the show, in which they mimic the Catholic ‘superstition’ of Cartier and the other Frenchmen. While they are trying to stop Cartier from trespassing further into their territory, Cartier assumes that the Native people are trying to put a curse on him and his men. In fact, the Iroquois are resorting to the very tactics Cartier and his men have modelled for them: an act of deception through a display of theatricalized Gothicism in an effort to control the other’s movements.

This battle of competing bedevilments reaches its height when the French fort succumbs to scurvy in the winter of 1535/6. Believing that the Iroquois have applied a curse on his men – and hence projecting onto them Gothic capabilities – Cartier finds himself ‘in great dread of the people of the country, lest they should become aware of our plight and helplessness’ (p. 78). Cartier becomes convinced that the Iroquois men are lingering outside his fort waiting for the moment to attack. In a wonderful twist on mystifying theatricality, Cartier and his dying men barricade themselves inside the ship and hammer on its sides in order to give the impression of robust manual labour, with the additional detail of Cartier emerging from the ship and forcefully beating his few remaining healthy men as a show of their continued vigour: ‘to hide the sickness, [Cartier]… would pretend to try to beat them, and vociferating and throwing sticks at them, would drive them back on board the ships, indicating to the savages by signs that he was making all his men work below the decks’ (p. 78). Paradoxically, it is the Iroquois who appear most rational, watching these dumbshows from afar. Slowly it emerges that the Iroquois are not planning an attack, but instead direct the Frenchmen to the boughs of white cedar which can provide a cure for scurvy. The culmination of this series of suspicions, however, occurs the following spring. In a weird re-enactment of the foregoing scene, it is the Iroquois men who are surrounded by the French and herded into the fort, only to have their leader Donnaconna seized and kidnapped on board the French ship bound for France.

European projections of monstrous behaviour onto Indigenous peoples are a recurring element of early exploration writings about Canada. The Jesuit Relations from the 1600s likewise describe ‘les sauvages’ in terms of devilry and cannibalism, culminating in the famous account of the martyrdom of the Jesuit priest Jean de Brébeuf, who was tortured and burned at the stake by the Iroquois in 1649 in an inverted ritual of Christian baptism. The details of the martyrdom, provided in the relation written by Christophe Regnaut, dwell in obsessive detail on every aspect of the torture, from the eating of his roasted flesh to the requisite scalping and removal of his beating heart, to the drinking of his blood. That Brébeuf, whose martyrdom has become one of the best-known tales of early Canada, was named the first bona fide ‘saint’ of Canada in 1930, says something about the Gothic foundations of Canada’s story of self-invention, and the co-optation of Gothic scenarios in the interests of national self-definition. Indeed, the martyrdom of Brébeuf has inspired a number of literary treatments in more recent Canadian literature, including E. J. Pratt’s long poem ‘Brébeuf and his Brethren’ (1940). According to Pratt, the Jesuit story is ‘the highest heroic episode in Canadian annals … It reads like a myth, with so much of the supernatural in it.’ Pratt was right to acknowledge the reasons for the popularity of the Brébeuf story. His poem concludes with the modern-day mission at Sainte Marie built atop the site of the priests’ martyrdom. The old trails, we are told, have sunk ‘[u]nder the mould of the centuries’, while the priests’ remains ‘come back at the turn / Of the spade with the carbon and calcium char of the bodies’. The new shrine is built upon the haunted site, where, in an ominous conclusion that cannot help but echo the torture (and prayers) of Brébeuf that comes earlier: ‘The shrines and altars are built anew; the Aves / And prayers ascend, and the Holy Bread is broken.’ The ‘return’ of the tortured Brébeuf takes inverted Gothic form in Anishinaabe playwright Daniel David Moses’s 2000 play Brébeuf’s Ghost (see chapter 7 for a discussion of this work), a postcolonial Gothic tale in which Brébeuf returns to haunt, cannibalize, and possess a Huron community, thus turning the tables on the Catholic ‘cannibalization’ of Native peoples and the dubious popularity of the Brébeuf story as a national myth.

One of the most famous English accounts of supposed Aboriginal ‘savagery’ appears in Samuel Hearne’s A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort, published in 1795. Hearne’s description of the famous Coppermine Massacre describes the Native people as being bloodthirsty and sadistic, emblems of ‘Indian barbarity’ (p. 80). Their ‘inhuman design’ (p. 77) is to butcher a group of Esquimaux in their sleep, and Hearne finds himself at a loss to stop it, describing in the process ‘[t]he shrieks and groans of the poor expiring wretches’, including that of ‘a young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age’ who fell down at his feet, ‘twining round their spears like an eel’ (p. 81). The sensationalism of Hearne’s account led to the astounding popularity of his work, yet it...