Home Ground and Foreign Territory

Essays on Early Canadian Literature

Janice Fiamengo

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780776621395
• eBook ISBN: 9780776621401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Home Ground and Foreign Territory is an original collection of essays on early Canadian literature in English. Aiming to be both provocative and scholarly, it encompasses a variety of (sometimes opposing) perspectives, subjects, and methods, with the aim of reassessing the field, unearthing neglected texts, and proposing new approaches to canonical authors. Renowned experts in early Canadian literary studies, including D.M.R. Bentley, Mary Jane Edwards, and Carole Gerson, join emerging scholars in a collection distinguished by its clarity of argument and breadth of reference. Together, the essays offer bold and informative contributions to the study of this dynamic literature.

Home Ground and Foreign Territory reaches out far beyond the scope of early Canadian literature. Its multi-disciplinary approach innovates literal studies and appeals to literature specialists and general readership alike.

Reflections on the Situation and Study of Early Canadian Literature in the Long Confederation Period

D. M. R. BENTLEY

In 1886, Matthew Arnold famously responded with condescending scorn to a recently published Primer of American Literature: “Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature, and a Primer of Australian? … [T]hese things are not only absurd; they are also retarding” (11: 165). Two years earlier, the Canadian historian, journalist and champion of cosmopolitanism Joseph Edmund Collins had reacted similarly to the very thought of a “Canadian Literature,” asserting categorically that “[t]here is no Australian Literature, no Heligoland Literature, no Rock-of-Gibraltar Literature [and] neither is there a Canadian Literature” (614). If there were, he added, “we would be obliged to subdivide the term and say ‘a New Brunswick Literature,’ ‘a Nova Scotia Literature,’ ‘a British Columbia Literature.’” Not much less than a century later, Douglas Lochhead felt it necessary to preface the volumes in the University of Toronto Press’s Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint series, of which he was the general editor, with a note for all the Virginias asserting that “Yes, there is a Canadian literature. It does exist” (v). To the extent that they were opposed to the idea of treating the literature of any country or region as a self-contained, hermetically-sealed entity, I entirely agree with Arnold and Collins, but it has nevertheless been my great pleasure and privilege to play a part over the last thirty years in confirming that there is indeed a Canadian literature—a distinctive body of poetry and prose written in and about Canada—with subdivisions of the sort that Collins mentions, and in establishing that the English Canadian literary continuity not only begins some two centuries prior to Confederation but from the very beginning contains texts that are worthy of respect, close study, and classroom space.

None of the work done on Canadian literature in the last three decades and more would have been possible, of course, without the trail-blazing and groundbreaking efforts of preceding generations of Canadian literary scholars such as (to name only three who had a special impact on me) Malcolm Ross, Michael Gnarowski, and Carl F. Klinck. Each of these scholars made important, individual contributions to our understanding of the authors and areas that they studied, but collectively they also created a literary equivalent of the great Historical Atlas of Canada (1987–1990), an inspirationally collaborative work whose “national, regional, provincial, and thematic” plates most definitely constitute, in the words of its Foreword by William G. Dean, “a sound and lasting reference work, and … a quarry for specialized research by future generations of scholars” (n.p.). In my case, that specialized research has been largely in the field of Canadian poetry, with occasional forays into fiction and non-fictional prose, all undertaken on the premise that, no matter who its author or what its date, a text must be assumed at the outset of study and analysis to possess intellectual, formal, and aesthetic interest and integrity as well as historical and cultural significance and value. By applying this premise to works as diverse as Thomas Cary’s Abram’s Plains (1789), Charles G. D. Roberts’s New York Nocturnes (1898), and A. M. Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” (1948), I hope that I have succeeded, at least sporadically, in revealing the shapes within the texts that were merely waiting to be found, admired, enjoyed, and seriously studied. I hope, too, that as editor of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews for over thirty years (is this perhaps a record for a scholarly journal?) and as editor of the Canadian Poetry Press for over twenty, I have provided other scholars with some hospitable surroundings in which to publish their own contributions to the study of what Ross so aptly calls “the impossible sum of our traditions.”

Before abandoning the autobiographical mode in favour of less cloying subjects, I would like briefly to extol and instance the pleasures and benefits of recovering, reinvigorating, and extensively editing and annotating Canadian texts, for some of the most memorable moments in my excavations have occurred during the process of annotating works of poetry and prose that I mistakenly thought I had adequately researched and understood. For instance, it was while annotating the description of the Great Lakes in Abram’s Plains that, with the help of a superb research assistant, Michael Williams, I discovered that Cary lifted the bizarre notion that Lake Erie is infested with “serpents … whose noisome breath,/By man inhal’d, conveys the venom’d death” (27–28) from Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 (1778) and, from this, established that Carver’s book and its (in)famous map provided Cary with the raw material for several sections of his poem. After this had led to additional findings of a similar nature during the annotation of Cornwall Bayley’s Canada (1806), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village (1825, 1834), Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), and other early long poems, the accumulated evidence prompted the suggestion in Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada that the “compositional setting” or “primal scene” in which these poems were conceived might be envisaged as a tableau containing the poet seated at a writing desk with “some engaging travel accounts open to his left and some admired English poems open to his right” (51). In his 1965 “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada, Northrop Frye is right to stress that Canadian literature is “a part of Canadian life” and rewards study as such, but he is very clearly wrong both in exiling it from the realm of “verbal relationships” and in regarding that realm as “autonomous” (821–822; Anatomy of Criticism 122, 350; and see Bentley, “Jumping to Conclusions” 58–60).

Of a very different but no less revealing nature was a discovery made recently while identifying biblical allusions for the annotations to Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) for the Norton Critical Editions series (which fell to me, incidentally, because the most qualified person for the job, Gerald Lynch, had already done a magisterial edition of it). When, in the opening sketch of the book, Dean Drone mistakenly situates a garbled biblical text concerning a “publican” (that is, a tax collector rather than, as he seems to believe, a tavern keeper) in “Matthew Six” (18), he does more than reveal his lamentably shaky grasp of the Bible and the English language: as Leacock’s original readers would have immediately recognized, he alludes to a text that contains the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer and, more to the point, several of Christianity’s central exhortations and ethical principles, including Christ’s injunctions against the public display of charitable acts, the accumulation of wealth, and the vanity of personal decoration, which is to say, the very things that Josh Smith conspicuously does and displays in the course of the sketch and, indeed, the book as a whole. Surely, there could be few more striking instances of authorial subtlety and sprezzatura than gesturing towards a work’s satirical norms by way of an erroneous biblical allusion? Almost needless to say, annotating texts can be tedious and frustrating but it can also be highly revealing and educational and, whatever the case, it is a—perhaps the—foundational activity that is essential if scholarship, criticism, and even theorization in the field of Canadian literature are to proceed in an informed and trustworthy manner.¹

Looking back over the last couple of decades without the self-reflecting rear-view mirror of autobiography, it is wonderful to see the vast amount of important and valuable work that has been done by feminist and postcolonial scholars to unmask and countervail the social and literary injustices done to people and peoples in Canada who have fallen afoul in one way or another of European hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Inevitably, perhaps, these achievements have led to other kinds of distortions that are less damaging because primarily academic but nevertheless worth remarking and addressing, an obvious case in point being the privileging of some kinds of texts over others, for example (under the influence of feminism), the works of Anna Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, and, above all, Susanna Moodie² over those of more-or-less contemporaneous male visitors and settlers. Among these relatively scanted male writers are some of the most significant and influential authors of early Canada, including John Howison, whose Sketches of Upper Canada (1821) exerted an obvious influence on Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and provided much of the inspiration for the opening sketch of Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker (1836); William “Tiger” Dunlop, whose Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada for the Use of Emigrants (1832) was also an influence on Traill and a shaping force in perceptions of Upper Canada; and Samuel Strickland, whose Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853) warrants more attention than it has received as a complement and supplement to the settler writings of his two sisters. Another partial casualty of recent interests and concerns as well as of other factors such as changes in high-school curricula has been poetry, which responds less readily than prose to issues of race, class, and gender: indeed, no poem published before 1880 is so much as mentioned in the new Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009), which thus consigns to a literary-historical memory hole the thousands of poems on a myriad of subjects that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, books, and unpublished manuscripts over the previous century and more.

A related but different problem that arises from the application of more-or-less recent ideological and theoretical paradigms and approaches to early Canadian literature is that they frequently make assumptions that are anachronistic and, on the basis of these, mount arguments and draw conclusions that are unwarranted, unfair, or simply wrong. For example, as Colin Kidd has demonstrated of the period up to 1800 (and, I think, his conclusions hold until well into the nineteenth century), “the historical evidence fail[s] to support current preoccupations of scholars in a variety of disciplines with the issue of ‘otherness,’” the principal reason being that “racial, linguistic and cultural diversity” did not generate an us/other binarism but, rather, “a series of theological problems” and speculations (289). If all peoples are descended from Noah, then how did they become so diverse? The confounding of tongues during the building of the Tower of Babel provided part of the answer, but nagging questions persisted and, to some extent, still do: how did the ancestors of the Native peoples get from Mesopotamia to the Americas? Why were Noah’s skills lost? In what ways do Native spiritual beliefs resemble or differ from those of the ancient Hebrews? Writers such as Bayley and John Strachan who pondered such questions and the scholarship and theories surrounding them “did not think in essentialist terms of innate ethnic difference but historically in terms of a process of differentiation from a common stock” (Kidd 290) that occurred over the course of time and as a result of environmental pressures.³ To condemn early Canadian writers for failing to exhibit attitudes consonant with the assumptions and preconceptions of postcolonialism and cultural studies is to exhibit an egregious and curiously elitist combination of ignorance, condescension, and self-congratulation that is more inquisitional than inquisitive, Savonarolan than scholarly. By the same token, to read Frances Widdowson’s and Albert Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation without recognizing that it is riddled with assumptions about cultural and social development that derive from the four stages theory (which governed perceptions of Canada’s Native peoples in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) is to enter the company of those whose approach to Canadian literature and Canadian culture rests on a mistaken belief in the pastness of the past and the newness of the present. The past is only partly a foreign country; it is also (to adapt a phrase from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”) now and Canada. As a core component of that present past, early Canadian literature is continuously open and available to old and new approaches: like a piece of shot silk, it continually reveals different patterns and effects when viewed from different perspectives and in different lights.

For some time now there has been a great deal of buzz and bluster at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (and among university administrators seeking new code words for budget and staff cuts) about the need for greater interdisciplinarity, cross-disciplinarity, and the like. To my mind, what is needed in early Canadian literary studies is not the hasty and opportunistic insertion of fingers into different pies that passes for interdisciplinarity in many corners of our discipline but a broadening and deepening of awareness of all the environments—physical, aesthetic, social, scientific, economic, political, national, international … —in which writing occurs and, with this, a sense of the ideas and events that were prominent, “in the air,” part of the “mood,” or merely givens in the environment at the time. Take, as a small example, the white marble “palace” on the “lofty hill” (208) in Archibald Lampman’s “The Land of Pallas” (1900). A few years ago, a sufficient commentary on the structure and its context would have consisted of one or more observations to the effect that “The Land of Pallas” is the utopian counterpart of “The City of the End of Things”; that it bears the imprint of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890); and that it is a reflection of Lampman’s Fabian socialism. Such comments might have been augmented by the observation that the poem is written in hexameters, a form consonant with the reference to classical Greek mythology in its title and with the visual allusion in the white “marble roofs” of the “palace” of its “all-wise mother” (208–209) to the Acropolis in Athens, whose patron goddess was Pallas Athena. None of these observations is obsolete; on the contrary, they provide a basis for wider considerations such as the relationship of the “all-wise mother” to the Theosophical ideas that appear elsewhere in Lampman’s work of the 1890s; the relationship between the white marble palace of the poem and the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition that Lampman yearned to visit and nevertheless celebrated in “To Chicago”;⁴ and the relationship of the poem’s agrarian vision to the therapeutic use of the natural world not only in Lampman’s work, but also in the work of other members of the Confederation group. In short, the “palace” on the “lofty hill” in “The Land of Pallas” is a luminous node of confluence where personal, literary, social, and historical contexts interacted and remain for the scholar to identify and present in a nuanced manner.

For scholars of early Canadian literature there is arguably a further responsibility, or at least challenge, presented by their field—namely, that of showing not only the relationship of a given text to the phenomena that surrounded and shaped it but also, where possible, to future developments in Canadian literature and culture. (Almost needless to say, early Canadian texts are fascinating in their own right and do not need to be seen as anticipating or aligning with later ones, but they can also display new facets when seen in that light.) Is it possible that W. D. Lighthall, who told Duncan Campbell Scott in 1943 that he “always felt” that “The Land of Pallas” was Lampman’s “ideal of a future Canada” (Lighthall), had the poem in mind when he put his politically progressive ideas into practice as mayor of Westmount (1903–1905) and as a member of the Royal Metropolitan Park Commission (1911–1913), the body responsible for the planning of greater Montreal? Is it possible to see in the peripheral component of Lampman’s poem—the “gray storehouse” inscribed with “tales and tragic stories” and filled with “traps...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication Page
• Introduction: Home Ground and Foreign Territory
• Reflections on the Situation and Study of Early Canadian Literature in the Long Confederation Period
• Periodicals First: The Beginnings of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver
• Rediscovering Re(Dis)covering: Back to the Second-Wave Feminist Future
• Lady Audley’s Secret versus The Abbot: Reconsidering the Form of Canadian Historical Fiction through the Content of Library Catalogues
• “Not Legitimately Gothic”: Spiritualism and Early Canadian Literature
• The Canadian Canon, Being “On the Other Side of the Latch” and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Anglo-Indian Memoir
• The Duelling Authors: Settler Imperatives and Agnes Laut’s Denigration of Pierre Falcon
• Anna’s Monuments: The Work of Mourning, the Gender of Melancholia and Canadian Women’s War Writing
• Hidden Hunger: Early Canadian Women Poets
• Judging by Appearances: Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the Ontology of Early Canadian Spirits
• Hallowed Spaces/Public Places: Women’s Literary Voices and The Acadian Recorder 1850–1870
• Who’s In and Who’s Out: Recovering Minor Authors and the Pesky Question of Critical Evaluation
• Texts and Contexts: CEECT’s Scholarly Editions
• Contributors