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Here There Be Monsters: Wilderness Gothic and Psychic Projection
In these distant solitudes, Menâs 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, âCanadian and Colonial Paintingâ, p. 199
One of Northrop Fryeâs more famous pronouncements about Canada was to delineate the âoriginaryâ Canadian drama as a terrifying psychic allegory that describes the landscape as an engulfing Leviathan. As Frye expressed it, âThe 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 continentâ (âCanadian and Colonial Paintingâ, p. 824). Fryeâs description, appearing in his âConclusionâ 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 âstrangled articulatenessâ (p. 826), âa terror of the soulâ not in response to the landscape itself, but to something in the self that this occupation of the landscape provokes (p. 830)1.
Fryeâs 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 âreadâ itself through a Gothic lens. The maps of early explorers to North America, with illustrations representing grotesque beasts and sections labelled âhere there be monstersâ, evoke the proto-Gothic nature of Europeansâ early encounters with the unknown elements of the âNew Worldâ, which, paradoxically, was faulted for being at once too ânewâ (uncivilized, unhistoried) and too ancient (primeval, wild, barbaric). Hans Holbein the Youngerâs âWorld Mapâ from 1532 decorates the edges of the then uncharted Americas with pictures of cannibals and winged serpents. Matthaeus Merianâs 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 âsuâ, 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 Hogleâs explanation of the Gothicâs location in âantiquated spaceâ (âIntroduction: The Gothic in Western Cultureâ, p. 2) is in terms of a dynamic that is played out on Gothic terrain âbetween the attractions or terrors of a pastâ once controlled by figures of authority âand forces of change that would reject such a past yet still remain held by aspects of itâ (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 âantiquated spaceâ 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 âothersâ who needed to be conquered, contained and converted. Early French and British explorersâ 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 âmarvelousâ, which then became converted into a knowable possession. âThe marvelousâ, Greenblatt writes, âis 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 hatefulâ (Marvelous Possessions, pp. 22â3). The response was either to convert the experience of the âstrangeâ into the familiar â an early expression of the uncanny â 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 âindigenizationâ contributes to a literary history that consistently elides the ways in which the very notion of âCanadaâ is premised on what Diana Brydon has called the slippage from invader to peaceful settler (âCanadaâ, p. 57). Since Canada âcovered over the violence of its origins by naturalizing itself as a nationâ, as Roy Miki argues (âInside the Black Eggâ, 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 âNew Worldâ 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 âAmericaâ typically present the figure as primitive, naked and âsavageâ â 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 âAmericaâ abound in early allegorical figurations. Nicolaes Berchemâs 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 Straetâs etching of Vespucciâs Voyage to America (~1589), monstrous sea creatures surround the ship and prefigure what he will find once he hits land. A siren wearing an âIndianâ head-dress stares into the explorerâs 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 Straetâs engraving of Amerigo Vespucci âdiscoveringâ America (~1575). The illustration shows the European explorer protected by the fetish objects of âdiscoveryâ (armour, imperial flag, astrolabe, sword, crucifix) as he confronts âAmericaâ, naked in a hammock while her cannibal minions prepare a human feast in the distance. Terry Goldieâs 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 âprehistoricâ nature of Aboriginal peoples and cultures (Fear and Temptation, p. 17). As Indigenous scholars Marie Battiste and James (SĂĄkĂ©j) Youngblood Henderson explain, Eurocentric constructions of Indigenous peoples imposed a dichotomy in which âEurope, at the center (Inside), is historical, invents, and progresses, and non-Europe, at the periphery (Outside), is ahistorical, stagnant and unchangingâ (Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, p. 22). Paradoxically, this construction of the New World as a primeval place situated outside historical time â a common figuration of colonized spaces â 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 âdeep terror in regard to natureâ (âConclusionâ, p. 830). As he puts it, âIt 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 manifestâ (p. 830). Fryeâs 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 ânuminousâ, 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 âterrorâ 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 âthe vast unconsciousness of natureâ which seemed âan unanswerable denial of those valuesâ (p. 830).
This dynamic is evident in many early exploration narratives, which corroborate Greenblattâs explication of appeals to the âmarvelousâ â and, one might argue, the Gothic â as a tool for appropriation and possession. Processes of entrapment (including literal kidnappings), by which many Europeans sought to âcivilizeâ 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 âsinister northâ or âengulfing wildernessâ 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 Hearneâs suspicion, in the 1770s, that his Aboriginal guides are trying to deceive him, to John Franklinâs constant fear that the MĂ©tis translators and voyageurs on his 1819â22 journey are plotting mutiny. One of the best examples is Jacques Cartierâs account of his 1534 exploration of the St Lawrence seaway, which relates his proto-Gothic adventures in what he christened âthe land God gave to Cainâ (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 âwould be easy to convert to our holy faithâ (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 âsuspiciouslyâ. This reaches a peak when he witnesses the âgreat ruseâ 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 oneâs 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 Cartierâs benefit the role of fearful Christians, âlifting [their] eyes toward heavenâ and calling out âJesusâ and âMariaâ to convince Cartier that something fearful is about to transpire (pp. 55â6). 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 Cartierâs 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 âdevilsâ â hence the play-within-a-play that they perform for his benefit. The Iroquois are perceptive enough to use a dual performance here: the âdevil showâ in the canoe alongside an acted response to the show, in which they mimic the Catholic âsuperstitionâ 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 otherâs 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 â and hence projecting onto them Gothic capabilities â Cartier finds himself âin great dread of the people of the country, lest they should become aware of our plight and helplessnessâ (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: âto 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 decksâ (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 âles sauvagesâ in terms of devilry and cannibalism, culminating in the famous account of the martyrdom of the Jesuit priest Jean de BrĂ©beuf, 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 BrĂ©beuf, whose martyrdom has become one of the best-known tales of early Canada, was named the first bona fide âsaintâ of Canada in 1930, says something about the Gothic foundations of Canadaâs story of self-invention, and the co-optation of Gothic scenarios in the interests of national self-definition. Indeed, the martyrdom of BrĂ©beuf has inspired a number of literary treatments in more recent Canadian literature, including E. J. Prattâs long poem âBrĂ©beuf and his Brethrenâ (1940). According to Pratt, the Jesuit story is âthe highest heroic episode in Canadian annals ⊠It reads like a myth, with so much of the supernatural in it.â Pratt was right to acknowledge the reasons for the popularity of the BrĂ©beuf story. His poem concludes with the modern-day mission at Sainte Marie built atop the site of the priestsâ martyrdom. The old trails, we are told, have sunk â[u]nder the mould of the centuriesâ, while the priestsâ remains âcome back at the turn / Of the spade with the carbon and calcium char of the bodiesâ. The new shrine is built upon the haunted site, where, in an ominous conclusion that cannot help but echo the torture (and prayers) of BrĂ©beuf that comes earlier: âThe shrines and altars are built anew; the Aves / And prayers ascend, and the Holy Bread is broken.â The âreturnâ of the tortured BrĂ©beuf takes inverted Gothic form in Anishinaabe playwright Daniel David Mosesâs 2000 play BrĂ©beufâs Ghost (see chapter 7 for a discussion of this work), a postcolonial Gothic tale in which BrĂ©beuf returns to haunt, cannibalize, and possess a Huron community, thus turning the tables on the Catholic âcannibalizationâ of Native peoples and the dubious popularity of the BrĂ©beuf story as a national myth.
One of the most famous English accounts of supposed Aboriginal âsavageryâ appears in Samuel Hearneâs A Journey from Prince of Walesâs Fort, published in 1795. Hearneâs description of the famous Coppermine Massacre describes the Native people as being bloodthirsty and sadistic, emblems of âIndian barbarityâ (p. 80). Their âinhuman designâ (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 â[t]he shrieks and groans of the poor expiring wretchesâ, including that of âa young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of ageâ who fell down at his feet, âtwining round their spears like an eelâ (p. 81). The sensationalism of Hearneâs account led to the astounding popularity of his work, yet it...