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Australasian
Canadian Studies
VOL 28, No 1, 2010
Editor: Robyn Morris,
University of Wollongong
Australasian Canadian Studies (ACS) is an international, multidisciplinary journal
of Canadian studies. ACS is published twice-yearly and is the official journal of the
Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ).
ACS has, since its founding in 1983, provided a forum for a diverse body of
scholarship. It welcomes theoretically informed articles from the Humanities and Social
Sciences with a Canadian and comparative Australian–New Zealand–Canadian focus.
These articles will contribute, but are not limited, to discussions on: anthropology,
architecture, communications, cultural studies, economics, education, film and media,
gender studies, geography, history, Indigenous studies, information technology, legal
studies, literature, musicology, political science, race and ethnicity studies, sociology,
Quebec and regional studies, theatre.
ACS is a double blind refereed publication that features articles (5,000–8,000
words), review essays (2,000–4,000 words), and book reviews (1,000–2,000 words).
ACS welcomes clearly written, scholarly articles based on original research. Please
ensure your manuscript conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. Articles
can be submitted electronically as an MS Word document. The title, author’s name
and address should appear on a separate cover sheet. To further preserve anonymity
during the refereeing process, the author’s identity should not be exposed in the text
or notes. Notes should be placed at the end of the article and before the Works Cited
list. An abstract and list of keywords should accompany your initial submission. If
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Submission of an article to ACS will be taken as an assurance that this article is
not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Editorial Correspondence, including submission of manuscripts, inquiries and
books for review should be sent electronically to:
Dr Robyn Morris
Editor, Australasian Canadian Studies,
Faculty of Arts,
English Literatures Program
Bld 19, University of Wollongong,
NSW 2522, Australia.
Email: robynm@uow.edu.au
editor@acsanz.org.au
Copyright: Australasian Canadian Studies and Contributors 2011 ISSN 1832-5408
Printed by: Print and Distribution Services, University of Wollongong
Graphic Design: Pia Petre, Graphic Designer
Australasian Canadian Studies
EDITOR
Robyn MORRIS
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Immediate Past Editor
Sonia MYCAK
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
EDITORIAL BOARD
Aidan BYRNE University of Wolverhampton, UK
John CARTER Ministry of Tourism & Culture, Canada
Nicolas DOUAY Université Paris Diderot, France
Evelyn ELLERMAN Athabasca University, Canada
Sneja GUNEW University of British Columbia, Canada
Helen GILBERT University of London, England
Stewart GILL University of Queensland, Australia
Coral Anne HOWELLS University of London, England
Chris HUBBARD Curtin University, Australia
Robert JOSEPH Waikato University, New Zealand
Alan LAWSON University of Queensland, Australia
John LENNOX York University, Canada
Timothy MALONY National Library of Canada, Canada
Brad MORSE Waikato University, New Zealand
Lianne MOYES Université de Montréal, Canada
Kim NOSSAL Queen’s University, Canada
David STAINES University of Ottawa, Canada
Cynthia SUGARS University of Ottawa, Canada
Gerry TURCOTTE University of Notre Dame, Australia
John WARHURST Australian National University, Australia
The Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ)
ACSANZ is a multi-disciplinary organization that recognises and encourages interest
in Canadian studies and aims to promote greater understanding of Canada at all
educational levels and in all disciplines.
ACSANZ has over 200 members, most of whom are academics and postgraduate
students engaged in research and/or teaching about Canada. The organisation:
• Promotes research and teaching of Canadian Studies in Australia and New
Zealand
• Supports, encourages and awards scholarship in Canadian Studies by
students and early career academics in Australia and New Zealand
• Publishes a peer-reviewed scholarly journal - Australasian Canadian Studies a multi-disciplinary journal of Canadian Studies
• Convenes a biennial multi-disciplinary conference in Canadian Studies
• Convenes the distinctive Federation Dialogues Series (in collaboration
with the Canadian High Commission in Canberra), which brings together
eminent Canadians and Australians to discuss issues of interest to both
countries in a moderated public dialogue
• Provides news and information to members about Canadian Studies
opportunities and events, including grants, scholarships, conferences and
publications
• Collaborates with other organisations and national associations for Canadian
Studies on events, activities and publications
ACSANZ is a member of the International Council for Canadian Studies (ICCS)
and receives support from the Government of Canada, through the Canadian High
Commissions in Canberra and Wellington. The Government of Canada and the
International Council for Canadian Studies (ICCS) also provide a range of grants and
awards designed to promote research and teaching in Canadian Studies. For further
information please visit the ACSANZ website: www.acsanz.org.au
AUSTRALASIAN CANADIAN STUDIES
Volume 28 Number 1 2010
ARTICLES
Cleaning Gives Me Pleasure’: Feminism and Housework in Carol Shields’s Unless
Fiona Tolen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Saying Yes with an Outreached Hand: Homelessness and Hospitality in Canadian
and Australian Literature for Young People
Debra Dudek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Men Without Women: Men Without Women: Coping with Loneliness and
Isolation on the British Columbia Frontier
Robert Hogg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Reeling Back Representation in Indigenous Filmmaking: Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes
Andrea Mackinlay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ Returns: Ethnicity and the Search for Home in
Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature
Katrin Urshel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
“Who are You Now?” Cultural Re-inscription in Indigenous Captivity Narratives
Evelyn Ellerman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69
BOOK REVIEWS
Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788-1868. Tony
Moores, 2010.
John Carter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Eds. Cynthia
Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2009.
Coral Anne Howells. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87
Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo. Eds. Aritha van Herk and Conny SteenmanMarcusse, Netherlands: Barkhuis Publishing, 2009.
Dorothy Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Cleaning Gives Me Pleasure’: Housework and
Feminism in Carol Shields’s Unless
FIONA TOLAN
Liverpool John Moores University
This article describes Carol Shields’s 2002 novel Unless as a twenty-first century
reflection on late twentieth century feminist discourses on housework and domesticity.
With reference to the seminal works of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, I
suggest that Shields uses the trope of housework as a means of challenging proscriptive
second-wave analyses of domesticity, while simultaneously resisting postfeminist ironic
reclamations of the traditional housewife role. The article also examines the manner
in which Shields makes evolving connections between housework, women’s work and
women’s writing. In returning to formative second-wave feminist questions and
debates at a time when the second wave is declared over, I argue that Shields makes a
clear comment on the continuing need for a politically-engaged feminist politics into
the twenty-first century.
Keywords: Carol Shields; Unless; housework; second wave feminism; postfeminism;
women’s writing
Why do I have red curtains in my kitchen? Because Simone de Beauvoir loved red curtains;
because Danielle Westerman loves red curtains out of respect for Beauvoir, and I love them
because of Danielle. They serve, when nothing else quite does, as the sign of home and comfort,
ease, companionability, food and drink and family. (Unless 170)
In her seminal 1949 study, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes: ‘Few tasks are
more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean
becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day’. Domestic work,
for de Beauvoir, is a ‘negative’ and stultifying pursuit that ‘provides no escape from
immanence and little affirmation of individuality’ (470). This same basic assumption
pervades much of the subsequent second-wave feminist discourse on domesticity. For
Betty Friedan, writing in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the myth of ‘The Happy
Housewife Heroine’ is ‘burying millions of American women alive’ (336). Germaine
Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) echoes de Beauvoir in describing housework as ‘a
typical vicious circle; work makes more work and it goes on’ (327). Women, declares
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Greer, ‘represent the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid workers, for whom
slaves is not too melodramatic a description’ (329). For Ann Oakley, discussing the
phenomenon in her 1974 text, Housewife: ‘A housewife and a woman are one and the
same: one and the same, they are subject to deprivation and oppression in relation to
the dominant group in society’ (4-5); while in her sociological case-study The Sociology
of Housework (also 1974), she concludes: ‘The major finding here is that dissatisfaction
with housework predominates’ (182). And Ellen Malos, editor of the 1980 collection,
The Politics of Housework, opens her introduction with the statement that: ‘There will
be no true liberation of women until we get rid of the assumption that it will always
be women who do housework and look after children’ (7).
This litany of second-wave feminist repudiations of women’s domestic labour
provides a crucial historical context to Carol Shields’s 2002 novel, Unless. It informs and
politicises protagonist and narrator Reta Winters’s seemingly innocuous declaration:
Cleaning gives me pleasure, which I’m reluctant to admit and hardly ever do, but here, in
my thoughts, I will register the fact: dusting, waxing, and polishing offer rewards. (60)
Reta’s statement wryly challenges second-wave orthodoxies on housework; it
undermines what Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd term ‘the investment of feminism
in this narrative of oppression-then-liberation’ (Johnson:12). It draws Shields’s text
into a contemplation of multiple interrelated themes around domesticity, women’s
work, and women’s writing. Laying claim to housework as both a sensual pleasure and
a therapeutic force, Reta’s increasingly feminist narrative returns to, re-examines and
largely countenances second wave analyses of the inequity of gender roles in society,
but simultaneously refuses simple disavowals of the domestic.
This article examines Shields’s twenty-first century contemplation of early second wave
deconstructions of domesticity, largely founded in the seminal works of de Beauvoir
and Friedan. I suggest that the trope of housework in Unless becomes a means of
challenging proscriptive feminisms and resisting the negation of pleasure and desire
within second wave discourse on the home. While this would seem to bring Shields
into sympathy with postfeminist ‘reclamations’ of domesticity, I demonstrate that in
her return to formative second-wave feminist questions and debates at a time when
the second wave is declared over, Shields makes a clear comment on the continuing
need for a politically-engaged feminist politics. Housework also lies at the heart of
the novel’s meditation on women’s writing, and I argue that Unless contemplates but
ultimately resists a feminist trajectory from home to the wider world, housework to
career; instead, women’s writing and the domestic remain determinedly entangled as
Shields maintains her faith that ‘the daily life of ordinary people’ (Shields 2007:27) can
sustain narrative tension. ‘I am interested in writing away the invisibility of women’s
2
lives’ (28), says Shields, and in Unless, I suggest, she does this by resisting a feminist
impulse to sweep the domestic life under the carpet.
The narrow walls of home
Writing in The Guardian in 2002, Blake Morrison points to the common perception
that Shields’s novels ‘are known for their accessibility (but not for their wisdom); are
praised for their exquisite touch (but not for their risk-taking); or are said to do domestic
ordinariness wonderfully (but not wider social issues)’ (n.p.). Unlike fellow Canadian
author Margaret Atwood, whose debut novel The Edible Woman (1969) was celebrated by
feminist literary critics for its ultimate rejection of marriage and motherhood as means
of ‘consuming’ female identity, Shields’s work has repeatedly been read as significantly
more conservative, rooted in the domestic, and – in the words of one 1970s reviewer:
‘smaller-than-life’.1 Interviewing Shields in The Observer, Barbara Ellen notes: ‘still
there are those who worry about the breadth and scope of Shields’s vision. That she is
too domestic, too measured and calm, too nice about everything. Not dark enough’
(n.p.). Such assessments motivate Alex Ramon’s Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of
Carol Shields, which commences with a careful defence of Shields’s work. Rather than
denying the domesticity of her narratives, Ramon suggests that Shields is instead
concerned with resisting reductive correlations of the domestic with the conventional;
with attempting to ‘restore familial context and a sense of the domestic to the avant
garde, and to bring postmodernist-influenced representational techniques to bear on
the experiences of groups who have been marginalised or simply caricatured within
postmodernist discourse: suburbanites, the middle-class, housewives, the elderly’ (10).
A similarly redemptive reading is offered by Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones in Carol
Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, in which they suggest that Shields’s writing might
‘represent a genuine, if modest, revision of literary realism in which the ordinary is
subject to contemplation, and not just celebration’ (Dvořák: 5).
Shields responded to her detractors with a cautious statement of intent. In a short
essay published posthumously, she declares:
I continue to worry about my chosen subject of home and family, always imagining it
might be read as a retreat from real issues. Nevertheless, over a lifetime I have convinced
myself – on good days, at least – that we all possess a domestic space, and that it is
mainly within this domestic arc that we express the greater part of our consciousness.
(Shields 2003a:262)
This assertion finds a refrain in Unless with Reta’s viscid description of writing ‘the
ordinary, the mucilage of daily life that cements our genuine moments of being’
(95). Nevertheless, it is this same notion of ‘retreat’ that concerns de Beauvoir in her
analysis of domesticity in The Second Sex. For de Beauvoir, a person ‘achieves liberty
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Fiona Tolan
only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties’. Consequently, ‘There
is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely
open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there
is a degradation of existence’ (28-29). Heavily influenced by Hegelian philosophy and
existentialist concepts of self-determination, de Beauvoir charges women with being
complicit in their own subjugation. As men look outwards, striving to shape the future
through invention and design, women, excluded from the public realm, retreat inwards,
and ‘The home becomes the centre of the world and even its only reality […] refuge,
retreat, grotto, womb, it gives shelter from outside dangers’ (469).
De Beauvoir’s existentialism finds a strong echo in Friedan’s liberal feminism.
Describing a generation of American women who have subscribed to ‘the feminine
mystique’, Friedan adopts a notably de Beauvoirean position, stating:
There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps
except by finally putting forth an effort – that human effort which reaches beyond
biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future. Only by such a
personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife
trap and truly find fulfilment as wives and mothers – by fulfilling their own unique
possibilities as separate human beings. (336-37)
Friedan’s dynamic vision of breaking out, putting forth, reaching beyond, resonates
with de Beauvoir’s language of transcendence. In The Second Sex de Beauvoir asks: ‘Is
not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman?’ and answers: ‘I am interested
in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of
liberty’ (28, 29). This same belief in a false consciousness leads Friedan to her analogy
of the home as ‘comfortable concentration camp’ and underpins much of the subsequent
second-wave analysis of the housewife.2
Shields’s assertion that the domestic sphere can be a site of potential, both political
and personal, rather than a closing off of consciousness and experience as de Beauvoir
and Freidan would have it, therefore directly conflicts with much early second-wave
feminism – and does so self-consciously. Suffering a terrible family crisis, Reta
acknowledges: ‘I dust and polish this house of mine so that I’ll be able to seal it from
damage’ (61). The home, therefore, is clearly the retreat and refuge that de Beauvoir
denounces it as being. It is also a place of meditation and cogitation and eventually the
location of Reta’s burgeoning feminist politicisation. These seeming contradictions are
carefully navigated by Shields, as she reflects on a twentieth-century feminist politics
that has long informed her own writing, 3 but from which – unlike Atwood – she has
simultaneously been excluded for producing works deemed too overtly conservative
and, indeed, domestic.
4
The goodness of housework
Unless begins with the revelation that Reta’s eldest daughter Norah, ‘[a]n intelligent
and beautiful girl from a loving family’ (12), has dropped out of university and is now
living rough, spending her days with a sign around her neck on which is printed the
single word ‘GOODNESS’. Aided by her friend Dr Danielle Westerman, a renowned
French feminist whose ‘kinetic, tough-corded prose, both beguiling and dangerous’
(3) she translates into English, Reta comes to believe that Norah has responded to the
cultural imperative on women to be selfless and good by adopting a wilful exaggeration
of ideal passivity, diminishing her self in order to embody ephemeral goodness. Norah,
reflects Reta, ‘had been a good docile baby and then she became a good obedient little
girl. Now, at nineteen, she’s so brimming with goodness that she sits on a Toronto
street corner […] and asks nothing of the world’ (11). This negation of agency impacts
with paradoxical force on Reta’s life, rupturing the fabric of her home and family. As
she attempts to obey well-meaning exhortations to ‘count my blessings’ (‘a husband,
Tom, who loves me […] a house with a paid-up mortgage […] three daughters’ (12)), Norah’s inarticulate protest instead forces Reta to reconsider feminist arguments
clearly rooted in the second wave as she ultimately comes to believe that women are
persistently written out of history and consigned to the impotent domestic sphere.
This conclusion – ‘the paradox of subjugation’ (251) – remains the central site of
tension within Unless. As Reta contemplates the forces that motivate Norah’s radical
self-abnegation, she is drawn to the aspects of Danielle’s feminist philosophy that
most closely interrogate Reta’s own values, and she is left simultaneously defending
and questioning the domestic role. Like de Beauvoir, Danielle believes that housework
binds women to the immanent realm, preventing them from attaining transcendence.
Reta notes at one point:
Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly,
she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their
possessions. Acquiring and then tending – these eat up a woman’s creativity, anyone’s
creativity. (62)
In this Danielle echoes de Beauvoir for whom: ‘The housewife wears herself out
marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present’ (470). Indeed,
Danielle is a de Beauvoirean figure in the text,4 her philosophical works rewriting de
Beauvoir’s transcendence and immanence as subversion and inversion, as she states:
‘Subversion of society is possible for a mere few; inversion is more commonly the tactic
for the powerless, a retreat from society that borders on the catatonic’ (218). This
idea, illuminating as it does Norah’s choices, exerts a powerful pressure on Reta, who
admits: ‘I wasn’t inclined to believe this statement when I first translated it, but now I
believe it absolutely’ (218). At the same time, Reta cannot help noting a contradiction
5
Fiona Tolan
between Danielle’s theory and practice, and counters the older woman’s dismissal of
domesticity: ‘I’ve watched the way she arranges articles on a shelf ’, notes Reta: ‘how
carefully she sets a table’ (62).
In Sentenced to Everyday Life, Johnson and Lloyd suggest that ‘feminists during the
first few decades of second wave feminism constituted ‘the housewife’ as ‘Other’ to
themselves’ (2). Typically this difference was rooted in class, with feminist intellectuals
frequently speaking of and for working-class women. And so Mariarosa Dalla Costa
and Selma James, writing in 1972, state: ‘Every analysis of women as a caste, then,
must proceed from the analysis of the position of working-class housewives’ (Dalla
Costa:40). For Juliet Mitchell, writing in 1971, ‘the “middle-class” composition of
Women’s Liberation is not an unhappy fact […] but an intrinsic part of feminist
awareness’. Adapting Marxist notions of the intellectual avant garde, Mitchell argues
that, ‘The ideological dimensions of the revolution are likely to come initially from within
the ideologically dominant class’ (22, 34). In contrast to this distancing of intellectual
feminism and the lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ women, recent critics of The Feminine
Mystique have argued that Friedan, ‘a labour journalist and union activist, re-invented
herself as a suburban housewife’ to enhance the potency of her ‘call to “we women”’
(Johnson:9-10). For bell hooks instead, Friedan’s fault lies, not in either objectifying
or appropriating the experience of the housewife, but rather in rooting her analysis
firmly within the experience of ‘leisure-class white housewives’, and she charges Friedan
with ‘ignor[ing] the existence of all non-white women and poor white women’ (2). In
Unless, Reta speaks as the other – as the theorised object of a second-wave feminist
discourse that rejected the home; but she also speaks as a clearly coded middle-class
white woman, versant in feminist theory, and is thus positioned simultaneously inside
and outside of the various ideological struggles enacted around housework, gender,
race and class.
Reta’s status as an educated, liberal product of second-wave feminism – ‘soixantehuitards in spirit’ (57) – makes her scepticism of the movement’s propositions more
complex than mere conservatism. At the same time, Unless implicitly interrogates the
absolutism of de Beauvoir’s analysis of housework. When the philosopher declares:
‘it is impossible to go on day after day […] ecstatically viewing one’s highly polished
taps’ (472), Reta instead muses on a polished oak banister and asks: ‘Why would I
not out of admiration stroke the silky surfaces now and then; every day, in fact?’ (62).
The sensual sibilance of Reta’s phrasing opposes de Beauvoir’s derisorily alliterative
dismissal of ‘ferreting out fluff from under wardrobes’ (470). As she describes ‘the
swift, transitory rewards of lemon spray wax’ (62), Reta marks out a distance between
the theory and the lived experience. While she countenances and increasingly values
Danielle’s (and de Beauvoir’s) political, intellectualised analysis, she also acknowledges
a personal, emotional engagement with the home that is visceral and potent – ‘Mention
6
a new cleaning product and I yearn to hold it in my hand’ (63) – and which stubbornly
countermands a purely materialist feminist analysis of housework.
Such analyses were offered by feminist critics such as Margaret Benston, who
draws the same analogy between women’s unwaged housework and slavery as Greer
(cited above) and de Beauvoir (19), arguing: ‘the condition of women is the condition of
others who are or were also outside of commodity production, i.e., serfs and peasants’
(121-122). As the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign developed,5 Marxist feminists
moved to define housewives as ‘workers in struggle’ (Federici:255), and the family as
‘an alienating capitalist mode [of production] which comes under the law of private
property’ (Landes:262). While some feminists questioned the strategy (for Oakley, ‘a
demand for wages is a move to affirm, rather than reject, the identification of women
with housewifery’ (Oakley 1974b:196)), the debate advanced connections between
domestic labour and the wider labour market and challenged the basic assumption
that ‘ housework is not work’ (Federici:255). In Shields’s novel instead, Reta is notably
distanced from these early second-wave feminist positions, repeatedly describing
housework as a pleasurable and notably proprietary engagement: ‘Ordering my own
house calms me down’ (56) she declares; ‘I especially love the manoeuvring of my dust
mop over the old oak floors’ (60). Yet even when, as writer and translator, she is more
unambiguously engaged in commodity production, Reta wilfully negates her own
economic status as worker, commenting: ‘I never thought in terms of career. I dabbled
in writing. It was my macramé, my knitting’ (4).
This insistence on pleasure would seem to draw Reta into sympathy with postfeminist
revisions of the domestic. Characterised by popular cultural productions such as US
television drama Desperate Housewives, or British celebrity cook Nigella Lawson’s selfdesignation as ‘Domestic Goddess’, the figure of the postfeminist housewife moves to
‘acknowledge agency and self-determination’ (Genz:50), adopting postmodern irony
in the circumvention of censorious rejections of the housewife as either pre-feminist
anachronism or post-feminist conservative backlash.6 The apparent revival of the
housewife can be read in different ways. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra point to
postfeminism’s rootedness in a white, middle-class culture that can afford to abandon
a coherent feminist politics. Championing ‘freedom of choice with respect to work,
domesticity and parenting’, postfeminism blithely assumes ‘full economic freedom
for women’ (Tasker:2). While it has been termed ‘faux feminism – that subtle, yet
increasingly pervasive brand of conservative thought that casts itself as deeply concerned
with the frustrations of modern women, but can ultimately offer no alternatives except
those of the traditional stripe’ (Sayeau:44) – Stéphanie Genz, for example, argues
instead that postfeminism ‘offers a new mode of conceptualizing the domestic as a
contested space of female subjectivity where women/feminists actively grapple with
opposing cultural constructions of the housewife’ (49). While Negra denigrates the rise
7
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of ‘housewife chic’ as ‘retreatism’ (Negra:72), for Genz, ‘The postfeminist housewife is
no longer easily categorized as an emblem of female oppression but she renegotiates and
resignifies her domestic/feminine position, deliberately choosing to “go home”’ (50).
The contemporary postfeminist turn to the domestic necessarily informs Shields’s
culturally aware 2002 novel, but despite its claims on the multiple ‘pleasures and
possibilities of ‘new’ femininities’ (Gillis:8), postfeminism fails to encompass the
intricate web of motivations that coalesce in Reta’s contemplation of housework.
She compares it at one point to meditation, recalling Buddhist monks who integrate
cleaning as part of their daily discipline – they ‘go out into the world each day with
buckets and rags, and they clean things, anything that needs cleaning’ (61) – but the
act of cleaning is not, for Reta, a means of devotional or existential transcendence, but
rather a process rooted firmly in female lived experience. Cleaning brings Reta into
communion with past housewives – with Mrs McGinn, the former owner of Reta’s
house – acknowledging unspoken sacrifices and frustrated ambitions. Reta’s cleaning
says to her predecessor: ‘Yes, it was worth it […] all that anxiety and confusion’ (62).
Cleaning is therapeutic: ‘With my dampened dust cloth in hand I’m keeping myself
going’; it is ‘a devious means of consoling oneself ’ (63). The tidy home shores up
Reta’s crumbling world at a time of great emotional distress: ‘If I commit myself to
its meticulous care, I will claim back my daughter Norah, gone to goodness’ (61).
Scrubbing and polishing enact a metaphorical banishing of corruption, infection and
decay. Contradicting de Beauvoir’s concept of housework as a passive retreat from the
world, Reta explains that her cleaning counteracts ‘the absurd notion – Tao? – that
silence is wiser than words, inaction better than action – that is what I work against’
(61-62). In this plethora of purposes, Shields takes her text beyond both second-wave
dismissals of the home as site of female oppression and postfeminist celebrations of
domesticity as liberative irony; both camps, she suggests, underestimate the potential
depths of the seemingly mundane.
Women’s work and women’s writing
Over the course of Unless, Reta begins to tentatively but cumulatively construct a grand
narrative of female displacement, making spiralling connections between housework,
women’s work, and women’s writing. Eventually, she is able to privately articulate
a statement of belief about the widespread dismissal of female experience within
contemporary intellectual culture. ‘I believe’, says Reta:
that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation,
encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever
and ever, and those like Norah, […] like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded
otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced
by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing… (270)
8
The breadth of this vision brings Reta into accord with de Beauvoir, who commences
her study with the words: ‘humanity is divided into two classes of individuals…’ (14).
Instinctively embarrassed by her impassioned statement – too ‘excessive, blowsy, loose,
womanish’ (270) – Reta is nevertheless confirmed in its denunciation of the general
disregard for women’s lives, both public and private. As the author of a self-admittedly
‘light novel. A novel for summertime’ (14), she becomes increasingly sensitized to the
‘casual disregard’ of literary reviewers who dismiss women writers as ‘the miniaturists
of fiction, the embroiderers of fine “feeling”’, and comes to believe that she is ‘the
mother of a nineteen-year-old daughter who has been driven from the world by the
suggestion that she is doomed to miniaturism’ (247-248). As Shields moves between
the minutiae of Reta’s domestic tragedy and the broadly denigrated domestic subject
of women’s writing, she inextricably entangles her defence of both.
Identifying correspondences between Norah’s inexplicable malady and what
Reta now identifies as a cultural collusion against women, the novel’s preoccupation
with connection invites the reader to trace similar parallels between Reta’s fictional
meditations and real life. For Neil Besner, Shields’s writing ‘performs the beautifully
intricate relation between art and life as if it were seamless’, and tempts us to read ‘the
protagonist of Unless as Carol, her sparking anger, her family, as Carol’s’ (9). As Shields’s
final novel, written in knowledge of her terminal cancer, the occasionally elegiac Unless
does carry a peculiar burden of consonance between its author and narrator. Reta,
with a metafictional nod to Shields, voices her anxiety at being ‘a woman writer who
is writing about a woman writer who is writing’ (208); and a reviewer’s description of
Reta as ‘a bard of the banal’ – ‘We really laughed about that’ (243) – strikes to the heart
of Shields’s reputation. For Ramon, this ‘playful self-referentiality’ seems ‘designed to
parody disparaging descriptions of Shields’s own writing’ (164), but it also points to a
broader commingling of fact and fiction in the text. When Reta challenges a critic whose
literary historical overview neglects ‘to mention Danielle Westerman or Joyce Carol
Oates or Alice Munro’ (164), Shields calls on the reader to translate Reta’s fictional
experiences into the real. And Shields’s fictional critics similarly resonate with real
world echoes. One might think for example of Toby Litt and Monica Ali’s editorial
introduction to Picador’s 2005 collection, New Writing 13, which laments that the
submissions received from female writers were: ‘disappointingly domestic, the opposite
of risk-taking – as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug
that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape’ (x). Such
continuing echoes serve as ballast to Reta’s statements, countermanding any suspicion
that her newfound sense of persecution is merely due to private trauma.
Newly cognisant of the enormity of gendered social inequality, Reta suffers a crisis
of confidence in literature, asking: ‘what really is the point of novel writing when the
unjust world writhes and howls?’ (224). Even the value of Danielle’s intricate works
9
Fiona Tolan
of philosophy, memoire and poetry comes under question: ‘What does her shelf of
books amount to, what force have these books had on the world?’ (228). Writing and
home represent the good in Reta’s life, and this crisis of faith in literature replicates
in some ways her fear that the domestic space to which she is committed may be a
contributory part of Norah’s breakdown. Yet despite these acknowledged anxieties,
Shields ultimately rejects the fictional reviewer’s call to abandon the ‘small individual
lives’ of women’s writing for the male writer’s ‘broad canvas of society’ (247). And she
equally refuses to complete the feminist narrative arc, potentially contained within
Unless and common in 1970s texts such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room,
that would see Norah’s crisis effecting Reta’s feminist awakening, bringing her to a
contemplation of the world and empowering her to leave the immanent domestic realm
behind. Instead, Unless mounts a sustained defence of the domestic within literature.
‘A thousand years from now’, writes Shields:
readers will look back on the novels of the twentieth century and wonder whether or not
we possessed a domestic life at all. A bed, a roof over our heads, toothbrushes, forks and
knives, alarm clocks, birth control devices – these accoutrements have been curiously
erased, except in so-called ‘marginal fiction,’ often women’s fiction. (Shields 2003b:32)
Unless restores the paraphernalia of the everyday to the literary text, but more urgently,
it exposes the casual dismissal of women’s writing as domestic and banal as intimately
bound up with a wider negation of female experience.
It is arguably no coincidence that Reta eventually finds her way to a feminist
denunciation of social injustice through a sustained contemplation of the home. Faced
with Norah’s near-fatal acquiescence to her own displacement and trivialisation, it is
only when the consequences of female oppression are literally brought home to her that
Reta finally recognises the continuing proximity of second-wave feminism’s supposedly
outdated debates. The extent of the novel’s feminism remains contentious however.
Wendy Roy suggests that it ‘does not just demonstrate feminist strategies, as have many
of her earlier works; it names them’ (126). Discussing Roy’s analysis, Ramon argues
that ‘the novel’s “feminism” may be more equivocal and ironic than her comments
suggest. Ultimately, an awareness of women’s “marginalizing and silencing” is offered
not as a total solution for Norah’s actions but rather as one of several possible theories
posited within the text’ (167). Shields certainly maintains a critical distance from a
feminism that too easily dismisses much of what she values. At the same time, the
feminist politicisation that Reta undergoes over the course of the novel is profoundly
transformative, although typically understated.
In an essay published in 2003, Shields recalls a homeless man in France wearing a
sign that reads: ‘J’ai faim’ (‘I am hungry’). She muses that the phrase gestures ‘perhaps,
toward an enlarged or existential hunger, toward a coded message, a threaded notation,
10
an orderly account or story that would serve as a witness to his place in the world’
(Shields 2003b:19). In Unless, Norah’s declaration of ‘GOODNESS’ is an equally
encrypted expression of ‘her solitary state of non-belonging’, of ‘how little she would
be allowed to say’ (309). Although Norah’s retreat from life is eventually traced to
her traumatic intervention in the self-immolation of an unnamed Muslim woman
who sets herself alight in the middle of a busy Toronto street, this causal explanation
fails to countermand Reta’s epiphanic realisation of the psychic impact of female
marginalisation. Instead, the inarticulate protests – both passive and violent – of
Norah and the unnamed woman become bound together as interconnected reactions
to a powerlessness that a postfeminist politics has failed to assuage. As Reta also
unexpectedly finds herself, ‘in the middle of my life, in the middle of the continent,
on the side of the disfavoured’ (310), Shields makes a strikingly wide-ranging and
unapologetically feminist statement about the marginalisation of women that crosses
both generations and ethnicities.
Unless is not a celebration of ‘happy housewife heroines’, but it is equally and
determinedly not a denunciation of domesticity as oppressive or banal. The domestic
remains instead an ambiguous space in Shields’s novel – a site of pleasure, comfort and
intellectual engagement from which one does not need to be rescued, but to which
one must not be confined. Consequently, it is perhaps unsurprising that in Unless,
the happy ending of the novel rests on a tension between Norah at home, safe, and
Norah soon to go out into the world once again. This tension might seem to point to
a feminist irresolution or critical impasse regarding the importance of home, but in
Shields’s novel, it instead becomes strikingly emblematic of the profound and even
violent risks routinely met within a culture that persistently precludes female experience.
In a scene of clear-sighted horror, Shields describes the dying woman’s ‘melting flesh’
and the dish rack and plastic bag that ‘burned themselves to Norah’s flesh’ (315) with
such psychically devastating consequences. As an ordinary day and ordinary objects
are suddenly made strange and threatening, Shields’s writing works to ‘prise open the
crusted world and reveal another plane of being’ (313-14), one that belies any attempt
to dismiss the moral seriousness of the ordinary and the everyday. Unless refuses easy
resolutions, and it acknowledges the ‘contradictions and irrationality’ that characterise
the domestic theme for many women; in doing so, it inarguably provides, for both Reta
and Shields, ‘the materials of a serious book’ (320).
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham,
UK, for its generous support while this article was being written.
11
Fiona Tolan
Notes
1 Barbara Amiel, review of The Box Garden, 1977. Quoted in Ramon, 1.
2 In The Sociology of Housework, for example, Oakley describes the psychological attachment
many housewives feel to “traditional notions of womanhood” as “an internal malignancy
that has to be painfully dug out and destroyed” (195).
3 In “A View from the Edge of the Edge”, Shields locates her work within a female tradition
and acknowledges the influence of feminism: “we needed Simone de Beauvoir and Betty
Friedan to come along and tell us we were smarter than we thought, and then Kate Millet
told us – I think it was in 1970 – that we didn’t have to take Henry Miller seriously any
longer, and what a relief that was!” (27).
4 Shields positions Danielle, born in 1915, as a fictional contemporary of her fellow French
national, de Beauvoir, born in 1908. In the coincidence of their philosophical positions,
Danielle vocalises aspects of de Beauvoir’s feminist position in Shields’s text, while her
conversations with Reta provide dramatic immediacy to Reta’s developing dialogue with
twentieth-century feminism.
5 Although remembered for Selma James’s 1972 “International Wages for Housework
Campaign”, Johnson and Lloyd extend the history of this second-wave movement, pointing
to feminist lobbying for financial remuneration for homemakers and mothers during the
1940s (40-42).
6 I use the hyphenated term “post-feminism” to designate the concept of a post-second-wave
feminist period, occurring after the popularly declared decline and fall of feminist politics.
This is contrasted with the equally contentious concept of a “postfeminist” cultural expression
of female agency that re-imagines and re-defines feminism for the twenty-first century. As
Genz explains: “postfeminism encapsulates a range of possible relations that indicate both
a dependence on and an independence from feminism” (50).
Works Cited
Ali, Monica and Toby Litt, ‘Introduction’, New Writing 13. Ed. Monica Ali and Toby Litt.
London: Picador, 2005. ix-xi.
Benston, Margaret. ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation’ (1969), The Politics of
Housework. Ed. Ellen Malos. London: Allison & Busby, 1980. 119-29.
Besner, Neil K. ‘Introduction’, Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life. Ed. Neil K. Besner.
Winnipeg: Prairie Fire Press, 2003. 9-13.
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James, ‘Women and the Subversion of the Community’
(1972), Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives. Ed. Rosemary
Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge, 1997. 40-53.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949. London: Vintage, 1997
Dvořák, Marta and Manina Jones, eds. ‘Introduction’, Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary.
Montreal: McGill- Queens UP, 2007. 3-16.
Ellen, Barbara. ‘Human Shields’. Interview with Carol Shields. The Observer. 28 April 2002.
Accessed 28 April 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/apr/28/fiction.carolshields
Federici, Silvia. ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975), The Politics of Housework. Ed. Ellen Malos.
London: Allison & Busby, 1980: 253-261.
12
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. NY and London: Norton, 1997.
Genz, Stéphanie. ‘‘I Am Not a Housewife, But…’: Postfeminism and the Revival of Domesticity’,
Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows. New York:
Routledge, 2009: 49-62.
Gillis, Stacy and Joanne Hollows, ‘Introduction’, Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture.
Ed. Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows. New York: Routledge, 2009. 1-14.
Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Pluto: London, 2000.
Johnson, Lesley and Justine Lloyd. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife.
Oxford: Berg, 2004.
Landes, Joan. ‘Wages for Housework: Political and Theoretical Considerations.’ (1975), The
Politics of Housework. Ed. Ellen Malos. London: Allison & Busby, 1980. 262-274.
Malos, Ellen. ‘Introduction’, The Politics of Housework. Ed. Ellen Malos. London: Allison &
Busby, 1980. 7- 43.
Mitchell, Juliet. Woman’s Estate. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
Morrison, Blake. ‘Hell Hath No Fury’, The Guardian. Books. 27 April 2002. Accessed 26.03.08.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,690977,00.html
Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.
Oakley, Ann. Housewife. 1974a. London: Penguin, 1990.
. The Sociology of Housework. London: Martin Robertson, 1974b.
Ramon, Alex. Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of Carol Shields. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2008.
Roy, Wendy. ‘Unless the World Changes: Carol Shields on Women’s Silencing in Contemporary
Culture’, Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life. Ed. Neil K. Besner. Winnipeg: Prairie
Fire, 2003: 125-32.
Sayeau, Ashley. ‘Having It All: Desperate Housewives’ Flimsy Feminism’, in Reading Desperate
Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence. Ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass. London:
I.B. Tauris, 2006. 42-58.
Shields, Carol. ‘About Writing’, Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life. Ed. Neil K. Besner.
Winnipeg: Prairie Fire Press, 2003a: 261-62.
. ‘A View from the Edge of the Edge’, Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary. Ed. Marta
Dvořák and Manina Jones. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2007. 17-29.
. ‘Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction’, Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and
the Possibilities of Fiction. Ed. Edward Eden and Dee Goertz. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
2003b. 19-35.
. Unless. 2002. London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra, ‘Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture’,
Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne Tasker
and Diane Negra. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007: 1-25.
13
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14
Saying Yes with an Outreached Hand: Homelessness
and Hospitality in Canadian and Australian Literature
for Young People
DEBRA DUDEK
University of Wollongong
Between 2003 and 2008, more than fifteen books for children and young adults were
published in Australia and at least thirteen in Canada that represent either literally
or metaphorically the experiences of people whose family homes are no longer places
of safety. In each of the texts analyzed in this essay—Shattered (2006) and Sketches
(2007) by Eric Walters and The Island (2005) by John Heffernan—homelessness is
represented not as the absence of a physical structure in which to live but as an absence
of belonging, an absence of hospitality. As the characters travel through their pathways
of homelessness, they develop interdependent relationships with people, creatures, and/
or structures personified as an outreached hand, a symbol and act of hospitality. In
each of these books, endings are uncertain in order to offer readers not a closed, stable
future, but a version of belonging that includes multiple possibilities.
Keywords: homelessness, hospitality, children’s literature, Eric Walters, John
Heffernan
Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation,
before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited
guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country,
a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.
(Derrida, Of Hospitality)
Fictional and non-Fictional Homelessness
Between 2003 and 2008, more than fifteen books for children and young adults were
published in Australia and at least thirteen in Canada that represent either literally or
metaphorically the experiences of people whose family homes are no longer places of
safety.1 Regardless of the conditions of displacement, both sets of texts highlight that
previously core aspects of stability and identity—the family and the nation-state—no
longer function as places of safety and security. Central to both sets of narratives is an
appeal to young readers to understand the individual and structural conditions that
15
Debra Dudek
render characters seemingly homeless and therein to work towards social justice for
displaced peoples.
In each of the texts analyzed in this essay—Shattered (2006) and Sketches (2007) by
Eric Walters and The Island (2005) by John Heffernan—homelessness is represented not
as the absence of a physical structure in which to live but as an absence of belonging, an
absence of hospitality. As the characters travel through their pathways of homelessness,
they develop interdependent relationships with people, creatures, and/or structures
personified as an outreached hand, a symbol and act of hospitality. By reading the
two Canadian novels by Walters, young adults confront realistic situations that occur
on the streets of Canadian cities, and their consciousness is raised about personal and
structural conditions that lead in and through homelessness. In the picture book, The
Island, child readers see a metaphor of absolute hospitality, an action that they can
apply to any situation in which they face a foreigner or an absolute other. In each of
these books, endings are uncertain in order to offer readers not a closed, stable future,
but a version of belonging that includes multiple possibilities.
In Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida uses the term absolute hospitality to distinguish
between foreigners and absolute others and therein to offer a theory of hospitality,
which includes the familial home and the State:
absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the
foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.),
but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I
let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without
asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law
of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice
as rights. (2000 25)
Derrida’s analysis of different forms of hospitality and different types of strangers
applies to how one greets strangers in one’s home without making a distinction between
arrivals to a family house, a city, or a nation-state. Such elisions of definitions of home
inform versions of homelessness, and, therefore can be brought to bear on the narratives
for young people discussed in this essay.
This essay focuses on the home situation of the main character (usually) in each
of the texts. This character may have a home, but it is either unstable, unrepresented,
mobile, and/or in transition.2 The term homeless circulates around the notion that the
protagonist does not live in her or his familial home for most—if any—of the narrative,
or does not have a familial home. In this sense, the character is represented as homeless,
and one of the primary tensions across these texts is a concern with finding a place
where and people—or creatures in the case of The Island— with whom the main
character can belong. In each of these texts, the main characters develop interdependent
relationships, which emphasise the diminished importance of the biological family
16
and nation-state. In the case of people living on the street, and especially of homeless
youths, the hospitality pact fails twice: once in the family home in which hospitality
does not extend to family members; and once on the streets, where the nation-state
does not practice conditional hospitality.
These fictional representations, which demonstrate a range of hospitality situations,
correspond with the lived experiences of homeless youths. In Moving Out, Moving On:
Young People’s Pathways in and through Homelessness, Shelley Mallett et al state, “For
young people, home does not only mean a physical place; it is understood as a place
where one feels connected, wanted and supported. Young people emphasised similar
issues in their definitions of homelessness. Most understood it as much more than
an absence of shelter; to be homeless is also the absence of caring, love or belonging”
(2010 2). Mallett et al advocate for a broader understanding of youth homelessness that
encourages interdependence rather than independence in order to provide hospitality
in the form of material, financial, and emotional support from family and friends and,
possibly, the government sector. The fictional representations of homelessness studied
in this essay align with ideological shifts away from individualization and towards
intimacy and interdependence, both of which rely on conditional and unconditional
hospitality.
In their study of youth homelessness, Mallett et al draw upon Ulrich Beck’s notion
of individualization in order to explain their findings, and his theory also assists with
an understanding of this essay’s examination of the representation of homelessness
and interdependence. In Democracy Without Enemies, Beck (1998) defines two types
of modernities: the first modernity arises from industrial society and the nation-state
and focuses on loyalties to family, ethnic group, and class, for example; and the second
modernity is shaped by globalization and by the collapse of the “pattern of preordained
affiliations,” which were crucial to the first modernity (74-76). In Individualization,
Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim elaborate on the reorganization of the family
within this second modernity:
The family is becoming more of an elective relationship, an association of individual
persons, who each bring to it their own interests, experiences and plans and who are
each subjected to different controls, risks and constraints. . . . Since individualization
also fosters a longing for the opposite world of intimacy, security and closeness, most
people will continue…to live within a partnership or family. (2002 97)
Instead of the hierarchical power structure within first modernity families, these
elective “post-familial families” function through negotiation and through “a virtual
exchange of roles, of listening and taking responsibility for one another” (81). Another
way of thinking about this “virtual exchange” is to understand it as a type of hospitable
interdependence. The term post-familial family, in which members must exchange
17
Debra Dudek
roles and take responsibility for one another, aptly describes many of the relationships
represented in the narratives analyzed in this essay. In the Canadian novels, these
interdependent relationships are formed on the streets, both within and across age
groups, and in The Island, the relationship extends to an inter-species partnership. All
of these instances shape the adolescent protagonists’ identities in ways that prepare
them for responsible or ethical individualised subjectivity in a globalised world, which
challenges the sovereign power of the nation-state and the biological family.
Interdependence in Sketches and Shattered
In their collaborative research project on homelessness in Canadian and Australian
texts for children, Mavis Reimer and Debra Dudek have identified more than twentyeight books that deal with this subject. Due to space limitations, only three texts will
be analyzed in this essay, each of which exemplifies key aspects of the genre. Of the
thirteen Canadian books, six of them— Tom Finder (2003), Last Sam’s Cage (2004),
Shattered (2006), Sketches (2007), Pain and Wastings (2008), and Feral (2008)—overtly
represent social justice for street people. Each of these novels is catalogued as juvenile
fiction and is targeted at an audience of readers aged approximately fifteen years. The
novels deal with the everyday experiences of homeless people living in Canadian cities,
and their overt message counters an assumption that people—and especially youths—
who live on the streets choose to do so without a good reason or have failed in some way
to manage their own lives. Instead, the novels represent homelessness as a structural,
not an individual, issue, to return to Beck’s concept of individualization. For instance,
in Tom Finder, Tom runs away from home after a beating by his mother’s boyfriend;
in Shattered, Jacques suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome after serving as a
Canadian peacekeeper in Rwanda; in Sketches, Dana leaves her mother’s home because
her stepfather sexually abuses her; and in Pain and Wastings, Ethan lives in a group
home for orphans and troubled youths because his mother was murdered by a john.
Two of the most prevalent interconnecting themes between these novels concern the
interrelationships between people who are not members of a nuclear, preordained—or
filiative—family. The first theme pairs an adolescent with an adult who is not a family
member. The second theme highlights how interdependent relationships between people
substitute for a home place. Both of these themes emphasise an alternative family
structure, which is based on affiliation not filiation or genealogy. In the most optimistic
of these inter-generational relationships, adults work with young protagonists in order
to assist them in constructing a healthier, confident sense of self, a self who begins
to trust adults and to seek communal belonging. These adults often occupy a space in
the government support sector and encourage subsequent sustained interdependent
relationships. Their hospitality is conditional upon knowing the individuals—their
18
names, their histories—and, for the most part, the institutions for which they work
operate as a safe place in lieu of a home.
In the “Author’s Note” that prefaces the novel Sketches, Eric Walters discusses how
the novel “is a work of fiction based on a real place—Sketch. I made up the people
in this book, but I didn’t make up the situations. Those are real. I don’t see Sketch
so much as a building as an outreached hand” (2007 np). This characterisation of the
building as an “outreached hand” personifies the structure and constructs it not as an
inanimate place but as an act of hospitality. Both of Walters’ novels feature a building
that substitutes for an outreached hand, and therein emphasise the importance of the
structural and the personal components necessary for an interdependent relationship.
In Sketches, the narrative revolves around fourteen-year-old Dana. Her
interdependent relationships extend to her friends Ashley and Brent, who are close to
her own age and who she refers to as her “street family” (2) and to the people who work
at the drop-in centre Sketches. Dana, Ashley, and Brent live on the streets together
begging for money to survive, until Dana is caught doing graffiti art by Robert, who
works at Sketches. Through Sketches, Dana connects with an artist, who once lived on
the streets but now has her own apartment and makes money through her art. When
Dana paints a canvas of herself and her sister, it reveals Dana’s fear that her stepfather
will begin abusing her sister. One of Dana’s mentors at Sketches reports the stepfather,
and the novel ends with Dana being placed with foster parents while she negotiates a
tentative reconciliation between herself and her mother.
The novel ends in a liminal place, with Dana neither homed nor homeless. While
the resolution opens the possibility of Dana returning to her familial home to live with
her mother and sister, readers never bear witness to this possible future. The novel
ends with a shared look between Dana and her mother, a look that takes place across
a crowded room in an art gallery but that nonetheless re-establishes a connection
between mother and daughter that may transfer back to inside their house, now that the
stepfather no longer resides there. This series of interdependent relationships that Dana
develops and the various “pathways through homelessness”—to borrow a phrase from
Mallett et al—she follows represent how homeless people navigate through different
modes of belonging. The novel demonstrates that positive subjectivity is based not on
individualization but on interdependence.
A more problematic representation of a post-familial family—where an adolescent
and an adult form an elective relationship in which they listen and take responsibility
for one another—occurs when this version of family maintains an unequal power
balance between a homed “us” and a homeless “them.” In Shattered, Walters—who has
received UNESCO’s international award for Literature in Service of Tolerance—draws
on the experiences of Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, who writes the “Foreword”
to the novel. He says,
19
Debra Dudek
The author has captured the frustration of the injured soldier and society’s indifference
to both him and the street people with whom he lives. In our rush to material success
and its rewards, we are prone to stereotype people without pausing to consider the
circumstances of the less fortunate and how we can help those who have become
marginalised to find some semblance of a tolerable if not a rewarding life. (2006 VII
VIII)
Even within this well-intentioned call to action, Dallaire divides the “we” who can
help from “those” on the streets, and this division occurs within the narrative as well.
This version of hospitality seems closer to pity than compassion, partly because the
narrative focuses not on a homeless person—although the main character is alienated
from his family3—but on the outreached hand of a fifteen-year-old boy.
While the novel’s overt message highlights interdependence—“We’re all in this
together. We’re all part of the same family” (124) or as stated at the end of the novel,
“Nobody can make it on their own” (202)—the covert meaning suggests that wealthy,
white, adolescents function as benign saviours. Told in first person by Ian Blackburn,
the narrative portrays Ian’s volunteer work at “The Club,” which he thought “sounded
classy. I guess it did have class . . . the lowest class possible” (3). The Club is a soup
kitchen that feeds homeless men and is run by Mac, who becomes Ian’s mentor. One
of the homeless people Ian meets is Jacques, nicknamed “Sarge” because he served
as a soldier in Rwanda as part of Canada’s peacekeeping mission there. As Ian learns
about Rwanda and about the individual people/men who live on the streets—all the
street people who go to the Club are men—so does the reader. For instance, for most
of the novel, Jacques relies on alcohol to deal with the trauma of serving in Rwanda,
and readers are aligned with Ian to understand the very valid reasons that people turn
to alcohol—and the streets—to escape trauma.
At the end of the novel, however, Ian learns from Mac that Jacques attends
Alcoholics Anonymous. For Ian’s sixteenth birthday, Jacques gives Ian—via Mac—a
two-week chip, which signifies that Jacques has been dry for two weeks. Jacques
disappears from the narrative at the time that he stops drinking, so Ian and therefore
the reader, do not see Jacques’s struggle to give up his addiction. Jacques’s disappearance
and presumed healing leaves Ian as the hero of the narrative because he is the one
who helps Jacques understand that alcohol is not the right way to deal with trauma.
In other words, the reader’s emotional engagement with Jacques is eliminated and
focused solely on Ian’s actions rather than on Jacques. In this way, young adult readers
are positioned not to empathise with war veterans or street people but to understand
that they can save the “less fortunate” from themselves.
The novel ends with a conversation between Mac and Ian in which Ian thanks Mac
for “everything.” He says, “‘I couldn’t have done it by myself.’ Mac smiled. ‘Who can?’
Mac asked. ‘Who can?’” (210). This ending points to the importance of inter-subjective
20
relationships and elective families, but it also invites the reader to reflect upon what
“it” is that Ian has done. Helped Jacques overcome his alcohol addiction? Stayed on
volunteering at the soup kitchen? While it is true that the soup kitchen provides Ian
with a post-familial family via Mac and Jacques and that Ian’s relationship with his
parents renders him alienated in that domestic space, this alienation from his biological
family seems trite next to Jacques trauma. There is no doubt that this novel wants to
work towards social justice for street people and to raise awareness about the genocide
in Rwanda and the disappeared in Guatemala. It is less successful than Sketches at
achieving social justice ends because they are undermined by a too-familiar trope in
which a white, upper-class, privileged male “saves” a marginalised other.
Walters bases both Shattered and Sketches on real situations and places, and
overwhelmingly the Canadian texts about homelessness employ social realism. They
teach young adult readers about aspects of Canada’s history and about some of the social
institutions available for people living on the streets, including soup kitchens, housing,
and drop-in centres. The stories encourage readers to be aware of similar situations
in their own communities and to think about how they, too, can extend hospitality,
can reach out their hand to strangers. As Margaret Visser states in The Gift of Thanks,
“Hosts and guests play different roles, but they are actors in one ‘play,’ a hospitable
action” (23). Young adult readers bear witness to the structural issues that can result
in homelessness, but they are also called upon to imagine the role they might play in
creating social change through their hospitable action.
Absolute Hospitality and The Island
In Australian fiction for young people, homeless subjects are often represented via
metaphor rather than the grittier realism of their Canadian counterparts. These books
cover the range of readers and modes of fiction, including picture books, junior fiction,
and young adult novels. Some of the most complex representations occur in picture
books, arguably beginning with Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000), and including David
Miller’s Refugees (2005); Narelle Oliver’s Dancing the Boom Cha Cha Boogie (2005); John
Heffernan’s The Island (2005); Jane Jolly’s Ali the Bold Heart (2006); Armin Greder’s
The Island (2007, first published in 2002 in Germany); Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006);
Liz Lofthouse’s Ziba Came on a Boat (2007); and John Marsden’s Home and Away
(2008).4 I shall analyze only one of these books—Heffernan’s The Island, illustrated
by Peter Sheehan—because it combines and exemplifies aspects of the aforementioned
picture books, and it demonstrates a model for the ideal individualised citizen, who
listens and takes responsibility for an other and offers absolute hospitality, without the
problematic ending articulated in Shattered.
Narratively similar to The Lost Thing in its use of the relationship between a young
boy and a non-human creature to model an ethical relationship that begins with
21
Debra Dudek
unconditional hospitality, The Island tells the story of two marginalised others—a blind
urchin and a sea creature—who change the way a community functions. In both these
picture books, the colour and shape of the creature highlights the bland indifference
of the society in which the boy lives. Colour and its absence heighten the difference
between the creature and the society in which it arrives and point to the homogeneity
and monochromatic nature of that society. In Tan’s book, the lost thing carries its
red curved bulk and waves its huge tentacles in a world of sepia tones and straight
lines (see Dudek 2006). In The Island, the homogeneous character of the community,
described as “a hardworking tribe that rarely smiled and never laughed,” is made literal
by rendering the tribe in black and white and shades of grey and setting them against a
backdrop of a brilliant multi-coloured natural island. The creature’s body matches the
hues, textures, and excess of the island, which connects the creature to the landscape
and separates the people from them both.
One of the most significant differences, for the purposes of this essay, between The
Lost Thing and The Island is that the main character in The Island is homeless, which
invites a multi-layered reading of homelessness and hospitality. At the beginning of
the narrative, readers identify with the young boy as a homeless subject, but as the
story develops, it becomes apparent that the creature functions as a metaphor for the
stranger, the absolute alien other. The creature may be read as a refugee who arrives
without notice, as a symbol of indigeneity,5 as a manifestation of happiness as reward,
and as a warning against the capture of marine animals.6 While it is beyond the
scope of this essay to analyze each of these possibilities, what unites each reading is a
characterization of the creature as an alien other.
The main character, who extends hospitality and literally reaches out his hand to
the creature, exists as an internal and external other. His belonging to and alienation
from the community is signified in multiple ways: he resembles the tribe in his skin
tone and clothing, but he is separated from the other people by his unruly hair; he
wears a striped tunic but he does not wear pants; he lives on the island’s beach, not
in a stilted house like everyone else; his lower status is literalised because the beach
is physically at a lower level than the concrete “city” on which the tribe live; and his
blindness means that he relies on his other senses to move through the world and to
approach and engage with an other. His characterization as an “urchin” signals his
connection to the sea, even though he cannot see.
In contrast to the urchin’s connection to the sea, the stature and demeanour of the
tribe and the structures they build stand in stark contrast to the natural landscape.
The island bursts out of its border: curly trees balance precariously on cliff edges;
erosion threatens the stability of the island’s surface; and various remnants of flotsam
and jetsam litter the beach, amongst which sits a young curly-haired boy, whose arms
and legs poke out from his tunic. In the opening image, the tribe stands erect behind
22
slabs of a concrete sidewalk on top of the island. Each member of the tribe is clothed
in a grey long-sleeved top and pants with vertical black stripes running the length of
their bodies. Their garments resemble prison uniforms and the militant stance of the
people in this first illustration, who stand unsmiling with their hands behind their
backs, strengthens the image of a community committed to uniformity, containment,
order, and borders.
The book establishes the urchin’s connection to the sea throughout the narrative,
which can be divided into four sections with four illustrations in each section. In every
illustration, regardless of whether the boy is on the beach or in the city, he touches
an aspect of the natural world. The first section establishes the boy’s connection to
the island and the tribe’s indifference to it. In the first two illustrations, he sits on the
beach and holds a starfish in his hand. The third illustration portrays him seated on
the beach amongst various natural detritus, which the omniscient narrator describes as
“treasures.” In the fourth illustration, the boy displays these “riches” on the pavement
of the city “for all to see and any to take. But no-one did.” In this final illustration of
the first section, five tribe members stride by the boy, who squats in the midst of shells
and starfish and holds a piece of driftwood above his head. The shape of the driftwood
resembles the sea creature and therein foreshadows the next section in which the boy
and the creature establish a relationship.
More significantly, perhaps, this image highlights the community’s indifference
to the boy’s hospitality. He does not beg or ask for their help; instead, he offers his
riches unconditionally to everyone, and the sea-creature-shaped piece of driftwood
symbolises his absolute hospitality, even in the face of hostility. Visser examines the
etymology of the words host and guest and shows the closeness “of hospitality to the
possibility of animus lurking in either host or guest, or both. (A hostage is a person
forcibly, and therefore discourteously, detained by a group not his own)” (23), which
is precisely the action taken by the hostile hosts. The second section follows how the
boy and the creature establish an intimate elective relationship, which may be read as
an example of absolute hospitality. Significantly, when the boy first hears the creature
approach and identifies it as “something he didn’t recognise,” he does not express fear
or concern of the unknown. Rather, he waits and listens and leans closer to the sound.
When the creature rears out of the water, its immense bulk towers over the boy, who
reaches out his hand to stroke the creature’s lip and skin. This initial touch leads the
boy to follow the creature into the water, where they begin to play and laugh. This
section closes with the tribe exhibiting the opposite behaviour of the boy. When they
initially see the creature, they call it a monster, and tell the boy to “Come away. But
the boy didn’t hear them, he was laughing so loud.”
The boy’s initial silence and the tribe’s “Come away” perform opposite ends of
Derrida’s notion of absolute hospitality:
23
Debra Dudek
It is true that this abstention (‘come, enter, stop at my place, I don’t ask your name,
nor even to be responsible, nor where you come from or where you are going’) seems
more worthy of the absolute hospitality that offers the gift without reservations; and
some might also recognise there a possibility of language. Keeping silent is already a
modality of possible speaking. (2002 135)
It is significant that the tribe’s initial response to meeting the sea creature is to say,
“Come away,” in an attempt not to welcome the creature but to rescue the boy from the
creature. Derrida ponders, “[W]e have come to wonder whether absolute, hyperbolical,
unconditional hospitality doesn’t consist in suspending language” (135), and the boy’s
silence, his touch that replaces language, seems to constitute precisely this form of
unconditional hospitality.
The tribe’s initial response changes when they hear the boy laughing, a sound
they had never before heard on the island. The laughter draws the people into the
water, and the third section maps their response to the creature and to the way that
“laughing ma[kes] them feel.” They attribute their sudden happiness to their hard work
and plot how to keep the creature and therein to keep their happiness. Their fear of
loss quickly replaces their joy of discovery, so they capture the creature, so it—and
their happiness—can never escape. The penultimate illustration of this section shows
twelve members of the tribe pulling on a rope they have tied to the creature’s tail. The
creature stretches half in and half out of a three-lane swimming pool, while the boy
struggles to assist the creature back to the sea.
Captured in this small pool in the middle of the island, the creature begins to die.
Significantly, as life drains from the creature, so does colour seep from its skin. In the
final image of this section, the creature frowns, its flesh sags, and its skin resembles
the greyish hue of the people. On the left side of the two-page illustration, the people
laugh, jump, and climb on the creature with smiles on their faces, and remain indifferent
to the creature’s diminishing health. Their hostile hospitality demonstrates Visser’s
characterization of hospitality as containing the possibility of “genuine interest in
him and delight in his company,” but they fail as hosts by depriving their guest of its
freedom to leave (Visser 23). On the right side of the page in the foreground, the boy
holds next to his cheek one of the creature’s tentacled extremities, which still contains
the barest of colour, and he understands that life ebbs from the creature.
The final section charts the creature’s return to its sea home and the tribe’s response
to this seeming loss. In the first of these illustrations, the boy helps the creature escape
back to the sea. In the second, the boy rides away on the back of the creature, unlike
in The Lost Thing in which the narrator returns to his own home after assisting the lost
thing. In the third illustration, the people search the island and call to the sea, but they
hear no reply. The final image of the book parallels the first and offers a glimmer of
hope for the future of the tribe, who now “sometimes even hear laughter.” In the book’s
24
opening image, the thirteen primary members of the tribe face forward with hands
clasped behind their backs and frowns spreading across their faces. The blind urchin
sits on the sand below them with a star fish in his hand. In the final image, twelve
members of the tribe stand behind the same sidewalk, but one boy moves towards the
beach and now some of the people look at each other while other members of the tribe
stare at the sky, gaze at the ground, or watch the sea. None of them frown. Where
the blind urchin once sat and played, there now exists a spiky sea urchin, or perhaps a
tumble of sea weed, that replicates his head of hair and remains a trace and reminder
of his absolute hospitality.
Recommended for children aged 5+, this picture book performs for young readers
the absolute hospitality advocated by Derrida in the epigraph to this essay. The
blind street urchin silently says “yes” to who or what turns up before determination,
anticipation, or identification, and he does so with an outreached hand. He defies his
community’s hostile hospitality and becomes part of a family of his own making, a
family based on interdependence and responsibility for the other. Children can see
how individual action might change a community’s view, and, in the book’s final
image, they might imagine themselves as that boy stepping off the sidewalk, away
from the community, and towards an unforeseen future where homelessness can be
a state of belonging.
Conclusion
The large body of literature for young readers that represents homeless people offers
a telling reflection of how the state of homelessness in Canada and Australia has
impacted on children’s literature since 2003. According to Michael Shapcott of the
Wellesley Institute, “In 2006, the United Nations called housing and homelessness
in Canada a ‘national emergency,’ a finding confirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Adequate Housing during his official fact-finding mission to Canada
in 2007” (2). Three days before they called the federal election in 2008, the Canadian
government renewed the federal homelessness program for five years, committing
$135 million to the program annually (Shapcott 3). Homelessness across Canada
affects local communities in particular ways, but the national condition demonstrates
a failure of the federal government to adequately provide structural support. Novels
for young adults, such as Shattered and Sketches, draw upon real situations and places
in order to raise young people’s awareness about why people live on the streets and,
ideally, to instigate social change. In Australia, debates over the past fifteen years about
homelessness and hospitality circulate primarily around asylum seekers. From Pauline
Hanson’s maiden speech in 1996 in which she said, “if I can invite whom I want into
my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country”
to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s 2010 election platform to “Stop the Boats” and
25
Debra Dudek
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s current agenda to set up a regional processing centre
in East Timor (Coorey and Murphy), the Australian federal government’s outreached
hand looks more like a backhand slap. In response, a substantial number of texts for
children, including John Heffernan’s The Island, illustrate that individual action can
work against a dominant majority who acts with hostility rather than hospitality. When
neither the nation state nor the family home provides a reliable safe space, people
create alternative family situations based on hospitable interdependence. The texts for
young people discussed in this essay represent some of the multiple possibilities for
belonging that form under such conditions, and they model for young readers ways of
saying “yes,” either with words or with an outreached hand.
Notes
1
2
3
For more information about this list of Canadian texts, see Reimer 2009.
See Reimer 2008 for more information about notions of home and homelessness in Canadian
Children’s Literature.
Ian harbours a lot of anger towards his wealthy hard-working, mostly-absent parents. His
closest connection in the family home is to Berta, his nanny, who is from Guatemala. One
of the novel’s subplots articulates Berta’s migration to Canada to escape an oppressive regime
after witnessing the massacre of her family.
Ziba, Ali the Bold Heart, and Home and Away rely on realism more than metaphor.
4
5
6
I presented a version of this paper at the 15th Biennial Conference of the Association for
Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ). I thank David McDonald
for his suggestion that the sea creature is indigenous to the island and the surrounding sea
and that the book, therefore, may be read as a metaphor for colonization.
The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry categorises The Island as
Juvenile fiction about happiness and marine animals.
Works Cited
Beck, Ulrich. Democracy without Enemies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998.
Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization: Institutionalised Individualism
and its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002.
Cooke, Bev. Feral. Victoria: Orca, 2008.
Coorey, Phillip and Damien Murphy. “Gillard’s Mission Improbable.” Sydney Morning Herald. 10
July 2010. http://www.smh.com.au/national/gillards-mission-improbable-20100709-10411.
html
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmanatelle invites Jacques Derrida to Respond.
Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Dudek, Debra. “Dogboys and Lost Things; or Anchoring a Floating Signifier: Race and Critical
Multiculturalism.” Ariel 37.4 (October 2006): 1-20.
Greder, Armin. The Island. 2002. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007.
Heffernan, John. The Island. Illus. Peter Sheehan. 2005. Sydney: Scholastic, 2008.
26
Jane Jolly: Ali the Bold Heart. Illus. Elise Hurst. Balmain, NSW: Limelight Press, 2006.
Leavitt, Martine. Tom Finder. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2003.
Lofthouse, Liz. Ziba Came on a Boat, Camberwell, Victoria : Penguin, 2007.
Mac, Carrie. Pain and Wastings. Victoria, BC: Orca, 2008.
Mallett, Shelley, Doreen Rosenthal, Deborah Keys, and Roger Averill. Moving Out, Moving
On: Young People’s Pathways in and through Homelessness. London: Routledge, 2010.
Marsden, John. Home and Away. Illus. Matt Ottley. Melbourne: Hachette Livre, 2008.
Miller, David. Refugees. Melbourne: Lothian, 2004.
Oliver, Narelle. Dancing the Boom Cha Cha Boogie. Malvern, SA: Omnibus Books, 2005.
Poulsen, David A. Last Sam’s Cage. Toronto, ON: Key Porter, 2004.
Reimer, Mavis. “Homing and Unhoming: The Ideological Work of Canadian Children’s
Literature.” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid
Laurier UP, 2008. 1-25.
. “No Place Like Home” Globalization and Deterritorialisation in Recent Canadian
Children’s Literature.” Keynote Address. The Child and the Book Conference. Vancouver
Island University. 1-3 May 2009.
Shapcott, Michael. The State of the Nation’s Housing: Federal Election 2008. Toronto: Wellesley
Institute, 2008.
Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. Melbourne: Lothian, 2006.
. The Lost Thing. Melbourne: Lothian, 2000.
Visser, Margaret. The Gift of Thanks: the Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social
Ritual. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2008.
Walters, Eric. Sketches. Toronto, ON: Puffin Canada, 2007.
Walters, Eric. Shattered. Toronto, ON: Puffin Canada, 2006.
27
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Men Without Women: Coping with Loneliness and
Isolation on the British Columbia Frontier
ROBERT HOGG
University of Queensland
Robert Harkness and James Thomson travelled to the Cariboo goldfields in 1862. Their
response to the challenges of the remoteness of the frontier of British Columbia and the
concomitant isolation from their families are revealed in a series of letters written to
their wives detailing both the psychological and physical demands they faced. It will be
argued that the challenges arising from a sense of geographical remoteness undermined
both writers’ sense of manly self-esteem and self-control. This was undermined by the
fact that in order to provide for their families, Harkness and Thomson had to leave
them, an act which potentially sacrificed their relationships and emotional life in
order to practice the more ostensibly virile ‘masculine’ attributes of the mid-Victorian
gender order. Arguably, the frontier for Harkness and Thomson was a place of trial
and tribulation, not of self-realisation and both were impoverished and diminished
by the experience.
Keywords: Masculinity; Frontiersmen; Isolation, Life writing
I hate isolation. To set out alone on a long trip makes me feel like the small child who, lingering
behind, screams for fear of being abandoned; or like the squadron horse, on scouting work, that
frets to go back to the other horses. Nearly always, on rough journeys, one has a companion, a
partner; and a partner means safety and cheerfulness and the surety of proper camps and fires
and meals. A lonely man, panting to get to his journey’s end, pushes on too hard, tires himself,
travels too late into the falling dusk, and is exhausted as he makes camp.
I cursed Carter as I dug my axe into log after log and found them all rotten; and every pole
and even every twig seemed rotten too. And at that twinge of despair the horror of loneliness
came upon me, and I looked up the mountain, and over the misty, white-caped sea, and round
upon the scattered tangle of fallen timber on the mossy rocks – and the sight was dreary, the
abomination of desolation.
(M. Allerdale Grainger, Woodsman of the West)
29
Robert Hogg
Robert Harkness and James Thomson travelled to the Cariboo goldfields in 1862.
Their response to the challenges of the remoteness of the frontier of British Columbia
and the concomitant isolation from their families are revealed in a series of letters
written to their wives detailing both the psychological and physical demands they
faced. Harkness and Thomson sketch a picture of frontier males who were far from
the rugged frontiersmen stereotype of popular culture and their letters can be read as a
journey of self in which the competing notions of masculinity and allegiance to family
are played out. It will be argued that the challenges arising from a sense of geographical
remoteness undermined both writers’ sense of manly self-esteem and self-control.
At the beginning of their journey Harkness and Thomson, as mid-Victorian
males appear to subscribe to the prevailing masculine ideals in which the male is the
provider and therefore protector of the family unit. Their letters also construct an
image of them as loving husbands and affectionate fathers. While they were optimists
who were willing to do what was necessary to provide for their families, neither man
conformed to the conventional image of the North American frontiersman. Harkness
was a shopkeeper and Thomson a baker; more used to wearing aprons than buckskins.
The frontier would test their physical courage, endurance, and fortitude; demanding of
them those attributes central to the Victorian masculine ideal. They also had to struggle
to reconcile their actions with devotion to family. Their time on the frontier illustrates
the paradox of manliness in that the centrality of the family and of a companionate
marriage that was central to the mid-Victorian gender order. This was undermined
by the fact that in order to provide for their families, Harkness and Thomson had to
leave them, an act which potentially sacrificed their relationships and emotional life
in order to practice the more ostensibly virile ‘masculine’ attributes. Furthermore, the
performance of the masculine virtues failed to yield any benefit. Their letters show
that neither man achieved wealth nor manly independence. Arguably, the frontier for
Harkness and Thomson was a place of trial and tribulation, not of self-realisation and
both were impoverished and diminished by the experience.
In his autobiographical novel Woodsmen of the West, M. Allerdale Grainger describes
the risks faced and the fear felt by men on the frontier, surrounded by strange and
threatening country, and remote from the familiar and reassuring people and places of
home. Grainger recounts the occasion on which he had been sent to procure supplies
for a logging camp, a journey that could easily take him a month or more alone. He
was well aware of the risks, and had spent some time apprising the camp boss of these
in a futile attempt to avoid the journey. A day into his trip ‘the horror of loneliness’ and
the ‘abomination of desolation’ came over him. As luck would have it, he was joined
by two loggers from a rival camp bound in the same direction, and he did not have to
face the wilderness alone. Later he engaged two men and a boat to help him return
to camp with the supplies.
30
For Grainger the very landscape is threatening, exacerbating his isolation,
emphasising his vulnerability. Loneliness can trigger primal fears and irrational,
bestial responses. Loneliness produces not only psychological dangers, but physical
dangers as well, as the lonely man feels compelled to push himself beyond his limits,
to somehow overcome his isolation through exertion. While Robert Harkness and
James Thomson were never absolutely alone on the frontier – in the sense that there
were no other people around them for an extended period – they experienced severe
emotional trauma arising from isolation from their families. Grainger had no family
that he wrote of, nor did he write of strong bonds with fellow woodsmen. He would
have been content simply to have one human companion. Despite these differences
in circumstances, Grainger’s story, together with those of Harkness and Thompson,
suggests that isolation and loneliness, was common among frontier men.
Among historians of colonial frontiers, gender has been a key variable in mapping
the development of various colonial projects, significant for both colonisers and the
colonised. Historians have sought to rectify a situation where the ubiquity of men as
historical actors ensured a situation where they were the least understood sexual and
gendered identities. In the words of John Tosh ‘in the historical record masculinity is
everywhere and nowhere’(Tosh, 1994:180). Canadian, Australian and United States
scholars have shown that frontier colonisation cannot be understood without examining
the role of gender, and in particular, masculinity. Adele Perry has examined the
connections between gender, race and the construction of colonial society in British
Columbia, probing the homosocial culture and the attempts by authorities to create an
orderly, ‘respectable’ white settler colony (Perry, 1994). Elizabeth Vibert in Trader Tales:
Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, has examined the journals of
frontier men whose model of masculinity was significant, not only for their self-image,
but also for their representations of Indigenous people (Vibert, 1997). The frontier has
loomed large in the national psyche of the United States and investigation of frontier
men has recently been added to the extensive frontier canon (Johnston, 2002).
Marilyn Lake was one of the first Australian historians to recognise masculinities
in Australia as an historical problem (Lake, 1986: 116-131). Her “Frontier Feminism
and the Marauding White Man” argues that it was the ‘marauding white man’ who,
as a sexual threat to women, was the authentic representative of the frontier male
(Lake 1996a: 12-20). Since her groundbreaking work, interest in masculinity has
been manifest in the emergence of a body of literature examining men in Australian
society. Robert Dixon’s Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation
in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 examines the relationship between
imperialism, adventure, masculinity, Englishness and Australian nationhood. He
argues that the ‘New Imperialism’ of the late- nineteenth century as an ideology, and
the adventure novel as an ideological form, resolved the contradictions in the lived
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Robert Hogg
experience of imperialism, by inscribing the male reader in tales of regenerative violence
on the colonial frontier (Dixon, 1995: 1). Work by Kay Saunders, Clive Moore and
Raymond Evans on frontier masculinities has resulted in nuanced understanding of
men as historical agents (Moore and Saunders, 1998; Evans 1998)
Robert Harkness
Robert Harkness, who had owned a general store in eastern Ontario, was a member of
the largest of the several groups of ‘Overlanders’ which journeyed across the Canadian
prairies, and over the Rocky Mountains to seek fortune on the Cariboo gold fields of British
Columbia in 1862. Compared to the published diaries of other Overlanders, Harkness’s
letters are more personal and possess an intimate and revelatory voice that public narratives
do not (See McMicking, 1862; Fortune, 1936; Leduc, 1981). He describes the trip as ‘a
great task’ and despite the hardship he expresses pride in his undertaking:
In a fortnight more we will be at Fort Edmonton & then our real hardships begin, but
I have grown so tough that I don’t expect to mind it. I have lost at least 20 pounds of
flesh since I left home but still I am perfectly healthy. In these long days & and in this
northern clime daylight comes very early & we are up every morning at two o’clock &
travel two or three hours before breakfast. What think you of that? (Robert Harkness
to Sabrina Harkness, 1 July, 1962).
Why did he choose the overland route as opposed to the alternatives – via the
southern tip of South America and San Francisco, or across the Isthmus of Panama?
A number of explanations are possible. He may have simply been unable to afford a
boat ticket. Perhaps he derived a sense of security from travelling with a group of likeminded men. Catherine Hall offers a third possibility: overlanding and exploration, in
the nineteenth century, was a ‘quintessentially male activity’. She describes exploration
as ‘the ultimate expression of frontier masculinity, the extension in the European mind
of man’s conquest over ‘virgin territory’ (Hall, 1996: 139). For Harkness the journey
may have been as necessary and important as the gold mining. This was a quest to
prove his manhood. Harkness undertook his journey as a test which, if he succeeded,
would redeem past failures. In an undated letter Harkness says of group leader Thomas
McMicking that ‘like myself he was unfortunate in business.’(Robert Harkness to
Sabrina Harkness, c1862). In 1864 he acknowledged his relief that ‘enough had been
collected on my accounts to pay Moran the interest due and got all the payments
postponed another year’ 9 Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 1 April, 1864).
Harkness goes into no further detail, but these lines suggest that his general store
had not been a success. Business failure, debt and possibly lack of local opportunity
meant that Harkness had lost his role as the family provider.
The Cariboo gold fields provided Harkness with a way of recuperating his fortune,
and salvaging his tattered sense of masculinity. In this sense it could be argued that
32
in Harkness’ letters home he reveals his attempt to conform to established masculine
stereotypes in being a provider, a man of fortitude, a family man and a courageous
adventurer. Finding gold is central to this myth for it is this success which will enable
him to financially support his dependents and maintain a home. In order to find gold
he must exert his physical strength. It also meant leaving the family for four years.
This results in a psychological conflict resulting in stress and anxiety. This is evidenced
in his letters home but at the same time, his professions of love for his wife and family
are not only undiminished but is intensified.
While he was away every letter Harkness wrote expressed his love for his wife and
children and his desire to be eventually reunited. At the early stage of his journey but
already homesick he wrote to Sabrina from Detroit:
I am more homesick than ever I was in my life before but if I had a letter from you it
would half cure me. I could sit down and read it over and over again and almost imagine
I had it from your own dear self. But although I haven’t heard from you I must keep
writing to you, I have nothing to do and I can think of nothing but the ‘loved ones at
home’. Do you know it hardly seems possible that I am really gone to stay away from
you for such a length of time. I feel at times as if I were dreaming but I know it is too
true that I am not. Well, Sabrina my dear, it must be put up with (Robert Harkness
to Sabrina Harkness, 22 April 1862).
On 9 May 1862 en route to the Cariboo goldfields of British Columbia, Harkness
wrote to his wife:
While assured of your love I care not for the world besides and O Sabrina I cannot
express my gratitude for the confidence you repose in me. When I feel disposed to repine
at my lot in being obliged to leave the sweetest wife and little ones that ever cheered
a mortal’s pathway I derive some consolation from the reflection that this separation
has at least one compensating quality; but for it we should probably never have known
the real depth and intensity of our love for each other. I, at least, am fairly surprised at
the almost frantic fondness with which my thoughts turn to the dear wife, my all in
all. And O! what exquisite pleasure to read the language of pure affection penned by
you; to think that you are mine and mine only and I yours and yours only; that though
separated by hundreds of miles we are yet one? True and faithful to each other and each
regarded by the other as the dearest thing on earth. Is not this some compensation? I
think so and feel so tenderly towards you that it seems to me I can never say another
unkind word to you and I hope I never shall. I’ll not ask your pardon for those that
are past for I know they are forgiven. True love cannot harbour unkind thoughts of its
object (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 9 May, 1862).
This passage suggests that Harkness subscribed to the ideal mid-Victorian domestic
life (or at least its rhetoric), embracing marriage and a loving family in which the male
is the breadwinner and the woman the nurturer (Tosh, 1999; Davidoff and Hall,
33
Robert Hogg
1987; Clark, 1995; Seccombe, 1998). This extract establishes what Harkness sees as
the fundamentals of his relationship with his wife. He portrays himself as a devoted
family man for whom romantic love for his wife and the family they raised were the
pillars of his life.
What did the children think of his absence? Only one voice from the family endures
in the form of a letter of daughter Mary Dell Harkness to her own daughter, written
in 1952. Although she was not born until after his return, Mary wrote of her father:
‘I am proud of the letters he sent home. They bespeak a generous and affectionate
heart’(Mary Dell Harkness to Isabel Kathleen Race Eddy, c1952). While Mary is
not reflecting on her father’s absence, nevertheless such sentiments suggest that he
was loved by his children, and his absence wrought no long term adverse effect on his
relationship with them. The ideals of family and domesticity are obviously central to
Harkness’s letters. In his letter of 28 June 1864 he wrote:
It is you and you only that can confer happiness on a husband who, whatever his faults,
is most sincerely and devotedly attached to his wife, and who, though in the third year of
his adventurous ramblings, has been uniformly faithful to his marriage vows. I take no
special credit to myself for this, it should mark the conduct of every man endowed with
a proper degree of self-respect and no man could love and esteem his wife as I do mine
and yet be deliberately false to her (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 28 June 1864),.
Harkness’s fidelity to his wife conformed to the Christian precepts of the Victorian
era and was clearly integral to his personal feelings of manhood and to his idea of
right conduct. This was not necessarily the norm on the British Columbia frontier.
A lack of women of their own race did not necessarily mean that white miners went
without sex. Mixed race relationships between white miners and indigenous women
were widespread (Perry, 2011: 48). Over the years Harkness’s yearning remained
undiminished:
Do you remember the 25th of June 1856? Day ever dear to me, that on which she whom
I so truly and faithfully loved deigned to become ‘all mine own’. Perhaps I have fulfilled
my trust unworthily, but at least, my Nina, I love you, if possible more truly and tenderly
now than on that memorable day( Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 28 June 1864).
While all the letters contain similarly effusive passages, there are also clues that
relations between Harkness and Sabrina were not always characterised by such strong,
loving feelings. The extracts below suggest marital conflict, harsh words, and discord
concerning Harkness’s plan to venture to the Cariboo:
O Sabrina nothing but a pressing necessity induced me to leave a home blessed with
all the affection the most craving heart could desire and I hope I shall not be very long
absent from it (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 23 July 1862).
34
… our petty difficulties. What a depth of love lay concealed beneath them and how well
we know it now! (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, n.d. c1862).
I don’t think you’ll ever doubt me again, it seems to me that my sincerity will be too
apparent to admit of doubt (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 3 April, 1864).
The letters these extracts come from were written over the entire period Harkness
was away. It seems that marital discord, or at least financial difficulties – ‘pressing
necessity’ – weighed on his mind for a very long time. Harkness’s effusions of love – ‘all
the affection the most craving heart could desire’ – appear in part to be attempts to
make up ground that was lost between him and Sabrina though that does not mean
that they are less than completely genuine. His words suggest that he and Sabrina
had quarreled – ‘our petty difficulties: what depth of love lay concealed beneath them’
– perhaps over the business and perhaps she did not embrace his plan to go to British
Columbia, and may have felt that he was deserting her and the children. Furthermore,
Harkness’s letters reveal a certain ‘asymmetry’ or lack of proportion in his feelings for
his wife and family. This is not to suggest that his words are inappropriate. The term
‘asymmetry’ in this context refers to the actual or conceptual distance separating one
individual from another (Lane, 1999: 1). In this case, the further Harkness gets from
his family in time and distance, the closer he gets to them psychically or emotionally.
The distance between him and Sabrina intensifies his emotions and language:
If only you knew how anxious I am to see you, your utmost cravings for my love would
be gratified (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 3 April, 1864).
O my own, my loved my precious wife, ‘tis a weary life apart from you (Robert Harkness
to Sabrina Harkness, 31 May, 1864).
Could gold by me love such as yours? Could gold buy children such as ours? No, verily.
And with such a wife & surrounded by such children I envy no man (Robert Harkness
to Sabrina Harkness, 5 March, 1865).
Obviously, what is missing here are Sabrina’s letters to Robert. One wonders if she
reciprocated his love with similar intensity. One can only imagine what her feelings
might have been during their separation. A little of her experience is revealed in
Harkness’s letters: it seems that she did not entirely approve of his venture, and is
often desperately short of money. In his own letters, Harkness tells her a good deal
about his life on the frontier, but there is little which indicates much understanding
of her predicament:
These two months are the only bit of civilized life I’ve led in two years, I’ve slept in
a house (not in a bed, but on a mattress) 7 eaten at a table but in three days more I
resume my savage habits, cook my own victuals, carry my blankets, & wrap myself
35
Robert Hogg
up and sleep as best I can whenever night overtakes me (Robert Harkness to Sabrina
Harkness, 3 April, 1864).
Grub is tolerably cheap here now, flour and beans 50c a pound, each, bacon $1.25 to
$1.50, sugar and salt $1 each (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 31 May, 1864).
You told men in one letter that I, as a father, couldn’t appreciate your feelings as a
mother in being separated from your children. That’s cool certainly. What till you get
to be a father before you judge (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 5 March, 1865).
There appears to have been no question that Sabrina or the children would accompany
Harkness to the Cariboo. Rather, Sabrina stayed at home and looked after the children.
While he was away Sabrina had a job – she taught at the school in Dixon’s Corner,
Ontario, which itself indicated a failure on the part of Harkness to support his family.
Harkness obviously felt that her teaching was undesirable as he wrote in 1865 that
‘I hope the money I sent you arrived safely and that you will not be obliged to teach
anymore’(Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 28 April,1865). When Harkness
eventually returned from the Cariboo he took over her job at the school. Thus her
place in the domestic sphere was confirmed.
In the early stages of his journey he had cause for optimism. On 22 April 1862 he
wrote: ‘I suppose you have read the Globe, I got hold of one here yesterday and was
gratified to see the favourable accounts of British Columbia.’ On 23 July 1862 he wrote:
‘That there is plenty of gold on the Saskatchewan and that rich diggings will yet be
discovered I have no doubt.’ Optimism was mixed with stoicism:
It is dark and damp, with a very cold wind blowing hard, so cold, in fact, that I was
obliged to put on two coats and wrap myself in my blanket and stay in the tent all day
to shelter my self from the piercing wind. These things, of course, however, I expected
and can bear them with tolerable patience if I could only be assured that my dear loved
ones were comfortable at home (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 15 June 1862).
Eventually, stoicism would give way to despair. Evidently, Harkness also feels guilt
for leaving his family. Nevertheless, he displayed some amount of resolve and expects
his wife to do likewise. That he felt guilt and resolved to repress his feelings illustrates
the tension between the domestic ideal and adventurous masculinity. At first Harkness
seemed to revel in the physical challenges his trek entailed:
The first night we camped out ice formed on a lake nearby more than a quarter of an
inch thick but I haven’t suffered any from cold. I am now sitting under a tent with a
piece of board on my knee for a writing table so you must be lenient towards my poor
writing. I am up every morning before 5 o’clock; what do you think of that for Bob?
(Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 9 May , 1862).
36
However, as the journey unfolded, it was not only the pain of separation that struck
Harkness hard. The frontier’s physical demands became more strenuous and Harkness
struggled:
Every morning we are up at 4 o’clock, eat a hasty mouthful, get up our oxen, start at
5 and travel until 10 or 11 o’clock. We then halt to about one or two o’clock when we
again start and travel til 6 or 7, stop, eat, and go to bed to get up the next morning and
repeat the same process. Walking 10 hours a day, although you go no faster than an ox
walks, is very hard work. Often we have to take off our shoes, roll up our pants and
help push the cart through mud holes. Yesterday we crossed the Assiniboine in a scow
taking one ox and cart at a time and pulling over by a rope. We don’t travel on Sundays
and both ourselves and our cattle are very glad to get a rest but today is very dreary and
dispiriting. (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 15 June, 1862).
As Harkness had been a shopkeeper, such strenuous physical exertion must have been
difficult, to say the least, and it obviously exacted an emotional toll. The trek must
have strained his reserves of stoicism and perseverance, and the temptation to turn
back must have been strong. The monotony and routine of frontier life and its negative
emotional toll did not end once he reached the Cariboo: “I wish I had something more
cheering to write but the fact is I am quite out of spirits. I have been three months
now in this miserable town [New Westminster], I have worked whenever I could to
get a days work, yet haven’t so much as made my board” (Robert Harkness to Sabrina
Harkness, 28 April, 1865).
Throughout these letters, when he writes of separation and the physical severity
of the journey, there is a strong sense of exile, of the psychological anxiety which
accompanies the uprooting of one’s foundations to wander in the wilderness. A year
into his sojourn, the Cariboo was clearly not what Harkness expected. In 1863 he
wrote from Richfield on the gold fields and there was no mention of earning a living
from gold mining, let alone striking it rich. One letter of 1864 conveys Harkness’s
feelings of exile and isolation:
It is now nearly two years since we separated, two long, weary years such as I hope never
again to see in my lifetime. If all we have endured is not to benefit us in any money
point of view, be it so, we shall, at the least, the better enjoy our domestic pleasures
from having experienced the pain of being deprived of them. I confess that I am weary,
weary of our separation. I am not, properly speaking homesick; home and friends are as
nothing to me compared with my household gods [sic], and but for you and our babes
it would cause me no very serious regret if I never again saw Canada, though I should
as soon think of settling in the moon as in this country. I am now very much like my
father, stern and unsociable, speaking to nobody and asking nobody to speak to me.
No play, no mirth, no jollity of any kind, all work and somberness. Robert Harkness
to Sabrina Harkness, 3 April, 1864).
37
Robert Hogg
The last few words largely speak for themselves. Harkness appears to have undergone a
transformation in outlook. The optimistic tone of earlier letters has given way to despair.
British Columbia no longer holds any attraction. He was not alone in his experience.
He had friends, but the frontier goldfields were not treating them very well either: On
28 June 1864 he wrote: ‘Charley Bowen is still on Lowhee Creek, prospects of getting
anything there are not very brilliant. Josh Bowen and Aus McIntosh are both working
in the Montreal claim. Gilbert Munro has been making shakes but is not likely to do
so well this summer as last’ (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 28 June, 1864).
Frontier British Columbia constructed a broad male culture that fostered same-sex
social, emotional, and sometimes sexual bonds. Illness and death often made these bonds
explicit and the dissolution of male friendships could cause considerable pain (Perry, 2001:
28-29). However, the depth of Harkness’s friendships is not easy to fathom. These men
were obviously his friends as they are mentioned in several letters. It is not clear whether
he knew them in Ontario, although he seems to take it for granted that his wife knows
who they are. Although Harkness shared a shanty with another man named Nicholls,
he explicitly states they ate and slept apart. Despite the common quest and common
hardship among these men, the letters give only very matter-of-fact reports of their
comings and goings. Harkness expresses no sense of a collective consciousness, nor any
hint of mateship. He may have been something of a loner, or the matter-of-factness in
the passages about his friends could indicate a masculine reserve in expressing feelings
towards other men. Either way, it appears he did not form close emotional ties with
others. For Harkness, the masculine frontier environment did not alleviate his sense of
loneliness and isolation, nor help him achieve redemptive manliness.
The last letter in the collection is dated 28 April 1865. Harkness has been away
for three years and he wrote from New Westminster:
I have been three months now in this miserable town, I have worked whenever I could
get a days [sic] work, yet haven’t so much as made my board. I live all alone in a little
cabin for which I pay $4 per month rent. I hired to go to work on a road on Monday, at
$40 per month and board. If I can get three or four months steady work the proceeds
will enable me to reach home. (Robert Harkness to Sabrina Harkness, 28 April, 1865).
He has clearly given up hope of making any kind of fortune on the gold fields. He
has not been able to provide for his family, which was the main reason for his journey.
All he hopes for is his fare home. It was to be another year before Harkness would
return to his family.
James Thomson
Compared to Robert Harkness, James Thomson had a relatively easy journey to the
Cariboo, sailing from San Francisco. As a twenty-two year old baker’s apprentice
38
from Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, he left Scotland in 1844 to start a new life in Canada.
Thomson’s journey began on 8 May 1862. He wrote in his diary: ‘got on Board ‘Pacific’
and sailed at 4p.m. Ship dreadfully crowded with passengers, oxen mules, horses and
sheep. Passed out at Golden Gate strong head wind’ (Thomson, 14 May, 1862). He
had chosen one of the sea routes rather than travel overland. On 13 May he arrived
at Esquimalt Harbour on Vancouver Island and walked the three and a half miles to
Victoria. After catching a boat to the mainland he walked for thirty-seven days from
Fort Yale, at the head of navigation on the Fraser River, to Keithley’s Creek which flows
into Cariboo Lake. Although he walked up to twenty-two miles a day, Thomson’s diary
conveys little of the physical hardship experienced by Harkness during his trek. The
diary records ‘the trail in some places very steep going zig zag up & down’, ‘mosquitos
very bad’, and ‘trail for 4 miles very bad with mud holes and fallen timber’, which, while
daunting, falls well short of the severity of Harkness’s journey ( Thomson, 27 May,
1862; 8 June, 1862; 14 June, 1862). In contrast to Thomson’s description, Harkness
wrote to his wife from Fort Edmonton:
We travelled every day but one and were continually wet. Our walking was all wading,
the whole country was under water for miles at a time we plodded along through mud
and water sometimes up to our ancles [sic], sometimes up to our armpits. We had to
build no less than eight bridges over streams so swollen by the rain that we couldn’t
cross them otherwise. At night we had to make willow beds to keep us out of the water
& in the morning we often found ourselves lying in puddles 3 or 4 or perhaps 6 inches
deep. (Thomson, 23 July, 1862).
Despite, ‘discouraging accounts from the mines […] causing many to return home and
throw a gloom upon others’, Thomson, like Harkness, retained a sanguine outlook:
‘To the upright there ariseth light in the darkness may it be so with us’ (Thomson, 14
June, 1862).
However, Thomson’s diary records how his first attempt to strike gold ended in failure:
June 24. Commenced sinking hole in bed of creek. Gravelly hole very hard.
June 25. White frost this morning, quite cold, rain P.M. hole down about 6 feet.
June 26. Hole full of water. Bailed out and got down about 10 feet from bed of creek.
June 27. Hole half full of water. Bailed out enlarged and timbered. Got no lower than
yesterday. Very hard picking. Dry all day.
June 28. Got down about 12 feet. Still hard clay and gravel. No gold. Fine dry day.
(Thomson, 24-28 June, 1862).
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Robert Hogg
This failure does not dent his optimism which is reflected in his appreciation of the
scenery:
June 29. Beautiful morning. Sun shining bright and clear. Tent pitched in a beautiful spruce
grove, Elpin Creek rippling past in new channel we have made for it. Lofty mountains
each side, thick timbered towards summit. Sides green with willows, grass and wild
rhubarb, weeds gooseberry bushes spruce pine and poplar trees. (Thomson, 29 June, 1862).
Optimism however, is one thing; fulfillment another, and in gold mining Thomson was
ultimately no more successful than Harkness. After this initial unsuccessful attempt
he and his companions set out for Antler and then went on to Williams Creek where
they were equally unsuccessful. The cost of provisions being exorbitant, Thomson and a
number of his companions returned to the Forks at Quesnel, and then on to Williams
Lake, leaving the remaining members of the party to continue prospecting. In Williams
Lake he and his companions obtained work building a clay oven and sawing timber.
It was from Williams Lake that Thomson wrote to his wife Mary. This letter reveals
that he was undergoing similar emotional privations to Harkness. Loneliness, anxiety
and desire are intermingled with a matter-of-fact account of his journey from Victoria
to Williams Creek. Most difficult is the fact that he has not received letters from
home: ‘Not a word have I heard from the loved ones at home since the morning of 7th
of April. Amidst all the toil and anxiety and privations experienced in this country
that is the hardest of all to bear’ (James Thomson to Mary Thomson, 27 July 1862).
The letter is in two parts. The first part is written so that Mary may show it to
friends if she wishes. The second part is for Mary alone, and it is here that Thomson
most reveals his emotional trauma:
Oh Mary were you by my side I have much that I would like to say. Mary I have
thought of you more, prayed for you more, and if possible loved you more this summer
than ever before. Volumes could not contain all the thoughts I have of home and the
loved ones there. Mary I often wish that I had more of your courage and energy and
resignation to battle with the disappointments in life. I sometimes wonder how I ever
came to leave a kind and affectionate wife and all that the heart of man could desire
of a family to sojourn in this land. (james Thomson to mary Thomson, 27 July, 1862).
Like Harkness, Thomson misses his children:
I suppose the children have forgotten all about Pa. Tell them I have not forgotten them.
I have got a Bible lesson for them to learn, I hope to hear them repeat it yet. Oh if God
would enable one to return and hear Minnie repeat that verse I would be a happy man.
It is the 2nd verse of the fourth chapter of Micah (omitting the first and the last clause,
get down to paths. May God bless all, and bring us to that land, where farewells are
unknown. (James Thomson to Mary Thomson, 27 July 1862).
40
Even though prospecting has been a failure, Thomson finds comfort in his religion:
‘I cannot say that I regret coming to this country for God has softened my heart and
enabled me to see myself in the gospel glass as I never did before, and I never yet
have been able to get over the conviction that God in His providence pointed it out
as my duty to coming [sic]’(James Thomson to Mary Thomson, 27 July, 1862). God’s
approbation notwithstanding, returning home without gold is not a prospect he relishes:
‘Mary, I really hardly know what to think about this country I cannot make up my
mind to remain long away from home and then to think of returning without making
something, to be as poor as when I left and in debt besides, and it might be laughed at
into the bargain is hard to think of ’ (James Thomson to Mary Thomson, 27 July, 1862).
It is clear that, like Harkness, Thomson left eastern Canada to redeem his family’s
fortune. He too chose a muscular path to redemption. He too experienced not only
failure in his quest, but also the emotional deprivation consequent on leaving loved
ones behind. Furthermore, he felt he lacked the manly virtues, virtues which he felt,
paradoxically, that his wife possessed. In this letter to his wife Thomson’s intensity
of emotion and language, magnified by distance, is similar to Harkness’s. There is the
same sense of exile, anxiety, and loss. Unlike Harkness, Thomson appears to have
found some comfort in religion, although the spiritual comfort God might provide is
countered by the temporal humiliation he may face at home.
The stories of Robert Harkness and James Thomson illuminate the effect of the
isolation and remoteness of the frontier on men’s attempts to perform according to the
manly ideals of the mid-nineteenth century. Their letters to their wives enable us to
see how two men saw themselves in relation to their environment and to their loved
ones. Loneliness on the frontier was common, and extreme isolation from one’s normal
social and domestic environment could undermine the manly ideal in a number of
ways. Emotional deprivation and personality change were often the result. Distance
magnified emotions and heightened desire towards those with whom one had closest
affinity, leading to dysfunction rather than independence. Like M. Allerdale Grainger,
they were remote from familiar and comfortable homes and experienced pangs of
anxiety and despair. As for Grainger the he frontier for Robert Harkness and James
Thomson was a place of trial and tribulation, not a realisation of their manliness.
Works Cited
Primary sources
Fortune, A.L. “The Overlanders of 1862.” Kamloops Sentinel, 27 November – 24 December, 1936.
Harkness, Robert. Correspondence Outward: personal letters to his wife, 1812-1865, BCA,
EB H22A.
Leduc, Joanne, ed. Overland Form Canada to British Columbia by Mr. Thomas Mcmicking of
Queenston, Canada West. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1981.
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McMicking, Thomas. “An Account of a Journey Overland from Canada to British Columbia
During the Summer of 1862.” The British Columbian 1862.
Preston, Richard Arthur, Ed. For Friends at Home: A Scottish Immigrants Letters from Canada,
California and the Cariboo 1844-1864. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974.
Secondary Sources
Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780-1850. London: Routledge, 1992.
Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure:; Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian
Popular Fiction, 1875-1914. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Evans, Ray. ‘“So Tough’? Masculinity and Rock N Roll Culture in Post-War Australia.”
Australian Masculinities: Men and their Histories. Eds. Clive Moore & Kay Saunders, Journal
of Australian Studies. 56 (1998): 125-37.
Grainger, M. Allerdale. Woodsman of the West. London: Edward Arnold, 1908.
Hall, Catherine. “Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies 1833-1866.”
Ed. Bill Schwarz. The Expansion of England: Race, Ethinicity and Cultural History. London:
Routledge, 1996.130-70.
Lake, Marilyn. “The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context.” Historical
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. “Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man.” Journal of Australian Studies. 49
(1996): 12-20.
Lane, Christopher. The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Moore, Clive and Kay Saunders Eds. Australian Masculinities: men and their histories, Journal of
Australian Studies 56 (1998): 1-16.
Moore, Clive. “Colonial Manhood and Masculinities.” Australian Masculinities: Men and
Histories. Eds. Clive Moore and Kay Saunders, Journal of Australian. 56 (1998): 35-50.
Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Seccombe, Wally. “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage
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Vibert, Elizabeth. Traders’ Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau 18071846. Norman Ok.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
42
Reeling Back Representation in Indigenous
Filmmaking: Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes
ANDREA MACKINLAY
Notre Dame University, Sydney
Film provides a mediation space in which to negotiate the imaginative, the narrative,
the social, and the political¾and especially, the past, present and the future—in the
seemingly unbridgeable gap between pre-colonial story and contemporary technology.
This article argues that the films, Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes are complex and authentic
Indigenous cultural artefacts that represent a space of Indigenous self-determination
and self-representation in the modern world. They attempt to authenticate their
legitimisation of ancient traditions and their positive representation of traditional life
to current generations through their contribution to a bright future in the continuance
of the millennia-old oral storytelling tradition. As such, they are regarded as watershed
representations in the ever-evolving canon of Indigenous oral storytelling in their
respective countries, and throughout the wider global context.
Keywords: Indigenous filmmaking; Atanarjuat; Ten Canoes; oral storytelling;
cultural misprepresentation
A key component of the two watershed Indigenous films under discussion in this paper—
the 2001 Igloolik film Atanarjuat, and the 2006 Yolngu film Ten Canoes—is certainly
in part, to participate in reversing the artistic and cultural misrepresentation—the
negative character stereotyping and the misappropriation of Indigenous artefacts, tribal
laws and social practices for artistic purposes—that has been perennially problematic
for the Indigenous peoples of both Canada and Australia since the advent of European
settlement. Arguably, this misrepresentation and misappropriation has irreparably
damaged Indigenous identity and culture, and has led to a wide fragmentation of
knowledge and understanding of traditional existence, not only within their own
communities, but also throughout the non-Indigenous communities in each country.
In the creation of a product of Indigenous artistic collaboration, self-determination and
self-representation within the legitimately appropriated contemporary technological
space of film, the filmmakers of Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes attempt to present a
traditional view of pre-colonial Indigenous culture.
It is only within the period of a few generations that the remote Indigenous
communities of the Igloolik, living above the Artic Circle in Canada’s remote and
43
Andrea Mackinlay
frozen north, and the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, in the far north eastern corner of
Australia’s tropical Northern Territory, have time-travelled from a culturally rich,
though largely nomadic and subsistence tribal lifestyle, based on hunting and fishing,
to a more sedentary and wage or welfare-based consumer economy within the global
digital community (Soukup 2006: 239-40). While these profound changes have
certainly been problematic, both the Yolgnu and Igloolik cultures remain deeply tied
to their land and—but to a significantly lesser extent—to their oral history, tribal laws
and traditional practises. Arguably, as two of some of the last remaining communities
in Canada and Australia to experience European contact—regaining access to their
ruptured cultural traditions, in order to create their resurrection on screen during the
production process of both Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes—was perhaps somewhat less
difficult than it would theoretically be for the hundreds of southern Indigenous nations
in each country, who encountered a much earlier and protracted experience of the
ravages of the colonial project. Therefore it is somewhat logical, gratifying and indeed
edifying, to witness the materialisation of ancient artefacts and traditional customs
from the Yolgnu and Igloolik communities on self-representational, Indigenous film.
Although emerging on film from the opposite ends of the earth, significant
connections can be drawn between the Igloolik and Yolgnu communities through an
examination of their filmic products—their genesis, production processes, and the
eventual audience impact of each film—reveal a strong commensurability. Each tiny
community—at home in the geographical isolation of the far north of Canada and of
Australia, in a beautiful but harsh landscape and climate largely unexperienced by the
southern populations of each country—has produced a film that has made a significant
contribution to the growing canon of worldwide Indigenous cinema. Indeed, in 2001,
Atanarjuat was awarded the Camera d’Or for Best Debut Feature at Cannes, and in
2006, Ten Canoes won six Australian Film Institute Awards, including best film.
Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes are considered to be watershed films for many reasonsmost importantly perhaps because they are the first feature-length films in both Canada
and Australia to be screened in the language of their originary communities. For
the first time, the dominant languages of Canada and Australia are relegated to the
bottom of the screen in the form of sub-titles. The success of Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes
indicates that at last, Indigenous people are able to tell their stories their way—and in a
way that non-Indigenous Canada and Australia, and indeed the world, appreciate—in
a powerful fusion of modern technology and ancient culture—that retains the patterns,
metaphors, structures, themes and characterisation—of traditional oral storytelling.
Both films indicate, and indeed celebrate, the continuance of the millennia-old
tradition of Indigenous storytelling within the modern world—whilst pointedly
setting their films in the context of pre-colonial times. The creators of each film took
ownership of the genre of filmmaking—historically a powerful tool in the colonisation
44
process—and employed it as a valid oral storytelling mechanism; not only as a mediation
space in which to negotiate the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between pre-colonial
story and contemporary technology, but also as an authoritative platform on which
to legitimate ancient traditions and to challenge and revise formerly established
representational hegemonies.
‘Like shamans of the digital age’ (Soukup, 239), the highly regarded filmmakers
of Atanarjuat, Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc., employed cutting-edge technologies
‘to travel through the layers of time, geography, language, history and culture’ (239),
that allow the audience to experience the living traditions of the past, and to extend
the ancient art of Inuit storytelling into today—thereby showing the world ‘a discourse
from a distinctly Inuit point of view and combating the historical media image of the
Inuit as Other’ (239).
Atanarjuat never plays like one of those deadening films about Aboriginal people that
stereotypes them as either nature gurus, martyrs, or booze-addled, gas-sniffing losers.
The Inuit don’t need that kind of depersonalisation, either from well-intentioned whites
or officially sanctioned Aboriginal media makers (Alioff, 2005: 14).
Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes are each firmly set in a timeless, pre-colonial context, and
the body of the narrative story of both films lack ‘obvious temporal markers, such as
datable material objects’ (Sadashige, 2002:989). Indeed, the narrative of Atanarjuat
‘floats freely in a culturally specific but temporally disengaged space’ (989), and is drawn
from an ancient Inuit legend of a young man who triumphs over the evil effects of
an unknown shaman’s inter-generational curse on his community—according to the
narrator of the opening sequences of Atanarjuat, ‘evil came to us like death’ (Atanarjuat,
2001). Shari Huhndorf, in her interrogation of the notion of Atanarjuat as an allegorical
tale about the ravages of colonialism, asks if indeed the filmmakers wished to recreate
an Inuit world unmarred by colonialism’s dislocations and losses—but concludes that
it was not their intention to suggest an uncomplicated return to a pre-colonial life,
but rather to provide a sense of continuity with the past and a creative response to the
ever-evolving present (2003: 825).
Ten Canoes similarly draws on legends from the ancient past and depicts a culture
that has existed in the lush, steamy and remote tropical north of Australia’s Arnhem
Land for millennia. Two stories, both relating to a young man’s fancy for one of his
elder brother’s wives, are set against the age-old tradition of goose-egg gathering and
other day-to-day activities of tribal life that are interwoven throughout the film. One
story is set in the recent past, but well before first European contact, and is shot in black
and white. The other, that of the ancients, is ‘set in the time after the beginning, in
the time after the big flood came that covered the whole land’ (Ten Canoes, 2006)¾and
is shot in colour. This is perhaps to highlight the Eden-like, pristine beauty of the
45
Andrea Mackinlay
pre-colonial landscape—which is itself, a virtual character in the film¾not unlike
the ‘white sunlight glancing off the ice and the true blues of the northern waterways
and the surprising colour bursts of the artic summer’ in Atanarjuat (Sadashige: 989).
However, whilst both films exhibit ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’ qualities, remaining
historically and culturally grounded in a pre-colonial past, they each contain clever
post-colonial nods to the contemporary audience. Huhndorf suggests that these
post-colonial elements serve two important purposes. The scenes from the making
of Atanarjuat that are interspersed with the closing credits, serve to establish the
film as an example of traditional oral storytelling-as opposed to an ethnographic
documentary-and also to show how Igloolik mastery of western technologies is
successfully appropriated to accomplish their purpose of artistic self-representation and
self-determination (825). The same aim is to be found in the opening scenes of Ten
Canoes, when well-known Australian actor and Yolgnu man, David Gulpilil, begins
the narration of the film with, ‘Once upon a time, in a land far, far away’ and then
interrupts his narration, by laughing uproariously. He then continues:
No, not like that, I’m only joking, but I am going to tell you a story, it’s not your story,
it’s my story, a story like you’ve never seen before. But you want a proper story, huh,
then I must tell you something of my people and my land, then you can see the story
and know it (Ten Canoes, 2006).
The frank generosity of Gulpilil’s invitation to share his story is tinged with the
subversion of the ‘Once Upon a Time’ European story-telling convention. This
highlights the rightness of the Indigenous appropriation of filmmaking for its capacity
to simultaneously show and tell-that there are other, equally valid stories (and storytelling modes) outside the European convention that are just as richly appealing and
meaningful to everyone. This quality is also inherent in Atanarjuat—described by
Maurie Alioff as ‘bold and emotionally generous’ (14).
It is worthwhile to reflect on how the making of Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes affected
their communities before, during and after the shooting process. The primary aim of the
filmmakers—to create self-representational narratives of traditional Indigenous life—
involved significant participation of many Igloolik and Yolgnu community members
as they worked on the various artistic and cultural recovery and regeneration activities
necessary for the films’ production, both in front of, and behind, the cameras. Perhaps
it was largely due to this community participation—and also that non-professional
community members filled most of the acting roles—that arguably contributed to the
success of each film. Atanarjuat’s Director of Photography, Norman Cohn explains,
Aboriginal storytelling like Atanarjuat, which is based on an ancient legend meant to
inform as well as entertain, doesn’t separate drama from documentary. Even though we
have actors working from a script, we are part of a tradition where this story has been
46
told generation after generation as if it happened in a very real sense, if we wanted to
make a documentary about the legend, we would make the same movie […] Every Inuk
has three or four or five identities […] they are actually performing their namesakes
(Alioff, 17).
Likewise, on the set of Ten Canoes, according to Tudball and Lewis, accurate character
identity was all-important to the authenticity of the project:
If the characters in the film had a certain kinship relationship (for example, a man and
his wife), then the actors playing those roles also needed to have that kinship relationship.
Every Yolngu is classified as being of one of two moieties
if they cannot be
married in reality, then they could not be seen as married on the screen f r o m a n
already small pool of available actors, there was sometimes only one person who was
possible for a particular role (12)6.
From a western filmmaking perspective, this respect for accuracy in characterisation
would have created complex casting challenges for both film projects, however, the
result of this respect for traditional laws and kinship patterns achieved an authenticity
of characterisation that was vital to the aim of the projects—to reverse the negative
representations in previous non-Indigenous filmic representations.
Another factor that played a part in Atanarjuat’s and Ten Canoes’ authenticity was
that the filmmakers in each case encouraged the community members to draw on the
remnant knowledge of their tribal elders to create the artefacts needed for the film.
Whilst insisting on accurate historical reconstruction as being vital to the Atanarjuat
project, Director Zacharias Kunuk ‘insisted on reproducing everything—from igloo
building, to women’s facial tattoos, to caribou skin clothing—with scrupulous accuracy’,
not only for the cultural preservation that was necessary to the filmmakers’ cinematic
vision, but perhaps and more importantly, ‘to show the Inuit community what it
had lost’ (Sadashige: 989). Kunuk’s cinematic vision of attaining accurate historical
reconstruction was also central to the authenticity of the Ten Canoes project:
As the shoot drew nearer […] the reconstruction work was, as in old times, divided very
distinctly along gender lines, so that the men made the bark canoes and the spears and
the stone axes, while the women made the huts, the dilly bags and the body decorations.
At each step, there was the feeling of doing something special, of cultural renewal, of
bringing back the old times (Tudball and Lewis: 12).
When they had finished constructing the first canoe, working as their ancestors had,
from the guidance given from the living memory of an elder, the Yolgnu men, young
and old,
[…] walked around it, admiring it. This one canoe was a small miracle, for forgotten
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Andrea Mackinlay
aspects of their culture were being brought back from the edge of extinction
and they knew it (12).
It is obvious that these experiences meant much more to the Igloolik and Yolgnu
communities than just the production of a film.
Indeed, Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes are complex and authentic Indigenous cultural
artefacts that represent a space of Indigenous self-determination and self-representation
in the modern world. They attempt to authenticate their legitimisation of ancient
traditions and their positive representation of traditional life to current generations
through their contribution to a bright future in the continuance of the millennia-old
oral storytelling tradition. As such, they are regarded as watershed representations in
the ever-evolving canon of Indigenous oral storytelling in their respective countries,
and throughout the wider global context. Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes indicate, indeed
celebrate, the continuation of the awareness of the values and intricacies of traditional
life and ancient traditions, that help to invigorate current generations of Indigenous
people—as David Gulpilil affirmed after attending the premier of Ten Canoes,
That story is never finished that Ten Canoes story, it goes on forever because it is a true
story of our people, it is the heart of the land and people and nature (Tudball and
Lewis, 17).
Shari Hahndorf ’s sentiment regarding Inuit filmmaking also rings true for the Yolngu:
If media has been complicit in the processes of colonisation and assimilation in the
contemporary Artic, it thus also constitutes a means of refiguring Inuit histories, culture
and identity in ways that support Native campaigns for self-determination (825).
Film indeed provides a mediation space in which to negotiate the imaginative, the
narrative, the social, and the political-and especially, the past, present and the future—
in the seemingly unbridgeable gap between pre-colonial story and contemporary
technology. Atanarjuat and Ten Canoes prove that this gap can be creatively closed—
in order to open up an authentically imagined future—through Indigenous selfrepresentation and determination.
Works Cited
Alioff, Maurice. “From the Edge of the Earth: Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)”.
Take One. 2005. June-Sept. (Accessed on March 6, 2010 from: http://find.galegroup.com.
ipacez.nd.edu.au/gtx/infomark.do?action=interpret&sPage=13&t…
Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner. Dir. Zacharias Kunuk, Director. Canada: Igloolik Isuma
Productions Inc. and the National Film Board of Canada. 2001.
Huhndorf, Shari. 2003. ‘Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner: Culture, History and Politics in Inuit
Media’. American Anthropologist. 105: 4. (Dec 2003): 822-26.
48
Soukup, Katarina. 2006. ‘Report: Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New
Technologies’ Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 239-46.
Sadashige, Jacqui. 2002. ‘Atanarjuat the Fast Runner’. The American Historical Review. 7: 3
(June 2002): 989-90.
Ten Canoes. Dir. Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr, Australia: Palace Films.2006.
Tudball, Libby & Robert Lewis. n.d. Ten Canoes: A Study Guide. Film Finance Corporation
Australia. Accessed on April 20, 2009 from: www.tencanoes.com.au
Editor’s note:
This essay was placed second in the ACSANZ 2010 Undergraduate essay Prize with
the judging panel giving it special commendation.
49
50
‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ Returns: Ethnicity and the
Search for Home in Contemporary Irish-Canadian
Literature
KATRIN URSCHEL
National University Ireland, Galway
Mark Anthony Jarman and Thomas O’Grady reassess their belonging to Canada
and Ireland through travel narrative and poetry, attempting to reconcile personal
experience with alternative histories, literary narratives and family memories.
Their urge to define themselves as Canadian and their simultaneous desire for origins
makes them continuously collapse temporal and spatial categories. Using post-colonial
criticism and life writing theory, this paper explores some of the dominant themes and
problems associated with reverse border crossings of diasporic writers. It analyses the
writers’ strategies for compensating the lack of chronology and examines their creative
use of Irish culture and literature, particularly the image of the graveyard and the
writings of James Joyce, to define their position in the intricate web of Irish-Canadian
connections. It also highlights the ways in which these writers have deviated from
traditional Irish-Canadian writing and found a way to subvert the idea of a unified
and ethnicity-free ‘Anglo-Celtic’ core in Canada.
Keywords: chronotope, cultural memory, diaspora, ethnicity, Irish Canadians, Mark
Anthony Jarman, Thomas O’Grady
The study of Irish ethnicity in Canada is entangled in complex debates about racial
superiority and postcoloniality. Although Irish emigration to Canada was, historically,
largely motivated by colonial oppression on the part of the British ruling classes, it was
also an expression of loyalty to the British Empire and thus represented a consolidation
of, and not a challenge to, British governing power (Akenson 142-147). The number
of Irish Protestants in Canada is disproportionately large; Irish Catholic settlers had
religious allies in the form of French Canadians, which aided their integration (Wilson
158). Accordingly, the Canadian Irish have long belonged to Canada’s ethnic majority,
a group that is increasingly termed ‘Anglo-Celtic’, following the Australian discourse
(Urschel 253-256). While this supra-label acknowledges the fact that the settlers from
Great Britain and Ireland have all had similar roles in Canada, especially considering
the displacement of Aboriginal Canadians and the continuation of British patterns
within Canada’s political, legal, educational and cultural institutions, it forecloses a
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Katrin Urschel
perspective in which the various ‘Anglo-Celtic’ groups can also be seen as ethnically
distinct. Regarding ‘Anglo-Celts’ as a naturalised, ethnicity-free unity circumvents
investigations of how whiteness has been socially constructed and normalised.
Examining the ethnic heritage of English, Scottish or Irish Canadians can therefore,
as Margery Fee has argued, be a productive move “as it forces those who have had
the privilege to feel they transcend ethnicity to reconsider their relations with other
ethnic groups from a slightly more down-to-earth position” (274). At the same time,
however, this move bears the danger of trivialising structural inequalities, especially
if ethnicity becomes symbolic and a mere matter of choice. If ethnicity functions as
the “leisure-time activity” (Gans 9) of individuals and is placed outside of the social
structures that regulate operations of power, the assumption of an ethnic identity
only “add[s] to the privilege of the already-privileged” (Fee 272) whereas it constrains
everyone else in definitions of otherness. How, then, can ethnicity be productively
reinscribed without risking or promoting a commodification that increases the cultural
capital of Anglo-Celtic Canadians?
Irish-Canadian literature has traditionally presented Irish ethnicity as a
transcendable category because several Irish signifiers – for example, different Christian
faiths and Celtic myths – could easily be relocated to Canada and become part of the
Canadian mainstream. Christianity and European mythologies belong to the set of
epistemologies that helped uproot Canada’s Aboriginal heritage. Other signifiers,
such as the Irish language, although still in use among a small number of migrant
communities in the nineteenth century, ceased to nourish a sense of difference in
Canada, because it impeded integration. Perhaps the most productive strategy of reinscribing ethnicity is therefore to re-route it to and re-root it in Ireland. Foregrounding
migrancy and acknowledging roots elsewhere de-emphasises indigenisation in Canada
(Fee 271). Instead, it emphasises cultural memory as a practice that can help reassess
power structures, representation and belonging and thus relativise the position of
ethnic majorities vis à vis other communities. Mark Anthony Jarman notes, “[t]hose
who hit forget; those who have scars remember. Je me souviens stamped on the Quebec
licence plate: I remember” (61). Curiously, Jarman issues this statement in the context
of Britain’s dominance over Ireland when, at the same time, in Anglophone Canada
the Irish were part of “those who hit”, those who helped decimate the indigenous
population, and those who posed a threat to the preservation of French-Canadian
language and culture. Jarman, an established fiction writer, editor and creative
writing teacher, is one of several Irish Canadians who have tried to come to terms
with their ethnic heritage by travelling to Ireland and locating ethnicity outside the
realm of Canadian multicultural symbolism. Thomas O’Grady, a scholar and poet
from Prince Edward Island, is another example. This essay examines Jarman’s travel
memoir, Ireland’s Eye (2002), and O’Grady’s poetry collection, What Really Matters
52
(2000). It explores the implications of temporary reverse migrations and investigates
the writers’ construction of ethnicity through their reassessment of what it means to
be of Irish origin.
Both Jarman and O’Grady are descended from Irish emigrants and primarily
experienced Ireland through family memories and stories before they set out to
experience it first hand. O’Grady’s father was born to Irish immigrants in New York,
whereas his mother’s family had been living on Prince Edward Island since the 1830s.
In 1977, O’Grady studied at University College, Dublin, for a Master’s degree. He has
returned to Ireland several times since then, and set many of his poems there (Compton
147). Jarman was born to an English father and an Irish mother in Canada. Several
aunts and cousins still live in Ireland, however, and their homes serve as starting
points for his travels. He travelled to Ireland for the first time in 1981 but only briefly
mentions this visit in Ireland’s Eye. The text focuses primarily on his visits in 1997 and
1999. His reflections on these two visits are placed before and after a short interview
with his mother, in which the author recorded her experience of growing up in Ireland
before Alzheimer’s erased her memory (195-209).
Although in a strict sense Jarman’s and O’Grady’s texts differ in genre, they
are – in a wider sense – merely different representations of life writing as classified
by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. They combine such variants as auto/biography,
autoethnography, ethnic life narrative, genealogy, memoir, oral history, poetic
autobiography, relational autobiography, and travel narrative (183-207). On the one
hand, their personalisation of history, that is, their positioning of “family stories as
authoritative within the histories of different communities and nations”, is a form of
“disturbing traditional hierarchies of knowledge” (Costantino and Egan 97, 110).
It constitutes a challenge to the invisibility of Irish Canadians as part of Canada’s
ethno-racial core. On the other hand, Jarman and O’Grady demonstrate that an
engagement with family history is necessary to render visible the very essentialisms
and contradictions that make bloodlines and familial knowledge a limited framework
for identity formation. They draw attention to the problems that arise from discussing
identity purely through genealogical lines of descent and thus creatively reflect an
argument already brought forward in critical discourse by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari within the broader realms of cultural theory and Catherine Nash in the
narrower context of Irish Studies. Dissecting bloodlines becomes a form of border
crossing that destabilises cultural fixities and potential entitlements resulting from
traditional constructions of heritage.
In Ireland ’s Eye and What Really Matters, border crossings are not merely
beginnings and ends. Rather, the act of producing an autobiographical narrative and
the investigation of a cultural attachment that is not only spatially but also temporally
removed from the writers’ Canadian reality makes border crossings an enduring
53
experience. O’Grady and Jarman frequently evoke situations in which the speaker or
narrator experiences a contemporaneousness of events that have occurred centuries
apart, and they appear haunted by the discrepancies between times and locations
and the ways these have entered memory and literature. Susanna Egan points to the
irrelevance of chronology for such writers because they experience the present as a space
that contains a fragmented and contradictory cargo which, among many other aspects
of identity, includes the writers’ history (124). Consequently, they have to find creative
ways to compensate the lack of chronology. They have to situate historic memories in
their places and bring places and stories into a creative tension.
History is also the temporal component of the chronotope, which Michail Bakhtin
defined as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature” (84). Symptomatic of their diasporic self-conception,
the writers’ present in Canada is “constantly shadowed by a past that is also a desired,
but obstructed, future: a renewed, painful yearning” (Clifford 318). By capturing their
memories of Ireland in their writing, they address this yearning. They approach the
question of their Irish identity spatially, as Gerry Smyth argued; that is, they project
all the elements of negotiation – Irish community, culture, history and beliefs – onto
the place which leads to a peculiar kind of chronotope, to the compression of time
within space, or to the presence of several layers of time in one place (2001 36). The
writers try to access their past and the elements that are supposed to have shaped
their ancestors. At the same time, they are confronted with a modern country that is
different from the place that their ancestors left in the past. History, explored on such a
personal level, and by creative writers instead of historians, is therefore not objectively
documented but largely a product of the imagination.
This discovery process even bears a sense of the religious. The second part of
O’Grady’s collection is entitled “Between Two Worlds” – a theme that is reflected in
many of his poems. The epigraph of that section, “If you bring forth what is within
you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do
not have within you [will] kill you”, is a quotation by Jesus from the Gospel of St.
Thomas (49). In an interview, O’Grady explained that he had originally conceived
of “Between Two Worlds” as the title for his entire collection. The phrase, he said,
had also resonated with him in the Irish language – “idir dhá shaolta”: “You look the
words up in an Irish dictionary and it means not just between two worlds, but between
two times, two states of mind. It resonates with multiple meanings” (Compton 156).
Understanding ethnicity in Canada not only as something imported and locally
modified but as something that is continuously contingent on different times and
spaces, both physical and metaphysical, marks indigenisation as impossibility and
identifies national identity by its interdependence on, rather than difference to, other
nations. This idea is similarly expressed in the title of the first part of What Really
54
Matters: “Transmigration” hints at a spiritual connection between different kinds of
lives – the journey of the soul through different bodies and times.
By allowing time and space to appear infinite and non-linear in their writing, Jarman
and O’Grady move away from the chronological, East-to-West, historiographical and
more essentialist approaches to Irish ethnicity and migration that have dominated
Irish-Canadian literature for a long time, perhaps with the exception of Jack Hodgins’s
postmodern novel The Invention of the World (1977). Both nineteenth-century poets –
examples include Standish O’Grady, Isabella Valancy Crawford and Nicholas Flood
Davin – and twentieth-century novelists such as Edward McCourt, Dennis T. Patrick
Sears and Jane Urquhart explored Irish-Canadian identity through chronological story
arcs of immigration and integration into an Anglo-Celtic community. Rebuilding a
connection to the Ireland of the present, Jarman and O’Grady emphasise their diasporic
identity and question their belonging to a unified, non-ethnic, Anglo-Celtic body in
Canada. This reclamation of diasporic space thus becomes a de-centering strategy
within Canadian literature.
The idea that ethnic memory haunts traditional conceptions of space and time
and makes them collapse finds a very vivid expression in O’Grady’s poem “As in
Wild Earth a Grecian Vase” (78-80). This poem is about O’Grady’s experience as
a student in Dublin in 1977, and it contains an abundance of motifs pertinent to a
discussion of reverse migration and diasporic ethnic memory. The first part of the
poem presents arrival as a long and rough process. The speaker is “Still forlorn after
weeks, / still reeling from exiles / first slap”, and feels “dead” to his family and friends
in Canada. He is disconnected by the time difference and the fact that his home is
“oceans away”; he dreams “of swift return / if only for one day” (78, original emphasis).
O’Grady borrows some prominent and culturally fraught terms from the discourse
of Irish emigration – death, exile, return – and applies them in the reversed, that is,
West-to-East order. He thus reinterprets an Irish cultural narrative from his Canadian
perspective. By the same token, he can only explain his alienation as a Canadian by
using his understanding of Irish history. Part two of the poem introduces the calming
and upsetting effects of writing. “It’s only for a year,” the speaker writes “to lessen
longing” (78). But when his mother in her reply letter tells him about the weather at
home, he is overwhelmed: “lost in the ache / of being neither here / nor there, I almost
broke” (78-9). The writing still somehow sustains him, for in part three he describes
how he lives for letters from home and longs for “local names, / familiar places … life
/ in short” (79, original emphasis). It is through writing and language that a feeling
of liveliness returns to him in the fourth and final part, and helps him overcome his
loneliness. Having let his hair grow in despair, he receives a letter from his mother
with the advice to get a haircut:
streelish, she spelled it –
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from straoille (I had learned)
in the native Doric
meaning “untidy crone.” (80, original emphases)
Streelish, a Prince Edward Island idiom that means “sluttish”, is the anglicised version
of the Irish word straoille, which means “hag” or “slattern”; in O’Grady’s family in
Canada, streelish signifies “unkempt” (Compton 170). A term of Irish provenance
morphed into a Canadian idiom during the course of integration and finally returns
to its country of origin with this new, slightly different meaning. Here border crossing
enlivens a language that is time and again threatened by extinction. These layers of
meaning are “doubly crossing / / syllables”: words that crossed the Atlantic twice and
make the speaker “feel so suddenly at home” (80). They “lift” him from the chair at
the barber where he just got his hair cut, and they lift his spirits and let him feel at
ease in Dublin. Home here is a language that exists only in the chronotope of the
Irish migration to Prince Edward Island, a compressed time-space that situates the
identity of the speaker in the in-between of past and present, Ireland and Canada,
Irish and English.
What is the meaning of the poem’s title? Like an archaeologist who digs up a
Grecian Vase, O’Grady comes across an Irish word and feels culturally enriched. He
re-connects with his Irish past on several levels: on a linguistic and a genealogical level
– through his parents’ Irishness – and even on a literary one. As O’Grady remarks in
a note (95), the title is actually the closing line of the poem “A Poor Scholar of the
’Forties” by the Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881-1972). Colum’s poem compares the
usefulness of Greek and Latin to that of the Irish language. His backdrop is the Young
Ireland movement of the 1840s, the nationalist movement that produced such cultural
visionaries as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who later had a considerable influence on the
emergence of a Canadian national literature. The concurrence of all these historical
and linguistic markers creates something like a time warp, a simultaneous presence of
different times and spaces. Life and death, emigration and return, Irish and English,
literary history and lived experience all intersect with each other and make borders
appear fluid.
Paul Smethurst argued that the loss of historicity in postmodern writing led to an
emphasis of place and placelessness and a foregrounding of a geographical imagination
against an historical one (15). The writers discussed here are torn between the mere
contemplation of a place as they experience it in the present and the consideration of
the amount of histories and memories that the place carries, and they end up conflating
the two. This is typical for their hyphenated identity insofar as this tension between
place and history expresses simultaneously their North-Americanness which is formed
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to a great extent by “the opportunities suggested in undifferentiated space” and their
Europeanness, which is conditioned “by the physical evidence of history” in European
places (291). Therefore the border-crossing writers themselves most often embody the
“doubly-crossing syllables” that tie Irish and Canadian identities together.
The conflation of all these spatial and temporal elements of identity produces an
existential crisis, which is why death and its visual representation by the grave/yard is
one of the most common motifs in O’Grady’s and Jarman’s work. Irish-Canadian writers
seem almost more obsessed with the dead than with the living Irish for the dead seem
to represent their missing link to Ireland. Moreover, the dead are conveniently silent
and can be mobilised and appropriated easily to serve an identity quest that would be
more difficult to complete with the lack of certain fixities.
The grave/yard condenses the contemporaneousness of different times, people and
hi/stories. According to Foucault, graveyards are heterotopias, which he defines as
something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may
be possible to indicate their location in reality. (1986 24)
On the one hand, they directly locate and represent the severed genealogical link
to Ireland and thus situate the writers even more definitively in Canada. On the other
hand, it is at the grave where the writers’ reality intersects with the buried person’s
chronotope, which creates a “quasi-eternity” of the link between the living and the
dead (26).
Jarman and O’Grady both visit Glasnevin, Ireland’s National Cemetery north of
Dublin. O’Grady’s “visit” is entitled “After Looking into R. J. O’Duffy’s Historic Graves
in Glasnevin Cemetery (1915)” and epigraphed with a quotation from the Hades scene
of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Let us go round by the chief ’s grave, Hynes said. We have time”
(76-77). The reference to Joyce is taken up in the first line and complemented later.
The beginning of part two, for example, “Gone but not forgotten” (original emphasis),
is a quotation from the Cyclops episode in Ulysses, and the image of “[f]ather and son”
another allusion to the novel. The phrases “land / / of the dead”, “Parnell’s ivy-bordered
/ / bower” and “clay” call to mind Joyce’s short stories “The Dead”, “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room”, and “Clay” from Dubliners. Moreover, the poem also remembers
a contemporary of Joyce (and the above-mentioned Colum), the “short-lived writer”
Seumas O’Kelly (1881-1918), whose short story “The Weaver’s Grave” provides the
framework for the poem insofar as it supplies one of the most important metaphors for
remembering: weaving. Whereas O’Kelly’s story weaves together different lives in an old
Irish village, O’Grady’s poem weaves together different layers of time. Identifying two
different models for memory, the “archaeological model” and the “processual model”,
James Olney specifically associates the latter, that is, the one that is more concerned
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with temporal rather than spatial metaphors, with weaving. As a continuous process, it
“will bring forth ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self ”
(Olney 20). Judging by several of his poems, it seems that O’Grady likes to combine
the role of the weaver and the archaeologist.
In “After Looking into R. J. O’Duffy’s Historic Graves in Glasnevin Cemetery (1915)”,
the writers of the Irish Literary Revival are joined by Charles Stuart Parnell, one of
Ireland’s leading nineteenth-century nationalist figures, whose grave draws many
visitors and is compared to Jesus’s. Through O’Grady’s speaker, the reader has access
to several lived and fictional experiences simultaneously: O’Grady’s, Joyce’s, O’Kelly’s
and Parnell’s – and historiographically, of course, also R. J. O’Duffy’s – each standing
for a chapter in Irish history and story. One could even add Aeneas, Virgil and Dante,
classical authors who are also mentioned in “After Looking,” and thus link it to the
aforementioned poem “A Poor Scholar of the ’Forties” by Padraic Colum with its
agenda of assessing different literary and linguistic contexts to create an Irish identity.
Intertextuality preempts closure and registers an ongoing cultural exchange that stops
neither with emigration nor death.
O’Grady’s and Jarman’s Ireland is evidently a morbid place. Both writers emphasise
the theme of death which could be seen as a means for them to distance themselves
from their country of ethnic origin and indicate their experience as outsiders in
Ireland. Although the roots might be dead, the genealogical link does not become
meaningless. The fact that both writers ponder existential questions in Ireland shows
their intimate relationship with it. In this context, their words and travels are about
creating new and different lives for the dead. It is striking that both writers evoke
various texts from the Irish literary canon in their presentation of the dead and their
graves. Their quest for home is not merely a breakaway from the Canadian tradition
which most often celebrates Canada as the sanctuary and the Irish as contributors to the
‘peaceable kingdom’ myth as a way of detracting from aspects of violence, destruction
and inhospitableness that are often associated with the immigrants’ origins (Frye
360; King 67-75). It is also an immersing in the Irish literary tradition, in which the
macabre and the gothic have played an important role for centuries (Mercier 47-74).
Jarman tries to explain why the graveyard particularly resonates with Irish people by
quoting his English father who claimed that “death doesn’t mean as much to the Irish;
they’re so used to it” (65). It is clear that in writing extensively about the dead and
thereby treating the subject so calmly, the authors are also siding with the historically
colonised Irish people for whom death is such a common theme.
On a higher level, their obsession with the dead is also a way to grieve and heal.
As Patrick Taylor, another Irish-Canadian writer, illustrated in his novel Now and in
the Hour of Our Death (2005), diaspora can be compared to the death of someone loved
(95). People have to mourn and grieve to get over it, and the graves and graveyards are
58
places where such necessary mourning is possible. O’Grady’s poem “On Unquity Road”
discusses the “fear / of dying far from home” with reference to emigration and Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (13). “War Stories” tells of how O’Grady’s Irish grandfathers
were often confronted with death while the speaker wonders if he can learn from
them how to cope with death in his own life (27-28). And in “Give Sorrow Words”,
the second poem of his three-poem section “Close to Death”, O’Grady even asks,
Can such inexpressible sadness span
generations, dormant until some jog –
some hurt – frees a memory bred marrow-deep
in the bone, one wound opening another? (85)
If the emigration experience is like death – and emigrants in fact used to be waked before
their departure in what is called the “American Wake” – then the diaspora appears like
limbo and provokes questions. Will the diasporic Irishman ever transcend this state
and feel at home, or “is grief / congenital like a hole in the heart?” (85). Death has a
metaphysical, genetic and cultural resonance that enhances the writer’s perception of
being between two worlds. In the early nineteenth century Irish-Canadian emigrant
writers mourned the disappearance of Ireland from their lives in numerous poems, and
this form of grief only ceased to be part of Irish-Canadian writing when the Irish in
Canada had a new cause: the development of a national Canadian literature. A renewed
interest in ethnic origins brings the lost connection with the ethnic homeland to the
surface again and calls for a new examination of death on the part of the writers. This
identifies places of death as important sites for identity formation. A bit like Orpheus
in the underworld, the writers are compelled to travel to Ireland to recover something
they have lost, but instead of being able to reanimate it they have to reinvent it and
‘sing’ about it.
For Jarman, travelling to Ireland means entering a giant time warp. Foreshadowing
his quasi-archaeological, psychoanalytical dig, he describes himself at his arrival
as “a fool, fallen from suave jet-set infallibility into a Freudian pop art installation,
product” (5, original emphases). Acutely aware of and continuously commenting on
the incompatibility of past and present Ireland, he later defines himself as “the future
coming back to tromp through the past, the wild colonial boy who desires a dark pint
with his dead grandfather” (53). He wants to reconnect with the dead on what he calls
his “Irish death trip” (67) – a desire that is, similar to O’Grady’s approach, expressed
on several levels. First of all, he visits Glasnevin cemetery and walks past the graves
of all the famous Irish nationalist leaders such as Charles Stuart Parnell, Daniel
O’Connell, and Michael Collins. Most important to him though is the grave where
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his grandfather, Michael Lyons, is buried. Imagining his funeral, he pictures “his tiny
grave opening and closing … like an eye” (151). That is, Jarman, who impersonates
the titular Ireland’s Eye, uses the same simile for his grandfather as for himself and
lifts their connection into the eternal realm of art, thus building a link that transcends
death. After visiting the grave, Jarman can therefore write calmly: “I’ve been to his
grave in Glasnevin and we left some flowers and we thought our thoughts and then we
go back to live with the living” – but not for long (177). He keeps “chasing … corpses
… and arguing with ghosts” (215).
He also visits Ashtown’s Grand Canal where Lyons drowned in 1922, and tries to
reconstruct his grandfather’s last day because he seeks “something official” to make sense
of the contradictory “shifting, murky family versions of his death” – a major obsession
of the narrator throughout the entire book (41). Lyons died the day of Michael Collins’s
funeral procession, which binds Jarman’s family history to Irish national history. This
conflation of events leads Jarman to research old newspapers at the National Library
in the hope to understand the connection between family memories and official history
more fully. His family’s history may be merely a tiny part of Irish history but it is the
part that binds him to Ireland which in turn makes it necessary for him to bind the
two histories more firmly together. Documented history and the stories in Jarman’s
head blur into one another and the “two Michaels” become inseparable (42, 163, 172):
The mysterious triggerman in the hills hit more than the Big Man’s pink hummingbird
brain, more than the commander-in-chief, the shooter connected to more than
Hollywood fame and Irish hagiography. The triggerman left my grandmother a widow
with ten children to raise on her own. (164)
Jarman is even able to link Lyons to Canada: he had worked for Guinness as a
cooper and transformed “heavy planks of English oak and Quebec oak” into barrels
(37). Moreover, Jarman goes so far as to point out the contemporaneousness of the
beginnings of the Guinness brewery and Wolfe’s and Montcalm’s battle on the Plains
of Abraham in 1759. His identification with his grandfather is made possible because
of the constructed intersection of history, geography, memory and imagination.
Jarman’s reconnection with the dead works on the level of literature, too, and it is again
James Joyce who provides the strongest link. Joyce’s writing about Ireland resonates
with Jarman also because Joyce might actually be a distant relative of his. Joyce’s aunts
had the same last name as Jarman’s Irish family, Lyons, and they lived only two houses
away from the building, in which Jarman’s mother grew up; Jarman’s uncle took piano
lessons in their house (169). That house is the setting of Joyce’s story “The Dead”,
which increases Jarman’s affective connection to Joyce’s work: “I’m expropriating the
story, making it mine as a squatter might in a Georgian house a door or two from my
mother’s ruined house” (214). The physical and the literary world collide and open
60
up a third space, in which Jarman can fully embrace a timeless form of Irishness.
He wonders whether Dubliners really was about paralysis, for “isn’t it clear he mostly
wrote about me?” (214). He also tries to locate Joyce in terms of Irish history – “What
was Joyce doing during the civil war?” – and transnational experience – “In Paris
publishing Ulysses? Teaching in Trieste? He never came back” (55). Joyce plays an
important role for Irish-Canadian writers and the meaning of his texts goes beyond
their contents. Having grown up in Ireland but spent most of his life in exile, Joyce
is a figure of identification for the diasporic writers. Just like them, he wrote about
Ireland from an outsider’s perspective. At the same time, he had a profound insight
into Irish culture, and therefore stands for truly Irish literature as well. He is a figure
against which Irish-Canadian writers can compare and contrast themselves. One could
consider O’Grady’s and Jarman’s use of different languages (such as Irish, French and
Latin) a quotation of Joycean cosmopolitanism. Joyce is in-between. It is not surprising
therefore that Jarman’s relatives told him “not to read James Joyce. That’s not Ireland!
Smut. Has it all wrong” (188).
Karen Lawrence writes, “as both canonical authority and disruptive iconoclast, Joyce
possesses a particularly slippery valence for postcolonial writers” (4). This is evident in
O’Grady’s and Jarman’s treatment of him. They know that to develop or sustain a sense
of “locational belonging” to Ireland they are “required” to engage with its literature
(Pearce 287). As O’Grady said in an interview, Irish writers “license” him to write
in the way he does (Compton 153, 162). When he introduces poems with quotations
from Ulysses he acknowledges that Joyce already found words for something he still
needs to express. With his “style of scrupulous meanness” Joyce inhabits such a strong
position that it is almost impossible for the Canadian Irish to develop their own voice
without relating to their literary forbear. O’Grady therefore calls his own style, in
contrast to Joyce’s, “a selectivity” (Compton 155). Jarman, too, feels so seduced and
intoxicated by Joyce’s world that by imagining himself “knocking back black garrulous
pints with James Joyce” he is likely to forget why he came, even though this image
serves, ironically, as a parallel to his imagined pub visit with his dead grandfather (4).
Besides being a canonical authority in Irish literature, however, Joyce tried precisely
“to undermine all notions of authority – religious, political, cultural” in his writing
(Smyth 1999 41). His texts employ strategies of resistance on all levels. By extension, the
Canadian authors’ engagement with Joyce is a conscious questioning of cultural power
structures, authorities and canons. Belonging to the Canadian literary scene, Jarman
and O’Grady speak from a Canadian perspective. Yet their engagement with Joyce
provides them with an angle from which they can question their own ‘national identity’.
The authors’ migrations and their discussion of origins belong to a writing strategy
that borrows from and sustains an intercultural discourse. It liberates them from any
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exclusive conceptions of their cultural belonging and strengthens the intertextual and
transnational framework, where they are trying to find a ‘home’.
Despite their obsession with the dead, Jarman and O’Grady view their Irishness
as a living aspect of their identity. Their travels are unfinished processes. The writers
continuously re-cross the border between the two countries to render it normal or
invisible. Jarman says, “I want to compare the Ireland living in my head with the real one
under my running shoes. I’m not looking for my roots and I’m not tracing my ancestry
or family tree – I just want to see what I see, a bit more each trip” (215). Because he
does not live there, he is very slow in catching up with Ireland’s modernisation. Talking
about the present he is often sarcastic or ironic which makes him fall into traps, for
instance, when he jokes inappropriately about IRA bombs (239). His interpretation
of Ireland remains an endless dichotomy also because his family was split across
the colonial line. For example, in the First World War, his great-uncle Patrick was
“fighting for the English overseas and his very own brother Michael fighting against
the English in Dublin” (91, emphases added). And yet, the overcoming of colonialism
and Ireland’s inherent dichotomies is captured in a powerful image, the living fence.
Coming across fence posts that “sprouted branches and leaves, came back to life,
walked again among us, so to speak” is Jarman’s “favourite moment of this trip” (265).
In a country that fought over land for centuries, and where enclosures mattered so
much, a fence that takes on a life of its own symbolises the dissolution of images and
assumptions that had been taken for granted. The image serves as a perfect metaphor
for the two writers’ treatment of death. Its finality is deceiving, they seem to say; death
has creative potential.
The living fence, furthermore, represents a fluid border between the past and
the present, the colonial and the imperial, Ireland and Canada. It is a reminder of
Ireland’s liminal position in postcolonial discourse. As Colin Graham has outlined,
“Irish culture, at once Western and colonized, white and racially other, imperial and
subjugated, became marginal in the sense of existing at the edge of two experiences,
with a culture that epitomizes the hybridity, imitation and irony latent in colonial
interchanges” (15). The descendants of colonial emigrants to an imperial setting are
confronted with complex negotiations of power, and they know too well that they must
not essentialise Ireland’s experience and reduce it to colonial oppression. Jarman may
call himself “the wild colonial boy”, but he has little in common with the eponymous
character from the popular Irish folk song. Jack Duggan, “the wild colonial boy” in the
song, searches for a better life in Australia, becomes a roguish underdog and is shot
there when he refuses to “surrender in the Queen’s high name”. Jarman, in contrast,
leads a privileged life as part of Canada’s ethnic majority but is also aware of Canada’s
(and the United States’) colonial legacy. Transcending the coloniser/colonised binary,
the returning “colonial boy” can now point the Irish to their inherent ironies, most
62
of all the fact that despite the memory cult of suffering and oppression, and a history
of emigrating into all corners of the world, the modern Irish now seem hostile to
immigrants and travellers in their own country (Jarman 144). It is in those moments
that Jarman’s mixed family background as well as his postcolonial understanding of
North American histories of land takes, slavery and discrimination enlightens his
understanding of Ireland.
O’Grady challenges the essentialism by saying, “Time devours all things,” or, to use
the Latin title of his poem, “Tempus Edax Rerum” (original emphases), and he, too,
references a popular song about an Irishman going to Australia, “The Fields of Athenry”,
in order to remind the Irish of certain postcolonial ironies (83). The commemoration
of the Great Famine and the beautiful rendering of the song transport the audience in
the poem outside the realm of chronological time. Ultimately, however, the listeners
are reminded of their position as customers in an efficiently run contemporary pub
and spectators to a cultural ritual that has become an indulgence precisely because the
economic and political status of its participants has changed so radically from the status
of the characters in the song they listen to. In the chronotope of the Irish Canadian
who returns to Ireland every experience – colonisation, independence, emigration,
return, starvation and indulgence – becomes contemporary. The Irish Canadian may
“crave a benchmark to compare – a true Ireland, a pure, untainted Ireland, a mythical
Ireland, a dreamscape Ireland, an ur-Éire”, as Jarman explains, but he or she knows
that “[n]o one, fixed Ireland has ever existed” (228).
Haunted by a sense of absence or loss, O’Grady and Jarman are compelled to
restore an historical connection and a spatial orientation in Ireland. They feel an urge
to embrace a cultural heritage that informs their Canadianness from a different place
and a different time. Their “temporary reverse migration[s]” allow them to claim “a
version of the past which contributes to present-tense belonging” (Costantino & Egan
96). Through their relation of family memory and personal experience as well as their
interaction with Irish people, literature and songs from different time periods, Jarman
and O’Grady merge a diversity of perspectives and celebrate new ways of understanding
Irish heritage in Canada. Janice Kulyk Keefer points to the ethical responsibility of
the writer in confronting the “interconnectedness … of history and ethnicity”, and
she notes that “like the archaeologist, the writer of ethnicity is forever coming across
bones” (100-101). O’Grady and Jarman have certainly proven this with their graveyard
memories and the digging up and weaving together of stories of the dead. But, to extend
Kulyk Keefer’s metaphor, they have proven, too, that bones may be accompanied by
cultural artefacts: relics of long-forgotten languages, for example, or fences that take
on lives of their own. And they have shown that linguistic, genealogical, literary or
other elements of ethnic self-conceptions continuously cross the borders of time and
space as they are woven into new interpretations of ethnicity.
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O’Grady and Jarman returned to graves and legacies of dead Irish writers in the
desire to obtain a licence for writing Irishness, and they borrowed motifs from them –
an act that Judith Butler might call repetition. According to her, a subject’s identity is
constituted by a repetition of rules, and agency lies in the possibility of varying these
repetitive acts. “If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the
assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, … then it is only within the
practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (185,
original emphasis). By returning to Ireland and re-engaging with Irish literature,
history and material culture, from a Canadian starting point, O’Grady and Jarman
have managed to subvert the traditional understanding of Irish emigrant culture and
literature in Canada (and perhaps even other places with large Irish diasporas such
as Australia, New Zealand and the United States). They present ethnicity neither
as a reduction to a number of symbols, such as the shamrock and the harp, nor as a
choice, but a haunting that needs to be confronted. Their Canadian and Irish identities
are reciprocal across generations, that is, migration is not a clear-cut borderline that
separates spaces and times. In fact, it is a completely different chronotope that must
be reckoned with creatively.
Until the very end of their texts, both authors defy finality. O’Grady’s ends with
“A Prayer for My Daughters”, which builds a metaphysical bridge across the Atlantic
and several generations as it connects a poem by William Butler Yeats with the future
of O’Grady’s offspring in North America (91-92). Jarman closes his eyes at the end of
his second trip and sees “my imprinted ghosts, my noisy lanes and yellow stone walls
and the oval faces of my children and ancestors lit like brief chemicals and then held
fast” (289) – again a spectral link between different places and generations. Ethnic
identity cannot be conclusively authenticated, even within the family, because “[t]he
search for descent ... disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments
what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent
with itself ” (Foucault 1977 147). Despite the pain and confusion that this in-between
status sometimes creates, however, the writers are able to build bridges between the
different elements of their hybrid identities and appreciate a fuller understanding of
the dichotomies that are inherent in their transatlantic selves.
Not only the writers but also the critics are left with open questions. What is the
“something” in Jarman’s “divided genes” that “connects with Ireland” (127, original
emphasis)? That is, why does he prioritise his Irish over his English heritage, and does
it matter? Perhaps the concentration on one half of the story “lead[s] to new sense of
the complexity of roots and the contingencies of ethnic affiliation” precisely because
there is more room for them to surface and affect, if the other half is left outside (Nash
269). Or are there other cultural and economic conditions that make a reinscription of
Irish ethnicity easier or more desirable than a search for roots in England? This essay
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has shown that the physical relocation and engagement with roots is a productive move
for Irish Canadian writers as it helps them reassess their belonging. However, does the
fact that both writers could afford to travel and spend weeks and months at a time in
Ireland in the end undermine their projects’ destabilising potential? How much are their
trips an embodiment of the capital – material and cultural – that is held by Canada’s
Anglophone, white, Christian majority? Do their absences from Canada free more
space for Aboriginal identities to surface? Cultural memory is a politically powerful
instrument that has an enormous impact on the issue of representation. Therefore it
is important to also scrutinise the operations of power behind the production of these
texts. Nonetheless, Jarman’s and O’Grady’s self-conscious assessments of Irish cultural
memory constitute an important departure from attempts at indigenisation as well as
notions of essentialism and authenticity, choice and complacency. Their work challenges
any settlement into normative structures and encourages a cultural exchange across
a variety of borders that may ultimately foster equality and respect among Canada’s
different communities.
Works Cited
Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Streetsville, ON: P.D. Meany; Belfast: Institute of Irish
Studies, Queen’s University, 1996.
Bakhtin, Michail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. 11th ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London; New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no.3 (1994): 302-338.
Compton, Anne. “Doubly-Crossing Syllables: Thomas O’Grady on Poetry, Exile, and Ireland.”
Studies in Canadian Literature 26, no. 1 (2001): 145-171.
Costantino, Manuela, and Susanna Egan. “Reverse Migrations and Imagined Communities.”
Prose Studies 26: 1-2 (2003): 96-111.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis; London: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Fee, Margery. “What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada?” In Unhomely States:
Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars, 267-276. Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans.
by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27.
Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion.” In Literary History of Canada, Vol. 2, Ed. C. F. Klinck, 2nd ed.,
333-361. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.
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Gans, Herbert J. “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America.”
Ethnic and Racial Studies. 2: 1 (1979): 1-20.
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& Stewart, 1994.
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66
“Who are You Now?” Cultural Re-inscription in
Indigenous Captivity Narratives
EVELYN ELLERMAN
Athabasca University
When Mary Rowlandson, the wife of a Puritan minister, escaped her 1675 captivity
by Indians, she published an account of her trials, The Sovereignty and Goodness of
God (1682), in which she framed her experience as a process of spiritual affliction,
testing, and redemption. Rowlandson saw herself as a member of a community that
had lost its spiritual way. God visited suffering and humiliation on her as a way
of strengthening her personal faith. Her response was to repent and endure, which
prompted God’s forgiveness. Rowlandson’s narrative of capture and escape is concerned
with re-inscribing the “good (Puritan) woman” back into her cultural context. Despite
the transformation occasioned by captivity, she must be uncontaminated by prolonged
exposure to the wilderness (Fitzpatrick 1991). Rowlandson succeeds by modelling
Puritan values in her captivity narrative, which was an instant publishing success.
Indeed, her survival story became the touchstone for the New World captivity genre,
a relatively plastic form that constructed an ideologically appropriate “good woman”
for each new era of American history (Sturma 2002; Sieminski 2002).
Keywords: colonial captivity narratives; Indigenous Australians; Indigenous
Canadians; Indigenous life-writing; Indigenous history
The American Settler Captivity Narrative
As a sub-type of a much older captivity genre, the Settler Captivity Narrative () that
developed in America was widely read across the British Empire (Baepler 2004). By
the end of the eighteenth century, 700 of these narratives had been published in the
United States alone, most of them fictional; thousands of copies were sold in America,
Britain, Canada, and Australia (Sturma 2002). The vast majority of these tales focussed
on the captivity of women. As gendered survival stories, Settler Captivity Narratives
offered a feminine generic counterpart to masculine epics of conquest. Yet, these tales
of high (and often lurid) adventure also served as powerful symbolic inscriptions of a
dominant over a defeated culture. The captivity narrative was, in fact, an ideal genre
for empire (Haberly 1976).
Over four centuries, the Settler Captivity Narrative originated and then reinforced a
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commonplace myth of settler-indigenous relations: that “Indians”1 were fundamentally
savage and untrustworthy; and that Indians offered a direct threat to the values of settler
society, embodied in the person of the “white woman.”2 Inherent in this myth was the
need for social and political control of the uncivilized; one administrative response was
to create mission settlements and residential schools for assimilating the Indian child.
In short, the captivity narrative offered a potent colonial topos of imminent cultural
threat that could be applied by politicians and administrators to a perceived real-world
colonial situation; residential facilities became a preferred strategem during the era of
late nineteenth and early twentieth century social engineering.
No matter the era or the colony of production, the American Settler Captivity
Narrative can be described as having a relatively static set of features. The Indian males
tend to ignore the female captive unless they want her as a “wife” or to ransom her for
goods. The females may protect her, but are generally unresponsive to her need. Yet
Indian women are generally described as being drudges at the beck and call of their
lazy partners. The occasional Indian befriends the captive and tries to lighten her load.
This “friend” is likely to be elderly or very young.
The white woman captive is usually married; she is abducted from her rightful
domestic situation, with violence, and often at night. The abduction is sudden,
terrifying, and brutal. The male members of her family are sometimes tortured, and
most always slain, as are some or all of her children. Babies are especially vulnerable to
having their brains dashed out. The woman’s capture involves being transported so far
away that she loses her physical bearings and thus cannot make her way home again.
The captive suffers humiliation through being stripped of all her clothing and given
meagre, filthy rags in return. She may have to go through a vicious hazing ordeal. If
any of her male family members have been carried off with her, she must watch them
die under torture; they often sacrifice themselves for her. The female captive is either
offered no food at all with the result that she has to forage; or she is offered inedible
and unrecognizable food. She is made to perform physical labour, often to the point of
exhaustion. She is physically and occasionally sexually harassed and must be vigilant
of her “honour.” Despite the harsh conditions of the captivity, she can be ambivalent
about her captors and about her experiences. She can be amazed at the size and
sophistication of the Indian encampment. In some narratives she prefers to remain
with the indigenous community. But in most cases, she keeps her sanity and humanity
through adherence to the values that define her place in white society. In time, she
either escapes or is rescued. On her return, she writes her story, “in her own words.”
In short, the female settler captivity narrative celebrates a heroine who has been
diminished in every way possible; she returns home, dirty and damaged. After a ritual
cleansing and re-clothing, it is up to her to regain her former status as a moral being,
or the whole experience will have been nothing more than sordid adventure. She does
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this by writing a narrative that constructs the captivity experience as a personal test:
one that she has passed. In this way, the adult female re-inscribes herself as a worthy
vessel (Pearce 1947; Sturma 2002).3
Children are rarely the subjects of Settler Captivity Narratives since, if they are
captured too young, they are either murdered outright, die from harsh conditions, or
are adopted by the Indians and therefore lost to the colonial enterprise. If they are
captured at an age that allows them to keep up on the trail and be useful around camp,
they are treated as adults. Few survive the experience. The fact remains that children in
Settler Captivity Narratives are generally represented as adjuncts to the female captive
(Marienstras 2002). Their high, narrative mortality rate serves to emphasize the trials
experienced by their mothers.
Although Australia and Canada did not produce many colonial captivity narratives,
white settlers in these two colonies had ready access to American literary models
(Sturma 2002). In the nineteenth century, the Settler Captivity Narrative entered a
sentimentalized, Victorian phase in which the “good woman” is a model citizen-mother
of a new nation, threatened by natives whose primitive urges must be civilised and
controlled (Kim 2003). Two of these narratives, the Canadian Two Months in the Camp
of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney (1885) and
the Australian Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings, and Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza
Fraser (1837) exhibit the same Victorian values that guide cultural re-inscription for
their American sisters. In both instances, the authors take care to situate themselves
and their stories within a larger framework of nationhood and the imperial project;
they are at once maternally capable and in need of paternal protection (Kim 2003;
Higginson 2005; Carter 1997; Behrendt 2000).
The Indigenous Captivity Narrative
While the Settler Captivity Narrative, as it circulated throughout the British Empire,
literally and figuratively opposes chaos (wilderness) with order (settlements), its
representative texts deal with the abduction of white settlers by indigenous raiders,
something that rarely occurred in real life. It was only towards the end of the twentieth
century that an increasing number of published residential school and mission
settlement captivity narratives began to rectify this imbalance4. Ironically, these
Indigenous Captivity Narratives (Indigenous Captivity Narratives), are concerned
almost universally with the experiences of children, not wives and mothers. Appearing
on the heels of other forms of indigenous life writing, the Indigenous Captivity
Narrative is different from autobiography, which tempers experience over an entire
lifetime. The Indigenous Captivity Narrative focuses instead on a single moment
in that life; it is a distillation of the effects of colonial injustice on those least able to
respond or resist.
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The disproportion of the forces ranged against the child in these modern day
captivity narratives is staggering and all the more startling because they are mandated
in the name of cultural “rescue.” The abductions are not random acts by a few raiding
individuals, but scheduled events by colonial bureaucracies calculated to crush all
family protest. Assimilation, or the “death of the Indian in the child” was their aim.
The policies that sanctioned removal to the schools and settlements intended that reinscription “as an Indian” would be irrelevant.
It is clear that Indigenous Captivity Narratives take their generic shape from the
American colonial captivity narrative. Children are abducted suddenly and brutally
from their homes and transported over great distances to an “unreadable” cultural
space. Their families are unable to help them. In the Australian Indigenous Captivity
Narratives, whole families could be abducted, with the young children physically
separated from their parents at the settlement.
The institutional “wilderness” in which the young captives find themselves is
unnatural and frightening: on arrival, the children are deprived of their own clothing
and given shabby replacements; their personal possessions are removed; the children
are de-loused; their hair is cut to uniform standards; they are fed strange, disgusting
foods; they are housed in inadequate and unsanitary conditions; they undergo hazing
and humiliation, often by female religious figures; they are prohibited from using
their own language; over time, they might be assaulted physically and sexually and
subjected to brutal punishments for failure to conform to institutional rules. Despite
the occasional act of kindness by white captors who are young or new to the facility,
the quality of residential school and mission settlement life is so poor that many of
the captive children die.
The lived experience of children held captive in these institutions belies the putative
benefits of their incarceration. They receive only a superficial elementary education
that barely fits them for basic literacy; their industrial education amounts to providing
free labour. Their spiritual growth is stunted. Most students remain in the residential
facility until their release. Of the few who escape, most are re-captured.5
Release from this form of colonial captivity is largely the purvue of the captor. In
a process similar to the ransom of captive women in the Settler Captivity Narrative,
children are released in proportion to their economic value in the workforce.
Unfortunately for these young “graduates,” their race and lack of education bars
participation in anything but the working class. They cannot therefore be fully inscribed into white society. And their assimilation prevents full re-inscription into
indigenous communities. The trauma of marginalization in both cultures effectively
silences these former captives for nearly a century.
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A Canadian Indigenous Captivity Narrative: No Time to Say
Goodbye
In Canadian indigenous literatures, the residential school has figured for several decades
as the darkest moment of First Nations childhood experience. Dating from as early
as 1830 with the foundation of the Mohawk Institute, industrial boarding schools
and their successors, “residential” schools, were established with the co-operation of
indigenous communities who wanted their children to receive an education equivalent
to that of white children. As it became clear that their children were both badly educated
and ill-treated at these schools, indigenous parents began to resist. Nevertheless, for
more than a century, about one in three indigenous children were removed to residential
schools (Miller1996).
Before the late 1990s, fiction, verse, and drama introduce the residential school
motif in largely indirect ways. Autobiographies include glancing references. It was
not until the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that the full
scope of the residential school experience was revealed to the general public through
many months of oral testimony. And it has only been since the 1990s that published
autobiographical narratives focussed specifically on the residential schools have begun
to appear. The residential school narrative chosen for discussion here is the result of
a group effort headed by Sylvia Olsen, a non-native member of the Tsartlip Reserve,
near Victoria, BC. Together with Rita Morris and Ann Sam, Olsen collected and
blended the memories of six former students into a fictionalized account of Kuper
Island Residential School, a facility that operated for nearly a century.
No Time to Say Goodbye: Children’s Stories of Kuper Island Residential School was
published in 2001 and is intended for a young adult market. It is prefaced by a short
introduction about Kuper Island and why the book was written. “Living with the
residential school experiences and telling the stories is often difficult and painful, and
First Nations people across Canada are now working on healing the wounds left by the
schools” (4). The events detailed in the narrative are set in the mid to late 1950s. The
composite identities that are used for these experiences are of three brothers: Thomas
(9 yrs.), Wilson (7 yrs.), Joey (5 yrs.), and of two neighbouring children: Monica (13
yrs.), and Nelson (14 yrs.). All five characters are from the Tsartlip Reserve, where
they attend a mission-run, Catholic elementary school.
No Time to Say Goodbye maps particularly well onto the Settler Captivity Narrative
model, but represents what I will call an “escape-from” variant. The focus of its narrative
is an exposé of the residential school system – what the children escape from - and
only secondarily on the escape itself. Each of the five chapters takes the point of view
of one child. The narrative begins with an indigenous family idyll. Readers meet a
functional indigenous family, lovingly raising its children in harmony with nature
and tradition. Unlike its generic model, the Indigenous Captivity Narrative describes
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capture in broad daylight; the children are literally kidnapped from school by the
Indian agent and taking all day by car, government ferry and boat to Kuper Island
Residential School. There they suffer from regimented neglect and abuse over several
years; each chapter is named for one of the children, thereby re-investing their personal
stories with an individuality the school system was meant to suppress. Four of the five
children effect their own escape, literally or symbolically, from Kuper Island. Wilson
rejects the whole notion of captivity by refusing to eat. Starving to death, the boy is
released to his family by the school in order to avoid negative publicity.
Monica, the 13-year old daughter of a Chief, suffers repeated sexual assault by the
school’s Principal, Father Maynard. Feeling alone and betrayed, she receives a letter
from her father saying that she is the hope of their people. They need her to stay at school
and become a teacher. In the depths of her despair, Monica is physically “saved” by
another girl, Vivian, herself a former victim of Father Maynard. In order to prevent him
from abusing anyone else, Vivian sacrifices herself. She confronts Maynard, punching
him, and threatening to kill him if touches one more girl. When the nuns escort her
to the mainland, she breaks away to tell the whole story to a group of indigenous
women standing nearby. One of them contacts the police, who investigate and remove
Maynard from the school. Drawing strength from Vivian’s courage Monica stands up
to her tormentors. She has re-inscribed herself as a “good” girl. For the balance of her
stay at Kuper she will resist injustice and acquire the skills and knowledge that will
allow her to help her community.
Joey escapes with another boy after serving five years in residential school. They
canoe across the strait from Kuper Island to Chemainus (on Vancouver Island) and
then walk along the train track for 90 km. to Victoria. They survive because of the
indigenous teachings of Joey’s father. One of the features of these two narratives is
that the children are received at journey’s end by tribal elders: in this case, Joey’s aunt
and uncle, who re-inscribe them culturally. They are welcomed unconditionally, fed
indigenous food, and praised for their courage. Not only do Phyllis and Willie reinscribe the children as belonging to “them,” personally, they in-scribe the boys into
the community’s multi-generational captivity narrative. A distinguishing feature of
the Indigenous Captivity Narrative is that it describes a shared experience by many
people on the reserve, not just of one individual. The story exchange in No Time to
Say Goodbye further reveals how paradigmatic the residential school experience was.
Each of their stories differs from the others only in its details. Joey’s friend, Stumpy
“rested his elbows on the table. ‘So did you learn anything at Kuper?’ Auntie Phyllis
laughed out loud. ‘I learned to wrap the blankets tight on those mattresses.’ Stumpy
looked confused. It sounded like nothing had changed” (101).
As culturally affirming as this re-inscription by tribal elders is for the two escapees,
the final decision about whether or not they can stay home must come from their
72
parents, who stand unofficially in the stead of colonial authority. The official reinscription is that the assimilated child returns home as an agent of change after the
residential school has “killed the Indian in the child.” So, until the children actually
reach their family homes, the narrative is incomplete. On Joey’s arrival, his mother is
too frightened of the authorities to allow him to stay. “She held him tight. And he did
stay home for a little while. But in the end, Joey went back to Kuper” (107). Readers
understand Joey as a “good” boy in that he obeys the wishes of his mother, even when
he knows her to be wrong.
Olsen and her co-writers do not choose to end No Time to Say Goodbye with a child
who escapes only to be re-incarcerated through the fear of a co-opted parent. Surviving
captivity is as much an exercise in mental resistance as it is in physical escape. In fact,
physical release means little if the captive has lost the ability to resist mentally. Nelson
is the tough guy of the original group of captives. He physically confronts the Brothers
and other resident tough guys at the school on a regular basis. He attempts escape, but
is brought back and punished.
Nelson is not a scholar. But, under the kindly eye of Brother Feldstar, the new
English and physical education teacher, he discovers that he has a talent: he can run
faster than anyone else. Under Feldstar’s support and encouragement, Nelson begins
to believe in his own worth as a human being and then develops the mental discipline
to overcome the psychological challenge of captivity. Nelson attends a track and field
meet on the Tsartlip Reserve between Kuper Island and his original elementary school.
When Nelson runs and wins against his cousin, Olie, himself a legendary athlete,
Nelson realizes that he has won in more ways than one. He knows who he is. Now all
he has to do is to wait until his release.
Nelson looked across the fields. He loved Tsartlip, he realized. And pretty soon he’d
be coming back. Kuper Island seemed a long way away now that he was at home. And
the sun was shining. And there were eagles, as always, soaring overhead.” (172)
An Australian Indigenous Captivity Narrative: Follow the RabbitProof Fence
While No Time to Say Goodbye can be described as an “escape-from” narrative that draws
the reader’s attention to the lived experience of captivity and incarceration, Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence [1996] (2000) takes the shape of an “escape-to” narrative. Author
Doris Pilkington’s central character, Molly, simply refuses to stay in the Moore River
Native Settlement; she escapes with her cousin/sisters, Daisy and Gracie, on the second
day of their residency. Of the book’s nine chapters, the eighth, entitled “The Escape,”
represents nearly half the total number of pages. The “escape-to” narrative focuses on
what the children are trying to recover, not on what they have escaped from.
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Pilkington prefaces Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence with four short historical
chapters proferring an indigenous view of settler-aboriginal relations: that fear and
racial arrogance prevented settlers from appreciating the sophisticated environmental
engagement and complex social structures of the Aborigines. Pilkington describes
the steady decline of the Aboriginal way of life in which whole communities were
deprived of their physical freedom and ability to live from the land. When extended
families drift into life on cattle stations, their power to protect themselves and their
children from the invading culture diminishes. Pilkington’s fifth chapter outlines the
arrival of Molly’s family at Jigalong depot prior to the 1931 capture of the three girls
for transport to Moore River.
The bureaucratic backdrop to this captivity is the 1905 West Australia Aborigines
Act, which reclassified Aborigines from “wildlife” to childlike dependents of the state
under the care of a “Chief Protector.” Among his powers was the ability to remove
children forcibly from their families for the purposes of assimilation. It is estimated that
anywhere between one in three and one in ten children were “stolen” in this manner
over the course of a century. In Western Australia, the child captives were taken to
over 40 different “missions,” or reserves, which have been described as “poorly run,
often disease-ridden prisons” (Ravell n.d. 2; Bringing Them Home 1997).
The more specific historical context to the captivity of these three girls is the 1907
construction of a rabbit-proof fence in West Australia, running from the north to the
south coast. This barbed defense of settler crops against the depradations of rabbits
was deemed so important to agriculture as to require constant upkeep by white crews.
Gradually Aboriginal communities, whose migration and hunting routes were disrupted
by the fence, came to settle near it. Growing numbers of half-caste children resulted
from relationships between indigenous women and the white men working on the
fence. These children appeared to be marginalized within their own communities on
account of their light-coloured skin. At least this was the observation in 1931 by the
station manager who recommended that Molly (14 years old), Daisy (11), and Gracie
(8)7 be removed in order to give them a “fair chance.” The fact that each of these girls
had a white parent suggested to settler authorities that they were likely more intelligent
than their full-blood Aboriginal relatives, more amenable to western education, and
better likely to succeed as labourers in white society.
The settlement at Moore River was originally established in 1918 as a self-sustaining,
farming community for Aboriginal families. When the farm failed, Moore River
was re-purposed in the 1920s as a government-mandated social welfare facility for
unmarried mothers, orphans, the elderly, and the ill. Among its involuntary residents
were half-caste children like Molly, Daisy and Gracie. Moore River was meant to
facilitate their inscription into the agricultural and domestic workforce (Jacobs 2006).
74
Like the residential schools in Canada, the Australian mission system, of which Moore
River was a part, lasted until the 1970s (Haebich 1988; Maushart 2003).
Yet Moore River, for all its storied and infamous role in settler-aboriginal relations,
joins the Aborigines Act and the building of the rabbit-proof fence as background
noise to the central concern of the author: the in-scription of the girls and their
people, to their rightful place in the landscape and history of Western Australia.
Pilkington does this partly through an appeal to historical veracity (Brewster 2002).
Rabbit Proof Fence is marketed as “a true story” on both its front and back covers.
The “Introduction” establishes the real-life relationship between the author and her
characters and sums up the historical facts of the case. Pilkington is Molly’s daughter
and niece to the other escapees. Separated from her mother for decades by the very
system from which Molly had fled, Pilkington trained first as a nurse and then as a
journalist before finally discovering her mother’s whereabouts. Rabbit Proof Fence is
the result of transcribing and merging the oral narratives of the three older women and
conducting research amongst official records. Several government documents provide
context for the ideology of captivity in the “Escape” chapter. While Pilkington’s appeal
to historical data was likely necessary, given that Aboriginals had largely been written
out of Australian history, her in-scription of the girls is most strikingly accomplished
through their epic trek across 1600 km of the Australian bush. Despite their trials,
the girls revel in the beauties of the bush and they are never lost because Molly is old
enough to “read” the land.
The captivity occurs one morning while Molly’s family is enjoying a camping
weekend. The girls are abducted by Constable Rigg, the local Protector of Aboriginals.
They are taken by car and overnight by boat to Moore River. Molly takes one look at
the Settlement, where the dormitories are padlocked and barred; where the children
huddle for warmth at night in over-crowded, fetid conditions; and where the food is
full of weevils; she decides that she and the other girls will escape. On the morning of
their second day at Moore River, she orders the younger girls to put on extra clothing,
grab their calico bags and quietly walk toward the river while everyone else is getting
ready for breakfast. After several hours negotiating the mud and tangle of the river
valley, the girls emerge onto the heathlands. Molly is confident about how to get home.
She has paid attention to the directions the car took on its way to Moore River. Her
plan is to use that knowledge, along with the position of the sun and the location of
the rabbit-proof fence to guide them. She has learned all the bushcraft she needs from
her step-father, “a former nomad from the desert” (82).
As soon as the girls reach the heathlands, their in-scription as its natural inhabitants
begins. But, just as significant is their in-scription as citizens of Western Australia.
The girls kneel to “touch the beautiful kangaroo paw flowers….our [my emphasis]
state emblem” (83). The girls walk for hours through a rainstorm until nightfall. Molly
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finds shelter for them in sand dunes, where she knows there will be rabbit warrens. By
enlarging a deserted east-facing warren, the girls provide themselves with a warm, dry,
safe place to sleep. The next day, the children walk through “a landscape dominated
by clumps of grass trees. Interspersed among them were zamia palms, and scattered
here and there were a few marri, wandoo and mallee gums (89). Pilkington fills the
pages of “The Escape” with a botanical wonderland, through which the girls pass in
awe and appreciation. This is indisputably their place.
Epic adventures with child heroes are particularly reliant on a “guide” character,
someone (or several someones) to supply knowledge, physical assistance, talismans,
or spiritual guidance to the children. Rabbit Proof Fence is replete with wandering
Aboriginal hunters and white farmwives who give the children clothing, food,
matches, and directions. Molly understands that she needs this external help, but
she also knows that she is in charge of the escape. Her job is to find the way; to keep
everyone motivated over what amounts to a nine week ordeal; to keep out of sight of
the search planes; to evade and confuse the Aboriginal tracker hired to catch them;
and to misdirect the helpful white settlers about their actual plans. Molly knows that
all of the white settlers who help them will contact the authorities with bulletins on
the children’s progress. Yet, no one is able to find or capture them.
The girls prove their worth as “good” daughters of the land through demonstrations
of physical skill, courage, and a steadfast adherence to their goal. They cross raging
rivers by holding on to fence wires; they carry one another when exhausted; they
endure leg sores, clouds of flies, starvation, and exposure; they double-back and create
false trails. Eventually the privations are too much for Gracie, who separates from
her cousins at a train station. But Molly and Daisy make it to a location where an
aunt and uncle live. They are welcomed joyfully, bathed and fed. They are asked to
tell their story, then put into warm comfortable beds to sleep. As far as the elders are
concerned, the girls have been re-inscribed into the community; they make plans to
return the girls to their parents.
Reaching home, the girls’ re-inscription into family life is complete. Their families
support them by moving away from the depot. They “had no intention of returning
until they were absolutely certain that the girls were safe from government officers and
policemen” (123). Colonial officials, in turn, decide after much debate that it would
be too much trouble to locate the girls and that, even if apprehended, they would be
impossible to detain for any length of time. What is more, they had already cost the
department too much in expense and adverse public attention. The captivity has failed8.
Conclusion
In Learning to Write ‘Indian,’ Amelia Katanski outlines how, in 1891, the administrators
of the Carlisle Residential School in Pennsylvania stole and “inscripted” Indian identity
76
using the school’s newspaper, The Indian Helper. The editor, Marianna Burgess, taking
an Indian-sounding pseudonym, wrote and serialized a novel called Stiya: A Carlisle
Indian Girl at Home. This novel describes the responses of the “good (assimilated)
Indian” girl to reservation life. When Stiya arrives at her family home, all she wants
to do is go back to the order and hygiene of Carlisle. But then, good assimilated girl
that she is, she decides to remain and educate her family in western ways in order to
save them from their own depravity (64-66).
From the seventeenth century settler captivity narrative to nineteenth century
pseudo-life writing at residential schools like Carlisle runs a powerful narrative tradition
of inter-cultural representation that pervades not only popular culture in print and the
movies, but inter-personal relations as well. For the indigenous writer, the problem is
how to counter a false, yet mythic, representation of who you are; how to describe the
complex mental and physical transformations wrought by your own captivity and that
of others. One solution has been through oral testimony such as that encouraged by the
“Bringing Them Home Oral History Project” in Australia and the Royal Commission
on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. Public witness validates personal experience and
creates an informed audience.
However, utilizing that testimony to effect healing, understanding and social change
requires broader dissemination of the message. A good way to do this is through print,
appropriating a genre that is familiar to everyone, but using it in order to produce a
mirror image of its cultural assumptions. It is this reversal of context and situation that
strikes readers of No Time to Say Goodbye and Rabbit Proof Fence. By altering the age,
race and colonial status of the captive hero and by inverting the semiotic implications
of “settlement” and “wilderness,” Olsen and Pilkington lead readers to re-interpret
an entrenched paradigm of cultural relations. In validating a fictionalized captivity
narrative with historical documentation, the authors help to in-scribe indigenous
experience into colonial social history. And, finally, by producing written texts that
can be included in the school curriculum, they ensure that this experience will assume
its rightful place as a chapter of indigenous history.
Endnotes
1 I use the word “Indian” wherever I refer to the American generic model, to the social and
political context in which that model developed, or to its direct influence on Australian
and Canadian literatures. When I refer specifically to twentieth century narratives from
these colonies, I use “indigenous,” “First Nations,” or “Aboriginal.”
2 In similar fashion, I use the word “white” in the context of the American model, whose
evolving ideological framework relies on a fairly rigid set of racial assumptions.
3 While it is not the purpose of this essay to compare feminine and masculine captivity
narratives, it is important to note that this process of feminine re-inscription is not a feature
of the masculine narrative. Male captives have the opportunity to accept indigenous culture
and stay with the tribe, or return to the white settlement. However, those men who have
77
Evelyn Ellerman
spent years in captivity and then return are heralded for the useful indigenous skills and
knowledge they acquired during that time. It makes them better able to succeed “on the
land” and useful in future negotiations with indigenous groups. The settler group is glad
to welcome them home – no proof of purity or steadfastness is required. Daniel Boone is
an iconic American hero of such captivity narratives.
4 The initial period of indigenous autobiography in Canada dates from the 1970s and 80s, but
life writing focussed specifically on residential school experience does not appear in large
numbers until the late 1990s. Three recent picture books about residential schools, written for
children, are Nicola Campbell. Shi-shi-etko. Groundwood Books, 2005; Michael Kusugak.
Arctic Stories. Toronto: Annick Press, 1998; Larry Loyie with C. Brissenden. As Long
as the River Flows. Vancouver: Groundwood Books, 2002. In Australia, early indigenous
captivity narratives for young readers date from the late 1980s and 1990s. They include
the following: Sally Morgan, My Place. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987;
Glenys Ward, Wandering Girl. Broome: Magabala Books, 1987; Barbara Cummings, Take
This Child . . . From Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children’s Home. Canberra:
Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990; Alice Nannup, When the Pelican Laughed. Fremantle:
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992.
5 Jack Davis, who himself had been incarcerated at the Moore River Settlement in Western
Australia, writes of one such escape in his play, Kullark (1982; first performed in 1979). The
father is sent to jail for six months each of the four times he escaped from Moore River with
his family. Eventually, the authorities recognize the inevitable and release them, but with
heavy injunctions to stay permanently out of any communities near their original home. In
a bureaucratic attempt to prevent any meaningful cultural re-inscription or indeed official
existence, the family is further prohibited from ever receiving any governmental assistance,
An early exception is Ganiesh: An Indian Girlhood by Jane Willis (1973).
7 The actual family relationship amongst these three girls is often unclear due to differences
between Aboriginal and settler kinship categories. The author makes it clear that each of the
girls has a different mother (39), but that they are all part of an extended family grouping
and so think of one another as sisters. At the time of their capture, Molly and Daisy were
in the same camp, while Gracie was with another group some miles distant.
8 In an appended biographical note, the author reveals that, for her mother Molly, the captivity
saga was iterative. After marrying and bearing two daughters of her own, Molly was
apprehended and taken once more to Moore River for convalescence after an appendectomy.
Denied the right to return to her home, she left Doris at Moore River and trekked the 1600
km back home with baby Annabelle. Three years later, Annabelle was also apprehended;
Molly has not seen her since.
WORKS CITED
Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture.” Early American Literature.
39/ 2 (2004): 217-246.
Behrendt, Larissa. “The Eliza Fraser Captivity Narrative: A Tale of the Frontier, Femininity,
and the Legitimization of Colonial Law.” Saskatchewan Law Review. 63 (2000): 146-82.
Brewster, Anne. “Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalisation: Doris Pilkington’s Follow the
Rabbit-Proof Fence.” Australian Humanities Review. 25 (March 2002).
78
Carter, Sarah. Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
David, Jack. Kullark/ the Dreamers. Syndey: Currency Press, 1982.
Fitzpatrick, Tara. “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity
Narrative.” American Literary History. 3/1 (Spring 1991): 1-26.
Willis, Jane. Ganiesh: An Indian Girlhood. Toronto: New Press, 1973.
Haberly, David T. “Women and Indians: The Last of the Mohicans and the Captivity Tradition.”
American Quarterly 28. 4 (Autumn, 1976): 431-444.
Haebich, Anna. For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western
Australia 1900-1940. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press,
1988.
Higginson, Kate. “Feminine Vulnerability, (neo) Colonial Captivities, and Rape Scares.”
Recalling Early Canada: Reading the political in Literary and Cultural Production. 35-72. Eds.
Blair, Jennifer et al. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. 35-72.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. Bringing Them Home: A Report of the
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Children from their
Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, 1997.
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, “Backgrounder - Indian Residential Schools Truth and
Reconciliation Commission,” accessed Jan. 2, 2011, http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ai/mr/
nr/m-a2009/bk000000351-eng.asp.
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Chapter 10, “Residential Schools,” In the Report of
the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996, accessed Jan. 2, 2011, http://www.
collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/20071211055641/http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/
rcap/sg/sg28_e.html.
Jacobs, Margaret D. “Indian Boarding Schools in Comparative Perspective: The Removal of
Indigenous Children in the United States and Australia, 1880-1940.” Eds. Clifford E.
Trafzer et al. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 202-231.
Katanski, Amelia V. Learning to Write ‘Indian’: The Boarding School Experience and American
Indian Literature. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
Kim, Christine. “Signifying the Nation: Gabriel Dumont, Harry Robinson, and the Canadian
Captivity Narrative.” Studies in Canadian Literature/ Etudes en littérature canadienne. 28/
1 (2003): 90-108.
Marienstras, Elise. “Depictions of White Children in Captivity Narratives.” American Studies
International. 40/ 3 (Oct. 2002): 33-45).
Maushart, Susan. Sort of a Place Like Home: Remembering the Moore River Native Settlement.
Fremantle: Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003.
79
80
Tony Moore, Death or Liberty: rebels and radicals
transported to Australia 1788-1868
Pier 9: Sydney, 2010. ISBN: 9781741961409. 416pp. Paper. AUD
$34.95.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Touted by media release announcements as “the
first narrative that brings together the stories of political prisoners sent as convicts to
Australia from all parts of the British Empire,” it sounded as if Tony Moore’s Death
or Liberty might be a welcome addition to my library and a new resource to put into
context my long-time research interest in North American political prisoners who
were transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1839-40.
I found in chapters one through three and in chapter five that I learned about late
18th and 19th century political enemies of the British government who were banished
to the shores of Australia. Sent as convicts to the other side of the world, these political
prisoners included liberals, democrats and republican machine breakers, food rioters,
trade unionists and Chartists, radical journalists and intellectuals, Irish revolutionaries
and Scottish Jacobins. All suffered the same fate. In the eyes of the British law they
were collectively transported as criminals and traitors to a distant land, even though
many were viewed as martyrs and heroes in their own communities. In some quarters
they were even revered as freedom fighters and patriots, progressive thinkers and
crusading reformers.
In these chapters I gained useful information about and knowledge of union and
Chartist agitators, secret societies in Ireland, Methodism and dissent, Swing rioters
and Irish revolutionaries. Their exile to the Australian colonies performed the dual
role of a terrible place of banishment with which to deter other would-be rioters and
unionists and a safety valve for discontent in the mother country. The intent was
to remove agitators and trouble makes from local communities and to rob nascent
movements of their leaders. Transportation would neutralize the threat of trade
unions, rid the country of malcontents and rebels, make an example and be a warning
to others attempting similar actions, and prove to be an effective weapon against
counter-revolution and the freedom to disseminate ideas.
This being said of the positive aspects of Moore’s narrative, I must turn to the more
perplexing and troubling aspects of his work related to the North American political
prisoners. As a backdrop, readers should be made aware that rebellions erupted in
Lower Canada in November 1837 and in December in Upper Canada, but were soon
put down by loyalist forces. However, a second phase of rebellion originating in the
81
United States and fought by Canadians and American sympathizers, took place in 1838. Major raids into Upper Canada occurred in February-March in the Detroit border
area, in June in Niagara, in early November along the St. Lawrence River and back in
the Detroit region at Windsor in December. A number of English speaking patriots
were taken captive in these raids and subsequently some of them were transported
to Australia. From the outset factual errors are made about these events. In the
introduction (p. 9), the author mentions North American rebels of 1837 and 1839. Dual rebellions did take place in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838, but not
in 1839. In chapter one (p. 27), Moore states that “North American freedom fighters
from Upper and Lower Canada (focused on Toronto and Quebec).” This statistically is
not accurate. During the Canadian rebellions more incursions and battles took place
in other venues and the focus was not on the two cities named. Chapter four entitled
“North American Patriots vs. the Empire” raises more concerns. From the beginning
of this chapter the chronology of events presented seems awkward. Moore begins his
comments about the 1838 Lower Canadian rebellion. This is confusing as the first
rebellions occurred in the Canadas in 1837. The 1837 rebellions then the events of 1838
should have been discussed in this order. On p. 214 the author writes of “Beauharnais
patriotes.” No such thing as the community where action took place was Beauharnois. Lack of knowledge and understanding of Ontario geography results in the next error. On p. 221 Moore has prisoners from the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott being
moved to “nearby Fort Henry.” Does he mean Prescott’s Fort Wellington which is
nearby? Fort Henry which was the final destination of these captured Patriots is in
Kingston a community nearby 100 km away by today’s modern highway!!! Also on p.
221, the author states that “the Battle of the Windmill was the climax of a year of raids
on Canadian soil by American insurgents.” This is factually inaccurate as the Battle
of Windsor which took place on December 4, 1838, was the last armed invasion of
the Upper Canadian rebellion. On p. 224 the author states that the English speaking
North American prisoners transported to Van Diemen’s Land came from three raids. In reality prisoners came from four incursions. The St. Clair Raid is not mentioned. It would have been useful for the author to provide some details about the numerous
incursions related to the 1838 Upper Canadian rebellion which numbered ten.
Moore heavily relies on research done more than 30 years ago by George Rude
(1978) and more recent writing by Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
(2002). This severely limits his access to other important information about the North
American political prisoners published in research studies by Stuart Scott, R. Alan
Douglas, Tom Dunning, John Thompson, Ian Brand, Thomas Gunn, F. Murray
Greenwood, Beverley Boisserry, Chris Raible and Robert Sexton, to name a few. Unpublished diaries of Aaron Dresser (at the Library and Archives of Canada) and
Elijah Woodman (at the University of Western Ontario), along with the translated
82
journal of Lower Canadian Patriote Francois-Maurice Lepailleur are also absent from
reference in Moore’s book.
Other factual errors occur in this chapter. Samuel Lount and Peter Mathews (sic)
were not hanged “at the crossroads of Bloor and Yonge Streets in Toronto, “(p. 243)
but instead were executed at the Toronto gaol at the north-west corner of Church and
King Streets. There is no evidence that any of the Patriots captured at the Battle of
Pelee Island were actually transported to Van Diemen’s Land (p. 257). Invaders from
Detroit did not cross Lake St. Clair, but rather the Detroit River to participate in the
Battle of Windsor (p. 262). A Lower Canadian uprising took place at Sherbrooke,
not Sheerbrooke (p. 264). French speaking Patriotes aboard the HMS Buffalo did not
“insist that the plot was betrayed in their midst” (p. 273). Published accounts of this
matter by French speaking rebels instead question whether a plot even occurred. There
is absolutely no evidence of English speaking North American political prisoners being
chained while working at probation Stations in Van Diemen’s Land (p. 278). Linus
Miller and Joseph Stewart did not flee from the Sandy Bay Probation Station (p. 280). Their escape resulting in confinement as second offenders at Port Arthur occurred at
the Lovely Banks Probation Station. The cairn commemorating the English speaking
North American political prisoners at Sandy Bay (p. 297) no longer exists. It has been
taken down and is currently being stored by the City of Hobart. Funding has not been
found to re-erect this cairn closer to the original location of the Sandy Bay Probation
Station. Surprisingly, Moore seems unaware of these facts. A third cairn exists at the
Campbell Street Primary School in Hobart. It was erected in 2000 at the site of the
former Trinity and Prisoners Burial ground and features a poem written by Patriot
Linus Miller. This memorial is not mentioned in Moore’s work.
Cross referencing to connections with various political movements and parallel
events would have been helpful. Some that I’ve uncovered and which if included could
have tied Moore’s argument together better include the following: Irish radical William
Smith O’Brien saw the “…similarity of circumstances that existed in the two countries,
Ireland and Canada.” [See Freeman’s Journal (January 27, 1838)]. No references appear
from this primary resource, Ireland’s national newspaper which published for 161 years
and reflected turbulent changes in Irish society. Chartist John Frost commented upon
“those engaged in the Canadian affair” and asked for similar treatment and indulgences
for pardons [see Colonial Times (October 6, 1846) and Colonial Times (December 26,
1843)]. Moore does not mention the imperial government’s concern about pardoning
of Lower Canadian Patriotes and the implications this might have on the repression of
Chartist discontent in the United Kingdom. Neither does the author make a comment
on the expressed concern for and potential of irruption and open rebellion similar to
that occurring in Upper and Lower Canada, breaking out in Australian colonies [see
Colonial Times (June 5, 1838) and The Australian (July 13, 1838)]. Similarly no reflection
83
John C. Carter
is offered upon the annexation of Texas from Mexico by the United States [see Sydney
Morning Herald (February 21, 1845) and Sydney Morning Chronicle (May 23, 1846)],
nor is the Oregon border issue addressed [see Launceston Examiner (October 28, 1846)]. With the availability of period newspapers through various internet websites, Death or
Liberty is devoid of references to these critical primary sources. This is a major failing
of the book. One must question this lack of primary research conducted by Moore,
especially in relationship to the North American political prisoners.
In conclusion, what is presented seems pretty much a synthesis of what has been
written previously, and perhaps could be viewed as a re-tread of Rudes’s work? If Death
or Liberty is to go into a second printing, then more judicious editing is recommended
along with revisions being made by the author to the noted factual errors and omissions. This would make it a much better resource in the study of political prisoners transported
to Australia. On the whole, Tim Moore’s book could be a helpful addition to a reader’s
library who has an interest in rebels and radicals shipped to Australia between 17881868.
Dr. John C. Carter, Museum & Heritage Advisor, Ontario Ministry of Tourism
& Culture and member of the ACS editorial board.
84
Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, eds., Unsettled
Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic.
Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-554585. xxvi + 297pp. Paper . C$38.95
“How do we know we are who we think we are, or thought we were … a hundred
years ago?” Margaret Atwood’s question which addresses Canadian anxieties about
national identity and heritage recasts Canadian history in the Gothic genre as a series
of resurrections of the dead. Her question points to the main line of inquiry in Unsettled
Remains, where many of these eleven essays investigate how the colonial legacy within
postcolonial Canada is unearthed and rearticulated in contemporary Gothic fictions.
However, just as no Gothic novel follows a single plot line, so this collection branches
out to include a variety of narratives of trauma and uncanny experience within the
Canadian postcolonial Gothic.
Hauntings and spectral presences have become familiar tropes in discussions of
colonial and postcolonial literature, and this collection addresses the multiple ways
in which the European Gothic genre has been transformed in a Canadian context.
Indeed, this topic was initially explored in Australasian Canadian Studies 24.2 (2006)
and four of those essays are reprinted here (though without acknowledgement). In
their Introduction the editors, both leading scholars in this field, present a historical
overview of Gothic fiction in Canada up to its postcolonial manifestations, while
offering a valuable sketch of the regional or “situated” nature of Canadian Gothic
(Southern Ontario Gothic, French Canadian, Maritime, prairie, northern, and most
recently, urban Gothic). Their common feature is noted: “Perhaps, most importantly, the
postcolonial Gothic has been used to challenge dominant literary, political, and social
narratives” (xviii). This claim is supported by the cover illustration, a photomontage by
Métis artist Rosalie Favell of a scene from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy awakens
to find her family gathered around her, with the ghost of Louis Riel peering through
the window. His uncanny presence suggests a revisionist historiography, setting the
tone for this collection which investigates “the way a modern nation might stage a
literary rehearsal of the past as mediated though the gothic mode” (xx). The book
incorporates a historical dimension, beginning with essays on a nineteenth century
French Canadian Gothic novel, Farley Mowat’s popular northern Gothic narratives
of the 1950s and 60s, and a representative modernist Gothic text, before shifting focus
to contemporary postcolonial Gothic novels.
Andrea Cabajsky’s discussion of Charles de Guise’s Le Cap au diable (1863)
85
Coral Ann Howells
provides a valuable opener with its strong argument for extending discussion of
postcoloniality backwards from the present by showing how a colonial text written
from a marginalised perspective might be read as a model for dissident postcolonial
narratives. That argument for alternative historiographies resonates through later essays
about ethnic minority and Aboriginal fictions by Gerry Turcotte, Shelley Kulperger,
Jennifer Henderson, and Jennifer Andrews. By contrast, Brian Johnson reveals Farley
Mowat’s mythmaking about the Arctic to be synonymous with the values of Canadian
cultural nationalism. In this nuanced reading what emerges is Mowat’s “desire to
exhume a primordial Viking presence” in a nationalist fantasy of White indigeneity in
the Canadian North. Territorial disputes over land claims and origins are embedded
in much Canadian Gothic fiction (as in Australian and New Zealand fiction) where
guilt over the violence of white settler history opens the way for representations of
unhomeliness. Two essays which explore this topic are Marlene Goldman’s analysis of
two women’s Coyote novels where the spectral presence of the Native Trickster god
figures white settlers’ “barely repressed awareness of the Native people’s prior claim to
the land”(53), and Herb Wyile’s “Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves”.
This historical novel reminds us of both Richardson’s Wacousta and Kate Grenville’s
The Secret River with its scenarios of “terror” and “horror” Gothic, gesturing towards
the traumas hidden within history.
If one of the qualities of Gothic is its spookiness, another is its seemingly endless
powers of transformation, so that a thematics of the uncanny, the traumatic, and the
return of the repressed may be identified in novels that are not about white colonial
history but about those others – ethnic minorities and Aboriginal peoples – excluded
for so long from the national narrative. Shelley Kulperger recuperates such ghost
stories through a feminist lens as domestic Gothic, while Atef Lauoyene’s “ghost
writing “situates trauma within a mixed race family narrative, and Lindy Ledohowski’s
scrutiny of Ukrainian Canadian identity locates home itself as the “shadowy spectre”.
Gerry Turcotte’s analysis of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, the story of Japanese Canadians’
experiences during World War II, is striking not only for its reversals of racist notions
of otherness and monstrosity in Kogawa’s text but for its overtly political gesture beyond
the text in his cross-cultural comparison between Canadian and Australian attitudes
towards others, ending with an assessment of the value and the cost of acknowledging
past wrongs.
The two chapters on Aboriginal Gothic introduce new critical perspectives as they
deal with the problem of reading these texts through a European Gothic or Western
psychoanalytic lens, in addition to the fact that contemporary First Nations texts
are syncretic productions from an inevitably hybridised cultural context. Thomson
Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen combines European Gothic conventions with the
Native Trickster (the Fur Queen herself) in his high camp and scandalous novel, which
86
as Jennifer Henderson shows, keys into the centrality of fetish and fantasy in queer
culture’s response to the trauma of Residential School sexual abuse. Eden Robinson’s
Monkey Beach writes back, as Jennifer Andrews argues, to the white Canadian
wilderness Gothic tradition, blurring boundaries between the psychological and
supernatural. The last essay also engages in a blurring of boundaries, this time between
the fantastic and everydayness, in Cynthia Sugars’ superb analysis of Vincent Lam’s
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. This is yet another transformation of contemporary
Gothic, set in a modern hospital, where Lam explores the “gothic potential within
transferential narrative exchange” (272).
And yet I feel a lack here: Where is Grace Marks, the personification of Atwood’s
postcolonial critique of Canadian colonial history, or the unsolved riddles of Alice
Munro’s deserted graves in “Meneseteung” and “Messenger,” or the diasporic urban
Gothic of Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For? But of course there is always a lack,
even in this extraordinarily rich collection, as the Gothic murmurs on beneath ideas
of order, reason, and nationhood.
Coral Ann Howells, University of Reading / University of London
87
Dorothy Jones
Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo, edited by Aritha van
Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse. Barkhuis
Publishing, 2009.
Barkhuis, 2009. ISBN 9077922512. pp156. Paperback.
In her story ‘A Scarf ’ Carol Shields reflects on a woman writer’s predicament. Its
middle-aged narrator, Reta Winters, leaves the comfort of her family home to embark
on a brief promotional tour arranged by the publisher of her first novel. Assured in her
roles of wife and mother, scholar and editor, the rather diffident Reta is uncertain of her
position as creative writer. Her reviews, though good, have been subtly undermining –
‘Mrs Winters’ book is very much for the moment, though not certainly for the ages’. She
herself believes her work fails to meet the standards of writers she admires: ‘I understood
perfectly well that there was something just a little bit darling about my own book’. 6
It has also been ‘shackled … to minor status’ by winning a literary prize founded by a
wealthy couple out of ‘exasperation’ with the opaqueness of the contemporary novel’.
The story culminates in a sardonically portrayed reunion between Reta and Gwen,
unofficial leader of a writers’ group they once both belonged to and now employed as
writer in residence at a small Baltimore women’s college. Her short stories have appeared
in literary quarterlies and ‘there had even been one near mythical sale, years earlier to
Harper’s’. Gwen studiously avoids mentioning either Reta’s book or her literary award.
‘It became suddenly important that I let her know about the prize”, but Gwen, well
aware of her friend’s success, is dismissive of the award’s middle-brow associations.
To Reta’s surprise she has appeared at lunch dressed in ‘what looked like large folds
of unstitched, unstructured cloth, skirts and overskirts and capes and shawls … This
cloth wrapping, in a salmon colour, extended to her head, completely covering her
hair’. The clothing corresponds to Gwen’s writing, which she keeps referring to as her
‘stuff’ – ‘she made it sound like a sack of kapok’. It is, however, her principal source of
self-definition, protective armour against a largely indifferent world.
Reta has spent the previous afternoon buying a scarf for her daughter, Norah,
aiming to choose ‘the perfect scarf, not the near-perfect’. She pursues her quest through
numerous boutiques like a search for le mot juste believing she ‘could provide something
temporary and necessary: this dream of transformation, this scrap of silk’. Finally she
discovers and buys it: ‘I found its shimmer dazzling and its touch icy and sensuous”.
Describing the whole experience, she shows the scarf as evidence to Gwen, who is deeply
moved by its beauty. ‘Finding it, it’s almost like you made it. You invented it, created
it out of your imagination. Gwen then rewraps the scarf, appropriating it as a gift to
88
herself. ‘”Thank you, darling Reta, thank you. You don’t know what you’ve given me
today.” But I did, I did’. An author, having written for a carefully selected readership,
has no control over her work’s actual recipients who may prove quite different from
those she herself would have chosen.
This story, emphasizing the precarious situation of women writers, forms a
somewhat wry comment on Virginia Woolf ’s ‘we think back through our mothers if
we are women’. Reta, reflecting on her own achievement, her daughters, her mother
and her mother-in-law, feels the world is still not ready to receive women’s creative
enterprises. ‘What does it amount to? A scarf, half an ounce of silk, maybe less, floating
free in the world. The scarf, in all its fragile delicacy, represents the vulnerability of
artistic endeavour in a society only too ready to disparage its beauty and significance,
especially when coming from a woman. Carol Shields highlights in her writing the
personal and the domestic – subject-matter often dismissed as minor or irrelevant to
life’s ‘real’ concerns as she notes in her essay ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing
Cupboard’:
A thousand years from now, readers will look back on the novels of the twentieth
century and wonder whether or not we possessed a domestic life at all. A bed, a roof
over our heads, toothbrushes, forks and knives, alarm clocks, birth control devices –
these accoutrements have been curiously erased except in so called ‘marginal fiction,’
often women’s fiction.
Shields’ great achievement, however, is her portrayal of what Margaret Atwood calls
‘the extraordinariness of ordinary people’, and, despite frequent dismissal of such subject
matter by the literary establishment, she gained a singular triumph by winning both
the Canadian Governor-General’s award in 1993 and the U.S. Pullitzer Prize in 1995
for her novel The Stone Diaries.
It is significant that in her celebration of ordinary people and their daily lives,
Shields also reveals the pain and suffering which so often underlies them. As Atwood
comments: ‘She knew about the darkness, but – both as an author and a person – she
held onto the light’. Her final novel Unless (2002) incorporates a version of her earlier
story ‘The Scarf ’. Reta Winters, now back home in Canada, embarks on a second novel
while confronting dire family trauma. Her eldest daughter, Norah, has abandoned her
university course, without explanation, to live on a Toronto street corner, holding a
begging bowl and refusing all communication with her family. Round her neck she
wears a placard inscribed with the single word ‘goodness’. Reta’s anguish over this
situation goes hand in hand with her continued involvement in writing and in household
chores: ‘My daughter is living like a vagabond on the streets of Toronto, but even so
I had to have four yards of screened bark mulch delivered to the house this morning
…’6 She even takes joy in cleaning: ‘I dust and polish this house of mine so that I’ll
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Dorothy Jones
be able to seal it from damage’ (41). Entering the imagined lives of others through
her writing provides further solace: ‘These lives hold a kind of tenancy in my mind,
tricking the neural synapses into a grand avoidance of my own sorrow’.
While composing her novel, she also muses on how women’s concerns and activities
are marginalised, denigrated or ignored, drafting imaginary letters denouncing various
male writers and editors. A series of books on Great Minds of the Western Intellectual
World omits all reference to women – ‘expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great
women’s minds’. A collection of interviews with contemporary writers includes no
female authors, so ‘women who fall even casually under your influence … are made to
serve an apprenticeship in self-abnegation’ (110). Reta comes increasingly to believe her
daughter’s behaviour is prompted by a culture that so often cancels women out. Norah
is in fact reacting against one woman’s erasure from the world. Deeply traumatised by
seeing a Moslem woman, enveloped in a burqua, immolate herself on the footpath,
she now makes a desperate attempt to assert the necessity of ‘goodness’.
Unless was written after Shields herself was diagnosed with stage three breast
cancer. Although not a book about illness, it is the author’s response to a diagnosis
‘when her placid, fortunate life cleaved into a “before” and an “after”’, and writing was
important in dealing with this.
It was bliss, she says, to escape herself for a while – to be free of what she calls the ‘selfcentredness that illness brings out, the worst possible kind’. She would wake up every
day, she says ‘feeling so happy that I had somewhere to go, something to do, work to do’.
Among the many tributes following her death in 2003 is this collection of essays
celebrating her life and work, Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo, edited by Aritha van
Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcus. Among the contributors are literary critics and
writers, including Margaret Atwood, Isobel Huggan, Susan Swann, Janice Kulyk
Keefer, Jane Urquhart and Aritha van Herk. Two of Shields’ daughters, themselves
writers, have also contributed. Sara Cassidy’s poems appear alongside two her mother
had previously published. ‘Calling My Mother’ is a moving tribute:
After she left, I continued
to holler greetings
when I entered that house
*****
Five months later, I still called
but my voice just pushed air
down the halls, over the furniture.
90
Anne Giardini’s story ‘A Wood, 2009’ continues an earlier one she and her mother
wrote in collaboration and which had appeared in Shields’ first short story collection
Various Miracles in 1985.
Several pieces in the collection contain personal reminiscences of Shields by friends
and colleagues, while others offer literary and critical analyses of her fiction. Shields
was keenly aware of the barbs and pinpricks writers suffer from peoples’ comments
on their work. Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo ends with her own essay ‘The Writing
Life’ which originally appeared in The Washington Post in 2000 and describes a gamut
of reactions to a writer’s latest book, ranging from the silence of family members who
haven’t read it ‘because they know me the author, in a particular and highly specified
way and prefer not to know me in any other, perhaps more dangerous way’, to ‘the
academic wave’ when her work is reassessed some years later and accorded layers
of meaning the writer never intended or suspected. Protest is useless: ‘it’s better to
keep quiet: let them have their way with your work’. Shields, who herself taught in
universities, has many sly digs at academe throughout her fiction, particularly in the
novel Mary Swann where a writer’s works are taken over, manipulated and reshaped
by an entire literary industry of editors, publishers and academics.
This collection of essays is subtitled ‘Evocation and Echo’ because the majority of
contributors have accepted the challenge to mingle their own imaginings with Shields’
so that, in Aritha van Herk’s words, ‘This collection echoes Carol, Carol’s writing and
Carol’s ongoing spirit’. Some of the writers insert characters of their own creation into
the context of Shields’ fictions. Susan Swan takes advantage of their similar surnames
to recreate the persona of Mary Swann, from the novel of that name, in a piece headed,
‘(A Few Words About the Author by her Character)’, insisting that ‘Carol constructed
me out of herself, and her own ordinariness’. Joan Clark’s tour de force, ‘The Man Who
Loved Mary Swann’, presents a middle-aged male character, Ed Miller, who reminisces
over his brief affair with Mary Swann and their snatched encounters in seedy motel
rooms. The bulk of Clark’s story, however, describes in careful and convincing detail
how Ed manages to insert his love letter to Mary into the archive of her papers held in
the National Library in Ottawa for future scholarly researchers to puzzle over. Clark
delights the reader by merging one work of fiction into another.
Boundaries are blurred in other contributions as individual works by Shields become
foundations on which further fictional scaffolding is erected. Marjorie Anderson
presents a middle-aged woman character who discovers that Shields’ fiction illumines
her own life, while helping her come to terms with the inevitability of death. Charlotte
Sturgess provides a whimsical account in ‘Moving On’ about a Character Complaints
Office at the back of the Gare du Nord in Paris where characters from works of fiction
set in France, even if published abroad, may come to complain about their authors.
…the “bureau des réclamations’ had come into being in the nineteen sixties when French
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Dorothy Jones
authors first started taking strange liberties with their ‘personages,’ stating publicly that
they were just an effect of the reader’s whims and fancies, and maintaining that the
author had ceased to exist, which understandably caused quite a few characters to take
to the streets of Paris in a panic, stridently demanding to meet their authors face to
face. There were demonstrations with banners … and slogans proclaiming: ‘Give us
back our authors!’
One complainant at the office is the young woman narrator from Shields’ story ‘Sailors
Lost at Sea’ who had been left abandoned, locked in a disused church, and Sturgess
now suggests a possible resolution of her dilemma. In another story, Christl Verduyn
creates a young woman who meets up with and is sheltered by a male character, now
grown much older, from Shields’ early story ‘The Orange Fish’, while Aritha van
Herk contributes ‘Debris’ in response to ‘Segue’, one of the last pieces Shields wrote
before her death. In this narrative van Herk develops a character, Liana, who is friends
with Shields’ narrator, Jane – chairperson of the Sonnet Society – sharing the same
commitment to ‘the secret task of women’ – ‘the discovery and expression of the essence
of those things that have been deemed unimportant’.
Just as different fictions merge into one another, reminiscence may also be tinged
with fiction. Elizabeth Hay, who never met Carol Shields, praises her kindness and
generosity, recreating a detail someone has told her:
I see her coming downstairs in her nightie, despite how extremely ill she was, to take into
her arms a mutual friend, a writer, who was reeling from a negative review. I imagine
her tight, warm embrace, motherly and knowing and fierce.
Isabel Huggan, a friend of Hay’s and the writer referred to here, recounts the incident
more fully, as she emphasises the importance of Shields’ friendship in her life. Huggan’s
book Belonging: Home Away From Home had been reviewed badly.
Shocked and hurt by the mean-spirited attack, I left the hotel and paced around the
harbour, weeping in shame and anger, considering drowning myself as a possible option.
Drying her eyes, she went on to pay a promised visit to the Shields’ house, to be met by
Carol, not in her nightie, but fully dressed ready for a busy day at the literary festival
they were both scheduled to attend. As in Hay’s account, however, her first act was to
embrace Huggan warmly and commiserate over the review.
Since reading Lizzie’s [Elizabeth Hay’s] piece, I’ve been thinking about how a minor
detail does not have the power to alter the truth, and wondering what exactly, is the
line of veracity separating fact from fiction.
92
This issue is addressed in various ways throughout the entire collection of essays and
stories, shedding light both upon Carol Shields’s own literary achievement and her
influence on other writers.
The entire book is a tribute to Shields as a human being as well as a writer. Marsha Hanen
and Margaret Atwood both draw attention to her feminism. Atwood comments that,
Possibly feminism was something she worked into, as she published more widely and
came up against more commentators who thought excellent pastry was a facile creation
compared with raw meat on skewers and who, in any case, could not recognise the
thread of blood in her work, though it was always there.
Other contributors comment in more personal vein on the courage Shields displayed
in her final illness and how, even at this desperate time, she kept up contact with
friends, continuing to provide emotional support. In Margaret Atwood’s words, ‘She
preferred to be treated as a person who was living, not one who was dying’. Essay titles
such as ‘Carol’s Kindness’ and ‘A Generous Spirit’ indicate the strong affection she
inspired and many praise her staunch and committed friendship. Although Shields
began publishing poetry and fiction in the 1970s, literary acclaim was slow in coming.
Susan Swan exclaims,
Did you know that none of her books made money until The Stone Diaries? Certainly
Swann didn’t. Carol never earned out any of her advances – at first. I know because
she told me.
In all her success, she remained a modest person continually willing to help younger,
less experienced writers.
This book is a fitting tribute to a major writer who has made her mark in the literary
world both in Canada and abroad. It conveys a strong sense of Shields’ writing and
personality, measuring her artistic achievement and celebrating her ability to convey
the texture of everyday life. Contributors value her representation of women’s lives and
issues which concern them, while also praising the insight and sympathy the author
shows her male characters, as in her novel Larry’s Party. Carol Shields: Evocation and
Echo is particularly interesting for revealing how writers, inspired by the works of a
colleague they revere, participate in the process of literary creation which she initiated.
It is also a guide to readers of Shields’ fiction, suggesting how they too might trace its
effect upon their own lives.
Dorothy Jones, University of Wollongong
93
Contributors
Contributors
John Carter (PhD) is Provincial Museum and heritage Advisor, Ministry of Tourism
& Culture, Toronto. After thirty years of service, John is retiring from the Ministry
of Tourism & Culture in April, 2011.
Debra Dudek is a lecturer in the English Studies Program at the University of
Wollongong, Australia. Her research interests include: feminist theories, especially
theories of the body; postcolonial and diaspora studies; Australian studies; Canadian
literature; children’s literature; popular culture and media studies; film and other
visual arts studies; women’s literature; creative writing. Her current project involves
researching representations of activism in children’s literature. She is the Deputy
Director, Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies (CCAS) and President of the
Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ).
Evelyn Ellerman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Athabasca
University, Canada. Her research interests include: colonial book history; the roles that
women played in the development of the book cultures of newly independent nations;
how new communication technologies are introduced, and in how those technologies
are used and received. She conducts conduct much of her research in the South Pacific
and travels to Australia frequently.
Robert Hogg is lectures in History at the University of Queensland and Griffith
University, Australia. His book Frontier Males: Manliness in Queensland and British
Columbia 1840-1870 is currently in press with Palgrave MacMillan.
Coral Anne Howells is Professor Emerita, Institute of English Studies University of
London. Coral Ann Howells, a well known Canadianist, has recently been elected as
a Foreign Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada. This is the highest honour a scholar
can achieve in the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. Coral Ann Howells is the foremost
scholar of Canadian literature in Europe. Her publications and teaching, particularly
in the field of contemporary English-Canadian women’s writing, have inspired several
generations of young scholars worldwide. Her special interest is in the writing of
Margaret Atwood, and most recently she has co-edited with Eva-Marie Kröller the
Cambridge History of Canadian Literature.
94
Dorothy Jones is a Senior Fellow, in the English Studies Program at the University of
Wollongong. The English Studies Program’s present profile is centred on its important
components of post-colonial studies and feminist studies. Dorothy Jones laid the
groundwork for both these initiatives by introducing comparative Australian/Canadian
studies, and by developing foundation subjects in Women’s Studies. Amongst her peers,
she is recognised as one of the major literary critics of Australian and post-colonial
women’s writing.
Andrea Mackinlay is an Honors graduate from the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.
This essay, published in ACS, was placed second in the ACSANZ 2010 Undergraduate
Essay Prize with the judging panel giving it special commendation.
Fiona Tolan is a Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her
main research interests are in contemporary literature, particularly British and Canadian
fiction, and the history of second-wave feminism. She is author of Margaret Atwood:
Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007) and co-editor of Writers Talk: Conversations with
Contemporary British Novelists (Continuum, 2008). She is also Associate Editor of the
Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Katrin Urschel has a PhD in English and teaches at the National University of Ireland,
Galway in Canadian literature. She has published articles relating to Canada, Ireland,
and transatlantic studies. Her PhD focused on ethnic identity in Irish-Canadian
literature, and was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service.
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