The Image of Canada in the Literature of the United
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THE IMAGE OF CANADA IN THE LITERATURE OF THE UNITED STATES by JAMES DOYLE B.A., Laurentian University, 1965 M.A., University of Toronto, 1967 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard 1?HE UNIVERSITY" OF BRITISH COLUMBIA November, 1974 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of English The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada i ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of the extent, nature, and significance of the image of Canada in the literature of the United States, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. After a preliminary chapter on Colonial American writing, the dissertation traces the development of various ideas about Canada as evinced in the work of obscure or "popular" writers as well as authors of acknowledged literary reputation, from 1776 to 1900, and concludes with a summary chapter on twentieth-century achievements and prospects. To the British American authors of various journals and captivity narratives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Canada is mainly the stronghold of French Roman Catholic heresy and Indian barbarism. To post-revolutionary authors, Canada becomes the last enclave of British imperialism in the New World, although a few Loyalist dissenters view Canada more favorably. Some writers of travel narratives and of anti-Catholic novels express their aversion to the French Canadians, and a few authors compare unfavorably the exiled Canadiens on the American prairies to American frontiersmen. James Fenimore Cooper evokes an indirect but symbolically suggestive conception of Canada in the Leatherstocking Tales, but most subsequent historical romancers emphasize the alleged religious decadence and racial inferiority of French Canadians. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Evangeline (1847) , expounds a more sympathetic—but very idealized—view of the French in North America. Pre-eminent among the many nineteenth-century American narratives of travel in Canada is Henry Thoreau's "A Yankee in Canada" (written 1850). Thoreau postulates an irreconcilable conflict between the civilized sensibility and the northern wilderness, and suggests that Canadians have failed to meet the unique challenge of their geographical and historical situation. Francis Parkman's epic history, France and England in North America (1865-92) attributes the fall of New France partly to the savagery of the northern wilderness, but primarily to the decadence of the anti-democratic French regime. William Dean Howells suggests in Their Wedding Jour• ney (1872), and other novels, that the great age which Parkman depicted has given way to a tranquil period when American tourists use Canada to test their optimistic view of New World society. In the fiction and essays of various "local color" writers, Canada serves similarly as a vast tourist resort where Americans can reassess their political and social values, which are usually revealed as superior to those of Canada. One writer who expresses a completely favorable reaction to Canada is Walt Whitman. The exuberant optimism of his Diary in Canada (1880) is echoed by various American authors who discovered the Canadian northwest in the last two decades of the century, but is qualified by Hamlin Garland, whose Trail of the Gold Seekers (1899) is a nostalgic lament for the disappearance of the "wild places" in America. In the early twentieth century, Jack London sees Canada mainly as the setting of a stark and elemental struggle for survival. The successors of London include James Oliver Curwood, who wrote many novels of northern adventure, and Sinclair Lewis, whose Mantrap (1926) is an ironic treatment of the "back-to-nature" theme. Other twentieth-century novelists, including Willa Cather in Shadows on the Rock (1936), have turned back to Canadian history. Eminent twen• tieth-century American writers who have written about Canada include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Edmund Wilson, but none of these writers seem to have been very interested in the country. In general, it appears that twentieth-century writers have continued to express basic attitudes about Canada which were defined and articulated in the nineteenth century by such writers as Thoreau, Parkman, and Howells. iv CONTENTS Introduction 1 I Canada in the Literature of Colonial America .... 9 II Canada in the Literature of the Early Republic . .23 III Cooper and the Historical Romance 4 9 IV The Acadian Tragedy: Longfellow and Others 70 V "A Yankee in Canada" and Other Travelers 8 8 VI The Northern Frontier. 124 VII Parkman: France and England in North America. .144 VIII The Successors of Parkman: Howells and Others . .165 IX Farnham., Burroughs, the Regional Realists 203 X Whitman and the Northwestern Frontier 227 XI Conclusion: the Klondike and After 241 A Selected Bibliography 262 V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Special Collections Division of the University of British Columbia Library, for their help in my consultation of the Colbeck Collection of travel literature. I also received vital assistance from the Library's Microfilm and Inter- Library Loan Divisions. I am very grateful to the staff of the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library for their courteous and efficient assistance during my consulta• tion of the Beadle Collection of Dime Novels. I would like to offer my particular thanks to Professor Bruce L. Grenberg of the University of British Columbia Department of English, who first suggested this topic, and who provided invaluable advice and encouragement throughout the research and writing. 1 INTRODUCTION In the imaginative literature of the United States, Canada has always been a vague, peripheral, and extremely ambiguous concept. Those authors who have looked northward beyond the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence and forty-ninth parallel, whether in actuality or imagination, have reported an almost kaleidoscopic variety of images involving strange• ness and familiarity, hostility and amiability, primitive wildness and highly developed civilization. To the early inhabitants of the colonies which ultimately comprised the United States, Canada was a remote stronghold of French "popery" and Indian barbarity. This is the image projected, for instance, by the Reverend John Williams of Deerfield, Massachusetts, in his personal narrative of captivity in Canada, The Redeemed Captive (1707). To many post-revolutionary authors, such as the Georgia humorist William Tappan Thompson (Major Jones's Sketches of Travel, 1848), Canada was the last retreat of decadent British imperialism in the New World; while in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline (1847) part of the northern regions appeared as a nostalgic and idyllic vision of prelapsarian peace and contentment. Henry Thoreau, after visiting Quebec City and environs in 1850, wondered in "A Yankee in Canada" (1866) whether he had found a grim sub• arctic region of exploration and adventure or some fantasy 2 world of medieval romance; while Francis Parkman, in his epic history France and England in North America (1865-92), constantly struggled to reconcile or explain the ambiguities and contradictions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France. "Neither a republic nor a monarchy, but merely a languid expectation of something undefined," announced Charles Dudley Warner after a visit to Cape Breton Island in 1874; and William Dean Howells, writing of Quebec province in 1871, frankly acknowledged his inability to comprehend the incongruities of the region, with the bemused comment "It is not America; if it is not France, what is it?""'" This variety of response is obviously related not only to the fact that the writers usually saw or contemplated a small part of a vast territory, but also to the extraordinary process of change and development that has characterized the history of the New World as a whole. Both the "United States" and "Canada" are relative terms which have been applied at various times to widely different political and geographical entities. Before 1761, the term "Canada" was applied with geographical imprecision to the widely scattered French settlements and outposts on the St. Lawrence River. After the British conquest, Canada was successively an ill-defined agglomeration of the former French possessions, a British colony consisting of two provinces, a large united province in central British America, and a confederation of provinces which grew steadily to encompass all the territory north of 3 the great lakes and the forty-ninth parallel, from Atlantic to Pacific. Similarly, the region which eventually became the United States has embodied a small group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast, a loose union of states, and finally a strongly centralized, rich and powerful nation extending from Atlantic to Pacific and from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico. And yet in this context of constantly shifting objective conditions and subjective viewpoints, it is possible to dis• cern considerable form and substance. The following chapters are concerned with demonstrating in detail the form, sub• stance, and extent of the image of Canada in the literature of the United States. "Canada" in the subsequent discussion refers to all those regions of North America, regardless of their political status or their local appellation at any given time in history, which constituted the nation after Newfound• land joined Confederation in 1949. The "image of Canada" is also understood to include the inhabitants and exiled former inhabitants as well as the land; so Canadian emigres in the United States will occasionally be the object of consideration.