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Margaret Atwood's the Journals of Susanna Moodie

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Margaret Atwood's the Journals of Susanna Moodie Premonition of a future line we will be writing: Politics, Language and Identity in Experimental English Canadian Poetry A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ryan Jacob Cox IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Paula Rabinowitz, PhD June, 2011 Copyright Ryan Jacob Cox 2011 i For Mom and Dad For encouraging me to read and understanding when I tilt at windmills. For Amanda Six long years and i'm still alive It's all for you. ii Table of Contents List of Figures iv Introduction 1 1: A Colonial Imagination 19 2: A (Post)Modern Archaeology 40 3: HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art 76 4: this pome sat down to write you 115 5: How Doozers and Fraggles Made Me Grow up Socialist 160 Bibliography 200 iii List of Figures 3.1 "Belly-Load-Ball" 113 3.2 "only th flesh in th heart" 114 4.1 Man in Lakeland 120 4.2 The Discovery of St. Reat 131 4.3 The Possibles of the Poem 157 5.1 Screw You Taxpayer, The Kids in the Hall 170 5.2 Traveling Matt at the computer 199 1 Introduction This problem of identity in Canadian letters has been lurking in the background since the beginning of Canadian literature. In the nineteenth century calls for a Canadian literature, where Thomas D’Arcy McGee's proclaimation that “Every country, every nationality, every people, must create and foster a National Literature, if it is their wish to preserve a distinct individuality from other nations… [else] the distinctive character and features of a people must disappear” (43) is echoed by Edward Hartley Dewart’s assertion “A national literature is an essential element in the formation of a national character” (ix) there is distinct understanding of the impact of a national literature on the formation of a national character, but an absence of definition of what this character is. Canadians needed to be afforded the opportunity to write their own books and needed to be protected from British and American literature—something D’Arcy McGee as a former member of Young Ireland would have been acutely attuned to—in order that the domestic literature would have a chance to take root and flower, but what that domestic literature would look like and what it would reflect in the Canadian character is conspicuously absent. The result, as illustrated by Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets, is a distinctly colonial poetry that has more to do with the mind and character of the motherland than it does with something that can be realistically labeled as Canadian. The problem that D’Arcy McGee and Dewart and countless others since failed to recognize is the utter impossibility of a neat and coherent national character. 2 Canadians are, as a rule, polite, clean, civilized, peaceful people particularly when they compare themselves with Americans. Canadian beer is stronger/better than American beer; our healthcare system is better—or at least more civilized—than the American one;1 Canadian’s are, as the Molson Canadian beer commercial once asserted, peacekeepers not police which is short hand for the belief that, unlike their American neighbours, Canadians aren’t warlike and belligerent. Of course, any time these old saws see the light of day they are quickly condemned for the fact that they are in effect a negative definition of national character and identity, focusing on what Canadians are not rather than what they are, and that they rely too heavily on definitions of Americaness to truly reveal something about Canadians. What this well-tilled soil does reveal is the discursive problem of defining Canadian identity as its own distinct object. Canadians have a great deal of difficulty imagining their own community. This makes sense if you look at some of the historical baggage that Canada has always already present in thinking of itself as a nation. The first and probably most important factor is the language divide. The competing interests and cultures of English and French Canada—rather unceremoniously welded together after Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in the Seven Years War and made permanent in the 1763 Treaty of Paris—can be seen operating in almost every aspect of Canadian political life. While there are certainly other regional and identity structures that effect the charting of the nation’s political and cultural life—the break between the west and “Central” Canada (Ontario 1 This is a particular point of pride among Canadians and recently manifested in the declaration that Tommy Douglas, a CCF premier of Saskatchewan and later leader of the federal NDP, widely credited as being the father of Medicare was named “The Greatest Canadian” by popular vote on a CBC miniseries. 3 and Quebec) particularly after Trudeau’s New Energy Program was enacted in 1980 has, arguably, had as large an impact on federal politics as the Anglo/French divide in recent years—the breakage between the two official language groups is so central to the way Canada defines itself that it trumps all these other conflicts. In order for Canada and, by extension the Canadian, to be a workable concept, a nation in the way Benedict Anderson defines it—an imagined community—rather than simply a state, there needs to be across the languages a certain level of agreement about what Canada is, a single dominant narrative of Canada. This presents a problem. As Hugh MacLennan observes in his foreword to his novel, The Two Solitudes, Canadians across the language divide lack even a single word with which to designate a Canadian: No single word exists within Canada itself to designate with satisfaction to both races a native of this country. When those of the French language use the word Canadien, they nearly always refer to themselves. They know their English-speaking compatriots as les Anglais. English- speaking citizens act on the same principle. They call themselves Canadians; those of the French language French-Canadians. (n.p.) MacLennan’s note, intended to explain to the difficulties or peculiarities of identity and language in a “novel of Canada” to an audience unfamiliar with these eccentricities, expresses a fundamental challenge to a statewide articulation of Nationhood. There are competing claims for the term Canadian/Canadien that serve to exclude the other language group from participation in the idea of Canada. In French, the Anglophones cannot be Canadien. In fact, in the dichotomy that MacLennan reveals, Anglophone Canadians and the English are synonymous. There is no discursive difference between 4 the identification of an English-speaking descendent of Eastern European Immigrants, an individual of Irish or Scottish descent, or a person living their entire life in London, England and never even knowing of the existence of London, Ontario. Language is the defining factor and it serves to weld together all English-speaking constituencies into one monolithic force that can be simultaneous with the conqueror and the oppressor. It certainly lends the French Canadien an air of legitimacy and domesticity in terms of political action and culture in comparison with the foreign Anglais. The English language designation of Francophones as French-Canadian serves a similar function. An Anglophone can claim the title of Canadian without reservation or modification; in this sense they are, by definition, more authentically Canadian than someone who must identify a modification to their national designation. French-Canadian then must be read as fundamentally different from Canadian. It may participate in some of the characteristics of Canadian, but the language proscription serves to identify some kind of deficiency or otherness. They are separated from true Canadianess by dint of their subclassification. French-Canadians and les Anglais are not compatible with the idea of Canadian nationality contained in the word Canadian/Canadien. This incompatibility is further stressed by the introduction of the term Quebecois,2 which underlines the discontinuity between English Canada and French Canada by producing a competing nationality. The conflicting language surrounding identity is representative of a larger, 2 Though Le Grand Robert de la langue française allows for this term to rather expansively refer to all citizens of the province, this would seem to be by contradicted popular usage and political deployment of the word. Jacques Parizeau, leader of the Parti Quebecois during the 1995 Referendum, blaming “money and the ethnic vote”—which is generally taken to mean Anglophones/The English, the Jewish population of Montreal and immigrants—for the separatists defeat would suggest that Quebecois and Francophone Quebeckers are coterminous. (“Quebec Referendum Reaction”) 5 historical, cultural rift between Canada’s two dominant (and official) language groups. It suggests that there are two competing claims to the idea of Canada and these claims are not easily ameliorated. Shared political institutions, history and cultural touchstones are insufficient to bridge the divide that language and colonial history creates, if only because this divides enables diametrically opposed readings of the shared material. Case in point, the interpretation of Louis Riel, Métis leader of the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70 and the Northwest Rebellion 1885, as either a hero or a villain has been historically contingent on the religion and language of the viewer. Riel, who was Francophone and Catholic, was viewed as a hero in Francophone and Catholic Quebec and, as he had defied the Crown and his provisional government executed Thomas Scott, a member of the Orange Order, in Anglophone and Protestant Ontario was a rebel and a villain. The politics of the Rebellions are more complicated than the issues of language and faith, part of what touched off the Red River Rebellion was the Hudson’s Bay Company selling of Rupert’s Land to Canada without the consent of its inhabitants which was a move to protect Canadian interests in the face of American expansionism, but the interpretation of Riel as “Father of Confederation” or traitor really isn’t.
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