WAYNE JOHNSTON'S HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: IMPERIAL TENSIONS AND NEWFOUNDLAND'S INHERITANCE

by

Heidi Butler

B.A. Honours, Trent University, 2005

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: David Creelman, Ph.D., English

Examining Board: John Ball, Ph.D., English, Chair Tony Tremblay, Ph.D., English Greg Kealey, Ph.D., History

This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

April, 2007

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada "An island to someone who has never left it is the world. An island to someone who has never seen it does not exist."

Wayne Johnston, Baltimore's Mansion ABSTRACT

Author Wayne Johnston re-writes history to explore Newfoundland's postcolonial relationships. His memoir, Baltimore's Mansion, and historical fictions, The Colony of

Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York, locate Newfoundland in a liminal space where it encounters (neo-)colonial pressures from Britain, the United States, and

Canada. Historically, Newfoundlanders have been written out of official histories or marginalized as Folk characters. As a result, Johnston's characters begin constructing distinct Newfoundland identities by subversively mimicking colonial historiography.

This narrative technique is effective, but the trauma resulting from colonial rule and from

Newfoundland's entrance into Confederation continues to haunt Johnston's male

Newfoundlanders. The problematic father-son relationships among Johnston's characters indicate that postcolonial concerns invade the family and affect patrilineal legacies. In order to construct Newfoundland identities, these characters must recognize the relationships between national and familial histories and attempt to influence positive change to their colonial inheritances.

n DEDICATION

For my family, whose support and pride make me who I am.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Dr. David Creelman, who supervised and supported this paper's development. I also thank Dr. John Ball for revising my work and encouraging my progress throughout the degree program. I am grateful to Dr. Tony Tremblay and Dr.

Greg Kealey for joining my supervisory committee and providing their insights on my work. As well, graduate assistant Theresa Keenan and administrative assistant Vera

Zarowsky have answered dozens of questions and helped to resolve the many problems

I've brought them over the past two years. Finally, I thank the friends and family who have cheered me on (and up) as this thesis progressed.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT .' ii

DEDICATION iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS v

1.0 INTRODUCTION 1

2.0 THE COUNTRY OF NO COUNTRY: CONTEXTUALIZING NEWFOUNDLAND (POST)COLONIALISM 7

3.0 BALTIMORE'S MANSION: REMEMBERING NEWFOUNDLAND IN THE FAMILY 24

4.0 THE COLONY OF UNREQUITED DREAMS: RE-WRITING HISTORY 46

5.0 THE NA VIGA TOR OF NEW YORK:

FORGETTING NEWFOUNDLAND 67

6.0 CONCLUSION.... 86

7.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY 90

CURRICULUM VITAE

v 1

Introduction

From its conception as a British settler colony to the present day,

Newfoundland's1 national independence has remained unrealized. As an extension of the expanding British Empire, the colony was never intended to flourish under independent rule. Its history is riddled with injustices performed and perpetuated by British authorities, who exploited settlers and reinforced a rigid class system. Colonial exploitation partially motivated Newfoundland settlers' desire for independence, and this longing increased as other nations began influencing Newfoundland society. With the

United States' dominance of the twentieth century and Canada's increasing interest in the region throughout the Second World War, Newfoundland became inundated by international pressures. Its identity had been historically dominated by British colonial practices, and was now challenged by neo-colonial policies and economies.

When Newfoundland became Canada's tenth province, it assumed (and was assigned) a regional identity within a country struggling to define its own national character. Newfoundland stereotypes seem ubiquitous: images of jolly fishermen with exaggerated brogues are used in tourist literature, restaurant menus, and vehicle advertisements. These essentialist images and attitudes directly result from

Newfoundland's colonial history. Historically, Newfoundlanders have confronted poverty; have relied on natural resources, particularly the fishery; and have challenged a forbidding landscape. Colonial documents and histories generally define

Newfoundlandness in relation to these activities, which made settlers appear less intelligent, less culturally refined, and less "civilized" than British authorities. A similar

1 Throughout this study, "Newfoundland" refers only to the island region of Newfoundland and Labrador. 2 effect results from contemporary essentialist attitudes, which marginalize

Newfoundlanders and complicate regional identity-construction.

The "imagined communities" with which many Newfoundlanders affiliate themselves support the concept that, like nationalism, regionalism "has come to be accepted as a discourse or form of identification or (following Benedict Anderson's view of nationalism) a kind of kinship - if not viewed as being as significant a component of identity as nationality, then at least not far off (Wyile et al. ix). By inserting the voices of diverse Newfoundland characters into Canadian literature, Newfoundland authors play an important role in shaping regional identities and contextualizing the province within

Canadian and global societies. English Canadian literary studies have recently paid close attention to Newfoundland fiction that responds to (neo-)colonial concepts of the province. From Michael Crummey's River Thieves to Lisa Moore's Alligator, a number of recent Newfoundland narratives purposely engage with and/or disengage from the island's colonial past.

Among contemporary Newfoundland authors, Wayne Johnston's work most consistently challenges colonialism's effects on Newfoundland. Johnston's early comic novels, including The Story of Bobby O 'Malley and The Divine Ryans, have attracted critical and popular attention within Canada. However, the 1998 publication of The

Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a fictionalized autobiography of Joseph R. Smallwood, drew international attention to Johnston's work. This novel, along with the simultaneously written memoir Baltimore's Mansion, suggests that the trauma resulting from colonial exploitation shapes Newfoundlanders' cultural inheritances. 3

Johnston's work examines Newfoundland's development from a colonial history through a neo-colonial present to explore the difficult legacies post-Confederation

Newfoundlanders have inherited. Many of Johnston's characters resist the threats that international powers present to Newfoundland's distinctiveness. While Britain relinquished political control over the island, its ruling class's patronizing attitude toward settlers remains embedded in Newfoundland culture. Combined with Canadian governance and economic dependence on the United States, this pressure challenges

Johnston's characters to resist assimilation into the overwhelming societies with which they must engage. This state of in-betweenness confuses and frightens many of

Johnston's characters, yet his historical narratives suggest that Newfoundland maintains a privileged liminal state. It is enisled among powerful nations, yet this space allows

Newfoundlanders to observe how other cultures operate in relation to their own, and to reflect on powerful societies' influences on their province.

Paramount among Johnston's themes is the generational division among

Newfoundland male relatives. The father-son relationships portrayed in Johnston's work mirror the conflicts that colonialism creates and aggravates. These microcosmic relationships suggest that global politics and economics, which father characters often perceive as mere abstractions, directly affect familial connections. Johnston's son characters desire to belong to their fathers' worlds and to the emerging new world; they therefore occupy the same liminal spaces and confront similar ambivalences as their colony/country/province.

Like all Newfoundlanders of his generation, Johnston's grandfather was a British colonial subject. Not only does this motivate Johnston's exploration of his own patrilineal legacy in Baltimore's Mansion, but helps to explain his historical fictions' shared concern for the youngest generation of Newfoundlanders. Johnston's work insists that an understanding of Newfoundland history cannot emerge only from reading historical accounts, but must result from an examination of the changes confronting generations of Newfoundland families. His books are primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with the legacies Newfoundland fathers provide their sons at moments of historical crisis. Father characters are caught between the traditions they love and invasive North American interests, and have difficulty passing their knowledge and passions to children maturing in an unfamiliar world. Therefore, Johnston's work is characterized by complex, tumultuous father-son relationships, as children struggle to understand the unfamiliar older generation and its fading traditions while their fathers and grandfathers deal with their frustrations at being forced to engage with a society that is becoming increasingly unfamiliar.

Like Johnston's work, this study concerns itself only with patrilineal legacies.

However, it should be noted that Johnston's treatment of women characters is generally problematic. With the exception of Sheilagh Fielding (whom Johnston compares to himself), women characters in his historical narratives remain on the books' margins.

Unlike The Divine Ryans, which explores a boy's developing sexuality through his relationships with female relatives, the books in this study are concerned only with paternal characters' influence on the youngest male generation of Newfoundlanders.

Women characters are generally one-dimensional, and often represent mere stereotypes.

For example, women characters in The Navigator of New York serve only to advance the male-centric plot, and Kristine is treated as little more than a stock love-interest and 5 trophy wife for the protagonist. Even the scarcely-mentioned Johnston family women in

Baltimore's Mansion are presented as grieving widows or forgettable wives. This

(mis)treatment of women characters deserves further study, but is not encompassed within the scope of this thesis. These characters' depthlessness is troubling, yet

Johnston's exploration of male relationships remains an intriguing technique for exploring sons' development in relation to their fathers' identities.

To explore Johnston's representations of postcolonial Newfoundland identities, this study will examine his memoir and two of his historical fictions. In the first chapter,

Johnston's work will be contextualized within postcolonial discourses and historical/contemporary perceptions of Newfoundland. Beginning with Baltimore's

Mansion, the three texts will each be analyzed in separate chapters. Exploring Johnston's fictionalized family history provides insights into the father-son relationships he establishes in his historical fictions, which outline the colonial traumas confronting his

Newfoundland characters. In his memoir, Johnston fictionalizes his own history to emphasize his resistance to traditional forms of imperialism and his father's struggle to maintain familiarity while resisting neo-colonialism. The third chapter will focus on The

Colony of Unrequited Dreams, particularly the way in which Johnston's fictionalized history highlights imperialism's effects on Joe Smallwood. The facts of Smallwood's life are subsumed within larger social, cultural, and economic realities, all of which he must navigate while attempting to establish a positive future for the new province. This movement away from tradition and toward an uncertain future will be further explored in the final chapter. In its analysis of The Navigator of New York, the fourth chapter will examine the protagonist's willingness to fictionalize history in order to expand American 6 neo-imperialism. The narratives of all three books highlight the historical development of Newfoundlanders' attitudes toward themselves, their colony/province, and the world, and suggest that fostering strong Newfoundland identities is difficult, but achievable. 7

Chapter One

The Country of No Country: Contextualizing Newfoundland (Posf)Colonialism

Johnston's memoir and historical fictions introduce characters who attempt to define themselves as Newfoundlanders. Their struggles to develop distinct

Newfoundland identities that resist essentialist definitions reveal the difficulty of settler identity-construction. Newfoundland's colonial history and current neo-colonial state position it in a cultural space on the margins of three international powers: Britain, a dominant culture from the colony's settlement until the Second World War; the United

States, whose culture and ideology infiltrates Newfoundland's; and Canada, the unfamiliar nation that a slim majority of Newfoundlanders voted to join. Rather than independently developing a national culture, Newfoundland encounters direct pressure from these nations. Johnston terms the result a "country of no country" (BM22S) - a colony/province whose people imagine themselves as members of the nation of

Newfoundland (Anderson).

As the last province to formally sever political links with Britain, Newfoundland's postcolonial state is distinct from those of the other Atlantic provinces. Until 1949,

Newfoundland was a British colony with a dream of nationhood that caused many

Newfoundlanders to view themselves as inhabiting a besieged nation (Johnston,

Reading). Newfoundland is often marginalized within Canada; if islanders neglect the maintenance of a distinct Newfoundland culture, the province could be more easily defined by the Canadian tourism industry and the American mass media.

Newfoundland's history of British subjugation also permeates its culture and affects its citizens to a greater degree than residual British ties affect Canadians in general. Among 8 his polemical claims concerning Canadian nationalism, George Elliott Clarke argues,

"Clearly, we are postcolonial now only in relation to Britain, whose cultural influence in

Canada is pretty much nil (save for Coronation Street, Benny Hill Show re-runs, and the

British monarch we dub, constitutionally, the 'Queen of Canada')" (29). Clarke's argument can be challenged from a national perspective - one could argue that Brownie leaders would not teach girls how to properly address the Queen in a post-Britain nation - but his comments are certainly untrue of Newfoundland. Newfoundland is no longer politically governed by Britain, but mere political separation does not create a "post-

British" state. Instead, Newfoundland has become a postcolonial state, in which "[t]he

'post' does not refer to the end of colonialism, but rather to what was formed under colonialism and remains after official colonialism is abandoned and colonialism begins to be recognized as a major component of modernity" (Brydon, "Canada" 56). As

Baltimore's Mansion demonstrates, for many Newfoundlanders the past is not the stagnant text of history books, but a force that infiltrates their realities.

Settler-invader criticism provides useful lenses for examining the lasting effects of Newfoundland colonialism and the presence of neo-colonial pressures. However, critics sometimes accuse this postcolonial sub-field of minimizing Third World2 postcolonialisms and of inappropriately focussing on nations that create and sustain Third

World social and economic crises. These arguments ignore the effects postcolonialism has on Second World countries and regions. Assuming that all postcolonialisms are alike implies that postcolonialism does not relate to a range of experiences. Canadian critic

2 This chapter follows Lawson's use of the term "Third World" to describe countries whose people were forcibly subjugated by colonists and "Second World" to describe settler-invader countries, whose colonists both oppressed indigenous peoples and were themselves exploited by colonial officials. Still, these descriptive terms (and others such as "developed/developing nations") are unsatisfactory, as they imply the existence of global and postcolonial hierarchies. 9

Cynthia Sugars challenges settler-invader postcolonialism's detractors by arguing, "The excision of settler postcolonialism implies a prescriptive essentializing of the postcolonial sphere, which denies not only the different manifestations that colonialism can take, but also, as [Alan] Lawson argues, that the colonial moment is very much a relation, and an ongoing one at that" ("National" 23). Newfoundland's colonial legacies certainly vary from those of Trinidad and India, but discrepancies between postcolonial experiences do not negate the region's history of colonial subjection or its methods for confronting neo- colonial attitudes and practices.

The pitfalls critics encounter when assuming all postcolonialisms are alike are evident: "Rather than 'downplaying the local,' as [Aran] Mukherjee writes, these

[Western] critics exaggerate the local/native in Canadian literature in order to make the argument that these texts are postcolonial, and, by extension, universal" (Sugars,

"Canadian" 136). These readings imagine a homogeneous postcolonial community among diverse nations. Critics must recognize the differences among postcolonialisms and the degrees to which they affect different nations. Otherwise, Canadians,

Newfoundlanders included, may create imagined ties with Third World nations without working toward solutions to post- and neo-colonial problems. Effective critiques of settler nations' postcolonialisms highlight the different ways colonialism has affected and continues to affect diverse peoples, and acknowledge the differences and similarities between Second and Third World nations' experiences. Homi Bhabha suggests, "the very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities - as the grounds of 10 cultural comparativism - are in a profound process of redefinition" (LC 7), and settler- invader postcolonialism creates new spaces for this redefinition to continue.

Debates surrounding Canadian colonial practices both challenge and support

Canada's status as a postcolonial nation. Some critics argue that Canada is not

"postcolonial" because the term connotes continued economic influence or formidable political pressures from the countries that originally settled Canada. As an independent nation with a strong economy, Canada is unlike many of Britain's former colonies.

However, Canada's settler-invader history and its contemporary global relationships demonstrate that it experiences the after-effects of colonial rule and negotiates neo- colonial influences. Herb Wyile defends settler-invader postcolonialism by arguing:

the idea that settler-invader cultures fail to qualify as postcolonial on the basis

of their European heritage elides the fact that all postcolonial societies have been

marked by colonialism and that the idea of a return to an uncolonial, prelapsarian

state is a dangerously essentialist ideal that has led to troubling forms of

nationalism and tribalism. (Speculative 35)

Like all nations, an ideal Canada exists only in tourist literature. Not only do its regions,

Newfoundland in particular, confront international influences, but the nation as a whole faces constant cultural, economic, and political bombardment, primarily from the United

States.

Throughout the later half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, many critics have considered Canada's (neo-)colonial relationships. Collections such as

Sugars's Unhomely States and Laura Moss's Is Canada Postcolonial? provide historical and contemporary analyses of colonial influences on Canadian nationalism, the various 11 ethnic and cultural groups affected by colonialism, and the term "post(-)colonialism" itself. Canadian postcolonial debates have been historically influenced by critics such as

George Grant, Northrop Frye, and Margaret Atwood, and the many passionate academic responses to postcolonial issues reflect the continuing influence of these critics' often polemical arguments. For instance, Grant's Lament for a Nation, a book written in 1965 that claims Canadian nationalism is dead or dying, provoked heated critical discussions.

These discussions are echoed in contemporary examinations of Canadian postcolonialism, which usually insist on multiple definitions of the nation and multiple identifications within the nation.

Some Canadians respond to Grant's challenge by defining Canada in opposition to other nations, particularly Britain and the United States. Identity-construction techniques such as anti-Americanism may be an inevitable part of national identification, but these techniques ignore Canada's distinct cultures by suggesting the nation shares a uniform culture that opposes the United States' and is often found lacking by comparison.

Neither Canada nor its regions can base positive identities on lack. By inciting the desire for a unique national culture, this type of national identification invites perceptions of essential "Canadian-isms" (such as politeness and a wild passion for curling), and essential "regionalisms" (such as Newfoundlanders' hardiness and drunken jolliness).

However, it also reveals Canadians' resistance to fostering a uniform national identity.

Of course, not all Canadians accept essential definitions of nation and region.

Paradoxically, Canada's relationships to international superpowers sometime encourage multiple definitions of "Canada." As Robert Kroetch suggests, 12

We define ourselves, often, as the cliche has it, by explaining to Americans that

we aren't British, to the British that we aren't Americans. It may be that we

survive by being skilful shape-changers. But more to the point, we survive by

working with a low level of self-definition and national definition. We insist on

staying multiple, and by that strategy we accommodate to our climate, our

economic situation, and our neighbours. (66)

A homogeneous Canadian identity contradicts the "official" Canadian identity that focuses on plurality. It also suggests that all Canadians share similar histories and are similarly affected by contemporary events and issues. Multiple identifications prevent such an assumption from dominating Canadian national consciousness. Diverse postcolonial experiences are then better recognized, rather than being subsumed within a totalizing national identity.

The complex relationships between the nation of Canada and its regions multiply and intensify postcolonial discussions. Many of these debates are region-specific, and many focus on one or more regions' marginalization within Canada. Ironically, in a country whose official national image relies on cultural, ethnic, and geographic diversity, many regions do not attract positive national attention. This is especially true of the

Atlantic provinces, which are often assigned the role of regional Other. From the

Canadian Centre, Atlantic Canada is sometimes viewed as lacking language skills, healthy economies, or political authority. These views ignore diversity's supposed importance to Canadian nationalism. They also help to Other regional peoples and places, containing unfamiliar customs and languages by ascribing them essential roles.

3 Conversely, from the Atlantic periphery, Ontario is often perceived as the national, imperialistic Canadian Centre, a region that is culturally similar to the United States, and which represents British tradition and "Canadian" interests. 13

Whenever the region is perceived as anti-modern or defeatist, its role as the site of unique cultures and histories is ignored. Othering therefore diminishes the region's linguistic, cultural, and historic diversity by homogenizing Atlantic Canadians' diverse experiences.

As British settlers, Newfoundlanders were not presented with a stable here/there or us/them binary through which to negotiate their policies, cultural practices, or everyday lives. Johnston's historical narratives indicate that many Newfoundland settlers desired to originate a culture that was independent of British colonial authority.

Therefore, even while many wealthy and powerful colonists still aspired to ideal

"Britishness," Newfoundland settlers also resisted British influences; they began developing their own traditions, speaking their own dialects, and narrating their own stories. Rejection of British culture created the beginnings of Newfoundland identity, one that was forced to continually negotiate the Old and New Worlds.

Newfoundland postcolonialism asserts the impossibility of sustaining a homogeneous Canadian culture, and suggests that Newfoundland's "historical traditions" undergo constant redefinition. When studying colonial histories and postcolonial experiences, critics might focus on what Bhabha terms "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself (LC 2). The in-between or liminal spaces that Bhabha outlines denote conceptual and lived realities in which two or more cultures overlap, and which the people inhabiting these spaces must struggle with and against.

Frye argues that maintaining focus on liminal space is difficult for Canadians, whose 14 history pulls them toward Europe while the United States monopolizes the present. He describes Canada as "in via mediocris, between the other two [Britain and the United

States]. This has the disadvantage that the British and American cultures have to be defined as extremes" ("Conclusion" 11). If Britain and the United States are perceived as extremes between which Canada occupies a tenuous liminal space, then Newfoundland exists in a more highly pressurized space between Canadian and international influences.

The desire to retain some aspects of British society while creating their own

"indigenous" culture established the first site of liminal interaction for Newfoundland settlers, who simultaneously inhabited both worlds and wholly belonged to neither. Alan

Lawson compares liminal spaces to David Malouf s description of a pier in Harland's

Half Acre, suggesting that the site is not simply "on the edge of something (in the sense of being marginal or split) but.. .the pier is on the edge of the land and on the edge of the water: it provides the vantage point from which to look both out and in" ("Cultural" 69).

Within liminal spaces, Newfoundlanders observe and reflect on multiple nations and cultures. They are not forced to sneak glimpses at the centre from the periphery.

Johnston's books echo Stephen Slemon's concerns with the challenges confronting Second World writers:

what perhaps marks a genuine difference in the contestatory activity of Second-

and Third-World post-colonial writing... is that the illusion of a stable self/other,

here/there binary division has never been available to Second-World writers, and

that as a result the sites of figural contestation between oppressor and oppressed,

colonizer and colonized, have been taken inward and internalized in Second-

World post-colonial textual practice. ("Unsettling" 148) 15

As members of a settler-invader colony, Newfoundland settlers were simultaneously "us" and "them". In annihilating the Beothuk, Newfoundland's First People, settlers emptied the land of its indigenous significance and established themselves as the "new" originaries. They not only wielded power over an indigenous people, but desired to be indigenous themselves (Johnston and Lawson 369). As Johnston demonstrates by lampooning colonial documents in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, this dual role as oppressor and oppressed permeates Newfoundland literatures. Fictional and historical writings depict Newfoundlanders struggling to define themselves as the original settlers of an island nation and as the inheritors of a British colonial legacy.

Like many colonial settlers (and all colonized peoples), Newfoundlanders were historically taught that the stable self equalled the British self. These teachings helped to establish Newfoundland's first site of liminal interaction. As settler-invaders and the

"originaries" in a new colony, Newfoundlanders could never be full members of British society. Therefore, regional dialects and traditions Othered Newfoundlanders within their own country, the colony whose officials expected its citizens to emulate Britishness.

Johnston's historical fictions highlight the divisions between settlers who desired a new life in the new land and those who stubbornly, often stupidly, upheld impractical British customs. This mimicry, an attempt to become the "Better Britons" that colonial officials supposedly encouraged them to become, discouraged settlers from developing new cultures and new relationships to the land and its inhabitants. Bhabha describes colonial mimicry as "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (LC 122). Like colonized peoples, Newfoundland's settlers were controlled and maintained by authorities mimicking the source culture. Not 16 until settlers realize mimicry's subversive potential could they begin creating a national identity within their colony.

Newfoundlanders who realized that mimicry can undermine colonial authority, like Johnston's character Sheilagh Fielding, still had to contend with perceptions of their colony as Britain's child. In his 1979 study of Newfoundland literature, The Rock

Observed, Patrick O'Flaherty addresses contemporary perceptions of Newfoundland-as- child: "Reading textbooks on Newfoundland's history and politics, and especially those in which the nineteenth century is quickly passed over as a prelude to developments in the twentieth, one gets an impression of the colony's history in the 1800s as a series of advances towards political and social maturity" (68). O'Flaherty does not outline whether Newfoundland "matured" toward a closer state of Britishness or toward a separate identity, but his analysis evokes images of Newfoundland developing under the instruction of its parent country.

In settling Newfoundland, Britain intended to expand its empire rather than create an independent nation. Therefore, it expected its settlers to emulate its cultural example as a child emulates a parent. The colony was perceived as a son4 who must aspire to his father's values and traditions, yet who could never become the father himself. Several of

Johnston's works, most notably The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, satirize official imperial histories highlight the absurdity of colonial officials' attempts to preserve and recreate British society in a land that does not facilitate their accustomed lifestyles. From the house Lord Baltimore required settlers to build for him (one winter in which persuaded him to permanently abandon Newfoundland), to Sir Cavendish Boyle's "Ode

4 While colonial connections can be compared to a mother-daughter relationship, with Britain representing the "mother country," the dominance of male colonial authorities and Johnston's emphasis on male characters prompts a masculine analogy in this study. 17 to Newfoundland," which romantically praises the "pine-clad hills" of this "frozen land," colonial figures attempted to recreate their home country within the colony.

Johnston identifies a parent/child colonial relationship between Britain and

Newfoundland that evokes Edward Said's theory of "Orientalism," a concept through which the West (the Occident) perceived and controlled "Oriental" colonies in the Middle

East, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contexts widely differ, but the colonial practices that Johnston presents match those outlined by Said, who suggests,

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing

with the Orient - dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views

of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism

[behaves] as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority

over the Orient. (Orientalism 3)

The authority of a parent nation over a childlike colony created various power relationships between the two states, all of which were commanded by Britain. This is typical of British colonial expansion, for "Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand" (7).

Bhabha also reads Orientalism as suggesting that "colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible" (LC 101). Newfoundland's origin as a colony ensured that submission to colonial authority dominated its culture (although its people were not always willingly 18 dominated). Unable to escape its parent country's authority, Newfoundland was utterly observable and utterly knowable, a ready subject to colonial authorization.

As Canada and the United States' influence over Newfoundland grew throughout the twentieth century, paternal authority increasingly came from nations other than

Britain. As Johnston's work asserts, both Canada and the United States have historically essentialized Newfoundland. "Newfies" were perceived as backwards, as uneducated, and as inherently inferior to their North American counterparts. Newfoundlanders were inscribed essential Folk characteristics, which incited the Canadian love affair with

Newfoundland music and folk tales. Cultural appreciation resembles obsessive fantasy when Canadians and Americans construct Newfoundland as the home of a quaint people untroubled by modernism. Ian McKay's The Quest of the Folk focuses on Nova Scotian historiography, but his arguments concerning Folk-construction are relevant to essential representations of Newfoundland. Referring to the perceptions of those believing themselves victims to modernity, McKay asserts that the Folk "were simple, isolated, different: they were Other, and not 'us.' And yet, paradoxically, the Folk were more 'us' than we ourselves.. .the last true products of our soil and the last authentic producers of our culture" (Quest 29). Newfoundlanders were perceived as harbouring ways of life that modernity denied Canadians and Americans.

Johnston suggests that Newfoundlanders were sometimes complicit in creating nostalgia and perpetuating essential stereotypes. A shared community facilitates and encourages Newfoundland identity-formation, but Johnston implies that its participants must carefully avoid supporting external types and false assumptions. In Culture and

Imperialism, Said writes: 19

As the twentieth century moves to a close, there has been a gathering awareness

nearly everywhere of the lines between cultures, the divisions and differences that

not only allow us to discriminate one culture from another, but also enable us to

see the extent to which cultures are humanly made structures of both authority

and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less

benevolent in what they exclude and demote. (15)

Newfoundland's liminal perspective provides a more helpful way of observing these divisions and boundaries than merely focusing on the centre/margin binary. Such a split reduces Newfoundland to marginalized Other and presupposes Central Canada's economic and social superiority. Conversely, liminal spaces subvert national hierarchies by eluding binary classifications.

Like all Canadian regions, Newfoundland engages with an international community. Therefore, it is critically important for Newfoundlanders to explore notions of national and provincial identity that will prevent the region from being utterly dominated by North American culture. Identity-creation and -preservation cannot take place within communities that assume Northrop Frye's "garrison mentality," a concept that describes

Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological

'frontier,' separated from one another and from American and British cultural

sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of

distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the

law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking,

menacing, and formidable physical setting. ("Conclusion" 14) 20

Many rural Newfoundland communities are geographically isolated, but North American mass media prevents communities from becoming totally insular. The concept of the isolated outport is a construction rather than a contemporary reality. In Canadian society, communities cannot isolate themselves, but must unite with and/or compete against other groups (27). Communities' most difficult challenges involve maintaining distinct identities while being bombarded with external pressures. When the region is externally defined, communities' uniqueness is threatened by perceptions of Atlantic lack. As

McKay argues, "The Atlantic Region comes to be defined largely in terms of its structuring absences: its lack of a metropolis, its lack of domestic pools of capital, its lack of a well-developed industrial base, its lack of a 'developed class structure'" ("Note" 96).

Atlantic lack is defined by what the Centre holds and the region does not, and usually alludes to wealth and political authority. If "global cosmopolitanism" "readily celebrates a world of plural cultures and peoples located at the periphery, so long as they produce healthy profit margins within metropolitan societies" (Bhabha, LC xiv), then North

American or Canadian cosmopolitanism celebrates Newfoundland for its essential qualities as long as it does not become (or remain) an economic liability.

Folk-creation initiates a neo-colonial discourse that invites critics to question "the processes of subjedification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse" (95). The nostalgia involved in constructing the Folk may also encourage

Newfoundlanders to revisit the past in order to escape neo-colonial pressures, thereby increasing their own subjectification. As David Creelman writes in a Maritime context,

Though nostalgia has sometimes been carefully manufactured, manipulated,

shaped, and marketed as a part of the tourist industry's desire to promote the 21

region as a retreat from the modern world.. .there is a more persistent and less

commodified 'memory of a shared community' that has also played a role in

Maritime culture throughout the twentieth century. Writers in recent years have

continued to explore this realm of memory - or reconstructed memory - and have

produced texts that look to the past, in order to recall some aspect or experience

that will enrich a diminished present. (Creelman 202)

Johnston's books re-examine Newfoundland's history to question the development of

Newfoundlanders' identities. Several of Johnston's characters, including Baltimore's

Mansion's Arthur Johnston, embrace Folk perceptions of Newfoundland in their attempts to create a nostalgic space that protects against international forces. They ascribe to the concept that "[a]gainst the industrial machine a more acceptable life is found to exist on the margins of society. In true Romantic style, culture represents freedom, humanism, spontaneity and naturalness. In the small region the soul can be recaptured from the machine" (Overton 16). Nostalgia provides temporary escape from modernity, but revelling in the past prevents characters from pursuing positive futures. Nostalgia also promotes concepts of a static, uniform Newfoundland culture. As James Overton notes,

"the assumption of most observers is that there is a single, distinct Newfoundland ethos, character or culture" (11). Tourist culture overlooks religious, historical, dialectal, and cultural differences within the island in order to paint Newfoundland with wide nostalgic brush strokes.

Johnston's memoir and historical fictions resist such homogenization. They assume Linda Hutcheon's directives for historiographic metafiction, which she defines as

"ideological fiction, taking ideology as meaning 'those modes of feeling, valuing, 22 perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power'" (253). Hutcheon also notes, "To write either history or historical fiction is equally to raise the question of power and control" (235). Johnston writes characters who attempt to reclaim Newfoundland from'colonizers and neo- colonizers by challenging accepted versions of regional history. In his study of Canadian historical fiction, Wyile writes,

Instead of contributing to the ideological consolidation of the nation as an

"imagined community"...much contemporary Canadian historical fiction can be

seen in terms of Homi Bhabha's essay "DissemiNation." In reponse [sic] to

Anderson's formulation, Bhabha argues that "[c]ounter-narratives of the nation

that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and

conceptual - disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined

communities' are given essentialist identities". (Speculative 7)

In a nation whose identity consists of multiple identities and affiliations, a focus on inter­ regional identities demonstrates how regions relate to and, ultimately, form the nation.

Concentration on regional complexity also helps Newfoundlanders to challenge and overcome essentialisms. Johnston's memoir and historical fictions epitomize

Bhabha's claim,

The problem is not simply the 'self-hood' of the nation as opposed to the

otherness of other nations. We are confronted with the nation split within itself,

articulating the heterogeneity of its population. The barred Nation It/Self,

alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that

is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories 23

of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural

difference. (LC 212)

Rather than suggesting ways for Newfoundland to integrate itself into mainstream

Canadian or North American culture, Johnston insists that Newfoundland is not only unique from (neo-)colonizing nations, but that multiple communities exist within the island. Differing concepts of the nation create diverse postcolonial experiences, and deny

Johnston's characters the comfort of a stable national, regional, or provincial identity. 24

Chapter Two

Baltimore's Mansion: Remembering Newfoundland in the Family

In Baltimore's Mansion, Johnston writes his memoir as myth, history, fiction, and fact, intertwining his own life with his father's and grandfather's. The book's non- chronological structure invites postmodern and postcolonial readings, as Johnston uses these devices to challenge history's authority. By exploring Confederation's effects on

Newfoundland identities and by questioning the plausibility of Newfoundland political independence, Johnston troubles the region's relationship to its nation, asking whether a

Canadian province can maintain a "national" identity. Throughout his memoir, Wayne5 struggles to discover the secret that haunts his father, Art, who strongly supports

Newfoundland's political independence. By remembering and fictionalizing his patrilineal past, Johnston attempts to stabilize his family within their politically divided province. In an argument relating to Third World "nostalgic narratives," Mridula Nath

Chakraborty provides insight into this use of memory. She suggests that these narratives create "not only a memory of home, but home in a memory" (128). Johnston's memories, both real and imagined, reveal that public politics have historically consumed his family's private existence, contaminating their relationships with doubt and complicating Wayne's ability to shape an individual or provincial identity.

The Johnstons are members of a nation whose identity is divided between

"independents" and "confederates," and they seek refuge from an intimidating nation- state that threatens to transform Newfoundlanders into "Canadians." Sugars argues that the nation "[i]s not just a socio-political fact, but as critics such as Benedict Anderson and

5 To avoid confusion between Wayne Johnston as writer and subject, this study refers to Baltimore's Mansion's author as "Johnston" and to its protagonist as "Wayne". 25

Homi Bhabha have explored, it is also a way of 'storying' or talking about ourselves"

("National" 22). Baltimore's Mansion makes clear that the nation and state collide, which influences the everyday existence of Wayne's family and the way in which

Johnston narrates their story. By writing back into the past, progressing toward a point where he can write from his grandfather's perspective, Johnston employs a technique that

Anderson describes as writing '"up time' - toward Peking Man, Java Man, King

Arthur....This fashioning, however, is marked by deaths, which, in a curious inversion of conventional geneology, start from an originary present" (205). Johnston becomes his family's originator by refashioning their history. He writes his life from the perspective of a Canadian Newfoundlander who negotiates the Johnstons' never-ending desire for independence while observing the changes Confederation brings to the province.

The nation's power to infiltrate Newfoundlanders' consciousnesses and create a sense of personal responsibility in protecting the nation-state is evident in Baltimore's

Mansion. Johnston echoes Jonathan Kertzer's suggestion that "[t]he nation is both a historical reality and a discursive need. We are not free to choose or reject it at will, since it has already helped to define the position from which we speak; it has already infiltrated our 'will', which cannot detach itself from the world we inhabit" (166).

Concepts of the nation of Newfoundland sustain and plague the Johnstons, who torment themselves with political regrets long after Confederation is decided by a slim margin.

The memoir is ultimately a trauma narrative that mourns the loss of a home place.

Johnston positions Baltimore's Mansion with personal narratives that "analyze the significance of individual and communal memory and history. They provide the means to attend to trauma on every scale, giving voice to untellable experience" (Egan and Helms 9). From the memoir's opening page, Johnston links his family to historical memory. He writes, "I am foreborn of spud runts who fled the famines of Ireland in the

1830s... .Their names. In reverse order: Johnston. Johnson. Jonson. Jenson...

MacKeown. 'Mac' in Gaelic meaning 'son' and Keown 'John'" (1, second ellipsis in original). By tracing the Johnston family from Newfoundland back to Ireland, he situates them in a historical postcolonial narrative. This approach not only allows Johnston to map his family history, but to work toward understanding the frustrating inheritance

Wayne receives from his forefathers.

Johnston writes his family history back into the past in order to make bearable the secrets and uncertainties it confronts. Wayne's family trauma begins with his grandfather, Charlie Johnston, a blacksmith in the rural community of Ferryland on

Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. Charlie produces the first generation of Canadian

Newfoundlanders, and his legacy is crucial to Wayne's understanding of his family's development. This legacy centres on doubt and betrayal, as Charlie's vote in the 1948 referendum becomes the fulcrum for the Johnston family's secrets and traumas.

Although he keeps a "countdown to Confederation" on a chalkboard slate (200), Charlie secretly votes to join a nation he appears to fear, and becomes what Wayne's father, Art, terms a "closet Confederate." The secret torments his family, particularly Art, who feels abandoned by a father whose personal strength made him a hero in his son's eyes.

Johnston's insistence on unravelling the secrets generated by paternal absences reveals his concern with "an ontological anxiety about the longing for a lost place, a father-land" (Cook 118-19). Unlike The Divine Ryans, whose protagonist is literally haunted by his father's ghost, Baltimore's Mansion presents a protagonist who purposely fictionalizes his grandfather to better understand the legacies Charlie leaves his family.

Johnston writes the book's conclusion through Charlie's perspective during and after his death; he looks to the past rather than to Wayne's future possibilities in order to highlight the traumatic Johnston legacy. Writing of the role of ghosts in Johnston's fiction, Meira

Cook argues, "Traditionally, ghosts materialize at moments of crisis, at the incurable break between a traditional past and an unstable present, between cultural loss and ethnic reinvention. Multiple in function, ghosts recover memory, make absence present, and offer the palliative of alternative histories" (134). By ending the memoir at a moment of family crisis, Johnston uses Charlie's ghost to assert memory's intrusion into the present and the importance of memory in confronting the future.

Charlie seems better understood by Wayne than by Art, who struggles with his father's political betrayal long after Charlie's death6 and who seems incapable of understanding his choice. Rather than resisting the possibility that Charlie 'betrays' his family's values, Wayne presents his grandfather as an ever-present memory by permanently linking him with Ferryland: "The House, the Gaze, the Beach, the Downs, the Pool, Ferryland Head, Hare's Ears, Bois Island, Gosse Island and the sea. All are fixed in a moment that for him will never pass" (272). Associating Charlie with

Ferryland makes his legacy and memory as permanent as the land itself. The memory of an almost-independent Newfoundland pervades Newfoundland's and the Johnstons' futures, and Charlie's decision, the pain of which is exacerbated by his death, will continue to haunt the family.

6 Art's struggle resembles that of The Divine Ryans's protagonist, Draper Doyle, who tries throughout the novel to accept the knowledge that his dead father was secretly homosexual. Both characters refuse to acknowledge what they consider to be flaws in fathers who seem larger than life. 28

Johnston does not represent Ferryland as a stereotypical Newfoundland outport, which is often considered to be an isolated community whose members represent the core of Newfoundland's Folk. By comparing the former Ferryland, whose people's jobs depended on horsepower, with the contemporary town, Johnston demonstrates that

Ferryland is not an antimodern outport, but undergoes enormous change. However, some critics continue to insist that such communities exist. In Under Eastern Eyes, a study of

Maritime literature, Janice Kulyk Keefer defends her choice to exclude Newfoundland literature by arguing that outports distinguish Newfoundland from the Maritime provinces. She claims, "What gives to the outport its stark and final isolation is not only the intractability of the sea, but more importantly, the sheer lack of any alternative to it at one's back" (4). Not only does this reading essentialize concepts of rural Newfoundland, but Johnston's descriptions of the dark Newfoundland "core" shows that an alternative to the sea does exist: "It was easy to imagine, impossible not to, that the core was always dark, that on this middle wilderness the sun never rose and the most it ever had by way of light it got on those rare nights when the sky was clear and the moon was full" (83). As

Wayne's descriptions of Ferryland demonstrate, Newfoundland geography varies as much as its communities.

Wayne repeatedly writes the land into his memoir in order to confront the increasing external pressures on Newfoundland. This is especially true of Ferryland's geography, which Johnston uses as a touchstone throughout his fragmented narrative.

Home to Charlie, Art, and much of Wayne's extended family, Ferryland becomes a site of memory and trauma, of nostalgia and secrets. Wayne repeatedly lists the names of each geographic feature of this rural town on the Avalon Peninsula, and writes at length about the largely forgotten trades and behaviours of its pre-Confederation inhabitants.

Wayne is not present when the "Virgin Berg," an iceberg shaped like the Madonna, passes Ferryland, and has no idea how big a man must be if he has '"a pair of hands on him twice the size of Howard Morrey's'" (15). Still, by including such anecdotes in his family history, Johnston incorporates past events and people into his personal legacy.

Wayne is not content with merely describing Ferryland, but lists each key geographic feature, making sure to include non-Newfoundlanders in his audience:

The primary landmarks of Ferryland were the protected part of the harbour, which

from the 1600s had been called the Pool; the Downs, the expansive, seaside

meadows where it was believed that Baltimore had built his mansion house;

Ferryland Head, a peninsula with a manned lighthouse at its tip; Gosse Island and

Bois (pronounced Boyce) Island; the two rocks that because of their shape were

called the Hare's Ears.. .and the four-hundred-foot-high hill behind Ferryland

whose crest was for obvious reasons known as the Gaze. (17)

By situating himself in Ferryland, Wayne links his personal development to the landscape in which his father and grandfather grew up. Wayne thereby connects himself to his present and to his forefathers' past. In an interview with Andrew Pyper, Johnston notes,

'"I wanted to describe Ferryland as a place of the mind - of my father's mind and of my own'" (par. 3). Although he lives in post-Confederation Newfoundland, Wayne inhabits a liminal space created as his past blends with his present. Danielle Fuller supports this concept, as she argues that "[pjhysical home places cannot guarantee physical or emotional safety, and their material and symbolic mutability means that they cannot secure identity or values. Instead, as an actual and imagined site, the home place of 30 contemporary writing engages people in processes of disidentification and identification"

(Writing 33-34). Ferryland connects three generations of Johnston men and becomes the nucleus around which Wayne constructs their history.

This connection between family and landscape could inspire essentialist readings of Johnston's memoir. When writing of a photograph of a Maritime family titled "A

Simple Life," McKay notes, "Surrounded by the hills and the sea, and above all by rocks: these people are firmly (and surely intentionally) 'fixed' within a natural frame, represented as small figures in a stark landscape that engulfs them" (Quest xi). The

Johnstons' connections to Ferryland might cause them to be similarly perceived.

However, by emphasizing his family's multidimensionality (and by writing a memoir with a non-linear, non-folksy narrative), Johnston avoids presenting his family as members of the Newfoundland Folk. McKay writes of Alistair MacLeod's short story

"The Boat," "MacLeod's imagined father is a tormented figure, longing for things his environment denies him.. .(One could say that he wants participation and honour in a common culture.).. .how could one even imagine a man of the Folk bitterly divided against himself and his family?" (Quest 310). Like MacLeod's character, Charlie is a father whose beliefs divide him from his family and from his own desire for

Newfoundland independence. His complexity prevents Charlie from being perceived as

Folk, and this character suggests that a traditional occupation and a strong, silent nature do not necessarily reinforce essential concepts of region.

Art never views Charlie as Folk, but idolizes his seemingly invincible father.

When he learns the truth about Charlie's vote, Art feels abandoned not only by his father, but by a personal hero. Wayne reflects: 31

For my father, as for all the Johnstons, it was not 'immediately before the

expiration of March 31, 1949,' as set out in the Terms of the Union, but with

Charlie's passing that the old Newfoundland ceased to be. His death divided the

century and, more effectively than anything else the chronophobic Charlie could

have done, kept his children rooted in both time and space, imposed on them an

obligation to continue, however pointlessly or tokenly, to resist Confederation.

Confederation and the death of their father were forever twinned in their minds.

(202) /

National concerns invade the Johnston home, forcibly mixing the public and private.

This phenomenon, which Bhabha terms "unhomeliness," is often linked to isolation, unfamiliarity, and claustrophobia (LC 13-14). Longing for the father mirrors the longing for home, and Art must renegotiate his relationships to both. Johnston's memoir echoes his fiction, in that,

Given the persistence of the recognizable, not to say obsessive, figure of the

absent father whom Johnston repeatedly reconfigures in his fiction, it is probable

that he is also alluding to an ontological anxiety about the longing for a lost place,

a father-land; the demise of region commensurate, in these texts, with the son's

filial longing for his ghostly progenitor. (Cook 118-19)

This tendency is also apparent in Johnston's memoir. Had Charlie voted for independence, Art may not have supported the lost cause and his relationship to his son may not be troubled by family secrets. Usually so vocal in his political views, Art remains silent concerning his family's history. Wayne is left to determine his father's character through observing his actions. As the inheritor of his father's frustrated 32 relationship with his grandfather, Wayne must decide how he can maintain a relationship with his haunted father. At family gatherings, Wayne "stood in the doorway" between two rooms, listening to the adults discuss politics (53). The adult Wayne narrates his memories to the same effect: he stands between his own life and his father's and can observe how Newfoundland politics shape his familial and personal identities.

Wayne complicates Art's heroic perception of Charlie by casting him as a

Newfoundland version of King Arthur. As Johnston insists in several books,

Newfoundland's most pervasive myth claims that the true king remains exiled while an impostor holds the throne. The Arthurian myth positions Johnston's characters in yet another liminal space - a colony that struggles to become a nation while perpetually awaiting its king's return. As Stan Dragland notes,

That 'river of what might have been' is carrying the true king. This is a mythic

way of expressing the political reality of a lost nation. This ancient myth is potent

in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams because it holds the hiatus between having

and not having that energizes many levels of the narrative. Smallwood is not the

king; Smallwood is a pretender. (195)

Dragland's argument is equally applicable to Baltimore's Mansion, whose characters perpetually struggle between "having and not having." Art would certainly agree with

Dragland that Smallwood is a mere impostor, but would argue that Peter Cashin, a

"Parnell-like figure" (55) who led the anti-confederate movement and whose portrait once hung in the Johnstons' porch, is the true king struggling to claim his throne.

Lawrence Mathews suggests that Johnston's memoir could have been subtitled

"An Elegy - not so much for the country that Newfoundland once was, but for the mode 33 of understanding that privileges notions of nationality over the levelling (or liberating) ideas of modernity" ("Charlie's" 222). Wayne recognizes nostalgia's allure, but he also realizes that Newfoundland's present state cannot be ignored. Rather than engaging in the self-pity characterizing Art's political views, Wayne seems critical of political views that romanticize the past. He suggests that Newfoundland will never have its own version of Arthur. The only kings who hold power in the province are the patriarchs who shape their descendents' inheritances. Johnston upsets the Arthurian myth by presenting

Charlie and Art, the "kings" of the Johnston family, as emotionally conflicted rather than infallible.

Charlie and Art's internal divisions originate in their desire to simultaneously inhabit the past and help shape Newfoundland's future. Charlie is caught between looking forward to the consequences of the referendum and backward toward

Newfoundland's colonial past. For Art, choosing Confederation means choosing to remain colonized by foreign powers. Independence means establishing a uniquely

Newfoundland government, economy, and culture. These characteristics position the characters as "ambivalent," which, in Bhabha's work, is "used to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and its opposite; or, the simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person, or action" (Zucchero 263). Both characters are attracted to and repulsed by their memories of the referendum. They desire independence as Newfoundlanders and are unsure how this goal is best achieved.

Charlie's referendum vote establishes his ambivalence and creates a legacy of doubt for his descendents. While he cannot prevent this legacy from becoming a determining force in his life, Johnston/Wayne attempts to resolve the frustration 34 ambivalence creates by abrogating traditional myths and histories to create a version of

Newfoundland independence. By representing Charlie as a mythic king, and noting that his own father's name, Arthur Reginald, echoes King Arthur's, Johnston positions

Avalon (both the mythic island and the Newfoundland peninsula) within British mythology. Rather than suggesting that "Avalon" has been dominated and then discarded by a father country that was happy to be rid of Newfoundland, Johnston creates a family myth which suggests that Newfoundland can originate its own kings. Still, by modelling his Avalon after British myth, Johnston negates Newfoundlanders' ability to be truly originary, as they remain caught within British stories and epistemologies.

Johnston narrates the past in order to contextualize his family's decisions within

Newfoundland's history of colonial exploitation. Wayne asserts that Lord Baltimore's interest in the colony ended at his desire to maintain legal ownership over Newfoundland, noting that "[t]he impossibly complicated and protracted litigation over Avalon makes the lawsuits in Bleak House seem expeditious by comparison" (15). Johnston claims that the only thing of Baltimore's that remained after he deserted the island in 1629 "was the name he had chosen for his colony - Avalon" (14). The name was not chosen to imply the promise of salvation in a new land, but merely reflected Baltimore's recent conversion to Catholicism, which caused him to name the island "after the birth of

Christianity in England" (14). While Baltimore ignores the mythological connotations of

"Avalon," Johnston abrogates Arthurian myth in his attempt to reclaim the past (both provincial and familial) and the authority to shape it. Like the mythical island,

Johnston's Avalon is the site of memory and of new beginnings. 35

Of all Johnston's historical prose, Baltimore's Mansion comes closest to retelling

"actual" history. It chronicles the lives of mythical family kings, and in order to resist concepts of stable, unchangeable history, Johnston weaves myth throughout his family's chronicle. Writing of Canadian historical fictions, Wyile argues:

Many of these novels in various ways reinstate myth - as the residual trace of

preindustrial, premodern, oral cultures and their knowledges - as a corrective or

alternative to history and make use of mythical discourse to question realistic

assumptions about historical time and causality....The use of myth in these

historical novels likewise raises concerns.. .about the potential construction of a

cultural binary opposition, the privileging of an ostensibly more simple and

primitive world view as a kind of nostalgic retreat from modernity. Yet,

ultimately.. .what these novels provide is a more sophisticated, though

nonetheless somewhat ambivalent, relation to myth. (Speculative 187)

Rather than using myths that resemble Newfoundland folk stories, Johnston employs mythologies that highlight Newfoundland's colonial history and this history's influence on three generations of his family. The mythic and historical narratives are transformed into personal narratives as Johnston writes his family into history.7 When archetypal symbols are repeated across regional literatures and oral traditions, they may be marked as cultural essences. By mimicking and appropriating Arthurian myth, Johnston's

7 It is ironic that reviews of Johnston's work and interviews with the author so often perpetuate the stereotypical myths that Johnston's writing avoids. In her review of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Elizabeth Renzetti describes her meeting with Johnston: ".. .the evidence of a Newfoundlander's famous homesickness is everywhere: in the pot of tea that simmers, East-Coast-style, on the back of the stove, and the map of the island, drawn in the 17th century but newly framed, sitting on the sofa" (Dl). Renzetti's attitude toward Newfoundlanders (one might question what defines the "East-Coast-style" of simmering tea) reduces myth to stereotype. It also reveals the difficulty of representing Newfoundland and its citizens through archetype, as regional essentialisms blur the boundaries between archetype and stereotype. 36 complex archetypal roles resist many archetypes' one-dimensionality in order to represent a family struggling to retain their version of Newfoundland identity.

Memoir provides authors with greater space for fictionalization than auto/biography, and Johnston takes full advantage of the genre, daring readers to accept his version of Charlie's death. According to Wayne, Charlie's journey to Avalon to be healed of his "grievous wound" (12) is interrupted by his hope to finally disclose the truth about his referendum vote to Art: "He hears the clatter of the rocks on the beach behind him. Someone is coming, someone he knew would meet him here if he waited long enough. But when he looks behind him, there is no one" (271). Combining family history with British myth demonstrates Johnston's desire to find a personal and national

"origin," the starting point from which Newfoundlanders abandon the past with its unrealized possibilities and from which Wayne's identity is influenced, not dictated, by those of his forefathers.

Both Wayne and Art eventually leave Newfoundland in an attempt to escape their familial history, but are continually drawn back to the island. Wayne cannot write about

Newfoundland while living there, as returning home causes him to re-engage with the familial and provincial history he attempts to present somewhat objectively in his narrative. Gary Boire suggests that "[historical narrativization places the displaced sense of a colonized settler society; it attempts to achieve priority, self-creation, origin" (222).

Johnston writes his history to establish a site of origin and a site from which an effective future can develop. Creating a non-linear narrative reflects history's infiltration into the present and prevents it from being considered obsolete and powerless over contemporary events and concerns. 37

Johnston's circular narrative asserts that "[rjevisiting the wound reminds the reader of the historical crises in the nation's history, moments when the nation as family failed to hold its members together" (Schultheis 126). For the Johnstons, the referendum signifies a colonial crisis that marks the end of Newfoundland-the-country and the beginning of a shameful family legacy. Trauma becomes the Johnston's religion, as demonstrated by the sadly hilarious "catechisms" Art teaches the young Wayne.

Typically, children sing nursery rhymes or perform skits at family gatherings, but Wayne recites abuse against Smallwood and praise for Cashin. Wayne becomes his father's ventriloquist's dummy, repeating anti-confederate views with no self-awareness or personal political views.

Among the "forms of bliss" the young Wayne will never know are "Ignorance of him who, toad-like, croaks and dwells among the undergrowth" (180). The catechism continues, "Q: Name him. A: Joey Smallwood....Q: Does he, pretender, occupy the throne? A: He does" (180). Wayne admits that did not understand the meanings behind the words he had phonetically memorized, but that he merely performed as expected in front of his gleeful family. The recitations are comical, but they also support Herbert

Pottle's claim that, traditionally, Newfoundland humour "has been both an individual and a collective means of enabling life to be tolerable" (14). The catechisms allow Art to humorously declare his resentment toward confederates and express his grief over the lost dream of an independent Newfoundland. Art abandons his comic facade only in relative private. Without Art's knowledge, the young Wayne observes his father crying over

Charlie's decision just after denouncing the "closet confederates" to his family: "My father, I could see, was not sick but crying silently, as if something inside him had 38 brimmed over without warning...I heard him say something, heard the words 'never' and

'too late"' ( 70). As a child, Wayne learns that Art's political self-righteousness masks the largely silent pain that unhomeliness creates in his family.

The Johnston family forms an island within an island, as they isolate themselves in a province whose members must embrace, or at least recognize the inevitability of, a

Canadian future. Art, however, is unwilling to move beyond personal trauma and accept this future. When he learns that the cross-Newfoundland train faces closure in favour of a faster, cheaper bus system, Art takes Wayne for a final trip across the island. The pair travels from St. John's to Port-aux-Basques and back on a journey that shows Wayne that he must eventually choose between inhabiting the past of Charlie and Art and the future his father vainly struggles against. In Lament for a Nation, George Grant argues that contemporary science, as represented in Baltimore's Mansion by the bus, destroys local cultures (53). This idea promotes conceptions of the anti-modern Folk in binary opposition to the modern urban-dweller. Johnston's version of the train journey suggests that, while the newer technology does not destroy a culture, it destroys the idea of a culture. It challenges Art's constructed perceptions of the Newfoundland that might have been, and the naive dream of a Newfoundland culture developing independently of external political governance.

Art laments the failed dream of a united Newfoundland nation-state, but

Johnston's narrative insists on the plurality of Newfoundland identities. Sugars claims that "Johnston reverses the typical postcolonial trajectory of national self-realization and independence by having a point of origin mark the end of national self-determination - that is, the event of Confederation marks the moment when the dream of Newfoundland 39 independence evaporates" (151-52). She is correct in noting the failure of Newfoundland statehood, but Confederation does not destroy Newfoundland nationhood. Art's allegiance to Newfoundland reveals that contesting imagined communities pepper the province. Anderson claims that imagined communities exist because, regardless of national problems and concerns, the nation is always considered as "a deep, horizontal comradeship" (6), but Johnston suggests this is not always the case. Neither national nor regional identity should be essentialized or expected to be consistent across provinces, municipalities, or geographical locations - certainly, Art would never consider himself a member of the same Newfoundland community as Joe Smallwood. In Baltimore's

Mansion, "identifying as Canadian involves a desire for origins and for ethnic belonging that contrasts with the unspecified and malleable nature of an imaginary Canada" (Egan and Helms 11). Johnston seems less concerned with defining himself as Canadian than with discovering how Canada affects Newfoundland identities, but his memoir highlights the power of mutually incompatible imagined communities that appear clearly defined.

Divisions among Newfoundlanders are evident in Johnston's examination of the differences between Art and the working-class people he encounters as a fish-plant inspector. As a resident of St. John's, a "townie," Art cannot engage with the outport communities he visits in order to inspect, and usually shut down, their fish plants. If

Johnston had represented outport people as despairing or defeatist, it would be no better than if he had written them as cheerfully ignorant storytellers. He avoids replacing one stereotype with another, and carefully develops Bhabha's suggestion that derogatory stereotypes must be replaced by images that oppose homogenization ("Representation"

105). Without representing characters as Folk, Johnston suggests that individual and communal identifications are related to geography, and that geographical isolation, particularly that enforced by the ocean, has political implications.

When Art and his colleagues are forced to close a fish plant after it fails inspection, they are accosted by the angry community: "In the shouting he makes out the words 'townies,' 'traitors' and 'Canadians.' There is no contradiction for these people, despite having voted for Confederation, denouncing feds as 'Canadians.' By Canadian, they do not mean confederate, they simply mean outsider, a kind of hyper-townie" (155).

Rather than implying that the "baymen" are ignorant (or "Innocent"8), Johnston contrasts their imagined community with Art's. They consider Art, the steadfast anti-confederate, to be Canadian not only because he is an "outsider," but because he is a member of the

"fink force":

Someone who used to be an anti-confederate now walking around in what he still

thinks of as his country with the badge of the federal Fisheries of Canada

plastered on both shoulders. Someone who used to be a fisherman but now is a

civil servant, getting paid to scrutinize and criticize the way that fishermen like

his father and the one he grew up with go about their work. (155)

Art's demonstrations against Confederation hide his own anxieties over living in a time of national transition. Like Wayne, Art cannot return to a romantic, nostalgic past.

Indeed, Johnston's representations of his father's encounter with this community reveal that such a past did not exist. Newfoundland was never united and never shared a uniform culture. Working for the nation he resists, Art finds himself caught between

8 McKay's The Quest of the Folk defines "Innocence" as a set of essentialist myths ascribed to Nova Scotians that was both "international and abstract" and "fiercely parochial and determinate.. .in its pursuit of local distinctiveness" (37). 41 loyalty to Charlie's way of life and the new reality that provides his family with economic stability.

Wayne and Art's generations often face very different challenges, but Johnston links the father and son by suggesting that the consequences of Confederation affect them equally. He indirectly positions them in the same liminal space by retelling the story of the Great Eastern, the ship that laid the transatlantic cable between Ireland and

Newfoundland. Plagued by misfortunes and eventually sold for scrap, the ship was discovered to contain the skeletons of a man and a twelve-year-old boy between its hulls.

After Art tells him the story, Wayne asks himself the questions his father refuses to answer: "Why was their disappearance not evidence enough of where they were?... The

Great Eastern and its hull-haunting ghosts, the bones of a man and his son still clothed, their boots still on their bony feet. A father and son. What a strange companionship their last days must have been. Companionship. Ship companions" (105-6). Like the trapped shipbuilders, Wayne and Art inhabit an in-between space, but their companionship does not develop in limbo. Instead, their responses to change characterize Wayne and Art's relationship. Wayne observes his father vainly struggling against the past, especially

Charlie's role in effecting unwanted political change. Although Wayne wants to understand his paternal legacy, his relationship with Art teaches Wayne that remaining fixated on the past only restricts identity development.

Wayne's primary concern involves appreciating his patrilineal legacy while creating an independent future. Writing of art, which he terms "the borderline work of culture," Bhabha argues, "it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-between' space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The 'past-present' 42 becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living" (LC 10). Johnston's memoir explores the past-present connection, as Wayne's relationship to Newfoundland traditions echoes his conflicted relationship with his male relatives. Wayne fondly remembers and enjoys certain traditions, such as eating toutons (fried pieces of dough smothered in molasses). His delight in this Newfoundland treat contrasts with Wayne's revulsion for mummering, a Christmas tradition in which people disguise themselves before visiting their neighbours for food, drink, and dancing. The tradition is commonly linked to good- natured fun and holiday amusement, but Wayne highlights the danger in being unable to recognize your neighbour: when disguised, even close friends can seek revenge for past insults or express their feelings of jealousy, anger, or self-righteousness.

Such an incident occurs during Art and Wayne's cross-Newfoundland train journey. Art confronts a stranger whose acceptance of Confederation and seeming contempt for Newfoundland nationhood causes Art to dub hum a "fact-facing bus boomer" ( 79). While the technology supporter walks away from his initial confrontation with Art, a mummering disguise emboldens the man. Approaching Art by "knighting" him with a lewd third leg made of a sock-stuffed stocking, the bus boomer "put his face to within inches of my father's and, speaking ingressively, said 'It's not a country, it's a province. It never was a country. If you know your history" (101). Even though he is dressed as a mummer, the "bus boomer" actually resists becoming Folk-like, as he engages in Newfoundland tradition while rejecting the ideal of Newfoundland independence. Similarly, by refusing to be enchanted by the dancing and drinking associated with mummering, Wayne both rejects personifying himself as a member of the 43

Folk and suggests that his generation of Newfoundlanders will begin questioning their ancestors' beliefs and practices as they engage with their new nation.

As members of families' youngest generations, child characters

try to escape both previous generations. They desire neither the Calvinism and

commitment to the land of the Grandparents, nor the grey placelessness and

undefined guilt of the Parents. They want, somehow, to live, but they have

trouble finding a way to do this. They sometimes feel a double pull - back to the

tough values and the land, like the Grandparents, or away - farther away than the

parents managed to get - to Europe. (Atwood 136)

For the characters in Baltimore's Mansion, escaping to Europe is less attractive than migrating to an economically strong region of Canada. Wayne's goals eventually focus on leaving Newfoundland for the mainland, where he will become the second person in his patrilineage (after Art) to attain post-secondary education. This act links Wayne to generations of colonized people; Anderson notes that, in colonies, "[y]outh meant, above all, the first generation in any significant numbers to have acquired a European education, marking them off linguistically and culturally from their parents' generation" (119). As the first-educated in his family, Art experiences even more strongly the pressures of tradition and of modernity. Before Art leaves Newfoundland for university,

"Be a good boy!" his father shouted. My twenty-three-year-old father turned and

looked at Charlie standing there a few feet from the water, not quite turned to face

him, one arm lifted and dropped quickly in a gesture of resigned farewell. Then

Charlie fully faced the sea again.. ..facing the direction exactly opposite the one

his son would soon be taking. (198-99). 44

Wayne's insistence on revisiting the past demonstrates that the tension between the child characters and their grand/fathers actually prevents sons from escaping their fathers' influences. By revisiting family wounds, Johnston refuses to turn away from

Newfoundland and Charlie's legacy. He does not abandon Newfoundland for Canada, but uses his distance from Newfoundland to gain new perspectives on the province.

Wayne realizes that isolating oneself in the colonial past merely stagnates personal growth. Conversely, engaging with contemporary realities not only facilitates personal development, but helps Wayne create new perspectives on Newfoundland that reject nostalgia and regret.

Robert Kroetsch remarks on the hesitancy of Canadian novels' conclusions, and suggests that "process becomes more important than the end" (65). This is also true of

Baltimore's Mansion, which suggests that endings, particularly of an ongoing family line or individual life, are merely false constructions. Johnston's chronicle, as the history of a still-existent line of "kings," cannot satisfactorily conclude. The memoir ends with

Wayne's assertion that, no matter how many times members of his family leave the island, they cannot abandon their histories or their permanent connections to

Newfoundland. It may be true that only a "mediocre" writer "articulates her or his 'place of belonging' as souvenir album rather than microcosm" (Keefer 29), but Johnston's memoir is not simply a nostalgic presentation of the author's history. Instead,

Baltimore's Mansion blends fond and painful family memories with social and political change to create a vision of twentieth-century Newfoundland where the boundaries between public and private spheres dissolve. 45 46

Chapter Three

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: Re-writing History

Johnston's most publicly acclaimed (and denounced) novel, The Colony of

Unrequited Dreams, was written simultaneously with Baltimore's Mansion and shares its postcolonial concerns. In this fictionalized account of Joe Smallwood's life, Johnston focuses on Newfoundland's history as an exploited colony to highlight the neo-colonial practices that affect post-Confederation Newfoundland. Just as Johnston re-writes family history in Baltimore's Mansion, he assumes Smallwood's character to offer readers a unique perspective on Newfoundland's entrance into Confederation:

Through his creation of Joe Smallwood, Johnston is able to re-enter

Newfoundland history and provide a different voice than the ones recorded in the

'official' narratives of struggle and failure... Though surrounded by notions of

Newfoundland hopelessness, Smallwood becomes an optimist who refuses to be

trapped in the unending cycle of Newfoundland defeatism.10 (Chafe 333)

The same observation applies to the novel's most exceptional character, Sheilagh

Fielding. Fielding is a fictional character whose life repeatedly intersects with

Smallwood's, and she becomes his greatest friend and critic. Her ironic prose and personal journal entries counterbalance Smallwood's narrative. She answers D.W.

Prowse's A History of Newfoundland with Fielding's Condensed History of

9 Rex Murphy and Stuart Pierson are among the novel's most vocal detractors. Many criticisms centre on Johnston's fictionalization of Newfoundland's history and geography, and critics express concern that many readers believe they are learning factual Newfoundland history when reading this novel. These criticisms suggest that postcolonial concerns are implicit in many critical readings of Johnston's novels - particularly the resistance to having an identity written onto a nation (or province). 10 Chafe assumes that a "cycle of Newfoundland defeatism" exists, an attitude that echoes stereotypical concepts of the region. Still, while it is more accurate to argue that Smallwood refuses to be trapped in a cycle of defeatism and hopelessness, the novel does suggest that Newfoundlanders sometimes adopted defeatist attitudes. 47

Newfoundland, an ironic account of the colony's history. Smallwood ignores Fielding's warnings against mimicking colonial authority, but her History urges readers to recognize the corrupt officials and exploitative actions that shape the new province's history.

From childhood, Smallwood is indoctrinated in Newfoundland's perceived inferiority to Britain. In this novel, the label "settler" does not imply Newfoundlanders' devotion to promoting British interests, but types them as nearly sub-human British aspirants. Like all British settlers, Newfoundlanders "were frequently characterized in domestic cultural and political discourses as ungovernable, uncultured: as 'colonials' they were second-class - belated or feral - Englishmen, and often came to be seen as political or economic rivals to the domestic citizens of the 'home' country" (Johnston and Lawson

363). Newfoundland offered little political or economic threat to Britain, but its supposed colonial inferiority infects Smallwood's peers and mentors. This is particularly true of middle-class families in the novel, who dissociate themselves from the working class by emphasizing their likenesses to colonizers. Children sense the importance of denying their inferiority as settler subjects; Smallwood remembers that "[a] boy named

Thompson claimed that there was a rule at Eton that no more than two brothers from any family could attend and, as two of his brothers were already there, that let him out" (33).

Thanks to his uncle's patronage, Smallwood attends Bishop Feild, a school for St. John's elite boys, where he observes that his fellow students have inherited patrilineal legacies of denial and self-aggrandization. Smallwood's schoolmates' excuses for inhabiting the island display their blind opposition to identifying themselves as Newfoundlanders. As

Smallwood encounters other would-be-British officials throughout his life, he observes their similarities to these boys. All of these characters are continually frustrated by a 48 colonial heritage that permanently renders them almost, but not quite, British. This oppression causes the boys to become oppressors themselves.. They establish social cliques that mimic adult socio-economic hierarchies, and participate in cruelties to avoid being exiled from desirable social groups. When Prowse, leader of the most powerful clique at Bishop Feild, lifts the young Fielding's skirt and threatens to cane her, most boys willingly assist. The incident allows them to restrain and humiliate a weaker subject, enacting the violence against Fielding that elitist colonial adults inflict on their own consciousnesses.

The concept of inherent settler inferiority also troubles the English-born, misfit schoolmasters of Bishop Feild. As teachers and mentors for the boys of the St. John's elite, these teachers could inspire a new Newfoundland originary. By insisting that

Newfoundland history and traditions are as important as colonial traditions, the schoolmasters could help the boys identify as Newfoundlanders and discourage them from seeking identities that dissociate them from the colony. Instead, the expatriate teachers' biases against Newfoundland and its citizens motivate their attempts to create

British clones, even though most of their students have never left Newfoundland.

Smallwood remembers, "We were taught next to nothing about Newfoundland, the masters drilling into us instead the history and geography of England, the country for which they were so homesick that they acted as if they were still there, denying as much as possible the facts of their existence" (35). The schoolmasters' refusal to teach young

Newfoundland boys about their nation implies that Newfoundland has no original culture, a view shared by Headmaster Reeves, who tells the boys that his job "was to civilize us, for it was plain to him that underneath our 'imitation finery,' we were nothing more than 49

savages descended from the 'dregs of England"' (34). The teachers do not even recognize Folk traditions in order to dismiss them or to highlight the colonial culture's inferiority. The traditions' working-class associations disqualifies these stories and songs

from being considered part of a "culture" comparable to Britain's.

Although Reeves's refusal to recognize Newfoundland culture is troubling, the headmaster is partially correct. In its desire to create miniature, inferior, versions of itself in its colonies, Britain discourages Newfoundland from constructing its own culture.

Ironically, Johnston's novel highlights Newfoundland's lack of a national literature.

Reflecting on his cross-island trek to unionize railway section workers, Smallwood notes,

"I thought scornfully of the moors and heaths I had read about in books. They were nothing next to this" (219). Just as British literature permeates Third-World postcolonial consciousnesses,11 it influences Smallwood's expectations for his own nation. By forcing

Smallwood and his peers to repeatedly draw the map of England in class without teaching them Newfoundland geography, the Bishop Feild schoolmasters encourage the children to imagine themselves as Britons. Anderson suggests that maps help create imagined

1 9 communities, but imagination alone is insufficient to qualify these students as British, particularly when their imaginations most often lead them to identity themselves as

British.

By mocking his childhood indoctrination in British superiority, the adult

Smallwood demonstrates his ability to critically observe active colonial practices in

11 With The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston joins numerous authors from former colonies who challenge official histories. It is not surprising that Johnston names Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children as the major influence on his work, as this book also highlights colonialism's role in shaping nations. 12 This helps explain Johnston's insertion of a map of Newfoundland, including a window of the Avalon Peninsula, before the text of Baltimore's Mansion. The map provides one conceptualization of the province, but Johnston's memoir provides several more complex definitions of Newfoundland. 50

Newfoundland. Not all characters share Smallwood's critical skills, and many become victims of colonial fallacies. The preoccupation with maintaining British facades insists that colonial practices are ongoing, and that this novel cannot be considered "post" colonial (Sugars, "Notes" 152). The Colony of Unrequited Dreams demonstrates how

Britain turns Newfoundland into an unfamiliar Other place by dominating, ruling, and teaching its citizens (Said, Orientalism 3). As a colonial "child," Newfoundland supposedly relies on Britain's instruction. Just as Smallwood and his childhood peers are taught their insignificance within the British empire, Newfoundlanders internalize essential definitions of themselves as colonial inferiors, even when colonial officials are dishonest and selfish. This is particularly true of the Liberal party leader, Sir Richard

Squires, the former prime minister of Newfoundland who resigns before being arrested for bribery, patronage, and embezzlement of public funds (263). He extends political favours and government positions only to men in high social classes - men such as

Prowse, grandson of D.W. Prowse. Squires's class discrimination not only directly affects Smallwood's career, but reveals the prevalence of colonial attitudes. His wealth and title appear sufficient to maintaining Squires's political career, as he is elected in his riding despite his criminal history.

According to Said, British officials felt that colonial subjects "did not have it in them to know what was good for them" {Orientalism 37). While this attitude is disturbing in itself, even more troubling is Smallwood's claim that many

Newfoundlanders cheerfully agreed. When Britain appoints a commission to study

Newfoundland society and economy, Smallwood reveals, "A contagion of self- debasement swept the land, as if we had lived in denial of our innate inferiority for 51 centuries and at last were owning up to it. There was more than a hint of boasting in it, a perverse pride in our ability to do anything, even fail, on so grand a scale" (338).

Smallwood is embarrassed by Newfoundland's defeatist performance. While interviewing Newfoundlanders who accept essentialist definition, Smallwood hopes to be mistaken for an Englishman (338). He thereby demonstrates essentialism's efficacy; even as a proponent of renouncing Newfoundland's colonial identity, Smallwood would rather identify with colonizers than with victims of colonial ignorance.

Without renouncing his personal history, Smallwood feels he cannot position himself to change negative attitudes toward Newfoundland. While Baltimore's

Mansion's Wayne renegotiates his relationships to Art as his Newfoundlander/Canadian identity develops, Smallwood completely dissociates himself from his father and his working-class family. Interestingly, Johnston does not investigate the relationship between Smallwood and his grandfather; as Stuart Pierson notes in his review, "It is a little odd that the grandfather, the successful boot-and-shoe man, who had the advertising boot installed in the Narrows, figures not at all in Colony. According to [Richard] Gwyn,

[author of Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary,] Smallwood claimed that '"no man influenced me more'" (288). However, as a successful St. John's merchant, Smallwood's grandfather represents the middle class that Smallwood's father simultaneously aspires to and denounces.

For Smallwood, his father embodies Newfoundland defeatism. Johnston creates a

Charlie Smallwood who rejects his family's shoe business and the socio-economic status it confers. He becomes an alcoholic husband and father to thirteen children, of whom Joe is the oldest. Joe's father exhibits many of the stereotypical qualities colonists ascribe to 52

Newfoundlanders: he is an impoverished, often unemployed alcoholic who decries anyone occupying a higher social station. Charlie Smallwood's rants, which closely resemble Art Johnston's, not only embarrass his son, but reinforce Smallwood's determination not to become a version of his father. Smallwood remembers his father raving against St. John's, his family, God, and himself: '"They should have called it Old

Lost Land, not Newfoundland but Old Lost Land,' he roared, with a flourish of his hand as though to encompass the whole of the island, then held his arms out to the sky like some ham actor beseeching God's forgiveness" (17). Smallwood cannot accept his father's version of Newfoundland identity, which is characterized by bitter criticisms rather than political action. Still, his desire to positively contribute to Newfoundland's future is marred by Smallwood's fear of acknowledging his patrilineage. His life becomes characterized by escape attempts - from the island, his wife, and his children, but particularly from his father, whose influence he desires to avoid.

Unfortunately for Smallwood, he cannot avoid history, whether political or personal. Although he considers himself a political reformer, Smallwood operates within colonial structures. Fielding, however, refuses to accept these constructions as unchangeable. She observes Smallwood's political efforts being exploited by Squires and Prowse, and recognizes politicians' perpetuation of elitist colonial practices.

Fielding's History challenges these practices by asserting history's insistence on infiltrating the present. Rather than committing herself to a single political party,

Fielding inhabits the novel's margins to observe its historical characters. As a woman from an elite family who shuns her father's wealth and eventually becomes a disabled alcoholic journalist, Fielding belongs to neither the wealthy nor the working class, to 53 neither the woman's sphere nor the man's. She therefore moves among social, economic, and professional groups while fully belonging to none.

Fiedling's mutability helps her to better understand the relationships between these groups, an understanding that partially explains her concern with Prowse's History.

While Prowse is hailed by various characters, including Smallwood, as having written the authoritative version of Newfoundland history, its essentialization of Newfoundlandness and its concentration on colonial officials limits its representation to the history of one select group. In Prowse's book, settlers are considered the originaries of nothing more than the Newfoundland Folk. Prowse continually refers to their work ethic and their ability to overcome adversity rather than providing insight into their exploitation under colonial rule. Fielding creates an alternative version of Newfoundland history, the first

"authoritative" version produced by colonists that reflects what Boire terms the postcolonial "obsession" with writing an authentic national history (221). The brief history's irony discourages readers from considering Fielding's version as truly authoritative. Her satire insists that history be read critically and in varying versions, a combination of which provides a better concept of history than one isolated text.

While Smallwood is repulsed by his own legacy and by Newfoundland's,

Fielding's History suggests that Newfoundland's past will not dictate its future as long as its citizens critique colonial historiography. By mimicking Prowse, Fielding highlights the deficiencies in imperialist history to demonstrate that "[w]hat emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents..." (Bhabha, LC 125). Fielding unleashes her irony onto colonists from Cabot to Squires, undermining her contemporaries while challenging the history that helped them gain power. Still,

Fielding's satire does not repeat Prowse's rhetoric only to highlight its absurdity. Her writing more effectively supports Dee Home's claim that "the colonized writer can metamorphose mimicry into a partial repetition to critique and delegitimize the 'original' settlers and discourse and, contrary to Bhabha's view, re-present (rather than repeat) the settlers and their discourse" (255-56). Home analyzes a First-Nations author's ability to re-present European settler-invaders' discourses, but Fielding uses a similar technique when critiquing European colonial officials. She re-presents Newfoundland's original colonial authorities as power-desperate incompetents and its original colonial subjects as actual people with genuine anxieties rather than jolly, work-driven Folk.

Fielding's satires highlight the actions Newfoundlanders may take to reclaim political agency. Keefer argues, "Since tradition stands in opposition (as well as in inevitable relation) to that which is 'new,' 'avant-garde,' and 'post' everything, only from an awareness of traditional literary forms and practices can we gain the ground that will give us a critical perspective on what opposes them" (9). Fielding's History exposes colonists' various attempts to exercise physical control over Newfoundland by claiming the authority over the land that they exercise over settlers. However, while some colonial officials literally exploit Newfoundlanders to death, their control over the land is presented comically. Newfoundland's physical indomitability overshadows colonial efforts to claim authority over it. The land is even presented as manipulative and as mocking colonists; writing of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Fielding notes, "Upon leaving

Newfoundland for England, he takes with him a piece of turf and a small twig, symbols 55 of ownership which, unlike him, remain afloat when his ship sinks in the mid-Atlantic"

(44). The physical elements of Newfoundland survive while, according to Fielding, Sir

Humphrey inconsequentially drowns.

Fielding's History asserts that Newfoundland's geography resists imperial control, but it does not equate the people with the land. If a comparison to the land is intended to allegorize Newfoundlanders by suggesting that they will eventually escape colonial rule and become as autonomous as the mountains and ocean, the remainder of

Fielding's text suggests that Newfoundlanders' struggle against colonialism is not yet finished. She agrees with Slemon's suggestion,

the documents the subaltern historians consider in arriving at their sense of the

past are not those texts produced by oppressed figures - in most instances, such

texts simply do not exist - but rather are the bureaucratic reports, the legal

proceedings, the formal and informal administrative documentation produced by

the colonizers. ("Post-Colonial" 191)

Lacking original documents produced by exploited settlers, Fielding uses fictional settler texts to parody the imperial documents that compose Newfoundland's official history.

Fielding mocks these first "Newfoundland" texts, produced in the colonial voice, by introducing secondary Newfoundland texts, "literature produced 'under imperial license' by 'natives' or 'outcasts'" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 5). She re-writes Robert

Hayman's 1628 collection of textual oddities, titled Quodlibets, from settlers' perspectives, providing what Fielding considers to be more accurate descriptions of life in seventeenth-century Newfoundland. The published book, edited by William Vaughan

(the official owner of a colony he has never visited), extols, "The aire in Newfoundland is 56 wholesome, good," and "The earth more rich, you know it is no lesse/Where all are good, fire, water, earth and air,/What man made of these would not live there?" Fielding contends that Hayman's unpublished original manuscript reads, "The aire in

Newfoundland unwholesome is, not good....Against life do all the elements conspire.

Man made of water, earth, aire and fire,/Hearken not to William Vaughan, he is a liar"

(83-4).1J The revision echoes Said's description of Edward William Lane's writings on the Orient:

The eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial

configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality,

were reduced considerably when they appeared as a series of detailed items

presented in a normative European prose style. It is correct to say that in

Orientalizing the Orient, Lane not only defined but edited it; he excised from it

what.. .might have ruffled the European sensibility. {Orientalism 166-67)

By mocking deceptive colonial poetry, Fielding deliberately ruffles her readers' sensibilities. The technique serves a dual purpose: it helps Johnston's readers reflect on their own perceptions of Newfoundland history, and, as Smallwood presumably reads

Fielding's History, it warns him against adopting colonizers' politics.

Fielding is a fictitious character, and Johnston's fiction does not extend to having her affect political change. Instead, her history warns Smallwood not to emulate his political forefathers, whose perceptions of Newfoundland are clouded by their colonial attitudes and personal ambitions. Fielding's warnings to Smallwood culminate in her

13 Compare an anonymous poem dating from 1966, titled "Twenty-Third Psalm of the Liberals": "Smallwood is my shepherd, I'll not want/He makes me to lie down on park benches./He leadeth me beside the still factories...Such poverty and hard living shall follow the Liberal Party, and I shall dwell in a rented house forever" (Pottle 76). 57 argument that Sir Cavendish Boyle wrote two versions of "Ode to Newfoundland," a song written in 1904 that remains the province's official anthem. Her version generally mocks Boyle's romantic descriptions of Newfoundland, as she changes "When blinding storm gusts fret thy shore" to "When rotting sculpins line thy shore" (475), but the ode's final verse challenges colonial authority over Newfoundland. Fielding writes, "As lived our fathers, we live not,/Where once they knelt, we stand./With God nor King to guard our lot,/We '11 guard thee, Newfoundland" (475). Fielding's version of the "Ode" resembles an over-zealous call to arms against Newfoundland oppression, but this stanza emphasizes Newfoundlanders' responsibility to their nation's future. As a once-typical

Newfoundlander who imposes his political vision on the island, Smallwood might be intended to read this poem not as supporting his actions, but, considering

Newfoundlanders' love for their nation, as a warning against overconfidence in political power.

In suggesting that Newfoundlanders rally against exploitative political forces,

Fielding's revised "Ode" characterizes them as protectors of their imagined community.

However, her History also emphasizes Newfoundlanders' inability to prevent colonial officials from literally buying their province. According to Fielding, after completing the trans-island railway and negotiating a contract for its operation in 1898, Scots-Canadian railway mogul Robert G. Reid "has little choice but to consent to the following new terms: he must accept five thousand acres of Crown land per mile of new railway; if he wishes to own the Newfoundland railway outright for all time.. .he must assume ownership of the Newfoundland Telegraph service, the St. John's drydock" (425).

Fielding's irony emphasizes Newfoundland's status as a colonial commodity. It is 58 privatized and divided according to officials' whims, with no apparent consideration for

Newfoundlanders themselves.

This section of Fielding's History draws parallels to Canada's increasing political and economic control over Newfoundland. Authority is externally imposed on

Newfoundland by those with little interest in the island, but power begins shifting away from Britain and toward Canada long before the Second World War. Reid's entitlement to Newfoundland is similar to that granted to David Kirke in 1627, when Charles I granted Kirke a charter to the entire island (94). Prowse describes Kirke as "rolling out money, leasing out stages, selling liquor, and doing the general Newfoundland business"

(150). But while Kirke's stay in Newfoundland was brief, reducing the damage he could directly impose on settlers, Reid's absence from Newfoundland does not diminish his control over the island's transportation and telecommunication services. Fielding implies that technology makes international exploitation of Newfoundland easier and more desirable, and that Newfoundlanders should note North America's increasing influence over the British colony.

While Fielding fictionalizes most of her history, it reflects the actual increase in

North American interest in Newfoundland during World War II. This is particularly true of the United States, which becomes a neo-colonial power within Newfoundland. Rather than negating British influence and supporting Newfoundlanders' desire for political independence, Americans become a homogenizing and exploitative presence. Johnston first examines American neo-colonialism by depicting American society from within. As a young politician, Smallwood joins the socialist movement in New York City. When the movement collapses, he becomes homeless, sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park. His time 59 in the park ridicules the stereotypical American Dream. Smallwood quickly learns his own insignificance within the machine-like city, and realizes American society's ignorance of its impoverished citizens: "all of us who had come to the city convinced that we were exceptional, unique, were now beset by the same hackneyed fate, living out the last days of our stint in the big city.. .before we went back home to take up our roles as local object-lessons for those who imagined they were different" (183). Just as working- class Newfoundlanders have been denied historical individuality (at least until Fielding publishes her History), the men inhabiting Bryant Park become a homologous mass who cannot affect change for themselves or for the society that helps entrap them.

When American troops are stationed in St. John's during World War II, their presence creates the same promise that initially attracts Smallwood to America - the promise that impossible ambitions can be realized. However, this promise hinges on the homogenization and ensuing dehumanization that affects the men of Bryant Park. As

Smallwood's narrative moves through the war, it becomes clear that

a major consequence of the war was to reorient global power away from Britain

toward the United States. The dissolution of empire and the sudden (newly)

hegemonic presences to the south of a linguistically and culturally similar state,

through one much more assured of itself as a nation, brought about the urgent

need for a specifically Canadian definition of the nation. (Szeman 16)

Johnston is primarily concerned with exploring various definitions of Newfoundland rather than helping to define Canada, but optimistic American nationalism permeates his

St. John's. By 1945, Canada was immersed in American culture. According to Paul

Rutherford, Canadians encountered "the culture of sentiment, sensation, sin, and above all laughter - courtesy of the United States. The voice of Frank Sinatra, the detective novels of Mickey Spillane, the zany antics of Milton Berle, radio's soap operas, baseball and boxing, Betty Grable's legs and Jane Russell's bosom - all had legions of fans across the country" (195). The same is true of Smallwood's St. John's, where popular culture divides Americans from Newfoundlanders. Outside the movie theatre at Fort Pepperrell, patrons are segregated according to nationality. American servicemen enter the theatre while Newfoundlanders wait outside in the rain; Smallwood ineffectually shouts, '"Why should all the Yanks be going in?....What's wrong with Newfoundlanders? This is our country, isn't it?" (396). A soldier mockingly responds to Smallwood's concern for the wet patrons by remarking that Americans must enter first to claim the best seats, yet

Smallwood and the others remain in line. The desire for American entertainment, including films which open with propagandizing news reels, suppresses any real national sentiment and reinforces Newfoundland's increasing incorporation into North America.

By this point in Smallwood's narrative and the island's history, the United States effectively owns Newfoundland. The province becomes a commodity that Americans may use and store at their will. Historically, while Canadian interest in Newfoundland grew throughout the war, American interest declined as Newfoundland lost its strategic importance. Still, "American rights were locked in for ninety7nine years, and there was little need to even consider the bargaining of concessions for Newfoundland"

(MacKenzie 162). Johnston presents Newfoundlanders as partially complicit in this new form of colonialism. American neo-colonialism depends on the homogenizing mass 61 media that Johnston's Newfoundlanders desire more than they dislike American arrogance. David MacKenzie argues that the war effectively severed the ties between

Britain and Canada, and that the island became more isolated than ever before after transportation and communication lines to Britain were cut (161).14 He also notes that the American "invasion" of Newfoundland "virtually completed the integration of

Newfoundland into the North American economy" (161), facilitating the transition from

British colony to Canadian province/American neo-colony.

Johnston could have created a Smallwood who pursues Confederation believing that Newfoundland can make a new beginning within a new country, where it would not be exploited by colonial politicians or considered inherently inferior. Instead, the novel demonstrates "how Smallwood fits precisely into the rogues' gallery of cheating, exploiting, pragmatically expedient, duplicitous, compromising and self-aggrandizing politicians who, in Fielding's view, have shepherded Newfoundland to the point of abandoning nationhood" (Bak 228-29). Because he helps perpetuate colonial models rather than opposing them, Smallwood eventually models himself after the officials he claims to despise. His opposition to, even hatred of, his father causes Smallwood to rebel against a working-class future by aligning himself with wealthy, elite, and corrupt politicians. Therefore, Smallwood does not become Newfoundland's hero, but adopts similar attitudes to those of Prowse and Squires. His desperation for personal notoriety and his dream of being included in future editions of Prowse's History prevent

Smallwood from acting in Newfoundland's best interests. The novel's greatest tragedy is not that Newfoundlanders have been traditionally exploited, nor that Smallwood has been

14 MacKenzie's argument only accounts for the effects on the state of Newfoundland, and does not consider the lasting cultural effects British imperialism has on the province. 62 maltreated for much of his life, but that Smallwood himself exploits and mistreats

Newfoundlanders.

While Fielding uses her writing to subvert Newfoundland history, Smallwood attempts to challenge history by raising his socio-economic status and becoming

Newfoundland's first premier. His intentions are not entirely self-serving, as he genuinely appears to despise colonial rule and wishes to help Newfoundland achieve a responsible measure of independence. Still, Smallwood's ambition marks each of his personal and professional decisions. Paul Chafe argues that Smallwood "represents an unknown entity, a Newfoundlander unashamed of his heritage and unwilling to be transformed into a colonial mimic man" (334). By championing openly corrupt politicians and later assuming roles similar to Squires's and Prowse's (in that professional gain usurps Smallwood's concerns for his family and for Newfoundland's greatest good),

Smallwood does become a mimic man - a colonized person who assumes the colonizers' attitudes and behaviours. Granted, Smallwood does not discredit Newfoundlanders' ability to self-govern. He claims that each of his bungled attempts to entice industry into

Newfoundland is a failed effort to improve the province's economy and international status.

Smallwood's attraction to Dr. Alfred Valdmanis, his "specialist in economic development" (503) and former "chief public prosecutor and director-general of justice in occupied Latvia" (512), exposes Smallwood's desire for personal, rather than provincial, glory. Smallwood admits, "I was infatuated, not so much with Valdmanis, as with the man he was impersonating, who had all those qualities that I felt the lack of in myself- worldliness, sophistication, business savvy, education, culture, taste, refinement" (514). 63

Not only does Smallwood admire Valdmanis's facade rather than recognizing the corrupt embezzler beneath, he perceives non-existent qualities in the man because he is foreign to

Newfoundland. Smallwood looks outside his own nation for cultural refinement,15 and, following Valdmanis's advice, squanders the $45-million surplus the province carries into Confederation. Newfoundland is merely a tool for increasing Smallwood's political importance. Ultimately, the island becomes a mere setting for Smallwood's induction into history, and a place that he seems to care for no more than the colonizers before him cared for it.

Reflecting the worry that Smallwood's fictional (and historical) career does not end Newfoundland's colonial legacy, the novel's final "Field Day" column recounts the story of Shawnawdithit, also known as Nancy April, who is recorded as "the last Beothuk

Indian" (556). This conclusion is both insightful and troubling. Several critics express concern with Johnston's last-minute introduction of the Beothuk, and worry that their history is being reduced to allegory. Fuller notes, "because Colony only mentions

Newfoundland's Aboriginal history in passing prior to Fielding's final column,

Johnston's inclusion of'Nancy April's' story is sudden, unexpected, decontextualized, and, because Fielding speculates on the parallels with her own life story, problematically naive and romantic" ("Strange" 33). If Fielding claims aboriginal status - the position of

Newfoundland originary - she may twist aboriginal history to align it with her own.16

According to Atwood, there are moments in Canadian literature when "Indian as

15 His attitude is comparable to Squires's, who also links political success to a non-Newfoundland culture. Squires's attempts to maintain British traditions, such as dressing his butler in silk stockings and a doublet, are presented as ridiculous, but Smallwood does not take caution from this example. 16 As the story appears in the book's final edition of "Field Day," it is difficult to know whether any parallels Fielding creates between her own story and Shawnawdithit's are intended to be ironic. Still, the column has a serious tone that other editions lack, suggesting that, for perhaps the first time, Fielding writes exactly what she means. tormentor and Indian as sufferer both permit the author the same kind of identification -

identification with a victim, whether white or red - and the same necessity-bound

outlook" (102). If Fielding's intent in relating Shawnawdithit's story is only to compare the Beothuk woman's suffering to her own, then she participates in the history her writing deliberately deconstructs. Rather than giving Shawnawdithit her own voice, as

she does with the settlers in her History, Fielding appropriates the woman's suffering.

If Fielding allegorizes Shawnawdithit's life, she engages in the dangerous critical practice of assuming that all colonial subjects are the same, and observes no differences between a settler's and an indigenous person's experiences. However, Fielding eventually reveals that she was most attracted to this story during her confinement in "the

San," when she "was young enough to think that Nancy and I had a lot in common"

(558). Whether the similarities between Fielding's and "Nancy's" experiences are real or constructed, Fielding demands they be analysed. Her insistence on comparing

Shawnawdithit's story to her own (or to Newfoundlanders' in general) reveals Fielding's desire to detach herself from all associations with colonizing nations, including Canada.

Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson argue, "In becoming more like the indigene whom he mimics, the settler becomes less like the atavistic inhabitant of the cultural homeland whom he is also reduced to mimicking" (369). Having seen Newfoundland historically exploited by Britain, treated with capitalist contempt by the United States, and marginalized within Canada, Fielding's final column distinguishes her from all colonizing countries by giving herself indigenous status. This is not to suggest that she does not recognize the differences between her experience and Shawnawdithit's, but that 65 maturity allows Fielding to perceive the similarities between colonizers' experiences without homogenizing them.

Before leaving Newfoundland for New York, Smallwood dreams, "I was sailing out through the Narrows.. .1 stood in the boat and called for help, but by then I had rounded the point and.. .the harbour lights had vanished" (132). The dream highlights the increasing difficulty of sustaining Newfoundland identities within a global context.17

Smallwood continues, "I made to touch my arms to reassure myself of my existence, but it seemed that even my own body had disappeared. I tried to shout again for help, but could make no sound" (133). As an individual, he becomes inconsequential after leaving the island. Readers might imagine that he merges with the international forces threatening the island's political and cultural independence. Fielding's conclusion raises similar possibilities, yet her account manages to be both fatalistic and hopeful. She claims, "It doesn't matter to the mountains that we joined Confederation, nor to the bogs, the barrens, the rivers or the rocks" (560), echoing the suggestions in her History that the land thwarts colonial rule. Her observation is also similar to Wayne's listing of geographical features in Baltimore's Mansion - a compulsion to assure oneself of permanence during times of political and personal change. Fielding identifies "[t]he river of what might have been" (560), the chronic regret that haunts her, the Johnston family, and, she implies, all post-Confederation Newfoundlanders. She writes, "We have joined a nation that we do not know, a nation that does not know us" (560), but this novel

17 The passage could also be read as suggesting that Newfoundlanders' existence depends on maintaining connections to the land, which supports criticisms that Johnston romanticizes Newfoundland's geography. For example, Fuller argues that Johnston's employment of tropes that evoke the rhetoric of tourist literature "within an elegiac narrative risks reinforcing the ex-centric 'otherness' of the Newfoundland sold to tourists" (Strange 31). Readers should be careful not to assume that all members of an imagined community imagine that community in the same way, and should take caution against framing Newfoundlanders as Others because they inhabit a unique landscape. suggests that Newfoundlanders' greatest challenge involves gaining the self-knowledge that has been historically denied by colonial pedagogies and politics. It also suggests that, to constructively engage with their new nation, Newfoundlanders cannot perpetuate colonial structures. Instead, they can challenge a history of exploitation and make

Newfoundland "known" within its new nation.

Chapter Four

The Navigator of New York: Forgetting Newfoundland 67

Like The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston's The Navigator of New York re-imagines history to challenge contemporary (neo-)colonialism. The Stead-Cook family saga can be read as an allegory for changes in the colonial relationship between

Newfoundland and the United States. The Newfoundland protagonist, Devlin Stead, undergoes radical changes in his self-perception and his assessments of Newfoundland once the American explorer Frederick Cook reveals himself as Devlin's biological father.

With a new father, whose heroism contrasts Francis Stead's abandonment of his family,

Devlin believes he can re-shape his identity and reject the failure associated with his

Newfoundland parentage.

After Francis Stead's death, Devlin's Aunt Daphne comforts him by emphasizing his individuality: '"You are not the sum of your parents. You are you. Devlin" (42).

Only when he learns that his biological father is neither a Stead nor a Newfoundlander does Devlin take interest in his patrilineage. Rather than rebelling against his biological father, Devlin seeks an identity that rejects Stead's patrilineal legacy in favour of Cook's.

The opposition Devlin perceives between his two fathers mimics his opposition of

Newfoundland and New York. He tries to abandon his Newfoundland identity for an

American identity, and does not initially perceive the neo-colonial dangers of America's

Manifest Destiny. Only after Devlin realizes the destructive nature of American expansion does he reject its ideals and begin establishing an identity that is distinct from his infamous father's.

Upon learning that Cook is his biological father, Devlin reiterates the theme echoing through Johnston's work: that an impostor inhabits the family/national throne.

He realizes, "If the claims made by Dr. Cook were true, my father had gone from being a 68 man whom I could not remember to one whom I had never met" (51). Most of

Johnston's characters are tormented by absent fathers, but Devlin embraces a new patrilineage. While Wayne is haunted by his family "monarchy" and Smallwood struggles to claim the national throne, Devlin is initially desperate to meet the man representing this novel's version of the absent family king whose return has finally come.

Rather than situating the familial "king" in Newfoundland after he is healed of his emotional wounds, Johnston locates Cook in New York City - an emerging Camelot in an increasingly globalized society. This change to Newfoundland's "informing myth" is troubling, as it causes a Newfoundland character to leave the island in search of new personal and national identities. This novel suggests that temporarily leaving the island facilitates identity-formation, but, in Devlin's case, the resulting identity sometimes discourages a character's return to Newfoundland. As Devlin's father is a resident of the

"New World," Devlin's inheritance is also rooted in the United States, away from

Newfoundland and the unique liminal position it offers.

In The Navigator of New York, Johnston contrasts his Newfoundland characters' fears of national failure with the American impetus toward global domination. Cook and his rival, Robert Peary, "embody the ambivalence of the social and technological advancement of the new America, which is portrayed as an erroneous association of forward movement with vitality and improvement, masking a'Darwinian fear of being upstaged or abandoned" (Wyile, "Historical" 94). Their common anxieties link the colonized island and the neo-colonial nation, and imply that fear is central to various manifestations of colonialism. The danger in making fear-based choices is clear in

Johnston's representation of the ultra-modern American city, which he portrays as a 69 model to "developing" cities like St. John's. Like Smallwood, Devlin lives in a

Newfoundland dominated by colonial influences and essentialist attitudes. Devlin's descriptions of the cliffs around St. John's harbour, the ocean as viewed from Signal Hill, and the tortuous, winding city roads give the impression of a city "on the edge of civilization" (18), overwhelmed (and sustained) by its geographic location. This perspective raises a potential concern with Johnston's treatment of Newfoundland geography and its effect on Newfoundlanders. If the people are equated with the land, or defined in opposition to it, they may easily fall into Folk categories. However, by writing the novel from Devlin's perspective, Johnston reveals how an expatriate Newfoundland character can assume essentialist attitudes similar to those shared by the novel's

American characters.

Devlin represents St. John's as a transitional space between England, Canada, and

America, a comparison warranted by the city's importance to international trade and travel. His first sight of the ocean permanently changes Devlin's perceptions of urban life: "Sky. Wind. Light. Air. Cold. Grey. Far. Salt. Smell. Now all these words meant something they had never meant before, and the word sea contained them all" (19). The city's residents may stay as long as the land and ocean permit, but at their own risk and often only en route to other destinations. Devlin's descriptions of a city dependent on the ocean, whose residents foster often oppressive relationships, implies that the modernity characterizing New York is inaccessible to Newfoundland's urban areas. He does not initially comprehend the possibilities inherent in this liminal space, but associates

Newfoundland with an obstructive family legacy and New York with exciting possibilities. 70

Devlin joins the people of St. John's in believing that, when Francis Stead abandons his family in favour of polar exploration, "[i]t was as if some latent flaw in the

Stead character had shown itself at last" (5). Devlin refers to his family's apparent hereditary weakness, but the perception echoes the colonial rhetoric Johnston employs in

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which resists depictions of Newfoundlanders as inherently inferior to colonial officials. Referring to the earlier novel, Chafe writes, "It is onto this sea of admitted incompetence that Johnston launches his protagonists, characters who are born of this failure and are born into it" (330). The concept applies equally to The Navigator of New York. Devlin is born into a colony that is considered inferior to (neo-)colonizing nations, and into a family that is considered inferior by other

Newfoundlanders. He is doubly marginalized, as a Newfoundlander and as a Stead, and desperately wishes to escape the sad fate others ascribe to him.

Rather than challenging colonial perceptions of Newfoundland, Devlin joins colonizers in perceiving the island as a child compared to "modern" nations. He therefore associates his life in Newfoundland with childhood and believes that his journey to New York will initiate him into manhood. Even though Devlin first leaves the island at the age of twenty, crossing the Brooklyn bridge several years later reminds him of "my first crossing from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, of a childhood that seemed more unreal as each day passed" (314). Devlin leaves a colony, which is not intended to achieve the independence and ambition associated with modernity, for the city that epitomizes American social, technological, and imperial pre-eminence. The move suggests that he leaves not only to find Cook and permanently abandon his 71

Newfoundland identity, but to achieve an adulthood denied him by his reputation as

"that Stead boy."

As the novel is presumably narrated by an older Devlin than the adolescent inhabiting St. John's, his reflections on St. John's reveal the expatriate Newfoundlander's desire to romanticize his home. Exposed to New York's stunning technology and bitter disappointments, Devlin views the nation in similar terms as Imre Szeman, who writes:

The nation in the decolonizing world is.. .envisioned as a potential buffer against

modernity as much as it is seen as a sign of independence, that is, as an enclosed

space (geographically, politically, culturally) that modernity cannot easily

penetrate, a specific space (or place) as opposed to the abstract ones (or

nonplaces) increasingly produced by modernity. (6)

No nation is unaffected by modernity, and Devlin essentializes Newfoundland in suggesting that St. John's is defined only by its landscape. Devlin's initial experience of

New York, a city whose people defy and mould the land, causes him to construct binary oppositions between St. John's/New York and Newfoundland/America. Even though he recognizes Newfoundland's position between the Old and New Worlds (Andrews 45),

Devlin does not immediately recognize the negative consequences of anonymity and technological advancement. He earnestly believes in the American Dream, and assures himself, "I would, in the immigrant tradition, start all over in America, where it would be easy to believe that my past in Newfoundland had never been" (127). Johnston presents

Devlin's enthusiasm with such naivety as to encourage readers' scepticism. He contrasts

Devlin's views of the city with Cook's to reveal the barriers New York presents to individuals' success. In a letter to Devlin, Cook writes of the city, "The streets are 72 crammed with traffic, so other 'streets' have been built above them, the el trains that block out what little sun would otherwise find its way down to the streets. The rivers are jammed with ferries, so bridges must be built above the rivers, and bridges built on bridges" (135). Just as Smallwood inhabits a city filled with nameless people, Devlin's

New York seems to progress independently of its residents. Cook's account reveals a city that grows nearly beyond control, and of its own volition.

Perhaps because Cook is himself an immigrant who grew up in the largely invisible New York working class, his ability to critically reflect on his city exceeds

Devlin's. Cook's many letters to his son describe a city whose expansion impedes its citizens' desire to recognize other nations and cultures. Cook relates an incident during

Amelia Stead's visit to New York: "Newfoundland's complete obliteration would not have made one person in this city pause, she said. If Newfoundland were to vanish from the earth, it would not slow down the progress of the Brooklyn Bridge" (67). The sentiment reflects the United States' self- and international importance, and British colonies seem inconsequential in the shadow of its technological developments. Devlin is seduced by the anonymity the city offers. Smallwood is nearly consumed and forgotten by New Yorkers' apathy toward the city's poor, unknown inhabitants, but

Devlin's unwanted fame as "that Stead boy" makes anonymity attractive.

Invisible in a city of thousands, Devlin literally becomes the navigator of New

York (Honnighausen 154). He wants to abandon his notorious identity as a Stead, but cannot help inhabiting a liminal space between the Old and New Worlds. Devlin is pushed to the margins of Newfoundland and New York societies. He belongs wholly to neither world, but is a colonial subject in a neo-colonial society. This position could help 73

Devlin to critique American imperial practices, but his initial naivety prevents him from considering American interests as potentially threatening to other nations. When Devlin first arrives in New York, he believes that the city represents a globally dominant culture that incorporates and celebrates other cultures. He compares Manhattan to a museum, "in which all the peoples and cultures of the world were on display - a live exhibit showing all levels and sub-levels of society; the latest advancements in technology; all known occupations, modes of dress, forms of art and entertainment; all known languages" (180).

Blinded by what he supposes to be a culture of acceptance and inclusion, Devlin supports

American ideals. Therefore, he willingly helps Cook increase New World expansion, regardless of American imperialism's negative consequences.

Most of Johnston's novels "demonstrate a desire for paternal authority; his characters want to know where they fit in the chain of communal and genetic inheritance"

(Sugars, "Notes" 153). This is no less true of Devlin that of Baltimore's Mansion's

Wayne. When he meets Cook, who promises him escape from the stigma of Francis

Stead's abandonment, Devlin falls in love with this promise and ignores the impossibility of severing himself from his personal history. The initial promise of America gives

Devlin hope that he can escape the Stead legacy and adopt his biological father's - a legacy of exploration, adventure, and seemingly assured fame. Devlin believes that

"New York is a place from where he can continue to erase his past and shape his future on his terms" (Andrews 48). However, as Johnston's narrative unfolds, it reveals that

Devlin can neither escape his past nor form his future independent of external influence.

Unlike those of Johnston's other Newfoundland characters, Devlin's

Newfoundland identity is almost completely obscured, and readers may easily forget that he is a Newfoundlander. His wonder at New York exposes his foreignness to the United

States, but there is little about Devlin's character that is distinctly "Newfoundland-ish."

Certainly, not all Newfoundland characters behave alike or share identical concerns, and

Johnston's books present varying versions of Newfoundland identity. Devlin is distinct among these characters in that he appears unconcerned with developing his identity as a

Newfoundlander and very interested in developing an American identity similar to his father's. Devlin struggles to define himself as a member of a distinct nation rather than as a member of a nation caught between colonizing forces. Remembering his departure from Newfoundland, he writes, "I, I now realized, was of neither the Old World nor the

New, but from a place so discrete, so singular that it required a periodic consultation of history books and maps to dispel the notion that human life there had begun independently of human life elsewhere" (143). Rather than suggesting that

Newfoundland's distinctiveness is a positive characteristic, Devlin wishes to be assimilated into the New World, thereby denying the unique liminal position

Newfoundland offers him.

Regardless of his national affiliations, Devlin inherits the same colonial history as all Newfoundlanders, and must contend with this history from within neo-colonial

America. Wyile offers insight into Devlin's historical burden and its relationship to the

United States' emerging international importance:

As in Johnston's previous fiction, the protagonist finds himself burdened by the

past and the pressure of social expectations, growing up at the epicentre of a

historical struggle and having to define himself while shouldering the weight of a

history of which he is largely unaware. In Navigator, however, those forces, in 75

the form of Cook and Peary, are associated with different facets of the emerging

American empire.. ..Marginal Newfoundland in the form of Devlin and Amelia

Stead is sucked into the vortex of American ambition and progress, as Johnston

shifts the focus of his fiction to explore America at the dawn of its imperial

power. ("Historical" 93)

From allegorical and historical perspectives, Newfoundland is used and deceived to further American ambitions. The country that seduces Devlin focuses on competition and the inevitability of success in all national endeavours. Francis Stead considers

Newfoundland as inherently inferior to the United States, and claims that he must leave the island because "[g]reat contests were under way, races for the North Pole and the

South Pole, and no one who did not live in some great city like New York was considered a serious contender" (11). Like Devlin, Francis Stead tires of belonging to an "anti- modern" nation that he believes cannot compete with American advancement and enthusiasm. By perpetuating such neo-colonialist ideologies,-Stead, who is himself a settler subject, reaffirms American dominance by defining his own nation in comparison to another. While American expansionism remains principally economic, "it is still highly dependent and moves together with, upon, cultural ideas and ideologies about

America itself, ceaselessly reiterated in public" (Said, CI 289). Johnston faces the difficulty of writing a Newfoundland literature that acknowledges America's historical and contemporary influence over the island without suggesting that Newfoundlanders must inevitably conform to American cultural models. He faces similar challenges as

Third World authors, of whom Timothy Brennan asks, How does the Third World writer participate in national culture under the

conditions of what Herbert Schiller calls 'the monopolization of culture' by

ceaseless western commercial and informational outpourings? What chance does

the natio [a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging] have

against this constant reminder of dependency? (60)

Second World writers are not only affected by Western modernization, but participate in its evolution and increase its global dominance. Devlin shares this problem with

Johnston, and as the narrative progresses, he begins to realize his role in propagating a culture based on deceptive national symbols.

Devlin's liminal perspective eventually helps him to observe the troubling nature of New World nationalism. When remembering his first meeting with Peary, Devlin describes the explorer as a spectre-like symbol of American imperialism: "The wind gusted for a moment and his trousers became a pair of flags, so that I could see the stick­ like outline of his legs...he might have been the commander of some long-besieged army who had come out to offer the enemy a ceremonial surrender" (254). Peary merits

Devlin's criticism as Cook's primary rival to "discovering" the North Pole, yet Devlin's willingness to allegorically criticize the explorer suggests that Devlin does not lose his individuality to an overwhelming city and nation. He is not consumed by what Wyile terms the American "vortex." By critiquing the country's central values of patriotism and militarism, Devlin's observation suggests that, although he wishes to become American, he will not blindly accept American ideals.

This novel's similarities to Johnston's memoir and other historical fictions is not surprising, but The Navigator of New York also shares central concerns with the only 77 book Johnston has set entirely outside Newfoundland. Human Amusements chronicles the life of the Prendergast family, who become isolated - enisled - once they achieve television fame. Jeanette Lynes suggests that this novel is concerned with "the confrontation between a small world - the Prendergast family.. .and techno-culture's global agenda. This margin-centre conflict involves regionalist difference pitted against hegemonic, nationalized corporate centrality" (88).18 A similar statement can be made of

The Navigator of New York and the Stead/Cook family. This novel does not focus on corporate America, but on a more literal global agenda: that of the American Manifest

Destiny. Throughout the narrative, Devlin's world expands from his St. John's neighbourhood to include New York City and, thanks to Gook, the uncharted Arctic.

However, Devlin always seems trapped within his surroundings, never able to fully inhabit the larger spaces that excite him. In Cook's Brooklyn house, Devlin is all but confined to "The Dakota," a hitherto unused apartment that houses memories of the life

Cook might have led as Amelia's husband and Devlin's father. Although Devlin freely accesses the city, his private space is restricted. This contributes to his ability to observe the city from a liminal position, as his living arrangement denies Devlin an identity as

Cook's son. The Dakota relegates Devlin to Cook's "river of what might have been," positioning him as a Newfoundlander, like his mother, who may visit New York but can never fully claim a home or family in the city.

This restriction ironically contradicts Cook's claim that "Americans like to think that anything is possible, that ours is a country of limitless opportunity for all. One cannot believe in that and believe in fate" (285). The statement itself is paradoxical, as

18 Lynes's analogy is insightful, but establishes a centre/margin binary that places nations and provinces into overly strict categories. It is more useful to think of regions and nations as engaged in relationships that must be constantly renegotiated, rather than in opposition to each other. 78

Manifest Destiny centres on the concept that the United States is fated for global domination. The presumed inevitability of American destiny justifies neo-colonial actions and helps Cook excuse his control over Devlin. Cook's insistence that Devlin appear as his protege rather than his son reveals that Cook doubts his own statement. The father and son's living arrangements reveal unhomeliness's effects on their relationship;

Cook's concern for his public image as a heroic American motivates his decision to recognize Devlin as his illegitimate, Newfoundlander son only in private. Afraid of being embarrassed before the community of explorers, Cook keeps his son a secret, knowing that limitless opportunity exists only for those with impeccable public images and wealthy investors.

As an explorer charged with spreading American global dominance, Cook's devotion to his career and ambitions to achieve personal and national fame are as obsessive as Smallwood's. Devlin relates,

The wisdom, the reflectiveness, his sceptical but sympathetic view of life as it

was lived in cities, the desire to accomplish something he would be remembered

for and thereby set himself apart from the common run of men, but only if that

something was truly worthwhile - all these qualities, I felt certain, he had

acquired or refined since he took up exploration. (105-06)

National and personal ambitions are conflated in Cook's mind, and he becomes willing to sacrifice his familial commitments, his ethics, and ultimately, his relationship with Devlin to achieve his goals. Cook exemplifies Kertzer's claim that "the nation has continued to inspire religious devotion...Traditionally, the nation is born in bloodshed and sanctified by suffering, which turns historical nastiness into national destiny" (175). Devlin's 79 narrative vilifies Peary's ambitiousness, even though it mirrors Cook's, and concentrates on Peary's insidious actions against his fellow explorer. However, Devlin does not take warning from Cook's admission that the poles will be achieved "by a succession of enlightening, educative failures" (88). Cook is willing to make sacrifices in order to gain eventual fame, and, like Peary (and Smallwood), Cook eventually compromises his family and ethics to achieve this ambition. Similar decisions made by early twentieth- century explorers would likely not have seemed unethical at the time. By addressing postcolonial issues pertinent to the twenty-first century, Johnston's narrative invites an anachronistic reading, even if readers are only intended to compare historical colonial practices with contemporary concerns.

Cook's major contribution to American expansion involves his expeditions to

"discover" Arctic territories. While The Colony of Unrequited Dreams presents settlers as exterminating the Beothuk and invading their land, the Arctic's virgin territory is virtually un-claimable. This excites and frustrates explorers, who realize that the North

Pole is not a static point of land, but consists of constantly shifting ice floes. This instability is irresistible to American explorers, who realize that "what is already known cannot be discovered, what already has a name cannot be named" (Lawson,

"Postcolonial" 155). The Arctic relieves explorers of the necessity of emptying the land of any indigenous significance, as it contains no inhabitants. This becomes crucial to

Cook's falsifying his North Pole discovery, as the only people present when he supposedly achieves the Pole are his son and two Inuit guides. The guides' presence legitimizes the "discovery"; explorers seem to believe that, as members of an indigenous nation, Inuit guides' testimony authenticates their claims. 80

As in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, First Peoples serve only to advance the white protagonists' plots. In both cases, these characters are narrated from the protagonists' perspective; rather than pointing to a troubling tendency in Johnston's fiction, Devlin's characterization of the Inuit reveals the self-centred nature of American expansion. He does not allegorize the Inuit as Fielding allegorizes Shawnawdathit, but, unlike Fielding, Devlin does not seem to perceive the similarities among differently colonized peoples. The guides' success and Devlin's both rely on Cook's willingness to credit them with helping him achieve personal/national success. The similarities between

Cook's exploitation of the Inuit and Devlin to authenticate his false claim to the Pole demonstrate Devlin's continued ignorance of neo-colonialism's seductiveness, which causes his own father to exploit Devlin's inexperience.

American explorers did not intend to settle the Arctic, but wished to establish a national presence in the region, thereby permanently identifying the North Pole as

American imperial territory. In this way, America's relationship to the Arctic resembles settler colonies' relationship to Britain: "Vast and empty lands, insistently recorded in both texts and visual images, called out, obviously, to the European imagination to be filled, and they were filled by, successively, people, crops, and herds, but also by the stories and histories that, like the economically-productive crops, legitimated the settlement" (Johnston and Lawson 364). Just as legends legitimated colonial settlements, explorers rely on legends that publicize their "discoveries." The lack of inhabitants on the shifting polar ice facilitates neo-colonial legend-creation and, in Cook's case, nearly ensures that the distinction between legend and lie remains unquestioned. 81

If Cook's primary ambition was to advance his nation rather than achieve personal glory, his false claim to the Pole negates this goal. After receiving temporary national adoration, Cook appears unconcerned that his country will face international ridicule. Cook never seems to regret his actions, even though his disgrace eventually causes him to permanently sever communication with Devlin. His desire to make himself into a hero shares similar origins with Smallwood's. Both men wish to become national and international legends, and both ultimately desire personal fame more than their nation's welfare. Unlike Smallwood, however, Cook's legendary status is largely constructed by the mass media that infiltrates every character's consciousness. In this novel, as in Human Amusements, the media is presented as a major force in constructing history, even if the resulting account is factually untrue. In an interview, Johnston discusses his own relationship with the media, noting that, growing up in Newfoundland,

'"The only outside world I ever saw was on television, and I didn't really even believe that world existed'" (Renzetti Dl). Devlin shares Johnston's sentiment; although his explorations take place before television's invention, he quickly learns that the media accounts he is exposed to are unreliable at best, and are often totally fabricated.

Cook's and Peary's lives are religiously recorded in New York newspapers, and constant media pressure causes both explorers to develop distinctly different public and private identities. Although "Cook reminds Devlin that the United States, as a new nation, with no ties to Britain (unlike the dominion of Newfoundland), is uniquely positioned to honour the risks that its heroes take" (Andrews 49), he fails to note that the country's desire to create new heroes often compromises journalistic, and historical, integrity. When Devlin is credited with saving Peary from falling overboard from his 82 ship, a newspaper biography identifies him as Francis Stead's son and begins weaving a myth around Cook's young protege,

Almost nothing was said of Aunt Daphne and Uncle Edward, who were referred

to only as 'the aunt and uncle by whom Mr. Stead was raised,' which somehow

made it sound as if.. .1 had grown up in a household so swarming with their

offspring that I had more or less been left to raise myself, thereby developing the

hardihood and quick-thinking resourcefulness that in Greenland had so well

served me and Lieutenant Peary. (273)

Disregarding the event's factual details, the media projects a publicly acceptable image onto Devlin: that of the working-class Newfoundland boy who achieves a measure of fame by exhibiting the courage to rescue a legendary explorer. Cook claims that revealing the true account of the event is pointless, asserting Hay den White's claim that

"[u]nless at least two versions of the same events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself (20).

Plurality is essential to narrating history,19 and this novel emphasizes mass media's historiographic role. The media's version of history is almost entirely fabricated, but newspaper reports become official historical documents, creating a national history based on public appeal rather than factual accuracy.

The public's ability to imagine a different version of history than the history remembered by direct participants suggests that public desire for national heroes encourages falsifications. After Cook and Devlin's failed attempt at reaching Mt.

19 This concept counters some of Johnston's critics by suggesting that, because Johnston's books represent one type of historical narrative (albeit a fictionalized narrative), they still represent a version of reality. 83

McKinley's summit, "Dr. Cook was at first convinced that his reputation was ruined, but all that the public cared about and fastened upon were the hardships we endured and the obstacles we overcame. A trip by raft down an uncharted glacial river was the highlight"

(320). This newspaper article demonstrates that the public is little concerned with factual evidence, but yearns for heroes who can be interviewed and photographed. As in The

Colony of Unrequited Dreams, "the writing of history itself is seen as a con-game between duplicitous and blatantly falsifying document lists, original versions waging war against amended, bowdlerized, suppressed or otherwise fictionalized or apocryphal accounts" (Bak 231). American newspaper reports act similarly to official colonial documents, as both create publicly "acceptable" versions of history. In The Navigator of

New York, there are few wars waged between fictional(ized) and "actual" historical accounts. Media coverage promises an international fame too seductive for the explorers to resist.

Along with media attention, the American impetus toward technological and imperial advancements allows Peary, Cook, and Devlin to feel as if they exist outside of history (Frye, "Levels" 201). As American legends, they transcend historical accounts to assume national symbolic status. This is particularly important for Devlin, whose personal and colonial histories shame him throughout his youth. Again, unhomeliness invades Devlin's life, as the public image constructed around Devlin informs his consciousness and private existence. This novel also explores the impossibility of being severed from the public sphere. Cook and Devlin's expedition in the Arctic separates them from civilization, but neo-colonial attitudes continue to influence Cook's consciousness. Only when he, Devlin, and their guides become trapped in a cave during 84 a blizzard and are near death does Cook put aside his ambitions and act like Devlin's father: "Dr. Cook, who was lying beside me, took my hand. 'Don't be afraid, Devlin,' he said, his voice a harsh whisper. 'Don't be afraid, my son. Go back to sleep.'" (406).

The cave becomes a space similar to The Dakota, where the father-son relationship can be developed away from public attention. However, immediately after their release from the cave, the intimacy between father and son dissipates. Devlin's narrative shifts its focus onto the explorers' arrival in Denmark and the ensuing media attention. The shift establishes distance between the father and son, and seemingly prepares Devlin to narrate

Cook's disgrace.

Most of Devlin's representations of Cook in the novel's final chapters emphasize the explorer's love of his heroic national status. Devlin and Cook never again appear emotionally close. Cook becomes part of an unrealistic spectacle, and consequently loses part of his individuality; Devlin writes of an archway erected for the explorers upon their return to New York,

It was a garish spectacle, painted with Arctic scenes and hung with imitation

icicles.. .At the centre of the arch was a giant cameo-shaped portrait of Dr. Cook,

and above it a banner that proclaimed, in letters six feet high, "WE BELIEVE IN

YOU." As we passed beneath the arch, a number of white pigeons were released.

(433)

Their own legend-status prevents the explorers from having a public father-son relationship, and the fanfare transforms them into stagnant national symbols rather than anxious human beings. 85

Devlin's eventual return to Newfoundland signals his realization that his identity cannot be adequately developed without recognizing his connections to the island.20 His separation from Cook at the novel's end suggests that Devlin can begin constructing an identity that neither rejects his Newfoundland past nor forgets his experiences with

American neo-colonialism. Like Wayne and Smallwood, Devlin leaves Newfoundland believing that it hampers his personal development. However, Devlin soon discovers that he cannot abandon his history. His identity breaks away from the restrictions imposed on it by Francis Stead's abandonment and Cook's manipulations, but Devlin becomes content only upon realizing that his fathers' legacies inevitably shape his character. He recognizes that familial legacies cannot be escaped, and that he must accept both his

Newfoundland and New York parentages. Aunt Daphne is incorrect in assuring Devlin he is not the sum of his parents, but Devlin's contentment at the novel's conclusion suggests that the combination of New World and liminal legacies need not destroy regional affiliations.

20 It is tempting to agree with Jennifer Andrews's argument that Devlin rejects his father's decisions in favour of his mother's (52), but this novel is so male-centric and the female characters are so one- dimensional that this reading is difficult to sustain. 86

Conclusion

Johnston's historical narratives engage with and resist the postcolonial processes affecting the province. His work asserts the need for Newfoundlanders to retain and continue to develop a sense of the Newfoundland self. Newfoundlanders' ability to recognize international influences on the province is key to this identity-development.

Even though Newfoundlanders cannot eradicate neo-colonial practices, constructive definitions of Newfoundlandness can balance the effects of these practices. Johnston evokes different versions of this definition to argue that, while it is difficult to incorporate diverse, even conflicting, elements of personal and national history into their identities,

Newfoundlanders should not accept essentialist roles and attributes. Instead, they must recognize the opportunities that Newfoundland's liminal position offers, and observe their culture's development in relation to British, American, and Canadian societies.

Blindly forgetting the past, especially a traumatic past, could promote

Newfoundland's assimilation into North American culture. Actively remembering and questioning history can help Newfoundlanders resist marginalization by or assimilation into a dominant culture. Johnston's books imply that Newfoundlanders who resist essentialist representations help to ensure the survival of distinct Newfoundland traditions. His memoir and historical fictions begin recognizing the deficiencies in colonial historiography, and create a Newfoundland voice that challenges (neo-)colonial authority.

Like Fielding, whose voice disrupts Prowse's essentialist history and

Smallwood's self-centric narrative, Johnston uses his writing to insert Newfoundlanders' voices into the province's official colonial history. He rejects-representations of 87

Newfoundland as an immature colony and region by creating strong, mature literary voices, and by insisting that Newfoundlanders are better able to narrate their experiences than colonial officials or Folk enthusiasts. The inscription of essentialist identities into colonial history strengthened and legitimated stereotypical definitions of Newfoundland, a practice that continues in media ranging from tourist brochures to "Newfie" jokes.

Johnston recognizes the power of written representation in forming Newfoundland identity, and uses this technique against (neo-)colonial forces. This creates space for multiple authorial voices that help readers re-examine concepts of the province. Rather than perpetuating Newfoundland stereotypes, Johnston insists on Newfoundlanders' plurality while celebrating their common heritage.

The generation of Newfoundlanders born before Confederation will soon be gone, making it increasingly important that younger generations actively pursue an understanding of their legacies' origins. As Baltimore's Mansion demonstrates, younger

Newfoundlanders can become frustrated and discouraged when denied an understanding of their familial inheritances. The historical narratives examined in this study highlight the dangers resulting from characters' reactionary attitudes toward older generations, which leads many of Johnston's younger male characters to assume that their choices are wiser than their elders'. By creating relationships with older Newfoundlanders (of

Johnston's grand/fathers' generations), young Newfoundland characters can potentially make more informed choices. These relationships may also generate more respect for the difficult choices facing characters who struggle with ambivalence - characters like

Charlie, who is caught between familial/national loyalties and personal beliefs, and Cook, 88 who is caught between desiring respect from his son and seeking fame as an American imperialist.

Although the father-son relationships Johnston develops in his earlier historical narratives provide unique insights on Newfoundland postcolonialism, his latest novel's plot repeats his narrative techniques while adding little to them. Johnston's most recent fiction, a sequel to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams titled The Custodian of Paradise, suggest a slip in his creative approach to postcolonial issues, particularly as they concern the Newfoundland family. Told from Fielding's perspective, the novel explores the relationship between Newfoundlanders and New Yorkers, and provides Johnston's first narrative centering on a father-daughter relationship. Still, Fielding discovers her biological paternity in a series of letters (almost exactly as Devlin does), and has a troubled relationship with her adoptive father that echoes the troubled father-son relationships in Johnston's earlier works. If Johnston is to question Newfoundland's postcolonial relationships in future historical narratives, he might diverge from a plot that is quickly becoming formulaic, and return to the creativity characterizing his memoir and other historical fictions. This creativity encourages readers to question Johnston's representation of Newfoundland history, to ask why he alters facts and chronologies, and to wonder whether literary histories compose the only historical fictions.

Despite the current exodus of Newfoundlanders from the province, many

"expatriates" maintain and uphold aspects of Newfoundland culture. According to

Johnston's work, the key to retaining Newfoundland identity, even in those who permanently leave the island, is to understand national and familial history. Like Wayne,

Arthur, Smallwood, and Devlin, Newfoundlanders can retain connections to their 89 province while engaging with a society that presents postcolonial challenges to

Newfoundland. Johnston's historical narratives suggest that rather than concentrating on

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2003. 252-67. CURRICULUM VITAE

Heidi Gloriann Butler

Universities Attended

Sept. 2005 - Present M.A. Candidate, English; University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB • Concentration: Atlantic Canadian prose • Thesis title: "Wayne Johnston's Historical Narratives: Imperial Tensions and Newfoundland's Inheritance"

June, 2005 B.A. (Honours), English, Trent University, Peterborough, ON

Conference Presentations

• 2005 "Thou Art a Newfoundlander": Politics and Geography in Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Paper presented at "Canada: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," a Canadian Studies undergraduate conference at Trent University.