Madness in English-Canadian Fiction
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Madness in English-Canadian Fiction Dissertation zur Erlangung der Würde eines Doktors der Philologie vorgelegt dem Fachbereich II: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft der Universität Trier von Susanne Pauly (M.A.) Eupenerstr. 283 A 52076 Aachen Aachen, im September 1999 Die Dissertation wurde selbständig und nur mit den angegebenen Hilfsmitteln angefertigt und wurde bislang in dieser oder anderer Form noch zu keinem anderen Prüfungszweck vorgelegt. Content 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................1 2. The Changing Faces of Madness..............................................................................7 2.1. Antiquity............................................................................................................7 2.2 The Middle Ages ..............................................................................................7 2.3. Humanism and the Age of Reason..............................................................9 2.4. Romanticism...................................................................................................12 2.5. The Victorian Age..........................................................................................13 2.6. Darwinism.......................................................................................................14 2.7. Freud and Psychoanalysis.............................................................................15 2.8. Schizophrenia and the Emergence of Antipsychiatry: Laing and Foucault ........................................................................................17 2.9. The (Post-) Structuralist Approach to Madness: Barthes, Derrida and Lacan ..........................................................................26 3. Colonial Madness .....................................................................................................38 3.1 The Chroniclers of Colonial Madness: Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill .............................................38 3.2 Madness and Terror in the Garrison: The Colonial Conflict and John Richardson's Wacousta .....................42 4. Pioneer and Plains Madness...................................................................................49 4.1 Moving Westward: The Experience of the Plains........................................................................49 4.2. Dramatising the Experience: Madness in Pioneer and Prairie Realism..................................................53 4.2.1 Laura Salverson's The Viking Heart............................................54 4.2.2 Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese ........................................................57 4.2.3 Frederick P. Grove's Fruits of the Earth and Settler's of the Marsh.............................59 4.3. As Things Get Worse: ...................................................................................65 4.3.1 Sinclair Ross.......................................................................................65 4.3.1.1 "The Lamp at Noon"........................................................66 4.3.1.2 As For Me and My House................................................68 5. Madness as Sacrifice .................................................................................................77 1 5.1 Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice..................................................................77 5.2 Morley Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved ..................................................83 6. Madness as Escape.....................................................................................................90 6.1. Madness as a Way of Coping .......................................................................90 6.1.1 Mavis Gallant's Green Water Green Sky.....................................90 6.1.2 Margaret Laurence's "Horses of the Night"................................97 6.2 The Aesthetics of Exclusion.......................................................................101 6.2.1 Margaret Atwood's "Polarities"...................................................102 6.2.2 Margaret Gibson's The Butterfly Ward......................................105 6.2.2.1 "Ada".................................................................................106 6.2.2.2 "Making It".......................................................................109 6.2.2.3 "Considering Her Condition" ......................................113 6.2.2.4 "The Butterfly Ward".....................................................115 7. Creativity and Insanity ..........................................................................................119 7.1 A Century-Old Debate: The Link Between Genius and Madness ................................................119 7.2 The Works of Michael Ondaatje...............................................................124 7.2.1 The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.........................................125 7.2.2 Coming Through Slaughter .........................................................129 8. Women and Madness............................................................................................136 8.1 Female Madness Now and Then: A Critical Overview.....................................................................................136 8.2 The Bleeding Body: The Works of Audrey Thomas.................................................................143 8.3. The Rapunzel Syndrom: Female Self-Enslavement ..........................................................................152 8.3.1 Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark.............................................152 8.3.2 Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman....................................160 8.4 The Psychic Journey or Madness as Breakthrough: Surfacing to Survival..................................................................................169 9. The Postmodernist Approach to Madness........................................................182 9.1 The Principles of Postmodernism............................................................182 9.2 Canada and the Postmodern......................................................................186 9.2.1 Re-writing History: Madness in the Works of Rudy Wiebe ......................................188 2 9.2.2 Deconstructing Reality: The Absurdist Fantasies of Robert Kroetsch .............................191 10. The Mad Worlds of Timothy Findley................................................................201 10.1 "Lemonade" and The Last of the Crazy People .....................................202 10.2 The Wars........................................................................................................209 10.3 Headhunter ...................................................................................................220 11. Concluding Remarks .............................................................................................236 12. Bibliography ................................................................................................................243 Primary Sources ......................................................................................................243 Secondary Sources ..................................................................................................246 3 4 1. Introduction When I started dealing with madness in English-Canadian fiction I had initially hoped to find something particularly Canadian about it. After all, the attempt of isolating certain themes and images in order to define what is central and characteristic to their literature appeared to be common practice among Canadian literary critics. One only has to assemble titles of the most influential essays or volumes for the thematic bias to become apparent. They either consist of dominant images to which Canadian literary experience is said to conform (The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination; Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature; The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction) or directly advertise the themes to be extracted from literature (Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature; Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction; Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel: the Ancestral Present). However, after I had consulted various of these studies as a sort of guideline, while I was still snaking my way through the different primary works, I came to realise that this kind of approach was in fact the least promising or convincing way to come to terms with the topic. For as much as these works can be hailed for the interesting as well as illuminating aspects they contain in their desire to find a common denominator in Canadian literature, their attempts to fit and too often force their literature into a pretentious all-embracing schema only led to far-fetched or absurd generalisations. One will go astray if one starts extracting thematic plums in order to prove one's point and will only succeed in distorting the facts.1 John Moss in his Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel, for instance, claims that the abundance of violence evident in Canadian literature in the 1920s and 1930s is something significant for this country during this period. It could easily be proven though that this was a phenomenon which was just as common, if not more so, in the United States. Or consider Margaret Atwood's contribution towards the search of Canada. In Survival she argues that all Canadian literature is based on