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Reading Canada in Nineteenth-Century American Literature CANADIAN MIGRATIONS: READING CANADA IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by Alyssa Erin MacLean B.A., McGill University, 2001 M.A., University of Western Ontario, 2002 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2010 © Alyssa Erin MacLean, 2010 Abstract This dissertation contributes to the fields of Canadian literature, American literature, and transnational and hemispheric studies by examining Canada‟s place in American Renaissance discussions about imperialism, citizenship, and racial and national identity. In the nineteenth-century US, Canada became symbolically important because of its perceived common origins with the US as well as its increasing resistance to forms of American imperialism. Canadian Migrations examines the significance of the Canada-US relationship by analysing literary representations of two population movements across the Canada-US border: the 1755 deportation of French Catholic Acadians from Canada to the American colonies and the antebellum flight of African Americans north to Canada. American authors gravitated towards these narratives of displacement to and from Canada in order to discuss the meaning of American citizenship and the treatment of racial minorities within US borders. I argue that both of these Canada-US movements prompted critical inquiries in US culture about forms of American imperialism. In Part One, I examine authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrayed the violent expulsion of Acadians by British troops justified the creation of the United States as a necessary defense against imperial rule. Yet the Acadian expulsion also prompted these authors to question the contemporary US government‟s own displacement of racial and linguistic minorities through slavery and westward expansion. In Part Two, I examine the northward movement of fugitive slaves across Lake Erie to Canada. By crossing ii Lake Erie, Black migrants—and the iconic texts written about them—challenged the conceptual categories that sustained US slavery and imperialism. Authors such as Stowe, Josiah Henson, Lewis Clarke, and William Wells Brown described scenes of nautical transit and transformation across the Lake Erie Passage to contest US slavery and to develop notions of Black citizenship. By recovering this conversation about the significance of Canada-US cross-border movement, I position nineteenth-century Canada within the movement of people and ideas across the Black Atlantic world. Together, my chapters demonstrate how the imagined community of the United States emerged through a series of complex political, cultural, and literary negotiations with Canada. iii Preface Sections of this dissertation‟s introduction and conclusion have appeared previously, in somewhat different form, in the essay “Canadian Studies and American Studies,” located in A Concise Companion to American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010. 387-406). iv Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ..................................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... v List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements................................................................................................................. vii Introduction: Reading for Canada in US Literature ................................................................. 1 Part One: “If I were an American poet, I would choose Acadia for the subject of my song”: the Grand Dérangement and the American Renaissance ....................................................... 53 1.1 US print culture and the Grand Dérangement ............................................................ 53 1.2 The Grand Dérangement and the history of the Acadians ......................................... 63 1.3 “Citizen[s] of somewhere else”: Hawthorne‟s poetics of exile in The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair ........................................................................................................... 76 1.4 The politics of displacement in Longfellow‟s Evangeline ....................................... 104 Entr‟acte: The Canadian Migrations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ................................................ 149 Part Two: Reading the Lake Erie Passage ............................................................................ 159 2.1 Black cross-border writing in the nineteenth century ............................................... 159 2.2 Historicizing the Canada-US border ......................................................................... 176 2.3 The Lake Erie Passage in autobiographical texts ..................................................... 195 2.4 The Lake Erie Passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Clotel ........................................ 224 2.5 Studying Black cross-border writing ........................................................................ 251 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 264 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 274 v List of Figures Figure 1: “Child Canada Takes Her First Step.” [Illustrator unknown.] ................................ 23 Figure 2: “A Pertinent Question,” by John Wilson Bengough. .............................................. 24 Figure 3: Expansion of Acadian settlements, 1605-1710. ...................................................... 63 Figure 4: Population density map of the maritime regions, c. 1750. ...................................... 64 Figure 5: [Acadians in Chains], by Jane E. Benham. ........................................................... 147 Figure 6: A Map of the United States and Part of Louisiana, by Mary Van Schaack [c. 1830]. .............................................................................................................................................. 162 Figure 7: “The Fugitives Are Safe in a Free Land,” by Hammatt Billings. ......................... 167 Figure 8: Black communities in Canada West. .................................................................... 178 Figure 9: Canals of Ohio, 1825-1913, by the Ohio Historical Society [1969]. .................... 188 Figure 10: “He's some crazy fellow.” [Illustrator unknown.] ............................................... 206 Figure 11: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Slave medallion by Josiah Wedgwood [1787]. .............................................................................................................................................. 207 vi Acknowledgements A doctoral dissertation is the product of many years‟ work and I would like to thank many people for their help and support. I have been blessed in my life with very good teachers. My supervisor, Mary Chapman, has supported this project in every way and has been a dynamic, generous, and insightful interlocutor. She has profoundly influenced the way I think about my field of study and her advice has never led me astray. Mike Zeitlin has been a meticulous reader and an excellent teaching mentor. I admire his dedication to his students and his passion for reading, and I will acutely miss his company in the classroom. Chris Lee joined my committee very late in the process but dedicated himself to the project wholeheartedly, offering theoretical insights and new perspectives on my work at exactly the right moment. Marlene Briggs provided new ideas, guidance, and advice in the early stages of this project. My thanks go as well to John Carlos Rowe, who (in a conversation on an escalator) was able to help me articulate why this project mattered, and who has gone out of his way to involve me in many subsequent conversations. Anita Israel helped me make my way me through Longfellow‟s papers at the Longfellow National Historic Site. I am also grateful to the University of British Columbia and the Department of English for providing generous financial support for my doctoral research. As I leave Vancouver, I will particularly miss the conversations that I shared with my friends in the English Graduate Reading Room. Terri Tomsky, Eddy Kent, Lisa Szabo, Tyson Stolte, Katja Thieme, Maia Joseph, Sarah Banting, Bettina Stumm, and Travis Mason created a dynamic and supportive intellectual community at UBC that was both vii professionally and personally inspiring. My friends in the American Studies reading group, notably Sean McAlister, Simon Rolston, and Moberley Luger, were always ready to discuss nascent ideas and to share new texts with me at our monthly meetings; I promise I won‟t make you read any more James Lee Burke. All of these friends—and many others who I have undoubtedly neglected to name here—have made this project better. I would also like to thank my family members for their love, their sense of humour, their curiosity about the world, and their weekly requests for progress reports about
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