Universidad De Crdoba

UNIVERSIDAD DE CÓRDOBA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Y ALEMANA STAGING PIONEER CANADA: A STUDY OF DOCUMENTARY AND MYTH IN JAMES REANEY'S THE DONNELLYS AND BALDOON TESIS DOCTORAL Presentada por Francisca Alemán Torres Dirigida por el Prof. Dr. Bernhard Dietz Guerrero Vo Bo El Director Fdo. Dr. D. Bernhard Dietz Guerrero Fdo. La Doctoranda Da. Francisca Alemán Torres TITULO: STAGING PIONEER CANADA: A STUDY OF DOCUMENTARY AND MYTH HAMES IN JAMES REANEY'S THE DONNELLYS AND BALDOON AUTOR: Francisca Alemán Torres © Edita: UCOPress. 2019 Campus de Rabanales Ctra. Nacional IV, Km. 396 A 14071 Córdoba https://www.uco.es/ucopress/index.php/es/ [email protected] A mi madre, mi hermana y mi esposo, por su amor y apoyo incondicionales. INDEX OF CONTENTS FOREWORD iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS x ILLUSTRATIONS xi INTRODUCTION 1 FIRST PART On Documentary 40 I. AN OVERVIEW OF DOCUMENTARY...............................................................41 I.1. Documentary: A Review of Approaches in English-Canadian Literature and Theatre................................................................................41 I.2 The Role of Documentary in Reaney's Work ..........................................77 I.2.1 The Documentary Element in The Donnellys and Baldoon .....................81 II. DOCUMENTARY AS REVISION: THE DONNELLY TRILOGY ....................91 II.1 A Review of Documentary Sources on the Donnellys...........................93 II.2 A Study of 'Documentary' in The Donnellys...........................................107 II.2.1 "A Canvas of the Pioneer life": Documentary and the Plot.................109 II.2.2 Irish, Catholics and 'Blackfeet': Documentary and the Characters ....127 II.2.3 Fragmenting Chronology: Documentary and Time.............................136 II.2.4 Naming and Mapping on Stage: Documentary and Place..................140 III. DOCUMENTARY AS EXPLORATION: BALDOON......................................148 III.1 A Review of Documentary Sources on Baldoon ....................................149 III.2 An Analysis of 'Documentary' in Baldoon..............................................152 III.2.1 Exploring Pioneer Baldoon: Documentary and the Plot.......................152 III.2.2 Pennsylvania Dutch and Scottish: Documentary and the Characters ......................................................................................................................158 III.2.3 Dating a Popular Tale: Documentary and Time...................................163 III.2.4 Creating a Sense of Locale: Documentary and Place ...........................165 SECOND PART On Myth 168 IV. AN OVERVIEW OF MYTH .................................................................................169 IV.1 A Brief Review of Approaches to Myth .................................................170 IV.2 Main Approaches to the Study of Myth in Literature.........................182 IV.2.1 Frye on Myth................................................................................... 190 IV.2.1.1. Frye and Reaney.................................................................................... 206 IV.2.2 The “New World Myth”...........................................................................212 i V. THE DONNELLYS: RE-MYTHOLOGIZING ...................................................218 V.1. The Donnellys: A Canadian Tragedy .......................................................219 V.1.1 The Donnellys: A Fertility Myth ...............................................................221 VI. BALDOON: MYTH-MAKING.............................................................................246 VI.1 Baldoon: A Canadian Folktale ..................................................................247 VI.1.1 Baldoon: A Myth of Deliverance ...............................................................268 CONCLUSION 272 WORKS CITED 288 APPENDICES 298 APPENDIX ONE 299 APPENDIX TWO 305 APPENDIX THREE 320 APPENDIX FOUR 327 APPENDIX FIVE 351 APPENDIX SIX 364 ii FOREWORD This dissertation is the result of several years of reading and studying James Reaney's great work. My interest in this Canadian writer started some years ago when I had to write an essay for the then lecturer of Critical Analysis of Literary Texts at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife. When I was asked which literary genre was my favourite one, I undoubtedly answered drama. Some months before, I had manifested to him my interest in learning something about Canadian Literature. It was so new and different! His answer was giving me the only theatre plays book he had in the still small library of the Centre for Canadian Studies and asking me to write an essay on it. This play happened to be The Donnellys by James Reaney. iii After reading the trilogy, I definitely decided to work on James Reaney's theatre and although that meant entering a whole new world, that of the Canadian Literature, his topics and his style engaged me. Several visits to Canada and especially to Toronto were necessary to get all his plays, novels, and poems and all the bibliography on him. I received the help of many people and especially that of the writer himself, who, after receiving the letter I had sent to the Playwrights Union Press, decided to send me most of his plays. In my second visit to the University of Toronto I could meet Prof. Richard Plant, from the Drama Centre. I knew he was an expert on Canadian Drama, so I decided to talk to him and tell him about my doctoral thesis project. He helped me give shape to my still vague project idea and recommended me to have a look at some of the theses that were written at the University of Toronto. After some time reading and analyzing Reaney's work, I finally took the decision to study the use of two of the most characteristic elements in Reaney's work, those of documentary and myth. Since Reaney has written quite a number of plays, delimiting the plays to be studied became a necessity. Finally, two of them, The Donnellys and Baldoon, which deal with pioneering Canada, were the selected ones because of the originality in which the issue of pioneers in Canada was dealt with, both in content and in performance. iv Most of the dissertation was written during one of my stays in Canada, having Prof. Plant's help in giving shape to the structure of the thesis. Also I took many Canadian dissertations on different literary topics as reference for my own dissertation. These are definitely the reasons of having written a dissertation with such a specific topic and not a more generalist one that included his whole theatre work. Thus, the dissertation ended up being a study, in the light of post-modern and post-colonial theories, of the use of documentary and myth in these two plays that portrayed pioneer Canada. The first part of "Staging Pioneer Canada: A Study of Documentary and Myth in James Reaney's The Donnellys and Baldoon" is devoted to the study of documentary. The initial chapter offers an overview of the different approaches to documentary in the fields of literature and theatre. Works by writers and critics such as Dorothy Livesay, Frank Davey, Barbara Godard, Stephen Scobie, Linda Hutcheon and Manina Jones on the use of documents and documentation in the Canadian narrative long poems and novels are discussed. With regard to drama, I refer to works by Diane Bessai and Alan Filewod. Finally, in the light of these contributions, I present my own approach to the study of 'documentary' in Reaney's history plays The Donnellys and Baldoon regarding the plays as dramatic texts and, therefore, as literary texts. v Chapters two and three offer a study of how the 'documentary' aspect reveals itself in The Donnellys and Baldoon. An analysis of documentary involves Reaney's treatment of the plot, characters, time and place as constituents of the dramatic text. This analysis of documentary includes an approach to the documentation inserted in the text and to several stage documentary techniques (taking as reference the information given in the didascalia). The third chapter is devoted to The Donnnellys, one of the most important plays in English Canada. Documentary in The Donnellys is dealt with as an example of revision since by using the documentary element, the author attempts to revise the history/story of the Donnellys. Baldoon is the subject of the third chapter in which the documentary aspect is seen as an exploration of topics such as religion and witchcraft in nineteenth-century pioneering settlements. The second part of this study, dedicated to 'myth', is also composed of three chapters. The first chapter is an overview of several theories of myth in general in order to contemplate the evolution of the term from classical Greece to the 20th century, and how it became related to literature. With respect to myth in relation to ritual and literature the studies of J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge School, Jessie Weston, Maud Bodkin and Richard Chase are briefly considered. A more detailed study is devoted to Frye's theories on myth. As Frye's influence on Reaney's concept of literature is of great importance, the vi way Frye's theories remain somehow present in Reaney's works is also addressed. The concept of 'New World Myth' in relation to Reaney's own myth is also dealt with. In chapters five and six, The Donnellys and Baldoon are once more the object of detailed study. The fifth chapter analyzes The Donnellys as an example of 're-mythologization'. That is, I analyze how Reaney, while deconstructing the widely popular myth of the Black Donnellys, creates a new

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