“Think of Me As Your Conscience”: Spectres in Recent English-Canadian Historical Fiction

“Think of me as your conscience”: Spectres in recent English-Canadian historical fiction by Reginald G. D. Wiebe A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Reginald G. D. Wiebe, 2015 ii “Think of me as your conscience”: Spectres in recent English-Canadian historical fiction Abstract In this dissertation I will discuss how English-Canadian writers of recent historical fiction incorporate ghosts for the purposes of recuperation: to suggest both the persistence of historical injustices and to signal the possibility of healing. Recognizing that views of Canada’s alleged ghostlessness perpetuate a colonial overwriting of the varied histories that preceded Confederation, many writers prominently feature history and hauntings to represent that Canada does, in fact, have a storied past. Recent historical fiction by English-Canadian writers has frequently demonstrated less interest in postmodern practices and more interest considering the past as ontologically stable, though not completely accessible. This is often, I argue, in the service of a postcolonial project to revise history to acknowledge the injustices and traumas that colonial historiography has suppressed. Spectres can negotiate a desire for retaining skepticism of the inherent biases of historiography and the need to maintain some level of historical certainty in order to advocate for a particular cause. Using Jacques Derrida’s concept of Hauntology and close readings of five novels, I contend that spectres are essential in postcolonial projects of illuminating the past for the purposes of recuperation in recent historical fiction. The goal of many novels of haunting and history is not only to note historical wrongs – to highlight the sense of unease and illegitimacy that ghosts signal – but also to suggest possible avenues of recovery. The presence of iii ghosts is central to this type of haunting, but the context of the historical novel is equally critical: these novels demonstrate a desire not simply to highlight the persistence of knowledge but to actually revise our understanding of the past. When novels of historical haunting seek to revisit historical wrongs it is for more than emphasizing their ongoing effects. They seek, sometimes paradoxically and sometimes dubiously, to present the past as a site of revision and as a site that can be recuperated. Underlying this project – often unspoken, but sometimes made explicit – is the hope that telling the story of an injustice is part of the project of reconciling that wrong without foreclosing its ongoing effects. In the first chapter, I will examine how spectres can signal the foreclosure of historical wrongs even as they can also suggest the persistence of those wrongs. Exploring Margaret Sweatman’s novel When Alice Lay Down With Peter, I will consider how ghosts can provide reassurance about Canada’s history of settlement and invasion even as they highlight the injustices of that practice. In the second chapter, I will examine how spectres can illuminate events and experiences lost to history. Through Jacqueline Baker’s The Horseman’s Graves and Jane Urquhart’s Away, I will consider how spectres are well suited to trouble our assurances in the foundations of the present. I will also consider how these same spectres can occlude the losses that they illuminate. iv In the third chapter, I will examine how the unsettling presence of spectres can demonstrate the ways in which historical fiction itself can be a vessel for recuperation. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees, enables me to consider how spectres manifest the advantages (and some of the risks) that historical fiction has for reclaiming lost history. In the fourth and final chapter, I will examine how spectres can offer a model for recuperating the past without foreclosing the traumas that perpetuate its hauntings. Reading Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, I will consider how spectres can prevent the conservative approach of much recent historical fiction from becoming totalizing and how the liminal nature of ghosts can signal strategies for healing. v Acknowledgments This thesis would not be possible without the support of colleagues, mentors, friends, and family. I want to thank my supervisor, Stephen Slemon, for his insight and encouragement. I will miss our meetings, if only for the sheer number and variety of ideas Stephen can generate in an alarmingly short amount of time; I will not miss the feelings of panic that come after the sheer number and variety of ideas Stephen can generate in an alarmingly short amount of time. I am also deeply grateful for the work of my committee members Cecily Devereux and Paul Hjartarson for their considered advice and feedback. Cecily and Paul always managed to be somehow both very encouraging and rigorously demanding (and, on a clearly related matter, I owe most of my slopitch skills to Paul). I am also very grateful for the contributions of Sarah Krotz and Gerhard Ens, particularly in this project’s formative stages. Albert Braz was a late but much appreciated addition to my defense. A special thanks goes to my external examiner, Herb Wyile, who carefully read and responded to my work. Much of my inspiration for this project came from Dr. Wyile, and the attention he paid to my research was incredibly rewarding. I am confident that I have chosen my friends well, because I received a lot of invaluable support over the years. I am indebted to Matt Rea, Theo Finigan, Neale Barnholden, Linda van Netten, and Dorothy Woodman for their solidarity and their ability to commiserate so persuasively. Very convincing work, you guys. I’m thankful for my family, none of whom told me that doing this project was a bad idea. I am lucky to have the support of my parents, Jakob and Shirley, who have always been encouraging and who will read this; my siblings (Stephen, Kalyn, Flora, Eric, Jill, Andrew, Theo, and Krista, who also found time for an urgent copy edit), vi who offered fresh eyes; and my extended family, including my in-laws Nick and Ruth, who learned how to ask carefully if I was finished yet. Finally, I want to thank my wife Allison for all of the things and our son Henry for napping. Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................................. v Introduction: Hauntings of the Living and the Dead .............................................................. 1 Chapter One “These are my beginnings”: The Haunting Anxiety of Illegitimacy in Margaret Sweatman’s When Alice Day Down With Peter ................................................... 35 Chapter Two “The place where the dead walk”: The Haunting of Cultural Continuity in Jacqueline Baker’s The Horseman’s Graves and Jane Urquhart’s Away .................. 70 Chapter Three “They’re all dead now”: Incomplete Healing in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees ................................................................... 112 Chapter Four “To Carve the Illness”: The Healing Spectres of Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road ............................................................................................. 147 Conclusion: Never Present Where You Stand ...................................................................... 185 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................... 193 1 Introduction: Hauntings of the Living and the Dead It’s the living that haunt the homes of the dead, wanting something from them we can’t articulate, something we can only gesture dumbly towards – Michael Crummey, “Finnish Cemetery Revisited” Haunting and history have been paired for some time in critical discourses about Canadian fiction. Many critics, including most notably Margaret Atwood in Survival (1972), have suggested that Canada is a country with a long-standing anxiety about how its lack of ghosts reflects a lack of history. As Stuart McLean argues, “It is not enough for the modern nation-state simply to assert the antiquity of its ancestral pedigree; for its claims to be culturally persuasive, it is necessary that these imputed primordial beginnings be reiteratively summoned and deployed in the present” (29). Indeed, as Atwood observes, the perception that Canada has no ghosts has an old grip on the imagination of writers in this country: as long ago as 1836, Catherine Parr Traill proclaimed that Canada was “too matter-of-fact a country for such supernaturals to visit” (75). Many writers considered Canada, in other words, to lack the history that ghosts manifest. Perhaps because of claims such as Traill’s, or the anxiety that these claims signal, English-Canadian writers consistently demonstrate a persistent preoccupation with spectres and haunting. Critics such as Jonathan Kertzer, Justin Edwards, Marlene Goldman, and Cynthia Sugars have argued that writing about ghosts in Canada is often part of the desire of a settler/invader nation to create a national sense of identity and provide a sense of tradition. As Marlene Goldman explains, “An underlying fear is that without ghosts, the settlers and their descendents risk remaining ciphers to themselves and never fully establishing a 2 sense that they have

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