Romance and Realism in the Depiction of The

THE PRIMITIVE MYSTIQUE : ROMANCE AND REALISM IN THE DEPICTION OF THE NATIVE INDIAN IN ENGLISH-CANADIAN FICTION A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English by Marjorie Anne Gilbart tRetzleff Saskatoon, Saskatchewan c 1981 . M .A . Gilbart Retzleff The author has agreed that the Library, University of Saskatchewan, may make this thesis freely available for inspection . Moreover, the author has agreed that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised the thesis work recorded herein or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of . the College in which the thesis work was done . It is understood that due recognition will be given to the author of this thesis and to the University of Saskatchewan in any use of the material in this thesis . Copying or publication or any other use of the thesis for financial gain without approval by the University of Saskatchewan and the author's written permission is prohibited . Requests for permission to copy or to make any other use of material in this thesis in whole or in part s hould . be addressed to : Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan SASKATOON . Canada . Abstract Although several critics since the nineteenth century have written about the variety of interpretations of the native Indian in English- Canadian literature, no one has yet devoted a full-length study to the way the Indian is depicted in fiction alone . This dissertation thus exa- mines a large cross-section of adult long fiction and investigates the degree to which the modes of romance and realism and the genres of romance and novel have informed these depictions . The dissertation is organized according to four major topics : love, religion, fighting, and community life . Each of these is divided into appropriate sub-topics, organized along roughly chronological lines . The chapter about love is the longest and focuses on fiction in which a white person and an Indian marry or have a love relationship, either potential or consummated . The chapter about religion focuses on fiction about the various kinds of relationships between native religions and Christianity . The chapter about fighting analyzes fiction about inter-tribal fighting, fighting along the frontier, and fighting between modern Indians and white authority . The chapter on community life focuses on fiction de- scribing daily Indian life, from the pre-contact community to the contem- porary reserve . Several conclusions emerge, First, the basic attitude to Indians reflects prevailing social attitudes . Second, the choice and use of genre are influenced to a significant degree by literary fashion . But more specific conclusions also emerge Most importantly, romance is the 111 dominant genre and romantic conventions of primitivism pervade almost all serious fiction on the subject, from variations on the Pastoral and Noble Savage conventions to a recent development approaching fertility myth, Instances of the realistic- novel as such are relatively rare, but realism of a documentary sort is frequent in romances which focus on social issues and is present for verisimilitude or ornamentation in many other romances, Finally,the best romances tend to have a sound basis in observable fact, just as the good novels have the subjective psycho- logical dimension provided by romantic convention, iv Acknowledgements I wish to thank all those who have contributed to the successful completion of this dissertation : the University of Saskatchewan, the Canada Council, and Champlain Regional College for financial assistance ; Prof . Carlyle King and the late Edward McCourt for their suggestions in the early stages of the research ; Marguerite Cotton of the Bishop's University library for tracking down rare books ; Edith Clarke and Paula de Man for typing at various stages ; my thesis committee for their useful suggestions--especially my advisor, Prof . Paul Denham for his guidance and support ; and, finally, my family for putting up with it all . v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I . INTRODUCTION 1 II . RED LOVERS 28 1 . Some Social Concerns 32 2 . Proprieties and Historical Fiction in the Nineteenth Century 57 3 . Versions of the Pastoral 77 4 . Historical Fiction in the Twentieth Century 99 5 . Primitive Vitality 120 III . GOD AND MANITOU : THE INDIAN AND RELIGION 153 1 . Damnable Darkness 158 2 . The Path to Salvation 170 3 . Doubts about Christianity 184 4 . In Praise of Old Ways 192 IV . RED-SKINS AND RED-COATS : THE FIGHTING INDIAN 212 1 . Fighting Other Indians 215 2 . Fighting the Settlers 220 3 . Fighting Modern Red-Coats 270 vi Chapter Page V . THE INDIAN AND THE COMMUNITY 286 1 . The Traditional Community 290 2 . Cultural Genocide 307 3 . The White Alien 318 4 . The Indian Alien 327 5 . The Modern Indian Community 337 VI . CONCLUSION 353 BIBLIOGRAPHY 373 APPENDIX . CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHORT TITLES OF CANADIAN WORKS MENTIONED, ARRANGED BY DECADE 394 vii Chapter I Introduction Since the discovery of America, men have written about the native populations with whom the explorers and settlers came in contact . But it is a limitation of human beings that they must write from within their cultural context and in terms of things familiar to them . The exotic must be given a framework sufficiently comprehensible to make the writer's efforts worthwhile . For these reasons any study of wri- tings about aboriginal peoples will in large part be a study of the cultures of the writers and their audiences . Eyes will see what they have been trained to see, evaluations will reflect what writers have been conditioned to accept as valid, and pens will write what readers can understand . Of course, the depiction of the exotic will change over the years as changing social ideas and literary fashions affect cultural assumptions . All these facts apply as well to innovative and erudite writers as to popular writers--the difference is merely of degree . It is not surprising that critics over the years have been at- tracted to the subject of the Indian in Canadian literature . From time to time chapters and articles about Canadian literary Indians have appeared . As early as 1926 Lionel Stevenson devoted a chapter to "Interpreters of the Indian" in his Appraisals of Canadian Literature . Typically of such short surveys, it treats only the best known of the 2 nineteenth-century writers, mainly poets, and mentions only Wacousta and The Master of Life amongst fictional works . Later, in 1962, a visiting Japanese critic, Keiichi Hirano, published an article, "The Aborigene [sic] in Canadian Literature" : it concerns only poet Duncan Campbell Scott (whose Indians have deservedly received frequent com- mentary) and prose writer Havelock Robb, and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of some conventions of English literary practice, such as that of the Noble Savage . In 1971 Dorothy Livesay published a stimulating article based on a paper delivered a year earlier : "The Native People in Our Canadian Literature" ; it focuses on the relationship between the rediscovery of the Indian in literature and the search for the Canadian identity, but it also treats mainly major works from The History of Emily Montague to recent anthologies by Indians Livesay's thesis is developed further and more specifically by David Williams in "The Indian Our Ancestor" (1978-79), which studies the way in which the Indian functions as the spiritual ancestor of the white man in several modern Canadian works of fiction . Margaret Atwood's well-known Survival (1972) also has a chapter on "First Peoples" : predictably many of Atwood's examples are drawn from poetry, and all are selected to support the thesis of "Indians as victims ." A few theses have also been written over the years, but none ap- proaches Canadian fiction only and all focus mainly on social attitudes and/or fidelity to fact . The earliest, "The 'Red Indian' of Literature : A Study in the Perpetuation of Error" (1941) by anthropologist Douglas Leechman, is concerned with the accuracy of details and concepts per- taining to Indians in literature generally . It offers few insights 3 into the literature discussed and is now quite dated . Chipman Hall's M. A. thesis "A Survey of the Indians' Role in English Canadian Liter- ature to 1900" is the first overview of the Canadian literary Indian . As the title indicates, it is a survey of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ; however, it focuses more on the writers' attitudes than on the Indians' role and touches all genres of Canadian literature . The most recent thesis, and the most thorough to date, is Leslie Monkman's "White on Red" (1975) in which Monkman takes several "perspectives" on the Indian in Canadian literature from the eighteenth century to the 1970's . His method is to comment at length on selected Canadian essays, plays, fiction, and poetry, and to link them by generalized critical bridges . While he discusses several of the works of fiction to be handled in this present study, he comes to quite different conclusions, possibly because of the variety of genres considered . The purpose of the present dissertation is much more specifically literary than that of its forerunners : it aims to survey the various ways in which Canadian writers of fiction have depicted the native Indian and to trace the variations and consistencies in

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