Strange Heaven

189CanLitSummer2006-5 10/4/06 10:24 Page 85 Herb Wyile As For Me and Me Arse Strategic Regionalism and the Home Place in Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven The narrative of a sensitive soul struggling to survive in a claustrophobic small town is so ubiquitous in Canadian literature as to be practically consonant with it. Think of, for starters, Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka novels, W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind and (perhaps the pinnacle of the genre) Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House. That claustrophobia, furthermore, is often compounded by the dynamics of the dysfunctional family, as in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Alden Nowlan’s Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, and, more recently, Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven (1998). However, as much as we might be inclined to read such preoccupations as defining the larger national literary culture, those preoccupations (as with so much else in Canada) are shot through with regional differences that complicate the unity that such shared concerns suggest. Coady’s novel, for example, which is about a Cape Breton teenager who returns from a spell in a psychiatric ward to her “cuckoo’s nest” of a family after giving up her baby for adoption, can certainly be seen as a sig- nificant and overlooked comic addition to these Canadian specialties. However, whereas typically the critique of the small town implicitly invites the critical gaze of the outsider, Strange Heaven turns that gaze back on the observer in a fashion that foregrounds the cultural politics between centre and periphery. In the process, the novel provides a good example of Atlantic- Canadian literature’s increasing and subversive self-consciousness, fore- grounding and deconstructing the way in which Canada’s eastern edge tends to be framed from outside. Canadian Literature / Summer 189CanLitSummer2006-5 10/4/06 10:24 Page 86 Strange Heaven The prevalence of dysfunctional (or at least seemingly dysfunctional) families in Atlantic-Canadian writing notwithstanding, the home place as a nurturing environment, as Gwendolyn Davies has argued, is a key trope in Maritime literature, contributing to a strong association between Maritime literature and a sense of community on the East Coast. In “The ‘Home Place’ in Modern Maritime Literature” Davies argues that “the emergence of the image [of the home place] in Maritime literature in the 1920s . has its gen- esis in social, economic, and cultural realities on the east coast that distin- guish it from similar images in other areas of Canada” (193). “[T]hroughout the outmigration and declining economic and political influence” of the rest of the century, the image of the home place “has continued . to illuminate Maritime literature with a sense of cultural continuity and psychological identification” (199). Davies concedes that the pastoral and nostalgic reso- nances of this image render it susceptible to charges of romanticism, but argues that “to dismiss this literature as static, merely the product of middle class romanticization, is to ignore the elements of realism, irony, and economic cynicism permeating much of it” (196). Here Davies addresses Ian McKay’s skeptical view of modern literature and culture in Nova Scotia, subsequently developed at greater length in The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth- Century Nova Scotia. McKay’s influential study chronicles the formation of a powerful cultural paradigm in which Nova Scotians are constructed as a hardy, simple, innocent people, close to the land and unravaged by modernity: “They lived, generally, in fishing and farming communities, suppos- edly far removed from capitalist social relations and the stresses of modernity. The Folk did not work in factories, coal mines, lobster canner- ies, or domestic service: they were rooted to the soil and to the rockbound coast, and lived lives of self-sufficiency close to nature” (26). McKay points to how pervasive and influential such pastoral, nostalgic, romanticized images of the Folk have been in shaping cultural identity in Nova Scotia. He also underscores how those images have been increasingly reconfigured and subverted by contemporary artists and writers. McKay argues that the “romance of the rural Folk,” though intensified in response to certain conditions of postmodernity, such as the desire for images of authenticity in a consumerist culture of simulacra, “has run aground on the shoals of its own implausibility. In the context of a countryside that bristles with satellite dishes and shopping-malls . and that is in a hundred ways so evidently not a haven set apart from late twentieth-century capitalism, the notion of the ‘simple life’ of the Folk can only be ironic” (308). Contemporary Canadian Literature / Summer 189CanLitSummer2006-5 10/4/06 10:24 Page 87 cultural and economic conditions in the Maritimes, in other words, render untenable the antimodern, pastoral paradigm in which the region is so often framed. One of the principal reasons that this hegemonic cultural construction needs to be contested, McKay argues, is that it reinforces and naturalizes an imbalance of social power and cultural capital. The imposition of an essen- tializing Folk innocence “establish[es] a political and social ‘commonsense,’ based on a commandeering of history and identity, which excludes at the outset a critical dialogue with the past and a realistic grasp of the present” (295). Subscribing to the concept of the Folk is thus politically neutralizing and disempowering, as it “leads one to a complacently organic view of soci- ety in which there are no fundamental social contradictions and no under- lying differences in perspectives” (298). Thus the attenuation of the Folk within the conditions of postmodernity provides the conditions for the development of an alternative and oppositional culture (308). McKay sees emerging in the latter part of the twentieth century “an entirely new group of cultural producers” whose work subverts “conventionalized commercial images of the Folk.” The concept of the Folk “has come to be a thinly spread rhetoric, vulnerable to articulate and subtle moral critiques, including those of people who were brought up in the rural areas it romanticizes” (310). At the end of The Quest of the Folk, McKay lists a series of writers, artists, and cultural commentators (including George Elliott Clarke, M.T. Dohaney, and Gerald Ferguson) whose work heralds a subversive reconfiguration of culture on the East Coast. Ten years after the appearance of The Quest of the Folk, many others could be added to that list, including Lynn Coady. One of the problems with the concept of the Folk, McKay argues, is its exclusionary ideology (308). In Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada, Danielle Fuller extends a similar skepticism about exclusionary and essentialist constructions of regional identity to the idea of the home place. Fuller argues that Atlantic women writers “tend to debunk nostalgic and romantic notions of home as the products of privilege or the reluctance to accommodate cultural change” (34) and underlines that the home place is often the site of physical and emotional conflict (33-4). Fuller is furthermore suspicious of the implications for women of traditional constructions of literary regionalism because they “do not allow us to under- stand regions as differentiated spaces, and they encourage critics to select texts that fall into a narrowly defined aesthetic” (37). Rather than dispensing with the notion of regionalism altogether, however, Fuller adopts in her study of Atlantic-Canadian women’s writing a “strategic regionalism” that Canadian Literature / Summer 189CanLitSummer2006-5 10/4/06 10:24 Page 88 Strange Heaven emphasizes the networks of relationships within which women write but also articulates the “common grounds, intra-class and cross-racial alliances that are informed and made possible by subordinate (non-elite) knowledges of economic marginality, geographic isolation, and various forms of social exclusion” (38). Having been picked up by a major publisher (Random House) after Fredericton’s Goose Lane published Strange Heaven and having departed Cape Breton for the West Coast, Lynn Coady fits uneasily with Fuller’s emphasis on regional “textual communities.” The second sense in which Fuller employs the term “strategic regionalism,” though, nicely articulates the gendered politics of a novel such as Strange Heaven, which challenges essentialist constructions of the East and dramatizes the patriarchal stric- tures that complicate the image of the home place as a nurturing environment for women. As importantly, though, the novel resists the idea of an essentialized Folk culture by highlighting and spoofing the ways in which the region is constructed through the gaze of the outsider. If prominent Maritime Bildungsromane such as Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley and Nowlan’s Kevin O’Brien have emphasized development of the masculine subject, Strange Heaven, by contrast, emphasizes the challenges of growing up female in a small Maritime community. McKay notes that part of the current countering of essentialist images of the Folk is that “the illusion of a happy seaside patriarchy has been challenged by very different stories” (309); this formulation is readily applicable to the development of Coady’s protagonist Bridget Murphy. To the degree that Strange Heaven portrays the traditional rural culture of Cape Breton familiar from the work of Alistair MacLeod, the novel emphasizes the way in which that culture is heavily gendered and affords males and females unequal degrees of agency and freedom. As Coady’s narrator succinctly reflects, “if [Bridget] had been a boy it would have been more fun” (158). Bored by an adolescent female culture characterized by stuffed animals, talk of parties and proms, and the emotional melodrama of relationships, Bridget longs for her cousins’ masculine culture of hunting and fishing, which her brother Gerard has rejected: “Bridget would have gone, if she had been a boy.

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