Settler Subjectivity and the Image of the Wild Animal in Canadian Fiction in English

A KINSHIP WITH OTHERNESS: SETTLER SUBJECTIVITY AND THE IMAGE OF THE WILD ANIMAL IN CANADIAN FICTION IN ENGLISH LEE FREW A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO SEPTEMBER 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-88695-3 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-88695-3 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada iv ABSTRACT This study examines the representation of wildlife in Canadian animal narratives in English. Such representations are determined by an image of the wild animal circumscribed by the post/colonial context of the settler episteme. As part of a discursive process of settler indigenization, this image represents a radical Otherness that the settler subject may appropriate through a comprehensive scientific knowledge of wildlife. Access to such indigenizing knowledge, however, is exclusive to subjects whom these narratives regard as lacking foreign traits, or what this dissertation theorizes as exogeneity. Because symbolic management is so important to the identity-formation of settler subjectivity, the image of the wild animal must correspond in some factual manner to its purported referent. As such, Canadian wild animal narratives quite openly register environmental anxieties and textualize a political unconscious of the dialectical relationship between settlers and wildlife in North America. After a detailed theorization of the role of the image of the wild animal in Canadian animal narratives, this dissertation analyzes the genre-founding works of Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton from the turn of the twentieth century. Offering a biocentric corrective to scholarly work that interprets their literary animals as metaphors for humans, this dissertation argues that the image of the wild animal represents a radical alterity that must remain impervious to the taint of modernity for the purposes of settler indigenization. Furthermore, these works establish, as a convention of a fundamentally antimodern genre, six basic human V figures whose relative possession of woodcraft knowledge and distance from commodity exchange structure their interaction with wild animals. This dissertation then surveys how this pattern continues in the postwar era by evaluating Fred Bodsworth's Last of the Curlews (1954), Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf( 1963), and Marian Engel's Bear (1976). After presenting a reading of Margaret Atwood's recent novel Oryx and Crake (2003) to assess the continuing potency of the settler episteme, this study concludes by suggesting that the image of the wild animal can be productively evaluated in terms of Pauline Wakeham's theory of taxidermy as a representational mode. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Maybe the best fringe benefit of undertaking this project has been to enjoy, vainly even, an immense amount of encouragement from numerous family members, friends, and colleagues. At the top of this list is my dissertation committee—Terry Goldie, Andy Weaver, and Leesa Fawcett—whose unflagging enthusiasm and professional rigour have made this process both enlightening and enjoyable. Special thanks go to Terry, whose intellectualism, kindness, and wit I can only endeavour to emulate. I am also grateful to the staff of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, especially Elaine Genus for her affability and thoughtfulness. I would like to thank my parents for their sometimes heroic devotion to their children, for their material support, and for insisting that I receive an education that neither of them could have; my grandmother Lucy for her continuing guidance; and my sister Lori for keeping me grounded. Thanks as well go to my extended family: Rick Archbold, Rick Feldman, and the Needles family have been steadfastly encouraging, while also providing me with many entertaining debates and delicious meals. My deepest gratitude, as always, is reserved for Christopher Needles and our dog Avro, with whom I am so very fortunate to share my life. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Table of Contents vii Introduction 1 (In the) Background 1 Animals in a Changing Landscape 9 Conceptual Framework 20 Methodology 40 Chapter Breakdown 54 Chapter 1: Theorizing the Image of the Wild Animal and Its Literary Origins 59 Postcolonial Subjectivity: Between a Rock and a Hard Place 59 Antimodernism and the Threat of Degeneration 71 Indigenizing Settler Subjectivity in Early Canadian Wild Animal Narratives 82 Woodcraft: "man's disquieting eye" 87 The Nature Faker Controversy 95 Chapter 2: The Wild Animal Stories of Charles G.D. Roberts 101 Introduction 101 Roberts's Wild Animal Stories 108 The Dynamism of the Image of the Wild Animal 121 Conclusion: The Boy 130 Chapter 3: The Wild Animal Narratives of Ernest Thompson Seton 142 Introduction 142 Seton's Wild Animal Stories 149 Two Little Savages: Atavistic Degeneration and the Exogene 169 Conclusion: The Taxidermy of the Image of the Wild Animal 194 Chapter 4: The Postwar Wild Animal Narrative: Fred Bodsworth's Last of the Curlews, Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf, and Marian Engel's Bear 204 Introduction 204 Fred Bodsworth's Last of the Curlews 209 Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf. 218 Marian Engel's Bear 233 viii Conclusion 267 Chapter Review 269 The SF Image of the Wild Animal in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake 275 Reading Things Differently 291 Works Cited 295 1 INTRODUCTION (In the) Background In Canada and Its Poetry (1943), Northrop Frye makes the assertion that "Nature is consistently sinister and menacing in Canadian poetry" (142). Frye states, "Canadian poetry is at its best a poetry of incubus and cauchemar, the source of which is the unusually exposed contact of the poet with nature" (141). A number of scholars, however, have since found such an understanding of nature difficult to accept unequivocally.1 In his introductory essay to the recent anthology Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (2009), Don McKay states that he "find[s] it hard to credit the view [.. .] that poets saw the natural world primarily as sinister" (17). Instead, he thinks it would be "helpful [...] to bring in a totally different tradition [...] as evidence that [...] other attitudes to primordial energies are possible, that the Canadian experience is controlled by historical circumstances, not fate or the human condition" (7). Though potentially at odds with McKay's claim that there are a multitude of responses to the natural world in Canadian poetry because poets have been so "resourceful [...] in struggling to meet the challenge posed by the landscape [...]" (7), the now commonplace understanding of the sinister nature of nature in Canadian literature speaks to the potency 1 For instance, John Ralston Saul has recently refuted the pervasiveness of Frye's famous notion of the garrison mentality, with its "deep terror in regard to nature" (Frye Conclusion 225). Saul states in A Fair Country (2008) that "To the extent that it exists," the garrison mentality relates very little to "the Canadian experience of the preceding centuries, except in the mind of colonial elites" (234). He claims instead that Canadian settlers generally "found their sense of comfort and place and belonging, and did so with astonishing speed [. .]" (233). 2 of landscape as a mediating discourse.2 Even McKay himself reaffirms the negative qualities of nature, suggesting that the struggle Canadian poets have traditionally faced results from "the difficulty of addressing the wilderness of the new world using traditional conventions and forms" because the "landscape and climate [are] so radically other and so frequently hostile" (6 emphasis added). Regardless of the emotional

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