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TROUBLE AT HOME: THE ANXIETIES OF BELONGING AND SELFHOOD IN THE FICTION OF LYNN COADY AND CHRISTY ANN CONLIN

Heather Levie

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2008

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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2 CONSTRUCTING INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN COADY'S STRANGE HEAVEN 15 CHAPTER 3 "CRASHING BACKWARDS": THE RESISTANCE OF TRANSITIONS, CHANGE AND LEAVETAKING IN CONLIN'S HEAVE 42 CHAPTER 4 "THE SEA IN MY BLOOD": SELF AND PLACE IN COADY AND CONLIN'S SHORT FICTION 67 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION 93 BIBLIOGRAPHY..... 105 ABSTRACT

Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin depict adolescence in Cape Breton and the Annapolis Valley, respectively, and illustrate how their heroines' ambivalent feelings about their homes negatively influence their senses of self and complicate their functional transitions into adulthood. Protagonists in the novels Strange Heaven and Heave, as well as in the authors' short fiction, grapple with oppressive conceptions of their regions' character and struggle to re-envision themselves as individuals apart from their homes. They exemplify what David Creelman identifies, in Setting in the East, as a regional culture at a point of transition between former and future identities. The novels characterize these two Atlantic Canadian regions, portraying their contemporary tensions and interrogating simplistic understandings of their people and culture. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED

DE Down East, Wolfgang Hochruck and James O. Taylor (Eds.) PP People and Place, Larry McCann (Ed.) PTMB Play The Monster Blind, Lynn Coady SH Strange Heaven, Lynn Coady SMLH Studies in Maritime Literary History, Gwendolyn Davies SW She Writes, Carolyn Foster (Ed.) TANM Towards A New Maritimes, Ian McKay and Scott Milsom (Eds.) TOTM The One and The Many, Gerald Lynch TQTF The Quest of The Folk, Ian McKay UEE Under Eastern Eyes, Janice Kulyk Keefer VM Victory Meat, Lynn Coady, (Ed.) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Deborah Stiles for her interest in and support of this project and for her unwavering encouragement throughout the process. I also wish to recognize the financial support of the Nova Scotia Agricultural College's Rural Research Centre, with its Humanities, Underdevelopment, Gender and Sustainability Fellowship. Andrew

Wainwright's expertise, guidance and insights are also greatly appreciated. I am grateful to Trevor Ross and Rohan Maitzen for their time and leadership. I owe endless thanks to my family and friends, who provide invaluable perspective and support. Most of all, I want to express my gratitude to my mother, Pat Levie, whose endless generosity, strengths and influence are apparent, to me, in all aspects of this work. 1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Reading the fiction of contemporary Atlantic Canadian authors Lynn Coady and

Christy Ann Conlin, one is privy to the inner voices of similar protagonists: intelligent, insightful and capable young women somehow broken at the core, so deeply troubled that they are not rebellious in a sense typical of young adulthood, but conflicted to the point of self-destruction and even madness. Their lives are evocative of a halted and hesitant momentum that reflects their abundant potential as well as the anxiety that holds them back. In Coady's Strange Heaven, Conlin's Heave and their various short stories, characters illustrate a specific stage in the maturation of young women and a particular difficulty at that stage centering around "the question of going or staying" (Kulyk Keefer

UEE 213) in their rural Nova Scotian homes. Coady and Conlin portray an overall malaise in their home regions and a deep, adolescent alienation, but one particularly felt in young women. What captivates and perplexes, however, is the counterbalancing reverence for home evoked by the humour, descriptions of regional particularities, turns of phrase and social norms found in nuanced presentations of Coady and Conlin's regional settings. These settings capture the ambivalence protagonists feel toward their homes and, with respect to their families, communities and regional identities, there is felt as deep an alienation as fundamental identification. This conflict preoccupies and paralyses the characters in these fictional works as they attempt to transition from adolescence to adulthood, evaluate their homes and communities, and envision themselves outside of and beyond them.

In his sociological study, "All kinds of potential: Women and out-migration in an

Atlantic Canadian coastal community" (2007), Michael Corbett examines trends in out- migration in a rural Nova Scotian community and specifically explores the motivating

factors behind young women's decisions either to stay in or leave their rural

communities. His work provides a real life context in which to consider Coady and

Conlin's creative exploration of this decision. Corbett identifies a "migration imperative"

in rural communities where there is a "climate of diminished opportunity" (11). He

argues that there is "an aura of obligation and compulsion for the individual youth" to

leave home in order to gain professional and financial security (11). He explains a "harsh

reality that women are under greater pressure to leave the area [than men], and that they

are destined for economic disadvantage should they stay" (13), for "women who stay . . .

earn less than half as much money as men and are economically disadvantaged in

comparison to provincial and national income norms for women" (9). However, despite

these trends, he finds that the "migration imperative" is countered by many rural youths'

sense of loyalty to and security in their home community; he refers to these young people

as "the place-attached rural youth" (2). He writes that "even in the face of limited

economic opportunity, it is difficult for many women to leave" (12), citing "pride in

survival" and "communal bonds" (10) as some of the factors that compel young women

to stay despite their low and unequal economic prospects. "Home is perceived as secure"

(10), Corbett argues, referring to a subject who explains of his peers, '"they don't want to

move, they're safe and secure ... when you grow up in a small place you fear the

unknown, you fear even Halifax because you've been protected and isolated in this safe

little environment where everyone knows everyone'" (10-11). According to Corbett's

study, young women face the dilemma "of going or staying" that Janice Kulyk Keefer 3

argues is prevalent and recurring in Atlantic Canadian literature (UEE 213), and which is

of central importance to Coady and Conlin's contemporary work.

The most intangible of the factors Corbett identifies, those of "pride in survival"

and "communal bonds," have to do with young women's essential identification with home and its particularity. These are the aspects of the young woman's relationship with this regional home that Coady and Conlin evoke most intriguingly, for they are not easily

explained or understood. Corbett's findings suggest that there is a perceived loyalty and

solidarity in "surviving" the difficult conditions of the shared marginal experience in this

region's rural communities, and that young women are willing to make a personal

sacrifice of their individual well-being in order to affirm this identification with home

and the collective. The authors examine this sacrifice, and the young woman's internal,

psychological negotiation of it, in their works. They illustrate the struggle to separate

selfhood from membership in a collective and problematize the tendency, both within and

outside the community, to repress individuality in order to affirm communal identity.

They question the existence of a shared essential character and perspective that can be

thought to unite the collective and justify the kind of self-sacrifice implied in Corbett's

study. As they present these struggles, their attitudes toward the region communicate that

this "harsh reality" is not easily faced. Coady and Conlin evoke young women's intense

ambivalence and debilitating internal conflict as they decide whether they ought to escape

or endure their homes.

Carol Ann Howells argues that the questions "Who am I? and Where do I belong"

(Howells 1) are common in writing by Canadian women, "since the early 1990s,"

referring to "Canadian debates about identity"(l). The questions that Coady and Conlin 4

address and which appear to exist in real Atlantic Canadian experience reflect a particular

concern with place. In depictions of rural Nova Scotia, questions about identity and

belonging also include, more accurately: Can I stay? Should I leave? They focus on a point of origin, uneasily yet inextricably connected with identity, that is characterized by

economic deprivation, political marginality, geographic isolation and cultural

particularity. These traits combine to make the choice to stay or leave these regional

homes especially difficult and widespread. This distinguishes Coady and Conlin's

writing and the experience it depicts from other contemporary literature in the national

context and the more general questions Howells identifies within that context.

The following discussion of Atlantic Canadian literature complies with

historiographical practice, as exemplified by Forbes and Muise's The Atlantic Provinces

In Confederation (1993), to regard the four Atlantic Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova

Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland as a geopolitical entity. While each

province and sub-region within this grouping is distinct and deserving of separate

attention, there exist geographical, political and cultural realities that also justify their

consideration as a whole. Precedents in the region's literary criticism set by Kulyk

Keefer and Creelman group together the three provinces excluding Newfoundland under

the appellation "Maritime" (Creelman 3, Kulyk Keefer UEE 4). Coady and Conlin's

works are set primarily in Nova Scotia or depict Nova Scotian characters; thus, this study

addresses depictions of this province in particular. Examination of literary

representations of the experiences and conditions of young women in the entire Atlantic

Canadian region does not fall within the scope of this study; however, because this larger

region shares geographical, political and social particularities within a national setting, 5 treatments of these themes in Coady and Conlin's works are considered in the context of

Atlantic Canadian literature. Specifically, these authors deal with the Cape Breton and

Annapolis Valley regions of Nova Scotia, respectively. They depict a time of economic

"downturn" as a result of "neo-conservative" (Forbes 511) moves by the federal government in the 1980s to reduce subsidies, tariff allowances and funding programs upon which the Atlantic Canadian economy had relied (Forbes 512). Of this decade, when Coady and Conlin's protagonists would have been children, E.R. Forbes argues,

"never have Canadians faced in so short a time such a bewildering array of initiatives of fundamental importance" and that the Atlantic provinces "had the most to lose through . .

. the dismemberment" of such "federal programs" (509). He asserts that these regions

"were among the weakest politically, and here the cuts were the most severe" (511).

Forbes describes the decade as a time when "dreams ... were dashed [and]... promises .

.. failed to materialize" (504), a statement evocative of the kind of atmosphere of defeatism that Coady and Conlin portray in their novels. In post-coal mining Cape

Breton and in the Annapolis Valley after the decline of local agricultural and fishing industries, the places and time in which these works are set, employment is scarce and economies rely even more than before on "the tourism economy" (McKay TQTF 33).

According to Ian McKay, the "transition to the tourism state" (33) that resulted from

Nova Scotia's economic decline fifty years earlier is only reinforced by this most recent crisis; and the consequent "expansion in the official production of images" (33) continues to orchestrate the way this place and people are perceived by those outside it. The regions' geographical isolation contributes to their political marginalization as well as 6 their economic deprivation, which, in turn, leads to the conceptualization of their particular identity and the commodification of their culture.

Kulyk Keefer writes that regional literature "reveals the kind of eyes the region gives to a writer; the kind of thing those eyes are compelled to notice and represent"

(UEE 5). Coady and Conlin write in contemporary, regional voices that indicate similar visions of agonizing choice and conflicting senses of loyalty to past and present, individual and collective, identities. Kulyk Keefer explains her "preference for transparency" (8) in literary criticism, as opposed to "opacity," as outlined by A.D.

Nuttall (qtd. in Kulyk Keefer UEE 7), to offer "ways of knowing our world, and perspectives which help us question and test the truth of inherited or imposed schemas and concepts" (9). The following study reflects her "transparent" approach in an effort to gain greater awareness and understanding of the literature and of the world that informs it. Regional literature's ability to be revelatory or reflective of reality is, David Creelman suggests, because "East Coast texts are produced within the matrix of tensions created as the ideals of the declining traditional culture come into conflict with the modernist assumptions and sense of alienation associated with the region's incomplete entrance into the industrial age" (18). This point of cultural and "ideological" (Creelman 19) transition that Creelman identifies is analogously represented in the stage of problematic transition from adolescence to adulthood in much of Coady and Conlin's fiction. The authors appropriately employ the genre of bildungsroman to examine a difficult process of evolution and differentiation between past and future selves. Their use of the short narrative format, with its necessary gaps and omissions, successfully evokes the difficulty of grasping the entirety and essence of self, which is the thematic exploration in many of their stories. Creelman argues that the "rise" of realism in this region's literature

"corresponded with a dramatic period of economic and cultural disruption" (5), and that its use allowed authors to explore and illustrate this time of change and rupture in the region's collective experience. Coady and Conlin demonstrate that this effort is ongoing, as they, too, adopt realism to portray current experiences of transition in the region.

Protagonists' attachment to family, heritage and community is reflected in moods of nostalgia and preoccupation with regional particularity; their need to strike out in pursuit of opportunity and autonomy is apparent in the biting cynicism with which they characterize their households. The choice faced by these young women is riddled with the potential for exile, disconnection from family, community and heritage; the loss of a sense of belonging; and the obscuring of individual sense of self, as personal identity is tied up in these aspects of home. Critical commentaries on the writing of another

Atlantic Canadian author, Alden Nowlan, reflect on the way he has evoked the difficult relationship between individual and community. Kulyk Keefer writes that his characters endure "poverty like a terminal disease, fear, hopelessness, a longing to escape, and guilt at the desire to desert and thus betray those condemned to remain in a territory where ugliness and deprivation are the most prominent landmarks" (DE 30). Though Nowlan's work is notably more concerned with impoverishment in the region than are the works of

Coady and Conlin, poverty is nevertheless apparent and relevant in their fiction as well, and the commonality of all three authors is their evocation of conditions that burden and alienate the individual, inspiring the need for "escape." Coady and Conlin's protagonists demonstrate devotion to family and home that makes choosing to leave seem like abandonment. Of the alternative of staying as presented in Nowlan's work, Stewart 8

Donovan writes, "almost all of Alden Nowlan's early poems [from the 1960s] are about

coming to terms with a home and a place that was inimical to his spirit" (198). Coady

and Conlin's works suggest that this dilemma continues in more recent creative

expression. Their work can be considered as part of a continuum of regional literature that examines the individual's struggle for personal autonomy from, and simultaneous

connection with, home. They contribute to what what Kulyk Keefer calls the "dilemma

over whether to go or stay," which she argues is "one of the major paradigms of Maritime

literature" (UEE 18). She makes her claim in reference to authors "almost from the

beginning of literary culture in the Maritimes" such as Thomas McCulloch, Thomas

Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles G.D. Roberts, Hugh MacLennan, Ernest Buckler,

Antonine Maillet and David Adams Richards (212). The theme's persistence in Coady

and Conlin's fiction demonstrates that this question remains an important one in the

region's contemporary literature and one of particular importance to literary

representations of young women in rural Atlantic Canada.

The following study will examine Coady and Conlin's treatment of the choice of

going or staying, the effect of a sense of 'home' on one's sense of personal identity, and to what extent a person feels she belongs to and in this region. Kulyk Keefer's study of the region's literature, Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction

(1987), McKay's The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in

Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994) and Creelman's Setting in the East: Maritime

Realist Fiction (2003) will contribute to the analysis of Coady and Conlin's fiction.

McKay's work will provide a framework for examining popular conceptions of Nova

Scotia and how they are reflected in the fiction as impacting young women's sense of 9

self. Corbett's sociological study, which details trends in education, out-migration and professional and economic opportunity for residents of rural Nova Scotia, will provide

additional context within which to consider these literary depictions of young women and

conditions in the region.

In examining the region's literature, these and other scholars discuss to what

extent it can be understood to reflect a common cultural experience and character. Their

findings are relevant to this study of two of the region's contemporary writers,

particularly because negotiations of individual and collective experience and identity are

what preoccupy the fictional consciousnesses of Coady and Conlin's characters. On the

complexity of notions of shared regional identity, Creelman argues:

In the past, many observers of Maritime society have produced overly

simplistic representations of the East Coast. Whether they are describing

the region's folk or ethnic practices or reviewing the overall "cultural

identity," some critics have constructed essentialist definitions that ignore

powerful tensions and divisions in the society and that narrow the field of

meaning available to the reader. (6)

He suggests that literary critics can oversimplify the region's society and "ignore" the

"anxieties, tensions, and contradictions that have arisen over the last century" (6). From

an historical and cultural studies perspective, McKay echoes the sentiment that Nova

Scotia is often conceived as a society frozen in time. He critiques the tendency for

"essentialist" definitions of the region, inaccurate and limiting conceptions of it, whether

positive or negative. McKay argues, "to rewrite the history of subaltern classes and

groups in ways that ostensibly pay them homage all the while draining their history of 10 specificity, is one subtle and effective method of preserving their inferior position"

(TQTF xvi). He further warns that simplistic conceptualizations risk "turning the

Maritimes into a large outdoor museum" (TANM 310). The uniformity of the types of representations to which Creelman and McKay refer is apparent in critical commentary on the region's literature and confirms the accuracy and relevance of their arguments.

Critics identify the attributes of Atlantic Canada's "cultural identity" (Creelman

6) as it is widely conceived in "tourism's totalizing and essentialist gaze," as McKay puts it (TQTF 34), and as it is often reflected in the region's literature. In his critique of

"essentialist definitions," Creelman describes some of the elements of such perceptions, such as "the mystical bond to the ocean waters,... persistent resentment of... 'Upper

Canada" . . . [and] homogeneity" (6). Kulyk Keefer also offers reflections on popular conceptions of the region, evoking

impressions formed by distant summer holidays or refulgent coffee table

books whose pages frame the requisite romantic emblems: white

clapboard church in scarlet autumn dale, dories in the very shape of

indolence nesting in placid harbours, the subtle rot of grey-shingled shacks

in dense spruce groves. (UEE 10)

In addition to this sensory, scenic image, Kulyk Keefer identifies the human traits of "a peculiarly Maritime sense of shared community" (13) and the "pride-in-place" and

"strong historical awareness" (12), which she argues are frequently expressed in the region's literature. She writes that there is a "general perception of this region as a cultural has-been as well as an economic have-not" (21), "exporter of the talented, harbourer of the shiftless" (263). Carrie MacMillan comments on "the central myth of 11 the region," that of "Evangeline" (84); Eric Ross observes impressions of the region's

"simple life close to nature" (170); and Gwendolyn Davies writes of the "rural and nautical character" (PP 150) for which the region is reputed. Of the compulsion to view

Nova Scotia as an anti-modern refuge, McKay writes,

The 'new truth' emerging from the mythomoteur of Innocence was that

the province was still enchanted, unspoiled, a Folk society, natural, and

traditional: that the fall into capitalism and the 'disenchantment of the

world' had not affected this society's essential innocence of everything

negative suggested by the phrase 'modern life.' (QOTF 32)'

That critics so widely identify complementary and corroborative understandings of

Atlantic Canadian society attests to the strength and prevalence of these conceptions.

Yet, even as they denounce conventional, generalizing and definitive representations of the region, critics attempt to examine it comprehensively and to describe its contemporary preoccupations.

The notion of what Kulyk Keefer calls a "fundamental coherence of Maritime ethos and vision" (UEExii), the idea of a shared regional experience and culture, is compelling enough to generate analysis of the region as a diverse and changing, but nevertheless unified and somehow "coherent," whole. Wolfgang Hochbruck addresses the challenge of examining a heterogeneous and evolving yet unified regional voice by placing it in the category of 'Post-colonial regionalism.' He argues "some of the best contemporary writing in the Maritimes, [has] a quality that is both regional in its

1 As McKay argues, these conceptualizations of the region's "Innocence" originated as much from within as from outside it (TQTF 217). For example, Ernest Buckler appears to assert such an ethos in The Mountain And The Valley. 12 connectedness to the space, and postcolonial in ... that [it] is pragmatic in outlook and diverse and multicultural in form" (17). He specifies that "discretion and the entailing new precision in observing detail and the delineation of particularities and peculiarities of spaces, and of the people inhabiting these spaces" (18) characterize the region's contemporary writing, to the end that its "cultural situation is gradually freed from the

[hegemonic] impulse of centres" (19). Coady and Conlin's writing supports his argument as it points out and finds fault with subjugating preconceptions of the region. The authors demonstrate a desire to assert the "peculiarities of [the places] and of the people" they portray, in an attempt to escape the silencing and confining influence of dominant impressions of the region's identity.

Describing the post-colonial tendencies of the region's contemporary literature,

Hochbruck suggests it "acknowledges" voices of "new audibility" and also "the link" with, and "importance of," recognized voices of the past, and he concludes by affirming the unity of the region's literature by writing that it "will insist on the special regional tone that is and always has been the hallmark of the best of Maritime writing" (18). He evokes a vision of an insistently heterogeneous region that is equally insistent on its unification in place and history. How such combinations of heterogeneity and unity, future and past, can be established and maintained, and the nature of the "special regional tone" to which he refers, are not easily discerned, but these are precisely the questions that Coady and Conlin address in their work. They confirm Hochbruck's observation that the region's contemporary literature asserts the need for evolving, diverse expressions of regional experience while also affirming the distinctiveness of that experience. Their protagonists are fundamentally conflicted by the struggle to free themselves from the 13

confinement and determinism of collective identity while maintaining a sense of

connection and belonging.

Hochbruck's focus on the continuity of voices from the past with those of "new

audibility"(18) is indicative of the challenge that lies in preserving established identity

while negotiating change and allowing for evolution. This is the struggle around which

Coady and Conlin's novels revolve and it is what Creelman argues is a defining feature

of Maritime society and literature. He argues, "Maritimers share a common memory of a

lost community, [and] they share a distinctive fear or hesitation about their tenuous

future. These forces of memory and hesitation form the central cultural boundaries of the

region" (14). Coady and Conlin demonstrate this "tension" (6) in their writing.

Particularly in their novels, its impact is manifest in their protagonists' physical,

emotional and psychological crises. The "persistent sense of longing and nostalgia" (11)

with which Creelman characterizes Maritime society is a defining feature of Conlin's

Heave, in which the protagonist is immobilized by her attachment to her past and

resistance to her future. "Hesitation about [a] tenuous future" also prevents Coady's

protagonist, in Strange Heaven, from actively engaging in her life. Similarly, in the

authors' short stories, the struggle to distinguish self from home holds young women in perpetual states of transience and uncertainty of self and place.

For a contemporary generation of young women, Coady and Conlin's works

address the anxiety suffered by individuals in what critics insist is a particular culture and

a particular collective experience. Their stories are microcosms of the "anxieties,

tensions and contradictions" (6) that Creelman argues are the collective experience of this

regional society. They are illustrations of the effects of a distinct societal ethos on 14 individuals negotiating their current and future selves. This determination of individuality within a community with a strong sense of collective identity is a not a new struggle. As Creelman has noted of earlier Atlantic Canadian fiction, certain authors, in this case Alden Nowlan, Alistair MacLeod and David Adams Richards, show

that the individual subject is essentially trapped within a deterministic

social structure ... that the individual's sense of self is difficult to

maintain in the modern Maritime setting . . . [and] how individuals are

restricted and confined by their familial or socioeconomic contexts. (24)

The continuation of this line of questioning in Coady and Conlin's work demonstrates that these anxieties persist today in the consciousness of characters representing individuals from the region. 15

CHAPTER 2 CONSTRUCTING INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN COADY'S STRANGE HEAVEN

In depicting the struggle for self-determination of one adolescent girl growing up in Cape Breton, Coady comments on the larger scale definition of identity of a regional population. Bridget Murphy's need to escape fixed reputation and to assertively express her own experience reflects the similar need of her community. Her ambivalence and

"apathy" (Coady SH 50) are a microcosmic distillation of the effects of simplistic and subjugating perceptions conventionally projected onto rural Atlantic Canadian society.

In Strange Heaven, the predetermination and perpetuation of limited notions of identity, both individual and communal, confine and condemn characters to alienation and lead to repression, stagnation, self-destruction and, in extreme cases, self-annihilation. For the narrator and protagonist, eighteen-year-old Bridget, who provides the primary example of the symptoms of this alienation, her feelings of lack of personal agency in the determination of her self and destiny, compounded by a sense of defeatism rampant in her community, make her leave-taking seem necessary for her survival. Societal and personal circumstances have taken their toll on the young woman and, with the exception of the very end of the novel, Coady presents a dark vision of the effects of restrictive definitions of this community, and of the individual's hope for a healthy, independent sense of self within it.

As an act of resistance to these damaging effects, Coady's novel is a subversion of projected conceptions of Cape Breton's regional character, at the same time as it confirms and critiques many of the negative aspects of that reputation. It implicitly advocates the rejection of imposed identity in exchange for self-expression, which 16

Bridget eventually achieves, and which the novel performs for the region in which it is set. Coady's conclusion is a subtle and tentative acknowledgement of the ties of family and of solidarity in a shared, particular identity; however, the tentativeness of this conclusion, especially in comparison to the cynicism of the rest of the novel, indicates an ambivalence toward the social dynamics of this region and their effects on the individual.

As Bridget relates the characters and customs of her family and small town community, the complexity of her tone and the combination of repulsion and admiration that comes across in her humour demonstrate the difficulty of growing up in this place. She is as compelled to identify with it as she is to distance herself from it. Similarly, Strange

Heaven is, for Cape Breton, an act of regional self-definition and an assertion of regional identity as much as a rejection of that shared identity. This, the novel implies, is a problem of particular difficulty in this region due to its reputation as a marginal and underprivileged place within Canada.

As the novel presents them, the irritants contributing to the malaise Bridget exhibits, and which her peers and community reflect, are mutually reinforcing internal and external preoccupations with shared identity. First is the preconception and commodification of Cape Breton culture that alienates the local population from those outside it, regarding them not as compatriots and equals but as a group of yokels and cultural exhibits. Second is the prescription of identity that happens within the regional community as a result, in part, of the conception foisted upon it from the outside, as well as its economic dependence on the tourism industry. In Coady's text, lack of economic prosperity and the defensiveness that results both from this lack and from the region's persistent marginalization are at the root of a toxic atmosphere of repression, defeatism, 17 and self-destructiveness. In this environment of closely guarded and vehemently enforced notions of collective cultural identity, of gender roles and of social norms, individuals are inevitably conflicted by the difficulty of fulfilling and adhering to social expectations. Characters in the novel are either strongly attached to the collective, defining themselves in total accordance with its patterns, or strongly opposed to it.

Subjugation of individual identity and repression of self-expression are common throughout and evident in reactions that include withdrawal from the collective, physical departure from the community, psychological breakdown and self-destruction.

What counterbalances Coady's negative cast of her Cape Breton setting and her characters is the tone of Bridget's narration which, for all of its jarring cynicism, nevertheless asserts the appealing and unique character of the place and people she describes, from the comic use of dialect to depiction of a family and community dysfunctional in their solidarity. To mature healthily, the narrator must somehow embrace the aspects of her heritage that are affirming, while not allowing its negative influences to determine her destiny. Her struggle can be understood as a reflection of a similar need in the Cape Breton community of Coady's novel to move beyond limited conceptions of collective culture while at the same time embracing its distinctive character. Just as Bridget finally makes a psychological grasp at personal agency and independence by speaking for herself, Coady's novel acts as a self-representation that celebrates particularity while resisting imposed definitions of regional identity.

Articulating the tensions and "impasse[s]" (123) of conceptualizing identity is part of that act of representation. 18

There is an overarching critique of preconception in the novel that supports

Coady's presentation of characters tortured by the need to either conform to or

completely resist imposed identities. The characters in this novel are highly judgmental

of one another and consistently interpret and categorize themselves. This is as apparent

in the hospital ward, where patients are labeled by illness or dysfunction (62), as it is in the Murphy household, where Albert and Robert are quick to label women (18, 112) and

pass judgment on their priest (100). The problem is often not misconception but

oversimplification. A telling example of this is the adults' commentary on the state of

adolescents in the community. Rather than engaging in a serious and thoughtful

discussion of the root of the youth's unhappiness, Robert and Albert perfunctorily

conclude that it is the same there as anywhere and that teenagers simply lack discipline

(104). Robert similarly fails to recognize the complexity of Bridget's condition, or that

of her fellow patients at the ward, and determines that they are "stubborn" (128). As her

characters hyperbolize the natural human tendency to confine others to stable, manageable boxes, Coady's text highlights the oversimplification of complex problems,

experiences and conditions.

The novel's descriptions of setting and characters engages with popular

conceptions of the Canadian East Coast, stimulating readers' consideration and

reconsideration of their assumptions, alternatively affirming and subverting common

perceptions of the region and its peoples. She draws attention to the particular

geographical region in which her novel is set by explicitly naming it, including the names

of local sites: Inverness (78), Creignish Mountain (88), Duck Cove (24), Port Hood (87),

Cheticamp (42) and Dartmouth's Mic Mac Mall (103). She engages in the 19 characterization of its community by employing the turns of phrase that are particular to the region such as the concluding of statements with "me byes" (104). In these aspects of her work, Coady provides a sampling of this Cape Breton atmosphere and explicitly represents a unique culture. However, she rarely does so without some kind of irony or complication. For example, Bridget turns her local accent on and off depending on her audience, most often invoking it in self-deprecating jest. The closeness of her family and the presence of aging relatives are also characteristics that readers might consider typical of the region, but which Coady subverts. Ian McKay comments in The Quest of the Folk that Nova Scotia is popularly associated with "timeless traditions of the fishing coves, the unceasing battles of male adventurers against an eternal sea, the pull of strong families bound together by tight knots of tradition and religion" (32). Coady's novel is notably void of references to "rockbound coasts" and oceanscapes. The Murphy family is

"knotted," but more often in the sense of confusion and tension than of stability and unity. With further irony, the family's use of religious idioms allude to Catholicism but demonstrate the perversion of religious tradition rather than its endurance. Margaret P.'s lack of memory (Coady SH 23) undermines notions of family tradition and heritage.

Coady evokes some features of stereotypes of rural Atlantic Canada only to demonstrate their inadequacy or outdatedness, and entirely ignores others. She engages with the assumptions of audiences, provoking preconception only to complicate it and she emphasizes the complexity of regional culture and character.

In order to emphasize the negative effects of simplistic and condescending conceptions of the Cape Breton region, Coady includes a character who exemplifies the type of objectifying and commodifying gaze that McKay critiques in his study. With Alan Voorland, she depicts the projection of a regional identity onto the Cape Breton community and the individuals within it. He does to Bridget what McKay identifies as the "transformation of commonsense, of a sense of identity, of that complex of myth and symbols that [tell] a people who they [are] ... the pattern of cultural redescription"

(TQTF 41-2). Alan is thus cast as one of what McKay calls the "cultural producers" (40) of such "redescription": what is perhaps more accurately put, in the context of Coady's novel, as cultural confinement. He is the most evident example of the novel's persistent critique of the manufacturing of Nova Scotia's imagined essential character, its founding in notions of what McKay terms "Innocence," anti-modernism (33), and "authenticity"

(222) of culture. Like the tourist's impulse McKay examines in his study, Alan seeks to gain access, via Bridget, to a cultural specificity and authenticity he lacks and which he imagines to be sited in the people of rural Cape Breton. Strange Heaven demonstrates the process of conceptualization and commercialization of Cape Breton's collective identity and its alienating effects. Alan's exploitation of Bridget's youth and place origins, her imagined innocence and symbolic essence are the most repulsive and poignant examples of the novel's repeated critique of the projection of identity.

Alan, "a twenty-five-year-old engineer who had been hired by the mill but wasn't sure if he was going to stay" (Coady SH32), is an Ontarian who expresses sentimental ideas of a pastoral, preserved and pre-modern Maritimes, replete with Celtic influences and a bitter-sweet downtrodden charm. He finds the marginal, disadvantaged quality that he associates with the region most appealing: '"This is a wonderful place, a fascinating people with a thriving, unique culture. And yet there is a sadness. A hopelessness about it all. The dependence on welfare, unemployment insurance. The bottle'" (32). He 21

distinguishes this population and culture from his own, but enjoys the privilege of

association with it, thanks to Confederation, and his ability to visit without being

permanently subject to the less appealing realities of life in the region. He takes

advantage of his ability to find employment there to observe the community without

being defined or affected by the ethos that so intrigues him. He considers himself not

only distinct from the place and people but somehow an authority on them, categorizing,

representing and ultimately dismissing them. He surveys the town "like an

anthropologist" (32), recording and reporting his impressions "like a newscaster" (33).

The problem, Coady implies, is that the reality is always more nuanced than such perceptions can encompass or honour and, as a result, impressions such as Alan's are

either inadequate, outdated or false.

Despite his detachment from what he perceives and represents, Alan is neither an

objective scientist nor a dispassionate journalist. Quite the opposite, he imposes his own preconceptions and thus finds nothing more than affirmation of them. He embodies what

McKay identifies as "that fatal complacency, content[ment] to think in essences" (TQTF xvii), his observations superficial, his conclusions pre-determined and one-dimensional.

Cast as a recorder, he appears a contemporary Helen Creighton figure. Alike, they are what McKay terms, "urban cultural producers, pursuing their own interests and

expressing their own view of things, constructing] the Folk of the countryside as the

romantic antithesis to everything they disliked about modern urban and industrial life"

(4). And just as McKay points out the commercial aspects of Creighton's interest in

Devil's Island, what she called the "gold mine" of her Folk and Folk songs (qtd. in

McKay TQTF 7), Coady's placing Alan in Cape Breton as an employed professional 22 underlines his, not the locals', economic benefit in this would-be anthropologist's interest in Cape Breton. Because Alan's view of the island is one of "hopelessness" and

"dependence," it is these characteristics that he sees, and it is only after their novelty and his sense of detachment from them fade that they swiftly lose their appeal. Coady writes,

The place that had once been so fascinating had rapidly lost its rustic

charm and begun to do bad things to him, he said. He was getting fatter

and fatter with no gym to work out at, and the shifts at the mill were

completely fucking up his internal clock. And the guys he worked with on

the platform were either drunk or hung over all the time and were going to

kill somebody soon.... The whole place was beginning to unsettle him.

(SH 38)

He "delights in" (91) the character of the place only as long as it remains as passively charming as he would like to perceive it, as a "romantic haven of the Folk," as McKay puts it (TQTF 7). In the disappointment of his expectations, Coady not only points out his bias and superficiality, but also the illusory nature and inadequacy of such mainstream conceptions of the region. He reflects the combination of contempt and admiration that

McKay argues characterizes popular sentiments toward "the Folk." McKay notes a

transition from scorning and criticizing their lives and customs to

celebrating them: and apparently celebrating them on the basis of a

redescription of the very grounds - "primitivism," "isolation," "distance

from modernity" - that had once been the cause of so much Victorian

hostility, (xv) 23

The irony to which McKay alludes is reflected in Alan's character and his changing attitude toward Cape Breton. He idealizes it and later detests it for the very traits he had first romanticized. His conceptions become ridiculous, revealing that reality

is more complex and more significant. Alan serves as a scapegoat against whom readers might distinguish themselves when interpreting Bridget's narration, so that they might be conscious of, and thus rise above, the "Tourist's Gaze" (McKay TQTF 34) and seek a

more authentic and complex understanding of the region.

Coady not only problematizes the attempt to understand and characterize a particular group from an outside perspective but also points out the difficult position of the insider at the margin. She demonstrates, through Bridget, that the object of a

fetishizing gaze such as Alan's is made to feel alien, and somehow deficient. Realizing that Alan's interest in her is as a representation of a distinct place and people, Bridget thinks,

It was impossible not to feel special. It was impossible not to feel a little

dumb. For the first time she experienced herself and her surroundings as

something other than commonplace. For Alan they were positively alien.

He wanted to hear stories about Bridget's Gramma. . . . Alan asked if she

was speaking in Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic and Bridget didn't know"

(Coady SH 33).

She feels inadequate, both for not realizing her own Otherness, and for not completely

fulfilling Alan's perception of her. The notion that he knows more about her than she

does about herself unsettles her self-confidence. She consequently re-envisions herself through Alan's eyes. She is both "special" and "dumb," but most significantly, she does not know herself. Alan is one of several other factors in Bridget's life that combine to destabilize her control over the determination of her own identity; his is the appropriation of her identity from outside her region.

Another example of this type of alienation that results from being viewed as a caricature is Bridget's father, Robert Murphy. As a "craftsman" (73), an identity and a symbolic significance are thrust upon him by an economically and culturally dominant elite. Much as Alan considers himself a sophisticated expert, qualified to observe and validate Cape Breton's unique and authentic character, so do consumers and traders of

"Maritime folk art," from the urban center of Halifax, attempt to elevate and validate

Robert's work by packaging and promoting it as such (73). McKay refers to this

"construction of the Folk" by outsiders, the "middle-class and often academic men and women [who] rule on their inherent 'authenticity' within a closely defined canon and on an 'objective' evaluation of their aesthetic worth" (TQTF 22). Robert is keenly aware of efforts to cast him as a character and his art as artifact, both of commercial and abstract cultural value, and is notably disturbed by them. He takes advantage of the economic opportunity his position affords but he also demonstrates discomfort with and even spite for the oversimplification and commodification of his regional culture and his identity.

His objection to the attention of folk art critics and media from the city could be interpreted as evidence of ignorance and lack of refinement, "'Ar-teests' .. . 'Arse-tits is more like it'" (Coady SH74), but several points undermine such a reading and suggest that Robert is, by contrast, neither ignorant in matters of art and aesthetics, nor unsophisticated in matters of cultural politics. Rather, this performance of crudeness is a manipulation of expectations of him for his own benefit. His artistic merit and keenness 25 are apparent, at least from Bridget's perspective, in her flattering portrayal of his wooden decoys which, she says, are "simply beautiful" and "all exactly the same" (SH 75).

Furthermore, Robert actively participates in the exploitation of his work and his perceived identity as commodities. Coady writes,

The shop did a fairly good business because he made cabinets as well and

because he over-priced his art work outrageously for the tourists. He had

also acquired a reputation for being a character, and local people were

always stopping by to see what he'd do. They found his insults endearing,

but if ever they loitered too long, he'd bark, 'If you're not buying, you're

leaving,' in a deliberately less charming kind of way, in such a way as to

make them fear they had offended him somehow. In such a way as to

prompt them to buy, perhaps one of his twenty-five-do liar golf balls. (75)

In this passage, Coady illustrates Mr. Murphy's appreciation of the commercial value of his persona as a Cape Breton artisan. Though he cannot make a living from interest in his work, he is willing to exploit it as much as possible, to be however "charming," or less so, as necessary to sell the product. He is quite the opposite of the simplistic and friendly folk character sought by cultural consumers, the figure McKay argues James D. Gillis had been unwittingly marketed as, "a quaint, droll figure of the backwoods" (TQTF236).

Robert is shrewdly alert to this objectification and is understandably alienated by it. It is perhaps this alienation, as much as the reality of his economic condition, that compels him to perpetuate the misunderstanding of his persona and the commodification of his regional culture. His insight and his own exploitation of preconceptions are not without consequence to his peace of mind. Like his daughter, he demonstrates a despondence and 26 cynicism that reflect resentment of being thought "known" and being denied the right to determine and express an evolving, authentic identity independent of his region of origin and the market value of his art.

As a result of being conceptualized and fetishized as members of their region, both Bridget and Mr. Murphy exhibit a preoccupation with falseness. For example,

Bridget makes paper snowflakes and compares them to crafts purchased from "dying children" or on "the Indian reserve" (93). She is aware that her crafts will be imbued with notions of symbolic value because of her diagnosed psychological state. Similarly, her father, with his brother's religious carvings, plays into what consumers would like to believe, that the carvings are miraculous and exceptional, rather than mere "overly sanded block[s] of wood" (77). Coady emphasizes the lack of authenticity, or more accurately, the fabrication of it. McKay argues that "the vital nucleus of the Folk idea

[is] the essential and unchanging solidarity of traditional society" (TQTF 12). He suggests that interest in and the conception of Folk culture stem from "such essentialist questions as those of origin and authenticity" (14) and "an intellectual search for something more real, natural, authentic, and essential" (37). Consumers of these crafts look for a tangible connection to transcendent, universal meaning. In Coady's work, such a search is bound to fail. She points out the relentless performance, construction and projection of meaning. In their alienation and their heightened awareness of falseness,

Bridget and her father demonstrate the disheartening effects of being made objects representative of essentialist, abstract concepts rather than understood as real and complex individuals. Bridget exhibits a spiritual emptiness that indicates her total suspicion of symbolic meaning and her sensitivity to others' attempt to impose meaning and significance where it may not exist. As a result of her metaphysical doubt and her preoccupation with falseness, the novel disrupts notions of the religious and the spiritual.

Examples of this motif are Margaret P.'s "3D plaque" of Jesus Christ, which Bridget associates with "Star Wars cards out of cereal boxes that do the same thing" (Coady SH

143); Rollie's "Religious Wooden Statues. Done by Retarded Man. Twenty-five dollars a piece" (78); and Robert's regarding Father Boyle as a "fat-arsed jeezless souse" (100).

Demonstrations of irreverence such as these contribute to Coady's subversion of the common conceptions of Cape Breton's culture as examined above. Here, notions of the culture's grounding in strong religious tradition (McKay TQTF 23) are undermined by the irony that accompanies allusions to religion. As contribution to Bridget's character development, this persistent atmosphere of spiritual emptiness, and the young woman's preoccupation with falseness are symptomatic of her senses of personal uncertainty of self and disconnectedness from her family and community. She distances herself from the dysfunction and disenchantment she observes around her, as her cynical tone evinces, and yet she reflects it herself; her tone reverberates with the disenchantment of her environment. Her confusion about how much she is a part of, and defined by, her

surroundings is the root of her virtual paralysis, which is symbolized by her constipation,

silence and apathy (Coady SH 51) and evinces her grappling with the metaphysical question of identity and whether there is anything essential that connects her to her home.

In Strange Heaven, the question of shared identity, the extent to which one is

defined by the group of which one is a part, is a recurrent thematic concern. This would 28 be expected to some extent in any representation of an adolescent psyche but, as the novel is undoubtedly also a representation of a particular region, and as the symptoms of those anxieties are so widespread and extreme, there is an implication that they are of particular concern to adolescents in this region. Bridget negotiates characterization by the many groups of which she is a member, her peer group, the hospital ward, her family, and, as Alan emphasizes, her Cape Breton regional community. In a particularly poignant state of self-doubt, not only as an adolescent but after the ordeal of her pregnancy, Bridget is especially vulnerable to the conflicting pressures and influences of these various group identities. Her utterance upon arriving at the hospital ward captures her confusion and total lack of sense of self: "I'm not. I'm nothing. I'm just not..."

(49). In her uncertainty, she does not know how to behave:

It was not like being at school, where you were constantly on your guard

not to seem weird. Here the strangeness was a given. It made Bridget

tense because it was like vertigo. The temptation was to seize the

opportunity to be weird, to revel in the fact that anything you said or did in

front of these people was of no consequence. It was the fear of falling into

madness, the easiest thing to do under the circumstances. The only thing

that was, in fact, expected of you. (64)

The image of vertigo illustrates the tension resulting from her simultaneous desires to adhere to and distinguish herself from this particular group identity. Compounding this is the pressure from the other groups with which she is associated: Albert insists she should be at home (18); her mother suggests she is better "away from this madhouse" (27), meaning the Murphy household; the hospital staff inevitably believes she belongs on the 29 ward. It would seem that each group excludes her from another and that none of them provides Bridget with a satisfactory sense of normalcy or belonging.

What sets Bridget apart from her adolescent peers is her sensitivity to social pressures; however, the disillusionment she illustrates in rather extreme symptoms is widespread in the adolescent sector of her community and in the adolescents' ward of the hospital. Teenagers in Coady's Cape Breton setting demonstrate various reactions to pressures that define or restrict their identities. The anorexic patients at the ward attempt to assert control by evading efforts to make them eat (126,135). Byron exhibits manic desperation to distinguish himself (65). Outside the ward, evidence of the same anxiety

is less pronounced, but still apparent, evinced in widespread alcohol abuse and compulsive self-destruction. The regional focus of Coady's work and the adolescent experience that it depicts are inherently connected in that the negative, repressive environment she illustrates is what threatens these young characters' well-being. She

depicts a community with limiting social norms that entrap individuals, as Bridget puts it,

"they make you be in it" (164). Pressure to adhere to and participate in prescribed behavioural patterns inhibits self-awareness.

An example of the social structures that confuse and inhibit adolescents in the

community is its dichotomous conception of female gender roles. Bridget's father, uncle, brother and male friends suggest there are two stereotypical categories into which women

are confined in this community. Coady's depiction of an environment of limiting gender roles reflects what Creelman notes in other Atlantic Canadian literature and what he calls

a "deeper systemic sexism that pervades the rural community" and which "accurately

reflects the historic limitations placed on women" (76). In Bridget's community, a young woman can be either the "sweet girl... a virgin" (Coady SH 23) or the "tramp" (113).

The former does not "curse" (22) and the latter has only one purpose; as Gerard puts it,

'"well, what else are you supposed to do with tramps!'" (113). Bridget has understandable difficulty determining in which category she rightly belongs. According to her brother, having "learned [her] lesson," she is "redeemed" (113) and is recast in the

first category. Her uncertainty about how her experience affects her identity is apparent:

she "sat back in her chair, draining the bottle. Is that what it was, she thought" (113).

Also apparent in this short passage is the way Coady implicitly connects alcohol

consumption with uncertainty of identity. On the social norms that determine the

behaviour and identity of males, the novel is less descriptive; however, that young men

feel intense social pressure and demonstrate symptoms of its effects is nevertheless

evident. Kenneth MacEachern's suicide and Archie Shearer's suicide-murder are two indications of this; Coady explicitly connects both acts with asserting personal control

over destiny (55). Albert, Robert, Gerard, Byron, Mark and Archie are aggressive in their attempts to control and impose conceptions of identity - their own and others'.

Young female characters, by contrast, are frequently shown to be victims of such

impositions, as exemplified most poignantly by Jennifer MacDonnelPs complete loss of

agency (150-1). Whether charged with the role of protecting social structures or adhering to them, Coady's characters are restrained by the culture and collective character of their

social environment and demonstrate the effects of that strain. The author evokes a young population of alienated, lost souls. The disproportionately large number of psychologically disturbed young people in her work, the depiction of pathological

drinking, the emphasis on dysfunction in the ward, are indicative of a general malaise in 31 the adolescent community and suggestive of a similar affliction in the broader

community.

The particular discontentment and dysfunction that seem to characterize Bridget's

community are the traits that she is hesitant to embrace and which lead to her intense

ambivalence. Facing alignment with the various collectives of her peer group, the

hospital ward, her family and her community, and not comfortably at home in any of

them, she struggles to determine how much she is alike or unlike the various groups to

which she belongs or has been assigned. Her uncertainty results in her sense of

liminality; her apparent apathy is evidently a sign of this inner conflict. Typical

adolescent confusion, significantly compounded by this particularly dispirited community

ethos, stifling social norms, and dysfunctional family environment leave Bridget caught

between embracing and rejecting her surroundings and deeply uncertain of her own

identity. Coady's comparison of the hospital ward and the Murphy household (27)

highlights Bridget's insecurity and alienation in both spaces, while the young woman's

narrative tone implies a hesitant fondness for, and identification with, both. When

Bridget comments "things were as always. [She and Gerard], sitting and laughing at their

family" (27), she lets her audience know that she loves her family, despite, if not for, its

unique dynamic, and that she yearns for familial solidarity. Similarly, on the ward, she

feels a part of "some isolated colony" (82). At home, as at the ward, Bridget is alienated

by chaos, dysfunction and pressure, but simultaneously drawn in by the solidarity of

shared experience and particularity. Coady's image of vertigo, the purgatory in which

Margaret P. believes Bridget to be stuck (100), and the latter's conclusion that "inertia 32

[is] the key" (67), are all indicative of her indeterminacy and liminality amidst alternative and equally influential marginal group identities.

Her brother and uncle are two characters who display the dichotomy of identification with and alienation from collective identity, the extremes between which

Bridget is caught. They choose the two alternative reactions to being confined to the profile of the "Folk," or to any definitive collective identity, that McKay describes as

"either [adapting] to this uncomfortable situation by intensifying their own separate

identity, or [seeking], by assimilating, somehow to cancel the polarity" (TQTF 13).

Gerard exemplifies a willful departure from home and a definition of self in decided

opposition to his origins. His disconnection is explicit; Bridget's brother "found her,

along with all the rest of them, grotesque in some respect" (Coady SH 22). He separates

himself from his family and community physically and emotionally, preferring to be at

school and, when at home, avoiding interaction (117). Gerard stands as a foil to Bridget with his assured reaction to his environment. He is comparatively resolute, certain of his

identity and his dissimilarity from his family, as evinced by his discomfort with the idea that he "got anything from his father" (79). Her brother confidently chooses

disassociation in reaction to the pressure of collective identity.

Albert embodies the very opposite approach to family and community solidarity, that of complete devotion to and emphatic affirmation of origin and shared identity. His

insistence that people should be "where [they] goddamn well belong" (18) clearly evinces

his association of identity and place. The anchoring of identity in regional community is,

according to Albert, a reliable truth: 33

Ontario constituted, [to him], 'a pack of a-holes,' and westerners were a

'pack of g.d. shit-kicking yahoos.' Only in Newfoundland was there to be

found 'any fucking civility,' although he had never gone out there to work,

only to visit Newfoundland friends who he'd made working in the mills,

and who, he said, could never stick it out for very long and always ended

up fleeing the mainland in fear and consternation. (12-13)

The security of Albert's sense of self rests in his community and its distinctiveness. As he vehemently asserts that identity, he distances himself from anything opposed to or outside of it. He displays a will for disassociation equal, though oppositely oriented, to

Gerard's. In relation to the particular collective character of their family unit, Albert and

Gerard embody the two poles between which Bridget oscillates in considering her feelings about home and her own identity.

Despite their seeming security, Gerard and Albert's psychological relationships with Cape Breton and the Murphy family also exhibit signs of the uneasiness and alienation experienced by Bridget. She is paralyzed, as her notions of vertigo and inertia suggest, by repulsion from and identification with the ethos and character of her home.

So repelled from his family that he "can't wait to get out of here" (23), Gerard isolates himself physically and emotionally as well. Similarly, Albert cloisters himself by rejecting anything that does not affirm his own worldview, such as when he dismisses Dr.

Soloman as a "twat," as he would, according to Bridget, "anyone he felt was uppity"

(18). The persistence of the negotiation between self and home in all three of these very

different characters exemplifies the degree to which individual and collective identity is a persistent problem in the text's Cape Breton setting. The anxiety Bridget faces as a post- 34 pregnancy, despondent, misfit teenager, is a heightened example of the difficulty faced by many individuals in this collective.

The symptoms of this widespread anxiety are evident in the self-destruction, repression, silence and stagnation of Coady's setting. She establishes a cycle in which limited perceptions of collective identity, whether promoted by forces internal or external to the community, hinder diversity and individual expression of self. That repression leads, in turn, to feelings of entrapment and atrophy, resulting in an atmosphere of defeatism. Her depiction illustrates Terry Whalen's claim that "it almost goes without

saying that the Atlantic region has a notoriety for its extreme acting out of that defeated mentality ... it has been hyperbolic on that point and a living demonstration to the rest of the country of how hangdog mentality can become a way of life" (qtd. in Hochbruck 13).

Coady's fictional community depicts this "mentality" and "way of life." Robert Murphy, for example, is portrayed as a progressive figure who would like to broaden local culture and infrastructure (Coady SH73) but is rebuffed and consequently subdued by the community's allegiance to conservative, restrictive conceptions of collective identity:

"One day [he] came home late from a meeting and announced, 'Piss on 'em. They can play the bagpipes till their foolish lungs implode. I hope they all go as deaf as me arse.'

And he went downstairs to work on his craft" (73). He submits to a pessimistic environment evocative of what McKay identifies as "the climate of defeatism that plagues concerned people in a thousand areas of endeavour across the Maritimes" (TANM

7). Robert's subsequent withdrawal from municipal affairs is a result of his feeling alienated and disillusioned by the collective because it continues to embrace and express only limited conceptions of its identity, that the festival, for example, should be limited to 35 bag pipes as they are what "[make] the community unique" (Coady SH73). As he had

"practically run the town at one point" (73), the community consequently loses an active, optimistic patron of its progress. This stagnation is also evident in the case of the football field at the local high school. Despite the triumph of overcoming funding shortages and the mayor's nay-saying (183), the field is built, but nevertheless falls to disuse because, as Bridget notes, "hockey was the only thing any one at school had ever cared about"

(184). Readers get a sense of a spiraling descent from disappointment, to lowered expectations and finally to defensive, stubborn resistance to change in order to affirm collective identity. The town remains static in continual reaffirmation of conceptions of collective culture. In turn, individuals within the town are similarly burdened and repressed by defeatism.

Bridget's peers reflect the despair that begins with the adults in her community.

They exhibit what Creelman calls "self-destructive cynicism" (79) and what Kulyk

Keefer describes, in her discussion of Maritime literature's depiction of its communities, as "the acceptance of impoverishment and entrapment that points to a painful stagnation: the overlooking of intolerable conditions because they have become part of the fabric of community life" (UEE 38). Like Alden Nowlan, in reference to whom Kulyk Keefer makes her observation, Coady depicts a setting in which "intolerable conditions" become the norm and, thus, simply the expectation of the town's youth. Rather than poverty, as

in Nowlan's fiction, what should be intolerable but is generally accepted in Coady's

setting is submission to an identity defined by economic hardship, scarce opportunity and

detrimental conservatism. The character of Chantal typifies the unconscious perpetuation

of fatalism. She says to her boyfriend, "luh, asshole, I'm done school, I work. You're almost done school, and Mark can get you on at Home Hardware. This is what people do, they get jobs and get married" (Coady SH 41). Bridget's peers' ideas of their own prospects, are limited to and determined by local examples and they actively assert and perpetuate established patterns. Bridget implies as much herself, in her pointed attention to the expression, "The world is your oyster" (17), which she claims never to have heard before leaving her town. The forcefulness of Chantal's assertion evinces her desire to

affirm and preserve regional cultural identity. She is like Albert in her allegiance to home and its status quo, explaining her torture of young Darlene MacEachern by telling

Bridget "this was how things were done back home [in Cheticamp]" (42). Coady shows that youth actively recreate and perpetuate conceptions of collective identity, and pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Young people around Bridget seek and create dysfunction because "that's what

[they] do on the weekends, because there [is] nothing else to do and it [is] boring otherwise" (14); it is, for them, a purpose and a sense of identity. Stephen is exemplary of this in his desperate need to be a cog in the wheel that propels Bridget and Mark's tumultuous relationship. Heidi is equally parasitic in her need to "get some booze into"

Bridget (166) so that her friend will facilitate opportunities for the group to collectively

affirm their identity. They abuse alcohol and drugs in imitation of local custom, as

exemplified in Heidi and Bridget's drinking with their parents (166), confirming cultural

identity. They also drink to escape the oppressing weight of that collective identity and those local customs.

Bridget's peers embody the culture in which they have matured but Coady's

depictions of their substance abuse suggest more, a desperation and a desire to numb anxiety and silence individuality. Youth are consistently intoxicated to the point of being

"so fucked up they could hardly see straight" (174), "hardly speak" or stand (192), immobile and barely conscious. Bridget explains that she forgets herself and her family when she drinks (173). While adolescent alcohol consumption is typical regardless of region, here it is pointedly connected to the erasure of self-awareness in a setting where group mentality and social codes override individuality.

Coady depicts the erasure of individuality as Bridget is virtually gagged and tethered by the pressure to remain in the collective and adhere to its identity. Mark regularly "ignore[s] her at parties" and "kill[s] conversation" (43). Bridget is also silenced when she "open[s] her mouth to say something and Chantal sh[oots] Jack

Daniels into it - five quick squirts" (41). She is cornered all evening at a party, surrounded by people fighting all around her (171) and continually bringing her drinks, as if stifled and trapped by the people and customs of her community. Bridget is conscious of this communal interdependence and the impossibility of her escape:

She didn't want to feel this way because she had come to know that as

soon as you start thinking you want to go, what always happens is that

people you didn't even suppose were paying attention all of a sudden

decide they can't live without you. Or that you can't live without them.

So you have to be restrained. (50)

In her entrapment and in response to other people's exploitation of her individuality,

Bridget shuts down and withdraws, much like her father does in response to the exploitation of his persona. He responds by commodifying himself, submitting with some amount of rebellion to being a commodity. Bridget submits as well. She allows 38 herelf to be used, by Stephen, Heidi and by Alan. Not free to be and experience herself,

Bridget reacts by negating herself. She succumbs to self-destructive thoughts: "The words in her head were: How do you be dead? ... It was this primal, fundamental wish .

.. this prehistoric need to turn herself off' (124). She is like Maria, an "aspiring cadaver.

Studying for the corpse-hood" (127), and Kenneth MacEachern, who "chose not to be carried along by life with everybody else" (55). In such a climate of repression, the assertion of selfhood and independence is achieved through self-annihilation.

The disappearance of Jennifer MacDonnell takes the repression of individuality to the extreme. The latter is controlled, consumed and appropriated at all stages by her community and her story serves as a heightened example of what Bridget experiences herself and what Coady suggests the Cape Breton community experiences on a broader level. Archie Shearer's crime is the result of his dependence on Jennifer and their relationship for his sense of identity. The erasure of Jennifer's individuality is repeated in the community's appropriation of her story into "The Ballad of Jenny Mac" (162).

The shortening of her name contributes to the community's sense of identity, the conception of its Scottish cultural roots, but obscures the specificity and individual identity of the girl. As Bridget notes, the latter "had never been called Jenny in her life"

(162). Jennifer's experience is incorporated into local culture, used as entertainment,

"something to talk about" (150), and as a cultural artifact, like the ballad "The Wild

Colonial Boy" (162), that fuels and commemorates the community's collective identity.

As in the case of Bridget in Alan's eyes, the community with the tourism festival, and

Robert's role as a Maritime artist, affirmation of collective identity comes at the cost of individuality and authenticity. 39

Jennifer MacDonnell's story sets the stage for Bridget's personal struggle between community belonging and independent sense of self. The extinguishing of

Jennifer's identity exemplifies Bridget's sense of erasure as her family, peers and community influence her identity so strongly. These pressures and her resulting uncertainty of self smother and restrain Bridget to the point of paralysis in various senses.

Whether in a bed, on a toilet, on the floor or in a corner, she is stationary, incapable or unwilling to move and act. "She did nothing. She exhibited no signs.... She had begun to think maybe she should do something but couldn't think what" (20). "Her body's betrayal" (21), her pregnancy (21), insomnia (67) and constipation (45), symbolizes her

sense of lacking agency in all senses. With little confidence in her own identity, her plans for escape are those suggested by others, such as Mona's desires to study pottery in

Halifax (78) and Alan's suggestion to go to school in Guelph (80). As Creelman points out, she is "passive" and "even her family doctor seems resigned to the futility of her life" (Creelman 191). Her sense that she will be completely lost to the social and familial structures in which she is immobilized is apparent in recurring allusions to Jennifer's disappearance, which resurface periodically and more frequently as Bridget becomes more resolved to escape the same fate. She determines, "people were using her" (Coady

57/150) and "she knew she did not want to be taking part... anymore" (152).

With the novel's conclusion, "the lights [come] on" (196) after the power outage and signal Bridget's empowerment; she asserts personal autonomy by finally articulating her own experience. She resists Mark's attempts to overshadow her pain and her experience with his own by actively defending herself. Rather than submitting and

allowing for her own disappearance, Bridget speaks up for herself: '"See a round mouth 40 opening and closing toward your tit and live after that.... Live and live and live after that" (194), and then she vomits, symbolizing the engagement of her body, its release from paralysis with that of her psyche. As the power comes back around her, she is sparked into agency, in body and spirit, with this self-assertion. Her repetition of the word "live" emphasizes that she has deliberately chosen a fate opposite to that of

Jennifer, Archie, Kenneth and Maria; it portrays the difficulty and also her determination to "live" consciously, recognizing her unique experience as an individual. When she returns to her house she demonstrates a new, more positive outlook. She seems to have reconciled that "this was the chaos" (197) of her family and to have accepted past hardships and the challenges of her particularity as a member of this collective. Looking at Rollie, "smil[ing] up at him and wav[ing]" (197), she reflects a sense of ownership and affection for her surroundings rather than of being confined and defeated by them.

Coady includes no indication of what Bridget will do after this point and how she will apply her empowerment; her having seized it, having taken control over her own self- definition, is in itself the novel's resolution.

Coady addresses the burden of negative conceptions of the Cape Breton region and society. The novel's presentation of Cape Breton insists that representation should be independent of agenda, not strictly reiterate and affirm prevailing preconceptions but recognize and embrace complexity and evolution. Her novel demonstrates the damage

done to individuals and collectives alike by prescriptive definitions of identity. She

implies that the construction, commodification and conservation of notions of shared

cultural identity only obscure reality and alienate people from one another. Bridget and

her father are exemplary of this as they withdraw from those around them and note 41 falseness everywhere. In general, Coady's fictional community is stifled, void of hope for a promising and enriching future. Trapped in cycles of defeatism, individuals like

Jennifer are virtually consumed in the community's attempt to reaffirm its solidarity and come to terms with its reputed identity. The novel suggests that self-expression and the acceptance of struggles and particularity, on both personal and communal levels, rather than the preoccupation with and performance of negative patterns, are possible antidotes to the pressures of imposed identity. 42

CHAPTER 3 "CRASHING BACKWARDS": THE RESISTANCE OF TRANSITIONS, CHANGE AND LEAVETAKING IN CONLIN'S HEAVE

As in Coady's Strange Heaven, in Christy Ann Conlin's Heave, the commodification and exploitation of a community's culture are symbolically wrapped up in the fetishization and exploitation of a young girl. Serrie and her experience become

symbols for the Annapolis Valley community in which the novel is set. The region's loss of its more prosperous past is analogous to Serrie's loss of innocence, given her sexual abuse at the hands of a buyer and seller of cultural historical artifacts. With this violation, she loses her sense of identity and self-worth and withdraws into a kind of self- imposed limbo. Though she should be transitioning into her future, twenty-one-year-old

Serrie internally oscillates between memories of a happier and safer youth and fears that her future will only repeat the hardships her parents have experienced. Senses of

injustice and hopelessness preoccupy her psyche and she refuses, or is unable, to take

control of her life, either at home or away at school. Conlin establishes a mirror image of

Serrie's sense of personal loss in the broader community of the Valley, where the failure

of a previously flourishing economy seems to prevent residents from embracing change.

Like Serrie, locals are often overwhelmingly despondent, scarred by changes that have

not brought improvement. They are loyal to memories of what they perceive as an idyllic

past and a former identity and are suspicious of the tourism industry's perception of

them, in current economic conditions, as a charming people, but evidently backward, lazy

or incompetent. As Creelman argues, 43

Combined with disruptions in the fishing and lumbering sectors, the

demise of the farming culture gave rise to a persistent sense of longing and

nostalgia in Maritime society. As the subcultures that had arisen around

these industries have disappeared, a large remnant of people have been left

whose beliefs in and memories of the older ways remain long after their

ability to reconstruct the traditions has vanished.. . . this genuine sense of

loss was subsequently reworked by the provincial tourist industries into a

marketing tool. Eager to attract tourist dollars, individual entrepreneurs,

government bureaucrats, and folklore historians constructed an image of

the Maritimes as an old fashioned land, steeped in a myth of innocence: a

quaint little world to be admired and explored by urban visitors.... But if

there was a version of nostalgia that was developed for the purposes of the

tourist industry, there was also a more diffused and less clearly articulated

sense of longing and loss. (Creelman 11)

Greelman's comment is most instructive, in the context of Conlin's text, in its distinction between constructed "nostalgia" and the "diffused and less clearly articulated," "genuine"

sense of lost identity. Conlin evokes both types of nostalgia, the first being the tourism

and antiques industries' interest in the rural region. She addresses the marketing and

consumption of the Maritimes to which Creelman refers, emphasizing forces such as

these that come from outside the region and presenting insiders insulating themselves,

attempting to resist the tourism industry's appropriation of their culture, and becoming all

the more nostalgic as a result. The second, more subtle and pervasive, is the underlying

ethos of Serrie's surroundings that so strongly contributes to her own unease, her attachment to home and the past. The low-level dispiritedness and perpetual backward- glance that Serrie perceives in her community influence her mindset. She demonstrates conflicting impulses to escape this atmosphere of longing and move forward, or away, and to remain loyal to her community and heritage by staying and avoiding real change.

She is both symbolic and symptomatic of her region.

Serrie's fundamental identification with her home and her past there is what leads to her anxiety about moving into her own independent future, to her "resisting" the

"transition to adulthood" (Conlin Heave 166). In the wake of a traumatic experience,

Serrie becomes fixated on the happier times she lived before her abuse, an event marking the loss of her innocence and her connection with her heritage. Literally exchanged for a broken piece of antique china, Serrie loses her sense of self as well as the tangible items that had represented her family's and community's more prosperous past. The blending of Serrie's identity with that of her region allows Conlin to demonstrate how the commodification of rural Nova Scotian culture reinforces its marginality and insularity.

Like Serrie, the community responds to outsiders' objectifying conceptualizations by

clinging to its own self-conceptions, rooted in the past. Turned both inward and backward, the community resists change, just as Serrie does. The young protagonist's

identification with this region is what makes it so difficult for her to leave, and yet the

climate of hesitation and shortage of opportunity there do not bode well should she stay.

Subjugating and commodifying conceptualizations of this region by outsiders

alienate inhabitants and encourage their defensiveness, insularity and preoccupation with

a past collective identity. Mr. Burgess's interest in the Sullivan family's heirlooms, and

in Serrie, is the offending conceptualization. The antiques dealer capitalizes on the 45 commercialization of culture and collectors' attempts to make abstractions such as authenticity, history and heritage tangible. Mr. Burgess shows little appreciation for the collector's wares but abundant superficiality in his character when Serrie notes, "Gramme said Mr. Burgess was afraid of getting old. ... Nothing more pathetic than those resisting the passage of time" (148). He shows disdain, rather than respect, for time, heritage, "old folks" and what he calls "sentimental" attachments to "just plain junk"

(84). All the while, he capitalizes on collectors' reverence for history (84). His scheming undervaluation of Sullivan heirlooms and his desire to cheat the family out of the market value of their artifacts (83), cheapen the Sullivan family history. His manipulation and coercion tarnish the family's genuine respect for its own heritage. Descendents becomes implicit in the damage to their ancestor's legacy by selling their heirlooms, but his exploitation, buying the "Clichy paperweight" for "fifteen hundred dollars" when it is actually worth "ten to fifteen thousand dollars" (310-1), exacerbates the offence.

Mr. Burgess's abuse of this family's property and of their desperation is a particularly repulsive illustration of what McKay describes in The Quest of the Folk as the construction and commodification of this conception of Nova Scotians'

"antimodernist impulse" (33). This "impulse," cast as "Innocence,"

is ethically troubling because it exemplifies the transformation of living

people (and their customs and beliefs) into articles of exchange. In a

general ethical sense, this transformation is disturbing because it treats

persons as objects rather than as ends in themselves. In a more down-to-

earth sense, it also raises questions of exploitation, since the economic 46

benefits of cultural commercialization are shared unequally and rarely

accrue to those whose culture is appropriated by others. (41)

Mr. Burgess's willingness to substitute Serrie for a broken teapot is a disturbingly literal example of the "transformation" McKay deconstructs in his study. Conlin further emphasizes it by the conflation of Serrie with cultural objects when she depicts "him

groaning in [Serrie's] ear" as he molests her, citing the values of the various antique collectibles in the Sullivan house (Conlin Heave 310). Mr. Burgess destroys what is intangible but significant by reducing it to a price; as he does to the family's heritage, he

steals Serrie's innocence and her person by recasting them as currency. He takes her youth and her family's past. She is made to feel ashamed, lost and helpless, as Martha feels selling the Sullivan inheritance (151). The novel illustrates an analogous relationship between the commodification and consumption of culture and the

objectification and ruination of a person. Neither the teapot nor Serrie can be completely recovered. The sea shanty Serrie hears articulates this sense of loss: "But the tender

grace of a day that is dead / Will never come back to me" (311). Mr. Burgess' actions, in

essence, drive a wedge between Serrie and her past unproblematic, and certainly less

painful, identity.

The relationship between Serrie and Hans Zimmer repeats the conflation of girl

and region and their reduction to commodity. Like Mr. Burgess, the German

entrepreneur sees both Serrie and Lupin Cove as attractive and lucrative prospects and,

though he may be seen as a more appealing character than Mr. Burgess, he is just as

much an opportunist and capitalist. He profits from conceptions of a regional character

that is not his own and for which he shows little genuine respect. Unlike Mr. Burgess, 47

Hans professes affection for that which he exploits, Serrie and the place and the perceived ethos of the Valley; however, he falls short of demonstrating a real understanding of them. He claims "he fell in love with Nova Scotia, with its potential" and declares that "Lupin Cove is a gem, an unpolished gem. A shabby little place but with some polish, so attractive" (273). His approach to Serrie is evidently the same. He appreciates her work ethic, her potential to be productive (273), but what is even more appealing is her unfinished, off-track quality. Watching her work, he focuses on her navel and nose piercings (255, 275), signs of her waywardness and her need of "fixing"

(304). Once he possesses her as a lover the way he possesses a piece of Lupin Cove with his motel, he is quick to remodel, deciding that she will grow her hair (283) and wear a

"nice little pale pink cashmere twin set" and skirt (283-5). Hans' affection comes with an agenda and with condescension, which Grammie notices, asking, "He's dressing you now, like a baby? ... Does he need a passport or something like that?" (284). Hans "is a

landed immigrant" (284) and does not stand to benefit in this sense, but Grammie's question demonstrates that she is aware before Serrie and the remainder of her family are of Hans' self-interest in appropriating what he does.

He capitalizes on both the region and on Serrie without really engaging with or understanding them. Though he has good intentions for both, he fails to grasp the

significance of what has come before his arrival and how it has shaped their unique character. He does not fully appreciate their identities; he would rather recreate them.

"He has marketing plans for the whole village, a future vision" (277), Serrie notes.

Grammie, however, a figure of time-earned wisdom and insight, is mindful that "it's

important to have present vision" (277). Vision, that is, truly seeing the community for 48 what it is, is what Hans lacks. Serrie is compelled to speak for the region and inform

Hans of what it has been, including the industry that once thrived in Lupin Cove and the struggles faced by local fishermen he has concluded "are lazy" (274). She asserts, "it's a real place, you know, with its own kind of reality" (275), claiming validity and a distinct identity for the community which Hans is so quick to critique and renovate.

He could not be more wrong about Serrie and her community when he accuses them of being out of touch with their identity. The irony of his accusation, "You have forgotten your history" (273), would not be lost on readers who recognize that the past is what preoccupies Serrie's mind. Her father is also invested in local history with his outhouses; Martha and Grammie with the Spinster Sullivan's antiques; Dearie with her

Acadian ancestry; and Percy with trains and all things historical. Hans' accusation is further evidence that he misunderstands the region's culture and Serrie. Far from having forgotten its history, Conlin emphasizes that change in this community has left scars which make past prosperity impossible to forget; "warehouses still stand empty" near the empty space from which train tracks have been "pulled ... out of the land like so many varicose veins" (71); "the lighthouse ... [has been] torn down ... and replaced with an ugly metal pole" (218). Creelman comments on this type of disillusionment which he argues is particular to the Maritime region and how it results in a unique kind of nostalgia:

Like the Maritimes, the other regions of Canada have modernized their

primary industries and have experienced a sense of nostalgia for times

past, but in Canada the Maritime region is unique in its brief development

of and subsequent loss of secondary industries. Quebec triumphantly 49

renounced its "myth of the land" during the Quiet revolution, and

Ontario's nostalgia for its displaced folk cultures has been mitigated by its

sense of confidence in its own future as an economic power. Only the

Maritime region's sense of loss has been compounded by its repeated

disappointments and frustrations in the industrial sector. (13)

Confirming Creelman's argument, Conlin's work suggests that it is disillusionment with change, rather than laziness or forgetfulness that makes locals resist Hans' efforts.

"Industrial innovation, it sucked the life out of here" (Conlin Heave 275), Serrie claims, to account for local hesitance. It is evident that it is Hans who does not know the community's history and thus does not understand the community itself. Like Mr.

Burgess, he sees only the potential for exploitation.

As Serrie is emblematic of the region in both Mr. Burgess' and Hans' eyes, her

feelings of alienation are reflected in her rural community. Serrie's sense of separation

from those around her is illustrated by her imagining herself as a product for

consumption, by men, her community, and her family. When, in the novel's opening

scene, she envisions herself as a buffet, her bridal train "laid out along the aisle like a banquet tablecloth with all the guests on either side waiting for [her] to be served up" (4),

Serrie establishes her persistent sense that she is an object, being consumed by her

community. It is a motif that recurs throughout the novel as she is likened to a "candy

stick" (309), a "cookie jar" (58), "pumpkin pie" and "a frigging piece of fruit" (59). With

these metaphors, Serrie is figured as sweet, innocent, and also silent, as when she is a

decorative fixture on the refrigerator (58). She is inanimate, reduced to an object for

pleasure. She feels that even her friends see her "like she's the night's entertainment" (47). Similarly, the region is marginalized, as it, also, is imagined sweet and delightful.

It is packaged and presented as a quiet, pleasant destination, suitable for the entertainment of tourists and for a "retreat" (284) to "peace and serenity" (299) from the active, productive, "real" world of commerce. As Mr. Burgess feels he can buy Serrie's innocence, so do tourists feel "as if everything they see can be purchased just for their asking" (7). Both Serrie and the wider community react to this condescension.and obj edification with ambivalence. The town takes advantage of the income tourism offers; Serrie remembers her sweeter, more innocent identity fondly and longingly, but neither embraces these perceptions of themselves without awareness that they are cast as the "Other" and as products. To this, Serrie and her neighbours respond by further reinforcing their difference and by turning inward.

Serrie demonstrates a defensive retreat into particularity in response to feelings of difference. The uniqueness of her home is special to her and part of her self-conception, but it is also a "trap" (304); the distinct character of her family is founded in its dysfunction. For example, her father's preoccupation with outhouses is a source of embarrassment but also of pride (102). Also, as Hans emphasizes, "the big draw of

Lupin Cove is that it is an actual working fishing village" (299); however, that old-time character is preserved, in part, due to the absence of more prosperous economic possibilities for such a remote and isolated community. What makes her home distinct is also what makes it difficult. Serrie's ambivalence about her region's marginality comes across when she mocks herself: "Anne of Green Gables Does The Big Time" (30). The irony of her tone and her reductive conflation of all Atlantic Canadian populations into one marginal group, symbolized by this simplistic, idyllic fictional character, 51 communicate her bitterness at her region's marginality. She implies that it makes her unequal to and ineligible for the hyperbolically modern and cosmopolitan world she experiences in London; her participation in the unrestrained sub-culture of drugs and sex appear all the more inappropriate because of her origins. Serrie's rebellion is an attempt to escape the cultural as well as geographical confines of her home, but Conlin implies that the young woman is unable to function in the wider world, or to cease from

essentially defining herself vis a vis these geographical origins. Despite her alienation,

she continually reaffirms her particularity by alluding to it. She both resents and relies on her region's difference.

Depictions of animosity toward outsiders and the tourism industry demonstrate the regional community's sense of marginalization, of which Serrie's is a microcosm.

She notes the sometimes exploitative and pretentious approaches taken to the region and the way they alienate local residents and perpetuate the region's insularity. She complains that "people who come from away ... just [like] a scandal and [have] to go hanging out all the Valley crap like flags at the United Nations, just to make a buck" (51).

She demonstrates solidarity with her region against outsiders' elitist perceptions. The

fishermen do the same with their defensive reactions. They respond to the German tourist's contempt by simply reinforcing the qualities he finds distasteful, those that make them different (302). In reaction to disrespect and condescension, they further reinforce their singularity and isolation. The men assert and protect their collective identity, the way Cyril does with his restoration of outbuildings and Grammie does with the Sullivan heirlooms. Cyril notes of a newly acquired building, "Old Mr. Hall said he was happy to

see it go to me and not some dealer from the city" (102). 52

There is a sense that outsiders cannot accurately understand the region's culture and, as a result, the residents retreat into a more closely-guarded insularity. An example of this misunderstanding is the scene in which tourists ask of Serrie's house, '"How much

... [t]o see your museum?'" (130). This scene is evocative of the image with which

McKay introduces his study, that of a photograph postcard captioned '"A [S]imple

Life,'" which '"frames' an understanding of a people in history" and "presents the fisherfolk as the Other, as a spectacle to be appropriated and enjoyed within the objectifying gaze of tourism" (TQTF xv). Serrie's observation of the tourists perceives this "gaze" of which McKay writes and reverses the perspective, exposing the way that gaze appears from inside the "frame." The resistance to change that Hans faces in the community, the local "mistrust of outsiders" (Conlin Heave 273) of which he complains, is not ignorance or stubbornness as he implies, but rather suspicion of the kind of condescension and cultural misunderstanding of which he himself is guilty. As Serrie says, "people have to know what you're about, know you appreciate who they are" (273).

Serrie and her community are both aware of their perceived difference and isolate themselves as a result. At the end of his study, McKay concludes that the predominant tourist's gaze is recently "encountering an opposition intelligent enough to realize that the ideals of community and belonging are too important to be abandoned to a commercialized antimodernism" (TQTF 309). Serrie's comments, Cyril's restoration of the outhouses, and the fishermen's solidarity all exemplify this type of "opposition."

They protectively, defensively embrace regional identity and ignore or reject trite, biased perceptions of it. 53

Serrie resents the patronizing and pejorative tones in Hans' and Joachim's observations of the region's character, but she, like the tourists to whom Hans caters, is also trying to capture the essence of a more simple and innocent time. The narrative voice is exemplary of the nostalgic impulse that Creelman examines at length. The trauma of Serrie's loss of innocence locks her in a psychological closed circuit. Put another way, she exemplifies Creelman's image of a "balance between hesitation about the future and ... memory of the past" (14) in the sense that a balance evokes instability and faltering momentum. Serrie longs for the days of her happier, safer youth and cannot overcome her mental and emotional anguish to move into the future. But even before her sexual abuse began, Serrie had a tendency to resist change and a persistent backward glance, such as when she admits that at thirteen, she "wanted to be back at [Grammie's] house in Foster" (Conlin Heave 82). In the context of the poverty and neglect she endures in her young life, it is fitting that Serrie, as sensitive to her surroundings as she is, would concentrate her longing on the more peaceful and nurturing environment of

Grammie's home. The same is true of the wider community members, the audience witnesses through Serrie's family and friends. They are also fixated on the past, the

symbols and stories of it that recall a more prosperous era and reinforce affirming senses of connection and solidarity. Conlin's novel examines a community that is emblematic, to the world outside it, of healthier, simpler living, and which itself clings to memories of a healthier and happier existence.

The novel evinces nostalgia for rural youth, the idea of home, origin and

innocence. It connects rurality with innocent pleasures, "those strawberries days" (295)

of "lemonade and ocean" (37) and "counting fireflies" (70). The association of rurality 54 with a simple, happy and healthy childhood is not a surprising one, nor new in this region's literature. Gwendolyn Davies observes in the works of Charles G. D. Roberts

"an escape into nostalgia and a boyhood past" in reaction to change in the region over a century earlier. She describes "a sense of loss, a yearning for a halcyon pastoral landscape of youth" (SMLH15) that Conlin's novel strongly echoes. Serrie's nostalgic recollections reinforce her dissatisfaction with life in the present, her stubborn, almost obsessive unwillingness to accept that time has changed her life, her family and her community and that "change is life" (Conlin Heave 11), as Grammie's voice reminds her.

While Serrie's difficulty in letting go of her youth is revelatory of a typical stage in any young woman's maturation process, for her, it is exceptionally difficult after her traumatic experience, and it is especially poignant in her particular community because of the general atmosphere of hesitation and nostalgia that surrounds her there. Serrie's nostalgia exaggerates the disjunction between her lost happiness and present distress.

She does this implicitly, for example, when, barring the bathroom door from a predatory

London bar-keep, she notes, "my legs are tight and strong from some distant healthy rural childhood" (28). Serrie's memories are often set, not running through fields, but indoors, amongst the dust, creaks and clutter of old family homes. It is less rurality than heritage that Serrie romanticizes.

The novel's frequent backward glance is an indication of the community's preoccupation with its past self as much as it is of Serrie's. The interest in antiques, both familial and regional, indicates that locals covet symbols that serve to represent and remind them of their past. People find a sense of identity in these items and strength in their restoration and preservation, such as Cyril's salvaging of local outhouses, or privies 55

(102). These symbolize the particularity of the region, each becoming known for and named after its place of origin; they commemorate specific locations throughout the

Annapolis Valley (102) and act as records, not only of these places but also of an era

(103). Maintaining these items is an accomplishment for Cyril and his family (102).

Despite their unconventional appearance on his property, his careful restoration of each building is a subversion of the temptation to commercialize the region's history for tourists and collectors. The market value of his work may be alluring (250), but Cyril defiantly saves the buildings and the history they embody from becoming products for outside consumption. Instead, they remain local, where they continue to remind him and other residents of the historical face of the region.

The antiques that fill up the Spinster Sullivan's house are also symbols of a past, infused with the identities of family members, their experiences and heritage. Items are literally imbued with family spirits: "long-lost relatives' names still and dead waiting to be spoken, their ghosts hovering about as [Serrie] wrapped the Limoges teapot and cups"

(152). This image evokes the sense of responsibility, for those currently in possession of the pieces, to remember and articulate the shared identity that has been passed on through time. Kulyk Keefer's comment reinforces this point; she makes note of the prominence of images of "inherited" communal memory in Maritime fiction, writing, "the ghosts ... hold hands with the living; the sense of traditional values and rights as an inheritance to be preserved and guarded against outsiders is strong" (UEE 37). Serrie's relatives and the physical space that their lives and stories occupied become a part of Serrie's self, part

of her narrative. As she recounts their stories (Conlin Heave 68), they consequently become interwoven with her own; the "turret room on the third floor" (70) of the 56

Spinster's home later becomes Serrie's own bedroom (214); the "antique glass paperweight collection" (69), only the last in a chronicling of the Spinster's many belongings, later becomes the crucial item that triggers Serrie's physical and psychological breakdown. The entwining of Serrie's ancestors' lives with hers is even more apparent in her maternal grandmother, "Grammie woven through [her] life" (289).

Grammie is so much a part of Serrie that she is internalized, after death, as the strong, humorous, insightful inner voice that animates the novel's narration. Their interconnection is strongly implied when Serrie examines herself in the mirror and knows

she will one day be wrinkled and appear like her grandmother (289) and when she dreams of herself "in the poses of Grammie, in all her photos ... [Serrie's] body takes each position as though it has been in it hundreds of times before, as though [she] was born in those postures" (297). The significant loss to Serrie's sense of self her grandmother's death triggers is illustrated as she imagines herself literally "pressed" between the pages of a photo album (297); when her grandmother becomes a memory,

she finds hers elf teduced to a memory. Serrie's nostalgic impulse stems from the

fundamental integration of her sense of self with her Grammie and her family heritage.

Like her, Serrie's community and family hold on to their past out of respect and in

order to maintain a sense of connection to it, because it is the site and source of their

identity. The region's past, as Percy points out, was one of economic prosperity and

represents a prouder version of itself with which the region can identify. Dearie's focus

on all "Acadian points of interest" (90) exemplifies reverence for familial ancestry.

Serrie asserts that ultimately, "all we've got is family"(305) and, indeed, in their financial

strain, this is almost literally true. In a very real way, Serrie's family survives because Grammie cares for and shelters them but also because of their heritage, Cyril's having inheriting the Spinster Sullivan's estate. The family sells off her belongings to sustain themselves, the china set paying for a new roof (151). The Spinster's "old things" that

Martha and Serrie dust and admire (151) are memories from before the house was in continual disrepair. Similarly, Percy's interest in trains (189) illustrates his glorification of a better time for the town, "before the bottom fell out of the apple market, when there were still trains running" (71).

Figuratively caught in this backward glance, Serrie's community, as much as

Serrie herself, is reluctant to let go of the past as well as to engage in a future direction and self-conception. Serrie notes the cyclical momentum that has prevented her moving forward and any lasting departure from her home and her past, stating within the novel's first few paragraphs, "my life seems to have been about crashing backwards" (4). Pulled back toward the altar by her bridal veil's catching in the church doors, she admits she has continually "been on the run, so to speak" (4), "not knowing whether to say hello or goodbye" (5); "gravity pulls at [her], but [she] resists" (7). After being "on the run" in

London, she observes, returning to Halifax, "big signs everywhere [which] say"

No Stopping

No Turning

No Reversing. (35)

Of this, Serrie notes, "it's just too much like my frigging life" (35) and yet she admits, paradoxically, "I'm back where I started and it's worse" (35). She does and does not want to "reverse." Her self-contradiction is further illustration that she feels "trapped"

(305), as implied by her dream of being captured in a family photo album (297). Her 58 sense of self is figuratively locked up in the place and people of her home. Though she hesitates to stay, she cannot easily leave. She expresses her affection for home, but also the feeling of entrapment that accompanies her attachment, exclaiming, "Do I leave? No,

I just can't get the fuck out of this place. I'm trapped here, because all we've got is family" (305). Her discontentment comes from her inability to leave and from the atmosphere of defeat that surrounds her at home. Though she identifies with her home and her past there, she would like to distance herself from the disappointment that in many ways characterizes them.

The reluctance to move forward that is evident in Serrie's individual experience as well as in the characterization of her community is founded in their identification with and attachment to the past and also in their disillusionment. The reluctance to invest and believe in a better future reflects what Creelman identifies as "the region's ... shared memories of a past security and the collective fear of an unpromising future" (201).

Serrie's community, ironically named Foster, demonstrates the two elements of

Creelman's observation. Serrie describes it as "old-style Nova Scotia, where change is slow like winter and tradition as strong as the forty-five-foot tides of the Bay of Fundy"

(Conlin Heave 5), a characterization which illustrates attachment to and respect for old ways of life and conventions that may be perceived as definitive. This resistance to change is not only sentimental, however. Gallie's pessimism (284), Martha's fatalism

(100, 151), the lobster fishermen's backbreaking toil (274) and the townspeople's distrust of Hans' business plans (273) imply that the community is as much disheartened as it is attached to its past. Residents are devoid of hope for the future. Serrie's own vision of her future is exemplary of this. Influenced by her community's defeatism, she feels 59

'"she's lucky to have a job,'" as Gallie puts it (284). Low expectations for her life begin to influence Serrie's self-conception. She reveals as much when she observes,

[Reggie] thinks I'm a little poor girl and poor girls don't do things like ski

and travel - they stay in the Valley and work as cashiers, wearing

uniforms. . . . Even if Reggie doesn't think this, obviously I do,... it

made me want to just scream and then whimper, like everything did since

the hospital. Reggie patted me on the arm and that made it worse, because

these days every bit of kindness hurts, my achy feelings plastered over my

flesh in bruises. (230)

For Serrie, "kindness hurts" because it only highlights her sense of despair. The same effect occurs repeatedly in the novel as outsiders' optimism only emphasizes insiders' hopelessness. On individual and collective levels, Conlin demonstrates that outsiders' enthusiasm fails to be reflected by Serrie and her community. The professor's faith, encouraging Serrie to return to school, and Hans' optimism, eager to invest in the community, are tempting, but no match for local disillusionment. Gallie's attitude reflects the community's doubtful reaction to Hans' business plans for the area; she wonders how "Hans Zimmer has people coming" and what "they do over there at this time of year" (284). Serrie's hopelessness about her own future is evident when she hides the professor's letter (287), only tentatively and indirectly hinting at returning to

school before abandoning the idea (298). Her reluctance is influenced by and a reflection

of the hesitance in her surroundings.

The essence of Serrie's conflict in the novel can be understood in that initial

image of a wave crashing and pulling backward and this pattern of defeatism is what both 60 initiates and prevents her escape. Despite her desire to flee from the hopeless capitulation that has come to define her mother and father, that very ethos is so strong around her, has sufficiently permeated her own persona, that she readily accepts and almost anticipates her own failure; she even prompts it with her self-destructive behaviour. Her drinking, as much as it is a result of her addiction and her psychological strain, is an effort to escape the anxieties of her home life; however, it always precipitates a return, either to thoughts of her family, to her past, or to a familiar sense of failure. Her description of drinking is revealing of this irony. She says that her "stupid family [would blur] into some sepia dream" (236), which ostensibly suggests the desire to distance herself, but also implies a connection, as "sepia" connotes old photographs, preserved

shared family memory. Her flight to London evidently does the same, in that the majority of her time is spent intoxicated and focused on home and the past, as evinced when she personally enacts a symbol of home, the bagpipe (33), and when she calls her childhood minister (34). Her drinking is a replication of the despair and entrapment of her parents' lives. Kulyk Keefer comments on a comparable depiction of parents in

Alistair MacLeod's depiction of a Cape Breton couple in "In the Fall":

Poverty paralyses them so that they can neither speak nor move freely ...

Poverty is the trap, poverty, and life itself under such conditions where

love yields not pleasure but children, and children, further entrapment in

unceasing labour and conflict between man and wife, child and parents,

freedom from and loyalty to the place which has become oneself. (UEE

184) 61

Kulyk Keefer's comments are applicable to Martha and Cyril, who are restricted by their poverty and defined by their attachment to their location, through family connection, emotional attachment, financial need and the wearisome dysfunction and dilapidation that surround them. This is the background Serrie would like to forget by drinking and yet that attempt to escape only brings her back, both practically and psychologically.

Serrie's final alcohol binge reinforces the cyclical effect of her drinking as she summons her grandmother in her stupor. She claims to drink to escape and "forget" but it also triggers her memory. She says,

I'm praying for a blackout. ... We drink to forget, they say, and that's

what I'm doing now, but it's not working - the drunker I get, the more I

remember.

"Oh, Grammie." A whisper breathed across the water at high tide.

The silence blows back her voice:

Break, break, break

On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me, (Conlin Heave 308)

In this image of waves repeatedly crashing and falling backward, Conlin connotes stalled momentum and perpetual return. Serrie's goal is to regain connection to family and the past. She states that Grammie's voice is silent in her (303), and her drinking reestablishes the connection to her grandmother and, Conlin implies, to her home and youth, when Grammie sang such ballads. The circularity of her thinking extends to her

engagement to Hans which she reveals by exclaiming, "Look at what I'm having to do just to crawl out of this stupid trap I'm in" (305). The "trap" to which she refers is her life at home, her parents' dysfunction, damaged psyches and impoverishment. She implies that to escape these burdens she is forced to submit to Hans (305). The "getting out" Serrie envisions is not an escape at all, but a sacrifice made in order to remain near her home. She tethers herself there in subjection to Hans, in half-conscious confinement to her memory. She establishes self-destructive conditions that return her to those of her upbringing. Serrie's notion of being trapped is apt; she is caught in this dilemma in which the defeatist, backward-looking mindset from which she would like to break free is the trait in her own personality that prevents her doing so.

Compounding her own inner conflict, she faces the additional quandary that

Kulyk Keefer refers to as "that peculiarly Maritime dilemma, going or staying" (UEE

236). In discussing Alistair MacLeod's The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, Kulyk Keefer argues that this author's "characters are caught in a particularly vicious trap: for the most part, their mothers strive to bind them to their birthplace and family, while their fathers ... urge them to go" (234). Conlin's work also illustrates this dilemma, as Cyril (Conlin

Heave 111) and Grammie (284) are eager to see Serrie reach beyond local limits and limited expectations to seek opportunities, academic and otherwise, beyond the

Annapolis Valley. She also faces opposing pressure to remain loyal to and preserve the place of her upbringing. Creelman notes of persistent outmigration in Atlantic Canada that "continual departures have ... acted as another source of disruption for the traditional local community" (13). Serrie exemplifies the impulse to counteract this kind

of disruption and stay at home out of loyalty. She responds to Martha's wishes, who would rather have Serrie stay nearby since her son has already left home on scholarship 63 in urban Ontario (Conlin Heave 296), and yet, she is also subject to her grandmother and father's wishes for her; it would be a failure and a betrayal to either stay or leave.

Placed in this liminal position by others' expectations, she is consequently confused by her own concept of where she should be. She feels out of place when she is away, but is not entirely comfortable at home, always facing the idea that she belongs elsewhere. Kulyk Keefer notes the inevitable alienation that results from the decision to stay or to leave. She comments on the feeling of displacement upon leaving, observing that Ernest Buckler's fiction depicts "the alienation, isolation, and ugliness endemic to urban life" for natives of rural Nova Scotia (UEE 221). She also comments that, for

Maritime writers, "successful escape is complicated by the condition of exile it necessitates" (212). One can never go home again. It is a difficulty faced by members of any distinct and isolated community but particularly problematic where staying at home condemns individuals to professional, financial or social disadvantage. Percy's disconnectedness, apparent in his neglect to return at Grammie's illness (Conlin Heave

288), demonstrates the condition of a successful emigrant. Serrie's comparative attachment to home makes this kind of exile unthinkable for her. While away herself in

Halifax, the absence of her family and rural home leave her lonely and lost. She comments, "I was so homesick, always trying to find somewhere in the city that felt comfortable and familiar for even just a moment, but it was impossible" (156).

Alternatively, her parents' thwarted ambition and ability demonstrate her prospects

should she stay in the Valley. Her attachment to her family keeps her at home, while her academic interests and her parents' misery, compel her to escape. 64

Conlin provides further illustration of the fundamental question of origin and place in Dearie. Her persistent desire to leave for New Orleans in order to be near her

Acadian ancestry (89) expires when her van sinks into the ocean, "some old Acadian folk song ... warbl[ing] across the water, accordian music pumping away" (317). She will never leave and reconnect with that part of her past, just as the ballad reminds Serrie that she can never completely return to "the tender grace of a day that is dead" (311).

Conlin's ironic reference to the Nova Scotian licence plate slogan, "Canada's Ocean

Playground" (318), in this scene, reinforces the significance of this struggle with attachment to home. Far from trivial, its pull on individuals is powerful, like the image of Dearie's sinking van connotes. The difference between both Martha and Dearie, who never do and never will leave, and Serrie, is that she has the choice to do so. That she has a choice and is self-aware are the only consolation for Dearie's death, for Serrie's traumatic experience as a young woman and for the hardships she and the rest of her family suffered throughout her life. That she struggles to disentangle herself from her home despite the difficulties she has experienced there attests to the degree to which it has and continues to define her conception of self.

This dilemma, which Kulyk Keefer observes in earlier Maritime fiction, defines

Conlin's protagonist and the author provides little resolution. While in the narrative frame she is pictured running away, literally fleeing the nuptials that would bind her to her home and to repeat her parents' experience, she is in fact running home, back to the delapidated house on Lupin Cove Road where she spent her difficult adolescence. She continues in the concluding frame to simultaneously flee and return. In the text's concluding sentence, a calmer Serrie looks over the landscape of her home, "the Lupin 65

Cove Road, then down over the Mountain and into the Valley below, everything old and

familiar, everything [hers]" (319). She affirms her connection with the place and accepts the past and present difficulties there. That she "pull[s] away the last shreds of the

antique wedding dress, tossing everything behind [her] into the outhouse" (319), suggests that she finally arrives at a point of transition in her own mind. However, Conlin does

not explicitly resolve whether Serrie will later return to wed Hans, leave to pursue her

academic interests, or stay on in her home region with some newly gained peace and perspective. Conlin's focus on the semantics of "going ahead" (315) and her use of the

title "Ebb Tide" for the epilogue offer little clarification of whether Serrie now believes

she ought to move on, away or fall back; rather, the two concepts contradict one another

and create the same cyclical, tidal effect that is recurrent throughout the work. The

implication is that what Serrie finally chooses to do is less the point than the experience

of this indecision. The existence of this anxiety and its effects are the text's subject.

They are particular to her stage of life, but also to her, because of the distinct attitude and

history of the region she regards as her home.

Serrie is indeed as conflated with the region as Hans and Mr. Burgess conceive of her, but the novel's conclusion recasts this conflation as an affirmation of self. Creelman

writes of MacLeod's No Great Mischief, that "his novel adopts an overtly nostalgic mood

and employs a sense of melancholic longing that ties it to earlier Maritime fictions" and,

further, that "Nowlan and MacLeod represent the hardships experienced in the region and

reject opportunities to idealize the past" (142). The same can be said of Conlin's novel.

The "melancholic longing" for a past self that cannot be regained or sustained aptly

characterizes Conlin's tone in depicting both her protagonist and the community that surrounds her. Like No Great Mischief, Heave is evocative of the region's past, real hardship and struggle included, and, as Creelman puts it, of a "fusion of hesitation and nostalgia" (143). As he argues of MacLeod's work, it "can also be read as a distinctly regional and Maritime text" (143). 67

CHAPTER 4 "THE SEA IN MY BLOOD": SELF AND PLACE IN COADY AND CONLIN'S SHORT FICTION

In Coady and Conlin's short fiction, what Kulyk Keefer calls "the question of going or staying" (UEE 213) is a central and unifying concern, connecting the authors'

stories with a particular burden while their topics are otherwise unrelated. Conlin's stories appeared in the anthologies She Writes: Love, Spaghetti and Other Stories by

Youngish Women (2002) and Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada (2003), in the two years after the publication of Heave. Coady's short story collection, Play the

Monster Blind (2000), was published two years after her first novel. The authors' works

in these collections are similar in that their protagonists are women of the twenty-to- thirty-year age range who, having grown up in Atlantic Canada, are now contemplating their home and whether they belong there. Though the figures in these stories are variably situated, their location is a consistent focus. These pieces are in keeping with the

issues of identity and belonging raised and explored at length in the authors' first novels.

The protagonists in Coady and Conlin's short fiction are unsettled both away and at home and, rather than endorsing either a return or an escape, both authors concentrate on a

depiction of the uneasy positions of exile and captivity in relation to Atlantic Canada.

Conlin's "Floating Bob's Dreams" and "Insomnis" and Coady's "Look, And Pass On"

and "A Nice Place to Visit" continue to examine the effects on young women of being

from the Atlantic region, particularly in terms of personal identity. The culture and

character of the place of their origin affect how protagonists are perceived as individual

women as well as how they envision themselves. Ambivalent relationships with home,

including varying degrees and combinations of sentimental attachment, antipathy, deeply 68 rooted loyalty, resented responsibility and dependence, are at the nexus of characters' conflicts and anxieties.

In their short fiction, Conlin and Coady continue their endeavor to represent a particular region as it is understood from various perspectives and experienced by young women. Their protagonists often conform to the profile of a young woman rooted in the geographic, economic and cultural conditions of an Atlantic Canadian rural community, and intellectual, insightful and reflexive enough to observe and relate the region's differing points of view. They examine the notion of regional "insider" and how the role can falsely distinguish and define individuals when they interact with people from outside it, as seen in "Floating Bob's Dreams" and "Look, and Pass On." Protagonists who are definitively "insiders" portray the sense of alienation from broader society that they feel when they are contained in or aligned with the isolated and distinct communities of their homes, as in Coady's "A Nice Place To Visit" and "The Devil's Bo Peep." Other protagonists portray the experience of the exile, illustrating characters leaving to pursue academic goals and consequently plagued by feelings of estrangement and isolation, as in

Conlin's "Insomnis," and by pressures to return as in Coady's "In Disguise as the Sky" and "The Devil's Bo Peep." Characters who have remained in or returned to their communities of origin, as in "Insomnis," "A Nice Place to Visit" and "The Devil's Bo

Peep," are also unsettled, restless and somehow unsatisfied. While they are free to leave in pursuit of personal autonomy, young women are not able to escape their identification with and attachment to their home. Low-level unhappiness, uncertainty of self and agitation are associated with the struggle to establish physical proximity to home and psychological identification with it, the sense of belonging, or lack thereof, in familial,

community, landscape and cultural settings.

Whether their protagonists are away or at home, Coady and Conlin make their

locations a primary object of readers' attention. Setting is always significant in these

stories, explicitly either in or beyond the protagonists' Atlantic Canadian home.

Consistently, that spatial relationship is an underlying contributor to the young woman's

frame of mind. When away, she cannot be entirely separated from her origins. More than the backdrop for events and the site of atmosphere, setting contributes to the theme

and content of stories because, as readers interpret the protagonist's character and

experience, they are, like the protagonist herself and the story's secondary characters,

inclined to consider her home and her position in relation to it as defining factors. For

example, a young woman's experience as a tourist in British Columbia is specifically portrayed from the standpoint of a rural Atlantic Canadian. The objectification of a young woman by an older man is distinguished by the woman's particular cultural and

regional origins. Just how these origins contribute to understanding of protagonists'

various experiences is not easily determined; that negotiation of individual and regional

particularity is the element that connects Coady and Conlin's works and their

protagonists' conflicts. The concern with the relationship of a story's setting to a specific

Atlantic Canadian place affects a protagonist's psyche as well as the audience's

interpretations of that character's experience. Experience is implicitly determined by the

particular perspective of regional origins. In Conlin's "Insomnis" and Coady's "A Nice

Place To Visit," protagonists exemplify this preoccupation with location and its literal

and figurative proximity to home. Both stories depict women who want to explore and 70 engage with the world outside their home but are equally influenced by their need for connectedness, belonging and familiarity, which home provides. The stories focus on the women's unstable senses of belonging and contentment in their various settings and their

struggles to address the opposing draws of opportunity and origin.

In "Insomnis," Conlin draws a comparison between her young female protagonist

and a feline, both nocturnal roamers, in order to illustrate her natural instinct to explore, which competes with her opposing need for shelter and security. This tendency for transience, to want, or perhaps need, to move is the story's primary focus and relates to

the question of belonging because, in her wanderlust, as the protagonist is drawn to the

outside world, she is troubled by fear of her insecurity in that wider world and the desire

for safety and connectedness of her home. She is neither at peace when away nor upon

returning and her insomnia and claustrophobia illustrate the tension of her conflicting

needs to explore and remain connected. Like a cat, she is exhilarated by the freedom to roam and expand the territory with which she is familiar, but she is also cognizant of the

dangers in the world outside her own immediate neighbourhood. The story depicts her

struggle with this conflict.

This narrative is at once grounded in a specific setting and in constant motion,

reflecting the protagonist's unsettled state of mind. Conlin situates her story at "home

[in] Nova Scotia" (VM57), in the city of Halifax, and even in a precise neighbourhood

within the city, near "Gottingen Street" (57). She does so within the first two sentences

of text, foregrounding the importance of location to the story, which her inclusion of the

cliche "location, location, location" (58) further emphasizes. The narrative characterizes

and documents this particular neighbourhood but, more importantly, it depicts the 71 conception of this location in the subject's psyche. It is at times a lonely cage and, at others, animated by human activity. Conlin creates a tension between desires to remain in the security of home and to flee those confines for adventure. The woman's restlessness is reflected in the way she perceives her environment. Even in her brief dream, she envisions herself "on a sunny lily pad," (57) which is a temporary resting place and also in constant motion itself, as it floats on water. The young woman Conlin describes is not rootless, as is later revealed by her certainty of "home" (57), but she is evidently unsettled. Still, in her bed, she perceives herself surrounded by motion, as she hears "the hot rod screech[ing] and squeal[ing] away" (57), "bits of far-off laughter bounc[ing] in the open window . . . coming over from Gottingen Street" (57), and "a car starting] in the parking lot outside ... back[ing] up and then driv[ing] off (58). In comparison to her own stillness, even her neighbour's voice appears enviably free to move, "rising and stretching" (58). All of this motion, from which the woman is notably remote and withheld in her hot bedroom, emphasizes her uncomfortable fixity and restlessness.

The agitation around her emphasizes the closeness and "claustrophobia" (57) of her bedroom in the unbearable summer heat. Conlin depicts an intolerably hot night that would make sleep a challenge for the most tranquil subject. On the "soaked" sheets (57), in the "thick hot air," the doctor's "wet breath ... fingers over her neck ... leg across her stomach and a sweaty hand sticking to her ribs" (58), she is literally stuck to her bed.

Conlin evokes the discomfort of confinement and enforced stillness, particularly for one inclined to wander such as this protagonist. Alert and "wide-smacking-awake" (57) in 72 the middle of night, she is all the more aware of her captivity and distance from "her precious and precarious sleep" (57).

Her insomnia, which she had hoped could be resolved by returning "home to

Nova Scotia" (57), is a symptom of her unsettled nature. She reveals that distance from

her home had been a source of anxiety and also that her return has not neutralized it. She

interprets the diagnosis of "transient insomnia" (57) to mean she is suffering "from

moving so much" (57); she suspects her vagrancy is a vice for which she must accept this

consequent symptom. Her anxiety is not so easily explained, however, for it persists

upon her return. The doctor's emphasis that it is "stress induced" (58) reflects the

mystery and subtlety of her condition. Her anxiety could arise from separation from

home or from transience itself, as she suspects, or from her evident struggle to resist such transience by returning home. Her admission, "I thought it would be better when I moved home" (57), evokes the experience of exile and her difficulty establishing a secure

sense of belonging. She evidently suspects any anxiety could be founded in her distance

from home; whether this is accurate or not, the awareness of her origin follows and

preoccupies her. When away, she cannot escape the pull of home and, when home, she is

clearly compelled to move.

The competing impulses for domesticity and freedom are illustrated in the parallel

drawn between the protagonist and her neighbour's cat, Lister. It suggests that, like a

feline, she has the instinctive desires to explore and to seek opportunity and experience

outside her home. The reading that she is "in heat" is available in the story's opening

with a sexual encounter, which emphasizes the character's wildness, her instinctive need

to be free. Conlin reinforces the metaphor by writing that, in the winter, she would 73

"scrape at the windowpane" (57), "the house a veritable sepulchre" (59) when she is penned in. What she dislikes is being "sealed in from the world" (59). Like a wild cat needing to interact with other cats, it is not only confinement but isolation, being cut off from human contact, that bothers the woman. She wants to hear the "sounds of life" (59), listening as "far-off traffic sounds drone and laughter floats from a neighbour's rooftop balcony" (59), reawakening the doctor (58) to keep her company. Her need for - interaction and her natural instinct for exploration and adventure keep her awake and uneasy in the confines of her house. The comparison between the protagonist and Lister continues until the story's conclusion where the cat's tragic fate illustrates what draws her back to the safety of "home" (57, 61).

Conlin affirms the pull of home on even as adventurous an individual as this protagonist. The threat of danger outside exhilarates and frightens this young woman and she is drawn back to the security of community, feeling "relief (61) to be safe. The tension between exhilaration and fear is mirrored in her combined feelings of alienation and familiarity in the downtown streets through which she roams. Her neighbourhood appears both threatening and familiar to her. The warnings from neighbours and police,

"Shouldn't be goin' out alone. You know it, girl" (60) and "Now you know, dear, it's not safe to be out in this neighbourhood at night" (60), imply that she does not belong there, that it is not home; however, the narration of her movement through the neighbourhood implies the opposite. As she passes "down Maynard Street," and "halfway across the

Commons" (60), "up Compton Street... over to the bright lights of Quinpool Road" and to "Video Difference" (61), she names the places and affirms ownership and familiarity.

That she knows and loves the city is evident as she recounts the landmarks and labels her paths. Conlin complicates the characterization of the protagonist's setting and illustrates the duplicity of her desires. She is at home in the dangerous city streets at night but also afraid, which is evinced by her exhilaration. Her conception of her environment, that she

is at home and unsafe, is contradictory and unstable, reflecting her internal conflict. The

image of the cat's owner also exemplifies the tension between threat and familiarity in

Conlin's setting. She depicts "the lady calling again, over on Creighton Street, each

syllable shooting out like gunfire, a tiny pause as she reloads with air and resumes,

relentlessly" (62), juxtaposing the violent image of machine-gun fire with the reassuring

image of a lady "standing on her step, fat and old, wearing a green nightie and pink

slippers" (62). The author mixes a sense of risk in the unknown with feelings of security, revealing the woman's conflicting mindsets. She is attracted to security and familiarity

as much as she is to the unknown.

This woman's competing impulses persist through the brief narrative but the

story's conclusion affirms the comforting and fortifying aspects of home. In the smaller

neighbourhood where she lives, she is safe from the city's dangers and within a smaller

community that nurtures and protects her. She arrives there and observes "Home. This

sweat is from relief and she can smell the difference. She sees the old man from the

corner, as she steps from the curb. She waves as her toes poke warm fur" (61). Despite the realization of Lister's death, the security this passage implies, the smile, wave and

warmth, followed by the humane, sympathetic reaction shared by the protagonist and the

old man (62), affirms the draw of community solidarity and connection that

counterbalances the woman's desire to flee. That she has evaded Lister's fate and arrived

safely home reinforces the importance of this security. Her complaint, "it's hard, [...] so 75 hard when you can't sleep" (62), conveys the tension that underlies her determination of where she ought to be in relation to home.

Like "Insomnis," Coady 's "A Nice Place To Visit" addresses a young Atlantic

Canadian woman's consideration of where she should live. As it also uses Halifax as the

"home" around which this question is focused, Coady's work reinforces the point that the

struggle for belonging and the question of location are of particular difficulty to young

women in this region. Though the story is set on the opposite coast of Canada, on

Vancouver Island, its subtext is definitively located in the "'East Coast'" (Coady PTMB

211). It is against the backdrop of the West Coast that readers are presented with varying perceptions of Atlantic Canada. The story characterizes by comparison, juxtaposing life, people and landscapes on the two coasts and revealing two young women's feelings and

impressions of their shared home region. It is comparable to Conlin's "Insomnis" in its

depiction of a young woman's feelings of discontent with home and her desire to search

for more and also in its validation of the draws of home.

Coady evokes the experience of leaving the tedious familiarity and seeming

shabbiness of one's home region for the surprising beauty and newness of a vacation

destination. She uses the opportunity that such comparison allows to develop a tarnished,

roughened illustration of the women's Atlantic home region and a hierarchization of it

and the West Coast that the story eventually inverts, ultimately lending credence to the

attractive factors of family and origin. In contrast with her surroundings of "water and

mountains and sailboats" {PTMB 213), Bess initially remembers her home as "streets

ugly and adversarial" (213) and a "dingy one-bedroom on a grey, violent street" (215).

Meg, for her part, describes that home as a "hell-hole" (214), where you are "stuck and 76 you think you can do no better" (215) until "you come out here, [to the West Coast,] and the whole world opens up" (215). The social landscape is also under comparison. Bess

suspects that deficits at home, lack of money, jobs and friends (217), compel her to drink

every night. She considers her own home uncouth, where chickens are allowed in the

house (216), in comparison to the sophisticated, "cosmopolitan" urban environment on the West Coast. Coady's juxtaposition and hierarchization of the two settings stimulates the audience to ask why Bess would not choose to leave the Atlantic region permanently.

Coady's often cynical portrayals of life in Atlantic Canada seem intentionally to prompt

such questions and effectively reflect her characters' doubt. An effective example of

such a characterization is Bess' feeling guilty for a fleeting sense of good fortune and her

belief that she is somehow undeserving of leisure, which seems influenced by her

upbringing or the ethos of her home. She exclaims, "It's not just that my goddamn pleasures are supposed to take a back seat. It's that there are no pleasures. There aren't

even supposed to be any" (218). By contrast, life in British Columbia appears to Bess to

revolve around recreation. The first half of the story establishes the reasons Bess might

consider trading in her East Coast life for a brighter, wider one on the West Coast, as

Meg has done.

However, Coady eventually validates Bess' choice to stay home by implying that

it has an authenticity, an inherent genuineness that Meg's new home does not, unsettling

the character's perception of the sheen and sparkle of the West Coast and presenting it as

merely superficial. The essence of Meg's experience there is not remarkably different

from her original life in Atlantic Canada; by contrast, Bess' life at home, though it

appears less attractive, is more content, secure and authentically her own. Despite 77 relocation, both women remain significantly connected to their home in identity and perspective.

It is in these characters' visit to the tourist attraction, "the dead Castleman Family

Farm" (226), that Coady most poignantly evokes a comparison between the attractive character of the "West Coast" and real character of the "East Coast." The farm is symbolic of Meg's life on the new coast; it gives an appealing impression, but is lacking in substance. The farm looks "quaint" (224) but is empty at the core, "in the building that was identified as having been the family homestead, there was nothing" (224). It is empty of essence, the buildings superficially "exactly" like those "back home" (224), but without the spirit and life, the "people still living in them" (224). By comparing this empty, "dead" (226) British Columbian setting to Bess' parents' Atlantic Canadian farm, where her son brings his pet chicken in the house, Coady illustrates the appeal of a genuine home. What had appeared unsophisticated and chaotic is more notably authentic and alive. The Castleman farm and Meg's life are perfect shells but empty, even inimical, upon closer examination, the first infested with "nettles" (225), and the second with parasitic relationships.

Meg's relationships and social life appear to be urbane and stimulating but are actually co-dependant and unhealthy, making Bess' life in Halifax, while generic and less glamorous, appear more authentic by comparison. Meg is not "healthy" and

"independent," as Bess imagines (216), because her self-image is focused on Lyle.

Figured as "a doll, or a mirror" (219), she is a cast or a reflection of him. She poorly masks her own feelings as evinced by the quick disintegration of her controlled persona upon losing contact with him (226). Her "giving up drinking" (217) and overcoming 78 addiction to drugs (221) is a false liberation, for she remains compulsively dependent on

Lyle. Her active lifestyle in her new setting, readers learn, is not the result of new-found peace and self-fulfillment as it might appear, but rather a coping strategy to distract her from her despair (224). Her relationship with Willis is equally false, as the two find comfort in each other as a substitution for the romantic intimacy they would both prefer to share with Lyle (227); "the two of them [sit] all night, speculating endlessly upon the secret thoughts and motivations of Lyle" (227). The signs of Meg's escape and ostensible rebirth, which Bess believes she achieves "merely by going away" (217), are artificial. Like the farm, Meg's relationship with Lyle appears perfect, like "grown-up, normal sex with her boyfriend on a houseboat. On an island on a houseboat. Without even a hint of nausea, Bess could only assume" (216). Bess idealizes Meg's situation.

Far from having "opened herself up like a flower" (217), Meg lacks autonomy and sense of self. By the story's conclusion Coady reveals that Meg has "flown across the continent" to live a superficially altered version of the discontented life she left behind her.

Both women hope for release and renewal by leaving their home, but neither truly achieves it. Meg perpetuates the identity and patterns of her adolescent life and Bess remains focused on her son and her life at home while she is away. Neither woman can exorcise her origins from her psyche and self-image. Rather than finding a more authentic and liberated self since arriving in British Columbia, Meg has only substituted her father and brother's suppressive influences for Lyle's. In leaving her home, "getting out from underneath a houseful of backwoods brothers" (212), she has exchanged one oppressive, alienating environment for another. Lyle's houseboat, "clothes heaped on [his] bed ... 79 smell[ing] of sleep and sweat and stale breath" (213) is just as much the overwhelmingly masculine environment from which she fled, with its "shaving mirror above the sink in the kitchen" and her brothers piling "freshly caught fish on the coffee table in the living room" (214). Like her brothers, Lyle shows little concern for Meg's wishes. Just as

"they would laugh at her" attempts to defend and assert herself (214), Lyle also disregards Meg's interests, neglecting to tidy his "slovenly houseboat" (213) and continuing to smoke and drink in her presence (212), mindless of her addiction (221).

Moreover, she admits that Lyle's effect on her is the same as her father's, to whom she

"might as well have been a doll or a mirror" (218). Meg, "sit[ting] nearby smiling at

Lyle's stories" (217) and obsessing about his thoughts (227), resumes the same role in a new location. On the West Coast, she is as poor (220), unhappy and subjugated to men as she was on the East.

Bess is no more able to leave home behind, even temporarily, by crossing the country. This is implied from the story's first line, in which Coady establishes the motif of Bess' guilt. The text begins, "Mount Baker rose like an iceberg up from the centre of the August haze, and Bess was feeling guilt again, because it was all so beautiful" (211).

The pang of guilt is related to her appreciation of British Columbia's beauty, her wonderment at it compared to her native region. It suggests she feels disloyal to her home and her own life for thinking them inferior as she imagines herself exchanging her life and abandoning home. She feels guilt for wanting more and even this tendency seems to be a trait instilled by her origin, as she admits her father's voice has "usurped the position of her conscience" (213). She has difficulty re-envisioning herself to belong in her new surroundings, focusing on her awkwardness, feeling "dowdy" (218) and 80 doubtful that she could "adopt the lifestyle while she was here and have to hike and swim and cycle all the time" (212). While her cousin, Meg, rejects her home and assumes a seemingly new lifestyle, she remains attached to an identity founded in her origins.

Contrarily, Bess appears to be more conscious of her identification with home and, feeling out of place, she longs "to be [home] instead" (226).

As Conlin does in "Insomnis," Coady illustrates the appeal of leaving home for the wider world away but demonstrates the difficulty of making a complete, contented break from origin. Coady conspicuously concludes her story, and the collection as a whole, with the word "escape" (228). Escape is desirable, as expressed when Bess pleads, '"Sometimes moms need vacations" (216), but it is fleeting and uneasy, if indeed possible at all. The concluding sentences are ironic, "Three long days of the vigil remained. She had planned for herself a lengthy vacation, knowing there might never come another chance for such ease, and escape" (228). This has hardly been a relaxing

"vacation" of "ease," or an escape, as Bess' thoughts are at home and Meg and her life are essentially similar to what they had been at home. What Bess would prefer is to be with her son,

in their apartment on the grey street, sitting on the second-hand couch with

the enormous faded afghan on it, knitted seventy-odd years ago by Bess's

father's mother. Dylan on her lap, the two of them watching 'Star Trek'

repeats after supper, smell of toast and macaroni all around. (226)

Coady validates the pull of family, comfort, history and origin that define one's home and identity. Bess admits her preference guiltily, as if she feels her expectations ought to be higher but she cannot help her identification with her home. She values the ordinary but 81 significant foundations of an imperfect and real life and she is more conscious than her cousin of the fundamental grounding of her identity in her home.

The comparison of the two women addresses a question Carol Ann Ho wells argues is prevalent in much of contemporary writing by Canadian women, particularly those representing voices from the margins. She suggests these women ask "how much of anyone's identity is authentic and dependent on inheritance, and how much it is performative, subject to circumstances, and so redefinable in different contexts" (2).

With Meg's character, Coady suggests that the ability to completely redefine oneself is limited. Both "Insomnis" and "A Nice Place To Visit" illustrate young women trying to re-envision themselves independent of the "inheritance" of identity. In leaving home, they attempt to "perform" and embody new versions of themselves, but all of Coady and

Conlin's young women are followed by the presence of their home in their psyches and remnants of its character in their self-conception.

In "Look, And Pass On" and "Floating Bob's Dreams," Coady and Conlin further examine the fusion of personal and regional identities, but demonstrate this conflation from the perspective of outsiders. Young women are unable to escape the identity

"inherited," as Howells puts it, from their home, not because they cannot relinquish it themselves, but because others perceive them as symbols of their region. Danielle Fuller observes the association of location with the determination of identity in Atlantic

Canadian literature, writing, "sometimes, Atlantic women's prose narratives follow a trajectory which takes them away from the home place and beyond a provincial or regional border into an unknown space and landscape in which they feel permitted to recreate and redefine themselves" (DE 295). The protagonists in Coady and Conlin's 82 works exemplify this tendency. In these two stories, however, women are prevented from "redefin[ing] themselves" by men who prefer to see them primarily for their regional origins. These stories echo themes raised in the author's novels, in which Alan, in Strange Heaven, and Mr. Burgess and Hans, in Heave, conflate the protagonists with their region, negating in the process their individuality and self-worth. Similarly, in these short stories, male suitors exploit Atlantic Canadian women for access to their imagined cultural essence. They do not know or understand the women as individuals and the protagonists consequently struggle to maintain their own self-conceptions.

Though they have physically left their home region and do not demonstrate strong identifications with it themselves, they struggle to establish and assert their individuality because others disregard it.

The title of "Look, And Pass On," which is a continuation of the plot of Strange

Heaven, draws attention to the parallel Coady creates between Bridget and the tourism monuments she insists on seeing as she crosses the country. Her interest in "the big blueberry and the big potato" (Coady PTMB 84) is analogous to Alan's interest in her.

He considers her synecdochic of her region, much like these objects, and his perception misunderstands and oversimplifies both the region and the girl. He conceives of Bridget as an artifact evincing his cultural expedition, "his great trek through Maritime Canada"

(86). That he objectifies Bridget is clear as he refers to her as "the thing" (83); she is his conquest, his prey, and he is a cultural, as well as sexual, predator. In his eyes, Bridget is an example of the Cape Breton cultural identity he envisions. He focuses on her religion, dialect, rusticity and perceived youth and naivety; she is '"sexy in that wholesome kind of way'" (94) and "all he had thought was what a body for a kid" (86), her "pleasant layer 83 of fat... like baby fat" (85). He is aroused by her youthfulness. His illogical association of her with "the Catholic Madonna" (86) is revelatory of his attraction to her perceived innocence and his transformation of her individual identity into a symbol, like

"the pictures, the statues" (86) of the Madonna. The comparison also indicates his curiosity for her religious culture, which is foreign to him (86). Bridget appears to Alan as a relic of cultural substance to which he has no personal access. His naive perceptions are inspired by his conception of Cape Breton culture, rather than an accurate understanding of her personal identity, and convey what Ian McKay argues is a widely accepted "idealized" (TQTF21) and "invented" conceptualization of Nova Scotia's

"provincial identity" (31):

The province was essentially innocent of the complications and anxieties

of twentieth-century modernity. Nova Scotia's heart, its true essence,

resided in the primitive, the rustic, the unspoiled, the picturesque, the

quaint, the unchanging: in all those pre-modern things and traditions that

seemed outside the rapid flow of change in the twentieth century. (30)

These are the traits that Alan, coming from the economically and culturally dominant center of the country, perceives in Bridget and which he considers as exemplars of the region's cultural identity. His interest in the young girl illustrates an attraction to the traits of "Innocence" (30) that McKay examines; Alan's journey to the Maritime provinces reflects what the historian identifies as the "the trope of the 'romantic quest'"(29). McKay argues that "the middle class described its ventures onto this primitive terrain. The emissaries of modernity braved dirt, isolation, and social danger to retrieve the true nuggets of authenticity concealed in the primitive countryside" (29). 84

Alan's notion of his "great trek" (Coady PTMB 86) evokes the adventurous, altruistic and patronizing attitude that McKay problematizes. He seeks access to what he imagines to be a Maritime essence, cultural exceptionality and authenticity that he personally lacks.

He also perceives himself rescuing and enlightening Bridget from her unrefined upbringing.

Alan's characterization of Bridget upon their first meeting is suggestive of the conception of Cape Breton he has in mind and of the condescension with which he regards the region. He portrays what Stewart Donovan refers to as '"the Atlantic look- down,' [that is,] the way Ontario and Upper Canada has always tended to view [Atlantic

Canadians]" (198). Alan recalls Bridget as a:

Tar-eyed thing in a Woolco dress, sitting at a chair and table set up outside

the high school auditorium, vacantly accepting his admission to see the

Swedish fiddlers. He had said, 'I can't believe I am paying money to see

Swedish fiddlers. I wonder what is happening to me,' and she'd looked up

as if he had introduced himself as an angel of the Lord. (Coady PTMB 86)

He imagines her uneducated and unsophisticated, economically and culturally deficient.

The country simpleton persona is reinforced by his description of her family's "innocent bechickened tablecloth" (85) and her community, "like hornets in the hottest part of the summer, flying drunk, bashing their prickly bodies into one another, buzzing enraged"

(86).

Alan's "euphori[a]" (86) at the thought of bringing Bridget home to Guelph, would seem contradictory in light of the disdain he expresses, but it is clear that he believes his attention to her reflects positively on him. In juxtaposition to her perceived 85 innocence and primitiveness, he appears mature and wise; "he could buy her all sorts of things" (84), "delight[s] in contradicting her" about matters of sexuality and culture (91), and considers himself "impervious with knowledge, 'existentially at ease'" (94).

Furthermore, he imagines that his discovery and imagined acquisition of Bridget evinces his own cultural astuteness. Intent that "his friends would see her and she would see them" (84, he gladly accepts credit for finding her; "everyone paid him compliments on

Bridget whenever they caught him alone, because she was so adorable" (94). Alan totes and displays her like an exceptionally life-like and pleasant souvenir. This dynamic is illustrative of McKay's description of the conceptualization and subjugation of Nova

Scotian society as the "Folk" by a central, dominant cultural elite. He argues,

The Folk [are] constructed as the unwitting bearers of a culture whose

significance they only partially grasped. ... The metaphors that occurred

again and again in the letters and books of the folklore collectors were of

"gold," "treasure," "mining," and "fortune": all metaphors that suggested

that Folk culture was a kind of static ore, and the middle class collector a

combined prospector/miner/refiner/marketer without whom this ore would

be lost to posterity. (TQTF3S)

Indeed, Alan demonstrates this combination of reverence and imperiousness toward

Bridget and her community that makes him want to salvage and display her as an organic,

"wholesome" (Coady PTMB 94) rarity.

What is most disturbing about Alan's objedification of Bridget and his neglect of her individuality is that she does not actively defend or assert herself. His failure to see her as an autonomous, unique person seems compounded by her tolerance for it. Having 86 flattered himself that "nothing was a mystery to him" (91), Alan eventually admits that he does not accurately understand Bridget and he is tormented by her mysteriousness. He laments,

But instead of drifting away, she shut down. Her answers became as

meaningless as she could possibly make them, and he felt himself getting

angry. Deliberately. She was like this on purpose. It was not emotional

laziness, as he had once supposed. Her mind was constantly in action,

behind the heavy eyelids, forming strategies of avoidance. (93)

By revealing less of herself, she limits the degree to which he can misunderstand and appropriate her identity; in this sense, her silence is a form of defense. She undermines his attempt to subjugate her by hiding herself from him and highlighting his ignorance.

But with this subtle and passive resistance, Bridget reveals her significant insecurity. In her defensive withdrawal from Alan, she is further prevented from exploring and defining her own identity, independent of her home.

Alan controls the narration and consequently what is explicitly revealed of

Bridget's experience. He suggests that Bridget is, conveniently, unconcerned with the way she is perceived (89). The narrative's subtext reveals that she is, on the contrary, alert to and wary of perceptions of her and that she lacks either sense of self or the sense of security to express herself. Alan's narration omits her subjectivity. The story is related in the past tense, but Bridget's dialogue is fixed in the present; as "the thing" (94), she is unchanging, a disembodied recording, rather than an evolving, sentient being.

Alan ostensibly portrays her as dispassionate and apathetic but implicitly reveals the contrary. His depictions, that her mind is "constantly in action ... forming strategies of 87 avoidance" and that she "was like trying to grab hold of a goldfish" (93), imply that she is desperately self-protective and self-conscious. In Strange Heaven, which preceded this narrative in publication, Bridget is virtually silent and struggles to achieve the most minute self-assertion; her situation in "Look, And Pass On" is no less bleak. Bridget's character illustrates how strong conceptualizations of Atlantic Canadian cultural identity can be projected onto individuals, thereby obscuring their personal identities, both from others as well as from themselves.

In Conlin's "Floating Bob's Dreams," the protagonist is similarly reduced to a symbolic stand-in for her region as perceived by her male companion. She is reduced to an idea, "floating Bob's dreams," that is, his desire to be an authentic seaman, and in fulfilling that role she loses her sense of self. Constructions of her character overshadow and confine her to a point at which she literally no longer recognizes herself. Much like

Alan does of Bridget in "Look, And Pass On," this protagonist's boyfriend envisions her as a substantiation of his own self-image. Conlin writes, "He thinks that because [she is] from the East Coast [she has] got the sea in [her] blood - he grew up surrounded by land and so [she brings] authenticity to the sailing passion" (SW130). Like Alan, Bob perceives her as an embodiment of a fixed and distinct character in Atlantic Canadian society and he is interested in her for access to that character; it is access he lacks himself and which he imagines she represents. He fixates on the popularized "nautical character" of the region that Gwendolyn Davies identifies (PP 141). Conlin demonstrates in her short story that such constructions oversimplify and misrepresent individuals from the region. The protagonist is aware of Bob's misunderstanding of her and appears not too concerned by it at first. She makes clear that she actually has little seafaring authenticity, 88 is ill-at-ease on his boat (Conlin SW143), does not "even know how to turn the engine on" (142), and, internally, she undermines Bob's characterization by thinking, "the only goddamn way the sea will be in my blood is if we sink in your goddamn boat" (130).

The significant effect his construction has on her psyche and sense of self is not immediately apparent and she allows it to continue, quietly assuming the part, silencing herself by "being kind" (130) and becoming "good at the smiling thing" and "[saying] nothing" (134). The role-playing and repression required to not only tolerate but support

Bob's misconception gnaws at the protagonist and she feels as distorted and fabricated as his idea of her.

Her disdain for her own disingenuousness is illustrated by her attention to the falseness of the story's secondary characters and setting. Bob's artificiality is apparent in his posturing as "a real sailor" (130) when "he doesn't go sailing;" he "had someone bring the boat out" (130) to where it "waits in an industrial park" (132), the sails [having not] been raised in months," more "like a mobile home at dock" than a seafaring vessel

(131). Tracy, who also imposes characterizations onto the protagonist, assumes false traits as well. She appropriates others' interests, traveling according to popular trends

(137), reading the same book as the protagonist (139), for example. Even the surroundings appear as imitations, a "built-up sprawl of a once-small town . . . malls that seem to repeat every mile, townhouse complexes" (135-6). The most revealing expression of her own sense of falseness, however, is the parallel she draws between herself, alone on Bob's boat and David Crowhurst, who, she explains, "pretended" (141) to sail around the world. As Bob pretends to be a sailor and uses her to this end, she 89 becomes like Crowhurst, pretending to be something she is not and losing her sanity as he does, or at least her sense of self, in the process.

Crowhurst and the protagonist are similarly marooned on their boats, forced to carry out charades of their seaworthiness, pantomimes driving them toward madness.

Images of entrapment abound in the story, such as the transnational car ride with the insufferable Tracy (137-8) and the protagonist's inability to get back to the city by bus

(134), or to "escape" the dock (139). Even when driving with Pete, she feels she "could never navigate [her] way out of here; [she is] at his mercy" (136). Her preoccupation with her physical restraint reflects her metaphysical sense of lacking personal agency.

She communicates this when she envisions herself "rolling down the embankment, plopping in the water and floating away like a log. A free log" (133). Rather than being free to float herself, the protagonist is being floated upon. She is trapped in the sense that her life is shaped by his perception of her, his dream, his work, its locations (136) and schedule (135). Submitting to this, she no longer assumes control of her own existence.

That she consequently loses her sense of self is clearly indicated when she cannot see her

"face in the bus window, [only] dark shadows and curves, a hint of an eye" (144). When she "[touches her] finger to the glass, trying to find some centre point from which to pull together the abstractions" (144), she is figuratively looking for her authentic self, trying to recall her true identity, independent of the conceptions imposed by Bob and Tracy.

With the story's allusions to travel, Conlin relates the question of her protagonist's finding herself to geographical location and dislocation. The story implies that identity is linked to place and it raises the question of whether a person is further from her authentic self the further she strays from her home. As a little girl, the protagonist feels "lost" when away from home, her "good-smelling room" where she

"[knows] where everything is" (135). Similarly, at age twenty-eight, she finds "relief at home (138). Her realization that "the adult forgets what the little kid knew and ... at some stage [she] can't pinpoint, [she] began plotting the course of [her] own sorrow"

(143) implies that travel can figuratively as well as literally take one away from one's origin and true self and that this can lead to unhappiness. Certain locations are more affirming for the protagonist than others and she requires freedom from confinement in order to find herself. Even when displaced from her home region of Nova Scotia, the city

(136) where she studies and works affirms her identity; whereas the boat, where Bob's life overshadows her own, undermines it.

Conlin's association of place with the question of identity is in keeping with the recurring examination of this relationship in all four stories. In each, the protagonist changes her location and experiments with various places and degrees of distance from her home, struggling to balance her attachment to and identification with her origin with her desire for personal autonomy. The women in "Insomnis" and "A Nice Place To

Visit" are unable to reinvent themselves in a new setting and to detach themselves completely from their home in order to contentedly belong, take root, as it were, in new places and communities; they are uneasy and remain preoccupied with home. In "Look,

And Pass On" and "Floating Bob's Dreams," these questions of identity and belonging are further complicated by the tendency exhibited by people from outside the Atlantic

Canadian community to characterize them on the basis of their region of origin.

Preconceptions of Atlantic Canada reduce these women to symbols and alienate them from the people around them as well as from their own senses of self. 91

These themes connect Coady and Conlin work and place them in context with such thematic concerns in the continuum of Atlantic Canadian literature. Of the link between location and identity in the region's literature, Fuller observes, referring to Joan

Clark's Swimming Toward the Light, "there is no final means of leaving 'home' behind.

Nor is there any easy passage back. .. . Clark indicates a relationship between the home place and our sense of self, a sense of fluid identity which shifts and changes whether our geographic location does or not" (DE 295). Similarly, in Coady and Conlin's fiction, individual protagonists negotiate to what extent they can and ought to distinguish and redefine their personal identities by removing themselves from their homes. Fuller's use of the word "fluid" is particularly evocative in relation to the stories studied here, as all four of the protagonists are figured, at one point or another, floating or in motion, in a sailboat, on a houseboat, in a car, or on a lily pad. Their inconstant settings illustrate the women's perpetually unsettled states. All are or have been away from home, but their psyches, their self-conceptions are constantly "fluid," oscillating between compulsion for renewal and independence, and identification with home.

Alice Munro, though not an Atlantic Canadian author, makes a comment that is comparable to Fuller's in regard to the relationship of origin and identity, that "there is some root in your nature that doesn't change" (qtd. in Howells 55). Munro's comment echoes Fuller's suggestion that one might leave her origins yet an essence lives on internally, that "uprooted," no longer in the land, one remains attached and founded on those origins in what Howells calls "the core of self' (55). Conlin and Coady's works unsettle the reliability of this idea. Their stories both affirm the individual's inherent identification with origin and critique outsiders' attempt to construct and fix such an 92 identification. Their protagonists are constantly in transit and unsettled, their identities and what defines them always indeterminate. Their writing reflects the "difficulties of ultimately condensing, grounding, and centering an ideal of self," which Gerald Lynch observes in Munro's writing (TOTM161). This critic argues,

The short story form, with its various strategies of fragmented coherence,

has shown itself well suited to the Modern and postmodern representations

of selfhood as a vaporous filter of various internal and external stimuli

rather than as the metaphysical ground of presence and meaning. (161)

Coady and Conlin use the genre to this end, demonstrating the instability of sense of self and the indeterminacy of its outline, sources and influences in their short fiction. There is a "grounding" in their works, however, for the presence of the Atlantic Canadian region is consistently apparent and central to the content of their stories. These authors' concern with the question of identity for protagonists rooted in this region, in combination with their examinations of perceptions of the region's shared identity, indicates a continued interest in and attention to the amorphous idea of self, and its relationship with place, in the region's contemporary literature. 93

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

Considering the anxiety and dysfunction of their protagonists, who are products and symbols of their homes, it is difficult to determine the degrees to which Coady and

Conlin affirm and criticize the rural Atlantic Canadian regions they depict. As they represent Cape Breton and the Annapolis Valley, respectively, in their novels, documenting locations, turns of phrase, family names and cultural practices particular to these regions, and do so in alternatively affectionate and caustic tones, they appear to both embrace and denounce the regions' particularity. Their protagonists' alienation results from their association with regional communities and from confining, often subjugating, conceptions of their identities. These young women demonstrate oscillating resolve to break free from and return to their communities and families. Both authors depict how their characters' own faltering momentum is a reflection of similar defeatism in their surroundings, but neither Coady nor Conlin present young women resolutely leaving their homes behind and moving independently into the future. Rather, their novels and short stories repeatedly depict the failure of this effort.

Corbett's work reveals that, in the rural, coastal Nova Scotian town where he undertook his study, young women face the difficult choice between staying near family in the security of the community they know as their home, and leaving in order to find greater professional and economic opportunity. He points out that educated women who remain in this area earn lower than average salaries in comparison with men in the area and with women elsewhere in the country; however, he discovers that despite the veritable certainty of such disadvantages, many young women choose to stay rather than leave their place of origin, families and communities. The reasons youth would choose to leave are apparent in the socioeconomic statistics Corbett cites; the reasons they would choose to stay are less obvious and quantifiable. His subjects indicate factors such as sense of loyalty to community as well as an inherent sense of belonging and a feeling of security in communities with distinct, isolated atmospheres. Youth appear to adopt a survival ethic, the notion that to be able to stay is an accomplishment and even a moral responsibility to family, community and regional heritage. Coady and Conlin's fiction depicts the environment in which protagonists face such decisions, the communal ethos that encourages the type of loyalty Corbett investigates, and "the effects of the persistent discourse of rural decline upon rural youth" (Corbett 2).

The authors demonstrate that the drawback of loyalty to and identification with the collective is the subjugation and even sacrifice of individual self, and that the affirmation of collective particularity can repress individual self-expression and development. They depict disappointed, defeatist attitudes and faltering momentum in families and communities that consequently lead to the same traits in protagonists. As expressed by a teacher cited in Corbett's study, '"girls who have all kinds of potential... end up a year after graduation with blank eyes pushing a stroller up the side of the road'"

(1). Protagonists in Coady and Conlin's fiction are figured confined, floating or oscillating, uncertain of who and where they should be. The questions of identity and belonging, which Howells claims are central to contemporary Canadian literature by women (1), are complicated by the economic, cultural and social marginality of a rural

Atlantic Canadian home. The freedom to choose one's identity and location is not necessarily a given, as economic conditions resulting from the region's isolation can restrict a woman's options. There is fear of the world outside the secure spheres of 95 family and community and, as expressed in Corbett's "migration imperative" (11), also a contradictory fear of limited professional, social and economic opportunities at home.

Coady and Conlin continue to engage in the questions that are central to the region's literature, examining the difficulty of distinguishing between individual and collective identities, embracing particularity while overcoming marginality, and progressing from past to future realities. Considering them in this continuum of the region's literary examination of itself, the question arises as to what extent they signal something new in such expressions, rather than reiterate the nostalgic impulse and the melancholic longing to "restore an ideal world" (Creelman 88), that critics have noted in earlier Atlantic Canadian fiction such as that of Charles G. D. Roberts (Davies SMLH

15), Charles Bruce (Kulyk Keefer UEE 55) and, to some degree, even Ernest Buckler

(Creelman 88). As they recount in detail the "harsh reality" (Corbett 13) of conditions for young women in this region, one wonders to what extent they advocate a rejection of backward glances, and attempt to dispel defeatism and propel their characters toward the future. How reliably do they censure dominant and damaging preconceptions of the region's cultural identity and to what extent do they engage with, accept and romanticize them, as some of Corbett's subjects seem to? The question of the region's culture, whether it has an authentic, shared character, what it is, and whether it is something to be celebrated or to be overcome and left behind, is the concern that underlies Coady and

Conlin's protagonists' crises. The dilemma is a real one, reflected in the region's literary history and in its social landscape. Coady and Conlin's work evinces that the conflict has far from disappeared and the majority of their creative efforts are devoted to depicting the censure versus acceptance question and its resulting anxiety, rather than answer it. Coady and Conlin depict young women's struggle to distinguish between internal and external definitions of identity. Their protagonists are silenced and trapped by the influence of conceptions of collective regional character, whether these ideas are imposed from outside or guarded and reinforced from within. They insistently interrogate the restrictiveness and immobilizing pressure of collective identity. Adolescents' dysfunction and self-destruction in Strange Heaven illustrate the results of individualities being subjugated to communal self-conception. In Heave, Conlin offers a disturbingly literal exchange of individual self, Serrie's, for collective interest, her family's financial need. In "Look, And Pass On," Coady parallels Bridget with a giant blueberry (PTMB

84); in "Floating Bob's Dreams," Conlin's protagonist is maritime, "the sea in [her] blood" (SW130). Women's individualities are repeatedly supplanted by regional collective identity. Rick Williams provides a revealing sense of the effects of rigid social conventions on adolescents in the Annapolis Valley one generation before Serrie's in

Heave. Though they antedate the temporal context of Coady and Conlin's fiction, the social environment and the effects he describes are illustrative of the historical conditions for individual youth in this region. He describes it as:

an environment in which anyone who was different from the rigidly

prescribed norm was subject to ridicule and persecution: boys who were

intellectually or artistically gifted were inevitably 'fruits'; girls who were

flamboyant or openly expressive of their sexuality were 'loose.' ... As

youngsters, we were all locked up, far too soon, in prescribed adult roles

and responsibilities. Becoming an adult should be a process of discovery,

a continual redefinition of ourselves in response to the circumstances that 97

choice, fate and ambition create. Not being able to discover and to change

is a prison. As children, we became lacquered over with an identity, a set

of ideas, a culture which had no intrinsic meaning except that it conformed

to the narrow expectations and demands of the community. After so many

coats, the essential person, still a child, was barely discernible through the

veneer. (237)

Williams' comment evokes the alienation that Coady and Conlin illustrate in their novels.

Coady's figuring teenage girls as "dustballs" (SH 62) and walking "elongated question mark[s]" (63), like Conlin's erasure of her protagonist's reflection in "Floating Bob's

Dreams" (SW144), illustrates the loss of self-knowledge to which Williams refers. The authors echo imagery also found elsewhere in the region's fiction; Creelman notes of

Thomas Raddall's Isobel Jardine, in The Nymph And The Lamp, she "is like a blank space

- a floating signifier - constantly attempting to define her self and her place" (55), and of

Ernest Buckler's Rex Giorno, in The Cruelest Month, he "spends his time at Endlaw either drinking or sleeping in the 'shape of a question mark'" (106). Coady and Conlin notably adopt and continue this imagery of lost individuality and in the difficult distinction between self and collective.

Further criticizing the oppressiveness of collective definitions of identity, both

Coady and Conlin interrogate the notion of "shared consciousness of community" (UEE

38), which Kulyk Keefer argues is evinced in the region's literature. Rather than affirm unity of perspective, they depict young women alienated from the families and communities that surround them by constant feuding and total lack of understanding.

Just as Creelman and McKay problematize the term "common sense" in their critiques of 98 popular conceptions of Atlantic Canada (Creelman 52, McKay TQTF 40), Coady's depictions of "chaos" (SH102) in the Murphy household and on the hospital ward illustrate the very opposite of common sense. She destabilizes the idea of "shared consciousness" based on kinship and family history; in this family, both children are adopted, Serrie gives up her baby, family history is forgotten, as evinced by Margaret P.'s lost memory (23), and traditions are corrupted, as demonstrated in the disruptions and disintegration of Christmas dinner (136). Conlin also disrupts the notion of strong and stable family bonds by repeatedly manipulating Christmas imagery in order to demonstrate Serrie's painful loss of bonds and stability (Heave 30, 39, 81, 125,175, 193).

The authors pointedly subvert ideas of connectedness in order to demonstrate the individual's alienation within the collective. Of Ernest Buckler's treatment of Christmas tradition in The Mountain And The Valley, Creelman argues, "the text's overly "poetic" passages indicate that the narration is trying hard - sometimes too hard - to recreate

Arcadia, and the overdetermined attempts to restore an ideal world occasionally collapse under their own weight" (88). Conlin and Coady emphatically decline such opportunities to "capture the experience of the whole ... family" (88) and purposely use them to depict division instead. They both use Christmas imagery to provoke and subsequently subvert notions of unity and solidarity in family. Individuals in their communities struggle to find strength and sense of self despite their families, rather than within them, as has been seen previously in the some of the region's literature (Creelman 83).

The authors' corruption of ideals of family and tradition contribute to the cynical tone of their work, what Creelman calls "anti-nostalgia" (215); but there is also a counterbalancing sentimentalism and affection communicated in their tone. Their novels 99 and short stories affirm the significant pull of family as much as they do its tumultuousness. Serrie laments, "all we've got is family" [Conlin Heave 305]; Bridget gazes on the dysfunction of her family and smiles (SH197); and Bess, in "A Nice Place

To Visit," longs for her son, "their apartment on the grey street" and the previously mentioned "second-hand couch with the enormous faded afghan on it, knitted seventy- odd years ago by [her] father's mother" (Coady PTMB 226). The authors depict protagonists' conflicting love for and repulsion from their families. They use alternatively critical and celebratory language to depict a combination of sentimental and cynical attitudes toward the region. For example, as Serrie romanticizes her rural youth, when "wildflowers and wild grasses had padded [her car] crash" (Conlin Heave 99),

Conlin evokes nostalgic impressions of a sheltered and nurturing upbringing; however, she also insists that, inherent in the isolation of Serrie's secure, rural home, is what makes it problematic: the lack of opportunity, economic hardship and fatalism that damage

Serrie's psyche and her prospects. The reader is consistently reminded that her parents' financial struggle and underemployment make her youth one of scarcity, neglect and depression, as much as it is, or is remembered to be, idyllic.

Like Conlin, Coady combines affection and disillusionment in her tone and demonstrates the duplicitous nature of her protagonists' feelings about her family and home. Creelman argues that "Coady completely dispels any nostalgic impulse" and that

Strange Heaven suggests "there is little of value or comfort to be attained through the attempt to reconnect to the society's traditional structures" (190). Creelman's observation of pessimism with respect to family is confirmed in Play the Monster Blind, where, in the title story for example, family connection brings more physical pain than "comfort." However, the humour that underlies Coady's depictions of families and of the

Cape Breton region complicates their interpretation. Bridget's sarcastic tone in Strange

Heaven destabilizes Coady's attitude toward the region. Depictions of Albert, for instance, are both repulsive and comical; he may be endearing, to the reader, in his outrageousness. Her characters are susceptible to being interpreted as parodies, and thus perpetuations of, stereotypical conceptions of the region's population, but they may also be read as rejections of stereotype. The difficulty of reading Coady's tone, as it wavers between expressions of fondness and disgust, makes her position on the region and its impact on characters difficult to pinpoint.

Coady's use of humour is more easily understood when compared with that of

Alice Munro as analyzed by Howells. The latter argues that Munro uses humour for its

"potential to subvert carefully contrived structures of reason and social decorum in outbursts of irrationality, which reveal dimensions of absurdity" (60). Coady uses humour to demonstrate "irrationality" bordering on insanity, satirizing her characters and also "subverting" readers' expectation and preconceptions. Her hyperbolic characterizations of repulsive characters and dysfunctional environments draw attention to her narrator's bias, undermine the reliability of representation in general and unsettle the audience's sense of familiarity with her subject, the Cape Breton region and the individual's experience there. In this sense, the irreverence of her tone works as much as a defense of the region as a derision of it. Howells suggests that Munro sometimes uses

"a coded language that seems to flaunt its duplicity ... producing the phenomenon of double vision. ... There are times when a joke is the only possible vehicle for representing a cluster of emotions too painful or too complicated to be described in any 101 other way" (60-1). This comment elucidates Coady's use of comic tone in Strange

Heaven to express Bridget's conflicting affection for and repulsion from her Cape Breton home. The author appears to mock the culture she depicts out of affection as much as out of disapproval. Of combined cynicism for and celebration of the region's culture,

Williams suggests that "flourishing Maritime regionalism," in "feelings of inferiority," eagerly examines the good and the bad, that regionalists "become the anthropologists of

[their] own despair, endlessly examining [their] personas" (TANM363-4). Coady's depictions of Cape Breton provide this type of self-examination, which seems to combine both attack and defense.

Coady and Conlin do examine the regional persona of Atlantic Canada in their work, but they are suspicious of tendencies to perceive an essential sameness and shared authentic character in the individuals of the region. In addition to their potential to inhibit the individual's sense of self, such essentialist conceptualizations are shown to reduce complex, evolving people to caricatures, such as Mr. Murphy, who becomes "a character" (Coady SH75). Coady's novel focuses overwhelmingly on negative examples of essentialist thinking, as exemplified by Alan, Maritime folk art consumers and

Bridget's community itself, all of whom exploit notions of authenticity and essence for commercial gain. She shows that such efforts confine individuals to limited, artificial identities, as in the case of the protagonist of "Floating Bob's Dreams." Conlin also depicts the perversion of ideas of essence into commodity in Heave, as cultural artifacts are used as currency and the residents themselves, their homes, stores, lifestyles and even their bodies, as in Serrie's case, are merchandise for the tourist's and collector's dollars.

As much as Conlin evokes the appeal of shared identity based on origin in passages such 102 as, "those days shaped our hearts, whole and strong and full of summer" {Heave 61), her narrator's idealism is unmistakable and regularly undermined by depictions of commercial exploitation of the region's perceived essential "Innocence," as McKay has described it. Both Coady and Conlin exemplify the deconstruction of popular conceptualizations of Nova Scotia's "Folk" culture, "primitive[nessj" and "simple life"

(McKay TQTF 276), re-presenting the region and invalidating previously dominant representations. They are two voices of a recently audible group McKay identifies,

"those who grew up in rural Nova Scotia [and] have begun to talk about their experiences in ways that undermine a Folk romanticism" (276).

In their subversion of notions of shared essential character and of collective experience and identity, Coady and Conlin appear to reject the idea of regional particularity, complicating an attempt to read their works as regional literature, yet they explicitly devote their attention to representing a region and there is a consistency to their protagonists' anxieties that demands comparison and analysis in a regional context.

Their works are aligned with Atlantic Canadian literary themes such as the "inimical" home environment Donovan notes in Alden Nowlan's fiction (198), the collective

"hangdog mentality," to which Terry Whalen makes reference (33), and the individual's struggle for autonomy within the collective, as Creelman has noted in the works of Ernest

Buckler (106), Thomas Raddall (55) and David Adams Richards (148), among others.

The ambivalent moods of Coady and Conlin's depictions of regional communities suggest engagement with communal solidarity and particularity and also rejection of sentimental or subjugating conceptions of these. Their dark depictions of their protagonists' experiences in this region undermine nostalgic and conservative 103 inclinations to find resolution to anxiety in the solidarity of social structures. Creelman notes that in much of the region's earlier literature, "many female characters find their identity and security only as they merge their selves with the roles defined by the collective society" (83). Kulyk Keefer makes a similar observation of this tendency to resolve the anxieties of alienation and fragmentation by affirming the collective:

"awareness of the breakdown of community is coupled with an intense desire for the sustaining and validating powers of communal life" (JJEE 54). Coady and Conlin distinctly opt out of such resolutions, focusing more often on the damage to young women's sense of self by conservative collective forces.

Nevertheless, they demonstrate the individual young woman rising, subtly, out of the collective and the past, and asserting some personal agency. Their protagonists resolve their anxieties, albeit minutely and tentatively, recognize their subjugation, articulate their pain and break from their restraints. Characters who overcome their struggles to differentiate themselves from their region do so by rejecting it less, accepting it rather than considering it a trap. Serrie asserts ownership over Lupin Cove and the

Valley, and in doing so, appears to gain some peace and release from the cyclical psychological pattern that restrained her (Conlin Heave 319). Bridget is similarly empowered by her assertion of self and acceptance of the "chaos" (Coady SH197) of her family. In "Insomnis" and "A Nice Place To Visit," the authors portray characters who deal with their desire to break free from their origins by acknowledging their need for the security of home and their essential identification with their origins. For the most part,

Coady and Conlin's protagonists confirm the endurance of "anxieties, tensions, and contradictions" that Creelman argues characterize the region's most recent fiction (6), but what little resolution their work affords lies in the empowerment of young women to liberate themselves from detrimental economic, social and cultural confinement and assert their own identities, while still recognizing and accepting the significant influence and impact of their origins. 105

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