Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 11-20-2015 12:00 AM Reading the Canadian Battlefield at Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, and Vimy Rebecca Campbell The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. D.M.R. Bentley The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Rebecca Campbell 2015 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Campbell, Rebecca, "Reading the Canadian Battlefield at Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, and Vimy" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3412. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3412 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Reading the Canadian Battlefield at Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, and Vimy (Thesis format: Monograph) by Rebecca Anne Campbell Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Rebecca Campbell 2015 Abstract Early Canadian cultural history is punctuated by a series of battlefields that define not only the Dominion’s expanding territory and changing administration, but also organize Canadian time. This dissertation examines the intersection between official military commemoration, militarism as a social and cultural form, and the creation of a national literature, with specific reference to poetry. By outlining the role war has played in defining Canada’s territory and the constitution of its communities, this dissertation will also uncover both the military history of the post-colonial nation, and the construction of belonging and territory in the “empire” of Canada, from its cultural origins at Quebec, the consolidation of its southern borders during the War of 1812, its claims on a white settler west during the Métis Resistance of 1885, and finally the invention of an international military identity on Vimy Ridge. War is cultural practice as well as political action and a traumatic dislocation, and the cultural history of war extends far beyond combat to inform both the civilian and the soldier, despite the distinctions we might make between the battlefield and the home front. Drawing on theorists of militarism and memory, as well as critics of Canadian cultural history, this dissertation seeks to reveal the underlying structures that govern not only military commemoration in Canada, but also the kind of space such military epistemologies produce, whether through memorials themselves, or through the geographic and literary legacies of a history punctuated by battlefields. Keywords Canadian Literature, War Literature, Commemoration, Cultural Nationalism, Military Geography, Poetry ii Dedication FOR DAVID STIRLING CAMPBELL (1944 – 2009) FAIR THESE BROAD MEADS - THESE HOARY WOODS ARE GRAND BUT WE ARE EXILES FROM OUR FATHERS' LAND iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Western’s English Department for the opportunity to undertake this work in the first place. Dr David Bentley’s insight, guidance, and critical work, in particular, are foundational to what comes after. I am also grateful to Dr Manina Jones for her sharp mind and her generosity as teacher, supervisor, and second reader. I have also been lucky in my friends at Western, and feel strongly that they should own some percentage of this work: David Hickey, Tina Northrup, Mandy Penney, Stephanie Oliver, Sherrin Berezowsky, Sarah Pesce, David Drysdale, Nadine Fladd, and Sean Henry come to mind in particular, for many, many conversations. Sharron Campbell, Ian Campbell, and Paulette Fitzgerald have my thanks for their support and patience. In keeping with the dissertation’s subject, I will also thank the dead: my father, David Stirling Campbell (1944 – 2009), my grandmother, Beverley Campbell (1920 – 2009), and my grandfather, David Maxwell Campbell (1914 – 1997). Finally, I must mention Donald Bourne, who has been patient with my visits to memorial sites in Canada and America, who is good at remembering dates, knows about firearms, and always asks interesting questions. Most of all I want to thank him because he was there even when the Lord who moveth mountains didn’t seem to help my labours, and for that I will be always grateful. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Dedication iii Aknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Introduction 1.1 The Canadian Thermopylae 1 1.2 Nation, Memory, War 13 1.3 A Sense of Place 37 Chapter 1: Staging Quebec, 1759 2.1 Approaching Quebec 43 2.2 Architectures of War and Memory 58 2.3 Scenography 68 2.4 Sanguinaria 84 Chapter 2: The Militia Myth on Queenston Heights, 1812 3.1 Re-Enacting 1812 90 3.2 Sarah Curzon and the Heroines of 1812 104 3.3 Engendering Canada 123 3.4 The Militia Myth at Fort York, Vimy, and Kandahar 133 Chapter 3: The Small War at Batoche, 1885 4.1 A Mari Usque Ad Mare 139 4.2 Guerillas, Civilized and Savage 156 4.3 Back to Batoche 173 4.4 A Place to Stand 189 4.5 A Battle Lost 200 v Chapter 4: The View from Vimy Ridge, 1917 5.1 The Problem of Distance 204 5.2 Time’s Wrong Way Telescope 214 5.3 Mapping the Page 222 5.4 On the Ridge 239 Coda: Under the DEWline 249 Bibliography 261 Curriculum Vitae 287 vi 1 INTRODUCTION 1. The Canadian Thermopylae Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. As for the Greek theatrical tradition Which represents that summer's expedition Not as a mere reconnaissance in force By three brigades of foot and one of horse (Their left flank covered by some obsolete Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet) But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt Robert Graves. “The Persian Version.” 1946. Archibald Lampman’s poem “At the Long Sault, 1660” recounts an historical confrontation between French and Iroquois forces on the Ottawa River, using the brief skirmish to describe a kind of productive tension between two sorts of space: the natural world of the opening lines, and the settled landscape of the work’s second half. The poem constitutes what D.M.R. Bentley calls a “scale model of the baseline-hinterland dichotomy of Canadian poetry” (The Gay]grey Moose 38): a spatial, economic, and conceptual division between wilderness and human activity that Lampman renders not only in the racialized distinction between civilized white defence and savage indigenous attack, but also in the tension between free and formal verse.1 From a military 1 According to Bentley, Lampman “employs fractured lines and irregular rhythms — a form bordering on free verse — to present the workings of a non-teleological, Darwinian nature in an area of conflict far from the baseland, but returns aptly to regular quatrains for the poem's final, heraldic vision of a feudal and 2 perspective, however, the poem describes three spheres of settler experience, with the baseline and its hinterland bound together by the intermediary battlefield. Between the uncivilized wild, where the wolfish Indigenous warriors dwell, and the “frail-walled town” (26) occupied by “mother and matron and child” (27), lies battlespace: liminal, productive, both violent and civilized, and figured through a ruin, the “broken palisade” of the opening stanza, as though in the moment of combat the battlefield is already ancient. Lampman’s poem describes the role of memory at the intersection of landscape and community, using the peculiar exigency of the battlefield to present a narrative of transformation. Successful settlement means the constant reiteration of national community as well as defence, and so Daulac dies for a nascent “Canada” in the village beyond the rapids. For those who remember it, the ruined battlefield, like the dead soldier, becomes a benchmark2 in the new landscape, one that renders it comprehensible, and makes it home. The poem also assumes many of the premises that this dissertation will explore: that war and its representation are central to the creation of community as a place, or a people; that a successful defence, like a successful invasion, authorizes the victor’s sovereign possession of a landscape, both the right to occupy and the right to represent; that war poetry, like commemoration, is location-work in time, space, and culture. urban order that has been preserved at the cost of the lives of Dollard des Ormeaux and his men” (“A New Dimension” n.p.). 2 In the case of General James Wolfe’s death in 1759, it is literal: in 1790 Surveyor-General Major Samuel Holland, who had been with Wolfe at Louisbourg and Quebec, established the site of Wolfe’s death as a benchmark (“A Rallying Site” n.p.). 3 Though it was written long after 1660, “At the Long Sault” celebrates the site’s military history as both liminal and original. This introduction explores a theoretical and historical framework that establishes the continuity between war and community in a specifically Canadian context, in preparation for a more detailed examination of four particular battlefields and their representation in inscription and poetry as sites of Canadian space/time: The Plains of Abraham, Queenston Heights, Batoche, and Vimy Ridge. These sites are represented by their inscriptions and their social history as well as representative poetry by early Canadian poets like Thomas Cary, Charles Sangster, Sarah Curzon, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Charles G.D. Roberts, as well as contemporary poets including Al Purdy, Tim Lilburn, and Marilyn Dumont.