On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

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2012-10-25 On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Ram, Véronique Dorais

Ram, V. D. (2012). On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27175 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/312 doctoral thesis

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On Deformity: Bodies in Contemporary Canadian Fiction

Véronique Dorais Ram

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

October, 2012

Abstract

This dissertation ponders how deformity acts as an index of resistance to the conventional family saga; it challenges the authority of the genre, which perpetuates conformity to affirm the existence of a national identity. I open with a history of the trope of deformity and a theory on its applicability to questions of the nation in Canadian fiction. Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House begins the literary analysis and considers how

Daphne’s asymmetrical face exemplifies the novel’s overarching deformation of the domestic realist text. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees rereads Victorian conventions to demonstrate the perversity of power and the purity of individuality as the characters contest hegemonic cultural projects. The giants and runts that make up the

Hervé family in D. Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love rewrite the traditional roman de la terre and exhibit how the trope of deformity underscores an indefinable Canadian identity – one that possesses roots only by seeking to disavow those roots. Anna’s body in Susan

Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World resists all acts of colonization, including historical proofs, and performs a parody that reverses the ideal of the female body as a trope for the mother nation. Lastly, the stories of Fielding and Smallwood in A

Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise destabilize the formulation of a collective unconscious based on historical writings. Their symbolic deformities reveal how Newfoundland’s status as a nation is both fact (as historically represented by

Smallwood) and fiction (as imagined by Fielding).

The deformed bodies in these texts are non-compliant disruptions of national discourses that enable national identity through exclusive ideological frameworks; they destabilize centralized myths of the nation frequently employed by supporters of the

ii classical canon to reaffirm a sense of cultural existence. Though they criticize the superficiality of kinship, they nonetheless highlight a still prevalent need for roots, physical and historical, as they reconstitute a more flexible sense of community.

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Preface: Why Deformity?

I spent the summer months of 2007 reading the texts on my minor field examination list in postcolonial theory and literature. Less than halfway through I started to notice a trend: the numerous peculiar and deformed figures that haunt Azaro in Ben

Okri’s The Famished Road; Lenny’s crippled body, the result of contracting polio, in

Bapsi Sidwa’s Cracking India; Baba’s physical and mental disabilities in Anita Desai’s

Clear Light of Day; Puli, deformed by disease, in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in the

Sieve; the one armed man in a key scene of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and Saleem’s distinctive nose in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I perceived this pattern as a common trope employed by postcolonial writers to portray fractured nations under imperialism and colonialist discourses. As I interspersed my reading requirements with readings for pleasure, I began seeing deformed characters everywhere – in short stories, in fiction, in poetry, on television, in film, and to my surprise, in my own creative writings. I became obsessed with this haunting presence, covering my office wall with post-it references, keeping lists on napkins, and starting numerous unfinished notebooks with ideas on the significance of these deformities in general, and more specifically in

Canadian literature.

Then I read Vandal Love, a novel I both appreciated and despised. I appreciated the text because of its successful representation of deformed bodies as symbolic of the dilemmas inherent in the search for what it means to be Canadian with a Québec ancestry, but I despised it for forcing me to acknowledge that I longed for a similar understanding of my roots as did the characters. As a French-Canadian raised on an

American military base in Belgium, I spent the majority of my life avoiding any visible

iv manifestation of my heritage for fear of being marginalized by my loud and dominant

American peers. Not only was I one of a handful of Canadians at my school, but I was definitely one of the few French-Canadians. Being away from Canada and Québec for so long, my ancestry seemed more mythical than real, and the opportunities advertised by the American dream were easy to accept as actual possibilities. I must admit I spent several years yearning for the strong sense of identity offered by American discourse rather than the dispossession I felt with regard to Canada. Even once I had returned to

Canada to attend McGill, I avoided my ancestry, rarely connecting with my extended family members (of which there were too many for me to recognize at that point), studying English literature and Hispanic studies, joining an English choir, and surrounding myself with English-speaking peers. I even walked out of a job interview after my prospective employer, hearing about my background, stated that I was a perfect example for the existence of Bill 101.

My visceral antagonism toward my heritage quickly proved a hindrance as I began my research and studies in Canadian literature, and I found myself gradually incorporating Québec literary texts into my repertoire. As I became better read in contemporary Canadian and Québec literature, I noticed a trend to deform characters, often children, to articulate a sense of dispossession equal to my own; one that reveals a struggle with family and heritage. Hence I decided to focus on the trope of deformity as a reflection of the contemporary development in writing to destabilize traditions of the novel as “an incipiently hegemonic expression of modern middle-class interests”

(Armstrong 169). Still drawn to family sagas, I drew on my foundation in postcolonial theory to reconsider the tropic significance of the home and the model family in its

v relation to representations of the nation. Though I knew the concept of the family as a model for the nation was nothing new to literary studies, I felt that the interpretation of the family as deforming the nation provided a complex lens through which to debate questions of Canadian national identity as explored by contemporary writers. Richard

White argues that countries such as Australia and Canada “were commonly thought of as the children of Britain or Europe, as strapping sons, or dutiful daughters or juvenile delinquents” (48). The image of Canada as the child of Britain amplifies the trope of the deformed offspring as contesting colonization and the narrative of a nation as a healthy and cohesive body. Deformity presents a body that questions the advocates for a unified national model because it not only expresses difference, but affirms the possibility of transgression. Thus by resisting the emblematic portrayal of the nation as a familial, unified, and often feminized body, the texts under study here deform the nation.

What do I mean by “deform the nation”? Put bluntly, I use the phrase to encompass how conventional family narratives, once employed to further nation-building rhetoric, are challenged by a physically deformed offspring that refutes the secure hegemonic control of the nation. The family proves a threatening trope because the

“valorization of the family, when is becomes the ruling class ideology, can lead to the repression of individuality” (Shahani 82). The domestic and nation-state ideals can entrap and marginalize the weaker members, often conceived as the child or the female.

Not surprising, the majority of the characters that sport deformities are children or women, or both at once, for they resist objectification by adult concepts to which they are forced to conform. Deformity becomes a resistant power, critiquing the model of the family and nation, confronting the stereotypical roles entrenched by a conservative

vi culture. In Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry notes, “Nowhere in the world has nationalization worked” (38), but in fact this supposed failure is beneficial. Nationalism requires a subsuming of the individual for the good of the collective; what these authors argue, however, is that plurality – recognizing deformities, that is various forms – composes a different type of nation, and one that escapes the cliché of collapsing difference under the umbrella term “identity.”

Although many critics employ the terms diversity and pluralism interchangeably,

I perceive diversity as a more problematic term. Diversity implies the existence, in a space, of various different bodies. For example, in Montréal, one can find Chinatown, little India, little Italy, etc. This, of course, suggests a diverse city – whether the bodies intersect with one another or not. In a way, however, they still “belong” to one city.

Pluralism, however, promotes the interaction of these bodies so that they may converge comparatively rather than assimilate or exist separately. Yes, diversity implies difference, but it continues to carry negative connotations, such as “[c]ontrariety to what is agreeable, good, or right” (“Diversity” 3) and “a point of unlikeness” (1b). Moreover, diversity is a “condition or quality” rather than a practice (“Diversity” 1a), more of a passive characteristic or diagnosis than an active opportunity. Pluralism, on the other hand, denotes a “theory or system of devolution and autonomy for organizations and individuals in preference to monolithic state power” (“Pluralism” 3); it resists a hegemonic nation and insists on the potential of a contingent canon and identity. The emphasis on pluralism entails a dialogue and encourages new conversations on how to address questions of literary identity and the complex tropes of the family, the body, and the nation.

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In a sense, I subject the nation to deforming analyses that respect Canada as an imagined community, but also that recognize how its imagined identity remains composed by processes of power that inevitably repress differences. Jonathan Kertzer notes how those concerned with Canadian nation-building are often frustrated in their quest to define a sense of identity. He highlights unity as an “elaborate artifice, a social imaginary convoking people, place, and time. It is a national dream shared by some and imposed on others, a dream that can be obsessive and therefore monstrous. As a model of personal and communal life, the nation can terrify as well as nurture” (119). Kertzer examines the paradox of the nation as, on the one hand, a compelling force demanding uniformity and submission, and on the other, a useful means to explore a country’s varied narrative existence. The paradoxical and murky theoretical perspectives on the body and the nation, particularly in a Canadian context, highlight how the quest to define

“Canadian,” let alone Canadian literature, remains dynamic, contested, multiple, and fluid. One might argue that this protean perspective itself reveals a limited reading of the nation, but I see it as in a process of becoming, perpetually open to deformation and reformation. The trope of the family, in this context, parallels Kertzer’s comment on the social imaginary of the nation, for the family can both terrify and nurture. In addition, by using the metaphor of the body, precisely the deformed body, I emphasize the indeterminable and elusive nation over the institutionally sanctioned nation.

What follows in chapter one is a brief history of deformity and how it applies to contemporary Canadian fiction. I outline why I focus on deformity, rather than disability, and introduce the texts under study. Selecting which texts to analyze for this project was no easy task, and I elaborate on the selection in my concluding remarks in order to

viii underscore the importance of the annotated bibliography I have opted to include. I am aware that the lack of published research on deformity in Canadian fiction requires that I define the term and its theoretical applicability to my dissertation, which I also undertake in the first chapter. I did not initially approach Canadian fiction with a notion of

“deformity,” but rather with a consideration of more popular concepts, such as landscape, survival, multiculturalism, (post)colonialism, and more recently, ecocriticism. My theory of deformity, however, is but a launching pad, I would argue, for questions raised and challenged in all literatures. As Laurence Ricou writes: “I am convinced that Canadian literature offers a wide range of rich and complex texts to support a study which I hope will have implications for understanding a general literary problem/challenge hardly restricted to Canadian writing” (x). I chose contemporary Canadian fiction because, as my own experience reveals, it hits home. I know that a preliminary study like this one, which focuses only on recent fiction, can only provide a small picture of deformity in

Canadian literature, but I hope it leads to further studies on the topic in a broader context.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the

Department of English, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies for their financial support.

Thank you to Dr. Pamela McCallum and Dr. Dominique Perron, for their generous and astute criticism, which has no doubt made this a stronger dissertation. A special thank you to my external examiner Dr. Cecily Devereux, for helping me realize that perhaps deformity is a process and an index of resistance, rather than a mere trope.

A most enthusiastic thanks to my academic mentors for their continual support:

Aritha van Herk, for her incisive criticism on academic matters, and warm and caring ear on personal matters; Dr. Susan Bennett, for her expert advice on professional aspirations, university politics, and parenting; Dr. Fred Hall, for never ceasing to ask about my writing progress and never (really) doubting that I’d finish.

To Dr. Jon Kertzer, fertile in thought. I cannot begin to thank you for being my supervisor. You are everything a doctoral student could wish for: critical, but considerate; wordy, but witty; professional, but human. Thank you for being a part of my life – from dissertation to wedding to baby showers to medical school. I shall always have fond memories of you and Adrienne at all the events that have touched our lives over the past six years.

I owe a gracious thank you to the role models I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with during my involvement in student politics and administrative work at the university.

Dr. John R. (Jack) Perraton: a model citizen and family man. I already miss your narratives about Charlotte and the kids. Thank you for believing in me – from ethical dilemmas to major changes in career paths. Without your support, I know medicine

x would’ve remained a dream. Charlotte Perraton: for letting me sit and hold Jack’s hand at the most opportune moment – you have no idea how much it meant to me – it has already made me a better physician.

Ann Tiernay, the model superwoman, who held a newborn Lal in her arms for hours, for proving it can all be done and done well; Dr. Alan Harrison, the model host, for holding the reception at his home where Rithesh and I first connected; Liz Osler, the model ally, for her welcoming ear and well-worded advice; Dr. Joanne Cuthbertson and

Mr. Charlie W. Fischer, the model alumni, for never ceasing to care about student success, including mine; David Johnston, the model Registrar, for being the senior administrator that makes me question my decision to leave a career in higher education; and Jennifer Quin, the model boss, for her outstanding wit and shared real estate obsessions.

Lastly, what would a dissertation on the family as a model for the nation be without recognition of kin? Kelly Goss, for family dinners and a sincere love of Lalina.

My mother-in-law, Rajammal: for being the most understated while progressive feminist

I’ve had the pleasure to meet, and whose grace I hope my children inherit. My father-in- law, Sewbareth, whom I have never met: your intellectual presence remains a gift.

Capitaine Dorais, Soldat Pelletier, et la petite souris: pour votre amour, patience, et fierté.

Mais plus important, pour m’avoir donné la liberté de trouver mon chemin au fils des années. Samson, my faithful dog, for keeping my feet warm when writing. My beloved daughter, Lalina, for reminding me how to read for pleasure. And little baby no name, for the kicks of reassurance as I prep for the defence.

Dedication

To my remarkable husband, Rithesh:

for taking the risk to be with me;

for asking what about now; and,

for having much bigger dreams for me, than I could ever have for myself.

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Table of Contents

Approval Page……………………………………………………………………………...i

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Preface: Why Deformity?………………………………………………………………...iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..…x

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..xii

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………..xiii

Epigraphs………………………………………………………………………………...xv

Chapter One: On Deformity: From History to a Theory………………………………...1

i. Deformity: History to Theory……………………………………………..4 ii. Deformity: Not Disability………………………………………………..21 iii. Deformity: In CanLit…………………………………………………….25

Chapter Two: body: house: nation: Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House…………………35

i. The Importance of Being Detailed………………………………………40 ii. What is a House?...... 45 iii. A Town Deformed by War………………………………………………52 iv. Storey to Stories: Inside a Good House………………………………….56 v. Table Talk………………………………………………………………..62 vi. Daphne’s Anti-Domestic Deformity……………………………………..64 vii. There’s Something About Meg…………………………………………..70

Chapter Three: Purity and Prejudice: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees….76

i. “achingly absorbed in Jane Eyre”………………………………………..80 ii. “Frances is uncanny”……………………………………………………91 iii. “Imagine if you had a tree growing inside you”……………………….106 iv. “The child seemed to be in disguise”…………………………………...110

Chapter Four: No Relations: D.Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love…………………………...122

i. Vandal Love Family Tree……………………………………………….122 ii. Deforming National Character………………………………………….128 iii. Domestic Genealogies: Virility versus Fertility………………………..140 iv. Nomads and Names…………………….………………………………154 v. “theatre of salvation, archangels, and businessmen”…………………...157

xiii

Chapter Five: “Of” the World: Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World……………………………………………...166

i. Beyond Allegory: Criticism…………………………………………….168 ii. All in the Family………………………………………………………..174 iii. The Fashion of Spieling………………………………………………...179 iv. Womb to World………………………………………………………...188

Chapter Six: Fieldwood’s Anatomy: Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise…….199

i. Smallwood the Skab: All Skin-and-Bones……………………………..204 ii. “The Book”.…………………………………………………………….210 iii. Failure of the Father…………………………………………………….219 iv. Fielding’s Remedy: Doctors, Drink, and Disease………………………225 v. The Provider…………………………………………………………….235

Conclusion: Introducing the Bibliography……………………………………………..242

Appendix: Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Fiction Portraying Characters with Physical Deformities…………………………246

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….269

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Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down, he disfigures everything, he loves deformities, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man himself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education

The siren goes on and on. That used to be the sound of death, for ambulances or fires. Possibly it will be the sound of death today also. We will soon know. What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed… Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

On Deformity: From History to a Theory

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opening to Emile, which serves as one of the epigraphs to this dissertation, introduces the negative influences of dominant social institutions on the shaping of “man.”1 “Society” as he goes on to discuss further, must decide between the making of a man and the making of a citizen (39), for civilization’s patterns and laws corrupt the “natural man.” Rousseau explains that society corrupts the “natural man” through laws of property, which are the basis of all inequality, and through the creation of unnatural desires, such as fame, wealth, and power, which pervert nature (41). In order to counter society’s denaturing of man, he proposes an educational project that will bring out the natural goodness, independence, compassion, and equality of all individuals.

Rousseau’s philosophical explorations of the corrupting power of social institutions over the essential nature of humanity inform my theorizing of deformity in contemporary Canadian fiction as it relates to the body and the nation. The epigraph encapsulates how social “man” deforms idealized models of humanity – from the Biblical representation of the human as God’s likeness in the flesh corrupted by earthly habits, to medical diagnostics and theories of evolution. Rousseau’s romantic notion of nature as reflecting beauty and virtue corrupted by society leads to his elaborate education to unlearn the artificialities taught by social establishments – as if progress actually promotes a form of digression from the natural order. Given the religious implications of his statement, this should not come as a surprise. Yet at the same time, Rousseau critiques man for not only deforming everything, but for valourzing acts of deformity, resisting the authority of the “author of things,” while at the same time noting that if man

1 I use the term “man” because that is the terminology employed by Rousseau.

1 did not “do this…everything would go even worse and our species does not admit of being formed halfway” (205). He begins by placing the duty of education on the mother, whom he perceives as being bestowed the gift of milk and thus the natural role of providing nourishment to the child and moral order of the family. The responsibility of the mother becomes common in early creative renderings of the family as a model for the nation, and the female body as a valuable natural resource.

Margaret Atwood’s words in the second epigraph voice the extreme result of a body corrupted by social institutions, in this case a totalitarian body politic that farms women as “national resource[s]” to reproduce natural offspring (Atwood 65). The future of the nation depends on healthy population growth, but disastrously technological advances result in polluted bodies leading to infertile citizens or deformed offspring called “Unbabies.” The Handmaid’s Tale presents the worst-case scenario where humanity’s environmental destruction leads to polluted, infertile, dismembered, and deformed bodies unable to ensure the survival of the species. The threat in the future becomes not the overwhelming landscape that needs to be tamed, but humanity’s obliteration of the landscape, resulting in the human body failing at its most basic act of nature: reproduction.

Atwood’s use of the word “Unbaby” introduces a key question driving this dissertation: in the texts under study, the families serve as a metaphor for the nation, and the physical deformities are those of the children in each family. In some cases, the deformities continue from childhood to adulthood (Fielding and Smallwood in Johnston’s novels, for example); but in all cases, the children are the ones initially labeled

“deformed.” Why are contemporary writers representing the future of the nation by

2 creating “Unbabies”? In a book review of The Handmaid’s Tale Mervyn Rothstein writes: “it’s a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime” (C11). Indeed, like Atwood’s text, the novels under study here are concerned with power and how it deforms or shapes character, both in reference to actual personages and national character. The children as symbols of the future of the nation demonstrate the need in literary theory to investigate how discourses defining a nation “are never uniform in their effects or unified in content”

(Turner 150). Subjected to a web of surveillance, the deformities offer a physical resistance by the younger generation to structures of social dominance in which they become objects, rather than subjects, of scrutiny. Deformity provides us with the terminology to address questions of nationalism, rather than a definition of nationalism that, for purposes of power, relies on hierarchy and subordination to assert a fictitious sense of universal being and belonging.

This chapter begins with a historical overview of the body, deformity, and the nation. Literary and critical writings have engaged with the body as a potent signifier for ages, and the conventions surrounding the symbolism of the body in relation to the nation reveal the social construction of normalcy as deeply entrenched and naturalized by generations of texts. The deformed body, historically labeled as monstrous, threatens the health of institutions supported by dominant ideologies of power. After the historical outline, I differentiate between disability and deformity to explain how I perceive the former as a complex term carrying negative connotations, whereas the latter proves entirely metaphorical. I then introduce my theory of deformity in Canadian literature and representations of the family and the nation as endlessly self-questioning and self-

3 validating. I do not seek to renounce the family or the nation; rather, I consider both concepts inescapable and worthy of critical attention because their contradictoriness disputes totalizing pedagogical narratives that maintain essentialist identities. The unformed nation and dysfunctional family are thus full of potential to reshape the cultural imaginary and national body.

Deformity: History to Theory

When considering the history of the body as a symbol, many critics have perceived healthy, diseased, or deformed bodies as reflections of the state of the nation.

The legitimizing discourses on the trope of the body in relation to the nation illuminate my theorizing of deformity in contemporary Canadian fiction, and reveal how the narrative of the nation in family sagas is matched on the level of body politics by a wide range of theoretical discourses on the proper body, including colonialism, monstrosity, freakery, medicine, and disability studies.

Literary texts with abject figures or monstrosities reveal material deviations from the normative and natural function of society, and generally identify physiological difference with moral deviance (Shakespeare’s Richard III, for example). Moral deviance, in turn, reveals the failure of social systems to maintain order and thus the failure of the “proper body” of society or body politic. The “proper body,” coined by

Paul Youngquist in Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, refers to how

Romanticism in England

saw the installation of a norm of embodiment…that served (and in some

ways still serves) to regulate the agencies of bodies in liberal society…The

4 proper body serves culturally as a disciplinary strategy that regulates

individual bodies and behaviors without reference to higher powers,

secular or divine. (xiv-xv)

Although Youngquist defines the term in reference to the Romantic period, the “proper body” applies equally to contemporary writings, for to exist outside the boundaries of the proper body is to affront legitimizing discourses of power and cultural definitions of civility and propriety. All bodies must assimilate to the proper body norm, or else “they remain merest matter, monstrosities that come to trouble the universality of the human”

(xix, my emphasis). The deformed bodies are therefore “trouble” – improper, uncivil, and in physical defiance of ideological standards. But who or what defines “legitimate” discourses of power, or more significantly, legitimate bodies?

Krista Scott notes that during the Middle Ages “the body model…was characterized by a strict hierarchy and designation of clean/unclean parts, which correspond to the monarchic hierarchy with the king, the head, at the top, and the peasants, the feet, at the bottom” (n.pag.). The body acts as a reflection of position and power, defining the cultural “norm” of embodiment and making physical appearance a reaffirmation of a social strata that devalues deformed flesh and pathologizes material difference as improper and unnatural. As Bryan Turner highlights in The Body and

Society, in mediaeval thought the body was an important metaphor for kingship and “the structure and function of society as a whole” (151). The king was both a material body

“subject to corruption and decay” and a spiritual body “which was symbolic of the life of the community” (151), but also considered at the top of the hierarchy and thus both proper and sacred.

5 Words employed to describe the proper body parallel the vocabulary used to define model nations, for “body metaphors for the state reflect both notions and assumptions about what the real physical body actually involves, as well as a paradigm for how the state is perceived to or should operate” (Scott n.pag.). Whether it endorses the head of the state, the secular authority of the monarchy, or the head of the Church, the proper body serves as a top-down model for a homogenous society of look-alike lemmings. Thus a historical look at the body in relation to the nation reveals a gradual shift from representations of kingship to kinship.

The link between bodies and questions of nationalism is nothing new to literary studies. Theories go as far back as the Middle Ages,2 as Jeffrey Cohen demonstrates in his analysis of the giant as a central figure in the shaping of national identity in Of

Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. He argues that Geoffrey of Monmouth in

Historia Regum Britanniae solves the crisis of national identity with the story of the

Trojan settlement in Britain, where Brutus and Arthur defeat “inimical giants” transformed by the narrative into “monstrous bodies” hostile to the formation of nation and empire (xviii). The giants are physically distorted to signify the monster the nation could be, if it remains uncolonized and therefore uncivil. Cohen argues: “Geoffrey’s achievement was to bestow on the Middle Ages a monarchical body through which

England dreamed its own prehistory and inhabited it as if it had always been home” (36).

2 Arguably, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson discusses in her introduction to Freakery, one could consider the founding Judeo-Christian myth that Adam’s body contained Eve one of the primary examples of an anomalous body, and I’d argue, a potential textual trope for the body as symbolic for the founding of a “nation.” Thomson even notes the “Stone Age cave drawings” that “record monstrous births” (1), and the many mythical hybrid and extraordinary bodies accounted for by the “fathers of Western thought” (Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, Augustine, Bacon, and Montaigne) as “disruptions of the seemingly natural order of their interpretative schemata” (1).

6 Arthur becomes a master-signifier materializing Britain, that is, giving heroic, material form to an ideal of nationhood. Hence Geoffrey is, from Cohen’s perspective, the father of the first “imagined community” (40). The body of King Arthur becomes a link between nation and God, and his success and civility become ways to measure the health of Britain as a nation.

Similarly during the Renaissance, the “king’s body was both biological and political – an organism and a political organization, a flesh-and-blood body and the body politic” (Olwig xvi). The metonymic role of the king as a figure defining the natural, the human, and the national continues, when Shakespeare becomes, as Harold Bloom has enthusiastically argued, the inventor of the human. If Shakespeare invents the human, then his portrayal of Richard the III personifies the inhuman. His deformed king claims his evil ways are a result of his physical deformity, and he famously uses his anatomical abnormalities as an excuse for his unnatural ascent to the throne. Richard never fails to soliloquize upon the correlation between his physical deformity and his devilishly wicked ways. From the opening, he blames “dissembling nature” and advises the audience that his thirst for vengeance results from his unjust corpus:

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

7 Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (Shakespeare 1.1.18-31)

Richard blames nature for his physical defects, and thus the British nation, as metaphorically embodied by the figure of the king, degenerates from an idealized

Arthurian body to the destructive physique of a deformed Richard. Whether Shakespeare uses Richard as a vehicle to critique national leadership in Britain is a subject for a different study. My purpose in mentioning Richard’s representation is to stress the emphasis in literary texts on the body of the head of the nation as a symbol reflecting morality. Richard is born deformed and portrayed as innately evil, for deformed or

“monstrous” children were perceived in early modern European thought as cursed and consequently a sign that the parental sexual union had been sinful (Paster 168). The church, as the ruling social institution, defined normality and humanity; anything or anyone different had to be categorized by the clergy as an aberration in order to secure its homogenizing mission. Deformed children were thus the result of inappropriate erotic behaviour – behaviour that overthrew the socially sanctioned “natural” boundaries of the body, defied marital regulations, and as a result threatened humanity as defined by religious leaders. By labeling deformed beings as cursed, the church appeases fear and secures its position as a powerful force maintaining social order. Goodness and “proper”

8 humanity are thus presented as innate and reflected by physical appearance.3 The most beautiful and “proper” of bodies become the most powerful because the social-historical assumptions perceive such bodies as closer to God.

In an essay entitled “Of Deformity,” Francis Bacon continues the familiar argument that external deformity suggests internal monstrosity, for the deformed are without feelings and quite literally, freaks of nature. He states that deformed persons are

“for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature” (308). William Hay’s response to Bacon’s writing in “Deformity: An

Essay,” offers a defence of deformity. His memoir as a self-described hunchback and virtuous man counters Bacon’s argument that deformed peoples are immoral or void of natural affection. Hay prefers to employ ridicule to position his anomalous body as a performative spectacle to ensure some level of control over his representation. As Simon

Dickie notes in a review of a recent edition of the essay, Hay jokes about his physical ailment and states that his ridicule is a consequence of deformity (425), a defence mechanism that becomes quite popular in the eighteenth century. For example, Samuel

Johnson defines “deformity” in his Dictionary as “Ridiculousness,” and “the quality of something worthy to be laughed at” (n.pag.). Though “to be laughed at” may seem to undermine value, the use of the words “quality” and “worthy” offer the possible

3 One could go even further in discussing how goodness and badness has been represented in literature by looking at fairy tales, where the good are more often than not, beautiful and “white” and the evil are ugly, deformed, and “dark.” Such visual and all too singular associations are still prevalent today in most children’s narratives (Disney, for example), and even popular fantasy fictions (for example, in The Lord of the Rings). Although we tend to separate adult and children’s literatures, children’s fiction “embodies the instructional objectives and moral imperatives of an adult world” (Rose in Mitchell and Snyder 195, note 9). The dichotomist images, as suggested by such literary texts, reflect a common rendering of the physical qualities of good and evil.

9 connotation as a body of quality and worth, and “to be laughed at” as something sought, rather than imposed.

As Roger Lund argues, the “English had a long tradition of laughing at physical deformities and handicaps” (92), a point also raised by Dickie who notes that in mid- eighteenth-century England “any deformity or incapacity was infallibly, almost instinctively, amusing” (“Hilarity” 16). Hay’s emphasis on ridicule introduces the subversive potential of the deformed body as one that, via humour in this case, draws attention to the social structures that limit non-normative bodies. Since physical deformities and handicaps inevitably proved amusing, such figures had the power to employ their differences to critique social and political bodies under the guise of jesting.

Moreover, although Augustan writers “endorsed the metaphor of man as microcosm” and “the notion that there was a correlation between physical form and moral goodness” (Lund 100), towards the end of the eighteenth century, “scientific inquiry began to eclipse religious justification” (Thomson, Freakery 2). With the rise of science and medical authority in the Victorian period, the analysis of representations of deformed bodies shifted from fear, ridicule and a desire to reform the deformed, to a need to explain the deformed. As noted by Tabitha Sparks in her study Family Practices: The

Doctor in the Victorian Novel, the “‘Scientific Revolution’ of the mid-to-late nineteenth century instituted an epistemological shift away from the personal subjectivity that was the special province of the domestic novel, and embraced, or at the very least confronted, a newly rational and empirical consciousness” (7). The collision between religion and science shakes the religious authority that previously defined what physical constitutions

10 were “good” and “human,” and the popularity of science in fiction submits deformed characters to the objectifying gaze of experimentalists.

Frankenstein, the most obvious novel depicting scientific hubris versus moral indictment, portrays the mad scientist “playing God” and therefore as more monstrous than his own creation. Frankenstein reveals the shift from religious authority to scientific inquiry, yet without specifically pinpointing one or the other as the “right” way of seeing and judging. In addition, the text illustrates the relation of the monstrous to nature and to culture (Brooks 599). Brooks notes, “every time ‘nature’ is invoked in the novel, as a moral presence presiding over human life, it appears to produce only the monstrous”

(591). By monstrous, he refers to nature as a destroyer rather than preserver, a perspective Frankenstein also develops through his relationship with his creation and the failure of “nature” to keep everything and everyone in order. The creature expresses his distaste for social exclusion and his failed existence within the signifying chain of being, for omission from this symbolic chain accounts for his monstrosity (593).

Frankenstein’s legacy is such that the grotesquely inhuman figure (the creature) proves a victim of human failure and the crippling social principles of society that serve to uphold an obedient humanity. Slavoj Žižek notes, “the fact that he [the creature] morally fails, that he turns into a vengeful monster, is not a condemnation of him but of the society which he approaches with the best intentions and a need to love and be loved”

(79). Although he creates a “monster,” by ignoring his responsibility to his creation,

Frankenstein becomes more monstrous than his creation. His failure in his duty possibly stems from his own realization that all he can teach his creature is how he will always exist, because of his physical difference, beyond the norms of humanity. Indeed, Anne

11 McWhir has suggested, the creature “can be educated only to know the full extent of his exclusion” from humanity (76-77), for he lacks the normative physical appearance to authorize his sense of belonging. All the creation learns throughout the novel is how he can never quite meet expectations, society’s and Frankenstein’s, and thus is doomed to remain an abject body.

In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson explores similar questions and examines the duality of human identity by deforming his civil Dr.

Jekyll into the primitive Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll states early in the text, “all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil” (55), which is best illustrated by his split personality. He calls Edward Hyde a “child of Hell” with “nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred” (63). More importantly, Hyde’s evil nature is correlated with his being “deformed somewhere” (9). Stevenson writes:

Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity

without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had

borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity

and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat

broken voice; all these points were against him, but not all of these

together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear

with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. “There must be something else,”

said the perplexed gentleman. (15-16)

Although Hyde’s deformity remains unclear, he inspires “disgust” and “fear,” prompting questions of what else could possibly be wrong with him. In her introduction to Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Martha Holmes reviews the

12 Victorian “meshing” of mind and body, and the corporeal manifestation of social, emotional, and moral health or illness (13). Holmes observes how the body carried physical signs of the emotional and mental well-being. Hence in order to ensure his representation of Hyde as evil was understood by Victorian readers, Stevenson simply records his character’s “impression of deformity” – a symbolic association with moral depravity. His deformity is never quite evident, but given his actions and evil disposition, he must be somewhat physically deformed – not just morally.

Furthermore, Stevenson’s story demonstrates the rise of a professional class and its techniques of governance based on the legitimizing forces of scientific knowledge, which assume unprecedented importance and pre-empt the clergy’s role in interpreting the ills affecting the social body. When I use the phrase “the social body,” I refer to the social body explained by Michel Foucault as the metaphorical description of the population as a unified corporeal whole. In Making a Social Body: British Cultural

Formation, 1830-1864, Mary Poovey agrees with Foucault and contends that the phrase

“social body…promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care” (8). The nineteenth- century concept of the social body encompassed political and economic powers, and therefore the health of the body was determined by government administrations and by professionals, which explains the emphasis on class formation (and deformation) in Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nineteenth-century novels consider questions of class as related to the social body, but as Poovey notes, we also experience “the gendering of the social body” (21), and the image of the angel in the house as the moral heart of the home, and thus the home as the heart of the nation.

13 As well as the monstrous portrayals of humanity common in the gothic texts of the Victorian period, the rise of realism resulted in more frequent depictions of disabled characters. Though disabled figures were not painted as monstrous, per se, they were nevertheless exemplary of othered bodies. Martha Holmes’s study, for example, focuses on how Victorian melodrama displays contemporary notions of disabled bodies and underscores how and why disability is a social construction used to reaffirm human norms. Her study echoes Cindy LaCom’s essay that surveys the many “lame” heroines in nineteenth-century novels who disfigure the angel in the house stereotype, which depicts the female heroine as a “cherished” beauty at home (LaCom 190). She shows how the

Victorian culture of femininity itself becomes a deformity, a strategy that refutes the

“medical and religious assumptions” that equated a “whole” body with a “wholesome” soul, by portraying physically deformed heroines as failed representations of an idealized female body, otherwise known as a vessel for moral superiority (190). Victorian heroines, as angels in the house, were the heart of the hearth, reflecting propriety and morality on the home front.

Indeed, the novel as a literary genre was primarily written for women and was thus used as a tool to promote imperialism by perpetuating fears of contamination from other racial and unknown bodies discovered through colonialism. In his chapter on “Jane

Austen and Empire” Edward Said argues for the novel’s role, particularly the domestic novel, in the British imperial quest for “subsequent acquisition of territory” (95). He defines the novel “as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society…its normative pattern of social authority the most structured” because of “a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois

14 society, their authority and power” (70-1). The novel thus highlights the hierarchy of the family and domestic space, becoming a means for the state to maintain social stability, dictating the virtues expressed by women inside the private sphere as influencing the behaviour of men in the public sphere. Hence women become the responsible bodies expressing normative expectations and with the rise of the family, the body as a metaphor for the nation, shifts from valuing kingship as head to kinship as exemplar.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and with the increase in modernization, what was previously seen as monstrous becomes freakish, inspiring both awe and horror.

Extraordinary bodies, as we see revealed in The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, were subjected to dissections and medical examinations to expose, and even sensationalize their differences. Scientific knowledge shifted religious power and “the exceptional body began increasingly to be represented in clinical terms as pathology, and the monstrous body moved from the freak show stage into the medical theater”

(Thomson, “Introduction” 2). Often referred to as “freaks of nature” the anomalous bodies are, in fact, freaks “of culture” (Stewart 109). Thomson states in her introduction to Freakery that the golden age of the “freak show” was between 1840 and 1940, after which it disappears until it reappears in the late 20th century (11). She notes how a “freak show’s cultural work is to make the physical particularly of the freak into a hypervisible text against which the viewer’s indistinguishable body fades into a seemingly neutral, tractable, and invulnerable instrument of the autonomous will, suitable to the uniform abstract citizenry democracy institutes” (10). She traces the genealogy of “freak discourse” as “both imbricated in and reflective of our collective cultural transformation into modernity” (3), and she argues that as modernity develops in Western culture, the

15 Victorian admiration of extraordinary bodies shifts to the categorization of deformed or freakish bodies as “deviant” (3). Hence the different physiques discussed in her historical and literary examples shift back and forth inspiring wonder and fear.

As society embraces the ideal of progress towards the end of the nineteenth century, modern industrial advances effect “a standardization of everyday life that saturated the entire social fabric, producing and reinforcing the concept of an unmarked, normative, leveled body as the dominant subject of democracy” (Thomson “Introduction”

12). Nineteenth-century scientific discourse articulates the importance of order and uniformity and “officially enunciated teratology4 as the study, classification, and manipulation of monstrous bodies,” thus further segregating physically deformed bodies and revealing the uneasy human impulse to explain uncommon corporeal manifestations

(2). Medicine, which continues to grow into an elite profession, emphasizes the need to diagnose and label extraordinary bodies in order to understand their physical “error.”

The histories of the body as metaphor outlined above demonstrate the close association between the body and the body politic, and emphasize how the body continues to serve as a metaphor for contestatory theories relating the novel to the nation.

Hence the body’s symbolic power is not its capacity to inspire unity but its ability to create conflict. The historical conception of social stability as signified by a subordinate body will continue to fail, for the body, this most “natural” basis of human experience,

4 Literally defined as the study of abnormal physiological developments, or the science of monsters. According to Foucault’s archaeology of teratology, however, the abnormal body embodies “the emergence of deviance as a correlate of social control” (Tyler 128). The abnormal body is not a product of nature, but rather a “correlate of a technique of normalization” projected by juridico-medical discourses of power and knowledge (Foucault, Abnormal 25).

16 remains continually in flux. This physical self, so easily corrupted by social institutions as painted by Rousseau, or denatured by technological progress as portrayed by Atwood, becomes deformed as it resists power, and thus what at first appears a negative physical difference becomes “bodies that matter,” to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase. Bodies matter

(are important, signify), but they are also made of matter: “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (Bodies 9, my emphasis). As in Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body, matter must become “material” and its ideological stability gives the impression of permanence, when in fact “[i]t is never finished, never completed” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 317). Although

Rousseau perceives man’s distortion of nature as a failure, such deformities highlight exactly what Bakhtin and Butler eschew: the concept of a fixed, closed, and classical body. Instead they support a theory of the body as protean, material, open, and even transgressive. Butler argues, in relation to abject bodies, that “the ontological claim can never fully capture its object” (qtd. in Meijer 279); therefore, the body – as an ontological matter subjected to power relations aimed at ordering society – can never be captured or perfectly formed, but it can be deformed.

Building on Butler’s theory in Bodies, the body can only “matter” when it is given meaning and fits a certain frame of intelligibility. Deformed bodies are abject bodies because they are portrayed as unintelligible or unnatural, existing beyond a frame of reference respected by those in power. She adapts Kristeva’s argument on abjection in

Powers of Horror to underscore that what is improper is excluded in order to ensure the existence of the proper – like Hegel’s theorizing of lordship and bondage, where the lord’s identity gains illusory confirmation “by requiring the Other to be the body that he

17 endeavors not to be” (Butler, “Desire” 79). Similarly, as Butler argues, what is significant is not how or why certain bodies are formed, but rather “how and to what end” they are deformed or “not constructed” (Butler, Bodies 16). Indeed, the bodies that reaffirm the norm are significant because their social assessment as “normal” relies on the judgment of others as “abnormal.” As Foucault illustrates in his theorizing of prisons, the body, as a prison itself, is a primary object of exploration and control. The physiques that threaten the familiar are doubly imprisoned (within the body and within panopticon structures), not only to allow power to operate efficiently, but to legitimize proper

(socially and culturally acceptable) power over deviance. This double imprisonment is something all the deformed characters in the texts under study encounter; they are subjected to surveillance schemes that police and politicize their physical malaise and contestation of disciplining hierarchies. Therefore, if the body is a trope for the nation, then deformity, as unregulated permeability, constitutes a disruption of the boundaries fabricated to define national character.

Butler and Foucault are but two of the many theorists interested in the body as a malleable entity and trope for power/discourse. More recent theories on the body populate interdisciplinary discourses (gender theory, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, etc), revealing the protean potential of theories of the body. I have opted to focus on

Butler’s and Foucault’s theories predominately because of their emphasis on permeable bodily boundaries, performativity, and power.

Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment illustrates “the practice of genealogy, since it traces the operations of force in the historical emergence of the prison and the production of ‘docile bodies’” (Mills 255). His examination of technological advances

18 provides a useful analytical framework for deformity as a subversion of the regimes intent on enforcing social practices and institutions that enable hegemonic top-down models. He looks at disciplining structures like schools, which produce docile bodies that are provided with specific roles in a regulated space, in order to enhance new social and economic conditions. Such regulated spaces appear frequently in the texts I study, from houses, to museums, to schools, to hospitals, to sanitariums. These spaces exist to reflect disciplinary power and normalizing judgment through visible examinations, or as

Foucault states, they are “the spatial ‘nesting’ of hierarchized surveillance” (Discipline

171 – 72).

Foucault’s criticism of the human sciences and the body as subject of political technology also contributes to my examination of scientific institutions and medical men in the novels. For Foucault, doctors define and enforce a cultural norm of human embodiment. After all, the “emergence of liberal society becomes possible by means of material – and medical – norms that coordinate the agencies of individual and collective bodies” (Youngquist xxvi). Youngquist’s use of the verb “coordinate” is perhaps a little gentle, for the increase in the reputation of medicine as a profession resulted in more than just the coordination of individual and collective bodies. Rather, scientific progress becomes equated with the rise of civilization whose material norms are controlled rather than coordinated. Foucault uses Bentham’s panopticon scheme to describe social control over deviant bodies, for “[t]he appeal to morality and the development of the church are no longer sufficient for the control of individual desire; it becomes necessary to encompass urban populations with new institutions of surveillance and inspection”

(Turner 138). Panopticon spaces appear in all the novels under study and serve as

19 institutions designed to control deformed and transgressive bodies, such as the haunted attic in which Kathleen gives birth in Fall; the museum in which Anna models in Biggest

Modern Woman; the boxing ring and the human laboratory in Vandal Love; the sanitarium in Colony, and the live-in room in which Fielding is hidden while pregnant in

Custodian.

I also employ components of Butler’s theoretical analysis of the body because her emphasis on performativity assures the disruption of these disciplinary spaces and practices. As Sara Salin notes, “Butler is drawn to figures who exemplify the ‘virtuous disobedience’ that she identifies as an effective strategy of subversion” (10). Many of the characters I discuss use their deformities to strategically destabilize social, professional, and kinship norms, revealing the contingency of existing power structures. For example,

Daphne chooses to have Murray’s babies outside marital expectations (Burnard);

Kathleen’s disembodied voice allows her to subvert her remarkable beauty – itself portrayed as a deformity – and her sexual orientation defies familial expectations of her circumscribed role as beauty and woman (MacDonald); and Fielding continually decentres herself to confound all expectations, as writer, woman, and mother (Johnston).

These deformities also challenge the myths of victimhood and imprisonment central to national Canadian literary discourses, such as Atwood’s. Relegated to ex-centric positions as women and as deformed, the characters destabilize the national narratives considered essential by some traditional critics by stealing the thunder from the landscape as the ultimate mythological space suggestive of Canadian identity. Instead, the texts portray the landscape as a space of confinement promoting discipline and punishment, and the body as the cultural corpus with subversive potential.

20 Deformity: Not Disability

In light of this discussion, the difference between disability and deformity surfaces, for although as othered bodies they overlap in their representative potential, they signify quite different contests with the disciplinary practices that destabilize the conventional family narrative and the idealized models of the nation. In the Oxford

English Dictionary “deformity” is first defined as “[t]he quality or condition of being marred or disfigured in appearance; disfigurement; unsightliness, ugliness” (“Deformity”

1); and then as “the quality or condition of being deformed or misshapen; esp. bodily misshapenness or malformation; abnormal formation of the body or of some bodily member” (“Deformity” 2). Although the definitions appear similar, the first focuses predominantly on the visual recognition of deformity, whereas the latter focuses on physical structures themselves as “abnormal,” the prefix “ab” suggesting “away from” the norm. The difference between the definitions is subtle; however, it highlights my approach to the trope of deformity in contemporary Canadian fiction. Deformity as it is depicted in the works discussed in this thesis subscribes to definition number two, for the deformations of the characters represent more than mere surface disfigurements. In fact, they are not unsightly or ugly, but rather provide a symbolic argument about the many

“bodies” that are deformed in Canadian culture: the body politic, the social body, literary and critical bodies, and the national body.

A “disability,” on the other hand, is defined as “a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities” (“Disability” 1). Along the same lines, the World Health Organization defines disability as “a restriction or lack…of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a

21 human being” (WHO, The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders

8). Both definitions highlight disability as limiting or restricting, and the WHO definition goes so far as to use the term “normal” as a measure for comparison. The use of the term

“normal,” in conjunction with the title “Classification” of Mental and Behavioural

“Disorders,” underscores how disabilities are socially created conditions defined by organizations, such as the WHO, that stress the boundaries of “normal.” There is inevitable overlap between deformity and disability; however, disability implies a body diagnosed with a deficiency, and thus presents a flawed body as an effect of the normative regime that regulates it, rather than a protean physique that resists regulation by a defining regime. Moreover, the disabled body carries the weight of negative connotations – an oppressive social rhetoric that critics of disability studies seek to revise.

Deformity and disability are both concerned with the human body, but disability theory aims to rewrite the disabled character’s marginalization in texts, literary and non- literary (Mitchell and Snyder 1). Disability is not usually accidental, but rather emerges as a subject position because of the structures that favour able bodies. Hence it evokes, at times intentionally and at times unintentionally, a desire to become part of an undifferentiated mass. Disability assumes centrality, “as both origin and end – its desired eradication in each generation is countered only with the ferocity of an ultimate recalcitrance to such violent ‘utopian’ programs” (41). Deformity, on the other hand, can result from genetics, disease, or an accident; it emphasizes differentiation and is solely physical. My dissertation reads deformity as a trope for the uncertainties of power and nationalism in Canadian fiction, rather than attempts to remedy representational discontents. This is not to say that disability studies cannot also consider questions of

22 nationalism; nationalism and disability interpenetrate in a variety of ways, especially when considering how disabled figures serve as examples of excluded groups that threaten a sense of a cohesive nation. Adam Pottle, for example, argues that disability constitutes a distinct cultural identity within Canada’s multicultural mosaic, and he uses several examples (such as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies, Rohinton

Mistry’s Family Matters, and Frances Itani’s Deafening) to underline the growing presence of disabled characters in contemporary English-Canadian fiction. He emphasizes that such a presence forms a subculture that suggests a shift in the literary canon and social context. He attempts to reverse the negative connotations associated with disabled figures, and frames his theory with Atwood’s victim/survivor rhetoric and

Hutcheon’s ex-centric theory.

Pottle’s analysis is astute, but it illustrates a common problem with disability studies as an umbrella theory: everything falls under “disability,” from mental illness to lost limbs, from accidents to birth defects, to life-altering diseases, to extraordinary bodies. Though the instability of the term could be argued as positive because it remains open and adaptable, it nevertheless poses a problem, for physical and mental disabilities require affected individuals to confront specific social obstacles. For example, language may prove a substantial obstacle to a mentally disabled character, whereas physical defence may be the primary concern of a character suffering from a physical disability.

Similarly, in her study of disability in Canadian literature, Maria Truchan-

Tataryn chooses to use the term “disability” to refer to any condition perceived as

“anomalous, whether it is an intellectual or physical impairment” (“(In)Visible” 7). Her study explains that the body/mind dichotomy is outdated and that a physical injury, such

23 as a brain injury, results in both physical and cognitive impairment. Her decision to use the term universally underscores “the shift from a medical to a social model” propagated by Disability Studies that treat “normalcy as an unchallenged ideological standard akin to whiteness and maleness” (7). I agree with Truchan-Tataryn’s position and I find her book a convincing account of how rereading disabled bodies can provide new insights into what shapes the Canadian national imagination. I disagree, however, with her decision to consider physical and cognitive impairments under the same rubric of analysis. Characters with cognitive disabilities inevitably experience different systems of injustice than characters with physical disabilities. Though both struggle with a society that privileges normalcy, their literary representations demand consideration of their unique challenges to sedimented models of nationalism. Nonetheless, her study effectively highlights the socio-cultural construction of disability and perceptively observes how disabled characters dominate the canon in ways that problematize Canada’s embracing of difference.

What I find most striking in her study, however, is her personal anecdote regarding the disabilities of her daughters: “the first and third with disability labels, the second struggling with a feeling of ‘difference’ for not having a disability” (“(In)Visible”

12). She elaborates, personally and theoretically, on the complexity of these labels and how society expects such a family to act as if they fit the status-quo, concealing the disabilities to avoid being categorized as dysfunctional:

The logical solution to this dilemma justifies the removal of the problem

to an institutional milieu that will control and manage the disturbance, so

that normalcy can be restored. The unforgivable sin in this societal event

24 is that the family has failed to pretend to be ‘normal’; the child with

disabilities has failed to disappear within family management. (“Life

Sentences” 14)

Truchan-Tataryn’s narrative introduces how fictional representations can inform real experiences in the painful form of cultural stigmas. Her comment highlights how the family, as a social structure meant to uphold normative expectations, has failed at its performance of “normal,” not as a result of producing children with disabilities, but for failing to manage them within the greater familial structure. If we expand this perspective to representations of the nation, the fictional families at the heart of the texts under study fail to operate efficiently because the deformed bodies resist institutional performances of “normal.” Thus these different bodies fail to epitomize a cohesive and consistent Canadian “identity,” reversing the conventional connotation of failure into a term with potential.

Deformity: In CanLit

Refusing to acknowledge where you come from…is an act of amputation: you may become free floating, a citizen of the world…but only at the cost of arms, legs or heart. (Atwood, “Travels Back” 113)

From Margaret Atwood’s many monstrous figures, to Barbara Gowdy’s Sylvie, born with extra limbs, to Anosh Irani’s unnamed, one-armed narrator, deformed characters often appear in contemporary Canadian fiction.5 The plethora of deformed characters is not, I argue, purely coincidental. I do not believe, however, that a group of writers huddled together one afternoon and opted to start writing fiction in which a

5 An annotated bibliography of Canadian fiction portraying characters with deformities is included in the appendix of the dissertation.

25 deformed character figures. As Atwood illustrates in the above quotation, to refuse acknowledging where one comes from is to sever a tie, a physical tie, to a nation; however, insisting on the relevance of a national identity does not preclude the need “to question those national narratives that Canadians hold timeless and of themselves”

(Kapuscinski 96). Indeed, the majority of critics interested in theories of nationalism recognize the instability of the nation and how it remains in constant flux. Kertzer argues, for instance, that “the nation persists because it is protean” (174, my emphasis), and that, more importantly, “it can hardly be considered just one dispensable ideology among others” (174). A nation, unlike a state, remains a tenacious concept referring to

“relations between people who envision themselves as connected through time, space, and an underlying set of values and principles, thereby highlighting the complex and recondite systems of meaning that combine to create the effect of national identity”

(Kapuscinski 97, my emphasis). Kapuscinski’s use of the phrasing “the effect” to refer to national identity parallels Butler’s explanation of how materialization, over time, produces “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (Bodies 9). The fact that systems of matter – physically present and self-evident – produce only the effect of a fixed national identity or boundary implies that the nation remains open to debate, which

I argue proves positive and productive rather than prescriptive and restrictive.

Bodies, as dynamic cultural constructs, frequently become sites of displacement for anxieties about legitimacy and shifting conceptions of nationhood. Writers look for

“appropriate metaphors to represent” the “phantoms” that haunt both the nation and the subject (Sugars vii), and for the authors under study here, the appropriate metaphor becomes deformity – and more specifically, deformed children. The deformed physiques

26 challenge the “naturalization of national identity” and signal a trend in Canadian metanarratives to embrace the changeability of national identities as an opportunity rather than vulnerability (Kapuscinski 100). The majority of the deformed figures analyzed are children; or, in some cases, they begin as children and grow into adults with aggravated deformities (e.g. Anna Swan). I am reminded of quasi-human Hephaestus in Greek mythology, who finds his mother Hera displeased with his lameness so that she tosses him out of the heavens. This is but one version of the myth, yet it highlights the dysfunctions in family stories and the common repulsion of parents and/or authoritative bodies in response to a flawed offspring. In cases where the parents seem unchanged in their appreciation of their child (in A Good House, for instance), the child nonetheless becomes a symbol for what haunts the family and disturbs the normative space of the home.

As Margery Fee acknowledges in her article on “Romantic Nationalism,” there is an indisputable link between child and nation employed by modern Canadian writers.

She argues that the child becomes a symbol for the quest for a national identity, immigrating from one land to another, inheriting the land, and working the land (46). Fee attempts to use the word “land” rather than “nation,” because she perceives the word

“nation” as “fraught with tension and ambiguity in Canada” (50). I use the verb

“attempts” because she is unable to avoid “nation” or “nationalism” or “nationalist” throughout her article. Her attempt to find a term, such as “land,” applicable to all her analyses of the child reflects the instability of the image of the child itself as a stable symbol – a problem she alludes to but fails to analyze at great length. Although aspects of Fee’s article from 1980 appear dated, and her discussion of texts is superficial, her

27 opening strikes a chord. Fee begins her article with a reference to Charles G. D.

Roberts’s patriotic ode “Canada” which opens with the phrase “O Child of Nations, giant-limbed” (RPO, n.pag.). The image of the giant limbs, Fee argues, “may now seem ludicrous, even monstrous” (46), but in fact, it nicely encapsulates the child as a symbolic body illustrative of theories of the nation, and already defying bodily norms.

Although the deformed characters I discuss in this thesis do not remain children for the entirety of their narratives, they begin as children with bodies that disturb by their very difference from social norms, and are often perceived as ludicrous, even monstrous.

As such, my theory of deformity relies on aspects of romanticism, nationalism, theories of monstrosity, and medical discourses on the body. I explore the complex way in which disease, deformity, and difference are intimately related to medicalized diagnostics of the body used as a metaphor for the nation – for not just what matters, but what is matter. I analyze the shift from Atwood’s Survival to Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies tracing a movement from the body of the landscape as suggestive of the “nation as monster,” to the bodies of deformed characters as reformations of the category of nation. Atwood’s thematic guide to Canadian literature, despite being over thirty years old, is still an often- quoted text in literary criticism on the nation and Canadian consciousness.6 Her primary argument is, “the central symbol for Canada…is undoubtedly Survival” (32). Like

Butler, I consider “survival” not the act of “averting physical violence and death, but it also means being able to consider that one’s life is possible and viable, so that one is permitted to exist and to operate freely in public spaces” (Salin 11). The struggle to

6 For example, see Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation, Kiley Kapuscinski’s “Negotiating the Nation: The Reproduction and Reconstruction of the National Imaginary in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,” Caroline Rosenthal’s New York and Toronto Novels After Postmodernism, and Carol Gerson’s “The Changing Contours of a National Literature.”

28 survive by the deformed characters as nonconforming subjects highlights the need to revise the bodies previously deemed exemplary of the model nation.

Certainly, the urgency to build a nation in Canada reveals that no matter how hard

“one tries to domesticate it, one’s home remains alien territory” (Kertzer 188).

Traditional family plots do in fact attempt to domesticate the nation – from farming to colonial practices – and confer legitimacy on the settlers and the value of the home. The trope of deformity permits the deconstruction of the conventional family plot preoccupied with la terre paternelle, making deformity the privileged signifier challenging the stability and authority of a canonical genre intended to perpetuate colonial discourse and reaffirm the growth of a legitimate nation. Deformity provides a lens through which to consider alterity as characteristic of the nation as a contested public space, because the

“abnormally” shaped characters emphasize that the nation is anything but a “normal” body easily contained and universally defined.

My use of deformity as a theoretical trope entails three primary analytical approaches that frame my discussion of the novels I discuss here. First, I observe how physical deformities distinguish characters from sanctioned normative bodies and provide material contexts to current theories that challenge hegemonic systems of power.

Subsequently, I consider how deformed offspring challenge the family metanarrative as a schematic framework employed to enforce a collective national imagination. Having children is essential to society and there is an anxiety in North American culture to continue the legacy of heteronormative reproductivity (Edelman 17), on the one hand, and the notion of the able-bodied family on the other. Deformed offspring emphasize how the image of the child as tomorrow’s citizen lies in the belief that the child is “a

29 potentiality rather than an actuality, a becoming rather than a being: an entity in the making” (Castaneda 1). Lastly, deformed bodies are non-compliant disruptions of the national discourses in Canadian literature that construct metanarratives to enable national identity; they are destabilizing forms reconfiguring centralized myths of the nation frequently employed by supporters of the classical canon to reaffirm a sense of cultural identity that unites and informs.

The family saga itself remains a popular novelistic plot for representations of the nation in Canadian literature. A quick glance at the annotated bibliography that accompanies this dissertation reveals not only a series of texts that feature characters with deformities, but the majority of which explore dysfunctional families, familial relationships, coming-of-age stories, etc. The texts I selected for closer analysis share other intriguing similarities, aside from deformed bodies. Fathers prove complicated characters, often alcoholics, at times incestual, and always patriarchal; mothers are diseased, dying, or dead; and physicians appear untrustworthy, obsessed with controlling pregnant, and other bodies. Recognized by a large literary prize, whether as a winner or a finalist (Giller, Commonwealth, Governor General’s), each novel also deforms a traditional literary form often employed to present the family as a model for the nation

(domestic realism, roman de la terre, and historical fiction). They are not discussed in a chronological order, but rather organized to expand on each other’s theoretical and thematic considerations. I begin with the text that best exemplifies a functional family (at least at first glance), and end with the novels that contest the hegemonic model of the nation most directly. None of the novels is entirely one or the other, but their approaches

30 to representations of the body and questions of nationalism are more explicit in the later chapters.

I open with Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House because of its crafty reconsideration of a traditional family plot. Burnard’s excessive use of detail introduces the link between the house, domestic realism, and the nation. Therefore, I examine the connection between the more flexible structure of the house (as opposed to the “home”) and the body as a means by which Burnard resists imperial values sustaining nation-building practices.

Daphne’s asymmetrical face, the result of a childhood accident, may seem a minor deformity in contrast to a missing limb or some of the extraordinary shapes discussed in subsequent novels; however, it acts as a tenet for the novel’s revision of domestic realism and figuratively suggests that what binds families together, and arguably the nation, are lies and stories – not secure truths.

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees in chapter three also focuses on a house and introduces a gothic component to my analysis of deformity, family, and nation.

Ghosts, saints, and various other bodies (ethnic, gendered, queer, deformed) haunt the novel. On the surface, MacDonald’s text is plot driven, filled with drama worthy of its

Oprah book club stamp; however, her emphasis on bodies provides narrative examinations of popular literary theories: gender performativity, postcolonialism, and nationalism. Moreover, MacDonald rewrites Victorian literary conventions that dichotomize female characterization, deforming the popular concepts of the angel in the house and the fallen woman, while offering a matrilineal rather than patrilineal account of family history. In an interview, she says: “it’s also necessary that they be put up against pluralism and democracy and individuality, and the right of people to be individuals, not

31 just products of their culture, or of the old country” (qtd. in Lockhart 140). Hence

MacDonald’s text demonstrates how the trope of deformity allows the characters to challenge colonialist texts and imperial cultural projects that seek to erase or hide figures that fail to preserve nation-building norms.

The giants and runts that make up the Hervé family in D. Y. Béchard’s Vandal

Love are the focus of chapter four. Whereas Burnard and MacDonald create more conventional family sagas, situating their characters within the space of a house to explore questions of the body and the nation, Béchard avoids houses altogether, making his characters wanderers. He expands on the questions raised by Burnard’s and

MacDonald’s texts, leading to a metaphoric exploration and deformation of the literary mythologies popularized by Canadian writing and criticism, particularly the traditional roman de la terre. Indeed, the novel’s opening pages hearken to the roman de la terre’s scripting of men as linked to the land, their robost bodies civilizing nature while women uphold the morality of the home and produce strong heirs. Yet Béchard deforms the conventions of the genre with a family curse, single father-figures, and the inauthentic connections offered by technological advancements and religious enthusiasm. Béchard’s emphasis on tenuous connections thus undermines the ideal of a unified family and nation.

In the final two chapters, I examine historical fiction and how the distortion of historical facts parallels the deformation of the family drama as a national metanarrative.

After all, history is our collective family story and ours to revise and deform. As Kertzer observes: “Within a national family, differences can be recognized and even indulged because they will always rest on the common ground of kinship. However misguided

32 your family/nation might be, it is still yours, and you therefore have the right to correct its course” (136 – 37). Susan Swan and Wayne Johnston explore the metaphors of the body and family as nation through the lens of history and nationalist rhetoric in contemporary historical fiction. As their “family/nation,” it is theirs to deform and correct.

Historical giantess, Anna Swan, fashions chapter five with her extraordinary size and spieling. Anna is “born to be measured” and does “not fit in anywhere” (Swan 332).

She becomes the subject of scientific study and her excessive physicality, both as giant and woman, disrupts authoritative acts attempting to cage her within physical-normative expectations. Most critics perform an allegorical reading of the narrative, perceiving

Anna’s marriage to Martin as the American spoilage of Canadian resources, her visit with

Queen Victoria exemplary of Canada’s subservience to colonial rule, and her giant body as symbolic of Canada’s massive landscape. Such readings are in fact valid, but most of them perceive allegory as limiting Anna’s subjectivity while I argue that her performativity and ex-centricity prove liberating. Her spieling, clothing, physicality, and sexuality transgress borders, rhetorical and physical, to reverse the ideal of the female body as a trope for the mother nation.

There is, perhaps, no better text in contemporary Canadian literature to explore nationalism and deformities than Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

Johnston portrays Smallwood as a man of grand ambition, but focuses immensely on his abnormally scrawny body, which he contrasts with the fictional character of Fielding, too tall (and too smart) for a woman, who uses her limp as an excuse for her failures. I also analyze the sequel, The Custodian of Paradise, because of its more detailed look at

Fielding’s physical deformities as a result of alcohol, disease, and pregnancy. The

33 struggle against familial roots foregrounds the disparate views on nationalism conveyed by Smallwood and Fielding, for he seeks to make history in spite of his upbringing and she tries to rewrite history to fill an insatiable void. Both characters confront the failure of the family unit as a unifying social organization promising meaning and connection.

Johnston’s emphasis on the physicality of Smallwood and Fielding illustrates how the family and nation cannot be represented by a singular body or history.

Failure. This dissertation underscores the potential behind the failure of bodies – the failure of the body to fit a normative form, the failure of families to form a cohesive whole, and the failure of the nation as the form exhibiting Canadian character. If the deformed bodies are intended as reflections of such failures, they implicitly reject any model of community entrenched in discourses that enforce unity. As Lennard Davis argues, “what is universal in life, if there are universals, is the experience of the limitations of the body” (32). Thus the deformed offspring suggest that conflict is the hope for more generous representations of the nation; the conditions of nation formation actually depend upon the constant debate over, and deformation of, models that advertise uniformity.

34 body: house: nation: Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House

The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and protect…Moving in ordered space, the body ‘reads’ the house which serves as a mnemonic for the embodied person. Through habit and inhabiting, each person builds up a practical mastery of the fundamental schemes of their culture. (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 2)

When Bonnie Burnard’s novel won the Giller Prize in 1999, the founder of the

Giller, Jack Rabinovitch, declared: “A Good House is a seminal novel for Canada” (qtd. in McLean n.pag.). His remark positions her text as not only influential and formative to

Canadian literature, but to Canada as a nation. Although I would not go as far as Heather

Mallick, who argues that the novel was basically ignored post-award “as if someone finally passed away after a long illness” (n.pag.), there is a lack of criticism on Burnard’s text – especially given its casting as “a seminal novel for Canada.” Mallick contends that the novel fails to garner the attention it deserves because it is “unfashionable” (n.pag.).

Rather than offer “[b]ig cities, dominatrixes, food so sculpted on the plate it could put your eye out,” it portrays “your parents” and the nonchalant events of everyday life, like

“buying trucks” (n.pag.). Andrew Pyper, on the other hand, disagrees vehemently with

Mallick’s claims, noting how the ratio of “family sagas in our literature to tales of urban dwellers under the age of forty stands at roughly 100:1” (n.pag.). He positions Burnard’s novel as canonical, fitting the “old-fashioned realism” model he deems characteristic of an all-too-common “aesthetic narrowness” inspired by an anxiety over asserting a quintessential Canadian national literature (n.pag.). Yet in the same piece, Pyper acknowledges that he has not read Burnard’s text and bases his remarks on reviews and other commentaries to make his point against current critical trends. He argues that

35 scholars dismiss “overtly contemporary subject matter” to focus on what he terms the

“mainstream critical texts” written by the “decidedly grey-haired” (n.pag.). A Good

House serves as one of his two examples. To counter Pyper’s central thesis, however,

Burnard’s novel has yet to receive serious and detailed consideration from scholars, and if Pyper had read the text, he would perhaps have noticed that although, on the surface, it seems “mainstream,” it actually pushes the boundaries of the conventional family saga.

Therefore, what makes Burnard’s text “seminal” and prize-worthy, I would argue, is her approach to the literary themes perceived as key to Canadian mythologies, rather than her use of these themes and myths in the first place.

Still, Pyper’s article importantly draws attention to the nationalizing mission of literary prizes. As Alex Good astutely pinpoints, the Giller is “an award given by the literary establishment to the literary establishment” (70). In fact, Good inadvertently agrees with Pyper when he notes:

As Canada’s most prestigious and certainly most highly publicized literary

award, the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian

literature should be. This has led to the creation of our own home and

native genre: The “Giller bait” novel. Giller bait novels are very serious

books emphasizing history and geography, generally without any sense of

humour, and written in a vague, pseudo-poetically lush and highbrow

style. (70, my emphasis)

The repetition of the adjective “serious” implies a staid and reliable Canadian literature, making the book weighty and important. Pyper is correct to assert a connection between prize winning texts and the formation of the canon in the name of a national literature. In

36 her study Nationalism and Literature, Sarah Corse similarly contends that “[l]iterary prize winners are ‘precanonical’ texts, educated guesses about what might survive the exigencies of time and caprice to become tomorrow’s classics” (100). Yet she further states how “contemporary literary prize winners serve as an avenue for revisions to the national images created in earlier works” (17), thereby indirectly noting how the prize winners seem “contemporary” as a result of time – not merely because they are written by “truly new-generation voices” (Pyper n.pag.). Moreover, Corse’s comment that these winning texts serve to revise national images proves interesting, particularly in light of

Burnard’s reconsideration of domestic realism. Burnard’s novel does, for argument’s sake, open with a “pseudo-poetically lush and highbrow style” (Good 70), describing the town, the house, and the Chambers family in meticulous detail. As the text progresses, however, Burnard revises the image of the family and domesticity as linked to the social construction of the model nation.

The branding imposed upon authors of award winning texts can steer attention away from the text itself. Owen Percy rightly contends that literary prizes “and the entities behind them [are] institutions in the broader sense in which they aspire, by their natures, not only to a conscious dream of objectivity, coherence, continuity, and sustained

‘excellence,’ but to a seat of cultural power permitting them to make evaluative and canon-forming decisions on behalf of an imagined constituency or community” (“Prize

Possession” 44 – 5). By winning a literary prize, an author is welcomed into this imagined community. One can sense Burnard’s discomfort with such labels in her interview with Linda Morra. When Morra asks her how she sees her novel fitting “into

Canadian literature,” Burnard responds: “I have no idea….” (n.pag.). Morra pushes her

37 further and asks: “Would you refer to it as a ‘Canadian book’?” (n.pag.), and Burnard replies: “It’s a Canadian book to the extent that I’m a Canadian, the place is Canadian, and most of the characters are Canadian. Whether ethically or morally or in some more abstract way it’s a Canadian book…” (n.pag.). Burnard never completes her statement and Morra then changes her line of questioning. I am curious about whether or not

Burnard intentionally rebuffs Morra’s suggestion that the novel reflects the aesthetic and political criteria of literary judges, for I myself, through the inclusion of the text in this dissertation (especially with the word “nation” in the chapter’s title), perform a similar reading of Burnard’s text. Although I hesitate to use labels such as canonical, ideal, or serious, I do consider Burnard’s text exemplary of the family model. Moreover, in light of this dissertation’s examination of the family as symbolic of the nation, Burnard’s novel does appear, at first glance, to underscore the traditionally envisioned Canadian multigenerational, regional, family saga; however, as her dis-ease in the interview suggests, despite its conventional framework, the novel pushes the boundaries of the family model as a metaphor for the nation, for such typecasting restricts the potential of each individual member in lieu of a collective vision.

In the same interview, Burnard states that she selected the word “house” over

“home” purposefully. She considers “house” more “structural” and the word home as

“just a little too warm” (n.pag.). Good’s passage quoted above, however, marks literary prize winning texts as leading “to the creation of our own home and native genre” (70, my emphasis). The distinction between the two words requires some elaboration.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the house is “[a] building for human habitation, typically and historically one that is the ordinary place of residence of a

38 family” (“House” 1a), whereas a “home,” connotes “[a] collection of dwellings; a village, a town” and a “place where one lives or was brought up, with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc.” (“Home” 1a, 2b). By using the word “house,” Burnard resists the concept of the family as representative of an imagined community in which one belongs, socially, politically, and nationally. In “Cadence, Country, Silence,” Dennis Lee writes: “For if you are Canadian, home is a place that is not home to you – it is even less your home than the imperial centre you used to dream about” (54). The value laden implications of the word “home” emphasize the relation between family citizenship, territory, and nation-state. By calling the representation of a nuclear family, a good

“home,” Burnard’s novel might reinforce imperial strategies of classifying and legitimizing a model nation. Rather, her use of the word “house” subverts the domestic focus of the family saga and resonates less with an imperialist history of nationhood, and more with the individual contributions of each character to the family’s overall narrative.

Therefore, this chapter begins with a discussion of Burnard’s elaborate use of detail, and her astute attention to each aspect of the house, as an appeal to the social realist text. I then consider various theoretical perspectives on the meaning of the word

“house” in social and literary texts. I proceed to analyze how the trope of deformity allows Burnard to resist patriarchal hegemony and the search for roots in the family saga, which is revised to embrace alternate conceptions of family and inheritance. Illness and disease deform the central matriarch and patriarch of the text, and in contrast to images of the war and survival, the debilitating images of disease on the body reflect the failure of nation-building bodies. Subsequently, I consider how Daphne’s character and physical deformity reveal Burnard’s subtle unraveling of the tradition of the domestic realist text,

39 particularly as a narrative tool to promote nation-building. Lastly, I contrast the representation of Daphne’s deformity with Meg’s disability to distinguish the one aspect of the novel in which Burnard fails to contest the parameters of the normative body of family and nation.

The homology that titles this chapter is meant to capture the relationship between the three primary concepts that frame my theoretical discussion of Burnard’s novel: body, house, and nation. Together, they represent three categories that Burnard challenges: physical, social, and political. The body symbolizes the generational, physically organizing a linear progress, but also mimicking cyclical nature. Its connection to the house demonstrates but also defies how body and home (rather than house) are often tacitly gendered for nation promoting purposes. The house reveals the crucial practical unit employed to organize society, while the nation represents the collective consensus of an evolving society. As the opening epigraph demonstrates, there is a “linkage between houses and bodies, between inhabiting and embodiment” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 42), a link Burnard explores to expose how the family, body, house, novel, and nation are not easily disentangled and yet not so easily connected.

The Importance of Being Detailed

Burnard’s opening passage describing Stonebrook Creek ends with a phrase that encapsulates her novel: “If you sat there long enough, if you were a patient person, you could see through the dark. You just had to start with the most prominent, most easily recognized shapes, the shapes anyone would know, and then concentrate, hard” (4).

Indeed, at times reading A Good House requires the reader to see through the dark.

40 Burnard’s style generally reflects “a traditional, mimetic third person fiction” that

“typically follow[s] the basic conventions of biography or the history of a family”

(Richardson 6). Burnard’s use of narrative voice and of overt description offers deceptively recognizable shapes to lull the reader with the illusion of the familiar. I would argue that there are two primary reasons for Burnard’s use of the intrusive third person omniscient narrator. First, she asserts an appeal to social realism by painstakingly depicting the town’s formation, the external influences on the town’s growth, and the role of the people in shaping the town’s culture and history. Second, her attention to detail offers a warm welcome for the reader, like a ceremonious acknowledgement of the reader arriving in a town and entering the Chambers house. This appeal to the conventions of realism invokes a familiar sense of place for the reader, fostering the reader’s trust in the narrator’s creation of what, ultimately, is a fictional space and story. This is a trust

Burnard will continually question as the story proceeds.

The narrator’s confident opening tone insists that the reader is not in a position to argue with what is being presented, and is an active participant in the narrative’s formation, easily integrated into the community. As a result, it becomes worthy of note that Bill attended the installation of the new siren in Stonebrook’s Town Hall, and that he made his own breakfast and left early, taking a different route to arrive just on time. His engagement in changes to the town’s central building illustrates how, like the reader, the characters are active participants in the town’s life. The reader experiences the first sound of the new siren and is therefore present at the family table when the discussion on

“where were you when the siren went off” takes place. The siren itself becomes a signal of space, requiring each character to pause and think about where they were, something

41 Bill articulates when he says: “It’s just a habit you could get into…Remembering where you are” (Burnard 16). This emphasis on place as the site of memory underlines

Burnard’s depiction of Stonebrook to provide an explanatory framework for the characters’ location and presence, but also to guide reader expectations and elicit trust in the narrator.

Burnard’s invocation of a reliable realist narrator proves foundational to a critical understanding of the novel, for it acts in competition with her characterization of Daphne, who, I would argue, is the focal point of the text in light of its revision of nation-building narrative models. Via Daphne, Burnard deforms the postulate that realist writing, in particular the domestic novel, provides truthful and stable narratives reflective of a consensual social and national experience. Daphne’s accident and subsequent lack of trust haunt the text, garnering the reader’s sympathy, but also forcing the reader to reconsider his or her expectations, for even amid an abundance of detail, not everything can be seen or foreseen. The accident shatters the comfortable opening, reminding us of the human tendency to find comfort in reliable patterns and scenes. Indeed, in an effort to subvert the ease with which a reader trusts, Burnard plots the accident as a circus scene, highlighting how the acts of narrating and reading are performative and unexpected. Having successfully created a believable town and a relatable family,

Burnard reminds the reader that narration is above all else an instrument of power that can provoke active thought, but also deliver deceptive representations, no matter how conventional the text’s structure seems.

The realism of the narrative and the reliability of the narrator become most suspicious when Margaret ponders: “And what’s a lie, she thought against everything

42 else?” (Burnard 96). The rhetorical change in this passage certainly acts as a clue to the artificiality of all narrative, despite the realistic approach earlier in the text. For a brief moment, one wonders if Margaret is in fact the narrator of the text: “She could talk about those years long enough to make them all believe they misremembered. And they would defer to her, just as surely as they watched her” (96). The discursive indicator of the phrase “she could talk” occurs as Margaret gazes outside the kitchen window, a structural symbol for perception that implies how, although the image beyond the window may reflect the “real world,” it is in fact framed by the viewer. The soap bubbles she sends into the air above Sally’s basket further symbolize this play with mimetic convention.7

Whether Margaret is the narrator or not, the scene’s suggestion that she could be is sufficient to raise the reader’s doubt regarding the authenticity of the narrative.

If Canadian national literature is defined, at least partly, by the family saga as a master narrative, then Burnard implies that the reader has a responsibility to think critically about how we grant credibility to narratives structured according to canonically sanctioned plots. In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kemode notes how master narratives are “the mythological structure of a society from which we derive comfort, and which it may be uncomfortable to dispute” (113). Burnard’s opening invokes this sense of comfort in order to untangle, albeit subtly, the ideal of a family narrative as a moral force to shape our national literature. Although the house is “good,” there is no clear

7 In fact, the bubbles and window remind me of the pier-glass metaphor in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot’s scratched glass illustrates how even realism is defective and distorted. She also uses the metaphor to remind the reader of the artificiality of the omniscient narrator, and that characters who appear too good to be true, often are. Patrick makes this exact observation of Margaret during a conversation with Murray, when he states: “I have always thought her moving into our lives was perhaps not entirely altruistic, not without significant and obvious benefit to Margaret herself” (Burnard 160).

43 dichotomy between good and evil in the text, nor a right or wrong way to behave as a member of the Chambers clan, or as a member of Stonebrook, or as Canadian.

Burnard’s minimal use of dialogue further upsets reader expectations and underscores our preoccupation with mimetic texts as accurate reflections of the world. In a way, Burnard mocks the reader’s naiveté and hints at the artificiality of narrative constructs, for despite the welcoming and comfortable opening, the lack of dialogue makes the text seem less intimate.8 Gérard Genette calls character dialogue

“objectivized” speech and points to its paradoxical effect, for the realistic conversations will appear unmemorable, and the more idiosyncratic speeches will appear performative and create “the effect of self-parody” (183, 185). Burnard’s dialogue is more performative than natural. The instances when dialogue does occur do “create the effect of self-parody” (185). For example, Sylvia’s decision to tell each child their specific roles in life from her death bed is almost too artificial, scripting each child into a character type – steady Patrick, mysterious Daphne, and funny Paul (Burnard 39). Hence the highly structured account of Stonebrook that opens the novel emphasizes how sustained references to actuality reveal the reader’s unquestionable acceptance of a familiar world. Burnard’s focus on realism, house and family illustrates how the most deceptive narratives of the nation do not depict grand events, such as the war, but rather quotidian moments and memories. They are the “most easily recognized shapes, the shapes anyone would know” and would be unlikely to question (4).

8 This would explain why some reviews note an inability to “relate” to the characters.

44 What is a House?

A great deal of Canadian fiction explores the imagery of the house and the ideological discourses that define the concept of the home: As for Me and My House,

The Stone Angel, A Bird in a House, Obasan, and Fall on Your Knees, for example.

Roshan Shahini’s study Family in Fiction dedicates a chapter to the “Home and the

Horizon Beyond: House and Journey as Metaphor,” in which she examines the quest myth as the means by which one leaves the home to journey towards selfhood, only to return to the home after realizing that family ties can never be “completely severed”

(131). Her study succeeds in its general overview of the family in Canadian fiction, but it lacks a critical consideration of the phenomenology of the home and the theoretical factors linking the family to the nation.

A house is, perhaps, the most obvious physical structure symbolizing civilization, particularly in Western culture. Whether you own your house, rent your house, or live outside the social definition of a house (for example, nomadically), the individual’s relationship to the house serves to designate his or her social currency and cultural circulation. The homeless, for example, disrupt public spaces by not having a socially sanctioned place; they are criticized for being disagreeable citizens, refusing to adhere to respectable guidelines that dictate how the proper body works, pays taxes, etc. The act of colonization, as another example, always entails conquering land and home, as well as othered bodies (at times literally, and sometimes metaphorically via assimilation). In both cases, the body is linked to the space of the house to facilitate the systems of power and ideologies that exclude what is considered unhealthy or infectious for national identity.

45 One can easily understand the connection between the house and ideals of domesticity, especially in relation to the novel. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, for instance, defines “aga saga” as a “saga of family life set against a comfortable background typified by possession of a kitchen with an Aga stove, notionally an emblem of middle-class life, and representing a sustained cosiness” (Knowles and Elliott 9). The novel as genre reflects the emerging bourgeoisie and the domestication of society, for

“the house and the novel are interconnected, for the eighteenth century, which saw the rise of the novel, was also the great age of the English house…It is no accident that many of the terms used in critical discourse – structure, aspect, outlook, even character – are related to domestic architecture” (Tristram 2). Novels were, in fact, directed at women readers, taking care of the home while their husbands were at work, thus making them responsible for the perpetuation of the social messages presented in the texts.

Jon Hegglund confirms the connection of novel to nation when he writes: “For a middle-class public that read voraciously, books linking ideas of nation and domesticity became something of a craze during the Edwardian period” (399). Moreover, he draws on the bodily metaphor of the “healthy home” and notes how the Edwardian fear of the degeneration of the national body was contested by literary representations of a healthy home, thereby identifying the health of the individual with the collective health of

“national bodies” (399). Although Hegglund analyses a specific historical period and nation, the connection between the healthy home as suggestive of a healthy nation also appears in contemporary writings. Indeed, there is a “proliferation of novels and tales named after houses” as of the eighteenth century and still present today, from Austen’s

Northanger Abbey (1817) to The House on Mango Street (1983) (Mezei and Briganti

46 840). In recent Canadian writing, this pattern continues, from David Gilmour’s Lost

Between Houses (2000) to Timothy Taylor’s Story House (2006) to Ami McKay’s The

Birth House (2007). Houses play important roles in all of these texts, as they did in early

Canadian writing,9 for they represent a physical structure by which characters interact with their internal and external environments.

Numerous theorists, such as Freud and Bachelard, have considered the analogy of the house to the human body or soul (Baak 54). For example, Freud notes how the image of the house often appears in dreams as a symbolic extension of the human body (54).

When the ego appears uneasy, Freud writes, “the ego is not master in its own house” (qtd. in Erwin 374). He also notes: “dream-imagination has one particular favourite way of representing the organism as a whole: namely as a house” (Interpretation 111). For

Freud, the house, as a dream symbol correlated to the human body, manifests unsatisfied wishes unacceptable to the conscious mind or society. Different rooms can suggest various anatomical parts, or even numerous houses can indicate “a single organ” (111).

He uses the example of a ceiling covered with toad-like spiders to expose a headache, and therefore, features how the unconscious uses the image of the house to signify the body’s needs and the mind’s symbolic associations.

For Gaston Bachelard, life and imagination invigorates the space of the house, making it “a tool for analysis of the human soul” (6). The house serves as a vehicle to illustrate the subjective perceptions of poetic imagery, for although the house is an external object, feelings and memories transform it into a “home.” The home

“constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17).

9 Cecily Devereux considers the significance of the house and family in early Canadian writing, specifically The Imperialist and Jalna, in her article “A ‘process of being re-Anglicized’: reconstructing ‘colonial’ houses in ‘post-colonial’ fiction.”

47 Although he recognizes that the house has dimensions of unity and density, Bachelard does not make a formal distinction between house and home. He values the house for being a home and intimate shelter, reading the house with similar connotations as the home. I, on the other hand, perceive the house as a material structure, open to subjective interpretation, whereas the home is a place of origin that offers an imagined permanence and refuge. Similarly, Burnard distinguishes between the two words to reinforce the illusion of stability suggested by the ideal of the home as a space reflecting a secure family and settled nation.

The connection between house, body, and soul resounded in my preparation for my postcolonial candidacy examination, where I examined the house’s metaphoric role in reflecting social and physical change in texts from around the world. Houses, “like bodies, come to play as symbols of social groups, inscribing boundaries and hierarchies and giving them an aura of naturalness” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 21). For instance, in

V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, the house he seeks to own signifies the family’s economic struggles, symbolized by the defects in its structure, and the Hanuman House reveals hierarchies of power under a strict social structure. In fact, Mr. Biswas’s many houses throughout the text symbolize social groups and boundaries under the familial umbrella, which ensure the illusion of naturalness and fixity. Moreover, the dollhouse, which parallels Mr. Biswas, is described as a human body with “delicate joints” and “torn skin” (209). This is but one example of how houses are often linked to the body and family in literature. Everywhere, houses represent family units. For example, the

“House of Montague” and the “House of Capulet” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

48 reveal two different families and kinship systems, and semantically illustrate familial allegiance.

Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, perceives the house as “the principle locus for the objectification of generative schemes” (89). His analysis of the Kabyle House, perhaps one of the best-known subjects of his writing, divides the interior and exterior, as well as the various rooms of the house, into gendered compartments. For Bourdieu, the

Kabyle House parallels the dichotomies between the feminine and masculine, placing men on the outside and women on the inside (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 40). This portrayal of opposing spheres recalls the rise of the domestic novel in the nineteenth century when narratives perpetuated the foundational principles of imperial messaging, representing motherhood and women’s home management as valuable national contributions. As English homes were built in the colonies, the enterprise of imperialism required not merely physically conquering the land, but also ensuring that British standards and morals were maintained. Cecily Devereux makes a similar observation and writes: “…by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the greatest concern had become its [British civilization] preservation – for to preserve British society and its values and, most importantly, its racial purity in the colonies is to work for the protection of the Empire itself” (12). Hence the division between private and public spheres echoes depictions of the home as a gendered space, underscoring the cultural construction of the house within ideological contexts; it presents the house as a spatial organization embodying the political processes in power, further linking the house to the social body.

Lévis-Strauss’s sociétiés à maisons also stresses the imagery of the house as a social institution. He considers the house “a hybrid, transitional form between kin-based

49 and class-based social orders” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 10). For Lévi-Strauss, the house functions as a moral person that embodies the continuity of a line by incorporating name and property (7). As a symbolic structure, the house represents unity, but also “various kinds of hierarchy and division” (12), by projecting the inconsistencies of social orders defined by the theory of descent. The house as a metaphor thus illustrates the blurring of boundaries conventionally employed to organize social units. House societies are not stable, but clearly plural, recognizing the potential for variability. Lévi-Strauss defines the house:

La maison est une personne morale, détentrice d’un domaine composé à la

fois de biens matériels et immatériels, et qui se perpétue par la

transmission de son nom, de sa fortune et de ses titres en ligne réelle ou

fictive, tenue pour légitime à la seule condition que cette continuité puisse

s’exprimer dans le langage de la parenté ou de l’alliance, et, le plus

souvent, des deux ensemble. (Lévi-Strauss 47)

I have opted to include the French text because the translation does not quite do the passage justice. The phrasing “personne morale” is translated, as quoted in Carsten and

Hugh-Jones, as “a corporate body” (49), which misses the emphasis on morality implied by Lévi-Strauss; thus the translation erroneously implies being combined into one body or under one united group, when in fact, he emphasizes plurality. He personifies the house, making it a moral person with the responsibility to retain material and immaterial property – from land to lineage to narratives of origin.

Still, there is more to the house than its domestic or ethnographic categorization; houses are dynamic and processual, literary and practical, individual and social. Building

50 on these theories I consider the house an embodied space because, like the body, it is a material structure and an agent in a family drama. The house and the body are thus not objects but subjects in the text, and the primary way Burnard makes this connection is by continually noting the connection of the house to the characters. The house is an integral part of the perceiving subject, “an extension of the person” and the self (Carsten and

Hugh-Jones 2).10 A good example of this practice occurs after Bill first makes love to

Margaret. He realizes a physical yearning to remember and to let go of his first wife,

Sylvia all at once. Hence he decides to build “a sealed room,” a space in his memory

to preserve and protect his life with Sylvia, to hold and protect the past.

There would be no end to what the room could contain and he would step

inside at will, he would for the rest of his life remember everything,

anything, any time he pleased. But he would never allow himself to speak

to the things housed in that room because there could be no answer and he

believed that such a silence would be the hardest thing his life could ever

give him. (Burnard 61)

The metaphor of the room as a storage space to retain (to use Lévi-Strauss’s terminology) memories is nothing new to images of the house. The ability to compartmentalize the past, like organizing rooms in the mind, is a common metaphor of every day discourse.

Yet the image of Bill constructing a room in which to keep his former wife as he strokes the neck of a new woman illustrates how the house and the body are interconnected and shifts the emphasis of the Chambers family core to Margaret’s “pulsing” vein, alive and present (61).

10 Burnard often employs architectural terminology to describe her characters. For example, Andy “became a cheerful fixture at the house” (83).

51 All the theoretical perspectives presented above are useful when considering the significance of the house, in particular in relation to the body and the nation. In naming her novel A Good House, Burnard evokes both the everyday, life-sustaining routines of her characters, and the more symbolic connotations of the house. She reflects Mezei and

Briganti’s statement, “we must be aware that romanticizing opposition will blind us to the fact that the domestic world of ordinary life holds as much significance as the world of extraordinary adventure and perpetuates a binary and essentialist way of thinking” (843).

At the same time, she notes the artificiality of the domestic novel’s imperial messaging and the need to both respect and revise the tradition to expand its possibilities. The house, the body, the novel, and the nation emphasize how ultimately characters are contained by spaces and how the boundaries of these spaces are permeable and restless.

Therefore, Burnard appropriates domestic ritual to demonstrate how the house, as the principle locus of the family saga, presents the illusion of a unified and civilized nation; an illusion shattered by the deformities of the characters, which disrupts the confident portrayal of the Chambers family as a functional and formative microcosm for the hegemonic process of building a seminal and national identity.

A Town Deformed by War

Burnard’s elaborate attention to detail conveys the Canadian preoccupation with landscape as a “most easily recognized shape” (Burnard 4), and reveals how the war changes the body of the town by introducing new familial and social concerns. The global and economic expansion brought to Stonebrook by the war introduces new opportunities and a changing cultural landscape. Burnard’s description of Stonebrook

52 incorporates both past and present, depicting the town as a body that remembers as it remodels.

Indeed, the town is immediately described as a body recovering from a severe physical loss as a result of the war:

Sixteen of the town’s sons had been killed overseas this last time and

another thirty had been wounded, many of them seriously. Amputees

were a common sight now, as were torn, badly healed, once-handsome

faces and eyes gone hesitant or vacant and, in the heat of summer, out at

the lake, backs and chests and limbs defiled by pulpy ridges of flesh which

had been pulled over wounds by military doctors working without the

luxury of time, without the care that time allowed. (Burnard 2)

Stonebrook’s deformities may appear grotesque or disabled, but they also symbolize the new social bodies embraced, rather than stigmatized by the town. Amputees, for example, are not concealed, segregated, or exiled, but accepted as common. The scars left on the flesh by rushed doctors are not concealed, but publically exposed at the lake in the summer. Burnard destigmatizes the deformed body and debunks the fiction of desirability invested in the idealized body, as she further demonstrates via her characterization of Daphne, which I will elaborate on shortly.

More importantly, the novel’s first insistence on deformed bodies as resulting from the war depicts a nation in flux, rather than advocating a hegemonic aesthetic beautifying a normative, stable, collective body. Stonebrook experiences fundamental changes to everyday culture and society, with not only the bodies of its inhabitants being altered, but the “order of things” transformed by restructurings, developments, and

53 economic growth. The opening pages tell the stories of both the origin and destination of the town and the characters, ensuring that the town itself acts as a character in the text that embodies the cultural and social practices of the present. For example, the town’s buildings are personified, described as “purposeful, symmetrical, calming” (Burnard 11).

The newest building is the arena, which the narrator explains has become a popular structure “all across the province…because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger” (Burnard 12 – 3). The allusion to the growing presence of hockey in Canadian culture hints at a nation-building rhetoric, with hockey offering one familiar expression of nationalism. Appearing across the country, hockey acts as an ideological tool to express a growing national sentiment, for the sport promises cohesion and identity. Neil Earle argues “that Canadians are involved in a form of collective myth- making when watching hockey” (329), and despite being a global game, Canadians continue to perceive it as their cultural unifier. Yet in contrast to her description of

Stonebrook, Burnard grants the arena very little descriptive space. Patrick and Paul both play, but little detail is provided on the sport and their participation fails to evoke the

“Canadian paradisiacal myth, the appeal to ‘the boy inside the man’” (Earle 326).

Burnard thus ignores the possibility of elaborating on a nationalist discourse, using hockey, like the war, as a new experience that alters the body of the town while undermining the authenticity of the sport as a collective cultural unifier.

With Bill’s deformity as a result of his experience overseas, Burnard emphasizes the impact of the war, not only on the town, but on the Chambers family. Bill returns from World War II with missing fingers on his right hand – a symbol of all the losses he will suffer as the story continues. As the traditional patriarch, Bill loses Sylvia, Paul, and

54 finds Daphne deformed, and subsequently, he deteriorates mentally as a result of what appears to be dementia. His experience at war, however, is quickly qualified by the narrator, who insists that “none of this made Bill Chambers extraordinary” for he had returned relatively unharmed and ready for the simplicity of a “comfortable” life

(Burnard 8). The narrator reports that the war reaffirms Bill’s appreciation for the simple life, resisting the need to fight for a national purpose and rather to take comfort in a daily purpose. He never discusses the war, though he observes the traditions sparked by it, such as the Remembrance Day walk – at least, until he finds himself mentally altered by illness, psychologically struggling with his numerous life losses.

As Linda Morra notes, “[t]he War continues [to be] reconfigured in other events” throughout the novel (n.pag.). Indeed, Burnard includes occasional reminders of the impact of the war on nation formation. For example, while driving to visit Bill and

Margaret with the kids, Mary listens to the radio and hears of the shooting at Kent State

University where “[f]our American students had been killed by troops from their own

National Guard” (Burnard 141). She listens to the reporter, all the while comforting herself with being “Canadian” because a “Canadian in 1970 didn’t have to fear her own armed government” or worry about her husband being conscripted “to fight someone else’s war” (141). Mary’s comfort as a Canadian reveals the average citizen’s perception of Canada as a country of peacekeepers, generally oblivious to the hardships of war, even beyond a country’s boundaries. As exemplified by her love of antiques and attentive care of her house, Mary prefers the illusion of her secure domestic, rural life over change and social advancement. Her conservative outlook is further epitomized by her outrage over

Daphne’s illegitimate pregnancy and Daphne’s direct defiance of socially accepted

55 practices. All of this, however, changes after her divorce from Patrick and her battle with breast cancer. Mary’s confidence in her social role as a member of a nation sets her up for disappointment and failure, when she discovers that nothing in life is sure.

In an interesting side story, Margaret reveals to Patrick that she lost her first love to the war. She recalls how “he had the best possible body” to match her tall physique, and how it was unfortunately “blown to bits in a field in France” (Burnard 248). She links her experience to the Chambers family, reminding Patrick that some of Bill’s “bits got left behind…Bits he could have used” (248). Margaret’s revelation offers an explanation for her dedication to the Chambers family. Her life having been turned upside down by the war, she finds a new role to perform.

Storey to Stories: Inside a Good House

The first mention of houses occurs early in the text to showcase how the war changes the town’s history, bringing “forty or fifty” new houses to Stonebrook’s “five hundred” (Burnard 3). In fact, Burnard presents a hierarchy of houses: old, new, and

“magnificent houses” with “a wraparound porch,” built before the Great War (4). Her opening description progresses from land, to locality, to family, tracing the shifting values of the house in her narrative – first as part of the land, then the town, and then significant to the Chambers family. Burnard spends the last five pages of the opening chapter detailing the Chambers residence, employing realist techniques to build the reader’s trust and to showcase the limbs and bones of the body of the house.

The Chambers house is linked to marriage, with Bill and Sylvia as the core of the house: Bill as the public figure who served the nation, and Sylvia as embodying the

56 values of nation building. Margaret comes to share the heart of the home and to serve as voice of the family with Sylvia. The house contains a “recently installed picture window facing the street. Since the war, lots of perfectly adequate living-room windows had been replaced with these picture windows, which were said to both nicely frame the view to the street and open the rooms to sunlight” (Burnard 5). The picture window creates the illusion of a broad unimpeded outside view, as if framing the external world. Aside from highlighting popular fashions encouraged by modernization, the picture window becomes part of Sylvia’s place of death. Sylvia’s illness limits her to the living-room, her participation in the world restricted to the stories told by her family members and the view available beyond the window. This picture window is key to how the house is altered, structurally but also emotionally, and how the division between interior and exterior spaces can be blurred.

Sylvia, as the matriarch and Bill, as the patriarch, find themselves debilitated by disease. Sylvia dies early in the story and Bill finds his personality altered as he ages and disease overtakes his mind. Burnard never officially names either disease, but reviewers speculate that Sylvia dies of cancer, and Bill suffers from Parkinson’s or dementia. The lack of a diagnosis makes the illnesses less important than their effects on the body. The nation’s mythologizing of the family valorizes a healthy body, often portraying disease as a means to eliminate the weaker members or to push them to the periphery. Burnard, however, accepts disease as a means to defamiliarize the familiar and to reveal how the house, as a site of shared symbolic meaning, may not always conform to the idealised home of a healthy nation. Changes to the body, the mind, the house, and to social

57 conditions alter human relation to space, further emphasizing the complexity of reading the home as a model for the nation.

Sylvia’s illness brings the first major change to the physical restructuring of the

Chambers’ house. Post-diagnosis, she quickly declines and Bill decides to move their bed to the living room to ameliorate her mobility on the main floor of the house. The bed becomes a new area where the family can unite and converse – an extension of supper, as though delaying the end of their time together:

Sometimes when supper was finished everyone would drift into the living

room to surround Sylvia on the bed and talk…In full swing they

encouraged and contradicted and interrupted and accused one another and

lied as much as they had to, to keep it going. (Burnard 40)

Moving the bed to the living room brings the private into a more public space, for the living room was one of the few rooms in which families welcomed guests; it presents

Sylvia’s illness as a public affair, and prompts “[th]e men that knew that Sylvia had been moved down to the living room” to build her a bathroom on the main floor of the house

(41). The process of building this bathroom is outlined by Burnard in careful detail, including the “pink Kleenex and toilet paper” Patrick and Daphne pick-up “uptown at

Clarke’s” to add the finishing touch (44). Sylvia’s bathroom demonstrates how relationships to space can epitomize dignity and this bathroom extends Sylvia’s autonomy and preserves her control over her own body despite her disease.

The image of the family seated around Sylvia’s bed offers a traditional portrait of the mother as the emotional and organizational force of the household. In a sense, Sylvia, despite being “always open to nonsense” (Burnard 34), is the rational force in the text –

58 not because she is always reasonable, but because she provides each other character with a reason to live. For example, close to her death, she decides to impart to each child what she considers to be their individual potential: “One night, with a deliberation only partially camouflaged by her casual approach, she said she was going to describe each one of them [the children], their skills and their particular talents. She was going to explain why they’d been put on this earth” (39). The narrator notes how the children realize the rarity of such a testimony and store the words away “for future use against other words” (40). Even Murray acknowledges towards the end of the story that Sylvia’s words that night inspired his life journey and desire to do good.

With Sylvia’s death, the reading of the Chambers house as a home also dies, not because it renders the house less organized, less moral, or less emotional, but because her death marks the end of a domestic ideology based on the purity of the nation as defined by bloodlines, and shifts the story from kinship to family by marriage. Margaret Kemp, who enters the house as the family’s caregiver towards the end of Sylvia’s life, replaces

Sylvia, both literally by marrying Bill, and figuratively as the new matriarch. The narrative depicts a series of events in which Sylvia transfers her role and duties onto

Margaret, even asking her if she will assist the kids when her illness gets worse (47).

While Sylvia remains alive, Margaret prepares the meals but always departs prior to dinner; a week after Sylvia’s death, however, Daphne leads her to “the table where a place had been set for her” (54). Patrick questions the family’s sudden reliance on

Margaret after consulting her on a gift for Mrs. McFarlane, finding it peculiar how

“ready” Margaret is to always be there for the Chambers family (56). This image of

Margaret as willing and available at first makes her seem almost too convenient;

59 however, she offers a revised conception of family and motherhood, removing the conservative viewpoint that only bloodlines make a family.

Bill’s character proves indispensable to Burnard’s text and her resistance to writing a female dominated narrative. His willingness to move the bed into the living room and continue to sleep by Sylvia’s side shows his love for her, but also indicates an openness towards negotiating the public and private spaces outside the conventional parameters of “home.” Indeed, in using the word “house” over “home,” Burnard represents the house from the exterior and interior simultaneously, to revise the image of the home as reflecting female domestic stratifications. Though one could argue that at the start of the text Bill is depicted as a patriarchal figure, overseeing the mobility of the

Chambers family, his swift deterioration from illness undermines such a reading.

Sylvia marries Bill because she is pregnant with Patrick, a condition that we are told was frowned upon but all too common. When her mother advises her that she could do better, Sylvia asserts confidently that Bill is “a very decent man, a kind man, that while obviously neither traditionally handsome nor brilliant he was everything else a woman could want, and then some” (Burnard 7). Sylvia’s allusion to Bill’s sexual capabilities showcases one of the other ways in which Burnard undermines domestic realism, for her depiction of sexuality in the text proves anything but conventional. She underscores the sexual relationships of all the characters, from Bill and Sylvia’s vibrant intercourse, to Murray and Daphne’s random encounters, to Meg’s unexpected exploration. Though sex certainly factors into the daily lives of families, it was not a common component of traditional domestic realism, kept behind closed doors. Beyond

Daphne and Murray’s unconventional relations, Burnard includes a telling scene to

60 highlight the social perceptions of sex as still conservative despite the practices of the characters. During her pregnancy, Mary experiences a heightened sense of sexual desire, which she mentions to her doctor. She expects him to reassure her that this is all normal, as he usually does when she voices her symptoms and concerns; but rather, he frowns and notes that this type of thought is somewhat peculiar. He identifies her feelings as “a slight aberration” and recommends she ignore her impulses (140). Interestingly, Sylvia’s remark to her mother recognizes that Bill is a considerate lover, keeping her physical needs a priority, which he also illustrates later in the text. The fact that Bill and Sylvia find pleasure with each other – beyond the procreative principle – further undermines the portrayal of the family as a model for the nation, expected to serve a generative agenda like the one understood by Mary’s family physician.

Unfortunately, when Bill is hit by illness later in life, his personality changes and he finds himself transformed into a rude and indecent man. Without a filter for his thoughts, he begins to mistreat Margaret, purposefully doing the things he knows “get under her skin” (Burnard 217). He no longer sports his veteran uniform on November

11th, refusing “the observance of the walk to the cenotaph” and its “faded camaraderie”

(217). Bill begins to talk about the war in detail and in a way, becomes shell-shocked, cursing those around him for being idiots, slamming his fists into furniture, and “blowing fuses” (218). As a plot device, Bill’s altered state removes his ability to filter his personal opinions and he voices, in his “first outside attack” a judgement on Daphne’s choices (226). In front of her girls, he outright asks her where the father is, and when she remains silent and gets up to leave, he cruelly yells: “‘Just took what he wanted,’ he said.

‘And you too stupid and ugly to deny him’” (226). Having spent his entire life ensuring

61 Daphne never considered herself ugly or deformed, Bill betrays his own promise and reveals that one cannot even trust oneself, for forces beyond our control can alter the mind as well as the body. The scene takes place in the kitchen and offers the one and only moment in the text when the kitchen becomes a space that divides rather than unites the family.

Table Talk

The kitchen begins as “Sylvia Chambers’ kitchen” (Burnard 5), an extension of her personhood, composed of modern conveniences, a large pine table for the family to eat together, and an unlocked door through which anyone can enter. Like Sylvia, the kitchen appears welcoming, warm, and family-oriented; it is the hub of family life, where members gather to eat and talk, filling both their stomachs and minds. For example, the first scene of the Chambers family all together is set around the dinner table where they tell their individual stories about when they heard the sound of the new siren. The scene conveys the initial cohesiveness of the Chambers family.

Dinner scenes populate the text and Burnard provides the reader with detailed accounts of the meal preparations and even the subsequent cleaning patterns of the family. Beyond the traditional image of family table talk, however, hides Burnard’s consistent, but subtle challenge of such cosy domestic ideologies. For example, the dinners are not consistently prepared by the women of the household, though Margaret generally oversees some section of the meal. In July 1963, the Chambers rent

Dunworkin, “one of the oldest and biggest cottages on the beach” (Burnard 97), and the entire crew comes for the first weekend (except for Murray’s wife). Bill and Margaret

62 walk to the store to buy butter and Murray cooks the meal “that night” (103). The men’s participation in the feeding of the family undermines gender-specific domestic norms.

Moreover, at Dunworkin, numerous architectural pieces of the house become dinner settings, such as the “sloping porch” where the family members “ate and drank and talked and lied and laughed” (Burnard 108). The unexpected inclusion of the verb

“lie” in this sentence stands for both the image of the characters lying on the porch, but also lying as they talk, emphasizing the dishonesty of idealizing the traditional family life.

Furthermore, Dunworkin acts as a symbolic revision of the country-house story, which often intersects with the genre of the domestic novel (as exemplified by Jane

Austen). The country-house “celebrates stasis” and the house itself figures microcosmically for “the state of the nation” (Jones, “Radical” 7). Powerful ideological imperatives were therefore at work in the representation of the country-house and its exposition of social hierarchy and order. Whereas the country-house was part of the country’s landscape, displaying national qualities, such as grandeur, stature, and power, the beach house undermines social graces and refinements and focuses on the simplicity of family life, rather than serving as a microcosm that perpetuates the values of the nation. Beneath the illusion of order and harmony that Burnard projects is a debunking of the family’s pretensions to embodying an idealized community.

The Chambers do not own the land, but rather rent the house on the beach. In contrast to the British country-house, which stood as a symbol of wealth and polite society, Dunworkin appears simple – “magnificent” but old, with “visible footpaths…worn into the planks’ grain from the front door back into the kitchen”

63 (Burnard 97 – 8). It does not signify material wealth, but rather immaterial fortune – the gift of being a body worn by personalized histories, indicated by footprints. Murray’s first wife, Charlotte, for example, comes from an upper-class, wealthy family and would fare well in the traditional British country-house; she never finds comfort at Dunworkin, however, for as the narrator explains, “[n]o one could imagine Charlotte at the lake anyway, so far away from a decent hairdresser” (101). Charlotte is critiqued for her lack of manners because she never offers to clear the table or help with the dishes until she is literally guided by Margaret to wash them. Her alienation from the norms of the

Chambers family life reveals the first instance in the text when the Chambers family expresses disdain for a character unable to fit the framework of the household.

Interestingly, it is in this chapter that Daphne’s difference comes to the forefront exemplifying the gradual decline of the family as a normative body characteristic of nation-building ideologies. Daphne’s affair with Murray during the storm destabilizes the maintenance of sexual and moral hierarchies, and subverts the moral code of domesticity that places male above female. With Daphne and Murray, Burnard resists scripting the idealized courtship of the domestic novel that would eventually result in

Daphne achieving romantic love and financial security. Instead, Burnard celebrates

Daphne’s deriding domesticity (not motherhood, however) as emotionally sterile and restrictive.

Daphne’s Anti-Domestic Deformity

Daphne’s deformity becomes a means by which Burnard contests the conventional domestic narrative’s representation of female heroines as performing the

64 rituals of repetitive ordinariness for the good of the family, and by extension, the good of the nation. Aware from a young age of what she requires to ensure her survival, Daphne becomes the most rebellious character in the text, challenging social expectations and trusting her individual judgement over the opinion of others. Her inability to trust undermines the conventionality of the text, and her self-affirmation and control over all her male partners rejects the virtues of domesticity.

The summer of the circus portrays Daphne as already a confident girl, aware of her gift of “showmanship and its rewards” (Burnard 24). Burnard’s extensive description of Murray’s plans for the circus, the preparation, auditions, and performance set up

Daphne’s fall as an abrupt change to the atmosphere, and one that affects each character differently. Bill, who misses Daphne’s fall, observes that her wrist would heal easily,

But her mouth and inside her mouth. The skin covering her jaw was firm,

unbroken, but the bones under it had been knocked out of alignment. The

bones were completely askew. He had to steel himself, counsel himself

not to look away. (28)

Bill struggles with the physical change of his daughter, unable to provide nurturing or practical support. Sylvia comforts Daphne, and post-surgery takes the time to help her brush her teeth, spending quality time with her in front of the vanity mirror, playing with her hair, and showcasing her still attractive features (31). Patrick immediately helps carry the mattress holding Daphne to the truck, all the time blaming himself for not knowing any better in a passage that foreshadows his continuous need to maintain order in life. Paul, in his clown costume, cries as he watches the commotion alone, and Murray seeks blame, wanting to be punished for trusting in his idea (30). Each character reacts to

65 Daphne’s accident differently; however, they all, in some way, express guilt and/or responsibility, even Daphne herself, who states: “I’ve hurt myself” (28). When Sylvia notes how Daphne blames herself for the accident, Bill thinks about his days at war and how his peers also always blamed themselves: “I’m hurt, I am hurt here” (30). The scene demonstrates that little stands between happiness and tragedy, success and failure; but more importantly, it highlights the individual sense of guilt and responsibility that arises from accidents – those unforeseen events that alter circumstances – and the simple wish that they were in our control. As predicted, Daphne’s arm heals, but her accident results in a permanent facial deformity.

Because of the “malformation of the healed jaw,” Daphne is no longer considered

“a ringer for her mother” (Burnard 35). Rather, this minor physical difference ensures her eccentric existence, making her free to contrast her mother’s gift of accommodation, for Sylvia is able to move “so fast from the one kind of woman to the other” (35).

Specifically contesting social and familial expectations, Daphne chooses to have children out of wedlock. Yet despite this social stigma, she proves the most maternal of the characters. For instance, when Sally arrives in time for Christmas, Margaret leans back

“against the living-room arch” and watches with curiosity as Daphne ties a red ribbon around her half-sister and places her amongst the “presents for a picture” (92). Margaret watches attentively not out of worry, “but because before Sally joined them she had not once seen Daphne reach to touch anyone, man or beast” (92). Daphne’s detachment reveals her discomfort with performing social expectations, rather than a need for personal space. Margaret first acknowledges Daphne’s avoidance of personal contact at

Sylvia’s funeral, when she avoids being hugged by everyone around her. This resistance

66 to intimacy reveals her distrust of social manners and the falsity often concealed behind good or appropriate behaviour. She reacts the same way at Paul’s funeral, avoiding social graces and remaining aloof during the ceremony.

Daphne’s career as a nurse illustrates her prevalent intent to care for others, despite her distaste for being touched herself. When visiting Andy at the hospital, she demonstrates her astute ability to read others when she provides comfort to the young girl in the bed next to Andy. The other nurses, frustrated with the girl’s uncooperative behaviour, literally force her up after three days and walk her out the door. Observing the girl walking with her eyes closed, nearly hugging the wall, Daphne notes her fear and discomfort. She later approaches her bed under the pretext that she’s going to pick up a magazine, in case the girl needs anything, but then adds quietly: “I was adopted. My mother was young, like you. But I’ve had a really good life. I’ve always wished I could tell my mother that. And I’ve always wished that she had a good life too” (Burnard 124).

The girl replies, “That’s nice of you to tell me” (124). The scene illustrates Daphne’s openness to alternate options for women beyond domestic orthodoxy, undermining its authenticity. Moreover, the little white lie Daphne tells re-emphasizes the unreliability of narration and how a falsity can sometimes do good.

Daphne’s refusal to marry Murray, despite their obvious love for one another, their two daughters, and the promise of financial security, perturbs most reviewers.

Kiersten Marek, for instance, notes that this plot twist raises questions she felt remained unanswered, and that “the only reason offered by the novel is Daphne’s observation that

Murray prefers love from a distance” (n.pag.). Daphne’s inability to ever fully trust

Murray results from her accident as a child. Although numerous scenes illustrate their

67 support of one another, for example when Murray takes Daphne to the formal dance, many other passages assert her stubborn and instinctual need to accomplish her goals on her own. For instance, she tells Murray, who tries to help her with her homework “that she was getting first-class honours on her own, thank you” (Burnard 77). Furthermore, during their first big conversation regarding the day of the storm, Murray recalls

Daphne’s use of the phrase “standard issue” and uses it in response to a comment she makes regarding her difference from Charlotte (149). Daphne immediately stiffens and states: “You don’t get to say that. I do, but you don’t” (149). Her need to control her relationships, which proves both a strength and a weakness, is thus continually reaffirmed by her behaviour and avoidance of marriage altogether.

Indeed, Sylvia, on her death bed, foresees Daphne and Murray’s future together, and advises Murray that he’ll “have to take [his] lead from Daphne” (Burnard 162). Her words, which follow her scripting of Murray as “good,” motivate his ambitions and secure his connection to the Chambers family. He explains to Patrick that he was always meant for Daphne, that Sylvia told him he “had exactly the kind of heart Daphne would need” (161). This heart proves to be flexible and adaptable, willing to love Daphne and meet her needs without too many questions. Though he proposes twice, Daphne rejects him both times because they can never be a “normal married family” (175). The closest she ever comes to voicing her love for Murray occurs when she says, “looking out her window at the distant muddy Thames. ‘It’s you’” (178). Although the two of them never join in a conventional romantic ending, Burnard ends with their daughter Maggie’s wedding celebration to illustrate how Daphne’s life is full and happy.

68 Daphne’s decision to form an unconventional family with Murray and her daughters reflects the changing landscape of Canadian society and Canadian nation.

When Daphne announces her first pregnancy, she receives mixed responses of support and shock. Margaret and Bill consider it a bad “mistake,” but the second pregnancy is seen as shameful and humiliating (Burnard 182). None of her family members directly ask her, however, to explain her situation; rather, they prefer to make assumptions, blaming her physical deformity for her lack of confidence and naïve belief that she must

“settle” for whatever she can get:

If any of them could have asked her, Daphne might have tried to say that it

wasn’t the deformity of her jaw….There certainly had been some cruelty,

sometimes more than she’d thought she would be able to withstand, but in

her experience kids with a physical oddness were not mocked so much if

they’d had an accident…you had to be born with something wrong to get

the worst of it….It was the time between…that everlasting split second

when there was nothing she could do to save herself. (183)

Daphne’s painful fear upon realizing that she cannot control the inevitable encapsulates her motivations in the text. She does not refuse Murray because she fears commitment, but because she needs to delay the fall – of being a vulnerable body dependent on others for security and survival. She hints at this when she tells Mary: “Likely the difficulty is not going to be with the word ‘man’ but with the word ‘connection’” (155). Daphne defies the ideal that she needs a man to fill her “lonely core” (152), and rather fills that void with her daughters. When Murray expresses concern over the illegitimacy of

Maggie, Daphne replies that legitimacy guarantees nothing: “I was secure and safe and

69 extremely legitimate and my mother still died on me…My mother still moved down to the living room and died” (176). The image of Sylvia being moved down to the living room onto a mattress to die, contrasts with Daphne’s survival from the accident and illustrates how the scene that proved certain leads to death, whereas the unexpected accident, leads to life.

There’s Something Different About Meg

Daphne notes that her deformity did not inspire cruelty from her peers because it resulted from an accident, rather than a birth defect: “…but in her experience kids with a physical oddness were not mocked so much if they’d had an accident…you had to be born with something wrong to get the worst of it” (Burnard 183). She recognizes how disabilities are more of a social stigma to overcome, foreshadowing the struggles of her niece Meg, who is Paul and Andy’s disabled daughter. Meg is born with physical deformities and mental limitations. She is portrayed as “extremely tall” and “heavier and stronger by far than her brother or her father” (Burnard 186 – 87). Meg’s character illustrates how images of the disabled are used only to reaffirm normative bodies.

Indeed, if Burnard’s text is in any way conservative, it is not because of her portrayal of a functional family, but because of how Meg’s characterization fails to challenge images of disability. In fact, given Daphne’s words above, Meg’s birth serves to minimize

Daphne’s own deformity and to render her disfigurement acceptable.

When Meg is born during the summer at Dunworkin, nobody suspects her disability except Bill, who since the war “had a sense” of “things you couldn’t imagine”

(Burnard 192). When, at the age of “four or five” she begins to “deliberately try to hurt

70 the barn cats,” Paul and Andy attempt common disciplinary practices, such as sharp voices and a “quick slap” until Bill interferes, knowing there is something different about

Meg (192). This is the first time Bill intervenes with any parenting decisions, signaling awareness that this child requires more careful child-rearing support. He reassures Paul and Andy that he and Margaret will help because they would likely have “to find another way” to deal with Meg (192). Indeed, this other way turns out to be medication. The town doctor experiments with various drugs and doses until they find something that keeps Meg calm “but not dopey” (192). Medication cannot erase Meg’s disabilities, however, and eventually she is removed from the family because, unlike Daphne, she “is too different to belong” (Truchan-Tataryn, “(In)Visible” 95).

The representation of Meg raises questions of defective genetics and the legitimate function of the family as a social model. Andy struggles to raise Meg until they are able to find her “a group home in London” with young staff to “teach kids things, normalization, it was called” (Burnard 187, my emphasis). Burnard uses narrative phrases, such as “it was called” to invoke social expectations, but also to set them at a distance, avoiding a definitive affiliation such as the one sought by Morra in her interview questioning the significance of A Good House within the wider social understanding of Canadian literature. Indeed, such phrasings strip responsibility from the author and narrator, placing the blame on accepted social discourse.

Significantly, Burnard refers to this place as a “home” rather than a “house,” accentuating how the home symbolizes a more disciplinary and uniform space. Meg is removed from the family because her “lack of conformity is interpreted as abnormal behaviour that requires discipline and control” (Truchan-Tataryn, “(In)Visible” 96). She

71 becomes but a mere visitor to her family, until, “[l]ater on [when] she would fall on them.

Everyone knew this” (Burnard 189). The Chambers family recognizes that once Meg’s time is up at the group home, she will once again become their responsibility and burden.

At the home, she remains institutionally managed, highlighting how the disabled is a product of cultural construction. Moreover, “[a]verted and silenced, the disabled body presents a threat to the very idea of the body, the body in its pure, empty form” (Porter xiii). Meg’s disability disrupts the purity of the family by requiring the assistance of a

“special needs” community to support her social interactions and remove her from the

Chambers family space in order to minimize the impact of her differences on the family’s functional structure.

Meg’s difference is marked by her aggressive tendencies and inability to reason critically. For example, she hitchhikes home twice, surprising her parents the first time as she runs up the long lane “like a child, her strides clumsy, her arms wild, clouds of cold panting breath bursting from her mouth” (Burnard 190). The image of a mature woman appearing childlike contrasts her aggressive bulk, yet at the same time presents her as animalistic, with panting breath and wild arms. The scene depicts the viewer at a distance, watching from the end of the long lane, delaying the change Meg imposes on the family environment and further revealing her detachment from her relatives.

After her first hitchhiking experience, Andy takes Meg back to the group home and meets with the Director, Richard, who advises her that Meg was found having sex with Matthew, one of the other residents. Meg takes the blame, telling Richard: “It’s my fault because I like it so much” (Burnard 195). Meg’s inability to reason and use birth control worries Richard, as does the fact that “she hadn’t been sterilized,” although he is

72 quick to say that “he was certainly not recommending that” (195). Nonetheless, the obvious fear of Meg’s reproductive abilities invokes an anxiety for both the family and

Richard. This anxiety reveals a concern with the impact the disabled body has on the formation of the family and the nation. Meg is positioned as unfit to propagate, for she could not raise a child, or worse, might give birth to one like her that further threatens the health of the social body.

Although Meg and Matthew are allowed to remain at the home and to be friends, they are strictly supervised when together, and years later Meg undergoes a hysterectomy, which changes her forever: “Meg had needed a hysterectomy soon after

Paul was killed and the surgery had frightened her, subdued her more than any of her drugs. She hadn’t been herself since” (Burnard 227). Meg’s change results from a new physical deformity – the loss of her uterus and her inability to procreate. We are not told whether Meg’s hysterectomy was voluntary or for health reasons, but given her lack of critical skills, especially when medicated, it would make sense to interpret the act as involuntary sterilization. She is no longer a threat to the fabric of the family or the nation, as the passage illustrates, for the surgery subdues her previous aggressions like no other drug. Thus her hysterectomy performs a social service and alleviates anxieties regarding her procreative potential. Furthermore, the passage uses the verb “kill” to refer to Paul’s death, which in actuality stems from an accident. The use of “kill” in the same phrase describing Meg’s hysterectomy places the blame of his death, and the losses that ensue, on Meg.

After the first hitchhiking experience, and the awareness of Meg’s sexual drive,

Paul and Andy stop making love. The change in their relationship influenced by Meg

73 illustrates how the disabled child negatively impacts the health and growth of the family.

Moreover, the second time Meg hitchhikes home results in Paul’s death. She and

Matthew make their way to Bill and Margaret in town, who call Andy to let her know that Meg has, once again, hitchhiked home. On the way to get Meg, Paul swerves to avoid hitting “the Fulbrights’ new dog” and the truck jumps “the ditch” and falls sideways next to “a substantial old maple” (Burnard 199 – 200). Paul’s death from the accident leads to a new absence for Andy, triggers Bill’s “psychological shock” and mental descent, and leads to Meg’s surgery (221). Meg is once again presented as leading the family’s death and degeneration.

I do not believe Burnard vilifies Meg or deliberately supports a literary history that positions disabled figures as problematic to the homogenizing norm; however, Meg’s sub-plot within the greater framework of the narrative does lack the subtle creative potential of the rest of the text’s challenge to the conventional family saga. Unlike

Daphne, who opposes expectations and makes her own way, Meg remains the object of disciplinary powers, through the group home, the medication, and the removal of her reproductive capacity. As such, Meg and Daphne embody the differences between deformed and disabled bodies as outlined in the opening chapter.

Nonetheless, in addition to Daphne’s non-traditional familial formation, Bonnie

Burnard’s A Good House, with its various affairs, divorces, and adoptions demands a reconsideration of the conventional definition of what constitutes a family, home, and implicitly what constitutes a nation. The purity of blood, as a living ideology of the official nation-state, is vigorously contested throughout the text. Home is fictional and

74 contingent, which Burnard underscores by using the word “house” in defiance of the idealisms “home” embodies as a trope for national literatures and ideologies. The imperialist image of the hearth and home as the locus for the nation’s values begins to change with the war, as Burnard illustrates from the start of the novel, and continues as the story progresses to embrace multiple marriages and blended families. Hence Burnard uses Daphne’s deformity to anatomize the family and develop it as a trope that castigates the rigidities and oversimplifications of domestic realism.

75 Purity and Prejudice: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees

Back in her room, Mercedes is finishing Jane Eyre again…Now, with that mixture of satisfaction and regret with which one comes to the end of a beloved book, Mercedes turns the last page only to find Frances’s unmistakable scrawl on the flyleaf. It is an epilogue, wherein Mr Rochester’s hand, severed and lost in the fire, comes back to life and strangles their infant child. (MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees 224)

Ann-Marie MacDonald uses a quotation from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to open

Fall on Your Knees, but Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre serves as a more important intertext for the novel. Frances’s revision of Jane Eyre in the passage above symbolizes

MacDonald’s subversion of the colonial canon and a challenge to traditional notions of patriarchy, family, and nation. The references to Jane Eyre are crucial interconnected elements of MacDonald’s plot that “constitute an embedded narrative of bonding between the sisters and initiation into the adult world, with its experiences of fatherly abuse, rebellion, erotic love, entrapment and escape” (Somacarrera 57). More importantly, Brontë’s text appears at opportune moments to underscore MacDonald’s representation of in-between spaces offering a vantage from which to reject ideologies that reinforce “the nationalist imaginary picture of Canadian society” (Frost 195).

Therefore, this chapter considers how the family, as a trope for the nation, also reveals the conflicts of devising a national canon as a literary body. The novel’s images of purity and prejudice illustrate how inclusion and exclusion are foundational concepts when assessing the literary bodies that belong (or do not belong) to a national body of literature. Canada’s historical affiliation with the British Empire echoes throughout the novel and the Piper family acts as an ensemble that explores the influence of English canonical novels on the shaping of Canadian culture.

76 MacDonald challenges Canadian colonial roots by rewriting a traditional English novel, but also through her decision to physically “deform” the Piper family – from

Lily’s leg to Kathleen’s porcelain beauty – as a symbolic strategy for “writing back”

(Ashcroft 96). Deformity is thus a “thematic parallel,” which connotes a recurrent structural pattern (28), like the construction or demolition of houses. Thematic parallels prove common in commonwealth texts that employ metonymic imagery to expose underlying cultural sensibilities (27), and although all the texts under study in this dissertation fall under this rubric, MacDonald’s novel also addresses the larger issues of how Canadian literature, still under the influence of its colonial roots, textually subverts the imprint of imperialism.

MacDonald’s use of the uncanny to challenge official history frames this chapter and highlights how individualized narratives counter the ideal of a heteronormative and homogenous family lineage. I agree with Katarzyna Rukszto, who astutely summarizes the novel’s predominant queries: “From the implications of incest on family relations to the desire for the other to the impurity of race, MacDonald fuses questions of national belonging, racial fictions and sexual fantasies” (17). Moreover, MacDonald’s use of the uncanny emphasizes the acts of remembering and narrating “to negotiate a process of mnemonic narrative mourning” (Laouyene 128). The repressed traumatic events must be collectively remembered through narrative recollections, leading to the transference of the family history to the next generation (128). MacDonald’s incorporation of the uncanny gestures towards the repressed and untold racial, ethnic, and other marginalized histories or identities in Canadian literature and society that evoke a cultural presence rather than a cultural absence.

77 Jane Eyre is one of the uncanny tropes in the text, and the first I examine in this chapter; it serves as an intertext to enact MacDonald’s revision of colonial narratives that portray the ideal nation as uniform. Her revision of Jane Eyre proves one of the many tropic tools to question the fixity of the canon, and underscores the internal contradictions within ideological systems that have shaped representations of Canadian identity. The revision of Jane Eyre with Mr. Rochester’s severed hand offers a different literary history and symbolically deforms the grasp of inherited texts employed in the formation of colonial nationalisms. As such, MacDonald reflects and deflects fantasies of homogeneity by telling the story of a competing matrilineal line. She examines ethnic policies and the fetish of a multi-cultural mosaic suggestive of the formation of the

Canadian nation, all through images of the body as a trope wrestling with the familiar and familial.

Subsequently, I consider how the Piper house is uncanny and “unhomely,” in reference to Freud’s unhemlich house. The ghosts that haunt the Piper family insist on the existence of an in-between space rather than the authenticity of a standardized, pure- blood family model. Moreover, the presence of ghosts contests the theory that Canadians lack an identity, without demanding the establishment of a collectively authorized community. Like Burnard, MacDonald emphasizes the house over the home and references Victorian novel conventions to script alternative possibilities for her female characters both inside and outside domestic realism. Indeed, MacDonald emphasizes how the matrilineal dynasty undermines the conventional patrilineal heritage of the traditional family saga.

78 Thirdly, this chapter examines how memory and narration deform the master familial story, which is symbolized by the family tree in MacDonald’s novel. The Piper family tree, first officially drafted by Mercedes as a gift for her father, introduces a paternal genealogical plot that the feminine storytellers rewrite as they each experience uncanny moments that inspire recollections of the truth behind their roots. The tree not only underscores the importance of the uncanny in the text, but also stresses the fear of tainted bloodlines via miscegenation. Mercedes’s attempt to draft a standardized tree suggestive of the family’s lineage proves as problematic as the concept of imagining one

Canadian national identity. Though some sense of kinship is important, the individual identities illustrate the power of distinction in shaping a story. Just as Jane Eyre appears at opportune moments in the text, revised and in relation to various Piper girl narratives, the family tree remains uprooted purposefully.

In the final section of this chapter, I consider MacDonald’s criticism of dominant notions of biological normalcy as they relate to ideologies of human value. Lily’s deformity is the most obvious confrontation with the formation of normal bodies and patrilineal histories. She refuses to be cured, accepting her crippled body and refusing to be validated by religious authority. Through Lily, MacDonald subtly critiques the heternormative religious narratives that uphold patriarchal governance. Kathleen’s body is deformed, not just by its beautiful exterior but also because it is depicted as a mere vessel for a voice, except perhaps during her romantic relations with Rose. Lastly,

Frances’s work as a stripper, acting as a youthful girl guide accentuates the novel’s dismissal of gender, age, sexual orientation, and ethnicity as regimes defining the contours of the body.

79 In the preface to Trans.Can.Lit Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki argue: “The body literary does not always have a symmetrical relationship to the body politic; the literary is inflected and infected by the political in oblique and manifest ways, at the same time that it asserts its unassimilability” (viii). Indeed, the female bodies in MacDonald’s text overturn the symmetrical relationship of the body literary to a body politic traditionally driven by patrilineal accounts of genealogical origins. Their revisions of the family tree, history, and colonial discourses assert their resistance to a national imaginary ingrained in a uniform, rather than deformed narrative.

“achingly absorbed in Jane Eyre” (186)

One tool that unleashes uncanny moments in the text is the appearance and disappearance of references to Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre finds its way to the Piper household via a crate of books ordered by James, books he has specifically selected as classics to educate and culturally elevate himself and his family:

One evening that spring, he pried the lid off a packing crate and removed

untold treasure: book after beautiful book, Dickens, Plato, The Oxford

Book of English Verse – he paused over the latter, weighing it in his

hands; just read that cover to cover, thought James, you could go

anywhere, converse with the Queen. Treasure Island, The World’s Best

Essays, The Origin of Species. (MacDonald 21)

He reads aloud to Materia, quizzing her on content in hope of enhancing her intellectual value as his wife. After all, his mother tells him that he must aspire to rise up in culture and class “for they were part of the British Empire” (7), and he will have “a family that

80 would fill his house with beautiful music and the silence of good books” (9). The passage illustrates Canada’s connection to the Empire, and how literary texts were employed as vessels for nation-building. In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said demonstrates the unique relationship of the novel to imperial process. He states, “I am not trying to say that the novel – or the culture in the broad sense – caused imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other” (70-1). The crate of books in the Piper household illustrates the influence of imperialist discourse on the shaping of cultural imagination in

Western nations, but also how in revising Jane Eyre, and including references to masterpieces of the Western tradition, MacDonald acknowledges the still prevalent influence of canonical texts in contemporary literature and how what becomes important is not their mere presence, but what writers do with them.

Although James does not take notice of Materia’s family wealth when he first meets her, her beauty and musical talent prove attractive and correspond with his mother’s aspirations for him “to read the classics, to play piano and to expect something finer in spite of everything” (MacDonald 7). Materia does not remain beautiful for long; rather, she is transformed by her first pregnancy into a monstrously deformed body, described as a “lump of dough” that heightens her darker skin and thus her racial difference (25). As James watches her grow, he hopes their child will be born “fair” and no longer finds himself attracted to Materia’s “summer skin the colour of sand” (12).

Instead, he begins to see an error in her ways for perversely seducing him and running away from her family, which he pinpoints as an obvious “racial flaw” (34). His sudden condemnation of her racial difference, younger age, and lower educational level (as a

81 result of her youth) leads to his growing security as the patriarch of the family, despite his less financially lucrative background. Hence the pregnancy marginalizes Materia, as both physically deformed and racially different.

Moreover, her pregnancy enacts a primary gothic element of the text – a curse.

When Materia chooses to leave her family to marry James, an “enklese” (MacDonald 17), her father arranges for a good-sized home for the newlyweds, not out of happiness but out of obligation. He then curses his own daughter: “May God curse her womb” (17). This curse resonates with the tone set by the photographs in the preface, reminding the reader that the “white frame house” may be new, but it is already “haunted” (18). The racial prejudices between the two families introduce MacDonald’s examination of how the fear of miscegenation haunts the Piper bloodline, and the clash of cultures between the

Mahmouds and the Pipers continues across generations. Materia’s womb is far from cursed in the traditional sense. She is, as Kathleen notes “A baby factory” (83), and produces several offspring for James. She does not, however, give birth to a male heir and indeed, her womb is cursed, producing daughters that inspire in James a deep desire he attempts to repress.

Despite already being married to Materia, James expresses an anxiety over the result of his miscegenation and attempts to control her cultural influence on their children. The second she speaks to their baby in Arabic, James interferes, telling her to

“Speak English” to avoid confusing his daughter (MacDonald 35). From this point on,

Materia begins to lose her humanity and becomes a mere vessel for procreation, constantly presented as an animal stripped of human characteristics such as language, voice, culture, and heritage. Indeed, James compares her to a cow “stooped over her

82 plate, masticating slowly” (67), always looking six or seven months pregnant. He becomes overly conscious of social perceptions and worries his daughter might be stigmatized if Materia is seen in public. Therefore, although he does not lock her in an attic à la Rochester, he no longer takes her for walks and tells her she’s “too fat” (37), all the while taking Kathleen for long walks knowing they “turned heads” (38), and for the right reasons.

Materia’s descent into monstrosity and later into madness is like Bertha’s in Jane

Eyre, and both madwomen illustrate Foucault’s argument that madness was a means of confining and silencing the other “in order to define the normative, rational self”

(Somacarrera 63 – 4). James quickly descends into non-normative and irrational behaviour, sexually desiring two of his daughters and obsessively attempting to control the purity of the bloodline. By stripping Materia of all respectability, James positions himself as perfectly sane despite his sick desires, contrasting “[h]er dark body and soft mind” (MacDonald 63). He forges a patriarchal household where his transgressions are obscured by the sexual and racial transgressions of Materia and his daughters.

Materia’s inability to love Kathleen begins her descent, for although she is self- critical and wishes she could love her, “her heart was empty” (MacDonald 39). As

James’s incestual desire for Kathleen develops, Materia begins to see herself as a monster for not interfering: “Materia saw herself in a clear glass at last, and it was monstrous”

(55). Her envisioned monstrosity becomes a means for her to diminish herself and her roots in contrast to Kathleen’s porcelain beauty. Materia has become the Oriental other compared to her daughter, who epitomizes English propriety: “Silky red-gold hair, green eyes and white white skin” (35). James grooms Kathleen into an English lady, buying

83 her an “English pram” (38), dressing her in “English clothes” (38), and ensuring she receives a proper English education. The Western image supporting colonial roots that he feels he failed to inspire in Materia, he cultivates in Kathleen in order to guarantee her success and rise in class. Kathleen quickly learns to speak with a perfect accent, whereas

Materia fails to master even conversational English.

Like her mother’s attractiveness, however, Kathleen’s “preternatural perfection” fades in the eyes of James when he discovers her relationship with Rose (MacDonald 41).

Kathleen’s journal, which narrates her New York adventures and affair with Rose, connects Kathleen to Brontë’s Jane, who leaves her family to live a life away from conventional expectations. This connection is further illustrated by the “one surviving photograph of Kathleen” hidden within the pages of the Piper family’s copy of Jane Eyre

(256). Indeed, both Kathleen and Jane find themselves in unconventional relationships,

Jane with Rochester, an older man of a higher class, and Kathleen with Rose, who transgresses all boundaries from class, gender, and race (Somacarrera 67). When James catches Kathleen with Rose, he expresses his hidden desire for his daughter, but also his obsessive compulsion to control the family bloodline. Although he himself participated in miscegenation, he cannot stand to witness his prize English beauty follow in her mother’s footsteps. Kathleen’s behaviour transgresses social, sexual, and gender boundaries of propriety and purity in his eyes and he does whatever he can to maintain the ethnic purity of the family line. Yet his control over the Piper lineage relies on negation and opens an aporia in the masculine ideal of “purity” as it merges with taboo.

Thus James’s obsession with maintaining a “pure” family line ironically leads to incest, resulting in a destructive and impure lineage after all.

84 James, grateful that all his daughters turned out fair despite Materia’s genetic make-up, nonetheless believes that “there’s obviously a morbid tendency in the blood they inherited from Materia that made Kathleen lean towards colour…He dipped into Dr.

Freud in an effort to discover where to lay blame for Kathleen’s perversity” (MacDonald

359). Kathleen’s decision to get romantically and sexually involved with Rose is thus blamed on a matrilineal biological determinant, as well as by a general gender flaw.

James is blinded by his own biases, however, for Materia is not as dark as he continually implies. He says, “For on top of everything else [her feeble mind and horrible figure],

Materia was dark. He tried not to see it, but it was one of those things that was always before his eyes, now that the scales had fallen from them” (37). James refers to Materia’s darkness not only because of her skin colour, but as a result of her overall composure as somber and foul. Without directly stating it, James casts Materia as wicked, possessing a gift of deception as well as a lack of civility.

After Kathleen’s death, however, Mrs. Luvovitz gives Materia a bath and notes:

“It’s a milk skin Materia has, not in colour but in texture, all curves, compact muscle under a soft sheath” (MacDonald 162). The accent on the texture versus the colour of

Materia’s body grants her substance, as does her name that hints at a present and material constitution. In this scene, MacDonald also draws attention to the unreliably of racial ideologies or hierarchies and “suggests that there is more overlap than distinction, more similarity than difference” (Somacarrera 62). First impressions in the novel confirm this statement as well, for Giles – Kathleen’s chaperone in New York – appears “a little spinster lady” (MacDonald 123), who proves much more daring and wise than Kathleen’s first impression suggests.

85 Similarly, Rose’s talent as a pianist goes unnoticed at first “because she is black and therefore outside any system that nurtures and advances a classical virtuosa”

(MacDonald 125). On the other hand, Rose acknowledges Kathleen’s talent, but refuses to give her the time of day: “The voice is worth considering. The singer can go to hell”

(125). None of the characters escapes stereotypical renderings imposed upon them, or that they impose on others. All are trapped by social viewpoints based on formulaic characteristics common to all humanity.

Aside from Kathleen’s and Materia’s early associations with Jane Eyre, subsequent references to the Victorian novel relate to Frances and Mercedes and how they reflect the nineteenth-century dichotomy of “angel in the house” and fallen female.

Mercedes resembles a governess, overseeing the effective running of the household and always presenting herself appropriately:

Mercedes doesn’t like to raise her voice. Anything worth saying is

worth saying in a civilized tone. This means she climbs a lot of stairs.

Mercedes’ light brown braids are decently folded into a bun at the

back of her neck. She wears a cameo fastened to the throat of her stand-up

collar, and her blue serge skirt hangs three inches below her knees.

Modesty is always in style. Mercedes is a slim girl who is scrupulous

about her posture. Mercedes is twelve going on forty. (185)

As Somacarrera notes, “Mercedes, like Jane Eyre, corresponds to a type of female who is supportive of Victorian imperialist values” (68). She suggests the “angel in the house” motif, the proper Victorian heart of the home projecting values in line with the body politic. Elizabeth Langland discusses the iconic Victorian “angel in the house,”

86 conventionally considered submissive and selfless, and argues that they were woman performing the crucial task of upholding social hierarchy (8). The home being the moral haven, the angels worked towards “specific goals of class hegemony, their actions were rarely the product of conscious deliberation and calculation, rather the result of an unconscious disposition (inscribed even in the body through speech and bearing) to act in certain ways” (10). In the above passage describing Mercedes, MacDonald clearly portrays a Victorian angel, wearing a cameo at her throat, a longer skirt, hair in a bun, and never raising her voice. Mercedes protects the Piper family status quo, dresses the part, and expresses her fervent faith like a proper lady.

Unlike Mercedes, Frances is “a bad girl” (MacDonald 174). She is the foil to the

“angel in the house,” representing the “fallen woman.” The “fallen woman” is a

Victorian category that is “historically determined, and typically gendered, conception of attenuated autonomy or fractured identity” (Anderson, Tainted Souls 23). Like Eve, the fallen woman is portrayed as a victim of forces beyond her control that result in her loss of a socially acceptable character (9). The term applied “to a range of feminine identities: prostitutes, unmarried women who engage in sexual relations with men, victims of seduction, adulteresses, as well as variously delinquent lower-class women” (2).

Similarly, it was often applied to actresses and female performers, for many “imagined the burlesquer as monstrously depraved, fallen from moral grace” (Pullen 124). Thus it is not surprising that Frances not only sports her Girl Guide uniform at the speakeasy, drawing attention to her youthful physicality, but also that she becomes a prostitute and performer of burlesque acts.

87 Of all the characters in the text, however, Frances is the most loved sister.

Despite Frances’s fallen status and inappropriate sexual behaviour, both Mercedes and

Lily are unable to dislike her or remain angry with her for very long. At first, Frances is depicted as a rebellious child, telling lies to scare Lily, destroying Mercedes’s personal property, and regularly defying James to provoke his anger. She seems to have accepted

James’s label as “the bad apple” (MacDonald 246). Sister Eustace asks Frances what she wants to become when she grows up and Frances responds, both humorously and honestly: “a cabaret parasite” (245). She does, in fact, aspire to spectacle and performance, something she expresses through her love of silent films and adoration of

American actress Louise Brooks, famous as a vamp. She even visits the town barber with a picture of Brooks in order to request a Brooks bob, which the barber hesitantly delivers.

Frances degenerates from being a conventional Victorian fallen woman, however, when she moves from passive receiver of her father’s beatings and molesting, to the abuser herself. In an attempt to get expelled from school, she sexually abuses “Puss-Eye” by jamming her “hand down his pants. She grabbed and jerked while he cried”

(MacDonald 291). This act is sufficient to get her expelled, which in turn provides her with the time to become a regular performer at the Speakeasy, raising funds for Lily. At the Speakeasy, Frances performs a Brooks-inspired striptease as a parody of her audience’s expectations:

She invests her early profits in face paint and costumery. She’ll start out

as Valentino in a striped robe and turban. While one hand teases the piano

keys, she removes the robe to reveal Mata Hari in a haze of purple and

88 red. The seven veils come off one by one to ‘Scotland the Brave’ and, just

in case any one’s in danger of getting more horny than amused, there’s

always a surprise to wilt the wicked and stimulate the unsuspecting. For

example, she may strip down to a diaper, then stick her thumb in her

mouth. (292-93)

Frances’s act “transgresses multiple borders,” from gender to nationalities to dance to childhood (Rifkind n.pag.). In a perverse way, Frances asserts her subjectivity via her performance, inflecting the act with various aspects of her personality. Her body becomes “a series of masks that transgress social categories and moral boundaries separating dangers, nations, adult sexuality and childhood innocence, domesticity and public performance” (n.pag.). Frances’s ability to perform numerous identities suggests the permeability of the boundaries of the body and the self, but also the problematic nature of freedom. Although she finds freedom in performance, her roles remain influenced by the scripts she enacts to revise (e.g. the bad apple).

She becomes baby burlesque, stripping and playing piano at the Speakeasy as a means of defying the patriarchal rule of her father. Her choice to control her sexuality through prostitution functions as a backlash of the abuse she experiences with James.

She does not enjoy the work, per se, for when she presents sober she feels like an

“automaton” (MacDonald 342), only going through the motions robotically. Yet she has a compulsion to perform and claim ownership over her classification as the family’s black sheep. Interestingly, Frances “remains a technical virgin throughout” (293), also governing what she allows to happen between her and her clients. She lap dances, allows men to grope her breasts, but she never participates in sexual intercourse, wanting to save

89 herself for her secret mission – a mission that she, herself, fails to comprehend until later in the text.

Given Frances’s young age of twelve, her childlike appearance is considered a disability in her profession, though one that seems appealing to certain male clients.

Frances feels out of place at the Piper home, but also on the stage. She considers herself inhuman, a false being left in the place of the real Frances who has somehow remained present: “Frances concludes, not for the first time, that she herself is a changeling”

(MacDonald 317). The use of the term “changeling” reveals her perception of herself as an imposter, not really human but living a human life. Only upon discovering Leo Taylor and deciding that he will play a significant role in her quest, does Frances begin to find direction. Her pregnancy allows her to stop her sexual performances, and she is finally

“stripped of irony. She is in the presence of something bigger – namely Herself” (416).

What initially makes Frances fallen, or “bad” in the eyes of Mercedes, however, is not her decision to become a stripper or her obvious challenges to their father, but rather the racial prejudice awakened by her union with Leo Taylor and their subsequent offspring. James’s fear of the degeneration of his family, and thus of the white race, arguably pushes his children in the opposite direction. Mercedes, in hope of satisfying her father’s wishes and protecting the Piper family, hides Frances’s baby in an orphanage. In doing so, she also ensures that Frances will always depend on her for support. In fact, the only time when Mercedes seems content is when Frances and James are convalescent, one with a bullet wound and the other with a stroke: “At last, Mercedes thinks, we are a family. Daddy is senile, Frances is crazy, Lily is lame and I’m unmarried. But we are a family” (MacDonald 431). Her vision emphasizes how

90 conformity, in this context, arises only from incapacitating others into submission. She believes she is the moral centre of the home, a duty she considers hers since their mother’s death. Together, Mercedes and Frances represent the dualistic sides of Jane

Eyre, matronly and rebellious; they reaffirm MacDonald’s emphasis that identity categories must be interrogated to expose the exclusions they generate. After all, neither

Mercedes nor Frances is entirely good or bad. Both find themselves navigating between both categorical possibilities and as Howells astutely observes, what MacDonald celebrates is the “mixture of unconventionality and tradition” employed by Brontë

(Contemporary 113).

“Frances is uncanny” (196)

MacDonald’s novel is a direct challenge “to the assumptions about Canada’s cultural absence” (Baetz, n.pag.). It issues this challenge through an uncanny pluralizing of time and history that allows for the possibility of a plural future (n.pag.). The concept of a Canadian cultural absence is perhaps best illustrated by Earle Birney’s famous last line in the poem “CanLit”: “it’s only by our lack of ghosts / we’re haunted” (386), words also quoted by Joel Baetz in his article on MacDonald’s text. In fact, I distinctly remember my first-year undergraduate survey of Canadian literature taught by Dr. Robert

Lecker and its emphasis on Canada as a blank space, lacking a distinctive literary identity in comparison to our American and British counterparts. Having recently moved back to

Canada after spending over ten years in Europe, I found myself in passionate agreement.

I had no idea what comprised “Canadian,” and the concepts we were taught that semester

– from our lack of ghosts, to wild landscapes, to definition by negation – haunted my

91 consciousness so that the lack of a defined Canadian identity appeared to me a reasonable perspective. As Kieran Keohane states in Symptoms of Canada: “At the heart of the symbolic order of Canada is an ironic relationship to the lack…We know that we lack particularity, and that acknowledgement of the lack is our particularity” (39). Ten years later, my perspective has changed from Canadian literature as defined by a lack of ghosts, to the absent presence of cultural and ethnic narratives previously unheard, buried or ignored. I disagree with Keohane – we do not lack particularity and MacDonald’s novel clearly illustrates how particularity actually drives Canadian literature.

MacDonald’s text begins with a haunting – “They’re all dead now” (MacDonald

1) – to refute the claim to a lack of ghosts in Canadian history and literature. Her use of photographs in the preface emphasizes the physicality of these ghosts as visceral bodies deformed by traumatic events; they are not a unified community, but snapshots of the various bodies that continue to act as sites of conflict over the notion of what constitutes a

“community” or “identity” in the first place. Though they refuse to be typecast under one identity rubric, they also manage to escape the notion that they lack particularity.

The preface, entitled “Silent Pictures,” previews the main characters of the novel, the location and atmosphere of New Waterford, and the house. MacDonald’s description of the pictures like a photo album resembles a visual family tree and hints at the secrets that have yet to be unearthed. In a way, the preface acts as an operatic overture, providing the reader with tidbits of the story to come. The format inspires the reader’s curiosity, promoting the formation of expectations that MacDonald will deform limb by limb through her astute gradual plot revelations. Thus the opening few pages set the tone for the novel’s continuous reminder that initial impressions are often incorrect, and that

92 bodies, particularly those entrapped within the borders of a photograph, cannot be trusted at face value. What matters is “the process of identification [which becomes] as important in the construction of identity as the existing system of values denoting hierarchies of difference” (Rukszto 18). Although photographs appear silent and still, they offer a dynamic opportunity to constitute identity, for the reader brings to the interpretation of the image his or her own baggage of values and customs. The unpredictable possibilities defy uniformity – and here we could consider “nation” an identity category – and therefore, the preface introduces MacDonald’s thesis that to situate diverse bodies under one common cultural metaphor (e.g. mosaic) proves dangerously restrictive. I realize this may seem like an odd remark, given I focus on

“deformity” in the novel; but I want to clarify that although I see deformity as a significant trope, I do not consider it the primary “cultural” category or metaphor.

Rather, I am more aligned with Rukszto’s employment of the verb “queering” as an exploration of “the process of enunciating difference” to deconstruct the boundaries of nation and the prescriptive means of belonging (32). As such, deformity is also a means of enunciating difference.

The uncanny is a useful concept for exploring how MacDonald expresses distinction, because the repressed memories and secrets deform the homogeneous ideal of the Pipers as a multi-cultural Canadian family suggestive of national belonging. Rukszto notes how many reviews of the novel admire its representation of multiculturalism as a unifying Canadian theme, but in fact, what MacDonald does is underscore how difference is “queer and disruptive” (25), or to use my terminology, difference deforms and disrupts.

Hence the uncanny moments in the text disrupt the coherence of narrative and the family

93 bloodline, rather than support any popular idioms defining “Canadian” and Canadian society.

Lily fittingly narrates the opening preface, as we discover only at the end of the novel. Once Lily is born, the Piper family secrets are slowly unearthed, through encoded memories, fragmented dreams, fractured conversations, stories, and atoning revelations.

The word “here” which opens nearly every paragraph of the preface suggests a recollection as Lily narrates: a summoning of the Piper story. The picture of New

Waterford sets the present scene as alive, the “sighing sound” of the sea exceeding the silent boundaries of the photographic frame, imitating Frances’s moving picture and the

“creek, flowing black and shiny between its narrow banks” (MacDonald 1, 3). The image of James, asleep with pigtails in his hair foreshadows a later scene in the novel.

MacDonald’s decision to introduce James here is interesting, for at first he appears non- threatening, and even ridiculous. Overall, the opening pictures hint at the unconscious responses and repressed childhood memories that will come to light as the plot progresses.

James turns to Freud in an attempt to understand the impulse behind Kathleen’s sexual desires, which he deems inappropriate. He discovers Kathleen in a lesbian relationship with Rose, an African-American woman, and the shock of her sexual orientation on top of miscegenation drives him to the brink. He agrees with Freud’s assessment of women as “the dark continent” (MacDonald 359), ascribing moral deviance to a racial deficiency and “bio-psychological queerness” (Laouyene 138). More importantly, Freudian theories haunt MacDonald’s novel. Lily reads to James “fairy tales and Freud” (MacDonald 421), Frances is deemed “uncanny” (196), and repressed

94 childhood memories, incest, and egos drive the plot. According to Freud, the uncanny involves “an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a content” (“The Uncanny” 249).

He outlines the uncanny experience as reliant on repetition and the return to light of a repressed thought or traumatic event, pushed back purposefully by the unconscious.

Freud uses the German word “unheimlich” as the equivalent of “uncanny,” but as Freud notes in a footnote, “unheimlich” literally means “unhomely” (219). Unhomely seems a better term in the context of the novel, given that uncanny moments reveal instances where the characters do not feel at home in their own skin, let alone their own house.

In MacDonald’s text, the Piper house is also uncanny. Despite being a new gift, the house is immediately described as “haunted” (MacDonald 18); it acts as a receptacle for existing ghosts and the ghosts that have yet to come. As Freud notes, Heimlich implies “belonging to the house or family” (“The Uncanny” 222), and the popular

German expression “an unhemlich house” indicates “a haunted house” (241). The ghosts in this case are not unfamiliar, but they nonetheless do not belong to the house or family.

Materia, despite living in a house purchased for her by her family, never feels at home within the walls of the “two-storey white frame house” (MacDonald 18). She asks James to move to New York, where she dreams of musical adventures, but he refuses to leave their “home” (21). He recognizes later, however, that although he does not believe in ghosts, he also fears areas of the house: “James, honest with himself, admits that there are places and times which he avoids in his own home” (209). He has trouble accepting the feel of raised hairs on the back of his neck and the presence of a demon, which he envisions like a physical warning of his unconscious thoughts.

95 The idea that the Piper house is haunted is further portrayed by the symbolism of

“No Man’s Land” – a phrase that MacDonald uses to describe an in-between space in which the characters exist. In her chapter “No Man’s Land,” MacDonald describes the area from a war perspective: “The mud between the opposing trenches is known as No

Man’s Land. This is a reasonable name for a stretch of contested ground that has yet to be won by either side” (108). Most of the characters at some point reside in a symbolic

“no man’s land” – appearing neither alive nor quite dead, both pure and perverse, or as the novel writes “[m]en equal parts monster and martyr” (170). For example, Leo Taylor initially perceives Frances as a ghost: “the little Girl Guide standing in his back yard staring at him. She is a ghost. What does she want?” (325). Similarly, Kathleen wonders if Rose’s mother, Jeanne, is fully alive: “there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell” (518). More importantly, Frances tells Lily a story that hints at the possibility that all the characters in the text are actually dead and simply telling stories in order to feel alive: “we think we’re alive, but we’re not” (295).

Similarly to the metaphoric role of the house in Burnard’s novel, the Piper house is itself a body and an embodiment of the family’s histories. In fact, at several moments the characters themselves are either described as a house, or as directly connected to a room in the house. For instance, during her pregnancy Materia is portrayed as “big as a house” (MacDonald 24), and during her pregnancy, Kathleen is hidden in the attic in an attempt to quarantine her shame. Kathleen’s photograph of her laughing in front of the house with the shadow of Materia gazing through the window in the background further illustrates the way the characters are connected to a house: Kathleen, always feeling

96 superior to her mother, is out front, and Materia, who struggles with her lack of love for

Kathleen, remains in the background.

The kitchen also serves as a physical extension of several of the characters, from

Materia learning to cook to her suicide in the oven. Our first image of Materia shows her dead in the oven: “What did she plan to cook that day? When mumma died, all the eggs in the pantry went bad – they must have because you could smell that sulphur smell all the way down Water Street” (MacDonald 2). Immediately, her character is associated not only with the kitchen, but with the act of cooking as her common practice.

Traditionally a feminine space, the kitchen presents scenes in which the family comes together for dinner, as well as scenes in which Mrs. Luvovitz teaches Materia to cook. A child bride, Materia enters her new marriage and house not knowing how to cook. Since her own family has disowned her, she has no mother or grandmother to teach her the ropes. Mrs. Luvovitz, the Jewish neighbour, takes her under her wing and Materia becomes an excellent cook of wide cultural variety – from steak and kidney pie the way

James’s Scots-Irish mother made it, to chicken soup with matzo balls, to Lebanese kibbeh. The preparation and consumption of food becomes one of the many ways the women share and shape their narratives, highlighting the interdependence of the cultural and the culinary in broadening national borders. Tanya Lewis argues something similar when she notes: “Although MacDonald identifies a particular cuisine as typical of Cape

Breton, her use of food in Fall and her insistence upon the mixing of foodways serve to highlight regional diversity” (101). Lewis perceives the symbolic use of food in Fall as an expression of individual as well as regional identity, combining the various influences of the population. Indeed, food acts as another trope for MacDonald’s overall thesis

97 regarding the presence of varied ethnic backgrounds in the social and alimentary definition of Canadian culture.

Carol Ann Howells argues: “The domestic space of the Pipers’ white house, which replaces the Gothic castle or abbey, becomes the dominant architectural metaphor”

(Contemporary 113). The attic, however, is the most obvious gothic space in Fall, metaphorically mirroring the text itself as it hides the numerous secrets gradually released as the plot progresses. MacDonald uses the attic to address the gothic tradition of the

“madwoman in the attic,” as a hearkening to Jane Eyre. The correlated characters are

Materia and Kathleen, both confined to the house for being monstrous and shameful.

Upon her return from New York, Kathleen is even constrained to the attic. MacDonald also uses dolls to signify the dichotomy of woman as angel or other (mad, monstrous, sexual). For example, The Old-Fashioned Girl doll that Mercedes owns is broken by Lily and reformed by Frances into a repulsive form referred to as a “disfigurine”: “The Old-

Fashioned Girl has a parasol for a head and a head for a parasol” (MacDonald 257).

Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic deconstruct the dichotomy of madwoman versus angel in the house. They emphasize the need to kill off the limited characterizations of these women, which is what Lily and Frances do by transforming the doll into a disfigurine rather than an idealistic figurine. Mercedes opts to place the desecrated doll in the hope chest because “the attic is so separate from the rest of the house. In a state of perpetual quarantine” (MacDonald 258). MacDonald portrays the space as an area where truths can be concealed, superficially cleansing the characters of shameful secrets by providing them with a safe haven for the expression of their collective unconscious.

98 Moreover, in the attic, the hope chest made of cedar inspires some of the most poignant scenes that reveal the anxiety of contamination that produces prejudiced conventions. The first hope chest scene that prompts an uncanny experience presents

Materia smelling the empty chest to beckon memories of “the Mediterranean, her grandfather’s silk farm; the dark elixir of her language…The Cedars of Lebanon”

(MacDonald 26). Materia’s conscious beckoning does not directly refer to Freud’s definition of the uncanny, for she purposefully invokes her thoughts; however, the scene illustrates how she has succumbed to allowing her heritage to exist in the back of her mind, evoked only through the power of smell offered by the hope chest – the container of hope.

Following this scene, Materia herself seems uncanny. Despite the continuous emphasis on her monstrous size, her body seems more symbolic than real, and her presence more ethereal than earthly. Mrs. Luvovitz wonders if she’s “human” or “an omen” and after talking with Materia and discovering her birth family name says confidently “You’ve got a family” (MacDonald 29). Materia is quick to correct her: “I don’t belong to them any more…I’m dead” (29). Materia’s words, “I’m dead,” hint at her out-of-body existence, as though she has left her roots stored safely in the hope chest and simply performs her earthly duties like an automaton.

Although Materia leaves the hope chest literally empty, the children fill the space with books, tokens, and other objects related to their own memories: Materia’s vaudeville music, the ruined Old-Fashioned Girl, the baptismal gown, and Trixie who gets stuck and dies in the chest. The chest contains the deformations or disfigurations of the family, hidden from open view but nonetheless present and suggestive of their

99 collective unconscious. In the chest and attic, they are able to explore uncanny invocations of familiar fears, but also capable of hiding them if necessary. In the attic, the characters often confront the truths they’ve buried, uncovering their memories of the past.

For instance, when James manages to break into the attic where Kathleen gives birth to her twins, he finds her dead, the centre of her body sliced open and Materia holding the two babies covered in blood. The scene is described as a painting combining elements of the gothic and Catholicism: the crucified Christ over the bed frame, pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus on the wall, the dead young mother with her hair across the pillow, a potential Guardian Angel, hovering clouds in the place of the wall, and God

“waiting” (MacDonald 144). The narrator says that if this were truly a painting, James would find “a demon peering out from under the lid of the hope chest at the foot of the bed” (143), but given the scene is viewed by James’s eye “the supernatural elements are, if present, invisible” (144). Nonetheless, the moment becomes, for James, a memory he immediately represses “into a real-life hope chest as if it were a family heirloom” (144).

Fourteen years later he recollects the scene, but the recollection is so painful, he passes out. The passage of James viewing the scene of his daughter’s death with the invisible demon peering from the chest demonstrates how he has buried the secret of his sexual abuse so deeply into his unconscious that its haunting presence manifests itself via a symbolic demon figure.

Freud highlights the uncontrollable double nature of the uncanny and “casts it as a malformed progeny of one’s own psychic denial” (Baetz, n.pag.). For James, that malformed progeny is the appearance of a “demon” that he and Materia both see, an

100 example of how an individual trauma contributes to a collective unconscious. Materia recognizes its existence, for “[i]t looked at her. She knows it’s coming back”

(MacDonald 67). When Kathleen is born, she holds her cocooned in her arms and “the demon grinning at her again from the mouth of its furnace” ensures its presence remains to haunt the family (68). Materia decides at that moment to bargain with the demon and agrees to give it to Kathleen if it will limit itself “to one daughter…The demon grins.

Agrees” (69). Materia’s bargain foreshadows Kathleen’s death and the presence of the demon in the family attic, a manifestation of both James’s inappropriate desire for his daughter, and Materia’s lack of love for her.

James’s sexual desire for Kathleen is something he attempts to repress early in the text. Holding her close, he voices his concern: “Then he shocks himself. He lets her go and draws back abruptly so she will not notice what has happened to him. Sick. I must be sick” (MacDonald 61). In an attempt to outsmart the demon and his unnatural desire for his daughter, James enlists for World War I. During his battles, he carries her photograph, however, rather than Materia’s. He volunteers for everything, constantly putting his own life in danger, finding himself often the sole survivor. Upon his return, he decides to send Kathleen to New York, again in an attempt to outsmart the demon.

James represses his desire for Kathleen, recognizing it as inappropriate until he discovers her in bed with Rose, her African-American lesbian partner, and his craving overrides his reason. He instinctually judges Kathleen’s relationship as less appropriate than his own physical reaction, which is to rape her and assert his perverse patriarchal possession. As Laouyene astutely notes, “So ingrained is the idea of ethnic purity in his mind that inseminating his own daughter, albeit unconsciously, would be the only way to

101 keep the bloodline untainted” (141). The fear of miscegenation haunts James, despite his own bi-racial relationship, which he rarely considers other than to place the blame on

Materia for seducing him into marriage. He acknowledges how he “doesn’t hate blacks, he just doesn’t want them near his bloodline” (MacDonald 359). In Kathleen’s case, the transgression proves even more abnormal to James because it defies what he conceives as socially acceptable sexual and racial boundaries. As Butler argues, “[e]specially at those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity, the ‘threat’ of homosexuality takes on a distinctive complexity” (Bodies 18). This threat challenges James’s perceptions of normative white patriarchy.

For Kathleen, the dangerous demon is “Pete” – a faceless figure that resembles the scarecrow in the Piper garden. Pete begins to appear after Materia forces Kathleen into a baptism in hope of cleansing her from evil. She warns Kathleen that if she is too vain and appreciates her beauty too much, “the devil will appear behind you”

(MacDonald 76). Arguably, Pete is a manifestation of Kathleen’s unconscious awareness of her father’s incestual attraction. In fact, Kathleen, in an attempt to scare Frances for using her things, tells her she will send Pete, “the bodechean” after her (98), a foreshadowing of James’s sexual molesting of Frances. After numerous nightmares,

James takes a young Kathleen out to the garden to beat “Pete,” the scarecrow. Pete seems to disappear from Kathleen’s nighttime fears until James abuses her, illustrating how Pete signifies the demon James ignores.

Frances also illustrates Freud’s theory of the uncanny, for her mind is a cave that never forgets (146). “Slippery Frances is consumed by her role as the Piper family’s

102 retainer of secrets and stories” (Gordon 160), and therefore her role in the novel is to repeat and deform the stories of ghosts, scarecrows, buried babies, and dead mothers.

Images keep popping into her mind to reveal repressed memories, such as the image of

Kathleen giving birth in the attic. Not recalling the truth of the story in its entirety,

Frances tells Lily a made-up version of her story:

It was the middle of the night. Daddy left her sleeping and went to get the

doctor. But she got up even though she was cut open…I was at my

bedroom window wearing my tartan housecoat. I saw Mumma down in

the creek. Ambrose was lying on the bottom. She was just about to do the

same thing to you. But she looked up and she saw me watching her and

she stopped. (MacDonald 251)

Frances makes up narratives based on fragmented memories in order to give meaning to her unconscious thoughts. For example, after Lily picks the mouth off the Raggedy-Lily- of-the-Valley doll, Frances paints her lips blue. When Lily asks why she did this,

Frances replies: “She stayed in the water too long and her lips turned blue” (183). The passage illustrates an uncanny moment for Frances, whose recollection of her accidently drowning Ambrose in the creek comes forth through play.

Perhaps the most obvious reference to the uncanny in relation to Frances, however, occurs when she takes Lily into an abandoned bootleg mine to visit Ambrose.

As Howells remarks, “the cave and the mine with its subliminal associations of ‘cave mind’ and Kathleen’s emptied womb transforms the sparse regional landscape into a theatre of psychic drama (and after all, what could be more ‘mine’ than the repressed memories of the unconscious)” (Contemporary 117). Frances drags Lily deeper and

103 deeper into the cave until Lily, afraid of what they might discover, pees in her pants. It is in this moment that Frances admits to Lily that she considers herself the “Devil”

(MacDonald 270), and Lily calms her with “It’s okay, Frances,” reassuring her that even if she is, she can be accepted (270). Without directly revealing to Lily what happened the night of Kathleen’s death, Frances asks for forgiveness – deep in the cave of her mind.

In addition, James’s anger towards Frances underscores the denial of the characters with regards to the events of the fateful night. When Frances enters the attic upon Kathleen’s death, she stows the image in the back of her mind: “But it steals the picture from her voluntary mind – grand theft art – and stows it, canvas side to the cave wall” (MacDonald 146). Mercedes, who later walks in on her father molesting Frances in the rocking chair, has pushed the memory of the “puppy sound” far back in her mind

(167), but nonetheless finds glimpses of the incident resurfacing through her questioning of James’s treatment of Frances as an example of the continual sharing and interchanging emotions within the family: “She ponders Daddy’s love for Lily. And his anger at

Frances” (189). James, in denial of his actions the night of Kathleen’s death, blames

Frances for Lily’s leg: “Only James knows whom Lily has to thank for her withered leg, because surely Frances was too young to remember” (194). James unconsciously knows that he is at fault for abusing Frances, but unable to voice his own regret and acknowledge his behaviour, he blames Frances for everything and nothing. Frances, aware of her father’s anger but not knowing why, regards herself as the child who must bear the brunt of his shame. She takes the blame for her sisters’ accidents and purposefully misbehaves to provoke James’s regular beatings and ensures that his anger only physically manifests itself on her body, rather than on her sisters. Her protective

104 instinct is also an unconscious need to understand why James sexually abuses her as a child. Hence she attempts to invoke in James the truth behind his own displaced anger, using the physical abuse as a means of understanding his previous actions.

Eventually James confesses the truth of the night and seeks forgiveness for his abuse of Frances. Finally, Frances must remember and repossess the story of what happened in order to move past the traumatic event. All the loose threads of her various versions of the event come together to form the true, but not an acceptable version. With

James’s narration, Frances finds closure and her stories come to an end: “They look so peaceful sitting side by side, with their eyes settled on separate pieces of sky. Like old friends. Daddy and Frances” (434).

Lily herself recollects the events of the night she was born, probably as a result of the pieces of stories she hears from others. In one telling scene, Lily awakens from a nightmare in which she is a drowning fish and narrates the dream to Frances:

“Fish don’t drown.”

“You were in it, Frances.”

“In the creek?”

“You were little.”

“…I know.”

“What were you holding?”

“Nothing….I don’t remember. Go to sleep. It was just a dream.” (225)

The use of ellipses, a formal marker MacDonald employs several times in the text, implies the uncanny sensation of a forgotten memory. After the dream, Ambrose’s ghost begins to appear to Lily. He tells her he is “No Man” (273), alluding to his lack of

105 physical presence and yet haunting presence through the secrets and stories collected by the Pipers. He is Lily’s twin, his absence metaphorically signified by her little leg, the result of catching polio, or as astutely termed in the text: “infantile paralysis” (168).

Hence Lily’s limp becomes a manifestation of the collective uncanny of the Piper family.

Lastly, MacDonald’s novel “is itself an uncanny narrative, both structurally and thematically” (Baetz n.pag.). Aside from her thematic exploration of the uncanny, the format of the novel itself suppresses, represses, and resurges; it refuses linearity, jumping back and forth in time without revealing too much of the buried truths too quickly.

MacDonald also includes a collection of songs, poems, letters, and Kathleen’s epistolary journal to complicate the structure of the text as a conventional family saga, once again exemplifying the layered family history. Therefore, MacDonald suggests that the Cape

Breton region, and in turn Canadian culture, survives because of its many ghosts and uncanny memories yet to be recovered.

“Imagine if you had a tree growing inside your skin” (157)

As well as the photo album, the Piper family tree is introduced as “[a] dry diagram covered mostly with names of dead Scottish people” (MacDonald 199).

Mercedes obsesses over this diagram and has been working “on it for almost a year”

(207). At the end of the novel, a formal family tree, completed by Mercedes in an attempt to achieve atonement for concealing the truth of Frances’s child, makes its way to

Lily and Rose now living in Harlem, New York. The boy who delivers the tree,

Anthony, is Frances’s illegitimate child, hidden for years in an orphanage by Mercedes in hopes of safeguarding the family’s reputation. The family tree finally ties up the plot’s

106 loose ends, clarifying connections; however, the tree itself undergoes several incarnations throughout the novel. Howells argues that what the family tree “reveals as it names relationships across cultural, racial, national, and sexual divides – Scottish, Lebanese, black, and lesbian – is the blurring of borders by its inclusion of excluded or marginalized groups” (Contemporary 107). I agree and would add that the tree subverts evolutionary conventions portrayed by imperialistic discourses intent on constructing the hierarchical

“family of man.” This addition responds to Howells’ question regarding why all the storytellers in MacDonald’s text are female. MacDonald revises the traditional “family of man” by offering a matrilineal line contesting the conventional patrilineal pattern.

Herbert Spencer, a social evolutionist, saw evolution as a tree: “The tree has always been one of the simplest forms of constructing classificatory schemes based on subsumption and hierarchy” (Fabian qtd. in McClintock, Imperial 37). The tree offers an ancient genealogy of power and becomes an image mediating nature and culture, to account for evolutionary human progress. According to this model, anatomy serves as an allegory of progress, and the family serves as a trope to sanction social hierarchy, placing the mixed families at the bottom because of cultural blending. Spencer’s construction of human evolution as a tree proved popular in the nineteenth century, securing the authority of man, and more importantly, the white man. MacDonald, on the other hand, refuses to embrace progressive and “white” authority in the shaping of the Piper family tree, just as she contests a singular national narrative derived from Britain, as James desires. The final Piper tree perverts a conservative genealogical project, securing the authority of women and racial difference. Hence the novel’s symbolic focus on the tree in relation to

107 the Piper family and its unsettled existence further revises colonial roots and serves as another means by which MacDonald writes back.

Howells makes this observation as she discusses the significance of the tree imagery in MacDonald’s text: “What is foregrounded here is the hidden multicultural and multiracial identity of one Canadian family, offered as a revisionary version of settler history that unravels English-Canadian colonial myths of whiteness and cultural unity through a dynastic narrative” (Contemporary 104). In the chapter “The Family Tree,”

Mercedes sketches the traditional paternal line, censoring any family secrets including her mother’s ethnic origin and Lily’s true parentage. She drafts an official version – the version without sin – just as everyone agrees that Kathleen died of influenza, even though

“[e]veryone knew that Kathleen was pregnant and that she died of the child” (MacDonald

165). Mercedes tells Lily that the tree “leads into the past. It tells us where we came from. But it doesn’t tell us where we’re going. Only God knows that” (207–8). Lily resists Mercedes’s explanation, unsure that the tree reflects their true lineage as it omits

“Other Lily” who was never baptized, and whom Mercedes has forgotten (208).

Mercedes explains to Lily the difference between a tree and a chart to suggest a scientific document:

“‘Tree’ is only an expression, Lily. If it looked like a tree then it

would be art. This is a chart.”

“Like a map?”

“Kind of.”

“Is there treasure?”

“Each name is a treasure.”

108 “Where does it lead to?”

“‘Map’ is just an expression too. It doesn’t lead anywhere.” (207)

In an attempt to transform the family tree into a work of art, Lily colours apples, earth, and worms “with crayons” onto the chart (213). Lily’s revision of Mercedes’s chart parallels Frances’s amendment of Jane Eyre, but also offers a reconsideration of Genesis via her symbolic “shiny red apples” (213). By transforming the inflexible chart, Lily rewrites Genesis, one of the oldest stories relating to the genealogy of humanity. After

Mercedes expresses her anger at the altered family chart, Lily and Frances opt to bury it under the rock where Ambrose has been buried (217), symbolizing the continued burial of family secrets and roots.

Before the rock covering Ambrose’s body and the deformed “dry diagram” drafted by Mercedes take their place in the Piper garden, another figure emerges, suggestive of the Piper family’s monstrous thoughts: Pete, the Scarecrow. Scarecrow symbolizes James’s failures to construct his family tree according to his British aspirations. When James’s life begins to unravel, he tears Pete the Scarecrow from the earth to mimic what he considers the downward spiral of his bloodline:

James tears the scarecrow free of the earth. Its body was impaled on a

stake and that stake must have been green wood, because now that Daddy

has yanked the pointed end from the ground you can see it is alive with

pale sprouting roots. Eventually a tree would have grown right up through

the scarecrow […] Imagine if you had a tree growing inside your skin […]

imagine seeing the green leaves everywhere, trapped just under your skin

and growing, imagine seeing the thin roots swirling under the surface of

109 the soles of your feet, their white ends looking for a place to poke through.

The earth is a magnet for roots. (157)

The earth, like a mother, represents the possibility of renewal and birth; it is “a magnet for roots” and has the power to transform Scarecrow, an inanimate object, into something living (157). By pulling Scarecrow out of the earth, James does what he does for the majority of the text: uproots his family, prohibiting their growth and existence without him. When he molests Frances shortly after, he continues his cycle of pollution, denying his behaviour as more hurtful and dangerous for the bloodline than his fears of miscegenation. Again, hinting at Genesis, the garden becomes a space in which the family has the potential to grow, but whose growth is arrested through James’s actions, and the burial of truth beneath a rock that replaces Scarecrow. The garden thus “doubles as a Gothic burial site” (Howells, Contemporary 114), hiding the dormant monstrous memories of the Piper household.

“The child seemed to be in disguise” (41)

Three physical anomalies draw attention to MacDonald’s portrayal of bodies as symbolic of the destructive ideologies that restrain rather than liberate identity:

Kathleen’s exceptional beauty, Lily’s little leg, and Frances’s performative sexuality.

Kathleen’s beauty inspires envy and proves the main reason for her marginalization, rather than her sexual orientation, which on the contrary allows her to flourish, opening her way into social circles and discovering her authentic voice. At the start of the text,

110 she is segregated, mostly as a result of James continually reminding her that she is unique, talented, and worthy of more than the average person.

At school, Kathleen has no friends and even the teachers fear her beauty, seeing her as fake: “The lady teacher got the creeps from the porcelain girl with the mermaid eyes. The child seemed to be in disguise” (MacDonald 41). Kathleen’s teacher distrusts her physical appearance, perceiving her perfection as a façade rather than truth.

Similarly, Materia questions Kathleen’s authenticity; she looks intently at her “[s]ilky red-gold hair, green eyes and white white skin” and wonders “where she’d come from”

(35). Ironically, beauty is seen as a deformity, a physical distinction that isolates and provokes stereotypical judgements. Kathleen’s beauty, like her ethnic background, is more a curse than a gift, and marginalizes her within her social network.

Moreover, outside the home Kathleen always remains alone, continually ostracized for her racial roots: “She may be peaches and cream but you should see her mother…black as the ace of spades, my dear” (MacDonald 97). Although she may be considered as perfect in the Piper household, idolized by her younger sisters and her father, Kathleen remains a social outsider. Her beautiful exterior proves more of an obstacle than a gift, but her talent provides a means of escape from a world in which she can never belong. In New York “Kathleen is truly and utterly and completely Kathleeen”

(122), for the environment, unlike Cape Breton, allows her to embrace life’s vertiginous possibilities. Her voice thus provides her with the tool to flee her family and social constraints.

Kathleen’s gift is her voice. As I note earlier in this chapter, it seems almost as though her body serves as a vessel for her voice, containing an ethereal presence. Our

111 first image of Kathleen, after all, is out of this world: “Kathleen sang so beautifully that

God wanted her to sing for Him in heaven with His choir of angels. So He took her”

(MacDonald 4). James raises Kathleen as a performer, teaching her to act like a British princess, thus demonstrating how class and culture can be appropriated through performative skill. Her talent fosters an “awareness of the performed nature of identity”

(Frost 204), and becomes her tool to escape the confines of the Piper house, at least temporarily. Herr Kaiser, her teacher, initially refuses to let her sing at all, and gradually allows her to sing one note at a time, further teaching Kathleen the performativity of identity, in this case symbolized by the progressive articulations of her voice. Frost argues that Kathleen’s vocal identity “is a metaphor for the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of sexual identity that she also undergoes in New York” (204). Indeed,

Rose convinces Kathleen to perform Carmen for her audition, illustrating her growth as a performer and new awareness of the difference between shallow sentiment and deep emotion – something she fails to express for Herr Kaiser at the start of their training. Her vocal and sexual identities are quickly destroyed, however, when James rapes her and brings her back to Cape Breton only to conceal her in the attic.

Kathleen’s lesbian relationship with Rose in New York awakens her womanhood.

Her previous performance as exemplary of British perfection is shaken by her New York experience and challenges the fixity of identity categories. In New York she writes: “I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me on to the stage where it’s so bright and so dark at the same time” (MacDonald 455). Kathleen’s words hint at what she is about to encounter when she meets Rose. At first, both Rose and Kathleen judge one another

112 based on racial prejudice, but in true MacDonald form, their initial impressions are quickly undermined by their discovery that they are both of mixed heritage. This discovery “brilliantly exemplifies the fallibility of conventional identity markers and the breaking down of artificial barriers, just as it opens the way for the two young women’s carnivalesque night out at the Mecca night club where Kathleen wears her new green silk dress and Rose dresses up in her dead father’s suit” (Howells, Contemporary 121). The suit is the one item she has inherited from her father, and initially Rose refuses to wear it until Kathleen begins to undress “as if suggesting that one of them must adopt the role of the man if their relationship is to develop in the way they both subconsciously want it to”

(Frost 206). Rose’s cross-dressing emphasizes the contingency of gender and the ability to deform identity markers.

Kathleen’s first phrase “I am burning” appropriately echoes Butler’s chapter in

Bodies That Matter, “Gender is Burning” (121), for the theoretical considerations Butler expresses serve as a useful framework for the analysis of Kathleen and Rose’s union as a simultaneous defiance and confirmation of norms. Butler notes how drag is ambivalent, both challenging “regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (125). Although Rose finds freedom through drag, her presentation as a young man does, arguably, reaffirm the heterosexual gender norms, albeit symbolically. Moreover, although the relationship subverts cultural expectations, James’s ability to sweep in and reassert his authority momentarily grants regimes of power success over subversive potential. Even in her diary, Kathleen refers to Rose as a “he,” accepting Rose’s comfort with being a young man, but at the same time complicating the subversion of genders by reaffirming

113 heterosexual desire as dignified. Yet Butler importantly adds that the ambivalence of drag indicates that “hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations” and therefore it also subversively “disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (125). She argues that identity is performative – in that identity is formed and deformed through repeated articulations – rather than biologically granted. Race and gender, therefore, are continually constructed, and as Corey Frost argues in relation to MacDonald’s text, so are ethnicity and culture, for “[t]hey are affected by the same regulatory fictions, and they each have a role in the denaturalization of the other” (210). Kathleen and Rose’s discovery of their sexual attraction draws attention to the instability of race as a secure marker of identity. When they lie together, for instance, Kathleen notes: “Black and white. Except she thinks I’m actually green” (MacDonald 534). Like Mrs. Luvovitz’s observation that Materia’s skin texture is more milky than dark, this sentence shows colour as unreliable and blurs the expected binary divide.

Kathleen and Rose’s “passion for each other, against prescriptive racial and sexual norms, against the racial and sexual fantasies of imagined national communities, testifies to the incommensurability of reproduction — racial, familial, national — and desire” (Ruszto 30). Indeed, when Rose’s mother sends her letter to James warning him of his daughter’s behaviour, she asserts that miscegenation “is a modern evil and it is weakening the fabric of our nation” (MacDonald 235). Rose’s mother expresses the social fear of abnormal behavior tainting the body of the nation. In addition, her words demonstrate how MacDonald exposes the inability of the parent to neutralize otherness in

114 order to protect ideological standards of the nation based on skin colour and heterosexuality.

Reproductive miscegenation, by necessity, “requires the procreative ability of heterosexuality” and by presenting the fear of a non-procreative relationship (Robinson

213), MacDonald further stresses that race trumps sexual difference as a social stigma, mostly because of the offspring that could result from such a union and lead to the degeneration of humanity and the deformation of the nation. Although in Canada there were no official laws against miscegenation as in the United States, transgression of social norms was subtly taken care of informally (Robinson 216). What MacDonald does by uniting Kathleen, a Canadian, and Rose, an American, is illustrate that although

Canadian history attempts to portray itself as less racist than its southern counterpart, anxiety over inter-racial relationships nonetheless shapes cultural and social discourses.

Like her mother’s pregnancy, Kathleen’s transforms her into an othered body, silencing her talented voice by locking her in the Piper attic. Even after birth, she is no longer described as beautiful or even human, but rather, as “an abandoned mine. A bootleg mine, plundered, flooded; a ruined and dangerous shaft, stripped of fuel, of coal, of fossil ferns and sea anemones and bones” (MacDonald 136). She gives birth to her twins, but only Lily survives the ordeals of that fateful night, though not untouched. A physical and metaphorical extension of Kathleen, Lily makes her way to Rose where she is seen by two black cleaning women as Kathleen’s ghost: “That red-haired devil who ruined out Miss Rose has come back to life as a shrunk-down raggedy cripple” (540).

Lily’s physical deformity – her little leg, the effect of contracting polio – symbolizes the secret scandal at the heart of the Piper family saga: specifically the

115 scandal of Lily’s parentage, but generally all the parentage questioned in the text.

MacDonald’s challenge of conventional family sagas as narratives of the nation that celebrate home, order, and morality is thus conveyed by her treatment of parentage, as well as her representation of bodies as deformed. As I note in the introduction to this chapter, each character is somehow deformed, whether literally or metaphorically, in order to assert a need to disfigure the linear version of human genealogy. Lily, as the final Piper child, is deformed in order to represent the future of the family line, and of the nation, as advancing beyond the constraints of conservative social categories. Although she is a twin, she remains unique and escapes the conventional motif of twins as duplicitous or as tricksters.

It is no surprise that Ambrose is the twin to die – the narrative line must remain feminine until the very end – and the Mahmoud curse of James’s production of an heir must remain unbroken. The twin motif (which also appears in The Custodian of Paradise and Vandal Love) suggests “profusion and the singularity of identity” (Gordon 160), reasserting the instability of social categories.11 Ambrose never acts as a rival or partner for Lily; rather, he symbolizes an unresolved contradiction in the Piper household, for despite his death, he remains erringly present.

After Lily overcomes Polio as an infant, the Piper sisters see her for the first time and ask “What’s wrong with her?” (MacDonald 175). James sees her as perfect and

“delicate” (222). Despite the town’s criticism of the family for having a bootlegger in

11 In her article “Twin Tales,” Neta Gordon addresses MacDonald’s use of the twin motif in her play The Arab’s Mouth. She argues that MacDonald’s interest in twins results from her theatrical background, and observes how MacDonald revises the biblical story of Jacob and Esau and the battle in the womb for supremacy. What is interesting is MacDonald’s decision to deform one of the twins in The Arab’s Mouth as well. Claire’s red furry ears represent her as an anomaly within her family to reflect a lack of uniformity, similarly to the depiction of the Piper girls in Fall.

116 charge, everyone respects Lily, the “prettiest” and bravest for “marching” in the walk to remember “The War to End All Wars” (241, 239).12 Lily is an extension of Kathleen both literally and figuratively. As with Daphne and Sylvia in A Good House, deformity ensures the singularity of the offspring, for although Lily bears a striking resemblance to

Kathleen, her minor deformity individualizes her and protects her from her father’s demon. When Kathleen dies, James and Materia decide to raise Lily as their daughter:

“Everyone agrees to this fiction…And as the years go by the facts are eroded and scattered by time, until there are more people who don’t know than people who do”

(166). The secret of Lily’s parentage haunts the text because despite mutual agreement, all the characters unconsciously struggle with the lie.

When Lily gets sick a second time with gangrene and survives, Mercedes begins to ponder the possibility that Lily is a saint: “Lily’s shriveled leg – saints are often stricken in childhood” (MacDonald 277). Her reading of Lily as a potential saint encourages her to respect her younger sister, whom she struggles to love, just as Materia struggles to appreciate Kathleen. Her mission becomes to save enough money to get Lily to Lourdes, where she can be healed and proven a saint. Mercedes considers Lily’s first two recoveries from polio and gangrene as miracles, her gentleness with the veterans as remarkable, and her ability to save Frances via her blood donation as the third major miracle. Her blood donation not only saves France’s life, literally, but also appears to change Frances, transforming her into a proper woman, baking all day, peaceful, and generally the opposite of her previous personality. This sudden change, Mercedes

12 MacDonald draws attention to Canadian history as a presence versus absence. Her portrayal of the wars and the historical affiliation of Canadians in battle underscore the impropriety of portraying Canadian literary and culturally history as blank, without a historical past worth considering or portraying in text.

117 reasons, stems from Lily’s goodness transferred via the blood transfusion, which miraculously cleanses Frances’s previously sinful soul.

Lily, however, dismisses the need for proof of her specialness. She does not care to be deemed a saint, or anything for that matter other than herself. She is secure, strong without requiring some compensatory advantage sometimes expected of cripples. Her rejection of the victim role demonstrates how she survives her family’s treachery, and ultimately asserts her subjectivity:

Lily has promised herself, her little leg, that – number one – she will never

let it be cut off. And – number two – she will never let it be obliterated by

a miracle. The idea of betraying so valiant a limb, which has carried and

marched beyond the call of duty. To say, here is your reward: to cease to

be – to become, instead, a false twin for the good leg. Her bad leg is

special because it is so strong. Lily has learned, however, that to others it

is special because it is weak. (377)

Lily perceives her leg differently than the general public does because to others it appears a weakness, something that fails to meet social norms, whereas to her, it represents her distinctness and strength. She refuses to ignore her leg and “to make it an absence, something that will ‘cease to be’” (Baetz, n.pag.), for that would result in the end of her individuality. Therefore, Lily opts for the power of deformity over uniformity, refusing to submit to social scriptures that regulate bodily norms to assert a hierarchy of worth and power.

Interestingly, like Mercedes, Frances has saved money for Lily. Her savings, however, are not to send Lily to find a cure for her deformity, but rather to provide her

118 with the means to escape their haunted house and find her connection to her mother through Rose. The inspiration for her quest, however, begins unconsciously: “She has no intention of leaving the island until she has made enough money for Lily. And accomplished something else too. What, Frances? Something. She will know it when she sees it. She is a commando in training for a mission so secret that even she does not know what it is” (MacDonald 307). After years of telling stories in which she always acts as Lily’s hero, rescuing her from the garbage, or from being smothered by Trixie the cat, or from being drowned in the creek by Materia, Frances actually rescues Lily. She provides Lily with her mother’s name, her journal, and financial backing. Lily takes the money, and finds a pair of red boots in her father’s workstation – his last project – made especially for her. With his gift and Frances’s money, Lily leaves the island.

Although James sees Lily as the daughter who most resembles Kathleen, Frances is actually the closest parallel. Her rebellious behaviour leads to her miscegenation with

Leo Taylor, which is arguably an extension of her earlier infatuation with “Queen

Teresa” (MacDonald 320). Her adoration of Teresa parallels Kathleen’s love with Rose, and further demonstrates the instability of gender, racial, and sexual categories.13 Her partnership with Leo, which he initially mocks, is her final defiance of her father’s attempt to maintain an untainted bloodline, and reflects her awareness of the secrets he buries in the family garden. Leo tells Frances they make quite “a fine team” with their

“wracked-up faces” (MacDonald 367), but his statement implies more than its literal

13 Teresa is married to Hector, a disabled character in the text, perceived as mentally limited because of a work accident. Hector, however, understands more than the other characters believe, and he becomes an important player in the survival of Frances. He manages, despite his disabled body, to rescue Teresa and eventually to impregnate her. Although he is but a minor character, his instrumental significance in the plot of the text portrays a disabled character with agency and relevance, further demonstrating how MacDonald undermines conventional representations of the bodies in power.

119 meaning. Leo and Frances recreate the destroyed union of Kathleen and Rose who were unable to produce an offspring and found themselves “wracked-up” by James for their miscegenation. In addition, Frances’s desperate need to become impregnated by Leo reveals her desire to resurrect Ambrose, which is symbolically illustrated by her taking

Leo to the abandoned cave where she brought Lily earlier to see Ambrose’s ghost.

The drama of Frances’s mission to seduce Leo and get pregnant at times appears a little over the top, particularly when Teresa decides to shoot Frances. Metaphorically, however, the shot underscores MacDonald’s representation of the permeability of memory. Frances believes Teresa’s bullet impregnates her, like a miracle that allows for an interracial homosexual union to produce an heir, and therefore fulfilling the union

Kathleen and Rose never experience. Thus Frances’s pregnancy disrupts normative heterosexuality because she offers an alternative and successful sexual procreation

(Rifkind n.pag.). Impregnated by a bullet, Frances achieves the grandest feminine revision of a master narrative; she continues the family line symbolically without a

(white) man.

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees deforms the ideologies of family, race, ethnicity, and nation to challenge Canadian colonial roots and emphasize the haunting presence of Canadian cultural history. The four sections of this chapter – Jane

Eyre as intertext, the focus on the uncanny, the symbolic family tree, and the anomalous bodies of Kathleen, Lily, and Frances – demonstrate MacDonald’s continual dismantling of identity categories. She revises the male master text via her focus on a matrilineal narrative, defying patrilineal accounts of genealogical origins. Her emphasis on

120 difference contests a national imaginary ingrained in a uniform existence, breaking down heteronormative and hegemonous discourses of power.

In Scandalous Bodies, Smaro Kamboureli identifies a trend in recent diasporic

Canadian fiction to occupy liminal space and identities, where marginalized characters never feel at home, existing in-between the sensation of settled and unsettled. In her chapter on the body in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, she uses the Freudian concept of the uncanny to define this condition as “the Canadian uncanny: Canadian-born and ‘foreign’ at the same time” (215). This condition should not, however, be deemed a negative state of being, for it offers the possibility of bringing to light what has been repressed; it acknowledges the politics of cultural difference that complicate the canonical national imaginary, presenting in-between spaces as fruitful areas for individual narratives and historical realities. Nothing, as MacDonald’s text clearly illustrates, is either/or. Perhaps the most telling phrase in the text becomes the words of Mrs. Luvovitz at the end:

“Nothing in life is not mixed” (560).

121

Vandal Love Family Tree

Wife One Hervé Hervé Georgianne

122 Boy Hon Boy Girl Girl Girl

oré Child Child Child Child Child Child Child Child Child

Legend

Solids and Arrows: Clear Connections Scots- Agnès Mystery Jean American Woman

Dotted: Unclear Connections

Peggy François Ernestine Louise Jude Isa-Marie

Elaine Harvey Levon Isa Bart

Isabelle No Relations: D.Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love

The nation-as-monster serves as a structural motif in literary histories, where it expresses the complex fate of a country never quite at home in its own place. (Kertzer 121)

He imagined her ghost within the landscape, the strength of her wandering a slow motion against eternity. (Béchard 232)

My first Graduate Teaching Fellowship was for a course on the body in contemporary Canadian fiction. I felt fortunate to teach a class related to my research, and I was eager to introduce students to literary texts that adopt the trope of the body to reflect colonial practices and represent the instability of the nation as model. My students loved all the readings – all except one: D.Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love. The complaints ranged from the usual hatred of reading, to the more critically interesting, which circulated around the following concerns: an inability to relate to the characters because of their overly symbolic physical deformities, a tedious and circular plot line, and the use of the French language. Students argued that the novel’s focus on deformed figures, in addition to the distortion of the text’s diction with interspersed French and convoluted metaphors prompted their sense of alienation and disinterest.

Reviewers, on the other hand, appear split on the novel’s success. Kevin Chong in National Post finds the narrative both “ambitious and frustrating” (WP15). He argues that “the novel’s whimsy is too flat and its characterizations too thin for it to succeed as a yarn” (WP15). Philip Marchand critiques Béchard for being “romantic” and pinpoints his writing style as “overshadow[ing] comprehensibility” (D07). The criticism of the text resembles the concerns raised by my students, however, from a more politically sensitive perspective. The professional critics are unable to relate to the characters because they

123 are flat and contrived, rather than deformed and symbolic. The awkward language perceived as “non-logical” or “non-sequential” results from a heavy reliance on metaphor

(Marchand D07), not the French language directly. Nonetheless, the “riff-heavy narrative” with disconnected and scattered characters proves a little too much for some readers (Chong WP15).

Other reviewers, conversely, rave about Béchard’s talent. Michel Basilières in

The Globe and Mail states: “D.Y. Béchard surpasses Kerouac in his consciousness of the

French as part of a larger people, how their struggle is socially and politically situated rather than strictly personal” (D9). Marie-Claude Legault in Canadian Ethnic Studies also articulates how the novel resembles Kerouac’s On the Road, and although she criticizes the text’s attempt to deal “with too many issues over too long a period of time”

(243), she finds the “original use of similes” and “the subtle use of irony” a “touching aspect” of the text (244). Joel Yanofsky notes a “tinge of Faulkner’s defeated South in

Vandal Love” and remarks, positively, how the novel makes “quite a first impression”

(H4). Lastly, Tyler Bradley in the Vancouver Sun expresses how “[i]t would be a shame if Béchard is not recognized for the new voice and talent that he is” (F21). The recognition came when Vandal Love won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First

Book, joining the ranks of previous winners, such as Bonnie Burnard, Mark Haddon, and

Zadie Smith. Yet in a class of fifty students, few found the novel readable.

Much of the distaste for the text involves a discomfort with the malaise imposed upon the reader by the crude and aloof characters. The desire to relate to the characters reflects a desire to construct “books as mirrors of ourselves” in order to “locate ourselves securely within history” (Kamboureli, Scandalous 4). I agree with Kamboureli that

124

“[t]he logic of self-location…is no less fraught with problems than the positions of alleged neutrality and liberalism” (4). The need to locate the self within a text can perpetuate colonial discourses and reveal, perhaps, an inescapable ethnocentrism.

Béchard depicts the body as continually deformed: mutilating categories of subjectivity to relinquish the security of self-location. Therefore, I contend that the alienation experienced by the reader (as in, an inability to relate to the characters) parallels the dispossession experienced by the characters themselves, which in turn underscores an indefinable Canadian identity – one that possesses roots yet also seeks to disavow those roots. Béchard’s overtly symbolic figures are intentionally metaphoric bodies, not created as relatable characters but as vehicles for his examination of the family motif in

Canadian literature. The tenuous connections undermine the ideal of a unified family and thus stress the diverse doubts that problematize nationalism.

Vandal Love’s overall indeterminacy – of history and heritage – challenges existing understandings of kinship and rejects the universalism of a cohesive family, and thus the nation. Unlike Benedict Anderson, who views nations as “imagined communities” in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (6), Béchard presents the nation as fraught with discontents, the shared experience privileging certain bodies and marginalizing others. In reference to the roman de la terre, he portrays the colonial conventions that define the nation as a male transmission of land and power, and women as metaphoric bearers of the nation. In doing so, he illustrates the hegemonic standards that shape the conventional family saga, and thus deforms his characters to critique the standards that characterize the history of

125 the nation under a family model. Indeed, the urgency to build a nation reveals that no matter how hard “one tries to domesticate it, one’s home remains alien territory” (Kertzer

188). As a result, deformity in Vandal Love provides a lens through which to consider alterity as characteristic of the nation, rather than uncharacteristic. Béchard’s characters provide a counter-discourse to the colonial command of the landscape that asserts ownership over all territory. In doing so, the novel engages with, and responds to, the critical trends that have shaped literary canons into nation-conscious models.

I begin with an analysis of the Hervé family members as metaphorical bodies that serve as structural motifs for a literary history obsessed with forming, deforming, and reforming the volatile category of nation. As big and tiny monsters, the Hervés act as double hooks to scrutinize the themes and theories associated with Canadian literature: the pursuit of ancestral ghosts, the troubles of immigration, the uncertainty of language and lineage, the fear of American pollution, and of course, the family as the centerpiece of nationalist ideology.

In addition to his exploration of Canadian literary patterns, Béchard portrays men as virile and women as fertile to reflect the Québec literary genre of the roman de la terre. Béchard shows how the symbolic deformations of the characters reveal the body as a signifier challenging the authority of a genre that perpetuates imperial images to affirm the existence of a nation. With the publication of Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre

Paternelle in 1846, the definition of a genre referred to as the “roman de la terre” became popular in Québec writing (Green, Women 52). The genre employs the family as

“the real protagonist of the novel, not only effacing the presence of women but effectively shutting out the drama of the individual and, as a matter of form and content,

126 silencing the personal voice” (53). Béchard contests the limitations of the roman de la terre by ensuring the presence of women and the drama of the individual, and thus disagrees with the belief that through portrayals of the rural family, Québec writers “had reason to believe they had found an adequate representation of an entire people” (53, my emphasis). Like Burnard’s appeal to domestic realism, Béchard opens his novel with a call to the traditional roman de la terre through his elaborate description of the Hervé family history, which introduces the generic structure he deforms and the mythologies he revises. He thus acknowledges the important influence of an established genre – just as his characters are unable to quite let go of their familial past – but also offers ways to engage in the popular revision of the genre, which was contested even as it was instituted.

Lastly, I examine the modern ideologies that transform the body into an artificial and disposable form. Béchard’s parody of the transformative power of the body accentuates the instability illustrated by the text’s exploration of vagrancy and naming.

His early emphasis on the body as more metaphorical than material comes full circle with the spiritual quests of François and Harvey and the need for the body to resist legitimizing systems of civility, such as religion and medicine. Though the novel ends with the father transmitting opportunity onto his son, it feels forced and inconclusive.

Ultimately, Béchard’s overall emphasis on bodily deviance highlights the text’s refusal to portray any body as stable, defined, and regulated. He disputes the incessant reiteration of the ideological role of the family in Québec and Canadian writing and revises the traditional roman de la terre motif of the transmission of the land from father to son; rather, he demonstrates a violent rejection of the heritage in the form of a physical curse that reaffirms roots. Vandal Love thus presents a picture of the family caught in

127 social transformation, or in what Ronald Sutherland refers to as “the breakup of the old order,” which depicts the shift from a predominantly rural, farm-oriented society to an urban, technology-oriented world (3). The conglomeration of histories and languages emphasizes the inability of the writer, or critic, to sum up the “story” of Québec or

Canada under one thematic rubric, or with one clear familial bloodline. In fact, the novel itself remains too “errant” to be classified as Canadian, English-French-Canadian,

French-Canadian, or Québécois. The difficulty of defining the novel becomes one of its defining characteristics. Thus, the body and the literary corpus both become deformed, named and renamed to pluralize the definition of a nation, and to validate the importance of a still unclear concept of canonicity or identity.

Deforming National Character

Béchard’s characters continually reinvent themselves, abandoning lineage, culture, history, and even ethnicity in order to escape ideological definitions of self and nation. Edward Hartley Dewart asserts in Selections From Canadian Poets that a

“national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character. It is not merely the record of a country’s mental progress: it is the expression of its intellectual life, the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy” (ix). Dewart’s words impose great pressure on literary texts not only to tell the stories of the nation, but to literally bring people together and inspire their commitment to the formation of a national ideology. As Adam Carter notes in his article “Namelessness, Irony, and National

Character in Contemporary Canadian Criticism and the Critical Tradition,” critics today would likely agree with Dewart’s comment that literature does, indeed, play an important

128 role in the definition of a nation (5). For Carter, the trouble with Dewart’s phrasing is the elusiveness of the words “national character” given “references to national character long ago gave way to the more respectable…‘national identity,’ although this phrase too can evoke a certain embarrassed uneasiness” (5). I perceive “identity” as equally elusive as

“character.” Either way, nation, nationhood, national identity/character, and nationalism are all highly questionable terms, debated by critics of all areas of study. What matters here, however, is the correlation made by Dewart between the role of literature and the formation of a national character, for Béchard’s challenge to representations of a national character inevitably requires him to consider Canadian literary motifs. Indeed, his metaphorical figures underscore the instability of the term “identity.”

Like MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, Béchard’s text does not argue for the absence of identity or a Birneyesque “lack of ghosts.” On the contrary, the characters are forever haunted by the palpable presence of ghosts, and are far from “bland, practical citizens [that] lack the historical traumas and the responsive imagination to expose the dreams on which the nation was built” (Kertzer 37). The national ghost “haunts all efforts to define, and even to renounce, ‘our’ literature” (38), a pattern that foregrounds the motivations of Béchard’s characters who discover that “[i]nclusion and exclusion are equally difficult” (39). The critics who pinpoint Vandal Love as a socially and politically conscious text hint at the novel’s reflection on facets of the Canadian critical tradition.

Béchard’s themes respond to the tropes and topics that are still debated as important patterns that shape Canadian national character. From the struggle of settlers, to the immensity and power of the land, to hostile nature and indifferent human nature, to US infiltration, and to globalization, the evolutionary history of the Hervé family that

129 provides the plot is haunted, not by a lack of ghosts, but by the omnipresence of the ghosts of thematic and theoretical criticism in Canadian writing.

The debate over Canadian thematic criticism is too long for me summarize in this chapter; however, I agree with Russell Brown that “writers are usually aware of at least some of their cultural themes” (682), and although the majority of contemporary literary critics in Canada vocally reject thematic criticism, a reconsideration of its value as part of the quest to define Canadian literature and its role in the formation of the nation can prove productive. To paraphrase Brown’s position, thematic criticism stems from a desire to draw attention to Canadian writing and provide a formula by which Canadian literature can be understood, both internally and internationally. It arose during a period of great national interest, after 1967, when writers such as Atwood also sought to define

“our” literature in critical overviews, such as Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian

Literature. Interest in the formation of Canadian literature was thus not only the concern of critics, but of writers as well.

No doubt Béchard shows an awareness of the cultural themes that impact the structuring of the Canadian experience. Although standard literary studies in Canada generally focus on either Québécois writing or English-Canadian writing, Vandal Love, as noted earlier, refuses such a binary division. Despite their Québec roots, the Hervés traverse borders, making it difficult to pinpoint the text as under any exclusive categorical frame (e.g. English-Canadian). After all, the family plot is not limited to Québec writing, and the troubles of the Hervés parallel those of the characters in the other texts under study here. The deformation of standard categories of literary analyses expresses the

130 disparate cultural and political perspectives of the divided country as equal influences over narratives of Canadian national experience.

Béchard traces Canada’s historical development as a colony, challenging the trajectory of the novel from the mythological and paternal roman de la terre to the more secular modern fiction that began during the Quiet Revolution. Green argues that “the dominance of the family plot in Québec fiction…testifies to the relationship of cultural ideology and literary form” (“The Novel” 178). Though Vandal Love begins with a traditional Québec ethos, the family plot as symbolic of cultural ideologies applies to writing beyond Québec’s borders. The novel’s “family plot” deforms its conventions to explore, more broadly, a human struggle for connection beyond the artificiality of institutionalized, unifying social arrangements. Indeed, the family’s gift, rather than curse, to produce “enormous child then changeling” reveals the persistence of heritage as well as a resistance to inheritance (Béchard 4).

As Green notes, the swan song of the dominant roman de la terre genre is often cited as Germaine Guèvremont’s novel Le Survenant, published in 1945 (Women and

Narrative 11). Clearly Béchard was aware of the genre and Guèvremont’s text.

Interestingly, he begins his novel in 1947, resisting the genre’s declared death and thus continuing the contestatory conversations that began when the genre was first established.

Indeed, the genre itself was never pure, challenged from the onset, inspiring an intellectual debate amongst writers concerning literary representations of Québec ideologies. Béchard plays with the roman de la terre and thus necessarily deals in stereotypes and exaggerations (as does, for example, Marie-Claire Blais). He contests the genre, particularly with his use of the family curse, deforming his characters beyond the

131 more common grotesque figures that appear in many romans de la terre, and thus makes the genre itself monstrous.

Guèvremont’s novel serves as an intertext to Vandal Love. This intertextuality underscores why Béchard plots a substantial portion of his story in Québec, in conversation with the roman de la terre genre and its many revisions. Guèvremont’s text and sequel, Marie-Didace, use the familiar structure of the roman de la terre “to inscribe a vision of women’s experience that subtly altered official stereotypes” (Green, Women and Narrative 50). Béchard, on the other hand, is not so subtle with his deformation of stereotypes, but like Guèvremont, he uses the generic framework to represent social changes and the changing cultural landscape.

There are significant connections and differences between Guèvremont and

Béchard. For example, some thematic similarities regard inheritance, wandering, virile masculinity and fertile maternity. Didace Beauchemin’s hopes for succession in

Guèvremont’s novel parallel Hervé Hervé’s obsession with a strong bloodline, both undermined by weak sons, Amable (Le Survenant) and François (Vandal Love). Her name transferred to Marie-Didace, daughter of Phonsine and Amable transforms the patriarchal past into a matrilineal future, something Béchard also suggests with Isabelle at the end of his novel. Both end with a somewhat false sense of hope, however, for Marie-

Didace will lose her name upon marriage (or death), and Béchard’s Isabelle never renews the family tree or comes to understand her lineage.

Inevitably, le Survenant, a nomadic figure perceived as a footless stranger who disrupts the certainty of roots, serves as a symbolic intertexual figure for Béchard’s vagrant characters who unsettle the cohesive community. In his study Beware the

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Stranger: The Survenant in the Quebec Novel, Peter Nobel pinpoints the Survenant as a

“literary trope” introduced by Guèvremont, though not exclusive to Québec literature, which reveals a disappearing way of life (17). Béchard’s text does not focus on how the arrival of a newcomer/stranger destabilizes a community, but rather on how all figures are, in one way or another, strangers, troubling the collective identity of family and nation. Nonetheless, both novels consider the destruction of familial roots, and the rugged hardships of nature and human nature on the dissatisfied and lost individual.

Moreover, in both texts the relationship with alcohol is associated with masculinity and linked to the need for the male body to assert its power by resisting a foreign substance. Le Survenant is a binge drinker, but his drinking does not interfere with his ability to work on the farm, whereas drink proves a toxic for Jude and Bart in

Vandal Love. Le Survenant stands for strength with his muscular body, which expresses force and potency, as illustrated by Didace’s belief that this stranger will renew his failing bloodline. Jude and Bart, however, are weakened by their alcoholic behaviours, unable to perform their routine responsibilities. Even though Jude becomes a successful boxer, at least temporarily, he never achieves the rock solid strength Guèvremont grants her Survenant.

Similarly, women are defined in both texts by fertility and maternity. Marie-

Amanda, Didace’s daughter in Le Survenant, suggests the ideal mother: robust, proper, and never complaining. Phonsine, on the other hand, is unbearably thin because of a sensitive stomach suggested by her inability to digest seasonings. Green observes that her “rejection of food may also, like the anorexic condition often found in adolescent girls, be a part of her rejection of womanhood” (68). Such a reading demonstrates how

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Guèvremont herself contests the roman de la terre’s stereotypical gender roles. Béchard takes this even further, however, by creating a multitude of female characters who physically resist womanhood and domestic scripting, as I elaborate later in this chapter.

More importantly, Béchard avoids placing the blame for the changing landscape on the arrival of a stranger, as well as rejects the romantic plot that drives much of

Guèvremont’s novel. Angélina’s attraction to the Survenant, which rescues her from sterile spinsterhood, is absent from Béchard’s text, where relationships lack eroticism with barely a hint of affection. In fact, the majority of the romances in his text are clinical, suggestive of a romantic model he defaces rather than employs to provide the reader with attractive figures. Guèvremont’s characters are less metaphorical, engaging in dialogue together, unlike the majority of Béchard’s silent personages.

Furthermore, Guèvremont constructs familiar figures, as Anthony Mollica states in his introduction: “Guèvremont assumes that the reader knows the members of the

Beauchemin family” for they are recognizable characters like those encountered in any rural Québec town (vii). Although Guèvremont contrasts strong family members with the weak and feeble, Béchard exaggerates the dichotomy to emphasize the monstrosity of a primitive segregation based on physical differences. Indeed, his allusions to

Guèvremont’s last roman de la terre reveal his dissatisfaction with the genre’s confines, as well as his dissatisfaction with her revisions of the genre, which remain deeply rooted in Québec soil. He therefore begins his novel in Québec, echoing Le Survenant, but the further his plot develops, the further he leaves hers behind.

Like Guèvremont, Béchard divides his novel into two books. Book I follows Jude and the line of giants to demarcate the colonial lineage of the Hervé family, whose stories

134 predate Christianity, but whose emigration partakes in the “Church’s divine mission in

North America” (Béchard 19). The third-person omniscient narrator opens the novel with descriptions of Jude and his grandfather, doubly named patriarch Hervé Hervé, whose sensory sensitivities are of mythic proportion. Hervé Hervé’s body conveys the

Québec landscape: poor, hard, and proud. He demonstrates the bond between the habitant and his land. Based on accounts made by villagers, the narrative notes the physical differences of the family and observes the prowess of the patriarch, whose skin refuses to bruise, whose one working eye remains “more intent” than two, and who manages to measure “the distance to the sea by tasting snow” (5).14 His “almost Indian features expressionless” hint at his genetic roots and his ability to survey the land without the use of a compass underscores his role as representative of the settled Canadian, resigned to the hardship and loneliness of the country (5). Hervé Hervé’s ambition in life is to civilize, not only the land, but the family lineage.15 He embodies Atwood’s thematic reading of “survival” in early Canadian writing as he overcomes external obstacles, “the land, the climate, and so forth” (Atwood, Survival 33).

Hervé Hervé rebuffs the role of victim or failure, however, and terrifies nature rather than allows nature to terrify him; he trusts the land more than people. Indeed, he expresses a distrust of people in general and despises “les États” for polluting the honest land of Québec with false promises of wealth and progress (Béchard 20). Hervé Hervé fights the myth of the south through toil, tipple and tales, asserting the strength of the bloodline with “long hours of labour” and by giving “away lemons” (12), that is, children

14 Guèvremont describes Didace with similar language, for example: “Despite his sixty years and more, his wrist was still strong and his eye steady” (5). 15 Similarly, Didace notes that he will need to find a man “to carry on the Beauchemin name” (10). 135 who are embarrassments to the bloodline.16 The family tales and cursing of foreigners

“who took everything” comes when Hervé Hervé drinks, a bad habit that appears to be genetically transferred to sons. As a result of his connection to the land, however, Hervé

Hervé contradicts the argument that to be “Canadian” is to “feel part of a no-man’s land”

(Frye 222), for he reads the land even better than he reads his own children. Indeed, he is formed and informed by the land.

Throughout Book I, Béchard contrasts his portrayal of Hervé Hervé with Jude, the

“illegitimate son of a brutish Scots-American tourist”17 and his stepdaughter Agnès

(Béchard 5). Jude embodies the themes of wandering and re-naming as tools that oppose familial roots and history. As Atwood argues, family in Canadian literature is “a trap in which you’re caught. The Canadian protagonist often feels just as trapped inside his family as his American counterpart; he feels the need to escape, but somehow he is unable to break away” (Survival 131). Béchard explores Jude’s escape from Québec to his career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana,18 his mixed-race relationship, and his solitary life with his daughter Isa on a horse farm. Jude’s attempt to disavow his roots through emigration inspires his refusal to tell his daughter about their past, and he falls deep into alcoholism to deal with his self-conflict. His slow but continuous withdrawal exposes his role as a trope for the detached and autonomous Canadian, subject not only to the harsh nature of Canada, but to his own harsh nature as un Canadien errant.

16 Similarly, in Guèvremont’s novel, “six generations had born the name” of the patriarch, Didace Beauchemin (81). Didace also notes his desire to substitute his frail and weak family members, even his daughter-in-law, with new members, such as le Survenant, who are robust and potent. 17 Le Survenant is also considered Scots-American. 18 Although not a professional boxer, le Survenant engages in a violent fistfight with Odilon Provençal, which makes Didace “proud,” for he proves “strong as an ox” (70). 136

Book II continues the conflict between owning and disavowing roots by tracing the life of the runts and matriarchal history. Georgianne’s holy sacrifices inspire her marriage to Hervé Hervé, but unlike her husband, she perceives the runts, not as abominations, but as saints. Like Hervé Hervé, though, she connects with the Québec landscape, “pausing over the Bible” to listen to the gulf wind, to hear the sound of the waterfall, and to acknowledge that this land “had been hers. She knew its history”

(Béchard 191). She epitomizes the charitable mother who perpetuates religious discourses of benevolence and enjoys recollections of her familial roots that reinforce her sense of duty to family. Georgianne becomes the receptacle for the Hervé family’s

“myths and curses” and protects the runts from their father (195), who takes pride only in

“a strong family,” whereas she aims to build “a holy one” (195). The stereotypical portrayal of Hervé Hervé and Georgianne as hard-working farmer and homemaker, respectively, may create the illusion of their characters as two-dimensional. Indeed, the third-person voice spends the majority of their scenes describing memories, rarely providing them with an opportunity to emerge through dialogue or action. Like Burnard in A Good House, Béchard’s description overload does not result from amateur writing; rather, the emphasis on description throughout the text demonstrates how

storytelling plays an important role in both Canadian and Québécois

fiction but, while it draws on oral tradition, its function has changed quite

drastically. In a genuine oral culture with a living folktale tradition, there

exists what could be called a communal author – or proprietorship of a

referential which is closely linked to the vernacular. Rather than using

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Benjamin’s adjective ‘anonymous’ to characterize such storytelling, I

prefer to see it as collective. (Söderlind 13)

Béchard’s omniscient narrator is such a collective storyteller who reflects the pluralistic consciousness of the characters in the text, split by language, religion and other cultural traditions that resist assimilation into a singular, mainstream Canadian literary tradition and voice. Let me be clear: I do not employ “collective” here in reference to a collectively imagined community, as in diverse visions in a “collective imagination,” forming a whole; rather, I use collective as a collection of consciousness, or pluralized accounts. Unlike Burnard, whose third-person narrator builds the social realism of the text, Béchard’s invokes a collection of third-person narrative accounts. The myths, tales, and legends spread by the villagers about the Hervé family offer a pluralized chronicle of the family’s history. Although Béchard’s narration echoes the roman de la terre’s tradition of presenting the family as the protagonist rather than a specific character, he continuously challenges the communal “one voice and one story” literary form through the inclusion of lies, imagined connections, and unclear histories to underline the falsity of a unified vision and version.

Moreover, Book II elaborates on the theme of tenuous connections by focusing predominately on the fragile runts in an era of modernization and secularization.

Whereas Book I revises the mythological element of the roman de la terre that explored the superior moral virtues of rural family life, the second book transposes the family to an urban setting. As Kertzer notes, “the nation is scorned as a conceptual tool because it is judged either too flimsy or too ferocious…” (165), a remark that relates to Béchard’s representation of the nation through the characters’ bodies in his first two books: the

138 ferocious giants and the flimsy runts. In the first book, the nation as symbolized by the giant bodies and landscape proves too aggressive and grand. In the second book, on the other hand, deformity is linked to feebleness and artificiality, as bodies are no longer described with mythic terminology, but with urban technological coldness. Male movements are described as “brusque and mechanical” (Béchard 216), Ernestine as a generic prostitute (228), and François as “a guinea pig” (228). Bodies previously seen as mythological landscapes corresponding to legend and romance become “miracles of science” (229), valuable “only so long as their bodies held up” (229). The connections between characters become even more forced and fake, and the definition of family, and thus nation, becomes even more discontent and inconsistent.

Béchard takes the novel from the metonymic portrayal of Hervé Hervé and

Georgianne as tropes for solitude to François’s life as a collection of solitudes.19

François begins as a modern errant: “As long as he could recall, he’d roamed” (Béchard

206). His constant search for love and to form a socially definable “family” leads to his multiple superficial involvements, and to his own son Harvey’s spiritual quests. The inconsistency of his “identity” presents the void in which Canadian literature remains adrift because of its quest to define a unitary nation, and a literary canon to represent said nation. Béchard’s narrative parallels the development of Canadian criticism, from belonging to the land, to “a need to think carefully about questions of belonging and subjectivity in the world of global capitalism” (Dobson xi). As Kit Dobson states in

Transnational Canadas, Canadian writing has shifted from “the rural to the urban” (xiii), a process exemplified by the literal and figurative bodies that populate Béchard’s text.

19 François never meets Hervé Hervé, but his feeble representation in Vandal Love reflects Guèvremont’s depiction of Amable as weak, or as Didace states: “He isn’t my idea of a Beauchemin. You’d think he was afraid of work” (102). 139

The unstable site of the family proves no less fraught in the modern city than in the mythological landscape, despite the novel’s hopeful ending. In fact, technology seems to further the break between familial connections, and relationships to bodies (both human and landscape), appear more tenuous than even the ones offered by folkloric or imagined relations. Béchard’s novel thus first embraces the discordant beauty, strength and solitude of the land to later highlight the movement from survival against nature to survival against human nature. The emphasis on natural (as in, born with) and unnatural

(as in, fabricated) bodily distortions, environmental pollution, and the spectacle of the other underscores how bodies serve as material texts for debates over national histories and identity politics.20

Domestic Genealogies: Virility versus Fertility

As the chapters on Burnard and MacDonald illustrate, gender inevitably becomes a factor for consideration when analyzing the link between the family and the nation. In

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Anne McClintock writes:

Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national

tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism’s

conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the

progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent,

20 Although unrelated to the dissertation, the emphasis on the body promoted by Béchard’s novel goes beyond the text. His apparent “literary hotness” is the constant subject of reviewers and critics, and The National Post claims his press kit cites his “killer eyes.” In an interview with Colleen Marie Royr, Béchard responds that he was “vaguely annoyed” with the Canadian Press’s focus on his photogenic quality. The emphasis on Béchard’s good looks serves as a contrast to his deformed characters, and the surprise of critics speaks to a still prevalent association by the general public between author and text. 140

historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or revolutionary principle

of discontinuity. (359)

She identifies “domestic genealogies” such as the “family trope” as reflections of gendered state hierarchies (357). For McClintock, “[d]espite many nationalists’ ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (353). The “family trope” in

Béchard’s novel reflects McClintock’s position that women embody nationalism’s continuity whereas men act as agents, for on one level, the female characters serve only as procreative vessels and the male figures as colonizing wanderers.

Béchard’s portrayal of male and female bodies emphasizes the patriarchal male body as linked to the land, and the female body as suggestive of fertility and morality to reflect the early Québec roman de la terre (Green, “The Novel” 178). The schematic form of the family plot is what Béchard deforms by questioning both the authority vested in the figure of the father and the moral vision projected by the mother to underscore the fallibility of family and nation. The imperial gender representations demonstrate an ideological alliance with patriarchal practices, and the inability of the audience to relate to the characters arises from Béchard’s attempt to illustrate the monstrosity of dichotomist depictions of all bodies (giant/runt, French/Anglo, Canadian/American), not just male and female, in relation to colonial discourse. Thus the nomadic characters with scrambled language and forever changing bodies test the limits of pluralism “to secure a more permissive form of nationality, which would allow for regional and ethnic disparities yet also offer a practical cohesiveness to the country” (Kertzer 198). The

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Hervé family demonstrates the need in Canadian theory and criticism for a space to renegotiate exactly what it is we “ought” to relate to in “our” national literature.

The history of the Hervé family becomes inextricably linked to the formation (or deformation) of the nation, as we are explicitly told, “the endurance of their lineage…had been among the first to colonize North America” (Béchard 277). Hervé Hervé epitomizes the formation of the family and its colonial legacy as he imposes order on land and on blood ties. His sons and grandsons, despite an overwhelming uncertainty, do procreate and extend their lineage beyond Québec borders, proving themselves “forward- thrusting, potent, [and] historic” (McClintock 359). Béchard generally portrays his female characters, however, as bodies to carry the family line, and symbolically to uphold the morals and values of the nation. Indeed, the women are perceived as useful when they are capable of producing offspring, underscoring “women’s active cultural and political participation in national formations” (357). Women exemplify the “last line of defense against change” because they are the heart of the home where idealized national rhetoric must remain secure to ensure cultural survival (Green, Women 17). On the surface, Béchard’s characters appear exact manifestations of the values projected by the roman de la terre, but the family curse and the deformed bodies subvert the nationalist and masculine narrative to present altered visions of roles. Although there are countless examples of Béchard’s description of the male body as violent versus the female figure as a holding cell for future generations, I focus my analysis on those that relate to the main protagonists.

The Hervé family owned the land “before the Seven Years War” and they are known amongst the villagers as strong (Béchard 4), with a patronymic pattern that

142 underscores “the power of their blood” (28). In fact, male figures are continually defined by words that foreground their brutish bodies prone to physical violence. For example, the narrator describes Hervé Hervé as “strong beyond his years” (4) and Jude as born with the look “of a punch-drunk fighter” (6). Jude does, in fact, become a punch-drunk fighter, first as his grandfather’s physical tool to defend manly values against the threat of effeminacy from the runts. He trains Jude like a boxer and has him fight villagers to assert the family’s physical dominance over other citizens, for “[b]oxing provides a particularly illuminating indicator of the complex relationships between rank, leisure, and competing masculinities as they are defined in terms of national identity” (Whale 259).

Hervé Hervé begins “taking him to travelling fairs, pitting him against grown men on sawdust stages after the shows had closed” (Béchard 10). The abnormal strength Jude exudes at first seems to exhibit the superiority of the Hervé bloodline.

Individuals of extraordinary physical strength are not uncommon and were often displayed in freak shows, as Leslie Fiedler discusses in his chapter “The Dream of

Giants” in Freaks. As one of the many “freaks” analyzed by Fiedler, the giant “can compete mentally and physically with the acutest of normals, though they are not the colossal monsters we dream” (106). He goes on to note that despite their size, they “lack their legendary ferocity” and are “in fact the gentlest of Freaks” (106). Indeed, the two main giants of the novel (Jude and Bart), despite their occupations as performers (Jude as boxer, Bart as sideshow freak) play the role of victims rather than victimizers and inspire more sympathy than fear.21 For instance, at the start of the story, Jude is born with his

21 In the next chapter on Biggest Modern Woman, I note how Susan Swan introduces Charles A. Sampson. Her inclusion of his historical existence indicates her awareness of the tradition of the Québec and the French giants, notably – aside from Sampson – Louis Cyr, Géant Beaupré, Jos Monferrand, Horace Barré, Apollon. Although Swan portrays Sampson as “French-Canadian,” 143 sister Isa-Marie in his arms. The birth of Jude the giant holding his runt sister between his arms presents a radical challenge to the categorical boundaries of binaries, for giant and runt arrive as one body, combined rather than separate: “He came into the world with a tiny twin sister, in his arms, it was told, as though he expected further violence”

(Béchard 6). The union of the twins proves a deformity for Hervé Hervé:

Whatever strange motherless, fatherless bond the twins shared was too

much. They’d both been idiots, one gentle, the other brutal, and while Isa-

Marie had inherited something of Jude’s strength, it now seemed the

opposite, Jude’s love no less an infirmity. (25)

Jude and Isa-Marie’s status as twins furthers their freakishness as giant and runt.

Together they represent the strong male and gentle female stereotypes, for he has “dumb, broken features” and she sports a “delicate pretty face” (13). Yet they also physically deform their associated stereotypes, for she inherits some strength and he is “infirmed” by love. Together they refuse definitive categorization as solely giant or runt. Their unity, however, and the strength Isa-Marie acquires from Jude prove insufficient and cannot guarantee her survival. She remains too fragile for Québec, subject to the harsh landscape and her predetermined female duty to produce heirs: “She wouldn’t make it here, they said. There was a country for everything” (11).

he is born in Metz, Loraine, France in 1859. Louis Cyr, on the other hand, was born in Saint Cyprien de Naperville in 1863 (Buck 18). Moreover, unlike Cyr, Sampson was not born with superhuman strength. The story claims he was hit by a lightning bolt and after a month of paralysis, “he awoke to find that he could bend an iron ring by placing it over his upper arm and flexing his biceps” (18). Most critics believe he fabricated this story for his autobiography, which in the context of Swan’s parodic play with the autobiographical genre, becomes a short but significant intertext. There is, clearly, a long tradition of the figure of the giant in Québec that Béchard inevitably alludes to with his creation of Jude and Bart. 144

Indeed, whereas the male bodies are described as virile, the female bodies are generally portrayed as reproductively utile: “[Hervé Hervé] bred his wife hard, and when she foundered in childbed, he replaced her” (Béchard 5). Georgianne, his second wife, gives Hervé Hervé eleven more children. Once Agnès, Georgianne’s daughter, gives birth to her illegitimate twins, she disappears from the text, abandoning family and children; her short side-story illustrates the novel’s portrayal of female bodies as predominately vehicles for procreation or purity. Isa-Marie appears readily disposable because “[s]he wasn’t a woman who would bear eighteen lineages” (23), and is therefore given away by Hervé Hervé. Jude rescues her, but her aunts, noting her frail stature, suggest she be sent to a nunnery. Nonetheless, she remains with the Hervé family and as she “becomes a woman,” Jude becomes her protector (13), guarding her purity, even against her wishes, for if she cannot reproduce, she must uphold the family’s morality.

As soon as Isa-Marie’s chastity appears threatened, Jude interferes. Feeling caged by familial and social expectations, Isa-Marie falls into a deep depression, refusing to eat or leave her room, which eventually leads to her death.

Jude’s unparalleled manliness, however, does not become the means by which

Hervé Hervé secures the survival of the bloodline, for Jude wanders bewildered,

“starving, naked” to America after Isa-Marie’s death (Béchard 31), where he becomes a professional boxer and seeks the glorious America he’s heard of in Honoré’s tales – an

America he never finds. Rather, Jude searches the crowds at boxing matches for the ideal

Americans he heard described and watches on television, but he only spots “crooked jaws, puffed lips, some bald, bearded fat men in oil-stained suspenders” (38). With his punch-drunk fighter look, he fits right into the ring but nowhere else.

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Boxing, the epitome of spectacular physical strength, serves as a trope for the assertion and subsequent deformity of masculinity in the text. Carney, Jude’s trainer, states: “Boxing, he’d once told him, is a world of what you can’t see coming. Here today, gone tomorrow and sometimes good things, too. You can’t make nothing happen.

It’s all got to be in you from the start” (Béchard 58). Carney, of course, sees it in Jude from the start, for Jude tackles Carney’s star boxer “Boss” and strikes him down as if hitting “a piñata loaded with loss and anger and loneliness” (33). Jude quickly becomes the most physically imposing man on display in the ring, and his strength combined with sadness expresses the inherent contradictions of the trope of boxing in relation to self- representation. As Jon Whale argues, boxing’s “claims to national identity justify acts of violence in terms of manly morality and its celebration of this manliness as a sign of material national character despite its recognition of social and ethnic differences at the heart of the enterprise” (262). Boxing thus performs the effect of overriding internal divisions while appropriating success to assert the superiority of one nation, as embodied by the athlete, over another. Despite being a more solitary sport than hockey, boxing still reinforces notions of cultural and national identity, albeit notions that remain contested inside and outside the ring.

Similarly to the convention of the father passing on his land and heritage in the roman de la terre, boxing symbolizes the training of one man by another to perpetuate masculine values worthy of national significance. Hence it becomes important that

Carney, though not biologically Jude’s father, convinces him to change his name to Jude

White: “a safe name the man in Atlanta had insisted, no need to attract attention”

(Béchard 36). The name change attracts the reader’s attention, however, for it

146 emphasizes Jude’s physical difference in an American context, not as giant, but as a

“white” boxer, as well as announces his surrender of his paternal roots. As a boxer, Jude has no problem integrating himself within the American sport, but as Jude “White,” his racial difference continues to haunt and hinder his self-expression.

Béchard underscores Jude’s ethnicity in relation to his boxing career by involving him with Louise, an American of Creole and Indian decent. The two connect because of their shared knowledge of the French language, albeit “un français bien différent”

(Béchard 50). Béchard further represents the functionality of the female body as linked to fertility through his characterization of Louise. Louise is a large woman hired by

Carney because she has the gift of healing. Her hands are “as large as a man’s” and remind Jude of his grandmother’s “big hands awkward on the folds of her apron” (43).

Louise’s French roots reaffirm her symbolic connection to his grandmother and the two find in each other temporary solace for their overwhelming loneliness and alienation from family. Jude is seduced by her use of the French language and drawn to her transformation in the act of sex into a vulnerable body “like a girl” (46). Pregnancy, however, reinvigorates her power and Jude notices how “[t]he girl was gone. She was bright and strong and beyond his grasp” (56). At the same time, he suffers a hand injury that prevents him from boxing and begins his descent into drink and depression.

His brute strength suspended, Jude appears intimidated by Louise’s newfound force and finds himself completely disconnected, irritated by her French origins and gradually ignoring her, going days “without speaking” (Béchard 59). Louise asks him to leave and he wanders, seeking any possible avenue that will allow him to fight, refusing to let his hand heal and causing further damage to his body. He makes his way back to

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Louise, doped on painkillers, his face “swollen, his lips ruined, one eye shut” (61). She takes pity on his beaten face and allows him to stay and sleep to recover. He initially refuses to acknowledge their child, but as she narrates tales from her past, exposing her family’s “French blood” and skin colour, he recalls Isa-Marie, his dead sister, and decides he has a duty to raise this child. She represents an opportunity for Jude to redeem himself for failing his own sister, and he decides to kidnap her, severing all ties to Louise and her heritage. He even renames the infant “Isa” (68), after Isa-Marie.

While Louise is asleep, Jude crushes the pet owls inside their cage to prevent them from screeching when he takes the baby from her crib: “He went to the owl cage.

With his good hand he opened it and took each soft stirring body and crushed it. He took the baby from the crib and wrapped her as gently as he could” (Béchard 66). By killing the owls, Jude destroys the watchful eyes overseeing the baby, taking on the role of surveyor. In this scene, Béchard juxtaposes Jude’s brutish conduct with tenderness to symbolize how he sacrifices the violent life offered by his strong hand for the gentle potential offered by Isa. As he departs and begins his journey as a single father, Louise becomes a mere shadow that occasionally appears “in dreams” (68), underscoring how she proved useful only when she healed Jude’s body and produced an offspring that he can now raise beyond his failures, his French roots, and his violent past.

When Jude kidnaps Isa, he takes on the role of protector and provider. He feeds baby Isa steak to ensure her health, and finds a job on a horse farm owned by a woman,

Barbara, whom he defers to “[w]hen things got complicated” with Isa (Béchard 74).

Despite a lingering love that neither Jude nor Isa quite understands, Isa fears Jude’s moods and desires knowledge of her maternal roots. She escapes the horse farm by

148 agreeing to marry Levon, “The Mexican” and to become his “watchful propriety” (90), for he promises comfort and the freedom of travel and education. She thus abandons her father for another type of father figure, who provides but still fails to fulfill.

Levon transforms Isa into a Southern Belle for appearances (86) – a not-so-subtle mockery of colonial roots and American identity politics polluting Canadian bodies. He does not support her education for individual growth, but rather to ensure she can carry a conversation at his level and accompany her physical reflection of domestic ideals with a qualified mind. Levon is a strange character whose foolish fixation with appearances becomes inconsequential in comparison to his obsessive quest to know the “truth” behind human origin. His support of “extraterrestrial civilizations” and “invisible planets” allots his religious inclinations a scientological slant that mocks his performance as an elite intellectual. Furthermore, his foolishness and failure to consummate his union with Isa destabilizes the evolutionary principle of marriage and their unconventional union resists the family model presented by the roman de la terre.

Although he agrees to a marriage without consummation, as the years progress,

Levon begins to express a sexual desire for Isa. Isa protects herself against Levon’s new sexual interest by becoming obese: “Only her size loosened his grip” (Béchard 94). Her relationship with food and incessant physical expansion reinforce her unhappiness and physical resistance of domestic scripting, initially expressed by her refusal to take his name when married. Despite her defiance of Levon, however, she still procreates with

Bart and dies upon giving birth, never performing her role as mother and thus never overcoming the portrayal of women as utile while fertile.

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Instead of sharing a life beyond day-to-day essentials with Levon, Isa becomes obsessed with trying to find her mother’s ancestry and attends university, majoring in

French. Her roots remain a mystery, however, because Jude’s false and anglicized last name never provides her with sufficient context to determine her heritage. Thus aside from portraying the female body as a mere vessel for procreation, the dead and disappearing mothers also demonstrate the loss of the mother tongue, for as Isa’s story illustrates, without the correct family name for her father she is unable to trace her roots back to a French-Canadian past. As Söderlind argues: “The language most closely linked to the territory is the vernacular, the mother tongue, which is primarily spoken, and whose function is to establish a ‘communion’ rather than a communication between interlocutors” (8). Isa’s preoccupation with learning the French language in order to better understand her devalued genealogical roots highlights the novel’s subtle statement on linguistic colonization and the importance of storytelling to perpetuate familial and cultural history. The loss of mothers reflects the death of the mother tongue, as French words quickly diminish and the Hervé bloodline becomes anglicized by the father figures. As such, Béchard re-articulates the tradition of the roman de la terre, which saw the figure of the mother as the centerpiece for the perpetuation of cultural values and morals, while at the same time contesting the genre’s emphasis on the connection to roots via paternalistic channels, such as the passing on of the family name.

Isa’s own changing pregnant body exemplifies her disassociation from her mother, for unlike Louise, her new physical state has a negative and destructive impact on her self-perception. In fact, Béchard’s portrayal of Isa’s pregnant body is gruesome, especially in comparison to her obesity, which he illustrates as a resistance to domestic

150 expectations. Upon discovering her pregnancy, she does not feel “herself transformed” but rather “cut off, insubstantial, her entire life something she’d heard from another, about someone else” (Béchard 140). Her gradual physical deformation does not bring her strength, but rather debilitates her movement: “Her body ached. Her guts cramped. Her feet were swollen, and veins bulged in her legs” (161). Isa does not experience the joys of expecting, but rather expresses distaste for pregnancy as reiterating essentialist notions of womanhood as motherhood, particularly in light of her perceived social role as

Levon’s wife. She imagines the town’s folk gossiping about “The Mexican’s child” and decides she must leave to avoid such categorization – and to ensure her child has a father

(146). Her desire to raise her child with Bart further emphasizes her difference from

Louise and how her pregnancy reaffirms rather than resists social models of the family, for she worries about performing the role of a single-parent.

Indeed, Isa decides to find Bart because she does not want her child to be raised with “a missing parent” (Béchard 141), for she perceives this deprivation as the main reason for her overall lack of a concrete identity and dissatisfaction with life. Although she finds Bart, she does not stay long because of his alcoholic, ferocious and physically abusive behaviour. Instead, she spends the end of her pregnancy in physical pain, wandering across national borders in search of a “place of letting go” (163), eventually ending up in Québec. Recognizing that “the family she could no longer let herself imagine” is lost (164), Isa dies in a car accident, leaving her baby to Bart, like Jude, a single-father figure.

After escaping the constraints of responsibility and marriage, the father figures

(except Hervé Hervé) take on a more active role in the raising of children. Though the

151 masculine characters appear stereotypically dominant as protagonists and patriarchs, their roles as single fathers dismantle “the phallocentric illusion of masculine self-sufficiency and fixity and enable us to envision masculinities in process, in struggle and contention”

(Coleman, Masculine 19). The movement from wandering to booze to fatherhood reflects the “allegory of manly maturation” that Daniel Coleman associates with “the metonymic and masculinist modalities deployed in this oft-repeated story of national legitimation” (“Immigration” 85). Béchard’s emphasis on the interaction of daughters and fathers destabilizes the mother-daughter bond that feminists employed to reverse the dominant patriarchal father-son family plot; however, the father-daughter bond in Vandal

Love also overturns the importance of the father-son plot as the nexus of the roman de la terre. To paraphrase Linda Boose in her introduction to Daughters and Fathers, the father-son bond is the most visible and discussed by Western theory and fiction, followed by the mother-son bond, then by the mother-daughter bond, whereas the father-daughter relations remain generally unexplored (2). Béchard refigures the centrality and dominance of the patriarchal father and the tradition of land and heritage transference to the son by replacing the “good” sons with rebellious daughters, interested in their lineage, but in constant battle with paternal authority. These daughters gradually evolve from submissive figures employed as objects of power between mother and father to women who reject their fathers and take possession of their own pursuits.

Deformed hands become symbolic of the destructiveness of male virility throughout the text as both Jude and Bart suffer from hand injuries and subsequently alienate their daughters. Like Jude, Bart injures his hand: “The links crushed the tips of two fingers. He roared and men gathered, and he punched the operator…Two fingertips

152 and nails may as well have been removed, they were so thoroughly crushed” (Béchard

181). After the injury, he refuses painkillers or drink, starting to feel alive despite the pain: “It was as if every emotion he’d known was in his hand” (182). The deformity allows Bart to acknowledge his sentiments towards his situation in life and he decides to find Isa and his child. He is initially unsuccessful, however, at locating her since her move from Levon’s house until the police find him and announce her death, making Bart

Isabelle’s primary caregiver. The fact that he seeks Isa prior to discovering her death underlines the positive change brought on by the deformation of his hand, as though the alcoholism that once served as a crutch for his emotional discontent has been crushed from his body.

Indeed, the deformation of male hands relates to the genetic predisposition to alcoholism that acts as a debilitating habit for masculine power. All the main male protagonists succumb to booze, drinking constantly and allowing alcohol to emasculate them. Béchard’s portrayal of the drinking dads parallels his representation of female bodies as procreative vessels, for the metaphorical implications of each stereotype reveal the overall powerlessness of the men, and their innate desire to both connect and escape.

Just as motherhood does not succeed in ensuring a family bond, alcohol creates only artificial connections and fosters a false sense of belonging to a community. Therefore,

Béchard underscores the metaphorical roles of the characters as subversions of the traditional characteristics valued by the representational customs of the roman de la terre, and the idealized casting of the family as a model for the nation.

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Nomads and Names

To avoid being trapped by categorical classifications, the Hervé children are continually on the move. The frequent dislocation of the offspring disorders the ideal of the home as a stable unifying space, further subverting the standards of the roman de la terre. Indeed, traumatic experiences of dispossession are genetically inherited by the

Hervés. As dislocated beings forever physically marked by lineage, Béchard’s characters demonstrate “how possessing is always already a negotiation with dispossession” (Sugars and Turcotte xx). Hence the Hervés perform acts of wandering, naming, and renaming to resist their inherited roles. Wandering and naming transform the mythological journeys of the Hervé offspring into an ontological quest. The term “ontological” as a medical adjective, as explained in The Oxford English Dictionary, designates “a theory that disease exists as an entity within the body” (“ontological” 1a), and thus the Hervés embody the dis-ease suggested by constantly moving and renaming.

The propensity to wander appears as a genetic trait in Vandal Love as all the major characters, at some point or another, become un Canadien errant. Jude drifts across the border to the United States, Bart’s family describes him as always coming and going, Isa travels in search of a place to belong, Georgianne walks across the country in search of Jean, François connects and disconnects with the highway, and Harvey journeys on religious paths across the continent. Wandering reveals the model of the nation as in constant flux, and the characters’ quest for a point of origin, but also their journey to abscond origin. Wandering refutes the settler motif projected by the patriarch and promotes the search for an alternative authenticity, or even an escape from authenticity itself; it parallels the erratic site of the deformed body.

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Likewise, naming demonstrates the struggle in the text between a longing for heritage and the need to reinvent one’s history. The mythological aspects of the family begin with the mythic proportions of the name (paralleling the mythic proportions of

Hervé Hervé’s physique): “[a]ll through Gaspésie the name was known for giants because, in a forgotten past, the family had begun christening male children with the patronymic, hyphenating it to tell them apart” (Béchard 28). For Hervé Hervé, the

“adventures of his ancestors” are forgotten, but “their name and the power of their blood” remain to underscore the endurance of the family lineage (28). Yet the unstable connections, renamings, and anglicization of the family name undermine Hervé Hervé’s mastery over the perpetuation of a pure bloodline, and thus subvert the mythic force of a large family as an essential cultural and political project reflective of the ideology of national survival.

As noted earlier, Jude begins the process of reinvention by changing his name to

Jude White, and he later changes his name again to William White. As a result, Isa is unable to find her true familial roots. Knowing Jude’s birth name would mean mastering both him and the history he represents; instead, her past remains a mystery, open to invention and reinvention. Though she exists as a blood relation of the Hervé line, she never discovers that connection. In a way, the certainty of the Hervé lineage ends with

Isa until her daughter, Isabelle, rebuilds the family history in the epilogue, for the family connections in book two are just as confusing and uncertain as in book one.22 For

22 Some of the confusion stems from Béchard’s use of the same or quite similar names for all the characters (Isa-Marie, Isa, Isabelle, Hervé, Harvey, etc). To help keep all the characters straight, I have provided at the start of this chapter a detailed family tree. Nonetheless, I think he purposefully uses similar names to emphasize the role of the characters as symbolic figures embodying the motifs he subverts, rather than individual personages intent on asserting their singularity. 155 example, Georgianne wanders randomly into a house where a woman calls her “Maman” and where she finds François (204). She believes this is Jean’s family, although he is nowhere to be found, and when the woman dies, Georgianne stays to raise François. She teaches him about his heritage and the power of his name: “She told him that he must learn to be like his father, and when she wrote his name – Hervé-François-Hervé – he recognized only the middle one” (206). At the beginning, François fails to connect with his supposed lineage, and his doubt mirrors the uncertainty of his true blood relation to the mythical family offered by Georgianne’s tales.

He chooses to anglicize his name to Frank, and changes the Hervé name to

Harvey foolishly hoping to inspire the “family magic,” despite the alterations and his uncertainty that “the anglicization would retain the name’s power” (Béchard 260). Yet despite his initial uncertainty, as François ages he becomes a perpetuator of family tales.

When Harvey Harvey asks about his family and whether there were others like himself searching for a place to call home, François narrates:

He described the endurance of their lineage that had been among the first

to colonize North America, and how his grandmother, in search for him,

had wandered the continent seven years, driven by love and faith. He

repeated the stories she’d told him time and time again, of family and

history and her visions, embellishing them himself, giving the Hervés a

knack for business and a penchant for the sciences. (277)

François changes from a man who mistrusted his lineage to one who enhances its mythical history to reflect modern perceptions of strength and success. Despite marrying an American and anglicizing his name and his son’s name, he is unable to completely

156 annul his history and even starts to notice the return of his accent, for an “accent, he’d learned for all his tired will, could never truly be erased” (312). The accent thus illustrates, like the genetic curse, an inability to rescind roots entirely.

Harvey’s spiritual quests, which encompass the final pages of the text, also involve naming and renaming. In college he finds himself basically disinterested, except in one assignment that requires him to trace the genealogy of his name. Then Harvey converts to Sikhism and changes his name to Sat Puja: “The journey began with taking a name…Each dawn he meditated on his name” (Béchard 287-88). He later changes his name again, to Juan Elhuésped in order to protect his identity after escaping from the police for a crime he did not commit. Harvey’s renaming parallels Jude’s renaming and illustrates the power of names as purely mythological. The deceptiveness and uncertainty of the Hervé line demonstrate the artificiality of kinship and the failure of the family to ensure authenticity and distinct meaning. Hence the characters’ constant wanderings and renamings reveal the illusion of a single self and deform the certainty of a uniform national character.

“theatre of salvation, archangels and businessmen” (173)

The city, as he’d seen it so often, suspended in morning light, held

millions of rooms like this one, sleeping, dreaming bodies oblivious to

each other, so numerous that perhaps God couldn’t touch them all, like the

prairie sun at dusk on the reaching grass, each blade lost in the shadow of

another. (Béchard 231)

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The desire to belong and to connect continues in book two, but the overwhelming sense of the tenuousness of all connections proves even more disheartening. As the passage above illustrates, millions of bodies exist in the urban landscape, but without recognizing one another. Aside from the physical stereotypes and the differences of the characters as a result of genetic inheritance, the focus on the body as a corporate entity reveals the disintegration of the subject and the dangers of a false nationalism. Béchard dissects

Canada’s relationship to modernity through the deformation of the body, and turns the emotional search for home into a flawed and fake inheritance.

Béchard ponders the superficiality of a universal culture rooted in American values and technological modernity through the character of François, who ditches his role as altar boy and becomes “a lab rat” (Béchard 228). He begins by registering for studies that pay participants to allow their bodies to become tools for scientific and product research: “He ate protein mixes and rode exercise bikes while men in lab coats took muscle samples from his anaesthetized thigh” (228). The scientific research in which he participates is a metaphor for how technological modernity takes what it perceives as incomplete elements (such as the body) and deforms them so that they become impure, removing any possibility of an authentic physical existence.

The mythological fears expressed earlier in the text regarding “the pollution from the U.S.” become a reality with François’s contemporary story (Béchard 201). He represents the American business man, set on making his fortune with various entrepreneurial endeavours – from bumper stickers to converting an abandoned garage in

Gastown “into a car/museum burger joint” that suggests “heyday America” (250). He sees Georgianne’s beliefs as “outmoded” and believes English is “the future world

158 language” (243-44). When he picks up Peggy, a lost Southern American girl, on the side of the highway, he falls for “her accent not Southern belle but low and rolling” (256).

François thus easily succumbs to technological advances and accepts the colonial dominance of the English language without much contestation.

Later, to test “laser mending” (Béchard 243), he registers for a study in which his big toe is cut off and put back in place without a scar. The scripting of himself as a dispensable body is not only illustrated by his compensation of “three thousand dollars”

(242), but even more so by his telling and retelling of the experience: “Speaking well, he decided, was the product of deep breaths…When he left the hospital, there was even, waiting on the steps, that sudden Western phenomenon, a fan club” (244). Fame is transitory and his temporary glory contrasts Hervé Hervé’s mythic legend. An article is also written on the scientific study entitled “Human Body Mere Mechanics” (243), which undermines the natural form of the human body illustrated earlier by the habitant in

Hervé Hervé. François literally prostitutes his body for science, a point further exemplified by his relationship with Ernestine, “la pute générique” (228), or the generic hooker.

François’s treatment of his body as a purely medical resource leads to his inauthentic relationships with women who use their sexuality for purposes other than child production (unlike the female characters discussed earlier in this chapter). Béchard portrays Ernestine as ugly with “ratty” hair, a “pigeon-chest,” lipstick marking “her buck teeth” and a “deformed sternum” (215, 223). Although Ernestine admits to him that prostitution is not “a choice” (223), she leaves him when he proposes an alternative life.

She refuses the socially acceptable life path he offers and remains a commodity

159 associated with monetary exchange, challenging the conventional social expectations dictated for women in the mythological scripting of the nation presented in Book I.

Ernestine’s ugly deformities may at first appear as negative descriptions, but in a novel in which all characters are somehow deformed, her unattractiveness transforms her body into a site of resistance to undermine the hegemonic depiction of the prostitute body in modernity as one in need of salvation. She directly opposes the domestic script offered by the roman de la terre, preferring her sexual liberty and sovereignty. Rather, Ernestine reaffirms her autonomy by leaving François, refusing to perform a role she perceives as more insincere than her profession.

Elaine, another of François’s lovers, is a sixty-eight year old woman whose entire physique is reconstructed by “Body-Sculpting,” a form of plastic surgery that goes deeper than the skin and attempts to regenerate the body. When François first meets Elaine, he estimates that she is around thirty, rather than sixty-eight. She initiates their sexual encounters and her body initially screams sexuality: “though petite and busty, [she] drew on her cigarette as if she’d been resurrected from the shadowy streets of some imagined

Paris” (Béchard 248). The use of the word “resurrected” in this sentence alludes to her actual bodily restoration, for her physique has been deformed and reformed in order to create her youthful appearance. Her sexual description is later undermined by the description of her plastic surgeries, when “doctors stretched her face, incised her eyes and lips, padded and tucked her breasts, sucked out varicose veins and removed folds of unwanted skin” (252). Elaine’s grotesquely beautiful physical distortion illustrates the falsity and fallibility of structures of power, for although she can mend her beauty to defy aging, she cannot extend the age of her mind. As Margaret, Elaine’s daughter, notes:

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“She told him about her mother’s bouts of premature dementia, the great irony of her life…You can’t fix the brain” (Béchard 253). Hence scientific progress cannot overcome mental degeneration, and her body becomes a mere product of science, highlighting the novel’s suggestion that all bodies, human, imaginary, and national, are artificial.

Although science has mastered the art of refashioning the body to project the appearance of youth, it fails to get to the crux of human origin and revise cyclical nature, emphasizing lack of certainty as the one thing humanity can trust. Yet Béchard does not only question the false meaning offered by scientific evolution – indeed, he subverts the roman de la terre even further by disputing the legitimacy of faith as foundational for a nourishing community.

Through Harvey’s character, Béchard evokes the compulsion people feel to belong to a sustaining community, a compulsion that leads to extravagant displays of faith. Harvey’s journey to find meaning leads to multiple religious explorations that initially appear to offer certainty, but that are ultimately cheapened practices. Although

Harvey’s (who is now renamed Sat Puja) intentions appear sincere, as he demonstrates with “an indefinite vow of silence” (Béchard 290), the performance of religion as a

“theatre of salvation” comes to him with Jamgoti (aka: Donald), a rich young man who drives a convertible BMW (173). Harvey’s attempt to cleanse his body and soul of a superficial global culture proves ironic because of his friendship with Jamgoti, who arrives at an ashram in an act of rebellion against his privileged upbringing:

Born into a world of euphemistic money – trading, managing, observing –

he’d rarely seen his father, who was among the elite to have mastered the

prima material of the capitalist world, and who could do so easily from his

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home PC…but [Jamgoti] knew that youth necessitated rebellion or else

would pass soundlessly into spongy middle age…He meditated often…He

received nighttime visits from stoners seeking consolation or God. He

was the dorm wise man. (292)

Jamgoti represents the superficiality of religious enthusiasm and his campus performance as a wise man mocks the sincerity of his beliefs.23 His religious aspirations are grounded in rebellion rather than faith, and although he claims to turn his back on money, he continues to drive the BMW. The master notes Jamgoti’s disingenuous devotion and names him “Jamgoti,” which means “loincloth” (293). With a true “politician’s sense of humour” Jamgoti turns his name into a redeemable joke: “Means loincloth, he clarified even to those who knew – Can’t leave home without it” (293), an allusion to the

American Express slogan that stresses his characterization as the embodiment of modern consumer culture. Pinpointing Jamgoti as a “politician” is appropriate, for he acts in a manipulative way in order to gain advancement in the religious organizations, continually presenting himself as wiser and more philosophically savvy. He becomes something of a religious celebrity and his fame further illustrates his bogus performance as a devout being with pure spiritual motives.

When Jamgoti proposes to Sat Puja that they become Sadhus, Hindu practitioners who live a life of moderation apart from society in order to focus on their spirituality, he still stages their roles in order to display the authenticity only of their performance rather than the sincerity of their intentions. Jamgoti sends the BMW back to his mother, and the

23 In Book I, Béchard also undermines religious enthusiasm, not only through Levon’s scientology, but Bart’s participation in Reverend Diamondstone’s conversion charades. Diamondstone, who notes he sports “a self-invented name” (168), represents those who take advantage of people seeking meaning and connections through religious fanaticism. 162 two friends leave behind their books and cut up their credit cards. They become “like itinerant Buddhists” walking and mediating (Béchard 298), until Jamgoti takes up an offer for a ride from Danny, which leads them to a house where Jamgoti spends days playing PlayStation and eventually tripping on LSD. When introduced to Danny’s brother Andy, Jamgoti undermines their religious quest and jokes that he and Sat Puja simply dared one another “to live like holy men” (301). The oversimplification of the pursuit for mystical experience reveals to Sat Puja the insincerity of his partner, who no longer appears as the wise guru on campus, but as a rebellious rich kid out for an adventure. Jamgoti is unable to resist participating in the games of capitalism, as suggested by the PlayStation, and his death brings to an end the dogmatic structures that perpetuate a false sense of clarity in Sat Puja’s life.

At the beginning of the novel, “[t]he expectation that the body will inhabit a single identity renders it individuated and isolated, left to fend for itself” (Dobson 171-

72). By the end, however, the fugitive Sat Puja presents the “liberatory potential of deterritorialized bodies” avoiding “regimes that control them through an ever-increasing variety of surveillance and policing techniques” (172-73). Escaping the police, Sat Puja becomes a deterritorialized body, living in “St. Louis under the name Juan Elhuésped” and painting his eyebrows and moustache “with a permanent marker” (Béchard 339).

Once again, Béchard illustrates the superficiality of identity by portraying how easily one can shift from one body to another. Despite his false identity, Béchard describes Sat Puja as more liberated than ever, uninterested in the possibility of being repatriated. He reaches a kind of salvation when he realizes “on a neglected sidewalk, eating salty blackberries grown up around a fire hydrant” that this was the “true sadhu” (340). Sat

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Puja thus manages to move past the need to belong in a single setting and finds a “new world” where longing can be “unexpected and good” (341).

The novel thus ends on a positive note of hope in contrast to the cold superficiality that encompasses the majority of book two.24 Sat Puja is reunited with his father, who is dying of cancer, probably as a result of his profession as a lab rat. He is able, however, to save Sat Puja by distracting the police and letting him run. The epilogue resists closure as Isabelle begins the discovery of the family tree, but gets distracted by falling in love. Sat Puja continues his existence as a fugitive, but with a new “keen sense of appreciation” for his physical and mental existence (340). Béchard hints that hope exists in the indeterminacy of roots. The deformed bodies, the act of renaming, and the continuous wandering – all serve to provide the characters with spaces in which to express difference and contest the tyranny of tradition. Ultimately, Béchard’s text remains inconclusive, filled with more questions than answers. The unresolved epilogue continues the novel’s representation of disconnections between the city and the land, and between the nation and the body. The need to find a place to belong remains an ongoing ambition that makes the family curse, not a genetic trait that leads to the alternating births of giants and runts, but a gene that propels a deformed selfhood that dissents against the status quo and stable identities.

D. Y. Béchard’s Vandal Love demonstrates how deformed familial bodies reinscribe the mainstream markers, such as man versus nature, colonial male and fertile female bodies, of the traditional roman de la terre. Ultimately the novel’s title is not

24 This sense of hope, however, does seem rather forced. 164 merely about the characters and their otherness, but the text’s purposeful defacing of the public property that is Québec or Canadian literature. Vandal Love’s reflection of

Canadian literary motifs positions the text within current critical conversations that ponder “the continuing anxiety over [the] intent and purpose” of Canadian literature and

“its intense preoccupation with its own formation” (Kamboureli and Miki viii). Its emphasis on the role literature plays in both the promoting and challenging to nationalism unmasks ideological aberrations that challenge the inherited colonial formation of the nation and the canon.

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“Of” the World: Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World

I was born to be measured and I do not fit in anywhere. (Swan 332)

Our most fundamental relation to the gigantic is articulated in our relation to landscape, our immediate and lived relation to nature as it ‘surrounds’ us. Our position here is the antithesis of our position to the miniature; we are enveloped by the gigantic, surrounded by it, enclosed within its shadow. Whereas we know the miniature as a spatial whole or as temporal parts, we know the gigantic only partially. We move through the landscape; it does not move through an abstract projection of the body upon the natural world. Consequently, both the miniature and the gigantic may be described through metaphors of containment – the miniature as contained, the gigantic as container. (Stewart 71)

Giantess Anna Swan, the protagonist of Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern

Woman of the World, finds her abnormal physical appearance subjected to various forms of measurement. As Susan Stewart states in the above quotation, our most obvious connection to the gigantic is through landscape which can be used to represent “the order and disorder of historical forces” (86). Stewart’s chapter on the gigantic discusses images of giants in folklore and literature, and how these literary depictions were often linked to the formation of nations (for example, the battles with giants in mythology or in the stories of King Arthur, which I address briefly in the opening chapter). She argues that the gigantic “represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural” (70).

Swan’s representation of Anna is, indeed, infinite, exterior, public, and natural to an exaggerated degree, and her connection to the landscape remains a popular topic of discussion amongst literary critics. Therefore, this chapter first examines the critical arguments regarding Anna’s allegorical representation of the Canadian nation, and other critical responses to the novel before conducting a more detailed analysis of Swan’s text itself. Smaro Kamboureli, for example, argues that Anna’s body serves as an allegory for

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Canada’s landscape, and her womb as a symbol of its huge, unspoiled natural resources.

Other critics consider Anna’s marriage to Martin suggestive of the American spoilage of

Canadian resources, while her visit with Queen Victoria illustrates Canada’s subservience to colonial rule. All these viewpoints are valid, but Anna’s ex-centricity goes beyond allegory and showcases questions of power in relation to deformed bodies, particularly female, in Canadian literature.

I then consider the depiction of Anna’s childhood to lead into my discussion of the fashion of “spieling” as revelatory of the artificiality of femininity, gender, and nation. Ma Belén Martín Lucas’s paper “El cuerpo femenino como emplazamiento de resistencia” accurately argues that the fragmented style of the text disrupts the authoritative male gaze, and Anna’s body thus resists all acts of colonization attempting to cage her within physical-normative expectations. Her spieling and physical size transgress borders, rhetorical and physical, and perform a parody that reverses the ideal of the female body as a trope for the nation. Moreover, Anna’s spiels are “commodified verbal performance[s]” (Wyile, Speculative 239), and her “ladylike clothes” (Swan 71) are performative strategies that illustrate her doubly marginalized position as woman and physical other. Indeed, Anna’s spieling and Victorian sense of style enact the parodic carnival of the text and demonstrate how her self-effacing performances deconstruct the commodification of both her voice and body.

I finish with an analysis of the womb and Anna’s sexuality as resisting the imperial fantasies of the male characters obsessed with perpetuating a patriarchal nation.

The title of this chapter positions the preposition “of” in quotation marks to emphasize the novel’s title. The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “From its original sense, of

167 was naturally used in the expression of the notions of removal, separation, privation, derivation, origin or source, starting-point, spring of action, cause, agent, instrument, material, and other senses, which involve the notion of ‘taking, coming, arising, or resulting from’” (“of”). The use of the preposition “of” indicates Anna’s position as having to do with location: it places her beyond boundaries as if the world belongs to her.

Hence Swan’s use of “of” rather than “in” indicates both a distance from the world, as well as a point of origin; it also presents Anna as an open, rather than closed body. Anna is, in a sense, a kind of preposition and announces her presence in the physical world, for as Swan acknowledges in the preface to the text, “Anna Swan is, curiously, not as well known as the other Nova Scotian giant, her friend Angus McAskill” (n.pag). Swan’s title thus introduces the theoretical ambitions of the text: first to “write Anna into history” by employing “conventions that have governed the traditional recording of history,” such as tangible facts, letters, testimonials, but also to confront the problematic presumption of linear genealogy (Heffernan 25); then, by granting Anna agency as a performer of her own story to resist erasure and the artifice of universal labels; and lastly, by questioning the colonial connection between the female body (biggest modern woman) and the nation

(of the world).

Beyond Allegory: Criticism

Literary criticism on Biggest Modern Woman remains inconsistent, offering both praise and discontent, often in the same review or article. Critics and reviewers seem uncomfortable with their inability to categorize the text with certainty and therefore tend to miss Swan’s intent to challenge classification altogether. Douglas Hill observes that

168 the topic of Swan’s text is “potentially fascinating” but the execution “falls well short of conception” (318). Linda Swan-Ryan, an extended family member of the historical Anna

Swan, states her disappointment and claims Susan Swan felt Anna’s true story “was not worthy of writing” (qtd. in Heffernan 26). Paul Wilson, however, values how the novel

“can be grasped, appreciated, and enjoyed on several different levels: as a straight story, as colourful social history, as pure entertainment and even as a novel of ideas” (30).

Linda Hutcheon builds on Wilson’s comments and calls Swan’s text “historiographic metafiction,” which she defines as “fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (Canadian 13). Indeed, Swan’s pastiche of intertexts disrupts conventional history and challenges the truthfulness of the autobiographical genre, just as Anna’s physique resists one categorical classification after the other. At the end of the text, Anna concludes that she does not fit anywhere, for throughout her performative narration she is

[c]ast as a marketable commodity in Apollo and Barnum’s story, as the

fecund, fertile female by her father, as domestic mate by Angus, as an

interesting scientific experiment by the numerous Victorian doctors, and

as a Cinderella figure who married for love in the fairy tale narrated by the

curator of the Sunrise Trail Museum in Tatamagouche. (Heffernan 29)

Anna is, as Heffernan suggests, a woman of the world, acting the many social roles imposed upon her rather than succumbing to one. Yet some critics insist that Anna serves solely as an allegorical figure for Canada, rather than as a subjective woman of the world.

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Jill LeBihan in “Freaks and Others: The Biggest Modern Woman and the World” alters Swan’s title to underscore her thesis that “an allegorical mapping of the novel into post-colonial politics of twentieth-century Canada” illustrates a revision of history (186).

Her change to the title’s symbolic preposition not only emphasizes the significance of

“of” in the first place, but underlines her argument that the novel illustrates Canadian colonial exploitation and post-colonial otherness, as embodied by the character of Anna

(186). I mention this precisely because although I find this a valid reading, Swan’s original title does not include “and” and therefore, operates beyond an allegorical level, offering Anna’s character more agency than the role of a scrutinized figure.

Similarly, Dorothy Jones states that the novel “employs quite specific political allegory, identifying the giant Anna both with the colonial terrain of Canada and the situation of women in general” (31). Expanding on this reading, Smaro Kamboureli, in one of the most cited articles on Swan’s text, writes: “As a Canadian woman, Anna becomes an allegory imaging the vast Canadian landscape, her personal difficulties depicting the problems of pioneers as represented in the novel by her parents…Whether

Anna is treated in the novel as a sexual or political allegory, she embodies the discomfort and uncertainty alterity induces” (“The Biggest Modern” n. pag.). Her analysis of Anna as othered not only by her physical difference, but also by her gender, reveals Anna as a metaphor for marginalization within the nation. She astutely acknowledges the text’s generic ambivalence to exceed “the aesthetic norms we traditionally associate with modernism and postmodernism in order to include sexual and national politics” (n.pag.).

The text is, indeed, performative, resisting all conventional boundaries and categories.

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Yet according to Kamboureli, although Anna defends Canada throughout the text, she sells out to the United States and continuously submits to male imperial discourses that undermine her value and lead to her failed subjectivity – a reading I do not entirely agree with and discuss throughout this chapter. I disagree that Anna’s performative narrative means that she “fails to become the subject of her own discourse” (n.pag.); rather, I believe she is more self-conscious about performing scripts imposed upon her.

As Foucault explains, discourse is a “diffuse and hidden conglomerate of power” and thus, rather than resist barely visible discourses as signifying practices intent on naturalizing power structures (“Order of Discourse” 67), Anna overperforms. Despite

Kamboureli’s solid argument that “[a]utobiography as performance delimits the signification of Anna’s narrative and marks the loss of her identity by default” (n.pag.), I perceive Anna’s performances as liberating through their very excess. Swan’s decision to write the novel as autobiography and historical fiction “sets out to break down or confuse categories normally considered disparate and distinct” (Jones 32). Hence the emphasis on Anna’s allegorical role and failed subjectivity is not misplaced or erroneous, per se, but it does hamper the text’s subversive potential.

Christopher Gittings takes a somewhat different approach and argues that the novel is a hybrid of postcolonial and postmodernist practices (89). He states that Swan’s

“textualization of allegory and carnival” creates “tropological spaces where postmodernism and post-colonialism work together to break down master narratives of

Canadian colonial subjectivity” (82). By fusing allegory with carnival, Swan reveals that

Anna does embody Canadian national character, but in excess, allowing her allegorical role to emblematize and destabilize received history. Her failed subjectivity thus

171 becomes emblematic of the failure of Canadian colonial subjectivity, transforming the negative connotations of previous critical renderings of the text into a successful challenge of representations of the body and nation. Her failure, by being exposed as a failure, becomes exemplary. By integrating the concept of the carnivalesque into his analysis, Gittings does elaborate on allegorical interpretations of Swan’s text; however, he still relies on the concept of allegory to foreground his reading.

Traditionally, allegory is an extended metaphor under the guise of conventional symbols, often concerned with asserting, rather than evading, national identity. For

Stephen Slemon, however, allegory “becomes a site upon which post-colonial cultures seek to contest and subvert colonialist appropriation through the production of a literary, and specifically anti-imperialist, figurative opposition or textual counter-discourse” (11).

The counter-discourse positions itself as “other” to perform an oppositional reading (11).

Although Swan’s text is anti-imperialist, in theory, its primary goal is not to counter an established discourse, but rather to reflect the entrapment of allegorical roles. Slemon actually mentions Swan’s text as exemplary of “how a fictional character attempts and fails to escape her subordinate allegorical role in a national allegory of imperial domination” (12). The argument that Anna’s body serves as an allegory for the tainted, vast Canadian landscape deserves attention, but neglects Anna’s self-conscious scripting as symbolic of “Canada” and her awareness of how “dialogue along national lines” undermines “the use of allegory as a textual device for reinforcing national identity”

(Wyile, Speculative 113). Ironically, although all these critics pinpoint Swan’s novel as

“allegorical,” their interpretations of the operation of allegory remains too varied and limited.

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Kamboureli, for example, contends that the “audience’s ambivalent response” to the novel makes it allegorical, and she defines allegory as that which conveys the “logic of identity”:

Allegory, in this respect, doesn’t merely suggest the double semantic

function of telling a story; it also suggests the semiotics of otherness, be it

the otherness of discourse, gender or nation […] Swan shows in this novel

how within the markers of difference between history and fiction resides a

logic of identity which authorizes the postmodern writer to unveil a truth

that demystifies its own absolute and terrifying status in human history.

(“The Biggest Modern” n.pag.)

This preoccupation with identity, which appears to drive the allegorical readings of

Swan’s text, neglects to observe the instability of the term “allegory” itself, and how, like the term “nation,” it can be explicitly superficial. As Paul de Man has argued, allegory is a void “that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents” (35). Allegory, then, turns the represented objects into these non-beings, and thus by pegging Swan’s texts as an allegory, critics remove any possibility of an “identity” for Anna’s character. Swan, on the other hand, recognizes this aspect of allegory and ensures Anna deliberately performs her role as a signifier, not as a historical figure or a character meant to embody a national identity. Moreover, de Man states that “whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference” (207). de Man’s key word is “identity,” and the fact that allegory can only distance one from origin, rather

173 than bring one closer to origin, destabilizes a reading of Anna’s body as an allegory for a successfully united Canadian nation. By using allegory as an analytical framework, critics already preclude Anna from ever being an effective body or voice for Canadian identity. Therefore, although I agree that allegory proves a virtue of the text, in terms of

Swan’s emphasis on Anna’s self-reflexive performativity, the critical readings under the lens of allegory seem too restrictive.

Swan’s most notable phrase in Biggest Modern Woman that reflects my position is: “The ability to function without a national consensus in the Canadas is a mystery to the Yankees who cannot fathom a system that isn’t modelled on theirs” (Swan 265). This ability to function without consensus also remains a mystery to Canadians, and in this case Canadian critics. Even in the story, for example, Canadians misunderstand one another. When Anna tours Ohio with the “CANADIAN HERCULES” or the “QUEBEC

SAMPSON,” they represent “a country of two nations,” united because they both stand apart from “the American empire” (265). Yet even within this context, the representation of a united Canadian nation ironically proves fallible, for Anna cannot understand Louis and he constantly sings anti-English songs. Swan thus parodies the ideal of the nation as unifying all members under one uniform umbrella, and to label the text as an allegory only enacts what the novel seeks to avoid: the categorical limitation of body, history, and text.

All in the Family

After a few spiels that serve as a preface to the text, Swan opens Anna’s autobiography with her birth: “The stomach of my reserved Scottish parent blew into a

174 monster sphere during her pregnancy” (Swan 9). The use of the word “monster” is telling, labeling Anna as monstrous even in the womb because of how she distorts the norms of the female body, in this case her mother’s. When she is born, she weighs eighteen pounds and tears her mother’s “perineum from stem to gudgeon, turning inside out her anal sphincter” (9). Calling herself the “infant giantess” Anna describes herself as “ludicrously fat” and questions whether “immigrants have large children” because they

“ran away from home” (10). Her question acknowledges the family’s roots and recognizes Canada as, not so much a “new” land, but as a land where people are punished for leaving their roots. From the perspective of an infant child, the question becomes not whether her parents left to discover more opportunities, but rather if they left out of defiance and thus must pay a price for abandoning their family and nation. On the surface, Anna’s questioning appears naïve and humourous, but it subtly mocks the ideal of Canada as a land of opportunity, for it ultimately fails to unite all immigrants into a mosaic because they produce abnormally sized offspring.

Throughout most of her childhood, Anna’s body and sheer existence are linked to the landscape and national growth, but her childish perception of her significance also scorns such readings. For example, upon her birth, the family’s garden vegetables begin to grow to gigantic sizes, with “squash as big as wagon wheels, zucchinis as long and as fat as men’s thighs, and potatoes the size of faces” (Swan 9). The association between

Anna’s arrival and the fertility of the land suggests she is a gift for the family, a sort of goddess unconsciously inspiring the seeds to thrive to new heights. Anna’s father perceives her birth as responsible for the fecundity of the crops and asks Anna to sing

“growing songs” (11), excited by the possibility of cultivation and reproduction.

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Similarly, Anna’s mother ascribes “higher meaning” to her infant giantess daughter, seeing her size as good fortune rather than a curse (11). Yet she expresses concern over

Anna’s abnormality by keeping her away from society, confining her to the family property until the age of ten. As a result, in her early days Anna believes she is a mythological being with magical powers, which she somewhat carries throughout her life as she perceives herself as responsible for the “normals” (the term she uses to refer to those unlike herself).

Anna’s height leads to special treatment from her parents and other figures of authority, inspiring bouts of jealousy from her peers and siblings. At school she is segregated by her height, forced to “sit on a high stool, and work at a table raised on boards” (Swan 27). The special attention afforded her because of her size accentuates her difference from her peers and becomes less of a magical gift as everyone stares at her as though she is deformed with “warts and infected wounds” (27). At home, she is the only child to have a bed, and she gets special dresses “modeled after the fashion engravings in

Mr. Godey’s Ladies” (28). Although the idea of individualized attire appears fortunate and a reason for envy, what this suggests is that Anna cannot fit into average clothing and has no choice but to have dresses made specifically to accommodate her physique.

Moreover, despite her size, Anna is unable to help on the farm, further emphasizing her isolation from her own family. Although she sings growing songs and appears to influence the growing of the crops, she has no physical connection to the roots and rich heritage suggested by the vegetable garden and farm. As one of her sister’s,

Janette, notes: “A fine help she is! While the rest of us have to sweat like pigs, she sings songs indoors – decked out like a queen” (Swan 29). In her own testimonial intertext,

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Janette calls Anna “a freak. Imagining herself a famous actress. In a hundred years nobody will know her name” (61). In New York, however, Anna does in fact find fame in Barnum’s human museum and sideshow, and as Swan’s text illustrates, over a hundred years later, we do know her name. Yet Anna’s othered position within her own family emphasizes her marginalization, and if the family stands for the mythologizing of the nation, as I have noted earlier, her physical deformity disturbs the deterministic and stereotypical connection between family and nation. Her immigrant family background raises the issue of Canada as a diverse society, a positive idea but one that also increases the pressure toward assimilation. But Anna is too large to assimilate. As her adventures in fame commence, she continually eludes incorporation into one culture, despite her verbal support of the Canadas.25 In effect, her defence of the Canadas only heightens the inadequacy of the stereotypes and characteristic clichés.

Aside from being the one who brings Anna to America, Barnum acts as a counterpoint to her Canadian assertions, reminding the reader of the disparity in public views of the two nations. Barnum considers Canada’s medical advancements, for instance, inferior to America’s, and Anna finds herself unable to resist using her

“forthright lecture voice” to “clear up some misconceptions about Canada” as a backward nation (Swan 68-69). She notes how “the Canadian cough drop is unequalled as an oesophageal elixir, and if administered in regular doses, along with maple leaves, our pills produce a calming side effect. In time, the user will exhibit an agreeable tendency to avoid confrontation and seek consensus instead” (69). As Nicole Berard argues, “Anna is self-congratulatory in tone when she suggests that Canada has superior conflict resolution

25 The “Canadas” is the phrasing used by Anna throughout the text and reflects the historical pluralism prior to the British Act of Union in 1840, which amalgamated lower and upper Canada under one political entity, the Province of Canada. 177 skills and methods, but does not suggest that these skills and methods are inherent to

Canadians, instead suggesting that they are the side effects of a superior cough syrup”

(n.pag). Indeed, Anna presents Canadians as harmless because of a drug rather than as a result of an innate disposition. The parodic content of this discussion mocks the popular labels of both Canadians and Americans, and when Anna finishes with “But there’s no telling what goes on in the blood if a Northerner leaves his habitat” (69), she begins the novel’s critical examination of typical and antagonistic representation of crossborder relations, something explored in discussions between Barnum and Anna.

Barnum becomes symbolic of the stubborn American unable to look beyond his borders for answers, and Anna becomes indicative of Canada, defending by negation and embodying a large space of unfulfilled potential. Kamboureli suggests that Anna inadequately defends Canada in the cough syrup episode as a result of her inability to abandon the masculine oral narrative of the sideshow spiel. She argues: “Obviously, and to her credit, the sixteen-year-old Anna wants to assert her Canadianness, which she fears is threatened by Barnum’s enterprising will. But if she succeeds at all as a Canadian here, her young female voice is totally consumed by the male rhetoric she employs”

(“The Biggest Modern” 7). But is Anna truly attempting to assert her Canadianess, or does Swan use her young character to ridicule the perception of Canadians as under the influence of a calm inducing medicine? I am inclined to support the latter.

Moreover, Kamboureli sees Anna’s failure as due to her use of male rhetoric to deliver her lecture in support of Canada’s technological advancement, whereas I would consider her spieling a liberating performance, neither essentially male or female. Anna subverts the language used to characterize her and other “abnormals” and successfully

178 makes her point. Similarly, upon meeting Barnum to announce her departure with

Apollo Ingalls’s tour abroad, Anna argues with Barnum, underscoring how America’s obsession with individuality and stardom lacks depth. She tells Barnum, “[t]he individual is a business gimmick” (Swan 156), acknowledging the self-serving process of fame as presented by Barnum, but at the same time voicing her own autobiographical performance as a stunt symbolized by her acts of spieling and fashion sense.

The Fashion of Spieling

The rhetoric of spieling and Anna’s passion for fashion articulate the parodic carnival in Swan’s text and demonstrate how Anna’s self-effacing performances deconstruct the commodification of her voice and body. Frank Davey has called Biggest

Modern Woman a failed Kunstlerroman because the first person perspective does not offer “a single, achieved discourse” (184). According to his understanding of the genre, the disjointed narrative reveals a “fragmented rather than achieved self” (67). As I said earlier, Kamboureli has also noted the text’s failed subjectivity, presenting Anna’s inability to distinguish between public and private discourse as illustrative of the lack “of a cohesive self” (“Biggest Modern Woman” 4). My problem with their readings resides in their desire for an authentic and stable self. Does a “fixed” self ever exist? Both critics also worry that the historical documents and testimonials in Swan’s novel are intrusions that emasculate the authority of Anna’s voice. On the contrary, I align myself with Goldman and Wylie to argue that Anna’s spieling purposefully disrupts history, and that the pluralistic perspectives provided by the multitude of testimonials serve to accentuate, and not diminish, Anna’s authority.

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Why should subjectivity be fixed rather than fragmented? The practice of spieling and the sensationalized enormity of Anna’s build portray an incomplete body in the process of becoming. As a result, she travels across time through narrative, as a

Victorian historical figure, a “modern” woman (as announced by the title), and a contemporary character (as read by the reader). Her voice “speaks to the reader from a space outside the linear time of received history” and “re-writes her self with a knowledge of the twentieth century, incorporating her own journal notes” and other documents “by friends and associates” (Gittings 83). Therefore, Swan destabilizes the structure of time, including both past and present in the “now” of the text. Anna’s opening spiel illustrates how she “crosses the boundaries of time and space to reshape or translate herself” to dislocate time and history (83):

Now I am in full voice…blowing my own horn…spieling the way I used

to for P. T. Barnum, Queen Victoria, and all the normals who came to my

performances after I grew up into an eight-foot giantess who toured North

America and the Continent. This is my final appearance and I promise to

tell all. (Swan 2)

The use of “now” and the past verb tenses in the passage fuse Anna’s past with her current performance. Throughout the novel, she defies linearity, received history, and categorical classification, through the text’s conglomeration of spiels, testimonials, and letters. She understands how “performance is not true exposure” and that if she acts skillfully, she can “hide behind [her] stage presence and fear nothing” (115). The opening chapter on the art of spieling exposes the text’s “rhetorical layers” (Steenman-

Marcusse 185). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “spieling” connotes “to reel

180 off” and “to perform” (“Spieling” 3). To reel off, one must have something to talk back to, someone to perform for; it involves a displaced “discursive move” (Goldman 70), shifting aside official history. The act of “spieling” parallels what Homi Bhabha refers to as “the performativity of language in the narratives of the nation” (3), for it is a verbal act always in the process of becoming, only “half-made because it is in the process of being made” (3). Hence her dramatic performance also reveals nation building as a process rather than product.

In addition, Goldman affirms: “textual production, linked to the production of the self, is conceived, not as the revelation of some unchanging ‘essence,’ but as a performance with the readers positioned as the audience” (69). Anna’s announcement thus situates the reader as audience; but her rhetoric also positions the reader as a voyeur:

“this is my final appearance and I promise to tell all” (Swan 2). The conventional voyeur is defined by the gaze, but this early pronouncement situates the reader as also an auditory voyeur interested in her appearance and “promise to tell all.” Hence her elocution is just as commodified as her physical presence because it presents the illusion of reliability and trust. The elocutionary act can never be complete.

The opening three spiels exemplify Anna’s subversion of her commodification through performativity. Rather than be “doomed” by her freakish body (Goldman 73), constrained by her gender, and limited by factual history, Anna uses her physical and vocal size to assert an effective public role. The culture she inhabits was created for standard sizes and as Anna states towards the end of the text: “I was a prisoner in the thin dimension of ordinary life, looking for a way out” (Swan 306). Anna’s way out is to perform her objectification. For instance, her disrobing allows her to shock the crowd,

181 but also reveals her self-control by exposing the crowd’s voyeuristic function. Instead of accepting the shame of being unveiled, Anna proclaims: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

FRIENDS AND PASSERS-BY: Forgive me. My body is showing” (24). The scene depicts spieling as a strategic play “with mimesis” that allows Anna, as “a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself simply to be reduced to it” (Irigiray 76). Her apology itself is performative, noting her awareness of the socially correct response to the incident but also revealing the demeaning role of the audience.

Anna’s emphasis on performance recalls Judith Butler’s theorizing of gender as not a preconceived category but a “stylized repetition of acts” (Gender 140). In fact,

Butler argues that the performative and provisional nature of gendered identity exists “in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of identity as a politically tenuous construction” (141). Anna’s agency “resides not in a pre-discursive gendered essence, but in the performative denaturalization and displacement of signifying practices” (Funck 142). The novel itself is one big spiel, denaturalizing and displacing signifying practices, for as Anna states: “life is a performance” (Swan 332). The one instance when Anna loses her voice, however, is during her wedding to Bates, which most critics jump upon as sufficient proof of her lack of power and subjection to a colonial act. Yet, although she has no voice, Anna writes “Yes” and “I do” to express her agreement to the union (200). Critical interpretations of the passage emphasize how she is stripped of her power, and yet she manages to employ another avenue, and arguably a more concrete one, to confirm her decision to marry. The scene, once again, demands

182 that Anna overperform and therefore accentuate the illusory effect of identity, mocking the loss of her own voice and preempting the critical interpretations of her loss in the scene.

Similarly, clothing acts as a semiotic system that standardizes corporeal size, and

Anna embraces garb as a means, like spieling, of standing out in the crowd. For example, during her encounter with Queen Victoria, Anna sports “purple-striped” silk stockings instead of the “white ones that ladies wear” (Swan 196). She remarks that the striped stockings are “a la mode in London” but a white pair is “more suitable for a royal audience” (196). The two types of stockings signify Anna’s dualistic subjectivity as a lady worthy of a court audience, and as an othered body empowered by her resistance to her objectified visibility. Already of extreme height, Anna’s physique refuses invisibility and exists beyond social standards of proper feminine physique. She is, quite simply, too tall to be ignored to the point of seeming improper and even unfeminine. Anna’s attention to dress heightens the reader’s awareness of her corporeal otherness, for the standard of size is best illustrated by the act of measurement: “Our clothes must be specially made, and our shoes, which costs a great deal of money” (3). Clothing becomes an ideological mechanism that commodifies the body, and the custom-made outfits refute society’s need to size the seam to specified parameters.

Anna’s continual reference to fashionable styles reveals how social discourses dictate the formation of identity, and how something as simple as clothing becomes a symbol that positions one as Other. Clothing as a code that disrobes and redresses the text also contests the centrality of the nation as a site of historical unity; rather, the text is a patchwork of parodies that resists standard discursive bodies made to measure like

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Anna’s outfits. During the nineteenth century, women were supposed to be verbally and physically guarded, as represented by corsets. The constraints imposed on the female body by corsets are best confounded by Anna’s eating contest with Apollo (Swan 78).

Swan details Anna’s attire during the contest to underscore the impulse to contain Anna’s uncommon corporeal appearance within fashionable standards:

I hoped I looked presentable: I wore a new Swiss muslin, in two tones of

ivory, with a bow at my neck and a tight clamp belt to accentuate my wasp

waist…when it came to food, I acknowledged no limiting principle.

(Luckily, I remained slim because I was tall). But my new English leather

corset, custom-made in the Victorian style, would be a handicap, as would

my clamp belt. (75-6)

The continual references to Anna’s attire during the contest highlight her unladylike physique, despite her perfectly selected attire. Her stomach remains “the infinite bowl of the universe” and she faints after nineteen puddings, constrained too tightly within her corset (78). The event reverses Victorian cultural discourses: the contest is a public performance (like spieling), Anna’s nineteen puddings underscore her massive appetite, and her unfastened corset exemplifies how a giant body prevents her from being categorized as a typical feminine figure. As mentioned by Goldman, corsets are “an ideological apparatus serving society’s desire to subjugate women’s bodies” (92); even during their popularity, corsets underwent controversial debates. Almost any issue of the popular magazine, Mr. Godey’s Ladies, “contained either an attack or a defense” of the corset (Kunciov 54-55), which exemplifies disagreement on the social role of feminine garments. Clothing is an unstable symbol in Swan’s text, an instability that also

184 characterizes the performance and pliability of confining structures, such as language, history, and gender.

Furthermore, the commercialization of fashion, publicized by the intertextual references to Mr. Godey’s Ladies, parallels the commercialization of freaks. Anna’s garb signals her astute observation of social classifications and how dress can be a vehicle for ironic commentary on the correlation between spieling as a disguise for the voice, and clothing as a costume for the body. Hence the novel’s strong emphasis on Anna’s

Victorian style of grooming and education is continually parodied by Anna herself. For example, she composes a manual titled “Giant Etiquette” on how to perform the role of

“giant” with grace and propriety (Swan 97). Her manual begins her career as a spieling giant and links the symbolic clothing to her performative speeches. Anna is thus “both actor and spectator, subject and object” (Gittings 85). She assumes the role of a marginalized body and announces she is “Rabelaisian in [her] giant core” (Swan 115).

Her reference to Rabelais invokes her carnivalesque position and emphasizes how she represents a body in the process of “becoming,” hostile to completion:

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates

temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established

order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms,

and prohibitions. Carnival was the feast of time, the feast of becoming,

change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and

completed. (Bakhtin 10)

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The eating contest reflects this carnivalesque component in the text, as her confining clothing snaps and provides her with a temporary liberation from the established social niceties which privilege orderliness.

Moreover, Anna’s encounter with Queen Victoria fuses the tropic significance of clothing and spieling under the rubric of carnivalesque. As the monarch rises from her throne to approach Anna, Anna is shocked by her small size: “Why, she was tiny, a miniature monarch whose ruched widow’s cap stood no higher than my thigh!” (Swan

193). The disparity in size between the two women echoes Stewart’s epigraph at the start of this chapter, which contrasts the gigantic and the miniature. Stewart perceives “the miniature as contained, the gigantic as container,” the gigantic as an exaggeration of the exterior, and the miniature as a metaphor for interiority (71). The small social space of the miniature, however, does not reduce the smaller body’s significance, but rather makes it emblematic. Therefore, Queen Victoria’s miniature body stands for a nation confined in time and space, emphasizing its ideological effect in contrast to Anna’s gigantic body, only partially seen and amazing the viewer.

Ironically, her Majesty says upon her private encounter with Anna: “If my people knew how I am riddled with imperfections, they would display me in one of Mr.

Barnum’s sideshows” (Swan 195). Queen Victoria’s comment suggests that she understands her role as a model for the nation: an item suitable for collection and consumption by the public. She narrates her own regality, refusing to acknowledge the difference in heights between herself and Anna. She positions Anna as a body for admiration and absurdly enjoys a “slow and leisurely” walk through her legs (196). She recognizes her “fine linen” and thanks Anna for having done “the Empire a great service”

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(197). The double entendre on the word “empire” (waist and land) correlates Anna’s body with nationalism and implies a connection to pregnancy as a symbolic physical deformation imitating imperial growth. On the surface, the scene shows a colonial power using a colonized body; but a closer reading reveals the Queen’s march and merriment as an act “like a sideshow performer” (Goldman 87). Hence the monarchy, itself an exceptional body, is represented by Swan as equally freakish, another show that puts on display abnormal bodies. As physically opposed as they are, the Queen and Anna divulge their relation to the Victorian age’s fictive ideal and recognize their respective roles as performers of a social model. The scene accentuates their eccentricities to posit not the obvious colonial allegory, but, from the perspective of a reader today, a parody of the colonial allegory.

Anna becomes a regular guest of the royals, meeting with the Prince at a private reception with the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia and Prince John of Luxembourg, where the Prince states his desire for them to “become good friends” (Swan 212).

Ingalls’s journal accounts follow the encounters with the royals at Windsor Castle and he narrates Anna’s distaste for her role as a “performing monkey for people who live inside a fairy tale and don’t understand anything except their own humiliations” (218). After unveiling her emotional distress to Ingalls, Anna passes out on his bed and he takes advantage of her state to express his sexual desire, wanting “to be dragged all the way in”

(220). His adventures leave Anna pregnant, subjecting her womb to the analytical discussions of Dr. Buckland, which I will discuss in the following section. Her pregnancy, labour, and stillbirth underscore the novel’s exemplification of Anna’s lower body as misunderstood and unconquered territory, despite her sexual penetrations, two of

187 which are initially depicted as rapes. Anna’s journal reveals her desire to allow Apollo to have sex with her while supposedly unconscious, but the initial account in Apollo’s diary exhibits him as taking full advantage of her while asleep. Once again, Anna defies expectations and undermines the man’s version of her history by countering his perception of the event with her own version in which she performs submission to gain what she seeks. Her phenomenally large womb exaggerates the novel’s parodic engagement with representations of women’s bodies as metaphors for national allegories.

Just as Anna’s womb appears oppressed, Swan’s text critically comments on the portrayal of women and othered bodies as marketable commodities serving the imperial idealism of men.

Womb to World

Swan purposefully exaggerates the passages that identify Anna’s physicality and sexuality as transgressions of societal systems delineating bodily normality and femininity. Anna’s birthing experiences, orgasms, and menstruation, for example, highlight the Victorian period’s control over representations of women’s bodies as reflections of the social body. The desire of Anna’s doctors and employers to measure and label her body serves the colonial discourse she resists by her mere physicality. This final section examines Anna’s sexuality and birthing experiences to demonstrate how the need to quantify her fetishized vagina reflects practices of colonization that correlated the woman’s body with the formation of the nation.

The focus on Anna’s body as freakish, particularly her lower strata, explores the fluidity of the body’s boundaries, mainly the female body, as another way of resisting the

188 ideal of the nation as a closed, unified community. Like many of the female characters discussed thus far, Anna enjoys unconventional sexuality; she not only seeks satisfying sexual encounters but also quickly learns how to satisfy herself, rendering most men in her life irrelevant, at least sexually. Moreover, her freakish birthing incidents release excessive fluid, revealing her body as both excessively internal and external. As theorized by Bakhtin, Anna embodies the

notion of the grotesque body which bears most relevance to the unruly

woman, who so often makes a spectacle of herself with her fatness,

pregnancy, age, or loose behavior. The grotesque body is above all the

female body, the maternal body, which through menstruation, pregnancy,

childbirth, and lactation, participates uniquely in the carnivalesque drama

of ‘becoming,’ of inside-out, death-in-life and life-in-death. (Rowe 33 – 4)

Although Anna is not “fat,” she is larger than normal, similarly calling into question the limits of appropriate physical femininity. The various scenes in which her sexuality and maternity are exposed display her grotesque body. She enjoys sex beyond procreation and her pregnancies emphasize her difference, rather than confine her to a sanctioned social role. She is not, however, monstrous, but anomalous, her deformities underlining how general understanding of the human body rests upon an image that is intrinsically prescriptive – one that must be deformed to create new roles, particularly for the female body.

Anna begins her sexual exposition by losing her virginity to a dwarf, Hubert, who takes advantage of her curiosity by claiming he intends to measure her birth canal with an icicle. He asks, “Do you know what a boundless universe lies inside you, Anna?” (Swan

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32), and links her unknown territory to “terra firma” and the “many roads and rivers” of the land humankind has yet to discover (32). The colonial vocabulary again elaborates the metaphoric connection between Anna’s womb and the world as unknown spaces subjected to the imperial impulses of men, although in this case a very small man. More importantly, this passage ruptures Anna’s belief in her magical existence and she is forced to recognize that she is unfortunately “human and vulnerable” (35). I cannot help but read this scene as also a parody of her body as an allegory for the nation, as Hubert uses the icicle, a symbol for the cold Canadian climate, to rupture her membrane. Anna’s loss of faith in her magical ability could thus be read as the loss of her confidence in a

Canadian imagined community. Of course, the grotesque quality of the scene under such a lens heightens Swan’s parodic play with conventional castings of the female body as embodying the nation.

After being sexually assaulted by Hubert, Anna becomes ashamed of her size, disgusted by her “monster opening” and her “entire body, even [her] head, which [she] considered too tiny” (Swan 37). She hides at home, fearful of the outside world and her indelicacy, stating that she could not find anything “humiliating enough” to mock her

“poor, over-grown vagina” (37). Yet Anna’s “over-grown vagina” only underscores

Hubert’s miniaturization in this scene; it also foreshadows her eventual reduction of the male narratives in competition with hers, for even as a scientific specimen she escapes attempts to script her identity “via their official documentation” (Heffernan 31).

Through the eyes of Bates, for example, the reader witnesses Anna’s medical examination by Dr. Naughton, who permits Bates to watch secretly, given their mutual interest in Anna’s reproductive possibilities. Bates describes the exam and begins with

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Anna’s pubis, finding no peculiarities “except for its extreme size” (Swan 170).

Together, both men observe Anna’s “dolichocephalic head,” her arms, breasts, legs, and womb (170). Bates notes that Dr. Naughton does “not use the standard pyramidal system of mass measurement” but rather measures Anna at random, focusing more on length than on width (171). Bates’s description of her anatomy highlights her difference while complimenting her physique. She is “blatantly feminine, with a pleasantly curved mouth,” with “baby-fine hair at the temples, “and her breasts “ampullaceous, boundless, with no disfiguring hair about their ruby peaks” (171). More importantly, she lies on her back quietly, with her eyes closed, only speaking when asked and in a girlish voice, which Bates views as a reflection of “refined temperament” (171). Bates portrays himself as one of the examining physicians, inspecting Anna’s body in detail and encapsulates the sexual politics at play between Anna and Bates. Bates’s medical surveillance from a secret space above evokes Foucault’s concept of the medical glance, where he analyses how discursive formations have structured medical perception. More precisely, he observes how the lack of “perceptual base” in eighteenth-century medical language changes at the turn of the century into “a qualitative precision [that] directs our gaze into a world of constant visibility” (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic x). Foucault underscores how the medical gaze “penetrates into the body…to perceive what [is] immediately behind the visible surface” (121). Hence the clinical anatomy of this scene turns Anna’s body into “an opaque mass in which secrets, visible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden” prepared for inspection and interpretation (123).

Although Anna’s docile performance during the exam could be interpreted as rendering her passive, like her speechlessness during her wedding ceremony, I perceive

191 the scene as an idealized vision of her propriety and body as perceived by Bates. After all, he narrates the passage and the reliability of the narrative must be questioned. He romanticizes Anna to undermine her power, but Anna herself continues to resist such categorization, as can be seen when Dr. Naughton analyzes her womb.

When Dr. Naughton finds himself unable to examine Anna’s womb as a result of his short arms, he requests the aid of an assistant with hands “the size of footballs” and a full head taller than himself (Swan 172). Anna’s statistics are provided in detail and

Bates exclaims:

Womb 61/2 ounces! Extraordinary to think that in that half pound lies the

future of man! I thanked the medico for confirming my belief that the

giantess is an unspoiled natural resource. Then I allowed Naughton to

calculate on me the genesis of the new species. (172)

From Bates’s perspective, Anna’s womb represents an object for male domination and the potential growth of a superior human race; however, the inability of Dr. Naughton to examine her womb without support from a partner emphasizes her ability to reduce the men in her life, for he is simply too small to perform his professional task. Anna overpowers him physically, despite her peaceful composure in the scene, undermining any potential for colonial control over her womb and body. The comic nature of the scene, recalling Gulliver’s Travels, undercuts any colonial theories, disputing Bates’s ridiculous reproductive aspirations.

Bates is further ridiculed through his marriage to Anna. He presents their union as a colonial act, stating that she is virgin land and his sexual act will transform her into an “all-American girl” (Swan 180). He describes her body with landscape terms, seeing

192 her shoulders as “draped with trade staples and immigrants” and her belly as a lake

“fenced in by fir and river valleys” (180). He also associates her with the animals of the land, her hair “like a flock of bison” and her teeth “like a caribou-herd” (181). More importantly, he sees her labia as “the north-west passage” (181), ready to be conquered.

Swan’s representation of Anna parodies the female body as a vessel for nation-building, and she curses him for assuming he can physically assert his “imperial fantasy” on her body (183). As far as Bates is concerned, they have a duty to procreate and “breed a superior species whose mental development increases as the race grows in size” (118). In the spirit of allegory, Anna herself acknowledges that she cannot help but feel she is

acting out America’s relationship to the Canadas. Martin is the imperial ogre

while I play the role of genteel mate who believes that if everyone is well-

mannered, we can inhabit a peaceable kingdom. That is the national dream of

Canada, isn’t it? A civilized garden where lions lie down with doves…We

possess no fantasizes of conquest and domination. Indeed, to be from the

Canadas is to feel as women feel – cut off from the base of power. (273-4)

Anna’s comments underscore the mythologizing of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers and express a subtle critique of Canadian complacency. She emphasizes her performative “role of genteel mate,” but not without a hint of distaste for such an act.

Moreover, her words demonstrate how Bates’s dream is not to overcome only the

Canadas, but the human race. He aims to selectively breed a race of giants where “the marvelous will be commonplace” (174). Despite Bates’s confident proclamations, however, he proves physically inadequate to fulfill his imperial fantasies.

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Ironically, Bates leaves Anna sexually unsatisfied. Although he claims superior manhood, he sports a “small nub of purple bob[bing] from the centre of Martin’s enormous frame. The organ was no longer than a baby’s” (Swan 209). In an attempt to help Bates understand her physical needs, Anna offers to show him how to make her

“dizzy with joy 100 times a night” (298), but he refuses to sacrifice his masculine role as master of sexual gratification. As a result, the two never successfully consummate their union. Anna worries she is “too big to be pleased by any man” (116), initially placing the blame on herself because of the period’s perception of sexual normalcy, but she quickly admonishes herself for such superficial thoughts. She notes that she has been “guilty of sloppy thinking as the normals who think the male is strong in all areas because he has strong muscles. What nonsense! A hole is not less than a rod” (230). She acknowledges the limitations of the normals in their gender associations and presents herself, as a giant woman, as exceptional, not only being of greater stature, but for knowing better than the

“normals.” In revolt, she begins an affair with Apollo to disapprove “Dr. Beach on the subject of the sensational impulse in large women” (298). Together, Anna and Apollo find sexual satisfaction, and he fathers two children, neither of whom survives.

Anna is, at first, surprised to become pregnant because she believes her physical difference meant she would be unable to conceive. Her pregnancies embellish her size and transform her stomach, previously called an “infinite bowl of the universe” (Swan

78), into a “gargantuan belly” (323). Her breasts become “colossal udders,” and she physically expands to sport a seventeen-inch vagina and a seven-ounce womb. Her physical excess exaggerates the novel’s carnivalesque spectacle. For example, when

Anna’s water breaks, Londoners experience a spring shower on a cloudless day, forcing

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“umbrellas [to sprout] like mushroom caps” (241). Subsequently, when Anna gets her period, all the women in Seville get theirs as well (272). Both scenes mimic “Rabelais’ use of the body and its excretion of fluids to further stress the co-mingling and impurity of communities” (Heffernan 33), beyond the cultural boundaries for the nation. As

Bahktin explains in defining the grotesque, “[t]he limits between the body and the world are erased, leading to the fusion of the one with the other and with surrounding objects”

(310). Thus Anna’s body constantly mingles with other bodies and cannot be subsumed within one narrative – not Bates’s dream of a master race, Angus’s domestic bliss,

Apollo’s capitalist ventures, or even critical readings of her womb as allegorical.

To further undermine the male figures who threaten Anna’s liberty under the pretense of scientific knowledge, Swan depicts the various doctors as generally ignorant and verging on evil.26 Aside from the scene in which Dr. Naughton allows Bates to survey Anna’s physical examination, her pregnancy proves difficult for “the doctors to detect” and they are also surprised by her ability to conceive in the first place, for most doctors assumed Anna’s “freakishness meant [she] would be abnormal in the child- bearing parts” (Swan 232). When Anna’s daughter is born stillborn, she donates the child

26 The representation of wise, but inhuman obstetricians haunts Canadian fiction, particularly two under discussion in this thesis – Swan’s novel and Johnston’s texts. I cannot help but notice the portrayal of physicians as restricting the agency of women, particularly in childbirth. In Johnston’s text, Stepdoctor Breen oversees Fielding’s pregnancy like a disease, putting her into a lying-in room. In Burnard’s novel, Mary’s increased sexual desire during pregnancy is perceived by her family physician as abnormal. Interestingly, in MacDonald’s novel all the childbirth incidents, even Kathleen’s horrifying C-section, occur in the home and without physician care. In Vandal Love, doctors are erringly absent, despite the numerous births. This distaste for medical doctors also appears in Atwood’s short story “Giving Birth,” in Surfacing, and in The Handmaid’s Tale. Moreover, in Ami McKay’s recent novel The Birth House, Dr. Thomas appears inconsiderate in comparison to the knowledge midwives. Judith Mintz examines childbirth through historical fiction and life writing in her recent dissertation, “Helpers and Demons: Binary Representations of Early 20th-century Midwives, Doctors and Childbirth in Ami McKay’s The Birth House.”

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“to the hospital museum so medical students could study her” (243). Ingalls seeks to view his dead daughter and finds her in “a large glass vessel” described by Dr. Buckland as “le monstre Bates” (243), rather than “bébé Bates.” He perceives the offspring as a specimen for study, not only othered by death but by his decision to categorize her as

“monster.”

Anna’s second pregnancy leads to more complicated labour pains, as her abdominal muscles collapse and the baby becomes “stuck inside her” (Swan 325). She describes the incident as a painful disembodiment: “Is this how the normal female goes through birth? Disembodied from the physical self which is the arena of action?” (325).

Her labour lasts three days and her son, despite his size, is born weak and dies “[e]leven hours after his arrival” (326). The doctors diagnose the infant as dying from “genetic difficulties,” with “an unformed male organ” (327). Anna, on the other hand, blames the death of both children on herself for being “female and flawed” (242). Biologically, she is not entirely incorrect in making such an observation, for her physical difference likely physiologically produces an abnormal genetic make-up for the babies that results in insurmountable anomalies. For instance, humans with chromosomal abnormalities have difficulty producing gametes that are viable. Yet this failure results from her genetic difference, not her gendered difference, and from her procreation with Apollo, whose physical normality, as defined by scientific terms, would also impact the overall health and development of the baby. Hence it is in this moment that Anna appears in any way defeated, resorting to social interpretations of her body as malfunctioning because of its inability to reproduce successfully. Yet this failure further undercuts her correlation with

196 the nation, for she is unable to perpetuate the symbolic associations imposed upon the female figure as propagating the future of the nation.

Swan includes two doctors’ reports to account for the details of Anna’s second labour. Dr. Beach’s report provides a medical outline of the birthing event, whereas Dr.

Robinson criticizes Beach’s procedural practice. The two reports contest one another in tone and reflection. For example, Dr. Beach finds himself accidently sliding on the

“slippery, almost treacherous” floor after Anna’s water breaks, whereas Dr. Robinson describes him as joking and “skating over the floor after the waters broke” (Swan 329 –

30). The two reports make a spectacle of each physician’s practices as they contradict each other and provide the reader with a final emphasis on the unreliability of the multiple narrators and narrative accounts that compose Anna’s autobiography.

Near the end, Dr. Robinson says that Anna asks him about “emblem fatigue” which he misunderstands as “suffering an aneurysm” (Swan 331). What she seeks is an explanation for the possibility that she suffers from fatigue as a result of performing the role of an emblem – an ailment described by Angus earlier in the novel as “an affliction peculiar to giants, who are always having to shoulder giant expectations from normal folk” (139). Emblem fatigue illustrates a point that Herb Wyile argues in Speculative

Fictions: Swan’s novel “warns against the dangers of national allegories and underlines their use in colonial and imperial discourse, suggesting that while they may be deployed for postcolonial, counter-discursive practices, they carry their own dangers” (115).

Although Anna manages to counter the socially constructed values of feminine passivity through her active sexual expression, she struggles to accept her failure to become a

197 mother, but in doing so reveals the inadequacy of the notion of nation as tied to the metaphor of the family, and even more precisely, to the woman’s womb.

Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World ponders whether the only way a woman can become the subject of historical fiction is if she is extraordinary or freakish. Although many critics argue that Anna fails to achieve subjectivity and remains powerless and docile, I am more aligned with Linda Hutcheon and Herb Wyile, who perceive Anna’s ability to self-consciously perform, physically and verbally, the patriarchal and imperial discourses of the Victorian period as destabilizing their idealized notion of the nation. Anna’s parodic engagement with her zany legend allows for a combination of creative expression and critical commentary. Her spiels and custom- made clothing epitomize the fabrication of her tale, which deconstructs the discourse and unlaces the social structures that attempt to make identity a product, rather than a process.

She exists as both an historical and a fictional figure. Hutcheon writes that “both history and fiction…are discourse, and by ‘discourse’ I mean here language as active

énonciation, and not as fixed and static text” (Canadian 73). Writing the nation and fashioning the subject are thus performative practices. Anna’s spieling and clothing are acts of enunciation that reveal the text of history, and the text of the self, as an ongoing performance rather than settled affair. Her uncategorizable womb exists not as the biggest modern woman “in” the world, but as the biggest modern woman “of” the world; hence she is not a static character restricted to historical truths, but a figure that keeps the text “of the world” open via the performative dynamic of social discourses. Whether it is the proper attire or the proper word, Anna dresses to impress.

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Fieldwood’s Anatomy: Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise

Hilarious, they think, the difference in our height and bulk. Even in my present state, I am twice as broad as him. Fielding and her sidekick. ‘More meat on her cane than there is on you.’ They talk to my cane, pretending that it’s him. Fielding and her nephew. Manservant Smallwood. Known collectively as Fieldwood. (Custodian 198).

Fieldwood – the amalgamated name for Fielding and Smallwood, the protagonists of Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise

– highlights the interdependence of the two characters in the fictionalized history of the texts. Unlike celebrity amalgams, such as Brangelina and Tomkat, Johnston’s amalgam does not draw attention to the two characters as a couple, but as physically unequal partners. Moreover, Fieldwood places the woman’s name first to underscore her bulk against Smallwood’s skeletal size. The body, as a popular and potent metaphor reflects perceptions of the nation and how it does, and should, operate. Herb Wyile notes how the nation in Colony certainly “is not a natural, organic formation” (Speculative 134).

The physical anomalies of Fielding and Smallwood therefore metaphorize a nation in flux

– defined neither by a skinny self-aggrandizing ambitious politician, nor by an unusually tall public patriot spewing anti-colonial rhetoric. The amalgam links Fielding and

Smallwood to the landscape as their shortened names literally connote areas of land (field and wood), with Fielding covering more ground (she is, as the passage above states,

“twice as broad” as Smallwood). Although historical documents certify Smallwood’s skinny physique, Johnston’s emphasis on his body in contrast to Fielding’s grandeur transforms them into more than simple character foils. Smallwood, despite his lack of flesh, exemplifies limitless enthusiasm and progress, whereas Fielding, despite her

199 height, embodies cynicism and a romanticizing of the past. As Paul Chafe argues: “Both

Smallwood and Fielding are personifications of Newfoundland, so contradictory yet so undeniably of the island that they threaten to debunk forever any notion of a singular

Newfoundland character” (323). Indeed, as symbolic narratives of the nation, the stories of Fielding and Smallwood destabilize the formulation of a collective consciousness based on historical writings. Their deformed and reformed bodies reveal how

Newfoundland’s status as a nation is both fact (as historically represented by Smallwood) and fiction (as imagined by Fielding). Their deformed bodies demonstrate how nations are not natural and pure entities, but hybrid characters.

This chapter examines the representation of Newfoundland as doubly embodied by the deformed physical statures of Smallwood and Fielding. Newfoundland’s lack of a clear definition is perhaps best illustrated by Smallwood’s insistence on memorizing and drawing the map of Newfoundland – a goal he fails to achieve. The continuing need to redefine the nation parallels the multiple histories that provide governing national narratives, and thus Johnston evades a definitive history and singular identity for

Newfoundland (Chafe 333). Johnston refuses to celebrate or condemn the nation and rather fictionalizes history to illustrate how structures such as the body, family, history, and nation remain erratic and eccentric. The two histories demonstrate dualistic challenges to a fixed national identity and thus emphasize the multiplicity of voices always narrating and re-narrating the stories of a nation. Thus the bodies of Smallwood and Fielding exemplify the contradictory meanings we make for ourselves as individuals and citizens in contrast to the meanings that are made for us by national and state ideologies.

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I begin with an analysis of Smallwood’s character and follow with a study of

Fielding. At first, Smallwood’s skinny body reflects an oppressed Newfoundland with a propensity for failure – a “cultureless outback” land overshadowed by “the masters drilling into [students] instead the history and geography of England” (Johnston, Colony

37, 35). The “character” mark of forty-five afforded Smallwood by Headmaster Reeves reflects the colonial belief in Newfoundland’s lack of national character. Reeves imagines the mark as a seal for Smallwood’s fate – and it is – but not in the restrictive sense that Reeves imagines; rather, the “character” mark reflects how Smallwood is

“[s]pawned from failure and motivated by it for the rest of his life” (Chafe 334).

Smallwood’s skeletal physique does not prove an obstacle to his national quest and ambitions. Though he continues to be mocked for being abnormally skinny,27 his physique actually helps secure the respect of Newfoundland’s poor population and he defies all odds, even those he inherits from his father, by becoming Premier. His hunger for success allows him to overcome his social and physical differences, and to become more than a signifier of national difference, but rather an active transmitter against the legitimate bodies currently in power.

Smallwood’s skinny body fails to hold him back, whereas Fielding struggles against disease, drink, and doctors that subsume her body and limit her agency. Failure proves a key concept in Johnston’s texts and Fielding’s failures are placed in direct contrast to Smallwood’s, from political positions to paternal relations. Indeed, the failure of the father figures in both novels suggests the inadequacy of paternal authority and the ideals of domesticity projected by British imperialism to incorporate all individuals under

27 One of the best lines in Colony to reflect the extremity of Smallwood’s body is spoken by Lady Squires who states: “My husband is skinny, Mr. Smallwood…There is, to the best of my knowledge, no word for what you are” (266). 201 one collective vision metonymically epitomized by the family. Smallwood’s and

Fielding’s bodies become enmeshed discursively and materially in nationalist discourse, both initially resisting British influence, but with Smallwood gradually fashioning himself after colonial models, settling for marriage and promoting confederation. His distaste for his own father may defy paternal authority, but in fact, it only distances him from working-class Newfoundlanders and eventually prompts him to adopt the attitudes necessary to ensure the success of his ambitions.

Although in Colony Fielding reflects the strength of Newfoundland’s character, eccentric but grand, refusing to mimic the behaviours projected by imperial authorities, in

Custodian, she reverts to a conventional female body, subjected to a family model and the constant surveillance of paternal authority. Anne McClintock acknowledges how women “are typically construed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to national agency” (“Family” 62). Moreover, “women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition” whereas men “represent the progressive agents of national modernity” (Imperial 359). Indeed, Fielding’s romanticizing of the past portrays her atavistic role versus Smallwood’s forward- thrusting political ambition. Despite acting as Smallwood’s critical citizen in Colony,

Fielding lacks agency in Custodian. Her domesticated body refutes the challenge to a history of exploitation earlier expressed in Colony, for her stature and grandiose voice first appear as symbolic elevations of the woman’s role in forming and deforming history; but in the sequel, her physical otherness masks political powerlessness, which is best illustrated by her subservience to the overarching guidance of protective father figures.

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The bodies of Smallwood and Fielding are juxtaposed in Colony to characterize alternative personifications of Newfoundland, whereas Fielding’s physicality and oddity dominate Custodian. Johnston’s sequel accentuates her bodily difference and transforms the fictional tale of Smallwood’s unrequited dreams into a narrative, not just of provincial political power, but of power in general. Fielding exemplifies Newfoundland’s institutional body, which is symbolized by her numerous subjections to social establishments and strategies of detention that attempt to domesticate her physical otherness. Indeed, surveillance and observation dominate Custodian, and as Fielding moves from one supervised “prison” to another, she exhibits her uncomfortable position as a receptacle of nationhood overexposed to the disciplinary gaze of father figures and medical men. Her secret pregnancy becomes an undercurrent subplot that reaffirms the metaphor of the female body as nation, for the “fascination with origins, national or otherwise, leads back to the body of the mother and the association of nation with mother bolsters the belief in the nation as something to which we are ‘naturally’ tied” (Stirling,

Bella 22). Simultaneously elevated and excluded, Fielding’s anatomy raises the question of women as invisible historical agents “withdrawn from the world to preserve, to keep inviolate, something that might be lost” (Custodian 448). Her panoptic provider strips her of all agency, pathologically outlining the boundaries of her body due to his obsession with her feared and fetishized differences. Under a panoptic lens in the second novel, Fielding’s defects demand scrutiny.

Ultimately, Johnston illustrates that one body cannot represent a nation, just as one history cannot account for a nation’s record. Both Fielding and Smallwood grapple with their physical roles as cast by colonial politics, at times successfully resisting the

203 models offered and at other times tempted by the illusion of a collective and essential identity. This personal friction parallels Newfoundland’s conflict between marginalization and assimilation, which in turn exemplifies the discord between history and fiction. Johnston illustrates how the desire for a single story to reflect an “authentic” national character proves narrow and fruitless. Far from being “natural,” narratives and nations are social constructions that perform cultural work (Corse 3), and neither Fielding or Smallwood proves authentic or natural. The bodies once perceived as secure, such as historical facts and texts (e.g.: Prowse’s book), are revealed as indeterminate and unreliable structures. With the deformed physiques of Fielding and Smallwood, Johnston disputes the authenticity and authority of historical records in defining the nation in favour of a more contestatory but pluralized model.

Smallwood the Skab: All Skin-and-Bones

Some anti-unionists at the boarding-house had nicknamed me Skab, a shortened version of Skin-and-Bones (and, of course, the last thing any union organizer would want to be nicknamed), and what would be left of me after I walked seven hundred miles I tried not to imagine. (Colony 213)

Chris Morris explains the parallel that Johnston draws between Smallwood and

Newfoundland in Colony:

In Smallwood’s case, he identified with Newfoundland because he saw

Newfoundland’s position in the world as being equivalent to his position

in Newfoundland. They were sort of at the bottom of the barrel. His

personal struggle for success eventually became synonymous with

Newfoundland’s struggle to raise itself beyond Third World levels. (12)

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Indeed, from the first page of Johnston’s novel, Smallwood is an activist; he seeks to make something of himself and of Newfoundland. Smallwood’s first two lines foreground the novel’s political plot and serve as a metaphor for Newfoundland’s coming-of-age: “I am a Newfoundlander. Although up to the age of forty-six I would have been voted by those who knew me to be the man least likely to warrant a biography, one has been written” (Colony 8). The mixture of apology and arrogance sets the tone for

Newfoundland’s character as expressive of “a perverse pride” in the “ability to do anything, even fail, on so grand a scale” (338). Smallwood’s opening statement voices the “innate inferiority” and “contagion of self-debasement” (338), which he continually asserts as exemplary of a Newfoundland temperament. His preternatural skinniness symbolizes the Newfoundlander sense of inferiority and also acts as a symbol of his own handicaps: a lack of financial flesh and a chronic character deficiency. Hence his skinny body reveals his hunger for political significance and greatness, as he demonstrates by putting his name at the end of a list of Newfoundland’s prime ministers (40). As a symbol for Newfoundland, Smallwood’s body reveals a starved nation – and nothing motivates a body more than intense hunger.

Smallwood’s physicality embodies Newfoundland’s condition under colonial rule: malnourished. The name “Smallwood” was from “the Anglo-Saxon and meant something like ‘treeless’ or ‘place where no trees grow’” (Colony 9), and his body, as a metaphor for Newfoundland, reveals a treeless landscape, or one lacking natural substance. The tree is also often employed to symbolize family and heritage, and thus to have a name that suggests a “treeless landscape” signifies his detachment from his familial roots, but also colonial perceptions of Newfoundland as unrooted in history.

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Smallwood’s name and skin-and-bones body act as symbolic deformities for a nation perceived as bare and fated for failure, but that also refuses to fatten up with British food.

For example, Bishop Field introduces Smallwood to “food that is neither pickled or preserved with salt” (24). The private school feeds the boys meat, not fish, and “fat- browned potatoes in thick gravy” rather than boiled potatoes cooked in the same water as cod to “save water” (24). The food, like the education provided, is meant to civilize the students by nourishing their bodies and minds with the ingredients of English customs

(34). Smallwood’s body, however, rejects the wholesome food as if his body “had altogether lost the knack of absorbing nourishment” (25). He is also expelled, albeit unfairly, from the institution. His physique parallels his country to the extent that it refuses the false sustenance provided by the colonizing power. As a result, his experience with food reflects one of the primary means by which the British seduce

Newfoundlanders and the way by which Smallwood initially resists colonial advances.

Besides manners, elitist rhetoric, and the exclusive teaching of British history, food marks the difference between social classes – a point further underscored by

Smallwood’s explanation of the “three factions” that segregate the Bishop Feild students:

The elite faction called themselves the Townies…The second faction,

known to the Townies as the Baymen, called themselves the ’Tories

because they stayed in the dormitories…Outcasts and misfits at Bishop

Feild eventually settled for one another, falling into a third faction cruelly

called the Lepers. (25)

The students at Bishop Feild classify their peers based on social hierarchies, placing the most fortunate and popular at the top and the most shunned at the bottom. The top

206 faction is overseen by Prowse, who arbitrarily selects those who join his ranks, and he offers Smallwood a spot, despite his malnutrition and poverty, with the Townies. The passage foreshadows a scene in which Smallwood attempts to defend Newfoundland to a group of upper-class aristocrats at the Government House, where once again Prowse epitomizes the top of the hierarchy, dressed “in a smart-fitting tuxedo with a black bow tie” (362). His rich attire resembles the lavish buffet in contrast to Smallwood’s “Harris tweed slacks and Norfolk jacket,” which parallel his famished body (361).

Johnston includes this scene at Parliament to highlight the sumptuous display of

British food that tempts the deep-seated hunger of Newfoundlanders. He notes how

Newfoundlanders recognize such displays as a showcase of status and power, rather than a sincere appeal to sharing a meal:

The Newfoundlanders acted as if they knew, and wanted the British to

know they knew, that such a spread was not meant to be eaten but to be

admired. Some were simply too proud, in front of others, to admit to

being hungry, though I doubted that more than one in ten of them had

eaten properly that day. (Colony 364)

Smallwood and Newfoundland are starved: for food, recognition, and fulfilled potential.

The Newfoundlanders in this scene interact with the British, but their avoidance of food only further classifies them as anything but British. Pride fills their stomachs and the food offered fails to satiate their hunger. Smallwood tries to argue against colonial control of Newfoundland, but his empty stomach leads to his drunken state and he makes a fool of himself, prompting Prowse’s harsh words: “Like father, like son” (368).

Physical hunger proves a symbol of the larger emptiness the people of Newfoundland

207 feel as a result of British colonial control, and Smallwood’s intoxicated state shows how easy it is for imperial powers to disregard bodies with something as simple as champagne, as long as the stomach remains empty.

In effect, hunger is a metaphor for the novel’s depiction of colonialism and

Smallwood’s experiences with food (or lack thereof) are described in significant detail.

His inability to avoid looking at the food symbolizes his desire for political prestige even though he resists a smooth integration into the elite group, unlike his assimilation at

Bishop Feild. His drunken speech on the British occupation of Newfoundland reveals how those in control of food dominate the hungry. During this scene, Smallwood realizes he has not eaten in days, and upon visiting the doctor in order to acquire “a certificate of health” to travel to the States, he is advised to change his eating habits because he is “pre- tubercular” (Colony 86). Unable to afford proper nutritional foods, he follows Fielding’s advice and drinks “one bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon Yeast Beer per day for 120 days”

(88). By depriving himself of food he reminds the reader that success may act as his primary source of nourishment, but his poverty can never be hidden. Poverty marks the body and fails to stave off the degradations of hunger, deportation, deprivation, and disease.

The attention paid to bodies and physical hunger emphasizes Smallwood’s hunger for success and engagement in social and political issues. Similarly, the Newfoundland landscape through its vastness expresses a lack of nationhood, and Smallwood’s frail body complicates the interpretation of confederation at the end of Colony as a significant advance in the expression of Newfoundland as a nation. Although Smallwood advocates for Newfoundland’s potential as a nation, doubt plagues his advocacy. Upon leaving

208 home, he states: “Perhaps we Newfoundlanders had been fooled by our geography into thinking we could be a country, perhaps we believed that by nothing short of achieving nationhood could we live up to the land itself, the sheer size of it” (154). In New York,

Smallwood’s physique allows him to pass for various cultural identities: “…because of my nose and dark features I could pass for Jewish…Because of my Newfoundland accent, I could pass for an Irish-man, a Welshman, a Scot. The Chameleon, Fielding called me, but it was really the audiences that changed, each one mistaking me for something different” (Colony 171). Interestingly, in all these cases, he passes for cultural minorities, those struggling to make something of themselves beyond colonialist political organisms. He reaches a new level of poverty, starving and literally becoming homeless, sleeping on park benches, wearing the same clothes every day, and refusing money from

Fielding. His skinny body and naturally impoverished look attract his audience, but they also accentuate his homesickness and growing hunger. Despite the opportunities offered in New York, he always somehow associates with his roots, staying at the

Newfoundlander hotel, writing for the Backhomer, and reconnecting with Fielding.

The overwhelming need to fill an empty space further accentuates hunger as a need that sharpens Smallwood’s political appetite; a point that is emphasized when he describes a photograph of himself at this time, in which his “spindle-thin, emaciated arms and legs” compete with his resolute confident stare, “a not-to-be-trifled-with ninety-five- pound twenty-one-year-old” (Colony 156). Newfoundland’s colonized future as embodied by Smallwood stands thin but staunch – a combination of his shortcomings and successes.

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“The Book”

Johnston argues that Colony

is not a biography or history, it is a novel…My intention in writing The

Colony of Unrequited Dreams was to fashion out of the formless

infinitude of ‘facts’ about Smallwood and Newfoundland a story, a novel,

a work of art that would express a felt, emotional truth that an adherence

to an often untrustworthy and inevitably incomplete historical record

would have made impossible. (“Treatment” n.pag.)

He underscores that his text is a fictional story that is not intended to project truth and facts. I suspect Johnston’s comment stems from the backlash he received regarding his treatment of history. Stuart Pierson in his review article, for example, notes how “the factual inaccuracies, the problem of Fielding’s age, the grammatical slips – hint at a certain disturbing carelessness in the working out of this book” (285). This

“carelessness” makes Pierson uneasy with Johnston’s fictional history, and although he does not state a desire for authenticity, he hints at an overall dissatisfaction with the text’s undocumented imaginings. Pierson fails to acknowledge that despite factual information, not everything can be known about historical figures and thus they can only ever be represented by fictional accounts. As Wyile’s book length study, Speculative Fictions suggests, historical fiction is indeed “speculative” – it ponders on history and deconstructs myths of the nation. Like Swan, Johnston must defend his taking liberties when it comes to his historical subject and he respectfully insists that scattered historical records are “formless” and “inevitably incomplete,” ridiculing Prowse’s “official” history of Newfoundland for its accepted certainty.

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Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland serves as a secular Bible in Colony: a scripture of accepted Newfoundland history and identity. Wyile observes how it “hangs over the novel as a whole” (Speculative 155), influencing Smallwood’s life, from its importance to his father, to the pieces from the book used in Dr. Fielding’s letter, to his ambition to become significant enough to make history. As Bannister writes in

Newfoundland’s recent Royal Commission, “it is difficult to overestimate the influence of Prowse’s work. Published to widespread acclaim in 1895, it has inspired generations of scholars and shaped the way Newfoundlanders see their past” (125). Johnston mocks

“The Book’s” influence throughout the novel, starting with the epigraph to Colony, which states:

The history of the Colony is only very partially contained in printed

books; it lies buried under great rubbish heaps of unpublished records,

English, Municipal, Colonial and Foreign, in rare pamphlets, old Blue

Books, forgotten manuscripts…(n.pag)

The epigraph sets the tone of the text, for official history is undermined by Judge

Prowse’s state of mind, which is a “rubbish heap,” and the novel itself is a collection of such “heaps” that construct an uneven story, rather than an authentic history for a nation.

Fielding’s “Condensed History” is also composed of parodic heaps of Prowse’s A

History. Her journals revise Smallwood’s autobiography and Smallwood’s written popular history becomes a radio show, accentuating the novel’s presentation of national history as a he said, she said contest. In a sense the novel is a battle for narrative authority, as one character tries to overwrite the other. For example, Young Prowse translates the ineligible scrawl of Judge Prowse in Charlie Smallwood’s A History in an

211 event narrated by Joey Smallwood. The layers of narration further strip Judge Prowse’s history of authority. David Williams argues that his scrawl serves as “the mark of an absent author, radically absent (in the Derridean sense) from the very structure of the mark” (109). Smallwood cannot help but see his “father’s History” as “defaced by the author himself” (Colony 49). For Williams, the scene portrays a trope of forgery and

“serves to remind us how Smallwood’s autobiography is also ‘defaced by the author himself’” (110). I agree with Williams’s reading, but I also consider the scene a deeper deformation of the bodies that script Newfoundland’s national narrative. Defacing history results in a simple spoilage of the surface whereas Johnston’s texts go beyond appearances to deform the very flesh of national texts. The scene does not prove a trope of forgery, but rather of revision, for none of the characters insists on copying Prowse’s history – they rewrite it.

Williams does, however, astutely note how Prowse’s History in the novel is itself a forgery, since Sir William Vaughan (the original colonist), “does not actually visit his colony but instead writes a book extolling its virtues called The Golden Fleece” (Colony

67). Of course, Fielding mocks this “fact” and as Williams states, she undermines the authority of the real Prowse (Williams 110). Prowse’s text claims: “Poor Sir William

Vaughan, after remaining out in Newfoundland some years and spending his time writing his remarkable works, through want of means was first compelled to sell a block of land to Lord Falkland” (qtd. in Williams 110-111). Fielding, on the other hand, writes:

“Prowse was completely taken in by Vaughan, to the point of believing that Vaughan travelled to Newfoundland and began a colony at Trepassey, when in fact he never in his life sailed far enough from England to lose sight of shore” (Colony 83). Fielding’s

212 version presents Prowse’s history as sheer delusion and thus destabilizes the notion of a point of origin for national formation.

Judge Prowse represents a formless history and his senile mind symbolically foreshadows, as noted above, a missing point of origin for Newfoundland’s formation.

His agraphia undermines “the legitimacy of history” (Williams 109), and yet his book haunts Smallwood for his entire life. His father becomes obsessed with his inscribed copy, spending weeks “talking to that book” as if he is in dialogue with Judge Prowse

(69). Minnie May eventually gets tired of her husband’s antics and hurls “it out into the darkness” (70). Charlie’s descent into temporary insanity as he converses with the Book parallels the Judge’s own senile mind and suggests the deterioration of the history presented in the text. Minnie May’s throw even prompts an avalanche that leads to the death of Mr. Mercer, who is found with his eyes open and “his mouth stuffed with snow”

(72). The avalanche could be read as the destructive capability of a rejected history, but the scene could also be interpreted as what happens when one is force-fed history.28

Smallwood notes how the History “contained, not a record of the past, but the past itself, distilled, compacted to such density that I could barely lift it” (Colony 46). Despite its uncertainty, “The Book” acts as a national narrative Smallwood must deform in order to re-imagine a nation to which he belongs – a nation he can lead. Indeed, in the scene that inspires the cover of the novel – the walk – Smallwood reads “The Book” nearly

“twenty times” (214), scripting himself into history as he performs his famous feat of walking the entire length of the railway to gather signatures to form a union. His intentions are generally presented as sincere, although he acknowledges that part of the

28 Alex MacLeod, on the other hand, reads this scene as demonstrative of spaces set in stone and that the challenge to history only reinforces the power of geography. 213 reason he embraces the idea results from the “momentous homecoming” that would reveal his “five years abroad” as full of such adventures” that would inevitably benefit

Newfoundland (213). As his walk reading “The Book” underscores, he aims not only to benefit Newfoundland, but to ensure his own fame and triumph. The passage foreshadows his political push for confederation and Johnston’s suggestion that his support for joining Canada proves both personal and political.

Similarly, in a chapter entitled “Confessions,” Smallwood reveals that his push for confederation may not be entirely altruistic, but more a result of his fear of being forgotten:

It seemed to me that unless I did something that historians thought was

worth recording, it would be as if I had never lived, that all the histories in

the world together formed one book, not to warrant inclusion in which was

to have wasted one’s life. It terrified me that if it were possible to

extrapolate the judge’s book past 1895 to the present, I would not be in it.

(454)

Kevin Flynn makes a similar argument, noting that “confederation is vital less because it allows Newfoundland to join Canada than because it allows him [Smallwood] to etch his name in the secular grand texts of the elect: History” (n.pag.). Smallwood’s obsession with making it into “The Book” and Newfoundland history factors into his consideration of what he deems “good” for Newfoundland, but also for himself. He cannot simply oversee, as a leader, past history, but he must rewrite history by changing the landscape.

The Judge’s Book has an impact on Smallwood’s upbringing and his relationship with his family, but in addition, his friendship with Young Prowse furthers the Prowse

214 influence on his overall development. Prowse is more than just a “frenemie” to

Smallwood; although he embodies what Smallwood can never be, even Fielding’s lover, he shares similar hopes and ambitions. Prowse’s lineage, “character mark” (bestowed upon him by Headmaster Reeves), and strapping good looks contrast with Smallwood’s poor upbringing, inferior character mark, and skin-and-bone body. He is everything the

British perceive as civilized and submissive to the politics of empire, whereas Smallwood performs the role of the proud Newfoundlander “unwilling to be transformed into a colonial mimic man” (Chafe 334). Prowse and Smallwood, however, both aim to become historical agents; they just employ differing approaches. Despite being the leader of the elite group in school, Prowse grows up to prefer a more compliant practice, especially in front of authority. Unlike Smallwood, he lacks a sense of self and instead performs the roles expected of him. His failure to garner the historical recognition that

Smallwood acquires reveals the crippling effect of social conformity in light of

Smallwood’s drive to define himself against the legacy of the past.

Smallwood claims to reject the imperial mission of the British, but he promotes joining Canada, which ultimately only reaffirms Newfoundland’s colonial status and membership under a British umbrella. Indeed, Smallwood’s inability to ever fully reject

British influence is foreshadowed by his inability to counter the colonial enterprise of

Bishop Feild College and his colonialist education: “My goal was to be able to draw it

[the map of Newfoundland] as well from memory as I could draw the map of England”

(Johnston Colony 89). Despite his antagonism towards British colonial practices,

Smallwood nonetheless expresses a colonial dream of his own by seeking to unite

Newfoundland with Canada. His national dreams are unreciprocated by Fielding, the

215 other symbolic “national body” in the text. Fielding sees beyond the false unity promoted by confederation and foresees the disjunctive destiny of the nation. She may love Smallwood, but she does not love his political ambitions. Ultimately, the rather unromantic love story that accompanies the national quest in Colony parallels the unrequited dream of nationalism. Fielding writes in a letter to Smallwood:

Nationality, for Newfoundlanders a nebulous attribute at best, will

become obsolete, and the word country will be even more meaningless

than it was before. The question that has been there from the start,

unasked, unanswered, unacknowledged, will still be there.

We have lost something we would have lost no matter which side

won. (Colony 493-94)

According to Fielding, the hunger for recognition and meaning will never cease, no matter which side wins. As Dragland argues, the “whole inconclusive relationship

[between Smallwood and Fielding] is a tale of frustrated seeking, unrequited love. They act out in their personal affairs a version of the myth of loss that contains them” (195).

When Smallwood proposes to Fielding in New York, the plot temporarily suspends the alternative histories offered by both characters and invites the possibility of resolution.

Unfortunately, Fielding hesitates as a result of the secrets she has yet to share with

Smallwood, and he quickly rescinds the proposal, extending the novel’s portrayal of their relationship as the failure to affirm a national existence for Newfoundland, particularly under the confederate unity of Canada. They are never capable of sharing a collective vision of nationality and although Smallwood technically “wins” by becoming Premier

216 and achieving confederation, Fielding’s final words emphasize loss and failure as inevitably tied to success.

Instead, Smallwood’s success comes not from his election as the first Premier of

Newfoundland after Confederation, but rather from his mobilization of Newfoundland’s working class, from walking the train tracks, to his use of The Barrelman to form a community despite distance and isolation. His national reputation grows because of his radio show, a program “of local history and anecdotes” (Colony 385). The show transforms him into Newfoundland’s voice – a voice that, in conjunction with his newspaper articles, reaches beyond the city to the rural communities. His narrative voice as “The Barrelman” proves more accessible and shares propagandistic stories that show

“how brave, hardy, smart, strong, proud, intelligent and successful Newfoundlanders are”

(385). He counters those people who “don’t think much of Newfoundlanders” with narratives of the populace at the bottom of the barrel (386), for he genuinely understands their perspectives, having battled similar circumstances, such as poverty and malnutrition. His radio voice conceals his skinny body and expresses with confidence the potential of Newfoundlanders, revealing his conflicting representation as a socialist intent on uniting Newfoundlanders and a heroic political leader determined to make it into historical textbooks.

According to Wyile, Smallwood stands as “the personification of Newfoundland’s inferiority complex, the continuation of its colonial cringe, and the continuation of its economic, cultural, political, and psychological dependence as part of the Canadian

Confederation” (“Historical” 130). Indeed, when the Amulree Commission rules

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Newfoundland unfit for self-governance, the Newfoundlanders feel discouraged and angry. Smallwood voices:

A contagion of self-debasement swept the land, as if we had lived in

denial of our innate inferiority for centuries and at last were owning up to

it. There was more than a hint of boasting in it, a perverse pride in our

ability to do anything, even fail, on so grand a scale. Whether our

distinguishing national trait was resourcefulness or laziness, ineptitude or

competence, honesty or corruptibility, did not seem to matter as long as

were famous for it, as long as we were acknowledged as being unmatched

in the world for something. (338)

Smallwood’s inferiority complex connects him to the innate inferiority of the people described in this passage and their overwhelming pride, even as failures. The novel’s title clearly emphasizes Newfoundland’s colonial status and the unrewarded ambitions and hopes of a people, for despite Smallwood’s political success via confederation,

Newfoundland remains a colony rather than a nation. Yet Smallwood is torn between his underdog status and his desire to save Newfoundland from its thwarted potential, which he sees as embodied by his father. As Wyile notes: “Johnston depicts Smallwood both as a mock-heroic champion of Newfoundland and as a man who, warped by his mission to save Newfoundland from the legacy of its past, is a carrier of the pathogens of its history”

(Speculative 126). His role as “The Barrelman” exhibits this tension, for he enjoys narrating the nation, but at the same time recognizes that this is a means by which he can unite the working class and the poor to support his upcoming political endeavors.

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To draw attention to Smallwood’s conflicting representation as “The Barrelman,”

Johnston includes Fielding’s mockery of the show in a “Field Day” column, which

“punctures Smallwood’s grand gesture and renders his attempt to create an imagined community as naïve and romantic in a society riven by class and economic differences, where, as Joey should recognize from his own experience, people are not so much

‘starved for information’ as hungry for food” (Fuller 27). As “The Barrelman,”

Smallwood does believe he forms a collective community, for he gathers stories, home remedies, verses, and recipes – practically anything written by audience members that he reads on air. More importantly, however, “The Barrelman” provides him with an excuse to escape his new domestic life with Clara and the children. He claims to require field trips to collect material, which transforms him into a “literal barrelman, aloft, aloof, removed” (389). Indeed, he enjoys his role as a “wanderlusting patriot” over his position as father, husband, or “homesick exile” (389). Although he may succeed in unifying

Newfoundlanders, at least temporarily, as “The Barrelman,” this success comes at the cost of his failure as another authoritative figure: the father.

Failure of the Father

The failure of nationality and the lack of leadership that resound at the end of

Colony highlight Fielding’s and Smallwood’s problematic relationships with their fathers.

The flawed familial relations demonstrate the unstable nation, delegitimizing the authoritative body of the patriarch. The hopeless fathers in Colony and later in Custodian symbolically condemn traditional authority. For example, Smallwood’s father is a drunk who spends “most of his meager wages on bottles of cheap West Indian rum” (Colony 9).

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Fielding’s fathers are perpetually absent and involved in a complex web of family drama, one being the biological father (the Provider), another being the surgeon who raises her

(Dr. Fielding), and the other raising her twins (Stepdoctor Breen). One cannot ignore the doctor figures in both novels, particularly in relation to Fielding, and their roles in defining the operations of the body. I elaborate on this point later in the chapter, for as doctors and fathers, they take on multiple significations in relation to colonial readings of the texts and reconsiderations of the nation as embodied by the female body. Moreover, the father/son/daughter conflicts echo Newfoundland’s inability to escape parental authority, remaining under constant watch and subjected to colonial relations. Overall, however, the father figures in both texts express a terror of domesticity and thus contest the idealized model of the nation as metaphorically represented by the family.

In Colony, fathers represent Newfoundland’s defeatism, but also a refusal to affirm British social idealism. Both Charlie and Joey defy the authority and value of their respective fathers and mirror the conflicts of colonialism. They express their frustration with familial roots, which parallels Newfoundland’s frustration with its own colonial lineage, lacking self-sufficiency and self-determination. Charlie Smallwood, for instance, despises his name for it reminds him “that he was a certain someone’s son, not self-created” (Colony 8). Joey, from the start of the text, appears in constant battle with his father’s behavior and beliefs. Indeed, the opening section of Smallwood’s first- person narration introduces his father’s failure as a main motivator for his political aspirations. Although Charlie sets out “for Boston with high hopes,” he returns

“destitute” and joins the family boot-and-shoe factory rather than succeeds on his own terms (8). He despises working for the family business and decides to become a lumber

220 surveyor, spending his wages on rum. Johnston portrays Charlie Smallwood as a frustrated and frustrating character, who creates his own misery and stunts the potential of his family by selfishly allowing his stubbornness and weakness for the bottle to dictate his social graces. His pride prohibits him from using the family discount to acquire new boots, preferring to repatch his old pairs. His “disgraceful” boots contrast with the children’s “well-heeled” feet (10), and indicate the gap between himself and his descendants. When Smallwood’s mother tells Charlie that his dreams are haunted by

“more booze than boots” (11), he laughs and repeats the phrase until he burns all the family’s boots. His absolute distaste for the boot business exposes his dismissal of his family roots, and his wayward ways inspire Smallwood’s similar desire to escape his lineage and overcome his low lot in life.

The symbol of “The Boot” in Johnston’s Colony brands Smallwood’s journey to become a self-made man and marks the start of his quest, as well as its end. Before departing for America, he walks down Signal Hill and sees the Boot with the Smallwood name inscribed on it: “The Boot was like some flag, Smallwood the name of some long- reigning monarch or a family that had laid claim to the place two hundred years ago. The republic of Smallwood. ‘My God, Smallwood,’ Reeves had said, ‘what are your parents trying to do, start their own country?’” (132). Reeves’s question may appear comic, but it hints at the intersection between Smallwood’s familial legacy and his political ambitions. Like his father, Smallwood fears the Boot as an unavoidable path and he desperately attempts to escape his family’s established presence in Newfoundland. He seeks to rewrite history, which he believes he has achieved when he confidently takes down the symbolic Boot like taking down a flag. Johnston portrays this gesture as

221 triumphant for Smallwood, but it also reveals his alienation from the people; the removal of the Boot becomes a symbolic stripping of the imprints that have shaped the

Newfoundland he abandons in favour of political success and historical recognition.

Cynthia Sugars’ essay on Johnston’s The Divine Ryans and Novac Fevronia’s article on The Navigator of New York both expose the relationship between father and son as foundational to Johnston’s writing. Sugars observes how “the quest for the father represents a quest for patrimony that is in turn a quest for symbolic legitimation.

Johnston’s novels, one might argue, demonstrate a desire for paternal authority; these characters want to know where they fit in the communal and genetic inheritance” (152).

In Colony, however, this quest for patrimony seems more applicable to Fielding than to

Smallwood. Smallwood knows his genetic inheritance all too well and rather seeks to revise it. Fielding, on the other hand, grows up with Dr. Fielding’s incessant probing of his biological link to her, and thus she cannot help but wonder about her narrative of origin.

Fielding’s desire to know about her past contrasts Smallwood’s progressive thinking, which reflects their individual perspectives on the colonization of

Newfoundland and the potential offered by confederation. Whereas Smallwood only looks ahead, focusing on the practical opportunities for Newfoundland’s people

(employment, economic expansion, recognition on a map), Fielding supports the past and present and is not so easily deceived by idealistic promises of the future. We learn in

Custodian that Fielding’s experience, despite growing up in a financially fortunate family, prompts her desire for isolation and distance from society, and her distrust of

222 everyone around her, even Smallwood. Her three father figures exhibit how paternal authority oversees her every move, maintaining the appearance of power.

The representation of fatherhood in both Colony and Custodian damages the father’s authority, which in turn weakens imperial power and colonial renderings of the family as nation. Smallwood’s grandfather, who is a self-made man and built the family boot business, is strangely absent from the text, and Smallwood himself, as a father figure, appears preoccupied with his political ambitions rather than his family responsibilities. In fact, Johnston suggests that Smallwood marries purely for political reasons – to perform the role expected by those in power – rather than for love. When he considers his attraction to Fielding, he recalls his “father’s horror of domesticity, of entrapment and confinement” (Colony 135). He therefore marries only because he saw

“that men of the sort I aspired to be had wives, were expected to have them, and children, too” (244). Indeed, Smallwood marries Clara Oates because she reflects the ideal of domesticity he requires for his political performance, not because he desires love or a family life. Clara, he explains, lacks “self-confidence, which after Fielding, was exactly what I was looking for” (245). He confesses to being a bad husband and father, noting “I had inherited my father’s terror of domesticity. I travelled to escape, not just the rote predictability and repetitiveness of life at home, but the loss of a sense of self that, for me at least, came with it, the feeling of being subsumed, submerged into that collective entity known as the family” (389). Smallwood’s fear of being subsumed by the family does not, however, preclude his mission to allow Newfoundland’s submergence into Canada.

His words do illustrate, nonetheless, how the collectivity of family parallels that of nation. At the end of the novel, he obscures his own labeling as a failure and avoids his

223 father’s fate, telling Charlie: “Whatever I am, I am in spite of you” (480). He verbally distances himself, once again, from his family and his past, illustrating his distrust of the collective idealism of the family as embodying the “home” and the “nation.”

For both Smallwood and Fielding, family drama frames their ambitions and journeys, for both inadvertently express a fear of the confining structure of domesticity.

Although their mothers are not granted the same descriptive detail as their fathers, they are equally represented as inadequate, struggling to uphold the moral centre of the home, as expected by conventional social standards. Smallwood’s mother labors to manage her children while handling a crazy, alcoholic husband. She casts Smallwood as “predestined for greatness” (Colony 8) because he is born on Christmas Eve, employing religious language to set the tone for his future ambitions.29 She does not, however, insist that the children attend church and therefore counters the traditional scripting of the mother as ensuring the moral growth of the family. She does, however, become “a student of religions, ‘reading up’ on them the way a stamp-collector might read up on stamps” (78).

She takes Smallwood with her on numerous occasions, not to instill in him moral values, but because “she seemed to be afraid to go alone” (78). When she is “saved” by

Pentecostalism, Smallwood is even more distrustful of religious systems and notes that unlike his mother, he would rather save himself than let God save him (82). Minnie May seeks meaning that she finds lacking in her day-to-day life, expressing an existential loneliness sparked by her dissociation from her husband and traditional family culture.

The Pentecostal Church promises to provide meaning and she becomes a body easily

29 Kevin Flynn’s recent essay on Johnston’s novel as a conversion narrative demonstrates how Smallwood dismisses religious conversion but embraces political conversion, going from “Socialism to Liberalism to Confederationism within politics” (n.pag.). He astutely illustrates how “Smallwood’s desire to actualize his social and political ‘salvation’ in the real world is rooted in the same instinct that compels him to resist religious conversion” (n.pag.). 224 swayed by the promise of belonging to a collective that accepts events as they come because they are preordained and beyond individual will.

In Colony, Fielding’s mother is presumed either dead or divorced, already situating Fielding within an eccentric family structure; but when her mother is discovered as alive and well in Custodian, she proves the antithesis of the maternal figure Fielding imagined, and rather than bring closure to her irregular family, she further accentuates

Fielding’s disparity from the norm. Her mother leaves Dr. Fielding and remarries, but she is unable to conceive and thus symbolically perform her duty as a female body contributing to the growth of the new American nation. When Fielding finds herself pregnant and unwed, her mother offers to hide her in New York and raise the children as her own. Hence Fielding never manages to escape her family and never fits the conventional domestic mold. In Colony Johnston may portray Fielding as a body that defies authoritative history and resists domestic expectations imposed upon women by society; however, in Custodian, she struggles more heavily with domestic expectations and the hegemonic bodies asserting control over her non-normative physique and practice.

Fielding’s Remedy: Doctors, Drink, and Disease

Laid low by TB and my weakness for the bottle but nevertheless an eccentric in any context but the one from which I came – that seemed to be how they regarded me. If not for my leg and my limp and my ability to affect unaffectedness, I might have become the target of scorn instead of pity, however begrudged the latter was. (Custodian 375)

Sheilagh Fielding is not the target of scorn or of pity. Despite the academic attention Colony continues to receive, little critical consideration has been given to

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Fielding beyond her satirical counter-history of Newfoundland, her role as Smallwood’s unrequited love interest, and her symbolic association with Johnston’s romancing of the landscape (Bak, Dragland, Fuller). Perhaps this lack of interest results from Smallwood’s historical weight, whereas the blurb on the back of Colony merely characterizes Fielding as “a popular newspaper columnist who casts a haunting shadow over Smallwood’s life and career” (n.pag.). Fielding is more than a shadow or a personification of

Newfoundland; rather, she embodies the struggle of the deformed body to resist regulatory power through constant attempts to assert her own value, and shape her own history, in the face of disciplinary configurations.

Critics and reviewers of Johnston’s novels note the similarity between Fielding and the land; her larger-than-life height, ironic detachment, and bold eccentricity have all been adduced as representative of Newfoundland (Beattie, Dragland, Fuller). Chafe, for example, states: “Fielding seems to embody not only Johnston’s novel, but the essence of

Newfoundland itself” (337). He goes so far as to claim her alcoholism, cynicism, irony, wit and wistfulness as “Newfoundland” (337). Fielding is, for Chafe, a postcolonial narrator who expresses nostalgia for lost origins and defies, with her written word,

Newfoundland’s colonial history. Chafe’s argument is sound and his analysis of Colony as postcolonial is interesting; however, the later publication of Custodian problematizes his reading. Yes, Fielding overwrites Prowse’s received history and she expresses her unhomely feelings as she tries to find a place to call home; but her association with the land undermines a postcolonial reading, for the spaces she inhabits (including her body) prove to be prisons controlled and colonized by men.

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Throughout Colony descriptions of the landscape can easily be transposed to

Fielding. As Smallwood traverses the land by train for the first time, he remarks:

There was beauty everywhere, but it was the bleak beauty of sparsity,

scarcity, and stuntedness…It was a beauty so elusive, so tantalizingly

suggestive of something you could not quite put into words that it could

drive you mad and, however much you loved it, make you want to get

away from it and recall it from some city and content yourself with

knowing it was there. (137)

The adjectives that dominate this passage evoke Fielding’s split subjectivity: beautiful but emotionally stunted, desired yet avoided. From the “elusive” and “tantalizing” geography stems Fielding’s own dualistic nature. Smallwood’s ambivalent reaction to the physicality of Newfoundland matches his confused feelings towards Fielding. He perceives the “whole island [as] a hermitage” (144), which resembles the scrutinized seclusion of Fielding. The “landlocked country” may romanticize its unchanging isolation (141), but such seclusion also arouses curiosity and the desire for control from the outside.

Smallwood’s geographical description of Newfoundland as a spatial compartment, like the one he rides in on the train, parallels Fielding’s continual imprisonments. Her association with the landscape is developed in Custodian, as she relocates herself to a segmented space: Loreburn, an isolated Newfoundland island.

Loreburn, like Fielding, appears “to be in a permanent state of mourning” (Custodian 21), a state that suspends the progression of time. The phrase also foreshadows Fielding’s narrative, for her body becomes a natural battlefield against death as she combats a

227 socially unacceptable pregnancy, alcoholism, tuberculosis, and barrenness. Fielding’s

Loreburn perspective frames her narrative to emphasize the enclosed structure of the text, as well as the bond between her body and the land. The frame situates Fielding’s personal history within a retrospective viewpoint that accentuates her landlocked fixity.

Her self-exile highlights her role as the cynosure within a strange and solitary landscape, for her otherness attracts the inscrutable gaze of all the characters, even her own. Her desire to find a deserted island to escape the vigilance motivated by the war only inspires another form of inspection: introspection. Indeed, the bulk of Custodian is a long letter

Fielding writes to herself, reflecting on her “former life” (10). Her isolation at Loreburn reveals her geographical self-imprisonment as emblematic of her body as a cage, and thus a reaffirmation of the colonial scripting of the female body as symbolic of the nation.

Johnston establishes size and gender as Fielding’s initial constraints, her abnormal height defying what was commonly perceived as an archetypal female body. Smallwood, observing her converse with male lawyers, comments: “They loved indulging her apparent belief that wit could compensate for her gender” (Colony 93). Despite her irony-laden cleverness, Fielding begins writing under a male pseudonym, a device that

“automatizes and disindividualizes power” (Foucault, Discipline 202). As a sociological space, gender proves a difficult system of categorization to overcome and it heightens

Fielding’s doubled marginalization as woman and other, depicting her as a shrunken member of the body politic, despite her loftiness. She must hide behind a pseudonym and the political personages – Smallwood aside – humour, but generally disregard her writings. Gender thus makes her more visible in one way, but invisible in another.

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Fielding is “considered something of an exotic” from the start because her

“estranged parents” generate a fraught domestic space (Colony 27). Deemed

“motherless” by her peers, she becomes the subject of gossip expressing “all sorts of misconceptions about the oddness of [her] origins and the composition of [her] family”

(Custodian 84). Her atypical family of two, father and daughter, spurs great concern from her peers for it defies their understanding of normative familial behavior and they cannot help but speculate on divorce and other controversies that explain Fielding’s size, age, and rejection of feminine propriety.

Her physical deformities (first height, then limp), further alienate her from the norm. Although the war is described as “an epidemic of some disease to which women are immune” (Custodian 217), the canes and crutches that populate the city also apply to

Fielding as a result of her dipsomania and her bout of tuberculosis (217). War injuries may be a gendered disease Fielding cannot contract, but she suffers from similar ramifications: loss of loved ones, trauma, and physical distortion. Here, disability and deformity merge. She is like a young solider whose body serves a social need, for she bears a future soldier, her womb portrayed as a space devoted to public purpose.

Fielding’s womb is symbolic of both profusion and paucity, as she gives birth to twins but is later made barren by her tuberculosis. Interestingly, both her pregnancy and her illness prompt her diagnosis and incarceration by father figures. Dr. Fielding, a chest doctor, identifies her tuberculosis, and Stepdoctor Breen, an obstetrician, supervises her pregnancy. Dr. Fielding’s fixation with patrimony and his responsibility to this creature whose “nature is as much an aberration as [her] stature,” expresses an anxiety about property and power (Custodian 440). Stepdoctor Breen, on the other hand, examines

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Fielding and treats her body as a territory to be mapped: “He looked like a doctor mapping out a woman’s womb, as if the stethoscope were an experimental instrument of his invention and he had no idea yet what the sounds were that it enabled him to hear”

(61). Fielding’s naming of her mother’s second husband “Stepdoctor” rather than

“Stepfather” affirms his practical and non-parental role, accentuating her unconventional family space. Both Dr. Fielding and Stepdoctor Breen oversee Fielding’s physical otherness under a colonial lens, seeking the truth of her origin (Dr. Fielding) or mapping her womb like an imperialist conqueror (Breen). Under one lens, she is subjected to demands of patrimony, and under the other she becomes a body exposed to medical probing to ensure her optimal health for the good of the conqueror’s (Breen) domestic model. Both doctors, however, express anxieties over Fielding’s non-normative body, and this discomfort with the uncertainties she physically and verbally arouses prompts them to supervise her within strict confines. Indeed, Foucault explains how clinical anatomy turns the body, which he defines as “an opaque mass in which secrets, invisible lesions, and the very mystery of origins lie hidden” into a “tangible space” that sanctions thorough inspection (Birth 123). Therefore, Fielding’s body, under a clinical lens, allows the scrutiny of her father figures to regulate her bodily operations. She does not, however, become a “docile body,” to again reference Foucault, for she struggles to maintain power. Nonetheless, the relentless surveillance performs a patriarchal disciplinary strategy that underscores her physical deviancy and abnormality.

When pregnant, for example, Fielding’s body is placed under constant surveillance. She is locked in a suite, stripped of her subjectivity. Her imprisonment is a form of medical panopticism, for although the room, like a prisoner’s, is not annular or

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“pierced with wide windows,” Fielding “is seen, but […] does not see; [s]he is the object of information, never a subject of communication” (Foucault, Discipline 200). Miss

Long’s silent treatment manifests the lack of communication, and makes the nurse’s presence oppressive. Fielding renames Miss Long “Florence Nightinjail” to mock her captivity under the nurse’s ruling eye (Custodian 62). Kept incarcerated, Fielding exists outside the critical view of society, but inside a suite of surveillance that accentuates the unnaturalness of her physical condition. The control over Fielding’s pregnancy renders her state an affliction, and her lying-in suite recalls the “architecture of confinement” created for pregnant women in the Victorian period to protect them from the social realm

– and, of course, to protect the social realm from the pregnant women (Adams 8). As

Annmarie Adams notes in her study, a pregnant body was perceived as a deformation; therefore, expecting women were kept away from public sight in order to avoid disrupting social propriety. Fielding’s body, on the other hand, reflects a pregnant and socially tainted body, for she is young, pregnant, and unmarried. In addition, she is further cast as “abnormal” for expecting twins, instead of the standard single child.

Hence Fielding is marginalized by her affliction and gender, suggesting the moral degeneration of the home and the family’s role in the maintenance of social and political order.

Fielding’s womb and body defy social expectations, but also her own expectations. The news of “twins” doubles her sense of guilt: “another life to be relinquished, another life that, with the one whose renunciation I was reconciled, would come tumbling out” (Custodian 63-4). She feels as betrayed by her own body as by her

“three attendants,” perhaps even more, for her body had kept the secret from her, but not

231 from Dr. Breen (64). This betrayal carries over to her birthing experience, for she expects birth to sever her body like the physical side effects of a severe disease: “I had imagined that it would be like losing a limb or having an organ extracted. I felt only the impressions that their bodies made on mine” (69). Only when she becomes barren does she experience the loss she initially imagined, her withered leg a metonymy for her deformed reproductive ability: “Unable to conceive. ‘Conceive.’ A verb without an object. As if he were telling me I would never think again. Telling me they had had to remove my imagination. Conceive” (295). She is no longer able to create, a fear she also uses to justify her alcohol addiction: “I don’t know if the drinking helps me write, or the writing makes me drink” (Colony 301-02). Her cane symbolizes a creative “pen,” a word that could also refer to an enclosed space or prison. The cane becomes a crutch that carries “the crushing weight of history but also the crippling effects of trying to repress the past” (Wyile 90). Wyile’s words disclose history as the malady that deforms

Fielding’s body. Her physical incongruities defy social propriety, like the “poor people with their horrible afflictions” in The Vile (Custodian 90), the book Fielding brings to school that exposes medically diseased figures. The diseased bodies in the medical photographs elicit “fear” but also reveal “beauty and dignity” (90), a paradox imposed on the ill as a result of the dreadful admiration such disfigurements inspire in the healthy.

Fielding’s deviant drinking and wit make her a “prodigy of her gender” (Colony

31), but her tuberculosis, like her pregnancy, brands her a threat to the social fabric. Her time at the “San” spotlights on her peripheral placement under a disciplinary lens that maintains power over individuals that threaten the health of the nation. The sanatorium is portrayed by Johnston as an institution “to protect [the sick] from the outside world”

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(Custodian 292); yet such buildings were often structures used to protect the healthy and the wealthy, since tuberculosis targeted the “malnourished and unsanitary” poor (294).

After all, “sanatorium directors distinguished their institutions both implicitly and explicitly from hospitals and allied them instead with asylums and reformatories”

(Feldberg 90). The association with asylums and reformatories results from the high volume of fatalities that occurred in the sanatorium and the “moral rectitude” attributed to those who survived (Custodian 292). Rather than representing a reformed morality,

Fielding’s body becomes “an emblem” (293), her physical stature “the measure of what it took to survive the illness” (293). Her gendered abnormality, symbolically heightened by her need to borrow a bed from the men’s ward, proves an asset that increases her chance of survival. Though her height no longer carries social connotations of malformation, the disease marks her with a withered leg.

Fielding describes her deformed leg as a keepsake: “Though no one else would have named it as an heirloom, there was my leg itself, which made the cultivation of a

‘look’ redundant” (Custodian 11). The self-mocking tone of her statement gives Fielding a protective distance that reinforces the significance of her limp. Her “ancient, thick- soled boot” symbolizes her thick skin (11), and her leg exposes her shrunken social composition. The leg is not amputated, a common medical practice for infected body parts; she is, however, physically transformed into a blurred icon “of superabundance and deficiency” (Custodian 34). Fielding’s body is thus deformed to display her paradoxical social position as a member of the upper-class distorted by the disease of “‘the scruff’”

(292), and as a woman with a robust left leg and a feeble right.

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Although tuberculosis is the spectral sickness that was romanticized in the nineteenth century (Wherrett xv), Fielding’s conquest of consumption is accompanied by another consuming social ailment: alcoholism. During prohibition “anti-TB workers attacked alcoholism as a key factor…predisposing alcoholics themselves to the diseases”

(McCuaig 12). Of course, this link “served a symbiotic purpose” that justified the prohibition movement’s campaign, insofar as it rearticulated social hierarchies and communal morality regarding proper behavior (12). Fielding’s alcoholism and tuberculosis prove problematic to the established social order because not only is she a woman, but a doctor’s daughter and a member of the upper-class. Her illness thus provokes fear in the general collective because both diseases can affect anyone, of any class, age or gender.

Fielding’s rebelliousness against socially constructed roles is intellectually expressed through her writing, but physically repressed through drink. She takes on the active masculine identity of writer and alcoholic, rather than obeys the passive performance of wife and mother. Her booze literally becomes a substitute for her lost children, an image darkly symbolized in Custodian by Mr. and Mrs. Trunk. As noted by

Ellen Lansky, the female alcoholic “disrupts a paradigm in the culture of alcohol” because she performs the addiction rather than the role of “accomplic[e]” (213).

Fielding’s dipsomania “transgresses her culturally determined role” (218), and given the prohibition movement, even violates social law.

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The Provider

Johnston initially introduces Fielding’s Provider as her wing man – the primary connotation of his name simply signifying his role as her alcohol supplier. Lansky astutely notes that “[a]iding and abetting an alcoholic is often an exercise in control and power. When the accomplice is a man, ‘keeping an eye’ on the alcoholic woman is an exercise in discipline and punishment” (217). Indeed, Fielding’s Provider is first introduced via a letter in which he notes his position as a watcher, observing her as she departs New York after giving birth to David and Sarah: “I watched you walk about the deck tonight. Looking so desolate I thought you meant to jump. We would not have let you” (Custodian 75). The Provider’s first words reflect his role as “keeping an eye” on

Fielding, an eye he extends to his position as supplier during their first encounter. Out on the hunt for junibeer late at night, Fielding meets her Provider at a window, although he remains concealed behind a curtain “tacked so tightly to the frame that it might have been a pull-down shade” (209). They share an awkward first conversation about women wandering alone at night and having children, culminating in the Provider supplying

Fielding with the alcohol she seeks. Although he remains behind the curtain, there is a clear expression of his power over Fielding, for he controls her ability to see him and he has the commodity she needs. When the Provider is later revealed as her “watcher,” he further underscores his privileged place as an omnipresent figure surveying her way of life.

Fielding’s Provider rather melodramatically turns out to be her biological father, a former priest who raped her mother out of revenge, and who spends his life playing

Fielding’s stalking-shadow, scripting her life through a series of self-righteous,

235 manipulative, and often disturbing letters. Johnston’s gothic plot at first appears sensationalist and is problematic in its undermining of both Fielding’s agency and narrative authority. After all, Fielding’s letters and journal entries are her narrative strength and to introduce a character whose epistolary voice dominates Fielding’s is a striking authorial decision that originally left me perturbed. Yet upon further consideration, one recognizes that Custodian presents a series of frames, a continuum of prisons, and a compilation of enclosures. The letters and journal entries that form its narrative framework may at times feel too contrived (Pullinger D14), and the Provider’s letters “a convenient device for conveying necessary information to the reader” as Steven

Beattie argues in his review of the novel (n.pag). However, their continual caging of the text accentuates the formation and deformation of narrative power invoked by Fielding’s struggle to survive as an eccentric body in a static space.

The panoptic Provider’s riddle regarding Fielding being “twice-fathered” frames the mystery of the story and hints at her paradoxical genealogy. Once again, she is stripped of any possible normative family space or relations, and her conception, the result of a rape, problematizes her origin. Although cliché, the rape certainly plays into the colonial motif and the portrayal of the mother’s body as subjected to imperial missions. The Provider justifies his assault by explaining that Fielding’s mother had previously aborted their child without his consent, claiming it was the result of a rape.

His defence remains illogical and his obsessive compulsion to seek revenge on Fielding’s mother undermines his credibility. Furthermore, the fact that he was a priest and

Fielding’s mother a nun destabilizes the credibility of religion as a system founded on rhetoric of unity and self-control. Johnston’s treatment of religion in Custodian parallels

236 its handling in Colony and stresses how Fielding’s origins and life, despite her strong- willed individuality, remain defined by oppressive bodies that marginalize her own.

Moreover, the Provider’s invented name for God, which serves as the title of the novel, parallels his own role as Fielding’s God-like-Custodian: a guardian who both protects and detains, sees but cannot be seen. I call Fielding’s Provider “panoptic” in reference to Foucault’s theorizing of Bentham’s Panopticon. Fielding’s spatial relations to society are defined panoptically: from the Spencer schoolyard to the sanitarium, the structural schemas locate her in relation to others in a spatial disposition of power. As

Foucault notes: “It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons”

(Discipline 205). Fielding’s body continually resists and submits to panopticon spaces, unable to escape surveillance but able to question and mock their effects on her body.

For example, in the live-in room during her pregnancy, she never attempts to escape the space, but rebels with rudeness and smoking. At Bishop Spencer, she recognizes the school’s mission to “ready the girls for marriage,” but undermines the domestic education project by drawing attention to the fact that they are taught by unmarried women called

“Spencer Spinsters” (Custodian 83). In the “San,” she accepts the medical practices to cure her tuberculosis, but jokes about the “spectacle” of her body that requires “a bed borrowed from the men’s ward” (293). These structures emphasize Fielding’s physical difference and uncharacteristic disposition. She mocks her own difference, but never fully escapes it.

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Foucault introduces the panopticon in relation to the spatial partitioning and surveillance that resulted from the plague, which required social control over space and continuous inspection of each area in hope of reducing the spread of disease. He states:

“The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline” (Discipline 198). Foucault’s emphasis on the plague as both a real and imaginary threat highlights how disciplinary mechanisms became a means by which social and political control could be asserted under the pretext of health over contagion. The dangerous bodies were those deemed a risk to social health and order, such as the ill, deformed, criminals and vagabonds (198). Rather than demand exclusion, these bodies require confinement, supervision and analysis.

The institutionalized “Pens” prompted by disciplinary projects are meant to reform individuals, and although Fielding resists ritual exercises intent on reformation, she does remain under constant surveillance. Her Provider continually plagues her like

“an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual” (Foucault, Discipline 197).

The Provider’s omnipresence works to Fielding’s detriment, rather than to her benefit, for although he carries the truth of her past, he keeps her confined to daily vigilance. His role as custodian of panopticism, rather than paradise, induces in Fielding “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”

(201). Despite her many attempts to remain imperceptible – hiding in a hermitage and disguised by pseudonyms – she remains visible. The Provider’s letters befit the

Panopticon model like architectural apparatuses that record and render palpable the secrets of Fielding’s personal history.

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The most disturbing, yet revealing passage is the Provider’s letter anatomizing the history of Fielding’s body. Recalling how he and his “delegate” rescued Fielding and

Smallwood from the snowstorm, the Provider starts his long epistle with a declaration of power. Fielding is no longer a potent agent who saves Smallwood “from freezing into

History” in Colony (Percy 221); instead, she and Smallwood are “[t]wo frozen figures” buried in the snow (Custodian 334), physical “exception[s] in the landscape” (334), placed under the observatory lens of the watcher’s gas mask. The mask represents the objectification of Fielding, which the Provider proceeds to describe with his “perpetual assessment and classification” of the external forces that have altered her body (Foucault,

Discipline 220). After asking patronizing questions regarding memory, mistakes, and madness, he writes:

Your body, like your soul, has been transformed. That boot. Like some

shameful emblem that you are forced by law to wear…The symmetry of

all your parts has been thrown off by your leg. Which looks so strange

beside the other, unafflicted one. Your good leg is the measure of your

loss. Two legs that once were twins. (Custodian 341)

Although the Provider is one of Fielding’s “twice-fathered” figures, he is not a medical doctor; yet his intense scrutiny of Fielding’s body continues for pages after the quoted passage, his attention to detail exposing her subjection to his pathological and disciplinary gaze. He imposes a hierarchy on her body, one leg classified in relation to the other, articulating the asymmetries of her corporeal power. The image of the boot echoes Smallwood’s “boot” haunting and demonstrates how both characters remain

239 symbolically imbalanced, despite Smallwood’s submission to the universal values of confederation.

Surprisingly, Fielding’s eventual confrontation with her controlling Provider shifts from first-person narration to third-person omniscient narration, a jarring change, but significant within the context of the Provider’s positioning of Fielding under the panoptic lens of his scrutiny. The most significant narrative events revealing Fielding’s past and present are thus described by her Provider, rather than by her witty introspective voice. The switch in perspective also reminds readers that despite the series of figurative cages in the text, the most important borders are those of the text itself, with the final critical surveillance being performed by the reader. Johnston thus challenges the reader to perform like a physician and analyze the text like Fielding’s body to uncover how she physically manifests her psychological symptoms.

In his article on Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Stan

Dragland writes: “So much of the novel rests on a myth of beautifully articulated enigma that I wonder if lasting irresolution on all levels isn’t called for” (205). Indeed, what makes Wayne Johnston’s texts the final ones discussed in this dissertation stems from their lasting irresolution. Johnston has repeatedly voiced that Colony is a novel, a work of fiction, and not a biography or historical record; it should be read as an imagined history, rather than a version of a historical narrative. He states: “My book is not primarily about Smallwood as a maker of history. It is about the human character and human emotions inherent in and often masked by historical events and by the written record we call ‘history.’ And human character and emotion can only be apprehended and

240 conveyed by the imagination” (“My Treatment” n.pag.). His statement applies to the text’s treatment of the nation as much as to his treatment of history, for the historical facts that define Newfoundland’s nationalism confront the imagined communities at the heart of the text. Jon Kertzer writes: “When nations are regarded as historical subjects, they take on the characteristics of people. They not only grant character to their citizens, but are themselves characters” (9). Hence Smallwood and Fielding, as personifications of Newfoundland, embody the contradictoriness of a nation formed and deformed, united and torn, by history. Despite Smallwood’s factual political rise, the novel illustrates that only in an unresolved narrative can two different characters embody national history.

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Conclusion: Introducing the Bibliography

Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary “outside,” if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter. (Butler, Bodies That Matter 16)

In this dissertation, I have outlined how the metaphor of the body, specifically the deformed body, proves a useful tool for reflections on the representation of the nation in recent Canadian fiction. Contrary to some critics, who perceive the nation as in a palliative state, I argue that its presence remains palpable, craving debate but avoiding, at all costs, a defining diagnosis. My focus is on how, to employ Butler’s phrasing quoted above, “bodies are not constructed” in order to explore alternate avenues for discussions on the Canadian nation and uncertainties of national identity. For me, the trope of deformity provides a complex lens through which to study the long-practiced tradition of the family saga, a literary genre I continue to be drawn to when reading for pleasure or research purposes. Contemporary novels that include a family at the heart of the plot are particularly interesting, for they contest imperial representations of the body and the nation with images of deformed offspring that resist objectification by adult concepts for the purposes of conformity and collectivity. By disrupting accepted conventions, such texts offer alternative visions of the tropic potential of the family and the body to present a pluralistic form as an alternative to a homogenous corpus. Hence, the texts I have selected revise the imagined national community perpetuated by subsuming discourses intent on the formation of a unified collective identity.

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Selecting novels for analysis was no easy task. My list changed regularly and the more I delved into my research, the more texts I encountered that seemed the “perfect” fit, employing images of the body to illustrate how hegemonic patterns are learned and formed culturally, and thus can be unlearned and deformed. Many Canadian authors, particularly contemporary writers, have employed the trope of deformity to challenge normalizing structures. Since the purpose of my thesis is to demonstrate how body narratives reveal the critical contingencies of the model of the family and the nation, I selected novels that proved both traditional and alternative at the same time. They all appeal to generic traditions that they respect, while deforming their structures to provide different avenues for representations of family and nation. For instance, Burnard and

MacDonald review domestic realism and Victorian conventions, respectively, Béchard reconsiders the roman de la terre, Swan reassesses allegory, and both Swan and Johnston rewrite history. For each author, revising traditional genres entails re-envisioning literary constructions of national collectivities without merely reproducing them.

Many of the texts I could not include in this dissertation further exemplify the potential of the trope of deformity in analyses of Canadian literature. My hope is that this dissertation opens the door to more research on the topic. Therefore, I have included an annotated bibliography to recognize some of the other texts I could have examined, but also to draw attention to the breadth of this trope. The works included in the bibliography reveal varying conceptions of deformity, and not all could easily be read in relation to the formation/deformation of the nation. However, I have included them nonetheless because they illustrate a symbolic pattern crucial to any analysis of Canadian writing.

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The dissertation focuses on recently published texts, but in the bibliography I include some works published in the early to mid-nineteenth century in order to demonstrate the growing importance of images of deformity in Canadian literature. The presence of a child with a deformity and disability in As For Me and My House is noteworthy, for example, given the wealth of criticism on the text, but the lack of anything substantial on the Lawson boy until Truchan-Tarayan’s recent study (2011).

Three of the earliest texts included in the bibliography are French-Canadian (by Blais and

Laberge), and this comes as no surprise, given the importance of the grotesque and the family in French-Canadian writing. Indeed, I believe the struggle against homogeneous colonizing traditions and the need to contest cultural and literary superpowers came a little earlier in Québec, as Green illustrates in her discussion of women writers deconstructing the paternalistic roman de la terre tradition. Arguably, by including them in the bibliography, one could argue that they are subsumed under the colonial and national umbrella of “Canadian,” and I understand how this could be conceived as problematic. Yet given my emphasis on pluralism and criticism of nation-building canonical models, the bibliography ventures beyond the bounds of a single culture, language, and nation to examine sites of convergence and resistance in Canadian writing.

I opted to focus on Béchard’s novel in the dissertation to provide a Québec context, for his characters embody the struggle with national, cultural, linguistic, and racial differences. Political issues of referenda and separation aside, French-Canadian writing remains in significant engagement with Canadian colonial and postcolonial history and literary theory. The family plot, as a popular historical genre in French-

Canadian literature converges with English-Canadian writing. Both rely on the family

244 and domesticity as organizing frameworks by which a nation emerges and endures. The cultural interplay that results from their constant border crossings destabilizes identity formation and the overarching family plot recognizes the mode of inheritance it deforms.

Lastly, I decided to focus on fiction, rather than all Canadian writing, because I felt the novel proved the most appropriate genre to analyse the family and the nation.

Deformity does, of course, appear as a trope in poetry, drama, and non-fiction; however, given the wealth of critical theories on the novel’s role in the rise of imperialism and the family metanarrative as a popular storying of the nation, I believe fiction proves the most obvious, and necessary point of entry into representations of deformity in light of theories on national consciousness. Rather than construct an identity independent of imperial influences and colonial traditions, the authors here identify the instability of the term identity itself, particularly in relation to models of the nation. Instead of a process of historical rehabilitation to include marginalized bodies and redefine the nation, they undermine the very idea of nation and collectivity by deforming bodies to point to the need for multiple and fluid associations.

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Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Fiction Portraying Characters with Physical Deformities

Alexis, André. Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa. McClelland & Stewart, 1998.

A collection of short stories. In “The Third Terrace,” the unnamed male narrator, a hand model in erotic film, fetishes deformed hands. He is also an aspiring painter in

Toronto and wanders the streets in search of prostitutes with mutilated hands for artistic inspiration. After consorting with a prostitute, he is robbed and beaten, and finds his own painting and modeling hand deformed.

Anderson-Dargatz, Gail. The Cure for Death by Lightning. Knopf, 1996.

Anderson-Dargatz’s novel has been classified as “magic realism” or “gothic fiction” by various literary critics because it blends magical with real, grotesque with natural. Beth Weeks is struck by lightning in the arm during a violent storm, which permanently changes her physique and personality. She is also surrounded by peculiar characters: Filthy Billy, the hired hand with Tourette’s Syndrome; her mother, with a man’s voice and an extra little finger; and her shell-shocked father with fits of madness.

Atwood, Margaret.

Many of Atwood’s texts include characters with physical deformities. In the dissertation

I discuss, briefly, The Handmaid’s Tale and the “Unbaby.” Below are selections of

Atwood’s texts in which images of deformity appear; I have opted not to include every occurrence, given her extensive oeuvre, as well as omitted the texts that lean towards science fiction and fantasy, for they offer quite different suggestions on bodily deformity.

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The Edible Woman (1969): As many critics have noted, Marian’s deformity

reveals her loss of autonomy as she adheres to patriarchal norms.30 Her feet

dissolve, her fingers become transparent, and whenever she catches a glimpse of

herself in reflective objects, she appears distorted. For example, looking at

herself in a spoon, she focuses on her narrow torso and pinhead. Moreover,

Clara’s pregnant body is portrayed by Marian as monstrous and abnormal.

Bodily Harm (1981): Rennie, the protagonist, has just experienced a mastectomy,

a physically transformative procedure that highlights Atwood’s criticism of the

objectification of women’s bodies, as well as her portrayal of deformities driven

by disease.

Cat’s Eye (1988): As a result of being subjected to serious bullying in childhood,

Elaine develops neurotic habits, physically deforming her body: peeling skin, nail

biting, and hair pulling. The deformity, however, is not only the pain Elaine

inflicts upon herself, but Atwood’s portrayal of little girls as cruel and freakish.

The Robber Bride (1993): Zenia is often compared to shapeshifters, such as

vampires, witches, monsters, and wolves. She physically transforms herself to

conquer her victims with a siren-like incantation and striking bodily beauty.

Barfoot, Joan. Critical Injuries. Key Porter, 2001.

Isla is middle-aged woman with grown-up children and in a happy second marriage. She becomes a victim of circumstance when she goes to an ice-cream parlour just as a young man, Roddy, pulls an ill-conceived robbery. Roddy accidently fires his

30 For example, Marta Cerezo Moreno in “Bodily Decay, Disease and Death in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman,” and Neeru Tandon and Anshul Chandra in Margaret Atwood: A Jewel in Canadian Writing. 247 gun and Isla gets hit by the stray bullet, which leaves her paralyzed.

Basilières, Michel. Black Bird. Vintage, 2004.

The Desouches live in a run-down house in working-class Montreal during the

1970s. Grandfather is a bitter grave-robber, Uncle is always drunk, Father is always conspiring and scheming, Mother sleeps for months, and the youngest, Marie, is an FLQ terrorist. The key character, however, is the temperamental pet crow “Grace” who eventually attacks Grandfather and scratches out one of his eyes. Aside from the emotional deformities and Grandfather’s handicap, the novel is littered with gothic and grotesque bodies, from a mad doctor (Dr. Hyde) to the walking dead.

Blaise, Clark. If I Were Me. Porcupine’s Quill, 1997.

In Blaise’s novel, the central figure, Gerald Lander, is a Brooklyn Jew and clinical psychologist with two children. The first, adopted after two miscarriages, is a black girl abandoned by her mother in a dumpster, with heroin in her blood and a missing finger as a result of frostbite. She grows up brilliant, but difficult.

Blais, Marie-Claire.

Blais is renowned for her representations of dark familial experiences and grotesque childhoods. Below are two such examples:

La Belle Bête (1959): Because she is ugly, Isabelle-Marie suffers from neglect by

her mother. Her ugliness proves a deformity that contrasts her with her physically

perfect, but mentally deficient brother, Patrice. As a result of her jealousy,

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Isabelle-Marie is portrayed as not only ugly on the outside, but monstrous on the

inside, performing evil deeds such as letting Patrice starve while her mother is

away, lying to her blind lover, Michael, about her beauty, and pushing Patrice’s

face into a pot of boiling water to leave him as deformed and ugly as herself.

Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1966): Blais’s entire novel could be

considered “deformed.” The grotesque characters underscore the text’s emphasis

on the physical manifestation of psychological wounds. Grand-Mère actually

notes early in the text that everyone has a secret wound, and as the story develops,

each character’s physical appearance becomes a mark of their emotional injuries.

Jean Le Maigre’s name draws attention to his skinny body and Pomme has his

fingers chopped off. Le Septième is covered in cuts and scratches on his face, and

Héloïse’s fasting transforms her into an emaciated body.

Bock, Dennis. The Ash Garden. Phyllis Bruce, 2001.

The intersecting lives of characters unsettled and/or disfigured by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A young woman whose face was burned away interviews

Professor Böll, a physicist who participates in the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bomb.

Bowman, Bonnie. Spaz. Anvil, 2010.

Bowman’s unconventional Cinderella story focuses on the protagonist, Walter

Finch, who sports an ungainly walk and average looks, both portrayed as marginalizing physical deformities. What makes him most peculiar, however, is his overall satisfaction

249 with being a mediocre human, except for his foot fetish and overwhelming obsession with designing the ultimate and perfect female pump.

Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road. Penguin, 2008.

Boyden’s text uses deformity to highlight the body as an instable site for identity.

Elijah, dominated by a morphine addiction and an insatiable hunger for killing, encounters French soldiers that suggest he scalp his victims to gain greater respect.

Elijah’s scalping disgusts Xavier and he kills Elijah and steals his identification card.

Shortly after, Xavier is hit by a shell and is found unconscious, losing his limbs.

Campbell, Sandra. Getting to Normal. Stoddart, 2001.

Alice is a young child who suffers from debilitating headaches, disorientation, and withdrawal. Her illness leads to pediatric isolation and complicates her relationship with her mother, her academic father, and her rebellious sister, Sarah. The juxtaposition of Alice’s narration with her medical reports reveals her physical ailments as never quite diagnosed, though they suspect a viral infection of the central nervous system.

Christie, Michael. The Beggar’s Garden. HarperCollins, 2011.

A collection of short stories. Dan, the protagonist of the story “An Ideal

Companion,” meets Ginnie at the dog park. Ginnie is a nurse with a harelip that becomes the focus of Dan’s attention. When Dan’s ex-bandmate Winston invites the new couple to his house for a barbecue, Dan worries about prepping his friend for Ginnie’s harelip.

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Winston and his wife, Marta, however, seem entirely oblivious to Ginnie’s affliction – somewhat ironically, since Marta is a beautician with a perfect face.

Coady, Lynn.

Coady’s writing often focuses on symbolic bodies to explore, in palpable terms, the sentiments and struggles of her characters. Here are two examples:

Strange Heaven (2002): Coady’s novel circulates around the abuses of the

characters on their healthy bodies. Bridget’s family is filled with freakishness,

including a father who swears excessively and a violent grandmother described as

a monster. The teenagers at the hospital starve their bodies with anorexia and

bulimia. There is also the fertile midget Tina, whose tiny body looks odd to

onlookers next to her beautiful three year old daughter.

The Antagonist (2011): The protagonist of Coady’s novel is a misunderstood

giant, Gordon “Rank” Rankin, adopted at birth by Sylvie and Gordon Senior, a

couple from a small town in Canada. At fourteen, Rank already looks like a fully

grown man and struggles to get along with his father, a short, angry man. The

father-son relationship is the predominant focus of the text.

Conan, Laure. Angéline de Montbrun. 1884. BiblioBazaar, 2008.

The story of Angéline and her relationships with her father (Charles), fiancé

(Maurice), and her fiancé’s sister (Mina). When Charles dies, everything begins to spiral downward. There are two published versions of the book that offer varying versions of how Angéline becomes deformed. In the serially published version, Angéline develops a

251 facial tumor that once removed leaves her disfigured. In the 1884 publication of the book, she experiences a tragic fall that leaves her facially disfigured.

Cook, Méira. The Blood Girls. NeWest Press, 1998.

In an attempt to explore the dichotomy between science and faith, Cook tells the story of Donna, an eleven year old girl with stigmata symptoms that deform her natural physique as she bleeds from all extremities. This is the second experience of stigmata in the small Manitoba town, and not the last.

Coupland, Douglas. All Families Are Psychotic. Random House, 2001.

Sarah, the only daughter of Ted and Janet Drummond, pursues a career in aeronautics, despite only having one hand, the result of a birth defect caused by her mother’s use of thalidomide during pregnancy. Sarah shares a strong connection to her siblings and is the first to know if anything is wrong with either of her brothers, Bryan or

Wade. She is married to Howie, an underachiever and unemployed “astronaut’s husband.”

Crummey, Michael. River Thieves. RandomHouse, 2002.

A historical novel that tells the story of the extinction of the Beothuk, or “Red

Indians.” Encounters between the Beothuk and the Europeans are horrific and violent.

For example, the Beothuk ambush and behead Harry Miller, John Senior’s former business partner. Two marines are also executed, beheaded and mutilated, their back covered with arrows. The Europeans are also depicted as violent. John Senior, for

252 instance, beats a wounded old man in a mamteek to death, and during an expedition to

Winter Lake, the settlers capture a Beothuk girl, kill her husband and brother, and give her a Christian name, Mary March.

Davidson, Andrew. The Gargoyle. Random House, 2008.

The unnamed protagonist suffers injuries as a result of a car accident that leaves him confined to a hospital burn unit. He becomes the Burned Man, believes he has a snake in his spine, and finds himself addicted to morphine. He meets Marianne Engel, a psychiatric patient and sculptress attracted to portrayals of the grotesque (or gargoyles), who believes she and the narrator are connected via their past lives.

Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. Penguin, 1970.

Davies’s novel has several moments in which physical deformities become significant symbols for the plot and the novel’s exploration of guilt, religion, and war. In

Part Two, for example, Ramsay is injured during the Third Battle at Yprès and has his left leg torn by shrapnel. In Part Five, he meets Liesl whom he describes as physically deformed and extremely ugly because she is unusually tall with large features. Perhaps more importantly, in the text’s foundational scene, Percy throws a snowball with a stone in it that Dunstan dodges, hitting Mary Dempster, who goes into premature labour and is never quite the same as a result.

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Farrant, Marion A. Altered Statements. Arsenal Pulp, 1995.

A collection of short stories populated with insane, aggressive grandmas, giants, deformed babies and the Miss Havisham Club in their rotting wedding gowns. Through her representation of bodies, Farrant takes some well-aimed shots at consumerism, conventional medicine, gender roles, TV, the media, and bureaucracy.

Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. Penguin, 1984.

Findley’s novel revises the story of Genesis and is composed of numerous deformities, particularly in reference to offspring that are disposed of in order to ensure the purity of the family line. Lucy, Ham’s wife, is seven feet tall and has webbed fingers, a trait the novel notes as generally found in angels. Near the end of the text, Lucy is revealed to be Lucifer in drag. Lotte, Emma’s visibly deformed little sister, is called a

“monkey child.” Lastly, Hannah’s baby, fathered by Noah rather than Shem, is also born a “monkey child” at the end of the text, and Shem wraps the infant in blankets to hide its hairy arms and throws it overboard.

Goto, Hiromi. Hopeful Monsters. Arsenal Pulp, 2004.

Goto’s collection of short stories explores maternal bodies and the reproductive technologies reshaping bodies seen as unfit for pregnancy and child rearing. Many of the offspring in the text have superficial deformities. Hisa, in the title story, for example, delivers a baby girl with a tail and finds out she was also born with a tail that was removed when her mother was sedated in order to normalize her physique.

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Gowdy, Barbara.

Many of Gowdy’s characters sport physical and/or emotional deformities. I have opted to include only two of her texts because they include the most extreme physical deformities.

We So Seldom Look At Love (2001): As Maria Jesus Hernaez Lerena writes in

her article “The Business of Invoking Humanity’: Barbara Gowdy and the Fiction

Gone (A)stray,” the stories in Gowdy’s collection “feed on the disarrangement of

bodily tissue. Viewed as a whole, the collection contains a wide range of bodies

whose limbs join deficiently or abnormally” (715). In the story “Sylvie,” a young

woman is born with a set of extra hips, legs, and reproductive organs that function

independently as a result of her twin sister’s failed development. She works in a

freak show and falls in love with a wealthy physician. In “Flesh of My Flesh” a

woman experiences a strong reaction when she discovers she is married to a

transsexual. In the poignant story, “Lizards,” a young mother expresses her

thoughts after losing her child in a grotesque accident. In “The Two Headed

Man,” a man removes his conjoined head and dies. “Body and Soul” contains

several unfinished bodies and minds (characters are blind, deaf, armless,

retarded), and lastly, “Presbyterian Crosswalk” deals with an apparent weightless

body and a diminishing head.

Mister Sandman (2001): Medical practitioners pronounce Joan, the central

character of Gowdy’s text, as brain damaged; she is also described as abnormally

small, mute, and with an obscure albino appearance. However, she is a piano

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prodigy and her peculiar appearance and apparent mental disability prove central

to the family’s growth and happiness.

Heighton, Stephen. The Shadow-Boxer. Vintage, 2001.

A coming-of-age story about Sevigne Torrins, who abandons his career to become a poet. The early chapters focus on his relationship with his parents: his father, a former sailor, drinks himself to death, and his mother lives in Egypt with a new husband.

Sevigne isolates himself at the family’s cottage, where a series of catastrophes reduce his writing retreat to a hut. He ends up catching an infection that forces him to self-amputate his arm.

Huggan, Isabel. The Elizabeth Stories. Oberon, 1984.

Elizabeth Kessler’s stories focus on her fear of being victimized, like her disabled cousin Gracie. She also worries about becoming a battered wife like her basketball coach’s wife, who gives birth to a deformed infant because while pregnant she was kicked in the stomach by her abusive husband.

Irani, Anosh. The Cripple and His Talismans. Raincoast, 2004.

Irani’s nameless narrator tells the story of his missing left arm. His handicap alienates him from a privileged upbringing and he goes on a quest to recover the lost limb. He encounters other deformed characters: a leper who bites off his own finger and

Baba Rakhu, a master of the underworld who obtains and sells lost limbs. From Baba, the narrator learns the story of his lost arm.

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Itani, Frances. Deafening. Phyllis Bruce, 2003.

Itani’s novel fuses representations of disability and deformity. Grania O’Neill becomes deaf as a result of contracting scarlet fever. She falls in love with Jim, who fights in the First World War. Itani’s description of the wounded and mutilated bodies in combat accentuates her portrayal of disabled figures as abled bodies beyond narrow categorizations.

Johnston, Wayne.

The dissertation discusses A Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of

Paradise, but Johnston’s most recent novel also includes characters with abnormal physiques making it difficult for them to fit normative spaces:

A World Elsewhere (2011): The story of Landish Druken, who is wider than

doorways, and Padgett Vanderluyden (Van), son and “dud” of one of the

wealthiest men in America. They meet at Princeton, but Landish is expelled and

they lose touch until years later, when Landish and his adopted son turn to Van

for help.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981.

Kogawa uses numerous bodily images to convey the emotional injuries of the

Japanese-Canadians. Naomi is fondled while working in the field, which inspires her fear of physical proximity, manifested by constant abdominal pain, and reflecting emotional and physical trauma. At the end of the novel, Naomi discovers that her mother was disfigured by the nuclear blast, her body marked by war.

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Laberge, Albert. La Scouine. Imprimerie modèle, 1918.

A French-Canadian generational novel with characters that embody distortion and ugliness. Urgèle Deschamps is like an animal at the trough, swallowing “d’un coup de langue” and drinking “à longs traits, en faisant entendre, de la gorge, un sonore glouglou”

(1). His wife is deformed by her advanced pregnancy and also compared to an animal.

The castrator Baptiste Bagon, perhaps the most physically repulsive, is portrayed as beyond deformed, with a large head, a short trunk, and very little hair. Despite being such a dated text, I had to include it in this bibliography because of its Québec perspective and how successfully Laberge portrays gruesome, idiotic, and vile characters.

Lansens, Lori. The Girls. Knopf, 2005.

At the age of twenty-nine, Rose and Ruby Darlen are the world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. They are born joined at the head, during a freak tornado, and abandoned by their teenage mother. Farlen, a nurse on duty the night of their birth, adopts them with her husband, Uncle Stash. Rose, the poetic twin, is the leading narrator and voices the permanent physical attachment to her sickly sister. Her long legs and 5’5 frame are topped by features misshapen and support the ravishingly pretty, but club- footed Ruby.

Lee, Sky. Disappearing Moon Café. Douglas & McIntyre, 1990.

An immigrant Chinese family tries to find its place in Vancouver. Early in the text, Morgan tells Kae that no matter where you look, they are all somehow related. The

258 theme of incest complicates familial interconnectedness and legitimacy in the text, and results in a literal and figurative deformity. Suzanne and Morgan have sex but later discover that Morgan is a disowned member of the family. Their offspring is referred to as a “deformed monster” (206), with “a massive medicine-ball bruise” (207-8).

MacLennan, Hugh. Barometer Rising. New Canadian Library, 1989.

MacLennan’s novel is famous for its representation of the Halifax explosion; however, the characters in the text, and their physical and psychological deformities, are also noteworthy. Neil, for example, is wounded and temporarily amnesiac, and after the war, Penelope is disabled to reposition her within a traditional feminine space.

McCormack, Eric. First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Viking, 1997.

McCormack’s narrator, Andrew, is born with a twin sister cuddled against his chest. Once they are pulled apart, they leave birthmarks – dark purple stains shaped like triangles - on each other’s upper bodies. Andrew compares the mark to a “dog’s head or maybe some kind of rodent” (4), and he aligns himself with the animal world, perceiving himself as monstrous or freakish. His psychiatrist diagnoses his sense of monstrosity as a lingering trauma resulting from the physical mark and his general perception of women, especially his mother and Aunt, as deformed and monstrous.

Mistry, Rohinton.

All of Mistry’s writings raise questions of family, nationalism, and the body. I have opted to include the following two texts.

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Family Matters (2003): Nariman Vakeel, a sick elderly widower, depends on his

family. Debilitated by Parkinson’s and a broken ankle, he finds himself

struggling to adjust to the shift of his social position from patriarch to disabled.

A Fine Balance (2001): Ishvar and Omprakash are part of the Chamaar caste,

traditionally considered “untouchable” – a cultural deformity. They work for

Dina, a seamstress who is nearly blind. The novel is overwhelmed with death and

despair. In one of the many memorial scenes, a funeral procession for Shankar, a

beggar whose humanity makes up for his horrible deformation, highlights the

novel’s use of the body as an unreliable image of goodness and justice. Having

no legs and fingers, he is the only one to move around on a rolling platform in

order to comfort the emancipated and injured forced laborers.

Munro, Alice.

Munro’s short stories are littered with images of the grotesque, murders, disabled bodies, deformities, sex, violence, and other assaults on bodily integrity. Mostly preoccupied with female bodies, Munro also focuses extensively on distorted representations of pregnancy and female sexuality. Below are some stories that feature common themes in her writing.

Lives of Girls and Women (1971): Del’s body and her observations of other

bodies explores sexuality and nature of humanity. In the incident with Mr.

Chamberlain, Del distorts his exposed penis with her description of its appearance

as “ugly,” “vulnerable,” and “like some strong snouted animal whose grotesque

simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good will” (158). Del considers being

260 made of flesh humiliating, unpredictable, easily degraded and subjected to violence, even by family members.

“Royal Beatings” (1978): Becky Tyde is a big-headed dwarf, with a twisted neck that forces her to hold her head on one side. Becky’s deformity is the result of contracting polio as a child, though the story is that her father beat her. Rose also suffers from a “royal beating” by her father.

“Fits” (1986): A murder-suicide frames this story in which the characters, obsessed with the reasons behind the murder-suicide, stalk a house from their cars, becoming distorted figures, half-car, half-human. At the end of the story,

Robert sees a “glitter” under the trees that ends up being a collection of old cars, which he calls “monstrosities” (60). The story ends with the constable describing

Mr. Weeble’s dismemberment as a result of the murder-suicide.

“Carried Away” (1994): The intersecting lives of four characters. The title refers to Jack’s head, which is carried by the saw and then by Arthur when his body is decapitated in an industry accident.

“Child’s Play” (2009): A short story about the cruelty of children. The story takes place at summer camp, where the able-bodied and disabled children are split into two groups: the Normals and the Specials. Marlene becomes fast friends with Charlene, but is haunted by Verna, whom she drowns. She describes Verna as a nag, abnormal and grotesque, monstrously skinny with an abnormally small head, like a snake.

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O’Hagan, Howard. Tay John. 1939. McClelland & Stewart, 1989.

The story of Tay John, a mythical Messianic halfbreed from the Alberta Rockies.

His name comes from “Tête Jaune” (Yellow Head) because of his golden hair. Fated to lead his people to a Promised Land, Tay John rebels and goes on a journey through the mountains. His physical turmoil, such as fighting a bear, provide the adventure in the text. In a grand act, he amputates his left hand to gain a horse.

Ondaatje, Michael.

The majority of Ondaatje’s work, including his poetry and non-fiction, reveals the recurrence of bodily images, often distorted or deformed as they change, heal, or serve as markers for historical events. Below are a few examples in his fiction.

Coming Through Slaughter (1976): A fictionalized account of Buddy Bolden’s

last months of sanity in 1907, before his schizophrenia leads to his hospitalization.

The novel also includes one-legged Duffy, who has her head beaten with her own

wooden leg and Tom Pickett, who has his nipple sliced off by Buddy during a

fight at the barber shop.

In the Skin of a Lion (1987): The bodies of the workers on the bridge are

permanently scarred, deformed, and marked by the hardships of their work.

Caravaggio also breaks his ankle and hides in the mushroom barn, where he heals

physically and emotionally. His escape from prison, all painted against the

ceiling, could also be read as deforming the body, or more precisely the skin, in

order to perform elusively.

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The English Patient (1992): Nurse Hana tends to a patient that has been badly

burned as a result of a plane crash and now sports an entirely black body. She

cares for his wounds until he is returned to a British camp. Caravaggio, an old

family friend of Hana’s father, comes to visit. His hands are bandaged because

his thumbs were cut off when, he claims, he was tortured by the Germans.

Page, Kathy. The Story of My Face. Phoneix, 2002.

Natalie Baron, an academic specialist in religious studies, travels to the small town of Elijoki, Finland to research the life and spiritual path of Tuomas Envall, a 19th- century village pastor who founded a radical religious movement. As a 13-year-old,

Natalie was involved with this Protestant sect, which is at the root of the story behind her disfigured face and deformed body.

Richardson, John. Wacousta. 1832. New Canadian Library, 2008.

A staple of Canadian gothic fiction. Wacousta is an elusive figure often in disguise. He has “large and muscular” hands, “a deep bluish gray” eye and “pale though sun-burnt skin” (137 – 38). Justin Edwards in Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a

National Literature examines Richardson’s text and pinpoints Wacousta’s deformed body as “a troubling surface that denies signification; it cannot be read according to social codes of identity” (6). Wacousta is a threat because his body resists the colonial discourses that assert European superiority (7).

263

Richler, Mordechai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. McClelland, 1969.

The coming-of-age story of Duddy Kravitz, growing up in Montreal. Duddy interacts with many characters during his apprenticeship into adulthood, but two have physical deformities. Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder, is crippled by polio and must use a cane to walk. Virgil Roseboro, who suffers from epilepsy, is the victim of a motor vehicle accident that leaves him paralyzed.

Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Vintage, 2001.

Lisa, the protagonist, has a smart mouth and temper that land her in and out of the emergency room as a child. Throughout the novel, Lisa encounters various other forms of physical disfigurements: the mutilated dog in the ditch, the chickens maimed by hawks, her uncle’s body partially eaten by seals, and Ma-ma-oo with no hair and no skin after a fire in her house.

Ross, Sinclair. As For Me and My House. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941.

The story of Mrs. Bentley, a woman unhappily married to a Protestant minister and who struggles with her new life in the small town of Horizon. The Lawson family of

Partridge Hill have a son, Peter, who has a limp and dies at the age of twelve. Mr.

Bentley sees in Peter the potential of his son, who was born stillborn. According to

Maria Truchan-Tataryn’s reading of the text, Peter “embodies the hopelessness of the

Depression” and his death signals the popular pattern of erasing the disabled body because it threatens hegemonic normalcy (“(In)Visible” 111).

264

Rothman, Claire Holden. The Heart Specialist. Cormorant, 2009.

A work of historical fiction that offers an account of the life of cardiologist, Dr.

Maude Abbott. Though Agnes is not physically deformed, she finds herself as a young age obsessed with performing autopsies, wanting to understand organs and the human body. For example, at age seven, she is found in her grandmother’s shed, covered in blood, dissecting a squirrel. Later, when one of her patient’s, a six-year-old boy, died because of a cardiac anomaly with no cure, she bottles and shelves his heart. Arguably, although Agnes learns everything about the heart as an organ, her metaphoric deformity is her failure to master her own heart.

Ruth, Elizabeth. Smoke. Penguin, 2005.

Brian “Buster” McFiddie goes partying with his buddies and passes out drunk with a lit cigarette in his hand. He wakes up to find his bed on fire and although he survives, the incident leaves him disfigured. The town doctor tries to distract him with tales of The Purple Gang, a notorious Detroit mob.

Scarsbrook, Richard. The Monkeyface Chronicles. Thistledown, 2010.

Philip Skyler is born with an extreme facial deformity, called “Van der Woude syndrome” by medical clinicians, caused by a mutation in his IRF6 gene. The deformation entails a cleft lip, unusual teeth, and a flattened nose. For Philip’s peers, the best way to describe his look is to call him “Monkeyface,” a term that clearly distinguishes him from his twin brother with an architecturally perfect face.

265

Thériault, Yves. Agaguk. 1958. Ryerson Press, 1967.

Set in 1940, the novel focuses on the conflict between the Inuit of Northern

Québec and white men. Agaguk is defaced and comes to stand for the instability of identity.

Tremblay, Lise. Mile End. Talonbooks, 2002.

Tremblay’s text (the French version, La Dance Juive, won the 1999 Governor

General’s Award for Fiction), is an unapologetic look at obesity as a physical deformity isolating individuals from social approval. The protagonist is a grossly overweight young woman filled with self-loathing – so overweight and despondent that she remains unnamed. Estranged from her family, her only close relation appears to be her “partner,”

Mel, an overweight junk dealer. The two of them engage in voracious eating and drinking patterns until Mel is hospitalized and the narrator decides to visit her family.

Wharton, Thomas. Salamander. Emblem, 2002.

A Slovakian count obsessed with puzzles hires a printer named Nicolas Flood to create for his library an infinite book to contain all others. He offers two assistants: one of the porcelain automaton, adapted for page-trimming, and a 12-fingered boy lute player, soon to be a whiz at setting type. Flood falls in love with the Count’s daughter,

Irena, who as a result of a childhood illness suffers from a weak spine that leaves her unable to hold herself upright. She maintains her posture with a corset of steel bands.

266

Wilson, Ethel. Love and Salt Water. 1956. New Canadian Library, 1990.

The story of Ellen Cuppy, otherwise known as “Gypsy,” who loses her mother at sixteen and travels with her father on a freighter voyage. Ellen’s nickname stands for her transformation into a wanderer after her mother’s death. In the third part of the novel,

Ellen visits her sister Nora in Vancouver, who lost her first son and whose second son,

Johnny, is born deformed, a mongoloid, and is going deaf. Johnny almost drowns in a boating accident because Ellen misses the changing tides. An ugly scar on the side of

Ellen’s face, the result of being gashed by the boat’s gunnel, serves to remind her of the frailty of human life. Her love interest, George, is repulsed by her disfigured cheek, but nonetheless manages to overlook the disfigurement to love her.

Wiseman, Adele. Crackpot. New Canadian Library, 1974.

Wiseman’s text is littered with physical deformities that emphasize the psychological trauma of the characters. The protagonist, Hoda, is obese and subjected to social criticism, despite the many clients she takes to the house she shares with her now blind father. Hoda’s mother, Rahel, is a minor character, but her hunchbacked figure accentuates her courage. During the plague, frail and deformed Rahel is married off to

Danile by their Jewish community because he is blind and they believe such a marriage will halt the disease.

Wright, Richard. October. HarperCollins, 2007.

James Hillyer travels to England to visit his daughter, recently diagnosed with cancer. He runs into Gabriel Fontaine, an American he met one summer during the war,

267 and with whom he competed for a French-Canadian girl’s affections. Despite being crippled by polio and wheelchair bound, Gabriel’s confidence outshines James. After their chance encounter six decades later, Gabriel asks James to accompany him on a final journey.

268

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