The evolution of Canadian Literature

From “The Pride”

... we stand alone,
but we are no longer lonely
but we have roots,
and the rooted words
recur in the mind, mirrors, so that
we dwell upon nothing else, in nothing else,
touched, repeating them,
at home freely
at last, in amazement

John Newlove (1938-2003)

...the reality of the Canadian experience is geography shaped by history...

George Woodcock (1912-1995)

Canadian literature

• now mature
• how did we get there?
• world known
• factors
• in last century
• sense of self as separate nation
• from the UK
• development of a literary world
• Canadian issues
• development of own language/images
• images come before language

Two approaches

• literary/historical
• subordinates individual writers to trends and movements
• critical
• study individual writers
• infer patterns
• apply to others

Two cautions

• highlights only
• very broad

Four stages

• explorer or traveler
• settlers
• post pioneers
• maturity

Explorer or traveler

• never settles
• lived outside of any pre-existing native culture
• do not truly enter the life of a region

Two points to note

• before 1867 Canada didn’t exist
• were outposts and colonies
• felt distant from the rest of Europe
• dominant literary form
• “documentaries” sent home
• E.g. letters, reports, diaries – most of which have been kept for records
• European Judeo-Christian beliefs
• Used to justify imperial expansion
• World existed for man’s use
• Precedence of man over nature
• Country viewed as barren and cold
• No economic value until development of the fur trade

Explorer

• Beginnings of our written literature
• Literature of travel, discovery and motivation
• Motivation
• To claim land
• Economic rivalry
• Quests for new trading territory
• Explorer journeyed
• Observed the land
• Noted features that could be exploited
• Exception:
• Samuel Hearne (1746 – 1792)
• Observer
• Gave rounded picture
• Includes journals written by
• Explorers
• Missionaries
• Travellers
• Those held in captivity
• Early settlement journals

Arctic Dawn The Journeys of Samuel Hearn (1795)

From our leaving the Coppermine River ... that my feet and legs had swelled considerably ... my toe-nails were bruised to such a degree that several of them festered and dropped off. To add to this mishap, the skin was entirely chafed off from the tops of both of my feet, and between every toe, so that for a whole day before we arrived at the women’s tents, I left the print of my feet in blood almost at every step I took.

The First novel
The History of Emily Montague (1769)

• Frances Brooke (c. 1763-1789)
• Accompanied husband (chaplain)
• Quebec

Some other firsts

• First theatrical performance
• 1606 – Order of Good Cheer, Samuel Chaplain
• First verses praising Canada
• 1628 – Robert Hayman (1575-1629)
• First newspaper
• Halifax Gazetter, 1752
• John Burshell (1715-1761)

Most firsts happened in the Maritimes region mainly because this was were the land was settled first.

Education

• First universities
• King’s College, Halifax, 1789
• Dalhousie, Halifax, 1818
• McGill, Montreal, 1821
• Queen’s, Kingston, 1827

Settlers

• Attitude began to change
• More than “take and run”
• building
• Land
• Beginning to be tamed
• Government offered parcels of land
• Often looked back at what they left behind
• Tried to recreate in a new setting
• Nostalgia

The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe

• Elizabeth
• Wife of the first Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Upper Canada, 1792-1796

Social problems

• Desire for political reform
• Secondary to need for more basic necessities of life
• British elite ruled
• Problems with disease
• Infection
• No control

Stricklands House, Lakefield

• Susanna Moodie (1803-1885)
• Wrote about the outside experience although she never really enjoyed it
• Roughing it in the bush (1852)
• Life in the clearings versus the Bush (1853)
• Catherine Parr Traill (1802-1899)
• Skilled naturist
• Self trained
• Not only observed, but participated
• The Backwoods of Canada (1836)
• The Female emigrants guide (1854)

Post pioneer

• Early terrors
• Abated somewhat
• Shelter
• Wildlife
• aboriginals
• Land cleared
• Farms begun
• Governing structures began to appear
• Based on the British governments
• Began to understand the land
• Knowledge of cold and bugs
• Populations began to be established
• York – later to become Toronto

Changes: visual art

• Visual art
• Group of Seven
• Tom Thomson
• Emily Carr
• French impressionists

English pastoral landscape

• Typical, pretty, style of painting brought

A New way of seeing

• Tom Thomson, 1877-1917
• Uofficially part of Group of Seven
• The Jack Pine
• Typical Canadian shield, rocks, trees
• Northern River
• Typical Northern Canadian landscape - untouched

What did the provinces have to offer?

• Newfoundland
• Separate society and culture
• Early oral tradition from the Irish
• E. J. Pratt (1882-1964)
• Often used conventional forms – poets and sonnets
• But some experimentation
• Images/emotions remain true to his home
• Also tackled national themes
• Maritimes: Nova Scotia
• Joseph Howe (1804-73)
• One of the early settlers
• Nova Scotian – 1828
• Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865)
• Created Yankee selling clock character Sam Slick – 1836
• Maritimes: New Brunswick
• Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)
• Used traditional forms but with a fresh eye
• Not looking for a “lost home”
• Frederiction
• Centre of poetry: Fiddlehead
• Magazine started after second world war
• Montreal (1920-1940)
• Extraordinary energy
• Productive tensions
• 3 active communities – English, French and Jewish
• A.J.M. Smith (1902-1980)
• F.R. Scott (1899-1985)
• Rejected the old ways
• Influences: Eliot, Yeates, Joyce
• Founded McGill Fortnightly Review
• A.M. Klein (1909-1972)
• Influenced by Jewish community
• Next generation influenced
• Irving Layton (1912- )
• Leonard Cohen (1934- )
• Toronto/Ontario
• Early writing
• Regional in nature
• Exception: The Imperalist (1907)
• Sara Jeanette Duncan (1861-1922)
• Did develop an individual voice in poetry
• Raymond Souster (1921- )
• Colloquial voice
• Great Plains
• Different process
• Response comes first in novels
• Novels originated in the Plains
• Different society
• No single founding race
• No common history
• Less inclined to repeat old patterns
• Instead confronted the present
• Prairie literature doesn’t start somewhere far away...
• It starts right here
• Most important developments in Canadian novel
• Happened here in Manitoba
• F. P. Grove (1879-1948)
• Sinclair Ross (1908-1996)
• Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)
• Did not forget their ancestral past
• But emphasis placed on adapting traditional attitudes towards present experience
• Begin to see an emerging self-sufficiency
• Finally begin waking up from our “colonial slumber”
• Home of social reform
• “only the land is level”
• Social reform political party NDP started in Saskatchewan
• Literature shaped by extremes of climate and passions
• Poetry comes much later
• 1960s onward
• West Coast
• Novel writing
• Experimental in 1950s
• The Double Hook (1959)
• Shifting point of view, unusual for the time
• Shelia Watson (1909-1998)
• Important centre of poetry
• Earle Binney (1904-1995)
• Phyllis Webb (1927- )
• Susan Musgrave (1951- )

Obsession with nationalism

• First emerges with Barometer Rising (1941)
• Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990)
• Peaks with Survival (1972)
• By Margaret Atwood (1939- )
• A necessary step in the development of a national literature
• Canada Council (national arts council)
• Established 1957
• Grants to support writers, magazines and book publishers
• New Canadian Library reprint series
• Established 1958

Three categories of Canadian writers

• Travellers
• Al Purdy (1918-2000)
• Poet, rode rail through the depression
• Earl Birney
• Travelled abroad
• Expatriates
• Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)
• British, lived in Vancouver
• “New Voices”
• Aboriginal and immigrant
• Voices that just haven’t been heard before
• Those who left but... returned
• Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)
• Born in Neepawa, Manitoba; moved to Africa, then England, returned to settle in Peterborough, Ontario
• Mordecai Richler (1931-2001)
• Moved to London
• Not returned
• Mavis Gallant (1922- )
• Lives in Paris
• Writes short stories
• Sometimes you have to leave a country to gain a true understanding...
  ...of the experience of living in that country...

Maturity

• Finally escaped from
• “garrison of enclosed attitudes” in the 1960s
• Thematic criticism useful
• One way to look
• Provides a very narrow interpretation
• But have travelled far beyond that
• See ourselves as different/distinct
• From US/UK
• Now truly international
• Roles to play
• Canadian writers are free to follow their own unclassifiable paths...
• Difficult to classify, known around the world, achieved in a short time

The Discovery

do not imagine that the exploration
ends, that she has yielded all her mystery
or that the map you hold
cancels further discovery.

I tell you uncovering her takes years,
takes centuries, and when you find her naked look again,
admit there is something else you cannot name,
a veil, a coating just above the flesh
which you cannot remove with your mere wish

When you see the land naked, look again
(burn your maps, that is not what I mean)
I mean the moment when it seems most plain
Is the moment when you must begin again.

Gwendolyn MacEwen
(1941-1987)