The Wilderness

Class Three

In-class Writing: (Suggested: 10 minutes)

• I want to ask you a question tonight that is identical to a question I asked you last week. Last week, I asked you what Canada appeared to be in The History of Emily Montage and Roughing it in the Bush. Tonight, I want you to consider the same questions, but describe to me what Canada appears to be as it is represented in Malcolm’s Katie and The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay.

Group Discussion:  (Suggested: 5 -7 minutes)

• In groups, I’d like you to come up with a list of your early impressions of Canadian writing as you have explored it so far, through these texts and others we have read and you have perhaps reflected on.

• Try to focus on specific details that have stayed with you. Why do these things appear to be important?

• You don’t have to relate everything to the Garrison Mentality or Anderson’s theory of Nationalism, but it may be a good idea to being with a consideration of these theories and how they relate to the reading.

Class Discussion of Group Findings: (Suggested: 10 minutes)

In-class writing #2 (Suggested: 10 minutes)

• Last week, I asked you to think about the limitations of the Garrison mentality, and we had a very good conversation on that topic. Tonight, I would like you to consider the limitations of Anderson’s theory of nationalism. Is there anything about this theory that does not make sense to you?

Group Discussion: (Suggested: 5 minutes)

Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5 minutes)

Break

Class Discussion of the CBC listening experiment (Suggested: 10 minutes)

Four Part Mini-lecture on Margaret Atwood’s Survival Theory!

Writing in the early 1970’s – before Anderson, actually, Atwood made the following claim, which we will be considering:  (Suggested: 10 minutes)

The following excerpt is from Atwood’s 1972 Survival. I have added some underlining for emphasis. In this writing, she makes some very useful comments about national symbols.

• “I’d like to begin with a sweeping generalization and argue that every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core.

• The symbol, then — be it word, phrase, idea, image, or all of these — functions like a system of beliefs (it is a system of beliefs, though not always a formal one) which holds the country together and helps the people in it to co-operate for common ends.

• Possibly the symbol for America is The Frontier, a flexible idea that contains many elements dear to the American heart: it suggests a place that is new, where the old order can be discarded (as it was when America was instituted by a crop of disaffected Protestants. and later at the time of the Revolution); a line that is always expanding. taking in or “conquering” ever-fresh virgin territory (be it The West, the rest of the world, outer space, Poverty or The Regions of the Mind); it holds out a hope, never fulfilled but always promised, of Utopia, the perfect human society.

• The corresponding symbol for England is perhaps The Island, convenient for obvious reasons…The Englishman’s home as his castle is the popular form of this symbol, the feudal castle being not only an insular structure but a self-contained microcosm of the entire Body Politic.

• The central symbol for Canada — and this is based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature – is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance. Like the Frontier and The Island, it is a multi-faceted and adaptable idea. For early explorers and settlers, it meant bare survival in the face of “hostile” elements and/or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive.

• But the word can also suggest survival of a crisis or disaster, like a hurricane or a wreck, and many Canadian poems have this kind of survival as a theme; what you might call ‘grim’ survival as opposed to ‘bare’ survival.

• For French Canada after the English took over it became cultural survival, hanging on as a people, retaining a religion and a language under an alien government. And in English Canada now while the Americans are taking over it is acquiring a similar meaning.

• There is another use of the word as well: a survival can be a vestige of a vanished order which has managed to persist after its time is past, like a primitive reptile This version crops up in Canadian thinking too, usually among those who believe that Canada is obsolete.

• But the main idea is the first one: hanging on, staying alive. Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all.

—

Okay, so — Atwood is expressing a very powerful idea here.

• For our first short journal entry tonight. What we have seen – what we have seen _a lot of_ is the notion of persistence. Ed Rivers persists in his attitudes in the New World, Susanna Moodie holds dear to her middle class values while navigating the St. Lawrence, and Katie quite literally lingers in love while she is waiting for Malcolm to return from the forest.

• We have encountered an alien landscape cataloged in established literary conventions, and through it all the one question that on one seems to have asked but which everyone is anticipating is “Do we belong here? What claim do we have on this land?”

• I will argue that, without definite answers to these questions, early Canadians began to struggle with the concept of survival – what does it mean to simply survive?

• It is perhaps a dark question, and one that may not appear to be validated by the current readings, but it is one that we are going to have to grapple with. As Americans, is it not a question that we are perhaps all that used to. Americans don’t “survive,” right? Americans, as far as I can tell “thrive” or lead lives of presumed glory and comfort — even then they obviously don’t.

Journal: (Suggested: 10-15 minutes)

• So, let’s just take up the general concept of survival as a class. Atwood as has made some comments about it, but I’d like to hear what the work means to you. What does it suggest to you? What qualifies as survival? Are there different kinds of survival? If so, what are they?

Group Discussion: (suggested: 7 minutes)

Groups discuss journal findings.

Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5 -7 minutes)

—

So, after Atwood establishes the notion of survival, she makes another general comment about Canadian literature, which is that it is about the survival of victims.

• She argues that Canadian works generally take up different kinds or levels of victimization:

The first level or , to use her term, “position” is the position of denying that you are a victim why arguing that people less fortunate than you are responsible for their own miserable lives.

Do we know anyone like this? Have we ever engaged in this kind of behavior? If so, where and when and why?

• Journal (suggested: 5 minutes)

• Group Discussion (Suggested: Five minutes)

• Class Discussion: (Suggested: 5 minutes)

Position two, to acknowledge that you are a victim, and to claim that fate is responsible.

Group/Class Discussion: (suggested 5-7 minutes)

• Position Three: Admit that you are a victim, but refuse to accept the assumption that you will play the role in of victim.

• This is an interesting concept, as it suggests people identify and victims by try to not act as victims. Have we seen anyone in the literature who has done this?

Discussion

• This is a dynamic position in which the victim differentiates between the role of victim and the experience of victim.

Journal

Group

Discussion

• The final position is one in which the victim attempts to become a non-victim — to survive with their dignity — through creative acts. non-victim

Journal

Group

Discussion

–

Timeline so far:

• The History of Emily Montague 1769

• Wacousta (1832)

• Canadian Crusoes (1836)

• The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856)

• Roughing it in the Bush 1852

• Malcolm’s Katie (1884)

Where are we going?

This week, you will be working with two excellent authors whose works can be associated with Frye, Anderson, and Atwood’s theories.

First, you will be encountering John Richardson’s Wacousta:

John Richardson

John Richardson:  1796-1852

• “Largely ignored during his lifetime by critics and the reading public, Richardson is now regarded as one of Canada’s major pre-Confederation novelists. Drawing heavily from the gothic and romantic traditions, Richardson’s oeuvre includes several fictional works about the American and Canadian frontier as well as narrative poetry and a history of the War of 1812. His most successful work, the novel Wacousta (1832), is a story of revenge and frontier warfare reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels. Dennis Duffy has stated: “The century and a half of critical and public attention paid to Wacousta has not only confirmed the enduring qualities of the work, but it has made of Richardson’s imagination a powerful force to be dealt with when outlining the shape of [Canadian] literary experience.”

Catherine Parr Traill

Hey, it’s Susanna Moodie’s sister!

1802 –  1899

• “A nature writer who, in richly detailed descriptions of frontier life, was one of the first to praise the beauties of the Canadian landscape.”

• Traill, a writer of children’s books in England, emigrated to the wilderness of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1832 with her husband and her sister, the writer Susanna Strickland Moodie.

Canadian Crusoes

• “The work is set in what is today central southern Ontario, just south of Rice Lake, where three children become lost and must fend for themselves. Drawing from its namesake, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, the novel sets out to show that these children, two English Canadian and one French Canadian, are able to work together to survive in the new world of Canada. This spirit of cooperation is emphasized by the fact that the children later meet a Mohawk girl who joins their group and is able to help them with her own skills.”

Homework:

• This week, in addition to preparing for your short group presentations:

Wacousta: Read 7-33 (first three chapters)

Canadian Crusoes: (read the first 25 pages)

• If you are presenting next time, you have no other homework. If you are not presenting next time, I want two pages on each text describing how it can be connected to at least two of the three major theories we  have discussed so far.

Largely ignored during his lifetime by critics and the reading public, Richardson is now regarded as one of Canada’s major pre-Confederation novelists. Drawing heavily from the gothic and romantic traditions, Richardson’s oeuvre includes several fictional works about the American and Canadian frontier as well as narrative poetry and a history of the War of 1812. His most successful work, the novel WacoustaWacousta

(1832), is a story of revenge and frontier warfare reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels. Dennis Duffy has stated: “The century and a half of critical and public attention paid to has not only confirmed the enduring qualities of the work, but it has made of Richardson’s imagination a powerful force to be dealt with when outlining the shape of [Canadian] literary experience.”

Advertisement