Canada as Gothic Tale

Review Article

Canada as Gothic Taledonna bennett

Justin D. Edwards. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature

Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. xxxiv 194 pp. $34.95

The picture is incomplete, part left out

that might alter the whole Durer landscape:

gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky . . .

Al Purdy (Wilderness Gothic)

As the list of works cited in Justin Edwardss book suggests, theGothic already has been an important topic in Canadian literarydiscussions. Indeed, although extensive, Edwardss bibliography is notexhaustive, particularly with regard to Canadian titles: it might also haveincluded, for example, Eli Mandels essays Atwood Gothic and A Lackof Ghosts: Canadian Poets and Poetry, as well as some of the pertinentCanadian and non-Canadian essays by Northrop Frye.

Enriched by Edwardss knowledge of European and Americanliteratures, Gothic Canada does bring fresh treatments of individualworks of fiction, drama, and film, but the overall analysis is notsatisfying. Nearly all the texts in this study are drawn from the last threedecades of the twentieth century: they are important to the argument butdo not support Edwardss assumption that they are representative ofCanadian culture as a whole nor are they good representatives of thoseGothic narratives that can be found in Canada.

Part of the reason this selection may be idiosyncratic is Edwardsssuggestion that Canadian neo-Gothicism is a spectre shapingCanadian literature and culture. This thesis that a genre can shape anations ongoing sense of identity and its writing recalls earlierarguments about unifying Canadian national themes. It is unconvincinghere because the genre on which he focuses is particularly tied to its ownliterary history. The English Gothic was the product of early Romanticismand of the Neo-Romanticism of the late Victorian era. In both cases, it was

university of toronto quarterly, volume 76, number 4, fall 2007

doi: 10.3138/utq.76.4.1095

a backwards glance at an imagined earlier society (that of medievalculture), warped to stand in contrast to an idealized present.

In order to draw on the Gothic to analyze works from a later milieuand time and to give it a meaning for Canada, Edwards doesnt lookfor generic consistency but relates the works he treats to aspects of thegenre, finding in each some Gothic conventions or tropes, if sometimes inonly a small part of the narrative. Thus Edwards can begin with twoearly tales John Richardsons Wacousta (1832) and James De MillesStrange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) to show that theGothics characteristic encounter with a threatening unknown has beenimportant in Canadian experience. He follows that with a reading ofJane Urquharts The Whirlpool (1986) to establish the appearance inCanada of the Gothic version of the encounter with the sublime.The importance in Gothic literature of malaise and the estrangementof the familiar he finds in books he otherwise identifies with realism:F.P. Groves A Search for America (1927), Sinclair Rosss As for Me andMy House (1941), and David Adams Richardss Mercy among theChildren (2000).

Up to this point, Edwards has focused on conventional elements ofthe Gothic as a genre; however, to show that the nation is more generallyis associated with Gothic attitudes, he generalizes from the story ofthe individual whose well-being is threatened to read the Gothicanalogically. In approaching Anne Heberts Kamouraska (1970) andMargaret Atwoods Alias Grace (1996), the conventional setting ofGothic fiction in a misty version of the ruined past can be displacedonto novels that use specific historical places and times by turninglegal systems into Gothic villains and murderers into victims. Thisturning of oppressive conditions into Gothic villain also allows him totreat as Gothic the urban isolation and emptiness felt by the characters inBrad Frasers play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love(1989) and in Andrew Pypers short stories collection, Kiss Me (1996).Broadening his application of the Gothic still further, Edwards alsoconsiders two life stories of native women Maria Campbells Halfbreed(1973) and Yvonne Johnsons Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman(1998; written with Rudy Wiebe) as tales of victimization that not onlyrepresent the larger mistreatment of an indigenous population (bothtexts suggest this) but redeploy the Gothic victim narrative in waysthat link it to the postcolonial so that castle is replaced by colony(and then by nation state) and the heroines terror becomes a metonymfor the debasement of exploited peoples or even for citizens moregenerally. In Shani Mootoos Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and in MichaelOndaatjes Anils Ghost (2000), Gothic anxiety and the threat of thesupernatural is recast as systematic abuse and the psychologicaldestruction of individuals or cultures, while in William Gibsons

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science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984) and David CronenbergsVideodrome (1983) Edwards finds a Gothic zeitgeist of virulent globalcapitalism and humanity transformed into a corrupted fusion of fleshand technology. Thus, through a series of readings that show increasinglyexaggerated or distorted recastings of the Gothic, Edwards makes hiscase about the pervasiveness of Gothic discourse in Canada.

But whether we call the Gothic a genre or a tradition or a mode,this continual extending and reconstruing of the concept denatures it.Once the Gothic is unmoored from literary and cultural history, so thattraits are all that define it, it will not be easily contained. What is tostop us from continuing this expansion by identifying as Gothic thoseGreek tragedies and narratives in which women are threatened bypowerful men in atmospheres of gloom and terror? Many Roman playswould fit in because of their depictions of exaggerated emotions andphysical torture, while, in the English canon, Beowulf would certainlyqualify, as would Shakespeares Macbeth and all Jacobean revengetragedies.

It is better to think of the literary Gothic as emerging from two periods,early Romanticism and late Victorian writing, and to see twentieth-century Gothic writing as what follows in some way from the formsidentified with these moments, and thus as responding to or workingagainst established traditions. Writers didnt invent the devices or tropesEdwards employs; they grouped them together into relational wholesthat had (and have) meaning for readers, meaning that is historicallybased. Twentieth-century Gothic texts are Gothic because we recognizetheir use of inherited conventions, but they exist in new temporalcontexts and cannot convey the same meaning as their precursors.In short, while some of the works treated here clearly should beunderstood as Gothic Barbara Gowdys short stories, DavidCronenbergs and Lynne Stopkewichs films they need to be under-stood in their contemporary terms.

Edwardss analysis depends on an elasticity of genre that makesit capacious but at the potential cost of emptying it of meaning andsignificance. Arguing that national identity is a spectre that influencesCanadian cultural products, he wants to connect his Gothic withthe Canadian obsession with national identity by which he means alack of national identity because the search for this elusive categoryignites a fear in the seeker, a fear that she will be faced with negationand disavowal. The idea that Canada continues to feel a lack of identityis not an accurate reflection of the last ten or fifteen years, though itis consistent with many of the texts Edwards has selected. The Gothicqualities Edwards senses in them, and his consequent readings ofthese texts, are shaped by events and understandings that dominateda later period and by the cultural theories that emerged in

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consequence: analyses from the perspectives of race, gender, and sexualpreferences (that is, from the viewpoints of various disenfranchisedcultural minorities); postcolonial criticism based on the consequences ofthe massive decolonization following the Second World War; andtheories of trauma both individual and global deriving from theunceasing violence of recent history. But if the Gothic does share topoiwith some of the cultural products of the later era, the distance it onceprovided is no longer on offer. These narratives dont contrast afrightening past to an idealized present; they document todays unjustand cruel reality.

In fact, the Gothic that Edwards finds is less central to Canada thanit would be to many other places. When we tell stories of horrific reality,they are based on less direct or less immediate experience than mightbe the case elsewhere. Perhaps our tales therefore reverse the temporalflow of the Gothic looking anxiously forward to a frightening future,which has not yet arrived.

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Canada as Gothic Tale