Medievalism in English Canadian Literature: From Richardson to Atwood: 17 [Illustrated] 9781843845478, 1843845474

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism
1 “Men of the North”: Archibald Lampman’s Use of Incidents in the Lives of Medieval Monarchs and Aristocrats
2 “Going Back to the Middle Ages”: Tracing Medievalism in Julia Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent and John Richardson’s Wacousta
3 John Richardson’s Wacousta and the Transfer of Medievalist Romance
4 A Canadian Caliban in King Arthur’s Court: Materialist Medievalism and Northern Gothic in William Wilfred Campbell’s Mordred
5 Orientalist Medievalism in Early Canadian Periodicals
6 The Collegiate Gothic: Legitimacy and Inheritance in Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels
7 Earle Birney as Public Poet: a Canadian Chaucer?
8 “That’s what you get for being food”: Margaret Atwood’s Symbolic Cannibalism
9 Lost in Allegory: Grief and Chivalry in Kit Pearson’s A Perfect, Gentle Knight
10 Remembering the Romance: Medievalist Romance in Fantasy Fiction by Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint
11 Medievalisms and Romance Traditions in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel
12 The Medieval Methods of Patrick DeWitt: Undermajordomo Minor
Index

Citation preview

EDITED BY M.J. TOSWELL AND ANNA CZARNOWUS

M.J. TOSWELL is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario. ANNA CZARNOWUS is a Professor at the University of Silesia

in Katowice. CONTRIBUTORS : D.M.R. Bentley, Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska, Anna Czarnowus, Brian Johnson, Laurel Ryan, David Watt, M.J. Toswell, Dominika Ruszkiewicz, Cory Rushton, Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Ewa Drab, and Michael Fox.

C OV E R D E S I G N : S I M O N LO X L E Y

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

M.J. TOSWELL, ANNA CZARNOWUS (eds)

Front cover: Bookplate commemorating the donation by the Manitoba Brewers’ and Hotelmen’s Welfare Fund as a memorial to the Honourable Andrew K. Dysart, M.A., LL.D., and Chancellor of the University of Manitoba. Reproduced with the permission of the Archives & Special Collections, University of Manitoba; all rights reserved.

MEDIEVALISM IN ENGLISH CANADIAN LITERATURE

The essays in this volume consider what is original and distinctive about the manifestation of medievalism in Canadian literature and its origins and its subsequent growth and development: from the first novel published in Canada written by a Canadian-born author, Julia Beckwith Hart’s St Ursula’s Convent (1824), to the recent work of the best-selling novelist Patrick DeWitt (Undermajordomo Minor, published in 2015). Topics addressed include the strong strain of medievalist fantasy in the work of the young-adult author Kit Pearson, and the longer novels of Charles de Lint, Steven Erikson, and Guy Gavriel Kay; the medievalist inclinations of Archibald Lampman and W.W. Campbell, well-known nineteenthcentury Canadian poets; and the often-studied Wacousta by John Richardson, first published in 1832. Chapters also cover early Canadian periodicals’ engagement with orientalist medievalism; and works by twentieth-century writers such as the irrepressible Earle Birney, the witty and intellectual Robertson Davies, and the fascinating and learned Margaret Atwood.

MEDIEVALISM IN ENGLISH

CANADIAN

LITERATURE

FROM



TO

RICHARDSON

ATWOOD

Volume XVII

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature

ISSN 2043-8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies: that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages – attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’ – in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252–0001 USA

Professor Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews Fife  KY16 9AL UK

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK

Previous volumes in this series are printed at the back of this book

Medievalism in English Canadian Literature From Richardson to Atwood

Edited by

M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2020 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2020 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 547 8 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

1

“Men of the North”: Archibald Lampman’s Use of Incidents in the Lives of Medieval Monarchs and Aristocrats D.M.R. Bentley

17

36



“Going Back to the Middle Ages”: Tracing Medievalism in Julia Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent and John Richardson’s Wacousta Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska

3

John Richardson’s Wacousta and the Transfer of Medievalist Romance Anna Czarnowus

4

A Canadian Caliban in King Arthur’s Court: Materialist Medievalism and Northern Gothic in William Wilfred Campbell’s Mordred Brian Johnson

5

Orientalist Medievalism in Early Canadian Periodicals Laurel Ryan

6

The Collegiate Gothic: Legitimacy and Inheritance in Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels David Watt

7

Earle Birney as Public Poet: a Canadian Chaucer? M.J. Toswell

8

“That’s what you get for being food”: Margaret Atwood’s Symbolic Cannibalism 129 Dominika Ruszkiewicz

2

9

1

52

66 83

97 113

Lost in Allegory: Grief and Chivalry in Kit Pearson’s A Perfect, Gentle Knight 143 Cory James Rushton

vi

Contents

10 Remembering the Romance: Medievalist Romance in Fantasy Fiction by Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint 155 Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun 11 Medievalisms and Romance Traditions in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel Ewa Drab

172

12 The Medieval Methods of Patrick DeWitt: Undermajordomo Minor Michael Fox

189

Index

205

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

T

he Parliament buildings of Canada tower over the Ottawa River like a medieval castle fronted by a curtain wall of trees. The Library of Parliament stands to the fore like the chapter house of a monastery, circular and entirely Gothic in its inception, with narrow arched windows, striking verticality as the focus drifts upwards to the central tower with its sixteen wholly unnecessary flying buttresses, its stone exterior and turret with walkway – all highlighted by delicate stone tracery. Inside, a massive circular room resembles the former British Library Reading Room, with a dome over 47 metres in diameter, wholly paneled in wood with nearly two thousand individual carvings of Canadian flora and fauna – and a healthy admixture of mythical and medieval beasts. The galleries and stacks are all that might be expected of this Gothic Revival building, the only survivor from the original Victorian parliament buildings constructed on the same site between 1857 and 1859. Behind the library the new-built range of government buildings dates after the 1916 fire destroyed most of the Centre Block. The first version of the Centre Block of the Parliament buildings was a splendid Gothic wedding-cake structure on three floors with twelve towers set around the edges of the roof and one massive central tower reaching to the skies. After the fire, a new-built block used more stone and marble internally, but reduced the profile of the crenellations and watch-towers on the outside – in order to balance an even higher and narrower central tower spearing upwards into the clouds. Enough was built that the new Centre Block opened in 1920 to host the jubilant celebrations after the end of World War I; in 1927, the completed central tower was renamed the Peace Tower, with a new carillon of bells installed. (The original bell, the Victoria Tower Bell, now reposes on the lawn outside the Parliament Buildings, as a kind of metonymy for the Canadian obsession with history and with not throwing anything out.) The entire complex is known as Parliament Hill, or “the Hill” for short, because it stands above the river on a limestone cliff.1 The symbolism of “the Hill,” separate and particular,

1 For the background and architecture of the Canadian Parliament Buildings as creating a new “national style,” see Carolyn A. Young, The Glory of Ottawa: Canada’s First

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monumental and traditional, evokes the British Parliament at Westminster for good reason; “the Hill” is the centrepiece of Canada’s constitutional structure and legislative engagement. The entire complex is profoundly medieval (British medieval, in particular) in its inspiration, depending on the governmental structures of the “mother country” for the fundamental beliefs and processes at work in the nascent nation – and the architecture. The papers in this collection reflect a similar ethos, as they address writers and texts of English Canadian literature from the nineteenth century onwards, and consider their medieval sources and inspirations. Those sources and inspirations come largely from British medieval literature, albeit sometimes from a kind of neo­ medieval imaginary space generally perceived as vaguely approximating the British medieval. The chapters on nineteenth-century writers, which very much reflect the deeply Victorian medieval approach of the Canadian parliament buildings, range from analyses of some of the earliest Canadian poets, including W.W. Campbell and Archibald Lampman, to the very earliest Canadian novelist, the Montreal writer Julia Beckwith Hart, to extensive consideration of Wacousta by John Richardson, perhaps the most well-known Canadian novel of the period, and analysis of the way in which Canadian writers constructed the exotic Other of the orientalist romance in this period. The scholars writing these papers are often comfortable commenting on specifically Canadian elements to the medievalism in their authors and their texts. On twentieth-century and contemporary writers, however, the approach is far more eclectic: the chapters address several well-known fantasy writers including Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, and Kit Pearson; the contemporary novelists Margaret Atwood and Patrick DeWitt; the learned and witty novelist and dramatist Robertson Davies; and the poet who strove to advance the notion of a specifically Canadian literature, Earle Birney. Here, the scholars in this volume draw more tentative conclusions about the specifically Canadian elements of the medievalism at work, because that medievalism is difficult to delineate, or in flux, or very much a part of a broader set of intersectional developments in contemporary Canadian writing. In some cases the medievalism is a manufactured and imperfect re-­creation of the Middle Ages, and in others it seems well-nigh accidental. In at least one case a writer’s medievalism causes offence given its lack of acknowledgement of the multi­ farious strands making up the multicultural Canada of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The contributors to the volume include experts in the study of Canadian literature, of medieval studies, and of medievalism, so that a rich admixture of scholarly approaches is to be found here. Before turning to a more detailed discussion of the contents of this collection of papers, it seems worth sketching out some of the parameters of medievalism, specifically Canadian medievalism as it intersects with Canadian history and Canadian literary history, and giving some sense of how this collection developed. Medievalism, the reception and re-creation of the Middle Ages, is still a relatively new field of scholarly endeavour; even newer is analysis of medievalism as it Parliament Buildings (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). But see also Timothy Di Leo Browne, “National Style in the Architecture of Parliament: Whose Nation, Whose Style?,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 25.1 (Summer 2016): 49–62.

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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functions in the literature of a particular nation. The cross-currents of medievalism and nationalism, of medievalism in a particular nation or ethnic group, of how a particular country addresses its medieval past: these have attracted little sustained attention in the discipline of medievalism. The early volumes of Studies in Medi­ evalism purported to address medievalism in America or France or England, and occasional sessions at conferences or in round-tables today speak to medievalisms beyond America and western Europe: eastern Europe, Russia, Australia or South America.2 But the designation by nation, which disappeared in the journal in the mid-1990s, did not reach towards a kind of national consensus about how medi­ evalism functions in a particular society, and rather served as a method of establishing some focus or common geographically and historically based themes. Not until recently has there been discussion of exactly how a particular nation or a particular ethnicity engages with medievalism, or of what medievalism means in a national context. No doubt in part that is because such discussions can be quite traumatic: thus, for example, balance is essential but difficult when analyzing the use in Nazi Germany of tropes and constructions of race that were presented as the genuine medieval roots of the Aryan race and lauded as signs of its embedded and instinct­ ive military and ethical excellence.3 Similarly, Armenians refer to their defeats by the Byzantines in the early eleventh century and then by the Seljuk Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 as the root causes for the Armenian genocide in the early twentieth century.4 The Christianity of the Armenian peoples was a continuing problem for their rulers, and examining the Armenian medieval past is to think about a millennium of suffering. For some ethnicities, and for some nations, contemplating the medieval past raises profoundly difficult questions and entangles issues that many members of that ethnicity or that nation might prefer to leave aside. For others, at the other extreme, medievalism offers such an inchoate longing for a past that never really existed that attempting to define a national approach, itself in many nations an inchoate and nostalgic entity that might involve complications of religion or ethnicity, is too dangerous or too painful or too difficult, or all three. That is to say, addressing a national medievalism brings with it a freight of 2 For example, Leslie J. Workman, ed. Studies in Medievalism 2 no. 1: Medievalism in England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), and Studies in Medievalism 1 no. 2: Medievalism in America (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982), and two volumes edited by Heather Arden, Studies in Medievalism 2 no. 2: Medievalism in France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), and Studies in Medievalism 3 no.1: Medievalism in France 1500–1750 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987). 3 See, for example, Fabian Link and Mark W. Hornburg, “’He Who Owns the Trifels, Owns the Reich’: Nazi Medievalism and the Creation of the Volksgemeinschaft in the Palatinate,” Central European History 49 (2016): 208–39; and also Hannah Johnson and Nina Caputo, “The Middle Ages and the Holocaust: Medieval Anti-Judaism in the Crucible of Modern Thought,” Postmedieval 5.3 (2014): 270–77. Many scholars have addressed the alt-right fascination with the Middle Ages: see Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, “Political Medievalisms: The Darkness of the Dark Ages,” in their Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013); Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007); and now Andrew B.R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017). 4 See David Nicolle, Manzikert 1071: The Breaking of Byzantium (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2013).

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nostalgia and remembrance that might be saccharine and optimistic, and equally might be dark and hopelessly pessimistic. Nonetheless, some attempts to define national responses to the medieval have taken place. Louise d’Arcens has led in addressing Australian medievalism, pointing out that in settler societies (colonies and former colonies) medievalism “produces ... the traces of an impossible his­ tory.”5 Because the former colony can only involve reconstructions or references to a medieval past that is the past only of the settler world, the medieval can never have been in this new world. As d’Arcens points out, this makes for a wonderfully ambiguous engagement with the medieval, a re-creation of a past that never was. (Toswell has argued elsewhere that such medievalism is the very definition of neo­ medievalism, as it is a notional medievalism, a simulacrum that re-creates a nonexistent past.6) Such a medievalism is for some tremendously productive because free of the trappings of history and realism, of authenticity and veracity. For others such a medievalism is anathema, unmoored from the past and drifting towards nothingness, an aporia that cannot correctly be resolved. For d’Arcens, Australian medievalism is a ferment of possibility and of complication. She points out that “[t]he decision to commemorate and continue a nostalgically imagined medieval heritage and thereby to occlude a more troubling history of colonial dispossession” continued well into the twentieth century.7 Like Canadian medievalism in some respects, Australian medievalism overlapped a nostalgic elitist search for British roots and modes of behaviour with Gothic reconstructions of desolate landscapes and geographies, and with a further overlap of indigenous elements awkwardly placed into these romanticized vistas of the past. Canadian medievalism is, however, a new terminological and intellectual development altogether. Medievalism in Canada has two fully functioning and deep-seated roots in European medievalism, in Britain for English Canada, and in France for French Canada including the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. Moreover, Canadian medievalism is deeply imbricated with American medievalism, with its complex stew of a British background, rejected but also engaged with, and its wide-ranging modern engagement with medievalism in a multitude of genres and modes. Canadian medievalism draws on and deals with these traditions in intricate intersecting ways, and often each writer and thinker has a different mix. Moreover, since in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Canada is profoundly an immigrant nation, not just a European settler society overlaying an indigenous past, engagements with global medievalism continue to expand and alter local and regional responses. In her edited collection on mapping medievalism at the Canadian frontier, Kathryn Brush included indigenous products from the time period that we would think of as European medievalism. This is an interesting and unexpected choice, 5 Louise d’Arcens, “Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox,” in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 177–86 (177). 6 M.J. Toswell, “The Simulacrum of Neomedievalism,” Studies in Medievalism 19: Defining Neomedievalism(s) (2010): 44–57. See also Lauryn S. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” in Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, ed. Medievalism: Key Critical Terms (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014): 223–30. 7 D’Arcens, “Australian Medievalism,” 177–86 (183).

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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most notably signalled by the presence at one of the exhibitions in London, Ontario and in Toronto of a birch-bark canoe. In the first place, Brush wanted to note that at the same time as the Middle Ages were taking place in Europe, there was a thriving and sophisticated indigenous culture in North America, with its own political, religious, and cultural institutions and engagements.8 Also, of course, the supposed European discovery of North America took place during the time period that most of us assign to the Middle Ages, by Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, and a few years later Giovanni Caboto (known in England, where his expedition was bankrolled, as John Cabot) probably in Canada – the contenders are the island of Newfoundland, the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and possibly Maine, the first three in today’s Canada, the last in the United States. (One school of thought argues that Bristol mariners had discovered Canada twenty years earlier, around 1470, and Scottish explorers as early as 1398.)9 There is also, of course, actual archaeological evidence that Vikings settled on the north side of the island of Newfoundland before the millennium, at one point at L’Anse aux Meadows for at least a decade, and possibly for other, shorter visits as well.10 Thus we have Viking Age temporary settlements with one clear attempt at a true settlement, explorations of eastern Canada by John Cabot and by his son Sebastian, and possibly by other English explorers. Then, French explorers begin to arrive, led by Samuel de Champlain. The records are clearer for Champlain, who over-wintered in Canada, and explored well into what is today northern Ontario during his travels, assisted by indigenous guides (according to the traditional European construction of the discovery of Canada). The history of Canadian exploration and settlement has fewer striking moments than does the American tale, fewer highs such as the first Thanksgiving, and fewer lows such as the first massacres. French settlements in what is today Quebec and New Brunswick were established in the seventeenth century, and English exploration and settlement in the eastern provinces, with intermittent wars between the French and the English during which the colonies were pawns, continued. The most striking date for Canadian history remains 14 September 1759, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside the city of Quebec, during which the British general James Wolfe defeated the French under Louis-Joseph, the Marquis of Montcalm. The victory was not consolidated until the next treaty between the two European nations in 1763, and in 1791 the British established the colony of Canada divided into 8 Kathryn Brush, ed., Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier (London, ON: McIntosh Gallery, University of Western Ontario and Museum London, 2010). The publication emerged from a curatorial project by Brush and a graduate seminar in winter 2010. For a careful assessment of the way the project overlaps with colonial ideology and indigeneity, see the review by Vanessa Dion Fletcher and Warren Bernauer in Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–5. 9 See Frederick J. Pohl, The Sinclair Expedition to Nova Scotia in 1398 (Pictou, NS: Pictou Advocate Press, 1950), and, by the same author, Prince Henry Sinclair: His Expedition to the New World in 1398 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1974). See also Farley Mowat, The Farfarers: Before the Norse (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998). 10 See the exhibition catalogue and commentary Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, ed. William F. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2000), and the archaeological investigations by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad at L’Anse aux Meadows.

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Lower Canada, the former French area now more or less corresponding to Quebec, and Upper Canada, more or less Ontario. British hegemony over the area later to be known as Canada was established, therefore, in the late eighteenth century.11 Less frequently highlighted in histories of Canada is the very significant migration that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century from the United States (during its throes of creation) to Canada. The United Empire Loyalists, as they are known in Canada, were a very powerful and important wave of immig­ rants, some before the American war of independence, and some after.12 They brought a deep connection to England (generally specifically to England, although Scotland and Wales also appear), and often were middle- or upper-class immigrants with significant personal possessions. Some had less, but given that these families had priority for farming lands and tended to establish themselves in entire counties, they brought a ready-made structure infused by Englishness, for which they were prepared to be displaced from the homes they had established in the former Thirteen Colonies. That is, the United Empire Loyalists were conservatives, upholders of the status quo, individuals who would leave prosperity they already had in order to maintain their loyalty to the English crown and their mode of existence. Further emigration from the British Isles, notably from Scotland and Ireland, also came to Canada in the next decades, some of it to Lower Canada and to the separate colonies on the eastern seaboard, and much of it to Upper Canada, to southern Ontario and eventually to northern Ontario and to Manitoba and points west. By this time there was also a thriving colony in British Columbia, founded from Britain across the Pacific. From the late eighteenth century onwards, then, Canada had a very different profile from other settler communities of the British Empire. Many citizens had explicitly chosen to live in Canada and to establish their homes and homesteads on what they perceived as explicitly British soil. At the same time, many citizens retained links to the United States, and the borders between Canada and the former British colonies to the south were quite porous (until quite recently).13 This settler world was a hardscrabble world, but it was also one very aware of the wider world and its concerns. The first mention of Beowulf in Canada, for example, came in the second volume of the new Canadian Monthly and National Review, published in

11 There are many histories of Canada, and many new ones being written in the present day; see now Peter H. Russell, Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 12 See W. Stewart Wallace, The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook, 1914), and now Peter C. Newman, Hostages to Fortune: The United Empire Loyalists and the Making of Canada (Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 13 Canadians tend to be awkward and a bit defensive about the relationship with the United States; Americans tend not to see a problem. For example, see Edmund Wilson, O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964). Wilson refers to this “peculiar” tendency of Canadians to refer to “‘the Americans,’ as if Canadians were not Americans, too” and then further indicates that in his youth Canada was “a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States” and allowing a North American to revert to the life of a pioneer and “revindicate one’s right to the continent” (35–36). This attitude might be fading, but it is not gone.

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July 1872.14 A largely literary publication, the Review published many reprints of British publications, and over its ten years of nationalistic fervour, celebrating the 1867 establishment of Canada as a separate political entity, it published most of the leading lights of Canadian literature and letters at that time. It also reprinted materials from England, including a piece called “From Cox’s Romances of the Middle Ages” published by Eustace Hinton Jones in Popular Romances of the Middle Ages. The piece includes a segment from Beowulf, translated by Hinton Jones. The headnote describes Beowulf as a “characteristic product of the rudest antiquity,” and then departs into the field of myth itself, describing the ships of the poem as “mysterious barks, which grow big and become small again at their pleasure, which gleam with gold and purple and crimson, or sail on in sombre and gloomy majesty ... which, in short, are living beings.”15 The description of the poem as of “the rudest antiquity” worked in London, England, and it worked in London, Ontario, named by John Simcoe in furtherance of his plan to make London the centre of the nation, the wellspring of government and religion.16 Simcoe’s plan failed, but the sense of English Canadians that they were just as entitled to sneer at these rude antiquities as were the English in England remained firmly held. Thus, in her recent thesis, Laurel Ryan investigates and catalogues Canadian mentions of the medieval in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is able to conclude that these were many and varied, but that they seldom suggested any inferiority in Canada to the accomplishments and medievalisms under way in England, Scotland, and Wales.17 Correspondence back and forth kept up quite easily, and individuals went back and forth without undue hardship, so there was no massive sense of distance from the homeland in Canada – at least, not until the full settlement of Western Canada. There was, however, always the double sense of Canada as involving the French and the English. In Canada, this is the great divide to be negotiated and surmounted and always has been. Canadian medievalism sharply bifurcates around Quebec, so that in Upper Canada and the Maritimes, Canadians are building neo-Gothic cathedrals and castles in the English mode. In Quebec, very firmly the antecedents are French. These can be difficult to divide from the English medieval ancestors where both are following Norman precedents for building castles and churches. However, foods and recipes can be notably distinct based on different underlying nationalities and ethnicities, as can other elements of daily life and of feasts or cele­ brations. In Quebec, the continental tradition of celebrating name-days survives, and the Catholic backgrounds of the nation-state remain a very significant influence, albeit now an underground one. Saints abound, beginning with the major 14 “Beowulf, from Cox’s Romances of the Middle Ages,” Canadian Monthly and National Review 2.1 (July 1872): 83–91. See http://eco.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_05010_7/ 84?r=0&s=1. 15 “Beowulf from Cox’s Romances,” 83–4. 16 See Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott, John Graves Simcoe 1752–1806: A Biography (Toronto: Dundurn, 1998), 119–21. 17 Elana Laurel Ryan, “A Medieval New World: Nation-making in Early Canadian Literature, 1789–1870,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2015. In an appendix Ryan includes a bibliography of Canadian medievalism between her two dates, 278–308. See also her article, “James Martin Cawdell and Medieval Politics in Early Canada,” SCL [Studies in Canadian Literature] 42 (2017): 173–90.

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river through Quebec and most of Ontario, the Saint Lawrence or the St.-Laurent, and continuing with the most significant provincial feast-day of St-Jean, on 24 June in honour of St. John the Baptist. Ontario, founded largely by Anglicans with a slight admixture of Presbyterians and Methodists, has a very different religious sensibility. Canadian medievalism is shaped more by the history of Canada than is generally recognized. The long border with America is a significant feature of Canadian medievalism, and much superficial medievalism in Canada (dressing up as a princess for Hallowe’en, the invention of Superman as a hero to right all injustice and fly to the aid of the innocent and unjustly condemned) has the taste and flavour of American medievalism. But, the deeper and more interesting medievalism in Canada emerges from its deep roots in French and English nationhood. However, there has been little attention paid to the particular parameters of Canadian medievalism. Other than the Brush collection mentioned above, only one article addresses this phenomenon in general terms: Raymond H. Thompson in the 1994 issue of Studies in Medievalism, in a special issue on Medievalism in North America, wrote a survey entitled “The Arthurian Legend in Canada.”18 Some scholars in the last decade have begun to address specific Canadian writers and their medievalism, but there has been no attempt to draw the threads of Canadian medievalism together and examine them carefully. There are certainly resemblances to Australian medievalism, appropriately since both are former colonies of Great Britain with a relatively similar history of colonization and settler societies imposing themselves on the indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, Canadian medievalism can stake a claim to be even more complicated than the paradoxical and complex Australian version, given Canada’s proximity to the huge engine of medievalist re-creations that is the United States of America. Canadians tend to try to separate their identity from the American behemoth, and to trumpet their own separateness – but quietly. Thus, for example, Canadians are proud that one of the two inventors of Superman, that thoroughly medieval and chivalric hero, was the Canadian Joe Shuster.19 Americans neither know this small fact, nor perceive it as significant. Canadian public buildings largely partake of the Gothic Revival mode of architecture rather than the American preference for Neo-Classical or Art Deco buildings (although American cathedrals often pick up the Gothic Revival style): see, for example, the Parliament Buildings in each provincial capital in Canada, the early colleges of the University of Toronto and all other universities founded in Victorian times, and most other buildings created by the Victorians as they rapidly consolidated the country. There is also some influence from the French medieval tradition, notably in some Beaux Arts buildings in Quebec and in the series of railway hotels built by the Canadian Pacific Railway company – notably the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, and the Royal York in Toronto.20 Medi18 Raymond H. Thompson, “The Arthurian Legend in Canada,” Studies in Medievalism VI: Medievalism in North America (1994): 85–99. 19 Allan Hustak, entry “Joe Shuster,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, 16 June 2008; see https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joe-shuster. 20 For commentary on some of these points, see Christopher Thomas, “‘Canadian Castles’? The Question of National Styles in Architecture Revisited,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32.1 (1997): 5–27.

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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evalism in Canada responds to a complex mixture of British, French, and American frameworks; it is never simple or static. It includes some general manifestations of medievalism, including institutions such as universities and schools, architecture, restaurants, stained glass, videogames, the role of the forest, and, to cite one literary example, fantasy novels. Canadian fantasy novelists with medieval engagement include Jack White, Guy Gavriel Kay, Sean Stewart, Dave Duncan, Jo Walton, Tanya Huff, Kelley Armstrong, Steven Erikson, Julie Czerneda, Michelle Sagara (West), and Charles de Lint. More names could be added. In short, Canadian medievalism is a fertile field of study, and the papers here can only begin to address the complexities of time and space, of national and global interaction, of individual learning and generalized notions. Like Australian medievalism, Canadian medievalism referring to a European Middle Ages really begins at the beginning of the nineteenth century and gathers steam during the Victorian era with novels, long poems, casual and studied references, and the construction of medieval elements in towns and cities.21 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, Canadian medievalism appears to bifurcate into a notional medievalism that often lends texts a kind of haunting desire to engage with the medieval in what Carolyn Dinshaw terms a wholly “asynchronous” approach, and into a kind of direct, even learned, medieval engagement that is radically embedded in medieval texts.22 Dinshaw’s asynchronous medievalism, here notional medievalism, suggests that individual writers and thinkers have a notion as to what the medieval might be. While the notion is sometimes exactly correct, more often it arrives in the general vicinity of verisimilitude with a slightly wonky construction. Moreover, notional medievalism is driven as much by emotion as it is by knowledge or a desire for authenticity; in notional medievalism, people find satisfaction in their own apparent engagement with the medieval. Thus, for example, the term “hockey chivalry” appears with remarkable frequency when sportswriters engage with the game; it is a feature of ice hockey chivalry that when two hockey players are squaring up to fight each other they doff their helmets and remove their gauntlets (in hockey terms, their gloves, but they are the size of knightly gauntlets) before skating carefully within reach of each other’s punches. Similarly, at the end of a playoff series, hockey chivalry requires that the two teams stand in a line at centre ice shaking each other’s hands and acknowledging the good efforts of their antagon­ ists, perhaps even with the loser wishing the victor good luck in the next round of the playoffs. Quite what this hockey chivalry means remains uncertain, given that no horses are involved and the knights in question are generally young men who are or expect to be extremely well paid for their jousts by their home team – not by looting the defeated opposition or winning a prize offered by an external scion of the nobility. Hockey in Canada certainly evokes a strong sense of notional medievalism: teams name themselves “London Knights” or “Las Vegas Golden Knights,” the players wear the modern equivalent of plate armour on their torsos, with helmets and 21 For the Australian context, see Louise d’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840–1910 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011). 22 See Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

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face-masks to protect their heads, and teams enter tournaments once or twice a year to demonstrate their prowess as young warriors in the game. The medievalism is notional rather than clearly delineated, but it is present and a powerful influence on present-day behaviour and ideologies. A second major strain of Canadian medievalism requires more explanation. Since the term “medievalism” arrived in modern critical discourse, it has generally referred to a consideration of the Middle Ages through the lens of the nineteenth century, when medieval materials were first edited, studied, re-created, and used as sources for new imaginings. Thus, for example, Michael Alexander in his study of medievalism considers the nineteenth century for eleven chapters, and the twentieth century for two.23 This strong and ingrained urge to start any study of medi­evalism by first looking at nineteenth-century reactions to the medieval period, the obvious point of departure, is ubiquitous in the field. However, there is a deep strain – and potentially also a very wide streak – in Canadian medievalism that could best be called “direct medievalism”. That is, many Canadian practitioners of medi­evalism insist on reading their medieval texts in the original, learning languages as necessary, and providing detailed bibliographies for their creative works. This is perhaps abetted by the important role Canadian scholars have played in the development of the field of medieval studies more generally, and medieval literature in particular (to cite but a few: George Kane, Leonard Boyle, Michael Lapidge, Paul Zumthor, Etienne Gilson). The existence of excellent medievalists who are Canadian, or trained in Canada (particularly at the world-famous Center for Medieval Studies and Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto), or working in Canada might help, but it cannot explain the remarkable way in which Canadians insist on engaging directly with their medieval antecedents. The most important current project in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is the Dictionary of Old English, conceived by Angus Cameron while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and founded at the University of Toronto, where today it remains, now edited by Stephen Pelle and Robert Getz.24 Canadians read Old Norse and translate it into poetry (Jeramy Dodds, and more recently, Emily Osborne).25 They read Old English and Middle English and re-create it as radio plays, as newly developed poetry, or even as children’s stor­ ies (Earle Birney, C.B. Hieatt, Welwyn Wilton Katz). They translate Beowulf, from 23 Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); he does begin in the late eighteenth century but by the end of the first chapter is already referencing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Alexander assesses the nineteenth century through to p. 226, and both modernism and the twentieth century from pp. 227 to 261. David Matthews makes a different argument, focusing on the 1840s as the greatest era of medievalism before the present day: see his Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015). See also an oft-cited originary text in the field for another approach to the nineteenth century as the source of medievalism: Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). 24 Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018). 25 Jeramy Dodds, tr. The Poetic Edda (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014), and Emily Osborne, Quarrel of Arrows: Ten Poets from Medieval Norway and Iceland (Toronto: Junction Books, forthcoming 2019).

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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R.K. Gordon whose translations of Old English poems and prose were the standard available translations for most twentieth-century studies of the subject, produced at the University of Saskatchewan in 1926 and a model of precision and exactitude, through to Michael Walton, a student at McMaster University who found Alvin Lee so exhilarating a professor that he produced his own idiosyncratic but very careful translation of Beowulf and published it on his family farm.26 Their urge towards authenticity, realism, and a kind of direct and accurate reworking of their medieval antecedents is certainly worth exploring. The papers in this collection deal in various ways with the peculiarities of Can­ adian literary texts with elements or entire plots drawn from a medievalist tradition. Nearly all the papers consider medievalism as applied to one Canadian author, reaching such preliminary conclusions about that author as are avail­ able with respect to the features of medievalism present in the work. The scholars discussing nineteenth-century authors comment on specifically Canadian concerns and raise specific issues with respect to Canadian medievalism, following in the path of standard works on medievalism, while the scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century medievalism are somewhat more circumspect in their conclusions. They point to indications and influences, and are more likely to find notional or even accidental medievalism at work in their writers, or to address medievalism itself as a less certain phenomenon. Nonetheless, the papers as a whole reveal both elements of notional and direct medievalism, and give some idea as to the principal genres Canadians are interested in for their medievalism (notably, fantasy novels are a strength), and the underlying notion of the “authentic” that seems so much a part of Canadian medievalism. In the nineteenth century, this meant poetry. D.M.R. Bentley, the Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario and a recent winner of the Killam Prize for making a substantial and signifi­ cant contribution to the field of Canadian literature, begins the volume with a consideration of some poems by Archibald Lampman. Lampman was perhaps Canada’s finest nineteenth-century poet, in Bentley’s estimation, and throughout his life he engaged with medieval topics. In particular, as Bentley demonstrates by analyzing five of Lampman’s poems, two of them until now unpublished and available only in the National Archives, Lampman was a Gothic Revival poet who was very interested in investigating the roles and behaviour patterns of kings – especially northern kings. Bentley places Lampman in terms of William Morris, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats, very much elucidating his fellowship with nineteenth-century poets with medievalist tendencies, and demonstrates how Lampman used his medievalist situations and constructions to create a space for investigating unconventional and controversial ideas – even Socialism or the overwhelming generosity of the true Christian as Lampman’s construction of “King Oswald’s Feast” demonstrates. Bentley concludes by noting how central Lampman’s poems were in Ontario school readers, the required reading of every child in the province in ensuing decades. Lampman’s medievalizing poems reached a very broad audience. 26 R.K. Gordon, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: Dent, 1926), and Michael Walton, tr. The Book of Beowulf: With the Fight at Finnsburg, Widsith, Deor, Caedmon’s Hymn, Waldere, and the Battle of Maldon (Walton Family Farm Books, 2007).

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Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska places the very first novel written by a Canadian-­ born author, Julia Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life into conversation with perhaps the most fam­ ous Canadian novel of the nineteenth century, John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, the Prophecy. Kliś-Brodowska is a specialist in English Gothic traditions teaching at the University of Silesia in Katowice, and she puts her expertise to work on how early Canadian literary discourse responds to the absence of the medieval by constructing a Gothic medieval, searching for spectral tales that will transfer medi­ evalism into the New World and deploy medievalist tropes to demonstrate how that world is rapidly becoming culturally mature and sophisticated. She demonstrates this by analyzing the way Gothic themes play out in the two works, with a surprising realistic bent in Hart’s novel so that the convent incarceration, exotic travel, and forced marriage involving incest become un-Gothic whereas Richardson projects a medievalized Gothic onto events that occur only shortly before the putative timeline of his novel. Moreover, he activates highly Gothic approaches to terror, brutality, and suspense, producing a Gothic sensibility that is quite unlike the pragmatic solutions found by Hart. Anna Czarnowus continues the focus on Richardson’s Wacousta, considering explicitly its use of cultural transfer to bring the Gothic mode and the colonialist medieval romance to Canada. She particularly focuses on the complex figure of Wacousta, who serves as an object of terror for the colonists as he appears to be a striking figure of indigenous opposition, but since he is not indigenous but Scottish also reflects another kind of rebellion against colonizers. The text presents both Scotland and Cornwall as medievalist lands, so that the European reality contrasts against the colonialist romance in the new world, such that the white settlers struggle to identify and define themselves. Czarnowus, who also teaches at the University of Silesia in Katowice and publishes on Middle English and medievalism (and is co-editor of this volume), concludes that the new form of romance exemplified by Wacousta is marked by “a pervasive recrudescence of medievalist elements”. Another medievalist romance is the concern of Brian Johnson, who considers William Wilfred Campbell’s play Mordred as a polyvalent Gothic fantasy of postcolonial revenge as well as a Darwinian materialist tragedy. Campbell’s melodramatic fantasy of colonial degeneration and imperial collapse appears to follow on from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King but really displaces and disavows the Arthurian tradition in order to investigate the racial degeneration and colonial dispossession at work in Canadian imperialism. Johnson, a queer theorist who works on Canadian literature and comics studies at Carleton University in Canada, argues that the model he develops can productively be applied to other late nineteenth-century texts to adduce some of the deeper issues at play in the Canadian medieval revival of the time. Laurel Ryan, a Canadian who is now teaching in the English department of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, takes a similar approach, looking at orientalist texts, particularly romances, that appeared in early Canadian periodicals for their construction of the exotic Other, and their cultural transfer of medieval romances set in lands other than Europe into the world of Canadian Gothic literature. Among the writers she examines who wrote orientalist romances of the medieval Middle

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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East are Susanna Moodie, Agnes Maule Machar, William Henry Withrow, and the obscure but fascinating John Hunter Duvar. David Watt moves the project into the twentieth century, addressing the protean twentieth-century figure Robertson Davies. In his time one of Canada’s favourite novelists, Davies was also a journalist, critic, the first master of Massey College in Toronto, a playwright, and a novelist who specialized in trilogies. Watt tackles The Rebel Angels, set in a fictionalized version of Massey College, built in the Collegiate Gothic style of most of the University of Toronto’s buildings. Watt addresses several medievalist elements in the novel, including the hunt for the apparently lost manu­script called the Gryphius Portfolio, the buildings of Spook (properly the College of St John and the Holy Ghost), the peculiar monkish cassock-wearer John Parlabane, a connection to Northanger Abbey (the medievalist romance of Jane Austen), and the medieval notion of translatio studii at work in the project of Maria Theotoky, the doctoral student at the centre of the novel. Watt’s background in medieval studies, particularly manuscript studies, serves him in good stead to unravel all the medievalist elements in Davies. Towards the end of his piece, he turns his attention to how Davies’s construction of the Collegiate Gothic can also be put to work to read the novel as “implicitly preoccupied with anxieties concerning the legitimacy of institutions on treaty land,” and addresses the larger question of the anxiety with which medieval materials were brought to Canada and assimilated here in various contexts, displacing the indigenous inhabitants of the land. Watt finishes with an example of a bookplate in a manuscript collection at his own University of Manitoba in Canada, discussing how it, like Rebel Angels, “transposes a European past onto the North American present.” The Collegiate Gothic, as building, as novel, and as institution, displaces and effaces the indigenous with the settler society. Earle Birney, another protean Canadian figure of the twentieth century, is the concern of Jane Toswell, who teaches English and medieval studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Where Robertson Davies frequently objected to being called a “man of letters,” Earle Birney embraced the term and sought through his life to be a public figure, a public intellectual encouraging the foundation and development of Canadian literature as a subject of study. Toswell examines Birney’s interest in being the sort of public figure that Geoffrey Chaucer was, and considers Birney’s lifelong interest in Chaucer as exemplified in his thesis on Chaucer’s irony at the University of Toronto, his medievalist poetry, his radio dramas and other works based on his knowledge of medieval studies, and his development of a very Chaucerian public persona filled with irony and self-deprecation. Birney aimed to be a Canadian icon, and during his lifetime he was, but he no longer has anything like the status of the figure of Canadian letters who is the focus of Dominika Ruszkiewicz’s attention: Margaret Atwood. Atwood is a cultural icon whose medievalism, hardly studied, merits significant attention. Ruszkiewicz begins this work with an analysis of The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride, using the image of the woman as food in such medieval texts as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Ruszkiewicz, who works at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Cracow on medieval and Renaissance literature, concludes that the concept of the woman as food is not only the image of “a woman

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M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

victimized, but also medievalized, or ‘a victim of a love medievalized.’” Atwood not only plays with Gothic fantasy constructions of the medieval in her novels and poetry, but also knows the sources direct from her own study of the materials, and is genuinely interested in the auctoritates that Chaucer used for his construction of the figure of Criseyde; in her novels, as Ruszkiewicz demonstrates, she replays those complex and ambiguous constructions. Cory James Rushton turns to a figure of similar stature in the world of children’s literature, Kit Pearson, and analyzes a recent novel: A Perfect, Gentle Knight. Although the title invokes Chaucer’s Knight, the text of the novel has the main characters replaying the roles of various figures of King Arthur’s court in Camelot. One of the characters, traumatized by the loss of his mother, engages in an approach to the world so allegorical that he almost separates himself permanently from his family and from his sanity. Rushton, who teaches medieval studies and medievalism at St. Francis Xavier University, investigates this medievalist trope of losing oneself in a chivalric identity, and considers how Sebastian’s role-playing as Lancelot nearly dooms his family to replay the collapse and fall of the Round Table. The young adult novel is set in Vancouver about sixty years ago, but in Rushton’s deft analysis it also recalls C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, other elements of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the perils of allegory, and the Fisher King – the disabled central character who must be rescued for the narrative to be restored. Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun treads deeper into the connection between the medi­ evalist romance and the modern fantasy with her analysis of Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne and Charles de Lint’s Yarrow: An Autumn Tale. In a wide-ranging and subtle analysis, she compares Kay’s openly medievalist and creative re-imagining of the medieval past of Provencal as alternative history and chivalric romance, to de Lint’s more circumspect urban fantasy linking contemporary Ottawa to an Other­ world that functions through the prism of Gothic romance. Kay sends the reader to a medieval past to reconsider its cultural memory and meaning, while de Lint brings the Gothic romance to the present, reinventing and re-creating its tropes. Borowska-Szerszun works at the University of Białystok in Poland on literary theory, medievalism, and fantasy literature, and brings a fresh eye to issues of cultural remembrance in Canadian medievalist fantasy. Similarly, Ewa Drab works on issues of genre in fantasy literature at the University of Silesia in Katowice, and here addresses a different novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel. Ysabel is Kay’s only novel to hover between the present and the past, and it provides fertile ground for Drab’s structuralist analysis of how “medieval symbols and images have grown into the tissue of fantasy fiction.” While all of Kay’s work offers a reconfiguration of the medieval, Ysabel in particular is an intrusion fantasy that plays Celtic and Roman elements against a modern Canadian family in Aix-en-Provence, and superimposes an Arthurian love triangle on the novel to force a new consideration of the role of the woman in such triangles. Kay elegantly requires history to play the role of fantasy in reconfiguring the reality of the modern world against a constantly intruding historical situation. Drab concludes that both Kay and Steven Erikson in his Gardens of the Moon use the medievalist past as an emblematic period of the past, and one with little connection to nationality, so that both fantasy authors demonstrate no sense of the Canadian in their work.

Introduction: English Canadian Medievalism

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Finally, in Michael Fox’s analysis of Patrick DeWitt’s novel Undermajordomo Minor it is not history that forces the reconfiguring of reality but folklore, and Fox uses the creative approach of J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and his version of what should have happened in Beowulf, called Sellic Spell [“Wondrous Tale” or “Strange Tale”] to delineate a folkloric approach to the motifs and structures of DeWitt’s novel. Fox teaches medieval studies, history of the English language and rhetoric at the University of Western Ontario, and uses this knowledge to argue that the underlying patterns of DeWitt’s text are both medieval and medievalist. He concludes that DeWitt’s use of the medievalist past is not only not particularly Can­ adian, but argues that the novelist perhaps does not even recognize the medieval in his use of folkloric motifs, so that his medievalism could best be characterized as “accidental,” not even “notional.” Many connections among the papers can be adduced. The poets Lampman, Campbell, and Birney are all engaged in nation-building, although for Birney and Lampman the process is relatively uncomplicated whereas for Campbell it is fraught with difficulties (see Bentley, Johnson, Toswell). Constructing a new reality in order to shed light on the world as it is lies at the core of fantasy literature, and while Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, Kit Pearson, and Patrick DeWitt might argue that their use of medieval romance tropes and approaches is very modern, they are not as far removed from John Richardson or from the exoticized orientalist romances of the nineteenth century as they might think (see Czarnowus, Drab, Borowska-Szerszun, Kliś-Brodowska, Ryan, Fox, Rushton). Both Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies took great pride in knowing the medieval texts to which they were alluding and which gave structure and focus to their modern novels, but it might be argued that neither quite realized just how far the cultural transfer of their medievalism might take them (Watt, Ruszkiewicz). The Gothic and Collegiate Gothic appear throughout these papers, sometimes as architecture, sometimes as the cultural Other of fear and horror or exotic travel or incestuous relationships. In Julia Beckwith Hart and John Richardson a relatively distant past is further medievalized by a focus on the local and historical context of Canada; in Wacousta the past is complicated by the way Richardson constructs the native inhabitants of Scotland and Cornwall as medievalized in the same way the indigenous inhabitants of North America are constructed in this colonial romance. Remembering the past, and re-membering the past, is something the romance mode plays with in the novels of Margaret Atwood and Patrick DeWitt, and in those of Guy Gavriel Kay, Kit Pearson, and Charles de Lint. Cultural memory and literary memory lead all these authors to engage with the medieval romance, and to interrogate the medievalist mode transgressively for its potential to tear down, and to re-create, the past in the present. This collection of papers engages in its own transgression, as it brings together a group of scholars from Poland and another group from Canada, in order to begin the study of Canadian medievalism. The Polish scholars bring both an outsider perspective to their readings of Canadian literature, and a deep understanding of medieval English literature and the position of the outsider – which is for some the standard trope of Canadian literature, when it is not the alienated and isolated outsider. Their interrogation of medievalism at work in English Canadian literature brings a fresh and theoretically aware perspective to the studies here. The

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M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus

Canadians, some of them scholars of Canadian literature and others of medieval studies, are thereby challenged to approach their own literature from a somewhat more removed position. The result, we feel, is a new kind of global partnership, a new engagement of medievalist perspectives from the nineteenth century to the present day, from two countries reaching across the Atlantic Ocean and re-engaging with the construction of the medieval in one modern nation – Canada.

1 “Men of the North”: Archibald Lampman’s Use of Incidents in the Lives of Medieval Monarchs and Aristocrats D.M.R. Bentley

“

T

he most interesting among the [...] Northern races were the Scandinavians or Norsemen […] Their Vikings and Sea kings, sallying forth in their frail vessels, made the North once more the terror of the world,” wrote R.G. Haliburton in 1869 in The Men of the North and Their Place in History; “[h]ere in the New World, we, who are sprung from these men of the North, are about to form a New Dominion in this Northern land, a worthy home for the old Frost Giant […] We are the Northmen of the New World” […] I am sick of hearing our poets forever harping upon the sunny South as ‘the land of love and song.’”1 Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) was living in Ontario in March 1869 when Haliburton delivered his lecture to the Montreal Literary Club, and there is no evidence that he read or knew of the influential lecture, but he certainly knew of the widespread belief that it articulated and helped to disseminate in the wake of Confederation (1867) – namely the belief that, as citizens of a northern nation, Canadians were environmentally and temperamentally aligned with the peoples of northern Europe and Britain, both modern and medieval.2 To a considerable extent, Canada’s supposed northern identity, most visibly manifested in the ancient fortifications of Quebec City and the neo-Gothic architecture of the newly built Houses of Parliament in Ottawa, was one of its ways of differentiating the Dominion from the United States, which was proclaiming itself the new Rome through the neoclassical architecture of Washington, DC and several state capitals.

1 R.G. Haliburton, “The Men of the North and Their Place in History. A Lecture Delivered before the Montreal Literary Club, March 31st, 1869” (Montreal: John Lovell, 1869), 9–11. 2 For a discussion of the origins and impact of environmental determinism in nineteenth-century Canada, see my The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880– 1897 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 145–50 and elsewhere.

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D.M.R. Bentley

As a student at Trinity College, Toronto from 1879 to 1882, Lampman enthusiastically embraced the Hanoverian component of his ancestry;3 among the works that he wrote after leaving college and settling in Ottawa are two fairy tales – “Hans Fingerhut’s Frog Lesson” and “The Fairy Fountain” – set respectively in Germany and Scandinavia; and one of his projects, he told a college friend in 1884, was a strictly Canadian poem, local in incident and spirit, but cosmopolitan in form and manner […] in the metre of [Longfellow’s] Evangeline but more like [Goethe’s] Hermann and Dorothea, or, nearer still, to the translations from a Swedish poet, [Johan Ludwig] Runeberg, who wrote lovely things about the peasants of Finland.4

That poem, The Story of an Affinity, was not completed until 1894, but in the interim Lampman wrote “Two Canadian Poets,” a lecture delivered to the Ottawa Literary and Historical Society in 1891, where he entertained the possibility that a future Canadian “race” and “literature” “might combine the energy, the seriousness, the perseverance of the Scandinavians, with something of the gayety, the elasticity, the quickness of spirit of the south.”5 The most substantial and important products of Lampman’s poetic interest in Scandinavia and northern Britain are (in order of composition) “The King’s Sabbath” (1884), “Ingvi and Alf ” (1895), and “King Oswald’s Feast” (1896), none of which has received the scholarly attention that all three deserve and reward.6 Between the first two of these are “Arnulph” (1884–85) and “White Margaret” (1885), two unpublished narrative poems with medieval settings and Gothic-revival sources that are relatively formulaic in both content and expression, but nevertheless warrant consideration as reflections of Lampman’s interest in the Middle Ages. Thanks to almost a century of the Gothic revival, by the 1880s and 1890s there was no lack of resources and inspiration to fuel Lampman’s medieval interests. Broadly speaking, a plethora of major Romantic and Victorian poets had used the Middle Ages as a setting and vehicle for their work, most notably Keats and Tennyson, both of whom were central to Lampman’s thought and practice. More specifically, several works of prose and poetry were available to draw his attention to the four kings who figure in his three poems: King Olaf II of Norway (tenth century), King Yngvi Alreksson of Uppsala and his brother King Alf Alreksson of Sweden (fifth century), and King Oswald of Northumbria (seventh century). Spawned in part by Walter 3 See my “Introduction” to Archibald Lampman, Scribe: Archibald Lampman and Episkopon: A Facsimile Edition, ed. D.M.R. Bentley (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 2015), xiii–xxxii (xxv). 4 Quoted in Carl Y. Connor, Archibald Lampman: Canadian Poet of Nature (New York and Montreal: Louis Carrier, 1929), 78. 5 Archibald Lampman, Essays and Reviews, ed. D.M.R. Bentley (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1996), 93. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Essays and Reviews. During the same period, Lampman wrote poems that occasionally contain such resonantly northern European words as “weirds,” “runes,” and “sleep-rune” (Archibald Lampman, Poems, ed. Duncan Campbell Scott [Toronto: Morang, 1900], 62, 22, 48). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 6 Here and later the compositional dates of Lampman’s poems are based on L.R. Early’s “A Chronology of Lampman’s Poems,” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 14 (Spring/Summer 1984), 75–87.

“Men of the North”

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Scott’s Harold the Dauntless (1817) and The Pirate (1822), interest in Scandinavian history and mythology had been growing for several decades by the time Lampman began to write, generating numerous works that were more or less accessible to him, including Benjamin Thorpe’s Northern Mythology (1851–52), William and Mary Howitt’s Literature and Romance of Northern Europe (1852), Matthew Arnold’s “Balder Dead” (1855), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Saga of King Olaf” (1863),7 Thomas Carlyle’s Lives of the Norse Kings (1875), and William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1877, with two more editions by 1880). Since Lampman was a great admirer of Carlyle, Lives of the Norse Kings may have awakened his interest in the influence of medieval Scandinavia, but arguably the most important influence on his Scandinavian poems was Morris. In a lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites entitled “The Modern School of Poetry in England,” which he delivered to the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society in or around March 1885, Lampman identifies The Earthly Paradise as Morris’s “greatest work,” but faults it and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1887) and The Life and Death of Jason [1867, 1882]) for “a universal monotony and want of hearty life” and for “the prevailing curse of the whole modern school – a morbid unhealthiness of the soul” (Lampman, Essays and Reviews, 67). Nevertheless, Lampman provides a synopsis of The Earthly Paradise (“A ship full of Norwegians set sail in the fourteenth century to search for a fabled country in the West” and so on). (Curiously, and, unlike the majority of his contemporaries,8 he dismisses The Story of Sigurd the Volsung as Morris’s “most unreadable” poem.) If by the early 1880s Lampman did not already know of Samuel Laing’s 1844 translation of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: A History of the Norse Kings, then Morris’s interest in the sagas, which had also yielded the Volsung Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda (1870), may well have pointed him in that direction. In any event, in November 1884 it was an incident in Laing’s translation that provided the inspiration for “The King’s Sabbath.” That incident, Section 201 of “The Saga of Haraldson,” is entitled “King Olaf Burns the Wood Shavings on His Hand for His Sabbath Breach,” the breach concerned being a violation of the Fourth Commandment, which, of course, forbids “labour” or “work” on the Sabbath: It happened on one Sunday that the king sat in his high-seat at the dinner table, and had fallen into such deep thought that he did not observe how time went. In one hand he had a knife, and in the other a piece of fir-wood from which he cut splinters from time to time. The table-servant stood before him with a bowl in his hands; and seeing what the king was about, and that he was involved in thought, he said, “It is Monday, sire, to-morrow.” The king looked at him when he heard this, and then it came into his mind what he was doing on the Sunday. Then the king ordered a lighted candle to be brought him, swept together all the shavings he had made, set them on fire, and let them burn upon his naked hand; showing thereby that he would hold 7 “The Saga of King Olaf ” is “The Musician’s Tale” in Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow’s Poetical Works (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, 1882), 359–80. 8 See William Morris: The Critical Heritage, ed. Peter Faulkner (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 230–67.

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D.M.R. Bentley fast by God’s law and commandment, and not trespass without punishment on what he knew to be right.9

Possibly because, some two years prior to using this incident as the basis for a poem, Lampman had taught Milton while working as a schoolteacher in Orange­ ville (north of Toronto), he cast “The King’s Sabbath” in the form of a Miltonic sonnet. The result is a single verse paragraph rhyming abbaabbacdcddc in which the absence of a distinct turn between the octave and the sestet – and, indeed, a delay of a break until the end of line nine – gives the effect of a brief but continuous narrative: Once idly in his hall king Olave sat Pondering, and with his dagger whittled chips; And one drew near to him with austere lips, Saying, “To-morrow is Monday,” and at that The king said nothing, but held forth his flat Broad palm, and bending on his mighty hips, Took up and mutely laid thereon the slips Of scattered wood, as on a hearth, and gat From off the embers near, a burning brand. Kindling the pile with this, the dreaming Dane Sat silent with his eyes set and his bland Proud mouth, tight-woven, smiling, drawn with pain, Watching the fierce fire flare, and wax, and wane, Hiss and burn down upon his shrivelled hand. (Poems, 51–52)

Olaf II, a devout and militant Christian who was later proclaimed Saint Olaf and patron saint of Norway, was also a staunch opponent of the Danes who, prior to his reign (1015–28) assisted Æthelred in fighting them, and, during his reign, led a failed attack on Denmark was scarcely a “dreaming Dane.” Lampman’s description of him as such is therefore erroneous and misleading, and probably dictated by the need to find a rhyme for “pain” and “wane” in the sonnet’s sestet. Other aspects of “The King’s Sabbath” reflect better on Lampman’s poetic skill. “[D]agger” rather than the saga’s “knife” is a nice period touch, though daggers are usually thought as having sharp points rather than sharp edges. “[A]ustere” economically captures and conveys the stern and “stringently moral” (OED) nature of the interlocutor who prompts the king to administer the self-inflicted punishment that ensues. “[B]land” may also have been chosen because of the need for a rhyme with “brand” and “hand,” but it does nevertheless suggest Olaf ’s gentle manner without being hackneyed, and the word “slips,” which may also have been chosen for the purpose of rhyme, is notable as an apt alternative to a repetition of “chips.” The subsequent description of the king’s mouth as “Proud [...] tight-woven, smiling, drawn with pain” succeeds well in providing a compressed narrative of the 9 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla; or, the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, trans. Andrew Laing, 1844. The Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #15b. http:// omacl.org/Heimskringla, 2:201.

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king’s physical response to the pain caused by the burning of the wood chips as – in another miniature narrative – they “flare, and wax, and wane” in the palm of his eventually “shrivelled hand.” Earlier in the poem, “Broad palm” and “mighty hips” perhaps insist too much on the king’s large stature, but on the whole Lampman is to be credited for allowing the reader to recognize without prompting that the king’s self-mutilation was intended (in the words of Laing’s translation) to “show […] that he would hold fast by God’s law and commandment, and not trespass without permission on what he knew to be right.” Although Lampman may have been drawn to “King Olaf Burns the Wood Shavings on His Hand for His Sabbath Breach” simply by its oddity, he may have seen its potential as a means of illustrating and condemning the harmful excesses that can result from an “austere” adherence to Christian rules, especially those enshrined in Mosaic law. Despite being the son of an Anglican minister and a student at two Anglican institutions (Trinity College and, before that, Trinity College School), by the time he wrote “The King’s Sabbath” Lampman was actively hostile to certain aspects of Christianity: in “The Revolt of Islam” (1880) he had written of P.B. Shelley’s “turn away from faith” as a result of “stories of the persecutions and oppression sanctioned by the church in ages past […] and the seeming harshness of some […] Christian doctrines” (Lampman, Essays and Reviews, 5); later, in “Life and Nature” (1889), the speaker “passes through gates of […] [a] city,” leaving behind him “churches” in which “organs […] are moaning shrill” to “meadows / Afar from the bell-ringing where he lies” “on the earth’s quiet breast” under the “blue […] [of] the heaven above” (Lampman, Poems, 139); and later still, in The Story of an Affinity (1893–94),10 clergymen in “great churches” “preach the great love and brotherhood of man” to “The rich and proud” who “S[i]t moveless” in “the velvet stalls […] While all that wordy thunder roll[s] and r[ings] / Around their heads and pitiless ears in vain.”11 From the perspective of Lampman’s attitude to Christianity, “The King’s Sabbath” may be an instance of the propensity of Victorian writers – indeed, writers of all periods – to use remote times and places as vehicles for articulating and addressing controversial contemporary issues in and through a looking glass. “[B]y bringing the Middle Age forward to the Present one,” Charles Kingsley wrote of Tennyson’s “The Princess” (1847), “he makes his ‘Medley’ a mirror of the nineteenth century, possessed […] of its own temptations and aspirations.”12 As Lampman himself put it, “[m]odern life is vast and complex, and the poet often finds that such primary feelings as belong to all ages and places may be dealt with more freely and with a sharper accentuation, when they are wrought upon a background of ruder and simpler custom” (Essays and Reviews, 63). Of the two unpublished narrative poems that Lampman wrote between “The King’s Sabbath” and “Ingvi and Alf,” “Arnulph,” which consists of well over a

10 Although not written until the early 1890s, The Story of an Affinity fulfils Lampman’s plan of over a decade earlier to write a “strictly Canadian” long poem. 11 Archibald Lampman, The Story of an Affinity, ed. D.M.R. Bentley (London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1986), lines 2:331–44. It is notable that Christianity is conspicuously absent in Lampman’s three narrative poems. 12 [Charles Kingsley], “Tennyson,” Fraser’s Magazine 42 (Sep. 1850), 245–55 (250).

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thousand lines of heroic couplets, is more medieval in detail and diction.13 Set in and around a “lonely” moated castle in an unspecified but – to judge by the Germanic origin of the name Arnulph – northern German or Scandinavian location, it is embroidered with words and phrases such as “mailed hand,” “charmed minstrelsy,” “ringed mail,” and “hour glass” that anchor it firmly in the Middle Ages.14 So too does the relationship between its hero and heroine: Arnulph is a “rough churl” who moves from admiration to love for his “lonely” “liege lady” Ida (a name rich in medieval associations by way of “The Princess” [1847]), who has enlisted him to lead her “true serfs and liegemen” in repelling the siege of her castle by a formidable army (“Arnulph,” 61). The poem takes place over three days and nights in which, by day, the large-statured and “yellow”-haired Arnulph (63) fights so heroically that the besiegers think he must be immortal and, by night, he suffers the indifference of the extraordinarily beautiful and also yellow-haired Ida. The turning point in their relationship comes when, after Arnulph has refused to negotiate a treaty to save the castle from falling into the hands of Lady Ida’s rapacious enemies and routed them in an audacious night attack, she overcomes her aristocratic hauteur and reciprocates his love. In suggesting that love conquers all class differences and prejudices, “Arnulph” anticipates the socialist beliefs that Lampman would later express in such poems as “To a Millionaire” (1891), “The Land of Pallas” (circa 1891 to 1896), and, indeed, “King Oswald’s Feast.” But Lampman may have had another (or additional) reason for turning to the Middle Ages in “Arnulph”: erotic fantasy. In the course of the poem a great deal is made of Lady Ida’s physical attributes and appeal, not least in the narrator’s initial description of her: Her sweet white face [is] lit round with tumbling threads Of thick-hung hair, sun-goldened, mistèd sad. And such a throat as for its beauty had No peer in song or ancient story told, A lily leaf sheathed round with curlèd gold Men said it was like some sweet death to see The golden youth and curvèd witchery Of her full-rounded beauty so distressed. (Lampman, “Arnulph,” 61)

As the poem proceeds, Lady Ida’s sterling qualities are much in evidence, as also are her “curvèd mouth,” her “silken-tressed” hair, “her soft silvern tongue,” her “pearly hands and brow,” her “curvèd breast,” and (twice) her “soft lips” (70, 71, 73, 83). As Arnulph becomes, by his own description, a ‘“love-mastered fool”’ (78), he longs to ‘“fold her between […] [his] hungry arms” and “touch her yielded lips”’ (80), desires that are granted in the poem’s climactic scene, for which Lady Ida prepares herself by slipping into something alluring (“like a bud” in this passage is particularly evocative): 13 Presumably Lampman regarded heroic couplets as appropriate to the military component of the poem’s theme. A similar logic may have governed his decision to sprinkle the poem with Homeric or epic similes. 14 Archibald Lampman, “Arnulph.” “Miscellaneous Poems,” Library of Parliament, Ottawa, ON, 61–94 (62, 65, 67).

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[…] her soft eyes were bright and glad, And all her garb was changed, and she was clad Divinely from the sweet throat to the ground In one long robe of snowy white that bound Her slender shoulders and the curved swell Of her soft bosom like a bud, and fell Down to her feet in many a shadowy fold. And like a racing river of deep gold From off her shoulders to her girdled waist Ungirt, with any ornament ungraced, The silken treasure of her golden hair Rolled down, soft-curlèd, and wonderfully fair. (“Arnulph,” 92)

That this description is derived in part from the opening stanzas of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” (1870, 1881), whose vision of love Lampman praises in his “Modern Poetry” lecture (see Lampman, Essays and Reviews, 62), is confirmed by its loud echoes of the damozel’s costume and hair: “Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, / No wrought flowers did adorn […] Her hair that lay along her back / Was yellow like ripe corn.”15 Commensurate with the “snowy white[ness]” of Lady Ida’s “long robe,” her feelings are those of an imagined bride: […] the eager blood From both her tender cheeks died pallidly With maiden fear and strange expectancy, And her breast heaved, and her white hands below Were hung light-clasped, for they did tremble so. (“Arnulph,” 92–93)

Lampman’s medievalized fantasy here reflects a very particular construction of the virginal bride, one that he shares with Rossetti. Like “Arnulph,” “White Margaret,” which consists of over sixty lines of blank verse, is set in and around a castle, in this case in an unidentified location in Britain. After a few lines of scene-setting that recall the “bitter chill” and “silent […] flock in woolly fold” of the opening lines of “The Eve of St. Agnes”16 – “One chill December evening, when the hounds / Lay shivering in their kennels” – Lampman introduces “white Lady Margaret […] / Beloved of Earl Robert” sitting by the fire with him in his “vaulted hall.”17 Contrary to expectations, she is not his wife but a foundling of unknown origin and class whom Earl Robert has long ago adopted and commanded his servants to call “Lady.” The plot begins to thicken when a gloomy and lethargic mood comes over Earl Robert and his castle, causing his dogs to be “hushed” and the “falcons in their mews” to “Grow lazy-eyed and fat” (97). Previously Earl Robert had habitually kissed Margaret when she welcomed him at the door after absences Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Works, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 3. John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H.W. Garrod, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 195. 17 Archibald Lampman, “White Margaret.” “Miscellaneous Poems,” Library of Parliament, Ottawa, ON, 96–117 (96–97). 15

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from the castle, but now he passes her with “averted eyes” and scarcely a greeting, behaviour that she strives not to notice: “Her bosom heaved a little, and she turned / And set once more her snowy hands to work / Patient and pale with grey, soft, serious eyes” (98). The emphasis on Margaret’s patience and devotion throughout the events that have begun to unfold mark her as a type of patient Griselda, whose more gruesome story Lampman may have encountered in “The Clerk’s Tale” or in a summary of it such as that by the Reverend J. Milligan in the 1884 number of the English Household Magazine.18 The cause of Earl Robert’s change in behaviour is revealed while he is away from the castle for an extended time, and a young page loyal to Margaret and gifted with second sight has a dream in which he sees Earl Robert with an unknown and extremely “fair lady at his side” and wonders aloud whether “my Lord / Could love that other lady” (99). On his return, Earl Robert reveals that he is indeed taking a bride, and “sad […] sweet” Margaret turns “patiently” to the task of preparing for the wedding and serving Countess Flora, who proves to be a callous tyrant who, with no objection or “pity” on the part of Earl Robert, assigns “Hard menial labours for her patient hands” (102). Countess Flora also proves to be a pleasure-loving and extravagant hostess who invites hordes of guests to the castle. “[G]arrulous whispers” of impropriety now speed “from tongue to tongue,” and the “noise and tumult” of the revellers begins to “chafe […] and anger” Earl Robert (105). The inevitable collapse of his marriage comes after three years of increasingly lavish and vexing revels and, as predicted by another of the page’s visions, Countess Flora brings a ‘“wicked prince”’ to the castle whom Earl Robert and the page see “kiss[ing] her on the mouth” while they are riding in the woods (112). Earl Robert’s anger gradually turns to grief for his cruel treatment of Margaret, who comes upon him “brooding” by the “hearthstone” in the great hall and tells him that she has been ‘“humbly dreaming”’ that ‘“some word or deed” of hers “[m]ight soothe and help” him on ‘“his road of pain”’ (115). Of course, her words do exactly that. As “White Margaret” draws to its conclusion, echoes of “The Eve of St. Agnes” multiply to the point of pastiche. As Madeline prepared for bed in Keats’s poem, the light of a “wintry moon” shining through a “casement high” fell on “fair breast” as she “knelt” in prayer (Keats, Poetical Works, 201). While Lady Margaret was expressing her “humbl[e] dream” to Earl Robert, “The great white moon shone down on the twain” “through a lofty window,” bestowing “A marble glow upon her spotless cheeks / And round her slender shoulders” where she “knelt” “Waiting with parted lips” (Lampman, “White Margaret,” 115). After Earl Robert expresses his hope that he and Margaret can undo the damage he has done, he “bend[s] down,” “kisse[s] her upturned brow,” whispers ‘“Come’,” and, with “trembling hands” and “bosom heaving,” she “follow[s] at his touch”; So through the moonshine and the noiseless hall, Around them hollow, dim, unechoing, They passed together quickly hand in hand 18 J. Milligan, “From London to Canterbury with Chaucer’s Pilgrims: Third Part,” English Household Magazine 5 (1884): 155–58.

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And came with silent footsteps to the door, And drew the heavy bolts and glided out Into the night […] (Lampman, “White Margaret,” 116)

Madeline and Porphyro “glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall,” slide aside “bolts” to leave the house, and flee at night into a “storm” (Keats, Poetical Works, 206). In “The Eve of St. Agnes” the lovers’ destination is “a home” on the “southern moors” (206). In “White Margaret” it is a “princely lodge” built by Earl Robert’s father in the “glimmering woods” where “in his vacant days / […] he loved to come and live the life of woodmen tough of limb / In strenuous health, clear-eyed and free of heart” (117). Not even when Countess Flora dies “in her rosy prime / Sated with intrigue and mirth” and Margaret becomes his countess do they leave their “woodland lodge” and return to his “hated hall.” In “White Margaret” medievalism becomes a vehicle for a Thoreauvian ideal of simple living in the natural world that Lampman would later express in “The Woodcutter’s Hut” (1893). “Ingvi and Alf ” is arguably the most enduringly engaging of Lampman’s published excursions into the Middle Ages. Dated 17 March 1895, it was completed some ten years after “The King’s Sabbath,” “Arnulph,” and “White Margaret,” an inter­val that saw him almost “get […] clear” of the “spell” of Keats.19 Lampman also profited from the publication in 1893 of its primary source: Section 24, entitled “Of Alf and Yngvi,” in Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon’s translation of Snorri Sturluson’s The Stories of the Kings of Norway Called the Round World (Heimskringla), an account of “two brethren” who “For jealous grudge / […] slay each other” (1: 37).20 Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon’s translation consists of three paragraphs in prose with a brief poetic coda, but “Ingvi and Alf ” is in blank verse, and includes techniques characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, most conspicuously alliteration and compound words. Here, for example, is the opening description of Ingvi and Alf, which is largely faithful elaboration of the first paragraph in Laing’s translation “Of Alf and Yngvi”:21 19 In the letter of 25 April 1894 quoted here Lampman tells Edward William Thomson that Keats had “so permeated […] [his] mental outfit” that he wondered whether “that marvellous person” had found a “faint reincarnation” in him; see Helen Lynn, ed. An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson (1890– 1898) (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980), 119, and see 117. 20 Snorri Sturluson, The Stories of the Kings of Norway Called the Round World (Heimskringla), trans. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, 3 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), 1:37. Words and phrases that appear in Morris and Magnússon’s translation and Lampman’s poem but not in Laing’s translation include: “bountiful” (in the descriptions of Ingvi), “moody” (in the descriptions of Alf), and “eagerest” (in the descriptions of Alf ’s wife Bera) (Sturluson 1:36; Poems, 348–49). In Laing’s translation, Bera declares that “happy would be the woman who had Ingvi instead of Alf for her husband” (Section 24) and in Morris and Magnússon’s translation and in Lampman’s poem respectively she says “happy were the woman that had Ingvi to her husband rather than Alf,” and in the former Ingvi sits in the hall with “a short sword upon his knees” and in the latter with “sword across his knees.” 21 In composing “Ingvi and Alf,” Lampman may conceivably have consulted Laing’s translation, but several verbal carryovers from Morris and Magnússon’s translation to the poem indicate that it was indeed his primary source: in “Of Alf and Yngvi,” Yngvi is “a great warrior and ever happy in battle, fair and of the greatest prowess, strong and most brisk in

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D.M.R. Bentley Ingvi and Alf, the sons of Alrek, reigned In Upsala together, kings; and each Was diverse from the other both in mood And habit of his hands. Ingvi was bold, And great of stature, fair of limb and face, A man of bountiful ways and winsome speech, Fond of his sword-play, fierce and fell in fight; But Alf was dark and dour, a silent man, Fond of the tillage of his acres, fond Of thrift and plenty and well ordered rule, Fond too of song-craft, and of cunning read, The lore and wisdom of experienced men: But he was grave and moody as men be That love much thinking but are slow of heart. (Lampman, Poems, 348)

Lampman may well have known the section on “Metre” in Henry Sweet’s An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse (1876),22 but to observe alliteration and compound words at work in a contemporary imitation of skaldic poetry, he would have had to look no further than Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, the opening lines of which read: There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old; Dukes were the door-wards there, & the roofs were thatched with gold; Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls’ wives were the weaving-women, queens’ daughters strewed the floors; And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.23

Even Lampman’s use of anaphora (the trifold repetition of “Fond”) at the beginning of lines may have been learned from Morris, whose poem in any case looms large in both the subject and the techniques of “Ingvi and Alf.” Wisely, Lampman chose not to imitate Morris’s distinctive rhymed anapestic hexameters. fight, bountiful of his wealth, and one of cheerful heart, and from all this […] famed and beloved” and Alf is a “moody man, masterful and rough,” who sits “at home” and does not “go to war.” Lampman’s more extensive elaboration of Alf ’s character in the opening account of the two brothers lays the groundwork for the complex psychological depiction of him to come. 22 “The essential elements of O.E. versification are accent and alliteration. Each full (long) verse has at least four accented syllables, and is divided into two half (short) verses, divided by a pause, and bound together by alliteration […] The other characteristics of the poetry are the use of archaic forms of words […] after they had become obsolete in the prose language, and the use of special compounds and phrases […] There is also a tendency to parallelism, or repetition of the same idea in different words. The last half of one line is connected with the first half of the next in this way […] [P]arallelism is common in […] poetical compounds […] Finally the word-order is much freer in poetry than in prose, such collocations as niht seó þístre (the dark night) being peculiar to poetry” (Henry Sweet, An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, with Grammatical Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. 1876. 2nd edn [Oxford: Clarendon, 1879], cii–civ. 23 William Morris, Collected Works, ed. May Morris. 24 vols. (New York, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans Green, 1911), 12:1.

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With the stark and foreboding contrast between the two brothers in place their story unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. One “shrewd autumn” – that is, an autumn “fraught […] with evil and misfortune” (OED)24 – while Ingvi is away “to the Westward” fighting and plundering with “his proud sea-dragons and his earls / And all his berserks,” Alf marries Queen Bera, a woman cast in the mould of Helen of Troy and similarly destined to cause division and destruction, albeit on a much smaller scale. In “Of Alf and Yngvi,” Bera is “the fairest and eagerest of women, a woman most gleesome of heart”;25 here she is all those things, and more: For Bera was the comeliest, and thereto The blithest of all women then on earth, The fairest shaped, the eagerest of heart; A spirit fashioned like the running brook With curve and shadow, fairy-foam, and light; A face of mirth and morning, and a tongue So sweet with laughter and so eloquent In all the bubbling womanly ways of talk That none had converse with her but his heart, Though grieved and grimly wrought, forgot its cares. (Poems, 349)

Alf ’s marriage to Bera is initially the cause of feasting, “goodly cheer and revel without stint” and her initial effect on him is positive – “For some short while [his heart] is forgetful of its gloom” – but misgivings soon rise in “men’s minds,” “and they deemed the end not well / Of such a mating.” Talk that “Ingvi should have had her” is accompanied by “dark tales of ancient wrongs, / And broken troths and bloody strifes of kin” – perhaps fratricidal “tales” such as those of Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, and, closer to home, Alrek and Eric in the section preceding “Of Alf and Yngvi” in Sturluson. As “Long days and busy months […] [are] eaten away,” Alf returns to his former “dark and dour” ways and Bera’s life with him “[Hangs] like a damp upon her soul” (350). Among the “Rugged [men] fettered to their ceaseless tasks” and the “bleak laughterless women” of Alf ’s “manor,” she is “like a summer wild-bird caught / And clipped and prisoned out of wind and sun,” and “sometimes, when she […] [is] alone, she f[a]ll[s] / Even to weeping, not for any grief, / But a sheer aching emptiness of heart.” Nevertheless, she remains a “dutiful wife” until the “Home-faring” of Ingvi and his “restless earles” from another expedition with their “bruised and sea-worn ships / […] rich in booty and full-fed / With battle.” “On the first night of Ingvi’s home-coming,” Alf and Bera sit together in the “high seat” “Amid the flare of torches and the din / Of wassailers merry with meat and mead” as the “bronzed sea-rover” entertains them with 24 It is possible that Lampman encountered the phrase “shrewd autumn” in Joseph Hall’s “The Golden Age,” which is anthologized in the “Chaucer to Donne” volume of Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions by Various Writers, and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold (London and New York: Macmillan, 1893), 542. The anthology contains a generous selection of Chaucer’s work with a lengthy introduction by Ward himself. “Shrewd” in this sense is now obsolete. 25 Sturluson, The Stories of the Kings of Norway, 1:36.

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D.M.R. Bentley The story of his battles and the run Of the long ship through unknown stormy seas, The taking of fenced towns, the deadly grip Of open fields fierce-foughten foot to foot, And how they captured a great stead at night Once in the Frankland by a lonely firth, And held it all a winter long, and fought With many hosts, and harried near and far. (Poems, 350)

The effect of this on Bera is akin to that of Othello’s tales on Desdemona (“She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” [1.i.167–68]), except that the responses of Bera and Ingvi to one another are mani­ festly sexual: […] as Ingvi told his tale, the queen, Who was the comeliest and far the best And blithest of all women then on earth, Leaned toward him, ever with flushed face and orbs Shining and smiling lips intent; and Alf, Silent and watchful, marked how Ingvi’s eyes Delighted with her beauty flashed and shone, And how his voice, as the wild tale ran on, Grew deeper for her ardent listening. (Poems, 351)

With the seeds sown of a jealousy that will prove as fatal as Othello’s, Alf stalks off to bed, bidding Bera “follow,” but, either because she does not “hear” or because she does not “heed” him, she remains in the hall, and he lies “long awake, / With anger and foreboding fill[ing] his soul.” In subsequent nights the pattern is repeated: Alf goes to bed alone and “Bera […] [sits] with Ingvi in the hall,” enjoying “kindly talk together” (352). Bera, “so fair of face, / So witting, so intent” is the best listener that Ingvi has encountered in his “lifetime,” and, for her part, she “Love[s] well the talk of Ingvi and his saws, / His tales of wild sea-faring, and his lore / Of other lands and other ways of men,” the result being that she becomes ever more “weary of her life, / And the dull manor and the mirthless folk.” As Alf ’s “grief ” at the apparent loss of his wife’s affection grows into “a tree that veil[s] the world / In poisoned shadows,” a “hateful picture” of Ingvi and Bera takes root in his mind: He saw the two […] set In talk together; Ingvi’s noble form And comely face and sea-blue sparkling eyes, And his blithe bearing, such as women love; Bera he saw, balefully beautiful, Alive and glowing with a terrible grace, The cheek rose-lit, that ever at his side Was pale and downcast, and the flashing eyes That never flashed for him. He seemed to hear

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Their voices mingled in forbidden speech, Or cruel laughter, and his doubting mind Grew hot within him. (Poems, 350)

As Alf ’s thought continues to darken, “He bec[omes] at last / So mad with brooding and so black with wrath / That life gr[ows] fearsome to him, and his will / A thing of terror” (353). The ensuing accounts of the darkening and complex emotional states of Alf and Bera and the growing tension between them are the psychological heart of the poem. Torn between believing Bera to be either “guileless” or culpable, and fearing that he will lose what remains of her regard for him, Alf “cloak[s] his anger” in “a mask of busy cares and blindness roughly feigned” (353). Bera is not deceived, however, but “Mark[s] her husband’s grim and growing gloom,” and, “chilled” by his “presence,” “cleaves more to Ingvi,” “not thinking / […] thought of evil” but because her “sunny-hearted nature” draws her, like a flower, to the “light” rather than the “dark.” The tension between Bera and Alf finally erupts in a scene reminiscent of the moment in “The Eve of St. Agnes” when Madeline “Loosens her fragrant bodice; [and] by degrees  / Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees” (Keats, Poetical Works, 202). With “light step” so as not to disturb him, Bera has entered the bedroom in which Alf lies “Alone and wakeful,” “and in the flood of moonlight stood, / And loosed her robes, and as they fell, the sheen / Lay soft upon her curved cheek and side / Like marble,” an erotic vision that prompts an explosive response from Alf: […] grim with rage And maddened by her beauty, [he] crie[s] aloud: “A shameless woman art thou thus to scorn Thy duty and thy wedded husband’s bed, To sit with strange and drunken men in hall. Art thou besotted? Dost thou never care For me, or for mine honour, or thine own?” (354)

As “The moonlight shift[s] on […] [Bera’s] comely form, /Revealing in the tender cheek and neck / A haughtier curve,” she responds to Alf ’s accusations with “angry pride,” accusing him of being an unsatisfactory husband, and confirming his darkest fears: “Men whose spirits are as dour as thine, As sullen and mistrustful, are not fit To wed with women, for their eager hearts Desire not duty and forbidding rule, But joy and fondness and free speech. See now How bountiful a man thy brother is, Frank and high-hearted. Happy were the wife Whose wedded mate were Ingvi rather than thou.”

In Morris and Magnússon’s translation, Bera’s final statement (“happy were the woman that had Yngvi to her husband rather than Alf ”) precipitates the predictable climax of the story, but Lampman adds a further incident. When he wakes

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the next morning, Alf forbids Bera to sit “With Ingvi in the hall apart from [him]” and then, overcome with emotion, proclaims his love for her while “Grasping her head between his hardy hands,” a “sudden and sharp” act from which she “shr[inks] away, / Not in disfavour, but too roughly touched / And startled” – a response that Alf interprets as rejection. “In a jealous rage he […] fl[ings] her fiercely from him, and rushe[s] out / A prey to madness” (355). “[S]o tells the tale, / That was the end between them,” comments the narrator in a gesture that nicely authorizes one of Lampman’s many enlivening additions to “Of Alf and Yngvi.” In the course of the day, Alf ’s “madness” renders him “half blind’ and “sick / With care, and passion, and conflicting thought” until in the evening he falls asleep exhausted, only to wake at “midnight” from a “bright and beautiful dream” “To hate, horror,” and the discovery that Bera has not come to bed. Concealing a sword beneath the “ample woollen folds” of his cloak, he pauses for a moment “as if doubtful of his mind” and makes his way to the hall. “[T]here in the glamour and the smoke” he “watche[s] unseen” as a sight that, heavy in its sexual implications, causes the “blackest deadliest rage” to “R[ise] up from his empty heart, and st[and] / Behind his eyes, and like a demon glare […] / Out of his wide white orbs”: Bera and Ingvi s[i]t In the high seat, and Ingvi ha[s] a sword Across his knees; and Bera, leaning forth, […] [Is] feeling with her fingers the smooth edge, And her bright eyes are fixed on Ingvi’s face.26 (356)

Knowing now that “The end ha[s] come,” he strides “soft footed, all unmarked” across the hall, “for men / […] [Are] witless […] and blind with drink,” and, drawing the sword out from beneath his cloak, “dr[ives] it clear / Through Ingvi’s breast.” It falls to Ingvi to bring the poem to a close “with a cry / Piercing and wild, [he] reel[s] up, and heave[s] his sword / And sm[ites] the head of Alf in twain, and both / On the grim floorway of the startled hall / Lay in their mingled blood together – dead.” “Ingvi and Alf” can scarcely be faulted for weak closure, but the charge of melodrama can scarcely be avoided. Indeed, the melodramatic ending of “Ingvi and Alf” draws it near to another manifestation of late Victorian sentimentality: the infamously fatal denouement (again involving two brothers) in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (1889). In his essay on Lampman in The World’s Best Literature (1917), James Cobourg Hodgins counts “King Oswald’s Feast” and “Ingvi and Alf ” among Lampman’s “poems of a purely imaginary character.”27 As has been seen, there is much of 26 The final line is quoted from the typescript of “Ingvi and Alf,” Lampman fonds, National Library and Archives, Ottawa, ON. The line is not present in the text in Poems, possibly because the editor, Lampman’s friend and literary trustee Duncan Campbell Scott, thought that it insists too much on the sexuality of the scene and wanted to protect Lampman’s reputation and his widow from unnecessary embarrassment. I am grateful to Steven Artelle of Library and Archives Canada for expediting copies of “Ingvi and Alf,” “Arnulph,” “White Margaret,” and “King Oswald’s Feast.” 27 James Cobourg Hodgins, “Archibald Lampman (1861–1899),” The World’s Best Literature, ed. John W. Cunliffe and Ashley Thorndike, Warner Library: University Edition,

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an “imaginary character” in “Ingvi and Alf,” but this is less true of “King Oswald’s Feast,” which is based, with substantial and significant, omissions, additions, and variations on a passage in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England that Lampman could have encountered in several places, including J.A. Giles’s 1849 translation in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library28 and, more likely, Auban Butler’s paraphrase of it in The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. Compiled from Original Monuments and Authentic Records:29 Wonderful were the humility, affability, and charity of this great king amidst his prosperity; of which Bede gives us the following instance. One Easter-day whilst he was sitting down to dinner, an officer, whose business it was to take care of the poor, came in, and told him there was a great multitude of poor people at his gate desiring alms. Whereupon the king sent them a large silver dish full of meat from his own table, and ordered the dish to be broken into small pieces and distributed among them. Upon this St. Aidan, who happened to be at table, taking him by the right hand, said: “Let this hand never corrupt.” Bede adds, that this arm being cut off from his body after he was slain, remained incorrupt till his time, and was then kept, being honoured by all with due veneration, in the church of St. Peter, at the royal castle of Bebbaborough, (so called from Bebba, a former queen,) now Bamborough in Northumberland. Simon of Durham, and Ingulphus testify that this arm was afterwards kept at Peterborough.30

“King Oswald’s Feast” consists of thirteen modified Sapphic stanzas that are pressed into narrative duty by interstanzaic fluidity (only six of the stanzas are end-stopped) and a liberal use of “And” at the beginning of lines (seventeen of the poem’s fifty-two 30 vols. (New York: Warner Library; Toronto and Glasgow: Brook, 1917), 15: 8860a–8860f (8860b). 28 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, also the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. J.A. Giles. Bohn’s Antiquarian Library (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 118: “In short, it is reported, that when he [King Oswald of Northumbria] was once sitting at dinner, on the holy day of Easter, with the aforesaid bishop [Aidan], and a silver dish full of dainties before him, and they were just ready to bless the bread, the servant, whom he had appointed to relieve the poor, came in on a sudden, and told the king, that a great multitude of needy persons from all parts were sitting in the streets begging some alms of the king; he immediately ordered the meat set before him to be carried to the poor, and the dish to be cut in pieces and divided among them. At which sight, the bishop who sat by him, much taken by such an act of piety, laid hold of his right hand, and said, ‘May this hand never perish.’ Which fell out according to his prayer, for his arm and hand, being cut off from his body, when he was slain in battle, remain entire and uncorrupted to this day, and are kept in a silver case, as revered relics, in St. Peter’s church in the royal city [Bambrough].” Lampman may have been alerted to the poetic potential of the incident by W. Foxley Norris’s “St. Aidan, First Bishop of Lindisfarne” in his Lays of the Early English Church (London: Parker, 1887), 19–26, and see 24 for the stanzas on Oswald’s feast. 29 “St. Olaph, King and Saint” appears under 5 August (93–100). Lampman’s “Vivia Perpetua” also appears to be based on Butler; see “St. Perpetua, and Felicitas, MM., and Their Companions” 3:55–65 (7 March). In the holograph manuscript of “King Oswald’s Feast” in the Lampman fonds the poem is followed by the statement, “This is told of Oswald, king of Northumbria, in the times of the Saxon Heptarchy.” 30 Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. Compiled from Original Monuments and Authentic Records, 12 vols. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1866), 8:97.

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lines begin with the word). Ignoring the Easter setting, the presence of St. Aidan at the feast and the miraculous event with which the account closes, the poem focuses almost entirely on the “charity of th[e] great king amidst his prosperity.” The first two stanzas deftly characterize Oswald as a monarch who has the best interests of his people and the Church at heart: he has “laboured all an autumn day / For his folk’s good and welfare of the Church,” and, as “eventide […] [is] well away” and “deepest mirk” (darkness) descends on “York town,” he sits “at meat, / With his great councillors round him and his kin” (Poems, 325). The contrast between the “folk” for whose “good” Oswald has “laboured” and the “great councillors” at his table already hints at the unconscionable disparity that the king will soon confront and address. The lines that follow create a vivid sense of not only the carefree pleasure and abundant food at the court, but also the luxury afforded by Oswald’s “prosperity,” which Lampman emphasizes by substituting “gold” for Bede’s “silver”: […] a blithe face […] [is] sat in every seat, And far within The hall […] [is] jubilant with banqueting, The tankards foaming high as they […] [can] hold With mead, the plates well-heaped, and everything […] served with gold.

In the next stanza, the disparity between rich and poor forcefully enters the poem with a servant’s announcement that “The folk are thronging at the gate, / And flaunt their rags and many plaints prefer” and that “many are ill-clad and lean. / For fields are poor this year, and food hard-won.” That this announcement is made, not by “an officer, whose business it was to take care of the poor,” but by “the doorkeeper” – the servant responsible for preventing unauthorized access to the building – suggests that Oswald has not been sufficiently conscious of the needs of the “poor” and that the “doorkeeper” is apprehensive that they will attempt to enter the building by force. (Significantly, the “doorkeeper” has observed the “folk” “through the grate” – that is, through “[a] framework of bars or laths, parallel to or crossing each other, fixed in a door, window, or other opening, to permit communication while preventing ingress” [OED].) The response of the “good king” to the possibly dangerous situation confronting him is based only on a recognition that to be feasting while others are starving is unseemly and abominable: “’Twere ill seen / And foully done / Were I to feast, while many starve without.” With this said, he commands that “the most and best” of food be given to the starving “folk,” who show their appreciation by “rais[ing] a shout” that “sh[akes] the hall.” Neither at this point nor when “lean fare for those at board [is] set” do members of the court object, but they have yet to witness the second component of Oswald’s “charity”: his command that “the dish […] be broken into small pieces and distributed among them.” This occurs after the “doorkeeper” reports that the “folk” are still unsatisfied: “They say they have no surety for their lives, When winters bring hard nights and heatless suns,

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Nor bread, not raiment have they for their wives And little ones.” (326)

Again recognizing the immorality of enjoying luxury in the midst of poverty (“It is not well that I / Should eat from gold, when many are so poor”), Oswald now sees the error of protecting his high social and financial status in the face of the needs of which he has been made aware: “he that guards his greatness guards a lie,” he tells the court; “Of that be sure.” In this new awareness, he commands that “the golden plate, / And all the tankards” be broken up and “give[n] […] the folk that thronged the gate, / To each his share.” To this act of distributive justice, with its anachronistic echo of Marx’s “each according to his need(s),” the king’s “great councillors” react with “cold surprise, and “Look […] on, and murmur,” but Oswald himself sits “unmindfully / […] dreaming with far-fixèd eyes.” “[I]t may be,” speculates the narrator, “He saw some vision of that Holy One / Who knew no rest or shelter for His head, / When self was scorned and brotherhood began.” The final words of the poem are a commitment by Oswald to social justice: “’Tis just,” he says, Henceforth wood shall serve me for my plate, And earthen cups suffice me for my mean; With them that joy or travail at my gate I laugh or bleed.

The echo of The Merchant of Venice in the final line (“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” [3.i.167–68]) reinforces King Oswald’s new-found belief in “brotherhood.” Given the reference to Christ and the allusion to Matthew 8.20 (“Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head”) in the final stanzas of “King Oswald’s Feast,” it is tempting to align the poem with Christian Socialism, but in view of the fact that long before he wrote it Lampman had distanced himself from Christianity and become a socialist, an equally if not more likely alignment might be with the movement that Ernest Belford Box – the coauthor with Morris of the Manifesto of the Socialist League (1885) – called the Religion of Socialism – a religion of this world rather than the next. “Socialism […] brings back religion from heaven to earth, which was […] its original sphere,” wrote Box in The Religion of Socialism (1886); “[i]t looks beyond the present moment or the present individual life, though not […] to another world, but to another and higher social life in this world.”31 It is worth noticing before leaving “King Oswald’s Feast” that, whereas Bede does not mention the geographical location of the feast, Lampman places it in “York town.” Could this perhaps be a reference to a more proximate provincial capital (Toronto, previously York), where in 1896 “great councillors” would have benefited from contemplating an act of distributive justice arising from “scorn” of “self ” and a sense of “brotherhood”?32 31 Ernest Belfort Box, The Religion of Socialism, Being Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism. 1886. 3rd edn (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), 52. 32 Although the reason given earlier for Lampman’s substitution of “gold” for Bede’s “silver” – and for his added emphasis on luxury – is probably sufficient, the change may have

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Whether Christian, Socialist, or a combination of the two, the message of virtuous human action founded on generosity, humility, and fellow-feeling in “King Oswald’s Feast” surely accounts for its presence in Ontario school readers such as The Fourth Golden Rule Book, Recommended by the Minister of Education for Use in the Public and Separate School Libraries of Ontario (1916) (319–21) and Selec­ tions in English Literature, Suitable for Use in the Lower Forms of High School (1923) (6.80),33 publications that must have helped to ensure Lampman a continuing readership after his untimely death in 1899. In October 1894, perhaps inspired by the appearance that year of Walter W. Skeat’s magisterial, six-volume edition of The Complete Works of Chaucer, Lampman wrote “To Chaucer,” a loosely Shakespearean sonnet in which he contrasts Chaucer’s time to his own, much to the detriment of the latter. Apparently regarding the fourteenth century as early modern, he envisages Chaucer as writing during the “high mid-spring” when “the new world was just begun”: For thee ’twas pastime and immortal mirth To work and dream beneath the pleasant sun, Full glorious were the hearty ways of man, And God above was great and wise and good, Thy soul sufficient for its earthly span, Thy body brave and full of dancing blood. Such was thy faith, O master! (Poems, 271)

According to the seasonal analogy of early modern/“high mid-spring,” Lampman’s present is a gloomy winter of discontent and disbelief: We believe Neither in God, humanity, nor self; Even the votaries of place and pelf Pass by firm-footed, while we build and weave been inflected by the heated debate in the United States during the economic recession known as the Panic of 1896 over whether to remain on the gold standard or switch to a combination of gold and silver (bimetallism). (“King Oswald’s Feast” was written in December 1896.) Broadly speaking, conservatives favoured the former and reformers the latter, in the belief that it would help to alleviate poverty and unemployment. One of the landmarks of the debate was the populist William Jennings Bryant’s widely circulated “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 9 July 1896. If the debate was a factor in Lampman’s decision, Oswald’s “gold” aligns him first with conservatives and then, with his decision to distribute his gold to the poor, with reformers such as Bryant. It is worth noting that 1896 was an election year in Canada as well as the United States: the Liberal prime minister Wilfrid Laurier was sworn into office on 1 July of that year. 33 Selections in English Literature, Suitable for Use in the Lower Forms of High School (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1923) and The Fourth Golden Rule Book, Recommended by the Minister of Education for Use in the Public Separate School Libraries of Ontario (Np: np 1916). The latter is prefaced by a page reading “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even unto them.” “King Oswald’s Feast” is also included in John C. Saul’s Narrative Poems, Morang’s Literature Series 16 (Toronto: Morang Educational, 1919), an anthology that went to eight editions between 1906 and 1914.

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With doubt and restless care. Too well we see The drop of life lost in eternity.

On the basis of “To Chaucer” Lampman might be expected to have gone to the Middle Ages as an ideal time of “faith,” “immortal mirth,” and “hearty ways” in search of sticks with which to beat the godless and inhumane world of “self ” and “pelf,” a strategy practised to powerful effect by Carlyle in Past and Present, William Cobbett in A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824– 27), and Augustus Welby Pugin in Contrasts (1836, 1841). Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Morris, and Lampman’s drift away from faith stood in the way, however, and what emerged instead in Lampman’s case were poems that interrogate a form of Christian excess (“The King’s Sabbath”), that put “dancing blood” in the veins of medieval characters (“Arnulph,” “White Margaret,” “Ingvi and Alf ”), and that use a moment of kingly generosity and humility to exemplify the socialist – and Christian socialist – gospel of “brotherhood” (“King Oswald’s Feast”) – poems that, collectively, enrich our sense of Archibald Lampman’s own “humanity” and of the impact of medieval literature in nineteenth-century Canada.

2 “Going Back to the Middle Ages”: Tracing Medievalism in Julia Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent and John Richardson’s Wacousta Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska 

I

“

t is like going back to the Middle Ages,”1 says minister Howitt, the protagon­ist of Lily Dougall’s short story “Witchcraft,” commenting on the local belief in Cape Breton that witches spoil cows’ milk.2 This single mention of the medieval in the story suddenly brings a version of dark Old-World history – not so much infested by witches as, worse still, inhabited by people who believe such nonsense – straight into a late nineteenth-century modern, and yet obviously superstitious, Cana­dian town. As Cynthia Sugars observes, early Canadian literary discourse is permeated by a sense of lack – there is in Canada nothing that is medieval or spiritual: no decayed castle, no ghost. Still, as she argues, Gothicism, rooted in a fascination with the medieval, is ever-present in the Canadian cultural and literary experience.3 In her study, Sugars is concerned with the historical circumstances that accompanied the shaping of national identity in Canada and which coincided with the Gothic vogue in Britain and on the European continent. Somewhat paradoxically, these circumstances had to do largely with a perceived lack of the nation’s own history, a basis upon which Canadians could found and define their nationhood and literature. As she writes, white settlers in Canada are “positioned as disinherited descendants of a Gothic past” (52), the country being at once too young to have been through an “ancient” and ghost-haunted phase of development, and spiritually too old, too progressive and too rational now to still undergo such a phase

1 I would like to cordially thank Jacek Mydla for all the inspiration at the initial stages of working on this project. 2 Lily Dougall, “Witchcraft,” in A Dozen Ways of Love (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1897), 197–217 (202), The Gutenberg Project, 30 March 2006, , last accessed 28 July 2018. 3 Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), see esp. 52–66; hereafter referred to with parentheses in the text.

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(53). As a result, early Canadian authors take recourse in Gothicism as particularly suitable for expressing their experience as well as producing and preserving the missing past. The Gothic romance serves to provide both credentials – representing a cultural-literary phase that, though critically unacclaimed, must be com­ pleted – and a “distant” history that the young Canada apparently lacks, whether it be projected on Quebec or on Nova Scotia (49–143). In so doing, it must be noted, early Canadian writers also effectively work to make medievalism a global phenomenon, partaking in the constant process of reinventing the Middle Ages in ways that suit present needs.  The present project is concerned with early nineteenth-century Canadian Gothic, and thus with medievalism as transferred into Canadian literature by way of Gothicism. I work here under the general assumption that any revival and redeployment of Gothic and otherwise medievalist tropes, rhetorical strategies and narrative devices has as its overriding goal the idea of making them relevant (perhaps even topical) in the new context to which they are being carried over. This chapter will analyze two Canadian Gothic texts, Julia Beckwith Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life (1824) and John Richardson’s Wacousta, or, The Prophecy (1851 [1832])4 – the earliest two, in fact – with the aim of assessing the extent to which they reflect and reproduce current realities, and the extent to which they reuse imported tropes, merging the two in pursuit of their own ends. Of particular interest is the extent of the redeployment of Gothic romance in the Canadian context, as these texts rework English imaginings of medieval history to suit contemporary needs, sometimes consistently, sometimes not. Kathryn Brush emphasizes the notion of medievalism as bearing double signification. One of its meanings refers to “‘conventional’ Middle Ages,” the other to “the ongoing process of imagining and creating the Middle Ages in a variety of subsequent eras, contexts, and cultures.”5 The very name assigned to the period is a post-medieval misnomer, a Renaissance construct, which fact may be actually seen as undermining any distinction between the imagined and the real Middle Ages.6 The term “Gothic,” in its turn, indicates a given continuation of reimagining and recreation, sparked off with the Gothic Revival. “Gothic past” as such resonates with a polyvalence of denotations and associations, a point made in Robert Miles’ account of the genealogy of the term. Miles notes the continuous yet ruptured process of emptying familiar medieval forms of significance and refilling them with meanings adequate for the given context: 4 Another text that unquestionably deserves scrutiny from this perspective is William Kirby’s The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec (1877). Particularly, Sugars’ analysis of the Gothic motifs Kirby utilizes could be extended to account for the medievalist themes he evokes and further reworks (85–95). Still, in order to fully grasp the status of medievalism and its traces in early Canadian Gothic, it is necessary to focus first on the earliest attempts at transplanting the genre into the Canadian context, which may help pinpoint and account for possible recurrences and variations in subsequent texts. 5 Kathryn Brush, “Introduction: Canoes, Crenellations and ‘Medieval Canada,’” in Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier, ed. Kathryn Brush (London, ON: Museum London, 2010), 8–19 (13). 6 Brush, “Introduction,” 13.

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Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska Gothic discourses are not, in the first instance, an expression of a Gothic sensibility; rather, they begin as the imitation of an earlier and vanished period. Gothic ‘dis­courses’, documents on the historical Gothic, are themselves a “rereading” or a reinterpretation of the past … and as such they disclose contemporary, and revealing, inflections.7

To speak of medievalism as transferred into Canadian literature through Gothicism is to speak of at least a double act of reinvention. While British Gothic is far from being true to Gothic history, relying on medieval symbols and associations transplanted on to contemporary realities, early Canadian Gothic, a Gothic transplanted onto Canadian soil in its turn, is thus also positioned in relation to the continued process of reworking medievalism. In it in this sense that I am going to account for St. Ursula’s and Wacousta as medievalist, or disclosing traces of medievalism. As both engage with the Old-World, or traditional, Gothic romance, they also draw from a certain set of medievalist imaginaries the genre/mode has to offer, and further the process of reimagining by adapting their material to colonial contexts. As a result, they “go back to the Middle Ages” by transplanting medievalisms on to Canada’s past – not a very far-off one, in fact – one with fear, the other with nostalgia, both not necessarily directly and obviously, while they still respond to contemporary and local needs. For Dougall’s minister Howitt, what makes Cape Breton regress towards the Middle Ages is the inexplicable persistence of Old-World superstitiousness in a modern colonial town, not so much the Gothic figure of a witch. What is noteworthy is that both the superstition and the belief in it are medieval by dint of association. The process of reimagining Middle Ages assumes an interesting form in the texts discussed here. Inverting the typical formula of borrowing medieval iconography to refill it with meaning, St. Ursula’s and Wacousta instead borrow the meaning ascribed to medieval figures, and adapt it to their own local and historical context, marginalizing or displacing the original iconography. The figure of the Gothic edifice illustrates this point particularly well. This move towards displacement corresponds with the requirement of realism typical of Canadian fiction.8 Simultaneously, this process impacts how a relatively recent historical time, not that far from the author’s own present, becomes either distanced and thus “medi­ evalized,” or presented as one that perhaps should best become so.

7 Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 17. 8 Canadian Gothic is notoriously seen as blending the imaginary with the realistic and historically accurate. Gerry Turcotte accounts for this blend by evoking the frequent positioning of colonial fiction as border fiction, aimed at conceptualizing spaces poised between civilization and wilderness, whose liminal character and resulting oppositional tendencies were part of the experience of the new world; see his Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009), 116–17, hereafter referred to with parentheses in the text. At the same time, it is the need to express this border experience in the wake of national consciousness that makes romance – and specifically Gothic romance, obsessed as it is with the fragmentation of the self – a particularly useful form (Sugars, 37–39).

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Hart’s St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life (1824) exemplifies this latter tendency.9 The first novel written by a Canadian-­ born author and published in Canada, St. Ursula’s is not an unproblematic text. Its very title discloses a certain contradiction: luring its reader with a promise of Gothic material, the novel proves realistic to the degree that, apart from perhaps two dreams, there seems to be hardly any supernatural to explain in it. While introducing an array of typically Gothic themes, from convent incarceration through international travel and forced marriage to incest, Hart annuls their effect by bringing them down to earth. As Sugars writes, “Hart’s novel has the distinctive honor of being a Gothic novel that is not one” (53). Thus, we may speak of it in terms of a succession of events – familiar as they are to Gothic readers – just happening, without any tension, and “ad nauseam.”10 The very status of the novel is similarly founded upon a contradiction of a kind: in Jennifer Blair’s words, “[s]uffice it to say that while St. Ursula’s might be forever celebrated as the ‘first Canadian novel’, Hart’s ‘little work’ now tends to be counted among Canada’s very worst novels of all time.”11 It is, however, possible, to consider the confusing, overly complex and un-Gothic character of St. Ursula’s in terms of its author’s attempt at adapting an Old-World genre to a new context that is not unambiguous itself. Blair convincingly argues that “the novel’s faults are also what marks St. Ursula’s significance in a particular social and literary context,” by accounting for the ways in which the text consciously engages with the topic of contemporary shifts in information exchange patterns.12 And it is also not without reason that Mary Jane Edwards speaks of the text in terms of “the ‘quintessence’ of early Canadianism.”13 Hart’s background incorporated the joint cultural perspectives of her Protestant English-speaking father of Fredericton, New Brunswick, with that of her francophone and originally Catholic mother, and her family story is one of cultural intermingling and mutual exchange resulting, for example, in her favourable views of Catholicism – which may already be seen as necessitating an extensive reconfiguration of the material offered by the Gothic romance.14 The novel consciously styles itself as Gothic to capitalize on this association. As Sugars notices, St. Ursula’s engages in a strategic manipulation of Gothicism: evoking the Gothic material while neutralizing it to simultaneously address the demands of the reading public and the critics (53–54). Furthermore, it also presents itself as a part of the nascent nationalistic body of Canadian literature (Turcotte 90–91). With each chapter beginning by addressing an established poet, from Racine to 9 Julia Beckwith Hart, St. Ursula’s Convent, or the Nun of Canada. Containing Scenes from Real Life, 2 vols. (Kingston, Upper Canada: Hugh C. Thomson, 1824). Hereafter referred to with parentheses in the text. 10 Nick Mount, “In Praise of Talking Dogs: The Study and Teaching of Early Canada’s Canonless Canon,” Essays on Canadian Writing 63 (1998): 76–98 (82). 11 Jennifer Blair, “Reading for Information in St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada,” Yearbook of English Studies 46 (2016): 201–18 (201). 12 Blair, “Reading for Information,” 202. 13 Mary Jane Edwards, “Early Canadian Literature in English: A Survey and a Challenge,” College English 51.5 (1989): 508–16 (511). 14 Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 88. See also Lilian M. Beckwith Maxwell, “The First Canadian Born Novelist,” Dalhousie Review 31 (1951): 59–64.

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Young, Hart demonstrates her familiarity with “the elegance and refinement which adorn the land of [Canadians’] forefathers” (St. Ursula’s 1: vii); simultaneously, she manifests an undeniable knowledge of the Gothic’s stock-features formula and the contents of chapbooks. In fact, St. Ursula’s draws directly from numerous Gothic texts, most notably Sarah Wilkinson’s 1807 The Fugitive Countess; or, The Convent of St. Ursula: A Romance (Sugars 53). It would thus be surprising if the author were not simultaneously conscious of contemporary concerns underlying the formula’s application, and of the differences resulting from her very own local context. The un-Gothickness of St. Ursula’s results also, to a degree, from the fact that it appears to draw from several genres at once, including the novel of manners and the moralistic tale (Turcotte 90). Blair discusses the text in terms of the convent tale exclusively, but acknowledges that St. Ursula’s frustrates readers’ expectations of this genre, too, with primarily its emphasis on communications allowing the novel to fit into the genre.15 However, the novel does engage with the issues generally addressed in the Gothic, and so, leaving the moralistic dimension to one side, the traces of medi­evalism often present in the female Gothic can be discerned. The nun’s testimony is particularly revealing in this respect. The Gothic typically adapts the figure of the castle as a contested image of patriarchy. Particularly in Radcliffean Gothic, the castle usurped by the aristocratic villain and his banditti turns from a refuge into a prison, and the role of the bourgeois heroine is to reclaim it, purging it of the lust and licence associated with the lower and upper classes.16 E.J. Clery points to the fact that the Gothic castle needs to become not only purged, but also owned, by the heroine, who has to obtain a proper fortune before marrying that she will be able to control afterwards.17 Clery thus links the Gothic setting – an imaginary version of a medieval edifice – as emblematic of the woman’s enclosure and entrapment at home with the way the nascent bourgeois order retains and adapts for its needs an actual medieval relict in the British common law, namely coverture: [T]he husband took control of the whole of his wife’s property, past, present and future; he had sole rights over their children; a married woman could not enter into any legal agreement or lawsuit on her own behalf; she could not bring proceedings against her husband in common law; and since her ‘very being’ as a legal subject was suspen­ ded she no longer held property in her own person – Locke’s minimum condition for civil rights. (Clery 125)

If, in the common law, coverture equalled civil death for women, in Radcliffe’s romances, it threatens female protagonists with actual death. While Mme Montoni exemplifies this most vividly, coverture is what results in the general ghosting of women – aunts, mothers, nuns – in these texts: “married women reduced to ‘ghosts’ or the ‘living dead’ by law exist as supposed ghosts” (Clery 125). In Radcliffe’s Gothic Blair, “Reading for Information,” 207. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 1989), xii–xiii. 17 E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123–24. 15

16

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the supernatural is engendered by the law – and as such it is indeed threatening to middle-class women readers (Clery 126). It is this Gothic theme – and anxiety – that Hart brings up in St. Ursula, though her own cultural perspective necessitates appropriation. The question of inheritance and property is persistently addressed in the text. At the same time, the mechanisms of patriarchy that result in the “covering” of women and their independence are displaced – in accordance with the actual provisions of the Quebec legal system – which results in a somewhat ambiguous representation of French-Canadian women, as not subject to coverture, and yet visibly covered with respect to their personal independence. While property laws of common-law Canadian provinces originated in England, the francophone population relied on the marital-property law provided by the Custom of Paris.18 Following the British conquest, and an ineffective attempt to impose the common law on French-Canadians, the Custom was reinstated in 1774 through the Quebec Act. In general terms, the Custom of Paris provided that, upon marriage, community property was owned equally by both spouses, though the husband had the sole right to manage it. Property inherited or acquired by spouses before marriage remained their separate property, though any income generated was also managed by the husband. The widow had the right to use half of the husband’s property as a dower, which upon her death passed to their children, and the remaining half was distributed equally between children of either sex. After the conquest, both spouses also acquired the right to dispose of their share in a will.19 In practice, the situation of a wife under this legislation was not remarkably different from that under common law, but the difference with regard to inheritance was notable, and the legislation generated general consternation and indignation among the British.20 Inheritance plays a decisive role in Mother St. Catherine’s testimony, which encompasses the period before and soon after the conquest. Julia de Montreuil, née de la Valiere, like Emily St. Aubert, inherits her fortune from two sources, though not after women: from her father-in-law, a descendant of the Counts of Bordeaux, who, following the supposed death of his children, in a will appoints Julia sole inheritor in case her surviving daughters should die prematurely; and from her father, a successful entrepreneur. Upon the death of her relatives in Canada, Julia is free to distribute her fortune among her domestics, her ghostly confessor Father Francis, and St. Ursula’s convent she enters (1:54). The text does not preclude that she might have been managing her fortune independently from the moment her father died, as was 18 The Custom of Paris automatically organized property in and after marriage unless the couple had specified otherwise in a marriage contract. For further information, also with regard to the changes in the English common law in the seventeenth century, which in reality sought to shrink previously granted women’s property rights, see Jan Noel, Along a River: The First French-Canadian Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 131–45. 19 Bettina Bradbury, Wives to Widows: Lives, Laws and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 63–64. 20 Alan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 70–71; as Noel relates, for the predominantly agrarian French-Canadians, the situation remained stable for a number of decades after the Conquest. Certain changes with regard to, for example, women entrepreneurship, marital market, and the general gender order were, however, faced by urban middle- and especially upper-class French-Canadian women. For a detailed account, see Noel, Along a River, 207–38.

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not atypical for women at the time, both in the British colonies and in Europe.21 At the same time, however, Julia is a covered woman whose financial situation makes her the target for an ancient institution, the Catholic Church. Father Francis and the abbess plot to make her enter the convent by hiding from her that part of her family, including her husband, is actually alive. Thus, for Julia, obtaining property equals becoming a ghosted aristocratic mother, immured in the convent, her activity reduced to moralizing and giving the testimony. Interestingly, however, instead of displaying a typically Gothic anti-Catholic attitude, the novel appears to dramatize Julia’s incapacity for becoming independent. St. Catherine’s testimony revolves around her relationship with her father, one of unquestioned subordination, but also a somewhat troubling succession. De la Valiere leaves for Canada following his bankruptcy due to shipwreck. As the master of the household, while habitually consulting his wife and two daughters, he gives them little actual choice in the decision to move (1:26); nevertheless, Julia promptly pledges to follow him to the ends of the world (1:23). Having married, she and her husband live with her father. After her husband is reported dead, soon after the British capture Quebec, Julia, having at first despaired excessively, is restored to her senses by her parents who remind her of her obligations towards her children. While she willingly accepts she cannot risk losing her breast milk, she appears terrified by the possibility of being forced to provide for the family: “‘Here, my dearest daughter, here is your child. Calm that violent sorrow, that you may live to be of service to your children. They will need your care. I feel that I have not long to live.’ ‘Oh, my father!’ I exclaimed, ‘I will not, cannot survive you’” (1: 37). What she willingly embraces is nurturing; what she refuses to accept is taking the man’s place, possibly both in the household and in business. The death of Julia’s father marks the beginning of her course towards identity crisis, depression, and final withdrawal from the world. As a result, the novel appears to intentionally raise the question of whether Julia, as a woman, could become independent. For example, St. Catherine suddenly switches from using the pronoun “I” to an atypical, excessive use of the pronoun “we” when she relates what followed the death of her father (Julia’s father). “We” refers to her and her mother, Mme de la Valiere, who now together appear to constitute a marital community: “We were at length aroused from the stupor into which grief had plunged us, by reflecting on the necessity we were in, of exerting ourselves in forming the minds and conducting the education of our children” (1:43). In this community, women do not seem to function independently, but form a striking unity, as if blending one into the other, with neither representing the other. Notably, referring to Julia’s mother only through “we” has the effect of effacing her identity; simultaneously, it helps Julia conceal her own, as if allowing her to remain “covered” once her husband, son, and father are dead. The mother is not referred to by name until the women separate, Julia leaving for Quebec to cater for the further education of her older and, by that time, only surviving daughter. It is interesting that woman–woman unity establishes its basic role as that of educating daughters. The novel does not provide direct information on the actual 21

Greer, The People of New France, 68.

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management of de la Valiere’s business or fortune; we are only informed in passing that Julia stayed in Quebec for “several urgent reasons” (1:45) while her daughter visited her grandmother. We are, however, informed explicitly that Julia wanted to rear the girl so that she was “suitable to” the fortune she stood to inherit, though Julia rather cautiously also preferred that she not get too attached to the money since she might lose it one day (1:45). Whether we ascribe such an upbringing to the overt moralizing dimension of Hart’s novel, or see it as an implied reference to the uncertain legal status of women in Quebec at that time, we may assume it to be presented as nonetheless faulty, for as soon as Julia’s daughter masters her school subjects, she dies. In consequence, Julia suffers from severe depression. In the short term, her condition results in the fact that her exceptionally pious Catholic daughter’s funeral is conducted by a female family servant (1:50), a fact that may be seen as casting some doubt on the family’s general devotion to the Church. In the long term, it brings Julia’s own mother to death, but also finally opens Julia’s eyes to the comforts offered by The Almighty – or at least this is how St. Catherine relates her story’s ending to young Adelaide. As the story goes, she cannot envision living for her own sake once her entire family is gone, so she enters the convent to serve society (1:54). We may wonder whether at this point the moralizing aspect of the novel might possibly serve as a cover for a deeper issue, that of the possibilities open to a wo­man poised between conflicting legislations, social demands, and gender orders, or simply held back by her own upbringing and status. Importantly, the husband’s testimony, given at the end of the text and thereby framing St. Catherine’s, establishes the upper-class women in the novel as lacking personal independence. This lack emerges most vividly through the major theme of baby-switching. As a patriarch, de Montreuil wields unrestrained power over his children, which allows him, on the request of his aristocratic brother-in-law, to substitute one of his newborn twins for his sister’s dead daughter, born the same day (2:19). The matter remains the men’s secret for years, with neither of the women consulted, nor, somewhat disturbingly, aware of the exchange. While secrecy might in this case signal illegality, the way in which the father, now the count of Bordeaux, reclaims his daughter, leaves little doubt. The matter is, again, discussed and agreed upon exclusively by men. Meeting with resistance from his brother-in-law, who appeals to the count’s empathy by pointing to the cruelty of tearing a daughter apart from her mother, the Count responds: ‘But I intend to procure for her a proper governess,’ replied I, ‘and shall superintend her education myself. She has nearly completed her twelfth year; and if her beloved mother be no more, will soon be of sufficient age to superintend my house. My brother, finding me determined, at length acquiesced.’ (2:48)

The passage clarifies the proper place of a woman in her husband’s/father’s household. What is left to the daughter and her supposed mother is to accept the fact. Marianne, having at first fallen short of words due to shock, thanks her brother wholeheartedly for his sacrifice (2:49).

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As a rule, the ghosted Gothic mother may be saved by her daughter, already better qualified to negotiate her way in this man’s world.22 Adelaide de St. Louis plays this role in St. Ursula’s, another girl switched in infancy (though this time by a Canadian peasant nurse). Blair describes the character as one who has “already learnt well.”23 With regard to information exchange, she points to Adelaide’s convent-­school education that makes her a worthy communicator by contemporary male standards: “[i]n a remarkable contrast to [the convent tale’s] hallmark convention, these young women function as active intercessors and are seen collecting, copying and conveying information, taking their knowledge to male family members in the form of written documents and displays of good reading.”24 It is notable here that Adelaide’s education has been nonetheless controlled by women, and, to a considerable extent, by St. Catherine. Nevertheless, when it comes to handling a woman’s status within the patriarchal family, Adelaide still has a lesson to learn. Having consented to marry Lord Dudley, who is, unbeknown to her, her biological brother, simply by leaving herself entirely at the disposal of her father (1:88), she develops a tendresse for another English lord soon after, but finds it impossible to take back her consent without provoking a scandal. She gave up her right to choose too hastily (1:94–95). What is left for Adelaide is only what St. Catherine has taught her, faith in the Almighty. And indeed, Providence comes to the deux ex machina rescue, in the form of the incest plot and the treacherous French-Canadian nurse. Turcotte views St. Ursula’s portrayal of French-Canadian peasants, informed by a loyalist dialectic, as simultaneously idealized and arrogant in a typically upper-class vein. Nonetheless, he also points to the fact that Hart qualifies her novels’ attitude by “cautiously and incompletely condemning the Old World generally, and notions of class specifically” (93– 94). At her wedding, Adelaide, now Lady Grenville, joins English villagers in dance according to a Canadian custom, and thus breaches local class decorum (1:133). For Turcotte, such a tentative gesture towards democracy is nonetheless “a generous concession” (94). In Blair’s reading, the novel represents French-­Canadians as suspect. This, however, is not a sign of prejudice but helps highlight the inadequacy of the old and British monarchical mode of governance based on family ties, and the manner of meaning-making associated with it, in the Canadian context: An interesting aspect of Hart’s novel is the fact that it concluded … by returning its French and English characters permanently to Europe. … The first Canadian novel, then, appears to safeguard the nation against a certain model of governance based on faulty attachments. It projects a future of the Canadian population that is not a biological reproduction of either the French or the British, just as it protects Canadian society from political subjects whose “reading” practices (and cultural discernments) are derived from those models.25 22 See for example Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 23 Blair, “Reading for Information,” 209. 24 Blair, “Reading for Information,” 209–10. 25 Blair, “Reading for Information,” 215.

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From this perspective, it is noteworthy that the peasant who switched Adelaide with Louisa Dudley saves the upper-class women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a striking contrast between Julia, incapable of living for her own sake, as if she lacked identity apart from the one her family used to endow her with, and the peasant nurse, Mary. Already a widow, having lost her only child immediately after she agrees to wean her to nurse sickly Louisa, Mary nonetheless promptly leaves for Quebec to receive the nursling and does not hesitate to secure her own financial future by secretly switching the girl for a healthy one (2:64–67). Years after, her testimony saves Adelaide from marrying Lord Dudley and committing incest, allows Louisa to marry him instead (in a sense, committing incest), and creates an opportunity to restore Mother St. Catherine to her family. In this way, an active, though immoral, French-Canadian peasant woman becomes Providence’s immensely useful tool. The Gothic requirement of purging the castle of the lustful aristocrat here perhaps becomes the purging of Canada of Hart’s patriarchs. From the Gothic perspective, the text codifies the recent past – almost the present, in fact – as a persist­ ent extension of a past distant both temporally and geographically. What makes St. Ursula’s Gothic and medieval is, thus, the subject matter. The text deals with fears that were very real at the time from the French-Canadian perspective concerning the law of coverture in French Canada and laws of inheritance relevant in English Canada, and also with contemporary fears and anxieties projected onto distanced places, aristocrats and Catholicism. Aristocratic characters of both French and English origins populate the text, denote what is undesirable and are, by the end, sent away. While Hart adapts Gothic formulas to suit her own local contexts, she minimizes medievalist iconography, retaining and updating what that very iconography was meant to represent for the readers of the traditional Gothic. Coverture, a medieval legal relic, is adapted and assimilated into the core of St. Ursula’s, with its unprotesting and malleable aristocratic women, and its one active and shrewd peasant. Wacousta’s engagement with medievalist iconography is a similar and yet different case. In Roughing It in the Bush (1854), Susanna Moodie juxtaposes the contemporary history of settlement in Canada with settlement in Europe by curiously emphasizing the duration of the process. In Europe, she writes, the gradual formation of towns often began “in barbarous ages, around a place of refuge during war,”26 such as a castle. In Canada, by contrast, locations providing water-power and fertile land guarantee rapid development of villages into considerable modern brick and stone towns within thirty to forty years.27 The following passage in T.C. Haliburton’s The Old Judge similarly indicates that the inherited Old-World notion of the passing of time is not necessarily applicable to the colonies: Among the various classes of comers and goers that have at different times visited this country (continued the Judge), witches and apparitions have now nearly ceased to honor or alarm us with their company. Forty years ago they were very numerous, 26 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush; Or, Life in Canada (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 115. 27 Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 115.

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Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska and every village and settlement had its ghost or its sorceress. Many well authenticated tales are told of their sayings and doings, and of their marvelous power.28

Sugars notes that Haliburton “uses Gothic nostalgia as a way of affirming a sufficiently ‘haunted’ and ancient past” (Sugars 118). There is more at stake here than Haliburton’s projection of Gothicism on to the previous century to achieve an impression of distance. Notably, for Haliburton, the haunted past is less than half a century old – and yet still sufficiently ancient for tales to be told about it. Moodie and Haliburton both seem to suggest that time in the colony accelerates curiously by comparison to Old-World Europe, as if several centuries were able to pass within the span of one generation. This acceleration appears to be an interesting twist on the Foucauldian notion of heterochrony – “a sort of absolute break with … traditional time”29 – and results in creating a somewhat heterotopic space, in which particular colonial regions are (dis)located in an attempt to produce a geo­ graphical and temporal rift that would allow the rising nation to claim a sufficiently distant past. This device, as it might be called, allows early Canadian writers to endow the colony with much-needed “ancient” history. John Richardson’s Canadian-­ Gothic classic Wacousta, or, the Prophecy, and especially its 1851 edition,30 is a not­ able example. As Turcotte remarks, the novel proves particularly Gothic in the way it handles brutality, suspense, terror, and gore (108). Medieval figures of the Gothic romance also appear. Like St. Ursula’s, Wacousta adapts the Gothic genre by assimilating the meaning ascribed to medieval iconography while exchanging the iconography for a locally relevant one. Simultaneously, its distancing techniques reflect an invented medievalizing past. The garrison at Fort Detroit – the locus of Wacousta’s plot – serves as an equivalent of the medieval castle in the traditional Gothic (Turcotte 116–17), often discussed alongside Horace Walpole’s Otranto.31 Scholars also note the fort’s coupling, or juxtaposition, with the surrounding wilderness as the direct heir of Gothic sens­ ibility in general and the Gothic castle in particular (Sugars 30). Transplanting Gothic reworkings of medieval tropes onto a realistic setting has a double literary/ political aim here. Richardson’s project is to “create a continuous and legitimate imperial past for Canada’s colonial present” as much as to “found ‘a national literary identity.’”32 Thus he sets the plot of the novel against a real historical background, 28 Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1849), 2:261. 29 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1 (1984): 22–27 (26). 30 John Richardson, Wacousta, or The Prophecy (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1851). Hereafter referred to with parentheses in the text. 31 See I.S. MacLaren, “Wacousta and the Gothic Tradition,” in Recovering Canada’s First Novelists: Proceedings from the John Richardson Conference, ed. Catherine S. Ross (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1984), 49–62, or Noel Elisabeth Currie, “From Walpole to the New World: Legitimation and the Gothic in Richardson’s Wacousta,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2 (2000): 145–49. 32 Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Creole Frontiers: Imperial Ambiguities in John Richardson’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s Fiction,” Early American Literature 49.3 (2014): 741–70 (749), and Currie, “From Walpole,” 157.

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as opposed to Walpole’s fantasy of a Middle Ages set in Catholic Europe.33 The spatially and temporally distant medieval setting retains its emotional associations – reprojected on the fort/forest – while the setting adapts to present needs. This not only satisfies the contemporary demand for both romance and realism in Canadian literature, but also has a particular significance with regard to Richardson’s political and ideological goal (Sugars 34–35). Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy observes that, by setting the plot of Wacousta against the background of Pontiac’s 1763 Rebellion, Richardson undertakes to erase the traces of French and Spanish history in North America and to frame “the continental past of the Canadian colonies in the larger British imperial narrative.”34 Thus, the representation of the fort/wilderness in relation to the Gothic castle illustrates Richardson’s project. The central motifs that Wacousta draws from Otranto are, as Noel Elisabeth Currie observes, inheritance and legitimacy: [Richardson] turns the historical situation of Pontiac’s Uprising into a “demonic world of gothic romance” and in so doing casts Natives as the illegitimate possessors of the territory. He achieves this first by using the discourse of savagery to weaken Natives’ moral claim to the territory, and then by transporting a Gothic revenge plot with roots in the European past to North America. … In Wacousta, Gothic conventions assert the legitim­ acy of English possession of the colony, against the claims of indigenous inhabitants.35

A number of appropriations figure here: the demonization of the Natives parallels that of Manfred, first identified with his castle, then distanced from it as a usurper; Gothic conventions endow the forest with a menacing atmosphere comparable to a crumbling edifice; and traditionally claustrophobic spaces that the Gothic heroine struggles to leave behind are projected onto an unknown open space.36 While the contemporary agenda ceases to be dressed in a medieval disguise, the associations typically assigned to the disguise remain in place through a curious reversal of the typical European Gothic distancing of present anxieties on historically and geographically distant loci. Simultaneously, however, an Old-World aristocrat haunts the text. Wacousta/Sir Reginald Morton is a ghostly presence, capable of invading the garrison and leaving it while passing the sentinels unseen, as if he were immaterial (Wacousta 11). While critics have complained about the importation of a revenge plot directly from the Old-World Gothic (Sugars 35), it is this transplantation that positions Morton – his family name identical with the name of the family castle – as the distant, anti­ quated other. As a first-born son with patrimonial rights he rejects (190), Morton finally comes to function as a “savage” tyrant in a quasi-incestuous pursuit of his own would-be colonial daughter, onto whom present anxieties may be projected.37 Currie, “From Walpole,” 147. Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Creole Frontiers,” 752. 35 Currie, “From Walpole,” 148. 36 Currie, “From Walpole,” 148–50. 37 See Margaret E. Turner, Imagining Culture: New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 38. On the other hand, Colonel de Haldimar as Wacousta’s double could be a personification of other qualities of a Gothic medieval patriarch; he is a usurper and the Walpolean curse is placed on his children. 33

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His identity, as Margaret Turner points out, is displaced by the move to the New World.38 Still, Morton does not simply turn into Wacousta, but instead his European identity experiences a series of marginalizations and shifts, which make it “corrupted, distant and deformed.”39 From a Cornish lord he transforms into a soldier and then a Scottish rebel (201), next into a French enemy (202), and only then into an indigenous chieftain. With each transformation Morton is further distanced from the colonizer until he becomes Wacousta, impossible to decipher, for he frustrates colonial discourses of superiority based on difference.40 He cannot reconcile with the colonist for he has “[left] the imperial centre” for good.41 Like any crumbling Gothic edifice, Wacousta is in a state of disintegration. This is indicated already by his incoherent appearance, his European features, and especially “the pale though sun-burnt skin” (57) of his legs, contrasting with the other­ wise perfectly indigenous attire.42 The disintegration begins with his rejection of the rights he has as the first-born son; with his dismissal from the army, Morton loses the status he chose for himself. The more distanced he becomes in terms of political allegiances dictated by vengeance, the more he also devolves in time into the opposite, not of the progressive, urbanized Canada of Moodie, but of European settlement progress as she fashions it. If we read Morton as a formidable embodiment of his family seat, we may observe that, from the castle as a centre of settlement development, he collapses into a barbaric entity that necessitates making the stronghold, Fort Detroit, into, the central locus in the landscape. He is, after all, the engine behind Pontiac’s conspiracy. This temporal and spatial distancing is subtly indicated through mad Ellen Hallo­way’s shattered sense of the passing of time. Ellen’s self has also been violently dislocated several times until it collapses into stupor.43 Carried away into the wilderness, Ellen loses her sense of contemporaneity, fails to recognize people, and her memory becomes unreliable (185–86). As she discloses her husband’s identity, she states: “My husband was Reginald Morton: but he went for a soldier, and was killed; and I never saw him more” (185). This may indicate her inability to distinguish life from death. In a striking contrast to Wacousta’s tragic/romantic, well-structured and self-fashioned life account, Ellen’s memories are fragmentary and fissured. She does remember Morton Castle: “It was a beautiful castle too, on a lovely ridge of hills; and it commanded such a nice view of the sea, close to the little port of ——; and the parsonage stood in such a sweet valley, close under the castle; and we were all so happy” (185). The castle functions as a landmark, the only well-defined place Ellen can now attest. It is also a landmark in time. A chasm of forgetfulness intervenes, as Ellen cannot recount Frank Halloway’s/younger Reginald Morton’s execution. Notably, she explains her inability to remember by temporal distancing: “but I Turner, Imagining Culture, 37. Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010), 7. 40 Edwards, Gothic Canada, 7. 41 Turner, Imagining Culture, 37. 42 For a discussion of Wacousta’s body as a “grotesque,” “troubling surface that denies signification,” see Edwards, Gothic Canada, 6–8. 43 See Turner, Imagining Culture, 36–37. 38 39

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forget the rest, it is so long ago” (185); similarly, the Morton castle functions as a lost idyllic place; nor does she recollect the older Reginald Morton, as if he also belongs to an even more distant past. Or perhaps, Ellen is well capable of telling life from death. Her description of Reginald Morton matches both her husbands, in fact. Both went to be soldiers; both were rejected because of a woman and lost their former status, leaving behind their identities; both were killed: one executed, the other expelled into the margins from which there is no return – and both are now gone. From this perspective, Wacousta, immaterial as he is when he wants to be, represents his own ghost. He is not only a dilapidated stronghold, but a haunted one as well. The haunted castle as a Gothic reworking of a medieval location, as well as an incarnation of an ancient order that is already gone (or that has to go for the present to thrive) is thus reprojected on a character in the novel – on Wacousta himself.44 Consequently, while Currie states that the wilderness in the text is a “menace in a world without any ancient ruins,” she is only partially right.45 Beyond Wacousta, the ruin of a British lord, there is one further ancient ruin in the text. In the 1851 preface, Richardson recounts how he was inspired to write the novel by the reminiscences of his maternal grandmother, Mrs Erskin, a life-witness to the siege. He describes his own visit at the site of the fort, years later: Five times within half a century had the flag of that fortress been changed. First the lily of France, then the red cross of England, and next the stars and stripes of America had floated over its ramparts; and then again the red cross, and lastly the stars. On my return to this country a few years since, I visited those scenes of stirring excitement in which my boyhood had been passed, but I looked in vain for the ancient fortifications which had given a classical interest to that region. The unsparing hand of utilitarianism had passed over them, destroying almost every vestige of the past. Where had risen the only fortress in America at all worthy to give antiquity to the scene, streets had been laid out and made, and houses had been built, leaving not a trace of its existence save the well that formerly supplied the closely besieged garrison with water; and this, half imbedded in the herbage of an enclosure of a dwelling house of mean appearance, was rather to be guessed at than seen; while at the opposite extremity of the city, where had been conspicuous for years the Bloody Run, cultivation and improvement had nearly obliterated every trace of the past. (vi)

44 Godeanu-Kenworthy notes that the plot of Wacousta is triggered by breaches of the law, initial transgressions committed by both Morton/Wacousta and de Haldimar. It is only when the transgressors die and the law, strict as it is but necessary for survival, is respected that order can be restored (“Creole Frontiers,” 759). From the perspective of Gothic conventions, however, this restoration of order opens up the possibility for a new one. While Wacousta and the garrison stand for the haunted castle in the text, Wacousta and de Haldimar also represent older and inadequate systems of societal organization in North America. Critics are divided on the matter of whether the fort is represented negatively, but it is noteworthy that both it and Wacousta eventually remove themselves; see Laura Smith Groening, Listening to Old Women Speak: Natives and Alter-Natives in Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2004), 34–35. 45 Currie, “From Walpole,” 148.

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“The unsparing hand of utilitarianism” discloses quite different sentiments on the part of the author than Moodie’s romanticized proclamations of civilization and freedom,46 but the process described is the same. In half a century, “the ancient fortifications” are not simply in ruin – they are entirely gone, their site converted into a modern American city. In this way, “the only fortress in America at all worthy to give antiquity to the scene” gives way to rapid settlement progress. The difference between Moodie and Richardson is that the latter combines the two development patterns that the former juxtaposes into one, in this way representing the relatively recent past as if it were distant by whole centuries. The city is where there used to be a settlement “in barbarous ages around a place of refuge during war,”47 so distant in time and space, in fact, that its traces are already gone.48 The Preface, set firmly in the realistic present, marks a temporal rift against both the author’s genealogy, the story itself told in the Gothic mode, and the historical events around which the novel oscillates. The acceleration of time and temporal distancing produce a sort of Canadian medieval past: a past that, from the perspective of the contemporary international reader, could parallel in its literary and national function the Middle Ages in Europe. It is in this way that Richardson attempts to romanticize the North American Wilds into the stuff of a national literature.49 In a Canadian heterotopy, fifty years prove enough for the whole process of attaining national and cultural history and maturity to occur and conclude with the arrival of an industrial and rational modernity to succeed the medieval time of the fort’s isolation and constant threat. The past is both nostalgically preserved and codified as bygone. It is debatable whether Richardson’s manner of transplanting the Gothic onto Canadian soil was entirely successful. As Godeanu-Kenworthy emphasizes, there are in fact three audiences that early Canadian writers typically address: colonial, metropolitan, and Anglo-continental.50 Perhaps this multiplicity of audiences exacer­bates the difficulty of attaining a satisfactory level of relevance. Perhaps the novel is indeed faulty in its application of Gothic conventions to the Canadian context, in that those conventions, associated with firmly recognizable discourses, are somewhat limiting in expression and representation.51 Sugars points to the ways in which Wacousta may be seen as too Gothic in the European fashion and insufficiently local; given its penchant for gore and Gothic excess, as well as the imported revenge plot, the novel fails to “tap into the truly uncanny nature of Canadian social and settlement anxieties” (Sugars 35). Wacousta, like St. Ursula’s, epitomizes the difficulties faced by early Canadian writers when applying Old-World genres – the Gothic and romance – to render a specifically Canadian experience (Sugars 36). And yet the attempt to adapt the traditional Gothic to a local context is what makes both texts partake in the ongoing, global process of reimagining and recreating the Middle Ages across eras, contexts and cultures. Both Hart and Richardson 46 47 48 49 50 51

Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 115. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 115. Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, 115. See Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Creole Frontiers,” 765. Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Creole Frontiers,” 742. See e.g. Turner, Imagining Culture, 32; or Groening, Listening to Old Women Speak, 29.

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focus on Canada’s relatively recent past but transplant medievalisms they “inherit” from the Gothic romance onto Canadian soil, though not without revaluing and assimilating them into the new context first. Both authors abide by the requirement of realism so that medieval Gothic settings become more contemporary and local. This is especially the case for St. Ursula’s, which does not attempt to medievalize its history to provide a missing past for a rising country. Rather, it appears to find enough medievalist – and thus terrific – material in the present by focusing on the issue of a woman’s status in a patriarchal family. While coverture in relation to property laws did threaten French-Canadian women of Quebec at the time of the conquest, Hart delves into other ways in which her upper-class heroines prove to be covered. She invokes an image of the medieval past that, once imported from the Old to the New World, persists in the present, to the inhabitants’ distress. In so doing, she also makes a gesture, even if a somewhat hesitant one, towards Canada’s future in which the present could in the end become the bygone and geographically distanced past. Nevertheless, the Gothic does inherently draw from “historical and folkloric sources based in local tradition and antiquity” (Sugars 36), the latter component being absent from Canada in white settler discourse. Where Hart attempts to bridge the Old and New World (Turcotte 91), Richardson aims to provide the missing distant past – a Middle Ages that would become the source for Canadian Gothic stories. While on the one hand it displaces medievalist icons to abide by the Gothic formula of projecting current anxieties onto temporally and geographically distant people and places, on the other, Wacousta engages a kind of temporal paradox: the need to produce a certain sense of the present by distancing temporally – and consequently medievalizing – the relatively recent past.

3 John Richardson’s Wacousta and the Transfer of Medievalist Romance Anna Czarnowus

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edievalist romance in Canada did not appear out of nowhere. Its presence in early Canadian literature was firmly grounded in the situation in which, to quote from Kathryn Brush’s introduction to Mapping Medi­ evalism at the Canadian Frontier, “the Middle Ages [were] embedded in Canadian history, identity, and culture in the form of mental conditioning.”1 In architecture, Gothic/Medieval Revival buildings were erected, including, for example, the London District Courthouse built between 1827 and 1829.2 Gothic conventions started to be used in literary texts, including novels such as John Richardson’s Wacousta, in which the Gothic conventions acquired a medievalist element. In this novel the literary medievalism is complemented with medievalist buildings, starting with Fort Détroit and ending with the medieval and post-medieval castles of Scotland and Cornwall. More specifically, the literary tradition of romance writing was transferred to Canada in a manner very similar to the transfer of Gothic architecture to the British colony. Furthermore, the indigenous past could provide white settlers with an equivalent of the medieval European past. Richardson’s classic Wacousta, published in 1832, exemplifies both the cultural transfer of gothicisms to Upper Canada and the transmission of romance as a genre from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, where it often adopts the form of colonial romance. The novel demonstrates the two manners in which the Middle Ages existed in the Enlightenment, which was apparently continued in Romanticism, at least in Canada. John Simons comments on this two-faceted presence of the medieval in this cultural period in England as the vogue for the

1 Kathryn Brush, “Introduction: Canoes, Crenellations, and ‘Medieval’ Canada,” in Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier, ed. Kathryn Brush (London, ON: Museum London, 2010), 8–19 (15). 2 For a discussion of the London District Courthouse, later called Middlesex County Courthouse and now Middlesex County Building, see Claire Feagan, “Castle-Building in Canada’s ‘New’ London: The Architecture of Authority, Ideology, and Romance,” in Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier, 20–31.

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Gothic, understood as the fanciful “Strawberry Hill” Gothic of Horace Walpole and his imitators.3 On the one hand the Middle Ages were imagined as the time of barbarism and viciousness, and on the other, as Simons argues: the Gothic romances of Walpole, Radcliffe, Reeve and others exploited this very distaste and made it a subject for fiction. Contrary to the current critical orthodoxy on Gothic fiction, which tends to offer to an otherwise repressed audience a titillating and almost pornographic alternative to mainstream literature and representing a revolutionary new direction in taste, careful reading of the romances will disclose that the Gothic actually reproduced very faithfully a body of opinion about the Middle Ages that had been current in one form or another for the best part of half a century. At the same time, this perception was being contested by the careful scholarship of a new generation of antiquarians and scholars who found in the Middle Ages not barbar­ ism but a sophisticated and complex culture, which offered a very real foundation for understanding of the present. Thus, a contemplation of the medieval romances and their neo-Gothic imitators in polite contexts shows a picture of discontinuity not only in the transmission of romance from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment but also within the polite audiences of the Enlightenment itself.4

As a consequence, it may be argued that what Wacousta does is to continue the tradition of romance in the sense of following in the footsteps of Gothic writers in England, such as Horace Walpole or Mrs Radcliffe. After all, it provides a sensational plot that is intentionally full of terror, and the strong emotions of the characters could be reflected in the emotional responses of the reading audiences. It also gives its readers a distinctly Canadian equivalent of what in the English Gothic romance was the medieval past. Obviously, Richardson could not write about the Canadian Middle Ages. What he did instead, then, was to form two images of the past: the near past of 1832, which in the case of Wacousta is the year 1763 and Ponteac’s resistance to the British, and the past of Scotland and Cornwall, which is much more mythical in the text. The choice of 1763 as a temporal setting also entails the presence of indigenous people, who for Canadians symbolized a primitivism similar to that offered by medieval culture for Europeans at the time. Yet another temporal dimension that functions in a manner very much like the existence of the Middle Ages in relation to the eighteenth and nineteenth century is the history of the Scots and even the Cornish as oppressed by imperial England. Scotland and Cornwall in the novel appear to be much more primeval than England, related to the past rather than the present, and replete with very old castles and fortresses. This temporal setting is also present in the form of references to specific historical events. Importantly, Fort Détroit in Wacousta provides a similar, pseudo-medieval, hence medievalist, architectural background to the events, and hence the ancient lands of Scotland and Cornwall have their cultural landscape apparently repeated in the Canadian colonies of Britain. 3 John Simons, “Chapbooks and Penny Histories,” in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 177–96 (185). 4 John Simons, “Chapbooks and Penny Histories,” 177–96 (185).

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Even if on the surface Wacousta is a novel where, in the Gothic manner, the concept of horror is exaggerated on purpose and non-scholarly ideas about the past are reproduced, it also shows that the indigenous peoples of Canada had their own culture, which could be seen as an equivalent of what Simons calls the “sophisticated and complex culture” of medieval Europe.5 If romance as a genre stemmed from this medieval culture, there was a possibility of adopting it in the Canadian context, particularly when the Scottish and Cornish past was incorporated into this image. Importantly, Natives, in the text called “Ottawa Indians,” stand not only for past barbarity, but also for the cultural difference of the people who lived in Canada before the Europeans settled there. Representations of indigenous people have therefore at least two functions. First, their role was to show to what extent people in the past were barbaric, which in the English Gothic was exemplified by medieval atrocities and in Wacousta by the Natives, who epitomized primitivism with their cruelty and specific practices of scalping their enemies. Secondly, however, their role was to demonstrate what culture preceded the nineteenth-century white settler one. The English Gothic authors revelled in the sophistication of the Middle Ages, but Richardson inserted ethnographic descriptions of Ponteac’s people to show his own sense of wonder at Native culture.6 In the introduction, Richardson resorts to stock elements used to invoke terror in readers of Gothic fiction. He presents the time of the first settlements after the victorious capture of French territories by the British as a terrifying period, a representation that evolved into the famous “garrison mentality” of Margaret Atwood.7 As she points out, “outside the walls are the hostile forces, Nature and the Indians.”8 Richardson in Wacousta exactly presages Atwood’s formulation: … the period was so fearful and pregnant with events of danger, the fort being assailed on every side by a powerful and vindictive foe, that a caution and vigilance of no uncommon kind were exceedingly exercised by the prudent governor for the safety of those committed to his charge. (24)9

Hence instead of the typical monsters, ghosts, and other apparitions of Gothic romance, in the world of the novel the principal object of fear is the Native, here characterized first as a “powerful and vindictive foe.” Importantly, indigenous people appear to be the Canadian equivalents of the ghosts that haunt earlier Gothic John Simons, “Chapbooks and Penny Histories,” 177–96 (185). According to David Beardsley, Richardson had real-life contacts with Native culture, since “he must have been fascinated … by the comings and goings of traders and Indians in his grandfather’s trading business,” and he even became acquainted with Tecumseh; see David R. Beardsley, The Canadian Don Quixote: The Life and Works of Major John Richardson, Canada’s First Novelist (Oakville: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1977), 11, 17, and passim. 7 For another discussion of Wacousta in the context of “garrison mentality,” see Robert Lecker, “Patterns of Deception in Wacousta,” in The Canadian Novel, vol. II, Beginnings, ed. John Moss (Toronto: New Canada Publications, 1980), 47–59 (47). 8 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 94. 9 All quotations from Wacousta, followed by parenthetical page numbers in the text, come from the following edition: John Richardson, Wacousta; or, the Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991). 5

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fiction in England. They have to be confronted in their “cunning and numbers” (24). This leads to the “sentiment of union” (24) felt in the garrison, understandable given a situation in which “the savages may be around us, though unseen” (39). In The Haunted Wilderness, Margaret Northey comments that in the novel nature “was haunted by the Indians … who at times appear as gothic embodiments of inscrut­able demonism.”10 Richardson here presents an image similar to visions of the Middle Ages in popular Enlightenment culture, where early medieval people were barbaric. The Natives could in this way be seen as yet another embodiment of this primitivism, an idea endemic to medievalism.11 (Later medieval culture, for example, was excoriated in Gothic fiction for its blind observance of Christian rituals and the combination of piety and cruelty within its very core.12) The Natives are firstly constructed as primitive, only to be criticized later for their blind observance of Ponteac’s politics and their sophisticated cruelty. The frequently anti-Catholic sentiment of English Gothic fiction, visible in texts such as Matthew Lewis’s Monk, finds its equivalent in the initial anti-indigenous atmosphere of Wacousta. Gothic fiction appears to dwell on hostility towards difference, either religious or cultural, a point true both of the original English Gothic and of the Canadian Gothic. The monstrosity of Natives is visible in Richardson, for example, in the scene when an attack “was instantly succeeded by a fierce, wild, and prolonged cry, expressive at once of triumph and revenge. It was that peculiar cry which an Indian utters when the reeking scalp has been wrested from his murdered victim” (37). Indigenous people take up not only a part of the landscape of the colony, but also its soundscape. If the Middle Ages in the Gothic culture functioned as the equivalent of the “long ago, far away,” in the Canadian context this “long ago” could only be provided by the colonial beginnings of the British rule in some parts of Canada and an impression of distance could be achieved by writing about the cultural distance of indigenous tribes from their colonizers – a strategy exemplified by Wacousta. Some of the descriptions in the text appear to be attempts at ethnographic writing, such as when Richardson writes: There were few forms of courtesy observed by the warriors towards the English officers on entering the council room. Ponteac, who had collected all his native haughtiness into one proud expression of look and figure, strode in without taking the slightest notice even of the governor. The other chiefs imitated his example, and all took their seats upon the matting in the order prescribed by their rank among the tribes, and their experience in council. The Ottawa chief sat at the near extremity of the room, and immediately facing the governor. A profound silence was observed for some minutes after the Indians had seated themselves, during which they proceeded to find their pipes. The handle of that of the Ottawa chief was decorated with numerous feathers fancifully disposed. (195) 10 Margaret Northey, The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 23. 11 Laura Morowitz, “Primitive,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), 189–98. 12 The possible anti-Catholicism of Gothic fiction is examined by Mark Canuel in Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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On the one hand, Natives are terrifying through their physical otherness and behavior, which radically differs from what was acceptable in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Europe. On the other, however, the difference they represent may become a source of fascination for the observers. Such was very likely Richardson’s intention: to show his personal interest in the other culture of colonial Canada, but also to illustrate the idea that indigenous people could be seen as sophisticated, which is the same as the perception of medieval people by intellectuals and scholars in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Such descriptions become the locus of transfer from the conventions of Gothic romance, where there is a need for a foe who will been object of fear – and the presence of a Native satisfies this need – to colonial romance. Wacousta undoubtedly becomes a colonial romance here, since it is not just a text about identity formation and a quest for love as an important element of one’s identity, but is also about colonial relations, or the relations between different groups inhabiting the colony: British settlers, Natives, and also the French who were forced to give up the colony to the British, but whose cultural presence was still tangible in the period described and later. The colonial relations in Upper Canada are alluded to in such descriptions as the one above, since the relationships of subjugation and domination, as opposed to resistance to the two, are expressed under the pretext of describing just the apparel and behaviour of the two groups, Natives and British colonizers. The description of Wacousta himself, at this point identified as just an indigenous warrior, also suggests the idea of resistance under the colonial rule: The individual, a man of tall stature, was powerfully made. He wore a jerkin, or hunting coat, of leather, and in his arms were a rifle which had every appearance of having been discharged, a tomahawk reeking with blood, and a scalping-knife, which, in the hurry of some recent service it had been made to perform, had missed its sheath, and was thrust naked into the belt that encircled his loins. His countenance wore an expression of malignant triumph; and as his eye fell on the assembled throng, its self-satisfied and exulting glance seemed to give them to understand he came not without credentials to recommend him to their notice. Captain de Haldimar was particularly struck by the air of bold daring and almost insolent recklessness pervading every movement of this man; and it was difficult to say whether the haughtiness of bearing peculiar to Ponteac himself, was not exceeded by that of this herculean warrior. (244)

Wacousta is primarily identifiable as a symbol of resistance to the colonizers. Importantly, however, his primitive image evokes associations with indigenous culture as a Canadian equivalent of a barbaric European medieval culture. He appears to come from some dark age, when cruelty was the norm and atrocities were committed on an everyday basis in warfare. Wacousta is called a “herculean warrior,” but he does not share much with Greek culture, and conforms more with figures from the Middle Ages as they were popularly imagined during the Enlightenment. It needs to be stressed that the image of Wacousta himself does not produce fascination with his ethnically and culturally different world. (As becomes clear later, Wacousta is not in fact indigenous.) He is marked here as an object of terror; the more enlightened mode of seeing the other, that marked with fascination, is not present in discussions of Wacousta.

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The overall impression of medievalism in the novel is enhanced when events anterior to the main plot are discussed. The romance in question becomes even more colonial once the events that took place in Scotland return in the flashback narration of Wacousta himself. Both Sir Reginald Morton, who adopted the name of Wacousta only on Canadian soil, and Charles de Haldimar were officers in the English army occupying the Scottish Highlands after the defeat of the Jacobite rebels in 1745. Morton lost the hand of Clara Beverley through a successful ruse by de Haldimar. As a result, Morton fell into disgrace and ultimately became one of Ponteac’s warriors. Obviously, the events above did not take place in medieval Scotland, but in the novel this land itself is consistently described as foreign, mysterious, and primeval in relation to eighteenth-century England. This makes eighteenth-century Scotland much more medievalist than England. The colonial conflict between England and Scotland is alluded to once the political situation of Scotland towards England appears in the plot: If the head of our family was unfortunate enough to be considered a traitor to England, he was not so, at least, to Scotland; and Scotland was the land of his birth. But let his political errors be forgotten. (120)

Scotland is thus characterized as the land of rebels who direct their political activities against England and a place where traitors to England are accepted or even supported. The future mother of the de Haldimars (Frederick, Charles, and Clara) was Scottish, which is stressed in the passage: “Clara [de Haldimar] suddenly breathed, … her soul was intent only on a story that related so immediately to her beloved mother, of whom all she had hitherto known was, that she was a native of Scotland, and that her father had married her while quartered in that country” (450). The context of political struggle of Scotland against England is specified in Wacousta’s reference to the situation in which “the rebellion of forty-five saw [him] in the Scottish ranks” (484). He fought with the rebels against the English. This is yet another medievalist element of the romance: Scotland appears here as a place where the medieval idea of honour still matters, where questions of loyalty and allegiance are central to the functioning of whole communities, and where people live surrounded by a medievalist landscape of castles and fortresses. This seems to be the architecture on which the forts of Upper Canada are modelled. This mosaic of diverse national identities including the English, the French, and now the Scottish, also includes the Cornish in the flashback narration. In her conversation with Wacousta, Ellen Halloway confesses that she and her husband are not Scottish, but Cornish: “Ellen, woman, again I ask you where he came from? This Reginald Morton that you have named. To what country did he belong?” “Oh, we were both Cornish,” she answered, with a vivacity singularly in contrast with her recent low and monotonous tone; “but, as I said before, he was of a great family, and I only a poor clergyman’s daughter” “Cornish! – Cornish, did you say?” fiercely repeated the dark Wacousta, while an expression of loathing and disgust seemed for a moment to convulse his features; “then it is as I had feared. One word more. Was the family seat called Morton Castle?” “It was,” unhesitatingly returned the poor woman, yet with the air of one

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Anna Czarnowus wondering to hear a name repeated, long forgotten even by herself. “It was a beautiful castle too, on a lovely ridge of hills ... and we were so very happy.” (431)

Cornwall also provides a medievalist background to the events. One of the two Reginald Mortons in the plot inhabited a castle, presumably a medieval or medi­ evalist one, whose existence remains a happy memory for Ellen Halloway. The place is actually characterized as a “long ago far away” place for the characters. The most important love stories of the novel take place in those two settings: in Scotland, which stands like an icon of medievalism for the characters, and in Cornwall, where one of the loves central for the whole plot develops and where the characters involved inhabit an actual castle. Thus the background for this romance is colonial: the inner colonies of eighteenth-century England, Scotland, and Cornwall, are presented as settings for love, and the plot is transferred from the peripheries of the colonial and imperial centre to the Canadian colonies as a natural ground for further developments of this kind. Dennis Duffy writes about “the novel’s strange, perhaps unintended, sexual undertone,” but this undertone goes very much hand in hand with romance as the genre that the novel inhabits, and even more with colonial romance as a specific subgenre.13 After all, sexual innuendo is natural in a text about ethnic and national otherness, since this otherness may be orientalized due to the very idea of the difference it enacts. Richardson displays awareness that his text could be seen as a representative of romance. Late in the novel he distances himself from this perspective, a move that cannot, however, alter our interpretation: To such of our readers as, deceived by the romantic nature of the attachment stated to have been originally entertained by Sir Everart Valletort for the unseen sister of his friend, have been led to expect a tale abounding in manifestations of its progress when the parties had actually met, we at once announce disappointment. Neither the lover of amorous adventure, nor the admirer of witty dialogue, should dive into these pages. Room for the exercise of the invention might, it is true, be found; but ours is a tale of sad reality, and our heroes and heroines figure under circumstances that would render wit a satire upon the understanding, and love a reflection upon the heart. (432)

Richardson lists “amorous adventure” as indispensable for romance and adds “witty dialogue” as a desirable part of the genre. Still, he calls his text “a tale of sad reality,” which stands in stark contrast to the purely amorous main part of the plot and the unusual language of the characters in the dialogues they utter, even if the dialogues themselves are not necessarily witty, but rather exaggerated in their emotionality, visible also in the exclamations that the speakers use. Duffy calls the exchanges between the characters “stilted, even ludicrous dialogue” and exemplifies his statement with the passage: “‘Almighty Providence,’ aspirated the sinking Clara … can it be that human heart can undergo such change?’ ‘Ha! ha! by heaven, such cold

13 Dennis Duffy, “Wacousta; or, The Prophesy,” in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983), 816–17 (816).

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pompous insolence amuses me,’ vociferated Wacousta” (510).14 Duffy uses the terms “stilted” and “ludicrous,” but such dialogue directly descends from the original English Gothic tradition. On the other hand, Richardson’s idea that his novel is realistic is also completely inadequate despite his attempts at ethnographic description and the temporal setting of the story located within borders designated by specific historical events in the history of Scotland and Canada. Love, an important element of romance as a genre, appears in Wacousta in many forms. There is the unhappy love between the English Morton and the Scottish Clara Beverley, the love between the Cornish Ellen Halloway and her husband, and also the love between Clara de Haldimar and Everart Valletort. Furthermore, exoticized love appears in the novel in the form of the devotion that the Native Oucanasta has for Charles de Haldimar, even though this is the type of love that also cannot be fulfilled. Terry Goldie comments on this relationship: … the sexual issue is avoided while Oucanasta’s attentions to Captain de Haldimar are the subject of ribald commentary by other soldiers, the narration provides no suggestion that the devotion is sexually based, regardless of the clearly romantic pattern of the relationship.15

The romantic nature of the relationship is delineated very subtly, as when Oucanasta talks about the soft feet of Europeans as opposed to her own bare feet being used to walking in the forest. Charles de Haldimar reacts to this in the following manner: This was too un-European, too much reversing the established order of things, to be borne patiently. As if he had felt the dignity of his manhood offended by the proposal, the officer drew his foot hastily back, declaring, as he sprang from the log, he did not care for the thorns, and could not think of depriving a female, who must be much more sensible of pain than himself. Oucanasta, however, was not to be outdone in politeness. (240)

De Haldimar expects women to be fragile, but he learns about Oucanasta’s difference in this respect. Oucanasta seems to recognize those expectations, yet does not pretend that they apply to her. The amorous intentions on the part of an indigenous character appear to be not only a constitutive part of any romance, but also one of the elements that make a colonial romance even more colonial in its nature. Such allusions to possible love add a mythical dimension to the fictional report on the relations between the Natives and the Europeans. Oucanasta somehow naturally falls for de Haldimar, as if to confirm his superiority over representatives of the Native, much more primitive, culture. De Haldimar represents the enlightened world of the white man and Oucanasta wants to be a part of it through her devotion. Naturally, the devotion cannot develop into anything that involves two people, but must 14 Duffy, “Wacousta; or, The Prophesy,” 816. It should be noted that these two sentences come from widely disparate parts of the novel and Duffy appears to have conflated them as if they were a dialogue. 15 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 70.

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remain her sole responsibility. Nonetheless, this attraction adds exotic flavour to the colonial romance. It is debatable whether Wacousta could be called an imperial romance. Susan Jones advises us to attach this label to “a complex group of fictions appearing in Bri­ tain between the 1880s and the 1920s, which were devoted to narrating adventure in colonial settings.”16 Wacousta does not fulfil these criteria, given that it was first published in 1832, but it may perhaps be tagged as a proto-imperial romance, since it addresses adventure in colonial settings under British rule. It is both a colonial and proto-imperial romance since, like any colonial Gothic text or, according to Simon Hay, like all Gothic texts, it presents “the dislocation of empire as horror.”17 In Richardson’s novel the empire is indubitably dislocated. Its state of belonging is increasingly to the disadvantage of France, but nor can Britain fully control its new colonies. They are inhabited by the First Nations who rebel against their colonialist rulers, and peopled by those who, like Wacousta in the past, stayed in rebellious Scotland during the hostilities with England. The British Empire is dislocated also in the ethical sense, since the righteous people who inhabited it once, such as Wacousta, start to side with the empire’s enemies, and representatives of the British, for example Colonel de Haldimar, turn out to have been treacherous towards their own friends back in Europe. Also, the physical transfer of the characters into the colony appears to be almost an instance of dislocating one’s home. What is left is horror of the unknown, fear of the physically threatening space, uncertainty about the strangers who inhabit it. History is a source of trauma as well. Writes Hay, In ghost stories, the key figure of the history-as-suffering is precisely the haunted house: houses are loci of history of suffering and trauma, initiated in the persistence of such feudal property as aristocratic manors, castles and abbeys.18

In the Canadian setting of Wacousta, castles as feudal property are left behind in Scotland and Cornwall. Instead, the new colonial rule makes Richardson focus the plot on the medievalist fortress. However, he does allude to the transfer from Euro­ pean feudalism to Canadian colonialism as traumatic not just for the Natives as subdued peoples, but also for the white colonizers themselves. Importantly, all the events central for the plot happened back in the British Isles; the state of affairs in Canada is no more than a continuation of what was started in Europe. Wacousta is fundamentally a text about cultural transfer: the transfer of romance as a genre from Europe to North America and the transfer of culture from medievalist Scotland and Cornwall to colonial North America, where medievalist phenomena have to acquire a new meaning. Richardson’s denunciation of romance as a genre, when in fact it is the genre he practises, suggests that the transfer is that from English romance to Canadian realism. On this point his judgement is faulty. He im­ agines that he departs from the European romance’s “long ago far away” formulation 16 Susan Jones, “Into the Twentieth Century: Imperial Romance from Haggard to Buchan,” in A Companion to Romance, ed. Saunders, 406–23 (406). 17 Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11. 18 Hay, Modern British Ghost Story, 12.

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in favour of the realism of colonial literature, but this is his own misconception. As Richardson presents it, Canada is partly imagined as “nowhere,” especially in relation to Scotland and Cornwall with their medieval past. It could even be argued that a medieval past, with its architectural artifacts, easily shapes the identity of any given country. Without such a past, places like Canada lack an important dimension not only temporally, since a significant part of European history is missing here, but also spatially, as the separation from Europe locates Canada in the sphere of “nowhere.” Consequently, love affairs encounter more difficulty with fulfilment in this nowhere land, by contrast to Scotland or Cornwall, the lands of romance where happiness in love could be accessible. In those places, romance could lead to a love affair; they are conducive to success in matters of the heart. In Canada, on the other hand, the plot of Gothic romance is more likely to appear than romance as a plot about reciprocated love. Michael Hurley presents romance itself as a liminal genre that situates itself at the boundaries in yet another sense, arguing that “Romance itself has been called a kind of ‘border’ fiction where the field of action is the borderline of the human mind where the actual and the imaginary intermingle.”19 Hurley writes about this in psychoanalytical terms, but the interplay between the actual and the imaginary is also visible in terms of the temporal and spatial setting. The setting that Scotland’s and Cornwall’s post-medieval history provides is the background for a myth of great love that could only flourish in Europe. The setting of North America is the actual colonial edifices, such as forts, and this background is made complete by the imaginary terror provoked by such apparitions as Wacousta. Yet, with time, he becomes an actual figure with a history going back to Europe. The Natives also have an initial imaginary existence in the minds of the Europeans, who can only produce a sense of horror directed at them. Later they develop an actual existence, behaving in specific ways, having their own mores, diplomacy, and culture as demonstrated in the clothing they wear and their patterns of behaviour. Also, white settlers in the colony are characterized by these two types of existence: they had quite unrealistic love adventures in the Old World, but now, in the New World, their trouble is real, since they face opposition on the part of Natives and need to engage with the effects of the difficult past events they have brought with them from Europe. Hurley further maintains that: “in Wacousta, two cultures, one immigrant, the other Native, apparently without any relation to one another, progressively intertwine and fuse in a curiously complementary fashion.”20 The word “immigrant” is particularly significant here, since it alludes to the migration to the colonies on the part of the Scots, the English, and even the Cornish. Thus, Hurley emphasizes the newness of their colonial identity. Hurley also focuses on their transformation from inhabitants of countries where the Middle Ages were still very much alive to settlers in a country that was new, with an indigenous history instead of a medieval one. The moment we experience in Wacousta is the beginning of a new society with a culture different from the European one. Hurley summarizes this: “Wacousta experiment[s] 19 Michael Hurley, The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 5. 20 Hurley, The Borders of Nightmare, 6.

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with the romance form of the descent narrative.”21 It is a descent narrative because the new society has its beginnings in the Welsh and Cornish ones, and what happens in the plot is secondary to what happened a few decades earlier back in Europe. The architecture of Fort Détroit increases this impression that the entire background of the story alludes to medieval European culture. Even though the colony obviously lacks some older fortresses, the one that does exist suggests relationships with the older architecture of Europe. Here, too, the soundscape is as important as what is visible: in a few minutes the heavy clanking sound of the chains of the drawbridge, as it was again raised by its strong pullies, and the dull creaking sound of the rusty bolts and locks that secured the ponderous gate, announced the detachment was once more safely within the fort. (75)

The clanking and creaking, which are standard elements of the soundscape in English Gothic fiction, here paradoxically do not serve the function of evoking fear and focusing on the danger related to the place described, but serve to put emphasis on the safety of the European characters.22 The ominous sounds complement the image of the medievalist architecture described, since all fortresses may ultimately be termed medievalist buildings, which enhances the impression of the story as a plot set “long ago,” if not “far away.” Yet another quality of romance is its tension between the old and the new, the conservative and the modern, the feudal and the capitalist. In Wacousta “capitalist” needs to be replaced by “colonial,” but the events set in North America that are anterior to the first half of the nineteenth century, when Richardson is writing the novel, seem to suggest that in the novel’s future the colonial will be replaced by the developments of capitalism. The growth of capitalism in North America would have been impossible without the fact of colonization and without coping with the indigenous existence there. Corinne Saunders writes that all romances “typically oppose a social, usually conservative, ideal of order with the threat of disorder of various kinds.”23 In Wacousta the old feudal, post-medieval world of England’s inner colonies is replaced with the dynamically changing world of eighteenthcentury North America, with implications for the nineteenth-century future. The society back in the Old World could be quite corrupt, as the case of Colonel de Haldimar proves, and that corruption needs to be answered with vengeance in the New World. The reality in Europe only seems to be orderly, but the combination of Native hostility and the tricks by such individuals as Wacousta renders the colonial world utterly disorderly, and does not even attempt to give us or the characters within the plot a false sense of security. Ellen Halloway’s vision of Cornwall includes some semblance of a utopian vision of order, but that vision was perforce wrecked upon arrival in North America. The plot is significantly set at what is now the border area between the United States and Canada. For Europe, Canada Hurley, The Borders of Nightmare, 4. Soundscape was as important as landscape in medieval texts; see, for example, the special issue of Exemplaria entitled “Medieval Noise”: Exemplaria 16/2 (2004). 23 Corinne Saunders, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Romance, ed. Saunders, 1–9 (2). 21

22

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existed as a faraway land. For example, Clara Beverley departs somewhere with de Haldimar after the wedding ceremony: “immediately after the ceremony they had left, but she [the landlady] knew not whither” (479). For Europeans at the time Canada could be a place that existed somewhere, but they did not necessarily know where. By necessity, no sense of stability was possible there on the part of the white settlers. Canada is a location that does not function in the European imagination, and staying there forces newcomers either to adopt a new identity or to reformulate their previous selves very thoroughly. This fascination with things happening “elsewhere” is yet another quality that makes Wacousta adhere to the tenets of romance as a genre. Umberto Eco presents his idea of romance as “a story of an elsewhere.”24 Fred Botting adds to this that “elsewhere may be past (Gothic romance) … but … it remains an ‘elsewhere’ at odds with the present.”25 He also states that “the first gothic fictions look back to romanticized feudal times, distinguished from the Enlightenment here and now.”26 Wacousta is designed in accordance with this pattern. The romanticized medievalist European past stands in conflict with the atrocious reality of military confrontations with Canadian indigenous peoples, making truces with them, and facing the difference that they represent in their manners, clothes, and the sounds they produce. The novel throughout focuses on shifting dimensions of the past. Botting also notes how Jerrold Hogle presents English Gothic fiction, using the example of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: “The counterfeited past of the fiction thus enables a move from the ‘bound’ order of medievalism to the ‘unbound’ fluctuations of the eighteenth-century free market, cloaking the latter in fake images of the former.”27 The function of medievalism in Walpole is then to reflect the uncertainties of eighteenth-century capitalism in an apparently medieval world, itself full of uncertainties. The time of instability is given a shape in the artificially “bound” image of the medieval. Similarly, in Wacousta the bound image functions to compare colonialism to the capitalism of Richardson’s own times. The image of Scotland and Cornwall as medievalist lands gives the readers a false sense of the past being more reliable than the eighteenth-century time of colonization of North America, with its incipient construction of modern capitalism in Upper Canada – something of the utmost importance to Richardson. The eighteenth and nineteenth century in Canada are thus cloaked in the conventions of romance. As a colonial romance, Wacousta plays the role of a vehicle that allows us to compare and contrast the European reality with the Canadian one. Richardson writes nostalgically about the past that some of the characters spent in Europe and also about the barbarism of the indigenous tribes in North American colonies, purely in order 24 Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), 67. 25 Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender, and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 8. 26 Botting, Gothic Romanced, 9. 27 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo-Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, ed. Tillotama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), as quoted in Botting, Gothic Romanced, 72.

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to offer a foil to highlight the dynamic development of commerce and business in the nineteenth century. Romance could also be a vehicle that allowed white settlers to redefine their identity under new circumstances. Lecker argues that, “Threatened with the irrational, the unexplained, and the illusory, the new society struggles endlessly to define itself.”28 Wacousta represents an attempt at defining this new Canadianness, and the medievalism of the novel is instrumental for this new construction of the self. It not only defines white Canadianness as radically different from indi­ genous culture, but also paradoxically embeds that new definition of being Can­ adian against the background of this culture. Natives function as the predecessors of white settlers on the soil of the colony in the same manner in which medieval people functioned as cultural predecessors for eighteenth-century Europeans. All this testifies to the Canadian notion of reimagining the Middle Ages in a new territory. The novel ultimately points not only to the Gothic novel in England as its predecessor, but also to the historical Middle Ages with their architecture and the post-medieval buildings that descended directly from this culture. Paradoxically, Canada is presented both as a land that had no Middle Ages other than the indigenous past and as a land where the past is preserved. The European past that is continued in North America is undoubtedly very strongly post-medieval, not in the sense of coming after the Middle Ages, but rather as a locus where medieval artefacts, such as architecture, are still inspiring, and medieval genres, such as romance, remain relevant to the Canadian colonial present. The character who is interested in preserving the past, even decades after his arrival in the colony, is Wacousta: Although all [these events] happened twenty-four years before in the Old World, Wacousta finds Canada a perfect climate for preserving the past; he swears that in no other country in the world could his dark revenge wreak such havoc.29

The Natives are ultimately instrumental in Wacousta’s revenge on some of the white settlers. This element also makes the novel a colonial romance: it is a text about taking advantage of the indigenous people by becoming one of them, hence adopting a bogus identity, and then using that position in order to attack other whites effectively. This colonial romance demonstrates interplay of likenesses and differences on several levels. A likeness between what happened in Scotland and what happens before our eyes as readers is noticeable, since the events in Canada are direct consequences of what started in Europe. The colony becomes a place where various important situations find their resolution, although generally the outcome is not happy. The difference between the colonized and the colonizers is clearly established. The colonizers nonetheless resemble the colonized in that they used to belong to the colonized nations of Scotland and Cornwall in the past. In Wacousta there is also a combination of literary and architectural medievalisms. This is complemented by the role that indigenous people play in this medievalist world. Like medieval 28 29

Lecker, “Patterns of Deception in Wacousta,” 55. Hurley, The Borders of Nightmare, 36.

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Europeans in English Gothic fiction, they are both a source of terror and an object of fascination. Romance as a genre found a new form in the New World, a form exemplified by Richardson’s novel and characterized by a pervasive recrudescence of medievalist elements.

4 A Canadian Caliban in King Arthur’s Court: Materialist Medievalism and Northern Gothic in William Wilfred Campbell’s Mordred Brian Johnson

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hen the Canadian Confederation Group poet William Wilfred Campbell turned to the Matter of Britain in his medievalist verse-drama Mordred, composed 1893–94, he was embarking upon politically fraught aesthetic terrain that was just beginning to be explored by writers of the new Dominion. Prior to 1892 – the year Campbell published his Arthurian poem, “Sir Lancelot” – the principal texts in this nascent tradition of Canadian Arthur­ iana were Irish emigrant and Anglican clergyman John Reade’s “The Prophecy of Merlin” (1870)1 and Charles G.D. Roberts’s “Launcelot and the Four Queens” (1880).2 In both of these early works, much of what D.M.R. Bentley aptly refers to as “the politically complex ... habitus” of post-Confederation Canadian literature3 is made apparent by their authors’ self-conscious engagements with a tradition of British medievalism whose availability as a site of national self-recognition was no longer self-evident. Reade, for instance, in his reprising of Alfred Tennyson’s “The Passing of Arthur,” feels compelled to justify his ex-centric (post?)colonial site of enunciation by inscribing Canada directly into Arthurian history in the form of a consoling prophecy, spoken by Merlin to Bedivere, about the founding of a new kingdom “In a far land beneath the setting sun / Now and long hence undreamed of… / … a land of stately woods, / Of swift broad rivers, and of ocean lakes,” that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s son, a new Arthur, will visit and eventually oversee as Governor-General.4 In this way, Reade “celebrate[s] the British

1 John Reade, “The Prophecy of Merlin,” in The Prophecy of Merlin and Other Poems (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1870), 3–28. 2 Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, “Launcelot and the Four Queens,” in Orion, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880), 37–49. 3 D.M.R. Bentley, The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 16. 4 Reade, “Prophecy of Merlin,” 27, lines 521–22, 525–26.

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Empire’s high destiny,” includes Canada in that destiny, and secures his own poetic authority in a single stroke.5 Roberts’s participation in the Victorian Medieval Revival in Canada was more straightforward than Reade’s but no less significant: his poem’s dramatization of Morgan le Fay’s machinations and Launcelot’s guilty conscience simply present no contradiction to him as subjects for Canadian poetry. As a self-described “cosmopolitan nationalist” Roberts was to argue in “The Beginnings of Canadian Literature” (1883) that a Canadian literary tradition should not require works exclusively based on “Canadian themes” to be considered authentic; Canadians were inheritors of “the whole heritage of English song,” and “the domain of English letters knows no boundaries of Canadian Dominion, of American Commonwealth, nor yet of British Empire.”6 If all Canadian literature was inevitably “native” and “cosmopolitan” at once, insofar as “poetry written in Canada by a Canadian cannot fail to bear traces of its origins if its author possesses the requisite originality and creativity,” legitimating gestures of the sort performed by Merlin’s prophecy in Reade’s poetics of imperial deference were unnecessary.7 Arthurian poets writing in the new Domin­ion were, to Roberts, de facto (post)colonials; cosmopolitanism guaranteed that Canadian medievalism was already catachrestic.8 Campbell’s medievalism is part of this tradition of (post)colonial catachresis in the sense that, like its precursors, it creatively “misreads” the sources of the imperial centre and inscribes through its misprision the inevitable (post)colonial disjunction. It does so, however, in ways that are more unconscious than controlled, more unruly, fraught, and symptomatic than the knowing interventions of Reade and Roberts had been. At first glance, Campbell’s ostentatiously debased and grotesque – even “Zolaized” – reinvention of the Matter of Britain in Mordred seems less concerned with the cultural politics of post-Confederation Canada than with the crisis of religious faith that had preoccupied his poetry since the 1880s.9 Campbell’s medievalism – like, but even more than Alfred Tennyson’s – is melodramatically concerned with working through the materialist shocks that Darwinian evolutionary science, ethnology, and comparative mythology dealt to Victorian Christian idealism. By returning to the darker source material of Sir Thomas Malory’s relation of Le Morte Darthur (1485) and filtering its portrait of Arthur as a morally culpable, incestuous 5 Raymond H. Thompson, “The Arthurian Legend in Canada,” in Studies in Medievalism VI: Medievalism in North America, ed. Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 85–99 (86). 6 Charles G D. Roberts, “The Beginnings of a Canadian Literature,” in Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, ed. W.J. Keith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 258. For a discussion of Roberts as a “cosmopolitan nationalist,” see Bentley, Confederation Group, 57–69. 7 Bentley, Confederation Group, 60. 8 My use of parentheses in (post)colonial throughout the essay is intended to signal the ambiguous status of Canada’s post-Confederation condition. See for example Bentley, Confederation Group, 15–16. 9 Review of Mordred and Hildebrand: A Book of Tragedies, The Globe, Toronto, 6 July 1895, 22. Quotations from “Mordred,” hereafter in parentheses in the text, come from William Wilfred Campbell, “Mordred,” in Poetical Tragedies (Toronto: William Briggs, 1908), 13–123.

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king with an unacknowledged child who returns to Camelot and destroys him through the high mimetic mode of the Shakespearean five-act tragedy, Campbell, in Mordred, revises two key aspects of Tennyson’s Victorian Camelot: (1) its tendency to idealize Arthur as a hero (which it punctures) and (2) and its thematic anxiety about “racial” degeneration (which it apocalyptically intensifies).10 As I also show, however, Campbell’s materialist medievalism was itself entangled in the cultural questions of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and imperialism that animated the Canadian literary scene throughout the period of Campbell’s most concerted and provocative treatment of neo-medieval figures, settings, and modes. For Campbell, as for Roberts, these questions were complicated by the improvisational, responsive, and therefore shifting nature of their ideological positions with respect to nationalism, independence, imperialism, and the cultural politics of the new, conceptually ambiguous “semi-autonomous Dominion” of Canada in the 1880s and 1890s.11 On the one hand, Campbell’s materialist medievalism emerged out of the cultural nexus of early Canadian literary nationalism and republicanist enthusiasm epitomized by Canada First and the Young Canada movements and modulated by Roberts’s cosmopolitan vision for Canadian literature of the 1880s. Yet just as Roberts was forced to moderate his championing of national and cultural independence for Canada in light of the threat of American annexation,12 Campbell’s ideological position throughout the 1890s until his death in 1918 conformed increasingly with the more “provincial” Imperialist recoil that emerged in fin de siècle Canada, gathering momentum among a vocal minority of Canadians who saw Imperial Federation with Britain as the surest safeguard against expansionist ambitions to the south. Thus, like Roberts, Campbell was initially drawn to both literary nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the “At the Mermaid Inn” columns he penned for the Toronto Globe in collaboration with fellow “Confederation Poets” Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott between February 1892 and July 1893. As early as 1894, however, coinciding with his completion of Mordred, he blasted his country’s filial negligence in “The Lazarus of Empire”: Are we Britons who batten upon her, Or degenerate sons of the race? It is souls that make nations, not numbers, As our forefathers proved in the past, Let us take up the burden of empire, Or nail our own flag to the mast.

This violent swing in the direction of imperial federation was catalyzed by Campbell’s fateful visit to Scotland and England in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond 10 For a systematic comparison of Campbell’s Mordred to its sources in Malory and Tennyson, see Harry M. Logan, “Wilfred Campbell’s Mordred: Sources and Structure,” Canadian Drama/L’Art Dramatique Canadien 4.2 (1978): 123–34 (124–25). 11 Bentley, Confederation Group, 15–16. On the conceptual instability of Canada in the post-Confederation period, see Bentley 301, note 16. 12 On Roberts’s shift towards a politics of “Imperial Federation inflected by Independ­ ence,” see Bentley, Confederation Group, 86–110, esp. 89–91.

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Jubilee, paving the way for his late-career identification with “Vaster Britain” and an imperialist cultural politics so robustly arrière-garde that he has been characterized as Canada’s quintessential “late provincial Victorian”13 and even “the unofficial poet laureate of Canadian imperialism.”14 Campbell’s ideological trajectory from flirtation with Canadian republicanism and cosmopolitan nationalism in the early 1890s to strident advocacy of imperial federation with England by 1897 frames the period of his most pronounced engagement with Arthurian medievalism, an engagement that comprises the poem “Lancelot” (1892); Mordred (written in 1893–94 and published in 1895); and several historical romances set in medieval Scotland – Ian of the Orcades (also known as The Armourer of Girnigoe) (1906), The Wizard of Tongue (unpublished), and The Hand of Lorat (unpublished) – all dating from Campbell’s visit to England and Scotland. The sheer extent of Campbell’s unfashionable reputation as “the unofficial poet laureate of Canadian imperialism” has overshadowed Campbell’s earlier period of “republican” flirtation and has undoubtedly contributed to the critical neglect of his Arthurian medievalism, a mode whose compositional method of revisiting, select­ing, reinterpreting, and recapitulating traditional sources becomes particularly fraught in a (post)colonial context where imitation must guard above all against appearing too sincere, lest it risk seeming merely subservient to the tradition that animates it. Campbell’s eventual enthusiasm for imperial federation has, in other words, made it difficult for later critics to appreciate his medievalism as much more than an aesthetic confirmation of a slavishly imperialistic anglophilia and evidence of his search, following the scuppering of his poetic reputation in Canada during “The War among the Poets,” for approval from British audiences.15 This is no doubt why Campbell’s evocation of a supranational literary tradition in his Preface to Mordred sounds less like an evocation of Robertsonian cosmopolitan nationalism than a bid to transcend the squabble of national literary culture by striking out for the heart of Empire: The Arthurian story is one of the most remarkable in human history or literature. … [W]hether Arthur is regarded as a great historic figure, as the traditions of my own race claim him to be, or as a mythological personage, there is something in the story akin to those themes of the great Greek Tragedies, and of the greater Shakespearean dramas, which associates it with what is subtly mysterious and ethically significant in the history and destiny of mankind. (11)

Nonetheless, Bentley, following a suggestion from Steven Artelle, has pointed out that Campbell’s Mordred may be more directly rooted in the soil of national cultural politics and literary squabbling than it first appears. “It is not beyond the bounds of

13 Carl F. Klinck, Wilfred Campbell: A Study in Late Provincial Victorianism (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1942). 14 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 192. 15 On the decline of Campbell’s literary reputation and the disintegration of the Confederation Group, see Bentley, Confederation Group, 259–60 and 272–90.

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possibility,” Bentley grants, alluding to the vein of medievalism common to Roberts and Campbell, that Roberts ... perceived the parallel between the knights of the Round Table and the poets of the Confederation group. It is also quite possible to read Campbell’s later Arthurian drama Mordred (1895) as, at least in part, a reflection of his place in the Confederation group, Arthur being Roberts and Campbell himself the ill-treated Mordred.16

Bentley and Artelle’s suggestion goes a considerable way towards restoring a sense of the literary nationalist stakes of Mordred by reconnecting its narrative to the scene of the production, circulation, and reception of Campbell’s output in the early 1890s, a period when he was increasingly stung by reviews of his work that compared it unflatteringly to that of his fellow Confederation poets. This is a persuasive surmise, as Campbell’s aggravating role in the vitriolic “War among the Poets” that followed Mordred’s publication in 1895 attests. But Campbell’s style, so characteristically overwrought that Bentley sometimes describes it as beset by “extremes of feeling that were almost manic (or bipolar) in intensity,” is too explosive and uncontrolled to be reducible to any single allegorical key and is thus particularly amenable to a symptomatic reading that proceeds from an intuition of its psychic and semantic overdetermination. I will here advance such a reading, focusing on the possibility that Campbell’s medievalism in Mordred indexes a more ambivalent position with respect to Canadian literary nationalism and imperial deference than even Bentley and Artelle’s suggestion would allow. Whereas Bentley entertains the idea that Mordred is “at least in part” an al­legory of the Canadian literary scene in the mid-1890s, I argue that the play is more adequately understood as a contradictory instantiation of the psychic volatility of Campbell’s own complex position as a disillusioned Christian idealist, an incipient Canadian imperial federationist, and a (post)colonial writer with considerable anxiety about his own literary reputation and significant resentment towards conferrers of literary recognition. My argument is that Campbell designed Mordred as a medievalist tragedy of Darwinian materialism, cast in the Arthurian idiom that most cogently signalled his admiration for and identification with the British literary tradition represented especially by Malory, Tennyson, and Shakespeare. Such a reading accounts, however, only for the play’s most insistently specularized concerns. Even as these are registered, Mordred must also be read symptomatically as a covert but disavowed Gothic fantasy of (post)colonial revenge against a psychically and geographically distant imperial parent: the cold Arthurian father who personifies, without dissimulation, the British cultural authority Campbell avowedly reveres and, I argue, unconsciously resents. In other words, Bentley and Artelle are almost certainly correct in proposing that the fatal Arthur–Mordred pairing strongly registers Campbell’s sense of misrecognition by one of the most influential and respected of the Confederation poets. Nonetheless, Mordred’s deformity – coded through a gothicized rhetoric of racial degeneration and colonial inferiority – signals its more than local 16

Bentley, Confederation Group, 318, note 1.

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frame of reference. If it is a signifier of deficient or misrecognized art, it is addressed not simply to the “Round Table” of Canadian Confederation poets, but to the very centre of normative judgement that the Matter of Britain itself calls forth. In spite of Campbell’s flagrant veneration of Britishness in his choice of a hybrid Arthurian– Shakespearean mode, Mordred’s self-tormenting revenge on his remote, unloving father simultaneously enacts a subterranean counter-narrative in which Arthur’s Britain must be understood indicatively as a marker of the imperial centre’s authority and Mordred’s deformity and illegitimacy as tokens of the quintessential position of the (post)colonial Caliban. Such a polyvalent reading of Mordred, which moves from a manifest concern with materialist tragedy and consoling imperialist identification to a latent narrative of (post)colonial resentment, I further maintain, is inseparable from Campbell’s temperamental fascination with Gothic, a historically prior medievalist mode that pervades the tragedy of Mordred and that has particular relevance both to Campbell’s articulation of materialist horror and to his vexed position with respect to Cana­dian cultural politics. Its aesthetic centrality to Campbell’s medievalism in Mordred, attests to the fundamentally dualistic – even contradictory – nature of his medievalism. As Alice Chandler argues in her classic study A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in 19th-Century English Literature, the medieval revival in Britain was to some extent Janus-faced.17 Although the main line of its development through Sir Walter Scott, William Cobbett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, and John Ruskin nostalgically idealized the Middle Ages “as a period of faith, order, joy, munificence, and creativity” in a critical and psychic response to the materialism, mechanism, socioeconomic upheavals, and human miseries attending the rise of industrial modernity and, at the same time, to bourgeois anxieties about revolutionary violence, the neo-feudalist noblesse oblige “Tory-Radical” social vision of nineteenth-century British medievalism “seemed to have quite trivial origins” in the “ruined churches by moonlight and forsaken graveyards and tombstones” of the Graveyard Poets and the shocks and terrors of the Gothic novel, which revelled in a “remote, forgotten past” to “titillate the emotions” and “arouse a sense of horror.”18 As E.J. Clery observes, far from stimulating reflection on a dream of order, “[f]or [Horace] Walpole’s contemporaries the Gothic Age was a long period of barbarism, superstition, and anarchy dimly stretching from the fifth century AD, when Visigoth invaders precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance and the revival of classical learning.”19 To the extent that Campbell’s fascination with Arthurian subjects indexes his own dream of a Canadian Imperialist order by paying homage to the font of tradition, his medievalism is a “provincial” extension of the tradition that runs through Scott, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Campbell’s poetry of religious doubt and materialist despair since the late 1880s was not medievalist in this sense. Rather, it was fully in the grip of the counter-tradition harkening back to medievalism’s eighteenth-century origins in the Gothic novels 17 Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in 19th-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1–2. 18 Chandler, Dream of Order, 4–5. 19 E J. Clery, “The Genesis of ‘Gothic’ Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–39 (21).

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of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe (but also in the nineteenth century to Coleridge and, in America, Edgar Allan Poe), the hallmark of which is an inversion of Victorian medievalism’s most Romantic elements – what Chandler describes as its “interest in nature, primitivism, and the supernatural” as imaginative corollaries of “the organic, the joyous, and the creative.”20 Campbell’s identification with the monstrous but sympathetic Caliban-figure Mordred, in his gothically inflected tragedy, I argue, thus represents a watershed in Campbell’s articulation of a two-sided medievalism. In this play, Campbell transforms the idiom of Gothic-materialist horror that he developed in the uncanny poems of Lake Lyrics (1889) and The Dread Voyage (1893) to express the collapse of his religious faith into an intuitive new language of self-division, to be discussed elsewhere. On the one hand, Mordred reaches towards reconciling Gothic (materialist) and Arthurian (imperialist) medievalisms by casting the Arthurian story in a tragic mode permeated by a materialist-Gothic atmosphere of degeneration and horror in a cautionary tale whose didactic implication is that the love of a British Prospero could yet redeem the Caliban-like bestiality of the Canadian artist. On the other hand, Mordred simultaneously reinvents the Gothic materialism of Campbell’s lyric poetry – albeit in a barred fashion that it seems neither to acknowledge nor recognize – as a signifier of the (post)colonial discontent that the play’s Victorian medievalism attempts to resolve. Mordred, which Campbell began composing in 1893, seems to announce a significant shift in Campbell’s medievalism, from the grim arctic poetics of northern Gothic to the more Tennysonian mise-en-scène of “Sir Lancelot,” the one Arthur­ ian poem to appear in The Dread Voyage.21 One reason that Campbell’s medievalism expanded to encompass the Arthurian scene more focally at this juncture was his discouragement with the state of Canadian letters in the early 1890s. For the eighteen months leading up to Mordred’s composition, Campbell had been opining about the arrested development of a national literary culture in Canada. His Globe columns frequently castigated fellow Canadian writers and critics, blasting the former for their “cold-blooded” production of “purely descriptive” landscape verse for the magazine market and censuring the latter for their failure to exercise “unbiased judgment” when reviewing the work of their compatriots.22 Addressing his fellow poets specifically in June of 1893, Campbell insisted that what Canada needs above all is not “pensive meditation” and “acute observation,” but a literature galvanized by “the issues of life and death” that characterize the work of “the truest poets in the language.”23 As the terms of Campbell’s growing impatience with the magazine-ready nature verse that described his own earliest poetic efforts suggest, the nationalist tenor of his literary pronouncements in the early 1890s did not imply a rejection of British Chandler, Dream of Order, 7. William Wilfred Campbell, The Dread Voyage (Toronto: William Briggs, 1893). 22 William Wilfred Campbell, “At the Mermaid Inn,” The Globe, 17 June 1893 in At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892–93, ed. Barrie Davies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 331–34; and 10 December 1892, 207. 23 Campbell, 17 June 1893 in Mermaid Inn, 333. 20 21

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models for literary greatness. His literary idols during this period were cosmopolitan, but with a clear British emphasis: Homer, Coleridge, Poe, Tennyson, and above all, Shakespeare were the literary touchstones of the “Mermaid Inn” columns, routinely invoked as exemplars of “true poetry” and employed as clubs with which to beat his “decadent,” nature-worshipping Canadian and American contemporaries.24 What the works of the “great” writers have in common, and what those of Canadian authors currently lack, Campbell repeatedly asserted, are the values of “universality” and “humanity,” terms that Campbell identified with his own patently tragic sensibility that was attuned to “the general pathos of human life” and capable of “clothing the realities of existence with the grandeur and divinity that belong to it.”25 It was in the context of this call for Canada’s writers to abandon the Romantic transport of their fields of millet and memories of low tide on Grand Pré in favour of the universal dialectic of “existence” and “divinity” that Campbell composed Mordred, a neo-medieval poetic tragedy that, as Klinck observes, plainly “showed that Campbell was making the transition from the realm of Flora to the ‘agonies … [and] strife of human hearts.’”26 “There is something in the story [of Arthur],” effused Campbell in his Preface to Mordred, akin to those themes of the great Greek Tragedies, and of the greater Shakespearean dramas, which associates it with what is subtly mysterious and ethically significant in the history and destiny of mankind. Like the divine literature of the Hebrews, all of these great world-dramas and epics ... lift the thought and imagination to a loftier plane, and are concerned only with man’s personality in his relationship to those more sublime and terrible laws of being which mysteriously link him to deity. (11)

In Mordred, these “sublime and terrible laws of being” are manifest in the doom that hangs over Arthur’s kingdom as a consequence of “One deed beyond all others of [his] youth” when, “mad, passionate, and wild to savagery … [he] violated a maid’s sanctuary,” only afterwards to discover that she was his sister (15). The opening scene of the play, which is set immediately prior to Arthur’s conquest of Britain, establishes Arthur’s “swart, incestuous night” as a symbol for original sin, framing the action as a religious allegory in which redemption is at least theoretically pos­ sible. “Redeem thy past deeds in future good,” advises the forest hermit who shrives Arthur: “Go forth to right all wrong and guard all right, … / Go forth in the name of God to build a realm / Built up on chastity and noble deeds” (16–17). But Campbell’s Arthur is hampered by pride and vanity, flaws that emerge in the second scene of Act 1, when Merlin brings Arthur’s illegitimate son Mordred to Camelot at the height of Arthur’s reign as a moral test for the king, setting him face-to-face with evidence of his baser “savage” nature and calling upon him to acknowledge and accept the embodiment of his own sin. To raise the stakes of this encounter and to foreground Mordred’s status as Arthur’s “sin / Incarnate,” Campbell makes Arthur 24 Campbell, “Views on Canadian Literature,” in William Wilfred Campbell: Selected Poetry and Essays, ed. Laurel Boone (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987), 167– 69 (168). 25 Campbell, 25 February 1893 in Mermaid Inn, 263–66 (263). 26 Klinck, Wilfred Campbell, 118.

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a worshipper of beauty and makes Mordred an ugly, deformed hunchback whose “god-like nobleness” is likened to “a jewel” hidden within a “poor, wry misshapen shell” (120, 22). In this way, Merlin not only challenges Arthur to overcome vanity about his own transgression, but tests his moral capacity to look beyond the surface of Mordred’s loathsome form. Cold, cruel, and repulsed by his offspring, Arthur fails the test, setting the tragic machinery in motion and illustrating, in the process, Campbell’s definition of tragedy as a dramatization of “the failure or falling off from the possibility of life as shown in the ideal, and the creation of the illusion, which is the real play itself.”27 From this point on, the main action of the play concerns the persecuting power of Nemesis and the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom. The forces of dissolution and punishment pitted against Arthur are embodied by the triumvirate of the now disappointed Merlin, the vengeful witch Vivien (whom Arthur has spurned as a romantic partner prior to the action of the play), and Mordred himself who, reluctantly at first, but with an increasing sense of bitterness and inevitability, becomes the principal agent of Arthur’s overthrow through his and Vivien’s stage-managing­­­ of revelations about Sir Launcelot’s betrayal and Guinevere’s adultery. Within the logic of the moral allegory that Campbell unfolds, and despite these villainous conspirators, Arthur’s tragedy is that he is the agent of his own destruction, for he has been unable to overcome his human pride and vanity to embrace the virtues of humility and love – virtues that would have enabled him to acknowledge Mordred as his son and thereby forestall the doom of Camelot. In Mordred, Arthur’s moral failure with respect to loving his shameful child dramatizes the collapse of chivalry and its support of feudal order in Camelot, but to the extent that Arthur’s sin is a consequence of his incestuous “savagery,” Campbell also makes this failure inseparable from the post-Darwinian crumbling of the naturalist pole of the medieval ideal (15). This no doubt accounts for the uniformly destructive and degrading role sexuality plays in the tragic action and Arthur’s correspondingly histrionic but ineffectual clinging to an ethos of “chastity and noble deeds,” which yields only a reputation for “coldness” so extreme that Guinevere “a princess warm in blood,” shrinks from being “wedded to a statue. / A marble, though that marble be a king” (17, 35). Mordred, the embodiment of sexual sin, is “the key” for destroying Camelot (25), but so too is Launcelot’s unwitting betrayal of his chivalric duty to Arthur with Guinevere, which almost immediately prompts Launcelot to call forth a “Black, murky fiend of hell … in … form / Most monstrous” to fight as a preferable alternative to sexual sin. The semantic parallelism between Launcelot’s fantasy of infernal combat with a “fiend of hell” and Mordred’s own “monstrous” form codes the Launcelot–Guinevere romance as equivalent in its transgressive significance to Arthur’s sin of incest. Mordred’s eventual destruction of Camelot is thus at once dramatically inseparable from their sexual conduct and symbolic of its consequences. Such focal treatment of sexual destructiveness in Mordred and the commensurate incapacity to imagine “chastity” as anything but a life-denying “coldness” or 27 Campbell, “Shakespeare and the Latter-Day Drama,” in Selected Poetry and Essays, 181–85 (185).

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petrification suggest that Campbell’s tragic “world-drama” is at once a development of the materialist medievalism of The Dread Voyage and an anticipation of the universal tragedy that Campbell began designing several years after Mordred in “The Tragedy of Man”: an elaborate Christian Idealist response to evolutionary theory that sought to refute Darwin’s reduction of the human to simian caricature. Significantly, Campbell had already begun to establish the link between the Gothic materialism of the northern poems and Mordred’s Arthurian scene in “Sir Lancelot,” a narrative poem from The Dread Voyage whose thematic anticipation of Mordred connects the doom of Camelot to the materialist horror and degenerationist fantasy of “The Were-wolves.”28 This early working-through of the Arthurian material that would become the basis of Mordred is a tortured exploration of Lancelot’s guilt over his betrayal of Arthur with Guinevere in which Lancelot suicidally attempts to redeem his sin by dying for Arthur in “The last dread battle of the Table Round.”29 Lancelot’s degeneration over the course of the poem from perfect Christian knight to pagan berserker telegraphs the pertinence of the materialist Gothic metanarrative that propels even Campbell’s Arthurian medievalism. Indeed, Mordred is ultimately legible primarily through the materialist lens of Campbell’s northern Gothic medievalism. Arthur’s failure to overcome his baser impulses is made “incarnate” on stage in the living product of Arthur’s “incestuous night” of “savagery” and “wildness,” and is then further dramatized by father and son’s mutual destruction following Mordred’s usurpation of Camelot. It is no coincidence that Mordred’s incarnation of his father’s earthly “sin” is marked by allusions to The Tempest, most especially in Vivien’s identification of Mordred with “foulest Caliban” as she goads him to “assert [his] dignity” and “make [his] kingship felt” (46) in one of many scenes that recalls Caliban’s murderous plotting against Prospero. Although it precedes Campbell’s earliest notes on “The Tragedy of Man” (Campbell’s ingenious rebuttal of the propositions of Darwinian theory in which he describes “race-doom” transformed into “race-­ piety” by way of the struggle inside the individual between Caliban and Prospero) by at least three years, Campbell’s Mordred is plainly already informed by many of that nascent treatise’s central ideas and motifs – a connection that Campbell himself confirms in his Preface to the 1908 edition of the play when he alludes to “[a work] I am dealing with ... treating the origin of mankind” (11).30 It is on the basis of its dramatized anticipation of Campbell’s material–metaphysical vision of a dual creation – summed up Mordred’s paradoxical status as “royal hunchback” or “hunchback king” (90, 112) – that the play finds the reactionary idiom of its bid for Shakespearean “universality” and “humanity.” Whereas “The Tragedy of Man” represents a workable imaginative compromise between Darwinism and Christianity that appears to have enabled Campbell to embrace British-Canadian imperialism and “race-piety” as ideological and psychic supports to his patriotic “Vaster Britain” poetry in the years that followed, Mordred records a less confident moment in the development of this new epistemology. Arthur 28 29 30

Campbell, “Sir Lancelot,” in The Dread Voyage, 36–41. Campbell, “Sir Lancelot,” 39 (line 94). Campbell, “The Tragedy of Man,” in Selected Poetry and Essays, 185–97.

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is decisively “[a] thing of clay,” and his “Table Round / Is but a stall-yard where the swine of men / Will rend and snarl and tear [his] glory down” (22, 100). Formally, the precarious and exploratory nature of Campbell’s compensatory meta­narrative during the writing of Mordred is signalled both by the play’s tragic mode, which presents the balm of race-piety only in negative form as a catastrophe-­producing breakdown of chivalry and an absence of paternal love, and, revealingly, by the way this “tragic” evocation of missed redemption gives way to the even more starkly pessimistic Gothic mode of northern poems like “Unabsolved.” “[S]uch flames I burn / Would scorch the northern ice-seas in their beds,” Mordred declares a propos his covetous, destructive, and incest-evoking passion for Guinevere in a soliloquy in which he vows to “use all deviltries and lies, / All plots and counterplots, to gain mine end” (82). As the doom of Camelot approaches in Acts IV and V, the Gothic atmosphere intensifies. Sir Lancelot is awoken from his sleep by a knight who has himself been plagued by nightmares: Strange horrors woke us from our beds. Hideous nightmares beset us. Some heard moanings, some that grave-bells rang, and others saw strange spectres, and I myself heard clash of mighty arms, and quick each man found himself leaped from his bed, naked blade in hand. What may it portend? We be much affrighted. (97)

In a further dramatization of these reports of “strange spectres,” prior to the final battle, Arthur is confronted by the ghost of Merlin, who comes prophesying doom, and then by the ghost of Sir Gwaine [Gawain], who warns him, “fight not to-morrow” (117–18). Such recreations of Shakespearean supernaturalism are consistent with the play’s tragic mode; in the context of Campbell’s developing medievalism, however, they acquire additional significance as markers of the ongoing pertinence of materialist horror to an Arthurian tragedy in which the consolation of Christian Idealism has not yet been worked out. What is perhaps most striking about Mordred, however, is the flicker of authorial identification evident in the play’s refusal to caricature Mordred as a mere Caliban – that is, its refusal to reduce the semantic unruliness of Shakespeare’s colonial other to a creature of earth without a soul, as the more strictly bestial rendering of Caliban in “The Tragedy of Man” would later do. In fact, the tragedy of Mordred repeatedly insists upon the beauty and nobility of Mordred’s soul and thus offers considerable justification for Mordred’s reprisals against Arthur on the basis of the father’s refusal to acknowledge this inner greatness of spirit. Arthur and Mordred are conceived as a reciprocal moral dyad, in which the play of surface and depth reveals contrasting value: cool and statue-like, Arthur nonetheless squirms with shame when he is forced to see the truth of his life “like some whited tower / Where all is foul and hideous within”; Mordred, meanwhile, in spite of his “poor, wry, misshapen shell” “[h]ath such a soul within him, like a jewel / In some enchanted casket” (15, 22). Striking also is the way that, in choosing a subject for his exploration of the “universal” “human” themes towards which he hoped to steer an emergent Canadian literature, Campbell gravitated towards a narrative about the destruction of the British kingdom by a deformed, illegitimate, and unacknowledged son whose closest literary kin is Shakespeare’s archetypal colonial subject. In ways that recall, without

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strictly repeating, the significance for postcolonial theorists of Caliban’s murderous hatred for Prospero’s authority over the island in The Tempest as an allegory of colonial resentment and a will to revolutionary violence, so might Mordred’s complex ambivalent feelings for Arthur and the reluctant revenge plot he sets in motion be considered in light of Campbell’s own status in the early 1890s as a Canadian poet and dramatist still writing in the shadow of a “universal” British literary tradition whose authority he admired and whose favour he curried, but from which he still felt adrift. By 1897 – the year of Campbell’s conversion to the Imperialist cause in Canada – there could be no question of a contradiction between nation and Empire in Campbell’s work. “By remaining British, we do not cease to be Canadian,” Campbell proclaimed to an audience at the Empire Club in Toronto in November of 1904. “The Imperialist is as good a Canadian as any.”31 But in the early 1890s, the more stridently nationalistic Campbell of “At the Mermaid Inn” was still a long way from the confident reconciliation of Canadian literary nationalism with Imperial authority that was to characterize his “Vaster Britain” phase post-1897. Campbell’s political rejection of British authority in his “Mermaid Inn” columns, for instance, was evident in his pronouncement that “we have had altogether too many St George … societies in this country for the national good” and in his consequent call for the establishment of “new Canadian Club[s] … all over the Dominion” in order to make “the national idea paramount in the hearts of the young men.”32 It was also evident in a column in which Campbell lambasted Canadian universities for their utter “lack of interest in the national literature” – a situation he attributed to the number of “professors of literature and history … who are [not] truly Canadians in birth, hope, sympathy, and education.”33 Yet, throughout this same period, Campbell also worried about British perceptions of the Canadian artist, even as he urged fellow-poets (and himself sought) to follow the path marked out by Shakespeare’s “universal” genius. His blistering 1892 review of William Lighthall’s landmark anthology of Canadian verse, The Songs of the Great Dominion, for instance, decried the volume’s “utter lack of literary standard” and lamented its representation of Canada as a crude colony, whose literature, if it could be called by such a name, is merely associated with superficial canoe and carnival songs, backwoods and Indian tales told in poor rhyme, and all tied together by pseudo-patriotic hurrahs, which are about as representative of our true nationality as they are of literature.34

As he goes on to fret: [W]e have a serious question to consider … and that question is, the fair representation of our best literature both abroad and in our own country. … [W]hen we remember that this work is being sold in England and goes into the hands of cultured 31 32 33 34

Campbell, “Imperialism in Canada,” in Selected Poetry and Essays, 173–79 (178, 173). Campbell, 8 April 1893, in Mermaid Inn, 289–92 (289–90). Campbell, 12 March 1892, in Mermaid Inn, 31–36 (34). Campbell, 3 December 1892, in Mermaid Inn, 201–06 (203).

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English men and women as representative of our best work and our claim for rank in the literature of the day, we cannot help but feel that we are being imposed upon. … No wonder that Sir Charles Dilke, on reading the book, set Canadian literature down as even inferior to that of Australia, while the truth is that as far as culture is concerned alone we rank with the best young writers today in the language.35

That Campbell himself hoped to make a “claim for rank” in the pantheon of world literature there can be little doubt, but his “claim” was paradoxical, since it rested on a veneration of British cultural authority that Campbell had elsewhere repudiated – in his imputation that British-born faculty in Canadian universities are culpable for failing to recognize the achievements of the new Canadian literary tradition, for instance. Their “indifference or contempt” is unacceptable to “younger Canadians who have been born on Canadian soil,” he cautioned, adding, “[e]ven the most ardent believer in the unity of empire must admit that we are no longer mere colonists.”36 Within this ambivalent context, as Campbell struggled to reconcile his attitudes towards (post)colonial deference and literary nationalism, the supranational tradition of literary “universality” represented by a neo-Elizabethanized medievalist work like Mordred afforded him a solution to the problem of (post)colonial dependency. Mordred’s flagrant homage to British precursors like Shakespeare, Malory, and Tennyson allowed Campbell to claim space for Canada within a specifically British tradition, even as “universality” functioned as a hedge against having to acknow­ ledge the difference of his own “colonial” text. Even as Mordred’s medievalism provided Campbell with a mask for (post)colonial difference, though, there are other ways in which the play’s monstrous Mordred/Caliban figure embodied a less conciliatory, less evasive approach to Campbell’s anxieties about the literary output of a “crude colony” that might be misrecognized by British readers as “misshapen.” When viewed in this light, the tragedy of Mordred discloses a second, more conflicted authorial impulse roiling beneath the anglophilic veneration of Shakespeare and the medieval Matter of Britain: a deeply ambivalent fantasy of (post)colonial revenge in which Mordred plays the part of a tacitly Canadian Caliban and gives symbolic vent to what seems to have been Campbell’s own barely acknowledged resentment towards the British cultural authority whose approval his imperialist poetics increasingly required. The spurned hunchback Mordred, in other words, emerges in such a reading as a double for Campbell himself in a manner reminiscent of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic account of raging but repressed nineteenth-century female authorial doppelgängers of The Madwoman in the Attic.37 Just as Bertha Mason can be seen as a distorted embodiment of Charlotte Brontë’s resentment against the constraints of the patriarchal Victorian culture to which her heroine, Jane Eyre, capitulates, so might Mordred be seen as the bearer of Campbell’s largely unvoiced resentment against an imperial centre of value that Campbell, 3 December 1892, in Mermaid Inn, 203–04. Campbell, 12 March 1892, in Mermaid Inn, 31–36 (34). 37 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 146–86. 35

36

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threatens to dismiss, or even simply ignore, his bid for recognition as a “universal” literary artist. Campbell had, in fact, already employed a persona very similar to Mordred in “Pan the Fallen,” a poem on the death of the woodland god, which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly of December 1890 and which was reprinted in The Dread Voyage. As Bentley points out, Campbell joined fellow Canadian poet Archibald Lampman in viewing Pan as “an apt image of the poet,” but, as was typical of Campbell, he emphasized the grotesquerie of his subject and transformed Pan’s death into a symbol of “the fate of the poet in a callous and unthinking society” – “a dark, albeit not unrelievedly negative view of the poet as an outsider to whom recognition comes, if at all, too late.”38 That Campbell’s woodland poet is “Part man, but mostly beast,”39 plainly gives him a family resemblance to Mordred and to Caliban in Campbell’s work, as does his futile yearning for recognition, a trait that defines Mordred’s relation to Arthur about whom the “twisted” son declares, ... love is not a thing so lightly placed That it may perish easy. Thou mayst kill The king in him, thou canst not kill the father. Though thou mightst make me bitter to conspire And topple his great kingdom round his head, Yet I would ever love him ’neath it all. The Arthur of thine ambitions may be dead, But not the Arthur of my childhood’s longing. (24)

Like Mordred, Pan has “a wounded soul, / And a god-like breaking heart,” and like the poetic subject of Mordred’s precursor in “Sir Lancelot,” he dies uncelebrated, his “strange, distorted head” laying in “the dust” but turned ironically “to heaven” watched by a “mob [who] only saw the grotesque beast / And the antics of the clown.”40 Given the convergence of Campbell’s characteristic northern Gothic motif of bestial human figures with poetic misrecognition in Mordred-antecessor “Pan the Fallen,” it is perhaps not surprising to find, reciprocally, that Mordred is characterized throughout Campbell’s play as an artist – symptomatically a stage-director or playwright: “I am half resolved to be a man, / … / And help pull the ropes behind the scenes / That aid the puppets to their forced parts” (44) he says, glossing his role as the agency of Nemesis in metatheatrical terms. In fact, because his role throughout the play is to stimulate the movement of actors around the stage through his scheming with Vivien, Mordred comes to seem increasingly like a representation of the playwright himself, particularly at the climax of the play when he arranges to have Arthur’s knights “catch” Lancelot and Guinevere in a compromising meeting that precipitates the tragic denouement. From such a perspective, this theme of the ugly but noble child’s futile wish for parental love and his revenge for its disappointment emerges as a symptomatic 38 D.M.R. Bentley, “Pan and the Confederation Poets,” Canadian Literature 81 (1979): 59–71 (65). 39 Campbell, “Pan the Fallen,” in The Dread Voyage, 91–94 (line 10). 40 Campbell, “Pan the Fallen,” lines 31–32, 56, 48, 47, 39–40.

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(post)colonial allegory of the nineteenth-century Canadian writer’s Caliban-like dilemma. For Campbell, torn as he was between the paradoxical literary nationalist and imperialist identifications of British-Canadianism in the post-Confederation decades, this dilemma provoked an ambivalent response. “Yea, Vivien, I have only half a heart / For this ill business,” Mordred admits to his scheming partner, to which she replies, in an echo of Lady Macbeth: “’Tis but a lack of manhood in thy blood, / That runs to water dwelling on puerile things, / Like parent-love and other sickly longings” (65). The multiplication of vengeful conspirators to include not simply Mordred but the evil witch Vivien, whose more uncompromising rejection of “parent-love” and “sickly longings” hints at the passionate literary nationalism of Campbell’s “Mermaid Inn” columns, attests to Campbell’s reluctance to fully identify with the play’s gothic fantasy of revenge, splitting its enunciation between Vivien’s violent certainty and Mordred’s tortured hesitation. Indeed, what Mordred consistently reveals is its namesake’s inability to ever fully dispense with the fantasy of parental acceptance. When he is unable to secure Arthur’s love, Mordred transfers his affection to Guinevere, Arthur’s Queen – an Oedipal scenario that is at once an attestation to Mordred’s desire to revenge himself on his father, a symbolic anticipation of his usurpation of Camelot, and a reaffirmation of his need for delayed acceptance by a parental figure. Vivien – another Oedipal mother-figure jilted by Mordred’s father – mocks the “puerile” longings of Mordred’s “ink-heart,” ultimately securing the regal position for herself when, following Mordred’s usurpation of the kingdom in Arthur’s absence and Guinevere’s subsequent rejection of his overtures, Mordred decides to “crown this farce and make [Vivien] Queen” (84, 108). Their loveless marriage parodies the play’s already grotesque rendering of failed paternal love and compensatory Oedipal longing, uniting Mordred–Campbell with a calculating maternal figure that Mordred fears he “must keep, evil though she be” because “She’s woven in my web” – a metaphor of artistic creation that vividly suggests the pitfalls of Campbell’s identification with British medievalism (84). The play’s tonal descent into “farce” and “mock tragedy” at this point, moreover, recalls “the burlesque, clownish play” performed by “Pan the Fallen” – a recognition on Campbell’s part, perhaps, of the futile absurdity of the play’s surreptitious (post)colonial invasion fantasy, wherein a resentful Canadian Caliban unseats the reigning British monarch on British territory. As the play hastens toward its climactic final battle, the focus on place intensifies. Arthur laments, “I would I were on British soil again!,” a repetition of Launcelot’s utterance at Leodegrance’s castle at Camelard when, immediately prior to his fateful meeting with Guinevere he frets, “There is a fatality upon this place; / I cannot shake its ague from my heart. / I would I were safe back in Camelot” (108, 37). In these utterances, the complexity of the play of authorial identifications is laid bare. Ultimately, Campbell’s Mordred does not provide anything like a stable allegorical structure – materialist, (post)colonial, or otherwise. What it provides, rather, is a polymorphous phantasmatic space of signification in which characters and kingdoms function as unstable, shifting, often contradictory sites for Campbell’s own projections and preoccupations. Arthur’s climactic yearning to return to British soil, like Launcelot’s wish to be back safe in Camelot, are tokens of the ambivalence of Campbell’s identification with Mordred, the “misshapen” colonial son. If Mordred is

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a surreptitious fantasy of (post)colonial revenge against an Imperial parent who can only recognize its offspring in chilling phrases like, “Mordred, take my crown. / To illegitimacy pass my glory now” (99), it is also a tormented (post)colonial wish for the counterfactual: to simply be “on British soil.” Mordred’s medievalism, in other words, is split between expressing half-acknowledged resentment towards the Imperial parent and, at the same time, registering an impossible disavowal of the (post) colonial condition by the Canadian artist. The final scene of Mordred, in which Arthur and Mordred clash and die, is as close as Campbell comes in the play to acknowledging the geopolitical nature of its resentments and the competing impulse to wish them away. Dost thou know, O mighty father, that thine ill-got son, Ill-got of nature and mysterious night, To mar thy splendor and enwreck this world, Now crawls to thy dead body near his death, As would some wounded dog of faithful days To lick his master’s hand? (122)

In this abject simile of dog and master, Campbell exposes the hierarchical framework in which Mordred’s resentment, and his own, acquire their meaning and intensity, even as Mordred’s profession of undying filial love disavows such a feeling. The equivocation that follows in Mordred’s dying monologue cannot sustain the denial, however, as he attributes “[t]he turbulent, treacherous currents of his blood” to Arthur’s original sin, and concludes, less generously, He [Mordred] would have loved thee, but remember that. Now, past is all this splendor, new worlds come, But nevermore will Britain know such grace, Such lofty glory and such splendid days. (123, my emphasis)

This concluding “would have” gives some vent to the Canadian artist’s death-bed resentment commensurate with the painful sense of exile expressed by the elegy for a Britain that can “nevermore” be revisited as “new worlds” emerge on the horizon; nonetheless, he still hopes for a metaphysical reconciliation at the moment of death: “Arthur! Merlin! Mighty dead, I come!” (123). The violently contradictory nature of Campbell’s (post)colonial/imperialist identifications in Mordred make use, as we have seen, of a modal (post)colonial medi­ evalism that is starkly divided between nostalgia and horror, Arthurian iden­tification and Gothic recoil. In Campbell’s oeuvre, nineteenth-century British medievalism’s nostalgic reinvention of the Middle Ages as a critical framework through which to address the social and spiritual failures of industrial modernity is characteris­ tically overwritten by an uncanny return of the historically prior, more pessimistic medievalism of the Gothic in which the Middle Ages are designated “Dark.” If Gothic acquired new purchase in the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to the intellectual provocations of evolutionary theory, as Campbell’s materialist Gothic medievalism illustrates, both it and Arthurian medievalism acquired special

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meanings in the new Dominion of Canada. Here, in the unruly ambiguity of an emergent national imaginary, the “Matter of Britain” and the materialist Gothic converged to produce a uniquely (post)colonial medievalism, of which Campbell’s literary production is a complex and revealing illustration.

5 Orientalist Medievalism in Early Canadian Periodicals Laurel Ryan

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ne of the persistent myths about Canada is that it is a nation of two solitudes, a country that is divided between the British and the French. As M.J. Toswell and Anna Czarnowus explain in the introduction to this volume, the majority of literary medievalism produced in pre-Confederation Canada drew on the histories and cultures of Britain and France. Yet, as is often the case, the exceptions help explain the rule. The imagined medieval ancestors of early Canadian literature did not always match the demographics of the nation: for example, Scandinavia (and thus Canada’s imagined Viking heritage) was a popular topic long before the discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows or substantial Scandinavian immigration to Canada. Even more surprisingly, early Canadians loved to imagine the Middle East. Nineteenth-century English Canadian periodicals published more than a hundred essays, stories, and poems inspired by the region, yet at no point in the century did Canada have a sizeable population with direct connections to the Middle East. This literary relationship was thus one-sided, reflecting desires not to engage with another part of the world, but rather to consume a fantastic, home-grown Orient. The vision of the region that these authors created and disseminated to the English-Canadian public was one that was simultaneously alluringly exotic and dangerously Other – though they kept this danger at a comfortable distance. In some cases, they created distance through genre: romance was particularly popular, perhaps following English author Clara Reeve’s 1785 model of romance as something that “describes what never happened nor is likely to happen” to appeal to a predominantly white, Anglo-European settler audience that did not expect direct contact with real Middle Eastern cultures.1 Other stories accomplished distance through time. Parallel to and reinforcing early Canadian interest in romantic Orientalism ran an even deeper thread of fascination with the medieval world; Canadian periodicals

1 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on Them Respectively; in a Course of Evening Conversations, 2 vols. (Colchester: W. Keymer, 1785), 1:111.

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regularly presented their audiences with stories set in both exotic times and places. This fascination was prodigious: to date, I have catalogued more than nine hundred examples of English-Canadian medievalism published in Canada between 1789 and 1900; of these, ninety-four engage with the histories, literatures, or cultures of the medieval Middle East.2 That there is substantial overlap between the trends of medi­ evalism and Orientalism is natural, given their histories; scholars such as Ananya Kabir, Raymond Schwab, and John N. Ganim have identified correlations between the two fascinations in Western cultural productions since at least the Renaissance.3 As Ganim demonstrates, Western European cultures over the last four centuries have perceived the specific relationship between the Middle Ages and the Orient in varying ways – sometimes as “parallel universes,” sometimes as part of “a matrix of influences and invasions” – but they have consistently imagined a direct relationship between them as Others, one geographic and the other temporal.4 This relationship between medievalism and Orientalism manifested in different ways in different parts of the empire: in nineteenth-century Canada, it was used to justify nascent ideas about building an Anglocentric national identity in opposition to Canada’s own colonial Others, both at home and abroad. In this essay, I will use broad trends in Orientalist medievalism in English Canadian literary periodicals of the mid- to late-nineteenth century to contextualize works by three influential early Canadian literary figures: Agnes Maule Machar’s interpretation of portions of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, the romantic “Oriental Tale” by Susanna Moodie, and a Crusade romance and dream vision by John Hunter-Duvar. I argue that these prominent authors who engaged in Orientalist medievalism subscribed to the “now-oriented understanding of the past” that Carolyn Dinshaw attributes to St Augustine, but with an extra fold of the space–time continuum. Dinshaw argues that Augustine is concerned with the past and future only insofar as “they manifest themselves in the present,” and only insofar as they help him understand his own present.5 In nineteenth-century Canada, Machar, Moodie, Hunter-Duvar and others constructed not only a now-oriented past, but also a here-oriented there. Their imaginary medieval Middle Eastern worlds existed only to feed a rapacious Canada, champing at the bit of the margins of Empire.

2 For a list of 443 instances of medievalism published between 1789 and 1870, see my PhD dissertation: Elana Laurel Aislinn Ryan, “Appendix: Bibliography of Canadian Medievalism, 1789–1870,” in “A Medieval New World: Nation-Making in Early Canadian Literature, 1789–1870,” unpublished dissertation, University of Toronto (2015). 3 Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England, and British India,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 183–204; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008). 4 Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, 87. 5 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?:  Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 14.

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Early Canadian authors participated in a broader transatlantic conversation about how to imagine the Orient. One of the primary methods was through the genre of romance, which as Carole Gerson has demonstrated was the dominant mode of Canadian fiction throughout the nineteenth century.6 Given the predisposition of readers towards romance, and given the lack of direct cultural contact with the Middle East, it follows that many English-Canadian authors of the time would imagine the Middle East along romantic, Orientalist lines. The use of romance as a marketing strategy for Orientalist medievalism is particularly compelling because it speaks to the status of the genre in early Canada as something that is desirable. This is a far cry from its reputation in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, perhaps the nadir of romance’s critical reception. It speaks also to the success of transatlantic projects to recuperate romance, such as Reeve’s 1785 The Progress of Romance. Notably, in order to demonstrate the artistic validity of the genre, Reeve asserts its non-Western origins: I was led to ask [a learned friend], why the fictions of the Ægyptians and Arabians, of the Greeks and Romans, were not entitled to the appellations of Romances, as well as those of the middle ages, to which it was generally appropriated?––I was answered by another question.––What did I know of the Romances of those countries? ––Had I ever seen an Ægyptian Romance? I replied, yes, and I would shortly give him a proof of it. (xii–xiii)

Reeve goes on to assert that the genre does not radically transform once it is appropriated into the Christian West, but rather that we should consider it and its Islamic Eastern predecessors as all part of one literary tradition under the name of romance. Moreover, she argues that this influence is of a greater antiquity than was generally acknowledged in the eighteenth century: It had long been a received opinion, that Romances were communicated to the Western world by the Crusades.––Mr. Warton7 allows that they were introduced at a much earlier period, viz. by the Saracens; who came from Africa, and settled in Spain, about the beginning of the eighth Century.––From Spain he imagines, they found an easy passage into France and Italy. (ix)

Note Reeve’s sense of what counts as “Western” in this cultural framework. The genre of romance enters Western literature through a two-pronged approach, both of which originate in the Islamic Middle East: the earlier strand cuts across northern Africa, through Spain with the Moorish conquest, and from there eastwards into France and Italy. The later strand takes a more direct east-to-west route through Christian–Muslim contacts during the Crusades. Reeve’s idea about the Arabic origins of romance and courtly love held popular sway until the end of the nineteenth century; at that time, John N. Ganim argues, 6 Carole Gerson, A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 7 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1774–81).

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French and Anglo-American approaches diverged in their representation of the influence of Arabic forms on Western literature. Whereas French critics still “ascribed the major themes and sources of late medieval love literature to sources in Arabic and Mozarabic poetry,” Anglo-American scholars “more or less made courtly love itself disappear, dismissing it as a neo-romantic historical fantasy, or explaining it as a transmutation of a European tradition of erotic poetry descending from Ovid.”8 To Anglo-Americans, including Canadians, romance and courtly love thus ceased to have Eastern origins and instead became traditions that European authors used to describe and contain the East. Early Canadian authors approached the idea of the Orient with ambivalence. On the one hand, they created fantastically dreadful images of the modern Ottoman Empire; on the other, historians and scholars of historical literature created an impossibly lofty idea of a medieval Orient, up to which no modern culture could hope to measure. One of these prominent historians was William Henry Withrow (1839– 1908), a Methodist minister and the editor of the Canadian Methodist Magazine. Although the Canadian Methodist Magazine had a naturally ecclesiastical focus, it also functioned as a literary miscellany. It was quite successful, running for over 30 years and at its peak having a readership of nearly 3,000.9 Withrow himself contributed a variety of historical articles to the Methodist Magazine over a number of years; his general focus was on early Church history, but within that realm, his interests were diverse. In 1876, he turned his attention to the Oriental Other, in an article rather cryptically titled “The Eastern Question,”10 which surveys the history of the Ottoman Empire. He leaves little room for doubt about his feelings about the Empire, introducing his article with the reflection: Few phenomena of history are more appalling than the successive rise of those Oriental dynasties, which glare with malignant influence over the nations, like some fiery comet, a portent of terror to the world, and then disappear in darkness. Such phenomena are presented in the history of Zingis Khan and Tamerlane. (563)

As much as Withrow may want the modern Ottoman Empire to “disappear in darkness,” his metaphor of the portentous comet suggests that it is rather the Western world that is left in the dark, superstitiously frightened of celestial bodies. He does not want to draw back the curtain of scientific and cultural understanding, preferring instead his frisson of horror at the British Empire’s uncanny Others. This construction of the Gothic horrors of Eastern power in the Middle East resonated with other mid-nineteenth-century Canadian authors, particularly when applied to Islamic conquerors (note in the example above, Genghis Khan’s empire was secular, whereas Tamerlane’s was Muslim): in a long poem entitled “The Fall of Con­stantinople,” George Longmore takes a similarly ominous tone with his Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, 10. G.S. French, “Withrow, William Henry,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography 13 (1994), , last accessed 28 November 2018. 10 W.H. Withrow, “The Eastern Question – Its Historical Aspect,” Canadian Methodist Magazine 3.6 (1876): 563–67. 8

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references to “the hydra of Mahometanism.”11 For Withrow, the Mongol and Ottoman Empires of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries were awful in both senses of the word: horrifying, but commanding a certain kind of respect. The Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century, however, commands no such awe from the author: he writes of the “present decrepitude of the Ottoman Empire,” which “can give no idea of its strength and vigour in the fiery zeal of its youth, nor of the apprehensions which it caused throughout Europe” (565). He sees the modern Ottomans as a fallen power, a country allowed to “exist only by the sufferance or jealousy” of the nations of Europe. Yet he sees strategic value in the region for whoever can take it next: he likens Turkey to a dying man who holds the “key of Empire in his trembling grasp. Into whose hands shall it pass when it falls from his?” he asks (566). He constructs an idea of the Middle East as almost a null space in itself, having value only in whether it is dominated by the East or the West. The Islamic Golden Age (circa ninth to sixteenth centuries) was not just a time of scientific achievement: it also saw the arts flourish throughout the Muslim caliphates. Nineteenth-century Canadian authors particularly appreciated the poetry of medieval Persia, especially that of Omar Khayyám (eleventh and twelfth centuries), Sa’di (thirteenth century), and Hafez (fourteenth century). In the Anglo-American Magazine in 1852, an author writing under the pseudonym of “Erro” published an original verse translation of a small handful of the odes of Hafez, preceded by commentary on the state of poetry in the modern Western world.12 Erro saw the mid-nineteenth century as a dark time for European poetry, an age in which: the mechanical has absorbed and overwhelmed the ideal […] the great poets who shed such dazzling radiance upon the earlier part of the past century have, for the most part, gone to their last long home; and they who were wont to listen to their strains, find few, if any, in these degenerate days, who can minister acceptable aliment to souls accustomed to such luscious food. (507, emphasis added)

Here, Erro establishes a number of temporal dichotomies. He associates the past with the organic, with light, clarity, harmony, and plenty; the present is the realm of the mechanical, of confusion, discord, and hunger. Erro thus offers the medieval poetry of Hafez not only as a corrective to what he sees as the overwrought state of modern poetry, but also as nutritious organic food to be consumed by a hungry West. Taken together, his mixed metaphors compare the West to a ravenous cyborg body that has already stripped its home territory and must look elsewhere (both in time and space) for suitable nourishment. Consuming the artistry of medieval Persia is a regenerative bodily act for Erro’s mechanized Anglo-European audience. Notably, Erro’s “overwhelmed […] ideal” is a target that moves through both time and place. Erro’s father, who visited Persia some twenty years earlier, complained

11 George Longmore, “The Fall of Constantinople,” Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository (1823): 497–505; (1824): 25–33. 12 Erro, “Selections from the Odes of ‘Hafiz,’ the Persian Poet. Rendered into English Verse by ‘Erro,’ from an Original Translation by his Father, with a Short Preliminary Sketch,” Anglo-American Magazine 1.6 (1852): 507–12.

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about the necessary disappointment of comparing places as Hafez described them to their modern incarnations: We are naturally led to expect something at least equal, if not superior, to what we have been accustomed to behold in our native land. He, however, who expects to find in modern Persia, scenery that can bear to be compared with the commonest picturesque views of England, will be miserably disappointed. The ‘heart-expanding’ garden has not in reality, at the present day, the smallest claim to the high-sounding title they have conferred upon it. The days of chivalry are past, and those of avarice, pride, and tyranny, have succeeded. The once rosy bowers of Mosellay are no more,—a little insignificant ruin is all that now remains of that spot which Hafiz has immortalized. (509)

Erro’s father conflates the physical beauty of a place with the moral integrity of its inhabitants: Hafez’s “heart-expanding” rose garden belongs to chivalric virtue, and the modern arid landscape to avarice, pride, and tyranny. For him, the double distance of Hafez’s poetry in time and space is much of what produces its romantic qualities. Erro may lament the “degenerate days” of English poetry, but his sense of the degeneracy of modern Western poetry compared to the ideals of medieval chivalric romance is tempered by his familiarity with modern Western cultures; because the Othering of medieval European poetry is only temporal for him, it does not produce the same high expectations. To his father, Persia has fallen much further. He hopes to find something romantically “superior” to Western culture in his visit to Persia, and so the gap between his artificially heightened expectation and reality produces a greater cognitive dissonance. The father also experiences racial disson­ ance in his visit, and may paradoxically have been ahead of his time in imagining a medieval Persia that exists outside of time. Geraldine Heng argues that modern race theory has a “blind spot” with regard to race in the Middle Ages, a “cognitive lag that makes [race] theory unable to step back any further than the Renaissance, that makes it natural to consider the Middle Ages as somehow outside real time.”13 De-temporalizing the Middle Ages effectively puts it outside the reach of the Enlightenment’s biological and sociopolitical formulations of race, which Heng argues have eclipsed all other methods of racial formation in the thinking of subsequent generations (18–19). Erro’s father is thus confronted not only with disappointment in the lack of gardens in Mosellay, but also with shock at moving from his un-raced experience of medieval Persian poetry to an acutely racialized encounter with modern Persia. Breaking these multiple layers of expectation leads to an even greater sense of modern “degeneration.” Erro shares with his father the idealistic and deracialized sense of the superiority of medieval Persian romance, and in holding up the poetry of Hafez as an example of that ideal, Erro feels the need to defend it from moralistic censure. Many of the odes feature decidedly earthly joys, namely, women and wine; however, Erro’s father insists that these pleasures of the flesh must be read allegorically. Erro does not push the argument quite so far, instead arguing that physical and transcendental 13 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 20.

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experiences are inseparable in Hafez’s philosophical approach to Islam. Erro’s translations of the odes maintain their ambiguously spiritual, Sufic nature: Thou has dwelt in my heart, I have nurtured thee there, Have fed thee with kisses, and fanned thee with sighs, Till nought that is lovely on earth can compare With the glorious image my fancy supplies! I longed to be great—and I made me thy slave— For sovereignty sighed, and thy service I chose[.] (512)

This translation supports Erro’s argument about the inseparability of earthly and divine experience for Hafez: love in the poem could be divine, or romantic, or both. Erro certainly pushes for spiritual allegory; however, he argues that the “rich goblet” from which the speaker quaffs “was surely not wine, but knowledge, wisdom, or something analogous is to be understood” (512n). In this way, the author attempts to justify the poetry of Hafez for Victorian moralistic sensibilities. Emphasizing the willing servitude of the speaker to the listener makes it further palatable for a Western audience: the speaker’s wisdom is offered up for easy consumption. Unlike Longmore’s “hydra of Mahometanism,” or Withrow’s “malignant influence” of “Oriental” empires, Erro’s approach emphasizes a common morality of spiritual experience, albeit one with a clearly Western-dominated hierarchy. Locating the roots of this commonality in the past creates a framework of an idealized medieval Orient set apart from modern reality, but it does not necessarily preclude a future meeting of East and West. For scholars of medieval racial identity from Clara Reeve in the eighteenth century to Geraldine Heng in the twenty-first, the primary marker of medieval racial difference in Eurasia’s cultural history is religion. However, something different is happening in early Canada in the romances published by Agnes Maule Machar and Susanna Moodie. Bucking the general trend of the transatlantic romance publishing industry, they use religion as a marker of difference, but not as a fixed characteristic. It is mutable, with Christianity taking the place of the absent lover in the romance formula. Like Erro, Moodie and Machar create the potential for a hybridization of East and West through religion, but their romantic strategies still distance this hybrid potential from the experience of their modern audiences. Susanna Moodie (1803–1885), who was not particularly charitably disposed towards even the Irish immigrants she encountered, seemed better able to see dignity in diversity when the diversity was fictional and distant. She published “Achbor: An Oriental Tale” in the North American Magazine in 1834 and then again in her own Victoria Magazine in 1848.14 The story opens with a constructed narrator at a caravanserai offering to tell his fellow travellers the “history of Achbor the Persian” (253). The story initially follows a fairly standard romantic course: Achbor, the brother of the King of Persia, has been exiled for conspiring to usurp the throne. Along with his beautiful, innocent, and self-sacrificing wife Zamora, Achbor flees to the “snow-covered mountains of Armenia” (253). The choice of Armenia is a 14

Susanna Moodie, “Achbor: An Oriental Tale,” Victoria Magazine 1.11 (1848): 253–56.

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significant one: it was the first country in the world to officially adopt Christianity, and the Christian Church retained significant influence even when the region was ruled by the Islamic Ottoman and Persian Empires. It was thus a place of religious and cultural contact. Moodie does not specifically address the historical religious tensions, so the story leaves ambiguous the characters’ religious affiliations. After Zamora dies in childbirth, Achbor is overcome with sorrow; the world seems lost to him, but at this moment the “Spirit of Joy” visits him: ‘Blessed are the eyes that weep,’ said a thrilling voice near him, whose unearthly sweetness was more melodious than the sigh of the south wind over beds of roses. The moaning of the tempest was no longer heard, and the moon broke through the clouds, and shed a soft light upon the scene of woe and desolation. The fierce passions which had shook the breast of Achbor were suddenly hushed. ‘Sorrow,’ continued the invisible speaker, ‘can alone unlock the gates of joy. The soul of man must be tried in the furnace of affliction, and pass through the dark valley of the shadow of death before it can inherit the glorious birth-right which is only purchased by tears.’ (254)

Here Moodie quotes directly from the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me”;15 but thematically, the episode is even more strongly linked to the 22nd Psalm, which progresses from feelings of sorrow and abandonment – “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”16 – to turning from affliction to rededicate oneself and the next generation to God. It is important to note that these allusions to the Psalms do not locate Achbor’s religious experience in a Judeo-Christian context, but rather serve to emphasize the unity of Abrahamic spirituality: the Psalms, after all, along with the Gospel and the Torah, form part of Islamic scripture. Muslims consider them to be divinely inspired, although not inherently divine. The story’s depiction of spirituality is thus fairly inclusive within an Abrahamic framework: it establishes the potential for common ground among the Abrahamic faiths, though it does not go so far as to include other Eastern religions. The rest of the story follows a parable of the Garden of Eden, which is an integral creation story in all of the Abrahamic religions. Achbor asks the spirit to let his son Jared lead a life essentially as he would have before the fall: “Bestow upon that sinless child the happiness which is denied to his fallen race. Let his existence be bright, and without a cloud;—let the voice of grief be unheard in his dwelling, nor the tears of sorrow dim his eyes;—let him behold you face to face, and let his days be prolonged upon the earth!” (255). The spirit acquiesces, again on the Edenic condition that the “son shall be happy as long as he wishes to make no acquaintance with grief; but in the hour he seeks sorrow, he shall surely die” (255). Jared lives many years in perfect happiness, quite unable to feel or understand anyone else’s sorrows. When the father of the woman he loves dies, Jared is still happy; the lover rather understandably gets angry with him for his complete lack of empathy. It is at this moment that Jared wishes to experience grief, and in that moment he hears 15 16

Ps. 23.4 KJV. Ps. 22.1 KJV.

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“the whole earth resound[ing] with the cries and groans of man” (256); the sorrows of the world strike him a mortal blow. He berates himself for seeking “a knowledge whose fruit was death” (256). His father happens upon him in his last moments, and unlike at the death of Zamora, Achbor finds consolation in accepting that “The ways of Providence are just. Death alone can restore happiness to a fallen race” (256). Achbor’s lament takes the teleological stance that the fall is necessary for redemption; he finally accepts the Spirit of Joy’s pronouncement that sorrow on this earth is necessary to unlock heavenly joy. The “fallen race” that Achbor refers to is all of humanity post-Garden of Eden, but the term is equally interesting for other usages that it both invokes and rejects. Other prominent Canadian authors of the time, W.H. Withrow and George Longmore among others, saw the Islamic empires of the Middle Ages as awful in both senses of the term, and the modern incarnations of these empires as simply degenerate; for such authors, a fallen race would be exclusively racialized, but for Moodie, it is not. By emphasizing the fall as point of commonality, Moodie destabilizes Achbor’s racially ambiguous Otherness. Unlike Erro, Moodie thus avoids creating a hierarchy of degeneracy; Achbor is no more or less fallen than Moodie’s readers. Again, this creates the potential for East/West hybridity, but with the temporal distancing of the romance, this potential is never realized in the now; it must always be in the past or future. Like Moodie, Agnes Maule Machar (1837–1927) was well-versed in using romance strategies in her fiction, such as in Roland Graeme, Knight.17 She was also an avowed imperialist, a belief that lends itself well to romance, as Barbara Fuchs asserts: chivalric romance speaks to the enterprise of conquest through its “geographical impulse,” […] and its accounts of successful encounters with the Other, as well as its glorification of the quest. Romance provides a vocabulary for describing travel and travelers in sympathetic, even heroic terms.18

However, the sympathy of romance can work both ways, effectively undermining the imperial project even as it gives it a raison d’être: the romance’s Other is also an object of sympathy, thereby destabilizing the binary. Fuchs argues: Although it might seem ideally suited to the enterprise of empire, it is also possible to read romance as the deflation of epic purpose and imperial conquest. Romance may offer a respite from the battlefield or an alternative way to imagine the relations between peoples […] Both formally and thematically, then, romance complicates the verities of imperial epic, foregrounding sympathy, wandering, and inconclusiveness over the finality of conquest. (83–85)

Writing under the pen name of Fidelis, Machar adopts this imperial ambivalence in an 1876 essay on Omar Khayyám, the eleventh-century Persian scientist and

17 18

Agnes Maule Machar, Roland Graeme: Knight. A Novel of Our Time (New York, 1892). Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 82.

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poet.19 Although she almost revels in describing “the barbaric splendour and squalid misery of the Persia of the present day,” she also encourages her audience to look past the “harsher and more prominent features” of the cultural landscape in order to appreciate the “fair undulating stretches of woodlands and fertile fields” to be found in its “learning and culture of a high order” (399). By creating the image of a culturally sophisticated people who live in squalor, Machar both familiarizes and Others Persia just enough to make it suitable as a potential colony of the British Empire. Machar turns the biography of Omar Khayyám into a romance, using many of the topoi of specifically chivalric romance. First, she establishes the authenticity of the account – she takes the translator Edward FitzGerald as her source, who refers to an ethnographic article in the Calcutta Review, which is excerpted from a translation of a translation of the work of yet another scholar on the History of the Assassins. Although this may seem a less-than-airtight provenance, it nevertheless follows the medieval romantic tradition of establishing as extensive a source history as possible. Next, she establishes clear moral lines by matching our hero with a villain, and subjecting them both to the morally indifferent power of the state: A story as romantic and dramatic as it is well authenticated, connects the poet’s youth and after life with that of two of the most celebrated characters of his time, the fanatic leader Hasan-ben-Sabbáh, who founded the sect of the Khojas, of murderous notoriety, and the all-powerful Vizier Nizám ul Mulk, who, under the successive reigns of the sultans Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, possessed almost unlimited power and prestige. (400)

The three are childhood friends, all pupils of the same teacher, and they make a vow: if any one of them should attain a fortune, then “the one to whom this fortune should fall should ‘share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself ’” (400). The youths part, “each to seek in his own way the realization of his vague dreams of ‘fortune’ and success” (400). Nizám eventually becomes Grand Vizier, and grants requests of both his childhood friends: Omar humbly requests only to spend his life in scientific study and service, and in true romance fashion, he is rewarded for his choice to turn away from the path of power and money. Hasan, on the other hand, ambitiously wants a place in government – which he receives – but his ambition overtakes him: he conspires against his benefactor, and in a punishment true to the genre, is exiled. As for Omar’s poetry itself, Machar does not take a clear side in the debate of whether it is Sufic, or whether it reflects a sense of sceptical agnosticism; rather, she attempts to walk the line between the two. Although it may not be strictly Sufic, neither should it be taken absolutely literally, she argues; she prefers to see Omar as a seeker of spiritual truth who just does not have the right tools at his disposal. She repeatedly compares the Rubaiyat to works of Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare – and it’s worth noting that she thinks Shakespeare is at a disadvantage 19 Fidelis [Agnes Maule Machar], “An Old Persian Poet,” Canadian Monthly and National Review 10.5 (1876): 399–404.

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in this comparison – but her most common referent is the Hebrew bible, particularly the book of Ecclesiastes. She writes: Like the author of Ecclesiastes, to which in some respects his poem bears a strong resemblance, he had found that ‘all this is vanity and vexation of spirit,’ that ‘the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing,’ and that ‘he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ […] [T]hrough the surface epicureanism and materialism, there breaks, like a sparkling, impetuous river through superincumbent rubbish, the pathetic, irrepressible craving of a strong spiritual nature, ever yearning, never satisfied. (401)

She claims that his poetry is “remarkable for its expression of what has been called Christian Pantheism, which is becoming more fully developed in our day” (404), and she concludes her essay with the hope that if Omar could not find the love of an implicitly Christian God, that it should instead find him, “this baffled seeker after Truth” (404). Like Moodie, Machar emphasizes the nearness of the Abrahamic faiths, thus destabilizing the initial romantic marker of difference in the service of romantic sympathy. Whereas Moodie creates the potential for a hybrid space of religious equality by eliding religious difference, for Machar the relationship between Christianity and Islam is hierarchical; even though she expresses the nearness of Omar’s faith to her own, she nevertheless sees hers as superior. She acknowledges the possibility of overlap, but only on the terms of Christianity and the West. Machar thus uses the strategies of romance to indicate the suitability of the East as a potential colony of the West. The work of John Hunter-Duvar (1821–1899) is today less well known than that of Moodie or Machar, but in the later decades of the nineteenth century he was a prolific journalist and poet, with his work appearing frequently in the newspapers and magazines of Atlantic Canada. His poems are predominantly romances, and his work shows a fascination almost to the point of obsession with medieval France in particular, and classical and medieval Europe more generally. He even renamed himself in a medievalist fashion: born John Hunter, he legally changed his name to John Hunter-Duvar to connect himself with the Var region of Provence, and called his first collection of poetry John A’Var, gentilhomme et troubadour, his lais.20 Like many other early Canadian poets, Hunter-Duvar applied Orientalist tropes to his work and used religious difference as the key marker of Otherness. Unlike Erro, Moodie, and Machar, though, Hunter-Duvar used romance explicitly to support imperial conquest. His work creates a meeting point of East and West, but this is no space of hybrid production; it is, rather, a clear locus of Western domination. Hunter-Duvar’s “The Knight and the Maiden: A Legend of the Crusades” sets up a romance between Sir Michael, an Italian knight-crusader and Zulème, a Syrian maiden; following romance convention, the maiden nurses the knight back to health from a near-fatal illness and the two fall in love amid the fragrant bowers 20 S.C. Campbell, “Hunter-Duvar, John.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography 12 (1990), , last accessed 28 November 2018.

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of her garden.21 They seek permission to marry from Zulème’s mother, who gives it gladly after Sir Michael prays to Mary. Zulème is redeemed from her Otherness not by her upcoming marriage to Michael, but by a double revelation about her lineage: her father was Greek, but even more significantly, she has a mystical racial affinity with the Virgin Mary. Zulème’s true inheritance is the girdle of the Virgin, passed down through generations of her family from Saint Thomas the Doubter. Her mother explains that when Mary was assumed into heaven, she dropped her girdle at the feet of Thomas, who took it “as was meet,—/To pagan lands where gospel is unknown” and hid it to wait for the coming of “A virgin [who] should be the last of all her race” (257). Zulème is this “last one of the line/in straight descent” from Thomas. Michael too has an affinity for the Virgin: Hunter-Duvar introduces him as “pure […] as a virgin blade” and “modest as a maid”; moreover, he “prayed to the Mother Maid divine/To keep his soul within her care,/From sinful lusts and pagan charms,—/And give some sign she heard his prayer” (255). In response, he receives a vision of a beltless Mary. The girdle – a symbol of chastity – thus seems to be as much his inheritance as it is Zulème’s. The notion of her being the “last of her race” might not be an assumption of patriarchal lineage but rather an assertion of the possible infertility of this union; perhaps she and Michael will not have children and thus end their lines directly. Even as Zulème is familiarized, Michael is Othered. He experiences sexual desire, but it serves to Other him further: as they go to ask permission to marry, he proceeds “with step/Arched like an Arab’s, for her soft touch sent/The blood warm coursing from his heart to his heel” (256). Hunter-Duvar does not construct Michael’s desire as manly but rather as exotically animalistic: the knight symbolically becomes a prancing Arabian horse at the same time as the maiden receives her Christian inheritance. They thus take on roles that, in medieval romance, were often associated with unproductive or unnaturally productive unions. Anna Czarnowus identifies a common thread of “monstrous birth” in late medieval romances, in which “the child born out of the marriage of a Christian princess and a Muslim ruler is deformed: half-hairy and half-smooth, half-human and half-animal, wholly hairy, or a formless lump.”22 In the medieval romances that Czarnowus surveys, a “magic beatification,” often in the form of baptism, usually “remedies” the spiritual and physical defects of both the Othered father and child (464). In “The Knight and the Maiden,” the “supernal,” “dazzling rainbow light” of “splendor that eclipsed the day” (257) that emanates from the Virgin’s girdle might perform a similarly benedictory role as a baptism, but instead of redeeming a child it redeems a city. As the splendour of the girdle wanes, it leaves in its stead a vision of a ship as “luminous as a star” sailing out from Jaffa (Joppa, in the text). The ship, flying Marian colours, leaves “a wake as white as milk”; around it, “scented zephyrs sigh,” dolphins play, and turtle-doves coo (257). The romance between Sir Michael and Zulème is thus a microcosm of the Crusades: their experience of being Othered in order to be brought 21 [John] Hunter Duvar, “The Knight and the Maiden: A Legend of the Crusades.” The Canadian Monthly and National Review 11.3 (1877): 255–57. 22 Anna Czarnowus, “‘Stille as Ston’: Oriental Deformity in The King of Tars,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 44 (2008): 463–74 (464).

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back into the Christian fold mirrors Crusader perceptions of the Holy Land needing to be redeemed from its Otherness. Hunter-Duvar continues this idea of appropriating Eastern lands in “On the Tigris,” a poem he published in the Dominion Illustrated in 1891.23 In a literal mani­ festation of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this poem creates a vision of the Orient as a Western dream.24 Despite the title’s reference to the Tigris River, which runs from modern-day Turkey to the Persian Gulf, the poem is actually set “High on a North Canadian alp/[where ...]/In trance a Poet lay upon/A bank of brown heath, facing east” (516). The Poet has a panoptic view across time and space, and witnesses “the dual ghosts and simulacra of all time” (516). From this modern Canadian vantage, the Poet can create a history from the materials of Europe and the Middle East, from the alpine “peaks” of European culture to the Mesopotamian civilization of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Significantly, the Poet sees places both real and fictional; stories create the dream-world over which he travels voyeuristically, never interacting with anyone or thing. He imagines that “Sinbad’s house had lights aglow,” and sighs over the mart “Where Benreddin his cream tarts sold,/And sorcerer gave new lamps for old” (517). His fabulous historical view differentiates between his Arabian Nights-inspired ideas of the Middle East and the tales of European history: the European traditions are directly imported to Canada, whereas the visions of Asia are pure fancy. The “alp” is Canadian; the Poet celebrates “Swithinmas,” a significant day in Arthurian legend; and the poem contrasts the bardic character of the Poet to England’s Tennyson (516). Conversely, the poem treats Asian cultures as mystical objects to be excavated or resurrected: “Hittite histories” are buried “underground/In perished porphyry-builded fanes” (516), and even life itself exists only in the past. It is only through the Poet’s vision that “Life out of doors and life within/Returned and was as it had been/[…]/And once more seemed it Bagdad bold/As it was in brave days of old” (517). The Poet thus subjects Baghdad to his complete artistic control, metaphorically colonizing the Tigris–Euphrates valley by rejecting the possibility of modern life there. Imposing a vision of historical backwardness thus validates the theoretically modernizing power of empire. Ganim sees this pattern of locating Eastern and colonized cultures in the past reproduced tangibly in the various expositions and World Fairs of the late nineteenth century, which would often juxtapose a medieval English or French street scene with one of an African or Asian village. With both the World Fairs and in literary Orientalism, he argues that “the Medieval is accorded a direct connection to modernity, explaining the origin of national and civil identity, while the Orient is a living museum of the past, bracketed off from modern development or even excluded from the potential for development” (87). In “On the Tigris,” Baghdad and other cities of the Poet’s imagination are not just “bracketed off from modern development” but even blocked from having any real meaning to a nineteenth-century Canadian reader. The Poet is even aware of, but blissfully unconcerned with, the limits of his knowledge: he wonders “whether dream/Or influence of some occult law/Showed things that were, or did but seem,” and he feels “Romance […]/In fable 23 24

[John] Hunter Duvar, “On the Tigris,” Dominion Illustrated 6.152 (1891): 516–17. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978, 2003).

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of the Orient” (517). He is perfectly happy when “The cloud-built arch” (517) of his Oriental vision collapses, and he heads down the mountain and jauntily pipes a song about his vision, thus passing on his imaginary construction of the East. This is the discursive colonial power of Orientalism at work: Hunter-Duvar disseminates his dream-vision of the Orient to the Canadian public with little concern for the difference between imagining and experiencing life “On the Tigris.” Visions of the medieval Orient served many purposes in nineteenth-century Canada, but at their most fundamental level they created a here and now rather than a there and then. Similarly, over the course of the century, romance became not a genre historically from the East but frequently about the historical East, mobilizing discourses of imperial power in works of literary colonialism. Hunter-Duvar’s brand of medieval Orientalism is particularly upfront about its colonial objectives, endorsing the Crusading conquest of Jerusalem and blithely inventing new Orients. Moodie and Machar offer more rhetorically complicated imagined relationships between East and West: they both return to the medieval romantic trope of using religion to establish difference, but they also both then undermine that very Otherness with the double-sided sympathy that romance produces. In this way, they challenge the notion of the romantic Other. With the fashion for romance as a morally instructive form in the nineteenth century, their romances might have advocated a morally uplifting embrace of Otherness, were they not careful to maintain a rhetorical distance between Canada and its Others. It would be irresponsible not to recognize that they were complicit in the colonial project, even advocates of imperial expansion; as is so often the case, the ideals of romance do not translate well into real life, and their romance was not their reality. All three of these popular English Canadian authors of the late nineteenth century fanned their audiences’ desires for literary exoticism without forcing them to confront anything more than an imagined Other well separated from Canada by both time and space. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, if all time eternally serves the present, is any of it redeemable?25 For Dinshaw, the restlessness of asynchrony produces the potential for justice (34), and in hope I am inclined to agree: may we continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Canada’s racialized exclusions to push us to create a more just now.

25

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt, 1943), 1:4–5.

6 The Collegiate Gothic: Legitimacy and Inheritance in Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels David Watt

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t the beginning of Robertson Davies’s 1981 novel The Rebel Angels, Professor Clement Hollier reveals to his doctoral student and one of the novel’s narrators, Maria Magdalena Theotoky, that Francis Cornish, “the foremost patron of art and appreciator and understander of art this country has ever known,” had died that morning. Cornish’s extensive collection of Canadian art is destined for the National Gallery, but “he was also a discriminating collector of books,” and as executor of his will, Hollier knows that “they go to the University Library”.1 Hollier then informs Theotoky that Cornish “was also a not-so-discriminating collector of manuscripts; didn’t really know what he had, because he was so taken up with the pictures he hadn’t had much time for other things. The manuscripts go to the Library, too” (3). This is the reason why Hollier wants Theotoky to work near him during the coming academic year: “one of those manuscripts will be the making of you, and will be quite useful to me, I hope” (3). Moreover, he tells her, “that manuscript will be the guts of your thesis, and it won’t be some mouldy, pawed-over old rag of the kind most students have to put up with. It could be a small bombshell in Renaissance studies” (3–4). Theotoky, of course, wants to know more: “What was this manuscript about which he was so evasive?” (4). When I first read this scene as an undergraduate, I was taken in by the intellectual excitement that manuscript studies seemed to offer. When I reread it as a graduate student learning to study manuscripts, I was convinced that other students had bombshells in their hands while I was pawing over mouldy old rags. Rereading this scene recently, I noticed something very different about it. Whereas Maria Theotoky is curious to know what is in the manuscript, the novel’s structure revolves around other questions: where is the manuscript and who has the best claim to study it?

1 Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (Toronto: Penguin, 1983), 3; further references to the novel will be in parentheses in the text.

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This essay begins by answering these questions in a fairly straightforward manner, recognizing that The Rebel Angels may not be widely known. It then explores the concept of the “Collegiate Gothic” as both an architectural style and a description of the novel’s genre before considering how the novel explores questions pertaining to legitimacy, inheritance, and national identity. The final section focuses especially on the concept of translatio studii, which suggests that the Collegiate Gothic’s preoccupation with the Old World reflects an anxiety about the way that New World institutions stake their claim to indigenous land by presenting themselves as the inheritors of a venerable tradition. While Theotoky does not discover what is in the manuscript Hollier has promised her for some time, the reader learns something about its contents thanks to the novel’s other narrator, the Reverend Simon Darcourt. He has been asked to serve as one of the executors of Francis Cornish’s will, alongside Clement Hollier and Urquhart McVarish and under the supervision of Cornish’s nephew, Arthur. Darcourt is responsible for the manuscripts and printed books, so Hollier eventually comes to him in order to gather more information about a manuscript he had initially seen when he and McVarish visited Cornish before his death. He is initially just as evasive about this manuscript with Darcourt as he had been with Theotoky, though he eventually reveals that it is “one of the great, really great, lost manuscripts” (89). Hollier believes the manuscript in question is a copy of Rabelais’ “Stratagems, that is to say, prowesses and ruses of war of the pious and most famous Chevalier de Langey at the beginning of the Third Caesarean War; he wrote it in Latin, and he also translated it into French, and it was supposed to have been published by his friend the printer Sebastian Gryphius, but no copy exists” (90). According to Hollier, the manuscript is “about forty pages, closely written” (91), and it was marked up for the compositor since it was supposed to have been published by Sebastian Gryphius, who did in fact publish some works of Rabelais. Hollier had seen the manuscript in a leather portfolio with “S.G. stamped on it in gold” (89). But that is not all. Hollier reveals to Darcourt that “in another little bundle in the back of the leather portfolio, in a sort of pocket, were the scripts of three letters” (91). According to him, these letters include “passages in Greek (quotations, obviously) and here and there a few words in Hebrew, and half a dozen wholly revealing symbols” (92). What the symbols reveal, in Hollier’s view, is “that Rabelais was in correspondence with the greatest natural scientist of his day, [Paracelsus], which nobody knew before” (92). This is the manuscript – or rather, these are the manuscripts – that Hollier has promised to Theotoky. But where is the Gryphius Portfolio? Locating the Gryphius Portfolio proves to be difficult for several reasons. First, Francis Cornish seems to have had no system for storing his manuscripts or printed books. When Darcourt arrives at Cornish’s apartments to begin the task of cataloguing his books and manuscripts for probate, he discovers an accumulation rather than a collection: “Books were heaped on tables and under tables – big folios, tiny duodecimos, every sort of book ranging from incunabula to what seemed to be a complete collection of first editions of Edgar Wallace” (22). He notes that “there were caricatures and manuscripts, including fairly modern things” (22). Cornish’s collection is typical of others in North America insofar as even its early manuscripts are particularly eclectic: some witness “ancient music” and another group was

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purchased “for their calligraphy: they were contemporary copies of letters to and from the Papal Chancery of Paul III” (88). Second, the collection is not adequately catalogued. When Hollier asks, “Have you found any catalogue of Cornish’s books and manuscripts?” (88), Darcourt replies that Cornish “made two or three beginnings, and a few notes. He had no idea what cataloguing means” (88). Third, Cornish had lent the manuscript to McVarish just before his death. Although Darcourt does not know what to make of it at the time, he finds what he assumes to have been Cornish’s last entry in one of his many notebooks: “Lend McV. Rab. MS April 16” (43). Darcourt recalls this entry when Hollier expresses his concern that McVarish has got his hands on the Gryphius Portfolio (92). Hollier wonders whether “lend” means Cornish meant to lend it or did in fact lend it, but they both ultimately agree that it is likely that McVarish has the manuscript. This supposition is confirmed near the end of the novel when John Parlabane offers it as a gift to Maria and Arthur, having recovered it from McVarish’s desk (295). The questions about the manuscript’s contents and whereabouts turn out not to be particularly interesting for those reading the novel for its plot. Readers learn very early on about the manuscript’s contents; they also have a pretty good idea about where it is, even if it remains inaccessible until near the end. The novel spends considerable time exploring who has the best claim to study it. McVarish’s claim rests on the fact that he is a Renaissance historian who regards himself, in Darcourt’s words, “as a big Rabelais man” (90). Hollier positions McVarish’s claim as being based on a dubious appeal to hereditary rather than scholarly right: McVarish’s ancestor – if indeed Sir Thomas Urquhart was his ancestor, which I have heard doubted by people who might be expected to know – Sir Thomas Urquhart translated one work – or part of it – by Rabelais into English, and plenty of Rabelais scholars think it is a bad translation, full of invention and whimsy and unscholarly blethering just like McVarish himself! There are people in this University who really know Rabelais and who laugh at McVarish. (91)

Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–1660) was a royalist with lands located in northern Scotland, and he did translate the works of Rabelais in the mid-seventeenth century. One might expect that Robertson Davies, someone who was vocal about his own Scottish ancestry, might be sympathetic to McVarish’s claim to the Gryphius Portfolio, yet the remainder of the novel carefully demonstrates that Theotoky is the person best situated to study a Renaissance author whose ideas were influenced by more arcane traditions from the medieval past. One of those arcane traditions is the Collegiate Gothic, which functions in the background of the novel as both a setting and an underlying structural principle of the genre of the novel. Even though it focuses to a great extent on medieval and Renaissance ideas, The Rebel Angels takes place entirely in Toronto, Canada. Both narrators describe events that take place at or near a fictionalized University of Toronto campus, the College of St John and the Holy Ghost in Maria Theotoky’s sections and Ploughwright College in Simon Darcourt’s. These are the main foci of the setting, and the other locations visited in the novel are few: a couple of flashbacks, the three apartments of Francis Cornish as visited by Darcourt in his capacity as

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literary executor, and Theotoky’s home. The Rebel Angels could certainly be read as a campus novel, yet it is a campus novel that also invites readers to expect the generic features regularly associated with gothic fiction. When Theotoky uses the term Collegiate Gothic to describe The College of St John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately known to its fellows as Spook, she both invites readers to see it as a fictional version of the University of Toronto’s Trinity College and reminds them that it is comparable to many other North American institutions.2 She claims, “Spook is about a hundred and forty years old and was built in the time when Collegiate Gothic raged in the bosoms of architects like a fire” (7). Trinity College itself was founded in 1851 (one hundred and thirty years before The Rebel Angels was published) by John Strachan, first Anglican Bishop of Toronto, and construction began on its buildings on 30 April of that year.3 The College could not become part of the University of Toronto until after Strachan’s death in 1904 because its foundation was designed to ensure that an institution of higher learning in that city would maintain strong Anglican ties, despite the university’s decision to cut that connection. The College of St John and the Holy Ghost in the novel certainly has strong Anglican ties, and Darcourt serves in his capacity as an Anglican priest during the “slap-up funeral” given to Francis Cornish “in the handsome chapel of Spook” (15). He notes that the Rector shows particular gratitude for Cornish, who has remembered his alma mater in his will, “in the only way college recipients of benefactions can do – by praying loud and long for the dear friend” (16). His reflections on this practice lead him to recognize a continuity between past and present: “Quite medieval, really. However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins, and the fact that Spook was a New World college in a New World university made surprising little difference” (16). Spook may well be a fictional New World college, but its structure – both architectural and collegial – is designed to establish its continuity with the Old World of medieval Europe. It can therefore be located in the same tradition as Trinity College and the many other educational institutions built across North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – all with the express purpose of emulating the Oxbridge colleges in their style and structure. As an architectural style, the Collegiate Gothic was not only an attempt to establish continuity between the medieval Oxbridge colleges and North American institutions; it also established connections associated with national identity in its affinity with the Gothic Revival movement, which influenced the design of prominent ecclesiastical and governmental buildings around the world but particularly in Great Britain and its colonies (including its former colonies).4 The clearest example of this connection between Gothic Revival architecture and nationalism in Canada is the design for Parliament Hill in Ottawa, which was chosen in 1859, the end of the decade in which Trinity College was founded in Toronto. According to Kevin

2 3 4

See Alex Duke, Importing Oxbridge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). “Trinity College, Toronto,” Canada Farmer (Toronto) 3.25 (24 June 1871), 388. See Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).

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Murphy and Lisa Reilly, the rise of Gothic Revival architecture and national identity were linked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: With the emergence of nation states in North America, Great Britain, and on the Continent, associations between architectural styles and political regimes became the subjects of great concern as antiquarians in various countries sought to describe the evolution of a national patrimony in buildings. The Gothic was central to many of these narratives and numerous countries attempted to lay claim to it as a particularly national style.5

In Great Britain and continental Europe, Gothic Revival architecture reinforced a sense of continuity between an idealized medieval past and the present. Yet, according to Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, “Britain and the United States (except for a short period following the ‘American Revolution’) imagined their countries and communities as linked to the medieval past by a unique kind of continuity.”6 Institutions located in Canada prior to 1982 were in a unique position insofar as their constitutional association with Great Britain ensured that they were deeply invested in locating their history in Europe rather than North America. Architecture associated with the Gothic Revival can be understood as a physical manifestation of Umberto Eco’s claim that the Middle Ages are sometimes used to locate national identities.7 Thus the “Collegiate Gothic” style of St John and the Holy Ghost both alludes to the medieval origins of the university and acts as a statement about national identity and the implied continuity of a scholarly tradition stretching from the Oxbridge colleges to the University of Toronto. Furthermore, The Rebel Angels suggests that the architecture at St John and The Holy Ghost establishes continuity between the past and the present through its organization of the practice of everyday life for those who live and work there.8 In her extended account of Hollier’s rooms at Spook, Theotoky reveals that its architectural features compel him to live as if he were inhabiting a building first built in the Middle Ages: The rooms where Hollier lived were space-wasting and inconvenient. Up two long flights of stairs, they were the only rooms on their landing, except for a passage that led to the organ-loft of the chapel. There was the outer room, where I was working, which was of a good size, and had two big Gothic arched windows, and then, up three steps and somewhat around a corner was Hollier’s inner room, where he also slept. The washroom and john were down a long flight, and when Hollier wanted a bath he 5 Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly, “Gothic,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), 87–96 (91). See also their edited collection, Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017). 6 Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, “Making Medievalism: A Critical Overview,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, 1–10 (2–3). 7 See Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” in his Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1986), 61–72 (70). 8 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially chapter 7, “Walking in the City,” 102–18.

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David Watt had to traipse to another wing of the college, in the great Oxbridge tradition. The surroundings were as Gothic as the nineteenth century could make them. (7)

Ironically, the main inconveniences described here arise from the location of the conveniences (especially those associated with the location of modern plumbing). Nonetheless, the passage implies that the Gothic Revival movement purposely created wasted space and inconvenience because its practitioners saw these as features of medieval life. Thus the college’s architecture establishes continuity between Hollier and his medieval predecessors through the ritual inconveniences it presents in everyday life. Parlabane also notices the continuity between the medieval university and Hollier’s rooms in Spook. He tells Theotoky that Hollier’s room is the room of a medieval scholar if ever I saw one. Look at that object on the bookcase; alchemical – even I can see that. This is like an alchemist’s chamber in some quiet medieval university. (11)

Notwithstanding the fact that the study of alchemy is far more common in medi­ eval fiction than it was in medieval universities, Hollier is certainly interested in the practice as part of his broadly defined field. As we hear from Darcourt, Hollier is a great medieval scholar with a world reputation as something out of the ordinary called a paleo-psychologist, which seemed to mean that by a lot of grubbing in old books and manuscripts he got close to the way people in the pre-Renaissance world really thought about themselves and the universe they knew. (15)

Theotoky defines his work slightly differently for Parlabane when he asks, claiming that what Hollier does is really digging into what people thought, in times when their thinking was a muddle of religion and folk-belief and rags of misunderstood classical learning, instead of being what it is today, which I suppose you’d have to call a muddle of materialism, and folk-belief, and rags of misunderstood scientific learning. (29)

Later, she tries to clarify for Parlabane when he dismisses the term paleo-psychologist: He tries to recover the mentality of the earliest thinkers; but not just the great thinkers – the ordinary people, some of whom didn’t hold precisely ordinary positions. Kings and priests, some of them, because they have left their mark on the history of the development of the mind, by tradition and custom and folk-belief. He just wants to find out. He wants to comprehend those earlier modes of thought without criticizing them. He’s deep in the Middle Ages because they really are middle – between the far past and the post-Renaissance thinking of today. So he can stand in the middle and look both ways. He hunts for fossil ideas, and tries to discover about the way the mind has functioned from them. (33)

Hollier is interested in both the Gryphius Portfolio and Theotoky’s mother, one of the bomari, because they offer access to what he calls “fossil ideas” in situ.

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Moreover, they offer clear evidence of the continuity between past and present, just as Spook’s “Collegiate Gothic” architecture establishes continuity between it and the medieval university. In Davies’s creation, the Collegiate Gothic also serves as a genre. Spook’s architectural features draw attention to his incorporation of elements drawn from other gothic novels. In other words, the buildings serve as the setting for a novel that can also be described as being Collegiate Gothic in terms of its genre. For example, Parlabane seems to haunt Theotoky. When she complains to Hollier, though, he insists that she must remain patient for a little longer before bringing their conversation to an end: “as he walked away I looked upward, and in the window of Hollier’s rooms – very high up, because Spook is nothing if not Gothic in effect – I saw Parlabane’s face looking down at us” (27). Parlabane’s appearance in the upper window of Spook may make him seem like a ghost in a gothic abbey, yet he proves to be more like Ambrosio, the title character in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance.9 When Maria first encounters him, “he was wearing a cassock, or a monkish robe that had just that hint of fancy dress about it that marked it as Anglican rather than Roman” (5). Although Spook is an Anglican college, Parlabane nonetheless seems out of place on a university campus – even one characterized by Collegiate Gothic architecture. However, he seems ideally well suited for the plot of a Gothic novel. Like Lewis’s monk, Parlabane is a gifted speaker who engages in scandalous sex and is willing to kill to achieve his desires. His presence in Rebel Angels alerts readers to the other ways in which he, and some other characters, can be associated with conventions regularly associated with this genre. Parlabane is a figure of suspicion throughout the novel because he seems to represent what Hogle calls the “attractions or terrors of a past once controlled by overweening aristocrats or priests,” yet he is out of place both in the modern campus and the monastery governed by a rule observed since the Middle Ages, having been adopted by the Anglican orders after the dissolution of Catholic foundations in England.10 Parlabane wears a cassock notwithstanding the fact that he “went over the wall” (72–73) of the Nottinghamshire monastery where he had taken his vows. He admits, ironically, “there was no wall. But one day at recreation time I walked down the drive in a suit and a red wig out of the box of costumes the school used for Christmas theatricals” (74). This admission reveals that he must have acquired the cassock that marks him as out of place on campus after he had rid himself of another one that would have marked him as a brother of his monastic order. He seems initially to have sought out monastic life because the idea of living in another time appealed to him, but he finds that he cannot abide living according to the monastic rule on a daily basis. Spook’s architecture may use wasted space and inconvenience to recreate the experience of living in the medieval past, but that is a far cry from the discipline that made Parlabane feel “stretched on a framework of the daily monastic routine” (71). Even when he seems to begin to find a place at Spook, readers know that Parlabane has just exchanged one role for another. Theotoky sees him after Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk: A Romance (London: J. Bell, 1796). Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–20 (3). 9

10

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he has acquired some teaching and (unbeknown to her) some of Darcourt’s suits. She claims, “the transformation in Parlabane was remarkable. Gone was the monk’s robe, and with it had gone the theatrically monkish demeanour” (137). While he plays the role of the teacher at a modern university for a short time, he ultimately reverts to the character he knows so well. After he kills McVarish and himself in order to ensure the publication of his novel, Parlabane stages his own dead body so that it is “dressed in his monk’s robe, his Monastic Diurnal clasped in his hands, looking well pleased with himself, but not smiling” (259). Parlabane may have rebelled against the norms of the medieval monastic rule, but he embraced his role as a gothic antagonist. By murdering McVarish in the way that he does, Parlabane also draws attention to the role that Theotoky may be playing as a gothic heroine (or perhaps a parody of such a heroine). In the long letter he leaves with his body, Parlabane reveals that he has left two packages behind. The first is for both Theotoky and Hollier. It is something which McVarish had “locked up in his desk … yes, it’s the Gryphius Portfolio and it’s yours, my dears, to gloat over and keep for your own dear little selves. Especially those letters concealed in the back flap” (295). Parlabane has also left another, larger, package that contains the manuscript of his novel, Be Not Another, which he urges Hollier to have published. By leaving these two packages, he not only draws together two threads in the plot line but also suggests that there may be a connection between Theotoky and Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. There is a remarkable similarity between Henry Tilney’s account of what will befall Morland when she reaches his home and what happens at the end of The Rebel Angels. Tilney thrills Catherine by ending his account of what will happen in this way: At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open – a roll of paper appears: you seize it – it contains many sheets of manuscript – you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher ‘Oh! Thou – whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall’ – when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness.11

While the manuscript Morland finally discovers at Northanger Abbey turns out to be “a collection of washing bills,” her anticipated discovery adumbrates Theotoky’s role in connection with a promised manuscript as well as Parlabane’s autobiographical novel.12 There are certainly considerable differences between Catherine Morland and Maria Magdalena Theotoky – differences that tell readers a great deal about the latter’s claim to the Gryphius Portfolio. The most important is their education and attitude toward knowledge. According to Austen, Catherine “could never learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she

11 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Claire Grogan, 2nd edn. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002), 163. 12 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 239.

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was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.”13 Because Mrs Morland has to spend so much time with her younger children, Catherine also prefers “cricket, base ball, riding on horse-back, and running about the country… to books – or at least books of information.”14 Theotoky, on the other hand, was educated at a “good convent school” (127) and she has clearly acquired extensive knowledge and scholarly skills by the time the novel opens. Hollier tells her that in order to study the mystery manuscript she’ll “need all your languages – French, Latin, Greek, and you may have to bone up some Hebrew” (4). Darcourt recognizes that she is an exceptional student when she attends his seminar on Greek. To be fair, the opportunity to attend university was never available to Catherine Morland; her brother James, however, does go to Oxford. This creates problems for Morland because John Thorpe, James’s friend from college, aggressively pursues her because of what he thinks her family can offer him. Aspects of this relationship can be seen in Hollier’s relationship with Theotoky. We learn from her at the beginning of the novel that they had sex after she had revealed that her mother knew the secrets of the bomari; we learn from Darcourt later on that Hollier’s guilt is one reason he has promised her the Gryphius Portfolio. This suggests that Henry Tilney is an analogue for Arthur Cornish, and that is not unreasonable: after all, both come from wealthy families and can provide their respective love interests access to the books that interest them. The parallels between Northanger Abbey and Rebel Angels reveal why it is useful to read the latter novel through the gothic tradition, but the differences between the novels – Theotoky’s opportunity to attend university and her capacity for scholarship – suggest that “collegiate” is a helpful adjective to keep in mind while analyzing it. Theotoky repeatedly emphasizes the difference between the way she is seen on campus and the way she is seen at home: “At the University,” she claims, “I was Miss Theotoky, a valued graduate student somewhat above the rest because I was one of the select group of Research Assistants. At home I was Maria, one of the Kalderash, the Lovari, but not quite, because my Father had not been of this ancient and proud strain, but a gadjo” (123). Theotoky describes her experience of living one way at the university and in another way at home as one of being caught in different times. She asks herself if she can be a “modern girl” and then responds ambivalently: I must be modern: I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. (124)

While Morland may share Theotoky’s sense that she is living in a different time than her parents, the reasons for this in Rebel Angels are slightly different than in Northanger Abbey. Theotoky seems to share Hollier’s view that her mother is a living embodiment of past knowledge, and she flatters her mother as she attempts to convince her to allow Hollier to visit their home. She admits to her Mamusia that Hollier will ultimately want to publish his research, potentially in a book, but she insists it will be “not just about the bomari, but about all sorts of things like it that wise people like you have preserved for the modern world” (131). While Hollier sees 13 14

Austen, Northanger Abbey, 38. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 39.

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Theotoky’s mother as a living fossil, Maria experiences the push and pull of the past in her everyday life: “when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and I when I long for the past […] the Present cannot be pushed away” (124). Theotoky’s sense that she is inhabiting different times and that the past cannot be separated from the present makes her look like a character in a gothic novel; the fact that this experience is marked most clearly by the contrast between home and university is what makes this novel an example of the Collegiate Gothic. As in other gothic fiction, especially American fiction, Theotoky’s family home functions figuratively.15 She lives in a house she describes as big and handsome, “in the heavy banker-like style that prevails in the most secure, most splendidly tree-lined streets of the Rosedale district of Toronto” (133). The house projects the kind of respectability associated with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that her father strove to achieve and that Theotoky enjoys as a graduate member of an Anglican college. Yet after her father’s death, her uncle Yerko converted the house into ten dwellings, and its interior now does not reflect the sombre and staid appearance of its façade. Theotoky insists that it “was surely one of the queerest warrens in a city noted for queer warrens” (134). At one level, the house reflects Theotoky’s own psychological state: she projects a respectable exterior to those at the university while struggling with a complex inner life. The house is much richer than this, though, for at another level the depiction connects her family home to Spook with its convoluted inner space. It reminds readers not simply to contrast the way past and present function at the university and Theotoky’s family home but to compare them as well. They may not be so different, although Theotoky’s experience of them certainly is. One somewhat unexpected way in which they differ is that Yerko’s conversion of the house means that while there may be some inconvenience associated with it, there is no wasted space. Indeed, Yerko and Mamusia agree that it would be a waste of space to give Theotoky her own rooms (136); therefore, she sleeps on the sofa, not entirely at home with her own family but unable to leave. She later admits, “I had struggled hard for freedom from my Mother’s world, which I saw as a world of superstition, but I was being forced to a recognition that it was out of my power to be wholly free” (270). She also recognizes that “[i]t was this duality of mind that, I suppose, that drew me to Hollier’s work of uncovering evidence of past belief and submerged wisdom. Like so many students I was looking for something that gave substance to the life I already possessed, or which it would be more honest to say, possessed me” (270). Although Theotoky is very different than Morland in her combination of intellectual capacity at the university and relationship to gypsy culture, the two women are alike in that they are both confront questions about how they have come to believe what they believe and what effect this may have on their decisions. The most obvious similarity between the women protagonists in Northanger Abbey and Rebel Angels is that they both marry men of independent means whom they consider to be friends, and after having been courted by someone associated with the university. Catherine Morland agrees to marry Henry Tilney after refusing 15 Two seminal examples include Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” first published in 1839, and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (New York: Viking, 1962).

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the affections of John Thorpe; Maria Theotoky agrees to marry Arthur Cornish after having been enamoured with Clement Hollier and beloved by Simon Darcourt. The manuscript in Northanger Abbey also returns at the end, when Eleanor Tilney marries the young man whose servant had left the washing bills for Catherine to find. Theotoky gains access to the Gryphius Portfolio when she marries, thanks to the delayed emergence of another bill. Arthur Cornish reveals that the portfolio “was not included in the gifts to the University, and in fact I paid the bill for it less than a month ago” (304). Arthur had planned to give the manuscript to Theotoky as a wedding gift, and he is particularly pleased that he will be able to give it to her as part of their wedding festivities. Thus, this novel’s Collegiate Gothic plot establishes that Theotoky has the best claim to the manuscript because of her family background, her scholarly excellence, and (perhaps surprisingly) her decision to marry. After Parlabane’s death, Darcourt reminds everyone that neither Parlabane nor Hollier had the authority to promise the manuscript to her, for it belonged to the estate (297). In the end, Theotoky’s marriage to Arthur secures the legitimacy of her claim on the Gryphius Portfolio. The question of legitimacy emerges in other ways in the novel as well, leading to issues of inheritance and national identity. Like many other gothic novels, Rebel Angels is profoundly concerned with questions of legitimacy and inheritance. In Northanger Abbey, for example, Frederick Tilney’s many liaisons raise questions of legitimacy and General Tilney casts Catherine Morland out of his family home when he becomes convinced that she is after his son’s inheritance. In later gothic novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is a profound concern about threats to the national identity that might threaten the very possibility of producing legitimate heirs who might inherit. The threats posed to the present from the past are regularly associated with gothic architecture in gothic fiction: strikingly, the key threats in both Northanger Abbey and Dracula are associated with repurposed or abandoned Catholic abbeys. These buildings serve as ambivalent reminders about the continuous national narrative; they are clearly very old, yet they mark a massive rupture in continuity between the Catholic Middle Ages and the Reformation. Gothic Revival and Collegiate Gothic start by assuming that divide, and both modes of architecture attempt to reinstate continuity between the past and present. In Rebel Angels, this also involves overcoming a geographical divide in order to connect the European past to the North American present. I have already suggested that Spook’s Collegiate Gothic architecture functions this way to connect it to the medieval Oxbridge colleges. I would now like to suggest that this process is connected more broadly to the concept of translatio studii, which is embodied most clearly in Maria Magdalena Theotoky and her association with the Gryphius Portfolio. The idea of translatio studii was invoked historically to describe the transmission of knowledge westwards, from Greece to Rome, then to Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is not hard to imagine why this ideal appealed to scholars in colonial North America, which they saw as the next logical destination in a westward trajectory.16 Rebel Angels seems to suggest that the process can 16 Candace Barrington discusses the idea of translatio studii in colonial North America in American Chaucers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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be traced even further back beyond Greece and then, partly through the Gryphius Portfolio, into Canada. The allusion to the rebel angels in the title and throughout the novel is a reference to the Book of Enoch, from what is now the apocryphal bible. Enoch 8.1–2 describes how the rebel angels shared knowledge of various crafts (including the making of weapons, ornamentation, sorcery, and astronomy), and how the sharing of knowledge led to conflict. Although in Enoch God ordains that this shall result in the destruction of the earth and the punishment of those who shared the knowledge, it is clear that the knowledge taught by the rebel angels was widely practised. The more arcane crafts (sorcery, astrology, astronomy) are particularly notable here insofar as these are the kinds of subjects that Hollier thinks Rabelais is exploring in the Gryphius Portfolio. The portfolio therefore acts as the link between the knowledge of the rebel angels, which was then passed down to the Greeks and Romans (Hebrew, Greek, and Roman all appear in the letters at the back of the portfolio), then on to Paracelsus and Rabelais in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance and finally, in the form of a single manuscript, to Canada. Rebel Angels seems to make the case that Theotoky’s own quite particular identity makes her the rightful inheritor of this tradition, and it emphasizes several times the fact that she is legitimately Canadian. When they first meet, Parlabane makes a faulty assumption about her name: “Not Canadian, I assume?” (5). She responds defiantly: “Yes, Canadian” (5). Parlabane remains undeterred. “Of course,” he admits, “I keep forgetting that any name may be Canadian. But quite recently, in your case, I should say” (5). She concedes that she is a first-generation Canadian and that her parents immigrated from England. Based on his initial assumptions about her name, Parlabane pushes her further and discovers that her parents were from Hungary, inferring that they “very wisely legged the hell out of Hungary because of the trouble there” (6). Her personal family trajectory has moved consistently from East to West. So, too, has Parlabane’s. He reveals that his own name is Huguenot, though it changed after several generations in Ireland, “and now, after several more generations in Canada, it is quite as Canadian as your own, my dear” (6). Nonetheless, he goes on to insist that the European past remains present even in those who may be several generations removed from Europe: “I think we are foolish on this continent to imagine that after five hundred generations somewhere else we become wholly Canadian – hard-headed, no-nonsense North Americans – in the twinkling of a single life” (6). Arthur Cornish takes a slightly different approach when he inquires about her name, but he asks nonetheless: “Theotoky; a Greek name, isn’t it?” (140). She concedes that this is correct, but she also insists it does not tell the whole story. Her surname is her father’s, she says, “but on my mother’s side I am a Gypsy, and being a Gypsy in the modern world – especially the University world – simply doesn’t do” (140). Maria’s diction draws a distinction between living in the modern world in which the university operates and being a gypsy, which she implies is a world that exists in the past. She continues by suggesting that her identity as a Canadian is related to this sense of modernity as well as to her rejection of her personal history: “I’m a Canadian woman, setting out on a university career, and I don’t want any part of the Gypsy world” (140). Yet she cannot leave her past entirely behind, and her knowledge about both aspects of the Old World – the Gypsy experience as well as the medieval past – make her particularly well qualified to study Rabelais.

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Theotoky’s family story also fits particularly well into the model that Davies establishes for Canadians in “Literature in a Country without a Mythology.”17 Speaking to an audience in Edinburgh, Davies decided he had better provide some background information about Canadians: “Who are we? The naked fact is that virtually all of us are descended from people who never wanted to go to Canada, and who did so under the lash of grim necessity.”18 If the gothic as a genre is particularly suitable for exploring questions of legitimacy and inheritance, then it must also invite opportunities to consider the sense of disinheritance that must have preoccupied many early settlers. The claim that Canadians are descended from people who did not want to go to Canada also resonates with his claim that Canada has “about four hundred years of history.”19 This view of Canadian history explains its predilection for Gothic Revival and Collegiate Gothic architecture, for this creates a sense of continuity to a much richer, European past for those who held that Canadian history was short. Moreover, the appeal of studying a manuscript by Rabelais in Canada takes on new resonance in this context, for its history seems to be longer than the nation’s. Yet this view is problematic, and Davies himself alludes to the reason why without addressing it. He describes a poem by Douglas LePan referring to “a lone adventurer travelling in his canoe along the West Coast of Canada, where the only traces of human life to be seen are the occasional aboriginal villages.”20 Davies does not suggest these villages are no longer inhabited, yet he describes them only as evidence of “traces of human life.” He further effaces the experience of Indigenous peoples when he goes on to say that LePan’s poem: speaks of the sense of isolation felt by the Canadian of today, at most only a few generations from Europe, in a land which still declares itself to be strange, and if not unfriendly, certainly reserved and only partly comprehensible. It is a land where there is no easily accessible guide to the past, no widely accepted tale of our beginnings, no friendly jumble of things that are taken for granted. A country, in fact, without a mythology.21

I do not want to dismiss this claim simply as a product of its time, but I do not think many Canadian writers would make such a statement today. It is now more widely recognized that people have been coming to Canada from around the world, not just Europe, for hundreds of years and, more importantly, that there are many nations who trace their connection to this land back for many more generations. Few of the indigenous people who live in Canada would agree that this is a country without a mythology, and other Canadians have been coming to recognize that fact. By implying that Canadians are at most only a few generations removed from Europe in both The Rebel Angels and “Literature in a Country without Mythology,” 17 “Literature in a Country without Mythology” was delivered as a lecture in 1988, and is available in Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Selections 1980–1995 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), 40–63. 18 Davies, “Literature in a Country,” 48. 19 Davies, “Literature in a Country,” 44. 20 Davies, “Literature in a Country,” 43. 21 Davies, “Literature in a Country,” 43.

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Davies engages in a profoundly gothic – in the sense of medieval – combination of tropes: the idea that the foundation has come about through travel from East to West and the insistence that the land being founded is essentially unoccupied. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain connects Britain’s foundation myth with the flight of Aeneas from Troy to Italy with Ascianus.22 Ascianus’ son Brutus makes his way from exile in Greece to Albion, which he finds unoccupied except for a few giants.23 The giants initially seem like an afterthought, though it takes some considerable work to kill them. Davies presents a similar view of indigenous people in North America, who are clearly living in the land but do not fit the broader narrative of cultural movement from East to West. Given the interest that Rebel Angels shows in aspects of culture that have been rejected or misunder­ stood, it seems astonishing to me that never once does the text acknowledge, as is now customary, that Toronto is located on land that “is the traditional terri­ tory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.”24 How different would this novel be today if the meals at Ploughwright College were to begin with this acknow­ ledgement as well as the recognition that “Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.”25 I conclude by suggesting that the Collegiate Gothic, understood as both an architectural style and generic marker, provides a powerful way of reading Rebel Angels as a novel implicitly preoccupied with anxieties concerning the legitimacy of institutions on treaty land as well as an uncertainty about what their cultural inheritance might look like. I do not think that Robertson Davies had these anxieties at the forefront of his mind while writing this novel, nor do I think it can only be read in this way. Nonetheless, I think it is helpful to ask about the larger context in which we might understand the many ways in which this novel insists that the Gryphius Portfolio of Rabelais’ writing can most appropriately be studied in a college characterized by the Collegiate Gothic style by Maria Madgalena Theotoky, a Canadian of European descent. These questions for me are very closely connected to the collection of manuscripts and early printed books in Canada. Part of my decision to study manuscripts was inspired by this novel, and I think it appropriate to end by thinking about how my experience working with manuscripts in Canada has changed my understanding of it. I will begin with Davies’s own claim that his portrait of Ozy Froats, who studies human faeces in the novel, was based on a good source: “no less than a statement of Sir William Osler, about his use of this despised substance in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, and his intuition that it might yield much greater information to a

22 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 54. 23 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, 72. 24 The quotation comes from the Land Acknowledgement that is a required element of official business in the City of Toronto, Canada: see https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/ accessibility-human-rights/indigenous-affairs-office/land-acknowledgement/. 25 Ibid.

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determined researcher.”26 I wonder if Davies’s depiction of the great collector Francis Cornish was based on the same man, whose bequest of books formed the basis for the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University.27 Or he may have had in mind the founder of Trinity College (upon which Spook is based), the Rev. John Strachan, who when Archdeacon of York, “obtained a donation of £500’s worth of theological books from the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge” for King’s College, Toronto in the early nineteenth century.28 Or perhaps he was also thinking of Henry Scadding, one of the original chaplains at Trinity, who donated his substantial estate to the University of Toronto – a collection that includes a Greek Evangeliary copied in Constantinople around 1050 and now known as the Codex Torontoniensis (MSS 01244).29 Or perhaps he had in mind someone like Father Athol Murray, whose eclectic collection of manuscripts, early printed books, and Canadian Art (now held at Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox, Saskatchewan) bears a remarkable similarity to that of Francis Cornish, with whom he could have been a contemporary.30 I could provide more examples, but the point really is that The Rebel Angels can help us to think about why so many people were committed to bringing European manuscripts to study in Canada and what they hoped to achieve by so doing. In some cases, the purpose of the acquisitions may be inferred from the name of the group who funded them. It seems clear that when the Walter Murray Chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire funded the purchase of a portfolio of leaves made by the notorious biblioclast Otto Ege they were likely attempting to create a sense of continuity between the North American present and the European past.31 That same desire for continuity is expressed in a slightly different way in the bookplate commemorating the Andrew K. Dysart Memorial Collection now housed at the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Manitoba. In a scene that can only be described as Collegiate Gothic (Figure 1), a kneeling figure who looks very much like the man who both championed the collection and acquired the books, then-president Dr Albert Henry S. Gillson, hands the book to a seated woman who may either be a mythological figure or the Head Librarian at the time of this purchase, Elizabeth Dafoe. The building that appears to belong in Renaissance Tuscany is now the University of Manitoba’s Administration building, though it was once home to the Agricultural College. Its place in the window situates the scene in what is now the Elizabeth 26 Robertson Davies, “The Novelist and Magic,” was delivered as a lecture in 1989, and is available in Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Selections 1980–1995 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), 117–43 (119). 27 See https://www.mcgill.ca/library/branches/osler/oslerbio. Accessed 20 February 2019. 28 Pearce J. Carefoote, “Medieval Manuscripts at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library: Past and Present,” Florilegium 33 (2016), forthcoming. 29 Carefoote, “Medieval Manuscripts,” forthcoming. 30 See https://torontoist.com/2016/09/now-and-then-monsignor-pere-athol-murray/. Accessed 22 February 2019. 31 For an exhibition including this material, see http://library2.usask.ca/ege/exhibit/; for an account of the discovery of this material, see https://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/chwp/ CHC2007/Stoicheff/Stoicheff.htm, both accessed 22 February 2019.

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Dafoe Library, where the books are now stored. This bookplate captures in an image what Rebel Angels does through its narrative; it transposes a European past on to the North American present by means of both architecture and genre. But this scene’s sublimation of the indigenous history of the prairies into a symbol on the university crest also draws attention to what the Collegiate Gothic might threaten to efface – and therefore it also draws attention to what the Collegiate Gothic as a genre might profitably explore.

Figure 1.  Bookplate commemorating the donation by the Manitoba Brewers’ and Hotelmen’s Welfare Fund as a memorial to the Honourable Andrew K. Dysart, M.A., LL.D., and Chancellor of the University of Manitoba. Reproduced with the permission of the Archives & Special Collections, University of Manitoba; all rights reserved.

7 Earle Birney as Public Poet: a Canadian Chaucer? M.J. Toswell

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edievalism, which addresses the pastness of the present in terms loosely related to the period between 500 and 1500 in Europe, carries a difference valence when the artist juxtaposing the modern world against the medieval is a trained and practising medievalist. John Gardner, for example, is for many a modern American novelist, but for those who study medievalism he is also a scholar who wrote books about Chaucer and the morality of fiction and taught courses at various universities on medieval subjects.1 His novel Grendel therefore strikes a fellow medievalist first in terms of its problematic and polemic relationship to Beowulf, and only secondarily for its presentation of the twelve signs of the zodiac or twelve philosophical approaches to human existence.2 Umberto Eco also has credentials as a medievalist, so that medievalists read The Name of the Rose with a more critical eye thinking about the niceties of life in a medieval European monastery and the highly abstruse details of medieval theology that Eco adduces in the novel.3 On the other hand, although Seamus Heaney completed an undergraduate degree in English in Ireland, and thereby learned basic Old English and some passages from Beowulf, medievalists offer to him a kind of intellectual freedom, and are willing to overlook minor peccadilloes or questions about register and tone in his remark­ able poetic translation of the Old English epic poem – although rarely can they resist a casual reference to Heaney’s amateur status as a translator from Old English.4 1 See Per Winther, The Art of John Gardner: Instruction and Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 2 John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). 3 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1983). The novel is much discussed: see Theresa Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), and Thomas Inge, ed. Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988). 4 For example, see Heather O’Donoghue, “Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North,” in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 192–205, or M.J. Toswell, “Seamus Heaney and Beowulf,” in Makers of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz

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Jorge Luis Borges similarly gets nothing but approbation from medievalists when he chooses to translate Old English poems into Spanish or to write an introductory manual on Germanic medieval languages and literatures in Castilian Spanish to be used as a textbook in the hispanic world.5 And, to move closer to home, when the Canadian writer Alice Munro chooses to have the elderly male protagonist of her short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (now better known as the movie Away From Her) be a retired English professor who specialized in Anglo-Saxon and Nordic (probably intending the more usual term Norse), medievalists rejoice in having broken – however tangentially – into the mainstream of modern literature.6 Usually, then, when a medievalist analyzes the medievalism of a post-medieval writer, the focus is the way in which that individual became fired by a discovery of the Middle Ages, a text or series of texts which occasioned an epiphanic response, or a process of reading and thinking that changed the writer’s perception of the world. The analysis concerns how that individual, in choosing to engage in the literary trope of medievalism, is in fact using medievalism as a lens by which to address the present day. Also relevant are the ways in which the apparent or transparent historicity of the text really demonstrate a profound interest in contemporary issues and serve as a way to open up a critical truth. How, though, do we approach a trained medievalist who is also a well-known poet, and specifically a poet whose earliest work is firmly grounded in a particular geographic place? More, how do we address a poet who has self-consciously modelled his poetic and public practice on the practice of a medieval poet? Earle Birney was such a poet in Canada, one who through most of the twentieth century saw himself as a Chaucer redivivus, a public poet creating Canadian literature as a vital and exciting national literature very much in the way that Geoffrey Chaucer created the concept of English literature in the fourteenth century. Earle Birney (1904–1995) came to see himself later in life as a kind of universal poet, although even then his focus was on establishing Canadian poetry in the world at large. Throughout the twentieth century, Birney was an active and publishing poet, an editor, an adaptor, a cheerleader for other people’s work, and generally a highly noticeable man of letters in Canada. His work spanned most of the century, beginning with David and Other Poems in 1942, after which ensued twenty-one other poetry texts and collections, two novels, a collection of radio dramas, three collections of prose essays and commentary, and, almost fifty years later, the poetic collection entitled Last Makings in 1991. These publications do not include the many radio programmes, talks, poetry readings, and other public engagements that were a primary part of his literary career in Canada and abroad. Nor do they include the significant editing and mentoring commitments he took on throughout his life, notably from 1936 to 1941 at the Canadian Forum, from 1946 the Canadian Poetry and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), 21–4. 5 See my Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 6 The story was first published as “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in The New Yorker, 27 December 1999 and 3 January 2000.

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Magazine, and in the 1960s editing the work of Malcolm Lowry.7 He held the first writer-in-residence gig in Canada, at the University of Toronto from 1965 to 1968. Birney was that rare being, a public intellectual, capable of writing for a mass audience and explaining poetry and how it is made. He was also willing and very able to present his own creative work everywhere that he was invited, and to speak in person or on the radio on topics literary and secular. Perhaps, at heart, he felt he was Geoffrey Chaucer redivivus, functioning in the twentieth century as Chaucer had in the fourteenth. Chaucer was similarly without question a public poet, and a poet whose concern was explicitly to entertain and delight his audience. He wrote a number of poems at the request of patrons, and towards the end of his life received a pension from the king.8 One manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde has a miniature as its frontispiece, which appears to depict the poet, Chaucer himself, reading his poem to an audience of nobles in a garden.9 Like Birney, Chaucer was also concerned that his work be carefully copied, and published (in the sense of being made available to those who could afford to commission or create manuscripts).10 He also lived a public life, such that extensive details of Chaucer’s activities survive, in some respects more information than survives about Shakespeare, who lived two centuries later.11 Moreover, Chaucer used an unreliable narrative voice in many of his poems to bring his audi­ ence into a dialogue with him and with his characters, creating what has come to be called Chaucerian irony. Recent scholarly research on Chaucer has emphasized these social and public qualities of his work, noting the wide dissemination of his works as reflected by the many copies of his poems in manuscript form, often with confusing and conflicting indications as to which version might have been the final

7 The standard biography of Birney’s life is Elspeth Cameron, Earle Birney: A Life (Toronto: Viking, 1995), but Birney also wrote various autobiographical pieces (some mentioned below), and there is discussion of his life and career in Frank Davey, Earle Birney (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1971), in Peter Aichinger, Earle Birney (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1979), and the biographical note by Wailan Low in Earle Birney, One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems, ed. Sam Solecki (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2006). 8 See, notably, Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), and also Richard Firth Green, Poets and Prince-Pleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 9 The image is the frontispiece to an early fifteenth-century manuscript, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 61. 10 Birney’s archive is held by the University of Toronto as MS Collection 49 in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and overseen by Birney’s widow and the literary executor of Birney’s estate, Wailan Low, now a supernumerary justice of the Superior Court of Ontario. I am very grateful to Madam Justice Low for permission to work in the Birney archives and to present this material here and elsewhere. On the question of the proper care and copying of manuscripts, and adequate attention to detail during publication, see my study quoting from Birney’s letters and exchanges with one press over the publication of his radio dramas: “Earle Birney’s Radio Dramas Based on Medieval Texts,” Canadian Poetry 61 (2007): 12–35; for the published dramas, see Earle Birney, Words on Waves: Selected Radio Plays (Toronto: Quarry Press and CBC Enterprises, 1985). 11 See now Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014); and also David R. Carlson, Chaucer’s Jobs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Gail Ashton, Brief Lives: Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Hesperus Press, 2011).

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authorial one (if such a thing existed for Chaucer).12 His genial, self-deprecating, and gently comic approach has also been extensively reconsidered and deconstructed for its coded criticisms and commentary on social, political, and religious issues of the day – both his day and later days.13 Birney shares all these characteristics, perhaps in part because his doctoral thesis was an exhaustive catalogue of Chaucer’s irony, focusing particularly on the political and social aspects of his critical commentary on fourteenth-century life.14 His passion for revising his work, and for its accurate publication, also shares more than might have been expected with his literary ancestor. Chaucer notably wrote a short lyric to his scribe exhorting him to accurate copying, and the many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in particular cannot be fully reconciled one with another as to the order of the tales. Birney’s irony, sometimes gently comic and self-deprecating, sometimes rising to fierce sarcasm and angry attack (unlike Chaucer, but like another fourteenth-century literary ancestor, William Langland) is a hallmark of his poet­ ry. Chaucer is most known as a narrative poet, although he also wrote short lyrics; Birney similarly writes, although on a smaller scale than Chaucer’s texts, narratives as a very large proportion of his poems. On the face of it, then, Birney and Chaucer share a similar outlook on the creation of poetry. I would like to propose here, however, that Birney engages in a conscious and self-conscious effort to make himself a public poet for Canada, using Chaucer’s role as the father of English poetry as a model for his endeavour. If this is the case, then several features of Birney’s life and poetry should reflect the way in which he modelled his public role on Chaucer. Four separate strands of his life and work suggest this possibility: first, his deep interest in irony, both in Chaucer and in his own life and work; second, his poetry, which was imbued with medieval prosody and themes but clearly intended for a large audi­ ence; third, his extensive efforts to explain and popularize texts both medieval and modern, notably for radio productions; and fourth, his efforts throughout his life to achieve a public persona. In a letter to Irving Layton, Earle Birney describes himself by saying that he would like to be an old man as Chaucer was, or made out he was, like a leek with a hoar head and a green tail, the tail standing up.15

12 Much has been written on this topic; see, for instance, Charles A. Owen Jr, Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007). 13 See, for example, Helen Barr, Transporting Chaucer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), and for an approach not unlike the one here, Candace Barrington, American Chaucers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Barrington does not refer to Earle Birney. 14 Earle Birney, “Chaucer’s Irony,” University of Toronto Dissertation, 1936. Discussion of Birney’s centrality to scholarship on this issue can be found in Beryl Rowland, ed. Companion to Chaucer Studies rev. edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), which extensively cites Birney’s dissertation. See also Beryl Rowland, “Earle Birney and Chaucer,” in Perspectives on Earle Birney (Downsview, ON: ECW Press, 1981), 73–84. No editor is given for the issue of Essays in Canadian Writing, but a group of letters in the Birney archive makes it clear that the collection was conceived and assembled by the ECW editor, Jack David; see Thomas Fisher archive 49: 191.1–2. 15 The letter is quoted in Elspeth Cameron, Earle Birney, 531.

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The two similes are striking, and provide a reminder that however much he presented himself as a rebel anti-authority free spirit – Earle Birney trained in the rigorous discipline of medieval literature, and remained a practised and engaged teacher of Old and Middle English at the university level for most of his career. That he should see the parallels to Chaucer’s long and irony-filled life in his own only seems right. Birney’s thesis on Chaucer’s irony was sufficiently in advance of its time that the University of Toronto Press rejected it just after his dissertation defence in 1936 but published its essence in 1985, almost twenty years after Birney retired from his position as a professor of medieval literature and creative writing in the University of British Columbia.16 Since the University of Toronto Press does not publish Can­ adian poets as a matter of course, the publication was only in small part a result of Birney’s fame in Canadian letters; the 1980s were a time that very much encouraged the placing of Chaucer’s practice into the social and political world of the late fourteenth century, and examining his ironic consideration of the class structure of late medieval England. Birney’s book came at the centre of this rehistoricization of Chaucer, and reflected the Chaucerian currents in motion fifty years after his thesis defence, long after the time of his own rather unhappy search for a congenial post and a permanent appointment. That he should see the parallels to Chaucer’s long and irony-filled life in his own only seems right. Birney’s further comparison, though, while its sexual content has been recognized, has eluded further analysis. Birney’s own sexual appetite is relatively well known; this vivid image to describe it is not, however, wholly his invention. The Old English riddle whose solution is “leek” or “onion” reads: Ic eom wunderlicu wiht  wifum on hyhte neahbuendum nyt  nængum sceþþe burgsittendra  nymþe bonan anum staþol min is steapheah  stonde ic on bedde neoþan ruh nathwær  neþeð. hwilum ful cyrtenu  ceorles dohtor modwlonc meowle  þæt heo on me gripeð ræseð mec on reodne  reafað min heafod fegeð mec on fæsten  feleþ sona mines gemotes  seo þe mec nearwað wif wundenlocc  wæt bið þæt eage. [I am a wonderful creature, bringing joy to women, and useful to those who dwell near me. I harm no citizen except only my destroyer. My site is lofty; I stand in a bed; beneath, somewhere, I am shaggy. Sometimes the very beautiful daughter of a peasant, a courageous woman, ventures to lay hold on me, assaults my red skin, despoils my head 16 Earle Birney, Essays on Chaucerian Irony, ed. Beryl Rowland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

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M.J. Toswell clamps me in a fastness. She who thus confines me, this curly-haired woman, soon feels my meeting with her – her eye becomes wet]17

I have used here the Early English Text Society edition and translation of Riddle 25 of the Exeter Book; although it has been superseded, it is likely the one Birney studied as a graduate student. The correspondences are perhaps not exact, but the impish comparison, and especially the failure fully to decode the message, is an Anglo-­Saxon technique that Birney exploited – even in a private letter. The Old English riddles were not provided with solutions in the manuscripts, and even today there is disagreement about what some of them mean. The ambiguity, the intentional layering, the sexual double entendres, the craftsmanship that holds the double image of the last line so that it hangs uncertainly in the air: Birney as poet and man would have exulted in all these features. His image of wanting to be an old man who is a “leek with a hoar head and a green tail, the tail standing up” very much reflects Riddle 25. Sexual punning and word-play are also among the principal hallmarks of the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, and much of Birney’s work on irony in Chaucer touches on the ludic eroticism in his texts.18 In any case, Birney ties his own sexuality and hope for a long and lusty life explicitly to Chaucer and implicitly to the bawdy puns of the Old English Riddles. He might well be a leek, but his delight remains in Chaucer and in sexuality. Earle Birney has received very little critical attention in the last two decades, and the descriptions and epithets he received in the 1970s as, for example, Bruce Nesbitt’s accolade that he is “Canada’s finest poet” in the introduction to a collection of papers on his work may seem to some outdated and unlikely.19 Nonetheless, his career and his poetry make him the quintessential Canadian poet. He grew up in a rugged town relatively far from the nearest city, the son of one immigrant parent and one deep-rooted Canadian, went to a major university and became involved there in the literary scene. His decision to go on to graduate school in the United States can only be described as utterly typical of the budding Canadian poet, as was his later frenetic juggling of the imperatives of a university post and those of a poet needing time and silence in which to write. His willingness to play the grant-getting game is perhaps noteworthy, and in the range and frequency of his poetry readings both worldwide and criss-crossing the country his spirit was indefatigable. Like Chaucer, he used all the modes available to him, worked locally but with an inter­national flavour to his writing (often organizing his books according to

17 The Old English and translation are from W.S. Mackie, The Exeter Book, Part II Poems IX–XXXII, The Early English Text Society o.s. 194 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 114–17. 18 Many critics now address these issues: see Elizabeth Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), and Geoffrey W. Gust, Chaucerotics: Uncloaking the Language of Sex in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 19 Bruce Nesbitt, “Introduction,” in Bruce Nesbitt, ed. Critical Views on Canadian Writers: Earle Birney (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 1.

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geographical locations of the poems), and always with a deep sense of irony. Later in the introduction Nesbitt comments on Birney’s irony: His verbal and dramatic irony have long been remarked on; less explored is his irony of manner as it is expressed by his shifting sense of voice; his profoundly personal sense of philosophic irony; and his care in constructing poems and books whose very structure is ironic.20

Nesbitt’s comments about Birney, except for the reference to “books,” which would have meant something slightly different to him, would apply perfectly to Birney’s mentor and literary father, Geoffrey Chaucer. Some elements of Birney’s indebtedness to Chaucer in his poetry, and more generally to his studies of medieval literature, have been identified before. For example, Richard Robillard argues: One could speculate that his editing developed in him the habit of using his blue pencil on his poems, that studying the forms of Chaucer’s irony sharpened the irony in his own poetry, and that his reading of the narratives in Old English literature led to his appreciation of epic and heroic poetry.21

In his book, Robillard highlights Birney’s sound-effects and their medieval influences, focuses on his nature symbolism, and notes with respect to his classic poem (the first of three versions) “Canada: Case History” that “for the man who loves and teaches Old and Middle English poetry, the lack of myths in his own country is a terrible challenge.”22 For Robillard, then, Birney’s intense desire to establish a sense of Canadian identity, with an appropriate mythology, reflected his training as a medi­ evalist, as did the form of many of his poems. Similarly, Peter Aichinger in his booklength study of Birney opens his second chapter with an extended comparison of Birney with Chaucer, picking up the observer stance that both used, but an observer stance from inside the poem. Aichinger also notes that irony is a fundamental principle of Birney’s poetry, reflecting not only Chaucer’s poetry but also Birney’s thesis on irony in Chaucer’s poetry. He suggests that where Chaucer’s ironic commentary on the folly that he saw about him was indirect and expressed very tactfully, Birney uses the more open society in which he lives to engage in more direct condemnation and satire. The chapter analyzes examples of that satire and its targets, especially in Birney’s autobiographical novel of the Second World War, Turvey. In a later chapter Aichinger discusses Birney’s perception of writing as a craft to be learned (echoing Chaucer), and analyzes the particular features of his poetic technique – noting especially Birney’s ability at writing narrative poetry and his lifelong belief that poetry was the way in which human beings speak to one another.23 Birney wrote his best-known and award-winning collections of verse from the 1940s to the 1960s, garnering two Governor-General’s Awards for his first two Nesbitt, “Introduction,” 14. Richard Robillard, Earle Birney (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), 5. 22 Robillard, Earle Birney, 41. 23 Aichinger, Earle Birney, 53–72, passim, and 138–41 on his narrative technique and on “the craft so long to learn,” paraphrasing Chaucer. 20 21

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books. He turned for some years to concrete poetry, and later yet to poetry that could be put to music or chanted or incorporated with rhythmic effects, only to return in the 1980s to the modernist lyric. His early poetry was rooted in the Canadian West, including “David,” that most well-known (in Canada) poem of friendship and death, bravery and tragic decision-making, mountains and sky.24 Later in life he moved farther afield for his inspiration, spending extended summers in Mexico and travelling the world over to “suffer the Idetic image” and to write poems as “counterspells to prevent the spectres from becoming permanent hallucinations.”25 His earliest inspiration, however, came from his training in Old English, which manifested itself in the alliterative metre of many of his poems, and most explicitly in word-compounding and Anglo-Saxon archaisms in a number of works that are clearly Anglo-Saxonist in conception. These features of his poetry have now been much discussed, but will bear some repetition.26 For example, “Oil Refinery,” written at Port Moody in 1964, begins: Under the fume  of the first dragons those spellbinders who guard  goldhoards under barrows whole fields of warriors  wilted: even Beowulf fell in balebreath  from firedrake fangs27

The debt to Old English is clear: Birney uses the caesura to divide the first half of the line from the second, links those halves by alliteration “fume” and “first,” then “guard” and “goldhoards,” “warriors” and “wilted,” and “fell” and “firedrake.” The added alliteration of “firedrake fangs” derives from Middle English alliterative verse, and would not have been acceptable in Old English. Birney also uses kennings: “goldhoards,” “balebreath,” and “firedrake,” giving calques of two Old English kennings, goldhord and fyrdraca, and deriving a third from bæl meaning “blaze, fire,” and bræþ, meaning “odour” or “aroma.” The compound bælblæse means a “blaze of fire,” and may have inspired Birney. The metaphor at the core of the poem, comparing the dragon assailing Beowulf to the massive threatening towers and chimneys of an oil refinery, is a powerful and apposite one. The refinery/dragon is stoked by men who stab at it/him, but despite the horror of its being, the “sly snake” is sufficiently manipulative that he “coils round our steadings” so that, as Birney concludes, “Eala! We are lost  in the spell of his loopings.” We need oil, and so the lament of the Old English word eala, meaning “alas,” or “oh woe!” requires that we continue to feed the dragon that is the refinery, and live with the balebreath of the monster’s exhalations. Here, then, as in a number of other poems, Birney uses an Old English structure 24 In his unpublished memoir, Birney recounts an incident that probably provided the inspiration for David. He certainly commented himself – and faced extensive commentary – on the widely held belief that the central incident of the poem, in which a wounded climber is pushed off a ledge to his death, at his own fervent request, by a fellow mountaineer, was based on a real story, and Birney himself had done the pushing. 25 Earle Birney, The Creative Writer (Toronto: CBC, 1966), 25. 26 See my “Earle Birney as Anglo-Saxon scop: A Canadian ‘Shaper’ of Poetry?,” Canadian Poetry 54 (2004): 12–36, and references there. 27 “Oil Refinery,” quoted from The Collected Poems of Earle Birney (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), 2: 60–61.

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and poetic technique to offer commentary on the modern world, generally ironic commentary as here, but sometimes in a more pointed way. He foreshadows the ecological poets of a later day in his description of the way in which oil is an insidious dragon, fearsome and yet necessary, polluting and only just under control, yet required by society and kept functioning despite all the obvious issues deriving from its “balebreath.” In other poems, Birney is very obviously Chaucerian in his inspiration. He compares his lover Wailan Low to a frisky squirrel, or to a weasel, playing both with bestiary images and with Chaucer’s well-known construction of Alison in “The Miller’s Tale.”28 The longer and more ambitious work “November Walk near False Creek Mouth” is a poem is written in seven stanzas of free verse in a bob-and-wheel pattern strongly reminiscent of Gawain and the Green Knight. Birney italicizes the wheel sections and changes the rhythm of the lines, with breaks and caesuras emphasizing the pulse point of the ocean in the Vancouver area, what he calls the “beat.” T.S. Eliot is an influence on the poem, as is the Old English figure of the wanderer in exile, but mostly Birney looks for vignettes, small images and narratives: Something  is it only the wind? Above a jungle of harbour masts is playing paperchase with the persons of starlings  They sift and fall stall and soar  turning   as I too turn  with the need to feel   once more the yielding of moist sand   and thread the rocks back to the seawall29

Birney has the wind as the wanderer, at the edge of the world, and employs pathetic fallacy as the wind reflects the “I” of the poet in its isolation and uncertainty, its flailing about and turning on the coast. The poem reflects both Old English patterns with its caesuras and images, and Middle English with the bob-and-wheel stanza leading Birney forward to new images and new stories. “Mappemounde,” a sonnet of sorts, similarly exists in the boundaries between Old and Middle English, describing the late medieval maps of the world but temporally shifting to structure the image in terms of Old English wandering; he finishes “Adread in that mere we drift to map’s end.”30 Finally, one poem most strikingly reflects Birney’s debt to Chaucer: his “For maister Geffrey” is written in Birney’s version of Middle English, and emphasizes Birney’s walking with Chaucer. He might be a wanderer, but Chaucer is his lodestar: 28 See my “Earle Birney: Medievalist Bard of British Columbia,” in The Year’s Work in Medievalism 23 (2009): 62–72 (68). 29 “November Walk near False Creek Mouth,” quoted from One Muddy Hand, ed. Solecki, stanza VI: 17–23, 104. 30 “Mappemounde,” from Collected Poems, 1:92, line 14. For an excellent study of Birney’s medieval material reflecting his modern wanderings about the world, see Adele J. Haft, “Earle Birney’s ‘Mappemounde’: Visualizing Poetry with Maps,” Cartographic Perspectives 43 (2002): 4–24.

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“I walken wol til al hys joy beth myne” (I will walk until all his joy is eternally mine).31 The poem finishes: In Chauceres haselwood I walke alweye And never thynke out of hise shawes to streye.

For Birney, life and poetry involved walking in Chaucer’s hazel wood, and in his shoes. He will, as he says, never stray from those shoes and that metaphorical hazel wood. Secondly, as a public Canadian figure, Birney took every opportunity to introduce matters medieval to a popular audience. Thus from 1946 to 1955 his principal output was a series of radio plays, including four adapted medieval texts: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and a version of the “Second Shepherd’s Play” sufficiently removed from the original that he called it the “Third Shepherds’ Play.” Birney did not prepare the Canterbury Tales, perhaps because versions had already been done both in England and in the United States, but did plan to adapt Troilus and Criseyde, according to notes in his archive.32 He was quite proud of his Gawain adaptation, and solicited the views of his former professor of medieval literature at Toronto, whom he describes as “the very cautious and scholarly Dr. Clawson,” who wrote, as Birney quotes, that he “succeeded to a remarkable degree in communicating the spirit of the original while providing an hour of delightful entertainment.”33 Birney’s archives also include a detailed piece on John Mandeville with a note in Birney’s hand on the top saying “Written for CBC but never, I think, broadcast – probably late 1950s.”34 Also to be found is a talk entitled “Talk on Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ for World of Books Program, B.B.C.,” written while he was on sabbatical in England in 1958–59 working on articles derived from his thesis on Chaucer’s irony. The talk advises listeners to read and enjoy a modern adaptation such as Nevill Coghill’s, stating that: All the delicate music, the metrical wit, will not be there in our modernization, but enough survives to catch the essential voice of Chaucer, the deceptively easy often slangy tone, the gaiety, and the constant play of the subtlest and most incisive irony. But there’s more to Chaucer than this, for he is the greatest by far of all our narrative poets, the only one who has succeeded eminently in effects of humour as well as of pathos and tragedy.

The brief talk goes on to tantalize the listener with discussion of some of the tales in particular, their literary delights and effects. Birney finishes on a suspenseful note, with a very brief discussion of the marriage debate, before advising listeners to read for themselves.35 The talk on Mandeville is in the same vein; my own “For Maister Geffrey,” Collected Poems, 1:182. See Birney’s Words on Waves, and Thomas Fisher archive 49: 109.6. 33 33 Birney, “Author’s Preface: Words to Make Waves,” Words on Waves, xi. The play on words with sound waves marking the fact that these are radio plays also allows Birney the ironic hint that he wants to make waves, change society, engage his audience as robustly as possible. 34 34 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 55.12.1–6. 35 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 62.31. The talk was broadcast, as notes with the paper refer to payment. 31

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suspicion would be that, having found while in England that the Third Programme encouraged this kind of material, he prepared a talk for the CBC in the hope that it might follow the lead of the BBC. The talk on Mandeville begins with his most famous character, Prester John, and describes the author as a “wonderful liar” when he speaks of having eaten fish, which are “right savoury in the mouth, but they are of other shape than fishes are elsewhere.” Birney discusses the fourteenth-century manuscripts of this text, developed from French and Latin originals, and speaks of the geographical wonders purportedly seen by Sir John Mandeville while on his travels. The court of Prester John is a magnificent and utopian place, the Valley of Thunder and Darkness a perpetual night of stumbling over the corpses of previous travellers slain by the “black beasts” who inhabited the place: these are for Birney “good whopping lies, precise and audacious, and deserve to survive for this alone.”36 Also present in the book, by Birney’s accurate account, were irony and cynical satire at the expense of clerics, romantic love, and religious excess. And there were facts in Mandeville, such as the firmly sensible argument that the earth was a sphere. This may perhaps explain why Mandeville’s account, the made-up fiction of the medi­ eval equivalent of a couch-potato, should have over the ensuing ages (even as late as 1821) been believed while the records of real travellers like Marco Polo and Friar Odoric were denounced as liars. Birney notes in closing that his century (the twentieth) casts doubt on both the book and on the notion of its English authorship. He would like to believe, however, that one could claim for England “one of the great liars of literature.”37 The account is vivid and striking, giving a tantalizing glimpse of Sir John Mandeville, and allowing audiences to hear the cadences of his writing. At the same time, Mandeville is ably presented by someone aware of how to rethink the Middle Ages for the modern era. It seems a great shame that Birney did not succeed in his aim of getting the CBC to broadcast this talk, as no doubt it would have been a precursor to a series of other similar recountings of medieval authors and their texts. Birney’s archive includes references to and scripts from very many other public appearances and especially radio interviews. He speaks about James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, about speech-patterns and linguistics, about his own poetry, on the English language from Caedmon’s Hymn in early Northumbrian onward, and even – briefly, for the CBC – on duelling.38 In fact, his archives include a huge quantity of radio-scripts from the 1940s, and Birney was obviously being broadcast a lot. He might well be described as Canada’s first public poet, a kind of poet of the air-waves. He was prepared to talk about a wide range of issues and ideas. For example, his interest extended to mob psychology, so that in a talk called “Exploring Minds” he considered the mob in Everyman as a way to address the riot in Quebec after Rocket Richard was ejected from an ice hockey game (the riot is famous in Canada).39 Birney used whatever grist came to his mill. Various talks for the “At Random” series Thomas Fisher archive 49: 55.12.1–6 (4). Thomas Fisher archive 49: 55.12.1–6 (6). 38 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 54. The box has drafts of many pieces, some in a more finished state than others. 39 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 54.48–49. 36 37

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tell the Summoner’s story, or comment on Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.40 While in England, he also prepared some notes for a film treatment of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, noting in particular that something should be done on this in England and it should not be left to Hollywood.41 In some ways most intriguingly, he delivered a sermon at the Unitarian Church in Vancouver on The Visions of Piers the Plowman and the search for Saint Truth. The sermon is undated, and extensively modified, so it was clearly well-thought and considered at some length.42 It introduces the probable author in very evocative terms, discusses the lack of popularity of the poem, its many manuscripts, and works through the opening sections of the poem (including Lady Meed, whom Birney suggests might best be translated as “Miss Almighty Dollar”). Birney’s plot summary is both fair and lively, intelligent and exciting. William Langland, for example, who refers to himself as Long Will, gets the following evocative description: With literacy he was able to escape from the life of a serf into minor clerical orders. He never, however, became a priest and held a parish, but, rather early in his life, developed into a kind of religious tramp, roaming over England, earning his way by occasional psalm-singing and prayers for the souls of the dead. He was poor all his life, dressed in rough sheepherder’s clothes, an eccentric, but one who looked closely and independently at the teeming life of fourteenth century England, and labored away, whenever opportunity allowed, at his one enormous and never-finished poem, in which he put down what he saw, and what he thought about it.43

The poem features Miss Almighty Dollar’s need to marry, her decision which the King rejects to pick her suitor Falsehood, an outright refusal by Conscience to have her, a timely but unsuccessful intervention by Worldly Wisdom, and the stately comments of Reason. The dreamer/author wakes but falls back in another dream to the fair field full of folk and focuses now on the Seven Deadly Sins (also personified in graphic detail in the text and by Birney) and their activities. Birney here translates several twenty- to thirty-line excerpts from the poem, including a section on Gluttony, some material on Harvey the miser who starves himself and cheats others (an early Scrooge figure), and Sloth. The sermon ends at the end of the first third (in most versions) of the poem, Passus VII, as the folk ask Piers to guide them on the further journey to the castle. In his final paragraph Birney summarizes the remainder of the poem, concluding that the poem rises into a magnificent scriptural allegory, the humble plowman transfigured into the person of Christ himself. But it is a Christ still in search, as it were, of himself, still in pilgrimage to the castle of St. Truth, to which we never quite arrive.44

Thomas Fisher archive 49: 55.19, 22. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 62.24. 42 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 62.37.1–11. 43 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 62.37.1–2. 44 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 62.37.11. The piece is an oddity, in that although Birney certainly taught Piers Plowman and adapted it for a radio play, it is a wholly religious poem and not the sort of material Birney often discussed. 40

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In a radio interview with CFRB in June 1946 (the most venerable broadcaster still on the airwaves today in Toronto), Birney states that “poetry has been for me a safety valve ... an opportunity for blowing off steam occasionally ... a spare time occupation.”45 This seems disingenuous, if not absolutely false, given his lifelong focus and concern. While Birney certainly held a full-time job as a professor of medieval English, and later, served as the inaugural chair of the department of creative writing at the University of British Columbia for a large portion of his life, he also took sabbaticals and leaves on a regular basis, and after retirement was a very peripatetic soul. Only one sabbatical, that of 1958–59, was for the purpose of writing Chaucer articles – as he noted in the margin of Catherine Broustra’s thesis on him when she was speculating incorrectly on what took him to London England for the year – otherwise his leaves were for finding poetic inspiration.46 He said in a meditative piece addressed to his friend Leonard that after the war, he “crawled back in ’46 to professoring, at less than union wages for truckdrivers, but with time, blessed time, to be a Sunday poet still and someday perhaps a summer novelist.”47 And yet, the entire meditation talks about how he escaped from the drudgery of the university for a few short months visiting his friend in San Miguel de Allende, where he bought the next-door plot of land and had another house built. He describes his visits there in terms of poems written and published, and materials gathered. In closing, he says: Now that my old novels are revived, and several volumes of my poems stay in print, and I get old-age pension and half-fare on the subway, I live at last by writing what I want.

and Is it odd, Leonard, we both fled from “teaching” and yet we’ve both been drawn to helping the young to work out their own creativities? It’s not sharing craft with others that artists shy from, it’s agreeing in the starvation of art. … We’ve all Canadian passports, wherever we’ve lived, because we were born that way but we’re also internationalists, because we elected to create.48

This lovely piece, entitled “Rambling with Leonardo,” has not been published, but it encapsulates the best of Birney.49 He describes eloquently the joys of San Miguel, Thomas Fisher archive 49: 54.1 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 139. The Broustra thesis did not inspire Birney to a lot of corrections, but he was very clear on this point, that he did take the 1958–59 sabbatical for research purposes, and not for his poetry. 47 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 209.29.2, labelled [19]39? and [19]82 in Birney’s hand. The Leonard of the title and address is probably Birney’s longtime friend and fellow mountaineer Leonard Leacock, though it could be a nom de plume for someone else. 48 Thomas Fisher archive 49: 205.29.6–7. There are several drafts of this piece. 49 The notes in Last Makings, Birney’s last collection published during his lifetime, indicate that he had thought of including this piece in the volume, but was not sure about it. When he became incapacitated, the decision to leave it out and focus on poetry was easier. See Earle Birney, Last Makings (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 119 in a note on the text written by Marlene Kadar and Sam Solecki, who assembled the final manuscript with help from Wailan Low. 45

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the rebirth of creativity, and provides an economical narrative of how he arrived, changed, and when he returned. Since the greater part of the piece refers to his first visit in 1951, it seems likely that the date Birney put on the piece of 1939 was early by possibly as much as twenty years. However, the deep-felt love of creativity, the joy of now being able (he says he is now 72, and refers to his new wife, already loved by his friends in San Miguel) to do the writing that he wants to do, the joy of discovery of new experiences: these are not the work of a part-time poet. In fact, Birney makes it clear throughout his writings, both published and unpublished, that he wishes to be a public man of letters, someone who brings know­ ledge and poetry to Canadians (and others, as the opportunity arises). He says, for example, in The Creative Writer, a book that consists of the texts of seven half-hour talks given by Birney for the CBC in November and December 1965, that poetry enters consciousness as magic, and that “The poem nags and whimpers … to be given life.”50 In a later talk, he holds a lofty view of the purpose of poetry and other arts: “The result of great art is to make men more aware of their essential brotherhood, and of the excitement, even joy, of being alive.”51 At the same time he believes, and perhaps this is the essence of Birney, a poet must have an audience within his own society with a certain sophistication or educatedness about his art.52 Later in the lectures he argues that the act of artistic creation is a blow for survival. The final lecture devotes itself to introducing all the many new kinds of poetic experimentation that were going on in the 1960s. The artist was attempting to educate and inspire his public. Birney was very much a public artist, a figure aware of his responsibilities to society in the larger sense. Where he might deplore the smallness of mind and soul of many of his contemporaries, he saw the need to keep addressing the larger audience, to vivify and recreate the world in art for those who would recognize and flame up at the new discovery. His subjects were often traditional and classical: travel poems, narratives, short lyrics. He reworked and recreated his works in different idioms and for different audiences, and because he was an inveterate reviser of his writings. That is, they were alive to him, never complete, never whole. His poetry, like Birney’s life, was in constant flux.53 Intriguingly, and perhaps not surprisingly given his deep interest in people, he began his public career as a Trotskyist, espousing Trotsky’s very extreme views in rallies in Canada, the United States, and in various places in Europe.54 Birney was a hard worker for communist cells – though he managed to retain his anonymity and never faced prosecution, either when teaching in the United States or when he settled into his permanent academic post at the University of British Columbia in Canada. In this respect he was quite unlike his literary ancestor

The Creative Writer, 14, 16. The Creative Writer, 45. 52 The Creative Writer, 45. 53 See Laurence Steven, “Purging the Fearful Ghosts of Separateness: A Study of Earle Birney’s Revisions,” Canadian Poetry 9 (1981): 1–15. 54 See now Conversations with Trotsky: Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s, ed. Bruce Nesbitt (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2017), which makes it clear that Birney was in close contact with Trotsky over the better part of a decade. 50 51

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Chaucer, as Birney was quite prepared to take a strong public stance based on his political and ideological convictions. In the Birney Archive at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Birney himself included many boxes of his teaching and research mater­ ials on Middle English. Box 32 includes, for example, a collection of teaching notes on Middle English. Several of the examination papers in Box 38 require students to “modernize” Chaucer or other Middle English texts; Birney’s approach to Middle English clearly intended to make it work in the modern day. Similarly, in Box 36 is an example of an assignment requiring the production of Chaucerian character sketches from the point of view of a modern student. Extensive notes on Anglo-Saxon and on History of the English Language, some from Birney’s undergraduate courses, some from his graduate work (including his notes from Arthur Brodeur’s lectures and his translation of the first half of Beowulf in box 81.13–14), and notes from his teaching of both subjects are also in the files (81.1). Even some of the examinations that Birney wrote himself, on Gothic, Old Norse, and a language examination in German (all from 1929) are in the files (81.5). The files further contain course outlines and introductory lecture notes on Old English from the University of Toronto in 1941 and earlier, from the University of British Columbia in the 1950s (81.7–11), and examinations from Toronto, UBC, and Utah from introductory survey courses as well as specialist courses in Old English and Middle English (81 passim). Birney’s interest in language, and particularly in the subject field known as History of the English Language (HEL for short) seems a constant in his life, and may provide some explanation for his shift to concrete poetry, noted for its playful approach to language, and for his lifelong interest in representing dialect and playing with etymology and with word usage. These issues appear to particular effect in the material Birney composed for his autobiography or memoir (only the first chapters survive in typescript). For example, Birney comments about Merritt Hughes, the professor whose seminar in Chaucer he took at Berkeley: He had an intelligence both receptive and constructive to each student’s ideas; to drop a thought in his mind’s pool was to set the trout darting and salmon leaping. Every seminar with him increased my determination as well as my knowledge. He made me believe, much more than Sedgewick had, that I could write a worthy and definitive book on Chaucer the Ironist.55

Hughes is unlike his colleagues, who according to Birney’s account were interested only in their own publications and prominence, and very uninterested in “students even in the Ph.D. program.”56 Birney thus describes the English department as an “educational lottery, with meal-tickets for prizes, run by practical men whose teaching was little more than a better’s handbook for passing exams.”57 Such a narrow-minded and uncreative approach to literature, as if it could be written about in the shorthand of a gambler deciding how to bet on the day’s races, was never 55 56 57

Thomas Fisher archive 49: 205.7.75. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 205.7.81. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 205.8.1.

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Birney’s approach, and it is hardly surprising that Birney did not thrive at Berkeley, and eventually returned to Toronto and to Canada for his thesis and for his career as a man of letters. Birney never did stray from Chaucer’s hazelwood, although he never quite achieved the fame he sought. It seems best to conclude here with one of his public activities, with some of his teaching notes. It is often forgotten nowadays that Birney both founded the Department of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and taught Old and Middle English courses for the Department of English for many years. In course notes for English 200, Birney describes Chaucer as “the greatest of all English medieval writers” and notes that in his life and writings he “reflects the beginnings of a transition from medieval to modern times.”58 He frames Chaucer’s life as liminal in terms of social class (he was born as part of the new social class of the bourgeoisie but his education and career reflect the knightly class and involvement in high echelons of medieval government). Birney notes: Poetry must have been mainly the product of leisure hours in a busy public life, something written to entertain and edify the circles of the Court, but he wrote with such universality of appeal that his work has achieved [a] permanent place in world literature.59

The next sections of the course material review Chaucer’s poetry, focusing on how “we feel they might have lived in any age, including our own.”60 Like any good educator, Birney tries to make the material relevant to the audience. Whereas Troilus and Criseyde might be called a novel, The Canterbury Tales is more, providing a vision of all of medieval English life. Birney concludes about Chaucer: In so far as imaginative fervour, philosophic depth, and intense self-revelation are essential for great poetry, Chaucer was not a great poet; but he was, within the literary conventions of his time, a supreme creator of character and scene, and the greatest of all writers of narrative verse in English.61

Birney’s two conclusions are particularly noteworthy. He clearly recognizes Chaucer as a part-time poet, someone who worked at creating narratives and vignettes, someone who strove hard at his poetry in order to entertain and delight his audience. Moreover, in so doing Chaucer established a mode and style of linguistic usage that led to his fame in later years as the founder of English poetry. The same, I would argue, could be said of Birney himself with respect to poetry written in Canada.

58 59 60 61

Thomas Fisher archive 49: 78.33.9. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 78.33.9. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 78.33.10. Thomas Fisher archive 49: 78.33.11.

8 “That’s what you get for being food”: Margaret Atwood’s Symbolic Cannibalism Dominika Ruszkiewicz

M

argaret Atwood is not typically referred to as a medievalist writer, and her novels, perhaps with the exception of The Handmaid’s Tale, are not often scrutinized for echoes of the medieval past.1 Instead, the novelist’s engagement with the romance tradition has been connected no further back than the Gothic, which is usually constructed as the source for her neo-medievalist threads.2 And yet in the works that will form the core of my analysis, The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride, Atwood takes us directly – rather than through the medium of Gothic fantasies – to the long-ago and far-off medieval and early modern past.3 In fact, what seems to inform much of Atwood’s œuvre is her knowledge of the source material and her genuine interest in the auctoritates to whom Chaucer and other medieval poets paid their respects. This connection to medieval authority seems to be a primary manifestation of her medievalism. In the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, Louise D’Arcens makes a distinction between “the medievalism of the ‘found’ Middle Ages and the medievalism of the ‘made’ Middle Ages.”4 The former sees the Middle Ages as a historical category and is based on examining objects of medieval material culture, whereas the latter approaches the medieval past in a more creative manner and

1 For a medievalist, or rather neo-medievalist reappraisal of Atwood’s novel, see Pam Clements, “Margaret Atwood and Chaucer: Truth and Lies,” in Makers of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 2012), 55–60. 2 Charlotte Sturgess, for instance, traces Atwood’s sources to the British Gothic or the Victorian novel in her Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women’s Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 124. 3 The Edible Woman (London: Virago Press, 1980), hereafter cited in parentheses with the abbreviation EW and page number; and The Robber Bride (London: Virago Press, 1994), hereafter cited in parentheses as RB with page number. 4 Louise D’Arcens, “Introduction: Medievalism: Scope and Complexity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–13 (2).

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involves an imaginative reconstruction of the medieval world. Margaret Atwood does not identify with the “made” medievalism of the nineteenth century. She does not see the past as a Golden Age, an idyllic childhood of modernity, and in her works makes a point against embellishing the medieval past, that is, adding colours unknown to the period. Neither does she situate her works along the line of continuity, starting with the Middle Ages, moving through the Romantic and Victorian British medievalisms, and ending with the Canadian expression of the medievalizing spirit. Instead, for this Canadian writer the medieval period forms a reservoir of motifs, images, and ideas representative of a common European past in the same way that Chaucer saw himself as a European poet, participating in European cultural heritage, represented by poets such as Dante and Petrarch, among others, as well as their predecessors Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Atwood recalls taking a course on Middle English literature and describes it as an additional asset that was supposed to make her education complete.5 She exhibits a great respect for her predecessors in the craft, as well as for their ideas concerning poetry. In fact, in describing the connection between mortality and writing, Atwood goes back for her choice of motifs and words to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Canadian novelist quotes from William Dunbar’s famous Lament for the Makars, and distances herself from the words of the Scottish poet, saying that what the writer feels is not so much a terror of death, famously expressed in his “Timor mortis conturbat me,” as “a definite concern with it – an intimation of transience, of evanescence, and thus of mortality, coupled with the urge to indite” (Writer 141). In her final words here, Atwood evokes the concept of medieval enditynge, that is, composing, dictating or relating a story, a concept that was the basis of Chaucer’s poetry. In this way, she points to a line of continuity between the medieval and modern arts of storytelling, as well as to a distinction between a fear of death, as evoked by Dunbar, and a respect paid to the figures of authority and their stories, which was often revealed by Chaucer, also through the word enditen.6 A similar distinction is brought forward by Robert O. Payne, who notes that Dunbar’s self-image, infused as it is with an overwhelming fear of death, is also informed by an awareness that his predecessors listed in his Lament are much closer to him than Chaucer’s “enthroned immortals of a distant time and another language.”7 The critic quotes in this context from the epilogue to Troilus and Criseyde, 5 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); reprinted as On Writers and Writing (Toronto: Emblem, 2014), 139. Further references to this text will be parenthetical in the text, with the abbreviation Writer. 6 The word endite(n) was very often employed by Chaucer and was contrasted with merely putting down words on paper, i.e. write(n). To quote a few examples, the word appears in the description of Chaucer’s Squire who “koude songes make and wel endite” (“General Prologue” l. 95); in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde, the poet asks Cleo, the Muse of history, for help “[t]hat of no sentement I this endite, / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write” (TC 2:13–14). 7 Robert O. Payne, “Late Medieval Images and Self-Images of the Poet: Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Henryson, Dunbar,” in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. L. Ebin (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1984), 249–61 (257).

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in which Chaucer addresses his book, saying: “Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye … / And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.”8 It seems interesting to note that Chaucer’s instructions to his book, which – as he is aware – will become detached from its original context, reverberate in Atwood’s reflections on the art of writing. “The words the writer writes do not exist in some walled garden called ‘literature,’ but actually get out there into the world,” she says, “and have effects and consequences” (Writer 86). In order to live on, they have to travel from reader to reader, like a child who leaves home in search of his/ her own way in the world (Writer 129, 132). At the same time, what we can sense in Atwood’s thoughts on writing is an almost Chaucerian respect for “the glorious dead, the giants of literature” (Writer 89), with whom the next generations of writers negotiate the truth, as well as an anxiety about being judged by them: All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them. But you don’t learn only from writers – you can learn from ancestors in all their forms. Because the dead control the past, they control the stories … (Writer 159)

The concept of the dead affecting the living finds its literal manifestation in Atwood’s The Robber Bride in the character of Zenia, who – quite mysteriously – fails to die. “What is she up to? […] What does she want? What is she doing here, on this side of the mirror?” asks her former friend, Tony. The character of Zenia is often taken as representing the other, either in a feminist or a postcolonial context.9 It seems to me, however, that what she represents is the dead author brought back to life and – even though she is not given direct voice – prompting anxiety because of her appearance. Just like the dead control the stories, Zenia controls the course of events and is central to their development. In other words, she identifies with the plot and belongs to the ones who “stir things up, get things moving,” like the witch from Atwood’s “Unpopular Gals,” who says: You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.10

In the tale, Atwood not only draws upon the well-known story of Cinderella, but also on a more ancient genre, for here its last passage reads almost like an Old English 8 References to and quotations from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, hereinafter referred to as TC in parentheses, have been taken from Stephen A. Barney, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde with facing-page Il Filostrato. Authoritative Texts, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2006), 8–428; this quotation is TC 5:1786–92. 9 See, for instance, Judith Timson’s review of The Robber Bride in Maclean’s 106.40 (4 October 1993), 55 and Fiona Tolan, “Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Postcolonial Other in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Margaret Atwood, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009): 143–58. 10 Margaret Atwood, “Unpopular Gals,” in Good Bones and Simple Murders (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1994), 6–12 (10).

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riddle. A speaking object describes its properties as well as actions that were performed on it by humans, in much the same way as the plot describes being shaped by the writer’s pen in Atwood’s story. Other genres Atwood invokes in her works include elegies and sermons, notably for their apocalyptic spirit. Antonia Fremont, one of Atwood’s characters, evokes that apocalyptic spirit in world politics: “The lust for power will prevail. Thousands will die needlessly. Corpses will rot. Women and children will perish. Plagues will rage. Famine will sweep the land […]” (RB 35).11 The apocalyptic spirit here tracks that found in many medieval sermons. In fact, it is such long-standing traditions as charms, invocations, dream visions, sermons, and elegies that Atwood mentions in her description of the underworld to which the modern writer descends in search of inspiration. She claims it is the duty of the living to “descend to where the stories are kept” and retrieve them for the land of the living (Writer 159–60). The traces of the ancient genres in Atwood’s fiction, as well as the riddle-like games that Atwood plays with her readers, may thus be seen as one manifestation of the medieval in her works. Another may be the open-­endedness of her writing, a feature often associated with medieval poetry and especially with Chaucer.12 Beyond these ideas lies an overwhelming urge to make extensive use of pre-existing material and turn familiar genres, motifs, and characters, all derived from various ancient sources, into a single “original” work. This recycling impulse, associated as it is with the medieval way of compiling books, is clearly seen in Atwood’s works, not least of all in the frequent references she makes to various aspects of medieval reality. Atwood’s contemporary world in, for example, The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride is peopled with “the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries” (EW 36), “emaciated figure[s] in a medieval woodcut” (EW 48), crusaders (EW 42), tonsured monks (RB 17), knights (RB 243), as well as medieval stone saints (RB 143). The writer mentions Saracens, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, and other tribes associated with medieval warfare. She conjures up images of places such as dungeons (EW 49), moats and drawbridges (RB 20), items of clothing such as girdles (EW 93, 252), as well as instruments of torture such as the rack (RB 224). She refers to such medieval concepts as “mortification of the flesh” (“hair shirts or sitting on spikes”) (EW 62), “Mediaeval Chastitie” (EW 186), chivalry (RB 131, 212), and the Seven Deadly Sins (RB 426). Visits to the sites of the battles are compared to pilgrimages, from which relics are brought home (RB 19), boiling the turtle brings to mind “the deaths of early Christian martyrs” (EW 155), and cataclysmic events anticipate “another Black Death” (EW 200). To cite one more example, the history department described in The Robber Bride is “like a Renaissance court” with its “whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits, and umbrage” (RB 23).

11 For an examination of the apocalyptic spirit in Old English literature, see Martin Green, “Man, Time and Apocalypse in The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and Beowulf,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74 (1975): 502–18. 12 Atwood lists six alternative endings to one story (numbered A to F); see “Happy Endings,” in Good Bones and Simple Murders, 50–55. For Chaucer’s open-endedness, see Rosemarie P. McGerr, Chaucer’s Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998).

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Through such comparisons, Atwood’s characters and elements of plot are exaggerated to the verge of caricature, revealing a discrepancy between their appearance and the reality that lies behind the romantic façade. For instance, we soon learn that the lady sitting aimlessly in a tapestry is a mother of three, and that the Vikings were in fact farmers. In a poem elsewhere, Atwood writes: “In my dreams there is glamour. / The Vikings leave their fields / each year for a few months of killing and plunder, / much as the boys go hunting. / In real life they were farmers.”13 Thus, the author speaks against the romanticizing impulse, which often lies behind modern reconstructions of the past, reconstructions which – according to Atwood – should be aimed at excavating the raw material of experience. It is not only in her poetry, but also in her fiction that Atwood advocates moving beyond the myth of glorious warfare in order to see the universally human dimension of great events. In other words, she speaks for a perspective that would include not only the male, but also the female experience, which is often drowned out by “the death-ridden discourse of men and of the poets who chronicle their deeds.”14 To convey her ideas, Atwood goes to the stories of classical women, such as Helen, Penelope, Cleopatra, Cressida, stories that were written by ancient historians and rewritten by medieval and early modern poets, the vast majority of whom were men, before they were taken up by female writers.15 Such stories have long been the means through which given cultures convey their attitudes towards female sexuality, attitudes that were often determined by the gender of the historian. Focusing on the Troilus and Criseyde story, as rendered by Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde), Henry­ son (The Testament of Cresseid), Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida), and Atwood (“Cressida to Troilus: A Gift”), I am going to demonstrate here Atwood’s response to the patriarchal standards and conventions of the courtly tradition, especially the convention of objectifying women’s bodies and identifying them with food. In the Anglo-Saxon riddle about a book-worm, chewing over and swallowing the words by an insect comes across as the most wondrous event, perhaps on account of the spiritual nourishment that the written word was intended to offer.16 A similar nourishment, albeit of a less spiritual and far more tangible kind, was expected in the Middle Ages of women, whose domestic roles situated them in the position of nurturers, providers of food and drink. Traditionally associated with the kitchen, where they prepared meals, they became an epitome of food itself. It is the image of the “edible woman” that I find central to Margaret Atwood’s medievalism, for the writer uses it as a kind of vehicle for the expression of her thoughts on reconstructing the past by male and female makers of history. 13 Margaret Atwood, “The Loneliness of the Military Historian,” in Morning in the Burned House (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 1995), 49–53, hereafter cited in parentheses as LMH with line numbers; this quotation refers to lines 46–50. 14 Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism. The Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 68. 15 I follow the convention of spelling the heroine’s name differently, depending on the work in which she appears: Criseyde (Chaucer), Cresseid (Henryson), and Cressida (Shakespeare, Atwood). 16 See “Riddle 47,” in translation in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1: The Medieval Period, 3rd edn., ed. Joseph Black et al. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2014), 58.

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Atwood’s engagement with the story of Cressida demonstrates that histories, as they were traditionally written in the Middle Ages, deserve to be rewritten by female poets and historians. For example, the question asked by Robert Henryson, the Scottish author of a sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?,”17 could be rephrased as: “Who knows if all that men wrote was true?” In contrast to Chaucer, whose main aim in writing Troilus and Criseyde was “[t]he double sorwe of Troilus to tellen” (TC 1:1), Henryson decided to concentrate on the story of Cresseid and her sorrowful plight, but his work is still the work of a male writer. It requires a female writer for the male rhetoric to be fully challenged, which is what Atwood does in her poem “Cressida to Troilus: A Gift.”18 In her version, Atwood evokes the world of medieval romance, in which human possibility is defined by strictly dichotomized gender roles, and works to counteract this kind of stereotypical thinking through offering a specifically female perspective. It is Cressida who is given voice to share her story with readers. Troilus’ silent presence is reduced to a mere shadow, hardly apparent in Cressida’s field of vision: “[w]henever I turned, watering / the narcissus, brushing my teeth, / there you were, just barely, in the corner / of my eye. Peripheral. A floater” (ll. 11–14). Even though he is situated on the margins of her field of vision, Troilus is nevertheless an unwelcome intruder, for his presence is stealthy (“whatever part of me you had slid into / by stealth”) and persistent (“[w]henever I turned”), which makes Cressida feel as if she was being constantly “devoured” by his gaze. According to June Deery, one of Atwood’s main points in presenting women as objects of the male gaze is that “it is difficult to say what women are without male observation: Women have always been women-as-observed-bymen.”19 But when does “always” begin? Examining the development of medieval romance, Helen Cooper notes that the process of falling in love was not always depicted from the male perspective. Anglo-Norman romances, for instance, privilege the female gaze and agency over the male. The fact that we forget about this is largely because we read the Middle Ages through Chaucer and are therefore more familiar with the French and Italian models he adopted than with Anglo-Norman love conventions. Following the Petrarchan tradition, as Chaucer did, eliminated women’s subjecthood, which was the central focus of the early romances.20 Thus, the concept of the “devouring” male gaze dates to the Petrarchan tradition, and was popularized by Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde and by other medieval and early modern versions of the story. In fact, the figure of the male lover feeding his eyes on the lady, who is being “consumed” by his gaze, was stock matter for every love-poet from Chaucer until 17 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, line 64, in Stephen A. Barney, ed. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde with facing-page Il Filostrato. Authoritative Texts (New York: Norton, 2006), 433–47. 18 Margaret Atwood, “Cressida to Troilus: A Gift,” in Morning in the Burned House (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 28–29. 19 June Deery, “Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge,” Twentieth Century Literature 43.4 (1997): 470–86 (476). 20 Helen Cooper, “Love Before Troilus,” in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. Helen Cooney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 25–43.

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Shakespeare. Chaucer’s Troilus, for instance, is seen walking around the temple, looking constantly now on this and now on that lady: “[b]eholding ay the ladies of the town, / Now here, now there” (TC 1:186–7). Here Chaucer first equates love with food by making Troilus watch other knights for signs of love, such as sighing or feeding their eyes on any lady they could spot. In Troilus and Cressida, which contains probably two of the best-known voyeuristic scenes in Shakespeare, relations between the watching subject and the watched object become much more complex, with characters watching others while being at the same time watched, creating a network of observers not unlike the Elizabethan surveillance system.21 So, too, Atwood’s female characters watch themselves being watched and, through identifying with the watcher, become their own observers, as in The Robber Bride: Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. (RB 471)

Having remained under the constant surveillance of men, women – it seems – have learned to internalize that scrutiny to such an extent that it is no longer an external phenomenon, but a permanent installation in their own minds.22 This seems to be the case in Atwood’s poem, in which Troilus – like a small particle within the eyeball – is moved from the centre to the periphery of Cressida’s vision, and is almost imperceptible, and yet he makes his presence felt. Even his complete disappearance from her field of vision would not change much, for he would always have his place in her mind, motivating her actions to suit his fantasies, especially those that conceptualize women as tempting and delicious food. Such fantasies are based on literalizing the romantic convention, derived from medieval writings on love, which defined desire as, in John Gower’s words, “food never digestible and drink ever thirsty” and “an insatiable mental hunger.”23 Men as depicted in medieval and early modern romances seek the female body as they seek the warmth of food and drink, and their appetite grows by what it

21 For an examination of multiple levels of observation in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, see my “‘Stand where the torch may not discover us’: The Watchers and the Watched in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” in Le badaud et le regardeur, ed. Jakub Kornhauser and Iwona Piechnik (Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska, 2017), 234–46. 22 Deery, “Science for Feminists,” 476. 23 John Gower, Vox Clamantis, V.2, in The Major Latin Works of John Gower, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 196–208. Reprinted in Chaucer. Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 192–206 (195). For analysis of this passage, see Anne Laskaya, Chaucer’s Approach to Gender in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 80.

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feeds on. Shakespeare’s Troilus, for instance, speaks of “[l]ove’s thrice repurèd nectar,”24 Cleopatra is described as “a dish for the gods” (Antony, 5.2.274), and Emilia states that men “are all but stomachs, and we are all but food” (Othello, 3.4.106). In Shakespeare’s works, love is often referred to in terms of surfeit, a word traditionally associated with food and drink, whereas the objects of love are natural inciters of the ever-increasing hunger and thirst, as can be seen in the description of Cleo­ patra: “Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (Antony, 2.2. 246–48); or of Iachimo kissing Imogen’s breast: “I kissed it, and it gave me present hunger / To feed again, though full” (Cymbeline, 2.4.140–41).25 Atwood’s Cressida joins this league of characters not merely identified with food, but with excessive consumption that leads to poisonous gluttony. She compares the gift of herself that she offered to Troilus to white bread, given to goldfish: They cram and cram, and it kills them, and they drift in the pool, belly-up, making stunned faces and playing on our guilt as if their own toxic gluttony was not their fault. (ll. 24–29)

Cressida clearly sees Troilus as a surfeiting glutton, whose desire – having usurped the name of love – feeds on itself. By comparing Troilus to the dead fish who consume white bread while being at the same time consumed by their lust for it, Atwood underlines that even healthy and potentially harmless food may prove toxic if consumed without measure, just like an excess of white bread may swell up when wet and kill the fish. Blinded by lust, Troilus – not unlike the fish that will cram any amount of food – ignores the consequences of such self-indulgence and risks dying of overeating. Atwood’s main point here seems to be Shakespeare’s that “[l]ust like a glutton dies.”26 Atwood here positions Troilus as an emotional cannibal and Cressida as both nurturer and betrayer. Her Troilus is “pallid and fishy-eyed” (l. 32) and he, in fact, does not seem any more alive than the dead fish, drifting belly-up in the pool. This analogy is reinforced by the first occurrence of the word “still” in the sentence: “There you are still, outside the window” (l. 30), where it can have a twofold signifi­ cance, referring either to the lover’s motionless presence or to the hopeless persistence of the posture. The remaining three uses of “still” in the same stanza – “still 24 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Criseyde, 3.2.21, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. D. Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997), 448–93. All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s plays come from this edition and titles are abbreviated to the first word. 25 For the purpose of my argument, I am referring to male appetites, but Shakespeare also describes sexual gluttony as characteristic of women. See, for instance, Gertrude’s hunger for her first husband: “she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (Hamlet, 1.2.143–5). 26 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 803, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. D. Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997), 1610–25 (1620).

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with your hands out,” “still pallid and fishy-eyed,” “still acting stupidly innocent and starved” (ll. 31–33) – serve both to reveal Cressida’s impatience and Atwood’s perception of continuity with the medieval tradition. It seems little has changed since Chaucer’s day, and modern Troiluses, epitomes of constancy and faithfulness in love, still nurture a beggar’s mentality of taking (“still with your hands out”) rather than giving. Modern Cressidas, on the other hand, can be both protective and destructive. Examining the figure of Cressida, Nikki Stiller states that the Chaucerian figure is “both extraordinarily loving and nurturing and a betrayer.”27 She nurses Troilus when he faints, revealing an almost maternal affection towards him, but once she finds herself in Greece, she gives her heart to Diomede. Unlike Chaucer’s Criseyde, who finds the narrator a stout supporter, Atwood’s Cressida has only her own voice to speak in her defence. She uses it to excuse herself through putting the blame on Troilus: “You forced me to give you poisonous gifts,” she says in the very first words addressed to Troilus (l. 1). Atwood’s conception of poison loads it with multiple meanings so that it may refer to Cressida’s own moral corruption, to the unwholesome nature of her relationship with Troilus – a relationship based on one-sided rather than mutual affection, however sincere and genuine it might be – or to the nature of the society in which their relationship was meant to thrive, a society “contaminated by patriarchal ideology.”28 Cressida’s position in the Trojan male-dominated society has always been vulnerable. Writing about the essence of Cressida’s character, as depicted in medieval and modern literatures, Nikki Stiller singles out the instinct for survival as her most defining characteristic: Perhaps we should put ourselves in Cressida’s position. We are living in wartime. Our father, a traitor, has gone over to the enemy and has left us unprotected in our native city which feels no obligation to shield us. In fact, we are suspect. […] Love we see as dangerous, for it evokes and fans emotions and impulses we may need to suppress in order to survive. Survival in a hostile environment and in a threatening time is our first consideration, always.29

Atwood herself grew up in a very traditional environment in the 1950s and 1960s, in which “[t]he boys were headed for the professions, the girls for futures as their wives” (Writer 18). Her protagonists often have to cope with the hostility of such an environment, in which all unmarried girls are thought of as “easily victimized and needing protection” (EW 35) and in which pregnant girls are removed from jobs so that they can focus on housework until they become fully monopolized by their husbands, their days being “made claustrophobic with small necessary details” (EW 32). In acts of rebellion, Atwood’s female protagonists either reject the food with which they are identified, as is the case with Marian McAlpin from The Edible

27 Nikki Stiller, The Figure of Cressida in British and American Literature. Transformation of a Literary Type (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 23. 28 Emma Parker, “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood,” Twentieth Century Literature 41.3 (1995): 349–68 (351). 29 Stiller, The Figure of Cressida, 166.

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Woman, or they offer “poisoned food” to their beloved, a survival strategy adopted by Cressida.30 In fact, Marian and Cressida have a lot in common, for they both rebel against a male-centred society, in which women are aligned with their bodies rather than their intellectual needs and expectations. Both try to write their own stories, and expose the ways in which men misconstrue women and in which women counter the male drive to objectify their bodies. Yet Marian’s and Cressida’s forms of retali­ ation are very different, for these two female characters, both strongly associated with consumption, were the products of different stages of Atwood’s career. Written by a twenty-four-year-old girl in the spring and summer of 1965, The Edible Woman was inspired by window displays featuring marzipan pigs as well as wedding cakes with sugar brides and grooms, but also by Atwood’s thoughts about symbolic canni­ balism.31 Atwood’s Cressida came into being thirty years later, in a collection of poems titled Morning in the Burned House, published in 1995, and does not belong to “the self-indulgent grotesqueries … attributable to the youth of the author.”32 These works thus present very different perspectives on women’s ways of writing themselves into the stories of their own lives. Before she fully realizes that her identity has been constructed as an object of male hunger, Marian subconsciously rejects food, starting with meat, through eggs and vegetables, until she can eat no more and starts feeling that she herself has been served on her fiancé’s plate. Instead of being consumed by passion for Peter, she is being consumed by his version of her. Manipulated in order to suit men’s fantasies, Marian thinks of a revenge fantasy that she implements in order to dramatize the horror of her realization and escape her predicament as a soon-to-be bride. Having prepared a sponge cake in the shape of a woman, she offers it to her fiancé, Peter, carrying it on a platter “carefully and with reverence, as though she was carrying something sacred in a procession, an icon or the crown on a cushion in a play” (EW 271). Before she kneels in front of him, presenting the sacrificial and symbolic offering of her own body, she has a conversation with herself. In a pensive mood, she addresses her cakey self, saying: “‘You look delicious,’ she told her. ‘Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food’” (EW 270). Throughout the novel, Marian identifies with food to suit Peter’s fantasies. Before his final party, she is asked to make herself beautiful and goes to a hairdresser who treats her hair like a cake: “something to be carefully iced and ornamented” (EW 208). She sees that the same operations are performed on her body as on food, whether by the hairdresser or by Peter, who moulds her the way she later shapes the cake: both seem equally pliable. However, even though the shape she gives to her cakey self, as well as the clothes and makeup “she” wears, are made to suit Peter’s taste, she selects the products for the cake herself and insists on using only newly purchased materials. No leftover food found at home would suit her purpose of producing a completely new self, albeit in the form of a cake. In this way, Marian 30 For an examination of other protagonists’ engagement with food in Atwood’s writings, see Parker, “You Are What You Eat,” 349–68. 31 See Margaret Atwood, “Introduction,” in The Edible Woman (London: Virago Press, 1980), 7–8 (7). 32 Atwood, “Introduction,” 7.

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– unable to envision herself in the role of a delicacy meant for her husband’s palate – prepares a powerful demonstration of her own being, as distanced from her physical body. It is only a few moments later that she resumes first-person narration in a triumphant attempt to assert her own identity. This sudden access of selfworth perhaps brings to mind the words of Chaucer’s Criseyde: “I am myn owene womman, wel at ese” (TC 2:750). Atwood’s Cressida, however, makes no such assertions of her will, but – like other classical female figures depicted by Atwood in this poetry collection – assumes the position of an accused, pleading in court to justify her actions.33 “How did all of this start?” she asks. It was neither with Troilus nor with herself, but with “Pity, that flimsy angel, /… She causes so much trouble” (ll. 18–21). Atwood’s Cressida objects to the idea of falling in love out of pity, as she does to vesting female identity only in the body. She does not, however, make any dramatic demonstrations, as Marian does, “offering herself in mock ritual, as a sacrificial cake at the altar of Peter’s ego.”34 In fact, the only symbolic and covert allusion she makes to Troilus’s ego is when she refers to the various everyday activities she performs, among them watering the narcissus, a flower whose immediate association with the story of the mythical young self-lover assumes potent significance. Like Marian, Atwood’s Cressida also offers herself up, here not in a triumphant procession but rather the way leftover food is thrown out to the beggars with a dismissive “There. Go Away” (l. 4). In that, she bears less affinity to Chaucer’s Criseyde than to Shakespeare’s Cressida, who is described in terms of “fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics / Of her o’ereaten faith” (5.2.163–64). Atwood’s Cressida encourages Troilus to have some more body, but is not offering anything beyond what is left of it. Her “You’ll make yourself sick. Sicker. / You won’t be cured” (ll. 36–37), which are the very last words she addresses to Troilus, resemble the testamentary bequest of his disease that Pandarus makes at the end of Shakespeare’s play.35 In her final words to Troilus, Atwood’s Cressida implies that love is like a plague and Troilus will never be cured. As with Shakespeare’s play, in which one of the greatest conflicts of the ancient world was reduced to mere war and lechery in Ulysses’ speech (5.2.198–99), Atwood’s poem is also permeated with cynicism and disillusionment. In that respect, it is a poignant exposition of the gap between the romantic ideal and the banal reality, which becomes all the more conspicuous when we compare Chaucer’s characterization of Troilus, an epitome of Trojan valour, with Atwood’s image of a perpetually hungry, emaciated beggar. The son of King Priam of Troy is presented by Chaucer in terms of highest praise and is second only to Hector: “The wyse worthy Ector the secounde, / In whom that every vertu list abounde, / As alle trouthe and alle gentillesse, / 33 Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108–09. 34 Eira Patnaik, “The Succulent Gender: Eat Her Softly,” in Literary Gastronomy, ed. David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 59–76 (70). 35 See my “Leaving the Final Trace: the Testamentary Poetics in the Troilus and Cressida story: Chaucer, Henryson, Shakespeare,” in Colossus: How Shakespeare Still Bestrides the Cultural and Literary World, ed. A. Shaw and S. Wojciechowska (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Ignatianum, 2018), 81–94.

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Wisdom, honour, freedom, and worthinesse” (TC 2:158–61). Atwood’s pale lover is a humiliated, degraded beggar. He is disgraced even more severely than Henry­son’s leprous Cresseid, for her loss of status, health, and beauty was related to an inward growth, whereas Atwood’s Troilus has learned nothing.36 Through his pity-evoking appearance, he seems to resemble a friend of Marian McAlpin, Duncan, whom she meets at the laundromat and to whom she feels attracted, yet Troilus does not have Duncan’s awareness of the destructive nature of pity mistaken for love. Duncan’s “cadaverously thin” figure (EW 48) and unearthly face (EW 95) bring out a maternal reaction in Marian: “I could have reached out effortlessly and put my arms around that huddled awkward body and consoled it, rocked it gently” (EW 99). He, however, warns her against revealing pity-motivated affection: … every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful […]. You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know. (EW 100)

The main point he seems to be making in saying that “hunger is more basic than love” is that nursing is not so much about selfless care-giving as about selfish fulfilment of one’s needs, and as such may be destructive. In fact, it has something of possessiveness in it, for it is based on the desire to feed on the emotions of others. The competent nurse, who smiles professionally from an advertisement Marian sees, is literally “devouring” her patients, as a cannibal does, instead of “giving the gift of life” (EW 101). Duncan makes Marian aware of the paradoxical nature of nursing, for “to nurse is to render the receiver either infantile or invalid.”37 This is what seems to have happened to Troilus, who was rendered impotent by his dependence on Cressida’s nurturing care. Seen from this perspective, it is not only that Troilus may be the receiving, cannibalistic male, but also that Cressida feeds his gluttony, thereby taking away his energy. Duncan’s words about the primacy of hunger over love seem to resonate with meanings that move beyond one individual love story, whether of ancient lovers – like Troilus and Cressida, or modern – like Marian and Peter. This conception draws the reader’s attention to basic needs and impulses, to the raw material of existence, untainted by conventions, which should be part and parcel of poetic and historical accounts of life. Writers, Atwood seems to say, can be divided into those who write about food and those who don’t, in the same way – we may add – that historians can be divided into those who “write things down the way they happened” (LMH l. 41) and those who don’t.38 Atwood’s sympathies are evidently on the side of the former, in both cases. She recalls how the association between the plot of the story and food came to her mind, saying: “I think I first connected literature with eating when I was

36 See Lee Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid,” Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714. 37 Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan, 1987), 31. 38 Margaret Atwood, “Introducing The CanLit Foodbook,” in Literary Gastronomy, ed. Bevan, 51–58 (52).

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twelve and reading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut down romantically in a tower, but what did she have to eat?”39 To ask such questions is to include the female perspective, a perspective that focuses on details, on the real rather than ideal, on life as it is truly lived. In this respect Atwood shares Virginia Woolf ’s ideas on how important it is to read human history through daily experience. In her story “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” Woolf describes Rosamond Merridew, a female historian, doing research into the medieval system of land tenure, who refers to her observations in the following way: A sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne; she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of mediaeval legs; and therefore with the reality of mediaeval bodies, and so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of mediaeval brains; and there you stand at the centre of all ages.40

It is symptomatic that in her description of the job of an academic historian in The Robber Bride, Atwood, like Woolf, talks about clothes to underline the “real stuff ” of history. The concern of her historian, Antonia Fremont, is the practicality of the garb worn for battle, which she points out in a particularly hilarious manner in her address to the students: The drawstring, the overlap, the buttoned flap, the zipper, have all played their part in military history through the ages; not to mention the kilt, for which, from a certain point of view, there is much to be said. Don’t laugh, she tells them. Instead, picture yourself on the battlefield, with nature calling, as it frequently does in times of stress. Now picture yourselves trying to undo these buttons. (RB 27–28)

Details such as what Rebecca had to eat, what kind of flowers Cressida is watering, or what kind of buttons the soldiers wore: these all matter to female historians and poets. They help us truly identify with the past, even though they are frequently dismissed as tangential and unproductive: “The ‘tiny details’ often feel unhistorical because they don’t typify an epoch … Cobblestones underfoot or a lizard sunning itself on a rock could date from the fourth century B.C., or today.”41 It is for this reason that male poets and historians prefer to concentrate on grand things, dismissing as insignificant the details that in fact often determine the result of the battle: “[R]ats and cholera have won many wars. / Those, and potatoes, / or the absence of them,” as Atwood points out (LMH ll. 78–80). Ignoring details, male historians focus on grand things, for it is great events that adorn the pages of history. Atwood objects to such an understanding of the past; she describes an annoying habit of speaking backwards in order to sound archaic. Antonia has this habit, which Atwood characterizes as a kind of “risky nostalgia,” Atwood “Introducing The CanLit Foodbook,” 51. Virginia Woolf, “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), 33–62 (34). For more analysis, see Louise A. DeSalvo, “Shakespeare’s Other Sister,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 61–81 (64). 41 Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 170. 39

40

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for the word, when it is spelled backwards (Aiglatson), can equally well be applied to “a Viking chieftain of the Dark Ages” as to “an up-market laxative” (RB 22). It is less risky, it seems, to concentrate our efforts on tactics and statistics, for the kind of evidence they yield is both verifiable and less depressing than grand, medal-­earning deaths.42 And yet history is written backwards, from the vantage point of later generations, and the exemplars of past glory, Vikings in this case, are often seen in terms of what we would like them to be rather than what they really were. For, as Hilary Mantel says, it is on glory rather than cold facts that the foundation myths of any tribe or nation are based: “Nations are built on wishful versions of their origins: stories in which our forefathers were giants, of one kind or another. This is how we live in the world: romancing.”43 Bringing out the dichotomy between “male” imagination and “female” realism, Atwood objects to the kind of history described by Robert Graves, history that begins with “the suppression of matriarchal culture by patriarchy, of poetic myth by prosaic records of generation – how this hero begat that hero and he another – with notes of the battles and laws which made each hero famous.”44 The issue of genealogy and causality, which lies behind male accounts of history and is also mentioned by Graves, was the reason why the Trojan myth was so popular among medieval Britons, who traced their ancestry to the Trojan heroes, including the legendary Troilus, known for fighting like superheroes to defend the city against the Greeks. And yet, the Trojans failed to see through the deception prepared by the Greeks, in much the same way as some poets and historians fail to see behind the romantic façade of war. By literalizing one medieval literary convention, Atwood shows that concepts such as courtly love or chivalry were a matter of poetry and romance rather than historical fact. They were mere covers for more primitive desires, such as the desire to possess and consume. Therefore, the image of the “edible woman” may be seen not only as the image of a woman victimized, but also medievalized, or “a victim of a love medievalized.”45

See Atwood, “The Loneliness of the Military Historian,” ll. 60–106. “Hilary Mantel: Why I Became a Historical Novelist,” Reith Lectures, The Guardian, 3 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-becamea-historical-novelist [last accessed 8 May 2018]. 44 Laura Riding, The World and Ourselves (London: Chatto & Windus, 1938), 122. 45 This expression was used, in a different context, by Gregory L. Morris in A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 88. 42 43

9 Lost in Allegory: Grief and Chivalry in Kit Pearson’s A Perfect, Gentle Knight Cory James Rushton

I

n Kit Pearson’s 2007 novel A Perfect, Gentle Knight, a family reacts to the death of their mother, and the benevolent neglect of their father, by playacting as the Knights of the Round Table. Led by the eldest brother Sebastian, who adopts the identity of Sir Lancelot, the siblings find their game taking over their lives. Sebastian, also suffering from bullying at school, increasingly loses himself in his chivalric identity. In Pearson’s Young Adult novel, set in late 1950s Vancouver, Sebastian’s allegorical approach to the world threatens to separate him from it completely. While the novel spends time on the motifs and characters of the Round Table tradition, the title hints at another connection: Chaucer’s pilgrim Knight and his son, the Squire. Despite its Canadian setting and the nationality of its author, this book suggests that Canadian medievalism is as yet undefined, outside of being something with its origins rooted in the medievalism of its British parent but inflected by that of its American cousin. Like Sebastian’s, Canada’s medievalism – like so much of its identity – is a kind of (sometimes uncomfortable) hybrid. A Perfect, Gentle Knight follows the Bell family, six children and their widower father William, recovering from the death of their mother and spouse. Sebastian, the oldest, runs the household with the help of his next two siblings, sisters Rosalind (Roz) and Cordelia (Corrie); they are followed by Harry and twins, Juliet and Orlando (Orly).1 Bullied at school, Sebastian sees his home life as a refuge; the reader is told that he keeps his hair in a way that makes him resemble Prince Valiant (40), which attracts trouble in a 1957 school. While they have an inadequate housekeeper, latest in a series, Sebastian refuses to allow his siblings to complain to their father, called Fa, lest he replace her with someone who will pay attention to what they do. The leading candidate is their paternal aunt, Madge, currently acting as a caregiver for a cousin in Winnipeg. Sebastian has a degree of independence that he does not want threatened, and part of that independence is built around what we would 1 Kit Pearson, A Perfect, Gentle Knight (Toronto: Puffin Canada, 2007), 8. Future references to this text will be in parentheses in the text.

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now call a roleplaying game: they pretend to be members of King Arthur’s court at Camelot. Everyday tasks are turned into chivalric ones, while weekends and even­ ings are dedicated to Sebastian reading from a book of Arthurian stories and the group acting out courtly behaviours. As stated above, Sebastian is Lancelot; Fa, unbeknown to him, is Arthur. Sebastian’s primary bully, Terry, is (again unbeknown to him) Mordred. When Roz and Corrie begin to cultivate independent lives outside of the game and the household that is subsumed in it, Sebastian grows increasingly agitated, resenting Corrie’s new friend Meredith and Roz’s increasing involvement with school activities. His own attempt at forging a relationship with a girl, Jennifer, involves believing her to be the reincarnation of Guinevere. When that, too, gets away from his control, Sebastian, like his hero Lancelot, goes “out of his wit” and must be rescued by his father and Corrie, who is the novel’s sole focal point. Mental illness disguised as a retreat into chivalry has been a prominent medievalist trope since Cervantes’ Don Quixote, picked up in pop cultural texts such as the 1982 anti-Dungeons and Dragons TV movie Mazes and Monsters, or Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. In Gilliam’s film, a professor of medieval literature played by Robin Williams loses his wife in a mass shooting and falls into delirium and homelessness, imagining an evil red knight that chases him as he longs for a Holy Grail he believes is hidden in a New York City mansion.2 Mazes and Monsters is the closer analogue to Pearson’s novel, despite the latter not explicitly condemning immersive roleplaying in and of itself. In the film, Tom Hanks plays Robbie, a young man obsessed with the game, which shares its name with the film, and who is also grieving over a missing brother. When his “Mazes & Monsters” group decides to start playing their campaign in a series of actual caves, Robbie has a psychotic epi­ s­ode in which he thinks he has killed a monster. He falls into a delusion in which he sees muggers as monsters, and the World Trade Center as two towers from the campaign. Although he is rescued by his friends, he never comes out of his hallucinations, living his life at his parental home, which he thinks is an inn surrounded by a forest containing great evil.3 The film spoke to specific societal anxiety around roleplaying games in the 1980s, and is part of a genre that also includes the notorious 1984 Jack T. Chick evangelical comic, Dark Dungeons, in which a young woman loses her thief character in the game and falls into a despair so sharp that she takes her own life (Chick also says that D & D is a cover for real witchcraft).4 Pearson’s novel is not part of this genre, but shares significant borders with it: a young person falls into a world he has created out of medievalist tropes and clichés. The greatest difference is how Sebastian accounts for the differences between his two worlds: it starts out not as hallucination but as allegory, his family playing as Round Table characters, reinterpreting their home and school lives as quest (what I will call the Round Table game). In all these cases, the link between the medieval or pseudo-medieval, the dangers of an overactive imagination, and the experience of emotional trauma and grief is explicit. 2 Terry Gilliam, dir., The Fisher King (TriStar Pictures, 1991). For a recent reading of this film through the lens of Disability Studies, see my “Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King,” in The Holy Grail on Film, ed. Kevin J. Harty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2015), 143–57. 3 Steven Hilliard Stearn, dir., Mazes and Monsters (McDermott Productions, 1982). 4 Jack T. Chick, Dark Dungeons (Chino, CA: Chick Publications, 1984).

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Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the originator of this trope, where it occurs in a manner echoed by Pearson. There is always a danger in medically diagnosing from a historical distance or from literary description, except where an author explicitly ascribes a condition to someone (at which point the question becomes the accuracy with which that condition is described). What Sebastian suffers from is, in origin, not dissimilar to what Cervantes’ narrator says is the source of Quixote’s affliction: In short, he so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He filled his mind with all that he read in them, with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments and other impossible nonsense.5

This description has not stopped critics from diagnosing Quixote with everything from Lewy bodies disease causing dementia to monomania. As recently as 2012, Jose-Alberto Palma and Fermin Palma argued for a neurological condition without attempting anything specific: they quote the Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), who once noted that doctors were so foolish they would “go so far as to analyze the type of madness from which Don Quixote was suffering, its aetiology, its symptoms and even its therapy.”6 The most relevant diagnosis for my purposes is that Quixote suffers from a sleep disorder brought on by staying up too late reading books of chivalry, “detestable books of chivalry” as he calls them when he finally does get some sleep, and then emulating them by staying up all night contemplating the woman he loves.7 This is close enough to Sebastian’s eventual predicament as to be a model: he stops playing a game and comes to believe he really is Lancelot, and then emulates (consciously or otherwise) the most dangerous of that knight’s legendary behaviours, his tendency to run mad. Even early in the novel, Sebastian declares that school, with its bullies, is “not real” (52). Without attempting any real medical diagnosis of Sebastian that is not provided by the book itself, we can comfortably say he suffers from a grief exacerbated by bullying, leading to a loss of both sleep and appetite. What the book is interested in is how popular culture imagines hallucination and disorientation not as fractured, but as allegorical – something governed by a key, the Round Table game, which transmutes both depression and the mundane into something else according to neat narrative lines. Take the novel’s other games, the ones Sebastian’s sister Corrie plays with her new friend Meredith. When Corrie and Meredith ask Sebastian if the latter can join the Round Table game, Sebastian “glared at Meredith as if she were an enemy” – he considers the game a private one (35). The friends decide that Meredith can secretly be Sir Perceval, playing at the Round Table in an equally private side game. But as the girls grow older, Meredith starts to long for other, more traditionally gendered 5

32.

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950),

6 Jose-Alberto Palma and Fermin Palma, “Neurology and Don Quixote,” Neurology and Art 68 (2012): 247–57 (255–56). 7 Alex Iranzo, Joan Santamaria, and Martín de Riquer, “Sleep and Sleep Disorders in Don Quixote,” Sleep Medicine 5 (2004): 97–100.

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games: creating a kingdom, Cordith, inhabited by their stuffed animals; tea parties; and play-acting as the characters from Anne of Green Gables (112, 147). Corrie does not particularly appreciate these games, pushing Meredith towards another medievalizing game: Robin Hood. Like the Round Table game but unlike Meredith’s preferences, the Robin Hood game proves dangerous: armed with toy bows and arrows, they pretend to hunt the Sheriff of Nottingham. When Meredith urges “Robin” to shoot, Corrie actually does so, hitting a neighbour’s cat: “Corrie didn’t mean to let her arrow go. She really didn’t. But somehow, Meredith’s words had fuzzed the line between what was real and what was pretending. And somehow the arrow flew through the hole” (148–49). This is late in the novel, when Corrie is increasingly stressed by the decline of Sebastian and the family. In other words, Corrie is threatened by the same disintegration of boundaries as her brother, and it is a specifically medievalist moment that reveals this. Nor is the reference to Green Gables an accident: while Meredith wants to play the scene where Anne’s friend Diana gets drunk accidentally, many readers will recall that the moment when Anne’s imagination gets her into the most trouble is in fact medievalist: when she nearly drowns because she is pretending to be Elaine of Astolat, on her funeral barge floating down the Thames.8 (The cat recovers.) This intertextual use of Green Gables seems to suggest that book might have a strong Canadian flavour, but this is not the case. The year over which the book takes place is pegged to the seasons – as one might expect – but also with reference to historical events specific to Vancouver: Corrie’s class is practising a song for 1958’s British Columbian centenary (23), and the parents discuss the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge (170). References to global events, like the death of Laika, seem just as key to the way the book tracks time (73). Indeed, Corrie compares the Second Narrows disaster to other parental concerns like the Cold War, all of which seem “to have nothing to do with her own world” (170). Meredith notes that Hallowe’en is practised differently in Vancouver than in her native Calgary (64), among other things, but these regional differences never amount to a portrait of the country or add much to the themes of the novel. Canada’s medievalism is rooted in British culture but heavily inflected by that of America, to the extent that a distinct Canadian medievalism can be difficult to delineate. Canada in 1957, or that year seen in retrospect, is a nation suspended between giants. Outside of Green Gables, the children read or are read to from American texts like Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur, the comic strip Prince Valiant (40), and Twain (42); and from British books like the Narnia books (152), Rosemary Sutcliff ’s Eagle of the Ninth, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and Kipling (41–42). This is a nation that has not yet seen the government-funded explosion of Canadian literature after 1967. This is a bookish family, led by their university professor father. Fa’s tendency when asked for help or advice is to give his children access to the books in his library, and so it is not surprising that Sebastian would look to books as a means to improve his reality. Assuming that there is no significant gap between Sebastian’s 8 L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (New York: Norton, 2007), 177–84.

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knowledge of the Arthurian legend and that of Pearson, Sebastian’s encounter with Malory is highly selective: what he forgets (or does not know) are the emotional moments. Sebastian and Corrie use copies of The Boy’s King Arthur, a mediated version of Malory done by American poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881, with the book first published in 1880); Lanier’s work is close enough to Malory to contain these elements. Both Sebastian and Corrie think that knights are unlikely to hug: “She had never heard of knights hugging each other,” and one of Sebastian’s rules of knighthood is that knights never cry (199–29). Knights do hug and weep in trad­ itional medieval romances, including Malory and Lanier: all the knights weep when they read Elaine of Astolat’s letter, for example, and Bagdemagus hugs Lancelot, for another.9 When Fa is finally told of Sebastian’s troubles and the intricacies of the Round Table game, he gently suggests that knights must need to cry sometimes (169). Given Fa’s tendencies to answer everything with something from a book that he does not do so here implies that either he or Pearson does not know that, or suggests that it is dangerous to do so while Sebastian is recovering from his bookbased break with reality. Sebastian does take the Arthurian and chivalric traditions seriously, but his reading of it is selective enough to cause inadvertent breakdowns in the allegorical logic. When Corrie is knighted at the book’s beginning, she chooses the name Sir Gareth, the younger brother of Gawain, whose name Roz has taken, but who is nevertheless knighted by someone outside the Orkney clan, Camelot’s greatest knight Lancelot. As Sebastian notes, this is a good choice for Corrie, who he suggests shares Gareth’s “‘gentle and loyal’” nature. His concern is expressed as a question about knowledge: “‘There’s only one thing … didn’t you read how he dies?’” (25). Gareth is famously killed during Lancelot’s rescue of the queen, condemned by Arthur to the fire after their affair is revealed, when he is ordered to defend the execution place and refuses to be armed. It is on one hand a strange comment for Sebastian to make: Gawain, too, dies in the traditional Arthurian story of Camelot’s destruction (in part by exacerbating wounds taken in a fight with Lancelot). Corrie defends the text’s Lancelot, interpreting Gareth’s death as most critics still do: it was an accident, despite Lancelot’s violent attack (25). On the other hand, the depth of Sebastian’s allegorization of their lives means he pays careful attention to the way those fantasy lives potentially map on to the original story. If Sebastian’s concern is that Lancelot’s relationship with Gareth ends in a violent and problematic way, he has ignored Lancelot’s very real responsibility for the collapse of Arthur’s kingdom. Why, then, is he Lancelot, and not Gawain, traditionally Arthur’s most loyal supporter? Father and son share a grief over Molly/Mother, which in another book might look like shades of incest. Here, when Sebastian finds a love interest with the ideal name of Jennifer (the modern form of Guinevere) Layton, he specifically states that he believes that they are the reincarnations of Lancelot and the queen – there is no mention of Fa as the reincarnation of Arthur. Sebastian’s argument is that with no Arthur in sight, Lancelot and Guinevere can be together in this life, a plot twist 9

31.

Sidney Lanier, The Boy’s King Arthur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 272,

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also found in the 1980s graphic novel Camelot 3000.10 Jennifer is the main reason why Sebastian has to be Lancelot; the quick collapse of the relationship prompts his absolute deterioration, and Gawain is rarely associated with any epic love affair, outside of the minor Middle English romance The Weddyng of Syr Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle. Tristram, whose amorous rival is his own uncle, is never mentioned. The novel risks an incestuous reading because it needs Sebastian to be pushed deeper into his own head, and it needs a female love interest to do it. Nevertheless, there is something suspicious in the relationship between Fa and Sebastian, and in their experience of grieving. It is in this relationship that the novel earns the quotation that provides its title, from Chaucer’s description of his pilgrim Knight and his son, the Squire, in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Sebastian’s mother called him “her knight in shining armour,” and Fa links his sensitivity to the phrase that encapsulates Chaucer’s portrait of the Knight, the perfect and gentle knight (102, 133): And though that he were worthy, he was wys And of his port as meeke as is a mayde. He never yet no vileynye ne sayde In al his lyf unto no maner wight. He was a verray, parfit gentil knight.11

While Sebastian has pretended to be Lancelot from a young age, he is in many ways closer to the description of Chaucer’s Knight. The rules of the Round Table concern cleanliness, honour, and deportment, even as both Sebastian and Fa’s clothing and appearance are reminiscent of the Knight’s: he is described as fresh off the ship from some recent military adventure, smattered with mud (I:73–78). Sebastian is almost nothing like the Squire, described as bright, fresh, and always singing, but metaphorically he does “carf biforn his fader at table” (I:100) – when we first see him, Sebastian is essentially running the household (perhaps more like a steward than a squire). Sebastian, like the Squire, will eventually fall into a euphoric state of love; unlike the Squire, whose romantic object is unknown and whose feelings are contained in the textual stasis of his portrait, Sebastian’s love comes near to destroying him. While most critics take Chaucer seriously with the Knight, finding it the one non-ironic portrait in the General Prologue, recent scholarship has noted that there is an absence here: there is no mention of the Squire’s mother, not even a confirm­ ation that the Knight was or is married. The tale the Knight tells is essentially about a forced marriage, conducted for political reasons.12 That needs no pursuit here, but the absence of a wife and maternal figure does seem to be echoed in Pearson’s book, driving both men into different kinds of despairing avoidance, as Fa himself finally 10 Pearson, 123–24; Mike Barr and Dave Gibbons, Camelot 3000: Deluxe Edition (New York: DC Comics, 2008), 12:29–30. As this graphic novel collection has no continuous pagination, I have cited by issue and page number. 11 The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), I: 67–73. 12 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 110.

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notes in the end (175). It is fair to say that the two men compete in their performance of grief, a competition Sebastian eventually, and dangerously, wins. The problem is one of hierarchy and responsibility, taking on more than a tinge of sovereignty because of the aristocratic theme of the children’s game. When Corrie explains the Round Table game to her new friend Meredith, she outlines who holds what rank, and states that they “‘… pretend Fa is King Arthur, who’s always away on a quest” (44) – the medieval Arthur, of course, rarely goes on quests. But then at times, Fa is Merlin because of his knowledge (131), leaving nobody to be king – this is a breakdown in authority imagined as a dysfunctional medieval sovereignty. Either way, Fa is an absent monarch, letting Sebastian run the imaginary kingdom; Sebastian in turn reimagines household tasks as chivalric ones. When Corrie tells herself that Fa is “King Arthur, far too busy running his kingdom to spend much time with his knights and their servants,” she is referring to his professor’s position at the university and to the writing of his book on Shakespeare, the latter keeping him locked in his study most of the time (23). Fa does not run his kingdom – Sebastian does. As a father, Fa is benevolently neglectful, kind but unapproachable, traits that he will come to understand as problematic in time when disaster nearly strikes and the family begins to fall apart in earnest. Elizabeth Scala, among others, has noted how Arthur is “a centrally dislocated figure” in the book that bears his name, active mostly at the beginning (to take power) and the end (to die).13 In Edward Peters’s classic study of the rex inutilis, Arthur is just one of many shadow-kings who are “essentially rulers of aventure who neces­sarily had to be inactive at times of public crisis in order to afford the knightly hero his triumphant or disastrous quest.”14 Fa is more like Malory’s Arthur than the children know, a figure absent from the centre of the text, although as stated above the reader eventually learns that he, too, has been grieving in a way that has damaged himself and his family. Sebastian likes it this way. When Roz complains that their housekeeper, Mrs Oliphant, is lazy and does not seem to use all the money Fa gives her for household duties and food, Sebastian insists that she not tell their father: “‘If Fa thinks we’re unhappy with the Elephant he might get rid of her” (22). For Sebastian, used to running the household to his own ends, a new and potentially better housekeeper could only feel like an intrusion. Mrs Oliphant does behave very badly, another neglectful authority figure but less benevolent than Fa: “But just look at this place – it’s such a mess and it smells so musty!” said Roz. The Elephant had practically given up cleaning. She had set up a table with a jigsaw puzzle on it in the corner of the kitchen. When she wasn’t reading her magazines, she worked at it, the radio turned up so loud that she hardly heard them go in and out. Every surface was thick with dust. When Hamlet [their cat] wasn’t napping, he was kept busy catching mice in the basement or scuttering after silverfish in the bathrooms. (63)

13 Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 170–71. 14 Edward Peters, The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 24.

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The state of the house reflects the state of the family, and Oliphant – with her odd name reminiscent of the antagonistic three-headed giant in Chaucer’s parody of romance, The Tale of Sir Thopas – is as dysfunctional, in her own way, as that family. Corrie eventually realizes the bad feelings were on both sides, and that the children were partially to blame for ignoring her: “And Mrs. Oliphant hadn’t said goodbye to them. She probably disliked them as much as they disliked her. None of them had ever asked her anything personal. They had ignored her, as if she were a robot, because that was how Sebastian wanted it” (176). As first Roz and Corrie, and then Sebastian himself, begin abandoning their roles in the hierarchy, the extent of Mrs Oliphant’s own unhappiness becomes clear: Fa had to raise her salary often to keep her in the home. However, Oliphant is also a replacement figure: in terms of the text’s narrative and character economy, the person who should be keeping the house is not an outsider at all, but Fa’s sister Aunt Madge. That is precisely the situation Sebastian most wishes to avoid, for his true rival isn’t “Mordred” the bully, but his aunt. Sebastian’s cruelty to Aunt Madge is an open point of discussion among Corrie, Roz, Madge, and eventually Sebastian himself. When Madge comes to take care of the children after their mother’s death, Sebastian makes a point of insulting her at every dinner except the ones attended by Fa, asking her whether she never married because of her smell or her whiskers (100). He attacks her, in other words, on exactly the grounds that make her available as a caregiver: her own lack of both marriage and children. Corrie, contemplating whether Madge could come and live with them, assumes Sebastian would be worse than before: “He was so used to being in charge now, to controlling their lives, from bedtimes to allowances” (102). The novel seems to suggest, through its accommodating female characters, that Sebastian’s cruelty was not only the act of a hurting child, but was something unusual for him. I suggest that his actions towards Madge were unusual in their force, but that many of his other actions towards the women in his life are nonetheless on a spectrum with them. Corrie’s test, which she must pass to become Sir Gareth, is to pull a dead and rank rat from a bag and sit beside it (33). Corrie is correct when she comes to realize that Sebastian longs for control. It is the two older sisters who eventually run afoul of Sebastian’s rules, as both are required to provide emotional labour, a term coined by Arlie Hochschild, within a game gendered as male.15 This presents a problem for the allegory Sebastian lives by, in that his lack of male friends must be accommodated by his female siblings. The father gets to play the game without knowing it, while the sisters have to keep the game alive and provide support in moments where Sebastian’s real life is at stark odds with his fantasy life. Clearly Sebastian’s needs are emotional ones, in that what he wants from them are what men often expect from the women in their lives: comfort, nurture, support. Sebastian sets the household’s responsibilities, leaning on Roz and Corrie to get things like meals and bedtime accomplished, and does so as a proxy for his father. But among these responsibilities is their continued par­ ticipation in the Round Table game, under the male guises of Gawain and Gareth. 15 Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).

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In other words, what looks like an admirable tolerance around gender is in fact Sebastian making up for his lack of male friends by pushing his sisters into playing some for him. Only when Roz abandons the game – and her male roleplaying identity – does Sebastian turn to a romantic interest in search of nurture and comfort, with disastrous consequences. Roz can be described as a Susan Pevensie problem. In the last book of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, Susan is the only regular visitor to Narnia who does not make the trip for that world’s apocalypse. When the last king of Narnia asks the whereabouts of Queen Susan, he is told that she is “‘no longer a friend of Narnia.’” She cares only for “nylons and lipstick and invitations … a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” Susan even apparently dismisses their Narnian adventures as mere games played as children.16 When the book ends and everyone (at least those chosen by Aslan to reside in his true heavenly kingdom) finds themselves reunited with their parents, Aslan tells them there was a train crash and everyone died. Only Susan lives on, condemned to live in the “Shadowlands” of Earth alone.17 Many later writers and critics, including J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have decried this as a sign of Lewis’s own misogyny. When Susan and her older brother Peter are first told they are not coming back to Narnia (in the third book, Prince Caspian), it is because they are now too old.18 She is, in a sense, obeying Aslan’s injunction to embrace maturity. But Peter never lets go of Narnia, in part because he spends time working for Diggory Kirke, the Professor from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, who turns out to be one of the first two humans to encounter Narnia and Aslan (with the retroactive publication of what became the new first book, The Magician’s Nephew, a Narnian creation story). Susan, said to be the prettier of the two sisters but “no good at schoolwork,” is on a different path, but one quite normal for her time.19 Pullman goes even further, arguing that Lewis’s killing of the entire cast and then calling it a happy ending is evidence of his “life-hating ideology”; this reaction comes, it must be said, from an explicitly atheist vantage point.20 The combination of disbelief, growing up, and sexuality in Susan’s case is bequeathed as a lasting trope to the fantasy genre, one to be wrestled with by subsequent authors. Pearson’s engagement with the Susan Pevensie problem is subtle but direct. There is even a moment where nylons act as a signifier of maturity, albeit here a positive one: when Corrie wears a pair, reluctantly, to a show of her mother’s paintings at the novel’s end, much to Meredith’s jealous delight (201). Despite the novel’s attention to Sebastian’s illness, it is equally concerned with how Corrie and Roz are growing up into two very different young women. The first sign that Roz is growing up comes when she refuses to attend the knighting and initiation of Corrie as Gareth, citing her need to practise baton, which Sebastian dismisses as a “stupid girl’s thing.” The other siblings wonder why she reacts so angrily, siding immediately with Sebastian (30). A later argument revolves around Sebastian’s refusal to cut his hair, although it evolves into a telling dispute over Roz’s participation in school clubs; Sebastian 16 17 18 19 20

C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 741. Lewis, Chronicles, 767. Lewis, Chronicles, 418. Lewis, Chronicles, 425–26. Philip Pullman, “The Dark Side of Narnia,” The Guardian (1 October 1998), 6.

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also turns his fire in Corrie’s direction, blaming her for spending too much time at Meredith’s house. In both cases, Sebastian complains that their absences mean the household work becomes his responsibility again (48–49). The final breaking of the Round Table comes at Christmas, when an obviously anxious Roz, her face white and voice shaking, retires from the game, even going so far as to suggest – as Aunt Madge also has – that Sebastian is also too old for it now. Sebastian pronounces Gawain to be a “false, recreant knight” and banishes the character, his voice “so cold that Corrie winced” (107). Roz devotes herself to being a girl her own age, and finds an instant peace (108). Her anxiety is clearly rooted at least partially in her fear of Sebastian’s predictable – and emotionally violent – response. Sebastian takes a dangerous turn when, following Aunt Madge’s Christmas visit, he turns from an allegorical vision of the world to one involving literal reincarnation. Reincarnation becomes the key not to understanding the allegory, but to making the allegorical into the literal, to reifying it. Michel Foucault, in lectures following his seminal History of Madness, writes that “the true secret of madness” is belief that one is a king (following a suggestion by Descartes): If you look at how a delirium, an illusion, or a hallucination was analyzed in this period [eighteenth century], you see it doesn’t much matter whether someone believes himself to be a king, that is to say, whether the content of his delirium is supposing he exercises royal power, or, to the contrary, believes himself to be ruined, persecuted, and rejected by the whole humanity. For the psychiatrists of this period, the fact of imposing this belief, of asserting it against every proof to the contrary, even putting it forward against medical knowledge, wanting to impose it on the doctor and, ultimately, on the whole asylum, thus asserting it against every other form of certainty or know­ ledge, constitutes a way of believing that one is king. Whether you believe yourself to be a king or believe that you are wretched, wanting to impose this certainty as a kind of tyranny on all those around you basically amounts to “believing one is a king.”21

Sebastian has been imposing his being “king” – sovereign in place of his father – through the allegorical Round Table game with some success until Roz rebels. His reaction involves turning to a new girlfriend named Jennifer, probably not coincidentally. Corrie reacts to his claims of reincarnation with alarm, making an explicit distinction between what she does (pretends to be Gareth) and what Sebastian is now claiming (he literally is the new Lancelot, and his girlfriend the new Guinev­ere). She first makes a historical claim, that the Round Table was not real. Next, stymied by Sebastian’s claim that the central figures were historical but became fictionalized, she objects to reincarnation itself, at which point Sebastian claims she is probably not Gareth reincarnated, thus appearing reasonable even as he claims special status for himself. Corrie begs him not to tell Jennifer about this, and although Sebastian agrees that she is “not ready” (124), he soon does exactly that. The breakup, and Jennifer’s new relationship with Terry, Sebastian’s bully Mordred, follows closely behind (154). 21 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–74, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 27–28.

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Sebastian’s attempt to draw Jennifer into the allegory is unsuccessful because he has no leverage over her: she is not part of the family. He can draw on a shared culture with his siblings, in the forms of his mother’s calling him her knight and their father’s knowledge and large library (101–02). His approach to Jennifer is, in a sense, a cold-call, and she responds by dumping him. Sebastian is doing more than trying to draw her into the game. On the allegorical level, he is replacing his mother with a new queen, but to do so he must overwrite her own personality. She is really the allegorical figure of Guinevere, not the real modern Jennifer. This should be a clue to the limits of Sebastian’s ability to control his surroundings: outside of the family bubble, he has little to no power, a reminder that harmless and even healthy newcomers (like Meredith) are intrinsically a threat to him. One could imagine a more tolerant, inclusive model for the Round Table game, one in which Corrie and Meredith would not have to play Gareth and Perceval in secret, or one in which Sebastian could invite Jennifer in as a character of her own choosing. Sebastian is interested in neither approach; the allegory he wants is already in place. He simply fails to overwrite Jennifer with his vision of Guinevere. What is interesting here is that Jennifer does not just leave Sebastian: she inadvertently recreates the problem at the heart of the legendary Round Table’s fall. Sebastian’s optimism that, absent Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere might finally be together turns into a Guinevere who leaves him for another, the bully Sebastian has suggested is Mordred. It is unlikely that Sebastian, or perhaps Pearson, is aware that the fourteenth-century Alliterative Morte Arthure does make Mordred and Guine­ vere lovers (indeed, it makes them parents). That is not the salient point. Rather, what happens is that the text does allow what looks like overwriting, in that Guinevere/Jennifer proves unfaithful to the proxy figure of sovereignty, Sebastian. In turn, this prompts Sebastian to lose all sense of perspective, inevitably leading him to act out his new or renewed pain as Lancelot would: by running mad in the woods. The novel is Corrie’s at this moment, as she is the only one to mark the real extent of Sebastian’s deterioration before he fails to come home one night. With nobody home and finding herself unable to get in touch with any adult figures, Corrie panics until Fa – typically late – arrives. They find Sebastian at an old fort in the woods: Sebastian was crouched in a corner of the fort, his arms around his knees. He was naked, except for a strip of cloth around his waist. His face and arms and legs were scratched and muddy. He shrank away from the beam of light and moaned like a trapped animal. (166)

Only his father’s voice finally recalls him to himself, and he cries out for his mother. Fa takes him home, bathes him, and gives him aspirin, and at last Sebastian sleeps. The nature of Sebastian’s madness is never fully explored; Corrie cannot follow him to the hospital or sit in on any meetings with his doctors, and she remains our focal point. There are obvious questions. Sebastian’s emotional pain, exacerbated by diet and sleeplessness, is real. But his madness is so literary – so perfectly chosen to meet his allegorical vision of the world – that it feels partially performative, one last turn in the Round Table game. In Foucault’s sense, Sebastian was both king and wretch. As “wretch” his emotional collapse commands the family’s attention to

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an even greater extent than he did as Lancelot: he calls the king-father back to the centre of the kingdom, and to the family. Fa retakes control of the household and finally treats Sebastian like a child who requires emotional care from him, and the allegory collapses into reality. When the game is invoked one final time, it is not at the level of allegorical play but rather rooted in the code Sebastian created: he is now reluctant to agree to Madge’s moving in, but because he is embarrassed by his earlier behaviour. When he calls Madge to apologize and invite her into their home, Corrie calls him as brave as Sir Lancelot – now a comparison, not an identity. Pearson’s novel is ultimately a kind one with a happy ending. Both Sebastian and Fa/William have reconciled themselves to their grief, even though their ability to do so is predicated on their finding a more appropriate provider of emotional labour in Madge. Both Corrie and Sebastian turn their creative energies to artistic depictions of the real: horses for Corrie (190), birds for Sebastian (197). Corrie starts Junior High and her world expands as she makes new friendships. Only one small detail troubles this happy picture: Sebastian likes his new high school, but by November has not made any friends (204). Sebastian has learned not to disguise the world under a roleplaying fellowship, but this has perhaps revealed his true and solitary nature. The perfect, gentle knight is now a quiet, contemplative young man.

10 Remembering the Romance: Medievalist Romance in Fantasy Fiction by Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun

S

ince William Morris’s Victorian prose romances, followed by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series, Clive Staples Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, images of the Middle Ages have flourished in fantasy literature, becoming a sort of default setting for much of epic and heroic fantasy. While Tolkien’s and Lewis’s medievalism is inarguably influenced by their authors’ philological background in medieval literature and culture, many representations of the Middle Ages in contemporary fantasy owe less to meticulous historical or literary research than to a sort of shared imagination of ‘the medieval’ that manifests itself across various phenomena of popular culture and typically includes feudal social structures, questing knights who follow (or not) chivalric ideals, and noble damsels in distress. This popular strand of medievalism, assembled over generations from stock images and clichés, has been labelled by Umberto Eco as “fantastic neomedievalism,” or even more derisively as “the avalanche of pseudo-medieval pulp in paperbacks,” which has little to do with the ‘real’ Middle Ages, which are, according to one Italian novelist and academic, a proper object of “responsible philological examination.”1 Over the last couple of decades, however, responsible philological examination has extended its scope to examine popular representations of the medieval within a growing field of medievalism studies. In the introduction to a collection of essays on the representation of the Middle Ages in popular culture David W. Marshall remarks that “medievalism interrogates how different groups, individuals, or eras for various reasons, often distortedly,

1 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 62–63.

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remember the Middle Ages” (italics mine).2 The issue of remembering in the context of medievalism is not further developed, yet Marshall’s observation proves an inspiring starting point, as it draws our attention to the conceptual interrelatedness of memory and medievalism. If we further acknowledge that memory and literature rely on similar dynamic strategies of selecting, organizing, and re-accentuating individual elements to form a coherent narrative, we can see fantasy literature as one of many forms of recalling the Middle Ages in contemporary culture. The following discussion will aim to demonstrate that despite numerous differences, Guy Gavriel Kay’s medievalist historical fantasy A Song for Arbonne (1992) and Charles de Lint’s urban fantasy Yarrow: An Autumn Tale (1986) actively “remember” the patterns and themes of medieval romance to weave meanings pertinent to contemporary readers. Inarguably, the last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in memory, which manifests itself not only in a new wave of social and political practices of commemoration and remembrance but also in the increasing body of multidisciplinary academic research. In Memory in Culture Astrid Erll emphasizes subjectivity, selectivity, and changeability of memory, which depends on the situation in which the past is recalled: Re-membering is an act of assembling available data that takes place in the present. Versions of the past change with every recall, in accordance with the changed present situation. Individual and collective memories are never a mirror image of the past, but rather an expressive indication of the needs and interests of the person or group doing the remembering in the present.3

The same process of re-assembling available elements is inherent to medievalism, as the Middle Ages cannot be considered as an objectively defined and constant reality but rather as a construct that emerges from the very beginning as “an invention of those who came after it,” whose “entire construction is, essentially, a fantasy” and which can be “continually reborn in new stories, new media, new histories” to explain, comment on, and even transform the present.4 In the context of literature, the most useful category for understanding the acts of remembrance is a concept of cultural memory developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann. According to them, cultural memory can be understood as a collectively 2 David W. Marshall, Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 2. The relationship between memory and medievalism has also been examined by Vincent Ferré, who draws on the writings by Jacques Le Goff, Paul Ricœur, and Pierre Nora to build a theoretical framework and discuss the political dimension of the memory of medieval past and its importance for the construction of national identities in the nineteenth century. He also observes the significance of memory for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where it is seen not only as a theme but also as the foundation of the novels, and briefly mentions the influence of Tolkien’s narrative on later fantasy fiction. See Vincent Ferré, “Memory,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), 133–40. 3 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 8. 4 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalism: Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013), 1.

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shared knowledge of the past, which is transmitted through rituals, images, and texts over generations and is instrumental in maintaining a group’s self-image and identity. Although Jan Assman is particularly interested in the connections between memory, identity, and cultural continuity/formation of tradition in the context of the ancient past, his observations may be generalized to refer to virtually any period.5 Cultural memory, according to him, is deliberately established, formalized, and stored in symbolic forms, such as texts, rites, monuments, celebrations, objects, sacred scriptures, and other media. These media function as mnemonic clues, which bring about meanings associated with the past yet, as he clarifies, “not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians … but only the past as it is remembered,” especially an absolute, mythical past.6 Although Aleida Assmann diverges from the study of mythological narratives and grounds her arguments in a thorough and illuminating analysis of a wide range of cultural phenomena from the European heritage (from Shakespeare, through Goethe and Wordsworth, through war and Holocaust testimonies, to contemporary art), she is also predominantly interested in canonized art and literature, which is collectively esteemed and belongs to the sphere of high culture.7 It is, however, not only the canon that participates in creating, circulating, and shaping contents of cultural memory; popular novels, including fantasy fiction, can also play an important role in envisioning the past. Drawing from the Assmanns’ model, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning have discussed various relationships between literature and memory, differentiating among three major approaches to the examination of memory within the field of literary studies, which can be characterized as (1) “memory in literature,” that is, representations of nature, workings and functions of memory in literary texts, (2) “memory of literature,” that is, the ways in which literary texts remember other texts through intertextuality, genre conventions, and recurrence of topoi, and (3) “literature as medium of cultural memory,” that is, the ways in which literary texts mediate and transmit memories.8 Given its scope, this essay will focus predominantly on the second approach, the memory of literature, examining how the novels in question reimagine the literary tradition of romance and what effects are created through this process. 5 Jan Assmann’s writing on cultural memory spreads across a range of articles and shorter texts, some of them translated into English, others not. His influential monograph, first published in German in 1992, offers a theoretical framework of cultural memory and then examines through case studies various aspects of the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, and Greece. See Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6 Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 109–18 (113). 7 Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 8 Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, “Concepts and Methods for the Study of Literature and/as Cultural Memory,” in Literature and Memory. Theoretical Paradigms. Genres. Functions, ed. Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer (Tubingen: Francke Verlag, 2006), 11–28 (13).

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Written in the vernacular in narrative verse or prose and concerned with the chivalric deeds of a questing hero, romance had many faces, including short Breton lais as well as extended Arthurian cycles. Acknowledging its capacity for participating in a dialogue with other narrative forms or even incorporating them within its structure, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner has called romance a “shape-shifter par excellence among medieval genres,” whose fluid generic boundaries remain problematic to modern critics.9 She further emphasizes the self-reflexivity of the genre, which through the act of rewriting reshapes earlier narratives, in this way drawing the reader’s attention not only to the story itself, but also to the ways in which the tale is put together. Dealing with the adventures of chivalric knights, whose values are tested in their fight for lost fortunes, recognition, and love, romance also becomes a medium that examines the past within the context of its own culture. In the process, the exploits of mythical, legendary, and historical figures are taken out of their original context and reframed in medieval settings familiar to the target audience. Construing the past in romances can actually be seen as an act of cultural remembrance – it is not necessarily about a truthful or accurate testimony about given historical events but about a vision that is collectively shared and instrumental in the formation of a group’s identity in the present. Thus, romances establish and perpetuate an image of past perfection, with the court of King Arthur, for instance, being seen “as an ideal society from a vanished golden age, remote in time but most worthy of imitation, indeed, especially worthy because remote,” but they do so in a way that remains meaningful to the specific group they address.10 Furthermore, since its inception romance seems to be about remembering and transmitting the memory of earlier oral and literary narratives. Logan E. Whalen convincingly argues that in her Lais Marie de France is preoccupied with literary remembrance in two ways. Firstly, she aims to disseminate the memory of earlier stories through writing them anew for her audience; secondly, she attempts to ensure that her own writing and name are remembered. Establishing herself in relation to ancient auctoritates, Marie sees her task as preserving the tales for posterity through refashioning them in her own poetic voice and perspective. Referring to Seneca’s figure of the beehive, often employed in the Middle Ages to represent memory and book collecting as a step crucial to composing literary texts, Whalen observes: Marie, like other poets of her time such as Béroul, Chrétien, and Thomas d’Angleterre, is analogous to the bee, as she uses the faculty of memory to store material that has been gathered from various sources. Just as the bee uses pollen that has been collected from various flowers in the field to produce honey, so too medieval poets chose different parts of previously acquired literary material from memory and combined them 9 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13–28 (13). 10 John Leyerle, “Conclusion: The Major Themes of Chivalric Literature,” in Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle, Studies in Medieval Culture 14 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1980), 131–32.

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with other parts to produce a work that in some ways resembled the sources from which it was taken but in reality represented something new.11

The beehive metaphor clearly emphasizes that medieval authors depended on the archive of cultural texts available to them, but it also implies the active role of memory in mediating this material – a process that is not merely passive transmission but new interpretation. Similar conclusions might be drawn from Tol­ kien’s observations on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a much later romance, which is seen as a deeply “rooted” work. This rootedness – another way of referring to cultural memory – is understood as a principle of composing narratives, which are “made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times,” not through simple repetition of plots, themes, and motifs but through welding them “into the service of the changed minds of a later time … for the expression of ideas quite different from those which produced them.”12 In fact, Tolkien’s own creative strategies can be summed up in a similar way. His writing, being itself deeply rooted in Scandinavian myth and saga as well as Old English and medieval English literature, has become a medium that forges new meanings for twentieth-century audiences and provides patterns for contemporary fantasy literature. Readers of fantasy, even if they have not gained expertise in medieval history, literature, and culture, share a common context, that is, knowledge of the Middle Ages, which arises from their familiarity with the conventions of the genre. While some texts, like Lord of the Rings, might draw inspiration directly from medieval tradition, other novels construe their Middle Ages by following, modifying, or defying the patterns established by their predecessors within the genre of fantasy. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, for instance, has remained a paradigmatic secondary world for many writers and readers, influencing the world-building of numerous successful fantasists and providing a repertoire of themes, motifs, and narrative solutions for future texts.13 Whether fantasy authors are inspired by medieval tradition itself or by medievalisms construed in other fantasy texts, they frequently remain, directly or indirectly, the inheritors of medieval romance.14 11 Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 40. 12 J.R.R. Tolkien [1983], “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 72–108 (72). 13 For instance, Terry Brooks in The Sword of Shannara (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977) follows Tolkienian patterns and tropes so closely that it is easier to label them as imitation than as inspiration. Tad Williams takes a different approach in his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series (New York: DAW Books, 1988–93), subverting some and developing other Tolkienian tropes. Finally, George R.R. Martin in A Song of Ice and Fire (New York: Bantam Books, 1999–) rejects what he sees as a nostalgic vision of the golden age to depict a dark and brutal version of the Middle Ages. 14 The links between the medieval genre and fantasy, especially in its epic and heroic guise, have already been noted by critics. For an analysis of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, see Thomas Honegger, “(Heroic) Fantasy and the Middle Ages – Strange Bedfellows or an Ideal Cast,” Itinéraires 3 (2010): 61–71. For another discussion related to fantasy literature

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Diverging from the Tolkienian pattern, Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne looks back directly to the Middle Ages and romance for inspiration.15 Grounded in history rather than myth, Kay’s novel is usually classified as historical fantasy, which according to Veronica Schanoes can be perceived as “a hybrid of two seemingly opposed modes, fantasy with its explicit rejection of consensus reality, and historical fiction, a genre grounded in realism and historically accurate events.”16 This hybridity has major implications for Kay’s world-building and story-telling. In this novel, typical fantastic elements are of only marginal importance – there are two moons; some characters have certain limited insight into the future; the ‘magic’ connected with a female goddess has more to do with intuition, herbal medicine, and midwifery than with supernatural powers. The most important building blocks of the secondary world of A Song for Arbonne are carved from the history and literary tradition of the medieval Provence of the troubadours. Kay’s inspirations include historical events (e.g., the Albigensian crusade, the rule of Eleanor of Aquitaine) as well as vidas of troubadours (e.g., Bernard de Ventadorn, Bertran de Borne, Jaufre Rudel) and the subject matter of their songs, which are then combined with purely fictional elements and characters. The storyline reimagines the Albigensian crusade as a clash of two different cultures. Arbonne is a female-ruled country, defined by the rituals of courtly love as well as by the cult of Riann – a female goddess that encompasses archetypal aspects of femininity. Gorhaut, however, is a country with strong patriarchal structures, where female submission is the norm and where the cult of Riann is perceived as heresy, aimed to “mock,” “demean,” and even “unman” (108) Corannos, the male god. Gorhaut wages holy war against Arbonne to take over its lands, but also to destroy its religion, its values, and its influential, politically capable and independent women, who are seen as a threat to the established order of things. Kay’s strategy is thus to reframe the conflict between the Church of Rome and the Cathar cult, with its dualistic beliefs in a god of light (heaven, spiritual realm, human soul) and one of darkness (material world, including the human body which entraps the soul), as a more general and symbolic conflict between the masculine and the feminine. As the author himself observes, incorporating the elements of fantasy allows him and his readers to see the issues of the past in a new light. Fantasy, he explains, “detaches the tale from a narrow context, permits a stripping away, or at least an eroding of preju­ dices and assumptions. And, paradoxically, because the story is done as a fantasy it might actually be seen to apply more to a reader’s own life and world, not less.”17 Yet the choice of Languedoc as the setting for the novel is significant and implies a written before the 1980s, see R.H. Thompson, “Modern Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study,” in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. R.C. Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 211–25. 15 Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne (London: Harper Voyage, 2011); further quotations have page numbers in parentheses in the text. 16 Veronica Schanoes, “Historical Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 236–47 (236). 17 Guy Gavriel Kay, “Home and Away,” Bright Weavings, http://brightweavings.com/ globe>, last accessed 11 September 2018. Italics in original.

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predilection for focusing on aspects of medieval history and tradition that are on the whole less explored in fantasy fiction. In light of A. Assmann’s model of cultural memory, which apart from the processes of remembering and forgetting involves gathering and storing information in various media, Kay’s strategy and choice of inspiration can be seen as an attempt to rely on the material that is overlooked or ‘forgotten’ in the majority of popular fantasy texts. Distinguishing between functional and storage memory, Assmann defines the former as consisting of consciously selected elements, maintained and transmitted as a coherent story to provide normative values essential for group identity, and the latter as a certain “reservoir for future functional memories,” where the elements, even if not actively remembered at the present moment, remain latent and accessible for potential future use. Importantly, the borderline between functional and storage memory is not fixed. Consequently, the importance of what were once central elements of cultural remembering may diminish with time, whereas other aspects might move from the margins to the centre of social attention.18 A Song for Arbonne, with its emphasis on a more female-oriented perspective of medieval history, with the discourse of courtly love reimagined in the novel as a complex system of social and political organization, can be read as an attempt to shift the structures of cultural memory related to the Middle Ages. Through encompassing neglected feminine elements within the narrative, Kay’s novel seeks to promote a more balanced distribution of gender power within a genre that more often than not extols masculine valour and naturalizes the oppression of women. This intent is achieved not only through reframing historical material but also through a skilful handling of romance tropes. The prologue introduces the matter of the proper tale by narrating earlier events and reworks the Arthurian motif of a love triangle, in which two men are in love with one woman, making it an important point of reference for other relationships in the novel.19 It tells the story of Aelis, an heiress of Arbonne, in a political marriage with Urte de Miraval, who falls in love with Bertran de Talair, a troubadour of noble origin. Refusing to be the unattain­ able lady of troubadour song, she actively participates in plotting a fake kidnapping, which makes it possible for the lovers to meet in the woods and satisfy their sexual desire for each other. Aelis’s story does not have a happy ending. She dies, giving birth to two out-of-wedlock children – a boy who does not survive (it is unclear whether he simply died or was murdered by the enraged husband) and a girl whose existence is hidden from everyone. Her death becomes the starting point for a lengthy personal feud between Bertran and Urte, which weakens the whole country and makes Arbonne vulnerable to attacks from its neighbours. The story, one of a woman who took her fate into her own hands yet ignored the political consequences of her decision, introduces the issue of female agency, desire, and love in a social reality that saw marriage as a practical matter meant to ensure political alliances and the continuity of lineage rather than a personal choice motivated by feelings. It also Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 123–32 (130). The motif recurs in other Kay novels and has already been examined with reference to The Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel; see M.J. Toswell, “The Arthurian Landscapes of Guy Gavriel Kay,” in The Year’s Work in Medievalism XXVI (2012 for 2011): 90–102. 18

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serves as a counterpoint for examining other female characters, who took different measures to find personal freedom within the limits imposed on them. Portraying these women, Kay manages to avoid not only damsel-in-distress stereotypes but also strong woman types, which according to Jane Tolmie constitute an “enduring cultural fantasy of the strong woman who rises above a general condition of female disenfranchisement.”20 Consequently, the women of Arbonne are depicted as actively pursuing their fates and bending the structures of patriarchal society rather than openly defying them by assuming masculine roles. Signe, Aelis’s mother and an insightful political player, is the one who “defined and shaped both the purpose and the art of courtly love” (231), seeing it as a way to direct male desire and passion to a cause that was important for her and her husband. For Ariane de Carenzu, who cannot find satisfaction in an arranged marriage with a gay man, seeking fulfilment elsewhere is acceptable as long as it does not destabilize the social and political order. Lucianna Delonghi, influenced by the figure of Lucrezia Borgia, is an archetypal femme fatale using her sexual allure as a tool in a game of power. Beatriz, the High Priestess of Ryan, renounces her sexuality in the service of the goddess, yet remains a key political player. Finally, Rosala, who is the most abused female character in the narrative, manages to escape the openly misogynistic culture of Gorhaut to save the life of her unborn child (also born out of wedlock) – the act that serves as a pretext for the invasion of Arbonne.21 On the whole, in A Song for Arbonne Kay offers a memorable portrayal of numerous individualized female characters without, however, removing them from the social conditions in which they had to operate, which makes their motivations even more convincing to readers. Although women are not really free from the constraints imposed on them and true gender equality remains elusive in the novel, the problem of female agency and the lack thereof in popular beliefs about the Middle Ages comes to the foreground. In such a woman-centred fantasy text, the figure of a chivalric knight on a quest needs to be reworked as well. Blaise de Garsenc is a mercenary knight raised in Gorhaut who initially sees “the woman-driven culture” as unnatural, “utterly irrational,” and “patently silly” (23). His own position in the society is realistically delineated. Like other younger sons of prominent lords “barred from a useful marriage by virtue of their lack of land or chattels” (114), Blaise could enter the clergy or attach himself to some prominent household but decides instead to leave his country and become a sellsword. Although skilful, he is not particularly heroic at the outset of the narrative; his journey from one quest to another is motivated by financial reasons on the one hand and a fear of establishing meaningful relationships on the other: “If you kept moving there was less chance of putting down 20 Jane Tolmie, “Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine,” Journal of Gender Studies 15.2 (2006): 145–58 (145). 21 For a more detailed analysis of female characters read against the context of courtly love and discourse love, see my “Faire Ladies Re-Imagined: Female Characters in Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne,” in Tekstowe światy fantastyki [Textual Worlds of Fantasy], ed. Mariusz M. Leś, Weronika Łaszkiewicz, and Piotr Stasiewicz (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Prymat, 2017), 167–77, available online through the Digital Repository of the University of Białystok, , last accessed 30 October 2018.

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roots, forming bonds, caring for people … learning what happened when those men and women you cared for proved other than you had thought them” (115). Simon Gaunt observes that “romances frequently narrate an individual’s quest for his ‘true’ identity through love and chivalric exploits,” and A Song for Arbonne clearly follows this trajectory.22 Yet, the military exploits of the protagonist prove inconsequential in this process. Blaise’s emotional growth is actually made possible thanks to the female characters he encounters on his way. Framing the protagonist’s development in terms of his changing attitude towards women, Kay emphasizes the transformative effects of true love. Blaise’s romantic relationship with Ariane de Carenzu is depicted as involving more than sexual desire. Instead, the relationship depends on mutual understanding and respect – the latter aspect, as the protagonist finally learns, being crucial to all healthy social relationships. As the story progresses, it turns out that only after acknowledging the feminine as equal to the masculine can Blaise become a true hero and a successor to the throne of Gorhaut, who will restore peace by sacrificing his true love and entering into a political marriage with Rinette, a rediscovered daughter of Aelis and Bertran and the heiress to Arbonne. The marriage, following the war that has been won thanks to a combination of armed combat fought by men and stratagems devised by wo­men, symbolically reflects the need for a harmonization of the spheres and for the desirability of the balance in gender power. Kay’s reimagined ladies are no longer passive and silent domnas of the cansos, who serve mainly as objects of troubadour desire; they have desires of their own and actively pursue them. More importantly, they are also given a voice through the figure of Lisseut, the trobairitz who acts as witness to the events and the focalizer for a considerable portion of the narrative. Although Lisseut plays little active role in the political games, she is an acute observer and her perspective informs the narrative. She also enjoys relative freedom of movement across both the land and social hierarchies, and in the end becomes one of the greatest woman troubadours of Arbonne. The inclusion of the figure of a trobairitz is thoroughly thought through, and encapsulates Kay’s attempt to present history and romance from a female perspective. The novel is framed by two vidas, the first devoted to Anselme of Cauvas, the first troubadour in Arbonne’s history, and the other to Lisseut, the first female troubadour. This metatextual frame can be seen as an attempt to restore the voice of female poets, which had been relegated to the margins of cultural memory and absent from popular medievalism.23 Moreover, Lisseut first appears in the novel 22 Simon Gaunt, “Romance and Other Genres,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, 45–49 (47). 23 Tilde Sankovitch observes that, despite being available in print since the nineteenth century, the contribution of female troubadours was neglected until the 1970s, when all aspects of medieval female culture aroused academic interest. She further notes problems in determining the corpus of texts that can be ascribed to the trobairitz resulting from the fact that many of the poems are anonymous. This corpus is relatively small when compared to the body of poems written by male troubadours. Finally, there is little biographical information even for those trobairitz, whose names we know, as only five vidas exist for female poets. See Tilde Sankovitch, “The Trobairitz,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113–26 (113–15).

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during a midsummer carnival – “a time between times, a space in the round of the year where all seemed in suspension, when anything might happen and be allowed” (121). In his understanding of the carnival Kay seems to follow Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw it as “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal,” which “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” and “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”24 Although sexual licentiousness, temporary suspension of the established order, and reversal of norms are all part of Kay’s depiction of the festivities, it is the aspect of renewal that is most meaningful in the introduction of Lisseut. At this moment of the narrative, she is still a juglar, a performer who sings the songs of male troubadours. Yet, when she is asked to perform in front of an audi­ ence consisting of the chief political players of Arbonne, her partner, Alain, offers her a very unique opportunity: The special thing though – the gift this song offered Lisseut – was that it was written for a woman’s voice. There weren’t many, which was why the female joglars of Arbonne spent much of their time transposing tunes written for male voices and ignoring as best as they could the obvious inappropriateness of most of the themes. In this piece Alain had changed a great many elements of the traditional liensenne, shifting the narrative to the woman’s point of view, while keeping enough of the familiar motifs to leave the audience in no doubt as to what they were hearing and appraising. (152)

This passage is crucial for reading A Song for Arbonne as a tribute to the forgotten female voice of medieval narratives and an attempt to move it from the margins to the centre of the reservoir of cultural memory. Through introducing a range of reimagined female characters and making their perspective central to the story, Kay shifts “the narrative to the woman’s point of view” and makes it an integral part of his vision of the Middle Ages. While his narrative keeps “enough of the familiar motifs” to appeal to fantasy readers, it also offers a unique way of dealing with the depiction of women in the text, reexamines the figure of chivalric hero and his quest, and revisits the values of male-centred fantasy texts. In a way, A Song for Arbonne is a song offered by Alain to Lisseut – a story that becomes a vehicle for the reinterpretation of the historical, cultural and literary heritage of the Middle Ages within the genre of fantasy, which perpetuates, often unquestioningly, the past as defined and made only by men. While Guy Gavriel Kay’s historical fantasy leaves no doubt as to its rootedness in medieval tradition, Charles de Lint’s Yarrow: An Autumn Tale (1986), a contemporary urban fantasy, is much vaguer in its reworking of romance tropes, which are also tinged with Gothic sensibilities.25 Most generally, according to John Clute, the category of urban fantasy embraces works where “fantasy and the mundane world

24 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 25 Charles de Lint, Yarrow: An Autumn Tale (London: Pan Books, 1992); further quotations have page numbers in parentheses in the text.

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intersect and interweave throughout a tale which is significantly about a real city.”26 Alexander Irvine, who develops Clute’s observations further, distinguishes between two major types of urban fantasy novels: the first recasts the tropes and characters of earlier fairy tales, myths, and romances in the contemporary setting of a pri­ mary world city (a literary representation of an actual or at least a recognizable city), while the second depicts fully fantastic, secondary world cities that are governed by their own rules irrespective of existing lore.27 However, as has been demonstrated by Stefan Ekman, urban fantasy escapes precise definitions because of its various mani­ festations. What connects various threads of this subgenre of fantasy is “a strong focus on that which in some sense or other is not seen: the Unseen.” One of the ways – the most meaningful for the present discussion – in which this effect is achieved is through the combination of a contemporary urban setting with elements of the Gothic to create an atmosphere of concealment and obscurity. Such stories, Ekman argues, draw on “the Gothic tradition of darkness” to create suspense and a sense of dread by depicting forgotten or abandoned places in which the Unseen – very often in the form of supernatural creatures such as vampires or werewolves – is not only hidden but actively hiding from public view.28 Set in the Ottawa of the 1980s, Yarrow engages with the Unseen in two ways. At one level, the female protagonist of the novel, Caitlin – or Cat – Midhir, is an author of successful fantasy novels who draws inspiration from dreams that are framed as visits to the Otherworld – an alternative reality inaccessible to other people. At another level, when her dreaming stops and she struggles with writer’s block, she is forced to confront a supernatural danger in the primary world. These two levels intersect and interweave throughout the tale, in which she has to confront her personal weaknesses and mature in order to save herself, her friends, the real world, and the Otherworld. De Lint’s realistic depiction of contemporary Ottawa and a range of secondary characters who occupy different positions within the society and lead quite ordinary lives becomes fractured with a realization that a supernatural evil threat lurks beneath the surface reality of the novel. The safety of modern life is shown as illusory and the city becomes a site of nocturnal violence, with an ancient vampire-like creature, Lysistratus, roaming the streets, feeding on people’s dreams and energy, and even taking their lives. The vampire is reimagined as a slightly androgynous man: “slender,” “physically fit,” with “styled hair and trendy tan suit,” reminding the narrator of “British rock stars like Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon or David Bowie” (28), forcing his victims to submit with “piercing blue eyes” (82) that control their thoughts. By contrast to classic vampire figures, Lysistratus feeds on dreams and life energy rather than on blood, and his sexual desire for the protagonist is aroused by the fact she is an extraordinary dreamer rather than by her physicality. As a creature of ancient origins, he used to look for prey in “strong-dreaming aborigines unsullied by the vacuous glitter of the Western world” (14), but since 26 John Clute, “Urban Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbit Books, 1997), 975 with italics in the original. 27 Alexander C. Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” in Cambridge Companion to Fantasy, 200–13 (200–01). 28 Stefan Ekman, “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 27.3 (2016): 452–69 (463, 464–65).

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their shamans developed ways of dealing with his kind Lysistratus finds it easier now to operate in a city, whose “inhabitants would not accept that he existed, except as a titillating fiction” (14). In this value-charged juxtaposition of precolonial indi­ genous cultures with contemporary modern urbanity, de Lint equips the former with more knowledge and a deeper understanding of reality resulting from their intimate connection with the mythical past, whereas the latter is defined by a detrimental absence or loss of this bond.29 Contemporaneity is thus defined by lack, and a void that might be filled by turning to the past, which appears at least more stable. In Yarrow this past is not clearly delineated and remains somewhat ambiguous: both threats and solutions can be found there, which implies a need to approach with caution if one looks for answers to contemporary problems there. The figure of the vampire is also instrumental in creating the atmosphere of dread caused by a gradual encroachment of evil. Initially observing Cat from a distance and stalking her, Lysistratus finally intrudes not only into the safe domestic sphere of her house but also into the Otherworld, her mental and psychological refuge. “Gothic novels,” as Fred Botting notes, “seem to sustain a nostalgic relish for a lost era of romance and adventure”;30 in Yarrow, de Lint seems to be playing with the ideas of what is typically associated with both of these elements. In particular, he skilfully manipulates the roles of the chivalric hero, his lady, and the antagonist. When the female protagonist is in danger, Ben, who has been admiring her writing and following her career for years, appears. Even before he met her personally, Ben had been attracted to the image of Cat in photos, and haunted in his dreams by her features, which were “a curious combination of frailty and strength that made him yearn to protect and be protected” (30). This admiration for a woman he does not really know may be a distant echo of a courtly lover worshipping his lady from afar, but Ben is also depicted as too shy and insecure to approach her. Cat, in turn, becomes attracted to him not because of his adventures and the exploits that are meant to prove his devotion but because she feels accepted the way she is – slightly socially awkward, quiet, and introverted. Just as Cat is not a stereotypical damsel in distress, Ben lacks the physical attributes of a hero in shining armour. As an avid fantasy reader, he realizes his attempts to help Cat appear unheroic, clumsy, and chaotic when compared with fiction and film, but his affection for her drives him to act when most needed. When he confronts Lysistratus face to face, he lacks no courage and manages to seriously wound the creature with a bat; yet the vampire is too powerful to be overcome with physical force and Ben’s attempts to save Cat fail. In fact, she turns out to be the only one who can defeat the monster. While romance and adventure are not dead in de Lint’s novel, they are reworked to a considerable 29 Ken Gelder observes that understanding and respect for the lore of folk culture that proves instrumental to defend a community is a frequent theme in contemporary popular depictions of vampires. Some recent vampire narratives depend on challenging this traditional lore, with vampires moving freely in daylight and not afraid of crucifixes, but the lore still provides an important point of reference for readers and viewers; see Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), 35. While de Lint equates true indigenous lore with deep knowledge, he undermines the lore popularized through popular culture, which is emphasized through frequent mock references to the popular image of the vampire. 30 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 4.

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degree. Bearing in mind the echoes of earlier narratives, de Lint’s approach allows for more flexibility in the depiction of gender roles of the characters, who are fully fleshed out and driven by motivations coherent and comprehensible to contemporary readers. Moreover, he delegates to a woman the quest to save the world. Another interesting aspect of the novel is its reuse of the motif of the Otherworld – an archetypal space of medieval romance, which according to Corinne Saunders is “a parallel sphere of marvelous adventure … a place into which anyone may step by chance … shifting and vaguely defined, not always explicitly as faery, not always given boundaries.”31 She further observes that it is opposed to the court and associated with wilderness, where forbidden and unrealizable desires can be played out, being at the same time a place of learning and development. In Yarrow the Otherworld is not open to everyone, but Cat can move freely between the primary world of contemporary civilization and a simpler, more authentic, world of fantasy. The Other­ world also serves as a space to which the protagonist has escaped in her dreams since childhood, a complementary reality where she can establish the meaningful relationships she lacks in real life: Her dreams and writing had always been her catharses, giving her something to turn to when the world seemed too big and frightening, filled with people who didn’t care, a way of communicating that didn’t require personal intimacies. (89)

It is there that an alienated girl, who has later become a writer, meets a handful of gnomes, who offer her kindheartedness and amusement, and Kothlen, a bard figure, whose elaborate tales provide inspiration for her own writing. The Otherworld is thus a sphere where Cat can have everything she misses in her ordinary life and be everything she is not. The strikingly asexual nature of Faerie, which in medieval romance was frequently presented as a zone where unrealizable or immoral desires could be played out, reveals the protagonist’s lack of interest in, or probably fear of, love, and implies the suppression of erotic desire, which foregrounds itself through contact with the figure of the vampire.32 Lysistratus does not abuse Cat sexually, but his intrusion into the fantastic realm through Cat’s mind is shown as “her soul being raped” (128), an ultimate violation, which changes the dreamscape, killing Kothlen, introducing darkness to a utopian space, and bringing about “an emptiness that stole the heart from the land” (69). It is, however, this invasion that forces Cat out of her comfort zone and pushes her to look for help in the ordinary world, where she meets Peter, the owner of a bookshop specializing in speculative fiction, and, through him, a man she gradually falls in love with, Ben. Although both men are truly supportive, they initially see her dreaming as a sign of her vivid imagination rather than as a portal to another world. Meanwhile, in a parallel reality of her dreamscape, Cat is pressed to reconsider her role in relation to the Otherworld and to learn the truth about herself. In a sacred space of the primeval forest, which is compared to a cathedral (132), she discovers 31 Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 179. 32 See for instance Jeff Rider “The Other Worlds of Romance,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, 115–31 (125–28).

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the truth about herself – that she is actually one with a mysterious antlered woman, Mynfel, who is the guardian of the place. The suggestions of her new-found friends in the primary world and the revelation in the woods together make Cat question her ability to tell the difference between the real and the imaginary, doubt her sanity, destabilize the border between the self and the other, and finally conclude that both the fantastic realm and Lysistratus are simply products of her imagination. Only later, after a final battle with the vampire in the Otherworld when she uses the magic of the place to defend against him, does she realize that Faerie really exists and that she – Caitlin Midhir, given a secret name of Yarrow/Heal-All, which is equivalent to Mynfel – is the only protector of the place, who must assume responsibility for its well-being. Destabilizing the border between the real and the supernatural to reassert the latter, de Lint’s narrative seems to be lingering between Tzvetan Todorov’s notions of the fantastic and the marvellous. The moment, in which the reader participates, of the protagonist’s hesitation between her belief and disbelief in the Otherworld belongs to the fantastic, which “occupies the duration of this uncertainty” and mani­fests itself as “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”33 Yet, in its acceptance of the supernatural as supernatural, the narrative firmly reaffirms the marvellous, implying de Lint’s participation in the tradition of fairy tale, myth, romance, and fan­ tasy literature, all of which may involve a transformation of the protagonist through contact with Faerie. In Yarrow, Cat’s transformation seems to involve acceptance of the repressed, as symbolized by Lysistratus. In her final combat with the creature, Cat does not annihilate him but entraps him within her soul. Having been nearly seduced by Lysistratus’ desire to possess the land, which in a way reflects the fact that for years she has been drawing inspiration from Faerie without assuming any responsibility for it, taking but not giving anything in return, Cat is forced to acknowledge her own egoistic impulses and escapist tendencies, accept them as an undesirable yet genuine part of herself, and go on living with them. Only through this acceptance can she heal the world and herself, becoming ready for meaningful relationships in both of her lives. In Yarrow, de Lint approaches the reservoir of cultural memory quite freely and selects various elements of earlier tradition to tell a tale of universal importance set in a contemporary setting. He reuses the figure of the vampire from Gothic narratives as an adversary to be defeated, simultaneously implying that the darkness we associate with him comes from within the protagonist. He reimagines the patterns of romance, adapting the roles of its male and female characters according to the tastes of a modern audience. He revisits the motif of a journey to the other land as a stage crucial for the development of the protagonist. Yet Yarrow is not obviously medievalist and does not rely on the reconstruction of a particular vision of the Middle Ages. Its rootedness in medieval tradition is more nuanced and can be understood only in relation to the novel’s metafictional self-reflexivity. While de Lint diverges from the patterns of fantasy set in the reimagined Middle Ages, which were 33 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25.

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still dominant in the 1980s, to establish himself as one of the first writers of urban fantasy, the writer protagonist of his novel remains firmly grounded in medievalist tradition, retelling the stories she hears in the Otherworld from the bard Kothlen. He explains the provenance of the tales and the process of their recreation to her: “The tales I tell are old,” he said. “When I relate them to you, I am merely retelling some ancient story or history in my own voice.” “You don’t make them up?” Kothlen laughed. “Oh, some of them. But mostly I just fill out the details. The tales themselves are what they always were. I think of them as the bones of some ancient beast that I must add flesh to so that it can live again. But while the tale itself, its truth, is of the utmost importance, it is the telling that allows it to be remembered or forgotten. The trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller’s craft.” (35)

The creative strategy behind storytelling is thus presented as referring back to the tales that were told before, but writing them anew in one’s own voice and thereby making them accessible to new audiences. The approach is strikingly reminiscent of the practices of medieval authors. Furthermore, Cat’s writing, which stands out for literary creation in general, connects throughout the novel to other works of fantasy, including associations with J.R.R. Tolkien (3), Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip, Nancy Springer (7), William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and Parke Godwin (29). Through its emphasis on these inspirations, de Lint demonstrates that Yarrow is deeply rooted in the tradition of fantasy literature, whose medieval inspirations function as a subtext in de Lint’s novel. As such, Yarrow can be read as an attempt to introduce new elements into the genre of fantasy, an enterprise meant to reinvigorate the conventions rather than rebel against them. Whether or not de Lint is aware of this fact, his novel mirrors the self-reflexive nature of medieval romance, which also reshaped earlier sources and drew the audience’s attention to the ways the stories were told. Returning to the metaphor of the beehive illustrating the mechanisms of cultural remembrance often employed in medieval texts, one can extend its scope to include fiction by both Gay Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint. Just as medieval authors selected various elements of earlier narratives to produce works that in certain ways resembled their original sources but also offered new qualities, Kay and de Lint approach the storehouse of cultural memory to select, transform, and reinterpret their sources of inspiration. Just as romance metaphorically recalls earlier literature, A Song for Arbonne and Yarrow: An Autumn Tale in their own distinctive ways recall the medieval tradition. While Kay’s novel sends its readers back directly to the Middle Ages, de Lint’s work is more removed from its sources and recalls the medieval as already mediated through Gothic and fantasy fiction. Although different in their reuse of the tropes of romance, both novels not only store elements of earlier narratives, but also exemplify the processes of invention, alteration, and reevaluation of this material, becoming vehicles of cultural memory. When considered together, they offer insight into how differently the motifs of medieval narratives can be remembered in contemporary fiction to examine the relationships between the past and the present, reality and fantasy, the tale itself and the act of its telling.

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Emphasizing the role of female storytellers in their novels, both authors seem to highlight the need for more woman-centred fantasy fiction. While de Lint’s contemporary urban fantasy novel consciously rejects a medievalist setting, implying perhaps that the Middle Ages is no longer a convenient time frame for staging a female quest for self-discovery, it still employs the medieval as a subtext, acknowledging the importance of romance for fantasy without fully realizing its potential. Consequently, despite using certain medievalist motifs, Yarrow does not really participate in any discussion about the Middle Ages and its complicated relationship with the present. By contrast, Kay takes a fresh look at the period, finding the forgotten voice of women in the history of medieval Provence and making it the focal point of his narrative. In so doing he challenges our shared construction of the Middle Ages and implies that the picture might not be as monolithic as common beliefs hold. That is, our memories of the medieval are not a mirror image of the past but an indication of the desire to keep this particular image unchanged in support of our collective values. Offering an alternative vision in A Song for Arbonne, Kay undermines hegemonic views of the past and implies that medievalist fantasy may play a more active role as a medium of cultural memory, transforming rather than perpetuating a clichéd vision of the Middle Ages. Though distinct, both approaches offer insight into the processes involved in making and transmitting cultural memory, exemplifying that when collective values change, popular literature reflects that shift, simultaneously transforming the canonized tales of the Middle Ages and redrawing the boundaries of contemporary genres to aggregate these new values within its scope. The use of romance elements in A Song for Arbonne and Yarrow: An Autumn Tale demonstrates the vitality of medievalist tropes and motifs in contemporary fantasy, which is clearly not exclusive to Canadian fiction. While it might be risky to make far-reaching generalizations about Canadian medievalism in fantasy on the basis of these two novels, they do indicate the directions into which Kay and de Lint have proceeded in their other works – towards historical and urban fantasy, respectively. Showing cultural continuity between the European medieval tradition of gothic fiction and fantasy both authors seem to extend the boundaries and modify the patterns of the genre, offering a refreshing perspective on the relationship between the past and the present. De Lint follows the trajectory originally delineated by Horace Walpole and produces a mixture of the ancient and modern romance by linking the medieval and the gothic with the urban. Foregrounding the ongoing dialogue between modernity and the past, Yarrow: An Autumn Tale implies that the former cannot exist without the latter in terms of personal and collective experience as well as in relation to successful storytelling. Kay, in turn, responds directly to the culture of the Middle Ages, yet diverges from its most widespread image as disseminated and popularized in fantasy, to offer a non-Anglophone and less male-centred vision of the period. Examining the use of Arthurian legend in Canadian literature, Raymond H. Thompson concludes that Canadian authors are indebted more to other Arthurian authors than to their own Canadian identity, which nevertheless “does manifest itself in subtle ways, particularly in the yearning for another and better world that

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Arthurian romance seems to offer.”34 If this “yearning” for a better world can indeed be seen as a Canadian trait, then both Kay and de Lint share it. Their novels also demonstrate that medievalist elements can be used to push the boundaries of fantasy rather than stabilize them, open the genre up to new values and points of view rather than preserve the status quo. Canadian medievalism as exemplified by A Song for Arbonne and Yarrow: An Autumn Tale can be thus seen as an inherently dialogic phenomenon that serves to highlight a variety of perspectives and voices while not dismissing the potential of the tradition of romance for rendering new meanings. Rooted in the tradition of romance (in its medieval and gothic manifestations) and fantasy literature, both novels participate in the processes of cultural remembrance, appealing to both Canadian and international readers.

34 Raymond H. Thompson, “The Arthurian Legend in Canada,” in Studies in Medievalism VI: Medievalism in North America, ed. Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 85–99 (95).

11 Medievalisms and Romance Traditions in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel Ewa Drab

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he character of fantasy literature has changed to a great extent since the nineteenth-century publication of those pioneering stories now considered fantasy, such as George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) or William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896), the latter creating for the first time an independent fantasy world. Nonetheless, despite all the transformations to which fantasy fiction has been subjected, it retains a profound connection with a medievalist aesthetics. Fantasy literature, indebted to recurring themes and traditions of the Middle Ages, has developed on the structural foundation of medieval myths and legends, chansons de geste, and chivalric romances. By consequence, elements such as chivalric exploits or magical phenomena are frequent in the genre. Any attempt to reveal the sources of magical stories points to “the ancient traditions of tales of marvels and wonders,” which “continued in the Middle Ages in the form of the romance.”1 Moreover, magic, widely associated with fantasy, was profusely employed by their authors to accompany medieval narratives, possibly “in order to encourage their audiences toward a multi-level interpretative engagement with the text.”2 With Arthurian romances and legends constantly influencing the genre, for example in such contemporary mutations as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series, medieval modes continue to constitute a rich source of inspiration and of useful devices applied in fantasy texts, especially in the context of the Gothic, which “ushered in the nineteenth-century cult of the medieval.”3 Reminiscences of the Middle Ages were constantly present in the later periods, thus strengthening the importance of its imagery in subsequent literatures, including fantasy. This tendency to perpetuate a medieval aesthetics in fiction perhaps

1 Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy Literature (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 9. 2 Michelle Sweeney, Magic in Medieval Romance from Chrétien de Troyes to Geoffrey Chaucer (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 12. 3 Mendlesohn and James, Short History, 15.

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diminished over time, and ultimately, “medievalism found refuge in fantasy literature.”4 A significant number of fantasy stories focus on technologically underdeveloped locations inhabited by heroes who perform glorious deeds and are involved in sword-fights and magic, which readers associate with uncomplicated images of the medieval period. Therefore, because general knowledge of the media tempora is strictly limited to these simplified, if not false, concepts, the representation of this part of history and its presence in the genre tends on the whole to be trivialized. Anne Rochebouet and Anne Salamon’s analysis of the medieval stamp on fantasy fiction reads: la fantasy ne fait pas que recycler des détails vraisemblables et concrets pour se constituer un décor. C’est tout l’imaginaire médiéval, avec les valeurs qu’on lui prête… [Fantasy does not just recycle plausible and concrete details in order to set a scene. All together this is the medieval imaginary, with the values that are associated with it...].5

As a result, they suggest [l]a source médiévale est toujours retravaillée en vue d’une insertion dans un nouvel univers, et souvent même dissimulée et effacée. [The medieval source is always reworked in view of being introduced into a new universe, and often even hidden and erased.]6

By consequence, the Middle Ages have become “a place of pure fiction which provides a privileged setting for the creation of imaginary worlds.”7 Thus, as a form of contribution to world-building, a given author introduces their imagined version of the period in order to lay the groundwork for their independent or interrelated universes, in the foreground or background of the story, thereby completing the created world with some additional concepts superimposed on to the medi­ evalist framework. In this way, medieval symbols and images have grown into the tissue of fantasy fiction. Kim Wilkins, a fantasy author and theorist, suggests that “[m]edievalism in fantasy is almost entirely generic,” and that medievalism manifests in many ways, including the genre’s “predilection for feudal power structures.”8 Thus, for example, in Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle (2008–17), the novel’s society is underdeveloped and relies on farming when at peace and on sword-fighting when at war. In Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea trilogy (2014–15), the feudal hierarchy is even more visible, with monarchs and their counsellors dividing the world among themselves and ignoring the problems of the common folk and the military. These borrowings from a medieval aesthetics are thus not limited to simplified imagery but the medieval may be embedded in the structures of fantasy in complex and 4 Maria Sachiko Cecire, “Medievalism, Popular Culture and National Identity in Children’s Fantasy Literature,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9.3 (2009): 395–409 (398). 5 Anne Rochebouet and Anne Salamon, “Les réminiscences médiévales dans la fantasy. Un mirage des sources?,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 16 (2008): 319–46 (330). 6 Rochebouet and Salamon, “Les réminiscences médiévales,” 331. 7 Rochebouet and Salamon, “Les réminiscences médiévales,” 319. 8 Kim Wilkins, “‘Cutting off the Head of the King’: Sovereignty, Feudalism, Fantasy,” Australian Literary Studies 26.3–4 (2011): 133–46 (135).

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nuanced ways, including the use of magic. Some fantasy texts have constructs modelled after medieval romances, perhaps because these are their ancestors. Therefore, the obvious tendencies of the genre deserve more scrutiny, even as it develops in other directions. With an intention to focus on Guy Gavriel Kay, another key question involves the impact of the history of fantasy and the evolution of the genre on the contemporary Canadian medievalist fantasy. Is it possible to discern any specific traits of this type of fantasy and to determine whether its character is local or global based on the work of one of its most eminent representatives? David Ketterer claims it is extremely difficult to pinpoint the nature of Canadian SF and fantasy owing to the disparate material but proposes a wide spectrum of definition.9 On the one hand, these texts should be written by Canadian authors, feature Canadian characters or places and manifest a vague “Canadian sensibility.” On the other hand, one should also take into consideration works created by non-Canadian authors, with no direct Canadian references or sense of Canadianness. However, in practice, the latter could suggest any work written in the genre. Consequently, it should be con­sidered whether the same conclusions are to be drawn for the contemporary Canadian medi­evalist fantasy and if this literature follows a universal model established over the years or if it could be distinguished among other similar texts. With an extensive and highly acclaimed body of work, Guy Gavriel Kay, with Charles de Lint, and Steven Erikson, remains a significant writer of fantasy literature, both as a Canadian author and as a writer of international recognition who is particularly acknowledged for the realigning in his works of the relations between history and fantasy.10 In fact, the role of history in his writing is the determining factor of the quality and particular character of his fiction. Kay’s contribution to fantasy literature is indelibly related to his painstaking research of the past and the impact it exerts on the present. By modifying the fabric of history in order to incorporate it in the structures of a fantasy narrative, the author delves into the intricacies and possible interpretations of time potentially having “dramatically different scales” whose layers “linger to influence how the present operates.”11 This is what Kay undertakes in A Song of Arbonne (1992) or The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), where the alternative variants of medieval Provence and Spain are depicted in a marvellous fusion of history and fantasy. However, by locating imaginative stories in the framework of alternative histories, Kay provides more than a medievalist reading of fantasy fiction or an inventive depiction of the chosen period. What his literary work offers is an echo of the medieval period and its literatures in contemporary imaginative stories placed at the intersection of these tendencies and tropes, and always capable of offering new twists in perceiving both medievalist narratives and fantasy. M.J. Toswell stresses 9 David Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 165. 10 Brian Bethune, “The Man Who Sailed to an Alternate Byzantium,” Maclean’s, 3 April 2000, , last accessed 26 November 2018. 11 Guy Gavriel Kay, “Q&A with Guy about Ysabel,” Bright Weavings, 2007, , last accessed 26 November 2018.

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the presence of so-called “Arthurian landscapes” in Kay’s novels, something especially discernible in The Fionavar Tapestry (1984–86) and perhaps in Ysabel (2007). What Toswell underlines is the fact that “his approach to history is dense and interlayered,” which implies the writer’s reluctance to settle upon simplistic direct uses of intertextuality.12 The retelling of medieval histories in Kay’s creations seems always nuanced and structured on the basis of deeply anchored connections between the past and the present, not only in terms of time but also in regard to a succession of literary influences and tendencies. Kay’s complex relation to the past and particularly to the medieval period fashions the fantasy he writes by simultaneously drawing from the genre’s rich history and rearranging the concepts and symbols associated with the Middle Ages, in terms of imagery as well as structures. By tailoring his fiction in this manner, the author locates the centre of the narratives he creates in Europe, even if the Canadian spirit is present by way of the characters participating in the unfolding events, as is the case, for example, in both The Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel. These “Arthurian landscapes” and the mechanisms of romance situate Kay’s fantasy stories in a thoroughly European context. On the one hand, the collective perception of the genre assigns the medievalist character of fantasy fiction first to J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whose impact has had a permanent effect on both writers and readers of the genre.13 However, renowned medieval texts with recourse to magic are generally linked to French authors, such as Chrétien de Troyes, or to Arthurian legends developed in medieval England. Thus, it might be argued that the correlation of Kay’s narratives with Europe distances him from Canadian perspectives. The key word here is perhaps “distance,” since Kay as an author using medieval themes and aesthetics works from the position of a respectful observer and researcher invested in combining facts with fiction. He aims at creating an honest representation of historical influences with adherence to fantasy traditions, despite the emotional detachment necessary to create a balanced work. As an outsider not from Europe, Kay may have a broader or even a global perspective, and the different frame of reference allows him to regard the motifs connected with the Middle Ages, whether stereotyped owing to the general perception of what they actually represent or in accordance with historical record, with an awareness of the complex and multidimensional quality of the subject. His scope is clear thanks to the wide array of methods he chooses to approach the Middle Ages in his novels; for example, he tackles different moments of this particular period in The Sarantine Mosaic (1998–2000), based in Byzantium, or Children of Earth and Sky (2016), focusing on Venice and the Adriatic, as well as different geographic temporalities in Under Heaven (2010) and River of Stars (2013) set in a China of the eighth and twelfth centuries, based on the history of the Tang dynasty. However, Kay’s relation with history is not limited solely to creative retellings, fusions, and alternative worlds of historical Europe or Asia. Medieval features and motifs permeate the very architecture of many of his narratives, for instance 12 M.J. Toswell, “Arthurian Landscapes of Guy Gavriel Kay,” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 26 (2011): 90–102 (91). 13 Wilkins, “Cutting off,” 135.

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in The Fionavar Tapestry, a trilogy “suffused with the matter of romance,” whose “strong connection to medieval literature” manifests itself “with its adaptation of the Arthur­ian materials.”14 The related tale of Ysabel also reveals the interconnections of the writer’s prose with medievalist imagery on the level of plot structure, albeit less explicitly. The novel is set in today’s France, which permits the audience to accept it a representative of urban fantasy, but draws from the era of the Celtic presence in Gaul, a time which a general public might not directly associate with the medieval. The novel is thus an example of a fantasy story built upon medievalist motifs and pointing to the Celtic influence on medieval romance. What is more, it is possible to argue that the modes of urban and low fantasy clash in Ysabel with the subgenre of historical fantasy, and together they feed on the reconfiguration of the medieval past. The combination in Ysabel of medievalism, romance, and fantasy, perceived through a modern lens, creates an inventive allegory. That is, Kay combines cultural archetypes and recurrent themes in service of a postmodernist attempt to reinterpret the past for the purpose of comprehending the present. Study of the novel, then, as a modern commentary on medieval themes in twenty-first-century fantasy literature offers a chance to elaborate on how Kay combines distinct modes and subgenres in strict correlation with contemporaneity. Published in 2007 and located in today’s Provence, Ysabel roots itself in the contemporary epoch both in the timeline of Kay’s work as well as in the timeline of the narrative. Ysabel, then, stands at a crossroads in the history of fantasy. The novel appears to be a low fantasy, but it welcomes elements of history as a form of intrusion of the uncanny into the structure of the representation of the real. Low fantasy, as Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James observe, is “a story in which the fantastic appears in the ordinary world […] as opposed to the epic other worlds of high fantasy.”15 Alternatively, Brian Stableford notes that low fantasy involves “non-rational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur.”16 This latter definition could be compared to the category of intrusion fantasy proposed by Mendlesohn.17 The name of this specific subgenre corresponds accurately to the unexpected irruption of the fantastic within the framework of the narrative. The author hints at the uncanny through a disturbing dissonance between the depiction of the real and the protagonist’s encounter with a man who from his irruption into the narrative is clearly capable of behaviour contradicting the familiar rules of reality. Ned Mariner, a Canadian teenage boy who comes with his father to the south of France in order to assist him in his work as a photographer and spend a holiday there, learns the specifics of a new place, namely Aix-en-Provence and its whereabouts, by walking around the town and at the same time accompanying his parent. From the beginning of the novel, the rich culture and history of the region are juxtaposed with the present filtered through the eyes of a modern adolescent. The contrasts are multiple, Toswell, “Arthurian Landscapes,” 91. Mendlesohn and James, Short History, 254. 16 Brian Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 256. 17 Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 114–81. 14 15

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with two viewpoints, French and Canadian, as well as two time periods, the past and the present, confronted both figuratively and literally. This meeting of reality and fantasy, the imposition of history on contemporaneity, is another juxtaposition that determines the structure of the narrative. This particular type of contact occurs for the first time when the protagonist enters a cathedral that his father has been contracted to photograph, the Saint-Sauveur Cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. He feels the burden of the past descending upon him when admiring a carving of a mysterious woman, a moment followed by an omin­ ous encounter with a stranger. As the reader later learns, the outlander is in fact a Roman who comes from ancient times and whose existence in the present moment violates the laws of the real and possible; his intrusion into the narrative exactly reflects Mendlesohn’s construction of the intrusion fantasy. The ingress of a figure symbolizing defiance against what is deemed achievable in the real world simultan­ eously allows Kay to introduce both fantasy and a feeling of distress or uneasiness, resulting from the anxiety-generating sense of inconsistency. In other words, a typical representation of a probable and acceptable version of reality is interfered with, an interference which in this novel takes the form of history, with a spirit of the past materializing in contemporary Europe. The result is that the subgenre of historical fantasy, to which the overarching structure of the narrative might seem to belong, gives way to low fantasy, in effect being used as an instrument of low fantasy, rather than an independent mode. The specific subtype of the genre in question is frequently compared with or even treated as alternative or secret history, with which it can merge and whose boundaries may fluctuate. Nevertheless, as Stableford notes, even if these two variants of history are very close, they are in a state of flux, with the former embracing an optional version of the past, a version attainable had one element been placed in a different position in the time configuration, and the latter an essentially unknown part of the record.18 The result is not necessarily the same thing as historical fantasy. The fantastic modes here seem to overlap, and seem to bring different determinants into play in the taxonomy of the text. Historical fantasy sometimes overlaps with an introduction of magic, a natural result if the fantasy is aligned with wizardry and enchantment, elements often interwoven into the fabric of history. Veronica Schanoes phrases this overlap as “a hybrid of two seemingly opposed modes” whereby the combined aesthetics and styles refer to the “explicit rejection of consensus reality,” on the one hand, and to “a genre grounded in realism,” on the other.19 Perhaps Ysabel could in this construction be read as a secret history expanded to the size of historical fantasy. Such an approach might be possible since some events belonging to the parallel narrative, whose participants baulk at manifesting their presence, interrupt everyday life, which creates the backdrop for the novel. The secretive nature of the supernatural characters also supports this particular interpretation. When it is revealed the two men, the Roman stranger and a Celtic warrior, have fought for Ysabel for ages, it is also revealed that Stableford, Historical Dictionary, 7 and 366. Veronica Schanoes, “Historical Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 236–47 (236). 18

19

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they keep their feud and the game leading to the heart of their beloved lady under a veil of secrecy. The only aggression they perpetrate against the protagonists, an aggression that eventually becomes the catalyst for the plot and antagonizes the main character and his friends, is the possession of Melanie, Ned’s father’s assistant, as the new vessel in this time and place for the timeless soul of Ysabel. Apart from the group of protagonists who have access to knowledge about these characters from another era, no one else is aware of the fantastic activity occurring in their vicinity. Nonetheless, Kay’s novel is not an example of alternative history. The purpose of the story is not to depict how a chosen episode of history might have progressed differently, even though the author alludes to concrete historical events, like the battle on the plain of Pourrières, which saw Romans fighting the barbarian Germanic tribes in 123 BC and two thousand people dying violently and rotting in the ground.20 The definition of historical fantasy proposed by Schanoes excludes any classification of Ysabel in this particular subgenre. Schanoes’ notion of a hybrid implies an equality of the combined constituents, but Ysabel has been constructed as a story in which the historical fiction is subordinate to the fantasy. The position of the past in the framework of the narrative does not correspond to the parallel position taken by fantasy since what refers in Kay’s book to history triggers the uncanny. The participants of the past’s love triangle exist in the present and have their supernatural abilities manifested in many ways including the possession of Melanie. Furthermore, history exerts a disturbing and superhuman effect on the protagonist by materializing itself essentially as a destructive feeling of horror at being part of the flow of time. None of the central characters of the historical matter can stop the cycle, however much they might try. They are doomed to constant repetition, even if they have variation. These elements of the story serve to demonstrate how historical concepts and images serve fantasy as it intrudes upon the supposed “consensus reality.” The territory on which the past leaves this imprint is the town of Aix-enProvence and its environs. As a result, Ysabel also acquires some of the characteristics of urban fantasy, a subgenre that features the introduction of fantasy tropes into an urban setting, with the urban either determining and dominating the fan­tasy, or the other way around.21 However, Kay does not in Ysabel stress the role of the scenery in the development of the narrative, instead concentrating principally on the shadow cast on the city by the past; by consequence, the specific environment is not clearly marked in the text. If the poetics of intrusive and historical fantasy are modes that mark the depiction of another era (in this case, the Middle Ages), then the elements of urban fantasy generally serve to invoke the contemporary both in time and place. After all, despite the fact that Kay constructs the narrative around the history of the region of Provence, the story is located in present-day Aix-enProvence. The urban thus suggests an association with the latest stage of human

20 Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel (London: Harper Voyager, 2010), 80–82. References to this text will hereafter be in parentheses in the text. 21 Alexander C. Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” in Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. James and Mendlesohn, 200–13 (200).

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dominance on Earth, a dominance particularly noticeable from the perspective of studies of the Anthropocene in literature. According to Anthropocene approaches, human debris, including buildings and the growing tissue of towns, constitutes a testimony to the human impact on the world. This creates a “material stratum” in the structure of the history of this human influence, and its detrimental repercussions.22 Human detritus remains an inherent part of the Anthropocene, an epoch that refers to the record of the most recent periods of human history, regardless of what perspective might be adopted in a given text. And so, in Ysabel, one perspective favours the identification of humanity’s footprint in ancient times, while the other concentrates on the coinage of the term Anthropocene, conceptualizing the epoch in question and contributing to the awareness of its existence. The urban factor of the novel, therefore, also locates it on a meeting point between the past and the present. In addition, the town itself and the house where Ned is living with his father provide him with a sense of security because the familiar gives him a certain point of reference when what the protagonist recognizes as the mechanisms of reality are being driven to the verge of collapse. Thus, while common knowledge might suggest that the medieval era should be associated with uncontrollable wilderness or with barbarity whereas the present moment should be seen as the period of progress and civilization, Ysabel questions both assumptions. These two lenses focus our perception of Ysabel to demonstrate how contemporaneity, the world of the urban and the Anthropocene, is automatically confronted with the past, identified in the text with the appearance of historical constructs. In other words, the clash of the present, mediated by means of urban fantasy, and the past, imported into the narrative by historical references, coalesce in order to trigger an intrusion fantasy, in which the uncanny adopts the form of the medieval ushered into contemporary times. Strikingly, neither urban nor low fantasy tend to be associated with the Middle Ages; both modes are usually correlated to later epochs, mostly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because those are the times of the development of the towns and cities into which the irruption of the fantastic may take place. The medieval period supplies epic and high fantasy with the tools needed for world-building and reflects itself in the use of medieval stereotypes in the plots of these books. The result of this distinction is that these subgenres tend to connect comfortably to the historical period in question, even if only in the sphere of symbols and exploited patterns. Kay thus rearranges the expected tropes and characteristics of these fantasy subtypes by relocating them within the configuration of the genre, and thereby plays with the expectations of his readers. Given that Kay has reinvented historical fantasy as a subgenre all to himself, his strategy of surprising the expectations of readers is not wholly unexpected.23 However, this does explain the non-conventional attitude he displays towards history in this particular context. Ysabel’s interest in medievalism exists on two levels; the surface level corresponds to the so-called “received Middle

22 Kate Marshall, “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time,” American Literary History 27.3 (2015): 1–16 (7). 23 Bethune, “Man Who Sailed.”

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Ages” and the deeper level pertains to the repetition of the paradigms and structures present in the extant culture and in literary texts. Angela Weisl’s term, the “received Middle Ages,” comprises numerous ideas and illustrations of the period as it is generally understood and received in the modern day, ideas and images that are not necessarily linked in any way with a true record of the past.24 To paraphrase, it could be argued that people see the medieval period through a prism of simple symbols, an argument similar to that of Rochebouet and Salamon cited earlier. As Maria Sachiko Cecire puts it, contemporary fantasy texts “are reliant on such medievalisms as questing protagonists, castellated architecture and simplified gender roles,” mainly in the interest of attracting the audience’s attention as well as facilitating engagement with the text.25 This reading may well be applied to Ysabel, which abounds in symbolic images associated with the common perception of the Middle Ages. For example, Kay uses a tower outside Aix-enProvence, where civilization encounters nature or the past meets the present, and which Kay exploits as the background for two scenes in the novel. Even though the watchtower is named Tour de César, or Caesar’s Tower, its origin is not in Roman times. As the author himself points out, the building is “a medieval watchtower,” of a strongly evocative and engrossing quality and aura.26 The Saint-Sauveur Cathedral, visited by the protagonist at the beginning of the story, delivers another medieval image coinciding with an existing place, “built in a dozen stages” with the nave finished in 1513 and the further parts completed as much as four hundred years earlier (Ysabel 10–11). Nevertheless, the real buildings in the novel remain real historical testimonies, whereas the images that they evoke may be subject to literary treatment, which enriches the collection of medievalisms surfacing abundantly in both fantasy fiction and mass culture. In Ysabel, these impressions concern mainly the past-representing supernatural characters who are so intricately entangled in a love triangle, as well as in multiple tropes regarding the feudal system and class hierarchy.27 The medi­ eval characters connect to the image of chivalrous warriors, valorous and willing to sacrifice their lives in the name of their king or their lady. Dominique Barthélemy claims, tongue-in-cheek, that “western man yearns to have the courage of the knight, while western woman dreams of the knight as an ideal lover,” because, as a repercussion of myths and legends, all the associations made with medieval warriors are lumped together “under the single term ‘knighthood.’”28 Obviously, in today’s transformations of these medieval notions, the term “knight” does not entail historical facts but symbols easily associated with any literary warrior, symbols that probably also result from the existence of “court poetry and the new romances,” said to portray “the innovations and traditions of actual chivalric life,” which added another layer of myth-generating images to our commonly held perception of the

Wilkins, “‘Cutting off,” 137. Cecire, “Medievalism, Popular Culture,” 396. 26 Kay, “Q&A” 27 Cecire, “Medievalism, Popular Culture,” 396. 28 Dominique Barthélemy, “Modern Mythologies of Medieval Chivalry,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London: Routledge, 2001): 214–28 (214). 24 25

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period.29 This concept echoes in the narrative, but Kay repeatedly challenges these traditional representations by undermining the statement by Jane Tolmie that “[t]he fantasy genre has conservative tendencies.”30 The result is that, in Kay’s reconstruction of the medieval material, the reputation of the warriors becomes tarnished for the reader as the depiction of history in the story proves to be saturated with violence. Moreover, “[t]hat violence is embedded in quite specific historical incidents and evoked by encounters with the monuments and with individuals.”31 The ferocity and the bloodshed of the past, as associated with the medieval period and often idealized or romanticized, also arise in the context of the battle on the plain of Pourrières. The memory of that conflict overwhelms Ned’s keen senses and leads to an acute physiological reaction, a result of his susceptibility to the burden of the past. A similar recurring motif in the novel is the massacre at Béziers, which constitutes another important point of reference in the constellation of Kay’s medieval allusions. The sack of Béziers, part of the Albigensian Crusade, took place in 1209 under the command of the Papal legate, Arnaud Amalric. Mention of this siege, which became a slaughter, marks the irruption of the three characters from the past into the novel for Ned and his friends to encounter: Phelan, the Roman that the protagonist comes across at the beginning of the novel; Cadell, a Celtic fighter; and the eponymous Ysabel. Their dangerous love story has lasted for centuries, thus imitating the progression of history and encompassing a cycle of recurrence. The three participants are repeatedly reborn to inhabit newer bodies and to struggle in what Faye Ringel calls “the eternal conflict between the two warriors,” and their story overlaps with the sack of Béziers, too.32 The rivalry reached a critical stage there in the past, as Ned learns and summarizes: “And if he was understanding anything at all, the other one, Cadell, had burned a city, Béziers, eight hundred years ago, with Phelan inside – and maybe Ysabel, whatever her name was that time” (280). Evidently, the incident, the well-known sack of the city, contributes to the intensity of hostility between the Roman and the Celt and impacts greatly their latest rebirth, which takes place very much in the present of the novel and involuntarily involves the Canadian teenager, Ned. The Béziers episode also accentuates the concept of the wheel of time, with history consisting of cycles and repeating ages. Terri Doughty points out that the archetypal figures enter the world of the protagonist in order “to enact their eternal return” whereas the re-enactment itself constitutes “one of the central issues of the novel.”33 This repetition of certain patterns lies at the heart of historical fantasy, with various schemes of retelling or rewriting the known record. What is more, a predilection for recurring cycles is readily discernible in the structure of stereotyped imBarthélemy, “Modern Mythologies,” 215. Jane Tolmie, “Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine,” Journal of Gender Studies 15.2 (2006), 145–58 (155). 31 Toswell, “Arthurian Landscapes,” 95. 32 Faye Ringel, “Kay’s Provence: From Arbonne to Ysabel,” Bright Weavings, 2009. 33 Terri Doughty, “Mythic Cycle vs. Linear History in Fantasy: The Limitations of the Eternal Return in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel,” in In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History, ed. Bogdan Trocha, Aleksandra Rzyman, and Tomasz Ratajczak (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 69–82 (77). 29

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ages of the Middle Ages. Tolmie, for example, observes: “after all, it is in the nature of medievalism to inspire forms of creative re-enactment.”34 Kay employs medievalism to construct the plot of Ysabel, thereby opting for the incorporation of an inventive reproduction of motifs and themes broadly affiliated with the Middle Ages into the novel. He structures the core part of the narrative on the base of the medieval romance, which marches along with his focus on the repetitiveness of life engaged in the cycles of history. He does so by exposing and examining the common mistakes and accomplishments of his central historical beings, but also by showcasing the universality and repetitiveness of the emotions, drives, and desires of human beings. Before writing Ysabel, Kay had already used a very similar narrative model in A Song of Arbonne to great success since, as Ringel points out, “[h]e has seen into the heart and soul of the medieval Arthurian romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: two competing versions of chivalry… and the conflict between them… had to drive the protagonists… to madness, irrational acts, and inevitable tragedy.”35 The structure of medieval romance is more explicit and prominent in this predecessor novel set in Provence. And, to step back farther, Kay established a pattern of reconciling medievalism with the subgenres of low and urban fantasy, as well as with a coming-of-age story of young adult appeal in The Fionavar Tapestry. Ysabel serves almost as an unofficial continuation, focused more on the medieval elements than on a direct recreation of the romance subject matter of Arthurian legend. Nonetheless, in the earlier trilogy, the crucial constituents of this particular model are in place. The two men involved in a romantic relationship with Ysabel come from two very disparate backgrounds, namely Roman and Celtic, and differ in almost every other aspect as well, apart from the love they harbour for their lady and their unalterable commitment to her. Even the names the woman bestows upon them on the night of Beltane, after the two of them perform a ritual whose purpose is to summon her to them from the void of history, indicate their dissimilarities. The Roman receives the name of a wolf as a reminder of his small silhouette, dark countenance, and shrewd disposition. In contrast to Phelan, his rival, the Celtic warrior is to be known by a name that brings to mind the image of a fighter, athletic, strong, gallant, and radiant. This re-enactment of archetypes is here vividly exposed, very economically, by the author. The dualistic nature of the men’s confrontation alludes also to the traditional opposition of light and darkness, cleverness and strength, agility and pure power. Their qualities prove to be, however, entirely at the service of Ysabel and of her fancy, and they need their archetypal characters to render them capable of waging war between each other forever, throughout the turbulence of time. The stereotyping of all three characters refers clearly to the model of romances reflecting “life in the courts of love, and attempts of knights to put women on a pedestal, and to play a fair game in tournaments.”36 Their brave deeds are motivated by their deep desire to satisfy the woman they swore to love ages ago; whereas the ultimate goal, of course, that of winning her heart and favour, fundamentally shapes their attitudes to each other and to her. 34 35 36

Tolmie, “Medievalism,” 149. Ringel, “Kay’s Provence.” Barthélemy, “Modern Mythologies,” 226.

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In this iteration of the plot involving a love triangle, the two enemies refrain from duelling at Ysabel’s behest, instead preparing to undergo a trial designed to test their patience, ingenuity, and longing. Ysabel herself describes the experiment: “Call it a quest. Pretend you are gallant, honorable men, unstained by any sins. Who finds me first will prove his worth by doing so. I will be hiding and not easily found. Trust me in this. I do not choose to be easily found, or idly claimed” (215). With these words, Ysabel underlines the existence of three threads of the narrative. Not only does she ask her knights to show their cleverness and prowess, thus inscribing them into the structure of a romance, but she also establishes herself in the configuration as a decisive figure. Furthermore, her injunction to them introduces the elements of the quest fantasy, which constitutes yet another fantasy element of the novel. Kay combines thereby the most important aspects of the modes of fantasy and medieval romance, merging the two seamlessly. In other words, the quest becomes an instrument applied to recapture the romance model, rather as the history serves as a literary device to encircle the intrusion fantasy. With Ysabel’s idea of the quest to find her, Kay supports both main pillars of the novel’s structure, namely fantasy and romance, interconnecting them in harmony to create a coherent whole. Thanks to Ysabel’s words, the role of medievalism reinforcing the mode of fantasy is yet the more explicitly highlighted. Kay here clearly confirms the hypothesis that he exploits history to lay the foundations for fantasy. As has been already observed, Ysabel manifests her position at the top of the hierarchy of the medieval romance trope by emphasizing the fact that she decides the fate of the two men struggling to win their privileges, even as she remains dependent on their willingness to continue with the tiresome contest. Her character, seen as a crucial player within the system of the medieval-like game into which the fight for her favour has been transformed, proves consistent in many aspects with Tolmie’s remarks, referenced earlier, about female protagonists in medievalist fantasy and medieval romances. Tolmie underlines the paradox of heroines who make their own decisions and have charge of their fate but belong to a patriarchal arrangement deluding them with only an illusion of power: “Middle English romances speak in two voices about women, thus producing heroines who are at once aggressive and oppressed, active and acted-upon.”37 In consequence, female protagonists in romances tend to settle for what freedom they can exercise, and they enjoy what little opportunity they have to act with forcefulness and to negotiate changes in their lives. At the same time, however, these women remain exceptions in the system, easily distinguished from the background vista of those women not granted any chance for improving their situation or achieving the slightest degree of independence. Moreover, in order to maintain any control over their decisions and their resolutions, these women are obliged to resist practices that stress their inferior position. Naturally, literature, especially fantasy fiction and its subtypes of quest and epic fantasy, takes delight in strong-willed, rebellious characters – regardless of their gender – who overcome obstacles leading towards the accomplishment of their objectives. To achieve this fancy, this fantastic and improbable objective, protagonists need to distinguish themselves through persistence and obstinacy. They require an 37

Tolmie, “Medievalism,” 146.

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obvious contrast to those less fortunate in their efforts to escape the oppressive system in place in their world. Female characters are those most likely to be unable to choose their own path. As a result, the individuality of a given female protagonist must be underscored to stand against any notion of a collective transformation; to be individual, a female character in a medievalist text must remain an exception, not in any way representative of a group, always marked as unique and different. Ysabel could easily be seen as relevant to this type of protagonist since Phelan and Cadell have an equal role to play in the triangle, even though the impression might be that the woman wields the whole power in the relationship. She maintains the appearance of being the dominant one in the power struggle for her love. Thus, for instance, she refuses to admit that her admirers are brought back from the past in order to fight for her, because such a claim would displace the weight of decision-making in favour of the men, and would simultaneously deprive her of being the central focus, the moving spirit of the whole imbroglio. Consequently, she retorts: “You are brought back to be deserving of me – the one more than the other – in my eyes! Will you deny that? Will you challenge it?” (212). Nonetheless, this does not mean that she cannot control the men. The power of time and history endows her with exceptional capabilities, even permitting her to play with an appearance of weakness. Tolmie would argue that such conduct is in part expected of her as a female character: “‘I am a helpless woman,’ she said at length. ‘I must believe you, I suppose.’ Helpless. Her tone and bearing made a lie of the word” (206). However, Ysabel here uses the language of feminine weakness, but her language is wholly at odds with her behaviour and her demeanour. She is powerful, and she intends to act, as much as the circumstances circumscribing her actions permit her. Ysabel profits in the novel from a unique opportunity to make her own decisions and to oversee the behaviour of her suitors; aware of the fact that she constitutes an exception, she manipulates what she has been given in an attempt to balance the power struggle involving her lovers. The woman has much more power than any of her peers, yet she depends at the same time on the men she attempts to control. In this manner, by repeatedly asserting her own unique rights as the commander of the knights ready to sacrifice their lives for her favour, Ysabel likens herself to the heroines of medieval romances that Tolmie describes from a feminist perspective. Using all the latitude she can garner, the character of Ysabel is able to select her beloved one, as well as to determine the form of the contest for which the prize will be her heart. This equips her with noteworthy autonomy and bestows certain liberties upon her. However, like medieval romance heroines, her freedom is profoundly restricted, because of her being in this instance somehow at mercy of the men who are supposed to worship their beloved, imbricated wholly in a cyclical ritual governed by an outside entity, time. The result is that this particular female protagonist coincides with the model to be found in the medievalist fantasy and, therefore, can be treated as an element common to both modes present in the complicated construction that is Kay’s narrative. In the novel, as proven by the character of Ysabel, the qualities of a medieval romance run parallel to the devices normally employed in the service of fantasy. Since Phelan and Cadell, with help from a druid, summon Ysabel, who has the capability of inhabiting the body of another person, one of those fantastic devices

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will be magic. In this particular case, the magic is fuelled by history, with the Celtic ritual on Beltane night triggering the action. Magic traditionally plays an important part both in fantasy and romance. In fantasy, spells and enchantments may be even perceived as the dominant factor in attempts to define the genre. Lin Carter claims that this specific feature is a determining component that is the sole condition for categorizing a literary text as fantasy. For Carter, a fantasy narrative would be “a story set in a milieu that includes magic as an integral part of the natural world.”38 Although numerous authors tend to hybridize their fantasy stories in order to escape such a strict categorization of their work, a move that contributes to the growth and diversification of the genre, magic remains one of the most common discriminants of this mode. It may nonetheless adopt multiple forms offering different types of influence on the audience’s perception of fantasy. Thus, a careful reading of contemporary fantasy writers reveals that they tend to search for diverse applications for the magic they employ and alternative ways to exploit the standard formulas for using magic. The direct presence of magic is not always an obvious ingredient in a given text. Magic may be directly present and manifested by spells organized in almost scientifically arranged systems, but it can also be inscribed very subtly in the very nature of the fantasy world, or even externalized or mediated by an object or creature. Furthermore, magic could appear in the particular universe exclusively as a possibility or a potentiality, not something functioning or live. The potentiality of magic would be then based upon the suggestion that it could be a natural part of the presented universe, or that it used to be its integral component in the past. The author only needs to convince the reader that magic, even if not visibly present thanks to spells or special objects, has the potential of existing within the framework of the narrative. In Ysabel, the magic that appears in the narrative is very strictly attached to particular characters and inextricably linked to the images referring to history. As in historical fantasy, it serves the purpose of complementing the instrumentation of intrusion fantasy, at the same time constituting a repercussion of the act of history materializing in the present. In other words, it does not manifest itself through spells or wizards’ spectacular feats, but stems from the imposition of the past on the here and now. It is given prominence when Ned feels overwhelmed by the years of violence and the sense of history’s repetitive character, as well as at the moment of summoning Ysabel from the darkness of the ages into her possession of Mel­ anie’s body. Magic also accompanies the two warriors who demonstrate supernatural abilities, such as transfiguration, and Ned’s relatives appearing near the end of the novel, specifically the characters known to readers from The Fionavar Tapestry. These are medieval romance materials that offer a magical inheritance to fantasy, comparing, for instance, with “the medieval writers intentionally employ[ing] magic as a literary tool” in the form of “rings, potions, swords, and certain types of illusions” and in order to “achieve certain goals” within the narrative.39 Apparently, fantasy creates a chain of references initiated by the importing of magic from myth and medieval romance. Furthermore, the genre demonstrates a capacity to 38 39

Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), 6. Sweeney, Magic in Medieval Romance, 18.

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process and transform magic with the object of nourishing the medieval elements and their derivative constructs with its framework. One might almost infer that magic, shared by both modes, permits their integration in a way that generates a consistent and coherent, a wholly united entity. By assuming the position of an outsider, well-versed in the past of Europe, especially the medieval period, Kay chooses a fresh perspective for combining the history of the region with fantasy. Thanks to a global approach towards the influences that shaped fantasy literature, he seems to gain distance and to be inclined to contravene the usual patterns and modes. His use of the medieval frequently determines the genre’s world-building and style. In Ysabel, instead of transforming historical events for the purpose of fantasy, which might be perceived as one of the most common and simplest methods of incorporating history into the genre, Kay prefers to have the medieval constructs embedded in the structure of the novel. Similarly, in place of creating an independent secondary world based on the foundations of the received Middle Ages and well-known medieval imagery of symbols, Kay decides to introduce the past and a medieval aesthetics into a plot located in the present day. Obviously, it is impossible to affirm that the construction of the world he depicts through the mediation of this story is not firmly planted in medieval imagery. Nonetheless, the impact of the symbolism he uses on the process of world-building differs greatly from the approach towards the matter of another internationally known Canadian author of fantasy fiction. Kay’s approach towards history, and most importantly towards the Middle Ages, shows that this part of his literary work infallibly remains another, and equally notable, side of the fantasy fiction he writes. Steven Erikson, on the other hand, opts for the development of an autonomous universe alluding to concepts the audi­ ence might be familiar with for his medieval tropes. His use of the medi­eval manifests mainly in the scenery he chooses, and in his manipulation of the theme of war. Given that the scenery and use of war are central to Erikson’s fiction, so too is the medieval. The very first pages of Gardens of the Moon, published in 1999, demonstrate vocabulary and descriptions that extol a fusion of fantasy and medieval imagery. Erikson designs an enormous, complex universe in which the dominating elements are buildings whose architecture invokes medieval references, sword-fighting in great quantities, and battles fought by massive armies. This brings to mind popular representations of medieval knights, or feudal hierarchy with kings, noble elites, and poor peasants all forming part of the system. What is more, the names of the locations accurately illustrate these components: “the Old Keep,” “the citadel,” or “Mock’s Hold.” Similarly, compare the following description: “Armour clanking, … [t]he man leaned vambraced forearms on the battlement, the scabbard of his longsword scraping against the stones.”40 In other words, the world of this series operates entirely within the traditional fantasy representation of the Middle Ages. For Erikson, these fantasy tropes are the only form of contact between his constructed universe and reality. Kay, however, chooses to use various fantasy subtypes to ponder on the nature of time and the impact history has on the present day. Hence, he conceives an intrusive 40

Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon (London: Bantam Books, 1999), 4.

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fantasy story, whereby history, in the form of medieval intrusions, plays the role of the fantasy factor that requires a startling reconfiguration of the reality of the modern world. This juxtaposition of the past and the present in a half-medieval, half-fantastic context is enabled by the employment of urban fantasy aesthetics, which anchors the narrative in a contemporary reworking of the fantasy genre. Kay refers to the existing Middle Ages by engaging with typical medieval buildings, such as the cathedral in Aix-en-Provence or Caesar’s watchtower, and by allusions to historical events such as the massacre of Béziers, and weaving these elements into the plot. However, the text is also thoroughly rooted in the medieval period because of the re-enactment of archetypes and characteristics of romance. Thus, the novel also constitutes a depiction of conflicted but loyal warriors imbricated in a confrontation whose purpose is to win their beloved lady’s favour. The clash between them repeatedly leads to a tragedy, which exemplifies the wheel of time. Furthermore, with Ysabel’s power over her knights, on the one hand, and her dependence on the men’s actions, on the other, she replicates the model of medieval romance heroines, also as seen in fantasy novels. Moreover, all three of the protagonists have some command of magic, another literary device establishing a connection between medieval romance and fantasy. The incorporation of the former in the structure of the latter is also underlined by the author thanks to the chosen setting in Provence since “[t]he history of France has a particular resonance because of its association with chivalric romance.”41 In short, by locating the story in Aix-en-Provence and its hinterland, thus enlarging the distance between the novel and Canadian contexts, Kay pays tribute to the mode from which fantasy draws. What conclusions could be made for Canadian medievalist fantasy thanks to the research of Ysabel in a brief comparison to Gardens of the Moon? The inclination to use France as the background for the story unequivocally manifests Kay’s fascination with the European medievalist tradition. Nonetheless, it also translates to the lack of interest for Canadian medievalism or his reluctance to acknowledge its existence. The author seems eager to perpetuate certain medievalist patterns in reference to European contexts but refuses to investigate what Canadian medievalism or Canadian medievalist fantasy mean. Nevertheless, by doing so, Kay provides a platform for discussing the character of the fantasy written by Canadian authors. Even if one book or the body of work of one author are clearly not sufficient to draw conclusions regarding all the works of Canadian medievalist fantasy, it still offers interesting observations. Perhaps the distance that allows Kay to borrow from European history and different variants of fantasy also reflects a departure from the search for Canadian identities. As David Ketterer observes, the “geography and the climatic catastrophes” of The Fionavar Tapestry, “…in spite of Kay’s habit of writing abroad (…), reflect something of the author’s Canadian experience.”42 However, the Canadian setting as a point of reference as well as a fantasy world modelled after the author’s motherland does not constitute a basis for defining the nature of Canadian medievalist fantasy. These particular elements disappear from Kay’s next books as they draw from various contexts and are removed from Canadian framework. The 41 42

Stableford, Historical Dictionary, 200. Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, 116.

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universal character of the genre seems even more visible in the work of Steven Erikson. Kay names the sources he uses in his fiction, for example by alluding to historical events, whereas Erikson distances himself from any direct or explicit references. The independent universe he creates is located on the plane of the imaginary and, in consequence, it does not have any connections with the extra-literary reality. This universe realizes itself on the pages of a book, whenever it will be read. Clearly, Canadian medievalist fantasy as seen through the prism of Kay’s, and to some extent Erikson’s, work is based on the fascination with the Middle Ages as an emblematic period of the past, similar to the work of eighteenth-century writers of the Medieval Revival, rooted in antiquarianism.43 Moreover, it adheres to the productive model of medieval reception as proposed by Francis Gentry and Ulrich Müller44 or David Matthews’s category of the Middle Ages “as it never was.”45 In both concepts, the medieval period is reinvented creatively in order to offer an entirely new work; the medieval motifs are processed to produce a medieval-like universe, such as Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings. Thus constructed worlds use what is associated with the reworked Middle Ages and focus on new images, which in principle do not serve to describe reality. In other words, both Ysabel and Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon may be seen as the representatives of cosmopolitan fantasy, universal and international works written by Canadian writers with no intention to imbue their fiction with the sense of Canadianness. Apparently, the point these particular authors are making, consciously or not, is that their medievalist fantasy does not have any nationality.

43 44 45

David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 47. Matthews, Medievalism, 36. Matthews, Medievalism, 38.

12 The Medieval Methods of Patrick DeWitt: Undermajordomo Minor Michael Fox

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atrick DeWitt would be more surprised than anyone to find himself the focus of a chapter in a book on Canadian medievalism. For DeWitt, nationality seems a matter of accident – “life happens … you just wind up where you wind up”1 – and his medievalism might also best be described as accidental. DeWitt was born in Sidney, British Columbia, and left Canada when he was 20. Until he began to publish with House of Anansi Press, he characterized his relationship with Canada as “slight.”2 Canada, however, embraced DeWitt, honouring his second novel, The Sisters Brothers, with both the Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction (2011) and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour (2012). Every other writer in this volume is still more distinctly Canadian than DeWitt: DeWitt does not display his Canadian identity like Robertson Davies, Earle Birney, and Margaret Atwood, and he does not connect any of his books to Canada like Guy Gavriel Kay or Charles de Lint, with their well-known settings in Toronto and Ottawa. Further, where the introduction to this volume makes the important distinction between notional and direct medievalism, demonstrating that Can­adian medievalism is often direct (that is, a specific response to reading and studying medi­eval texts in their original form), DeWitt’s medievalism could be argued to fall short even of the standard of notional, which at least assumes some intentionality. DeWitt dropped out of high school, unlike the mostly university-educated authors of this volume, and his engagement with the medieval seems neither to come from reading medieval texts nor from reading texts of medievalism. Instead, and I believe uniquely, DeWitt’s attention to story is what draws him into the world of medievalism. As we will see, Tolkien and DeWitt share remarkable similarities, but perhaps even more remarkable is that Tolkien’s work is the height of direct medievalism 1 Josh Visser, “Author Patrick DeWitt on Booze, Expectations, and Fairy Tales,” Vice, 8 September 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019. 2 Visser, “Author Patrick DeWitt.”

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while DeWitt’s is, indeed, a kind of accident resulting from immersion in folktale, a genre that predates yet still permeates the medieval. Though there have not, to date, been any full critical analyses of Patrick DeWitt’s third novel, Undermajordomo Minor (2015), the book has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Several of the reviews mention The Sisters Brothers, noting that DeWitt’s earlier novel “gleefully subverts” or “reinvents” the genre or “conventions of the traditional Western,”3 calling the book “a take on the western.”4 Reviewers have sensed the same kind of generic play in Undermajordomo Minor, saying that DeWitt “riffs on the folk tale,” “blend[s] fantasy and gothic romance,” offers a “darkly funny twist on the traditional fable,” gives a “modern take on folkloric storytelling,” or, most ambitiously, mixes “fairy tale,” “folk tale,” some “gothic touches,” and “adventure” by using “a melting pot of assorted old European scraps.”5 Two reviews specifically mention the Brothers Grimm, and one reviewer repeatedly returns to Tolkien and hobbits, in fact likening Lucy’s affectation for his pipe to “hobbit-y” behaviour.6 Although dozens of critical responses, therefore, sense the novel’s association with folktale and medievalism,7 no study has yet attempted to investigate what exactly DeWitt has borrowed to tell the story. The novel, however, might have been written specifically with Tolkien’s methods in mind, for Tolkien’s own creative work twice plays with the genre of the folktale to create once what most would consider a pure folktale, his Sellic Spell, and once what most would consider a work of fantasy, a work of fantasy that is also a work of medievalism, The Hobbit. In between these two works, we find Tolkien’s model for both, Beowulf, and the folktale that has been seen as the foundation of the story, ATU 301, also known as “The Three Stolen [or Kidnapped] Princesses.”8 Though DeWitt is not retelling ATU 301, as Tolkien does 3 Michael Bourne, “Review: Despite a cast of quirky characters, Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor is a muddle,” The Globe and Mail, 11 September 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019; Liz Jensen, “Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt review – a comic tale with a touching protagonist,” The Guardian, 5 September 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019; Max Liu, “Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt, book review: A strange and beautiful world,” Independent, 27 August 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019. 4 Daniel Handler, “Patrick DeWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor,” The New York Times, 17 September 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019. 5 Handler, “Patrick DeWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor.” 6 Jensen, “Undermajordomo Minor” (Grimm); Visser, “Author Patrick DeWitt” (Grimm); “Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt,” Kirkus Reviews, 8 September 2015, , last accessed 6 January 2019 (Tolkien; “hobbit-y”). 7 For a range of approaches to the term “medievalism,” see Studies in Medievalism 17: Defining Medievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), esp. 1–91. 8 The tale was renamed from “The Three Stolen Princess” to “The Three Kidnapped Princesses” when the updated tale-type index came out in 2004. See Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, 3 vols., FF Communications no. 284–286 (Helsinki: Suomalainen

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twice, Undermajordomo Minor is in almost every way a tale constructed according to the conventions of folktale, conventions that underpin many modern works traditionally labelled as fantasy. In 1939, when Tolkien first gave his lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” he noted that “[t]he borders of fairy-story are inevitably dubious.”9 Efforts since to define the genres mentioned by reviewers of DeWitt’s novel have not removed a great deal of doubt. Stith Thompson notes that “folktale” is often used to refer to “fairy tale” (German Märchen, best exemplified by the tales of the Brothers Grimm), but reserves for “folktale” a broad definition of a prose tale, oral or written (though presumably with an oral origin), which has been handed down over the years.10 Vladimir Propp might agree with a reverse-engineered definition that folktale is any tale that accords with his basic morphology of folktale functions, but his system, although it would largely work for each of these stories, is overly abstract for this analysis.11 “Fairy tale,” on the other hand, has been argued to be a literary development of the “folktale”: The fairytale is a literary artform that brings structure and style to the folktale, which is otherwise an unencumbered transcription of a simple tale.”12 A recent collection of tales edited by Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek is simply titled Folk and Fairy Tales, and their introduction suggests that we look at the “fairy tale” as a “con­ tinuum,” with oral folk tale at one end and the literary tale (“written by a specific person at a specific time”) at the other.13 Ruth Bottigheimer, on the other hand, has made a case for an exclusively literary origin of the “fairy tale,” contrasting the structures, characters, plot trajectories, and age of folktales against those of fairy tales, even though she acknowledges a great deal of overlap in motifs and techniques. Bottigheimer traces much of the problem of definition to the collections of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (the English title, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, somehow coming out of Kinder- und Hausmärchen), although even “Tolkien ended up conflating Märchen with folktales, fairy-stories, nursery-tales, and, by implication, fairy tales.”14 What Tolkien adds, though, is an important qualifier: the term “fairy” (which he archaizes and capitalizes as “Faërie”15) means that the story is about a realm where fairies (and Tiedeakatemia, 2004). 9 J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. C. Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 109–61 (116). 10 Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 4. 11 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd rev. edn. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). However, Propp has been deployed on Beowulf with excellent results: see Thomas A. Shippey, “The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf,” Notes and Queries 16 (1969): 2–11; and Daniel R. Barnes, “Folktale Morphology and the Structure of Beowulf,” Speculum 45 (1970): 416–34. 12 John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 359. 13 Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, Folk and Fairy Tales, 5th edn. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2018), 15–16. 14 Ruth R. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 1–10 and 118 n. 13. 15 Tolkien says that Faërie is most closely translated by Magic (“On Fairy Stories,” 114), but not as we normally think of magic. Tolkien later adds: “Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World” whereas “Enchantment” “produces a Secondary World” (143).

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many other things) exist, usually about the adventures of people in that realm. The central feature of the “fairy-story” is the satisfaction of certain primordial desires: “to survey the depths of space and time” and “to hold communion with other living things,” and, within those parameters, “magic” need not be a part of it.16 Such a description is apt for The Hobbit and Undermajordomo Minor, certainly, and in the absence of many remarks from Patrick DeWitt about his creative influences and processes, a look at Tolkien offers several clues. Tolkien remarks twice on his reactions to medieval literature and fairy-story. As Douglas A. Anderson puts it, “Tolkien once said that his typical response to reading a medieval work was not to want to embark on a critical or philological study of it, but instead to write a modern work in the same tradition.” Tolkien’s reaction to fairy-story is the same, as he observes that he “hardly got through any fairy-stories without wanting to write one [himself].”17 DeWitt, similarly, in several interviews about Undermajordomo Minor, claims to have been inspired by reading what he calls (across different interviews) “fables,” “folktales,” “fairy tales,” and “old-timey stories”: “I began reading fables, fairy tales, first to my son and then on my own. I was easing my way into this other world … [it was] strange and magical.”18 DeWitt comments on the language, the quality and density of the storytelling, the way the stories are often bleak and bizarre and contain “perverse” moral lessons. Although we cannot be certain what tales DeWitt might have been reading (he once gives an example of “Jewish fables, central and eastern European fables”),19 we know that Tolkien’s main inspiration for The Hobbit is Beowulf. When discussing the source of the “cup-stealing episode,” Tolkien confirms that: “Beowulf is among my most valued sources [for The Hobbit], though [and here, I think, Tolkien adds a somewhat disingenuous qualifier] it was not consciously present to mind in the process of writing.”20 Beowulf is also explicitly the sole motivation for Tolkien’s Sellic Spell, of which Tolkien comments: “It is … an attempt to reconstruct the Anglo-Saxon tale that lies behind the folk-tale element in Beowulf.”21 Though I am not suggesting that Patrick DeWitt uses Tolkien or Beowulf 16 Tolkien confirms that the desires are key: “A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story” (“On FairyStories,” 111 and 116). 17 These remarks are somewhat obscure, both arising from oral remarks made by Tolkien on very different occasions. I owe my knowledge of them to Douglas A. Anderson’s superb edition of The Hobbit; see The Annotated Hobbit, rev. and expanded edn. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1 and 23 nn. 1–2. 18 Visser, “Author Patrick DeWitt.” See also Mike Harvkey, “A Writer’s Evolution: Patrick deWitt,” Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2015, , last accessed 10 January 2019; and Miranda Newman, “On Fables and Fiction,” The Walrus, 4 July 2016, , last accessed 10 January 2019. 19 Visser, “Author Patrick DeWitt.” 20 J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to The Observer, 20 February 1938, 9, cited frequently by Tolkien scholars. See, for example, with further discussion, Jane Chance, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England, rev. edn. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 50–51. 21 J.R.R. Tolkien, Sellic Spell, in Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell, ed. C. Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 355–414 (355). The elided words are “to a limited extent,” but what Tolkien means is that the tale is a possible version of

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as a source, two of Tolkien’s creative works (Sellic Spell and The Hobbit) demonstrate how stories that are inspired by folktale wear their folktale inspiration while taking on a “specific colouring” that makes them fresh and vital. By the time Tolkien delivers his lecture about the poem, in 1936, Beowulf’s connections to folktale are well-known. Tolkien acknowledges that the “main story of Beowulf is a wild folktale,”22 and not long after that lecture and the publication of The Hobbit (1937), Tolkien was working on his own imagined version of that wild folktale (“in the early 1940s”).23 Tolkien observes that the “principal object [of the tale] is to exhibit the difference of style, tone, and atmosphere if the particular heroic or historical is cut out … And by making it timeless I have followed a common habit of folk-tales as received.”24 In other words, Sellic Spell is an attempt to create a pure folktale, the sort of story that lies behind Beowulf, The Hobbit, and Undermajordomo Minor.25 Tolkien’s marvellous tale is about Beewolf, and the tale contains many traditional motifs.26 The story begins “Once upon a time,” and, as Tolkien suggests, there is little that is historical, and the setting is timeless. Beewolf is a foundling of unknown parentage, having lived in a cave with a bear until the age of three. Beewolf maintains some bear-like characteristics (B635.1) while he grows strong (F610), speaks little, and is generally “held in small account” (L114). He has two major adventures, a youthful swimming contest with a character named Breaker, in which he swims for many days (F696) and kills several sea-monsters. Later, as a man, he is “greater than any other man of that land in those days, and his strength [is] that of thirty.” He hears about the difficulties of a distant king in a golden hall and decides to go help. On the way, he meets Handshoe and Ashwood (F601), heroes with what seem to be magical tools, gloves (D1066) and a spear (D1084), respectively. They present themselves to the king, and they are challenged by Unfriend, a jealous retainer, who questions Beewolf ’s contest with Breaker. The king agrees to let them try and rid him of the monster, Grinder, who is terrorizing the hall (G475; H1471). Ashwood fails, Handshoe fails, and Beewolf, thought least likely to succeed, notes that “[t]hird time pays for all,” and wrestles an arm from something that is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty. 22 J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters and the Critics, 5–48 (12). Tolkien is specifically reacting to prior criticism of the poem, and he mentions R.W. Chambers’ observation that “the folk-tale is a good servant, but a bad master: it has been allowed in Beowulf to usurp the place of honour, and to drive into episodes and digressions the things which should be the main stuff of a well-conducted epic” (quoted in Tolkien, “Beowulf,” 12–13). 23 Tolkien, Sellic Spell, 359. 24 Tolkien, Sellic Spell, 355. 25 The title of Tolkien’s tale comes from the poem. When Beowulf reports to Hygelac on the entertainment at Heorot, he mentions true songs, laments for things past, and marvellous tales, a set of categories that could be used to contain all of the disparate narrative threads of the poem itself. See R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds, Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), lines 2105–14. 26 Motifs cited throughout are from Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jestbooks and Local Legends, 6 vols. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1975). The index is also available online (without vol. 6) at , last accessed 9 January 2019.

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Grinder, who flees. Beewolf and Unfriend track him (N773.1) to his remote lair under a waterfall (F531.6.2.2.3). Unfriend guards the rope as Beewolf goes down (F92). In a cave behind the waterfall, Beewolf finds Grinder’s mother. They have another desperate fight, but Beewolf finds a sword in the cave, “the work of giants,” too heavy for anyone else to wield (F833.1.1), with which he manages to decapitate her. Handshoe’s gloves help him roll aside a stone that blocks the way to Grinder’s chamber. He appears dead, but Beewolf chops off his head just in case (E431.7.2). Meanwhile, Unfriend sees blood in the water, loosens the rope (K677), and leaves (K1931.2). Beewolf has to swim a long way to get back (F101), but arrives as Unfriend is speaking of his death (N681.0.1). Beewolf is given many rewards, finally returns home, rewards the king who took him in, marries the king’s daughter (L161), and eventually becomes king himself. Readers of Beowulf will recognize how Tolkien is stripping away the “particular heroic and historical” from the poem, rationalizing some of the odd features of the poem, and isolating the first two fights from the third, much later, fight with the dragon. To confirm the relative legitimacy of Tolkien’s effort, one could look at the folktales that have already been associated with the poem. Without labouring over the details of each, an analysis of tales such as Dat Erdmänneken (“The Gnome”; Grimm 91) or Der starke Hans (“Strong John”; Grimm 166) would demonstrate striking similarities in tone, style, and content with Tolkien’s reconstruction.27 Readers would also notice significant differences, in that both “The Gnome” and “Strong John” include a missing maiden (or maidens) and, in the former, a recognition scene. The differences can be traced to their stronger resemblance to ATU 301, which, as we have noted, is called “The Three Stolen [or Kidnapped] Princesses.” That tale has six movements: (1) the hero; (2) the descent; (3) stolen maidens; (4) rescue; (5) betrayal of hero; and (6) recognition. Sellic Spell and Beowulf, therefore, belong to a subtype of ATU 301 in which movements 3 and 6 are omitted, and the strongest Scandinavian parallels to the poem (such as the so-called “Haunting at Sandhaugar” of Grettis saga) also omit any reference to maidens. In these four-movement tales, a group that has been known as “The Bear’s Son Tale” or “Two-Troll”/”Two-Ogre” pattern stands out: each movement has a range of common motifs, the most ubiquitous of which include the hero’s odd origins (and, usually, strength), a fight leading to a descent to an under- or otherworld, another fight, often won with something discovered there, and an escape despite some kind of betrayal or abandonment by companions.28 Already, then, various tale-tellers (and authors) have radically altered what Aarne, Thompson, and Uther believe is the core form of the story.

27 See Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm, 10th edn. (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1980), and Jack Zipes, trans., The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Bantam, 1987), among many editions in German and English. For English versions online, see (among many) , last accessed 20 December 2018. 28 The scholarship is vast. For the major work that started analysis of “The Bear’s Son Tale,” see Friedrich Panzer, Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte I. Beowulf (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1910). On “two-troll” fights analogous to Beowulf (and much bibliography), see Magnús Fjalldal, “Beowulf and the Old Norse Two-Troll Analogues,” Neophilologus 97 (2013):

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If we assume that the Beowulf-poet were working from a story like Sellic Spell (even if that is almost certainly not the case: the folktale exists at many removes from Beowulf), then what are the substantive changes that can be isolated in the movement from folktale to what we might now call a fairy-story or a fantasy, even if most students of the poem would call it an epic? To begin with, the poet’s inspiration may not have been entirely unlike the inspiration of Tolkien and DeWitt. Tolkien has argued that the poem takes its genesis from a certain firing of the imagination as the giants of scripture were considered in relation to the giants of northern mythology, both opponents of gods. In other words, an opponent such as Grinder, an ogre in Tolkien’s tale, was considered in Germanic mythology a jötunn or a troll, an opponent of the gods, a being lexically the same as the gigantes who warred against God in Genesis 6. In the poem, Tolkien argues, the connections between northern myth and the biblical narrative are interwoven: the folktale, which likely reflected a myth about reaching the land of the dead, becomes fused with the Christian tradition.29 Two examples should suffice: first, the setting of the poem is at once at an indeterminate time in the history of the Danish royal line (Scyld is the good king after the grim king Heremod), and alternatively, the poem suggests a collapsing of that genealogy to make Scyld the son of Sceaf, the ark-born son of Noah, meaning that the action of the poem takes place just a few generations after the flood. Second, the mere and Beowulf ’s descent into it are infused with imagery of hell, making the descent at least echo the Harrowing of Hell, at the same time as the fighting of a dragon in a poem in which monsters are the descendants of Cain is going to evoke the great dragon of Apocalypse 12. The hero of the poem is a man of immense strength, but his relationship to the bear’s son is elided or suppressed, and his unpromising youth is mentioned only briefly, when Beowulf is an old man.30 Beowulf has his youthful swimming contest, but the story is told by Unferth and Beowulf himself when Beowulf is challenged upon his arrival in Denmark. The hero’s companions are more or less absent: he has them, but only one has any real role in the first two-thirds of the poem (Grendel seizes and kills him, and we learn his name is Hondscio much later in the poem), and in the final fight, Beowulf has his young kinsman Wiglaf to assist him. The fights against Grendel and Grendel’s mother are much like Beewolf ’s fight against Grinder and his dam. The dragon guarding treasure (B11.6.2), the dragon fight (B11.11), and the cursed treasure (N591) would seem to be innovations, and Beowulf has no love interest in the poem. In one reading, therefore, the poem could be interpreted as a series of three monster fights with interludes, as John Niles has noted: 541–53; on how the related monster fights fit into Old Norse, see John McKinnell, “Þórr and the Bear’s Son,” Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 126–46. 29 Tolkien, “Beowulf,” 26. 30 The primary evidence for Beowulf as a bear-hero lies in the analogues to the poem. The name Beowulf was for a long time (and by Tolkien) thought to be a kenning for bear (Bee-wolf), but this is highly unlikely. Beowulf also squeezes one enemy to death in what has been thought to be a bear-hug. On the name, see Larry D. Benson, “The Originality of Beowulf,” in The Interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1–43; and R.D. Fulk, “The Etymology of Beowulf ’s Name,” Anglo-Saxon 1 (2007): 109–36.

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Michael Fox If the reader does not become lost in the many byways of the narrative, its large-scale symmetry of design will be evident: (A) introduction, (B) fight with Grendel, (C) celeb­rations, (D) fight with Grendel’s dam, (C) celebrations, (B) fight with dragon, (A) close. The three great fights that constitute the main body of the poem are separated by two substantial interludes.31

That structure becomes important in both The Hobbit and Undermajordomo Minor, but we must also consider what Niles calls “the many byways of the narrative,” for both Tolkien and DeWitt imitate the multiple byways of Beowulf. The first of these lies in the nature of the hero, who, though the strongest man in those days, has a strength which the poet matches to the strength of Grendel through a repetition of the number thirty. The poet links the hero and the monsters in other important ways: for example, Beowulf and his adversaries are referred to by the same epithets; Beowulf is made monstrous; the monsters are made human; Beo­ wulf violates the “halls” of the monsters; and only Beowulf, monsters, and Wiglaf are able to pass the liminal marker that leads to the other world.32 Further, Hrothgar, who at once echoes God and Nimrod in the poem, cautions Beowulf against turning out like the grim king, Heremod, who is explicitly linked to the kin of Cain. At the conclusion of the poem, we are not quite sure what to make of Beowulf, for he is criticized by Wiglaf, and he is buried with the treasure, just like the Last Sur­ vivor and just like the dragon. The poet takes pains to blur the distinctions between heroism and monstrosity in a way that folktale rarely does: we wonder about the purity of the hero, and we wonder about the monstrosity of his foes. To put it yet another way, the poet complicates the folktale by distributing similar characteristics and motives across a range of characters in the poem, much as we shall find in The Hobbit and Undermajordomo Minor, and one effect of this is a layering of conflicts in the poem, as we see not only fights against monsters, both internal and external, but also peoples at war with one another. What remains to be observed is how the telling of the story complicates and differs from the linear and chronological structures of folktale. We have seen that Beowulf is non-linear, that it takes episodes such as the swimming contest and Beo­ wulf ’s unpromising youth and relates them out of chronological order, in this case as analepses, sometimes told by other characters, and that it is isochronous (most remarkably, fifty years pass in the space of a few lines). Analepses and prolepses abound, and they look both inside and outside the main narrative.33 This feature of the poem has often been called its digressions and episodes, and these stories within the main story are often highly allusive, especially to a modern audience. In terms of overall structure, the symmetry of the poem as a whole works at many levels, both micro and macro, though the single ring or annular structures are only 31 John D. Niles, “Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,” PMLA 94 (1979): 924–35 (929). 32 For example, Andy Orchard concludes his discussion of Beowulf ’s fight with the dragon by commenting that “Beowulf and his dragon are inextricably linked” (A Critical Companion to Beowulf [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003], 227–37 [237]). 33 On narratology and the poem, see Michael Lapidge, “Beowulf and Perception,” Proceedings of the British Academy 111 (2001): 61–97.

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one part of the narrative structuring of the poem. Ward Parks notes how different systems work together: [R]ing patterns might comprise just one component in a sophisticated narrative weave that makes use other kinds of narrative organization also, such as themes or type scenes, or Proppian strings of narrative functions, or interlace. … Again, ring structure promotes balance and symmetry around a medial point which provides the narrative crux; yet equally valid from both the aesthetic and psychological standpoints is a progressive movement towards an ultimate climax and resolution.34

Even in the straightforward fairy-tale technique of trebling, the poet combines the obvious (three monster fights) with more subtle and sophisticated structures of three, a feature John A. Nist has called “triadic unity”: the fights have progressively more rounds (one against Grendel; two against Grendel’s mother; and three against the dragon);35 the fights become progressively more difficult; Beowulf ’s foes seem to have increasing justification in each fight; the person killed in each fight increases in importance (Hondscio; Aeschere; and Beowulf);36 and the third fight also sees Beowulf speak three times before he dies.37 Tolkien three times restates the theme of Beowulf: (1) “man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time”; (2) “man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die”; and (3) “the wages of heroism is death.”38 In The Hobbit, though he is using Beowulf as a model and retelling ATU 301, Tolkien is clearly reworking the theme to accord with his notion that fairy-story includes a happy ending (his “eucatastrophe”), and he accomplishes this through a marvellous redeployment of the key features of the poem. Bilbo Baggins is an unpromising hero, though unpromising in a very different way from Beewolf or Beowulf. He has something peculiar in his lineage (Baggins and Took, and a fairy wife among the Tooks long ago), and though he possesses the wisdom and courage of a hero like Beo­wulf, Tolkien makes it clear that this is not a traditional heroic story. Gandalf rules out the idea of an expedition to the front gate of the dragon’s mountain: “That would be no good … not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero.”39 The primary Beewolf/Beowulf figure in the poem is instead Beorn, who lives outside the regular affairs of the world, but who fights as a bear (and whose name certainly means “bear”). However, to make sure that we associate Beorn’s traditional brand of heroism with Bilbo’s unexpected heroism, Tolkien parallels the two characters in several ways, most obviously in the way each must be approached in his lair in reduced numbers. Beowulf ’s ambiguous demise is transferred to the character of Thorin Oakenshield, and the misery that awaits the Geats at the end of the poem as 34 Ward Parks, “Ring Structure and Narrative Embedding in Homer and Beowulf,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 237–51 (241). 35 Thomas L. Keller, “The Dragon in Beowulf Revisited,” Aevum 55.2 (1981): 218–28 (222). 36 John A. Nist, The Structure and Texture of Beowulf (São Paulo, Brazil: University of São Paulo, 1959), 20–21. 37 Niles, “Ring Composition,” 927. 38 Tolkien, “Beowulf,” 18, 23, and 26. 39 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 21.

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they face the attacks of the Swedes and the Frisians becomes the possibility of conflict between the dwarves and the elves and the men of Lake-town, which is averted in the Battle of the Five Armies. Though Bilbo is no Beowulf, he still descends many times to the other or underworld, and he is alone, suspected dead, and/or on the verge of being abandoned several times. Tolkien also deploys the same overall annular structure as Beowulf (the subtitle of the novel is “there and back again”).40 Without doubt, the novel has the same pulses of action as Beowulf, moving from conflict to celebration and rest, but with one extra iteration of conflict and rest: (A) Introduction; (B) Trolls; (C) Rivendell; (D) Goblins, Gollum, Wolves; (E) Beorn; (F) Mirkwood; (G) Lake-town; (H) Dragon; (I) Conclusion. The effect is clear: central to the structure now is the rejuvenating stay at Beorn’s hall (instead of the fight with Grendel’s mother), and Bilbo’s exploits increase in significance until the dragon episode at the end, at least with respect to his importance to the expedition.41 Tolkien embeds smaller structures within this larger structure as well, particularly in threes. For example, the second fight has three phases (goblins, Gollum, wolves), the party three times tries to reach the elves’ midnight feast, and Bilbo three times descends into Smaug’s lair, noting finally that “Third time may pay for all!”42 The central fight in the threestage fight before the structural centre of the novel is the encounter with Gollum, the “monster” who most mirrors Bilbo, and who is in turn mirrored by Smaug in the repetition of the verbal contest. The story progresses at a steady pace and is far more linear than Beowulf, even though the narrative splits such that the slaying of the dragon is narrated as an analepsis. Where in Beowulf we see moments of obvious first-person narration and reference to an extradiegetic Christian world, Tolkien’s narrator also breaks into the narrative frame, so greatly as to be considered a character in the story.43 Tolkien, in fact, once remarks that he regretted his choice of narrator: “The Hobbit was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children,” even though the narrator’s presence, as in Beowulf, often adds a sense of immediacy and orality to the story.44 Digressions and episodes are few, but allusions to other stories are many, including the Battle of the Green Fields, the death of Thror at the hands of Azog, the repeated mentions of the Necromancer, the brief introduction of Radagast (Gandalf ’s cousin), the histories of Gandalf, and the various races and their conflicts. 40 See, for example, Bonnie-Jean Christensen, “Tolkien’s Creative Technique: Beowulf and The Hobbit,” Mythlore 57 (1989): 4–10; Jonathan A. Glenn, “To Translate a Hero: The Hobbit as Beowulf Retold,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 17 (1991): 13– 34; Paul Bibire, “By Stock or Stone: Recurrent Imagery and Narrative Pattern in The Hobbit,” in Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, University of Turku, Finland, ed. K.J. Battarbee (Turku: Publications of the Department of English, 1993), 203–15; and Chance, Tolkien’s Art, 48–73. 41 In terms of Bilbo alone, the story seems to crest twice, once in the Misty Mountains and then again in the tripartite encounter with Smaug and the theft of the Arkenstone. 42 Tolkien, The Hobbit, 217. 43 Chance, Tolkien’s Art, 70–73. 44 J.R.R. Tolkien, quoted by Philip Norman in “The Prevalence of Hobbits,” New York Times Magazine, 15 January 1967, 100 (quoted in Chance, Tolkien’s Art, 49).

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Though Tolkien’s primary source is Beowulf and ATU 301, he does deploy several other sources, including Old Norse accounts of dwarves for their names and some of their habits, the story of Sigurd the dragon-slayer for another model of the dragon fight, including the talking dragon, Fáfnir, and helpful talking birds, and the Middle English Sir Orfeo (itself another story of descent to the other or underworld) for the elves and their moveable feast.45 Tolkien also incorporates motifs that are not or are rarely part of ATU 301, some of which we will see again in DeWitt. The most prominent of these are: remarkable stone-thrower (F636.4); old man helper (N825.2; or old man helper on quest: H1233.1); journey to get lower world treasure (F81.5); trolls turning to stone (F455.8.1); visit to the lower world through opening rock (F92.3); ring of invisibility (D1361.17); magic sword that gives warning (D1081); escape by eagles (B542.1.1); and object (here, the magic river: D915) causing magical sleep (D1364). Another common folktale element is more a function than a motif, and that is the interdiction, which according to Propp’s morphology is usually an early function in the folktale. The interdiction leads to the interdiction violated (also a motif, J652; inattention to warning), and this is what Tolkien is exploiting in the instructions not to leave the path as the party passes through Mirkwood.46 In the development, therefore, of a pure folktale into Beowulf and The Hobbit, the Beowulf-poet and Tolkien manipulate and sophisticate many conventions of the genre. DeWitt, as we have noted, confirms his own impulse to imitate folktales, fairy-stories, and fables, yet of course the difference is that DeWitt is not working primarily from one particular and identifiable folktale. Tolkien speaks of fairy-­ stories as servings from the “Cauldron of Story” – “the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty” – but the servings are not random: “But if we speak of a Cauldron, we must not wholly forget the Cooks. There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.”47 DeWitt, therefore, instead of serving up soup from a particular Cauldron with a limited or guided set of ingredients (as I would suggest the Beowulf-poet and Tol­ kien do), cooks and serves from a more inclusive Cauldron, even while the hero and his adventures feel immediately familiar to critics and readers. Although Undermajordomo Minor contains trains and guns and cannons, meaning that the action must logically take place at least as recently as the nineteenth century, no details attach the story to any particular time. DeWitt has commented on the timelessness of the novel, suggesting that it was “intentional”: “I remember feeling somewhat bullied with The Sisters Brothers because it was set in a specific time period. There was a lot that I couldn’t do.”48 The names of the characters point also in multiple directions, mainly suggesting some kind of eastern European setting, but not with any consistency (ranging, as they do from Myron Olderglough to the warrior Adolphus). The hero, Lucien Minor, is known as Lucy: his name is a feminine/diminutive anglicized form of Lucianus, thus, perhaps, “a feminine minor 45 See Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 55–93. 46 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 26–28. 47 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 125–28. 48 Newman, “On Fables and Fiction.”

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light,” a name that immediately suggests he is not a traditional hero. In fact, Lucy is as unpromising a hero as Bilbo Baggins, even though Beewolf and Beowulf also fall into this broad category (L100: unpromising hero), which includes such subcategories as hero of unpromising habits (L114), lazy hero (L114.1: “[Lucy] elected to linger, a favoured pastime”), unsophisticated hero (L122), and unpromising son leaves home and goes into the world (L133).49 Lucy is not much loved by his parents (4), a feature of many Old Norse tales of strong heroes, his inner warrior is dormant (181), he does not fit in in Bury, a place of “brutish giants,” and he has no particular skills (unlike Bilbo, he clearly cannot throw stones or move with stealth), unless we count his ability to tell lies (X909.1: incorrigible liar), which itself seems like a lie and suggests this is among motifs of humour and lies (X960: lie: remarkable person’s skills): Lucy regarded the village of Bury, resting – or collected, he thought, like leavings, debris – in the crease of the valley. … Had he ever been anything other than an outsider here? No, is the answer. In a place famous for its propensity to beget brutish giants, Lucy by comparison was so much the inferior specimen. He couldn’t dance, couldn’t hold his drink, had no ambitions as a farmer or landowner, had had no close friendships growing up, and none of the local women found him worthy of comment, much less affection, save for Marina, and this had been the all too brief exception. He’d always known an apartness from his fellow citizens, a suspicion that he was not at all where he should be. (12)

Much in the same way that traditional heroic qualities are relocated to Beorn (“bear”) in The Hobbit, DeWitt shifts strength, martial prowess, skill, and good looks to Adolphus, whose very name, in fact, comes from the Germanic Aethelwulf or “noble wolf ” (47–50). DeWitt comments on that brand of heroism as well, never specifying the reason for the fight and making it clear that Adolphus lives primarily for that fight, a choice questioned by everyone in the story.50 Though the narrative arc of Undermajordomo Minor does not involve a set of monster fights, DeWitt has fashioned a tale every bit as symmetrical and intricate as Beowulf and The Hobbit. Lucy’s quest is a simple one: he wants something to happen and not to be bored. The story is set in motion by that desire, as Lucy on his deathbed is visited by a mysterious man in a burlap sack who asks him what he wishes and seems to grant it by transferring Lucy’s illness to his father. The scene is a classic fairy-tale moment: a mysterious stranger appears at a liminal place or time, tests the hero with a question, and, seemingly happy with the answer, grants a boon. Lucy’s boredom vanishes almost immediately, and he journeys east to the Castle Von Aux where the bulk of the story takes place. The return from death, which opens the novel (Book I), is repeated at the end of it (Book XII), when Lucy once more returns from death and journeys back west to Bury, where he again sees Father Raymond and perhaps the man in the burlap sack. In other words, the structure is: Lucy at the 49 Patrick DeWitt, Undermajordomo Minor (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2016), 4; further references to this novel will be in parentheses in the text. 50 When Lucy, standing beside Adolphus’ corpse at the end of the novel, wonders for the last time what they were fighting about, Mewe simply says: “Some men just like to kill each other, I expect” (DeWitt, Undermajordomo Minor, 324).

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moment of death (A), sees a man in a burlap sack (B), visits Father Raymond (C), and journeys east (D), where he again experiences death (A), journeys back west (D), encounters Father Raymond (C), and sees what he believes is the man in the burlap sack (B). At the beginning and end of the novel, in other words, are parallel structures (death plus its aftermath) with internal chiastic structures. The novel is rife with this kind of patterning: to give one further example, Book VIII, “The Baroness von Aux,” has its own annular structure: the baroness is discussed as she nears the castle, alone on the train (A); the subject of Broom comes up in the conversation (B); the Very Large Hole is discussed (C); and the Baroness, clearly corrupted, appears (D); before the centre of the book, a first-person analepsis called “Memel’s Lesson to the Children” (significant for being the only first-person digression in the novel and a thematic key to the text), Memel’s story of conversion (E); leads back to the Baroness, full of profound sorrow (D); who takes Lucy to the Very Large Hole (C); where she tells him about Broom (B); and then once again moves off alone (A). The story, therefore, primarily focuses on Lucy’s rebirth(s) and growth. As Tolkien parallels and contrasts Bilbo with other characters in The Hobbit, DeWitt sets up four different “love triangles” for the same kind of effect. Lucy’s first love is Marina, and he loses her to the giant Tor before the action of the novel even begins; Lucy reflects on that first love affair (a reflection that will be paralleled in the analepsis about Klara’s first love) after he has had his brush with death. When he arrives at the Castle Von Aux, he quickly steps into the same kind of situation, finding that Klara has a relationship of sorts with Adolphus. Over the course of events inside and outside the castle, Lucy discovers two other (former) sets of lovers, Memel– Tomas–­Alida and Baron–Broom–Baroness. The four triads have many parallels and contrasts: DeWitt offers no simple solution for how they should be compared. For example, Tor and Adolphus are clearly parallel in some ways, but Marina and Tor seem as if they will be a perfect couple (Lucy was always too gentle for Marina’s liking). Klara’s sadness and desire sometimes to be alone is very similar to the Baroness, but DeWitt never gives us the sense that Klara is corrupted in the same way that the Baroness has been, perhaps because Klara is of the village and the Baroness is of the castle. When Lucy is faced with the question of what to do, he seems to have three options: take Memel’s implicit advice and push his rival into the Very Large Hole, give up and jump into the Very Large Hole like Broom, or do nothing, like the Baron, and see what happens. Lucy is likened again and again to the Baron in the novel, but in the end, of course, he finds an unexpected path that had not seemed to be an option. In this aspect of Undermajordomo Minor, we see a sophisticated and inventive take on the traditional trebling of folktales and fairy-stories. Lucy’s first moment of rebirth sets events in motion, and he has two major turning points or tests in his career, much like Bilbo’s finding of the ring and his encounter with Smaug. In Book V, Lucy, having been shoved away by Adolphus, seems poised to run away and give up when he opens a letter from the Baron to the Baroness in which the Baron, moved almost to suicide, decides instead he will wait so long as the Baroness lives: [T]he Baron’s letter conjured in him a shame which eclipsed these other emotions, and so he did not strike out for the station as planned, but removed the cape from his valise

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Michael Fox and walked back down the hill, and to the village. As he knocked on Klara’s door, he could feel his heartbeat in his hands. She answered; she was alone. He passed her the cape and told her, “You can’t marry Adolphus.” Her face was so pale, and she looked at the cape with such superlative sadness. “Why,” she asked. “Because of the fact that I love you.” Lucy said these words and he watched as Klara’s sadness drifted away, her eyes brightening in pulses, and now she was beguiling again. (144)

The second comes in Book IX, after the “Strange and Terrible Ballroom Goings-­ On,” when the Count is drunkenly assaulting Klara. Lucy, in a scene that very much mirrors Olderglough’s clubbing of the Baron, wakes up his inner warrior and cracks him in the mouth with Agnes’ pestle. The scene ends with a perfect moment for Lucy and Klara – “They held each other, and kissed, and were so very much in love” (259) – but because fairy-story moments of celebration, rest, and calm are always brief, the problem of Adolphus comes back before twenty-four hours has passed. Undermajordomo Minor progresses at a steady narrative pace, but several analepses of various lengths interrupt the trajectory of the plot. The most startling of these is the first, a digression (“Eirik & Alexander”) in a separate section of Book I that explains why Lucy’s train to the castle is late. The story has three characters, Eirik, Eirik’s unnamed wife, and Alexander, which does slightly inform the triads of the rest of the novel, but Eirik and Alexander’s conflict could be a folktale on its own, centred upon the traditional motif of the absurd or short-sighted wish (J2070).51 The other three are about Klara’s affair with the Eastern Stranger (told at Lucy’s request, but by the narrator as a completely separate section of the novel), Memel’s lesson to the children (told in the first-person, embedded in the main narrative), and Memel’s account of how he dealt with Tomas (told in the narrator’s voice as a completely separate section of the novel). Proleptic moments are few and brief and come only from the narrator, who sounds at times much like the narrator of The Hobbit. The narrator foreshadows what will happen over the course of the novel as a whole – accepting the offer from Olderglough to work at the castle “led to many things, including but not limited to true love, bitterest heartbreak, bright-white terror of the spirit, and an acute homicidal impulse” (11) – and occasionally says things such as “[i]n the end, Lucy did come up with a plan of his own, and as it happened, this was the idea they could all three of them agree on.”52 At times, as in Beowulf and The Hobbit, the narrator/story has a meta-awareness of its status as story, coming close to breaking the narrative frame: where Beowulf has “double scenes,” and scenes 51 Eirik repeatedly asks Alexander if he is absolutely sure he wants congratulations on his promotion to engineer, and Alexander insists that he does, until he receives a congratulatory blow from a shovel that severs his fingers (DeWitt, Undermajordomo Minor, 23–28). 52 DeWitt, Undermajordomo Minor, 306. Later, when the narrator is explaining the plan, he says: “The idea, of course, was to tie the string of laces to the tail of the fish” (312), and that “of course,” which speaks to the shared knowledge of the narrator and the audience, is quite common in The Hobbit, even if here the intention may be ironic.

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of composition and classification, and where Tolkien’s narrator intrudes upon the story by being a character who talks about golf and engines, modern sayings like “out of the frying pan and into the fire,” and seeks agreement from his audience, DeWitt’s novel contains two major nods to the writing, telling, and hearing of stor­ ies. In the first, Lucy, while writing the letter that will bring the Baroness back to the castle, recognizes how difficult it is: “It was a tedious business, he decided, and he felt no envy of the learned men and women of the world for whom composition was their stock in trade” (146). The second is about the reception of stories: the Baroness claps a book shut when Lucy enters the room: “I for one find it an annoyance when a story doesn’t do what it’s meant to do. Don’t you, boy?” “I’m not sure I understand what you mean, ma’am.” “Do you not appreciate an entertainment?” “I do.” “And would you not find yourself resentful at the promise of entertainment unfulfilled?” “I believe I would, ma’am.” “There we are, then” (216).53

A story needs to be complete, even within the constructed world of the novel. The climax of the novel, which parallels the moments of bliss at the end of the first half of the book, is the pit entrance to the lower world (F92), the same motif that is central to Sellic Spell, Beowulf, and The Hobbit. This section of the novel (Book XI) is a brilliant demonstration of DeWitt’s selection and innovation when it comes to the raw materials of fairy-story. The descent itself, emblematic of a descent to the otherworld, to death, is common: Beowulf ’s descent has been linked to Aeneas’, Odysseus’, and Christ’s; even the fate of Joseph, shoved into the pit out of envy and assumed dead by his father, makes for a compelling analogue. What links the descent also to folktale are the other details, for DeWitt has cleverly placed the skilful companions of ATU 301 (F601) already there in the pit (to make the number three) and he has given two of them, the hero’s newfound companions, special abilities, which are their own fabrications: Broom claims second sight; and Tomas has a special wisdom granted by time (304–6). In a way, the pattern DeWitt creates is much like Tolkien’s Sellic Spell, in which the companions must first be wrong before the hero can do what is right. The path out resembles a labyrinth (F781.1), and the animal guide, the helpful fish (B470) with their laces tied to it, echoes yet transforms Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth (R121.5). Being guided away from the underworld is a reversal of the much more common pattern of following some kind of animal or beast or demon to the lower world. Lucy, as with Beewolf, Beo­ wulf, and Bilbo, has been (feared or) assumed dead. DeWitt also sprinkles other 53 DeWitt, Undermajordomo Minor, 216. This passage is also quoted by Handler, “Patrick DeWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor,” who feels that it may be a nod to readers who are put off by the unexpected turns of the book.

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motifs throughout the novel, motifs such as the food that turns to dust (D476.2.1), the interdiction and interdiction violated or inattention to warning (J652; Lucy ordered to lock his door at night), the old man helper (N825.2; Memel as mentor), and the enmity of the spider and the wasp (A2494.14.2.). These help the novel to maintain a consistent generic feel. Tolkien famously dismisses a line of inquiry of this sort. He objects to the way scholars mine Beowulf for clues about other things, using the analogy of the field of old stone, the old house, and the tower destroyed to see how it was made, and he very specifically objects to motif hunting, noting that such studies “are the pursuit … of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested.”54 Instead, he directs us to think about Beowulf as whole; in fairy-story, “it is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.”55 Still, we must consider the web of Story (as he calls it) as consisting of “independent invention, inheritance, and diffusion,” and Beowulf, The Hobbit, and Undermajordomo Minor are excellent examples of how the threads of the difficult genre of fairy-story or fantasy are interwoven.56 In typical fairy-­story fashion, these texts, taken together, form a thematic trebling: the Beowulf-poet, sitting between the pagan and Christian worlds, looks forward and backward and explores the theme that all of us and all we do is doomed. Tolkien calls the poem an elegy. The Hobbit transforms the theme in many ways, changing the definition of heroism and manipulating the different narrative strands of the poem to produce what is, for the most part, a happy ending in which everyone (except Thorin and Fili and Kili) goes home with treasure, if not precisely to live happily ever after. DeWitt’s novel, like Beowulf, emphasizes transience and sudden changes of fortune, but DeWitt also explores the violence and power of love. The ending is neither elegiac nor eucatastrophic: Mewe and Lucy feel the sadness of endings, but life goes on until it no longer does, so Lucy sets out after Klara, heading west toward the ocean, and, thinking no doubt of Memel, composes his epitaph for when that day comes.

54 55 56

Tolkien, “Beowulf,” 7–8; Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 119. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 119–20. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 121.

Index Aarne, Antti  194 Abercrombie, Joe  173 Aeneas  110, 203 Æthelred 20 Aichinger, Peter  115, 119 Aidan, St.  31–2 Alexander, Michael  10 Alf Alreksson of Sweden, King  18 alliteration  25–6, 120 Amos, Ashley Crandell  10 Andersen, Douglas E.  192 Anne of Green Gables 146 L’Anse aux Meadows  5, 83 Anthropocene, the  179 Arden, Heather  3 Armstrong, Kelley  9 Arnold, Matthew  19, 35 Art Deco  8 Artelle, Steven  30, 69, 70 Arthur, King  66–70, 73–7, 79, 80–1, 144, 147, 149, 153 Ascianus 110 Ashton, Gail  115 Assmann, Aleida  156–7, 161 Assmann, Jan  156–7 Atwood, Margaret  2, 13–14, 15, 54, 129– 42, 189 The Edible Woman  13, 129, 132, 138 The Handmaid’s Tale 129 Morning in the Burned House 138 The Robber Bride  13, 129, 131–2, 135, 141 auctoritates  14, 129, 158 Augustine, St.  84 Austen, Jane  13, 104–7

Barrington, Candance  107, 116 Barthélemy, Dominique  180–2 Beardsley, David  54 Bede 31–3 Benson, Larry D.  195 Bentley, D.M.R.  66–70, 79 Bernauer, Warren  5 Beowulf  6–7, 10–11, 15, 113, 120, 122, 124, 127, 189–204 Berger, Carl  69 Béroul 158 Bethune, Brian  174, 179 Bibire, Paul  198 Birney, Earle  2, 10, 13, 15, 113–28, 189 Blair, Jennifer  39, 40, 44 Borges, Jorge Luis  114 Borowska-Szerszun Sylwia  162 Bourne, Michael  190 Botting, Fred  63, 166 Bottigheimer, Ruth  191 Boyle, Leonard  10 Box, Ernest Belford  33 Bradbury, Bettina  41 Bradley, Marion Zimmer  172 Brett, Peter V.  173 Brodeur, Arthur  127 Brontë, Charlotte  78 Brooks, Terry  159 Broustra, Catherine  125 Browne, Timothy Di Leo  2 Bryant, William Jennings  34 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn  158 Brush, Kathryn  4–5, 8, 37, 52 Butler, Auban  31

Bakhtin, Mikhail  164 Barnes, Daniel R.  191 Barr, Helen  116 Barr, Mike  148

Caboto, Giovanni/Cabot, John  5 Cabot, Sebastian  5 Caedmon’s Hymn 123 Camelot 3000 148

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Cameron, Angus  10 Cameron, Elspeth  115, 116 Campbell, S.C.  93 Campbell, William Wilfred  2, 12, 15, 66–82 Canuel, Mark  55 Caputo, Nina  3 Carefoote, Pearce J.  111 Carlson, David R.  115 Carlyle, Thomas  19, 35, 71 Carter, Lin  185 Cathars 160 Cecire, Maria Sachiko  173, 180 Chambers, R.W.  193 Champlain, Samuel de  5 Chance, Jane  118, 192, 198 Chandler, Alice  10, 71–72 Chaucer, Geoffrey  13–14, 34, 113–28, 129–39, 143 Canterbury Tales  14, 116, 118, 122, 124, 128, 148 Clerk’s Tale 24 Knight’s Tale 148 Tale of Sir Thopas 150 Troilus and Criseyde  13–14, 115, 118, 122, 128, 130–1, 133, 134 Miller’s Tale 121 Chick, Jack T.  144 Chrétien de Troyes  158, 175 Christ  33, 124, 203 Christensen, Bonnie-Jean  198 Clements, Pam  129 Cleopatra  133, 136 Clery, E.J.  40–1, 71 Clute, John  164–5, 191 Cobbett, William  35, 71 Codex Torontoniensis  111 Coghill, Nevill  122 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  10, 71–2, 73 Coletti, Theresa  113 Collegiate Gothic, the  13, 15, 97–112 Columbus, Christopher  5 Confederation Group, the  17–35, 66–82 Connor, Carl Y.  18 Cooper, Helen  134 Currie, Noel Elisabeth  46, 47, 49 Czarnowus, Anna  83, 94 Czerneda, Julie  9 Dafoe, Elizabeth  111–12 d’Arcens, Louise  4, 9, 129

Davey, Frank  115 Davies, Robertson  2, 13, 15, 97–112, 189 de Borne, Bertran  160 de Certeau, Michel  101 David, Jack  116 Deery, June  134–5 de France, Marie  158 de Lint, Charles  2, 9, 14, 15, 155–71, 174, 189 de Riquer, Martín  145 DeSalvo, Louise A.  141 Descartes 152 Desdemona 28 Detroit, Fort/Détroit, Fort  46, 48, 52, 53, 62 de Unamuno, Miguel  145 de Ventadorn, Bernard  160 DeWitt, Patrick  2, 15, 189–204 Dictionary of Old English 10 Dilke, Charles  78 Dinshaw, Carolyn  9, 84, 96 Disraeli, Benjamin  71 Dodds, Jeramy  10 Don Quixote  144, 145 Dougall, Lily  36, 38 Doughty, Terri  181 Dracott, Christopher  7 Duffy, Denis  58–9 Duke, Alex  100 Dunbar, William  130 Duncan, Dave  9 Dunsany, Lord  169 Duvar, John Hunter  13, 83–96 Early, R.L.  18 Ecclesiastes 93 Eco, Umberto  63, 101, 113, 155 Edwards, Justin D.  48 Edwards, Mary Jane  39 Ekman, Stefan  165 Elaine of Astolat  146, 147 Eleanor of Aquitaine  160 Eliot, T.S.  96, 121 Elliot, Andrew B.R.  3 Ellis, Kate Ferguson  40 Emery, Elizabeth  101 Erikson, Steven  9, 14, 174, 186–8 Erll, Astrid  156, 157 “Erro”  87–9, 91, 93 eucatastrophe  197, 204

Index

207

Everyman 123 Eyre, Jane  78

Guinevere  74–6, 79, 80, 144, 147, 152–3 Gust, Geoffrey W.  118

Feagan, Claire  52 Ferré, Vincent  156 FitzGerald, Edward  92 Fitzhugh, William F.  5 Fisher King, The 144 Fjalldal, Magnús  194 Fletcher, Vanessa Dion  5 Foucault, Michel  46, 152, 153 Frazer, James  123 French, G.S.  86 Fryer, Mary Beacock  7 Fuchs, Barbara  91 Fulk, R.D.  195

Hafez 87–9 Haft, Adele J.  121 Haliburton, R. G.  17 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler  45–6 Hall, Joseph  27 Hallett, Martin  191 Handler, Daniel  190, 203 Hart, Julia Beckwith  2, 12, 15, 36–51 Harvkey, Mike  192 Hay, Simon  60 Healey, Antonette diPaolo  10 Heaney, Seamus  113 Hector 139 Helen of Troy  27, 133 Heng, Geraldine  88, 89 Henryson, Robert  133, 134 Hieatt, C.B.  10 Hoberman, Ruth  133 Hochschild, Arlie  150 Hodgins, James Cobourg  30 Hoeveler, Diane Long  44 Hogle, Jerrold E.  63, 103 Holsinger, Bruce  3 Homer  22, 73, 130 Honegger, Thomas  159 Horace 130 Hornburg, Mark W.  3 Houses of Parliament in Ottawa, the  1, 17, 100 Centre Block of Parliament, the  1 Library of Parliament, the  1 Victoria Tower Bell, the  1 Howard, Robert E.  155 Howitt, Mary  19 Howitt, William  19 Huff, Tanya  9 Hughes, Merritt  127 Hurley, Michael  61–2 Hustak, Allan  8

Ganim, John M.  84, 85, 95 Gardner, John  113 Gareth, Sir  147, 150–3 Gaunt, Simon  163 Gawain/Gwaine  76, 147–8, 150, 152 Gelder, Ken  166 Gentry, Francis  188 Geoffrey of Monmouth  110 Gerson, Carole  85 Getz, Robert  10 Gibbons, Dave  148 Gilbert, Sandra  78 Gillson, Albert Henry S.  111–12 Gilson, Etienne  10 Glenn, Jonathan A.  198 Godeanu-Kenworthy, Oana  46–7, 49, 50 Godwin, Parke  169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  18, 157 Goldie, Terry  59 Gordon, R.K.  11 Gower, John  135 Gothic/Medieval Revival, the  1, 8, 11, 12, 18, 37, 67, 101–2, 107, 109, 188 Grant, John  191 Graves, Robert  142 Graveyard Poets  71 Green, Martin  132 Green, Richard Firth  115 Greer, Alan  41, 42 Grettis saga 194 Grimm, Brothers  190, 191 Groening, Laura Smith  49, 50 Gubar, Susan  78

Inge, Thomas  113 Ingstad, Anne Stine  5 Ingstad, Helge  5 Iranzo, Alex  145 Irvine, Alexander C.  165, 178 Jackson, Shirley  106

208

Index

James, Edward  172, 176 Jensen, Liz  190 Johnson, Hannah  3 Jones, Eustace Hinton  7 Jones, Susan  60 Kabir, Ananya  84 Kadar, Marlene  125 Kane, George  10 Karasek, Barbara  191 Katz, Welwyn Winton  10 Kay, Guy Gavriel  2, 9, 14, 15, 155–71, 172– 88, 189 Keats, John  11, 18, 23–5, 29, 35 Keller, Thomas L.  197 kennings 120 Ketterer, David  174, 187 Khayyám, Omar  87, 91–3 Kingsley, Charles  21 Kipling, Rudyard  146 Klinck, Carl F.  69, 73 Kirby, William  37 Laing, Samuel  19, 21, 25 Lamb, Charles  146 Lampman, Archibald  2, 11–12, 15, 17–35, 68, 79 Langland, William/Piers Plowman  116, 122, 124 Lanier, Sidney  146, 147 Lapidge, Michael  10, 196 Laskaya, Anne  135 Launcelot/Lancelot  14, 66, 69, 72, 74–6, 79, 143–54 Lecker, Robert  54, 64 Lee, Alvin  11 Le Goff, Jacques  156 LeGuin, Ursula  169 LePan, Douglas  109 Leyerle, John  158 Lewis, Clive Staples  14, 146, 151, 155 Lewis, Matthew  55, 103 Lewis, Michael J.  100 Lighthall, William  77 Link, Fabian  3 Liu, Max  190 Logan, Harry M.  68 London District Courthouse, the  52 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  11, 18, 19 Longmore, George  86–7, 91

Low, Justice  115 Low, Wailan  115, 121, 125 Lowry, Malcolm  115 Macbeth, Lady  80 MacDonald, George  172 Machar, Agnes Maule  13, 83–96 Mackie, W.S.  118 MacLaren, I.S.  46 Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl  139 Magnússon, Eiríkr  25, 29 Malory, Sir Thomas  67, 68, 70, 78, 147 Mandeville, John  122–3 Mantel, Hilary  142 Manzikert, the Battle of  3 Marshall, David W.  155–6 Marshall, Kate  179 Martin, George R.R.  159 Mason, Bertha  78 Matthews, David  10, 188 Maxwell, Lilian M. Beckwith  39 Mayer, Lauren S.  4 Mazes and Monsters 144 McGerr, Rosemarie P.  132 McKillip, Patricia  169 McKinnell, John  195 Mendlesohn, Farah  172, 176 Merlin  66, 73–4, 76, 149 Miles, Robert  37 Milligan, J.  24 Milton, John  92 Montcalm, Louis-Joseph, the Marquis of  5 Moodie, Susanna  13, 45–6, 48, 50, 83–96 Mordred  66–82, 144, 150, 152, 153 Morgan le Fay  67 Morowitz, Laura  55 Morris, Gregory L.  142 Morris, William  11, 19, 25, 26, 29, 33, 35, 155, 169, 172 Morte Arthure 153 Mount, Nick  39 Mowat, Farley  5 Müller, Ulrich  188 Munro, Alice  114 Murphy, Kevin D.  100–1 Murray, Father Athol  111 Mydla, Jacek  36 Neo-classical architectural style  8 neomedievalism  4, 129, 155

Index Nesbitt, Bruce  118–19 Newman, Miranda  192, 199 Newman, Peter C.  6 Nicolle, David  3 Niles, John D.  195–6, 197 Nist, John A.  197 Noel, Jan  41 Nora, Pierre  156 Norman, Philip  198 Norris, W. Foxley  31 Northey, Margaret  55 Nünning, Ansgar  157 O’Donoghue, Heather  113 Odoric, Friar  123 Olaf II of Norway  18, 20 Orchard, Andy  196 Osborne, Emily  10 Osler, William  110–11 Oswald of Northumbria, King  18, 31 Ovid 130 Owen, Charles A., Jr  116 Palma, Fermin  145 Palma, Jose-Alberto  145 Panzer, Friedrich  194 Parker, Emma  137, 138 Parks, Ward  197 Patnaik, Eira  139 Patterson, Lee  140 Payne, Robert O.  130 Pearson, Kit  2, 14, 15, 143–54 Pelle, Stephen  10 Penelope 133 Perceval  145, 153 Peters, Edward  149 Petrarchan tradition, the  134 Plains of Abraham, the Battle of the  5 Poe, Edgar Allan  72, 73, 106 Pohl, Frederick J.  5 Polo, Marco  123 Ponteac/Pontiac  47, 53–7 Pre-Raphaelites, the  19 Prince Valiant 146 Propp, Vladimir  191, 197, 199 Pugh, Tison  3, 156 Pugin, Augustus Welby  35 Pullman, Philip  151 Rabelais, François  98, 99, 108–10

209

Radcliffe, Ann  40, 53, 72 Reade, John  66, 67 Reeve, Clara  53, 83, 85, 89 Reilly, Lisa  101 Richardson, John  2, 12, 15, 36–65 Ricœur, Paul  156 riddles (Old English)  117–18, 131–2, 133 Rider, Jeff  167 Riding, Laura  142 Rigney, Barbara Hill  140 Ringel, Faye  181, 182 Roberts, Charles G.D.  66–70 Robillard, Richard  119 Robin Hood  146 Rochebouet, Anne  173, 180 romance  2, 12, 13, 15, 52–65, 83–96, 155– 71, 172–88 Rowland, Beryl  116 Rowling, J.K.  151 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  11, 23 Rudel, Jaufre  160 Runeberg, Johan Ludwig  18 Rushton, Cory James  144 Ruskin, John  71 Russell, Peter H.  6 Ruszkiewicz, Dominika  135, 139 Ryan, Laurel  7, 84 Sa’di 87 Said, Edward  95 Sagara, Michelle (West)  9 Salamon, Anne  173, 180 Sankovitch, Tilde  163 Santamaria, Joan  145 Saul, John C.  34 Saunders, Corinne  62, 167 Scadding, Henry  111 Scala, Elizabeth  118, 149 Schanoes, Veronica  160, 177–8 Schwab, Raymond  84 Scott, Duncan Campbell  18, 30, 68 Scott, Walter  18–19, 71 Second Shepherd’s Play 122 Seneca 158 Shakespeare, William  70, 73, 76–8, 92, 115, 135, 136, 139, 149, 157 Antony and Cleopatra 136 Cymbeline 136 The Merchant of Venice 33 Othello  28, 136

210

Index

The Tempest  75, 77 Troilus and Cressida  13, 133, 135 Venus and Adonis 136 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  21 Shuster, Joe  8 Simcoe, John  7 Simons, John  52, 53 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  121, 122, 159, 182 Sir Orfeo 199 Skeat, Walter W.  34 Solecki, Sam  125 Springer, Nancy  169 Stableford, Brian  176, 177, 187 Steven, Laurence  126 Stevenson, Robert Louis  30 Stewart, Sean  9 Stiller, Nikki  137 Stoker, Bram  107 Strachan, Rev. John  111 Strohm, Paul  115 Studies in Medievalism 3 Sturgess, Charlotte  129 Sturlason, Snorre/Snorri Sturluson  19, 25, 27 Sugars, Cynthia  36, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 50, 51 Sutcliff, Rosemary  146 Sweeney, Michelle  172, 185 Sweet, Henry  26 Tamerlane 86 Tennyson, Alfred Lord  12, 18, 21, 35, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 92, 95 Thomas A. Shippey/Tom Shippey  191, 199 Thomas, Christopher  8 Thomas d’Angleterre  158 Thompson, Stith  191, 193 Thomson, Edward William  25 Thompson, Raymond H.  8, 67, 160, 170 Thoreau, Henry David  25 Thorpe, Benjamin  19 Timson, Judith  131 Todorov, Tzvetan  168 Tolan, Fiona  131 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel  155, 156, 159, 160, 169, 175, 189–204 The Hobbit  15, 189–204 The Lord of the Rings  155, 156, 159, 175, 188 Sellic Spell  15, 189–204

Tolmie, Jane  162, 181, 182, 183 Toswell, M.J.  4, 83, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 161, 174–5 Trotsky, Lev  126 translatio studii  13, 98, 107 Turcotte, Jerry  38, 39, 40, 44, 46, 51 Turner, Margaret  47–8, 50 Twain, Mark  146 Ulysses/Odysseus  139, 203 United Empire Loyalists  6 Urquhart, Sir Thomas  99 Uther, Hans-Jörg  190, 194 Utz, Richard  101 Victoria, Queen  66, 68 Vikings  132–3, 142 Virgil 130 Virgin Mary, the  94 Visser, Josh  189, 190, 192 Vivien  74, 75, 79, 80 Wallace, David  148 Wallace, W. Stewart  6 Walpole, Horace  46, 47, 53, 63, 71, 72, 170 Walton, Jo  9 Walton, Michael  11 Ward, Elisabeth  5 Warton, Thomas  85 Weddyng of Syr Gawaine and Dame Ragnelle 148 Weisl, Angela Jane  3, 156, 180 Westminster 2 Whalen, Logan E.  158 White, Jack  9 Wilkins, Kim  173, 180 Wilkinson, Sarah  40 Williams, Tad  159 Wilson, Edmund  6 Winther, Per  113 Withrow, William Henry  13, 86–7, 89, 91 Wolfe, James  4 Woolf, Virginia  141 Wordsworth, William  10, 71, 92, 157 Workman, Leslie J.  3 Yngvi Alreksson of Uppsala, King  18 Young, Carolyn A.  1 Zingis Khan/Genghis Khan  86 Zumthor, Paul  10

Medievalism I Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins II Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau Alicia C. Montoya III Memory and Myths of the Norman Conquest Siobhan Brownlie IV Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages Louise D’Arcens V Medievalism: Key Critical Terms edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz VI Medievalism: A Critical History David Matthews VII Chivalry and the Medieval Past edited by Katie Stevenson and Barbara Gribling VIII Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730–1840 Peter N. Lindfield IX Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation Jennifer Rushworth X Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century Andrew B.R. Elliott XI Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation edited by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons XII Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones Shiloh Carroll

XIII William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas Ian Felce XIV Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern Robert Mills XV François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence Claire Pascolini-Campbell XVI Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones KellyAnn Fitzpatrick

EDITED BY M.J. TOSWELL AND ANNA CZARNOWUS

M.J. TOSWELL is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario. ANNA CZARNOWUS is a Professor at the University of Silesia

in Katowice. CONTRIBUTORS : D.M.R. Bentley, Agnieszka Kliś-Brodowska, Anna Czarnowus, Brian Johnson, Laurel Ryan, David Watt, M.J. Toswell, Dominika Ruszkiewicz, Cory Rushton, Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Ewa Drab, and Michael Fox.

C OV E R D E S I G N : S I M O N LO X L E Y

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

M.J. TOSWELL, ANNA CZARNOWUS (eds)

Front cover: Bookplate commemorating the donation by the Manitoba Brewers’ and Hotelmen’s Welfare Fund as a memorial to the Honourable Andrew K. Dysart, M.A., LL.D., and Chancellor of the University of Manitoba. Reproduced with the permission of the Archives & Special Collections, University of Manitoba; all rights reserved.

MEDIEVALISM IN ENGLISH CANADIAN LITERATURE

The essays in this volume consider what is original and distinctive about the manifestation of medievalism in Canadian literature and its origins and its subsequent growth and development: from the first novel published in Canada written by a Canadian-born author, Julia Beckwith Hart’s St Ursula’s Convent (1824), to the recent work of the best-selling novelist Patrick DeWitt (Undermajordomo Minor, published in 2015). Topics addressed include the strong strain of medievalist fantasy in the work of the young-adult author Kit Pearson, and the longer novels of Charles de Lint, Steven Erikson, and Guy Gavriel Kay; the medievalist inclinations of Archibald Lampman and W.W. Campbell, well-known nineteenthcentury Canadian poets; and the often-studied Wacousta by John Richardson, first published in 1832. Chapters also cover early Canadian periodicals’ engagement with orientalist medievalism; and works by twentieth-century writers such as the irrepressible Earle Birney, the witty and intellectual Robertson Davies, and the fascinating and learned Margaret Atwood.

MEDIEVALISM IN ENGLISH

CANADIAN

LITERATURE

FROM



TO

RICHARDSON

ATWOOD