Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention

By Cynthia Sugars

This book explores the Gothic tradition in Canadian literature by tracing a distinctive reworking of the British Gothic in Canada. It traces the ways the Gothic genre was reinvented for a specifically Canadian context. On the one hand, Canadian writers expressed anxiety about the applicability of the British Gothic tradition to the colonies; on the other, they turned to the Gothic for its vitalising rather than unsettling potential. After charting this history of Gothic infusion, Canadian Gothic turns its attention to the body of Aboriginal and diasporic writings that respond to this discourse of national self-invention from a post-colonial perspective. These counter-narratives unsettle the naturalising force of this invented history, rendering the sense of Gothic comfort newly strange. The Canadian Gothic tradition has thus been a conflicted one, which reimagines the Gothic as a form of cultural sustenance. This volume offers an important reconsideration of the Gothic legacy in Canada.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783160778

Cynthia Sugars

Cynthia Sugars is a Professor of English at the University of Ottawa where she specialises in Canadian literature, Gothic theory, and postcolonialism.

Book preview

CANADIAN GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Canadian Gothic

Literature, History and the Spectre

of Self-Invention

Cynthia Sugars

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Cynthia Sugars, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN        978-0-7083-2700-5

e-ISBN     978-1-7831-6077-8

The right of Cynthia Sugars to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published with the financial assistance of the University of Ottawa/Université d’Ottawa

To Neve for asking the questions

To Abbey for making me rethink my answers

And to Morgan for seeing the irony in it all

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Settled Unsettlement; or, Familiarizing the Uncanny

1 Here There Be Monsters: Wilderness Gothic and Psychic Projection

2 Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts: Gothic Absence and Settler Melancholy

3 French-Canadian Gothic: Excess as Emplacement

4 Local Familiars: Gothic Infusion and Settler Indigenization

5 Playing fort da with History: Settler Postcolonial Gothic

6 Strangers Within: Unsettling the Canadian Gothic

7 Indigenous Ghost-Dancing: At Home on Native Land

Conclusion: The Spectre of Self-Invention

Notes

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am extremely grateful for the assistance of an SSHRC Insight Grant in the preparation of this book, without which I would not have been able to undertake the research for this project and the dissemination of my work. I am also very thankful to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa for their support in the form of a Research and Publications Grant to help offset costs in the preparation of the manuscript. It was after writing my chapter on the Canadian Gothic for David Punter’s A New Companion to the Gothic (Blackwell, 2012) that I decided to propose the idea for this book for the Gothic Literary Studies series of the University of Wales Press. Many thanks to David, and to Andrew Smith and Benjamin Fisher, the editors of the Gothic Literary Studies series, for their interest in my work. As academics, we are fortunate to be part of a community of insightful, generous, tireless and often brilliant scholars, some of whom we never meet or whose contribution to our work goes unacknowledged because it occurs at a level more profound than that of citation. I’d like to acknowledge the many critics whose work (in many cases unbeknownst to them) has been crucial to my thinking on the Canadian Gothic: Renée Bergland, Patrick Brantlinger, Steven Bruhm, Terry Castle, Jodey Castricano, Daniel Coleman, Justin Edwards, Michael Gamer, Carole Gerson, Terry Goldie, Marlene Goldman, Avery Gordon, Sneja Gunew, Jerrold Hogle, Jonathan Kertzer, Kerstin Knopf, Alan Lawson, Tanis MacDonald, Gaile MacGregor, Robert Miles, Margot Northey, David Punter, Teresa Raddu, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Schwenger, Stephen Slemon, and Gerry Turcotte. Without the work of these and similar scholars to build on, there would be nowhere to go. I hope my work will be a similar stepping-stone for others. I am also grateful to the colleagues who contributed chapters to the volume of essays, Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic, which I co-edited with Gerry Turcotte in 2009; their work, too, has had an integral influence on my thinking about the Canadian Gothic. I’d like to thank, as well, the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries for inviting me to present a plenary lecture at their annual conference in Grainau in 2011, and to the audience at that session for their helpful feedback on my work. Thanks also to the McGill English Graduate Student Association for inviting me to present a keynote lecture based on this work at their 2012 conference on ‘Ghost Stories: Hauntings and Echoes in Literature and Culture’. Many of my friends in the academy have supported this work in a variety of ways, sometimes just by listening: Jennifer Andrews, John Ball, Diana Brydon, Andrea Cabajsky, Renée Hulan, Laura Moss, Tony Tremblay, Gerry Turcotte, Eleanor Ty and Herb Wyile. Your friendship and good humour make this job a pleasure! Thanks also to my research assistants who helped with different tasks along the way: Sue Bowness, Saskia Tolsma and especially Emma Gabe for her fabulous close reading! Above all, my gratitude and love are extended to my husband, Paul Keen, a truly brilliant thinker and scholar, who capably manages to extract sense from my elliptical prattle, and whose luminous mind and sense of humour have helped me chronicle the strange feu follet of Canadian Gothic spectres. I am inexpressibly fortunate and blessed to spend my life with such a grounded, loving and deeply optimistic human being. I am also indebted to Paul for my three beautiful children, Morgan, Abbey and Neve, my close collaborators in ghostspotting.

Language is how ghosts enter the world.

Anne Michaels, Miner’s Pond

Introduction: Settled Unsettlement; or, Familiarizing the Uncanny

Using the word ghost is good because that’s what the old people say when they talk about white people in this country: ‘Ghosts trying to find their clothes.’

Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, The Book of Jessica, p. 96

It is a fact rarely acknowledged that what are arguably the two most famous poems in Canadian literature, Robert Service’s ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ (1907) and John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1919), contain ghosts. More than that, both poems include a ghostly exhortation from the dead to the living, comparable to Hamlet’s father’s ghost who impels Hamlet to ‘Remember’. Both poems are a call to action, and both are about remembering, memorializing. I will discuss Service’s poem in chapter 4, but for now, let me consider the elegiac poem written by McCrae in 1917 while serving with the Canadian Forces overseas in France,¹ a poem that is today recited across Canada every year on 11 November to commemorate the fallen soldiers in the First World War and all other military engagements since. What is often forgotten about the poem is that its implied speaker is a ghost – or rather, a throng of ghosts, the soldiers who died in the midst of battle. ‘We are the Dead’ is a line that shockingly interrupts the reader midway through the poem. Before that point, the poem reads as a straightforward narrative: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow’ might be taken as a description of a pastoral scene, albeit a graveyard, until there is the merest hint in the reference to the crosses that ‘mark our place’ that this is no ordinary omniscient narrator. Yet half-way through the poem, we realize that it is a ghost who has been describing this scene to us, and more uncannily, that it is the consciousness of a dead person (or people) buried beneath those very poppies that appear to open the pastoral scene of the poem. The ‘Dead’, we are told, were once just like us: they ‘lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow’, but now they are larger than life – hence the upper-case D on ‘Dead’ – as haunting spectres who are there to disturb the complacency of ordinary Canadians untroubled by Gothic monsters (either the horrors of war or the Gothic tradition more generally). The Dead in this poem extort from the reader a promise. Without our consent, they impose on us their mission. Like the Ancient Mariner, these Gothic spectres speak into their unwilling victims’ ears a tale that is from beyond the grave: ‘To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high.’ At this point, one might accept the call to arms implied by the poem – we are being asked to continue the fight in order that these men will not have died in vain (only, of course, to lure more men to their early deaths). But it is the conclusion of the poem that is most ambivalent. Our fallen comrades, our national heroes and compatriots, threaten us with a curse: ‘If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep.’ There is something rather ominous in a national poem, recited by schoolchildren every year across the country, which threatens to haunt its citizens if they do not comply with its message. One might argue that the nation is already ‘haunted’ by these ghosts, who sleep fitfully beneath the poppies for, as we know, World War I provoked a number of national crises at home, including the well-known revolt that took place during the conscription crisis of 1917/18 when many Canadians (mainly in Quebec, but not only) refused to pick up the torch held quaveringly by the dead men of this poem. Canada’s national poem, one might argue, is a poem that emblematizes Canadians’ own conflicted relation to their ancestral dead, not only in the context of war, but in the context more generally of generational hauntings as they have played themselves out in Canadian culture from the very beginnings. Canadians have long been haunted by ghosts who summon them to play their part in history.

In an interview with Michael Hulse in 1986, the well-known Canadian author Robertson Davies proclaimed that Canada was not the boring place that people of his generation had been led to believe. As Davies put it, ‘in this country, which is thought to be so dull, the grotesque and the strange are very present, and Gothic goings-on are to be found in every part of Canada’ (‘Robertson Davies in Conversation with Michael Hulse’, p. 254). The fact that it was Robertson Davies who uttered this pronouncement was reassuring at a time when Canadians were reaching towards a postcolonial awareness of themselves and struggling with a longintuited sense that they had been deprived of their local traditions and histories – through myriad forms of cultural, political and pedagogical erasure. Canadians, in short, had inherited a niggling sense that they were dull. With this statement, however, the wizard of Canadian Gothicism and ghoulishness himself had pronounced Canada an eccentric object worthy of attention. That Davies felt the need to announce this fact attests to his sense that the contrary was widely held to be the case. Indeed, as I will demonstrate in chapter 2, Canada’s adequacy as a place that could inspire ghosts and Gothic tales had long been denied, even though there was widespread literary evidence to the contrary. In her 1989 study, A Purer Taste, Carole Gerson details the multiple ways in which Canadian cultural commentators of the nineteenth century expressed doubt about the applicability of Gothic or romance literature to a Canadian environment, even though they longed for a home-grown Canadian tradition of just that kind and pedigree. How could a tradition of Gothic romance, dependent as the genre was on a far-reaching historical consciousness and genealogy, find expression in such a young country? How could the imported Gothic be transformed into a local tradition, both in setting and in sensibility? Writers of the time were preoccupied with what we might today identify as a profound psychoanalytic question: How could an imported tradition of the unhomely be used to contribute to the emergent homeliness of Canadian space? In what ways could the inherently unfamiliar be familiarized, and how would such a transformation affect the discourse of the Gothic in a new space? How could the colonies warrant such attention, when there was neither a long-standing history nor culture to bolster such a literature and, indeed, when the colonials themselves were thought to be a bloodless lot who were more concerned with clearing land and cutting down trees than telling tales that would inspire the soul? From what corners of society would such readers – let alone authors – be drawn?

There have been a number of critical studies of the Canadian Gothic, from Margot Northey’s 1976 study, The Haunted Wilderness, to Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syndrome, and most recently critical studies by Justin Edwards, Marlene Goldman, and Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Northey’s and McGregor’s studies emphasize the Canadian wilderness Gothic tradition. I will consider this tradition of Canadian Gothic writing in chapter 1, but my argument is that this is not in fact the predominant mode of Gothic writing in Canada. On the contrary, if one looks back to Canadian Gothic writings of the nineteenth century, one finds a wealth of Gothic materials that adapt the Gothic for new, nationally consolidating ends. Writers of the Canadian Gothic were early on seeking to engage with a tradition from which they were seemingly excluded, expressly because the New World, because of its very ‘newness’, was not considered a suitable place for literary treatment or inspiration. Canadian authors thus inherited an established literary tradition from which, because of their position as colonial authors, they felt marginalized. Given the processes of erasure that were applied to New World settings by cosmopolitan (and indeed colonial) authors, many Canadian writers chose to adapt the Gothic to colonial cultural-historical circumstances expressly because the Gothic was tied to the very elements that settlement Canada seemed to be lacking: cultural mythology and historical antiquity. The Gothic, indeed, offered a handy means to assert and overcome cultural-historical belatedness through the invention and implantation of a resonant and rooted cultural tradition, thereby contributing to an emergent national consciousness that was founded on a form of constitutive haunting. The proclaimed lack of inspiration or lack of ghosts that was said to predominate in the New World – a topic that I explore at length in chapter 2 – in effect inspired a counterresponse in which authors mobilized the Gothic as a way of infusing their world with cultural-historical depth: a way of haunting the space of Gothic absence.

In this sense, I would argue that the transformation the Gothic experienced in Canadian writing bears similarities to the revision the elegiac tradition underwent among Canadian authors. In Priscila Uppal’s analysis of the specific modality of the Canadian elegy, ‘the work of mourning is not performed in order for the living to achieve separation from the dead, but instead emerges as a process through which reconnection with the dead is made possible’ (We Are What We Mourn, p. 14). If the relation to a national history is a tenuous one, as Uppal argues, processes of construction and invention become imperative, which means that attempts to forge a collective identity are tied up with inherited cultural models transposed into new contexts. In the case of the Canadian elegy – and, I would argue, the Canadian Gothic – the resolution marked by the Freudian work of mourning is overturned in the urge to invent a form of inheritance that will give an illusion of collective memory. This process aligns with Freud’s concept of retroactivity, which is not reducible to ‘linear determinism’ but with processes of ‘retranscription’ or ‘retroactive illusion’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, p. 112). The past, by its very invented/illusory nature as a stratified memory trace, is all the more powerful because it is a retranscription. As Laplanche and Pontalis explain, ‘It is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context’ (p. 112). If we adapt this mechanism to colonial experience, one might argue that the unavailable history/memory becomes the very thing that must be retranscribed as an illusion. If framed within the context of Gothic conventions, the spectral nature of the process attains a materiality that lends the colonial context a sense of grounding.

In his critical introduction to the Gothic, David Punter provides a history of the rise of the genre in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. In this period, he argues, one finds a shift in attitudes towards the past and a rise in the cultural valuation of British history, whereby the primitive, the medieval, the archaic became positively inflected. There was a sense that modern English culture was lacking the ‘vigour’ and ‘sense of grandeur’ possessed by these earlier periods (Punter and Byron, The Gothic, p. 8). Gothic writings thus became a forum for working out concerns about ancestral inheritance and historical continuity, which in late eighteenth-century Britain emerged from post-revolutionary anxieties about social legitimacy. According to this configuration, the Gothic was considered to be ‘prior to … the establishment of civilized values and a well-regulated society’ (p. 8). Yet it was also perceived as somehow necessary as a ground for a properly cultured civilization. For Punter, the Gothic signals a ‘refusal to be written out of history’ (‘Introduction’, p. 8). This statement might serve as an entry point into understanding the transmutation of Gothic traditions in a Canadian context, especially in terms of their association with questions of historicity, inheritance and political power, and with perceptions of the sublime (and uncanny). The one constant in traditional Gothic literature, which is central to my interest in the ways that it circulates in Canada, is that there is always an anxiety about history. This element of Gothic discourse lent itself to a curious transposition in Canada in a kind of fort–da dynamic by which the Gothic would be invoked (repeatedly) only to have the spectre of its presence rejected in the same breath. One can argue that from the beginnings of colonial settlement, the ‘idea’ of Canada was integrally caught up with discourses of the Gothic (which sometimes take the form of rejections of the Gothic, as we will see).

There is a long history of Gothic expression in Canadian literature, reaching back to the colonial foundations of the nation. Indeed, the Gothic Revival in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, and the backlash that followed soon after, coincided with the first attempts, in Canada, to articulate and define a Canadian literature. The criticisms of Gothic sensationalism that took place in the early and mid-1800s were occurring at the very time that Canadian literary discourse was consolidating around discussions of the need for an identifiable national literature, one that would substantiate, distinguish and define the early sensibility of the nascent nation. Writers were seeking to assign a literary modality to the new nation, but were caught within the literary debates that were raging in England. Projecting Gothic absence onto Canada was at once a way of imagining a superseding of the Gothic and a lament for its absence, while at the same time transposing the historical and cultural reach of Gothic literature onto new terrain. Caught in the pull between realism and romanticism, such as Carole Gerson explores in A Purer Taste, early Canadian authors and readers favoured generic conventions that were aligned with both traditions.

Canadian literary discourse, from early on, was entangled with these debates, striving to import a literary pedigree from abroad, but struggling also for forms of distinctly local expression that would distinguish Canadian national and literary identity from both the British and American traditions. There were a number of debates taking place simultaneously, of course; debates about realism versus romance; historical writing versus fiction; the role and definition of the novel as a genre; the applicability of literary treatment to Canadian settings; the relationship between local and cosmopolitan expression; the damaging effects of nationalist boosterism in the building of a Canadian literature; and the competition from the American print industry, which flooded Canadian markets. Within all of this, Gothic romance held a place as a genre that was precariously suited to Canadian contexts. In part this was because the Gothic genre was being denounced by cultural critics for its aesthetic excesses and assault on taste and moral decency, yet more seriously, there was a sense that the application or location of a Gothic romance on Canadian soil was an oxymoron: the place had not yet been sufficiently historied or lived in, it was thought, to be able to inspire a home-grown romantic tradition. On the other hand, it was to the romance tradition, including that of the Gothic romance, that writers and critics turned as the salvation that Canadian literature required: a tradition that would fabricate/conjure the ghosts and superstitions of an authentically Canadian location and would thereby contribute to a locally grounded and poetically resonant emergent national culture. In a sense, it is the Gothic romance, more than the historical romance, that enabled authors to establish this aura of antiquity, since the newness of the settlement colony did not lend itself to distant historical settings in the mode of Sir Walter Scott. And yet the Gothic effects in these works are notably tempered, so that uncanny familiars are rendered just that: familiar.

This context is something that is often overlooked in writings about early Canadian literature. Robert Kroetsch, for example, in his 1983 essay ‘On Being an Alberta Writer’, wonders how Canadian prairie writing might have been different if it had arisen during a different literary-historical moment: ‘What if the prairies had been settled – as much of the United States was in the 19th century – at a time when the Gothic model was easily available to the novelists?’ (p. 329). Although Kroetsch is right to note that the prairies were settled much later than the eastern seaboard of North America, and hence his statement is largely correct about Canadian prairie literature, he elides the fact that a Gothic model was contemporaneous with the early settlement and writings of eastern and central Canada. His statement, which turns to the United States as the model for a North American Gothic tradition, forgets two things: first, that the Gothic in Britain arose before the nineteenth century; and second, that Anglo-Canadian literature, influenced as it was by British (and later American) models, reaches back into the early nineteenth century and before. Early Canadian authors who were writing in the 1830s, including the well-known pioneer sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, were steeped in the British Gothic and Romantic tradition, as is evident in the highly stylized nature of their writings about Canada. Likewise, an enormous amount of Canadian periodical literature from the early 1880s takes the form of Gothic stories and tales, or, by contrast, editorials that lament the overabundance of Gothic sensationalism in the press of the day.

As this book will demonstrate, from very early on the Gothic has held a precarious, even contradictory, position in Canadian literature. Canada, or the area that would eventually come to be called Canada, had long been perceived as either a location of monstrous extremes or an empty terrain that was unhaunted by a historical tradition. Rupert Brooke, during his 1913 tour of the United States and Canada as a travel writer for the Westminster Gazette, would smugly suggest that Canada was embarrassingly unhistoried. In a letter to Edward Marsh, he expressed his distaste for the unhistoried – unGothicized – surroundings:

You can’t think how sick one’s heart gets for something old. For weeks I have not seen or touched a town so old as myself. Horrible! Horrible! They gather round me & say, ‘In 1901 Calgary had 139 inhabitants, now it has 75,000’: & so forth. I reply, ‘My village is also growing. At the time of Julius Caesar it was a bare 300. Domesday Book gives it 347 and it is now close on 390.’ (‘To Edward Marsh’, p. 209)

Ironically, Brooke’s yearning for something old would instil in him a sensation of horror, a kind of uncanny Rip van Winkle effect in which the observer feels himself to be older than everyone else around him. An article on Brooke’s Canadian visit in the 11 November 1978 Montreal Gazette suggests that Brooke found Canada lacking in ‘soul’: ‘it had neither ghosts nor the overlay of generations to give it presence’ (Martin and Hall, ‘A Poet’s Canada’, p. 8). In this formulation, there is no possibility for the uncanny since there is no familiarity, yet this sensation in itself becomes an uncanny one – an intimation of vaguely familiar originary amorphousness (comparable to the terror experienced in the face of sublime emptiness or vastness). Paradoxically, for Brooke, Canada was an almost archetypal scene of Gothic unsettlement, despite its lack of recorded ancient history.

There is an urgency to Brooke’s insistence on his antique credentials that echoes the Canadian condition of Gothic ambivalence. The sensation of horrific newness – a kind of metaphorical orphaning – instills in the subject a reaction formation: an insistence on roots. That Brooke wrote this letter shortly after meeting one of Canada’s foremost Gothic authors, Duncan Campbell Scott, is doubly ironic. Scott might have had something to tell Brooke about the real, though perhaps invisible, horror of Canadian experience: a terror that comes with the sensation of settler inauthenticity which nevertheless gives to life in the New World (for Scott at least) an invigorating edge. Scott might have had something more to say about the sense that one must construct a past – even appropriate it from Indigenous peoples – in an urgent need to fix a Gothic tradition that would foster Canadian self-identity and cultural sensibility. While Brooke probably felt little connection to the conquering Romans he conjures in his retort, Scott would have felt an intimate connection with the tightly coiled tensions among the fur traders, settlers and Indigenous figures that populate his writings. They were, after all, projections of Scott’s own sense of alienation, complicity, and – paradoxically – belonging in the rising nation within which he played so integral a part.

Brooke’s assessment provides a useful prelude to what is perhaps one of the most famous statements of Canadian Gothic expression, the paradoxical finale to Earle Birney’s 1962 poem ‘Can. Lit.’, which concludes with the startling claim: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts / we’re haunted.’ Birney’s poem has been subjected to frequent punning and quotation, and is generally interpreted to mean that Canada lacks an adequately substantive history or culture to render it ‘haunted’ in the sense that European nations (or, indeed, the United States, with which he contrasts Canada in the poem) are haunted. A more considered reading of Birney’s text, however, reveals that he is speaking on the level of perception. The poem conjures various clichés about Canadian belatedness and practicality, which are belied by the very poem that Birney writes. If the poem attests that there is no such thing as a ‘haunted’ (i.e., adequately uncanny and textured) Canadian culture, the poem, as an example of the supposed lack of ‘Can. Lit.’, undermines its own (apparent) argument. Canadians, his poem argues, are haunted by a sense of colonial inferiority which projects an apparent lack where there is none. It is not that there are no ghosts, but rather that people are too blinkered to see them. Birney’s poem expresses an anxiety about historical erasure which, even in its supposedly anti-Gothic assertion, is a concern common to most Gothic fictions: the underlying fear that somehow the ‘past’ has been overturned too precipitately.

In Birney’s poem, it is the Gothic, as a genre, that is conjured as having been erased. In other words, the absence of Gothic effects is evidence of the absence of cultural memory, which, historically, may be related to two factors: the incongruity of European epistemological systems with the Aboriginal ones they encountered in North America; and the failure of imported European ghosts to make the easy transition to a new world. Questions of authenticity thus haunt and, paradoxically, gothicize Canadian spaces, from the beginnings of European settlement in what is now Canada into the present day. Historical erasure, in a Canadian context, is equated with an absence of Gothic remembering and, by extension, with a sensation of alienation because the Gothic is not available to render the home space (un)heimlich. This desire for ‘settled unsettlement’ informs much Canadian writing, which, contrary to Birney’s assertion, is invested in an obsessive resettling of local ghosts. Birney may be right to suggest that it is not the ghosts that haunt, but the fear that they are inadequate to the task.

As this book will demonstrate, this mixed stance with respect to the gothicization of Canada has a long history in Canadian cultural expression.² Indeed, Canada may have the particular distinction of having a Gothic tradition that both is and is not one. This bifurcated condition originates in two interrelated phenomena dating from the periods of first contact and early settlement. From very early on, Canada was considered at once too young (a ‘new’ world) and too old (an antiquated primordial space): an empty space waiting to be written upon and a space teeming with Gothic monsters so alien that their appearance as recognizably ‘unhomely’ was not always immediately apparent. On the one hand, Canada was figured as an ‘empty’ and unpeopled land devoid of legitimate inhabitants, culture, history, antiquity … beyond the reach of memories. Gothic renditions of the New World could not easily project anxieties onto the terrors of the past since the ‘pastness’ of the place, outside its assumed primordiality, was not evident to newcomers. ‘Gothic atmospheres’, writes Fred Botting, ‘have repeatedly signalled the disturbing return of pasts upon presents’ (Gothic, p. 1). But what if there is no clearly identifiable and agreed-upon ‘past’? On the other hand, imperialist responses to the New World figured that land as a place populated by monsters, savages, sublime landscapes and strange mythical beasts. Indeed, the extensive colonization of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with the rise of the Gothic as a genre in Europe; so it is not surprising that we see this mode applied to experiences of the New World. Many of these works are responding to the profound psychic disarray resulting from social and cultural transplantation to a new, strange and frightening locale. There were thus two dichotomous features of Gothic expression in early Canadian literature: one positing the Canadian wilderness as a Gothic landscape inhabited by savage creatures (animal and human) which posed a threat to the European adventurers; the other conjuring the place as an equally terrifying terra nullius that was devoid of Gothic effects or ghosts, with the accompanying implication that the Gothic could not be inscribed on the place in any meaningful way. The latter gave rise to the paradoxical sense that Canada, as a ‘new’ world, was both unfamiliar and ‘unhaunted.’ This approach informed the emergent belief that Canadians were a ‘practical’ people who had no time