[They]
heard so often, “There shall stand our home–
“On yonder slope, with vines about the door!”
That the good wives were almost made to see
The snowy walls, deep porches, and the gleam
Of Katie’s garments flitting through the
rooms;
And the black slope all bristling with burn’d
stumps
Was known amongst them all as “Max’s
House.”
–Isabella
Valancy Crawford, Malcolm’s Katie:
a Love Story 2: 247-53
Of
whatever it is constructed, except it be solely of fantasy,
a house transforms its portion of space into a place.
As a fixed entity, it is permanently there
(and here) unless and until it is demolished.
As a building in a location, it enters the virtual reality
of surveys, maps, postal directories, address books.
As a solid but holey enclosure, it separates its inside
from the outside while permitting entrance, egress,
and vistas.1
As a place, an entity, a location, an address to visit,
stay, leave, live at or in, it acquires distances to
and from creates nearness and farness, engenders associations
and prompts memories, enters and even inspires literary
texts. Much of this is captured by Martin Heidegger
when he writes in “Building Dwelling Thinking”
that, “by virtue of constructing locations,”
“building ... is a founding and joining of spaces”
(Poetry, Language, Thought 158) and by Wallace
Stevens when he writes in “Anecdote of the Jar”
that, when “placed ... upon a hill,” a jar
“ma[kes] the slovenly wilderness / Surround that
hill” and “[takes] dominion everywhere”
(21). Much of it would also have been well understood
by the settlers and builders of early Canada and by
the writers who, like Isabella Valancy Crawford, responded
textually to the buildings and settlements, villages
and cities, that they saw or imagined around them as
aspects of space in the process of being made into a
home place.
As
well as being landmarks and place-makers, houses are
the products of memories and the producers of memories.
Whether in reality or in texts, they are “memory-homes”
(Matt Cohen (1942-99) (Elizabeth and After
13) from the very moment of their conception and construction,
whether mental or physical. Since most early emigrants
had no idea – that is, memory – of what
a log house looks like, emigrant ships were advised
to carry “models of houses” to enable passengers
to build “mimic log houses” of “sticks”
during the voyage across the Atlantic (Robert Mudie,
The Emigrant’s Pocket Companion [1832]
qtd. in Guillet 78). Houses like the one that Max has
built by the end of Malcolm’s
Katie – a “little home …
of unbark’d trees” with a “trellis’d
porch” (7:37,4) – could not have
been imagined into existence or into the poem without
memories of similar houses. Always retrospective in
form and style, houses are also “triggers”
of memory or, as Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre
would have it “memory machine[s]” (8), by
dint of their ability to prompt personal reminiscences
and to evoke the longer past, be it historical, political,
or artistic. “I am home. / Old farmhouse, …
talk about … the first time we met,” writes
Michael Ondaatje (1943- ) of visiting friends in Wawanosh,
Ontario after several months away; “in the 1830’s”
“We would be plotting revolution…. And outside
the same heat …” (Secular Love
[1984] 110-11). “[I]t was there that the traitor
Benedict Anderson lived while in Canada,” wrote
Elizabeth S. Tucker of a house in Fredericton, New Brunswick
nearly a century earlier. “A pile of ruins is
now all that is left of the place … [but] [h]ere
once was heard the martial tread of this mysterious
man as he walked up and down in meditation bent …”
(22). John Ruskin may have been exaggerating when he
claimed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849) that “there are but two conquerors of …
forgetfulness …, Poetry and Architecture; and
the latter in some sort includes the former, and is
mightier in its reality” (148), but he was surely
right to identify memory – the capacity to evoke
and inspire – as one of architecture’s salient
and most valuable qualities.
During
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
the absence of “gothic tow’rs” and
“pillars glowing with Corinthian flowers”
(Bayley 455-56) in Canada’s urban and
rural landscapes was occasionally noted and usually
regarded as of little importance in view of the country’s
other amenities (see Chapter
1: Preliminary). By the end of the nineteenth century,
however, several factors, including the nationalism
that came with nationhood and the nostalgia that came
with modernity, had generated extensive interest in
Canada’s past and its historic buildings (see
the Annex to Chapter
4: Rising and Spreading Villages). This interest
in turn helped to prepare the ground for the Canadian
wing of the heritage movement, which would come to full
strength in the decades preceding the Millennium, when
“accelerating technical processes,” “increased
mobility around the globe,” and a crisis of belief
in progress created an intense “need for temporal
anchoring” and “a memory boom of unprecedented
proportions” (Huyssen 5-9, and see Bentley, Mnemographia
1: xvi-xxiii). That these developments produced a large
number of Canadian architexts that are concerned to
a greater or lesser extent with remembering comes as
no surprise, but what is a little surprising at first
blush is the extent to which such architexts focus,
not on museums, historic sites, and other official aides
mémoires, but on houses: to be sure there
are historically retrospective responses in prose and
poetry to the Brock Monument, the Quebec Citadel, Fort
Anne, Fort MacLeod, and numerous other official monuments,2
but the preferred triggers of memory in Canada both
before and after Confederation have been domestic buildings.
I
In
the nineteenth century especially (though by no means
exclusively), the houses that worked most effectively
as memory triggers were ones that were known or felt
to have been the sites of “passion, … action,
and … lived experience” and thus come to
possess what Henri Lefebvre terms an “affective
kernel or centre” (42). The oak tree near Queenston
where Thomas Moore was believed to have composed “Ballad
Stanzas” during his visit to the Niagara region
in 1804 was dubbed “Moore’s Oak” and
became an object of poetic and patriotic veneration.3
While travelling from the Talbot Settlement to the head
of Lake Erie in 1819, John Howison took shelter from
a snow storm in “the remains of a large Indian
wigwam” and, as “the flakes of snow fell
in noiseless succession among the boughs of the leafless
woods” beneath a “sombre” sky and
in “a calmness that amounted to solemnity,”
observed and pondered his surroundings:
Several
fragments of Indian utensils, and likewise the skull
of a deer, lay near me, while the blackness of one
spot of ground showed where a fire had once been.
It seemed almost inconceivable, that human beings
should be permanent inhabitants of this wilderness,
– that domestic ties and affections should often
brighten the gloom of such a solitude, – and
that those leading passions, which agitate the hearts
of all men, should be elicited and brought into action
amidst the appalling loneliness and depressing monotony
of the boundless forest. The decaying vestiges of
human existence, which the wigwam exhibited, made
the scene appear more desert and affecting than it
would otherwise have done. (185-86)
In “Legends
of the Early Settlers” (1847) by “Cinna,”
the historical events recounted in the sketch are introduced
by a vignette of Johnstown (now Prescott, Ontario),4
its “streets,” “decay[ing] Court House
(1842), and the“one storey” house in the
“Dutch style, with sharp pointed roof, and curious
gables,” in which “John Graves Simcoe …
held his levee, on his first arrival in Upper Canada”
(199). “Young Canada … may be more prone
to look forward to the future with hope, than back on
the past with regret,” avers the narrator, “[y]et
the house in which … Simcoe reposed himself and
cast his martial eye over the gracefully curving bay,
the sparkling [St. Lawrence] river, and the dilapidated
fortifications of the old French ascendancy [Fort de
Lévis (1760)] … may still be an object
of interest … in a Province, which owes so much
of its present prosperity to the good commencement made
by one possessed of his historic heroism, humanity,
and noble self-denial in the cause of an exiled race
[that is, the Loyalists].” Unusual in style, modest
in size, and only tenuously connected to Simcoe, the
house is nevertheless for “Cinna” a means
of connecting the past to the present and of asserting
a continuity of values and achievement. As was the case
with the oak that became Moore’s and the Native
remains that moved Howison, “an affective kernel
or centre” a “knowledge” of “what
happened at a particular spot or place and thereby changed
it” has created a “representational space”
in which objects (the tree, the remains, the house)
retain their physical existence and, at the same time,
become legible and symbolic texts (Lefebvre 42, 37,
39).
A
similar process can be seen at work in the chapter on
“The Duke of Kent’s Lodge” with which
Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) begins the third
series of The Clockmaker (1840). The Lodge
in question – an ornate structure on Bedford Basin
near Halifax whose only surviving component is a circular
neoclassical music pavilion (see Kalman 1: 132-33) –
was not in fact “owned” by the Duke of Kent,
as Haliburton asserts (Sam Slick 285) but leased
to him during his sojourns in Nova Scotia during the
seventeen nineties by the then lieutenant governor,
Sir John Wentworth (MacNutt 297). Nor was it merely
“the scene of [the Duke’s] munificent hospitalities”
(Sam Slick 284), but the residence that he
shared with Thérèse-Bernadine Montegnet
(Madame de Saint-Laurent), his beloved companion for
twenty-seven years prior to his marriage in 1818 to
Victoria Mary Louisa, the mother of Queen Victoria.
A Burkean Tory bent on strengthening Canada’s
ties with Britain as a bulwark against the United States,
Haliburton both elides the scandalous history of the
Prince’s Lodge (as it is more commonly known)
and emphasizes its royal associations. It is “the
only ruin of any extent in Nova Scotia, and the only
spot either associated with royalty, or set apart and
consecrated to solitude and decay” (287). By virtue
of “the long and close connection … between
them [and Queen Victoria’s] illustrious parent,”
Nova Scotians “feel a … lively interest
in, and a devoted attachment to,” the Monarch
and “flatter themselves [that] her Majesty …
will condescend to regard them as ‘the Queen’s
own’” (288). “The Duke of Kent’s
Lodge” is, indeed, as Haliburton’s biographer,
V.L.O. Chittick remarks, a “rhapsody to royalty”
and “a creditable example of the graveyard school
of composition” that constitutes an early phase
of British Romanticism (470, 308).
Because
the Prince’s Lodge is a visible sign of “the
bonds of affection” between Nova Scotia and Britain,
its rapid “decay” can only be for Haliburton
a dismaying sign of the disintegration of the imperial
relationship. This is not stated directly in “The
Duke of Kent’s Lodge” but it is clearly
evident in the elegiac tone of the sketch. Everything
about the “ruin,” from its “tottering
fence” to its “silence and desolation,”
“bespeak a rapid and premature decay … and
tell of … the transitory nature of all earthly
things” (284-85). “[M]ost depressing”
is the speed with which the wood of which the Lodge
was constructed has decayed. Unlike the “massive”
brick and stone ruins of European “antiquity,”
which “exhibit the remains of great strength,
and though injured and defaced by the slow and almost
imperceptible agency of time, promise to continue thus
mutilated for ages to come,” “a wooden ruin
shows rank and rapid decay, concentrates its interest
on one family, or one man, and resembles a mangled corpse
rather than the monument that covers it. It has no historical
importance, no ancestral record. It awakens not the
imagination” (285). Of course, Haliburton’s
own imaginative response to the “historical”
and “ancestral” implications of the Prince’s
Lodge has already belied these assertions. Wooden it
may be, but in The Clockmaker “the only
ruin … in Nova Scotia … associated with
royalty” becomes a bleak memento mori,
a resonant symbol of the mutability and demise of all
earthly things, including “the first and fairest
empire in the world” (287).
“The
Duke of Kent’s Lodge” begins with the hopeful
assertion that “[t]he communication by steam between
Nova Scotia and England will form a new era in colonial
history” (283), but the present and projected
conditions of the Prince’s Lodge are an architectural
narrative with a very different ending. Not only has
the “vegetable decomposition” of its wood
made it “deformed, gross, and repulsive,”
but “[th]e forest is … reclaiming its own
so fast that in a “few years … all trace
of it will have disappeared for ever” (285). Already
in 1828, less than ten years after the Duke of Kent’s
death, the eaves of the Lodge are full of “luxuriant
clover” and “coarse grasses,” and
its wooden “portico … present[s] a mass
of vegetable matter, from which ha[s] sprung up a young
and vigorous birch-tree, whose strength and freshness
seem … to mock the helpless weakness that nourishe[s]
it” (285-86). The near-bathetic pathos of these
statements and an accompanying note stating that between
1828 and 1840 both “porch and tree … disappeared”
(286) indicates the depth of Haliburton’s dismay
at the “relapse into nature” (286) that
he continued to find at the Prince’s Lodge. What
future could there be for the British presence and the
imperial connection “in a climate where the living
wood grows so rapidly, and the dead decays so soon,”
where the residence of the “commander-in-chief
of the [British] forces in th[e] colony” could
so quickly have become the “mouldering”
abode of “the ill-omened bat” (286, 184,
287)? Small wonder that in 1856 Haliburton emigrated
to England and, as a Tory parliamentarian and pamphleteer,
continued to argue “for the development of a colonial
empire with an improved communication system”
(Cogswell 355).
More
important than this proleptic aspect of “The Duke
of Kent’s Lodge,” however, is its rôle
in giving the Prince’s Lodge a virtual existence
that has persisted long after all but a portion of what
the sketch describes, interprets, and theorizes. Of
course, the prominence, if not the persistence, of Haliburton’s
sketch as a component of Canadian literature and culture
is contingent on its literary merit, the esteem in which
its author is held, and, hence, on the vicissitudes
of taste and reputation. To Archibald MacMechan, writing
as a conservative and anti-Modernist in the nineteen
twenties, “The Duke of Kent’s Lodge”
was the “finest essay in serious prose”
of one of the world’s great humorists (see 39
and 188), but to R.E. Rashley, writing in the ’fifties
after the Modernist cry for newness had reverberated
through Canadian culture, it was remarkable only for
a “feeling of inferiority [that] helps to account
for the absence of real feeling from immigrant verse”
(10). When Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle visited Canada in the early ’twenties
he was delighted by the “villages and villas”
that “adorn[ed]” “the beautiful shores
of the St. Lawrence” but dismayed to discover
the “small house of stone … in which Tom
Moore dwelt and where he wrote the ‘Canadian Boat
Song’” bore “[n]o medallion”
to commemorate the event (qtd. in Colombo 99). When
John Robert Colombo collected material for Canadian
Literary Landmarks in the early ’eighties
the house had been transformed by the Victorian Order
of Nurses into a restaurant called Au P’tit Café.
Today, Haliburton’s own house in Windsor, Nova
Scotia is a heritage building, but it is unlikely to
draw as many visitors as it did in the eighteen eighties
and ’nineties when the Windsor and Annapolis Railway
was touting tours of “The Land of Evangeline”
that included a “visit [to] the home of the immortal
‘Sam Slick,’ known at his own fireside as
Judge Haliburton.”5
As will shortly be seen, this would not be the last
time that a house in the Maritimes became home to a
literary character for the purpose of attracting tourists
and boosting the local economy.
Since
Upper Canada (or Canada West as it became in 1840) contained
relatively few of “Cinna”’s “objects
of interest” in the early nineteenth century,
those that did exist, usually by association with prominent
military and/or administrative figures like Brock and
Simcoe, attracted a good deal of attention, and residents
and visitors alike who were in search of historical
buildings often travelled far afield to find them. In
the wake of Romanticism, numerous writers registered
“the appalling loneliness and depressing monotony”
of the province’s “boundless forests”
(Howison 186) as either “exciting to the fancy,”
“oppressive to the spirits” (Jameson 237),
or conducive to “a feeling of gloom almost touching
on sadness” (Traill, Backwoods 63), but
among the first to regard abandoned log houses as “monuments”
to blighted hopes and to make a pilgrimage to a log
house associated with a famous person was Sir Francis
Bond Head (1793-1875), the luckless lieutenant-governor
of the province during the rebellions of 1837-38. Writing
in The Emigrant (1846) of the “deserted
log-huts” standing amid overgrown tree stumps
that he frequently saw while “riding through the
forest,” he confesses that “[t]here was
something that … [he] always felt to be deeply
affecting in passing these little monuments of the failure
of human expectations”:
The courage
that had been evinced in settling in the heart of
the wilderness, and the amount of labour that had
been expended in cutting down so many large trees,
had all ended in disappointment, and occasionally
in sorrows of the severest description. The arm that
had wielded the axe had perhaps become gradually enervated
by ague …, until death had slowly terminated
the existence of the poor emigrant, leaving a broken-hearted
woman and a helpless family with nothing to look to
for support but the clear bright blue heavens above
them. (89-90)
Bond Head
proceeds to recount grizly stories about particular
log-huts and then tells of riding “some miles
out of … [his] way” while travelling to
Ottawa in order to “visit … [the] lone shanty”
where “nearly thirty years” earlier, on
August 28, 1819, the then governor general of the Canadas,
the Duke of Richmond, died of rabies-induced hydrophobia
(90-107). “As I remained for a few minutes on
horse-back before the hovel which commemorates …
the well-known facts” of the Duke of Richmond’s
horrific final hours, he concludes, “I deeply
felt, and have ever since been of opinion, that there
exists in the British peerage no name that is recollected
in Canada … with such affectionate regard as that
noble Englishman and English nobleman, Charles Lennox,
the late Duke of Richmond” (107).
Flowing
from many of the same Romantic springs as the acute
sensitivity displayed by Bond Head were the valorisation
of the peasantry and the reverence for wild Nature that
by the eighteen seventies had combined with American
frontier mythology to make the log cabin an icon of
pioneer simplicity and proximity to the wilderness.6
Scott Symons' contention that “the ‘log
cabin legend’ simply didn’t belong in Canada”
(Place d’Armes 6) reflects a loathing
of American culture and an insistence on Canada’s
distinctiveness that have not always been as well developed
as Canadian nationalists have hoped. Within three years
of the iconographically seminal Pioneer Log Cabin at
the American Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in
1876, “John Scadding’s cabin, built in 1794
on the east bank of the Don River,” was installed
in “Exhibition Park in Toronto … to memorialize
… [the city’s] oldest house” (Gowans
Building Canada 6). The foundations had now
been laid for the elevation of the log cabin into “the
great frontier symbol of Upper Canada” and for
the emergence of a literary sub-genre – the abandoned
pioneer dwelling poem – for which Bond Head had
already cleared the site and into which numerous Canadian
poets, good and bad, would soon begin to cram their
most sentimental and often kitschy feelings.
One
of the earliest and best poets to do so was Archibald
Lampman in two lyrics written in 1893, the year in which
the Columbian Exhibition at Chicago gave the world not
only the White City that he eulogized in “To Chicago”
(see Chapter 7: Northern
Reflections), but also the much publicized Hunter’s
Cabin designed by William Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin
Roche (1855-1927).7
(That Holabird and Roche were pioneers of skyscraper
architecture is one of many indications of the role
of urban intensification in the conceptualization and
development of the wilderness as a countervailing place
in the late nineteenth century.) The earlier of Lampman’s
two poems, “The Settler’s Tale,” is
put into the mouth of a pioneer who recalls in some
detail how, with his own hands, he “built …
a hut by a northern lake”: “The logs I measured
and hauled and hewed…. I raised and mortised them
close and well, / … I finished the roof….
I carved and fitted it fair within” (“Twenty-five
Fugitive Poems” 60). With his hut completed, he
fetches his bride and they live happily for a year until
tragedy strikes, first with her death during childbirth
and then with the death of their infant daughter. Driven
to despair, he loses his will to live and is saved from
suicide by an Indian. Nursed back to physical health
by his savior’s “wild-wood wisdom and rugged
care,” he remains psychologically damaged (“My
joy went forth … my heart is dead”) and
makes no further mention of his abandoned homestead.
The later and less melodramatic of the Lampman’s
poems, “The Woodcutter’s Hut,” stands
squarely in the tradition of the Romantic solitary that
Thoreau
enacted at Walden Pond,8
but the seasonal rhythm that it describes is decidedly
northern: an “animal of a man in his warmth and
vigour, sound and hard, and complete,” its woodcutter
divides his time between the hut in the mountains where
he lives in the winter while logging and the farm, where
during the remainder of the year, he “handle[s]
… plough and … harrow, and scythe”
(Poems 249). The sight of his hut when it lies
empty in the summer prompts thoughts akin to Bond Head’s
meditations on “deserted log huts”:
So lonely
and silent it is, so withered and warped with the
sun and snow,
You would think it the fruit of some dead man’s
toil a hundred years ago;
And he who finds it suddenly there, as he wanders
far and alone,
Is touched with a sweet and beautiful sense of something
tender and gone,
The sense of a struggling life in the waste, and
the mark of a soul’s command,
The going and coming of vanished feet, the touch
of a human hand. |
(Poems
250) |
By endowing
the woodcutter’s hut with a false history, Lampman
(or his speaker) is able to experience emotions and
envision a scenario that is necessarily inauthentic.
This would be unremarkable if it were not an instance
of the susceptibility of log cabins once mythologised
to become receptacles for sentimentality and fantasy
as well as cues for historical retrospection and meditation.
Even
after Modernism had driven the spikes of irony and realism
into the perceived excesses of Romantic sensibility,
the abandoned pioneer dwelling genre continued to thrive.
Indeed, it expanded to embrace other rural buildings
such as barns, silos, grain elevators, and country churches
in almost every region of Canada, from the Nova Scotia
of Alden Nowlan (1933-1983), whose “Abandoned
House” (1970) finds the odd glass of old windows
turning the colours of “sunset … lonesome
/ and strangely cold” (35), to the British Columbia
of Frances McLean (1921- ), whose “A Sod Roofed
Cabin” (1966) includes such mawkish forays into
bathos as “Long since chilled, are the busy hands
/ That scrubbed, sewed and baked a pie” (np).
Such poems as “Cottage” Skydeck
[1971] 23) by Stuart Mackinnon, “Log House”
(Fathers and Heroes [1982] 48-49) by Brian
Mackinnon (1945- ), “Someone Lived Here”
(Tough Roots [1987] 59-60) by Jean McCallion
and “Homelite XL130” (Sanding Down This
Rocking Chair on a Windy Night [1987] 57) would
be indicative of Scottish domination of the core component
of the genre if it were not for contributions by Tom
Howe (1952) (“Prosser’s House,” Myself
in the Rain [1979] 52-53), Blaine Marchand (1949-
) (“Insect,” After the Fact [1979]
11), and several others. As geographically widespread
and varied in the degrees to which they attempt to tug
at heart strings are McCallion’s “Deserted
Country Church” (1987) (21), Stuart Mackinnon’s
“Windmill” (The Lost Surveyor [1976]
23-24), and the abandoned mill, silo, and greenhouse
poems of Valeria Malcolm Baker (“The Old Mill,”
Canadian Heritage [1967]) 18), Nancy Pearce
Maki (1940- ) (“At the Backhouse Mill,”
This County Norfolk [1972] 17), James Deboer
(1941-1976) (“Sunset,” Strings of Memory
[1977] 45), and Terrence Heath (1936- ) (“The
Chinaman,” The Truth and Other Stories
[1972] 12-13). Some of these poems and poems like them
contain fresh and striking images such as McKay’s
“antique cottages … crouch[ing] defensively
/ as though expecting hard core porn” (57), and
the “dangling … jointed legs” of wasps
flying from their “mud nests” of an “old
barn” (26-27) in “Barn Poems” (1972)
by David Helwig (1938- ), but more often than not they
fail to rise above the level typified by Deboer’s
…
o’er the hoary hills
The silent silos of the land
Protrude mysteriously, huge monuments,
Gothic-like, memories of ancestors
And shades of barns scattered about
Whipped by winds and storms of ruthless time,
Hollow, barren, lifeless
Like huge hulks of battered freighters
Swept ashore, too old for battle,
Retired like ancient shrivelled men
Too old for service but not for pain. |
(45) |
Perhaps Deboer
deliberately chose archaic language as the appropriate
medium for his subject, but other aspects of the passage
such as clumsy alliteration, clumps of stale adjectives,
and the suggestion that “freighters” are
war ships scarcely support this charitable construal.9
Although
abandoned dwellings have been a staple component of
writing with a rural or semi-rural setting since before
Confederation, they appear less frequently in works
whose setting is urban, the obvious reason being that
in towns and cities unoccupied houses tend either to
be demolished or adapted to be new uses (as was the
case, for example, with Emily Carr’s house in
Victoria).10
Probably because the transformation of “old houses”
into, say, “dentists’ offices or dress-making
establishments” (Atwood, The Edible Woman
[1969] 78) does little to fire the imagination, adaptive
re-use seldom figures in Canadian writing.11
House demolitions fare little better, but do sometimes
prompt elegiac thoughts about the degradation of the
built environment and the destruction of history. “There
were a few older houses, but they were quickly being
torn down by developers,” observes the narrator
of Margaret Atwood’s “Polarities”
(1977); “soon the city would have no visible past
at all” (Dancing Girls and Other Stories
47). When he discovers that Chorley Park, a fictitious
“Loire valley chateau, built of the finest Credit
Valley limestone that supposedly had served as the residence
of the Ontario “lieutenant-governor” has
been demolished, the protagonist of Anne Michaels’
Fugitive Pieces (1996) laments that it was
“as though an eraser had rubbed out its place
against the sky” (106-07). (As a Jewish writer
whose fiction and poetry is profoundly concerned with
the Holocaust, Michaels [1958- ] is, of course, acutely
aware of the dangers of “eras[ing]” the
past.) To Eirin Mouré in “empire, york
street” (1979), the sight of a man with “survey
equipment” contemplating a “condemned”
house that is not “ancestral” but merely
the occupant of “a city block” that is his
“empire” and the site of his future “condominiums”
conjures up dark thoughts of the “history of empires”
and various forms of imperialistic exploitation (Empire,
York Street 89). The demolition of an old house
can be an occasion for regret and a cause for concern
about the obliteration of the past, but the demolition
of an old house to make space for the construction of
a new building compounds the matter, especially if the
new building is associated with capitalism and the writer
is a socialist. In Canadian literature, condominium
and apartment buildings come second only to office and
bank towers as the most despised of architectural structures.12
In
stark contrast is the affection heaped on Victorian
and Edwardian houses as the dilapidated but enduring
residues of pre-Modern times that are conceived as less
American and more foundationally British Canadian. Architexts
containing pre-Victorian houses with these
and similar implications can be found (the “vast
rambling white colonial [house] … built …
in 1760” [8] in Tolerable Levels of Violence
[1983] by Robert G. Collins [1926- ] is a sterling case
in point), but, like the houses that they evoke, they
are rare and limited to central and eastern Canadian
settings.13
As rare even in very recent writing as objects of attention
let alone generators of memory are houses built after
the First World War – the “‘shabby
Insulbrick bungalows’” (3) in which Matt
Cohen (1942- ) locates part of a short story in Getting
Lucky (2000), the “war-time homes”14
that Joan Crate (1953- ) likens to “a
row of identical ageing midgets dressed in different
clothes” (1)15
in Breathing Water (1989), and the “beige
and uninteresting house” laden with “all
the bone-cracking clichés of Sixties architecture”
that Carol Shields (1935-2003) describes as “a
shell to live in without thought” (13-14) in Small
Ceremonies (1976).16
Vastly more congenial and therefore common are houses
with the “gable[s] … steep roof-edges”
and “walls / Dripping lengths of scarlet creepers”
that Lampman imagined as the home of “Love”
in “The Old House” (1900), a superb poem
that has been almost entirely ignored, probably because
its utterly Victorian theme and architecture were not
congenial to the Modernist critics and anthologists
such as A.J.M. Smith who shaped still-prevailing conceptions
of his work.17
Depending
on their state of preservation, the Victorian houses
of post-Victorian Canadian writing suggest either social
and economic decline or the appeal and persistence of
the achievements and values of their era. In Atwood’s
fictional world, for example, there are “picturesque
red Victorian houses” (Bodily Harm [1981]
18) and “pointy-roofed twin houses” with
“mouldering wooden scroll work around the porches”
(Cat’s Eye 294), there is a “red
brick house with a front porch that has two thick white
pillars holding it up” (52) and there is a house
with a “Gothic tower” and a verandah that
has “begun to sag” (The Blind Assassin
[2000] 58). Indeed, an entire “neighbourhood”
of “old two-storey red brick” houses with
“front porches” look “squalid and
sagging in Lady Oracle (1976) and in Life
Before Man (1979) one of the characters, Lesje,
is reminded of her “grandmother’s house”
by seeing street after Toronto street of “crumbling
insulbrick siding, sagging porches, old houses skewed
and crowded” (268). In “Surviving the Blast”
(1988) by the Nova Scotia writer Lesley Choyce (1951-
), “a three story Victorian house probably owned
by a sea captain is “now a pastiche of cracked
windows,” “curling” paint, and “sagging
and rotted wood gutters and drains” that its landlord
admires for surviving the Halifax explosion (Coming
up for Air 66) but in “The White Ash”
(1983) by the Ontario poet N. Roy Clifton (1909- ) a
“massy red” “three-storey house”
on an “elm-tenanted street” in Toronto “Shed[s]
Victorian calm” on everyone living in it (66).
“Squirrels in the House” (1989) by another
Ontario writer, Bruce Reynolds (1955- ), is a refreshingly
amusing poem about the nightmare of a “Solid-brick,”
“three-storey Victorian” house having its
roof torn off in a gale as a result of the “gnawings
through the faciaboard[s]” of a pair of black
squirrels” (73).
Unfortunately
but predictably the extensive corpus of Canadian
writing on Victorian houses also includes works of startling
banality such as Marshall’s “Victoria Park”
(1994), where “You look and / eyelike dark windows
/ of old brick / row-houses look / back at you”
(Some Impossible Heaven of the Senses 50) and
“Open House” (1992) by David Donnell (1939),
which reads in part:
A
leaded window pane, a semi-Gothic
brick arch around a doorway.
Victorian
gable, chipped green,
deep flat cement window sills. They represent an
infinity
spectrum. The cement porch where a painter was murdered
in 1926, the year that Hemingway published
The Sun Also Rises.
I am quite young, but some of these houses go back
to the 1860s, approximately the period of the Civil
War. |
(64-65)
|
Later in
the piece, when Donnell states that he has “given
… [his] whole life, okay, a big piece, / to the
contemplation of certain images” and asks “where
/ does that leave me?” the reader can readily
think of several answers, none quite so unexpected as
Donnell’s own: “With a large & very
specialized / vocabulary. I have 47 different words
for darkness / including scuro, as in rosso
scuro, a deep red” (66).
No
Canadian poet has meditated at greater length on the
appearance and significance of a Victorian house than
the Hamilton-born writer Philip Child (1898-1978). First
published in Toronto in 1951 and twice prescribed as
a text for students in Ontario’s since-abolished
Grade 13 (Bieman 13), Child’s The Victorian
House is described on its dust-jacket as “the
poet’s in memoriam to an age that is past and
gone” (qtd. in Bieman 16). A Prefatory Note by
Child himself guardedly concedes the element of personal
reminiscence in the poem: “[t]he characters and
episodes of The Victorian House are invented,
not reported from recollection. It is true, however,
that the convention of poetry requires an author to
dip his pen in the blood of at least one or two slain
reticences and to reveal more of himself than, in the
prose of life, he would ordinarily disclose (np). As
Child’s note intimates, a recurring theme of The
Victorian House is the contrast between poetry
and prose. Set against the poetic that Child gives to
the narrator, his mother, his father, and a dying friend
who possesses a saintly quality of “whole-ness”
(30) is the prosaic way of talking and thinking that
characterizes the poem’s other principal character,
a real-estate developer called “Mr. Hammer”
whose “mathematical” interest in the house
that he plans to destroy (2,36) makes him a typical
representative of materialistic capitalism – one
of the “robot-men with mechanistic souls”
who recognize “no thing but things”
and assess the past only in terms of its commercial
potential. (For Lampman’s vision of the productions
and consequences of this mentality in “The City
of the End of Things,” see Chapter
7: Northern Reflections.) “Who built this
house? And what’s its history?” Mr. Hammer
asks between recording its total number of rooms and
explaining his crass reason for wanting to know: “In
my prospectus of a lot of this size / I always write
a note on former owners; / Folks like to think that
a lot they buy was owned / By solid people and has its
little story” (2). While the narrator makes his
way through the house that his father built in 1888
(2), recalling as he goes the personal and historical
associations of the various rooms (“I sometimes
think the walls remember” [5]), Mr. Hammer keeps
up a running commentary on the house’s deficiencies
that prepares the ground for his final financial offer:
“I’ll
give
You Fifteen Thousand for the house and grounds.
The house has got too old; I’ll have to tear
It down, of course. But I can use some bricks
And some of the trim, perhaps, to build a new one.”18 |
Anyone who
has disposed of their parents’ home with the help
of a callous real-estate agent will be especially inclined
to dislike Mr. Hammer, even to wish him ill in his cannibalistic
project.
But
this would be a simplistic response, for as Desmond
Pacey and others have recognized (see Pacey, Creative
Writing in Canada 214-17, Bieman, and Duffy “MEMORY
= PAIN”), Child was a Christian-Humanist who believed
that divine and human love and forgiveness should and
do extend to all human beings, including Judas and his
heirs. “Christ has gone down to search the earth
/ Where Judas’ bones lie low” begins the
final stanza of the last poem in The Victorian House,
and Other Poems, and in the penultimate section
of The Victorian House itself the narrator
affirms that Christ “summoned Judas” as
well as “Peter and John to enter” the “Kingdom
of Heaven … and bade us all / Whose homes must
be a strew of bricks some day, / To come from this our
otherness to it” (36). The mercenary nemesis of
a narrator who feels that he is being betrayed and crucified
(“My Hammer has come back to nail me down”
[20]), Mr. Hammer is also “on his way …
/ To the Kingdom of Heaven” (36), a fellow pilgrim
who must be forgiven and loved by anyone who would truly
imitate Christ. That is why, at the end of the poem,
the narrator, though deeply saddened by the loss of
his family house and earthly “home,” does
not condemn Mr. Hammer but, rather, leaves open the
possibility that his “new house” will be
a manifestation of spiritual renewal – a “new
architecture” that incorporates elements of the
old house, but nevertheless represents “a change
of heart” (Auden 7). It is also why the narrator
describes the “limbs” of an old (and Edenic)
“apple tree” that he played on as a child
as being “stripped for [their] winter sleep”
(1,36): whether it reawakens in spring, as the narrator’s
trope implies that it will, or yields to the axe, as
Mr. Hammer’s plans suggest,19
the apple tree must pass like everything else in the
Christian narrative through death to rebirth or resurrection.
By the conclusion of The Victorian House an
older Canadian house and garden and a poignant instance
of the displacement of the Victorian by the Modern have
been assimilated to a typological scheme that points
to the redemption of the fallen world.
Rarely
have writers been as capable as Child of absorbing the
destruction of an old house, let alone a family home
and “memory-house,” into a romance narrative.
In the opening paragraphs of this chapter, a crisis
of belief in progress or, as Andreas Huyssen puts it,
a rejection of the “celebration of the new as
utopian” that “marked the age of modernity”
(6), was counted among the factors that contributed
to the “memoryboom” of the decades preceding
the Millenium. As a contrast to The Victorian House
and as the conclusion to this portion of the chapter,
here are some stanzas from “Architect Examining
an Old House,” a poem in The End of the Age
(2000) by the Toronto writer A.F. Moritz (1947- ) that
put the contrast between a Victorian house and its postmodern
surroundings at the service of a meditation on what
has befallen the great Enlightenment ideals from which
modernity flowed in these diminished, self-satisfied,
and “unpropitious times.” The modified Sapplic
form of the poem’s stanzas is nicely evocative
of the classical roots of Western civilization without
being merely imitative, as is the case with the postmodern
buildings that the architect deplores.
It
was a powerful dream – that there’s
one spirit,
always the same spirit finding its way
to lands, times, persons. And its aftermath
is
what descends to us here,
Is
what we have, a hovel we inherit:
dull and shrouded, but in it something wants
to fall at times like rusty water, startling
the
lover of desolation
who
in its long- abandoned cellar touches
the corroded, now porous, poisonous lead pipes.
Not yet torn down, forgotten somehow, its grey
façade
of the last century
stands,
a shadow, between clear glass and chrome
developments – behind the doming and arching
of reminiscent designs, unprecedented,
that
suddenly came to us
as
we trailed after the modern, wanting to be
more modern. Yet to this dwarfed house those towers
are as erotes to telamones20
in naked
power
displayed: they lounge
in
mere distance, delighting themselves, leaning
on columns that once a great form of their own
bodies in bare strength bore up, crushed and stronger
for
a passion of enduring. |
(28-29) |
The poem
concludes that “in the dust-bronze light of an
old mirror” it is “Hard … to …
forget that an end has come” (30). Several years
into the new century it is also hard not to hope that
fresh starts are possible.
Annex
Real Houses/Imaginary Characters
“Isn’t
it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines
that Hamlet lived here?” wrote Neils Bohr to Werner
Heisenberg of Kronberg Castle in Sweden in June 1924:
“[s]uddenly the walls and ramparts speak a different
language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark
corner reminds us of the darkness of the human soul,
we hear Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’”
(qtd. in Bruner 45). A more compelling testament to
the power of a text to change the perception of a building
can scarcely be imagined. Yet W.H. Auden disagreed.
“[P]oetry makes nothing happen,” he wrote
in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” as the Second
World War loomed: “it survives / In the valley
of its saying where executives / Would never want to
tamper …” (53). Few, if any, of the architexts
so far examined have affected perceptions of Canadian
buildings as powerfully as Hamlet affected
Bohr’s perception of Kronberg Castle and certainly
none could be marshalled to disprove Yeat’s conviction
that poems lack instrumentality or agency. Nevertheless,
there are texts that have the power to change the way
their readers perceive a particular Canadian building
and there are texts that have made things happen in
this country. The knowledge that it was the childhood
home of Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922) and the inspiration
for “the ‘Plummer Place’” (14)
in The Imperialist (1904) must cast the Thorpe
Brothers Funeral Home at 96, West Street in Brantford,
Ontario in a new light that, among other things, enlivens
its designation as a “home.” Three major
developments in the Maritime provinces are the direct
result of literary works: the “Land of Anne”
on Prince Edward Island, Le Pays de la Sagouine in New
Brunswick, and Cape Breton Highlands National Park in
Nova Scotia.
Under
the fictional name of Elgin, Brantford is represented
by Duncan in enough detail in The Imperialist
to become a circumambient environment whose components
are readily visualized and remembered by the reader
and, hence, readily available to make the building at
96 West Street “speak … a different language.”
Generally known in Elgin by the name of the immigrant
from England who built it some twenty-five years earlier,
“the Plummer Place” is home in the novel’s
present day (circa. 1902-03) to Mr. and Mrs. John Murchison,
more recent immigrants from Scotland whose six children
include Lorne, “the imperialist” of the
title. Situated in “an unfashionable outskirt”
of the town, it is nevertheless “a respectable
place” for a hardware-store owner and his family
to live; indeed, its “ornamental grounds,”
physical fabric, and, especially, its large coach barn
require more money and manpower than the Murchisons
can provide: “a fountain ... with a plaster Triton”
in the “middle of the lawn” is “difficult
to keep looking respectable,” “the cornice
... in the library” is but one of a number of
things that continually need attention, and “the
barn [is] ... outside the radius of possible amelioration”
and “pass[ing] gradually, visibly, into decrepitude”
(14, 22, 23). To Haliburton all this would have been
dismaying evidence of the decay in Canada of the English
upper-class traditions that the house embodies, but
to Mrs. Murchison, who shares her husband’s middle-class
liberal values, it is a regrettable but necessary result
of the family’s financial situation that is consistent,
moreover, with the value of Elgin – which is to
say, English-Canadian – society. She “often
wishe[s] [that] she could afford to pull … down”
the coach barn, not just to remove a useless eyesore,
but also because, like most people in Elgin, she recognizes
the incongruity between the class-system represented
by “the Plummer Place” and the more democratic
values of early twentieth century Canada:
The
house was admired – without enthusiasm –
but it was not copied. It was felt to be outside the
general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it wore
its superiority in the popular view like a folly.
It was in Elgin, but not of it; it represented a different
tradition; and Elgin made the same allowance for its
bedroom bells and its old-fashioned dignities as was
conceded to its original master’s habit of a
six o’clock dinner, with wine. (23-24)
Whether or
not this passage was based on actual responses to Duncan’s
childhood home will probably never be known, but the
house is certainly capable of generating the sorts of
attitudes described: less insistently evocative of Tuscan
villas than Bellevue (see Chapter
7: Northern Reflections), its Italianate form and
substantial dimensions – its low-hipped roof,
its scroll-bracketed eaves, its arcaded verandah, and
accentuated portico – speak loudly of Old World
tradition, solidity, formality, and elegance.
What
Mrs. Murchison does find attractive about “the
Plummer Place” is “the large ideas upon
which it ... [was] built and designed” (23). As
Duncan prepares to register the impact of the house
on John Murchison, she places it in relation to the
social strata and eclectic tastes that are evident elsewhere
in Elgin’s built environment:
The architectural
expression of the town was on a different scale, beginning
with ‘frame,’ rising through the semi-detached,
culminating expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas
and modern conveniences, and blossoming, in extreme
instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk portières
for interior decoration.21
The Murchison house gained by force of contrast: one
felt, stepping into it, under influences of less expediency
and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention;
its shabby spaces had a redundancy the pleasanter
and its yellow plaster cornices a charm the greater
for the numerous close-set examples of contemporary
taste in red brick22
which made, surrounded by geranium beds, so creditable
an appearance in the West Ward. John Murchison in
taking possession of the house had felt in it these
satisfactions, … the more perhaps because he
brought to them a capacity for feeling the worthier
things of life which circumstances [in a northern
Scottish town] had not previously developed. (24)
The architectural
forms, interior decorations, and floral adornments of
the other houses in Elgin betoken the conventionality,
fashion consciousness, and constricted lives and minds
of most of the town’s residents. In contrast,
“the Plummer Place”/“Murchison house”
was conceived and built, Mrs. Murchison imagines, by
“a person of large ideas,” and its effect
on her husband is expansive and inspiring: he takes
“acute pleasure … [from] seeing the big
horse-chestnuts in flower”; he derives continual
satisfaction from feeling the “weight” of
the hall door; and he resolves to “supplement
the idiosyncracies” of the house by filling the
bookcase in its “library” with “English
classics” (22, 24).
The
house also has a positive effect on the Murchison children,
especially Lorne and his older sister Advena, for it
stimulates their imagination and thus strengthens the
faculty that will enable them to see beyond the horizons
of Elgin and, indeed, Canada:
…
the place … was pure joy to the young Murchisons.
It offered a margin and a mystery to life. They saw
it far larger than it was: they invested it, arguing
purely by its difference from other habitations, with
a romantic past. “I guess when the Prince of
Wales came to Elgin, mother, he stayed here,”
Lorne remarked as a little boy. Secretly he and Advena
took up boards in more than one unused room, and rapped
on more than one thick wall to find a hollow chamber;
the house revealed so much that was interesting, it
was apparent to the meanest understanding that it
must hide even more. It was never half lighted, and
there was a passage in which fear dwelt – wild
were the gallopades from attic to cellar in the early
nightfall, when every young Murchison tore after every
other, possessed, like cats, by a demoniac ecstasy
of the gloaming. And the garden, with the autumn moon
coming over the apple trees and the neglected asparagus
thick for ambush … – these were joys of
the very fibre, things to push ideas and envisage
life with an attraction that made it worthwhile to
grow up. (25-26)
“[I]f
I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house,”
writes Gaston Bachelard as he embarks on his phenomenological
“topoanalysis” of the house and its components
in The Poetics of Space, “I should say:
the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the
dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace….
If it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors,
our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly
delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our
daydreams” (6, 8). There can be little doubt that
Duncan’s lengthy description of the responses
of the Murchison children to the house and garden of
“the Plummer Place” contains elements of
memory and daydream (reverie) or that she would
have accepted Bachelard’s claim that the house
occupies a central place in “the metaphysics of
consciousness” and the “phenomenology of
the imagination” (7, 17). In the Duncan house
at 96, West Street in Brantford lay seeds of “the
Plummer Place” in The Imperialist and
in “the Plummer Place” the seeds of Lorne’s
capacity to envisage imperial unity and Advena’s
willingness to become the wife of a missionary in White
Water, Alberta (258).23
In both instances lies the fundamental truth that to
imagine a house is always in some sense to (re-)create
it and, for better or worse, to change a part of the
world from what it is or was to what it might be or
could become.
The
architectural form as well as the geographical location
that Duncan gives to “the Plummer Place”
are further indications of its rôle as an encouragement
to ideas and vision. “[A] dignified old affair,
built of wood and painted white,”24
it has “wide green verandahs compassing …
[its] four sides” (22) that allow the Murchisons
and their children to look east (towards Britain), south
(towards the United States), and north and west (towards
the sites of Canada’s burgeoning prosperity such
as Alberta).25
Situated in the West Ward (and thus oriented towards
Canada and the future) and, more precisely, where “the
plank sidewalk finishe[s]” and the “wheatfields”
begin, it occupies a liminal – and therefore creative
– position “betwixt and between” different
realms, a site of “possibility” where cultural
gives can be “deconstruct[ed]” and “reconstructed”
into new units and combinations (Victor Turner 159-60).
That the house is indeed such a site of creative destruction
is abundantly evident, not least in the “frayed
air of exile from some garden some garden sloping to
the sea” exuded by the “plaster Triton”
on the lawn and by the Murchison’s early attempts
to find a practical use for the horse barn: “at
one time [they] kept a cow in [it], till a succession
of ‘girls’ left on account of the milking,
and the lane was useful as an approach to the back yard
by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter”
(22-23). (Perhaps the “cornstacks … [that]
camp … around [the house] like a besieging army”
in the “autumn” [22] are to be read as figures
for the forces in the Canadian environment that militate
against the persistence without adaptation of upper-class
British traditions in North America.) When Duncan’s
narrator later discloses that she has “embarked
... upon an analysis of the social principles in Elgin”
the “clue or two more” that she “leave[s]
… for the use of the curious” confirm that
“the Plummer Place” is paradigmatic of British
Canadian society:
No doubt
[Elgin’s social] rules had their nucleus in
the half-dozen families, among whom we may count the
shadowy Plummers, who took upon themselves, …
by the King’s pleasure, the administration of
justice, the practice of medicine and of the law,
and the performance of the charges of the Church of
England a long time ago. Such persons would bring
their lines of [class] demarcation with them, and
in their new milieu of backwoods settlers
and small traders would find no difficulty in drawing
them again. But it was a very long time ago. The little
knot of gentry-folk soon found the limitations of
their new conditions…. They took, perforce,
to the ways of the country…. Trade flourished,
education improved, politics changed…. The original
dignified group broke, dissolved, scattered….
It was a sorry tale of disintegration with a cheerful
sequel of rebuilding,26
leading to a little unavoidable confusion as the edifice
went up. Any process of blending implies confusion
to begin with; we are here at the making of a nation.
(40-41)
With “wheatfields
... billow[ing] up to its fences” in the summer
(22), “the Plummer Place”/ “Murchison
house” is Duncan’s architectural microcosm
of the edifice of British North America/Canada. “Building
and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for
dwelling,” writes Heidegger, but they are also
“insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies
itself with its own affairs in separation instead of
listening to one another” (Poetry, Language,
Thought 160-61). In The Imperialist, as
will be seen again in the next chapter, “building
and thinking” most definitely listen to each other
and “belong to dwelling.”
Four
years after the appearance of The Imperialist
in book form in 1904, the novel that has done more than
any other to change a portion of Canada was published
in New York. Anne of Green Gables (1908) by
Lucy
Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) contains an interlocked
trio of elements whose impact on the perception, landscape,
economy and “image” (not to say “brand”)
of its setting was to prove immense: Anne herself, the
red-haired orphan whose power to transform people as
well as landscapes in and through her imagination prefigures
the effect of the numerous novels in which she would
eventually appear; the landscape and seascape of the
area around Cavendish, which figures in the novel as
Avonlea; and Green Gables, the house of Anne’s
adoptive parents Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, which
Montgomery based on the house of David and Margaret
Macneill, who were cousins of her grandfather. (Montgomery
herself was doubtless a visitor to the house, but she
never lived there; rather, she lived and wrote Anne
of Green Gables in the home of her maternal grandparents,
Alexander and Lucy Macneill.) As indicated by the opening
description of it, Green Gables is as inseparable from
its environs as it becomes for its imaginative young
occupant:
the big,
rambling, orchard-embowered house where the Cuthberts
lived was a scant quarter of a mile up the road from
Lynde’s Hollow…. Matthew Cuthbert’s
father, as shy and silent as his son after him, had
got as far away as he possibly could from his fellow
men without actually retreating into the woods when
he founded his homestead. Green Gables was built on
the furthest edge of his cleared land and there it
was to this day, barely visible from the main road
along which all the other Avonlea houses were so sociably
situated. (3-4)
Located at
a point of balance between the human and the natural
realms on the “edge” of a field and the
forest, Green Gables recalls “the Plummer Place”
in its liminality, but with some important differences:
whereas the Murchison’s house is a part of the
built environment that is undergoing a process of “disintegration”
and “rebuilding” in response to its Canadian
circumstances, the Cuthberts’ house is apart from
the built environment and represents the persistence
across generations of a bucolic – indeed, pastoral
– harmony between human beings and the natural
world that will prove utterly congenial to Anne’s
post-Romantic sensibility. Not only are its gables green,
but the east window of its kitchen, “whence you
g[e]t a glimpse of the bloom white cherry-trees in the
left orchard and nodding, slender birches down in the
hollow by the brook, [is] greened over by a tangle of
vines” (4-5).
Encouraged
by the appearance between 1909 and 1920 of several sequels
to Anne of Green Gables as well as a movie
of the novel (1919), tourists eager to visit the house
and landscape in which it is set were already visiting
Prince Edward Island in considerable numbers in the
nineteen twenties, but the transformation of the novel’s
settings into tourist sites did not begin in earnest
until the mid-’thirties. Perhaps inspired by the
thriving tourist industry that had been developed in
late nineteenth-century Nova Scotia around Longfellow’s
Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie (1847) and, to
a lesser extent, Haliburton’s Sam Slick,
the federal government began to expropriate the seashore
east and west of Cavendish for the Prince Edward Island
National Park, which is configured so as to embrace
the town and include the David and Margaret Macneill
house. This too was acquired by the federal government
and, in a curious (even uncanny) mixture of authenticity
and inauthenticity, equipped with green gables, an Edwardian
girl’s bedroom, and other period accoutrements
as an appropriate physical dwelling for Montgomery’s
fictional character so that it became a there (or here)
inhabited by the materialized spectre whose presence
(presumably) can be felt by visitors.27
Present-day Green Gables is thus a building that inspired
an architext and was in turn inspired by that architext;
a house in which a fictional character lives spectrally
at the centre of a landscape organized by a fiction
but no less real for that. As employees of Parks Canada
have been known to observe wryly, it is “the house
in which the girl who never lived never lived”
(qtd. in Struzik 3). By 1973 when Green Gables was opened
to the public, there had been two more Anne movies (1934,
1941) and Anne of Green Gables: the Musical
(1965 and almost every summer thereafter). Further encouraged
by the alluring 1985 television series directed by Kevin
Sullivan and starring the brilliantly chosen Megan Follows,
the transformation of north-central P.E.I. into an Anne
of Green Gables theme park was virtually complete: the
saddle of the Island is now known as the “Land
of Anne” or “Anne’s Land” and,
much to the horror of many tourists and residents, now
contains everything for the Anne fan from “The
Enchanted Castle” in “The Enchanted Lands”
and “Avonlea, Village of Anne of Green Gables”
to “The Anne of Green Gables Store” and
“Anne’s Tea Party.” “This area
needs no introduction,” reads the Prince Edward
Island Handbook for tourists (2000 edition); “it
is the region that has made P.E.I. famous around the
world through Lucy Maud Montgomery’s feisty fictional
character, Anne of Green Gables … plan to stay
for a while” (50).28
In part a consequence of the tourist industry in which
Anne of Green Gables looms so large, the construction
of the 12.9- kilometre Confederation Bridge (1993-97)
between the Island and New Brunswick can only add further
impetus to the Annification of a province in which tourism
comes second only to agriculture in economic importance.
Indeed, in 2002 the P.E.I. Department of Tourism revealed
that “visits to the island … [were] up 60%
since the … Bridge opened in 1997 and that 40%
of the visitors sa[id] they came because of Anne”
(Gates).
Although
the creation of a representational space on the basis
of what happened there to a fictional character rather
than a real person is not unknown in other countries
(221b Baker Street quickly comes to mind), it is relatively
unusual and appears all the more freakish in light of
the fact that the actual house in which Montgomery lived
and wrote in Cavendish is a subterranean ruin that attracts
only a small fraction of the touristic interest generated
by Green Gables. A pilgrimage to the ruin is worthwhile
for at least two reasons, however: like a journey to
Saint-Marie among the Hurons as described by E.J. Pratt
(1883-1964), it brings the visitor to “the exact
spot where [Montgomery] wrote and read” and may
engender “an emotional experience … akin
to the feeling which a parent would receive standing
near the soil under which a child had been buried”
(E.J. Pratt 121); and for those who have had
this experience of its “affective kernel or centre,”
it deepens the realization that the treatment of Montgomery’s
fiction as if it were reality – indeed, the embodiment
of it in material forms – constitutes a gross
violation of the Victorian principles whereby the excesses
of fancy to which Anne is given are methodically chastened
by experience until her Romanticism is aligned with
a mature sense of duty and responsibility. Perhaps an
even stronger sense of presence and infidelity may result
from a visit to Montgomery’s grave in a small
cemetery adjacent to the Royal Atlantic Wax Museum,
which contains “109 life-size wax figures”
of movie stars, British royals, American presidents,
and the like (Prince Edward Island Handbook
58). Little wonder that Cynthia Brouse has invoked Jean
Baudrillard’s McLuhenesque concept of the “simulacrum”
(36) – the likeness that becomes more real than
the thing it purports to represent – in relation
to all but a few elements of “The Land of Anne.”
But
why, it may be asked, has “Anne” of all
literary characters become the centrepiece of the largest
assemblage of simulacra in Canada? Why was she rather
than Montgomery herself chosen as a primary means of
attracting tourists to Prince Edward Island? The very
obvious answer – that a widely known and loved
character has eclipsed her relatively colourless creator
– should not be allowed to obscure other factors,
including the preference in popular culture for easily
identifiable (and thus marketable) characters and images
over the writers and texts from which they spring, and
the absence in Prince Edward Island of appealing (and
again marketable) alternatives in such realms as history,
folklore, and archaeology. No doubt, similar factors
lay behind the constitution of Evangeline and Sam Slick
as real figures in late nineteenth-century Nova Scotia,
the result being a continuity of incarnating the literary
imaginary in the Maritime provinces that, once recognized,
can be seen to include two other examples: that of La
Sagouine, the literary character created by Antonine
Maillet (1929- ) in her 1974 novel of the same title,
who now has her “House of her Dreams” in
a mock village that was created around her in the early
’nineties on an island in New Brunswick’s
Bouctouche River and that of The Lone Shieling,
a Scottish cattle or sheep herder’s summer hut
that was built in Cape Breton, not as a home for a fictional
character, but to give physical form to three words
in a stanza of a poem whose author is unknown.
To
accomplish the translation of visitors from reality
into myth (and thus “the transformation of myth
into reality” [Kapelos 56]) at Le Pays de la Sagouine
(1991), the Acadian architect Élide Albert29
divided the forty-acre site of the theme park into two
separate and distinct precincts. The first of these
is an aggregation of buildings on the shore of the river
that offers arriving and departing visitors the opportunity
to climb an observation tower, eat at a restaurant,
visit an interpretation centre, and, of course, shop.
The second, on an island in the river named L’Île-aux-Puces,
consists of buildings constructed of traditional Acadian
materials and in traditional Canadian forms that answer
to the buildings mentioned and described in La Sagouine.
Connecting the shore to the island is the park’s
equivalent of the yellow brick road in The Wizard
of Oz: a long, winding, wooden bridge that takes
the visitors’ eyes and feet on a path whose serpentine
curves reinforce a sense of journey from terra firma
and the mundane present to a picturesque setting and
fictional past. The fact that the village on L’Île-aux-Puces
is built on low pilings to accommodate the tidal and
seasonal variations of the river further enhances the
visitors’ sense of a journey back in time and
into a realm of “fiction-made-real,” as
did the presence until recently of Viola Léger,
the Acadian actress whose stage performances gave Maillet’s
character a “real” face (Kapelos 56). Just
as the mechanisms of modern life are kept as remote
as possible from the core buildings of Upper Canada
Village (see Chapter 11:
Moving House(s)), the evidences of electrical and
other services to L’Île-aux-Puces are hidden
beneath the decking of the serpentine bridge. In Anne
of Green Gables, a “log bridge over …
a brook” takes the novel’s too-imaginative
heroine to a realm “where perpetual twilight reigned
under the straight, thick-growing firs and spruces”
and “[g]ossamers glimmer … like threads
of silver … and the fir boughs and tassels seem
… to utter friendly speech” (67). In Le
Pays de la Sagouine, visitors travel into Acadian fiction
and folklore on a bridge that is actual as well as wooden,
but in both cases bridges fulfil one of their traditional
functions by carrying their users across borders into
different but mutually dependent states of consciousness.
The
poem whose three words provided the inspiration for
The Lone Shieling in Cape Breton is the “Canadian
Boat-Song,” which was first published anonymously
in the “Noctes Ambrosianae” section of Blackwood’s
Magazine (Edinburgh) in September 1829 and has
since generated more scholarly discussion than any other
poem written in or about Canada.30
One reason for this is that the poem’s anonymity
has prompted numerous authors to suggest and defend
candidates for its authorship, a roster that includes
John Galt and William “Tiger” Dunlop. The
other is its second stanza, four lines whose poignant
expression of “the regret of the immigrant at
the loss of his familiar home” (R.E. Rashley 4)
have led to its inclusion as an independent poem in
numerous novels and anthologies such as Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Silverado Squatters
(1883) and Field Marshall, Lord Wavell’s Other
Men’s Flowers (1945). Spoken as if by the
collective voice of an exiled community, the “Lone
Shieling” stanza of the “Canadian Boat-Song”
speaks of enormous physical barriers transcended by
feelings and imaginings whose origins lie deep in the
identity of Scottish exiles and emigrants:
From the
lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the
waste of seas –
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the
Hebrides . . . .
(qtd. in Bentley, “‘The Canadian Boat-Song’”
69)
Whatever
its authorship, this stanza makes masterful use of rhythm,
diction, and imagery to reinforce its themes and moods.
Particularly notable is the shift from somewhat irregular
rhythms that accompany the expression of division in
the opening two lines and the more regular rhythms in
which the transcendence of division is expressed in
the lines beginning with “Yet.” So, too,
are the evocative vagueness of “the misty islands,”
the desolate expansiveness of “the waste of seas,”
and the confident affirmation of “the heart is
Highland.” And, of course, at the imagistic focal
point of the poem is the affective and, for many readers,
mysterious figure of “the lone shieling.”
Although
“The Lone Shieling” stanza must have had
its effect on men and women of numerous national and
ethnic groups it has inevitably exerted an especially
powerful influence on people of Scottish extraction,
one of whom initiated the architectural project that
Ian McKay has described as the “oddest event”
in the construction of Nova Scotia as an essentially
Scottish province in the years surrounding the Second
World War (“Tartanism Triumphant” 34), namely,
the construction of the Lone Shieling that now stands
beside the Cabot Trail in northern Cape Breton. As McKay
records in “Tartanism Triumphant: the Construction
of Scottishness in Nova Scotia, 1933-1954,” the
project was instigated in 1934 by a bequest to the Crown
of a hundred acres by a former Dalhousie University
professor named Donald S. MacIntosh, who requested in
his will “‘that the government of [Nova
Scotia] maintain a small park [on the property] ...
and ... build there a small Cabin which will be constructed
in the same design or plan as the lone shieling on the
Island of Skye, Scotland’” (33). (The echo
in MacIntosh’s request of W.B. Yeats’s “The
Lake Isle of Innisfree” [“I will arise and
go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build
there, of clay and wattles made” (44)] is but
one indication of its participation in the pastoral
yearnings of antimodernism.)31
Because the premier of Nova Scotia at that time was
Angus L. Macdonald, a Liberal with a conservative bias
and a regional vision who, in McKay’s neo-Marxian
(Foucauldian, Gramscian) terms saw “pre-Capitalist
Highland culture” as a bulwark against modernity,
MacIntosh’s bequest was accepted by the Province
and used to strengthen the case for the establishment
in 1937 of the park whose very name – Cape Breton
Highlands National Park – attests to the “naturalization”
of Macdonald’s belief in Nova Scotia’s “inherently
Scottish” identity (“Tartanism Triumphant”
34). The fact that Macdonald had earlier alluded to
“The Lone Shieling” stanza in a speech at
the “Memorial to the late Bishop MacEachern of
Prince Edward Island, 1929”32
makes his enthusiasm of MacIntosh’s bequest especially
understandable. A bronze plaque carrying details of
the bequest and an unlineated version of “The
Lone Shieling” stanza was unveiled in Cape Breton
in 1947 by Fiona McLeod of McLeod (see McKay, “Tartanism
Triumphant” 34).
McKay’s
research into “the Construction of Scottishness
in Nova Scotia” is brilliantly illuminating, but
not everyone will agree that the project that helped
to establish a large national park on Cape Breton, to
secure a lasting source of tourist revenue for Nova
Scotia, and to enhance the economic prospects and local
pride of many Maritimers (and, indeed, Canadians) was
quite as sinister and risible as he suggests.33
(The “tartanization” of Scotland itself
has been similarly ridiculed and denounced by critics
of the Left, but it, too, has had many positive effects.)
It is true that the Lone Shieling that stands in Cape
Breton Highlands National Park is inauthentic (“Tartanism
Triumphant” 33), but, as argued elsewhere, this
does not prevent it from having educational value or
serving as a reminder of past events and past conceptions
between Canada and Britain.34
Moreover, it joins Green Gables and Le Pays de la Sagouine
as an extraordinary instance of the imaginary realized
in such a way as to create a “representational
space” and a visitable space – indeed, to
“found … and … join … spaces”
and to make “the slovenly wilderness / Surround”
the place on which it stands. |