The long narrative poem has been regarded as a "Canadian" "national" genre since Dorothy Livesay’s discussion of the "documentary poem" in 1969. Well before Livesay’s articulation of the importance of this genre to Canadian nation-building, Northrop Frye had made a case for the centrality of "the narrative tradition in English-Canadian literature." What Susan Stanford Friedman has shown in the American long poem, however, is also evident in the Canadian tradition: even as the genre engenders history as a national subject, both the history and the story that it constructs are gendered. In Canada, the genre has served, as Livesay has pointed out, to "document" the history of the nation, but it has done so by "using language," as Frye puts it, "as one would an axe" (230); and the axe, to paraphrase Jane Austen, has been in male hands. Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie (1884) and Hugh and Ion (1977) are the only long "nation-building" poems by a female author in nineteenth-century Canada to be included in the canon of "the narrative tradition" in poetry. Unless we are swayed by the rhetoric of Tennyson’s poem The Princess and conclude that women simply cannot write narrative verse, the singularity of Crawford can only "document" the restrictions imposed by gender and by genre upon the production of stories of "epic" conquest by female poets in Canada.

One approach to Malcolm’s Katie—as well as to Hugh and Ion— has been to return to the myths upon which the poem is seen to be structured and to reposition them in relation to a feminist critique. Another approach might be to bring the poem into alignment with "women’s history" and the study of gender constructions in late nineteenth-century English Canada, with particular reference to the western expansionist movement. Another related approach, and what I have undertaken here, is to look at the poem as what Teresa de Lauretis calls "an engraving of the history of [gender] construction" (3): that is, to read the poem both as a female-authored narrative and as a poem which works against a male tradition of narrative (myth and history), in light of the gender conflicts which are inevitable in the interpretation of Malcolm’s Katie as a "story" of "man’s conquest" of the west. These conflicts provide a context both for Crawford’s writing and for our reading of the poem, since the gendered imperatives of genres—and especially of narrative poetry—are indicated in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary critical discourse.

O’Hagan’s comments on the genres of pioneering poetry in Canada underscore the process of literary nation-building (implicitly by critics, explicitly by poets) as a gendered one, for they also draw attention to the construction of history in literature through the symbolic alignment of text with context. The suggestion that "man" found the epic in the process of conquering an army of "forest giants" arises from the assumption that it was there to be found, that the process of colonization is made intelligible only in terms of this literary/historical/mythological genre, and, most significantly, that both the physical experience and its "translation" into literary terms are available only to men. What O’Hagan in effect does is to impose a narrative (a "story") simultaneously upon "history" and its representation. The crucial restriction inherent in this narrative is twofold: first, it mist be performed (physically) by a man and, second, it must be written by a man, the man, implicitly, who performs the tasks. Thus the extrinsic "text" (the context) and the intrinsic or imaginative "text" are equally produced—and reproduced—by men. Women writers such as Crawford, even if they have made "the best image a poet has given us of Canadian living in the years following Confederation" and possess "the most remarkable mythopoeic imagination in Canadian poetry" (Frye 147-48), are effectively denied access to Canadian history—at least the history of nation-building—and thus to the genres which "document" it or, in fact, construct it. Both history and myth, that is, are simultaneously gendered and engendered.

The gendering of the "epic" of nation-building is a tradition of long standing in English Canada, and converges, in the late nineteenth century, with the allocation of literary genres within the ideological framework of separate spheres for men and women. The Canadian version of this issue merges the kind of rhetoric disseminated by misogynist commentators and anthologists in England and in the United States with a growing nationalist (and of course imperialist) interest in establishing a mythology and a history which would demonstrate the triumph of "civilization" in Canada.¹ Thus, W.D. Lighthall writes in his Introduction to the 1889 anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion, "The poets whose songs fill this book are voices cheerful with the consciousness of young might, public wealth, and heroism…The tone of them is courage;—for to hunt, to fight, to hew out a farm, one must be a man!" (xii; my emphasis). Lighthall’s anthology is composed of lyrics, but, as his subheadings suggest, these songs are strung together in such a way as to constitute an imaginative narrative, and "taken all together," as he puts it, convey a "history" of the "Great Dominion" that is the "story" of man’s conquest.

Although women are well represented in Lighthall’s anthology (Crawford, for instance, has four poems in the "Settlement Life" section, two in "Sports and Free Life," and one in "Seasons"), the "virility" of Canadian verse is made explicit in this first paragraph on the Introduction, and re-emphasized in his subsequent comments about "lady singers" who write "with the power and spirit of masculinity" although they do not necessarily transgress either sexual labour divisions or gendered literary genres: "How these women," he marvels, "sympathise with the pluck of the heroes!" (xxxii; my emphasis). Such "heroes" as these build nations, figure in the documentation of the processes of nation-building, produce the texts and read them. When women trespass upon this ground, they must write as men ("with the power and spirit of masculinity") and follow the prescribed narrative that is "history" or, more precisely here, his/story, mythologized in terms of (epic) male conquest.

The compromised praise that is usually accorded Crawford even by her most ardent supporters bespeaks a problem that is still pressing for contemporary criticism of women’s writing in Canada. While it is probably misguided to postulate that Crawford was denied recognition in her own lifetime because she was a woman writer—the nineteenth century in English Canada, after all, was a period of enormous literary production by women in almost every genre but narrative poetry—it is possible to see how the construction of a narrative/history/myth of Canada as a "male" space leads to a considerable diminishment of the "poetic value" of her long narrative works. Its "truth," while foregrounded as the most valuable feature of the poem, is also undermined by her own "failure" either to participate in the history of nation-building that she "documents" in Malcolm’s Katie or to suit her genre to her gender: she "chose to waste her talents writing about men with axes, whom she did not understand" (Newton 12-13). Few critics question her ability to write lyrics; her narrative poems have proved to be intensely problematic precisely because they are not only at the edge of genre, as Smaro Kamboureli puts it, but also at the border of gender, even, on occasion, transgressing the boundaries, as she writes the kind of poem that men are to produce in conjunction with/as a representation of their pioneering processes in the business of building a nation. The problem is the fact of Crawford’s gender and the immutability of the history and myth with which she engages as male-identified processes.

To read and to value Malcolm’s Katie only, or primarily, as a "document" of western expansion is to position Crawford (and the poem) as an intermediary between "texts" that she has not written at all—the "history" and the "myth" of the frontier. It is, moreover, to fix this "history" as the only "true" story of Canada, and the "myth" as the only viable interpretation of that story, and, thus, to reaffirm a standard of "truth" which can never be made available to women writers, either now or retroactively, to "express" their own experiences in nineteenth-century Canada. Like literary forms, myths, Kamboureli has suggested, "are ready-made grids, codes of experience prepared in advance. Their content is that of doxa, a system of thought pronounced with the vigor of truth but lacking truth itself" (1985, 107). When female poets "use" myths, Kamboureli argues, they do not "use [them] as referents, as stories denotating experience. Instead, they break through this dialectic shield of ‘illusive’ truth and reach to an open field, the meadow, their psyche inhabits" (1985, 108).² Such an interpretation may well explain what Dorothy Livesay sees as the deposition of "old myths" in Malcolm’s Katie: although Livesay’s perception of this exchange is couched within a rhetoric of the New World displacing the Old, rather than of the female poet rupturing the dialectic of "truth," it nonetheless situates the poem in (albeit against) what Kamboureli identifies as "the male praxis of thought and interpretation" itself (1985, 107). If the myth and the history essentially tell the same "story," in so far as they are equally and simultaneously constructed within the gender-specific "praxis of thought and interpretation," and we accept Crawford’s act of writing against this particular narrative, then the "story" of Malcolm’s Katie must also be seen as working against history as his/story.

It is possible to see, through a re-consideration of this central problematic of Malcolm’s Katie, that women’s narrative poetry in the nineteenth century, as Susan Stanford Friedman has argued it does in the twentieth, works fundamentally against history and myth as epic.³ That Crawford’s poem does indeed work against history and myth should be evident in the failure of the heroic narrative to be conclusively resolved. Although Max "conquers" the terrain, he is reminded of the tenuous nature of his success when he is pinned by a falling tree; moreover, he is not permitted to represent his success as the happy ending of the Eden myth in the New World, or to close the poem as its authoritative poet-hero. That this process is directly relevant to the constitution of the women as subject (reader/ writer/heroine) in the poem should be evident in the success with which Katie redirects the narrative and empties Max’s symbols and literary/mythological patterns of meaning. In Malcolm’s Katie, the process of working against the male modality of narrative is neither an act of subversion nor one of subterfuge, but one of decentring: Katie’s narrative is not the poem’s "subtext," hidden beneath its seemingly benign reproduction of male history/myth/narrative, but is constituted as "story" and positioned, gynocentrically, in the same time and space that Max occupies. In this way, the woman writer (Crawford) puts herself into that text— "as into the world and into history," as Hélène Cixous argues the woman writer must do— by her own movement (875). She thus draws our attention as readers to the presence of women in the text and the reader is invited to interpret the "story." It is not, therefore, necessary—and may well be counterproductive—to treat Max’s story as the "surface" text, a mimetic and "truthful" account of pioneering beneath which lies a seething, erotic, and politically charged talk of angry feminism. Indeed, Katie’s "stories" on the "surface" produce the "love story" the poem announces as its organizing principle. Katie’s story has been more or less obscured by the predominance of one myth and one history and by the critical positioning of the nation-building epic as the primary narrative model in English-Canadian literature of the last century. It is this "story" that a feminist reading of Malcolm’s Katie must work against, just as Katie does throughout the poem, because, as Tania Modleski has put it, "[i]f…we wish to participate in and elucidate the ongoing process that makes up female subjectivity, feminists at this historical moment need to insist upon the importance of real women as interpreters" (135), now and in other "historical moments."

If Malcolm’s Katie fundamentally fails as a "document" of pioneering because its female author is excluded from the experience that leads to both mimetic and mythopoeic reproduction of these processes of nation-building, it cannot be read solely as an image of them. Indeed, if the social interactions that contextualize the poem in nineteenth-century English Canada and in relation to its female author are ever to be categorized and analyzed, Malcolm’s Katie has to be pried loose from its critical context of history and the "epic man found." Since any interpretation of the poem within or against the praxis of either myth, as Kamboureli demonstrates, or history, such as is indicated in the "gendered process" of pioneering, leaves intact a narrative in which neither the woman in the text nor the women producing it can participate, the poem will remain in static constellation with the "story" of colonization, its "value" calculated in relation to the impossible paradox of a nineteenth-century woman writer producing a "truthful" account of a process in which she did not engage, but which is nonetheless identified as the one "true" and valuable story of the whole business of building a nation. Don Precosky would like us to see Malcolm’s Katie as undeservedly canonized though "the coming together of feminism and myth criticism" (94), but the fact is that a feminist analysis of the poem should begin with a separation of the two, since the myth— and the myths of Canadian history—effectively erase the female author from the scene of the poem.

The first step, therefore, is to disengage the narrative from the story of Max: this is the "story" of his winning of Katie and "winning through" the obstacles presented by a voracious Nature, to establish a "new" Eden in the "New World," a prevalent myth in colonialist literatures. This epic of prelapsarian recovery is told, however, in the most ambiguous terms, and, like the romantic quest charted in Crawford’s other major narrative poem of the mid-’eighties, Hugh and Ion, Max’s romance of colonization is forestalled. Although Max clings to his vision of himself as a conquering hero ("[p]oor soldier of the axe" [1: 24]) throughout the poem, he is unable to define the garden he finally recovers as paradise. As Robin Mathews has pointed out, "[t]he rejection of Eden [in Malcolm’s Katie] cannot be stressed enough. Crawford is not postulating a new Eden; she is rejecting the Eden idea" (59).⁴ In fact, it is Katie who articulates the distinction between Max’s vision and the domestic tableau which closes the poem. When Max returns at the end of the poem to his notion

his fantasy of recovery is immediately deflated by Katie, who "reads" the landscape against this myth, and, at the same time, debunks the myth Max is still anxious to impose as a cultural and narrative pattern. To her father’s comment that Max "speak[s] as every Adam speaks / About his bonnie Eve" (7: 27-28), she responds in such a way as to separate the narrative of which she is the eponymous heroine from the history and myth which exclude her: