The North American novel begins, of course, in Canada. Although The History of Emily Montague was written by Frances Brooke, a British woman of letters, and was published in London in 1769, this first New World fiction is both record and product of the coming into being of what will be Canada. Brooke had sailed from England in 1763 to join her husband, who was the chaplain of the British garrison recently stationed in Quebec City. On the basis of five years' residence, she vividly contrasted the newly victorious English and the just defeated French, the Christian settlers and the 'savage' Indians, the European paradigms whereby her main characters perceive the new (to them) country and the different reality of the land itself. Moreover, the author's marriage plot (another metaphor for 'settling') is effectively at odds with her most intriguing character, Arabella, who capably coquettes her way through the work and who, at one point, can even contemplate that she might 'marry a savage, and turn squaw' because of the liberty Indians allow their wives but who just as precipitously decides not to because of the liberty they do not allow their daughters. The juxtaposition of such balances and imbalances anticipates more the Canadian national myth of the mosaic than the American myth of the melting pot, even though America too, as the thirteen colonies with their own political and social problems, is also present in the discourse of the novel. Brooke's History is, admittedly, more a historically interesting document than a major work of literature. Nevertheless, Canadians can take pride in this first novel and in the novels that followed it, just -558- as they can also take a certain pride in how well the American novel has done despite branching away from its Canadian beginning.
If the foregoing paragraph seems a belated and dubious Canadian attempt to claim credit for the form, I would here stress that Americans have long been claiming just about everything else: texts, titles, readerships, and publication rights. In this context, the case of Major John Richardson's Wacousta; or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (3 vols., 1832) is particularly relevant. The author, of United Empire Loyalist and perhaps Indian ancestry, was the first novelist to be born in Canada. He had grown up in frontier posts where his father, a British Army medical officer, had been stationed. Richardson himself had served in the War of 1812, had fought with Tecumseh, and had been captured following Tecumseh's defeat to be held for a year as a prisoner-of- war in Ohio and Kentucky. Those experiences provided much of the basis for his best book, Wacousta, a high gothic tale of an earlier episode of white/Indian frontier warfare, the 1763 Pontiac uprising, and an account in which the implacably savage leader of the Indians, Wacousta, turns out to be an Englishman in disguise but is still no worse than his former rival in love and present rival in war, Colonel De Haldimar, the ostensible representative and defender of 'civilization.' Everything in this novel is doubled, undone, inverted, and reversed, including the usual sexual implications of imperial conquest. 'Instead of Mother Nature versus a paternalistic military establishment,' Gaile McGregor argues, 'Wacousta seems to pit a feminine garrison against a masculine gothic landscape.' McGregor is so struck by the different 'theoretical wilderness/civilization dichotomy' set forth in this novel as compared to 'the American wilderness romance' (particularly the novels of James Fenimore Cooper) that she titles her massive study of language and landscape in Canadian literature The Wacousta Syndrome. Yet even though Wacousta is a founding text of Canadian literature, until very recently the novel was available in Canada only in the condensed edition early published in the United States, a version that suppressed almost all the explicitly anti-American passages.
Canada has long contended with what might be termed the Wacousta problem. Throughout the nineteenth century and until well into the twentieth century, a relatively small population spread over the vast expanse of the country made difficult the support of any -559- substantial indigenous publishing industry. Books were commonly obtained from England or the United States, as, indeed, they still mostly are. Canadian authors wrote to be published in those countries as well as at home, and foreign audiences were not always particularly interested in things Canadian. According to an early movie mogul, if a boy meets a girl in New York City you have a story, but — to quote the Hugh MacLennan essay title taken from this American observation — 'Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg: Who Cares?' Care, however, might be generated by sounding New York, and numerous Canadian novels of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century are curiously placeless. Nor has the success of the last few decades completely dispelled old 'branch plant' views of Canadian letters. For example, Alice Munro's American publisher objected to her title Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). Americans presumably know who they are and are not troubled by questions of identity. The American edition was titled The Beggar Maid. Yet that very substitution of a fairy-tale designation for a Canadian one merely gives another reference and relevance to the original title.
Canadian wry, it was early discovered, was one major way to achieve more than local notice. Humor was an effective way of subverting perceived second-class status and was also eminently marketable in England and the United States as well as in Canada. Indeed, Canada's first best-selling author was Thomas C. Haliburton, whose Sam Slick sketches collected into the three series of The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville (1836, 1838, 1840) went through some one hundred printings in the nineteenth century. Their main appeal was the ambivalently portrayed comic protagonist, Sam Slick, a Yankee peddler in rural Nova Scotia whose verbal facility contributed such expressions as 'upper crust,' 'conniption fit,' and 'stick-in-the-mud' to North American English. Are the literary Yankee, American humor, and even, perhaps, Uncle Sam all, like the New World novel, Canadian inventions? Stephen Leacock similarly achieved great popularity with Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), his comic exploration of the private and public foibles of life in provincial Ontario.
Admittedly, The Clockmaker and Sunshine Sketches seem more collections of stories or sketches than novels. But Canadian writers frequently blur the distinction between the two forms. In Clark -560- Blaise's A North American Education (1973), for example, separate stories of loss and dislocation add up to an appropriately disjointed anti-Bildungsroman. Or, conversely, in Alden Nowlan's Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien (also published in 1973), what at first seems a novel reconstitutes itself through the refracturing of the protagonist into a series of short stories. Similarly, Canadian women writers have long conjoined stories and novel — as exemplified by Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971) — in a feminist querying of both artistic and social categories. In view of this tradition and in the spirit of claiming that so far characterizes this chapter, I here claim The Clockmaker and Sunshine Sketches as Canadian novels and as the beginning of a comic fictional form that will later include such works as Ray Smith's wry, experimental, subtly interconnected Lord Nelson Tavern (1974).
Another way to broad appeal for the Canadian writer was through the documentation of place. A naming of parts — and Canada, starting with Upper and Lower Canada, has always seen itself as constituted of parts — could attract a regional, a national, and sometimes even an international readership. For example, Prince Edward Island, surely one of the least exotic islands in the world, becomes one of the best-known island settings thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its sequels. Of course, the character of Anne has much to do with these novels' huge success but, I would suggest, so does the setting, portrayed as both comfortably distant and comfortably familiar, whether the reader is British, American, or Japanese (and Montgomery's novels well might be the most widely read Western fiction in all Japan).
All regions of Canada have contributed substantially to the country's fiction. But rather than assess in any detail David Adams Richards's stark portrayal of poverty in the rural Miramichi area of New Brunswick in Blood Ties (1976) and Road to the Stilt House (1985), or Matt Cohen's Southern Gothics — Southern Ontario, that is — such as The Disinherited (1974), or numerous other possible writers and works, in the interests of brevity I will consider only two areas, French Quebec and the far West. Each has particularly appealed to English Canadian writers, perhaps because, in each case, regional narratives can also be seen (in a modest Canadian way) as national epics, and in the case of the West often, in fact, they are. -561-
In the case of Quebec, however, the many novels of New France written in English during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are too obviously intended primarily for English readers. Thus Roanna Leprohon's Antoinette de Mirecourt; or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing, a Canadian Tale (1864) sees the secret marriage between the French Canadian protagonist and an English officer whose 'royal standard' had recently 'replaced the fleurs-de-lys of France'
