DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction 9780773587311

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dispossession

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preface

DisPossession Haunting in Canadian Fiction marlene goldman

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3950-1 Legal deposit first quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Goldman, Marlene, 1963DisPossession : haunting in Canadian fiction / Marlene Goldman. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3950-1 1. Canadian literature – History and criticism. 2. Supernatural in literature. 3. Ghosts in literature. 4. Spirit possession in literature. I. Title. PS8191.S87G65 2012

C813’.54

C2011-905743-3

This book was typeset by True to Type in 11/13.2 Garamond

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my mentor and friend Linda Hutcheon who continues to give me the confidence to articulate my ideas.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: DisPossession and Haunting in Canadian Fiction 3

Part one The Haunted Nation: Explorer and Settler-Invader Amnesia and the Spectral Native 1 Coyote’s Children and the Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning 39 2 Dispossession and the Rule of Primogeniture in John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright 63

Part two Transnational Haunting: The Ghosts of the Diaspora 3 Jane Urquhart’s Away: Magic Realism and the Ghosts of Celticism 103 4 ‘Cloth Flowers That Bleed’: Haunting, Hysteria, and Diaspora in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 149 5 ‘The spirits call she and make their display in she’: The Trope of Possession in the Work of Dionne Brand 186

Part three and Repair

Ghosts and the Cycle of Reparation

6 Ghost Play: The Use of Transitional Phenomena in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water 243

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Conclusion: Toward an Ethics of Haunting 298 Notes

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Bibliography 345 Index 365

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Acknowledgments

There are many people who have helped me and whose guidance and support over the years have made this book possible. I began writing this book shortly after my second child, Emma, was born. As the mother of young children, I frequently travelled to conferences with an entourage that included my husband, my sister, and, on at least one occasion, my mother. I owe tremendous thanks to my husband, Bob, to my children, Luke and Emma, and to our extended families for graciously giving me the support and the time to wrestle with this project and to see it to fruition. My colleagues and friends at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Graduate English Department at the University of Toronto – especially Linda Hutcheon, Russell Brown, Donna Bennett, Lora Carney, Andrew DuBois, Sara Salih, Jill Matus, Michael Lambek, Neil ten Kortenaar, Malcolm Woodland, Naomi Morgenstern, Daniel Heath Justice, and Andrew Lesk – provided ongoing encouragement and advice. When I began considering the topic of haunting in Canadian literature, I was extremely fortunate to work with fellow Canadianist Joanne Saul. In 2004, we hosted two sessions at the accute conference and later co-edited a special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly on Haunting in Canadian Culture in 2006. I also want to thank the graduate students at the University of Toronto who took my classes “The Politics and Poetics of Haunting in Canadian Literature” and “Annexing the Mind.” From 2006 to 2011, my students and research assistants tested and stretched the theoretical and literary foundations of this project. I am particularly lucky to have had the opportunity to work closely with Nicola Renger, Jody Mason, Ceilidh Hart, Gillian Bright,

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Julia Grandison, Sarah de Jong, Katie Mullins, Michael Collins, and Angelo Muredda. Many of the ideas in this book were first aired as conference papers and brief articles, and I also want to express my gratitude to my friends and colleagues who invited me to speak and to publish articles on my research. Chapter 1 on Gail Anderson-Daargatz and Sheila Watson benefitted tremendously from Cynthia Sugars’, Gerry Turcotte’s, and Michael O’Driscoll’s editorial suggestions. Chapter 2 on Steffler’s fiction was first presented as a talk to the Graduate Canadian Literature Group at the University of Toronto, and I remain thankful for their enthusiastic response and suggestions. Chapter 3 on Urquhart and the Irish diaspora was inspired by my discussions with Dominic Jenkins and aided by the editorial acumen of Héliane Daziron-Ventura and Marta Dvorak. Chapter 4 on Atwood was developed and revised in the light of responses from my friends and colleagues in Canada and abroad, including Jennifer Henderson, Margery Fee, Hilde Staels, Julia Creet, and Andreas Kitzman. I’m also very grateful to my fellow Canadianists in Italy, Rosella Mamoli, Laura Ferri, and Carla Comellini, who invited me to lecture on Atwood and Canadian literature at the University of Venice, at the Sienna Centre, and at the University of Bologna, respectively. It was also a profound honour to be invited by Fu Jun and Lily Yuan, from the Centre for Canadian Studies at Nanjing Normal University in China, to lecture on Brand and my research on haunting in Canadian literature. I also owe thanks to Rinaldo Walcott and Dina Georgis for inviting me to speak at their conference on Dionne Brand in 2006, and to my friends and colleagues in Germany, including Reingard Nischik, Martin Kuester, Caroline Rosenthal, and Eva Gruber, who likewise invited me to speak on Brand and spirit possession. The final chapter on Thomas King and Winnicott emerged largely from my lively conversations with Heather Weir, Ann Baranowski, and Fadi Abou-Rihan, who were kind enough to share their profound knowledge of the writings of D. W. Winnicott. My consideration of King’s role as an artist was also greatly enhanced by the conference presentations on artivism that I co-organized with Lora Carney and Rory Crath. My greatest intellectual debt, however, is to Kristina Kyser, who worked with me throughout the entire project, reading versions of each chapter and unfailingly offering invaluable, intellectually rigorous, detailed responses.

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Excerpts from earlier versions of chapters 1, 3, and 4 appeared in journals issued by Australian Canadian Studies and English Studies in Canada, and in books published by the University of Toronto Press and Peter Lang. I am grateful for permission to publish revisions of the following essays: “Coyote’s Children and the Canadian Goth: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning” in Australian Canadian Studies special issue on “Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic,” eds. C. Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, 26.2 (2006): 15–44, reprinted in Unsettled Remains, ed. Sugars and Turcotte, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009; “Ethics, Spectres, and Formalism in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook” in English Studies in Canada, (2009): 33.1–2: 189–208; “Memory, Diaspora, Hysteria: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace” in Memory and Migration, eds. J. Creet and A. Kitzman, University of Toronto Press, 210–34; and “Talking Crow: Jane Urquhart’s Away” in Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Prose and Poetry, eds. Héliane Daziron-Ventura and Marta Dvorak, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010: 129–44. This book was researched and written with the help of an sshrcc grg award and an aspp publication grant. I count myself lucky to have had the opportunity to work with the wonderful editorial staff at McGillQueen’s Press, including Mary-Lynne Ascough, who shepherded the manuscript through the reviewing process, the anonymous reviewers whose criticism sharpened my analysis of the Gothic, and my copy editor Grace Rosalie Seybold.

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Explaining u.s. Policy Variations

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introduction

DisPossession and Haunting in Canadian Fiction

The uncanny tropes of haunting and possession pervade contemporary Canadian fiction. As Freud and more recent critics have argued, the uncanny (unheimlich) concerns the “heim” or home, and typically surfaces in conjunction with crises concerning matters of possession and inheritance. In the works examined in this study, uncanny, spectral tropes betray disturbances on the domestic, national, and transnational levels. As Joanne Saul and I note in our introduction to the University of Toronto Quarterly special issue on haunting, Derrida insists in Specters of Marx that learning to live necessitates learning to live with ghosts – an injunction tied to a politics of memory and a conception of justice. Yet learning to live with spectres seems vexed and difficult to heed in a settler-nation such as Canada, which, for many years, was renowned for its supposed lack of ghosts. In 1836, Catherine Parr Traill proclaimed, “As to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of-fact a country for such supernaturals to visit” (75). Over a hundred years later, Canadian poet and critic Earle Birney echoed these sentiments in his poem “CanLit,” stating that “it’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted” (15–16). Nonetheless, despite or perhaps because of Birney’s suggestion that Canadians are haunted by a lack of spectres, contemporary English-Canadian authors are obsessed with ghosts and haunting. A host of writers, including Sheila Watson, Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Timothy Findley, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, Kerri Sakamoto, Eden Robinson, Tom King, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Douglas Coupland, and Dionne Brand, have taken pains to highlight the intricacies of haunting. In this study, I focus specifically on Watson’s The Double Hook, Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure

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For Death by Lightning, Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Urquhart’s Away, Atwood’s Alias Grace, Brand’s stories, poetry, and novels, and, finally, King’s Truth and Bright Water. Recognizing that earlier views of Canada’s supposed ghostlessness need to be revisited, this study draws on critical tools derived from postcolonial studies, post-structuralism, feminist and queer theory, and psychoanalysis to reflect on the politics and poetics of haunting and (dis)possession in Canadian literature. Although the tropes of spirit possession and the ghost in these texts do overlap with and invoke to varying extents the genres of the Gothic, magic realism, the fantastic, and Surrealism, their relationships cannot be mapped in a one-to-one correspondence, and the definition and delimitation of these genres is not the main concern of this book. A consideration of the Gothic, in particular, is crucial to provide context for my study, and in what follows, I provide an overview of the Gothic for readers unfamiliar with the genre.1 Ultimately, however, my aim is to emphasize the cultural and historical specificities toward which each individual text gestures, and to explore how each author uses ghosts and spirits to express the uncanny return of unspoken and repressed histories, raising key questions such as these: To what extent is it helpful to speak of a “Canadian Gothic”? What is the relationship between spectres and colonial plots? How do works by First Nations authors interrogate Canada’s supposed ghostlessness? If ghosts signal the return of a secret, something repressed, then what types of secrets (ranging from familial to national) are encrypted in the texts under consideration? To what extent do ghosts signal anxieties associated with multiple and/or diasporic identities? What is the significance of haunting in women’s textual and artistic productions? What is the impact of haunting on textual production? And, finally, in what ways do depictions of ghosts lay the foundations for what might best be termed an ethics of haunting? To answer these questions, this study does not trace the development of the ghost story as a genre; instead, it analyzes the motifs of ghosts, haunting, and possession in contemporary Canadian fiction to show how they signal uncanny threats to national and individual identity. The story of cultural haunting, as Kathleen Brogan suggests, needs to be distinguished from the more familiar ghost story – “that genre of short fiction that blossomed during the nineteenth century, leaving us with thrilling fireside tales of haunted houses, graveyard revenants, and Christmases past” (5). In tracing the motifs of haunting and possession,

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like Brogan, I place less emphasis on “the idea of the internally haunted self,” and more on the cultural, political, and historical contexts that give rise to these motifs. In this regard, my study recalls Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada, which traces how gothic tropes reveal the instabilities in the discursive construction of the Canadian national identity. My book also has affinities with Justin Edwards’ Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, an ambitious analysis of a wide variety of historical and contemporary Canadian texts that illustrates the connection between gothic tropes and Canada’s spectral national identity. Unlike Kertzer’s and Edwards’ projects, however, as noted, my study does not read the appearance of haunting and possession solely as gothic tropes reflecting the uncanny malaise generated by the impossible task of imagining a unified nation. In other words, whereas Kertzer and Edwards offer macrocosmic analyses of the gothic features of Canada’s national identity, my study engages in microcosmic close readings of a range of discrete texts and drills down to explore the specific political, historical, and geographic contexts of each. In keeping with Kertzer’s and Edwards’ analyses of the relationship between national identity and the Gothic, I argue that to a large extent, the ongoing preoccupation with haunting in Canadian writing expresses the legacy of the settler-invaders’ long-standing desire to lay claim to a Canadian genius loci or spirit of the nation and to come to terms with Canada’s past. An underlying fear is that without ghosts, the settlers and their descendents risk remaining ciphers to themselves and never fully establishing a sense that they have fully arrived and are at home in Canada. Yet remembering is not easy; on the contrary, it can be a tremendously unsettling experience. In Canadian literature, haunting and possession are powerful tropes for highlighting this tension between the desire to face the past and the fear of what skeletons may emerge from the familial and national closets, if we engage in this uncanny process. As Stuart McLean asserts, new-world nation-states require ghosts: “It is not enough for the modern nation-state simply to assert the antiquity of its ancestral pedigree; for its claims to be culturally persuasive, it is necessary that these imputed primordial beginnings be reiteratively summoned and deployed in the present” (29). Yet what if those revenants, once summoned and unleashed, destroy the culture from within by shedding light on the peoples and knowledges that were repressed to allow the nation to cultivate its image as a unified whole? As Ian Bau-

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com explains, the haunting opposite (and double) of the citizen has been both “the extra-domestic alien” captured by the imperial state and “the domestic interloper” (191). In North America, these categories have been occupied by the colonial subject – Native North Americans and slaves – and the racialized Other – refugees and immigrants. Generally speaking, the tension and the anxieties haunting generates reflect a broader tendency on the part of western cultures to suppress one side of many perceived dualities, including male/female, civilization/savagery, and reason/passion. As McLean explains, “historical knowledge, at least in the modern west, is founded on the silencing and sublimation of other ways of knowing, including communion with spirits and the dead” (17). In effect, the tropes of haunting and possession reveal the tensions aroused by the desire for and fear of ghosts, show how western cultures’ dualities collapse, and convey the terror aroused by the seeming chaos that ensues. Given the stakes involved in narrating a collective past and in imagining the nation, and given how fraught the process can be, many critics – myself included – advocate adopting a self-reflexive and responsible praxis when contacting the dead. A fundamental aspect of this praxis involves recognizing that personal and national memory are highly selective; hence, if we hope to contact the dead in an ethical fashion, then we must attend carefully to the conventions associated with the cultural discourses that stage these spectral encounters. This is why my study does not concentrate solely on the Gothic, but, instead, creates a dialogic analysis that draws on dominant and marginalized theoretical paradigms. Equally important, we also need to explore the relationships between genres such as the Gothic and magic realism – the media that typically channel spirits – and the historical and geographic specificities that these genres both reveal and conceal. At bottom, my contribution to Gothic studies lies in approaching the genre less in terms of an array of formal structures than as a field in which cultural and historical specificities manifest. In effect, my goal is to re-politicize the Gothic by situating it in specific geographic and historical Canadian contexts. My aim also lies in demonstrating how writers such as Brand and King challenge the limitations of western genres by drawing on marginalized knoweldges from Afro-Caribbean and Native North American spirituality. By portraying individuals designated as Other reappropriating their subjectivities, King and Brand install and resist the racialized history of the Canadian nation-state and engage in a process

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that Teresa Goddu terms “haunting back” (53). In their fictions, the haunting voices of culturally repressed groups – women, racialized black people, and Native North Americans – can be heard. Their voices and ghostly appearances act as the means of insisting on the presence of elided and alternative histories. With respect to its overarching structure, this study adopts an approach to haunting and possession in relation to three main concerns: the dispossession and marginalization of Native peoples and cultures; transnational and diasporic migrations instigated by imperialism and colonialism; and, finally, conceptions of femininity and the female body. Implicit in the questions cited earlier is a desire on my part to unearth what gets covered up or buried by contentions of Canada’s ghostlessness, or, put another way, to ask what is at stake in such contentions. Although separated by over a century, both Traill’s and Birney’s sense of Canada’s lack of history are arguably based on the mentality of the colonial cringe – a phenomenon that is equally evident in early us writing. As a new settler in Canada, Traill compares the vastness of the mother country’s past and the richness of its treasures to Canada’s supposed newness – a country whose “volume of history is yet a blank” (69). Birney looks south for his comparison, with both a sense of dread of being swallowed up by a much more ‘historied’ and storied nation and with seemingly more than a little envy. He contrasts the manual labour of railway building in Canada to the intellectual and creative labour of a Walt Whitman or an Emily Dickinson in the United States: “too busy bridging loneliness to be alone we hacked in railway ties what Emily etched in bone” (296). Rejecting such overt manifestations of the colonial cringe, in the 1970s Margaret Atwood attempted to fill in this supposed emptiness by exhuming ghosts and providing evidence of a past, a history, and thus a culture. “The digging up of ancestors, calling up of ghosts, exposure of skeletons in the closet which are so evident in many cultural areas,” writes Atwood, “have numerous motivations, but one of them surely is a search for reassurance. We want to be sure that the ancestors, ghosts, and skeletons really are there, that as a culture we are not as flat and lacking in resonance as we were once led to believe” (“Canadian Monsters” 100). Atwood’s list of “ghosts” (including the wendigo, the Coyote, several magicians, and the wabeno) supports her position that “there is more to Kanada than meets the eye” (122). In her 1976 study The Haunted Wilderness, Margot Northey similarly suggests that the Canadian Gothic is “at the base of cultural revitalization”:

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“those works studied which appear so death-ridden and frequently disintegrative may indeed be considered catalysts of regeneration. With good reason we may suppose that in culture, as in the natural world, death and decay are compost for new growth” (110). Seeking a new Canadian mythology that rejected previous dependence on a set of alien or imposed myths, critics like Atwood and Northey attempted to “fill up” the emptiness and to replace what they perceived as the socio-realistic take of much of modern Canadian fiction with a new unifying thematic for Canadian literature, the Gothic. The strengths and limitations of such a unifying thematic remain an important concern in this study. The first two chapters respond directly to the first question posed earlier: namely, to what extent is it helpful to speak of a Canadian Gothic? For the purposes of this introduction, suffice it to say that this unified and unifying gothic vision of Canadian culture sought to challenge the narrative of Canada’s “pastlessness.” However, it did so without adequately coming to terms with Canada’s past (or present). For example, there is no mention of First Nations’ writing (or of First Nations peoples) in either Northey’s or Atwood’s version of Canada’s past. In fact, Atwood’s take on Canadian monsters depended on and was a response to seeing the land as empty, silent, seemingly unpeopled, and yet, perhaps paradoxically, threatening. The set of questions posed and the texts examined in my book reflect an attempt to tease out the paradoxical nature of this complex threat and the implications of this earlier colonial and postcolonial dread, to explore past histories, and to examine the empowering and provocative uses of haunting and possession in contemporary Canadian literature. In my analyses of the works under consideration, I argue that learning to live with ghosts involves coming to terms with the often violent, synthesizing ambitions of the nation-state and the alternative histories and modes of knowing that the state, in an effort to create a unified national image, suppressed or tried to assimilate. In effect, my decision to juxtapose a variety of generic, historical, political, psychological, and philosophical perspectives rather than to view the texts within a single paradigm such as the Gothic underscores my resistance to this type of synthesizing ambition which can leave readers with the erroneous assumption that they have mastered and assimilated the Other. As I noted earlier, the political stakes are often high in attempts to commune with the dead. As McLean explains, “the covert persistence of seemingly archaic vestiges within the epistemic stronghold of the modern ... appears to hold out the possibility of sub-

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sequent reformulations, and thus, by extension of alternative pasts and futures” (30). Learning to live with ghosts thus brings with it the possibility of radical changes to personal, familial, and national histories as well as the threat of altering the future trajectories of these narratives. Indeed, if, as Kertzer argues, “the nation is inescapable and continues to haunt us” (26), then the situation is even more complex in Canada where the supposedly unified nation is haunted from within by other nations. In both Canada and the us, Native North Americans feature prominently as ghostly “domestic interlopers,” to use Baucom’s term, since both nations engaged in colonial wars with indigenous peoples and were bent on murdering or civilizing demonized Indian “savages.” As Leslie Fielder famously observed, the emphasis on conquering the Indian “devils” was a distinct feature of early American and, I would add, Canadian literature (160–1). In his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels,” D.H. Lawrence also identifies the figure of the displaced Native American as the ghost that haunts American culture. Recent studies by Renée Bergland and Joshua Bellin focus directly on the haunting of the American literary and cultural imagination by the figure of the Native American. Subtle yet crucial differences exist between us and Canadian experiences of domestic haunting. For instance, whereas both Canada and the us share the concept of the frontier and the trauma and guilt concerning our treatment of the indigenous peoples as gothic subjects, the latter perhaps has dealt more profoundly with the particular haunting from within associated with the legacy of slavery. A massive population of Africans was transported to the New World after the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, and the Royal African Slave Company received a monopoly from the crown to begin importing and selling Africans to the colonists for lifetime indentures. By the time of the American Revolution, the million or so black slaves, whose labour was exploited primarily on plantations in the southern states, constituted forty percent of the southern population (Dinnerstein and Reimers 10). Although slavery played an equally profound role in the formation of the Canadian nation-state – Afua Cooper refers to it as “Canada’s best kept secret, locked within the National closet” (68) and writers in this study such as Steffler and Brand directly address its legacy – it is an open secret and a central concern in American Gothic literature and criticism. Referring to the fundamental nature of the horrors of the slave system and to the formation of the American Gothic, Goddu states that the lat-

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ter “did not invent horror, but is invented by it” (131). Commenting on Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, Fiedler states that “it is, indeed, to be expected that our first eminent southern author discovered that the proper subject for American Gothic is the black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged” (397). In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison corroborates and expands Fiedler’s observations to include other examples of American literature when she remarks on “how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature is” (35-6). Tracing the ghosts within early American romance, Morrison reveals how “symbolic figurations of blackness” in the form of “the Africanist persona” continue to haunt American literature (17). The force of Fiedler’s and Morrison’s critical insights is evident in current scholarship on the American Gothic, which continues to foreground the buried figure of the racialized Black persona and relies on Morrison’s theoretical armature to look more broadly at the construction of a racialized Other, rather than an exclusively Africanist Other (see Anolik and Howard 18). In the us, discussions of haunting remain closely tied to the issues of slavery and miscegenation (see Edwards, Gothic Passages). Critics often link the us preoccupation with slavery to the nation’s Puritan legacy. The hell-fired discourse of Puritanism promoted a tendency toward “Manichean formulations of good and evil,” a preoccupation with “guilt and dread,” and a habit of thinking of virtue “in terms of black and white” (Lloyd-Smith 38–9). By contrast, discussions about Euro-Canadian slavery, as Cooper observes, “often disconnect Canada from the larger Atlantic and American world of slavery of which it was very much a part” (10). Although Canada might not have been a slave society – that is, a society whose economy was based on slavery – “it was a society with slaves” (Cooper 68). In fact, slavery was practiced in a third of what is now Canada – in Upper Canada (Ontario), New France (Quebec), New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia (Cooper xvi). Canada’s avoidance of the history of slavery represents the antithesis of the us’s preoccupation with its legacy. Another difference between haunting in the us and in Canada concerns the regional nature of haunting in the us. As critics of American Gothic frequently observe, in the us, haunting is typically aligned with New England and the Southern Gothic rather than, for example, that of the prairies (Savoy 6). As Goddu observes, “the South is a benighted landscape, heavy with history and haunted by the ghosts of slavery”; equally important, “the South’s oppositional

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image – its gothic excesses and social transgression – has served as the nation’s safety valve: as the repository for everything the nation is not, the South purges contrary impulses” (76). The situation changes, however, on the Canadian side of the 49th parallel. For one, our national mythology conveniently erases Canada’s reliance on slavery and, instead, portrays Canada as the final destination on the Underground Railroad and, hence, as a site of “freedom’s land” (Cooper 69). As well, although our national anthem celebrates the “true north strong and free,” it is referring to the far north as a utopian site of liberty. Despite our regional differences – which include the linguistic and ideological divisions between the French and English that constellate in the possibility of a separatist Quebec, and the tensions between maritime, eastern, and western provinces – our national mythology never forged the distinctly us Gothic divide between a freedom-loving, industrious north and a decadent, slaveholding south.2 Without minimizing the similarities between the ways in which haunting manifests in European, American, and Canadian literatures, I would suggest that the latter gives a more central place to the interrogation of the settlers’ right to lay claim to and take possession of the new world in light of the Native North American peoples’ more legitimate and prior claim. As a result, in Canada, the ghosts of North America’s indigenous population and women are as important as the ghosts of slavery to literary and critical explorations of the dark side of Canadian national identity. As in American tales of haunting, however, in Canadian Gothic narratives it is also possible to trace “other social, political, and class fears, such as the fear and distaste generated against specific immigrant groups: the Irish, in [the] mid-nineteenth century, southern and eastern Europeans and Asians later in the century, or against homosexuality in the twentieth century” (Lloyd-Smith 9). In Canada, all of these spectres repeatedly unsettle the imaginary, unified vision of an Anglo-Canadian nation-state. Compounding Canada’s haunting from within, however, are the forces of globalism and diasporic experience which ensure that the nation is also haunted and fractured at the transnational level. Part of the explanation for the return of the trope of haunting in contemporary literature and criticism is the unprecedented movement and dislocation of people across the globe associated with the development of global or transnational capitalism (see Cheah, Inhuman 1). Several works in this study link the tropes of haunting and possession to the increase in com-

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modification that occurred in the late eighteenth century associated with the acceleration of the slave trade, which entailed literally taking possession of human beings and transforming them into commodities. In Spectres of the Atlantic, Baucom traces the relationship between these tropes, which are integral to the British and American Gothic – and the development of new forms of global finance capital, specifically, stock, bond, and paper money networks, associated with slavery. He argues that the transnational Atlantic slave trade provided the foundation for contemporary forms of global commodity culture.3 In this study, I argue that writers such as Steffler and Brand forcibly interrogate the gothic global machinery instigated by imperialism and slavery in the eighteenth century.4 These literary and scholarly critiques of what might best be termed gothic globalism represent part of a much larger effort to articulate the horrific costs associated with global capitalism. Scholars from around the world have begun to trace haunting and the Gothic more systematically into “territory previously uncharted by gothic fiction, namely, global culture” (Castricano 212). Citing Fredric Jameson, Jodey Castricano identifies global culture with the us, and defines it as “the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (Jameson qtd. in Castricano 212).5 In addition to and yet distinct from these critiques of global capitalism, the Gothic itself has also gone global. Scholarship on Gothic fiction and film includes studies of South American, Asian, Australian, New Zealand, Kiwi, and African Gothic. In Europe, critics have collected essays on and examples of Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian Gothic.6 Both projects (the critique of global capitalism and the global mapping of Gothic literatures) are integral to my study because many of the texts that I examine show how transnational spectral tropes, identified with free-floating capital, exceed the borders of the nationstate. In their exploration of the structure of global capitalism, the fictions under consideration likewise map transnational gothic sites. In studying haunting and possession, it is also helpful to appreciate that from the start, Gothic literature has itself been a capitalist venture; more recently, global capitalism has played a large role in the dissemination of the Gothic. From its inception, the Gothic established itself as a highly lucrative and popular commodity explicitly associated with the

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rising power of the market. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Miller – a friend of the American writer Charles Brockden Brown whose novels profoundly influenced the direction of the American Gothic – declared: “In this century, for the first time, authorship became a trade. Multitudes of writers toiled not for the promotion of science, nor even with governing view to advance their own reputation, but for the market” (qtd. in Michaud 14–15). This type of mercenary bid to earn money as a writer in the market is associated with the rise of the Gothic, and, for some, it represented a new and unsettling social development, particularly in the case of women writers who challenged the nineteenth-century stereotype of women as domestic angels. An appreciation of the complex national and transnational investments associated with haunting and possession – ranging from explorations of gothic globalism to mapping the transnational Gothic to the global marketing of gothic commodities – is crucial because it complicates any simplistic notions about the politics of the Gothic. More precisely, it precludes reductive readings both of the national and postnational arguments mobilized within the fictions in this study and of the political valence of the fictions themselves. On the one hand, since the rise of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, many authors have relied on the tropes of haunting and possession to “articulate the concerns of the unvoiced ‘other’” (Lloyd-Smith 28) and to criticize the violence of global capitalism and its commodification of marginalized groups on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation (Sonser 2). On the other hand, as Robert Martin remarks, although the Gothic can allow “for the voice of the culturally repressed, and hence, act out a resistance to the dominant culture,” critics generally agree that the Gothic is most often a politically conservative form “that gives expression to the anxieties of a class threatened with violent dissolution” (130). The politically conservative aspect of the form continues in the strand of the global Gothic that deals in pulp fiction featuring haunting, possession, vampires, and zombies. In its commodified and mass-marketed form, the Gothic is not at all consciously political. Nor do its references to and reliance on transnational global networks signal the utopian transcendence of the twin evils of nationalism and global capitalism, since its essential popularity makes it a global commodity, “an issue that critics have acknowledged only peripherally” (Sonser 4). Put somewhat differently, the racist and assimilative dynamics of imperialism and nationalism, which give rise to the Gothic, are neither avoided nor resolved by transnational identifications

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on the part of contemporary gothicists since similar dynamics are currently being played out in the global marketplace. In Post-National Arguments (1993), for example, Frank Davey explicitly warns against naïve beliefs that transnationalism represents a positive solution to the gothic problems of Canadian nationalism; Pheng Cheah makes this point more forcibly in Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Maintaining a focus on Canada, Davey considers the implications of the free-trade deal and bemoans the fact that what post-centennial Canadian fiction appears most strongly to announce is the arrival of the postnational state – a state invisible to its own citizens, indistinguishable from its fellows, maintained by invisible political forces, and significant mainly through its position within the gird of world-class postcard cities ... Collectively they suggests a world and a nation in which social structures no longer link regions or communities, political process is doubted, and individual alienation has become normal ...‘We are all Europeans now.’ (226) The nation has been replaced by a “transnational textuality whose orientation is ethnic, feminist, racial, or sexual” (Kertzer 26) – orientations that have, in fact, become commodities. Sharing some of Davey’s pessimism, Kertzer argues further that to propose “a clean break from all national literary histories in the hope of devising an unprecedented alternative is to dream of a fresh start ... But to ignore the nation is to fall into the trap of trying to escape from the past by silently reinscribing its forms” (193). My response to this complexity is not to try to resolve it, but, in Kertzer’s words, “to inhabit it” in an effort to understand how it is articulated through the tropes of haunting and possession in contemporary English Canadian fiction (194). One reason for the popularity of tales of haunting and possession may be the fact that the movement from the domestic sphere into the global marketplace, instigated by global capitalism and diasporic upheavals, has meant that home as a constant has become less of a given, as more and more people are unhomed–often forced to exist in a kind of liminal space traditionally associated with the ghost. The sense of “neither here nor there” experienced (albeit in profoundly different ways) by the traveller, immigrant, migrant, and refugee can all be related to the inbetween space of the ghost. This may explain why various theories of

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postcolonialism and diaspora that take as their starting point the movements of individuals, the dispossession of people, and the clash of disparate cultures make use of the image of the ghost to capture the inbetweenness of the displaced. Not surprisingly, a range of postcolonial theorists use the trope of haunting to symbolize the traces of lost histories in their understandings of colonial relations. A number of postcolonial critics have made use of the vocabulary of haunting to evoke the uncanny legacy of colonization. Some of these include Baucom, Bhabha, Chambers, Cheah, Gelder, Lopez, and Sharpe. Diaspora theorists have also found the trope enabling. The authors of Ghosts and Shadows, for example, suggest that their examination of the African diaspora, specifically “how the past continues to affect the present in the lives of diaspora populations,” is “a ghost story” (Matsuoka and Sorenson 4). For these critics, “[l]ooking at ghosts and shadows helps us to understand both ontic and epistemic aspects of diaspora experience ... ghosts and shadows are not merely the spectral recurrences that haunt individual experiences; they often become the source of a structure of feelings, the basis of the mythico-history that allows groups to analyze their collective experience and identity. They are neither objective nor subjective” (5). In her book Cultural Haunting, Elizabeth Brogan refers to what she calls “American ethnic” writers who make use of the symbol of the ghost. According to Brogan, their stories are centrally concerned with the issues of communal memory, cultural transmission, and group inheritance. In a country like Canada – with four major waves of immigration after the initial period of British and French colonization, and a fifth wave that is currently ongoing – the tropes of (dis)possession and haunting may be a particularly useful way to think about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement, about ancestors, and about inheritance. Since Brogan coined the phrase “cultural haunting,” it is important to consider her work in the light of the similarities and differences between us and Canadian ethnic haunting. In her introduction, Brogan explains that her interest in the subject of cultural haunting sprang from her realization that ghosts were “populating African-American literature in growing numbers” (1). In her initial recognition and more detailed account of cultural haunting in America, the legacy of slavery takes precedence (15). In tracing what she terms the “masterplot” of panethnic novels of haunting, Brogan contrasts the function of ghosts in

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traditional Gothic novels with the spectres in African-American narratives. She claims that whereas ghosts in Gothic novels merely register individual and psychological taboos, ghosts in African-American fiction perform this function and also “signal an attempt to recover and make use of a poorly documented, partially erased cultural history” (2).7 A distinctive and rather rigid teleology emerges in Brogan’s account of the trajectory of the pan-ethnic “masterplot.” Brogan insists that depictions of traumatic possession by frightening ghosts must be resolved by “exorcism” and “revised” into non-traumatic, conscious “narrative memory” (6, 17). This prescription installs an opposition between the supposedly discrete categories of “traumatic possession” and “narrative memory.” Moreover, the statement implies that an absolute “working through” of cultural trauma is possible and desirable. To illustrate her argument concerning the benefits of shifting from “possession to exorcism ... from bad to good forms of haunting” (6), Brogan turns to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. As Brogan says, “Morrison defines historical consciousness as a good form of haunting, in which the denied ghosts of the American past are finally integrated into America’s national identity” (8). In essence, she uses Morrison’s writing to support her view that to achieve a unified national identity, formerly enslaved African Americans must be repossessed and wholly assimilated, “finally integrated” into “America’s” national identity. Brogan’s repeated insistence on labelling possession as a “dangerous incorporation of the dead which signals a failure to organize memory, to render it useable” likewise supports this fantasy of repossession and incorporation by attempting to contain and expel unAmerican ghosts which threaten the mythic identity of the American citizen – a citizen who supposedly knows how to put the past in its place. As I argue in chapter 1, many Canadian writers and critics are slightly more resistant to the related projects of modernism and psychoanalysis, which privilege exorcism over learning to live with ghosts. Perhaps because Canada experienced neither a revolution to separate from Britain nor a Civil War centred on the conflict over slavery, Canadian identity – if such a thing can be said to exist – never congealed with the same force or fervour as America’s in response to the trauma and guilt associated with the institution of slavery. As Smaro Kamboureli notes, anxiety about identity is a “trait Canadians want to believe is peculiar to them” (xii). By extension, haunting in Canadian fiction and Canadian critical responses to haunting do not typically generate scholarly read-

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ings that support this type of project, namely, the forging of and insistence on a monolithic national identity. A comparison of what Brogan terms American pan-ethnic literatures’ “masterplot” to the fictions analysed here by Brand and King, for example, highlights how the latter repeatedly underscore the interminable nature of the temporal possession of the present by the past, eschew the work of exorcism and mourning that Brogan advocates, and, instead, rely on haunting and possession to rewrite the hegemonic mythology of the Canadian nationstate or, to borrow McLean’s words cited earlier, to forge “alternative pasts and futures” (30). Brogan’s study remains valuable, however, because in addition to coining the term ‘cultural haunting,’ she also observes the fundamental connection between women and haunting. Early on, Brogan posits a specific connection between women and the uncanny when she poses the following question: “Why, might it be asked, are so many stories of cultural haunting written by women?” (24). As Brogan points out, haunting in women’s texts tends to attach to reproductive issues: “the ghosts often arise from traumatic memories of rape, abortion, or miscarriage; possessed bodies are described as pregnant, or ghosts themselves may appear as pregnant ...” (25). Yet, as Louis S. Gross remarks, women’s involvement with cultural haunting has a long pedigree: “As producers and consumers, women have sustained the Gothic novel for two hundred years” (37). Sonser argues further that women writers foreground these tropes in Gothic fiction in an effort to “critique a tradition of exploitation, colonization, and commodification” that characterizes the “American capitalist experiment” (Sonser 5). Simply put, the emphasis on reproduction in women’s tales of haunting reflects a world in which the social construction of womanhood was and, to an extent, remains predicated on women’s reproductive function, which, regardless of whether one is black or white, is “largely controlled and manipulated by men” (Sonser 28). Critics of the Female Gothic, a tradition that I discuss in more detail in the introduction, have also helpfully traced the metaphors of haunting in women’s writing directly to the repressive force of British law. Commenting on Mary Beard’s 1946 study Women as Force in History, Diana Wallace credits Beard with drawing “attention to what has been one of the most powerful metaphors in feminist theory: the idea of woman as ‘dead’ or ‘buried alive’ within male power structures which render her ‘ghostly’” (Wallace 26). Metaphors of haunting, as Wallace

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explains, go back well beyond what we normally think of as the first “gothic” period to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s famous 1662 lament: “Men are so unconscionable and cruel against us, as they endeavour to bar us of all sorts and kinds of liberty, so as not to suffer us freely to associate amongst our own sex, but would fain bury us in their houses or bed, as in a grave; the truth is, we live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms” (248). With its metaphors of live burial, Cavendish’s plaint speaks directly to English laws surrounding marriage, “which only allowed the legal existence of one person – the husband” (Wallace 30). The most explicit statement of legal concepts of coverture and the femme covert, however, are found in William Blackstone’s influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765– 69), a standard textbook for trainee lawyers. Here Blackstone asserts: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything” (qtd. in Wallace 31). Wallace, and Mary Beard before her, trace the origin of the “haunting idea” to this passage and the notion that married women are thereby “‘civilly dead’” (Beard 78–9). Commenting on these laws, Frances E. Dolan notes: “The laws respecting women ... make an absurd unit of a man and his wife; and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cipher” (257). As Wallace underscores, the word “cipher,” originating from the Arabic word for ‘zero,’ and meaning a symbol that denotes ‘no amount’ but is used to occupy vacant space (OED), anticipates Dolan’s reference to the “spectre of the erased, dead or zero wife” (39). In his textbook, Blackstone further emphasizes the gothic implications of women’s erasure and their position as spectres haunting the nation when he compares the English constitution and laws to “‘an old gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.’”8 Owing to women’s problematic relation to retaining ownership of their property after marriage, early feminists and feminist sympathizers including Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill drew analogies between women’s erasure under English law and the institution of slavery. As Wollstonecraft explains: “When therefore I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense” (286). Mills develops the analogy between marriage and slavery when he states: “Marriage is the only actu-

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al bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house” (220). Following these first wave feminists and their supporters, a host of feminist critics continued to rely on metaphors of spectrality, burial, and imprisonment. As Wallace notes, however, a shift occurred “as they are no longer used to theorise women’s ‘subject’ position specifically within marriage but to analyse the repression of women’s ‘subjectivity’ in a wider sense” (34). In addition to juridical discourse, powerful connections were also forged between women and haunting within biomedical, psychological, and psychoanalytic discourses. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Freud famously aligned the female body with the uncanny: “It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (221). Taken together, the awareness on the part of scholars such as Brogan, Sonser, and Wallace, to name only a few, that a preponderance of women writers gravitate to stories of haunting and possession refines Freud’s universalism and ahistoricism by suggesting important links between patriarchal nations, their laws, and gender roles – links that have particular relevance in Canada, a nation whose literature is renowned for its female authors. In accordance with Brogan, I would suggest that “the ghost provides a metaphor for how women’s more restrictively defined roles as bearers of culture might be reconceived” (25). In Brogan’s words, because female bodies are often the site of an uncanny struggle for control over lineage, “the shift from metaphors of blood descent to ghostly inheritances reframes cultural transmission in ways that women especially are likely to see as liberating” (25). Yet, in keeping with Freud, I argue that women’s ghost stories are also written in response to the long-standing psychological associations between femininity and the uncanny – associations that date back to classical conceptions of hysteria, a disorder supposedly caused by a pathological “wandering uterus.” Since patriarchal contests of power based on lineage and inheritance are fought on the grounds of women’s bodies – the womb being the site of legitimate and illegitimate modes of social reproduction – it is useful to appreciate how contests over property and propriety relate to hysteria, a disorder whose name refers to the Greek term for uterus. Equally important, as critics such as Anne McClintock and Jodey Castricano have argued, in both colonial and

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post-colonial literature, the female body often serves as a figure for the land and indigenous and enslaved peoples caught in imperial and colonial struggles. Castricano observes, in particular, how images of black and white/light and dark “have been instrumental not only in spinning out the ethos of Othering in linking woman to matter, nature, and evil but also in justifying the brutal exploitation of non-European cultures by western colonial and imperial forces” (203). As I argue in this study, frequently the image of the lost or injured mother serves as a trope for the settler-invaders’ attempts to destroy Native culture and the environment. As well, in these fictions, struggles within the haunted house signal contests over both women’s rights to property and unresolved Native land claims. A closer examination of the terms addressed in this study as they appear in the works under consideration sheds light on the profound connections between haunting, possession, the uncanny, gender, race, and the nation-state. The OED defines possession as “the action or fact of holding something (material or immaterial) as one’s own or in one’s control; the state or condition of being so held.” In effect, both “possession” and “dispossession” recall Freud’s contention cited earlier that the uncanny concerns the home and typically surfaces in conjunction with crises concerning matters of possession and inheritance. In using the term “(dis)possession,” this study gestures toward the often enigmatic links forged in narratives between distinct yet related understandings of home as a body, a domestic space, and a nation – all of which are capable of being possessed, a process that often renders the individuals associated with these homes dispossessed. My aim in placing the prefix “dis” in parentheses is to draw attention to the enigmatic doubling in stories that feature haunting and possession – stories that repeatedly frame female characters’ isolated, individual experiences of spirit possession within the larger, yet often elided context of the unsettled and unsettling legacy of the dispossession of bodies, families, homes, and nations instigated by the impact of imperialism, colonialism, diasporas, and globalization. In other words, the term “(dis)possession” sutures the fiction’s manifest content of spirit possession to the more shadowy, traumatic, and latent experiences of dispossession instigated by clashes between cultures. As a result, I argue that instances of spirit possession in the works under consideration are often best understood as attempts at re-possessing the personal and cultural identities of marginalized groups whose knoweldges have been elided and, at times, forcibly repressed by the

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white, patriarchal, Christian Canadian nation-state. As we will see, in Steffler’s and Urquhart’s novels, haunting is indicative of the workings of much larger cycles of victimization, in which individuals are dispossessed by British law, dispossess Native peoples, and are finally erased and/or rendered spectres within the narrative. With respect to the second term in this study’s title, “haunting,” the OED definition is as follows: “Of imaginary or spiritual beings, ghosts, etc: To visit frequently and habitually with manifestations of their influence and presence, usually of a molesting kind. To be haunted: to be subject to the visits and molestation of disembodied spirits.” I am not using haunting in the more abstract and colloquial sense of being “haunted by memories” or being “haunted by the past” but referring specifically to texts in which ghosts appear. As noted earlier, the appearance of ghosts often signals the deployment of specific aesthetic conventions and/or generic contexts, such as the Gothic or magic realism, and so prompts an analysis of how those forms are themselves haunted by knowledges, bodies, and histories previously excluded by these western, European aesthetic paradigms. Rather than focus solely on a particular genre, however, this study explores individual examples of what Mark Edmundson terms “the art of haunting, the art of possession” (xi). In addition to the terms of this study, I also gave careful consideration to the national and temporal scope of my project. In essence, the choice of texts for this book is governed by a desire to consider the extent to which the trope of haunting is bound up with Canada’s status as a settler-invader society historically engaged in the project of nation-building, and currently occupied with the challenges of post-nationalism (and the return of nationalism) and globalization. For my purposes, although the fictions range from post–World War Two to the present, they maintain a critical engagement with both the historical and contemporary national contexts. To date, only two book-length studies, one written in the 1970s and the other thirty years later, touch on the subject of ghosts in Canadian literature: Margot Northey’s The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction (1976), and Justin Edwards’ Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005). Current scholarship, however, including A. Manguel’s The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories (1990) – a second version will be released shortly – and John Robert Columbo’s Mysterious Canada (1998), as well as the special issues and various articles on the subject, indicate a tremendous

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resurgence of interest in the trope of ghosts and haunting in postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, post-structuralist and postmodern theory, and feminist and queer theory. A partial list of recent Canadian scholars who have engaged with the trope of haunting includes McFarlane, Kertzer, Gunew, and Edwards. There are also two special issues of Mosaic on “Haunting” edited by McCance, as well as Atwood’s Strange Things and Negotiating with the Dead, and Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic edited by Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. While these works analyze the significance of ghosts in specific texts, this study is the first to address directly and comprehensively the motifs of haunting and possession in a range of contemporary Canadian fiction. Moreover, whereas the other studies have focused primarily on the Gothic, the critical frameworks brought to bear on the texts in this study are not limited by genre and attempt instead to acknowledge a variety of traditions and influences, including Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and Native North American spirit beliefs. For this reason, although gothic and psychoanalytic approaches remain important, they exist in dialogue and, at times, in tension with the equally relevant non-western frameworks that inform the texts under consideration and problematize any singular critical perspective. Given that this study deals most explicitly with the Gothic, I will now briefly review what the Gothic is and explore what critics have to say about its basic structural, affective, thematic, and political elements. (Readers who are already well versed in the genre are welcome to skip ahead to the outline of the sections and individual chapters at the end of my introduction.) In general, scholars find it increasingly difficult to define the Gothic, a complex poetics that “mutates across historical, national, and generic boundaries as it reworks images drawn from different ages and places” (Smith 4). Drawing on the story of Frankenstein’s monster, Maggie Kilgour likens the Gothic to a literary patchwork, “assembled out of bits and pieces,” and calls it a “hybrid between the novel and romance” (4, 6). As Justin Edwards asserts, the Gothic’s hybridity may be understood in at least two ways: “as a Frankensteinesque creation that is patched together from various textual features to create a new life or, as a revolutionary process, creating new life out of the dialectical merger of outdated textual productions and world views” (Gothic Passages xix). Stressing the diversity of gothic cultural production, now a global phenomenon, Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy suggest that

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“in this u.s., it has produced neither a ‘genre’ nor a cohesive ‘mode’ but rather a discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self ’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness” (vii). They argue further that “the Gothic coheres, if it can be said to cohere, around poetics (turns and tendencies in the dismantling of the national subject), around narrative structuration, and in its situation of reader at the border of symbolic dissolution” (vii). They warn that “the multivalent tendencies of the Gothic have not been particularly illuminated by recent attempts at generic categorization” (vii). By contrast, critics such as Marilyn Michaud argue persuasively that due to the “splintering of analyses into a host of thematic temporal and regional subspecialties,” significant explanatory relations often go unrecognized (2). Marchaud goes so far as to argue that the emphasis on a distinction between early American and British Gothic literature constituted nothing more than a marketing ploy (14). As part of my effort to map the poetics of haunting in contemporary Canadian writing, in what follows, I explore the central branches of the Gothic’s complex genealogy, namely, the British, the American, and the Female Gothic traditions. Although the Gothic emerged at different times and in different genres across Europe, as Lloyd-Smith asserts, strict interpreters of the genre would perhaps agree with Maurice Levy’s insistence that “the true period of the Gothic and its cultural, aesthetic, religious and political background was from about 1764–1824, the period of the first Gothic Revival and the culture of Georgian England” (Lloyd-Smith 4). Scholars typically trace the origins of British Gothic fiction to the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, printed under a pseudonym in 1764 and reissued in 1765 with a new preface, in which Walpole promotes his unique “blend [of ] the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern” (9). According to Walpole, the former consists of “all imagination and improbability” whereas the latter is governed by the “rules of probability” connected with “common life” (9). Although the appeal of this type of blended or hybrid fiction remained limited for several decades, demand for the Gothic exploded “throughout the British Isles, on the continent of Europe and briefly in the new United States during the 1790s (the decade Walpole died)” (Hogle 1). In the nineteenth century, elements of the Gothic were disseminated into various modes, including more realistic Victorian novels. At the end of the nineteenth century, akin to the fin de siècle of the previous century, there was anoth-

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er surge in Gothic fiction that culminated in the production of classic examples such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (see Hogle 1–2). Scholarly comparisons between the British and American Gothic traditions frequently emphasize their differences. Unlike the British Gothic, which developed during a definable time period and has a recognized coterie of authors, the American Gothic is less easily specified in terms of a particular time period or group of authors (Goddu 3). Moreover, as Gross observes, in contrast to the British Gothic which explores the past, American gothicists’ approach to time and setting is strikingly different because the latter “do not remove their characters to Italy, Spain, France or other centres of English Gothic mystery; they shriek and faint in familiar surroundings and near the readers’ own time” (24). In the hands of American writers, Gross argues, the Gothic is used “to illuminate our own people and our own age” (24). The presentist focus of the American gothicist is largely shared by early Canadian writers; in this regard, Lloyd-Smith’s view that “the distinctive theme and deepest insight of American Gothic, the sense that there is something behind, which may not be, as in European Gothic, the Past, but some perpetual and present Otherness hidden within, behind, somehow below the apparently benign ‘natural surface’” also holds true for the Canadian Gothic (LloydSmith 86). His views are echoed by Eric Savoy’s sense that “the entire tradition of the American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke “‘the face of the tenant’ – the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative” (14). In the case of Canadian literature, the landlord is typically the belated arrival, the settler-invader, and the tenant is the Native North American. Critics who compare British and American Gothic invariably cite Lesley Fiedler’s claim that American fiction has been “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a Gothic fiction, non-realistic and negative, sadistic and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29). According to Fiedler, “until the Gothic had been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the Gothic cannot die” (143). Gross likewise underscores the fact that unlike the English Gothic “which was and is seen as something apart from the mainstream of English narrative, American fiction established itself in the Gothic genre. There is a more

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central position for the Gothic in American fiction than in any other national literature” (Gross 2). In his preface to Edgar Huntly (1799), Charles Brocken Brown, one of America’s first novelists to use the Gothic, argues that the “field of investigation, opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe ... Puerile superstition and exploded manners; gothic castles and chimeras” might feature in European versions of this genre, Brown continues, but the “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable; and, for a native of America to overlook these, would admit of no apology” (3). In his comments on Edgar Huntly, Fiedler likewise insists that the change from European prototypes, such as the ruined castle, to the forest and cave reflects a profound change of meaning: In the American Gothic ... the heathen unredeemed wilderness and not the monuments of a dying class, nature and not society becomes the symbol of evil. Similarly not the aristocrat but the Indian ... the savage colored man is postulated as the embodiment of villainy. [The American Gothic becomes] a Calvinist exposé of natural human corruption rather than an enlightened attack of a debased ruling class or entrenched superstition. The European Gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American Gothic (at least as far as it followed the example of Brown) identified evil with the id and was therefore conservative at its deepest level of implication. (160–1) As Renée Bergland explains, in colonial Gothic, when cliffs are substituted for castle towers and caves for dungeons, “the threats and dangers of the natural world replace the threats and dangers of ancient aristocratic power structures” (95). Again their observations confirm trends in the Canadian Gothic. In addition, Fiedler’s reference to the “savage colored man” forcibly reminds us that “the rise and flowering of the Gothic novel in Britain and the u.s. between 1765–1850 coincides with the emergence and codification of modern conceptions of ‘race’ as a biological division of humans into specific groups characterized by distinctive, non-overlapping physical, moral and intellectual and emotional attributes” (Anolik and Howard 18). The formation of both Gothic traditions has, indeed, “par-

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alleled uncannily the history of racial formation” and reflects profound anxieties concerning “dark racialized others” (DeLamotte 17). As Justin Edwards points out, “British Gothic tropes of questionable primogeniture, pure bloodlines and transgressive sexualities return to haunt the American tradition with a vengeance” (Gothic Passages xvii).9 As we will see, particularly in Steffler’s fiction, these tropes also haunt the Canadian tradition. In the British, American, and Canadian Gothic traditions, then, the shadowy alliance between the Gothic and slavery constitutes a powerful common denominator. Many of the eighteenth-century British male gothicists – such as Matthew “Monk” Lewis and William Beckford – were either slave-owners or pro-slavery (Goddu 133), and in America, Edgar Allan Poe dedicated his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1836) to Colonel William Drayton, author of The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (1836). As Lesley Ginsberg argues, with this gesture, Poe almost “invites us to link the psychological machinery of the American Gothic to the political machinations of American racism” (123). Due to their connection to the institution of slavery, both Old and New World Gothic traditions confirm Goddu’s assertion that “slavery was a significant part of the historical context that produced the Gothic and against which it responded” (Goddu 133). In the American republic, however, slavery “destroys the antithesis between Europe and America and thereby undermines the myth of American exceptionality” (Goddu 18). Although, as I noted earlier, slavery plays the opposite role in the mythology of Canadian national identity, as we will see, Brand’s and Steffler’s fictions likewise explore the traumatic impact of slavery. Due to its emphasis on slavery, the irrational, and the perverse, many scholars conceive of the Gothic as the flipside of eighteenth-century rationality and morality – the reverse of Enlightenment values (Botting 2, Lloyd-Smith 6). More precisely, the Gothic condenses threats to Enlightenment values since it is associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgressions, mental disintegration, and spiritual corruption (Botting 2). In effect, the Gothic offers a vision of illegitimate power and violence that threatens to consume the civilized world and its domestic values. Critics have long noted, for example, its first widely popular use during and after the French Revolution (1789–99) and they cite the view of the Marquis de Sade, a frequent adapter of gothic devices, who in 1807 saw this “genre [as] the inevitable product of the revolu-

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tionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded” because it was able “to situate in the land of fantasies” the violent challenges to established orders that by now were “common knowledge” (Sade qtd. in Hogle 12–13). Indeed, the skeletons that leap from the family closet often expose the erotic, sadistic, and incestuous tendencies of gothic villains – “spectres that threaten complete social disintegration” (Botting 5). Through its characteristic portrayal of villainous patriarchal figures stalking helpless females through gloomy castles, the Gothic signals fears about patriarchy’s capacity to withstand threats to rational behaviour and illicit passions. Failure to do so invokes terrors associated with exceeding the bounds of reason, social propriety, and moral law. Within the newly formed American republic, the Gothic signaled profound concerns about men’s capacity for rational self and national governance. Behind “the states of fear and horror, and driving through the tissue of reasonable and rational explanations loom the outlines of real horrors. In early Gothic it was sometimes the reality of the oppression of women, or children, in a patriarchy that denied them rights” (Lloyd-Smith 8). In recognition of women’s early and ongoing investment in the Gothic, Ellen Moers coined the term Female Gothic (1976). As Moers states, “What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic. But what I mean – or anyone else means – by ‘the gothic’ is not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear” (90). For Moers, the Female Gothic represents fears about women’s entrapment within domestic spaces and anxieties about birth. As Sonser explains, a central concern in the Female Gothic is “the economic and social violence through which women are constituted as subjects or, conversely, denied subjectivity” (98).10 One of the primary features of the Female Gothic is its encoding of challenges to patriarchy’s hold over women in the form of the gothic mother and the terrifying pull “of the masculine back toward an overpowering femininity” – epitomized in contemporary culture by Alfred Hitchcock’s portrait of Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. As I noted, many Canadian authors including Watson, Anderson-Dargatz, Steffler, and King align the figure of the lost or gothic mother with repressed Native North American cultures. As I suggested earlier, in his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud sheds light on societal fears of an overpowering femininity. But Freud also demonstrates in this essay that the Gothic provides the most powerful instances

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of those fears. For Freud, what epitomizes the uncanny, as he reveals in his close reading of E.T.A. Hoffman’s German Gothic tale “The Sandman,” is “the deeply and internally familiar (the most infantile of our desires or fears) as it reappears to us in seemingly external, repellent, and unfamiliar forms” (Hogle 6). Freud suggests that the feeling of the uncanny arises when individuals are threatened with a “regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people” (212). At issue for Freud with respect to the uncanny is the question of origins, the nature of being, and the process of individuation as it pertains to the individual, the family, and the nation: To what extent does my existence depend on the past, on the m/other, family, or nation? For Freud, the uncanny and, by extension, the Gothic represent everything that threatens the teleological process of individuation – personal and national – and movement away from undifferentiation. In his infamous concluding remarks cited earlier, Freud reports that the unheimlich response to women’s genitals springs from the fact that “this is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning” (221). In keeping with his observations concerning the relation of the uncanny to personal and national origins, all of the works under consideration invoke spectres in conjunction with ambivalent desires to return to a more undifferentiated and dyadic state. Whereas Watson’s, Anderson-Dargatz’s, and Steffler’s novels portray this doubling back to repressed Native North American origins largely as a threat to the Christian patriarchal nation-state, Brand’s and King’s writing celebrates the experience of returning to lost matriarchal cultural origins. Taken together, all the writers in this study implicitly respond to Freud’s suggestion that the repressed knowledge of women’s power over individuals as infants and of humanity’s biological debt to and dependence on women haunts patriarchal society. In addition to the spectre of the Great Mother, in Gothic fiction, homosexuality also surfaces as a significant threat to patriarchal society; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously observed the homosexual panic in the Gothic mode (89). At times, these two threats fuse in the figure of the independent and powerful lesbian. As Terry Castle argues, One might think of lesbianism as the ‘repressed idea’ at the heart of patriarchal culture. By its very nature (and in this respect it differs significantly from male homosexuality) lesbianism poses an

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ineluctable challenge to the political, economic, and sexual authority of men over women. It implies a whole new social order, characterized – at the very least – by a profound feminine indifference to masculine charisma. (In its militant or ‘Amazonian’ transformation lesbianism may also, of course, be associated with outright hostility toward men. One might go so far as to argue – along with Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and others – that patriarchal ideology necessarily depends on the ‘compulsory’ suppression of love between women…) (Apparitional 62) In his analysis of Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story “Carmilla” (1872), Smith observes that according to the story, under patriarchy, “a father’s love and lesbian love are incompatible” (97). In general, the prohibition against lesbianism recalls Margaret Cavendish’s assertion cited earlier that “men do not suffer us freely to associate amongst our own sex, but would fain bury us” (248). As Diana Wallace suggests, it is “the radical potential of relationships with other women (whether genealogical, political or sexual) which has always been most strongly repressed” (38). Ultimately, the greatest horror of the Gothic is not tied to a particular unlawful desire but to the more general fears associated with the dissolution of western society’s codes of civilization, which are predicated on binary oppositions such as reason and passion, masculine and feminine. On the basis of the presence of these recurring anxieties and figures, as well as a relatively constant set of features, scholars identify fictions as “primarily or substantially Gothic” (Hogle 2). With respect to the latter, in accordance with Walpole’s preface, Gothic fictions typically play with and “oscillate between the earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the supernatural” (Hogle 2). Second, as The Castle of Otranto and Dracula illustrate, Gothic fictions typically take place in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space, although in contemporary examples, the locus of the castle gives way to the old house (Botting 2–3). In the case of the Gothic, however, this primary feature, the concept of the house, refers both to a building and to a family line. Speaking of the works of Hawthorne and Faulkner, Martin asserts that “the centrality of the house ... stands for a fallen family, the failure of an attempt to inscribe the self in history through possession” (131). Within this space are hidden “secrets from the past ... that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story” (Hogle 2). Yet these individuals can also be understood as

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haunted by “deep-seated social and historical dilemmas ... that become more fearsome the more characters and readers attempt to cover them up or reconcile them symbolically without resolving them fundamentally” (Hogle 3). In this way, Gothic fictions align the conflicted and haunted individual with the equally doubled and divided political unconscious of the nation-state. Finally, these hauntings frequently assume the features of “ghosts, specters, or monsters that rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view” (Hogle 2). In The Powers of Horror, psychoanalytic and literary theorist Julia Kristeva aligns these gothic ghosts and grotesques with what she terms “the abject” and products of “abjection” – terms that she derives from the literal meaning of ab-ject: “throwing off ” and being “thrown under” (see Lloyd-Smith 97–8). In the case of the Gothic, however, whatever is expelled or hastily buried insistently returns to haunt the living. Given the preceding account of the Gothic, one might expect the genre to be wholly aligned with revolutionary politics. Yet, as noted earlier, the political valence of the Gothic is particularly complex, making it difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain in the abstract whether the Gothic is fundamentally conservative or revolutionary. As critics observe, there are as many instances of the genre being used to promote a revolutionary ideology as there are of its use for conservative ends (Hogle 12–13). Anolik argues, for example, that the work of the Gothic is neither radical nor deconstructive. As she explains, “the AngloGothic suspicions that the ‘other’ may really be the ‘self ’ operate not to interrogate the racial ideologies that structure the central metaphors of difference embodied in gothic boundaries and barriers, but rather to help construct the racial ideologies that assign dark persons with deviance to begin with” (26). Similarly, Katherine Henry surveys early American Gothic texts that engage in what she terms “civic recovery – the reconstitution or re-centering of a dysfunctional civic identity – redrawing the boundaries of America citizenship in a way that promises a return to stability”; yet these solutions “eventually prove problematic, revealing a racist configuration at the heart of the developing model of citizenship” (33). Although the Gothic’s particular ideological valence must be determined on a case-by-case analysis, it is nevertheless possible to state with certainty that Gothic fictions convey a doubled and divided perspective, hesitating between “the revolutionary and the conserva-

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tive” (Hogle 13). This ambiguity has significant repercussions for my study, which traces the manifestation of the tropes of haunting and possession in Canada, a post-colonial settler-invader nation. As Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte suggest, for some time “postcolonial and gothic discourses have been paired in critical invocations of the inherently ‘unhomely’ legacy of imperialism” (Sugars and Turcotte 1). They argue further that gothic tropes have emerged in Canadian literature “as integral to the postcolonial articulation and interrogation of national identity constructs and dominant representation practices” (1). In keeping with my initial identification of the three primary forms of haunting in Canadian fiction, Sugars and Turcotte also observe that sometimes the state is haunted and unsettled “by intra-national ‘others’” and, at other times, gothic discourse is used “to figure diasporic displacement as an inherently ‘haunted’ or unhomely experience” (2). In conclusion, they pose an important question, namely whether the Gothic takes “a somewhat different form in a New-World context from that of the Old-World prototypes” – are we, they ask, beginning to define a new genre: “the Postcolonial Gothic” (4)? In essence, the aim of my book is to trace the poetics of haunting and possession that are associated in part with this new genre. In doing so, however, I remain mindful of Coral Ann Howell’s warning that Gothic criticism sometimes fails to “pay ... close attention to the slippages and oddities in these texts now that we have ready-made theoretical perspectives through which to read them” (vii). Part I of this study, “The Haunted Nation: Explorer and SettlerInvader Amnesia and the Spectral Native,” consists of chapter 1 on Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, and chapter 2 on John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright. Both chapters trace the association between home and nation to demonstrate how the tropes of haunting and ghosts signal the uneasy relationship between the settler-invader society and Canada’s indigenous peoples. Chapter 1 examines Watson’s The Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning in an effort to complicate by historically and geographically contextualizing the question posed earlier, namely, to what extent is it useful to talk about the English-Canadian Gothic novel and what differentiates it from other national manifestations of the genre? In formulating answers to these questions, I rely on close readings of the texts and argue for the need to pay careful attention to the historical and geographic specificities of the

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spectral presences in both works. Both novels deal with communities within the interior of British Columbia which are the sites of protracted disputes over land claims. In effect, these novels portray the settlerinvaders’ anxious attempts to exorcise the spirit of Coyote and replace it with the familiar stereotype of the vanishing and/or doomed Native. However, uncanny traces of Native people’s claim to the land continue to unsettle both narratives. In The Double Hook, Coyote is given the last word, and in The Cure for Death by Lightning, the triumphant settlerinvaders seemingly rid the town of Coyote’s troublesome effects, but they can never expunge the evidence of their aggression against Native peoples and its traumatic impact, symbolized by a ghostly and ineradicable trail of blood. Chapter 2 on The Afterlife of George Cartwright continues to re-politicize and complicate the tropes of haunting and possession and builds on the first chapter’s primary argument that discussions of the Canadian Gothic need to attend carefully to the specific historical and geographic contexts that prompt the gothicizing of settler/Aboriginal relations and the transformation of Canadian landscapes into haunted loci. In my reading of Steffler’s narrative, I trace the impetus to gothicize these relations and the landscape to the eighteenth century’s British inheritance laws and religious and secular theories of degeneracy. Ultimately, I argue that Steffler’s novel exposes a larger cycle of victimization that complicates the traditional binary opposition between colonized-colonizer, victim-victimizer, self-other. Viewed within the terms of this cycle, readers can appreciate how Cartwright’s monstrous aggression against North American Native peoples is prompted in part by his prior dispossession by the British law of primogeniture. Part II, “Transnational Haunting: The Ghosts of Diaspora,” adopts and adapts the earlier insights concerning cycles of dispossession and victimization to explore how these cycles inform literary portrayals of the Irish and Black diasporas. Taken together, the three chapters in Part II, on Jane Urquhart’s Away, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Dionne Brand’s poetry and fiction, illustrate how traumatic pasts rooted in Canada and distant homelands continue to haunt the protagonists long after their arrival in the host nation. In keeping with the texts examined in Part I, Urquhart’s, Atwood’s, and Brand’s writing also depicts home as radically divided and haunted by history, although, in this case, the haunting and fracturing occur at the national and transnational levels. In essence, their writings confirm that in addition to chal-

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lenges posed by the spectral legacy of the settler-invader’s clash with Native North Americans, the idea of the unified nation is further undermined by fictions that rely on the images of haunting and possession to portray the experience of more recent immigrants and members of diasporas. While recognizing the spectral nature of Canadian national and transnational politics, these novels by three celebrated Canadian women writers locate phantoms within the familial and national contexts to challenge Canada’s historically entrenched patriarchal, racist, and classbased divisions. Taken together, the texts in both Parts I and II raise a question central to a national literature renowned for its female authors, namely, why are so many Canadian stories of haunting written by women? One answer is that associations between the female and the ghostly tend to appear owing to anxieties connected with the nature and place of female desire and agency within patriarchal culture. In Away, Urquhart eschews the Gothic in favour of magic realism to inscribe a matriarchal and utopian vision of Celticism in opposition to the dominant, patriarchal, Christian discourses of British and Canadian nationalism. In keeping with Urquhart’s novel, Atwood’s Alias Grace explores the impact of the Irish diaspora, but whereas Away aligns haunting with the resurgence of Celticism, Alias Grace links haunting and possession to anxieties associated with gender and class mobility in nineteenth-century Upper Canada. With its repeated allusions to hysteria – a disorder infamous for blurring the lines between illness, fakery, and fabrication – Alias Grace expresses a nightmare of the upper class, namely, that in the New World, inheritance based on networks of filiation and blood will be trumped by networks of affiliation and hard work so that, ultimately, no one will be able to tell the difference between the true gentleman or lady and the upwardly mobile lower-class pretender. Part II’s final chapter on Brand’s writing complicates the preceding argument by demonstrating that the prevailing paradigms of the Gothic, magic realism, performance, and trauma, however useful, nevertheless have their limits. Although it lies outside the orientation and the aims of this project to leave such paradigms behind, I draw attention to the ways in which Brand’s texts self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of possessed bodies and, in the process, demonstrate a profound awareness of alternatives to western epistemology and ontology afforded by AfroCaribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions. As noted earlier, both chapter 5 on Brand’s writing and chapter 6 on Thomas King’s

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Truth and Bright Water emphasize the need to recognize the partial nature of western critical paradigms and to forge a dialogue between these and their marginalized counterparts. Both steps are integral to my exploration of writing by racialized Others that “haunts back.” Part III, which includes the chapter on King’s novel and the conclusion on the ethics of haunting, offers a response to the texts addressed in part I since King’s novel speaks directly to the uncanny relationship between the settler-invader society and Canada’s First Peoples. Equally important, King’s fiction, like many of the works in this study, invokes haunting and possession in the context of a broader exploration of the role of art in responding to the (dis)possession of Canada’s marginalized and racialized “Others.” In keeping with the other works under consideration Truth and Bright Water aligns haunting with the return of the repressed, offering spectral reminders of the unresolved crimes against Canada’s First Peoples. In my analysis of King’s novel, I align haunting with the concept of liminal, intermediate, or transitional phenomena, as they are variously known, to show how in King’s novel haunting maintains both negative and positive valences. In keeping with the doubleness characteristic of Gothic fiction, in Truth and Bright Water, both the ghosts and the land on which they wander constitute transitional phenomena that fuse two seemingly opposite elements – first, traces of the traumatic impact of first contact and of subsequent crimes against Native peoples, and second, traces of Native cultural practices that have the power to counteract the devastation wrought by the settler-invaders. In the conclusion, I draw on the close readings offered in the preceding chapters to generate a critical practice that grapples with the ethics of haunting and possession. More precisely, I challenge the prevailing view of ethical criticism which treats literature as a tool to access the experience and mind of the Other – in the words of Michael Eskin, “the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other” (Eskin, “The Double” 560). I argue that the tropes of haunting and possession instigate an encounter with ghosts and the past that resists this type of mastery and, hence, does not necessarily entail a reenactment of history as conceived of by the dominant members within the nation-state. If, as McLean suggests, the return of the repressed appears to hold out the possibility of radically rewriting the past, present, and future, then rather than merely supporting the nation in its efforts to assimilate the recalcitrant fragments of diverse, marginalized cultures, spectral narratives have the potential to counter the urge to master the other (see McLean 30–2).

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Using the novels under consideration as evidence of this potential, I argue that narratives that feature haunting often strategically introduce obstacles that arrest the impulse to cross barriers and merge self and other, particularly when this impulse is directed at marginalized groups. To highlight the ethics of haunting, this chapter revisits the works under consideration with an emphasis on Watson’s The Double Hook and King’s Truth and Bright Water, the foci of chapters 1 and 6, respectively. I would suggest that both Watson’s and King’s texts exemplify the ethics of haunting precisely because they complicate naïve assumptions about literature’s ethical engagement. In effect, by self-consciously emphasizing misrecognition and miscommunication, their novels challenge the fantasy that we can easily cross cultural boundaries and plumb the depths of the other. Ultimately, I argue that the tropes of haunting and possession in the works under consideration play an uncannily double role. On the one hand, they remind readers of the extent to which the Other has been constructed and treated as a spectral pawn on a predominantly western semiotic chessboard. On the other hand, the range of spectral tropes deployed by these fictions signals strategies of resistance – powerful challenges and alternatives to the cherished fiction of the unified, patriarchal, Christian Canadian nation-state.

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Explaining u.s. Policy Variations

part one

The Haunted Nation: Explorer and Settler-Invasion Amnesia and the Spectral Native

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1 Coyote’s Children and the Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning This chapter analyses the treatment of the uncanny gendered and racialised nature of haunting in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959) and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996). Of all the works considered in this study, their novels are most complicit with the project of exorcism outlined by Brogan, which, as noted in the introduction, she associates with contemporary American tales of ethnic haunting. In Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s texts, however, the success of the exorcism remains highly ambiguous. Ultimately, both novels suggest that if critics choose to speak of a “Canadian” Gothic, then they must contend with the ironic possibility that in these haunted narratives, the spectres haunting Canadian society prove too powerful and compelling to banish. In accordance with the Gothic, both Watson and Anderson-Dargatz fashion doubled and divided texts. On the one hand, their novels promote colonial and apocalyptic values associated with the settler-invaders’ fantasy of a new Eden; yet, at the same time, their works remain haunted by the victims of this fantasy and the outstanding claims of North American Native peoples. I chose Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels for comparison primarily because in both works the figure of Coyote serves as the locus for competing discourses: patriarchal/Christian/heterosexual/settler-invader versus matriarchal/nonheterosexual/Native. In addition, both works are concerned with houses, which, in keeping with the uncanny, signal multiple and related anxieties associated with property, lineage, and race. I assert that both texts feature gothic elements including distempered patriarchal figures and transgressive matriarchs aligned with Coyote, which express the complex

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dialectic of the state and the national unconscious. Ultimately, the features that threaten to subvert the dominant discourses of the modern Canadian nation-state are expelled – the gothic mother and the Native other, who are both aligned with the spirit of Coyote. Owing to this process of abjection, the integrity of the nation is seemingly secured. Despite the characters’ attempts at exorcism, however, Coyote’s ghostly presence continues to haunt the land. His spectral presence hints at several possibilities for a doubling back to repressed origins that include Native people’s prior claim to the land, matriarchal and non-Christian spiritual traditions, and, finally, non-individualistic dyadic states epitomized by the mother-child bond and represented by the threat of the lesbian couple. Watson’s novel The Double Hook immediately highlights the tensions between Christian and Native traditions and histories by offering a biblically inflected introduction to its characters, who live “under Coyote’s eye”: In the folds of the hills under Coyote’s eye lived the old lady, mother of William of James and of Greta. (19) The introduction is immediately followed by a description of James’ murder of his part-Native mother, the old lady.1 The remainder of the text details the other characters’ repeated, uncanny encounters with her ghost, which is always associated with Coyote. Similarly, in AndersonDargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, the narrator, Beth Weeks, is a fifteen-year-old, white, Christian girl who is also under Coyote’s eye. Her whereabouts are uncannily transparent to this ghostly force that menaces her and that ultimately possesses the body of a man aptly named Coyote Jack.2 As noted in the introduction, Canadian texts that feature haunting and possession are valuable sites to study the extent to which it makes sense to refer to a “Canadian Gothic.” Intriguingly, in Watson’s The Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, spectral effects associated with gothic conventions are linked both to unbridled male and female desires and to indigenous mythology, specifically the figure of Coyote. I would suggest that the spectre of Coyote that haunts both Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s

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novels serves as a figure for the settler-invader society’s anxious and barely repressed awareness of the Native people’s prior claim to the land. Ultimately, in these novels, Coyote remains more of a ghostly absence than an actual presence, serving both as the trace of Native people’s unjust treatment by the settler-invaders and as a screen for the latter’s projection of a variety of threats to the image of a patriarchal, Christian, Canadian nation-state. Both The Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning are set in the interior of British Columbia and explore relations between the Natives and non-Natives in the area – a two-hundred-year-old struggle within the province of bc that continues to this day. Viewed in this light, it is not surprising that the ghostly spirit of Coyote haunts the settlerinvader’s land; indeed, with the exception of a very few coastal bands, the Native peoples of bc “never made any agreement for the sale of their aboriginal rights, nor had they fought and been conquered by the whites”; thus, unlike most of the indigenous peoples elsewhere in Canada, “they are non-treaty Natives, and land laws were imposed on them without any recompense” (Balf 13).3 As Watson herself admitted, “I went to teach in the Cariboo where I sank roots which I’ve never really been able to disentangle” (qtd. in Flahiff 39). She was particularly disgusted by the government’s treatment of the Shuswap tribe. Commenting on the residential school attended by the Native children from Dog Creek, Watson stated, “The Indian mission school at Williams Lake seemed like a penal colony out of which children were released, finally into a starving and decimated community in which language and culture – religious and social – had been destroyed – but not obliterated – not completely” (Flahiff 39). In 1924, Watson wrote to Emily Carr and asked her what contacts she had made among the Shuswap. Watson concluded her letter by saying, “Too little is known and too much is being lost of the spirit which is native to British Columbia.” Watson remained haunted by Canada’s treatment of the Shuswaps, and, in turn, she left her readers to negotiate the legacy of this haunting.4 Owing to their implicit engagement with the tensions surrounding the ongoing aboriginal land claims in bc, Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels constitute important examples of the geographic and historical specificity associated with the appearance of the tropes of haunting and possession. As Arnold Davidson, citing Margot Northey, asserts, “Canadians have long been haunted by their wilderness” (243). The use of the possessive “their” is both troubling and relevant to this discussion because it

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highlights the vexed question at the heart of Canadian tales of haunting concerning rightful ownership of the land. As Davidson observes, one form of haunting involves “the new immigrant, the settler who would remain firmly grounded in the values he brings with him,” finding the “unsettled forest or prairie appalling” (243–4; my emphasis). Indeed, the settlers’ haunting fear that they are being hunted by “an indefinite thing with no name,” according to Davidson, “is almost always invoked or created by those who find their sense of reality, which is the source of their security, at odds with the different reality of the empty land that they see all around them” (244). Recognising that this type of haunting is based on the misguided perception of an “empty land,” Davidson argues further that a second, more complex form of haunting involves the recognition that “a wild, empty land ... is empty only according to the prevailing civilised standards of what constitutes a full one ...” (244). As suggested earlier, the spectre of Coyote that haunts both The Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning indicates the settler-invaders’ experience of being unsettled by the return of their repressed awareness of indigenous people’s prior land claims. Watson and Anderson-Dargatz lived in neighbouring regions of bc (the Cariboo District and the Thompson Okanagan, respectively) that featured an uneasy juxtaposition of Native reserves, small towns, farms, and ranch land–regions that later served as the inspiration for the settings of their novels.5 The co-existence of these regions highlights the fact that colonial space “is by its very nature a bifurcated, ambivalent space, where the familiar and unfamiliar mingle in an uneasy truce” (Paravisini-Gebert 233). Far from anti-realist fantasies, Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s texts register the uncanny status of Canada and of bc, in particular, by representing conflicts between those aligned with the patriarchal, Christian, settler community and those aligned with the unsettling trickster-god Coyote. A transformer-trickster figure who provides sustenance for his people, Coyote embodies, for the settler-invader society, the uncanny, aboriginal claim to the land.6 The term “uncanny” is appropriate for a study of Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s para-colonial7 haunted texts because within it two seemingly antithetical terms circulate: heimlich, which Freud glosses as “home,” a familiar or accessible place; and unheimlich, which is unfamiliar, strange, inaccessible, unhomely (Gelder and Jacobs 181). As Gelder and Jacobs explain, an uncanny experience may occur “when one’s home – one’s place – is rendered somehow and in some sense unfa-

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miliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This happens precisely ... when one is made aware that one has unfinished business with the past, at the moment when the past returns as an ‘elemental’ ... force to haunt the present day” (181). As they assert, “An Aboriginal claim to land is quite literally a claim concerning unfinished business, a claim which enables what should have been laid to rest to overflow into the otherwise ‘homely’ realm of modernity” (181). In essence, the “uncanny” can remind us that within settler nations, “a condition of unsettled-ness folds into this often taken-for-granted mode of occupation” (182). Watson based The Double Hook on her two-year experience teaching during the Depression (1934–36) in the Cariboo District of British Columbia, which she describes as “a country of opposites”: “heat and cold; flat rolling plateau and sheared-off hills; streams, rivers, potholes and alkali waste; large ranches and small holdings; native Indians and expatriated Europeans and great stretches where no one lives at all” (Watson qtd. in Morriss 55). In her unpublished commentary on the novel, Watson describes the District as “devious” and “hostile,” filled with “the isolation of which spatial separation is a symbol, the isolation of mind from mind ...” (qtd. in Morriss 55). Noting Watson’s determination to forge a unified community, Shirley Neuman states: “Writing about a region and a time in which English, American, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese settlers, among others, lived alongside an aboriginal population, Sheila Watson asks what common knowledge could possess them, make them into a civilised community ...” (Neuman 1). Indeed, Watson admits that she wrote the novel because she was deeply troubled by the fragmented and isolated community that she encountered: “The theme of the book is simply this: ... If men ... have neither an image of church or state or even tribal unity, if they are cut off from a rooted pattern of behaviour ... they respond to life with violence or apathy” (qtd. in Morriss 55). To resolve the apparent isolation, “unsettled-ness,” and lack of civility, the novel portrays the once-isolated inhabitants forming what Morriss refers to as “a true community” (56). But the community that constellates, in true gothic fashion, remains predicated on the expression of direct threats to its cohesion, namely, the unsettled and unsettling desires of nomadic Native peoples and women who refuse patriarchal and Christian models of domestication. In using the term “expression,” I am referring to Kristeva’s notion of abjection, as well as Rosemary

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Jackson’s insights about fantastic literature, which, as she says, can operate in two ways (according to the different meanings of “express”): “it can tell of, manifest or show desire (expression in the sense of portrayal, representation, manifestation, linguistic utterance, mention, description), or it can expel desire, when this desire is a disturbing element which threatens cultural order and continuity (expression in the sense of pressing out, squeezing, expulsion, getting rid of something by force)” (3–4). Indeed, “in many cases fantastic literature fulfils both functions at once” (4). Although Jackson seemingly conflates the Gothic and the fantastic, the former is best understood as a subset of the latter, which encompasses a broad range of literary genres including fantasy, detective fiction, utopian fiction, adventure tales, heroic literature, romance, and the Gothic. Unlike the latter, which is associated with singularly dark affects including the uncanny, horror, and terror, the fantastic, as its name suggests, is characterized by the more general affects of surprise and astonishment (Rabkin 17). Equally important, fantastic literature produces astonishment, as Eric Rabkin explains, by forcing the ground rules of a narrative “to make a 180-degree reversal” (20). Rabkin argues further that the fantastic offers a vision of escape (42), and this is why scholars commonly refer to it as “escapist” literature (Cornwell xi). Stressing fantastic literature’s reversal of norms, Rabikin argues that the escape offered by the fantastic comes precisely from its ability “to exchange the confining ground rules of the extra-textual world not for chaos but for a diametrically opposed set of ground rules that define fantastic worlds” (44). In his study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov offers a more formal definition: In a world which is indeed our world ... there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions. ... The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. ... The possibility of hesitation between the two creates the fantastic effect. (25–6) Ghosts and other mysterious entities either have a rational explanation – which Todorov terms “the uncanny” – or they have a “marvelous” one

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– in which there is actually a supernatural origin for the phenomenon. I would argue further that this choice contributes to the process of expulsion that Jackson describes. In keeping with Jackson’s insights, the formation of the new community in Watson’s novel is quite literally predicated on expulsion and sacrifice. Two threatening, part-Native women die violently: the selfish old lady is murdered by her son James – an overt example of “getting rid of something by force”: “Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today” (19). In addition, the old lady’s daughter, Greta, whose transgressive sexuality is incestuously8 directed toward James, commits suicide: And Coyote cried in the hills: I’ve taken her where she stood my left hand is on her head my right hand embraces her. (85) Although Coyote claims both Greta and her mother, throughout the novel, the old lady’s apparition, always in association with Coyote, haunts the community.9 Scorning notions of property and propriety, restlessly and shamelessly fishing on everyone else’s land, her ghost acts as the trace of an aboriginal claim that, to borrow Gelder and Jacobs’ words, overflows “into the otherwise ‘homely’ realm of modernity” (181). Ann Radcliffe, famous for Gothic novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, wrote that gothic protagonists live in a world that seems “more like the visions of a distempered imagination, than the circumstances of truth” (Radcliffe 329). Her view of the gothic world is echoed in The Double Hook: “The whole world’s got distemper he [James] wanted to shout ... The ground’s rotten with it” (43). Distemper is an apt term because it links an individual’s “disordered condition of the body or mind” to the “derangement, disturbance, or disorder” of the “state or body politic” (OED online). In the case of Watson’s novel, the distemper and rot are tied to unresolved Native land claims. Moreover, because the old lady embodies these repressed claims that disturb the mainstream cultural order, the other characters condemn her both for her nonmaternal, nomadic lifestyle and for her defiant insistence on looking for something that has been hidden or lost. Early on, the old lady’s daughter-in-law, Ara, sees the old lady’s ghost fishing along the creek and

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remarks bitterly, “Passing her own son’s house and never offering a fry ...” (20). Later, Greta complains, I’ve seen her standing looking for something even the birds couldn’t see. Something hid from every living thing. I’ve seen her defying. I’ve seen her take her hat off in the sun at noon, baring her head and asking for the sun to strike her. Holding the lamp and looking where there’s nothing to be found. Nothing but dust. No person’s got a right to keep looking. To keep looking and blackening lamp globes for others to clean. (31) Although readers never know what exactly she is looking for, in keeping with Arnold Davidson, I would suggest that she may be doubling back, looking for traces of Native culture that have been effaced and repressed by the settler-invaders. Angel, the only “pure-blooded Indian” woman in the novel (see Morriss 61), reminds Greta that “[o]ne person’s got as much right as another ... There’s things people want to see. There’s things too ... there’s things get lost” (31). Indeed, what “gets lost” or, perhaps, more accurately, sacrificed in The Double Hook, are histories and desires that threaten the sex-gender system and resist the Christian, assimilationist project of the Canadian nation-state. Viewed in the larger context of the Gothic, the old lady represents the familiar figure of the occulted female.10 As noted in the introductory chapter and as Freud’s comments concerning the uncanny suggest, at the forbidden centre of the Gothic “is the spectral presence of the dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront” (Kahane 336). Yet, in Watson’s novel, the old lady’s identity simultaneously represents both the “dead or displaced mother” (Kahane 335) and the spectre of Native “survivance (survival + resistance)” (Powell 400). Although it is possible to trace the old lady’s connection to this well-documented gothic figure, in what follows, I explore the intriguing and lesser-known connections between the old lady and Native survivance. Here and in the final chapter’s discussion of Thomas King’s novel Truth and Bright Water, I argue that the lost mother frequently serves as a powerful trope for the settler-invaders’ repressed attempts to destroy Native culture and the environment. As I observe in my book Re-writing Apocalypse, amnesia and repression typically obscure the often violent creation of nation-states. In this respect, Freud’s speculations concerning the unheimlich have particular

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relevance to the uncanniness of the Canadian nation-state. As Ernest Renan argues in “What Is a Nation,” nations are troubled by secrets. According to Renan, the “forgetting” of historical events is always a “crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” What must be forgotten are the “deeds of violence which took place at the origin” (Renan 11). Yet, as Homi Bhabha insists, this process, which he terms “forgetting to remember,” constantly calls back into discursive existence that which it purports to erase (DissemiNation 310). Despite the effects of this willed amnesia, traces of apocalyptic violence and resistance to it remain visible (26). Put somewhat differently, the spirits and histories of what in Re-writing Apocalypse I term “the non-elect” continue to haunt the descendents of the European settlers who relied on the discourse of apocalypse – with its vision of the “old world” being replaced by the new – to legitimate their claim to Canadian land. As I note in my study of apocalypse, the misogynistic biblical narrative portrays “a stark opposition between good and evil – an opposition that culminates in the sudden and violent destruction of the non-elect” (11). The violence at the heart of apocalypse, which reveals the rage unleashed on the non-elect, is perhaps most graphically expressed by the fate of Jezebel and the Whore of Babylon. According to Revelation, the Whore’s flesh is devoured and burned up with fire (Rev. 17:16). Although the United States’ pre-eminent status as the apocalyptic nation has partially obscured Canada’s debt to apocalyptic discourse, fictions such as The Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning demonstrate that the creation of the Canadian nation-state was also predicated on visions of a patriarchal God and His male elect creating a new Eden. Bearing the apocalyptic resonances of first contact in mind when we turn to Watson’s novel, we can appreciate that by fishing upstream to the source, the old lady may be finally attempting to resolve after her death one of the ambiguities of her life. Searching for Coyote, she could at last ground her being in its Indian source, a source that well may be itself in the process of disappearing or at least becoming something else as indicated by Coyote’s propensity (protecting disguise?) to pass himself off as the Christian God. (Davidson 36) Viewed in this light, the amnesia that attends the settlers’ creation of a new Eden on Native people’s land is undercut by the old lady’s doubling back to Native origins.

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Although Davidson suggests that Coyote is passing himself off as the Christian God, a more vexed and vexing reading of the novel locates the imposition of the Christian religion on Native peoples within a broader colonial framework. As Native educators assert, “the erosion of Shuswap authority over their own lands and people started with the Hudson Bay Company’s imposing British justice on Shuswap people. This was the most insidious and fundamental political change that occurred from 1800 to 1858” (Wolf 26). But this change was followed by the equally insidious and fundamental imposition of Christianity in 1842 (Balf 6). Replicating the ongoing pattern of colonial imposition, Watson’s narrative transforms Coyote, a Native-American trickster figure, into an Old Testament version of God.11 This transformation is, in fact, part of the narrative’s overarching Christian paradigm, which aligns the consolidation of the community’s elect and the reawakening of Christian values with the eradication of the transgressive female (the Whore) by fire and with the birth of James’s son. The novel concludes with James assuming his rightful role as patriarch and his decision to build “a new house” where his mother’s house once stood. Viewed in this light, the transformation of a Native spirit into the Holy Spirit reflects both patriarchal nationalist and modernist agendas to “clean house.” In his introduction to A Companion to the Gothic, David Punter asks, “Where might we locate the ‘Gothic moment’ in modernism?” He goes on to wonder whether we might “prefer to see in modernism precisely that movement of the mind that seeks to exorcise the ghost, to clean out the house ... and assert the possibility of a life that is not haunted as it situates itself resolutely in a present and strains toward the future” (ix). The Double Hook, one of Canadian literature’s most celebrated modernist texts,12 seemingly confirms Punter’s observations with its apocalyptic conclusion in which the old lady’s son James envisions building a new house on the charred ruins of his mother’s home: In his mind now he could see only the seared and smoldering earth, the bare hot cinder of a still unpeopled world. He felt as he stood with his eyes closed on the destruction of what his heart had wished destroyed that by some generous gesture he had been turned once more into the first pasture of things. I will build the new house further down the creek, he thought. All on one floor. (131)

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As this passage suggests, James’ gesture reflects the novel’s explicit debts to the biblical discourse of apocalypse and to literary modernism, with its famous injunction to “make it new.” In his keynote address to the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2007, entitled “Memory and Modernism,” Robert Pinsky usefully elaborates on this injunction when he refers to psychoanalysis – which, speaking of cleaning house, was founded and described by Breuer’s famous patient “Anna O” as a mental form of “chimney sweeping” – as “a psychological parallel” to modernism and probes their mutual, paradoxical obsession with remembering and forgetting. In his talk, Pinsky cites Hans Loewald’s well-known reflections on Freud’s footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams about the ghosts of the underworld, hungry for and awakened to life by the blood of the living souls. As Pinsky observes, Loewald’s oft-cited remarks about turning ghosts into ancestors are intimately related to modernism’s cultural and psychological projects. In short, psychoanalysis promotes the re-excavation of history for the purposes of renewal – a praxis that dovetails with modernism’s injunction to look to the past and make it new. As Loewald explains, in classical psychoanalysis, the patient’s unconscious discovers or, in his words, “tastes” in the present “the blood of recognition,” which reawakens “the old ghosts” to life. Moreover, according to Loewald, “those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from the ghost life and laid to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life” (qtd. in Pinsky 1083). Both Pinsky’s and Loewald’s comments underscore that psychoanalysis, like modernism, maintains a future-oriented bent that privileges exorcism over learning to live with ghosts. As a result, both modernism’s and psychoanalysis’s end-driven discourses are at odds with the type of cyclical and accretive gothic narratives generated by authors whose counterdiscourses exhibit an alternative tendency to live with revenants and to dwell on and in the past. As noted in the introduction, the transformation of ghosts into ancestors is particularly difficult in a settler-invader society such as Canada – a nation-state whose political unconscious remains haunted, as Cynthia Sugars observes, “by several Native ghosts: the ghosts that European settlers and their descendants refused to recognize as legitimate, the ghosts of those whom they killed, and the ghosts that they

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recognized and subsequently appropriated” (“Haunted” 5). Yet, as I also point out, according to McLean, the modern nation-state must repeatedly summon and deploy these ghosts “for its claims to be culturally persuasive” (McLean 29). The demand that the nation-state repeatedly summon its ancestral ghosts presents a problem in Canada. One might well ask how a settler-invader nation is supposed to transform its Native ghosts into ancestors. This apocalyptic and modernist attempt to clean house by transforming living Native peoples into ancestors who can then be laid to rest is apparent in The Double Hook. Yet, as I argue both here and in the final chapter, Watson’s novel does not so easily banish its uncanny spirits. For instance, although Coyote does frequently speak with a biblical cast, readers may still question whether he necessarily becomes God – as the majority of critics have argued – or whether he functions instead, in accordance with gothic conventions, as God’s uncanny double (see Davidson 35). Moreover, even if mainstream critics equate Coyote with God to make Coyote God, as Davidson asserts, “why could not the same equation have the opposite resolution and make God Coyote?” (35). In fact, readings that emphasise the subversive power of Coyote are reinforced by Watson’s own revisions to the conclusion, which underscore Coyote’s continued spectral presence.13 In earlier drafts, Coyote’s blessing of James’ newborn son appeared before the conclusion, but the published version ends with Coyote’s voice crying out from “a cleft in the rock” to herald the birth: I have set his feet on soft ground; I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders of the world. (134) As Morriss argues: “Watson’s simple adjustment gives Coyote, the preternatural focus of discord and abdicated humanity, the last word” (63). Calling out from the vaginal cleft, the womb/tomb to which Greta and the old lady have been banished, the spectre of Coyote ensures that in Watson’s haunted novel the claims of both the displaced mother and the Shuswap Nation continue to haunt the text.14 Watson has fashioned a divided text that, in keeping with both modernism and the Gothic, holds together the secular and the supernatural in what McLean, tracing a similar phenomena, describes as “a relation of contrast and opposition that is also, necessarily, one of mutual interdependence” (5).

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The Cure for Death by Lightning, like The Double Hook, emphasises gendered and racialised contests over spiritual and geographic territory and continues to raise unsettling questions about the settler-invaders’ status in Canada. Set in bc’s China Valley, this novel initially highlights global disputes over territory by virtue of its temporal setting during World War Two, when imperial powers were engaged in struggles over the borders of European nation-states. These overarching conflicts have an impact on the protagonist’s family; for example, early on, we are told that the narrator’s father suffered a head injury during the Great War that left him “irritable and demanding” (10). Like James in The Double Hook, Beth’s father suffers from “distemper.” Later the narrator states, “The blood of a war a thousand miles away rained down on us” (63), thus linking the distempered, macrocosmic struggles over territory to their microcosmic parallel in the battle between Beth’s father, John, and his neighbour, the Swede, to establish the border between their farms. At this same microcosmic level, the narrator’s father forcibly attempts to contain the threat of the Natives who live on and near the reserve by ordering them off his property. When the Shuswap elder, Bertha Moses, criticises Beth’s father for exploiting Native youth – “You hire our boys because they don’t know how to ask for what they’re worth ... You treat them as if they were slaves” – he shouts, “Get out of my house!” (14). Faced with a disturbing element that threatens mainstream cultural order and continuity, he responds like James in The Double Hook and forcibly attempts to banish the threat from his house. Within Anderson-Dargatz’s novel, as in The Double Hook, contests over territory are also envisioned as a battle between Native and Christian spiritual traditions. Again, both novels cryptically encode the traumatic experience of the Shuswap Native peoples with Christian missionaries from 1842 onward. When Beth visits the reservation, she notices that it was “overwhelmed by the church” (112).15 Yet, as Bertha Moses explains, “Those Christ people rule this village here, but Coyote owns the bush. He always has” (117). In keeping with the conventions of the Female Gothic, Coyote’s possession of the bush is initially aligned with the familiar binary opposition between helpless young women and male victimisers whose erotic and incestuous tendencies raise the spectre of complete social disintegration (Botting 5). Indeed, in the novel, the overt, familiar threat springs from unrestrained sexual, patriarchal forces: “men on the rampage” (Ferguson Ellis 263).16 When the mysterious, threatening force chases Beth through the grass, she says, “it could

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be anything: a man like the ones my mother’s friend Mrs. Bell warned of, who would catch a girl in the bush and do unspeakable things to her” (4). Ultimately, this threat is realized when Beth is raped by her father. Although the novel sets up what appear to be stable binaries – church/Coyote and village/bush – in fact, the introduction of men on the rampage and helpless women complicates the equation and raises difficult questions: are men aligned with the church and women with Coyote or vice versa? As noted in the introduction, the fear is not identified specifically with men or women, but with the possibility that patriarchy will be undermined from within by a host of uncanny returns. In addition to the threat of transgressive and incestuous male desire incarnated in Beth’s father, a much more covert, aboriginal, and sexually transgressive desire presented in familiar melodramatic gothic terms gradually emerges as the most subversive challenge to the dominant patriarchal order – a threat so terrifying it must ultimately be banished from the text. Early on Beth is befriended by Nora, Bertha Moses’ granddaughter, a Native girl who sports “boys’ jeans and a western shirt that stretched a little at the buttons across her breasts” (9). The attraction between the two women is immediate. When their eyes meet in a crowd for the first time, we are told, “The room grew womanly” (10). Interestingly, as their relationship develops, a curious shift occurs in the menacing spectral force: Coyote is increasingly aligned with Nora: I saw a motion in the grass coming towards me, a splitting of the grass as if an animal or a man were running through it, but there was nothing there ... The swishing of grass filled up my ears and came at me faster than anything possible. Then a hand was on my shoulder. I swung around and Nora was there, her hand on my shoulder. (129) Scene after scene aligns Nora with Coyote,17 rendering her phantomlike perhaps because, as Terry Castle asserts, “to love another woman is to lose one’s solidity in the world, to evanesce, and fade into the spectral” (32): One woman or the other must be a ghost, or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited, only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to under-

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write these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free – together – from their male sexual overseers. Homophobia ... the order of the day, entertains itself wryly or gothically with phantoms, then exorcizes them. (Castle 34) In keeping with Loewald’s account of the goal of psychoanalysis, the goal, according to Castle, involves having a taste of blood to awaken the ghostly threat of lesbian desire, but only for the purpose of exorcism. As Castle explains, her attempt to trace the literary history of lesbianism entailed confronting from the start “something ghostly: an impalpability, a misting over, an evaporation, or ‘whiting out’ of possibility” (28). By repeatedly inviting Beth to run away with her, Nora embodies the possibility of “women breaking free – together.”18 Yet, in accordance with Jackson’s observation about fantastic narrative’s characteristic shift “from expression as the manifestation to expression as expulsion,” the narrative invokes the subversive power of lesbian desire only to exorcise it in order to maintain the patriarchal order. When Beth’s father discovers his daughter consorting with Nora, he confronts the latter and shouts: “Get off my property. Get away from here. Lousy Indian! Get off my property” (98).19 Toward the conclusion, however, Beth also playfully confronts Nora: “Maybe it’s you that’s following me ... You’re some spy, like them Germans. Or them Japs. Maybe you’re a Jap spy” (189). Her comments subtly reinforce the connections between internal and external territorial threats, equating the unsettling challenge posed by her Native, lesbian lover to global threats to the Canadian nation-state. Again, as noted in the introduction, the female body serves as a figure for the land and indigenous peoples caught in imperial and colonial struggles. Like Watson’s Native revenant, the old lady who wanders between two worlds, Nora poses a threat both to the patriarchal order and to the Canadian nation-state. This dual threat is conveyed by her unusual eyes and is registered when Beth first sees Nora: “Each of her eyes was a different color, one blue and one green. She was a half-breed, then” (15). Later, Beth muses that Nora “was Indian enough to be an outcast in town and white enough be an outcast on the reserve” (97). In addition to marking her unsettled and unsettling status as part Native, part white, Nora’s differently coloured eyes also mark her as a lesbian, what Native North Americans refer to as “two-spirit people,” a term that refers to

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Native people who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many indigenous groups. In a manner that parallels features of the uncanny gothic double, the term “two-spirit people” implies both a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit living in the same body – a concept that threatens the western ideal of the autonomous, selfpossessed man (see Gilley). Referring to Nora’s eyes, Beth explains, “This close I could see that her eyes of two different colors, one green, one blue, were startling, the eyes of two women in one face” (71). Here Nora’s eyes function as an emblem of what Castle terms “the embodiment of female-female Eros” (41). Due to the threat posed by her liminal status – a Native/non-Native, a girl/woman who, by virtue of her dress and sexual preference, acts like a man – Nora and those who associate with her are taunted and attacked by members of the Native and white communities alike. In her study of the Female Gothic, Claire Kahane traces the fears and desires associated with the figure of the lesbian who tempts the female protagonist with the possibility of “remaining bound within a motherdaughter relationship – erotically bound, that is, to a woman, a transgression of heterosexual convention” (342). As we saw earlier, the repression attending the settlers’ fantasy of Eden is undermined in The Double Hook by the narrative doubling-back to Native origins and Native people’s prior claim to the land. In The Cure for Death by Lightning patriarchal, Christian society, predicated on begetting, procreation, and paternal lineage, is also threatened by a doubling-back – in this case, to the mother-daughter bond. The relationship between Nora and Beth is explicitly likened to this bond. For instance, when Nora runs her hands through Beth’s hair, we are told, “It felt good and calming, like my mother brushing my hair before bed” (109). Later, when Nora sneaks into Beth’s room and slips into her bed to calm Beth after a nightmare, Beth remarks, “Nora rocked me and sang quietly ... When Nora finished the song, she combed my hair with her fingers, as my mother used to when I was a small child. I became aware of my mother, listening at the door. After a moment she moved away” (264). Nora’s maternal gestures, and her juxtaposition with Beth’s actual mother in the passage cited above, reinforce Nora’s role as a surrogate mother, a replacement for the mother who failed in her role because she allowed her husband to sexually abuse her daughter.20 In keeping with gothic conventions, the dystopian, patriarchal family dynamic leaves Beth feeling like a prisoner in her home. As she tells

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her mother, “it’s so dark in here, I feel like I’m suffocating” (125). By contrast, the utopian possibilities associated with Beth’s and Nora’s relationship are symbolised by their discovery of a secret house in the wilderness. Shortly after they meet, Nora leads Beth to a house buried in the earth that once belonged to Bertha Moses: “This is Granny’s old house,” Nora explains, “A winter house” (111). Although it belongs now to Granny, as Nora explains, before that it was her “great-granny’s house,” indicating that it has been in the family for generations (112). With its “opening into darkness at the centre of ... [a] mound of dirt and weeds” (111), the structure recalls women’s genitalia. Later, Bertha makes the connection between the winter house and the maternal body explicit, telling the girls that her mother “used to say the winter houses were safe like a mother’s hug” (115). In actual fact, what the girls discover is the remains of a kekuli or pit house, the circular, underground winter homes of the Shuswap that were built along riverbanks.21 These houses have become crucial to aboriginal land claims in bc since remnants of kekuli have provided archeological evidence that the Shuswap people lived in and laid claim to the interior of bc for four thousand years (Jack, Matthew, and Matthew 6). If, as critics recognise, the primary locus of the Gothic is “the castle [which] gradually gave way to the old house” – a topos that refers both to a building and to a family line (Botting 2–3) – then the girls’ discovery of the ancient, underground Native home simultaneously affirms the prior claim of the Native peoples of bc and the potential for escaping and radically revising the structure of the mainstream, patriarchal family. This potential is made explicit when Nora explains to Beth that the winter home is passed down through the maternal line and thus now belongs to her. Beth replies, “My dad wouldn’t give nothing to me ... The farm goes to Dan when he’s done with it, even though Dan wants nothing to do with it” (112). The challenge posed by the winter home – aligned with a non-domestic, nomadic existence – to traditional forms of patriarchal inheritance recalls Brogan’s observations cited in this study’s introduction. As Brogan explains, women’s writing that relies on the trope of haunting often stages the uncanny struggle for control over lineage. In this context, “the shift from metaphors of blood descent to ghostly inheritances reframes cultural transmission in ways that women especially are likely to see as liberating” (25). In The Cure, as in The Double Hook, however, rejecting paternal, civilised authority ultimately proves too threatening. In fact, Davidson

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argues that the decision to uphold supposedly civilised principles and propriety is characteristic of Canadian Gothic fiction: Huck can recognize where his real interests lie, abjure the dubious benefits of civilization, and light out for the territories. But his Canadian counterpart acts in quite a different fashion. Already inhabiting the territories, Niels Lindstedt, in Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925), will still retain, and abide by, all the principles he picked up at his mother’s knee. (245) Similarly, although Beth ultimately confronts her father and demands that he keep his hands off her, the novel’s conclusion reinforces what Kahane calls “the real Gothic horror” in which the heroine “is compelled to resume a quiescent, socially acceptable role” (342). Rather than continue to grapple with the pathology of a patriarchal, Christian social system, The Cure re-installs the familiar, conservative, and masochistic gothic conclusion in which “the master of the house is discovered as the evil source of her [the protagonist’s] tribulations and is vanquished by the poor-but-honest (and inevitably later revealed as noble) young man, who marries the woman” (Massé 10). Although The Cure for Death by Lightning does not end in marriage, the narrative underscores that Beth’s fate now rests in Billy’s hands. Ironically, in a novel whose title foregrounds the need to effect a “cure,” Anderson-Dargatz’s heroine, like so many gothic heroines before her, is supposedly “cured by the medicina libidinis offered in the conservative and comic resolution” (Massé 11). In this case, the cure is figured as the death of female and indigenous agency and subjectivity. On one level, the narrative submits to the imperatives of heterosexuality, “the reality principle before which the problematic pleasures of the female body yield” (Massé 11), and it also pathologizes Nora and other powerful Native women. As noted earlier, Nora possesses differently coloured eyes. But Beth notices that several other women in Bertha Moses’ household are similarly marked. When readers first encounter Bertha, Beth remarks that she “had no husband and no son. Her house was a house of women” (9). She goes on to observe that one of “the daughters’ daughters was pregnant, another had webbed fingers” (9). In effect, the syntax of Beth’s casual observation aligns independent women, the female body, and reproduction that exceeds societal sanctions with freakishness. Later, Beth remarks that Nora’s mother has “a

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man’s voice” (116) and “an extra finger on her right hand” (116). In her study of the Female Gothic, Ellen Moers confirms that the modern Female Gothic is populated by “freaks” – “creatures poised on a sharp, thin line between opposites: of sex, of race, of age” (108). Nora – a child/adult, white/Native, with her girl’s body concealed in a man’s clothes, and her attraction to Beth – sits on this knife’s edge. Whereas Moers argues that the appearance of freaks indicates the presence of a “haunted and self-hating self ” (109), the situation is more complicated in Anderson-Dargatz’s text where the threat posed by independent, phallic women is projected specifically onto Native women. In this case, the haunting and hating spring from a tripartite source: mainstream culture’s misogyny, its racism, and its suppression of Native rights. Although the narrative largely conforms to the logic of compulsory heterosexuality, in keeping with the ironic aspect of Canadian tales of ethnic haunting, it remains divided and, on occasion, resists this logic; thus, one cannot take the triumph of the settler-invaders at face value. In fact, both misogyny and racism are foregrounded when Beth asks Nora about these bodily signs of difference that run in her family: “A lot of your aunts and cousins have webbed fingers and things ... Like your mum and her extra finger. That’s weird, all that stuff happening in one family” (189). But, as Nora tells her, “Granny says they’re Coyote’s daughters. If Coyote’s inside some man when he’s with a woman, you know, then the child that woman has by him is like that. Webbed fingers, or extra fingers, or weird birthmarks, or each eye a different color” (189). Nora goes on to explain that, according to her mother, her father “was some white man ... who caught her in the bush. She told my uncles and they went and beat the white man up. Then the Mounties came and put my uncles in jail” (189–90). Rather than maintain the familiar, disquieting, and supposedly essentialist gothic link between the female body and freakishness, Nora’s response, which describes the rape of a Native woman by a white man and the Mounties’ perverse response, suggests, instead, that the weird “stuff happening” (189) in Bertha’s family is the bodily trace left on the Shuswap by the rapacious, unjust settler-invaders. Here the narrative reveals the familiar post-colonial “secret” of miscegenation. To be sure, the settler-invaders’ rape of Native women further complicates the lines of inheritance and confuses legal claims. Yet, far from facilitating the transformation of Native ghosts into ancestors who can be laid to rest, the legacy of rape manifests itself in the bodies of Native people who, in contrast to the stereotype of the doomed Indian,

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stubbornly refuse to vanish. As argued earlier, in both Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, Coyote figures as the trace of the repressed aspects of colonialism – its violence and its impact. This is emphasised when Bertha Moses tells Beth, “Did you know your ancestors, you white people, came from Coyote? You are his children. That’s why you act like that. Always greedy. Got to have everything for yourselves” (170). In forging a direct link between white people and Coyote, Bertha simultaneously restores primacy to Coyote and invites Beth, a child of the settler-invaders, to consider the negative effects of colonialism that are glaringly evident in both the non-Native and Native communities. In essence, Bertha’s statement highlights the precarious nature of the settler society’s claims, which are based on its faith in patriarchal family lineage – The House of the Settler – since, in the Canadian nation-state, the ultimate origin/father is not God, but Coyote. As noted, however, both Watson and Anderson-Dargatz fashion ambiguous and ironic tales of ethnic haunting. In Anderson-Dargatz’s novel, countering the selective attempts to reveal the repressed violence and traumatic impact of the settler-invaders on the Native peoples of bc – a revelation that challenges the supposedly essentialist link between freakishness and the racialized female body – are elements that reinforce this link and, in so doing, perform the traditional spectralising and “‘whiting out’ of lesbian [and Native] possibility” (Castle 28). In this case, the term “whiting out” is especially apt because Nora, the figure subjected to abjection, is a Native woman who is displaced by a lighterskinned man. Beth eventually spurns her lesbian lover from the reserve, paving the way for the heteronormative pairing of the protagonist and Billy, the Native youth who assists Beth in vanquishing the demonic spirit of Coyote on Christmas Eve. In light of the tension between Native and non-Native spiritual traditions in the novel, this date is particularly significant.22 The narrative’s logic of abjection calls for the sacrifice of both Coyote Jack and Nora. As Beth explains, on Christmas night “Coyote Jack hung himself ” (275).23 And, after repeatedly pleading with Beth to leave with her, in late winter, Nora gathers her belongings into a bundle and disappears down Blood Road. In this Canadian, postcolonial gothic fantasy, the troubling indigenous spirits willingly commit suicide or vanish into thin air.24 In this study’s final chapter, Thomas King’s response to the stereotype of the vanishing Indian is addressed in detail. As Malea Powell observes, “the Indian (whatever that may be) must disappear so that ‘America’ can live” (402). This narrative

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trope, in turn, recalls the actual work performed by the Christian missionaries: “Indian reformers throughout the nineteenth century most certainly believed that the salvation of the tribes meant the sacrifice of the ‘savage’ to Christianity and civilization” (Powell 403). Nevertheless, both the sacrificers and the sacrificed in AndersonDargatz’s The Cure, as in Watson’s The Double Hook, leave a disturbing trace. In The Cure, the trace is palpable: as noted, the rape of Native women by the settler-invaders leaves a physical mark on the bodies of their victims. In addition, those who have been injured are compelled to repeat the injury.25 Nora repeatedly cuts her arm: “[s]pots of blood dropped from her arm to the snow, creating a trail behind her” (283). At one point, she cuts herself while Beth watches in horror: “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “Stop that!” I cried. “There’s nothing pretty about it.” “It’s so red.” She sucked the blood from the cut on her arm. “So salty. You’d think you were drinking the ocean.” “Stop,” I said. “You’re making me sick.” Nora looked up at me. She’d been crying. Her lips were smeared with the blood from her arm. She licked them clean. (270) References to blood throughout the novel recall Loewald’s comment concerning the patient “who tastes” in the present “the blood of recognition,” which reawakens “the old ghosts” to life (qtd. in Pinsky 1083). Here, however, the references to blood underscore the theme of female and Native abjection and the violence that must be erased or “licked clean.” In the passage cited, blood overtly marks Nora simultaneously as masochistically female and Native (a Blood or Red Indian). Moreover, her gesture of sucking the blood from her arm is also linked to vampirism, rendering Nora racially, sexually, and monstrously Other.26 In contrast to characters such as Nora and Coyote Jack, scapegoats who serve as figures of abjection, Nora’s cousin Billy, who settles on the farm and protects Beth from her father and from Coyote, embodies the conservative message conveyed both by the Gothic and by the nationstate. In essence, as the youthful saviour who ultimately vanquishes and replaces the evil father and tends to both Beth and the farm (the father’s property), Billy replicates the Gothic’s consoling image of heteronormativity and redeemed masculinity. But he also serves as propaganda for the nation-state’s equally conservative program of Native assimilation.

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Readers are alerted to the latter when Beth remarks that unlike Nora and Billy’s cousin Dennis, who is “Indian all over,” Billy is different: he “cleaned his nails and shaved daily. He wasn’t as Indian as Dennis was. He had fairer skin” (21). Whereas Nora starts off as a girl of flesh and blood and ends up as a phantom, Billy begins as a monstrous figure of abjection, aligned with Coyote, and ends up as a real (white) man. Early on, readers learn that Billy’s nickname is Filthy Billy because “he does not own his voice” (22) and shouts and mutters obscenities. As Billy tells Beth: “That thing you (shit) got following you – that follows me. (Fuck) You don’t have to name it Coyote. (Shit) You call it demon or ghost, but it’s the same thing. Coyote (shit) won’t kill me. I’m his house” (257). By the end of the novel, however, boundaries between self and other are reinforced, and Coyote is evicted: “Listen,” says Billy, “I’m not swearing! He’s gone!” (277). Here the body-as-house recalls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s awareness that in the Gothic the “self is spatialized” (12–13). In this case, it also underscores the connection between lineage and inheritance, as well as the bodily and mercantile aspects of possession and dispossession tied to the projects of imperialism and colonialism. As noted earlier, the Old World castle and, later, the old house are primary topoi of Gothic fiction – as the title of Poe’s Gothic story The Fall of the House of Usher suggests. Moreover, as Davidson argues, in the Canadian Gothic “the Old World castle and the empty New World land are analogous. Both require inhabitants” (243). I would argue, however, that in the Canadian Gothic both the Old World castle and the New World land are also sites of ongoing struggles over possession. Thus, owing to both the primacy of the generic trope and the specific historical tensions concerning land claims in Canada, Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels are preoccupied with houses (in terms of the physical structure – property – and in terms of lineages – race). In The Cure, Beth’s father brutally governs his house until he is taken away to the local asylum. By contrast, Bertha Moses oversees a matriarchal, nurturing home on the reserve. Beth and Nora finally rebuild Bertha’s “winter house” deep in the earth, a structure that, like the concluding image of Coyote’s cleft in the rock in The Double Hook (134), recalls both the womb and the tomb, thereby underscoring the fears and desires instigated by Native and matriarchal forces. In light of the primacy of the gothic trope of the house, the fact that Billy ceases to be possessed by Coyote in The Cure (he no longer serves as Coyote’s house/host), much like the burning of the old lady’s house in The Double Hook, signals the supposed triumph of the Christian, nuclear fam-

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ily over the tribal and nomadic spirit of Coyote. Although to an extent, The Cure encodes elements of resistance to mainstream culture by portraying a mixed-race, lesbian relationship, Anderson-Dargatz’s novel, like Watson’s, also inscribes the masculinist imaginary that informs the patriarchal, Christian nation-state by attempting to exorcise the perceived essential, uncanny otherness of lesbian desire and Native resistance – a pattern that contributes to the formation of an unstable and ironic Canadian Gothic. In The Double Hook, the birth of James’ son, like Christ’s birth, supposedly effects the redemption of the isolated community. Similarly, in The Cure, allusions to Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection abound. As Bertha Moses states, Billy’s father sacrifices himself to save humanity (172–3). In addition, Beth insists that after Coyote leaves, Billy is reborn: “it was as if Billy had been remade, as if that old Billy had been sloughed off and he’d grown a new skin ... Nobody, not even Dennis, called him Filthy anymore” (285). Despite the supposed triumph of the Christian, patriarchal family – a triumph predicated on the Christ-like sacrifice of the Native – The Cure ends, like The Double Hook, with the spectre of Native resistance – the ironic counterpoint to the supposed triumph of the settler-invaders. Beth stands in the middle of Blood Road watching Nora “leave all over again. She was walking way from me, down the stretch of road. A trail of blood chased her ... Then she was gone and Billy was standing behind me, holding my shoulders” (292). By concluding with Beth (a white girl) “in the middle of Blood Road,” watching Nora (a mixed-race girl) moving away or, more accurately, being chased by a trail of blood, the text juxtaposes stasis with movement, the settled with the unsettled. On one level, like The Double Hook, The Cure seemingly ends with an affirmation of civilised community: Beth reaches over and clasps Billy’s hand. At the same time, Beth’s father takes his wife’s hand “in his fist and ... [holds] on to it for dear life” (292). But just as Coyote has the last word in The Double Hook, in The Cure, the repetition of the static, heterosexual, farming couples and their desperate clutching of hands signals a panicked and futile attempt to ward off the spectral threat with its familiar trail of blood – evidence of both a crime and a wound that cannot be erased. In Katherine Henry’s words, an “unsettled white citizenry has become haunted by its own exclusions” (33). As we will see in the final chapter of this study, in King’s Truth and Bright Water, a similar trail of blood leads readers back to the infamous Trail of Tears and the Removal of the

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Cherokee and other indigenous nations from their homelands in the United States. In both Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, the modern nation-state’s attempts to transform Native ghosts into ancestors is countered by the forceful irruption of repressed histories including traces of Coyote and, by extension, Native people’s prior ownership of the land; the transgressive and incestuous excesses associated with Christian, patriarchal rule; and a return to less differentiated, dyadic states. In the next chapter on Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, similar uncanny threats to the individual, family, and nation erupt. Moreover, as in Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, these threats transcend a purely literary context since they gesture to political and historical injustices that continue to haunt the Canadian nation-state.

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2 Dispossession and the Rule of Primogeniture in John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning invoke virtually all of the topoi of the Gothic, a genre famous for its doubled and divided structure. As we saw, these novels promote the fantasy of the New Eden as well as the Enlightenment and Christian values of reason, order, and good government. At the same time, they are suffused with transgressive passions and betray the anxieties of a settler-society haunted by the prior claims of its indigenous inhabitants. Central to my argument is the fact that in both works this characteristic gothic tension is used to illuminate a specific temporal and geographic context. As noted earlier, both novels are set in neighbouring regions of bc, the Cariboo District and the Thompson Okanagan – the home of non-treaty Natives who “never made any agreement for the sale of their aboriginal rights, nor had they fought and been conquered by the whites” (Balf 13). In their depictions of the protagonists’ encounters with “unfinished business with the past,” the moments when “the past returns as an ‘elemental’ ... force to haunt the present day” (Gordon 181), Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s ambiguous and ironic texts thus rely on the Gothic not solely as a means of entertaining readers, but also as a way of exhuming and exorcising the barely-repressed, historical secrets of the Canadian nation-state. John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright mirrors many of the features of Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s texts. First, it deploys the tropes of haunting and possession to illuminate the clash between European and Native peoples in the New World. Second, the novel also probes the repercussions of the imperial and colonial fantasy of creating a new Eden in North America. Third, The Afterlife of George Cartwright

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aligns Native culture with the figure of the monstrous female. Finally and most importantly, like the novels analyzed in chapter 1, Steffler’s narrative gestures emphatically beyond the Gothic to history, indexing specific wounds and crimes that continue to haunt the nation. The Afterlife of George Cartwright uses the actual journals of the eighteenth-century explorer George Cartwright (1739–1814) as the basis for a supernatural story in which Cartwright dies, but continues to haunt the English countryside. In the 170 years that follow his death, Cartwright’s spectre hunts with his favourite hawk, rereads and rewrites his journal, and reflects on the legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and the Industrial Revolution.1 Cartwright’s spirit is finally released from its isolated purgatory only when he acknowledges his complicity with imperialism and his mistreatment of the land and of Aboriginal peoples. After reflecting on his life, both Cartwright and contemporary readers are left wondering what could have possessed him to behave so abominably. Toward the end of the novel, Cartwright poses this question himself. “Who, if not God,” he asks, “is to blame for making monsters like me?” (245). Like many Canadian writers, Steffler relies on gothic tropes including ghosts, monstrous transformations, and forays into frozen time to express postcolonial anxieties concerning first contact. As Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte observe, from the beginnings of first contact and settlement in Canada “gothic projections onto the landscape were prevalent, in part because the colonization of Canada coincided, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the literary genre of the Gothic in Europe” (3). The tropes of the Gothic and the uncanny continue to prove “especially useful in figuring the nation’s ambivalent relation with its past (and present)” (Sugars and Turcotte 4). I argue further that the conjunction of gothic and postcolonial discourses also inflects critical approaches to texts since, as Jennifer Lawn observes, if the Gothic lends postcolonial literature its achronological temporality, then “postcolonialism enjoins gothic studies to devote close attention to local specificities of geography, history, and culture” (146). In an effort to repoliticize the discourses of haunting and the Gothic by situating them “more precisely as a grounded manifestation of communities in highly delimited locales subjected to cruel and unusual forms of political disempowerment” (Luckhurst 536), this chapter considers how settler/Aboriginal relations in Canada are gothicised, and how New World landscapes and societies become gothic sites (see Sugars and Turcotte 5). By offering

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close readings of both Steffler’s novel and the actual George Cartwright’s historical papers, this chapter identifies specific spectral forces ranging from British inheritance laws to religious and secular theories of degeneracy to an emerging sensibility in the eighteenth century associated with a growing sense of the ghostliness of other people that conditioned Cartwright’s monstrous, imperialistic behaviour. As critics such as Sherene Razak observe, racial violence is built into imperialism and colonialism – ongoing praxes that involve the dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples, and that invoke theories of degeneration to maintain the view that there are two levels of existence – the fully civilized human and the subhuman other.2 As a concept, degeneration “was formed and functioned within institutional arrangements ... which reflected and furthered the needs of ... European culture to reify its own power and to institutionalize the powerlessness over which it exercised its dominion. This dominion was both literal and figurative and included the real world of the European colonies” (Chamberlin and Gilman viii; see also Edwards, Gothic Passages xii). I argue, however, that to probe the workings of these hierarchical and racist discourses, which were disseminated throughout the British colonies, it is necessary to appreciate the impact of the law of primogeniture. The Afterlife of George Cartwright illustrates how imperialism and colonialism are transmitted on the individual level; in Cartwright’s case, the impetus to master the colonies is at least partially an acting out of the trauma of dispossession instigated by the English laws of inheritance. Born after the first son, in a nation that abides by the rule of primogeniture, Cartwright is dispossessed by his family and society. Redundant even before he enters the world, Cartwright’s ghostly “afterlife,” in fact, begins at birth. His grandiose dreams of (re)possession are triggered by the very real threat of dispossession and boundary loss instigated by the rule of primogeniture and vividly conveyed by Cartwright’s experience of being a younger son – an atom, rather than an Adam, among similarly dispossessed atoms – and by his nightmare images of degeneration, monstrous animal transformations, slavery, and disease. Viewed in this light, Cartwright serves as a microcosm who embodies the ideology of his society and delivers its ills unto others – the native inhabitants of the British colonies in India, Africa, and the Canadian north. In attempting to found a nation in Labrador, Cartwright vainly attempts to alter his inferior status by transforming himself into the first British leader, king, and father of a new-world nation.

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Despite his best efforts, Cartwright never achieves this transformation, in part because of his haunting awareness that First Nations peoples, as their name suggests, arrived first. In The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, Daniel Francis analyzes the familiar settler-invader dilemma that plagues Cartwright: Sometimes we thought it was simply a matter of conquering the Indians, taking their territory and absorbing them out of existence. Then America would be ours. Sometimes we thought just the opposite, that we had to become Indians in order to be at home here. This myth of transformation lies at the heart of Canadian culture: Canadians need to transform themselves into Indians. (122–3) In Cartwright’s case, both tactics prove futile, and as a result, his familial experience of primogeniture and dispossession is repeated on a national level. In life and in death, Cartwright remains redundant – a ghostly presence – and his status, as well as the patriarchal and hierarchical system that established primogeniture, follow him wherever he goes. He is doomed to exist as a double and a repetition. An awareness of the larger cycle of victimization – in which Cartwright is dispossessed by British law, dispossesses Native peoples, and is finally dispossessed and rendered a spectre by the novel – is valuable for at least two reasons. First, it complicates the traditional, sanctioned binaries – colonizer-colonized, self-other, dominance-resistance, metropolis-colony, colonial-postcolonial – which, as Anne McClintock maintains, “are inadequate to the task of accounting for, let alone strategically opposing, the legacies of imperialism” (15). Second, an understanding of this cycle sheds light on the impact of haunting on the level of textual production and, in this case, offers a model for conceiving of the relationship between Steffler’s novel and Cartwright’s original journals. Viewed in terms of primogeniture, The Afterlife of George Cartwright assumes the status of the younger son whose belated existence haunts the first born – Cartwright’s original journals. In fact, a parallel doubleness also exists between Steffler’s ambivalent approach to the historical Cartwright – characterized by a mixture of condemnation and support – and the fictional Cartwright’s response to primogeniture: a spectral law that he finds monstrous, yet nevertheless upholds.3 To trace the influence of primogeniture in Steffler’s novel, this chapter begins by examining the origins of and the debates surrounding this

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distinctly British law of inheritance – discourses that frequently invoke the notion of the uncanny and the biblical narrative of Paradise lost. In my close readings of The Afterlife of George Cartwright, I underscore the connections between allusions to the biblical Fall in the novel and the more widespread anxieties in the eighteenth century concerning class mobility and degeneracy. As a soldier, Cartwright is profoundly influenced by the discourses of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism – discourses that promote the reification and spectralization of the Other. Under the sway of these discourses, Cartwright strives to model himself after the age’s ideal of the self-possessed, civilized, British gentleman. Yet he remains haunted by this figure’s antithesis, epitomized by nightmarish images of sub-human others, degeneration, slavery, and disease. I argue that both Cartwright’s identity and the narrative as a whole are ruptured and unravelled by the return of the repressed. In Steffler’s text, the repressed takes the form of a gothic secret concerning Cartwright’s transmission of smallpox and his exploitation of Inuit slaves for profit. In fact, this secret, like the return of the repressed in Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, points beyond the fictional text to actual crimes committed by the historical George Cartwright. Ultimately, my interest in uncovering these historical crimes dovetails with contemporary critics’ efforts to repoliticize the Gothic by risking “the violence of reading the ghost, of cracking open its absent presence to answer the demand of its specific symptomatology and its specific locale” (Luckhurst 542). In the preface to his Labrador journals, the eighteenth-century adventurer-explorer George Cartwright opens with an account of his birth: “I was born on the twelfth of February (old style) 1739, of an ancient family at Marnham, in the County of Nottingham. Not being the eldest son, and my father having but a moderate estate and nine other children, it was not in his power to do much for me” (qtd. in Townsend 6). In relaying this detail about inheritance, or lack thereof, from the actual George Cartwright’s historical journals, The Afterlife of George Cartwright alerts readers to the uncanny theme of dispossession: in this case, the dispossession of younger sons instigated by the rule of primogeniture. Although this law is by no means the sole or original source of the uncanny sequence of possession, dispossession, and repossession that haunts The Afterlife of George Cartwright, tracing its implications in Steffler’s narrative provides a cultural context for the spectral mechanisms that drive the protagonist’s obsession with regaining his lost status and

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finding a home, first as an imperial soldier in India and Europe and later as an adventurer-entrepreneur in the New World. The power of Steffler’s novel lies in its emphasis on the extent to which Cartwright experiences and absorbs the harsh lessons of a British law – described by Thomas Paine as “a law of brutal injustice” (Rights of Man II 250–1) – and the lessons of imperialism and colonialism, first as a youthful employee of the East India Company and later as the aide-de-camp of the Marquis of Granby in Germany before going on to conquer Labrador. Only after having been dispossessed and made a victim of primogeniture and imperialism, which render Cartwright a mere spectre, does he generate his grandiose dreams of (re)possession which he unleashes on Native peoples, and most forcibly on the Inuit. The rule of primogeniture is defined as “the right of succession or inheritance belonging to the first-born, the principle, custom or law by which the property or title descends to the eldest son (or eldest child); spec. The feudal rule of inheritance by which the whole of the real estate of an intestate passes to the eldest son” (OED). An unwritten law until 1833, primogeniture was denounced by its enemies as “unnatural” although it was understood as necessary for ensuring the continuity of the patrilineal family on which rested the whole English political system from the Norman Conquest to the Settled Land Act of 1925 (Jamoussi 2). The rule is uncanny since in keeping with the definition of the latter, it involves “the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home ... [It is] a crisis of the proper: it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper (from the Latin proprius, [to] ‘own’), a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property” (Royle 1). It is of the home, yet alien to it since it cuts off younger children from their inheritance and carries out its aim with the help of an unwritten, statesanctioned law.4 In a famous passage of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville stresses both the law’s magical powers and eerie permanence. “Through [its] means,” he writes, “man acquires a kind of preternatural power over the future lot of his fellow creatures. When the legislator has once regulated the law of inheritance, he may rest from his labor. The machine once put in motion will go on for ages, and advance, as if selfguided, towards a point indicated beforehand” (47–8). As de Tocqueville argues, the law attains a spectral power due to its capacity for “independent activity” – a capacity that enables it to haunt subsequent generations (see Freud, The Uncanny 220). Due to its support of aristocracy, primogeniture forges additional links with the Gothic, a genre

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that “tends to focus on protagonists caught between the attractions or terrors of a past once controlled by overweening aristocrats [...] and forces of change that would reject such a past yet remain held by it” (Hogle 3). In Steffler’s narrative, the links drawn between primogeniture, colonization, and the Gothic are profoundly rooted in British history since primogeniture was first established when England was colonized by the Norman invaders. In highlighting its impact, Steffler’s novel gestures toward the uncanny return of a violent martial strategy, since to organize their own forces and to subdue their colonies, British imperial forces relied on a once foreign practice first used by their Norman conquerors against Britain (Jamoussi 18): It is a generally accepted fact, in the case of England ... that the introduction of primogeniture was not only contemporaneous with the Norman invasion, but somewhat organically linked to the feudal organization set up in its wake ... It is assumed that the few thousand barons and knights from Normandy who had helped William conquer England received royal grant in English land as a reward for their participation. This operation must have required the expropriation of native landowners, and the new landlords were to constitute a network of militarily powerful families ready to confirm their domination and consolidate their occupation in the face of what must have been, despite William’s claim to legitimacy, a hostile environment. (Jamoussi 18) Yet the law is both uncanny and unnatural because it creates a painful and arbitrary distinction where none existed before. Primogeniture enforces an arbitrary distinction between offspring that leaves younger children landless and without a home. In other words, the law “institutionalized status inconsistency” (McKeon 218). This unhomely law may well have made it easier for British imperialists and colonialists to institutionalize status inconsistency abroad. Timothy Winterbottom, author of “A Letter ... on Primogeniture” (1835), writes that primogeniture “draws an artificial line” and causes “an artificial elevation on the one side and an artificial depression on the other” (14–15). As Jamoussi explains, “the perversion, immutable to primogeniture, of traditional family values like paternal authority and protection, filial duty and affection, brotherly love and general harmony, as well as the institution of social inequality between children born to be

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equals, were extremely sensitive questions which remained so for centuries” (44). In “A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth and An Apology for Younger Brothers” (1659) William Sprigge states: The younger Son is apt to think himself sprung from as Noble a stock, from the loyns of as good a Gentleman as his elder Brother, and therefore cannot but wonder, why fortune and the Law should make so great a difference between them that lay in the same wombe, that are formed of the same lumpe; why law or Custome should deny them an estate, whom nature hath given discretion to know how to manage it. (qtd. in McKeon 218) Sprigge goes on to ask if it would not be more charitable “to expose or drown these latter births ... than to expose them like so many little ‘Moseses in Arks of Bulrushes to a Sea of poverty and misery, from whence they may never expect reprieve’” (qtd. in McKeon 219). Sprigge’s allusions to Moses being cast out as an orphan and to the sea of poverty are extremely apt in the case of George Cartwright. Steffler’s novel repeatedly alludes to the Moses story and, more generally, to biblical stories of the Fall and Paradise lost to contextualize Cartwright’s plight. Like many younger sons charged with “compulsory mobility” (Jamoussi 61), Cartwright experienced a sea of poverty when he sailed to India and endured the miseries of a colonial soldier. Moreover, in keeping with the majority of English young men who “showed no great enthusiasm for careers in the army and the navy by continental standards,” but by the same standards were “much more willing to engage in commerce and trade” (Jamoussi 64), Cartwright also left a disappointing career in the army and went into trade. As Jamoussi puts it, “Younger sons were driven out of heaven, and it is no wonder that they should refer to themselves as outcasts. But paradise was sometimes regained” (60). In search of Paradise lost, Cartwright established a “colony” of twenty-two people in the promised land of Labrador in an effort to profit from trade in fish and furs. In keeping with the biblical allusions to the story of Moses, Steffler’s Cartwright is allowed to glimpse Labrador before his second and final death at the close of the novel. Despite the fact that Cartwright sees “the black humps of Labrador” as “he has never seen them ... before,” like Moses, Cartwright nevertheless fails to attain the promised land (266).

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Regaining Paradise was especially difficult for dispossessed younger English sons because, although some form of primogeniture was practiced throughout Europe from the early modern period onward, younger sons in England “enjoyed considerably less status than their continental counterparts” (Austin 3). “That younger sons of gentlemen in England were downwardly mobile to a degree unknown abroad is beyond dispute,” writes Lawrence Stone (An Open Elite? 32). During the eighteenth century, when “the social and ideological gap lay wide between the landed and the moneyed interests, the ejection of the younger son almost inevitably entailed his going over to the opposite social camp, for which he was ill-prepared by his upbringing” (Jamoussi 59). As a result, among the social economy of the English landowning class, “few people were thought to be more wretched than younger sons” (Austin 2). One prominent British historian writes that “to describe anyone as a ‘younger son,’ was a short-hand way of summing up a whole host of grievances ... ‘Younger son’ meant an angry young man, bearing more than his share of injustice and resentment, deprived of means by his father and elder brother, often hanging around his elder brother’s house as a servant, completely dependent on his grace and favor” (qtd. in Austin 1). When Shakespeare’s Falstaff needed words to describe, clearly and unambiguously, the inadequacy of the troops that had been placed in his charge, he needed only to complain that they were “slaves,” “serving men,” and “younger sons to younger brothers” (qtd. in Austin 2). Owing to the cultural links forged between primogeniture, dispossession, and slavery and to his own participation in the slave trade, which I discuss in more detail toward the end of this chapter, Steffler’s Cartwright is haunted by the image of the slave – the epitome of dispossessed humanity in eighteenth-century Britain. By the close of the seventeenth century, the rule of primogeniture and the dispossession it sanctioned were hotly disputed. In a pamphlet entitled “The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced” (1649), written in collaboration with fourteen other members of the movement known as the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley railed against the rule. Interpreting the Book of Genesis as an allegory of the movement from common ownership to a property-based economy, the pamphlet captures the debate that runs through The Afterlife of George Cartwright and, in particular, the obsession with reversing God’s curse on Adam and recovering Eden. “In the beginning of time,” Winstanley writes, “the great Creator Rea-

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son, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury.” In the world before the fall, there was no ownership, no property, and no provision “that one branch of mankind should rule over another” (251). The Fall of Man occurred when one man attempted to control and have dominion over the earth. This fallen man’s name was “A-dam” because his attempt to usurp control over common property did “dam up the spirit of Peace and Liberty” (252). In keeping with Winstanley’s views, Steffler’s novel aligns the Fall and more secular and scientific notions of degeneration with the impact of primogeniture. By the time Cartwright came of age in the eighteenth century, as Edward Gibbon observes, increases in the civil and military establishments both at home and abroad opened up many new paths to fortune for younger sons (qtd. in Spring 90). As The Afterlife of George Cartwright illustrates, Enlightenment ideology together with colonialism in the eighteenth century prompted dispossessed sons to dream of travelling to the colonies to restore lost status and lost fortunes and, in some cases, to consider alternatives to the land-based criteria of status. For many of these younger sons, imperialist dreams were a direct response to the trauma of dispossession. Daniel Defoe, for instance, recalls the London tradesman’s boast that “if he could not find the antient race of Gentlemen, from which he came, he would begin a new race, who should be as good Gentlemen as any that went before him” (qtd. in McKeon 221– 2). The preoccupation with the status of the “race” and with being a Gentleman – essentially one’s genealogical pedigree – was, as McKeon argues, associated with anxieties about British class mobility and degeneration, in this case, the degeneration of aristocratic landowners. Dispossession and degeneration were linked during Cartwright’s time because estates were often lost due to the “incapacity of the heir to reconcile his rights with his duties” – a polite way of saying that incompetent and degenerate heirs often laid waste to entire family fortunes (Jamoussi 43). In true gothic fashion, in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, the sin of the degenerate father returns to visit the children. Cartwright’s mother openly accuses her husband of having squandered her children’s inheritance and of having “stolen” Cartwright’s future to build a useless bridge on their property. Cartwright’s father believes that landowning families should all build bridges on their estates that will join with systems of canals to “link ports and country capitals together” (16). After his plan fails and his entire estate has been mortgaged, Cartwright’s father succumbs to alcoholism, but not before embarking

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on his final, biblically inspired scheme to breed a thornless, edible thistle. Weeping, he tells his son George, “It will release the poor from hunger and reverse God’s curse on Adam. It is a great step toward the recovery of Eden, which now must be the whole object of man’s endeavour” (24). This allusion to Paradise lost suggests that Cartwright’s later inability to attain paradise in the New World represents an uncanny repetition of the degeneration and failure of the previous generation. In his afterlife, Cartwright comments on the forces that propelled him and admits, “[i]n many ways my life was a continuous effort to earn the estate at Marnham and restore the old family ... to correct the mistakes my father had made and make it flourish again” (27). He specifically alludes to his father’s failed plan when he envisions himself serving as a bridge that would bring “two continents together” and pave the way for the “mating of two cultures” (97). In addition to echoing his father’s obsession with bridges, one can hear echoes in Cartwright’s statement of the London tradesman’s boast that “if he could not find the antient race of Gentlemen from which he came, he would begin a new race.” In effect, both the rule of primogeniture and imperial discourses inform Cartwright’s dreams of restoring his lost status, since he also imagines ruling the Inuit: “Perhaps I could become their great leader,” he says (97). Later, he expresses the hope that they might “look on him as a kind of king” (164). Ultimately, however, Cartwright is not content to rule: he harbours a secret belief that he is actually aboriginal: “[H]e felt the power they [the Inuit] gave him ... because they were his natural company. They proclaimed what he’d always harboured inside himself ” (14). As Maria Torgonovnick argues, going native frequently expresses a desire to recover “irreducible features of the psyche, body, land, and community – to re-inhabit core experiences” (5). Steffler’s novel, however, illustrates how these individual psychological motivations are informed by broader cultural factors, since Cartwright’s desire to belong to Canada’s First Peoples is conditioned by the particular anxieties and insecurities associated with not having arrived first in a nation that strictly enforced the rule of primogeniture. As Terry Goldie explains, “The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada?” (12). To resolve this dilemma, as Goldie observes, writers often mobilize what he terms “extinction discourse”: “We had

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natives. We killed them off. Now we are native” (157). As I go on to explain in greater detail, Cartwright mobilizes this discourse in his writing – a discourse that Steffler foregrounds in his novel by portraying Cartwright as being haunted by a particularly ghastly example of an “extinction discourse” associated with the historical Cartwright’s transmission of smallpox to an Inuit village, which resulted in the deaths of all of the inhabitants – approximately sixty people. In Steffler’s novel, the haunting allusions to smallpox function as a synecdoche for what Brian Johnson terms “the primordial crime and uncanny secret of settler-invader society – a criminal secret” (87). Although this type of extinction discourse is mobilized in Cartwright’s historical journals and self-consciously re-installed and interrogated in Steffler’s novel, in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, ghosts and monsters of various hybrid lineages compromise its bold promise of purity and possession. In so doing, they also destabilize the familiar pattern of nationalist novels that “naturalize imperial ideology by grafting the bildungsroman of the journey to manhood onto a parallel narrative of romantic nationalism whose fulfillment depends on the protagonist’s journey north towards successful indigenization” (Hulan 98–109; see also Grace 184–5). Although Steffler invokes this narrative of romantic nationalism, successful indigenization is ultimately parodied and exposed as a fictive and illusory, although consoling, conceit. As a dispossessed son, Cartwright initially attempts to rectify his inferior status and pursues the narrative of romantic nationalism when he travels to India. Steffler’s Cartwright imagines India “would be the door by which I would come into wealth and honour and discover my character as a man. I expected it to transform me” (27). In his musings, Cartwright links the global, political project of empire with a positive metamorphosis, the attainment of wealth and honour and the construction of masculinity – a familiar triumvirate in male imperial discourse. Yet, as Anne McClintock observes, the interplay between economic, sexual, and imperial desires is frequently accompanied by “the simultaneous dread of catastrophic boundary loss, associated with fears of impotence and infantilization and attended by an excess of boundary order and fantasies of unlimited power” (26). Yet this oscillation is also a familiar feature of the Gothic – a genre that first appeared in the eighteenth century and traced “the underside of Enlightenment values,” specifically the expression “of illegitimate power and violence that threaten to consume the world of civilized domestic values” (Botting 1,

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4–5).5 Again, in Cartwright we see the historical and political underpinnings of the Gothic and the distillation of Enlightenment ideology, since his experience of dissolution is partly the effect of the rule of primogeniture. As Lawrence Stone explains, it was “the relation of the individual to his lineage which provided a man of the upper classes in a traditional society with his identity, without which he was a mere atom floating in a void of social space” (The Family 29). As I suggested earlier, for Cartwright, the “dread of catastrophic boundary loss” and the existential vertigo associated with being “a mere atom floating in a void of social space” crystallize in the image of the slave. Steffler’s novel exposes the harsh binary logic of the eighteenth century, wherein if one does not own property, then one is susceptible to being viewed and treated as property. As Cartwright’s housekeeper and mistress, Mrs Selby, explains, “Slavery has various forms. Only great wealth confers liberty in this self-deluding land” (102). During the transatlantic slave trade, which reached its height during Cartwright’s lifetime, the slave epitomized dispossession and constituted the antithesis of the age’s ideal of the civilized, self-possessed gentleman. As a dispossessed son, Cartwright is haunted by the threat of slavery; the figure of the slave plagues Cartwright’s imagination and Steffler’s novel as a whole. While en route to India, during a stop in Rio de Janeiro, Cartwright watches as Portuguese ships “unloaded strings of black slaves chained together by their necks” (35). We are told that “Cartwright was mesmerized by their naked pliable-looking limbs, their amazing apathy. It was as though their souls had flown out of their captured bodies and stayed in the forests where they had lived. Bodies awaiting the will of their new owners” (35). Later, as an aide-de-camp, Cartwright again contemplates the horrific effects of slavery and recalls the soulless bodies of the black captives when he finds himself herding his troops through forests and ruined villages in Germany: “Their faces as blank as those of the slaves he’d seen at Rio de Janeiro, their souls having deserted, unable to wait for the bodies to take the chance. Most of them sick” (68). Ultimately, Cartwright aligns the military profession with slavery when he observes that the ideal soldier “was one who had been robbed of his individual identity and driven insane in a special way” (75). During his years as a soldier, Cartwright remains ambivalent concerning the hierarchies associated with primogeniture, aristocracy, and the military, and gradually adopts something akin to Paine’s view, real-

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izing that the imperial project attains its ends by dispossessing and brutalizing the lower orders in its efforts to conquer foreign territories. In the midst of a more recent attempt at colonial conquest, Cartwright surveys the battlefield strewn with the remains of his massacred regiment. Gazing upon their flayed and bloody bodies, Cartwright realizes that only in death are his men liberated from their role as actors in the ongoing, tragic play of imperialism: Cartwright was astonished by how clean and bright their innards were compared to the shabby uniforms, the dirty exteriors with which he was familiar. Their bones and tendons, the insides of their skins gleamed surprisingly white ... The face of the dead had the appearance of delicately fashioned masks dropped by actors onto discarded costumes at the close of some play. They were not soldiers anymore. They were all that was left of horribly misused men. (77) Rather than shore up his diminished status, wealth, masculinity, or whiteness, Cartwright’s experiences as a soldier serve only to reinforce his awareness that men in the service of empire are “horribly misused.” In contrast, then, to his longed-for utopian metamorphosis, Cartwright is forced to acknowledge that, in the name of Empire and its contrived military hierarchy, men are transformed, in Cartwright’s words, into “assassins and bullies” (57). Ironically, Cartwright’s early experiences in the colonies strengthen his connection to the radically dispossessed – a connection that both his social milieu and the discourse of colonialism reinforce and align with degeneration. As Steffler’s novel illustrates, the powerful rule of primogeniture was mirrored by its conceptual opposites – slavery and degeneration. As critics observe, the word degeneration “was itself a curious compound. First of all, it meant to lose the properties of the genus, to decline to a lower type ... to dust, for instance, or to the behaviour of the beasts of the barnyard. It also meant to lose the generative force” (Chamberlin and Gilman ix). Due to their mutual concern with maintaining an ideal aristocratic and hierarchical lineage – as their shared roots indicate – primogeniture and degeneration are etymologically and conceptually linked. According to Margaret Hodgen, theories of degeneration were affected by a paradigm shift that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century when the model of the Great Chain of Being was superseded:

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[M]ankind was no longer considered a perfect whole, standing alone and indivisible in an unassailable central position in the hierarchy, with the animals classified and ranked below him and the angels classified and ranked above. In both biological and ethnological inquiry the discovery of ‘missing links’ became the order of the day. It became the task of the naturalist to effect a rapprochement between man and the ape and of the student of man to compose an acceptable social or cultural hierarchy as an extension of the biological. (418) In an effort to effect this rapprochement, various Enlightenment figures would project the stigmas of degeneration “onto lower categories of the taxonomies of mankind” (Boon 25). As a younger son cut off from inheritance and property – the fruits of the family tree – Steffler’s Cartwright is deemed genealogically, culturally, and evolutionarily degenerate. Initially, Cartwright is surprised at the disparity between how he views himself and how others see him: “Given his family’s former wealth, his connection with Lord Tyrconnel, his father’s respected place in Nottinghamshire, Cartwright considered himself equal at least to most of the English in Madras. Superior certainly to the little merchants’ and factors’ wives who let him toy with them and treated him like a penniless soldier-boy” (44). But, as Cartwright soon realizes, he is ostracized not only because he lacks wealth but also because he is deemed more animal-like than human: “Cartwright knew that others often thought him boorish or dull. It was expected that country gentlemen like himself would be addicted to hunting and sports, but his fondness for getting dirty was too extreme. He seemed to come into his own sitting up in the branches of trees or chasing wild pigs” (44–5). Later, Cartwright again demonstrates his fondness for sitting in the branches of trees when he climbs one to fetch a lady’s fan. Finding himself face to face with a leopard, Cartwright does not flee; instead, he remains hidden in the boughs, gazing along with the leopard at the people below. His companions inform the lady that “Cartwright cannot save you. He has fled. His lust for you has transformed him into an ape!” (60). Thus, not only does Cartwright’s family’s former status count for nothing, but being viewed as “penniless” or worthless renders him susceptible to the more profound taint of degeneration.

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Cartwright’s displacement and degeneration are figured in the passages cited above by allusions to the tree – an image that has both genealogical and mythical associations with the Judeo-Christian Tree in the Garden and with the Fall of humanity. The genealogical tree is “the universal representation of pedigree,” but “primogeniture marked the English genealogical tree with a special imprint” (Jamoussi 35). The author of “the Laws and Custom of Primogeniture” (1872), G.C. Brodrick, uses the metaphor of the tree to explain the effects of the rule: “while it roots the elder branch for the time being in the soil, [primogeniture] uproots all others” (60). Younger sons also spoke of having been “transplanted” to foreign soil to describe their compulsory mobility and geographical separation from home. In addition to recalling the genealogical tree and the uprooting of younger sons within the family associated with primogeniture, the emphasis on trees also recalls two central imperial tropes, the tree of evolution and the Family of Man. Due, in part, to this tropological connection, primogeniture is imbricated in the discourse of imperialism. Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), a prominent Italian neurologist, physiologist, and anthropologist who founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, relied on the tree when he drafted the “Morphological Tree of the Human Races” and the “Aesthetic Tree of the Human Race.” Drawing on the former, Anne McClintock argues that several key principles emerge from Mantegazza’s reliance on the figure of the tree: First, mapped against the tree, the world’s discontinuous cultures appear to be marshaled within a single, European Ur-narrative. Second, human history can be imaged as naturally teleological, an organic process of upward growth, with the European as the apogee of progress. Third, disobliging historical discontinuities can be ranked, subdued and subordinated into a hierarchical structure of branching time – the differential progress of the races map against the tree’s self-evident boughs. (37) As this passage suggests, imperialism and colonialism attain their distinct brand of racial violence by relying on the figure of the tree to install a single spectrum on which diverse cultures’ evolution and progress are measured; the antithesis of progress was also measured and labelled degeneration. McClintock goes on to explain that complementing the

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image of the tree was a second, decisive image, the Family of Man, “in which evolutionary progress is represented by a series of distinct anatomical types, organized as a linear image of progress” (38). Fears of degeneracy went hand in hand with the hierarchical image of the tree because custom decreed that the order of birth was the order of worth: Younger brothers were inferior to elder brothers because they came after them in time. Eve came after Adam and therefore was inferior to him, from which it followed that any woman was inferior to any man. That was the permanent, immutable state of the world. To question the divine nature of kingship at the level of the state, the supreme patriarchal authority of the father over the family, the superiority of the elder to the younger brother, and of man to woman, was to contravene the law of God and the law of nature. Any demand for constitutional change was fundamentally evil, just as any attempt by the individual to set himself free from the structures of authority, as clearly defined in the Bible, was fundamentally evil. (Jamoussi 81) As this passage suggests, in addition to being end-driven, eighteenthcentury British society is also alpha-driven. Viewed in the combined light of primogeniture, imperialism, and colonialism, readers can appreciate why Steffler’s Cartwright is classified by others as degenerate in terms of genealogical, cultural, and evolutionary discourses. By the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, however, support for primogeniture waned and the rule came under attack. Whereas Cartwright blames God for transforming him into a monster, Thomas Paine blames such monstrosity on primogeniture and the system of aristocracy that it supports: “To restore ... parents to their children, and children to their parents – relations to each other, and man to society – and to exterminate the monster Aristocracy, root and branch – the French constitution has destroyed the law of primogenitureship. Here then lies the monster” (Rights of Man I 105). In contrast, then, to Cartwright, who frequently attributes his monstrous complicity with this process to God, Paine’s comments situate Cartwright’s individual and family trauma within the larger context of European debates about aristocracy, primogeniture, and imperialism. Ultimately, in conjunction with Paine and Mrs

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Selby, readers recognize that equally spectral though far less divine forces are at work (244). In its treatment of both primogeniture and degeneration, Steffler’s novel remains highly reflexive. By emphasizing Cartwright’s penchant for crouching in the branches of trees, for example, Steffler’s narrative is neither complicit with theories of degeneration nor suggesting that becoming animal is a real possibility. Instead, in true gothic fashion, The Afterlife of George Cartwright highlights the paralyzing tensions and doubleness associated with responses to the discourses of primogeniture, aristocracy, colonialism, and degeneracy. In fact, as much as Cartwright longs to “set himself free from the structures of authority” (Jamoussi 81), he is equally threatened by alternatives to this order – alternatives associated with wild animals and the Inuit of Labrador. At one point, while in Granby’s service, Cartwright spies a squirrel with a nut in its mouth, and readers are told that he “was struck by the thought of this sanity, this vast undemonstrative order continuing outside the confines of his life. Something lovely and enduring that he longed, with a painful surge, for his life to match” (80). After glimpsing this alternative order, Cartwright asks himself, “Why not desert, leave the war with its unnecessary imperatives behind?” (80). Immediately, however, doubts assail and paralyze him: “And then what? Live in a tree, eating nuts? Where would he go? He could desert, but he couldn’t transform himself into a leaf or squirrel. He would have to continue to live in the human world, and that world held only one place for him” (80). After accepting the immutability of his singular, albeit degraded “place,” Cartwright shoots the squirrel. For Cartwright, alternatives to the “monstrous” rule of primogeniture are equally terrifying and unthinkable, and hence, they must be annihilated. This is not the last time that Steffler’s Cartwright responds to a threat to the familiar, hierarchical, social order by invoking an “extinction discourse” (Goldie 157). Again, Steffler’s novel neither advocates this discourse nor suggests that becoming animal is a real possibility. Instead, The Afterlife of George Cartwright reinscribes the tropes of primogeniture, including the tree and the concomitant stereotypes of degeneracy, to expose English society’s spectral mechanisms of dispossession. Forced to assume the fantasy projected by his culture, Cartwright becomes the eighteenth century’s idea of the animal. The distinction between actually becoming an animal and assuming society’s projection is crucial and is one that the narrative takes pains to underscore. For example, in his description of

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Cartwright’s prowess at sports and hunting, the narrator comments, “He wasn’t playing so much as going wild, in a very efficient way. The officers were in awe of him, but dismissed his threat to their own sense of superiority by thinking of him as barbaric, peasant-like” (45; my emphasis). The phrase “in a very efficient way” forges a subtle connection to Enlightenment notions of rationality and efficiency which undercuts any essentialist notion that Cartwright is, in fact, becoming animal. Moreover, by stating explicitly that the officers were in “awe of him” but dealt with “the threat to their sense of superiority” by “thinking” of him as an animal, the narrative exposes the societal motivation for applying the label of degenerate. Put somewhat differently, Cartwright is accorded the status of what Bhabha labelled “mimic men,” colonized peoples who are obliged to mirror back an image of the colonials but in imperfect form. In its treatment of the animal, Steffler’s narrative never portrays a simple or natural fusion with the Other. Instead, the categories of the animal and the Native are revealed to be powerfully desired and feared discursive fantasies of escape and refuge from eighteenth-century society that are, at bottom, inextricable facets and products of a colonized and colonizing nation. As we will see, the novel’s parodic conclusion likewise affirms Cartwright’s recognition that fusion with nature is impossible. Although Cartwright recognizes that he cannot merge with nature, the role played by society in putting humans and animals in their “place” continues to mystify him in life and torment him in his afterlife.6 Cartwright’s confusion is most obvious in his afterlife when he meditates on the nature of his trained hawk. Initially Cartwright identifies completely with his hawk and assumes he understands her: “The bird is either lit or unlit, like a lamp ... When she is lit ... she is all appetite. There is no middle ground, no domestic self behind her theatrics. Cartwright identifies with her. He feels she expresses his own will, his own insatiable cravings” (93). Later, Cartwright’s naive identification with this supposedly “natural-born-killer” is challenged by his dream in which he creates a new creature – a cross between a man and a bird – by artificially inseminating birds or, as he puts it, by “breaking into the chemistry of hawks” (198). In the dream, Cartwright plays the role of the mad scientist crossbreeding various species of hawks and other birds to produce a monstrous “hawk-faced boy with red eyes, dressed in a blue frock coat, stockings, and breeches, wearing a tricorn hat and a silver sword” (199). The significance of his dream only becomes fully appar-

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ent when Cartwright admits that his hawk’s insatiable appetite for killing is not natural but constructed: “I’ve made her specialize in the business of slaughter, taken away every other pursuit from her. In the wild she would kill only enough to feed herself and her young” (245). Just as Cartwright recognizes that soldiers are “driven insane in a special way” (75), and that he is “going wild in a very efficient way,” his dream likewise underscores society’s role in fashioning imperial soldiers. The fusion of hawk and boy graphically illustrates that humans and animals alike are the monstrous products of the eighteenth-century “heroic” model of science and social engineering.7 Cartwright’s dream also emphasizes that despite his longing to escape British society, he carries the ideological baggage of dispossession and degeneration with him. As Mrs Selby says, “You came here to escape England and so did I. But you bring with you the very things you wanted to flee” (162). As a result, his journey to Labrador does not provide an escape or an authentic encounter with the Other; instead, it provides an opportunity for even more powerful spectral projections of the mutually reinforcing discourses of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and masculinity. Yet, owing to the fragility of these projections, no matter where Cartwright travels, these discourses are repeatedly challenged by uncanny threats of degeneration, slavery, and disease. Taken together, Cartwright’s experience in the colonies prior to his voyages to Labrador offers a counter-discourse to his belief that he will regain paradise and to his initial, naïve expectation that life as a colonial solider would “transform” him; instead, he discovers degeneration, the dark side of progress. As a soldier, Cartwright repeatedly tries to resolve the threat of his own dispossession and insignificance by replicating the logic of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism which, as noted, transforms humans into bodies awaiting the will of another. After succumbing to scurvy and after watching the slaves being loaded and unloaded during his stop in Rio, Cartwright attempts to assert his potency by feasting on beef and wine and by projecting a familiar, gendered fantasy onto the landscape: “The twilit harbour necklaced in lights rose up like a beautiful woman opening her arms. ‘I shall live here forever,’ Cartwright said. ‘I have found my home’” (35). Later, during his stop at Cape Town, Cartwright enjoys the favours of a prostitute. He describes her body as “the entrance to a garden” and marvels at how she “coiled and uncoiled her arms and legs around him like soft vines” (37). Echoing his earlier description of Rio, after feasting in Cape Town, Cartwright describes “[t]he green har-

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bour lifted up like a gorgeous face. ‘I shall live here forever,’ Cartwright said slowly ... ‘I have found my home’” (37). As Peter Jaeger notes, the body of Cartwright’s prostitute metaphorically “figures nature, the garden, and the land, tropes that have a long history in Western literature” (45). More precisely, the connection forged between woman and nature illustrates how imperialism takes possession of the supposedly primitive body. The ‘home’ referred to by Cartwright is not so much Rio de Janeiro or Cape Town, but, as Jaeger asserts, the locus “of Western domination over the lands and peoples of the colonies, a position that in this instance is immediately bound to both racism and sexism” (45). As McClintock explains, for Europeans, the colonies constituted a “pornotropics” – “a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (22). My aim in underscoring these familiar colonial tropes is to suggest why the younger sons of country gentry who felt the effects of the rule of primogeniture most acutely, such as George Cartwright, would have been especially prone to such projections. As a soldier in India, Cartwright again tries to find a vital sense of “home” and nature in the body of a Native woman named Devika. Cartwright’s lover is also a weaver of muslin who “mended the officers’ uniforms,” a vocation that underscores her role in repairing frayed male, colonial identities (47; see McConnell). When she breaks off their relationship, explaining, “[m]y cousin says you are robbing us ... he says you and your people are taking more than you bring” (53), Cartwright enquires whether she will miss him if he leaves. “No,” she replies, “I have many things. I never think of you when you are not here” (54, emphasis added). Her blunt dismissal due to a trade imbalance between their respective countries coupled with her use of the word “thing” illustrates that the logic of dispossession, which, as noted, results in the transformation or degeneration of humans into commodities or things – is inherently reversible (in this case, a Native woman turns the tables and transforms a white Englishman into a commodity or “thing”) and thereby underscores the precariousness of Cartwright’s position. In keeping with the narrative oscillation between dispossession and grandiose attempts at repossession, Cartwright’s decision to travel to Labrador is triggered by a near-death experience, in essence, a profound experience of dispossession. Within a week of accepting the role of captain of the 37th Regiment of Foot in Minorca and joining his new reg-

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iment, Cartwright contracts malaria: “The life outside seemed conjectural, unreal. He sank and floated, passed through layer after layer of matter, soft textures that rolled like bolts of cloth underneath him ... He could die, he realized, and no one would notice or care. The laughter and banging doors, the rattling equipment and shouts would go on just as they went on now. He would have to get out of there if he wanted to live” (91). The repeated references to textiles in the passages cited above signal the textual or discursively constructed nature of Cartwright’s identity as a soldier. As critics observe, this is an identity Steffler’s Cartwright methodically constructs and reconstructs as he writes and revises his journal. Even Cartwright’s seemingly authentic, final celebratory vision of Labrador betrays its fabricated nature: “the river passing beneath like a black silk scarf shot with white thread” (266). Rather than consolidate a sense of self, Cartwright’s experience causes his identity to unravel. Moreover, as I suggested earlier, this unravelling is duplicated on the level of textual production, since Steffler’s novel functions as a belated and haunting force that both installs and subverts the primacy and authority of Cartwright’s original journals. When he leaves India, Cartwright contrasts his expectations that India would be “the door by which I would come into wealth and honour and discover my character as a man” (27) with his newfound sense of his own insignificance: “The whole place awhirl with its own affairs, its feuds and imperatives. None of it paused to watch him go” (58). Cartwright has become, in Lawrence Stone’s words, “a mere atom floating in a void of social space.” By the time he leaves Minorca, Cartwright is rendered even more insubstantial and abject than before. Due to the powerful and vaporizing discourses of the rule of primogeniture and imperialism, Cartwright is thus initiated into his “unreal,” spectral existence long before he dies and is condemned to his meaningless, repetitive 170-year-long afterlife. To appreciate the pervasiveness of spectralization in eighteenthcentury Britain, which, as I argue, subtends the discourses of primogeniture, imperialism, and colonization, it is useful to consider Terry Castle’s insights into eighteenth-century culture and the invention of the uncanny. As Castle explains, A crucial feature of the new sensibility of the late eighteenth century was, quite literally, a growing sense of the ghostliness of other people. In the moment of romantic self-absorption, the other was indeed,

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reduced to a phantom – a purely mental effect, or image, as it were, on the screen of consciousness itself. The corporeality of the other – his or her actual life in the world – became strangely insubstantial and indistinct: what mattered was the mental picture, the ghost, the haunting image. (125) In The Afterlife of George Cartwright, after having been reduced to a “mere atom,” Cartwright in turn transforms his companions in the new world, most obviously the Inuit, into ghostly figures in his narcissistic imagination. Ironically, the novel conveys the repercussions of spectralization by emphasizing Cartwright’s experience as a soldier and by subjecting the protagonist to the same fate: Steffler’s Cartwright is a trapped and ineffectual ghost who flickers on the screen of the reader’s consciousness. In a reversal of imperial and colonial logic, it is the white, male, imperial subject, Cartwright, who is trapped in “anachronistic time and space” in a realm “empty of all but animal life” (Steffler 22). As McClintock argues, in the mapping of progress, “images of ‘archaic’ time – that is non-European time – were systematically evoked to identify what was historically new about industrial modernity” (40). At this point, the trope of anachronistic space also makes it appearance: “Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). In The Afterlife of George Cartwright, postcolonial and gothic discourses combine, as death casts Cartwright outside of normative paradigms of time and space: “time had stopped and everyone was away somewhere” (8). In his afterlife, the ghostly adventurer transforms his friends and family into mental images as he sits “picturing the beautiful troubled faces of the people he knew, speaking to them in his mind” (8). The Afterlife of George Cartwright consistently drives home the “ghostliness of other people,” an eighteenth-century existential gothic perspective conditioned by imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and print culture. To signal the impact of capitalism, the novel opens with Cartwright’s spirit recalling his first trip home from Labrador and boasting that his ship “was snug with cargo, the fruit of a two-year stay in Labrador” (13). Among his “cargo” is the Inuit family (the “priest” Attuiock, his wife, their daughter, and Attuiock’s younger brother Tooklavinia and his wife, Caubvick) who befriended Cartwright when

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he first arrived in Labrador. As Cartwright confesses, they “belonged to the part of his cargo he couldn’t understand; the most precious part, he now thinks, the most curious of all he carried from Labrador” (13). While in possession of his “cargo,” Cartwright “could see his success”: “His cargoes wouldn’t completely repay his debts, but they would impress his creditors ... the Inuit would bring him renown, audiences with curious grandees, people of influence – perhaps with the King himself ” (13). To elevate his sorely diminished status, Cartwright transforms Native peoples into commodities. His behaviour is so flagrant it prompts a benevolent artist to enquire whether Cartwright “intended to make slaves of them [the Inuit]” (194). Cartwright betrays the fact that he views them as captives when, during their stay in London, he observes that the Inuit family was pleased by the attention, gifts, and invitations which flowed their way: “It suited the way they preferred to think of themselves: not as curiosities or captives, but as dignitaries, representatives of their people” (194). At bottom, the gap between Cartwright’s view of the Inuit and their self-perception mirrors the disparity Cartwright himself experienced earlier between his view of himself as a country gentlemen and society’s view of him as a “penniless soldier.” In his dealings with the Inuit, then, Cartwright is thus acting out and disseminating the rule of primogeniture and the logic of imperialism. As noted earlier, status inconsistency and desires for transformation plague colonizers and colonized alike. Like the dark-haired Devika, the dark-haired Caubvick becomes Cartwright’s lover in Labrador and she demands that Cartwright rectify imbalances in their relations. In Steffler’s fictional account, shortly before sailing to London, Caubvick repudiates her husband and family: “Eskimo clothes were ugly, she said, Eskimo food was unclean. She wanted to stay and live in a tall house and learn to read, and live like my [Cartwright’s] sisters” (211). Like Cartwright, Caubvick wants to be “transformed,” but the former adamantly denies her request to share his cabin, which would entail a profound elevation in her status. As Cartwright states, “My intention had been, after all, not to transform a few Eskimos into Englishmen, but to create a core of Eskimo allies and interpreters who could mediate on my behalf with their countrymen for the purpose of trade and exploration” (212). Like the officers who rely on Cartwright’s skill, yet dismiss him as “barbaric” and “peasant-like” in order to secure their own positions of power, Cartwright wants Caubvick and her people to continue

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playing the role of “mimic men.” In effect, his dismissal of her and her eventual fate echoes his response to the squirrel; despite the temptation of an alternative order, Cartwright cannot ultimately cede his assigned place. What is perhaps most intriguing and characteristically gothic about Steffler’s novel is how the narrative portrays the impact of status inconsistency and degeneracy on the body and identifies their impact with disease. As Anne McClintock explains, in addition to the image of the primitive and the animal, “the idea of contagion (the communication of disease)” was central to the idea of degeneration (47). In Cartwright’s accounts of the voyage to India, descriptions of disease and slavery are juxtaposed. En route to India, Cartwright and his friend Kellett initially fall ill with scurvy. Cartwright’s description of their bleeding gums is followed by the account of the Portuguese slave ships and their dispossessed cargo cited earlier. Cartwright goes on to explain that just outside Rio “[f ]ever broke out among the recruits ... Nearly every day bodies were thrown into the sea” (35). Before they reach their destination, “[a] third of the crew had succumbed to disease and exhaustion ... Uniforms were kept to be sold again” (39). By framing the horrific account of slavery with descriptions of bodies possessed and decimated by disease, the narrative links imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, suggesting that working together they function like a disease. When Cartwright himself succumbs to illness on arrival at Madras, we are told that he “was certain he’d swallowed the egg of some hideous animal that had hatched inside him and was growing, taking over his body as a second shell. His face was about to split, curl back in two halves to reveal one of those fanged heads he had recently seen carved on a native shrine” (38–9). With its emphasis on the “egg” of a mysterious “hideous animal,” Cartwright’s feverish nightmare anticipates his dream of the hawk-boy and his later epiphany that he, himself, is a monster – all familiar gothic images of self-as-alien/other and fears of harbouring the alien within (see Halberstam). In Steffler’s narrative, these nightmarish images together with Cartwright’s epiphany on the battlefield concerning his “horribly misused men” undercut prevailing romantic national allegories that “rationalize imperial violence as a necessary stage in the dialectical progression toward a higher unity” (Johnson 91). It is also significant that Cartwright’s youthful, feverish dream essentially disavows Britain’s role in spreading infection and disseminating the lethal logic of imperialism, since Cartwright identifies the disease with the figures of “the ani-

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mal” and “the primitive” Other. As we will see, this identification, which veils responsibility for the crimes of imperialism and capitalism, gains in intensity and fantastic properties in Cartwright’s recurring nightmares about the historically verifiable devastation that attended the transmission of smallpox to the Inuit in Labrador. In a gruesome echo of Cartwright’s earlier experiences of dispossession, which align dispossession with slavery, degeneration, and disease, Caubvick and her people contract smallpox after leaving London and setting sail for Labrador. When Cartwright refuses her request to live with him, Caubvick complains of sickness in her stomach. At first, Cartwright assumes that it is merely a symptom of her reluctance to return to Labrador. But, as he says, “I looked in her mouth and found red spots, and was terrified. It occurred to me then that my influence, my country’s influence on her, and on all of them, was likely to be much greater than I had imagined, and more terrible” (212). Here he explicitly aligns his “country’s influence” with a terrible infection. Within days, the entire family succumbs to smallpox, and in keeping with medical beliefs at the time, Cartwright is advised to approach them wearing red clothes. In this episode, the colour red is repeatedly emphasized along with details of hemorrhagic fevers that leave victims bleeding continuously from their mouths and anuses (215). Recalling Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, The Afterlife of George Cartwright features a familiar trail of blood. Before Attuiock dies, Cartwright appears before him in a “scarlet foot-soldier’s coat, like the kind he used to wear” (216–17). But by then “the smallpox had changed Attuiock beyond recognition, given him the face of a lizard, a red toad. Attuiock looked at Cartwright, then closed his eyes. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you were a soldier all along’” (217). In effect, this episode features two horrific transformations: Attuiock’s monstrous degeneration and the revelation that, despite having left the army, Cartwright remains a soldier and an “assassin” responsible for infecting and mutilating others. Faced with the death of Attuiock and his entire family, Cartwright is forced to follow the trail of blood and to recognize that all along he acted as the unwitting agent of the British empire.8 The Afterlife of George Cartwright signals Cartwright’s barely repressed awareness of his responsibility for the spread of smallpox among the Inuit by opening with Cartwright’s recurring nightmare featuring Caubvick’s hair that became infected with the smallpox virus. Although Caubvick is the only member of the family to survive, like Attuiock, she

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is grotesquely disfigured, and one might even say castrated since her hair is repeatedly aligned with potency: The fever “had lifted [her hair] ... off like a wig. The potent mane was attached to a scalp-shaped layer of scabs and dried skin. ‘Give it to me, in the name of God,’ he had pleaded repeatedly as they sailed toward Labrador. ‘It’s full of death. It will kill your people’” (24). In Steffler’s narrative, the gruesomely accurate and traumatic details concerning Caubvick’s illness and the actual deaths of the entire village of Inuit people unravels the utopian dreams of Steffler’s protagonist. But the indications of Caubvick’s disease are also a marker of a larger trauma which, according to Caruth, “is not so much a symptom of the unconscious as a symptom of history ... The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 5). Viewed in this light, the episode highlights the complex expression of cultural, political, and historical forces at work within the individual. The disruption instigated by this historical trauma not only undermines Cartwright’s dreams, it also unravels the aesthetic weave of the entire novel, leaving gaps in the text that are also apparent in the historical papers on which the novel is based. By gesturing to these gaps, Steffler’s novel most powerfully haunts Cartwright’s original journals and instigates a return of the repressed and a demand for justice. In his historical papers, Cartwright insists on his repeated attempts to persuade Caubvick to part with her infected hair: Caubvick’s hair falling off, and being matted with the small-pox, I had much difficulty to prevail on her to permit me to cut it off, and shave her head. Notwithstanding I assured her that the smell of the hair would communicate the infection to the rest of her country folks on her return, yet I was not able to prevail on her to consent to its being thrown overboard. She angrily snatched it from me, locked it up in one of her trunks, and never would permit me to get sight of it afterwards; flying into a violent passion of anger and grief whenever I mentioned the subject, which I did almost every day, in hopes of succeeding at last. (136–7) Steffler’s Cartwright also insists on his attempts to dispose of the infected hair; however, in a fatal bargaining session when he promises he will give her “whatever she wants” for her hair, he breaks his promise when she asks to live with him. “Then there is no trade,” Caubvick replies.

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Steffler’s Cartwright refuses to trade with Caubvick because, as noted, his “intention had been ... to create a core of Eskimo allies and interpreters who could mediate on my behalf with their countrymen for the purpose of trade and exploration” (212). As it turns out, the historical Cartwright was so bent on this mission that the year following the deaths of Attuiock and his family, he took an Inuit boy of about twelve years of age named Noozelliack back with him to England. “Fearing that Noozelliack should take the small pox in the natural way,” Cartwright determined to have him “inoculated” (146). He gave the boy to Mr Sutton “to whom I told what had happened to those Indians I was carrying back in the spring” (147). When Sutton determined that he had sufficiently prepared the boy, he introduced the infection. “The disease appeared in due time, but he died in three days after; so fatal is that disorder to this race of mortals!” (147). Referring to his medical experimentation on the child and to the impact of Noozelliack’s death, Cartwright emphasizes only the dint it made in his plans for enhancing his business interests: This was a very great mortification and disappointment to me; for ... I had brought home this boy, in order to put him to school to be instructed in the English language; intending him for my interpreter. Through him I should have been enabled to have gained full information of their religion, customs and manners. At the same time, I should have improved myself in their language, my dealings with his countrymen would have been greatly facilitated. (147) In the journals and in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, both the actual and fictional Cartwright’s attempt to justify their monstrous behaviour and consistently downplay their role in spreading the figurative and literal infections associated with exposure to English culture. Ultimately, the gaps in the actual George Cartwright’s memoirs and in Steffler’s fictional account attest to the unspeakable nature of the disaster Cartwright unwittingly instigated. Steffler’s hero goes so far as to blame Caubvick for causing the death of her people, even though the narrative takes pains to reveal that it was Cartwright who transformed Caubvick into a skilled trader who tried to beat him at his own game. In his nightmares, Cartwright envisions Caubvick reaching for him, her “grin already devouring him ... Her

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hands, broken, her fingers lopped off and bleeding” (161). In a macabre reversal of agency, Cartwright aligns the victimized Caubvick with gruesome and demonic imagery: “He had not just reduced her, made her pitiable, but had pushed her into another state, freed some monstrous power in her, that she now turned on him” (161). His blameful comments highlight his guilt, but they also allude to the “monstrous power” associated with the concept of degeneration – that magical, “profound and disturbing power that operated in the universe,” which he projects onto the Native woman (Chamberlin and Gilman x). Since the control that sustained European culture and the colonies was exercised through the use of the models of progress and degeneration, as Chamberlin and Gilman explain, the fear of losing control “meant that the negative model, the model of degeneration, was a particularly powerful one, caught as it was between its own negative power as the opposite of progress, and a positive energy which gave the model a fascinating appeal on its own, an appeal not manageable by any dialectic. It lurked in the nature of the Other ... as it lurked within those who generated it” (Chamberlin and Gilman viii). Its powers are thus akin to the gothic “return of the repressed”: This ‘return of the repressed,’ or emergence of whatever has been previously rejected by consciousness, is a fundamental dynamism of Gothic narratives. Something – some entity, knowledge, emotion, or feeling – which has been submerged or held at bay because it threatens the established order of things, develops a cumulative energy that demands its release and forces it to the realm of visibility where it must be acknowledged. The approach and the appearance of the repressed creates an aura of menace and ‘uncanniness,’ both in Freud’s sense of ‘unheimlich’ – something that becomes apparent although one feels it ‘ought’ to remain hidden – and in the Jungian sense of something possessing an awesome or transpersonal, numinous quality. (Clemens 4) Later, Steffler’s Cartwright attributes the devastation of her people entirely to Caubvick’s “monstrous power” when he contemplates the actual discovery of “bones,” “clothes,” and “more than sixty skulls” scattered around the island – the deadly outcome of the transmission of the virus:

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So many unburied. No one had left the island alive. They had camped there for the seals, and the disease had taken them like the fulfillment of one of their terrible myths. It had lain coiled in her trunk like a vicious animal. Did she take it out and put it on like a wig? Did she dance with it on? Wave it over their heads? He pictured it bobbing through the air like a torch trailing black fire and smoke. He should have thrown it into the sea, trunk and all. And her with it. And as for himself ... (236) In this passage, Steffler elaborates on the historical Cartwright’s comment that “Caubvick must have retained the infection in her hair which she kept in a trunk.” But the novel’s description of Caubvick’s hair “coiled” in her trunk “like a vicious animal” specifically alludes to the proverbial snake in the Garden, belying Cartwright’s claim that this is the fulfillment of an Inuit myth, and suggesting, instead, that it is a version of the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall. In this case, the dispossessed son “driven out of heaven,” Cartwright, blames Eve, cast once again as a Native woman, for despoiling Paradise. Unfortunately, the horrific events related in Steffler’s novel are far from mythical. The paucity of facts concerning this event reflect a gap in the actual historical papers that is preserved in Steffler’s novel. It is fitting that Cartwright’s ghost refers to the nightmares that haunt him as “unspeakable” (8) since, in their accounts, both Steffler’s Cartwright and the historical Cartwright retain the “unspeakable” nature of the events associated with the smallpox epidemic and with Cartwright’s possession of Native slaves in Labrador. With respect to the latter, although Steffler’s novel casts Mrs Selby as a critic of slavery, Steffler’s text never betrays the fact that while in Labrador Cartwright owned Native slaves.9 Steffler was certainly aware of Cartwright’s participation in the slave trade because in his papers Cartwright explicitly states that he possessed a Native slave girl bought for the price of a “bait-skiff ” (143). When the father of his “slave girl” died, he left Cartwright a legacy of two wives and three children, one of whom was Noozelliack, the boy whom Cartwright inoculated with smallpox. The historical Cartwright explicitly states that after the smallpox outbreak onboard the ship carrying him back to Labrador, on 1 September 1773 he took leave of Caubvick (140).10 He closes the entry, explaining that Noozelliack’s sister “Tweegock, the girl whom I had bought ... came

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along with me in the shallop” (140). In his entry on Nov. 16, 1773, he reports that his “slave girl ran away.” Following her footsteps in the snow, Cartwright eventually “met a skiff, coming up from the sealing-post, with her on board”; she had attempted to flee to her mother’s house. Tweegock is mentioned again when Cartwright informs us that after receiving what he describes as “a small slap for some sluttish and dirty tricks,” she attempted suicide. Her name appears in the journals for the last time on Cartwright’s list of the members of his colony who were captured by privateers: “Tweegock, a woman about 18.” Beneath her name is a final entry: “Phyllis, a girl 3 ½, daughter to Tweegock” (245). From these cryptic entries, readers may well suspect that Cartwright was the father of a child born when “his slave” was 14 years old – a fact that lends credence to Steffler’s protagonist’s hopes of “mating the two cultures” (97). Cartwright’s list concludes with a postscript explaining that the last four names “are Esquimaux, and my household servants, who were carried away, to be made slaves of ” (245). In penning this postscript, he seems to have forgotten that Tweegock and Phyllis were already his slaves. Despite the dramatic and ethical import of Cartwright’s possession and treatment of his Native slaves, The Afterlife of George Cartwright omits all reference to this aspect of Cartwright’s experience and confirms Afua Cooper’s insight noted earlier that slavery is Canada’s “best kept secret” (68). Perhaps because Cartwright was never ambivalent about the institution of slavery, inclusion of this facet of his life may have made him far too monstrous and precluded contemporary readers from identifying with Steffler’s gothic hero. Put somewhat differently, inclusion of these facts would have compromised the doubleness associated with Steffler’s portrayal of Cartwright – a doubleness that, as noted earlier, mirrors Cartwright’s ambivalence toward primogeniture. Both the novel and the historical Cartwright’s journal offer equally terse references to the outcome of the smallpox epidemic among the Inuit of Labrador. In his historical papers, the details of the tragedy are framed by information pertaining to the success of Cartwright’s trade in fox and beaver skins: Sunday, March 28, 1779 At noon Mr. Daubeny returned, and one of Mr. Coghlan’s people with him. From this man I learned, that their crew, consisting of three hands, had killed but eleven foxes and one deer: and that the

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other crew of three hands at Black-bear Bay, had killed but three foxes. Mr. Daubeny brought with him a medal, which William Phippard picked up last year among the Indian baggage, which they found on the island in Ivucktoke Bay, where they saw so many dead Esquimaux. As I well remember this medal (for it belonged to a brother of mine who gave it to one of the Indians whom I had in England) I am now no longer in doubt respecting their persons, or the cause of their death. I am certain, that they must be the same I was acquainted with; that Caubvick must have retained the infection in her hair which she kept in a trunk; and that the small-pox broke out amongst them in the winter, and swept them all off. He also brought eleven beaver-skins, which he purchased from one of the people. (261–2) In keeping with the historical Cartwright’s brevity on the subject of the smallpox epidemic, Steffler’s Cartwright follows his discussion of Caubvick’s monstrous power by a terse acknowledgment of the horrors she must have endured: It is well known that people do not contract smallpox more than once. The disease either kills them or leaves them scarred but immune to its influence. The thought of what Caubvick endured on that island, with everyone dying around her, has become more terrifying the longer I’ve dwelt on it. (226) Despite Cartwright’s attempts to repress these terrifying thoughts, they continue to return and disrupt the text in the form of nightmares. As noted, the recurring, fantastic image of Caubvick’s hair “bobbing through the air like a torch trailing black fire and smoke” specifically recalls the primordial crime and uncanny secret of the settler-invader society. As Renée Bergland explains: “The American subject [...] is obsessed with originary sin against Native peoples that both engenders that subject and irrevocably stains it” (22). In keeping with the rule of primogeniture with its emphasis on arriving first, according to Bergland, the settler-invaders’ “originary sin” sprang from a related belief that only by dispossessing North American Native peoples could Europeans became Americans and Canadians. This uncanny secret, the familiar

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trope of postcolonial Gothic, however, specifically recalls Caruth’s account of trauma, which “registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (151). In her discussion of postmodern novels, Amy Elias discusses the encoding of trauma in narratives that “foreground ... an unrepresentable or unsaid space within the rational context of the Enlightenment moment; and ... symptomatically locate this event within the figural rather than the discursive” (546). As Elias argues, these novels centre “on an occurrence that jars with its Enlightenment context, that exceeds the parameters of Western logic and reason that heroic science would construct as cognitive boundaries for apprehending the real” (546). The irrepressible nightmare image of Caubvick’s dark hair echoes Elias’s description of this type of figural rather than discursive event which “takes the form of the occult or the criminal that remains unrecognized, unspoken, and/or inexplicable within the framework of heroic science” (546). Yet, as I assert, in Steffler’s novel, the figure of Caubvick’s hair is not simply a familiar postcolonial or postmodern gothic device because an actual historical event is buried beneath this trope. The Afterlife of George Cartwright tacitly acknowledges the historical trauma and guilt associated with the smallpox epidemic but preserves its unspeakable nature by shifting abruptly from the terse reference to the event to Cartwright’s grotesque and protracted slaughter of bears gathered by a waterfall. Steffler retrieved the surreal, five-page account of the slaughter from Cartwright’s historical journals, but altered the sequence of the original narrative so that in the novel the slaughter of the bears serves as a screen memory for the human deaths. In his historical papers, Cartwright claims to have counted “thirty-two white-bears and three black ones” feasting on salmon near the cataract, and he dearly regrets that he had enough ammunition to kill only six animals. In the end, he and his men could not manage to carry the weight of a single carcass: “Thus ended in disappointment, the noblest day’s sport I ever saw; for we got only one skin, although we had killed six bears, and not one morsel of flesh” (236). Steffler’s narrative invokes this screen memory twice: first, in a realistic account that concludes with a passing reference to the smallpox outbreak and the demonic image of Caubvick’s wig “bobbing through the air like a torch,” and second, in a fantastic revision of the slaughter at the novel’s conclusion, in which the polar bear consumes Cartwright’s ghost.

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He watches and, incredibly, feels no pain, feels instead, the satisfaction of feeding a fierce hunger. He has been starving for so long. And with each bite, as more of him vanishes, a feast of new beauty appears. Small ferns and mosses curly as hair spring from the cracks in the rock where he was sitting. The bear devours one leg as far as the thigh, then the other, turning its head sideways like a dog to crunch the ones in the back of its jaws. Then it plunges its snout between Cartwright’s legs up through his hips, burrowing under his ribs. The bear’s white head is a wide pointed brush, moving from side to side, painting him out, painting the river, the glittering trees in. (267) This scene confronts readers with the persistent ambivalence and doubling in male imperial discourse, “suspended between imperial megalomania, with its fantasy of unstoppable rapine, and contradictory fear of engulfment, with its fantasy of dismemberment and emasculation” (McClintock 26–7). On the level of fantasy, Steffler’s novel traces Cartwright’s conversion from an idolatrous worshipper of the crown to true worshipper of the sacred ground, from an allegiance to “the Family of Man, which admits no mother,” to an allegiance to the “shadowy inversion beneath it of its other, repressed side” (McClintock 4). The conversion from patriarchy to its shadowy inversion, a matriarchal vision of nature, is further underscored by the fact that Cartwright’s manhood is consumed by a familiar Canadian Gothic symbol of Nature, a bear that “plunges its snout between Cartwright’s legs, up through his hips.” In his absence, “[s]mall ferns and mosses curly as hair spring from the cracks in the rock.” On one level, this scene portrays the familiar transition of the protagonist from “intruder or conquering invader” to one who “spiritually become[s] part of the land” (MacLulich 231, 237). Yet, in keeping with the earlier discussions about the status of the animal in Steffler’s narrative, Cartwright’s fusion with the polar bear is not portrayed as a realistic option. In this scene, the promise of assimilation with the land is subverted by a recognizable figure of romantic consolation that supposedly erases the deaths of the Native/Other with the help of the selfconsciously aesthetic artist’s “pointed brush” and naturalizes in the “afterlife” of fiction the dispossession and erasure that proved so unnatural and so threatening in life. As Goldie observes, typically, the settler

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goes native at the very moment that the Native conveniently disappears. Another turn on the dilemma presented by what might best be termed cultural primogeniture involves the settler-invaders turning themselves into spectral presences, so that the settler seemingly disappears along with the Native (Ledohowski 156–7). This strategy, however, which presents the colonizer as transient is, as Deena Rymhs argues, pure illusion, a false “promise of reconciliation” (109). In the passage cited above, the reflexive nature of Cartwright’s concluding fantasy, with its explicit allusion to painting, works against the impulse toward consolation and reconciliation since its constitutive elements underscore the stark gap between fantasy and history, intimating that the former can never redress or whitewash the unspeakable horrors associated with slavery and the genocide of North American Native peoples. The final episode also recalls the rule of primogeniture since the tableau of erasure acknowledges that the Native peoples were here first. Steffler’s novel ultimately undermines this fantasy of transformation by stressing that Cartwright’s death by landscape, which portrays a land cleansed of Europeans and returned to its pre-colonial, Edenic state, is sheer artifice.11 Like Moses, tainted by the fleshpots of Egypt and barred from the Promised Land, Cartwright is never permitted to realize his dream of becoming truly (ab)original. In both his life and afterlife, he is doomed to come second and is repeatedly exposed as an uncanny double. Contemporary readers, however, are not invited to mock Cartwright at a comfortable distance; instead, we are invited to consider carefully his discovery that time “is like sound – that the past doesn’t vanish, but encircles us in layers like a continuous series of voices, with the closest, most recent voice drowning out those that have gone before ... it’s possible at times to tune in a detail from either the past or the ongoing course of time and, by concentrating on it, become witness to some event in the affairs of the dead or the living” (9). Cartwright’s investment in witnessing the past in the present echoes contemporary critics’ efforts to repoliticize the Gothic. As noted earlier, Luckhurst enjoins critics to risk “the violence of reading the ghost, of cracking open its absent presence to answer the demand of its specific symptomatology and its specific locale” (542). As this chapter demonstrates, this task involves tracing the cycles of victimization and searching the archives for the forgotten names and buried histories of the radically dispossessed.

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In keeping with Watson’s The Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright aids my project by politicizing and historicizing the discourses of haunting. In effect, all three texts enable readers to appreciate how settler-First Nations relations in Canada are gothicised. Whereas Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels briefly allude to the settlers’ biblically inspired fantasies of Paradise regained, as my analysis of Steffler’s text suggests, The Afterlife of George Cartwright explicitly demonstrates how closely imperialist and colonial desires for mastery are tied to the trauma of dispossession. In Cartwright’s case, the initial expulsion from Paradise is instigated by British law of primogeniture. Equally important, in accordance with the Canadian Gothic’s characteristic doubled and divided, ironic structure, which is evident in both Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, two competing visions likewise plague Steffler’s protagonist. On the one hand, as noted, Cartwright aligns the global, political project of empire with a positive metamorphosis, which promises an increase in status and honour and the affirmation of patriarchal, Christian identity. Yet this positive view of metamorphosis is simultaneously contrasted with an antithetical vision of degeneration, of catastrophic boundary loss, impotence, and infantilization. In accordance with Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s Canadian haunted narratives, Steffler’s text aligns the latter vision with the figure of the indigene. For Cartwright, however, the most dreadful example of degeneration and dispossession is incarnated in the image of the slave. In chapter 5, which focuses on Dionne’s Brand’s corpus, I trace the profound connection between dispossession and the traumatic impact of slavery on the formal and thematic levels of her narratives. In essence, all of the novels in this part of the book grapple with the difficulty of transforming ghosts into ancestors within the settler-invader nation-state of Canada. As I suggested with respect to The Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning, this desired transformation gives rise to futile attempts either to merge with the Native peoples and the feminine landscape/heim or, conversely, to exorcise the spirits of Native peoples. In the conclusion to Steffler’s novel, a similar attempt is made to indigenize the ghost of an imperial explorer. In fact, the description of the ferns and mosses springing from the cracks in the rocks recalls portrayals in Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels of the distinctly feminine landscape which tempts the protagonists to merge with the Native land – pun intended. Yet, in accordance with Watson’s and

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Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, in Steffler’s narrative, as I note, Cartwright’s attempts at merging with the land are arrested by the narrative’s self-conscious and highly aesthetic depiction of his metamorphosis. Although the next part deals primarily with haunting and possession in the context of the Irish and Black diasporas, as we will see in the next chapter, Urquhart’s Away makes a similar bid at indigenizing an Irish woman via a related form of death by landscape. In both cases, however, attempts at indigenization are highly contrived and, as a result, cannot wholly conceal the inauthenticity of the transformation.

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3 Jane Urquhart’s Away: Magic Realism and the Ghosts of Celticism

“There is no question,” Renée Bergland explains, that Freud’s model of the uncanny “relies on racial and political hierarchies” that informed imperial and colonial endeavours (10). In Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, and Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, the conventions of the Gothic shed light on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial attitudes to the supposed uncanny, “savage races” – attitudes that were tied to religious and scientific notions of degeneracy. Similar concerns with degeneracy surface in Jane Urquhart’s Away, a novel that draws on ancient Irish Celtic tales of “otherworld” spirits to trace the experiences over four generations of a rural Irish Catholic family that flees the Great Hunger of 1846 and immigrates to Upper Canada. Unlike the previous novels considered, which are of interest to this study due to their depiction of the spectral encounters between settler-invaders and Native North Americans, Away is concerned with both first contact and the relationship between haunting and diaspora – the latter is the focus of my analysis of all of the works by Urquhart, Atwood, and Brand considered in this part of the book. Away opens with the retelling of a miraculous event: in 1842 on the island of Rathlin, the narrator’s great-grandmother, Mary, visits a beach after a storm that leaves the ocean glistening with silver teapots, bobbing green cabbages, and barrels of whisky. Clinging to one of the barrels is an exhausted young man. Mary drags the stranger to shore and, before expiring, he murmurs the word “Moira” and dies. As the narrator tells us, Mary recognized immediately “that he came from an otherworld island, assumed that he had emerged from the water to look for her, and

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knew that her name had changed, in an instant, from Mary to Moira” (8). From that moment on, the entire village understands that Mary has been “taken” by the Formoire, the ones from the sea. This magical encounter endows Mary with significance, transforming her from a dispossessed and impoverished Irish peasant girl into a powerful woman who has knowledge and possession of an otherworld spirit. As Mary explains, “Everything about him was hers now, all hers forever” (5). Mary is hastily married off to Brian, the local schoolmaster, and they immigrate to the New World. But after the birth of her second child, Mary again falls under the spell of her daemon lover. This time, she sheds her domestic life entirely and abandons her children so that she can live with his spirit by the shores of Lake Moira in Ontario. In relating the family’s story, which begins with Mary and Brian O’Malley and their two children, Eileen and Liam, Away also explores the larger complexities surrounding the formation of what Mark McGowan terms “the Irish collective memory” of the Famine and the diaspora, and Irish nationalism in both Ireland and the New World. Although varying in many details and by no means constituting a unified genre, the diverse narratives that convey the Irish collective memory share common elements: first, “the ‘potato famine heritage’ is integral to the Irish”; second, “the Irish are Catholic”; third, “they have emerged from poverty, ignorance, and social degradation”; fourth, “the Famine was created artificially by British conquerors and landlords who were determined to rid Ireland of her Catholic vermin”; and, finally, “Irish Catholics are the Famine’s children who passed through ‘Hope’s Gate’ in Canada” (McGowan 2).1 As noted in the introduction, the need for a unified cultural memory often gives rise to ghosts. In Atwood’s words, “We want to be sure that the ancestors, ghosts, and skeletons really are there, that as a culture we are not as flat and lacking in resonance as we were once led to believe” (“Canadian Monsters” 100). Rather than relying on the Gothic to install the Irish collective memory – with its emphasis on the Famine, the impact of dispossession, and the providentialist vision of repossessing all that was lost – Away explores this vexed nationalist discourse by invoking the related yet distinct subgenre of magic realism.2 As Lois Parkinson Zamora attests, ghosts “in their many guises” abound in the Gothic and magic realism (497). Gothic and magic realist texts are also doubled and divided; they juxtapose “differing realities, explore the relationship of time and space, present irrational or mysterious levels of experience through the appearance

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of ghosts, depict acts of sexual deviance (including incest), and expose the primitive or ‘savage’ side of otherwise cultured individuals” (Andrews 7–8). Whereas the Gothic concentrates on the “psychological dimensions of human evil” (Andrews 8) – a concern forcibly articulated by Cartwright’s question “Who, if not God, is to blame for making monsters like me?” (Steffler 245) – the primary focus of magic realist texts is to explore and contest “the nature and limits of the knowable” (Andrews 9). My goal in analysing Urquhart’s reliance on magic realism lies in exploring the political dimensions of literary forms that rely on the tropes of haunting and possession. As Herb Wyile reminds us, “generic affiliations create not only aesthetic effects but political and cultural resonances as well” (35). In her essay on magic realism, Lois Parkinson Zamora explains: Magical realist texts question the nature of reality and the nature of its representations. In this, then, magical realist texts share (and extend) the tradition of narrative realism: they, too, aim to present a credible version of experienced reality. The crucial difference is that magical realist texts amplify the very conception of “experienced reality” by presenting fictional worlds that are multiple, permeable, transformative, animistic. (Parkinson Zamora 500) As Parkinson Zamora’s statement suggests, magic realist texts highlight ways of seeing – mental landscapes – and they foreground the connections between subjective and communal imaginaries and literary form. In essence, Urquhart’s magic realist text illustrates the process by which people attempt to transform an alien environment into a home by invoking the figure of the ghost. As illustrated in the previous chapters, this mythic fantasy of (re)possession and incorporation typically involves the spectralization of the Other. Moreover, the transformation of the unheimlich into the heimlich occurs on many levels, ranging from the individual/psychological, to the tribal/communal, to the national/political. Finally, as noted earlier, magic realist texts, like the Gothic, betray the uncanny doubleness associated with installing mythic fantasies of a homogenous community or nation-state. As Stephen Slemon explains, In the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two opposing systems takes place, each working toward the creation

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of a different kind of fictional world from the other. Since the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the other ... a complete transference from one mode to the other never takes place, and the novel remains suspended between the two. (409–10) Slemon’s insights about the battle between opposing systems in magic realist texts echo Jonathan Kertzer’s fundamental assertion that “no discourse is autonomous or pure, and those that pretend to be brand new have merely mystified their lineage” (193). In both the Gothic and in magic realism, the return of repressed lineages, histories, and stories constantly threatens the authority and authenticity of the newly minted “original.” In Away, magic realism’s multiple worlds reflect a version of Ireland’s colonial past and the Irish collective memory that was generated in contrast to the prevailing, dominant discourses of British and Canadian nationalism. I argue further that Away’s use of magic realism reveals that nations are not merely “imagined communities” but, more specifically, collective identities borne of fantasies that arise, in part, in response to suffering and loss. Viewed in this light, magic realism can be used by displaced and dispossessed members of a community to fashion a consoling vision of survival. Critics of Canadian literature have repeatedly analyzed how history is transformed into myth in the service of unifying the nation and offering consolation (see Vautier and Kertzer). My aim in this chapter, however, is to examine Away to discover why the process of myth-making fails and how this particular narrative emphasizes the reverse process, namely, the fall from myth into history. By tracing the intersections between postcolonial theory and magic realism in Away, this chapter reveals how the narrative constructs both Ireland and Canada in ghostly terms. I argue that both the old and new world nations assume spectral qualities because they are fashioned on the basis of the characters’ experiences of absence. Both old and new worlds are conceptualized in terms of nostalgia (the yearning for what has been lost) and amnesia (the forgetting of what has been lost while simultaneously projecting an idealized version of the lost object into the future). Ultimately, Away reveals that these ghostly constructions are dangerous primarily because they obscure, behind the fantasy of the absent other, real others. The pitfalls of this fantasy become glaringly

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apparent when we see how the production of archetypal, mythic identities enables characters to disengage from their actual circumstances. Equally problematically, absorbed in their mythic fantasies, characters often perceive themselves solely as the victims of history; in so doing, they efface their own agency and capacity to victimize others. In what follows, I argue that the ghosts that haunt Away carry the burden of the Irish collective memory. As a result, they instigate a return to some of the most heated and racialized debates in the nineteenth century concerning Celtic identity and the foundations of Irish national identity. In Away, spirits raise several questions: How does the experience of colonial dispossession consciously or unconsciously shape the characters’ views on personal and national identity? More precisely, does national identity lie in extrinsic factors such as territory, politics, language, and distinctive cultural practices or in intrinsic and essentialist factors such as race and, in the case of Ireland, what has been termed the “Celtic mind”? Finally, what is the impact of the Irish diaspora on conceptions of personal and national identity? To highlight Away’s engagement with spectres and the questions that they raise, this chapter begins by tracing Away’s debt to magic realism. In keeping with critics such as Compton and Wyile who locate the text within the generic frameworks of romance and magic realism, respectively, I adopt a formalist approach. I argue that in Away magic realism is instrumental in disseminating the Irish collective memory and the related ideologies of Primitivism and Celticism that permeate the novel. During the mid-nineteenth century, when the novel is set, these ideologies helped to fashion an Irish collective identity in the face of terrible deprivation and loss. Primitivism has been famously defined as the “discontent of the civilized with civilization” that gives rise to the idealization of the primitive (Garrigan Mattar 4). Primitivism can thus be understood as a product of disillusionment and the resulting nostalgic desire to return to what has supposedly been lost, not on an individual but on a cultural level. As critics note, however, Primitivism is not so much a thing as a process “of self-referential idealization that can constitute an ideology, a poetic mode, a form of satire, a social contract, a religious instinct, an intrusive element in a ‘scientific’ discourse, or an instrument of tyranny” (Garrigan Mattar 3). During the nineteenth century, Primitivism provided a “cultural counterweight to the modernization and rationalization of society encompassed by the Enlightenment through its display of commitment to the preservation and transmission of the past, particularly

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the past of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the out-lying regions of England” (Pittock 36). In fact, Primitivism was also intimately bound to Celticism; the latter was “the main stream of the Primitivism that became fashionable throughout Europe, and which led Napoleon to found an Academie Celtique in 1806, while the bards themselves, for so long despised, persecuted and almost extinct, were swept up by sentimental romanticism as the avatars of its lyric ideal” (Pittock 36–7).3 For the purposes of my study of haunted, doubled, and divided texts, it is important to appreciate that Celticism exists in a dialectical relationship with what has been termed “Anglo-Saxonism.” That is, the spirits and magical beliefs associated with the ancient Celtic Irish aristocratic culture as it was “imperfectly preserved, adapted, and transformed by a repeatedly colonized and disenfranchised Catholic peasantry” (Scheper-Hughes 25) coexist with the supposedly rational, colonial “AngloSaxon” approach to daily life. The most important aspect of the latter’s creed was the belief that the Anglo-Saxon people or race, “as clearly distinguished from all other races in the world, had a peculiar genius for governing themselves – and others – by means of a constitutional and legal system that combined the highest degree of efficiency with liberty and justice” (Curtis 6–7). In Ireland, the Anglo-Saxonist mythology elicited “a counter-current or cultural resistance movement,” known as Celticism or the Irish Revival. “Drawing on many different talents and disciplines, Celticism tried to accomplish for the ‘Irish race’ what AngloSaxonism had managed to do for the ‘English race,’ namely to raise the people concerned to an exalted position of cultural and racial superiority ... Ethnocentric Irish men and women sought to combat heavy doses of Anglo-Saxonist venom with a Celticist serum of their own making” (Curtis 15). Celticist scholars viewed the modern Irish as direct descendants of a “pure and holy race ... whose ancient institutions, veneration for learning, and religious zeal made Saxon culture during the two or three centuries before the Norman Conquest look nothing less than barbarian” (Curtis 15; see also Pittock 5–6). The first section of this chapter explores how Away deploys magic realism to champion the Irish collective memory and Celticism, which looked beyond the present and the people who actually grappled with very difficult circumstances to a largely imagined past and future in a bid to mitigate the brutal effects of colonization and the English’s view of the Irish as a degenerate tribe – “a turbulent, semi-nomadic, treacherous, idle, dirty, and belligerent lot who reminded them of the ‘savages’

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or Indians of North America” (Curtis 18). I argue that Away’s commitment to the Irish collective memory and to Celticism is epitomized by its portrayal of the O’Malley family’s profound faith in and identification with Irish mythology, its feisty, red-headed heroines, and its credible treatment of Mary’s relationship with her daemon lover. Together, Mary and her lover represent the genius loci of the rural Irish landscape. The family’s enduring connection to Irish Celtic spirituality, tradition, and collective memory is facilitated primarily by the women. With their pale white skin and banners of red hair, the women bear an uncanny resemblance to each other. This resemblance is both physical and psychic since they also possess the same childlike imagination and supernatural gift for clairvoyance. As Parkinson Zamora observes, in magic realist fiction, “we often encounter successive generations of a family, but not in any realistic sense. Rather we may think of them, paradoxically, as a simultaneous series, an on-going progression of ahistorical archetypes” (508). In Away, readers are told that in this family “all young girls are the same young girl and all old ladies are the same old lady” (325). The narrative’s initially positive approach to Celticism and Primitivism is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of the vibrant, magical, feminine world of Celtic Primitivism to the sterile, isolated, masculine existence of the family’s Anglo-Irish landlords, Granville and Osbert Sedgewick. Despite their assiduous efforts to collect and study samples of Irish culture, flora, and fauna, these middle-aged bachelors have no authentic spiritual connection to the land or its people. After outlining the salutary aspects of Away’s Celtic brand of magic realism, this chapter turns to some of the problems associated with reinstalling the Irish collective memory and Celticism’s Primitivist world view, including the implications of aligning Ireland with an uncanny, child-like femininity. One of the most intriguing features of Away is the way in which the narrative illustrates the tensions surrounding “the rebirth of Ireland (and Irish culture, language, ethos and values) elsewhere ‘off island,’ the ultimate postmodern paradox” (Scheper-Hughes 29). Viewed in terms of Celticism, the diasporic upheaval irrevocably severs a people from their roots, their life-giving and sacred land. In Away, however, the diaspora confers land and newfound wealth on the once-impoverished O’Malley family, a transformation that, ironically, puts them in an analogous position to their former, contemptible Anglo-Irish landlords vis à vis North American Native peoples. Portraying the Irish in terms of the collective memory as a unified, dispossessed,

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primitive tribe eternally victimized by the British Empire thereby obscures the Irish settler-invader’s complicity in the imperial and colonial project in Canada and elsewhere. In the chapter’s final section, I explore how the unequal power relations between Native North Americans and Irish settler-invaders are obfuscated by Away’s reliance on Celticism’s and magic realism’s characteristic archetypal tropes which promote a “mythic participation” in what Jorges Luis Borges termed “a ‘universal history’ that is always present, available, communal” (Parkinson Zamora 508). At one point, Away invokes Celticism’s rhetoric of universal, ahistorical oppression to link the sorrows and spirits of Ireland and its dispossessed and vanishing people to that of the dispossessed and disappearing North American Native tribes. But this rhetorical move undercuts “the impulse to generate a specific political and cultural assessment of the impact of imperialism and colonialism on the distinct groups” (Parkinson Zamora 504). To establish a connection between the Irish and the genius locus of the New World, Away invokes magic realism to identify the Irish characters with the Canadian landscape and, on occasion, to transform Irish characters into replicas of indigenous people. In this way, magic realism serves the necessary, yet politically suspect work of indigenizing the Irish settler-invaders – a process that I outlined in the previous chapter on The Afterlife of George Cartwright. In its attempts to legitimize the Irish’s right to possess the land, however, Away uncannily replicates Europeans’ romantic reification of Native North Americans. As Thomas King observes, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Europeans became obsessed with a mythical Indian, “the wild, free, powerful, noble, handsome, philosophical, eloquent, solitary Indian ... who could be a cultural treasure, a piece of North American antiquity. A mythic figure who could reflect the strength and freedom of an emerging continent. A National Indian ... If North Americans couldn’t find him, they could make him up” (79). Away conjures this mythic figure in its portrait of Mary’s Indian friend, Exodus Crow. Ultimately, Away’s impulse to indigenize is undermined by its revelation of the dangers associated with Europe’s obsessive conjuring of mythic, romantic figures – an obsession that, as noted in the previous chapter, Terry Castle sees as the flipside of the Enlightenment: the growing ghostliness of other people associated with romantic self-absorption and the tendency to reduce the other to a phantom (125).

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This romantic sensibility, which underpins Celticism, results in a preoccupation with an idealized “world of memory – where the dead continue to ‘live’” (Castle 132). Paradoxically, “these ‘recollected presences’ are more real, more palpable-seeming than any object of sense ... Unpleasant realities cannot compete with the marvelous projection of memory, love, and desire” (Castle 133). Again, as noted, Away demonstrates on the individual level how fantasy serves as a salve for unbearable suffering. But the nation itself can likewise be understood as the product of powerful fantasies generated in response to terrible hardship and loss. These fantasies ultimately prove dangerous because they ignore real human beings in favour of pursuing ghosts. In Away, Mary and her daughter, Eileen, illustrate the consequences of romantic selfabsorption when they transform the men whom they love into purely mental pictures, so as to experience the pleasure of being haunted by ghosts who are wholly in their possession. In this case, possession is taken to such an extreme measure that the other is assumed to have no reality outside the imagination. As Castle explains, the successful denial of mortality requires “a new spectralized mode of perception, in which one sees through the real person ... towards a perfect and unchanging spiritual essence. Safely subsumed in this ghostly form, the other can be appropriated, held close, and cherished forever in the ecstatic confines of the imagination” (136). Ultimately, Mary’s and Eileen’s tragic fates expose the flaws that inhere in both personal and national mythic fantasies of (re)possession and incorporation. Having unconsciously absorbed the lessons of imperialism – lessons predicated on what Castle terms “the spectralization of the other” – the women never attain their goal of becoming (ab)original; instead, they are exposed as tragic dupes of their colonized imaginations. Although the novel seemingly embraces Celticism and romantic nationalism – discourses that incite the characters’ and, by extension, the readers’ engagement with a spectral world of ideal memory and a tribal sense of identity – at bottom, the narrative maintains its doubled and divided relationship with these mythical fantasies, illustrating their seductive power over the imagination, on the one hand, and attempting to exorcise them, on the other. In keeping with Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, Away emphasizes the impulse to exorcise the past. This tension is conveyed from the start in the retelling of the O’Malleys’ family story, which is recollected during the course of a single night by the eighty-two-year-old narrator, Esther, the “last and the most sub-

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dued” of the family’s “extreme” women. As Cynthia Sugars asserts, the framing of the text “is that of a warning,” since Old Eileen, Esther’s grandmother, initially tells Esther the tale of the family’s ancestral curse when Esther is twelve years old, so that Esther “may be safe from its damnation” (9). The narration serves as a means of expelling transgressive desires since Old Eileen told the story in an effort to “calm ... Esther down” and “put her in her place” (3). In using the term “expelling,” I am drawing on Rosemary Jackson’s insights into fantastic literature, which, as noted earlier, serves a double function of telling of or showing desire or of expelling it. In her retelling of events, Esther emphasizes the deleterious impact of Mary’s transgressive behaviour and departure on her children, Liam and Eileen. Whereas Liam rejects both his parents and eventually becomes a prosperous farmer, his sister, Eileen, like her mother, allows her imagination to take her away. Eileen becomes captivated by the idea of Irish nationalism and by its supposed New World champion, Aidan Lanighan. But Eileen’s imaginary and romantic preoccupations result in the assassination of Aidan’s hero, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the Father of Confederation, and Eileen’s tragic separation from her beloved. The story concludes with Esther’s confirmation that unlike her foremothers, she heeded Old Eileen’s warnings about the dangers of the imagination and adopted a more grounded and rational approach to the world. The novel’s connection to magic realism is signalled from the start, since the account of Mary’s discovery of the stranger and its impact on the village is ripe with allusions to Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realist story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.” In this story, children find the body of a drowned man whose physique presents a sublime challenge to the men and women in the village: “he was the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination” (666). Their response raises key questions. What happens when we encounter the Other? Can he or she ever be admitted wholly into our subjective worlds or must we create a fantastic substitute? In Márquez’s story, the women bestow on the stranger the name “Esteban” (667). When they discover that he did not come from the neighbouring village, like Mary, they assume possession of him: “Praise the Lord,” they sighed, “he’s ours!” (668). Readers also learn that in preparation for Esteban’s burial, “the villagers chose a father and a mother for him ... and aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through him all

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the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen” (669). Here we encounter the unifying function of shared fantasy, which simultaneously severs the villagers from their prior experience. When they bury him at sea, they discover that it is they, themselves, who are now “away”: “They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be” (669). But the villagers also know “that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban’s memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams ... because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban’s memory eternal” (669). The villagers imagine how “in future years” passersby would gaze on the place “where the sun’s so bright that the sunflowers don’t know which way to turn” and say, “yes, that’s Esteban’s village” (669–70). On one level, Márquez’s story deconstructs the myth of romantic nationalism and its faith in the unity between the people and their native soil. More precisely, Márquez’s tale of the founding of a collective identity highlights the reliance of this process on the uncanny and on myth-making since, according to the story, it is not the living “volk” but a stranger who serves as the national genius, unifying the people and giving them a distinct identity that anchors them in time and space. Paradoxically, however, the production of the collective identity simultaneously installs and defers the attainment of home and identity because it locates these features in what Márquez’s narrator terms a “maze of fantasy” (667) and in the temporal and spatial realm of “future years” – rendering home and identity unattainable, mythic ideals. As Cynthia Sugars observes, Canadian culture in general reflects this paradox, namely, “that the unsettling and uncanny experience of being haunted is what produces a feeling of familiarity and home” (7). In Away, Esther’s account of the magical events that transported her great-grandmother Mary away forcibly echoes Márquez’s account of the transformation that befell the villagers. Just as the villagers in Márquez’s story knew “that everything would be different from then on” (669), “Esther knew that at that moment her red-haired great-grandmother would not have wanted to go on living, or at least to go on living in the way she normally had. Time would have frozen, her childhood would have disappeared, and the present would have descended upon her like the claws of a carnivorous bird” (7). And, as in Márquez’s story, the appearance of the dead stranger savagely catapults the characters into the

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realm of mythical time. The response on the part of the villagers of Rathlin island also recalls that of the villagers in Márquez’s story. Both the villagers of Rathlin and Mary accept the events and their magical interpretations and, in so doing, illustrate the fundamental characteristic of magic realism in which magic is not “madness, but normative and normalizing” (Faris and Parkinson Zamora, “Introduction” 3). Away’s reliance on this story in its opening pages highlights the fact that the collective memory of the tribe or nation is the uncanny product of the romantic imagination. But it also signals an understanding of literature’s double function with respect to the creation of a national ideology. As Kertzer suggests, “Literature challenges the nationalism in which it is implicated because its self-interrogating forms put that ideology on critical display. If a national literature ... knits people together, it also shows how the knitting was accomplished” (118). Away’s allusions to Márquez’s story highlight that the novel’s nationalist ideology is woven on the loom of magic realism, and, as a result, reflects a debt to the postcolonial valence of Latin American magic realism. The term “magic realism” was first used to describe English-Canadian novels and short fiction during the late 1970s. In 1977, Geoff Hancock, who introduced the term to Canadian criticism, wrote that magic realist fiction by Canadian writers is characterized by “hyperbole treated as fact ... a labyrinthine awareness of other books ... an absurd recreation of ‘history’; a meta-fictional awareness of the process of fiction making ... [and] a collective sense of a folkloric past” (qtd. in Andrews 5). Since the features of magic realism have been the subject of a number of detailed studies, they need not be reiterated here.4 Instead, in what follows, I trace how Away’s narrator and characters rely on particular features of magic realism – specifically, the juxtaposition of the natural to the supernatural and the promotion of a willing suspension of disbelief – to forge personal and national fantasies in a bid to defend against suffering and loss. Magic realism’s most distinguishing feature, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “is the commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (qtd. in Bowers 3).5 For many critics, this domestication of the supernatural marks the fundamental division between the sub-genres of the Gothic and magic realism.6 In magic realist works, the “supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism” (Parkinson Zamora and Faris,

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“Introduction” 3). To achieve this realistic effect, the narrative perspective relies on an “absence of obvious judgments about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world view expressed by characters in the text” (Chanady 30). As we will see, by relying on magic realism, Away not only challenges official histories but, by virtue of the form itself, attempts to foreclose further dialogue and shut out dissension. The ordinariness of the supernatural in magic realism also serves political interests since the sub-genre originated in many of the postcolonial countries that were contesting the influence of their previous rulers and considered themselves to be at the margins of imperial power (see Bowers 33). Márquez, for example, relies on magical realism “to express the excessive violence and confusion of Columbian and Latin American politics” (Bowers 39). As he explained during his Nobel Lecture, “the horrific past and present of much of Latin America lends itself to magical realism due to its ability to convey the ‘unearthly tidings of Latin America’” (qtd. in Bowers 39). Away likewise deploys magic realism in response to suffering and loss, and responds to the need to convey accurately the subjective impact of that experience. Here magic realism’s fusion of the “improbable and the mundane” conveys the “unearthly tidings” of Ireland, a nation that from the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion late in the twelfth century endured seven hundred years of English aggression and domination.7 In accordance with narratives that convey what McGowan terms “the Irish collective memory,” however, Away’s “unearthly tidings,” which are conveyed to and recalled in Canada, focus primarily on the impact of the Great Hunger.8 English-language magic realist writers are often connected by the political nature of their work (Bowers 47) and, more precisely, by the desire to distinguish the colonized nation’s identity from that projected by the colonizer. As a result, facets of magic realist fiction in Canadian literature recall Latin American magic realism’s challenge to the colonizer’s vision: Oral history and myth take on the value of the real, enabling Canadian writers to explore how fiction can and does preserve or distort the past. The collision between Old and New Worlds, which is an integral part of Latin American magic realism, also characterizes much of the magic realist writing produced in Canada. This tension between established traditions and New World attempts at self-defi-

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nition is an important part of Canadian literary history, especially given the legacy of British rule over Canada and the nation’s desire to separate itself from the culture of Empire by creating an independent political, social, cultural and economic profile. (Andrews 5) From the start, Away stresses both the oral nature of Esther’s tale and the necessity of suspending rational “judgments about the veracity of the events” (Chanady 30). As Esther explains, she is retelling an oral or “told” story “to herself and the Great Lake” (3, 133). Lying in her sleigh bed, she “feels like an Irish poet from a medieval, bardic school” (133). In addition to underscoring the story’s noble Celtic lineage, the narrative also censors any temptation to pass judgment on the tale. Esther insists that the absence of an audience does not trouble her because listeners might be tempted to ask the wrong questions: “‘How could you possibly know that?’ Or ‘Do you have proof?’ Esther is too mature, has always been too mature, for considerations such as these. The story will take her wherever it wants to go in the next twelve hours, and that is all that matters” (3–4). In this way, Esther sets her oral performance against the limiting and limited paradigm of Enlightenment rationalism and the colonizer’s vision. She proudly underscores that the family story, suffused with Celtic legends, draws on “cultural systems that are no less ‘real’ than those upon which traditional literary realism draws ... Their primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals – that is, in collective (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written) practices that bind communities together” (Faris and Parkinson Zamora, “Introduction” 3). Esther likewise confirms the power of story-telling to strengthen communal ties when she states that “she is recomposing, reaffirming a lengthy, told story, recalling it; calling it back. She also knows that by giving her this story all those years ago her grandmother Eileen had caused one circle of experience to edge into the territory of another” (133). On the one hand, as Esther suggests, story-telling can bind communities and create a homogenous space – a home; on the other hand, as the novel itself emphasizes, it can also expose the rhetorical ploys by which notions of identity, home, and nation are constructed and foisted on less powerful individuals. In the case of Eileen’s transmission of the story, the goal is not merely “to edge into the territory of another” (133), but, instead, as noted, to “put Esther in her place” (3). In this way, Urquhart’s narrative relies on magic realism to highlight the antagonistic contest between multiple and opposing views of the world.

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The question is thus not whether the nation is or is not an imagined community, but “whose imagination is advanced as the national imaginary” (Bannerji qtd. in Sugars 3). Readers are also implicated in this struggle insofar as they remain in the grip of the narrative, which likewise attempts to foreclose debate even as it installs its alternative and marginalized perspective. As a result, the novel itself subtly demonstrates how revolt can transform into orthodoxy. By alluding to Márquez’s short story and by employing magic realism, more generally, Away highlights the related awareness that the nation “structures its ethos simultaneously to build a norm as an artificial construction, and then to forget that it is artificial” (Hunter qtd. in Kertzer 130). Similarly, in magic realist texts magic is used to challenge the norm paradoxically by becoming the norm. Magic is rendered “normative and normalizing” in Away in various ways. For example, although one might expect a Catholic priest to dismiss the concept of being away as mere pagan nonsense, in Away, Father Quinn quickly informs the entire village that the young man who has possessed Mary is, indeed, a daemon (14; see also Birch 3). Quinn also blithely accepts Mary’s assertion that her name is no longer Mary but “Moira” (14).9 After Mary’s transformation, the priest’s awesome hold and, by extension, patriarchal power, is gone: “She thought only occasionally of Father Quinn and his holy water, believing him to be powerless now in the radiance of this new holiness” (17). His power is trumped by her newfound, primitive sexual allure, which inflames the men, including the priest, with transgressive, carnal thoughts. Father Quinn decides that something “must be done before the whole island became possessed” (23). In this instance, spirit “possession” can be usefully aligned with territorial and cultural colonization and possession. Viewed in this light, Mary’s possession and the threat of “the whole island ... [becoming] possessed” might be better termed a “re-possession” since, as I argue, Celticism emerges as a response to the prior dispossession by the Christian English invaders. Father Quinn repeatedly tries to exorcise Mary. But while he repeats this ceremony, Mary’s mind is elsewhere, immersed in visions of her new home conveyed by her beloved’s spirit: “Her homeland was a city under water that she’d never seen except when he’d shown her – the spires, the steeples spilling from his open hand” (48). Although Father Quinn tries to put Mary in her place – the place patriarchy and Christianity have fashioned for the Irish – like the women in Márquez’s story, Mary relies on a spectre to create a vision of “her new home.”

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Rationalism again gives way to magical beliefs when Father Quinn calls on his friend, the educated and pragmatic school master, Brian O’Malley, to help him resolve his difficulties with Mary. Secretly, Quinn hopes to marry the girl off to one who knows she is away “but doesn’t believe” (27). When the priest asks Brian, “What am I to do?” and wonders, “How’s it all to end?” Brian offers a sensible response: “When you convince yourself and her that it’s all nonsense ... that and your congregation ... that will end it” (49). Gradually, however, skepticism gives way to belief even for Brian as the “speechless young girl” conjures odd memories of his life “before the ideas in books began to direct it,” including imaginative childhood pastimes, images of the landscape, and “the stories his grandfather had told him in Irish” (52–3). Rather than bring her into the sphere of the rational, Brian moves into Mary’s sphere. “Suddenly and inexplicably he remembered his mother and the game she played with him when he was a boy” (55). After promising neither to disturb the place where she thinks she has gone nor to force her back, he relies on a childhood guessing game to propose to Mary. This episode is significant because it demonstrates Mary’s ability to shift the balance of power and to act as a catalyst that instigates a doubling back and restores Brian and other men to their childhood – an ability that underscores her dual connection to Celticism and the uncanny. In this episode, Brian serves as a model of the rational, adult, and doubting reader. His conversion thus demonstrates the power of this uncanny force. The links forged in Away between the uncanny and childhood recall Freud’s conception of the term and its racist connotations. Like many of his contemporaries, Freud assumed that “civilized white Americans and Europeans go through childhood phases that are analogous to the adulthoods of savage races,” and his text implies that the mental health and good government of the former depend on the successful repression of “their intimate relation to other, less inhibited races, as much as on the repression of their own childhoods” (Bergland 11). Moreover, according to Freud, from repressions “come ghosts”; as a result, Freud’s basic formulation of the uncanny “evokes the colonialist paradigm that opposes civilization to the dark and mysterious world of the irrational and savage. Quite literally, the uncanny is the unsettled, the not-yet-colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized, or the decolonized” (Bergland 12). In Away, Brian effectively makes a truce with the uncanny when he accepts Mary’s reply to his proposal. “‘I am here but I am not here,’ she said. ‘I will be your wife and I will not be your wife’” (57). In these paradoxical

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replies, one hears the evasive and ambivalent response of a woman whose desires exceed the formalized structures of a patriarchal marriage, as well as the ambivalent response, part acquiescence and part refusal, of the colonized to the colonizer. This uneasy truce with opposing worlds is reflected in Away on several diagetic levels since, in addition to the emphasis on Father Quinn’s acceptance of the supernatural and Brian’s conversion, the narrative’s treatment of Mary’s repeated encounters with her spirit-lover is similarly “normative and normalizing.” Both the men’s acceptance of the supernatural and the matter-of-fact presentation of Mary’s repeated encounters with the spirit world challenge the colonizer’s rational and empirical orientation to the world. In magic realist fiction, apparitions are “inherently oppositional because they are an assault on the scientific and materialist assumptions of Western modernity: that reality is knowable, predictable, controllable” (Parkinson Zamora 498). Ghosts unsettle modernity’s (and the novel’s) basis in progressive, linear history: they float free in time, not just here and now but then and there, eternal and everywhere” (498). In Away, the villagers’ and Mary’s belief in ghosts specifically challenge the primacy of both Christianity’s and modernity’s teleological visions. As noted, ghosts instigate a return of repressed ancient Celtic spiritual traditions. After Mary’s encounter with the dead sailor, “hearth fires burned bright all over the island ... In the tiny villages ... tales of the Sidhe were told and the properties of Fetch, Pookah, Banshee, and Love-Talker were discussed. The Children of the old God Lir were brought to mind, how they had spent hundreds of years as swans, confined to the turbulent waters of the Moyle, which churned through the strait separating the island from the mainland” (17). In these tales, the landscape colonized by the British is literally re-mapped in light of Celtic legends, which privilege water as “the element of oracular wisdom,” echoing the Celtic tradition that “one received wisdom at the water’s edge” (Sugars 13; Ellis 44). Throughout Away, realism and magic remain in tension. On the one hand, readers learn that a ship named “Moira” bound for Halifax sank near the island, suggesting that Mary misunderstood the mysterious sailor’s dying words, just as the villagers in Márquez’s story fashion an identity based on their own subjective interpretation of a drowned sailor.10 But rather than stressing the implications of this matter-of-fact information and dismissing the spirit’s subsequent ghostly visitations as psychotic hallucinations, Away affirms their veracity and significance. In

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fact, far from dismissing Mary’s experience, the text emphasizes that Mary encounters a liminal zone that ignites a sensuous dialogue with the other.11 The text also repeatedly demonstrates that Mary learns from these supernatural encounters. When Mary is starving, for instance, the spirit offers her a glimpse of a forest in which a cyclical, fatalistic process occurs: “[S]he had never seen a forest but, as he touched her, one grew over her head. He showed her the sapling that would grow to be a tree. And then the great tree being cut down for the timber that would build the ship that killed him” (98). In effect, Mary’s engagement with the sailor’s spirit, like that of Márquez’s villagers’ treatment of Esteban, lends a sense of order to what might otherwise appear as random, tragic events, and affirms Jonathan Kertzer’s assertion that national history represents “a victory over fragmentary circumstances” (76). At times, however, this “sense of order” is imbued with heroic destiny, particularly when the spirit’s vision (and the narrative) highlights Mary’s connection to her Irish forbearers: “[d]ancers, poets, swimmers. Their distant blood ran in Mary’s veins” (84). Before Mary leaves for Canada, her ghostly lover tells her, “This is what you take with you and what you leave behind” and he proceeds to show her a tableau of Irish history ranging from the “obsessed kings and warriors” to the “great scholars carrying pictures of medieval poets” to the saints with “their raised arms thrust up to heaven.” “‘These are not being shed,’ he said to her, “‘they are accumulated’” (127). In these spectral episodes, Mary’s daemon lover explicitly bears the burden of Celtic tradition. He also emphasizes the ongoing, often illicit education of generations of disenfranchised Irish that Birch sees as the crux of the novel.12 Mary’s spirit shows her teachers of all kinds, ranging from a “brown-robed brother guiding the hand of an acolyte through the deliberate strokes of calligraphy to a gypsy woman demonstrating the exact turn of a bare ankle to a young girl eager to begin dancing ... Everywhere around was the quiet that accompanies the act of passing skill from one mind and hand to another” (127). This vision of education is not solely rational or pragmatic, however, since its portrayal by a supernatural being suggests that it is the uncanny legacy of those who possess an essential, “blood” tie to the tribe. Not surprisingly, the contest over spiritual beliefs and world views that suffuses Away is a crucial feature of both postcolonialism and magic realism. As Maggie Ann Bowers argues:

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It is generally agreed in postcolonial theory and criticism that the effects of colonialism were not just the imposition of one nation’s rule over another, but it included attempts to change the colonized people’s way of thinking and belief to accept the cultural attitudes and definitions of the colonial power. This often involved the attempt by colonial rulers to define the colonized people and their nation from the colonizers’ perspective. (96) In many respects, the aims of magic realism and postcolonialism are identical: that the “dispossessed, the silenced, and the marginalized of our dominating systems can again find voice” (Slemon 99). To articulate this silenced voice, magic realist and postcolonial texts often rely on a dual narrative structure to present the postcolonial content from both the colonized peoples’ and the colonizers’ perspectives, a form of double vision that has its roots in the process of imposing a foreign language and culture on an indigenous population. Earlier, I cited Slemon’s comments about the ongoing, irresolvable battle between opposing systems (409–41), which suggest that no matter how great the desire to take control of another’s psychic, geographic, and cultural territory, the effort can never entirely control the discursive terrain. This unending “dialectic” continually challenges any monolithic vision of the national imaginary. In Away, matriarchal Celticism battles with patriarchal Christianity and Anglo-Saxon notions of the primitive, degenerate Irish. The text’s double vision is perhaps best expressed by the oscillation between the opposing perspectives of Mary and Brian – although more pragmatic and rational than his wife, Brian nevertheless respects his Celtic heritage – and that of their Anglo-Irish landlords, Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, an oscillation that reinforces the dialectical relationship of Celticism and Anglo-Saxonism. The narrative forcibly instigates the juxtaposition by introducing the Sedgewick brothers following a typically sensual account of Mary’s ritual pilgrimages to the sea in which she immerses herself until her beloved takes shape and offers her visions. Her “great treasure” would “open his hands under the water and there would be steeples, towers, forests, a crowded wharf ” (37). In contrast to Mary’s passionate communion, Osbert and Granville sit side by side on camp-stools inside the “not-so-picturesque ruins of Bunnamare Friary” (39). While Osbert studiously paints a watercolour “of one of the Friary’s few remaining arches,” Granville composes his “forty-third lament

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concerning the sorrows of Ireland” (39). Unlike Mary, who is at home in the sea, the bachelors are cold and damp and “generally uncomfortable owing to the mud and water that filled their shoes”; yet both are happy in the belief that they too are “communing happily with the spirit of their country’s past” (39). Whereas Mary pursues a primitive orgiastic ritual, the residents of Puffin Court engage in a cultivated obsession. As the narrator explains, they were dedicated collectors “of almost everything, they had dragged an extravagant amount of information and unprecedented numbers of specimens and objects into their damp, illlit halls, going about the task with such zeal it soon appeared they wanted all of Country Antrim under glass” (39). Several of the older men in the community “kept their minds busy inventing new folklore to relate at their firesides during Osbert’s and Granville’s note-taking visits so as not to disappoint the young masters” (41). In sum, if Mary can be said to be communing with the genius loci, then the Sedgewick brothers are merely tourists being duped by the well-meaning locals. In her portrait of the Sedgewick brothers, Urquhart pokes fun at the actual historical “gentlemen antiquaries, influenced by the romantic movement and stirred by nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing way of life, who had begun to see the culture of the folk in a more positive light. Following the lead of Sir Walter Scott, they now began to collect tales, legends, and ballads from the folk themselves” (Stocking 55). In Away, Granville professes “great sympathy for the cause of an independent Ireland” (43), although he “had given little thought to what might become of his family holdings were this grand liberation to take place” (44). “It was,” as the narrator explains, “the myth of the desire for freedom that appealed to him” (44). Worse, the brothers are so preoccupied with their romanticized aesthetic pursuits that they cannot recognize the signs of famine and starvation all around them until it is too late; again, romantic fantasy obscures the actual experience of the other. When Granville informs his brother that “tinkers, traveling people are bringing tales of incredible hardships in the West,” Osbert dismisses these unearthly tidings: “Terrible hardships in the West ... Always have been. Some of them are without windows and, as a result, without views” (65). Reports of the potato blight are similarly dismissed along with the news that Mary’s husband, Brian, will lose his job owing to the imposition of the National School. The brothers’ conversation concludes with their trite acknowledgment that these events are “a shame,” although no doubt “for the best” (69).

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In contrast to his landlords, Brian understands all too well the apocalyptic implications of these same events. Lamenting the impending closure of his beloved hedge school, Brian tells Mary, “There’s a rare beauty ... in something hidden and secret, and it’s a rare kind of education to be got in hidden places” (76). Aware that the arrival of the National School will eradicate this secret education and, worse, further the aims of the English colonizers, Brian proclaims, “It’s the end of us ... The poetry will be gone from our people ... The old language will disappear forever, and all the magic and the legends. It’s what they want, what they’ve always wanted, to be rid of us one way or another” (73–4). In view of Brian’s passionate response, the Sedgewick brothers’ complete lack of concern for the fate of their rural Irish peasants leaves readers wondering who, in fact, is more dissociated or “away,” Mary or her landlords? In a key episode, Mary and Osbert meet at the tidepools; the former gathers seaweed in a futile effort to fertilize the blighted soil, and the latter collects specimens. Eager to engage in conversation with the woman reputed to be “away,” Osbert asks Mary what she is doing. Readers learn that “[r]eplicas of Mary had gathered seaweed along the coast for hundreds of years, singly, and at certain seasons, in groups. She knew suddenly that this man had been blind to them, her people” (87). She dutifully explains this practice, but, still hoping “to glean some useful information for his folklore collection” (88), Osbert persists in conversing. To his “astonishment,” Mary interrupts him to ask what he is doing. Osbert’s Anglo-Saxonist prejudice is revealed by the narrator’s comment that “[c]uriosity was not a state of mind that he associated with these people. Imagination, superstition ... but certainly not curiosity” (88). Behind this comment, however, is the full force of English racism.13 Osbert’s prejudice highlights the political challenge associated with seeing and being seen that informs collective and national identities. Osbert’s amazement increases when Mary asks him to show her the sea creatures in the tidepool. He suddenly has a “brief, inexplicable memory of himself as a child” in his mother’s company. But the encounter at the tidepool also serves more generally as an allegory for the English colonial encounter with Ireland. Looking at the pool (and not merely being looked at), Mary tells Osbert, “See how calm and clear ... like a mirror with our faces in it, except that behind our faces there’s a whole world of things alive and being beautiful” (90). In contrast to Osbert’s hierarchical perspective, Mary sees both of their faces reflected together on the water’s surface – a form of mirroring that affords the

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chance for authentic mutual perception between self and other in contrast to the dissociated stalemate that results from Osbert’s Romantic projections. Her comments also suggest that beyond the English’s narcissistic projections onto the “mirror” of Ireland, there lies a hidden world where the Irish live, not as degenerate specimens, but as “things alive and being beautiful.” After this brief glimpse of the magical primal power of the land, Osbert finds himself mentally and physically transformed. Master and servant, teacher and student, adult and child exchange places: “The landlord was on his hands and knees now beside the pool” (90). In keeping with the colonial allegory, when Osbert offers to “capture some specimens” for Mary, she is horrified and challenges the imperialist reflex to take possession of alien worlds. Following this, the supposedly degenerate Irish “other” leaves her Anglo-Saxon master “in a ridiculous posture on all fours” (91). The narrative consistently portrays Osbert as the fabricated foreigner in contrast to Mary whose body is supposedly wholly natural. Due to her connection with the genius loci, Mary is repeatedly deified, first in the scene where she discovers her own “holiness” and later when Osbert informs Granville about “the light in her” that “must not be put out” (122). Both characters, however, are equally fabricated constructs drawn from the discourses of Anglo-Saxonism and Celticism. Mary is as much a product of discourse as is Osbert, despite her association with the “natural” world. Although these discourses intersect and much as Osbert would like to “acknowledge the brief flash of understanding she had granted him,” he knew “their worlds divided the second that she had stepped away from him” (91–2). As the novel insists, the spirit that Mary encounters endows her with “significance” (15). Within the novel, her violent transformation serves as a microcosmic example of the impact of the exodus from Ireland and the difficult journey across the sea. In this way, the novel suggests more generally that the spirit of Irish nationalism serves as a powerful, preservative force in the New World and at home.14 As portrayed by the novel, Celticism assures the survival of the language and history of Ireland’s colonized peoples. Whereas Brian fears that the language and old beliefs will be gone forever, Mary “knew there was something hidden inside her, a lost thing she could find again when she had need of it, for she had fragments of the old beliefs. They were gone from her husband but they had not been completely stolen from her” (74–5). The novel repeatedly takes pains to install the Irish collective memory. For exam-

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ple, when Mary sets out to cut seaweed on the day of her fateful encounter with Osbert, we are told that “the knife that she carried had lived indoors for two centuries after serving as a weapon in Cromwellian times. The creel was woven in sorrow by Brian’s grandmother when she was mad with grief over the death of her first-born son ... The passion and even the memory of the passion, forgotten” (82). In the face of the natural erosion of memory through time and the more insidious efforts of the colonizers to extinguish all memory of resistance, the narrative’s transmission of mythic Irish history is, indeed, in Mary’s words, a life-sustaining treasure. “You bring as gifts to me,” she sings to her beloved spirit, “all that murdered you ... I remember you when the pot is empty and hunger kicks its boots against the door” (99). In her discussion of the power of spectral visions, Castle suggests that one can speculate on the wishful content “to undo the death of another by meditating on his visionary form; [it] is ... a compelling way of negating one’s own death. Romantic mourning gave pleasure ... precisely because it entailed a magical sense of the continuity and the stability of the ‘I’ that mourned. To ‘see’ the dead live again is to know that one too will live forever” (135). Celticism as conveyed by the spirit of the novel provides this consoling vision of survival. Implicated as it is in this nationalist discourse, Away offers the consolation of art in the face of historical injustice (see Kertzer 81). As Kertzer asserts, traditionally the nation “is born in bloodshed and sanctified by suffering, which turns historical nastiness into national destiny” (175). Away repeatedly emphasizes the power of the romantic imagination and Celticism to transform “nastiness” into “national destiny” through various artistic cultural practices that preserve the Irish culture and people in the face of terrible oppression. These cultural practices are vividly illustrated in the episode in which Mary and Brian attend a villager’s wedding during the Famine. In the face of a decimated village, the old fiddler announces, in Irish, “‘We’re not dead yet,’” and he proceeds “with a surprisingly graceful gesture, to pick up his fiddle and bow” (106). In this scene, the narrative celebrates art’s capacity to console and unite a traumatized community. People all over the area within hearing distance “emerged from the doors of their cabins, for they were hungry, not only for food, but for the music they thought had left them forever. Soon there appeared several streams of moving flesh which joined to become a river” (107). Later, a woman sings about the vanished woods of Ireland, and the land itself is person-

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ified because it is imbued with the bones and blood of the Irish. In this episode, metaphors emphasize the romantic nationalist view of the land and people eternally animate and united, as flesh becomes a river and bodies join the earth that hears the songs sung by the bones of the Irish. As portrayed in this scene, however, the imagination is not merely a tool for individual romantic reverie; instead, it serves as a wellspring of creative embodied knowledge that ensures the survival of the entire community. The singing and dancing culminate when the men use their bodies to “construct the hull of a ship,” hoist a sail, and shout: “Away, boys, away” (112). Slowly, the ship was built “in the crumbling cabins, until the emigrants-to-be held her in their hearts as the greatest possession of all” (119). When Brian and Mary immigrate to the New World and find themselves alone in the forest, singing and dancing again make them feel at home and connected to their Irish roots – roots that must somehow grow in an alien soil. The difficulties that attend transplantation are perhaps best illustrated by yet another cultural practice that supposedly binds the community to its Celtic heritage, namely, dance. Away’s portrayals of riotous dancing specifically recalls nineteenth-century Celtic scholars’ analyses of the relationship between the Dionysian cult, which in Greek times developed into religious ritual (and ultimately into theatre), and its Irish equivalent in the dancing Tuatha de Danaan, the people of the ancient Mother Goddess (Garrigan Mattar 69).15 In keeping with the writings of Celticist scholars such as Alfred Nutt and Andrew Lang, Away allows “the possibility that dance itself might be the expression of a mystical truth” and that the dancer, to borrow the words of the symbolist movement, is “l’incorporation visuelle de l’idée” (see Garrigan Mattar 95). When Liam and Eileen leave the cabin in the woods and venture to Port Hope, they obtain lodging at the Seaman’s Inn, and Eileen “allowed herself to be guided over the threshold and into a riot of male dancing” (241). A few days later, her beloved literally dances into the room: “Aidan Lanighan twirled meteorically around the room, grasping, in welcome, the hands of everyone near him. In minutes everyone in the room had felt the ephemeral, lightning strike of his touch” (247). Like Mary’s beloved spirit, Aidan’s dance seemingly transmits Irish history: “In a miracle of tone, stress, time, pause, tempo, silence and thrust, the histories of courtship, marriage, the funeral, famine, and the harvest were present in the inn” (248). For the most part, however, Aidan remains silent, and when the owners of the Inn explain to Eileen that

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Aidan is bound for Ottawa to plead with Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Eileen rightly asks, “How will he do that if he won’t talk?” (257). They inform her that he will dance his petition to McGee. When Eileen dares to enquire how McGee will know what Aidan is saying, they dismiss her question: “A true Irishman always knows what a dancer is saying” (257). As it turns out, neither they nor Eileen truly understand the meaning of Aidan’s dance since unbeknownst to them Aidan remains allied with McGee. When Eileen asks him why he dances alone when he could have danced with her, he replies, “You didn’t know the steps” (328). Touching as it does on the tenets of romantic nationalism, with its faith in the national spirit born of the soil and in the nation itself as “the social forum in which the story of justice unfolds” (Kertzer 31), the inn owners’ and Eileen’s misunderstanding, which illustrates the power of the imagination, challenges romantic nationalism’s notions of purity (the ‘true’ Irishman), sacred unity, and its moral compass. However brief, their exchange about the meaning of dance highlights profound problems with constructing any national imaginary and, in this case, a national imaginary based on Celticism and magic realism. Like the dance, the meaning of the Irish nation is protean, particularly after the diaspora when the dancers have changed and incorporated new steps. Ultimately, Eileen’s inability to accept this protean quality contributes to McGee’s death. In keeping with Cynthia Sugars, I would suggest that these misunderstandings warn against “clinging to ancestral ghosts” (15) – in this case, Celticism and its medium, magic realism. As scholars argue, if magic realism is constructed from conflicting discourses of magical and realist, and if that model is associated with a postcolonial situation in which colonized and colonialist are forever in conflict, then one of the two may appear to be associated with the “magical” and the other with the “realist” (Bowers 122). In the case of Urquhart’s novel, the initially speechless Mary and the silent Aidan further align the “magical” with the body, such that “the model replicates colonialist thinking in its affirmation of the ‘primitive’ and pre-modern attributes of the colonized, whereas the colonialists are a people whose culture is rational, progressive and modern” (Bowers 123). As noted earlier, Celticism was a direct response on the part of a dispossessed people to British colonization; hence, its promotion of a tribal identity predicated on the people’s connection to the land is merely the flipside of the racist, Anglo-Saxonist stereotype of the physically and mentally degenerate Irish in dire need of adult, ratio-

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nal English governance. As a result, Away’s Celtic tribal construction of identity recapitulates the stereotype of the feminine, hysterical Irish.16 Away’s portrayals of Mary and her daughter Eileen replicate AngloSaxonist stereotypes by stressing the following features: their uncannily similar beauty, their impulsive, child-like imagination that fixates on men as love objects after only a brief encounter, their capacity to dissociate, and their supernatural connection to nature. As Terry Castle explains, “when everyone looks like everyone else, the limit between mind and world is profoundly undermined, for such obsessive replication can only occur, we assume, in a universe dominated by phantasmic imperatives. Mirroring occurs in a world already styled ... by the unconscious” (128). Castle argues further that the proliferation of doubles “signals the fact that we are experiencing events from the perspective of the deranged and hallucinating hero” (128). But Away’s reliance on recurring archetypes also recalls a central feature of romantic nationalism, specifically its belief that “each particular National genius is to be treated as only One Individual in the process of Universal history” (Hegel 53). In nationalist rhetoric, personification “conveniently assimilated the diversity of historical experience and civil discord into a single figure” (Kertzer 43). In Away magic realism supports the efforts of romantic nationalism – a mythical discourse that, as noted earlier, relies on the ghost of the other to put everyone in the same place and thereby transform the many into one – the national genius. Viewed in this light, we can see how the O’Malley women serve as figures for Ireland itself (see Birch 115). In a chapter entitled “Engendering the Celt,” Pittock outlines how “femininity became an increasingly crucial component in defining the characteristics of the Celt” (61). The nineteenth century witnessed a “softening of the Celtic image” (61). Some of the signs of this change were already visible in the Romantic period, “when the association of the sentimental with emotionalism gave the Ossianic Noble Savage a feminine dimension, one intensified by the nineteenth century, which also identified such emotions with women’s ‘hysterical’ qualities” (Pittock 61).17 This image was internalized by the Irish themselves as the Sir Horace Plunkett statement attests: “That Ireland is spoken of as a woman is probably due to the appearance in our national affairs of qualities which men call womanly. And this impression is not merely the cheap attribution of racial inferiority by the alien critic which is familiar, it is our feeling about ourselves” (qtd. in Pittock 66).

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By stressing its propensity for going “away,” both Celticism and Urquhart’s novel endow the Irish national genius with the capacity to regress to feminine and infantile states, or worse, to run mad. As Curtis explains, “Of the many pejorative adjectives applied by educated English to Irish perhaps the most damaging, certainly the most persistent, were those that had to do with their emotional instability, their mental disequilibrium, or dualistic temperament. The stereotypical Irishman was a kind of Celtic Jekyll and Hyde” (Curtis 51). The Irish were deemed “the children of impulse: a single idea fixes itself upon their imagination and from that they act” (Curtis 55). In his 1898 study, The Making of Religion, Lang argued that primitive peoples, the Irish peasantry included, lived on the verge of trance and hallucination (Garrigan Mattar 76). In addition, Celtic literature placed “woman in an intermediary position between man and the supernatural world” (Garrigan Mattar 25). By attributing all of these qualities to the female characters, Away reinstalls the stereotypes embraced by the Irish Revivalists and the Anglo-Saxonists alike. Before she disappears into the forest, Liam catches a glimpse of his mother: “her head unleashing a torrent of fire, her throat exposed to air, her pale hands sailing down the red banner, pulling it apart so that sun and wind could enter it, the wall forest shimmering with heat and light” (154). Like a primitive nature goddess, Mary disappears in the fall and dies “in the dead of winter” only to be reborn in her daughter, Eileen. After Mary’s Native friend, Exodus Crow, sees Eileen for the first time, he whispers, “Another one” (172). When Brian and Mary’s former landlord Osbert visits the cabin after they have died, Osbert also mistakes Eileen for her mother (215). Whereas Mary had the gift of communing with the spirit of the water, Eileen communes with the birds of the air; “touched by the divine, these women hear the speech of animals, dance themselves into the minds of their lovers, and prophesy” (Compton 137). In Away women exist in the liminal space between nature and the supernatural, sanity and madness. In the nineteenth century, when the “very idea of female emancipation aroused deep fears among the male members of the population, the assignment of feminine traits of mind to a people like the Irish certainly did not enhance their claim for political emancipation inherent in Home Rule” (Curtis 61–2). The impact of Darwinism provided “a more ‘scientific’ justification for the decline of the Celt as an ‘unfit’ race in the process of ‘social evolution’” (Pittock 70).18 Inspired by Darwinian

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notions of the survival of the fittest, the English politician and imperialist Charles Dilke described the English as a “race destined to rule and to spread itself all over the earth” (qtd. in Curtis 46). Since the fate of the Anglo-Saxons was his primary concern, he could face the prospect of the vanishing tribes of the Celts, like the American Indians, with equanimity: “The gradual extinction of the inferior race, he declared, is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind” (qtd. in Curtis 46). In lectures, Arnold advocated a similar policy, arguing that “the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogenous, Englishspeaking whole ... the swallowing up of provincial nationalities is a consummation ... a necessity of what is called modern civilization” (qtd. in Pittock 64). The great Irish out-migration, which began at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and continued in its classic form until the Partition of Ireland in 1920, seemed to confirm the vision of the Irish as a vanishing race. Between 1815 and 1870, a total of 4 to 4.5 million people migrated from Ireland. In the mid-twentieth century, a book entitled The Vanishing Irish posed the central question: “Are the Irish going to vanish from this earth?” (qtd. in Akenson 10). Away promotes the traditional view of the Irish as both feminine and vanishing, although by the time Esther tells her story, it is not solely the English who have devastated the Irish, but modern industry with its even more dissociated workers: “Loughbreeze Beach Farm spreads in ruin around Esther. The parts of it that are not being claimed by that which is unclaimable are being excavated by industry: the growing quarry, the impossible earth-wound made by the cement company ... This evidence of decay the property of a cement company, and soon the evidence itself will be eliminated” (9–10). In its emphasis on the supposedly vanishing Irish, the novel again signals its profound debt to romanticism. As Thomas King wryly observes, “Edgar Allan Poe believed that the most poetic topic in the world was the death of a beautiful woman,” but from the literature produced during the nineteenth century, “second place would have to go to the death of the Indian” (33). In Away, Mary’s death explicitly provides readers with the former while the fate of the Ojibwa and their land implicitly serves up the latter. To summarize, in its attempt to conjure the spirit of Ireland, Away reinstalls the familiar, racialized colonial stereotype of the mad, feminine Irish. Equally problematic, the valorization of Mary and Eileen’s magical power serves as a fantasy that obscures the actual position of Irish in ancient history and in the nineteenth century. In 1842 when Mary

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encountered the sailor on the shores of Rathlin Island, among the very poor of Ireland, women were the very worst off. An 1830 survey confirmed this and John Revans, the secretary of the commission, wrote, “[It] cannot be a matter of astonishment, which it is considered that females cannot maintain themselves by honest industry, however well inclined” (qtd. in Akenson 165). As Akenson writes, what he meant was terrifyingly simple: In those years, even before the Famine, an unmarried woman, or a widow who did not own land, could not support herself in Irish society. A woman either had to leave Ireland or become part of a family unit (either as a wife or as a cling-on-spinster-daughter) – or she had to live in abject poverty. This confirms that anyone who portrays the “freedom” of the pre-Famine era as being a Golden Age for Irish women is being irresponsible. (165) In Away Mary’s father dies at sea, leaving her mother, Norah, a widow. Viewed in this context, going “away” shields both Mary and the reader from Father Quinn’s decision to arrange a marriage that was both beyond Mary’s control and entirely in keeping with Irish rural society; moreover, it ensured her survival. Similarly, Brian’s and Mary’s departure for British North America is less a singular event instigated by the Famine, than the predictable outcome of a protracted history of outmigration. From 1815 onward most Irish men and women who came into adulthood had to consider whether or not to leave Ireland. As the historian David Fitzpatrick puts it, “growing up in Ireland meant preparing oneself to leave it” (qtd. in Akenson 5). By omitting this information, Away offers a consoling fantasy that almost completely elides the actual experiences of suffering and deprivation that gave rise to the fantasy in the first place. Equally problematic, Celticism, which secures Mary’s identity, proves to be a very unstable foundation on which to secure the identity of the next generation in North America, due to changing attitudes toward the supernatural. As Castle notes, the “debunking of ghost stories and apparitions coincides with an uncanny ‘spectralization’ of human psychology” (17) and a growing awareness of the dangers associated with romantic self-absorption which transforms “the mind into a ‘world of phantoms’ and thinking itself an act of ghost-seeing” (17). In what follows, I argue that the waning power of Celtic Primitivism and the

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increasing spectralization of the mind leave Mary’s offspring in the New World with two options: amnesia (the denial of the collective narrative) or tribalism (a dangerously unmoored and isolated engagement with Celticism). The first option is illustrated by Mary’s son, Liam. He arrives in Upper Canada at six years old, but the transatlantic voyage instigates his regression to infancy. He is figuratively reborn in the New World. Emerging from “the dark belly of the ship,” he had “forgotten how to recall images, engage in conversation, and how to walk” (137). We are told that he was “being flung into a world it would take him years to know and understand” (139). About the departure “and the misery that preceded and followed it, he remembered nothing at all. His first real souvenir was the act of arrival – immigration” (207). Liam’s response to the terrifying and sublime encounter with the New World is to shun his heritage and engage in gestures of self-assertion and mastery. For example, when Liam revisits the house that terrified and enchanted him as a child, he informs his sister that he is going to buy it (244). After buying the house and the land that first overwhelmed him, Liam informs his sister that he is gong to evict a family of mixed Irish and native ancestry. She responds by taunting him: “So now you’re going to evict some people from land you never would have had in the first place if the English hadn’t stolen it ... and if they hadn’t stolen Ireland” (279). Ironically, the outcome of the diaspora is the transformation of an Irish boy into the very thing the family fled in Ireland: namely, a landlord. Here amnesia is accompanied by an ironic reversal – the dispossessed becomes a landlord, the victim becomes a victimizer. By contrast, Eileen, who is born in Canada and has no direct experience of Ireland, embraces her homeland and its collective memory through her father’s tales. Brian worries about the impact of these tales of sorrow, but because “of his belief in the influence of landscape, he hoped that the tales were as divested of power, far from their native soil, as the German and French and Danish fairy tales that the children at his school were beginning to learn in the Upper Canadian Readers” (167). Unfortunately, the stories that had merely entertained Liam, but “left his centre untouched” were “ingested” by Eileen, “their darkness – the twist in the voice of the song, the sadness of the broken country – and [she] had therefore carried, in her body and her brain, some of that country’s clay” (207). As a result, Eileen becomes trapped by nostalgic stories.

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Here as elsewhere, gender informs the difference between attitudes toward possession and repossession. When Liam tries to show Eileen the magnificent lake on whose shores he plans to make his home, she turns away. “I can’t look,” she tells him. “I’m afraid. I think it’s mine but I’m afraid ... It’s mine and I know nothing about it. It doesn’t have another side” (233). Perhaps because Eileen is a ghostly repetition of Mary, Eileen assumes that the lake is akin to her mother’s ocean – the home of the daemon lover whom Eileen is destined to possess. When Liam reassures Eileen that the lake does, indeed, have another side, she refuses to listen. “No,” she says, “I feel it in my heart. There’s no end to it, no end to it at all” (233). Her use of the word “mine” indicates an awareness of the imperative toward possession and mastery; however, as a woman lacking the means to assert herself, she remains overwhelmed by the sublime object. Repeatedly, Eileen desires not so much to possess as to be incorporated by powerful forces. This is perhaps most evident in her feelings for Aidan Lanighan. We are told that she wanted “to creep inside him to be a vital part of his life, his politics” (322). Ironically, because of her desires to be subsumed, Eileen never learns who her lover really is. Worse, she is so mistaken about his politics that she unwittingly assists in a plot by Irish nationalists to assassinate the one man he reveres, the politician and poet, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Recognizing the limitations of his sister’s tribalism, Liam confronts her, saying, “What does this Irish misery matter, Eileen? We’re in Canada now, we’re Canadian, not Irish. I don’t even remember Ireland and you were born here. Soon we’ll be living on the new farm and I’ll have a wife, some sons, a hundred cows” (256). As a woman, however, Eileen is in much the same position as her mother, Mary. Eileen’s response, “And what will I have?” makes perfect sense in this light. Ironically, when Osbert visits Liam and Eileen at their cabin, Osbert rejoices in “their new prosperity in a fledgling land,” and in “how their children’s children would walk free, serve no master, worship where they choose, answer to no one” (296). His utopian dreams for the children are undercut by the narrator’s comment that he “did not know that there was an inner theatre where a girl could build a prison. He did not see Eileen translating from myth to life the songs her father had taught her” (296). Although born into “a raw, bright world,” like the biblical Lot’s wife, Eileen “would always look back towards lost landscape and inwards towards inherited souvenirs” (207–8). In Eileen’s case, Irish romantic

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nationalism becomes a dangerous and dissociating fixation that leads not to communion with the land and its people, but to misguided idolatry and tragedy. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastic universe is “like that of the newborn infant or psychotic. Self and other are not properly distinguished; everything merges – inside and outside, cause and effect, mind and universe – in a vertiginous scene of ‘cosmic fusion’” (qtd. in Castle 127). In essence, Urquhart’s magic realist text conveys this alternative way of seeing from the individual’s perspective. As Patricia Smart observes, perhaps because Eileen never knew her mother, she succumbs entirely to this type of fantasy when she focuses her desire to merge with another on Aidan (68). As the narrator explains, “The idea of oneness of the tribe, the imagined collective voice calmed her. There were no uncertainties” (330). In some respects, Eileen’s desire to possess Aidan also echoes Mary’s attitude toward the sailor, specifically Mary’s celebration of the fact that he was “hers now, all hers forever” (15). But in Eileen’s case, Aidan has not conveniently died; as a result, his deification is all the more misguided and dangerous.19 Unpleasant realities do intrude into Eileen’s fantasy. In an attempt to commune with her love, Eileen travels to Griffintown in Montreal, which has been severely flooded. Her meeting with Aidan parodically recalls Mary’s sensual, watery encounters with her daemon lover, but in Eileen’s case, their lovemaking occurs in a squalid flat reeking of “mildew” (313). Like Mary, Eileen is also convinced that she is “annexing” her beloved’s power; she “felt it travel her bloodstream as they moved together ... They were of the same tribe and she was strong in his arms, ready to seize the new territory” (312). Attempting to echo her mother’s magical renaming, Eileen asks Aidan, “Is my own name, do you think, right for me?” (312). Aidan ignores her question and, for the most part, he repeatedly repudiates her romantic fantasies and he underscores the very real differences between himself and Eileen. In this way, he complicates Eileen’s mythic and monolithic notion of the tribe of Irish by reminding her of their class difference; his “people” can neither read nor write and they live in squalor (311). Like Liam, Aidan has no time for romantic nostalgia and he tells Eileen curtly, “We’re in Canada now” (330). After realizing that Eileen handed the gun to McGee’s assassin, Aidan berates her for her fanaticism: “It was all play for you wasn’t it ... All some kind of dream ... some kind of goddamned otherworld island. You think this will make things better for our people?” (343). His

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comments emphasize that Eileen is living in a fantasy world, having embarked on a futile search for the lost object. Despite the novel’s initial celebration of Celticism, Away ultimately warns against deploying mythical nationalist beliefs when they are not clearly in the service of the community. Eileen’s obsession for Aidan is a far cry from the text’s depiction of the communal and therapeutic effects of the fiddler’s primal melody. The mythic perfection espoused by Celticism and Primitivism is also forcibly challenged by the fact that after living in the bush for seven years, Mary dies and her Native friend, Exodus Crow, carries her frozen corpse back to her family’s cabin. Her death, presumably from exposure and starvation, recalls Yeats’ criticism of escapist fantasies. In his nationalist writings, Yeats describes an ideal historical period (a golden age) in which the artist does not dream of escaping to a perfect world, but, instead, works in the real world where he translates religious ideas of perfection into a form that is relevant to the people. He lamented the contrasting situation he found in Ireland, in which, in his words, priests and artists “have grown ... too proud, too anxious to live alone with the perfect” (qtd. in Garrigan Mattar 81–2). Yeats’ diagnosis of the limitations and selfishness that attend the desire “to live alone with the perfect” helps to illuminate the pitfalls of both Mary’s and Eileen’s romantic and escapist response to the New World. When Mary learns that the stream behind their house runs to the lake below Madoc and discovers that the name of the lake is Moira, she turns to Liam shortly after Eileen is born and asks her seven-year-old son, “Surely it is in you to look after small Eileen?” (156). That night, she abandons her son and newborn child, leaving Liam to wander in the forest of white birches where her form “appeared and disappeared, multiplied, and then reduced itself ... [There were] multiple versions of her, straight and thin and white” (158). In keeping with magic realism and Celticism, this episode suggests that Mary fuses with the land and with her beloved spirit. In Sugars’ words, Mary is assimilated “into the Canadian wilderness” (13) – a familiar “death by landscape.” But her disappearance and death traumatize the members of her family. Although readers might understandably be tempted to dismiss Mary as a madwoman, especially given the fact that she freezes to death, Exodus Crow insists that she partook in a profound relationship: “There is this fierce love in all of us for that which we cannot fully own,” Exodus tells her grief-stricken family. “The whole world is an island,” he says,

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“and all who live in it are island dwellers – walkers on surfaces, floaters on water, standers on mountains. No one is ever in anything until they have been touched by what she was touched by” (183). This is a powerful statement that relates to a desire that permeates the whole novel to escape from subjective fantasies and to allow “one circle of experience to edge into the territory of another” (133), in essence, to meet and be met by the other, to be at home. Exodus’s lofty sentiments are undercut, however, when Eileen glimpses the corpse and does not recognize her mother: “Look,” Eileen cries, “it’s a big doll.” In keeping with Steffler’s novel, which portrays its protagonist being erased by a polar bear, Mary’s transformation into “a doll” (connoting lifelessness, inauthenticity, and childish forms of play so viciously derided by Aidan) subverts the myth of authentic indigenization. Eileen’s hopes for tribal unity are similarly dashed when she discovers that Aidan is working for McGee and that both oppose the Fenian (Irish nationalist) cause. Thus far, I have discussed problems with romantic nationalism that are explicitly addressed in the novel itself. In what follows, I explore the more subtle problem with Away’s reliance on romantic and stereotyped images of the Indian and the figure of the crow, which serve to indigenize the Irish, but, at the same time, reduce Native North Americans to spectral images. In a multi-media presentation entitled “Canadian Blackbirds: Crow and Raven in Canadian Literature and Art” held in 2001, scholars of Canadian literature and visual culture observed that the figures of the crow and the raven functioned as a “way to construct a tradition for a new literature in a new land, providing a meeting place of the inherited and the new.”20 In the Greek proverb of the Oldest Animals, repeated in Hesiod, Plutarch, Erasmus, and other texts, the crow lives nine times longer than humans do, and the raven much longer than that, and both are thus figures of time itself (though both must die as the universe continues). In Anglo-Saxon poetry, crows and ravens are sinisterly identified as the birds of battle because they are drawn to carnage. In the narratives of Native peoples, the raven and the crow are portrayed as creators and tricksters whose presences trouble and vitalize the landscape. Precisely because the figure of the crow is not purely indigenous to North America, but bore a prior and potent meaning before being transported to the New World, in Away, the figure of the crow serves as a reminder of the seemingly inescapable hold of the romantic European interpretive framework. As Wyile explains, in Celtic mythol-

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ogy, fairies or the Sidhe “often take the form of birds”; as depicted in Away, this transformation merges “with the trickster tradition so important in Ojibwa and other native cultures, giving the novel a conspicuous dash of the syncretism that is such an important feature of Latin American magic realism” (29–30). Whereas Wyile and other scholars celebrate this fusion, I am troubled by its political repercussions. In her essay on the native in literature, Margery Fee observes that non-Native writers, especially those from marginal groups, frequently adopt Native imagery and Native peoples themselves to assert nationalist claims: A variant of mainstream nationalism uses the First Peoples’ position as marginal, yet aboriginal, to make a similar claim-by-identification for other marginal groups. Those who do not wish to identify with “mainstream” Anglo-Canadian culture, or who are prevented from doing so, can find a prior and superior Canadian culture with which to identify. (17) This strategy is apparent in Steffler’s novel, which portrays Cartwright’s desperate attempt to shed his sense of inferiority instigated by primogeniture by aligning himself with the Inuit. To legitimize the Irish people’s right to possess the land – essentially to effect their indigenization – Away similarly relies on the figure of the crow and the metonymic connections among this figure, Celtic mythology, and the spiritual traditions of Canada’s indigenous peoples.21 In its depictions of the three central characters, Mary, Liam, and Eileen, Away illustrates how their respective encounters with the crow nurture and supposedly authenticate their claim to the land. Initially, the crow appears in human form. Seven years after her disappearance, Mary’s friend, the Ojibwa Exodus Crow, emerges from the forest bearing Mary’s frozen body. Before explaining the reason for their mother’s mysterious departure to her children, Exodus Crow outlines the significance of his name: The crow was my father’s spirit-guide and, in time, became mine. He is a wise bird who survives hardships and who loves that which shines. He is a bird with a strong voice who insists on being heard. Because he sits high on the top branch of the tallest tree in the for-

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est and flies even higher than that, he can see many things at once and so is a good guide. Because he flies fast and calls loudly he is a good messenger. (174–5) He goes on to explain that he is called Exodus Crow because his mother, who read the Bible, loved the name Exodus, even though according to her, that biblical book was not worthy of its name because it was filled with “battles for land and the making of laws” (175). The allusions to the Book of Exodus are especially significant because, as Mark McGowan, observes, sometimes “the Irish were likened to the Jews,” and “[h]omilies cited the Book of Exodus wherein the Chosen of God were released from bondage and called upon to do mighty deeds” (10). In Away, Exodus Crow’s introduction recalls these associations to God’s Chosen People and more generally aligns him with both Native and biblical wisdom and spirituality. By referring to his mother’s rejection of the Judeo-Christian book, Exodus Crow specifically identifies himself as a pacifist and a Primitivist symbol of natural virtue.22 Despite his mother’s rejection of the biblical book’s contents, both Exodus and the members of his generation – not to mention subsequent generations – remain concerned with “battles for land and the making of laws.” By portraying Exodus’s mother as dismissive of law-making and territorial battles, the narrative again seemingly promotes nostalgia and amnesia over pragmatic action. Ironically, both Exodus’s mother’s response and Mary’s escapist fantasies constitute a similar reaction to terrible sufferings born of displacement, dispossession, and loss. Viewed in this light, Away demonstrates the extent to which disparate peoples in the New World were caught up in the conscious and unconscious project to imagine a nation, a New Jerusalem, a Promised Land, in an effort to mitigate suffering and to magically restore a lost home. Exodus Crow goes on to tell the family about his unexpected encounter with Mary by the shores of Lake Moira; he thinks at first she is an animal or a ghost (178). When he realizes that she is a white woman alone and starving in the forest, he provides her with food. As in so many texts by non-Natives, Exodus Crow plays the role of the “magical helper” common in myth and fairytale (Fee 22). His portrayal recalls Thomas King’s account of the pattern that began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century that would culminate in the creation of “a singular semi-historic Indian who was a friend to the White man, who was strong, brave, honest, and noble. A figure who kept his

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clothes on and who spoke reasonable English” (83). The shift from fiend to noble friend that King traces is in fact merely the flipside of the same coin, just as the Celtic identity, as noted, constitutes a reaction to and a derivative of Anglo-Saxonism. Even in the more positive Primitivist versions of the stereotype of the noble savage, the indigene remains “a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker” (Goldie 10). Exodus Crow recounts how, after accepting his aid, Mary told him stories about Ireland, her homeland, and its mythical inhabitants. As he says, he believed her because “it was as if his own mother were telling the stories of the spirits” (180). Again, Mary demonstrates her ability to transform grown men into children in touch with their primal imagination. In turn, Exodus Crow relates Ojibwa stories about the spirits that live in the forests and Mary assures him that she believes these stories. Eventually, Mary explains why she abandoned her family and came to live in the forest: “I am loved by the spirit of this lake,” she says, and “I will stay near him now until I die.” Again, Exodus Crow tells Mary’s family, “I said that I believed her because I did” (182). Like Eileen’s initial insistence on the need to suspend rational doubt and censor questions and Brian and Osbert’s conversions, scenes such as this that emphasize credibility and verification of magical thinking have a political valence. Simply put, they condition the reader to accept magic over realism, presumably in light of the recognition that, at an earlier point, so-called realism was, in fact, artificially or magically produced. Indeed, as I have noted, magic realism exposes the process by which one imaginative version of reality trumps another and becomes the governing truth of the community or nation. But Exodus Crow and Mary share more than a belief in the spirit world. After several years pass, Exodus Crow listens as Mary speaks about “the time of the stolen lands of her island, and of the disease, and of the lost languages and the empty villages” (184). Exodus Crow then confesses to Mary that “some white men had seized my people’s land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women” (184–5). Hearing this, Mary embraces him, saying that “the same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our people” (185). Read in light of the urge to legitimize the Irish’s possession of the New World, this episode forges strategic links between Irish and Native mythical worlds, implying that a spiritual kinship exists between Canada’s indigenous peoples and the Irish. Here as elsewhere suffering, as presented through myth, unites a people. This kinship is so strong that

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after meeting Mary only once, Exodus Crow has a vision that tells him what he should do: “I should help this woman to stay near her spirit and to live there in the forest” (183). More important, the text enhances this supposed kinship by forging yet another connection between the Irish and the Native peoples based on their mutual experience as colonized peoples. As noted earlier, the text’s reliance on magic realism promotes the tendency to forge universal, archetypal connections. But myth obscures history, and this is a familiar compromise: the universals, commonalities, archetypes, and Truths that unify people efface the specificities of diverse subjective experiences of historical events. As a result, myth also obscures the agency and responsibility of various groups for perpetuating or acquiescing in others’ suffering. Away thus maintains a tension between a mythic and spiritual perspective – all peoples are on similar paths involving suffering – and the post-colonial, political, and historical perspective that I adopt in this chapter, which insists on drawing causal links and identifying specific agents and victims. The mythic perspective is evident in a scene that takes place shortly before Mary emigrates, when her beloved spirit shows her “the world’s great leavetakings, invasions and migrations, landscapes torn from beneath the feet of tribes, the Danae pushed out by the Celts, the Celts eventually smothered by the English, warriors in the night depopulating villages, boatloads of groaning African slaves. Lost forests. The children of the mountain on the plain, the children of the plain adrift on the sea. And all the mourning for abandoned geographies” (128). Framed in this way, the Irish diaspora is simply another example in a series that also includes the dispossession of Native North Americans. If, as I am suggesting, Mary’s relationship with the figure of the crow establishes grounds for the Irish’s claim on the new world, then her children’s subsequent encounters with the crow serve to deepen and strengthen this initial claim. When he returns with Mary’s body, Exodus Crow insists that it is his mission to give Liam back his mother. After climbing into a willow tree and pondering how to achieve this, Exodus Crow suddenly departs. Eileen tells Liam, “first he turned into a bird, then he flew away, high up, very high over the trees” (194). As the narrator explains, each spring “from then on, Liam would set out in search of Exodus ... Years later he would say that this was the time when he learned the woods” (196). Again, in the service of indigenization, the text plays on the archetypal notion of the mother – this notion is also

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central to King’s Truth and Bright Water. While it is clearly impossible for Exodus to bring Mary back to life and thus restore her to Liam, he does give Liam Mother Nature, a gesture that recalls Mary’s consistent identification with nature throughout the novel. As the narrator explains, Liam “would not find Exodus and eventually, he forgot that this had been his original intention. He would find, instead, rock and bark and swamp and cedar and strange, narrow liquid highways the colour of mahogany” (197). Ultimately, surrounded by nature (and rivers the colour of his mother’s hair and the ship imagined by the would-be-immigrants), Liam has an epiphany: “he knew he wanted to make things grow, wanted, above all, to nurture, to be a farmer” (197). The novel further reinforces Liam’s connection to the land and to the aboriginals by portraying his marriage to Molly. She and her father are squatters on the land that Liam purchases. Part Irish and part Ojibwa, Molly is a woman who “[c]arried the cells of both the old world and the new in the construction of her bones and blood” (302). Ironically, when Molly and Eileen first meet in the forest, both girls simultaneously exclaim, “I live here” (271). In depicting Molly’s satisfying marriage to Liam, the text predictably resolves the Native/non-Native contest of ownership by presenting the blessed marriage between Irish and Native and by conveniently fusing the two tribal identities in what Sugars refers to as “a dubious process of indigenization” (18). As we have seen, this same strategy is deployed in the conservative, gothic conclusions of Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels. Taken together, Liam’s experience – his confusion about his mother, his meeting with Exodus Crow, and his recognition of his vocation – mirrors a familiar pattern in many Canadian works that rely on Native imagery: Typically a white speaker or main character is confused and impelled by a strong desire to know more about the past: personal, familial, native or national. The confusion is resolved through a relationship with an object, image, plant, animal or person associated with Native people. Occasionally, the relationship is with a real Native person. The resolution is often a quasi-mystical vision of, or identification with, Natives, although occasionally it simply takes the form of a psychological or creative breakthrough ... The movement from observer to participant, outsider to insider, immigrant to ‘native’ ... is often commented on specifically. (Fee 16)

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In Away, Liam’s experience of the Famine and his subsequent discovery of his vocation also recalls the prophetic overtones of Mary’s panoramic supernatural visions of Irish history over the ages. These prophetic episodes, in turn, can be read in light of the reworking of the Famine by Irish nationalists into a “providentialist vision” (McGowan 3). Exodus Crow reinforces this sacred vision when he insists that Liam must hear his mother’s story: “Like Crow I will be heard. Your sister wants to hear the story, your father wants to hear the story. But you, who will move forward and make the change, must hear the story” (175). His oracular pronouncement intimates that Liam must hear the story to fulfill the family’s heroic destiny first prophesied by Mary in Ireland when she saw little Liam begin to dig in the earth, “caking the undersides of his delicate new nails with mud” (80). In Herder’s theory of romantic nationalism, “soil” denotes not just place, but the spirit of place (Kertzer 48). Viewed in this light, Mary realizes that, like her, Liam has a primal connection with the spirit of the land. Eileen’s relationship with the crow likewise establishes the Irish’s claim to the land, albeit in a slightly different fashion. After Exodus Crow’s departure, Eileen spends a great deal of time sitting in the willow tree, conversing with an actual crow. Speaking of the crow, Eileen explains that he was “her bird; her secret. She had tried once or twice to share him with her brother but his lack of belief had eliminated the possibilities for the crow in any other life but hers” (220). Like Mary’s spirit, Eileen’s crow furnishes her with accurate and helpful information. On one occasion, readers are told that Eileen watched as the crow dove into the creek and “returned with what appeared to be a piece of the sun in his mouth” (22). After teasing Eileen, his beak held open by “solidified light,” the crow eventually dropped “his most recent gift into her palm” (222). The gift turns out to be gold and, shortly after receiving it, Mary’s children are paid a fortune for their property. This enables Liam to realize his dream of buying even more arable land and becoming a prosperous farmer. This episode featuring crow’s gift to Eileen, a nugget of gold likened to “the sun in [crow’s] ... mouth,” specifically recalls the Native story of Raven stealing the light. In keeping with this story, the gift in Urquhart’s novel has both positive and negative consequences. As the crow tells Eileen, “the only problem was that from now on her family would be visited by the curse of the mines” (225). While this episode, like the others mentioned above, aims to authenticate the settler-invader society’s

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claim to the land, it is particularly troubling. As Fee generally observes, “Several English-Canadian works describe the transfer of something symbolic of the land from Native to white ... sometimes a Native voluntarily hands a totem ... over to a newcomer, thereby validating the white’s land claim and blessing the relationship between old land and new land-owner” (21; see also Monkman 5; Kertzer 131–3). In Away, this “totem-transfer” implies that the crow, essentially the Ojibwa spirit of the land, willingly offers his land to the Irish, whom he loves, for appropriation and exploitation. Ultimately, Eileen forgets about her relationship with Exodus Crow and her conversations with her feathered friend in the willow tree. Again, this forgetfulness is in keeping with non-Native portrayals of First Peoples, in which the Indian is relegated to “the side of childhood, innocence, and nature” (26), representing what is, according to Fee, “past, lost, almost forgotten” (25). In other words, the Native is relegated to the realm of the uncanny and repressed, primitive beliefs. It is only later, as an adult, when she hears the Irishman and Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee speak in the House of Commons that Eileen is reminded of the wisdom of her beloved crow: “Eileen was shaken by sudden recollection; the privacy within the curtains of a willow; a dialogue with a blue-black bird ... She remembered now, for the first time, that as a child she had listened to a wise man” (338). As noted in the previous chapter, Daniel Francis observed that settler-invader societies had two characteristic responses to arriving second in the new world: conquering the Native peoples or transforming themselves into Indians (122–3). Away repeatedly figures attempts at the latter. First Mary literally goes Native and proclaims that Native and Irish peoples share similar spirit worlds and similar fates. Second, thanks to Mary’s friend Exodus Crow, Liam finds his home in Mother Nature, and eventually marries a Métis, thereby ensuring that his children are part Native by blood. Finally, the Irish politician D’Arcy McGee is transformed into a Native, by virtue of his likeness to Exodus Crow. In the novel’s concluding pages, an Irish orator becomes the mouthpiece of the wisdom of Canada’s Native peoples. Taken together, the text’s reliance on Celticism and romantic nationalism is responsible for reactivating a host of stereotypes of the Irish and for reinstalling caricatures of Native peoples ranging from the exotic, magical friend, to the Rousseauian symbol of natural virtue, to the “wise elder.” Moreover, after playing the role of guide,

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helper, and shaman to Mary and her children, the Native vanishes from the text. In effect, both Mary and Exodus Crow vanish, in keeping with the prevailing romantic view of the Indians and the Irish as members of a doomed and degenerate race (see King 83–4). Unfortunately, while every effort is made to demonstrate the kinship between the Irish and the aboriginals, no effort is made to identify their differences. Yet, as Donald Akenson explains, “The Irish participated energetically, efficiently, and enthusiastically in all of these processes [of colonization] and they were very well rewarded for doing so” (151). Despite their image of being rebellious and anti-imperial in general and anti-British Empire in particular, the Irish have actually been among the greatest supporters of the second British Empire and the Commonwealth. Drawing on Ronald Robinson’s theory of “collaboration,” Akenson outlines how the Irish served as “the ideal prefabricated collaborator: ‘the white colonist’” (142). According to Akenson, Ireland’s greatest boon to the United Kingdom Empire “was through the massive numbers of everyday settlers that it provided ... From 1815 until the Great Famine, the first overseas choice of Irish migrants ... was British North America (modern day Canada). This was a set of British colonies most of which had been founded by people opposed to the principles of the American Revolution and extremely loyal (among English-speakers) to the Crown” (148). As Akenson explains, [W]hether they settled in the British or American empire, the members of the Irish diaspora were an integral part of the nineteenth century and twentieth-century tidal waves of European imperialism. In the empires-of-settlement (which includes the English-speaking world), the success of imperialism was contingent upon the displacement of indigenous populations, upon the legalized theft or confiscation of land previously held by the native inhabitants, and upon the breaking of aboriginal cultures. (151) As my reading of Away’s treatment of Native figures and the crow suggests, it is crucial to revise simplistic views of magic realist texts as unequivocally opposing the imperial centre. Instead, it is more fruitful to consider how spectral figures signal barely-repressed investments in romantic nationalist paradigms. It is useful, as Jennifer Andrews argues, to attend more carefully to how Canadian magic realist fiction “may perpetuate and profit from romantic constructions of ‘otherness’” (16).

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Although it might appear as if Away successfully and rapidly indigenizes the Irish and exorcises the ghost of tribal nationalism, the spectres of romantic nationalism are not so easily banished. In Kertzer’s words cited earlier, “no discourse is autonomous or pure, and those that pretend to be brand new have merely mystified their lineage” (193). Citing Ralph Cohen, Kertzer insists that histories are always “complicit with the paradigms they claim to supersede: ‘it is thus impossible to generate a new history without being contaminated by the language and genre of the old’” (193). To Eileen’s surprise, the new nation described by McGee “was one in which there would be no factions, no revenge for old sorrows, old grievances. Everything about it was to be new, clear; a landscape distanced by an ocean from the zones of terror. A sweeping territory, free of wounds, belonging to all, owned by no one” (338). Moreover, McGee was addressing them “not as the representative of any race, any province, but as the forerunner of a generation that would inherit wholeness, a generation released from fragmentation” (338). I would argue, however, that McGee’s vision and Eileen’s are two sides of the same coin – another example of the doubleness associated with the various discursively constructed identities that I have traced throughout this chapter. Whereas Eileen’s romantic nationalism remains fatally oriented toward the past, McGee’s remains fixated on the future, so that both preclude an engagement with the present. Moreover, McGee’s vision of the New Jerusalem is predicated on historical amnesia, as if one can, by an act of will and imagination, erase racial formations and install wholeness – an example of “domineering universalism” which presents itself as a benign antidote to tribalism (Kertzer 166).23 While seemingly purged of tribal nationalism, the appeal of McGee’s vision, and, by extension, the narrative as a whole, lies in their uncanny similarity to the assimilationist discourse of British imperialism. Historically, Celticism often coincided with an overarching assimilationist policy. As noted, the Celticist scholar Matthew Arnold argued that “the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogenous, English-speaking whole ... The swallowing up of provincial nationalities, is a consummation ... a necessity of what is called modern civilization” (qtd. in Pittock 64). Many other writers likewise indulged in Celticism “only in the context of ‘the larger responsibilities of united [British] nationality and race’” (qtd. in Pittock 72). Away’s tendency to incorporate archetypes and ahistorical comparisons is thus in keeping with this assimilationist agenda. For a vast number of writers, whose “western

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gaze echoed the association of the Celtic lands ... with marginality, mortality and decline,” the image of the Celt abused by the Saxon became “a type for the general experience of mankind” (Pittock 73). The movement to construct and deconstruct Celtic identity at one time thus served the aims of British nationalism: Part of the manner in which homogenous identities succeed derives from not only the suppression of diversity, but also the suspension of belief in that diversity or its value among those who are its heirs. This is part of the process of consolidating the “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s phrase ... In postcolonial terms, the systematic downplaying or rubbishing of Celticism and Celtic culture was part of the British imagination in which many of the Celts themselves took part ... The display of national culture could only be approved if it consented to disown its nationality. (Pittock 102) In Away, both Mary’s Celtic Primitivism and McGee’s equally visionary image of the modern nation are thus dialogically related and constitute an uncanny repetition of the nineteenth-century tensions between the Irish and the British discourses of romantic nationalism that were carried across the ocean to the New World. Not coincidentally, these tensions are reflected in the novel’s formal structure and its reliance on fantasy, which, as Rosemary Jackson explains, serves the double function of telling of desire and of expelling that same desire. As noted earlier, the movement “from the first to the second of these functions, from expression as manifestation to expression as expulsion, is one of the recurrent features of fantastic narrative” (4–5). Away fulfills fantasy’s dual function of allowing for a vicarious experience and expelling the threatening desire since Old Eileen tells the story initially with the explicit intention of convincing Esther not to follow in her foremothers’ footsteps, a story in which both Mary and Exodus Crow vanish and Eileen remains forever haunted by her beloved. Having unleashed the power of fantasy to convey a vision of Celticism and the Irish collective memory, Old Eileen concludes by admonishing Esther to eschew fantasy and to stay in her place and never go away. The tension between inscription and expulsion is also evident in the mixed feelings elicited in Eileen by her closing injunction: “‘Imagine this room,’ [Eileen] ... said, ‘alive with leaping men and politics!’ She paused then and the light in her face disappeared. ‘If I were you I would be

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where I stand’” (355). Her expressions reveal the tension between experiencing the present moment – which involves facing loss – and indulging in fantasy, being “away,” and experiencing the “light” and consolation that fantasy brings. Although Esther may have been claimed “by the ground on which she stood,” the fact that she repeats the tale the night before the farm is about to vanish – as the “scream of machinery intensifies ... [and] the fossilized narrative of ancient migrations are crushed into powder” (356) – suggests quite literally that unsettling forces remain at work. Moreover, Esther, who is blessed with a “banner of red-gold hair,” admits that, like her great-grandmother Mary, she, too, took a sailor as her lover. Esther confesses that “between her lover’s visits, when she found herself waiting, she knew it was for a kind of completion – his absence from, not his presence in her life” (354). Her celebration of absence reminds readers that although the traditional belief in spirit may have been banished as primitive superstition, the spectralization of the other persists. Moreover, in its treatment of the spirit of the nation, as we have seen, Away resurrects the legacy of Celticism and its counterpart, assimilationist British nationalism, in the guise of a new form of assimilationist Canadian nationalism. Although the most zealous proponents of both forms of nationalism die, namely, Mary and McGee, their spirits continue to haunt the Canadian nationstate. Although, as we have seen, Urquhart’s novel relies primarily on magic realism rather than the Gothic, in keeping with all of the texts analyzed thus far, Away instigates the return of the repressed. More precisely, Away reactivates the racialized debates in the nineteenth century that contrasted Celticism with Anglo-Saxonism in terms of the prevailing notions of Primitivism and degeneracy. Rather than suggest that we have transcended these historical debates, Away demonstrates instead how Canada, a modern, New World nation-state, unconsciously reiterates these debates with some minor modifications. On a related note, Away also illustrates how Old World romantic myths about femininity, the Irish, and Indians continue to circulate, perhaps most obviously in the image of North American Native peoples as a disappearing or doomed race. Atwood’s Alias Grace, the novel considered in the next chapter, also takes as its focus the Irish diaspora. In what follows, this study turns away from its primary focus on the tensions associated with the clash between aboriginals and the settler-invaders to concentrate on the uncanny relationships between haunting, race, gender, and class. In

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effect, Atwood’s Alias Grace and Brand’s entire corpus narrow the focus and pose a similar question: why are racialized female bodies so often identified as uncanny and susceptible to possession? In keeping with Urquhart’s Away, Atwood’s Alias Grace explores how nineteenth-century debates about women’s susceptibility to haunting and dissociation (the experience of being “away”) express both historical and contemporary fears associated with the gendered and racialized lower class’s increasing social mobility in the New World.

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4 ‘Cloth Flowers That Bleed’: Haunting, Hysteria, and Diaspora in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace In this part on transnational haunting, I examine texts that highlight the connections between diasporic experiences, haunting, and possession. Generally speaking, the works by Urquhart, Atwood, and Brand engage with a specific set of questions posed in the introduction: To what extent do ghosts signal anxieties associated with multiple and/or diasporic identities? What is the significance of haunting in women’s textual and artistic productions? Is haunting a response to classical conceptions of women’s uncanny propensity for hysteria? While all of the works in this study implicitly or explicitly probe the links between haunting and women, Atwood’s fiction is famous for its gothic treatment of women’s historical and contemporary social roles. In keeping with the previous chapter, my analysis of Alias Grace aims to historically and geographically contextualize, and thereby re-politicize, the Gothic by demonstrating the connections in Atwood’s novel between haunting and hysteria and the physical and sexual abuse of racialized, working-class women in Upper Canadian Victorian society. Ultimately, I trace the tropes of haunting and hysteria in Alias Grace to the trauma instigated by the Irish diaspora and to anxieties associated with class mobility. Due to its obsession with reproduction, lineage, and socially sanctioned and unsanctioned transformations in social class, Alias Grace recalls the gothic preoccupation with primogeniture and degeneration in Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright. In keeping with all of the works under consideration, in Atwood’s novel, haunting is associated with anxieties about securing the home, the family line, and the nation-state against perceived internal and external threats.

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With the publication of her first novel, Surfacing – which charts the psychic and physical journey of a woman wandering in the wilderness, haunted by an abortion that she remembers only in traumatic fragments – Atwood initiated her readers into her ongoing exploration of the relationship between haunting and hysteria, a disease that since antiquity has been associated with the notion of wandering and with women’s reproductive organs. The word “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, which derives from the Sanskrit word for stomach or belly. According to the ancient Egyptians, the cause of disturbances in adult women was the wandering movement of the uterus, which they believed to be “an autonomous, free-floating organism, upward from its normal pelvic position” (Micale 19). Alias Grace selfconsciously takes this connection between haunting and hysteria in new and important directions by rooting it in a historical period during which concerns loomed large about hysteria and about women wandering beyond the confines of class boundaries and patriarchy’s tight control. Based on historical events, Alias Grace serves as a particularly useful tool to examine the connections between haunting, hysteria, and fears associated with gender and class mobility. Alias Grace offers a thoroughly researched account of Upper Canadian life in the nineteenth century, when some servants, many of them newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, aspired to the status of the upper classes and, on occasion, realized their desires to rise above their station. However, their desires for change in status challenged what Fredric Jameson describes as the representation of the social world as “an organic, natural, Burkean permanence” by confronting it with a vision of the world that is “not natural, but historical, and subject to radical change” (193). In so doing, they attacked the notion that inheritance rests solely on “filiation,” defined strictly by blood, and argued instead for “affiliative” notions of inheritance based on performance, hard work, and “collegiality” (Said 20). This attack generated tremendous anxiety and exacerbated the tension between what society deemed legitimate and illegitimate modes of social reproduction. By juxtaposing mobile immigrants and hysteria, a disorder that emphasizes transgressive wandering, Alias Grace highlights societal fears associated with female emancipation and the upwardly mobile racialized “Other.” In effect, Alias Grace self-consciously explores competing understandings of identity and its construction through the impact of socio-economic forces beyond one’s control, on the one hand, and through acts

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of performance and fabrication in which one may play a part, on the other. In the novel, the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the words “character” and “performance” highlight key tensions associated with the conflicting notions of identity. For instance, character can be defined as an innate set of attributes: “the sum of the moral and mental qualities which distinguish an individual or a race, viewed as a homogeneous whole; the individuality impressed by nature and habit on man or nation; mental or moral constitution” (OED online; my emphasis). Yet character can also be understood as an artificially assumed role: “the personality or ‘part’ assumed by an actor on the stage” (OED online). Similarly, performance can be aligned with the notion of “habit,” which surfaces in the initial definition of character: “a long-term, characteristic manner of doing an action or operation – as on a job” (OED online). Yet, like the word character, performance can also be linked to “an instance of performing a play, piece of music, etc., in front of an audience,” which entails being “in character” (OED online). As we will see, the tension and slippage between these terms is crucial to the questions raised in Alias Grace: is identity inherent, biologically determined, and stable, or is it socially constructed, fluid, and subject to change? For the most part, the characters in the novel can be divided roughly into two categories: those to whom the accidents of birth and history have been kind and who, therefore, have an investment in maintaining the status quo, and those who have not been so fortunate in the arbitrary assignment of class, gender, and nationality, and who have an interest in the possibility of changing their situation for the better. In Alias Grace, conflicts surrounding identity are aligned with racial tensions between the British and the Irish, and with sexual differentiation and the threat posed by “the Woman Question.” Atwood’s gendered rewriting of the nightmare of social class – which required hypervigilance by the upper classes as well as constant monitoring for potentially transgressive forays across class boundaries – is apt since the same message directed toward lower-class Irish was often repeated to women: stay in your place! As Jameson observes, this class warning “can be rewritten as an actantial injunction: do not attempt to become another kind of character from the one you already are!” (191). His emphasis on “characters” is particularly relevant to my study because, as noted, Alias Grace aligns class and race conflict with hysteria based on the fact that both were associated with debates about performance versus biological inheritance and with pathological forms of wandering.

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Alias Grace’s central figure, Grace Marks, an impoverished Irish immigrant, was one of the most infamous Canadian women of the 1800s. With the help of a fellow-servant, James McDermott, Grace apparently murdered both her well-to-do Tory employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his pregnant housekeeper and mistress, Nancy Montgomery. While McDermott was found guilty of Kinnear’s death and hanged on 21 November 1843, Grace’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, thanks to the efforts of her lawyer and a group of gentlemen petitioners who emphasized the “feebleness of her sex,” her “extreme youth” – she was fifteen years old – and her supposed witlessness (McLean and Barber 133). In Atwood’s retelling of events, in addition to suffering from traumatic amnesia and claiming to have lost the part of her memory associated with the execution of the murders (41), Grace is prone to terrifying hallucinations, fits, fainting spells, somnambulism (sleep walking), and episodes of double consciousness – symptoms typically associated with what was then known as the “disease” of hysteria. Alias Grace explicitly interrogates the hysteria diagnosis by pairing Grace with a fictitious American doctor, Simon Jordon, who travels to the Kingston Penitentiary in 1859 and studies Grace to determine whether she is, indeed, hysterical as opposed to merely criminal. Dr Jordan has been invited to examine Grace at the behest of the Reverend Verringer, a Methodist minister. Verringer hopes to prove scientifically and unequivocally that Grace is mentally ill and, on those grounds, secure her release from prison. At the crux of the novel, when Dr Jordan’s proto-psychoanalytic method fails to penetrate Grace’s amnesia and “wake the part of her mind that lies dormant” (131), he permits Grace to undergo hypnosis at the hands of Dr Jerome DuPont. In this pivotal scene, Grace lies in a hypnotic trance and, to everyone’s amazement, an alternative identity emerges claiming to be the spirit of Mary Whitney, Grace’s friend who died several years earlier from a botched abortion. As Mary’s spirit malevolently insists, it was she, and not Grace, who slaughtered Kinnear and his mistress. Recent scholarly readings of Alias Grace interpret the intrusion of the ghost of Mary Whitney as a familiar gothic device and trace the novel’s gothic and fantastic generic features. By contrast, I adopt a historical and materialist approach to haunting and hysteria that locates Grace’s story within a vast wave of impoverished diasporic Irish women who were marginalized and dispossessed in the New World. Ultimately, as noted earlier, I interpret haunting and hysteria as the uncanny return of repressed facets of what Fredric Jameson terms the political unconscious,

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namely, the physical and sexual abuse of working-class women. I argue that Grace’s experience within this predominantly female diaspora informs the dynamics of her possession (whether real or fabricated) by the spirit of Mary Whitney. In what follows, I explore the parallels drawn in the novel between Grace’s disorder – a disorder historically linked to “wandering” – and the trauma instigated by the Irish diaspora among working-class women. As we will see, Alias Grace portrays hysteria as a performance of distress used by women caught – due to socioeconomic and historical reasons beyond their control – in situations in which their direct agency is barred. In the process of highlighting the connections between diaspora, haunting, and hysteria, Alias Grace prompts readers to reconsider prevailing theories of trauma and its relationship to performance and fabrication. In the narrative, both hysteria and haunting are portrayed as responses to the crushing losses that stemmed from dispossession and forced migration. In addition to exposing the mental and physical suffering of racialized, working-class women, by juxtaposing wandering immigrants and hysteria – with its emphasis on pathologized wandering – Alias Grace also highlights societal fears associated with the mobility of the lower classes and of lower-class women, in particular. In effect, Atwood’s novel realizes the upper classes’ worst fear that if the lower class rises above its station based on work or performance (rather than on biological reproduction and inheritance), then no one will be able to distinguish true gentlemen from the pretenders; worse, the pretenders will actually become gentlemen. The subversive potential in Atwood’s story of Grace Marks lies in its suggestion that this particular young woman fabricated an identity and acted in ways that, to some extent, subverted the monstrous social determinism of her assigned gender, race, and station. More precisely, while Atwood’s depiction of Grace Marks suggests that fabrication and performance can involve the conscious mimicry of the object of desire (“I will play the role of the lady”), the novel also hints at a more uncanny possibility: it suggests that fabrication constitutes a far more pervasive facet of the ongoing and largely unconscious psychological process of incorporation – the taking in of the lost/desired other – which is an inseparable part of living, loving, and mourning. Viewed in this light, Alias Grace explodes the notion of an autonomous self and reveals instead that we are all fabrications or composites; hence, it makes no sense to speak of the self in isolation. Moreover, the implications of this uncanny model of interpenetrating selves are equally radical, for if the other

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changes, so must the self: If my beloved dies, then who am I? It is precisely because of this blurring of self/other that the mobility of others – women, lower class, Irish – proves so threatening: If my servant rises to my station, then what will I become? What is particularly intriguing about Atwood’s novel is how it challenges our common view of haunting as the supernatural return of, or possession by, the ghostly lost object. By repeatedly emphasizing the relational, fabricated, and performative basis of human identity, Alias Grace identifies haunting with a more commonplace understanding of both possession (the self as a composite of multiple selves) and dispossession (the loss of self occasioned by the death of a loved one). In the case of Grace Marks, the loss of the other instigates a loss of self – part of her self goes missing when her loved ones die, including her mother and her best friend, Mary Whitney. Although the disease of hysteria seems far removed from the fears associated with social mobility and artifice, in fact, the disorder has a long-standing and intimate connection to wandering, role-playing, and mimicry. Doctors were never sure if the patient’s bizarre symptoms were real or fabricated; worse, as I demonstrate later on in this chapter, physicians themselves unknowingly taught their patients how to perform the disease. As a result, in Alias Grace, hysteria serves as the ideal disease to underscore the fears and desires associated with the rejection of traditional social and gender roles. Ultimately, Alias Grace, like its infamously doubled, eponymous protagonist, plays a dual role: on the one hand, it highlights hysteria’s early historical associations with women’s supposedly essential pathological nature. On the other hand, the text counters this biological perspective with newly emerging psychological theories in the nineteenth century that reinterpreted hysteria as a non-sexually-specific and non-genetically-based disease. Instead, some nineteenth- and many twentieth-century psychological theorists suggested that hysteria was, as noted, more appropriately understood as a complicated performance of distress.1 In this way, Alias Grace acknowledges the oppressive, historical, essentialist associations between women and pathology, but shows how these associations are haunted by alternative, uncanny, discursive, and performative conceptions of identity instigated, in this case, by the second wave of feminism – epitomized by the suffragettes – and by the Irish diaspora. Before I turn to the impact of the diaspora on Grace Marks’s identity, I want to outline the novel’s historical context, specifically, the widespread debates in the mid-to-late nineteenth century about the nature of the human mind and of the soul – debates that

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frequently centred on the nature of women and their susceptibility to the disease of hysteria. Within the nineteenth-century scientific community depicted in the novel, many respected physicians in America and Europe would not have hesitated to classify Grace’s experiences of double consciousness under the hysteria diagnosis. Freud and Breuer famously asserted that “the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the classical cases under the form of double conscience is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria” (Studies 45). Moreover, in France, as Ian Hacking writes, “double consciousness (what is now called multiple personality) was born under the sign of hysteria” (132).2 In Alias Grace, Dr Simon Jordan articulates and debates the key stances of this period on possession and dissociation. In many respects, his approach to Grace anticipates Freud’s psychoanalytic method – a method that developed in the face of the perplexing symptoms associated with hysteria and, as a result, owes its existence to this disease. Anticipating Breuer and Freud’s method, Dr Jordan’s approach to Grace remains fundamentally psychogenic in that he ultimately calls into question the sufficiency of both biology and heredity to account for Grace’s hysteria. Although he champions a proto-psychoanalytic approach, Dr Jordan must nevertheless contend with alternative views. For instance, during his informal lecture at the Governor’s home, Dr Jordan compares and contrasts the various schools and their approaches to diseases of the mind. As he explains, on the one hand, practitioners of what he terms the “Material school,” perhaps best represented by the famous French neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot who ran the Salpêtrière, held that mental disturbances were entirely “organic in origin – due, for instance to lesions of the nerves and brain, or hereditary conditions of a definable kind, such as epilepsy; or to catching diseases, including those that are sexually transmitted” (299). Dr Jordan goes on to contrast practitioners of the “Material school” with those of the “Mental school,” who believed in causes of mental illness that were much harder to isolate: “How to diagnose amnesias with no discernible physical manifestation, or certain inexplicable and radical alterations of the personality? What was the role played by the Will, and what by the Soul?” (299).3 In his account of the debates about hysteria and the various schools, however, the well-travelled Dr Jordan neglects to mention what might be best described as a “third school,” namely, the Spiritualist approach to dissociation, which maintained the historical links between hysteria and

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haunting. Whereas the French primarily understood alternating personality as a form of hysteria, in both England and America, due to the prominence of spiritualism, alternate identities (“alters”) were sometimes conceived of as departed spirits who found a home in the body of a willing or unwilling living host (see Crabtree). Indeed, as Hacking reminds us, the disorder “now known as ‘multiple personality’ perpetually requires ‘a host’”: in our day, “the host has been child abuse”; in France “the hosts were ... hysteria, hypnotism, and positivism”; but, “in New England in particular, and in both America and Britain more generally, an additional host was psychic research linked with spiritualism ... mediumship and multiple personality grew close” (135–6). Moreover, as Ruth Harris explains, it was in the mid-to-late nineteenth century “that the phenomenon of spiritualism became a legitimate area of philosophical and scientific enquiry, becoming annexed to positivism and altering the epistemological perspective of many previously ‘materialist’ practitioners” (195). Atwood’s literary invocation and critique of the discourses associated with hysteria and possession are particularly relevant because, as Hacking observes, fiction, rather than medicine, disseminated and entrenched the idea of hysteria and, more precisely, of possession. In a host of works, including the tales of E.T.W. Hoffman, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dostoyevsky’s The Double, and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to name only a few, possession, represented by the infamous image of the double, conveyed the uncanny idea of the coexistence of two souls in one body. “I make the strong point,” Hacking writes, “that the whole language of many selves had been hammered out by generations of romantic poets and novelists great and small, and also in innumerable broadsheets and feuilletons too ephemeral for general knowledge today” (232). At bottom, our understandings of hysteria and possession are the direct “consequence of how the literary imagination has formed the language in which we speak of people be they real or imagined” (Hacking 233). Viewed in this light, by linking the historical discourses associated with haunting and hysteria to the Irish diaspora and to Upper Canadian society, more generally, Atwood is following in the footsteps of her nineteenth-century literary predecessors whose quotations are liberally scattered throughout the novel. Moreover, in keeping with Urquhart’s exploration of the dialogic construction of the primitivist, feminine Celtic identity, which was transported to Canada during the Irish dias-

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pora, Atwood – like all of the authors whose works are considered in this study – is actively and politically engaged in interrogating pathologized constructions of femininity and the racialized Other that continue to haunt the Canadian nation-state. Even from the brief account of Alias Grace cited above, readers can appreciate that this novel highlights the fascination and confusion surrounding the relationships between haunting, hysteria, gender, race, class, and criminality in the nineteenth century. At the time, the connections among these factors were hotly debated and provided fodder for the speculations and turf wars of spiritualists and scientists alike (see Harris). Indeed, Grace’s gender, race, and position in the servant class locate her at the centre of these debates. As historians observe, the sensational murder case, “involving sex, violence, and insubordination carried to an extreme, portrayed in stark relief the gender, class, and ethnic tensions in the master/mistress-servant relationship. It also revealed the complex and gendered public response to Irish immigrants” (McLean and Barber 133). Set in the mid-1800s when Irish women were arrested and convicted of crimes with much greater frequency than any other group (Diner 111), when “among immigrant servants committed to insane asylums, Irish women far outnumbered all other ethnic groups combined” (McLean and Barber 149), and when “hysteria was the most prominent and memorable maladie de la mémoire” (Roth 1), Alias Grace explicitly probes the racialized links between madness and migration, and highlights how these links were disseminated in narrative form. Critical accounts of this period in Upper Canada stress the unheimlich aspects of the Irish diaspora, a mass migration that unsettled not only the Irish women who immigrated and worked as domestics, but also their employers who felt uncomfortable with “degenerate” Catholic strangers in the bosom of their homes. Nineteenth-century Upper Canadian gentlefolk were particularly concerned about “allowing unknown immigrants into the private sanctum of the home” (McLean and Barber 137). Due to their supposed love of finery, Irish domestics “were frequently suspected of trying on their mistress’s clothes in her absence” – a fear which masked the deeper terror that “such relatively harmless acts of insubordination could mirror more serious crimes such as theft from their employers or, at an extreme as in the case of Grace Marks, even murder” (McLean and Barber 137). As noted earlier, these types of transgressions associated with impersonation instigated existential fears: if the other transforms into me, then who do I become?

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Given the powerful fears and anxieties that circulated within Upper Canadian society, it is hardly surprising that the servant class suffered from psychological distress. Recent studies concerning the occupational identities of past hysterical patients reveal that among working people one category appears time and time again: domestic servant (Micale, “Theorizing” 158–9). Contemporary scholars suggest that illness roles were extremely fluid during this period. Put somewhat differently, just as certain “aristocratic ailments of the eighteenth century descended to the middle classes in the early nineteenth century, so perhaps a more medicalized self-consciousness began to form later in the century among working-class people living in bourgeois environments. A kind of psychological gentrification” (Micale, “Theorizing” 160; see also Ellenberger 190). By postulating that Grace suffers from hysteria, a disease more often associated with Freud’s affluent Viennese patients than with working-class Irish immigrants, Alias Grace emphasizes that nineteenth-century social mobility, the disease of wandering above one’s station, instigated the transgressive assumption of new social positions and the challenges and illness roles associated with these positions. Alias Grace highlights the fact that the disease of hysteria surfaced when both lower- and middle-class women were wandering beyond their allotted places in the domestic sphere. Mary Whitney, for instance, proves to be an especially troubling spirit both alive and dead because she espouses “democratic ideas” (159) and insists on women’s potential for social mobility. She tells Grace that “being a servant was not a thing we were born to, nor would we be forced to continue it forever; it was just a job of work ... and that one day I would be the mistress of a tidy farmhouse, and independent ... And one person was as good as the next, and on this side of the ocean folks rose in the world by hard work, not by who their grandfather was, and that was the way it should be” (157–8). Mary’s philosophy of rising by “hard work” (a vision of class based on one’s performance and not on inheritance) is aligned more generally in the novel with performative and fabricated conceptions of identity. As we will see, in Alias Grace, utopian possibilities associated with conceiving of a fabricated identity are prompted by the experience of diaspora and the prevalence of job opportunities for domestic servants in Upper Canada. Yet, at the same time, within Atwood’s narrative, the traumatic facets of the diasporic experience also resonate on the discursive level of the text and within the recurring and haunting images.

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Taken together, the negative and traumatic facets associated with forced migration instigate a discursive symptom: the characteristically fractured structure of hysterical narratives. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes how during the late 1300s and early 1400s, the mad were driven from the cities and set aboard boats that “conveyed their insane cargo from town to town ... Often the cities of Europe must have seen these ‘ships of fools’ approaching their harbors” (8). Foucault ultimately describes the madman as “the Passenger par excellence; that is, the prisoner of the passage ... He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him” (11). In his case history of Dora (1901), Freud likewise associates madness with wandering when he asserts that the disease of hysteria is caused by pathological memory and argues further that it is characterized by a specific hallucinatory, fragmented, and meandering narrative style. As Freud explains, hysterics are unable to tell a complete, “smooth and exact” story about themselves: “their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and riddles unanswered ... The connections – even the ostensible ones – are for the most part incoherent, and the sequence of different events is uncertain” (Freud, Dora 45–6). Moreover, for Freud, this incapacity to give an “ordered history of their life” was not simply characteristic of hysterics; it was, as Elaine Showalter observes, “the meaning of hysteria” (Hystories 84). In essence, Freud associated both normal and hysterical forms of memory with discrete narrative styles – smooth and exact, on the one hand, and those with gaps and riddles, on the other. In so doing, however, Freud seemingly remained unaware that the apparently natural, smooth, and exact story that offers “an ordered history,” which he privileges and associates with healthy forms of memory, is itself a highly artificial narrative mode honed by traditional historical novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As I noted in the previous chapter on Urquhart’s Away, an awareness of the discursively constructed nature of identity allows one to trace a genealogy of the norm and alternatives that were repressed in an effort to portray the individual and the nation-state as a unified whole. Contrasting sharply with the form and assumptions associated with the “smooth and exact” narrative mode, Alias Grace’s opening scene introduces a type of fragmented hysterical narrative style along with the text’s governing image of dark red cloth flowers, hallucinatory fleurs du mal (Baudelaire’s “flowers of evil”), that haunt the novel:

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Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails’ eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground ... I watch the peonies out of the corners of my eyes. I know they shouldn’t be here: it’s April and peonies don’t bloom in April. There are three more now, right in front of me, growing out of the path itself. Furtively I reach out my hand to touch one. It has a dry feel, and I realize it’s made of cloth. Then up ahead I see Nancy, on her knees, with her hair fallen over and the blood running down into her eyes ... I am almost up to Nancy, to where she’s kneeling. But I do not break step, I do not run, I keep on walking ... and then Nancy smiles, only the mouth, her eyes are hidden by the blood and hair, and then she scatters into patches of colour, a drift of red cloth petals across the stones. (Alias Grace 5–6) As Heidi Darroch argues, Grace’s narrative is “intended to be read as one more version of the hysteric’s story” (106). Viewed in this context, the image of flowers recalls Breuer’s famous reference in Studies on Hysteria to hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers” (Freud and Breuer 284), a simile that gestures towards the ways in which hysterical women often subverted social norms by failing to marry and continue the family line. In double flowers, such as peonies, the purely sexual function has been tampered with to serve aesthetic desires because the stamens – that is, the male organs – have been replaced by petals. According to Showalter, Breuer implies that, like the double flower, the hysteric is “the forced bud of a domestic greenhouse ... [S]he is also an aesthetic object, standing in relation to a more sober ‘mankind’ as feminine and decorative” (“Hysteria,” 291–2; see also Smith-Rosenberg). As Alison Syme observes, in the nineteenth century, women’s bodies and sexual activity of all sorts “was floral” (31). For example, to lose one’s virginity was “to be deflowered.” Syme argues further that a poetics “of vegetal creation” was central to nineteenth-century literature and visual art (1). Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal was a literal anthology (from the Greek, a collection of flowers): “I’ve made a new flower,” the poet would write to describe his progress. Most importantly, according to Syme, the fin-de-siècle increase in floral-female imagery, which often rendered women “both passive and consumable,” has been linked to the threat of the New Woman. As Showalter observes:

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That hysteria became a hot topic in medical circles at the same time that feminism, the New Woman, and a crisis in gender were also hot topics in the United States and Europe does not seem coincidental ... In every national setting where female hysteria became a significant issue, there were parallel concerns about the ways that new opportunities for women might undermine the birth rate, the family, and the health of the nation. Intellectually competitive women, doctors warned, were sterile flowers doomed to bring forth only blossoms of hysteria. (“Hysteria” 305–6; see also Porter 248) Equally relevant to my analysis of Alias Grace is the connection between flower imagery and alternative modes of social reproduction: “the floral birth of the work of art was also a modern version of the enduring fantasy of artistic parturition” (Syme 8). As Syme explains, “the fantasy of vegetable reproduction could allay anxieties stemming from physiological incapacity of whatever sort, and was an alternative form of imaginary reproduction for both men and women” (8). In Grace’s hallucinatory account, the red flowers are made of cloth, which further emphasizes their socially-constructed and fabricated nature and their links to alternative forms of reproduction. In Alias Grace, the image of cloth flowers that bleed serves as a trope for women’s highly sexualized and controlled social roles and for potential alternative roles, which, in Atwood’s novel, are aligned with the uncanny. In keeping with the reliance on gothic tropes in Watson’s, Anderson-Dargatz’s, and Steffler’s novels, whatever threatens the patrilineal line – whether it be a doubling back to Native origins, the mother-child dyad, or, as in Anderson-Dargatz’s and Atwood’s novels, emotionally charged friendships with women – is aligned with the uncanny. In addition to invoking Breuer’s image of hysteria, the opening passage graphically illustrates the workings of hysteria by virtue of its meandering narrative style in which the peonies “burst” and Nancy’s visage “scatters” into “patches” of colour, a “drift” of red cloth petals” (5–6). In effect, on both the intradiegetic level of Grace’s narration and on the extradiegetic level of the narrative – marked by its excessive reliance on epigraphs, fragments from nineteenth-century texts, and chapter headings named for well-known quilt patterns – Alias Grace deploys hysteria’s fragmented and drifting narrative style. As Grace herself admits, her lawyer wants her to tell her story “in what he called a coherent way, but

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would often accuse me of wandering” (357). Not surprisingly, it is precisely this penchant for wandering that has also characterized hysteria from antiquity. In what follows, I trace the evolution of the hysteria diagnosis and compare it to the etymology and experience of the Irish diaspora. As noted, my aim lies in demonstrating how Atwood interrogates the traditional, pathological view of femininity by revealing how this traditional view masks the anxieties associated with female emancipation and the upwardly mobile racialized “Other.” I show how Alias Grace portrays hysteria as a performance of distress in the face of seemingly intractable socio-economic conditions and entrenched social roles. In addition, the narrative also aligns hysteria with haunting, and portrays both as symptoms attesting to the overwhelming losses that resulted from dispossession and diasporic migration. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for uterus, and the disorders that went by this name were understood by the Egyptians to stem from the wandering movement of the womb. These ancient Egyptian beliefs, in turn, provided the foundation for classical Greek medical and philosophical accounts of hysteria. The Greeks adopted “the notion of the migratory uterus and embroidered upon the connection ... between hysteria and an unsatisfactory sexual life” (Micale 19). In Timaeus, Plato famously explains that “the womb is an animal which longs to generate children. When it remains barren too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body and cutting off the passage of the breath, it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into the extremist anguish and provokes all manner of diseases besides” (qtd. in Micale 19). A range of texts of the school of Hippocrates from the fifth century bce likewise affirmed that sexual deprivation caused a restless womb to wander in search of gratification (Micale 19). Later, Roman medical authors, in accordance with the beliefs of the Egyptians and the Greeks, also linked hysterical disorders with the female anatomy, identifying cases most often in “virgins, widows, and spinsters,” and recommending as a solution “a regular regimen of marital fornication” (Micale 20). For the purposes of this study, it is important to recognize that wandering, haunting, and possession figure prominently in the earliest accounts of the disease. Whereas early scholars believed that the uterus pathologically “possessed” women and drove them to distraction, the concept of extrinsic, diabolical possession gained momentum with the

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arrival of Christianity in the Latin West. From the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, biological or “naturalist pagan” constructions of the disease were increasingly displaced by “supernatural formulations” (Micale 20). With its shifting and highly dramatic symptomatology, hysteria was viewed as a sign of possession by the devil: During the late medieval and Renaissance periods, the scene of the diagnosis of the hysteric shifted from the hospital to the church and the courtroom, which now became the loci of spectacular interrogations. Official manuals for the detection of witches, often virulently misogynistic, supplied instructions for the detection, torture, and at times execution of the witch/hysteric. (Micale 20–1)4 In the seventeenth century, advances in the understanding of the human nervous system resulted in the waning of gynecological and demonological accounts of the disease. As early as 1670, it was proposed, instead, that the site of hysteria was the brain and spinal cord (Micale 22). One of the most important theorists of hysteria in Britain, Thomas Sydenhaun (1624–1689) fashioned the first neuropsychological model of the disease (Micale 22). During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, theorists reintroduced the uterine model of hysteria. Ironically, whereas classical scholars associated hysteria with women’s sexual deprivation, eighteenth-century writers blamed it on sexual overindulgence (23). In the nineteenth century – the temporal setting of Alias Grace – medicine forged what Michel Foucault describes as “a new hysterization of women’s bodies” (qtd. in Porter 250). At the time, the new sciences of gynecology and psychological medicine provided the “twin pillars supporting the rehabilitation of uterine theories of hysteria” (Porter 255; see also Oppenheim 204). Indeed, in the history of hysteria, the mid-to-late nineteenth century is marked by an astounding multiplication of texts and competing theories and therapies. No single school reigned supreme. Instead, half a dozen theoretical currents developed simultaneously and, at times, ran independent courses and, at other times, flowed together in the writings of individual physicians (Micale 23). During the nineteenth century, hysteria “became the explicit theme of scores of medical texts. Its investigation and treatment made the fame and fortunes of towering medical figures – Charcot, Breuer, Janet, and Freud. Hysteria came to be seen as the open sesame to impenetrable riddles of existence: religious ecstasy, sexual deviation, and, above all, that mystery of mysteries, woman” (Porter 227).

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As I argue, however, in Alias Grace hysteria is not solely linked to a wandering uterus but, more generally, to the transgressive wanderings of a dispossessed and diasporic female working class and to their stories of hardship, which continue to haunt the host nation. In Atwood’s narrative, the mobile lower class is analogous to the transgressive, pathological uterus classically associated with hysteria. “Diaspora,” like the word “hysteria,” originates from the Greek, a combination of “dia,” meaning “through,” “thoroughly,” “apart,” or “across,” and “speiro,” meaning to “scatter” (OED). When Jeremiah, the mysterious peddler who later refashions himself as the hypnotist Jerome DuPont, reads Grace’s palm, he states enigmatically, “You are one of us.” Grace assumes he means that like him, she is “homeless, and a wanderer” (155). In her study of hysteria, Elaine Showalter likewise argues that in nineteenth-century France, “runaways and migrants can be seen as social equivalents of the unruly migratory uterus traditionally associated with female hysteria” (Hystories 71). Michèle Ouerd similarly asserts that the working class in nineteenth-century France “is itself the wandering womb of Paris” (qtd. in Showalter, Hystories 71). Their analogies between the migratory uterus and the working class in France shed light on Alias Grace’s depiction of the status of migrant workers in Upper and Lower Canada during the same period. In Alias Grace, the connections forged between Grace’s pathological memory, hysteria, and the Irish diaspora are especially apt when one recognizes that the latter was unusually gendered: “Whereas most transatlantic migrations of people to North America were dominated by men, for significant periods of time women formed the majority of Irish migrants” (McLean and Barber 134). This migration constituted “a mass female movement ... No other major group of immigrants in American history contained so many women” (Diner 30; Akenson 42). Like Grace, the majority of these women worked in rural rather than urban areas. As a result, “these ‘women alone’ sometimes lacked kin or friendship networks for advice and aid and hence were more vulnerable” (McLean and Barber 136). Atwood’s gothic representation of Grace’s and her fellow workers’ direct and indirect sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their various employers accurately attests to the fact that the impact of scattering and the resulting isolation and loneliness in both rural and urban work increased “the vulnerability to conflict with employers or to sexual exploitation” (McLean and Barber 137–9). Studies of Irish domestics in courts, jails, and asylums tellingly reveal that

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almost half the women in jail who listed occupations were servants or housekeepers, and by far the largest immigrant population was from Ireland (McLean and Barber 139; see also Diner ch. 5). Thus, as a convicted murderer sentenced to life in the penitentiary who also spent time in Toronto’s newly opened insane asylum, Grace Marks was “definitely not the only Irish immigrant domestic servant labelled both ‘mad’ and ‘bad’ whether because of intolerable conditions, poverty, overwork, rebellion, physical or mental illness or mental retardation” (McLean and Barber 149). In contrast, then, to classical approaches to hysteria, Atwood aligns the disorder with complicated performances of distress and, at times, trauma. One of the strengths of Atwood’s novel lies in its refusal to label Grace as “mad” and “bad.” In contrast to healers and physicians from antiquity who adopted the hysteria diagnosis to account for women’s supposedly pathological minds and bodies, Atwood’s representation of Grace’s hysteria, in keeping with feminist analyses of the disorder, suggests that hysteria had more to do with women’s social roles and the unequal relations of power associated with these roles than with any innate gendered or racial aetiology.5 Contemporary medical historians now acknowledge that in the early 1800s women’s madness typically resulted neither from a wandering uterus nor from lesions of the nervous system – signs of degeneration (see Harris 64–79) – but, instead, from what was referred to in 1820 as “domestic affliction,” traumatic experiences including physical and sexual abuse, death of loved ones, and bereavement that were often exacerbated by alcoholism and poverty (Houston 320). In Atwood’s novel, Grace’s early account of her stay at the newly opened Toronto Asylum explicitly addresses the role played by “domestic affliction” in instigating madness. As Grace explains, [A] good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle ... One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue ... and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum ... But some were not pretending. One poor Irishwoman had all her family dead, half of them starving in the great famine and the other half of the cholera on the boat coming over ... (31)

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In addition to offering insight into the links between women and madness, Grace’s comments, which juxtapose “domestic affliction” with the trauma of the Irish famine and the transatlantic journey, provide readers with clues to the riddle of her own illness and amnesia. Alias Grace forges links between hysteria, domestic affliction, and migration early on when readers witness Grace succumbing to “hysteria’s most characteristic and dramatic symptom ... the hysterical ‘fit’” after a doctor arrives at the Penitentiary to measure her head (Smith-Rosenberg 201). As Grace explains, when “I see his [the doctor’s] hand ... plunging into the open mouth of his leather bag ... my heart clenches and kicks out inside me, and then I begin to scream” (29). She continues to scream until the Matron slaps her across the face. As the latter explains: It’s the only way with the hysterics ... we have had a great deal of experience with that kind of a fit, this one used to be prone to them but we never indulged her, we worked hard to correct it and we thought she had given it up, it might be her old trouble coming back, for despite what they said about it up there at Toronto she was a raving lunatic that time seven years ago. (30) On one level, in keeping with the Matron’s statement, readers gradually appreciate that Grace’s hysterical responses are, indeed, the result of “her old trouble coming back.” Yet, far from a sign of innate pathology, her hysterical symptoms constitute an expression of the profoundly ambivalent feelings of rage and grief triggered by the loss of her Irish homeland and the even more devastating losses associated with the deaths of the three women who played a central role in her life, namely, her mother, Mary Whitney, and Nancy Montgomery. To borrow the text’s governing image of quilting, Grace’s hysteria is not genetic in origin, but, instead, constitutes the uncanny return of repressed facets of the social fabric. Viewed in this light, her hysterically fractured narrative, with its haunting allusions to cloth flowers that bleed (297), exposes society’s dirty secrets – most obviously, the physical and sexual abuse of working-class women by their fathers, their husbands, and their middle-class employers.6 In Alias Grace, patriarchal contests of power, based on lineage and inheritance, are fought on the grounds of women’s bodies – the womb being the site of legitimate and illegitimate modes of social reproduction. In this context, control over women’s reproductive capacities equals

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control over the forces of social transformation. As a result, in Alias Grace women’s wombs are portrayed as sites both of power or powerlessness and of hysterical conflict. Grace’s Irish Protestant mother, after marrying a hard-drinking and physically abusive Englishman and bearing him nine children, expires due to a mysterious, deadly growth in her abdomen. At first, Grace assumes that her mother is expecting: “There was a hard swelling, and I thought it was another little mouth to feed, although I did not know how it could have come on so quickly” (119). However, as Grace’s mother tragically prophesies, the fruit of her womb is death. As Grace tells Dr Jordan, when she woke up in the morning, she found her mother “dead as a mackerel, with her eyes open and fixed” (120). Grace’s description of her mother offers readers a nightmare vision of an individual so lacking in power, she is unable to exert any control over her own body. Pregnancy and death also uncannily go hand-in-hand in Mary Whitney’s travails. After consorting with a gentleman, presumably her employer’s son, and finding herself pregnant with his child, Mary is cast off. In desperation, she undergoes a backstreet abortion and haemorrhages to death. In this case, the narrative leaves open the possibility that Mary may, in fact, have allowed herself to become pregnant in a bid to secure power in her struggle for social transformation, as if to say, “I am pregnant with your baby, so now you must marry me.” Whether or not it is a power play, for Mary it ends tragically. Finally, in keeping with the prevailing theme of gender and class transgression, Nancy is murdered shortly after Grace discovers that she is carrying Kinnear’s bastard. In effect, the spirits and histories of these women return to haunt the novel. As Kathleen Brogan observes, haunting in women’s texts often tends to attach to reproductive issues: “the ghosts often arise from traumatic memories of rape, abortion, or miscarriage; possessed bodies are described as pregnant, or ghosts themselves may appear as pregnant” (Brogan 25). Whereas Brogan posits that the connection is based on the fact that “female bodies are often the site of an uncanny struggle for control over lineage” (25), Alias Grace extends Brogan’s insights by highlighting the historical connections between haunting, hysteria, and diaspora. Indeed, for Irish working-class women in Canada in the early 1800s, migration, sexual exploitation, and hysteria were intimately related. By weaving traces of the transatlantic journey into subsequent events, Atwood’s text identifies Grace’s “old trouble,” her hysteria, with the shattering of domestic comfort and protection instigated by the Irish

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diaspora and exacerbated by the deaths of the three women who provided Grace with material and psychic security in the world. In Alias Grace, haunting and hysteria constitute responses to profound loss. Grace’s mother, for instance, dies on the transatlantic voyage, leaving Grace vulnerable to her father’s abuse and the sexual advances of other predatory males. When Grace recalls her mother’s death on the ship, however, she insists that her mother’s spirit continues to wander the earth.7 As Grace tells Dr Jordan, when her mother’s beloved teapot mysteriously shatters, she suspects that the act was perpetrated by her mother’s enraged spirit, “trapped in the bottom of the ship because we could not open a window, and angry ... caught in there for ever and ever, down below in the hold like a moth in a bottle, sailing back and forth across the hideous dark ocean” (122). Her description of her mother’s spirit caught in the hold uncannily echoes Foucault’s image of madness – “the prisoner of the passage.” Here, however, madness or hysteria is the result of the losses that attended the passage to the new world. Traces of the traumatic losses instigated by the diaspora also surface in later scenes that foreshadow the emergence of Grace’s hysterical double consciousness. Gazing at Mary’s body, whose eyes, like those of Grace’s mother in death, also remain “wide open and staring” (176), Grace hears Mary, “as clear as anything, right in my ear, saying, ‘Let me in’” (178). Here it appears as if Mary’s spirit escapes by entering Grace – as we will see, this hypothesis is seemingly confirmed during the hypnosis scene. Later, on the eve of Nancy’s murder, Grace dreams that Mary is in the room with her, holding a “glass tumbler in her hand, and inside it was a firefly, trapped and glowing with a cold and greenish fire ... and she took her hand from the top of the glass, and the firefly came out and darted about the room; and I knew that this was her soul, and it was trying to find its way out, but the window was shut; and then I could not see where it was gone” (312–13). This dream recalls Grace’s earlier concern that her mother’s spirit is caught inside the hellish ship “like a moth in a bottle” (122). The links between Grace’s hysteria, haunting, and the fateful voyage are further strengthened when Grace learns the secret of Nancy’s pregnancy and we are told that Grace goes to bed with the rain pouring down so that she “was sure that every next minute we would split in two like a ship at sea” (279; my emphasis). In each of these scenes, Grace’s hysterical symptoms – specifically, her memory loss and the fracturing of her psyche – are related to the earlier trauma and fragmentation springing from her family’s journey to the

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new world and the death of her mother. In each of the episodes cited, the spirits of the living and the dead are portrayed as being lost at sea or, more generally, in water; in some instances, pregnancy introduces another layer to the pervasive notion of the fluid doubling of identity. Water is, of course, the familiar trope for the unconscious. Yet, as the narrative repeatedly suggests, it is also the actual medium of the haunted and haunting diasporic subject’s transatlantic journey – “the hideous dark ocean.” In this regard, it is fitting that Grace emphasizes the simultaneous fracturing of the domestic realm and her psyche when she associates her mother’s death with the broken teapot and, later, compares her sketchy memories of Ireland to “a plate that’s been broken” (103). In keeping with fellow Canadian writer Jane Urquhart, in Alias Grace Atwood probes what it means, spatially and psychically, to be “away.” Moreover, in both Urquhart’s and Atwood’s novels, haunting and hysteria and, more specifically, double consciousness serve as tropes that attest to the devastating and traumatic losses associated with the Irish diaspora and the utopian desires bound up with immigration. Alias Grace alludes to the tensions between migration, haunting, and madness early on when Grace ponders various phrases associated with madness: “Gone mad, is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could stop into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in” (33). This powerful statement, which recalls the spatial conception of self in Urquhart’s Away, highlights the connections between the various registers associated with the concept of home outlined in the first chapter of my book: home as body; the hearth and home of the domestic sphere; and, finally, home as “native land” or nation-state. Grace’s uncanny description of madness likewise recalls Hogle’s observation cited earlier that in Gothic fictions, hauntings frequently assume the features of ghosts that “rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view” (Hogle 2). In the first chapter, I traced hauntings in which the ghost rises from within “the antiquated space,” and identified the settler-invader society’s fear of Coyote’s (re)possession of its house. By contrast, in Atwood’s diasporic narrative Alias Grace, haunting is associated with ghosts that invade the nation from “alien realms” – uncanny others who transgress the bound-

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aries of the nation, home, and the self. Alias Grace’s portrayal of haunted, doubled, and divided selves, and of the invasion of the self, links Grace’s individual experience of hysteria and possession to the more widespread social upheavals associated with the nation-state’s response to the Irish immigration. Viewed in this light, Grace’s comment that “when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in” (33) applies equally to the entry of Irish domestics into middle- and upper-class homes and, more generally, to the arrival of racialized immigrants in the Canadian nation-state. In addition to highlighting the haunting affects that spring from the threat of “the domestic interloper,” to borrow Baucom’s words (191), Atwood’s narrative also explores more prosaic forms of haunting associated with our primary modes of attachment. The latter is perhaps most evident in Grace’s description of what occurred after she woke to find a blood-soaked Mary “dead in the bed” (176). Grace tells Dr Jordan that she “fell to the floor in a dead faint”: [W]hen I did wake up I did not seem to know where I was, or what had happened; and I kept asking where Grace had gone. And when they told me that I myself was Grace, I would not believe them, but cried, and tried to run out of the house, because I said that Grace was lost, and had gone into the lake, and I needed to search for her. (180) In this passage, readers apparently encounter an instance of possession that effaces the host’s identity. In her essay on mourning, Judith Butler argues that profound experiences of loss expose the fact that individuals were never entirely separate or autonomous in the first place. Butler posits that the self is not singular, but consists of its accumulated attachments to people and places, an insight that helps to explain Grace’s profound disorientation after Mary’s death: When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these constitute who we are. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over

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here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if an attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? When we lose some of those ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. (22) Viewed in this light, Grace’s experience of losing herself on the event of Mary’s death supports my earlier suggestion that in Atwood’s narrative haunting foregrounds not only the uncanny return of or possession by the lost object, but also the inescapable loss of self that attends the loss of the other. Equally important, this scene and others like it raise crucial questions: exactly who or what is being incarnated or fabricated? Moreover, is this fabrication willed or unwilled? Put somewhat differently, are we witnessing the traumatic fracturing of Grace’s psyche or a process more closely aligned with what Stephen Greenblatt refers to as “selffashioning”? In accordance with the Gothic, Atwood’s text allows readers to grapple with numerous and sometimes antithetical explanations. One could, for instance, accept the view that Grace is literally possessed by Mary’s spirit. Understood in the context of Grace’s forced departure from Ireland and the loss of her mother during the voyage, one could also argue that Grace’s psyche compensates for the traumas that attend dispossession with illusions of re-possession that address her desire and real need for protection. Prior to her outright possession, Grace refers, for example, to her “guardian angel”: “It is a strange thing, but however deeply asleep I may be, I can always sense when there is a person come close, or watching me. It’s as if there is a part of me that never sleeps at all, but keeps one eye a little open” (261). Protection and possession go hand in hand because, as Grace explains, the arrival of her guardian angel coincided with the trauma inflicted by her physically (and possibly sexually) abusive father. As she tells Dr Jordan, her father fell into rages and pummelled her arms “black and blue, and then one night he threw me against the wall ... shouting that I was a slut and a whore, and I fainted” (129). Owing to Mary’s decision to take Grace “under her wing” and to protect Grace from her father on several occasions (149, 157), Mary serves as Grace’s maternal “guardian angel.” Even after Mary dies, Grace continues to rely on Mary for guidance. As she confesses to Dr Jordan,

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when McDermott told her he planned to kill Kinnear and Nancy, she did not tell anyone, fearing that McDermott would deny his plan and she would be dismissed as a “silly hysterical girl” (310). Instead, she “remembered Mary Whitney, and wished very much that she was there, as she would know what to do, and would help me out of my difficulties” (311). That night, Grace dreams that Mary “was standing beside the bed in her nightdress ... on the left side of her body I could see her heart ... But then I saw it was not a heart after all, but the red felt needle-case I made for her that Christmas, which I’d put in the coffin with her, under the flowers and the scattered petals; and I was glad to see she still had it with her, and hadn’t forgotten me” (312). The image of the needle case draws our attention to fabrication. Both this image and the reference to “scattered petals” recall the initial hallucinogenic illusion that Grace reports in which she sees Nancy “on her knees,” her eyes “hidden by the blood and hair,” before she “scatters into patches of colour, a drift of red cloth petals across the stones” (5–6). With respect to whether this fabrication is willed or unwilled, I would suggest that the novel ultimately refuses the either/or formulation of the question. In keeping with Freud’s notions of hysteria and of the dynamic unconscious, Alias Grace leaves readers in doubt that anyone is ever wholly in control of his or her thoughts and actions. Without resolving this productive ambiguity, it is nevertheless still possible to assert that on some level, Grace finds herself unable to face perils alone in the new world and to bear the guilt associated with outliving her mother and her best friend. As a result, and in keeping with Freud’s theories of the uncanny and of melancholia, Grace incorporates facets of Mary’s identity, thereby becoming a vessel for her disincarnate spirit.8 Grace reports to Dr Jordan, for example, that on the fateful morning of the murders, she felt “light-headed, and detached from myself, as if I was not really present, but only there in body” (315). She also recalls how later on, in the garden, she reached out her hand for some chives, but “it was as if my hand was not mine at all, but only a husk or skin, with inside it another hand growing” (317). The image of another hand growing illustrates the complications associated with determining agency in instances involving incorporation and possession, and suggests that agency, like identity, is a complex and hybrid construction. Although it remains unclear whether these transformations are spectral or willed or unwilled/ unconscious, Alias Grace maintains the possibility that the traumatic losses instigated by migration and dispossession are countered by uncan-

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ny and generative illusions of (re-)possession. Yet, by virtue of the ongoing dialogue between Grace and her proto-analyst, Dr Simon Jordan, Alias Grace underscores that the search for Grace/Mary is not so much a search for the Truth or for a true self as it is an engagement with fictionmaking and fabrication, requiring an acknowledgment of the self as both self-fashioned and constructed by social forces. Thus far, I have analyzed how the novel’s portrayal of Grace’s experience of doubleness remains ambiguous. She may be haunted and/or consciously or unconsciously deploying a strategy to acquire protection. Yet this same experience can also be viewed in terms of the type of double consciousness that arises in individuals who transgress social boundaries. In other words, Grace’s hysterical episodes also signal her divided and doubled responses to her own transgressive desires for class mobility. Her experience of “splitting” is thus more akin to the forms of “double consciousness” described by W.E.B. Du Bois in his writings about Black identity in America. According to Du Bois, who himself suffered from “nervous invalidism” (Micale, “Theorizing” 162), the experience “of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” gave rise to a sense of “two-ness ... two warring ideals in one Black body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 23). When Atwood’s novel is read in this light, it becomes significant that Grace’s consciousness initially fractures when she is forced to contend with the conflict between Mary’s bold aspirations to rise in station and the tragic results of this experiment: having been impregnated and jilted by her gentleman lover, Mary dies from a botched abortion. Later, Grace’s consciousness doubles once again when she discovers that Nancy Montgomery, following in Mary’s footsteps, has engaged in a tryst with her employer, Mr Kinnear, which elevates Nancy’s status to “mistress” of the house. After she learns about Nancy, Grace hears a voice whispering in her ear, saying, “It cannot be” (279). Grace’s unconscious negation of interclass relations – a negation that, as portrayed in Atwood’s narrative, may well have culminated in Nancy’s murder – illustrates the extent to which Grace may have internalized the prohibition concerning social mobility. Grace’s hysterical response to Nancy suggests further that Grace suffers “réssentiment,” the destructive envy the have-nots feel for the haves (Jameson 201). The ghostly whisper in Grace’s ear, however, underscores the debilitating effects of envy on marginalized groups, since in this instance réssentiment is directed at the have-nots who presume to join the haves. The process

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depicted in Alias Grace also recalls Atwood’s infamous comment that in Canada, we cut our tall poppies down. Within Alias Grace, the profound tensions concerning class mobility are perhaps most apparent in the pivotal occult hypnosis scene attended by the Governor’s family, Rev. Verringer, Dr Jordan, Jerome DuPont, and Mrs Quennell, the celebrated Spiritualist and advocate of an enlarged sphere for women.9 The latter’s presence is significant since, as Showalter observes, “traditionally, multiple personality was linked with spiritualism and reincarnation, and with mediums like Madame Blavatsky” (Hystories 160). Showalter also underscores the profound links between women’s increasing power due to spiritualism and suffrage and the hystericization of women’s bodies. The latter constitutes, she argues, a backlash against the threat posed by women’s social mobility, “a reassertion of women’s essentially biological destiny in the face of their increasingly mobile and transgressive social roles” (“Hysteria” 305). Not surprisingly, the men of reason in Atwood’s novel, Dr Jordan and Rev. Verringer – in keeping with contemporary medical historians – underplay occult interpretations of dissociation. On one occasion, Verringer and Dr Jordan aggressively dismiss the spiritualist movement and its adherents, who ranged from the famous Fox Sisters to Susanna Moodie.10 Verringer, for example, refers to spiritualism as a form of madness that “must run its course” (192) and Dr Jordan heartily concurs: Spiritualism is a craze of the middle classes, the women especially; they gather in darkened rooms and play at table-tilting the way their grandmothers played at whist, or they emit voluminous automatic writings, dictated to them by Mozart or Shakespeare ... If these people were not so well-to-do, their behaviour would get them committed. Worse, they populate their drawing rooms with fakirs and mountebanks, all of them swathed in the grubby vestments of selfproclaimed quasi-holiness, and the rules of society dictate that one must be polite to them.’ (83) For the purposes of this chapter, it is significant that Dr Jordan aligns spiritualists with “fakirs and mountebanks” and anxiously dismisses both, since both Mrs Quennell and DuPont, to a much greater extent, realize Mary Whitney’s profoundly threatening “democratic ideas” (159) concerning the lower class’s potential for social mobility.

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Although Mary only achieves mobility in death – when her spirit supposedly takes possession of Grace’s body – likely because he is a man, DuPont successfully fabricates alternative identities and experiences mobility in life. In what follows, I trace DuPont’s fate because, in conjunction with those of the female characters, it sheds light on the tension between legitimate and illegitimate modes of social reproduction and the text’s preoccupation with the ambiguity associated with the notion of identity, character, and performance. Unbeknownst to Dr Jordan, Grace first encounters Dr Jerome DuPont in the humble guise of “Jeremiah the peddler” at the home of her first employer (153). In keeping with the text’s emphasis on fabrication and its relation to identity, Jeremiah sells clothes and other wares. From him, Grace buys four bone buttons to which he adds a fifth for good luck (155). According to rumour, Jeremiah is “a Yankee with an Italian father who’d come over to work in the mills ... and his last name was Pontelli” (154). While seated in the kitchen, Jeremiah also entertains his audience of female domestic servants by performing conjuring tricks and by doing a perfect “imitation of a gentleman, with the voice and manners and all” (155). He confesses that he learned these tricks when “he was a wild lad and worked at fairs” (155). Later, when Jeremiah encounters Grace at the home of Thomas Kinnear, he warns Grace about her sexually predatory employer. He also informs Grace that he plans to stop peddling and take up mesmerism: “I could go about the fairs,” he explains, “and be a medical clairvoyant, and trade in Mesmerism and Magnetism, which is always a draw” (267). As he tells Grace, he once had a very lucrative partnership with a woman who donned a muslin veil, went into a trance and spoke in a hollow voice, telling the people what was wrong with them, “for a fee of course” (267). Before he departs, he urges Grace to join him in a similar venture: You could be a medical clairvoyant; I would teach you how, and instruct you in what to say, and put you into the trances. I know by your hand that you have a talent for it; and with your hair down you would have the right look ... You would need a different name, of course; a French one or something foreign, because the people on this side of the ocean would find it hard to believe that a woman with the plain name of Grace had mysterious powers. The unknown is always more wonderful to them than the known, and more convincing. (268)

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As Teresa Goddu observes, the rise of spiritualism in the 1840s and 1850s, illustrates how “the veiled lady served to both represent and mask the marketplace” (97). The fact that the “essential passivity of women was asserted in a public arena, displayed before thousands of witnesses” marks the lady’s central contradiction: she was both private woman and public performer (Braude 85). Although Grace refuses Jeremiah’s invitation to don the veil, both characters’ behaviour highlights the fears and desires associated with the commodified self – “a fluid social persona produced through a series of transactional performances” (Goddu 35). Like earlier gothic villains such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Welbeck, Jeremiah “coins himself a personage of opulence and rank by hiding his past and forging a fictional identity” (Goddu 33). Jeremiah, who reappears as DuPont, epitomizes this type of commodified self and clearly heeds his own advice in adopting a French name, learning the arts of mesmerism, and refashioning himself in the image of James Braid, the Scottish surgeon who extended Mesmer’s heritage.11 Like the text’s governing image of cloth flowers, Jeremiah, with his bone buttons, symbolizes the potential for fabricating multiple selves and the corollary of this activity, namely, social mobility. Ironically, when Grace first learns of Jerome’s scheme to become a medical clairvoyant and to change her name, she challenges his plan, saying, “wouldn’t that be a deception and a cheat?” (268). Jerome defends his plan, however, insisting, “no more than at the theatre. For if people wish to believe a thing, and long for it and depend on it to be true, and feel the better for it, is it cheating to help them to their own belief, by such an insubstantial thing as a name?” (268). In this way, DuPont suggests that his practice can be aligned with the positive and generative illusions produced by the theatre and, more generally, by other aesthetic practices. DuPont’s perspective highlights a pervasive theme in this study, namely, the role played by imagination and aesthetics in fashioning both individual and national identities, and the relationship between this role and the rise of commodity culture. Throughout the evening at Mrs Quennell’s, DuPont maintains his credo and plays the part of a scientifically credible hypnotist. Aware of the negative associations between mesmerism and charlatanism, DuPont aligns himself with science. Although he lays claim to the power and knowledge associated with science and thereby legitimises his method, DuPont’s efforts are subsequently cast in a very different light by the events that follow and, more important, by his response to these events. For instance, although Grace easily succumbs to neuro-

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hypnosis, when DuPont’s putatively scientific experiment is interrupted by the sounds of knocking and sharp raps, he turns to Mrs Quennell, and exclaims, “This is unconscionable ... Please request them to go away” (399). By responding to the intrusion of spirits as an empirical albeit “unconscionable” fact and by ceding authority to Mrs Quennell – he specifically asks her to “request them to go away” – DuPont drains the authority from the very masculine rational science on which he stakes his claims. Moreover, her reply comically attests to the fact that when it comes to understanding the human mind, every dog or, in this case, every theory will have its day: “‘But this is Thursday,’” she exclaims. “‘They’re used to coming on Thursdays’” (399). In this episode, scientific authority is thoroughly trounced not only because DuPont is the author of an elaborate confidence trick, but also because the real gentleman physician, Dr Jordan, finds it increasingly difficult to perform his role as a doctor. Like his celebrated patient, Grace Marks, Dr Jordan also suffers from hysteria and episodes of dissociation. By day, he plays the role of a respectable doctor, but by night he assumes the role of a sex-crazed, sadistic lover of a married woman.12 Owing to the violent duality of his psyche, at the gathering, Dr Jordan is somewhat mentally absent and distracted by lascivious thoughts of the Governor’s pretty daughter, Lydia, seated beside him. The unsettling knocking and rapping of Mrs Quennell’s extrinsic spirits mirror Dr Jordan’s intrinsic spirits – unwilled sexual fantasies that feature both Lydia and his mistress. Moreover, when he tries to speak as a physician, he is not in control of the questions that he puts to Grace. By rights, he should ask her something that would help to establish her guilt or innocence. Instead, driven by his own transgressive desires, he focuses on her sexual behaviour: “Ask her whether she ever had relations with James McDermott” (399). Dr Jordan’s lack of control mirrors that of his patient (or her “alter”) who turns the tables on her supposedly respectable doctor. Ultimately, both Grace and Dr Jordan seemingly lose control of their utterances. As the narrator explains, “After a pause, Grace laughs. Or someone laughs; it doesn’t sound like Grace” (399). The strange voice launches an interrogation that betrays astounding knowledge of sexual matters and tremendous powers of clairvoyance. After regaling the audience with tales of her sexual exploits, the voice claims that she had both McDermott and Mr Kinnear “on a string ... dancing to my tune” (300). Simon is astounded: “This voice cannot be Grace’s; yet in that case, whose voice

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is it?” (300). Ultimately, the voice cajoles Dr Jordan into solving the riddle of her “true” identity: “‘You like riddles. You know the answer. I told you it was my kerchief, the one I left to Grace’” (402). Horrified, Dr Jordan says, “‘Not Mary ... Not Mary Whitney’” (402). Like one of Freud’s reluctant female hysterics, Dr Jordan’s repeated negations furnish his interlocutor with the accurate, albeit repressed, response. As if to corroborate both his response and the existence of the spiritual realm, Dr Jordan’s utterance is followed by “a sharp clap, which appears to come from the ceiling” (402). The voice then offers what amounts to a complete confession: I told James to do it. I urged him to. I was there all along! ... With Grace, where I am now. It was so cold, lying on the floor, and I was all alone; I needed to keep warm. But Grace doesn’t know, she’s never known! ... They almost hanged her, but that would have been wrong. She knew nothing! I only borrowed her clothing for a time ... Her fleshly garment. She forgot to open the window, and so I couldn’t get out! (402–3; my emphasis) Following this confession, which conveniently fabricates an alias that renders “Grace” innocent of the murders, Mrs Quennell escorts Grace from the room, leaving the men to ponder the shocking turn of events. Initially, DuPont claims that he is “at a loss” (405). Yet, as Verringer points out, “[t]wo hundred years ago, they would not have been at a loss ... It would have been a clear case of possession” (405). Dr Jordan predictably champions more current theories. “But this is the nineteenth century,” he insists. “It may be a neurological condition” (405). Ostensibly siding with science, DuPont tacitly ignores Verringer’s point and supports Dr Jordan’s assertion by listing the scientists who previously investigated double consciousness, beginning with Dr S.L. Mitchill’s treatment of Mary Reynolds of New York in 1816 (see Hacking 154 and Crabtree 38–40). Although science seemingly triumphs over religion, in this scene, both religious and scientific arguments are ultimately trumped by the narrative’s overarching emphasis on the uncanny possibilities associated with fabrication – the idea that in consciously and unconsciously fashioning our identity we construct relationships based on affiliation that may well disrupt those based on biological models of reproduction, or “filiation,” and inheritance. Rather than maintain identities based on biology and inheritance, individuals can rely on perfor-

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mance. To borrow Mary’s words, they can “borrow each other’s clothing for a time.” In essence, DuPont’s presence in the room of esteemed gentlefolk affirms the latter possibility. In addition to successfully fabricating his identity as DuPont, a French gentleman-hypnotist, Jeremiah may well have convinced Grace to engage in an elaborate confidence trick in which she plays the part of a woman possessed and in so doing “proves” her innocence. Again, as noted previously, hysteria serves as the ideal tool to articulate the tension between legitimate and illegitimate modes of social reproduction because the disorder “hovered elusively between the organic and the psychological ... it muddled the medical and the moral, or (put yet another way) because it was ever discrediting its own credentials ... were sufferers sick or shamming?” (Porter 229). Shamming and acting are inextricably tied to hysteria because hysteria’s symptom choice “involves complex learning and imitative processes” (Porter 229). Indeed, scholars suggest that hysteria is best understood as “a mimetic disorder” because it mimics “culturally permissible expressions of distress” (Porter qtd. in Showalter, Hystories 15). Edward Shorter explains that society generates “legitimate symptoms” that, in turn, constituted “the symptom pool” from which sufferers draw in fashioning their illness. For example, fainting fits and gait disorders were prevalent symptoms in the nineteenth century, whereas we in the twenty-first century are more familiar with anorexia, bulimia, and cutting. Shorter suggests that “by defining certain symptoms as illegitimate ... a culture strongly encourages patients not to develop them or to risk being thought ‘undeserving’ individuals with no real medical problems. Accordingly there is great pressure on the unconscious mind to produce only legitimate symptoms” (qtd. in Showalter, Hystories 15). Aware perhaps of the longstanding relationship between haunting and hysteria, one doctor suggested that hysteria’s symptoms might best be described as “spectral” rather than “imaginary” (Webster qtd. in Showalter, Hystories 17). Medical historian Ilza Veith specifically locates hysteria in the context of the reproduction of societal conceptions of femininity, and observes that female hysterics reproduced hysterical symptoms in accordance with their age’s ideas: “Throughout history, the symptoms were modified by the prevailing concept of the feminine ideal. In the nineteenth century, especially, young women and girls were expected to be delicate and vulnerable both physically and emotionally, and this image was reflected in their disposition to hysteria and the nature of its symptoms. Their deli-

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cacy was enhanced by their illness, and as a result, the incidence of overt manifestations was further increased” (Veith qtd. in Showalter, “Hysteria” 330; see also Smith-Rosenberg). In Alias Grace, long before the occult trance scene, Simon Jordan must likewise decide whether Grace is “sick or shamming”: “Was Grace unconscious at the time she claimed,” he wonders, “or was she fully awake ...? How much of her story can he allow himself to believe? Is it a real case of amnesia, of the somnambulistic type, or is he the victim of a cunning imposture?” (320). Dr Bannerling informs Dr Jordan in no uncertain terms that Grace is “an accomplished actress and a most practised liar” who “amused herself with a number of supposed fits, hallucinations, caperings, warblings and the like, nothing being lacking to the impersonation but Ophelia’s wildflowers entwined in her hair” (71). In fact, several nineteenth-century physicians accepted the links between acting and hysteria, but they nevertheless maintained sympathy for their patients. In 1904, for instance, P.C. Dubois wrote that “the hysteric is an actress, a comedienne, but we must never reproach her, for she doesn’t know that she is acting” (qtd. in Showalter, “Hysteria” 320). In light of hysteria’s links to fabrication and performance, it is fitting that Alias Grace portrays Grace’s pardon and release from prison as an exercise in self-transformation and disguise. As Grace explains, I have been rescued, and now I must act like someone who has been rescued ... It was very strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated murderess any more, but seen perhaps as an innocent woman wrongly accused and imprisoned unjustly, or at least for too long a time, and an object of pity rather than of horror and fear. It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed, I am not quite used to it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face; but I suppose it will become easier in time. (443) For Grace, the Irish diaspora instigates both unwilled and willed transformations. On the one hand, as we have seen, the traumas of migration trigger unconscious defences, most obviously, incorporation. As the passage cited indicates, the Irish diaspora also paves the way for more agential and theatrical approaches to identity. Yet this passage also underscores a more pervasive and crucial feature of Alias Grace concerning the relational basis of identity. More precisely, Grace’s comments suggest that not only are we composites of all of the selves who have invaded us,

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we are also granted identity or validated in our performance by being seen and recognized as credible by others. Rather than offer a definitive statement about who Grace is or what she has or has not done, Atwood explores societal fears and desires concerning the construction of personal and national identity. It is significant in this respect that the novel concludes with an image that refers to the willed suturing of multiple identities. In her final letter to Dr Jordan, for example, Grace describes her plans for a quilt composed of scraps from her prison dress, Mary’s petticoat, and the pink and white floral fabric of Nancy’s dress. Her statement, “And so we will all be together,” ends the novel (460). In essence, her statement likens the self to a quilt of incorporated others, a microcosmic version of Canada’s “multi-cultural mosaic.” My point in drawing attention to the role of mimicry and mimesis in the creation and reproduction of hysteria is not to dismiss hysteria and hysterics as the combined work of a host of charlatans. In effect, the novel’s emphasis on ambiguity surrounding our notions of character and performance offers an important contribution to the prevailing theories about trauma.13 The trauma theory currently in vogue in the humanities posits that because the victim of a traumatic event is allegedly unable to process the experience in a normal way, he or she is left with “a ‘reality imprint’ in the brain that, in its insistent literality, testifies to the existence of a pristine and timeless historical truth undistorted or uncontaminated by subjective meaning, personal cognitive schemes, psychosocial factors, or unconscious symbolic elaboration” (Leys 7). This theory conceives of trauma victims as entirely passive, possessed by the Truth that returns in flashbacks and nightmares in the form of pristine fragments of missing history. According to Cathy Caruth, psychological trauma allegedly remains singularly enigmatic and haunting because [t]he pathology consists ... solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. And thus the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished. (4–5)

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Caruth repeatedly insists that the “traumatic nightmare” presents us with something “undistorted by repression or unconscious wish” (152). As Caruth argues, “[i]f ptsd must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history. The traumatized ... carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (5). Indeed, as Leys observes, this memory, in “its literality and unavailability for representation, becomes a sacred object or ‘icon’” (253). In contrast to this view, however, Alias Grace underscores the creation of identity through narration, even in the case of trauma. More precisely, Grace’s traumatic flashbacks, which alter according to events in the present, confirm Leys’ finding that the allegedly pure idea is, in fact, subject to “the effects of distortion and ‘contagion’ from environmental and other cues”; in other words, the “content might be true, false, or confabulated” (243). Put somewhat differently, Alias Grace suggests that traumatic events elicit responses that cannot be teased apart – those that are anti-mimetic (unwilled and reflexive) and mimetic (subject to cognitive elaboration). In many ways, the blurring of mimetic and anti-mimetic registers recalls Grace’s texts – her quilt and her narrative – which are seemingly motivated both by unconscious and conscious forces. Taken together, the connections posited between diaspora, trauma, and self-fashioning in Alias Grace call for more nuanced and socially contextualized understandings of illness and suffering that exceed the narrow limits of biomedical notions of disease, on the one hand, and shamming, on the other. Moreover, as I argue, the novel’s treatment of haunting and hysteria must also be contextualized within the prevailing, although not necessarily unified, discourses that inflect the social performances of gender, race, and class. Critics recognize that hysterics did not simply produce their symptoms in a vacuum – they learned and performed them. Scholars also note that the medical establishment, including Charcot’s infamous clinic at the Salpêtrière, was deeply invested in reproducing both hysterics and hysteria. Fabrication and performance were built into the diagnosis and not merely the disease; in this regard, the dialogic and relational construction of hysteria recalls the construction of Celtic identity in response to Anglo-Saxonism discussed in the previous chapter. Charcot himself was an artist who “did excellent drawings and was an expert in painting on china and enamel” (Ellenberger 95; see also Showalter, Hystories 31–7). While he built his reputation as a famous alienist – he was known as “the Napoleon of Neurosis” (Ellenberger 95) – he continued to maintain a pri-

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vate studio at his Paris clinic. In his attempts to identify and treat hysteria, Charcot and his interns made careful sketches of their hysterical patients during their attacks. Charcot was also the first physician to hire a full-time professional photographer, Albert Londe, and install a photographic studio at his clinic. The sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs of Charcot’s hysterics were sold throughout Europe and America. Perhaps the best known, an engraving of Charcot and his most famous hysterical patient, Blanche Wittman, hung in the lecture hall at the Salpêtrière; Freud always displayed a copy in his office (Showalter, Hystories 31). On one level, the fabricated nature of the disease sprang from the fact that the patients themselves would study Charcot’s elaborate charts which “outlined the different phases of hypnosis, the stages that the patient is expected to pass through as she performs for her male audience” (349). One patient actually stole photographs from the hospital and used the images to perfect her performance of hysterical symptoms (Gilman 349–50). As Gilman concludes, the hysterical patient “knows how to be a patient ... only from the representation of the way the physician wishes to see (and therefore to know) the patient as the vessel of a disease, not any disease, but the disease of images and imaging” (353). Gilman’s comments again underscore Atwood’s exploration of the relational nature of identity through Grace and recall Grace’s comment that, having been released from prison, she must learn to assume “a different arrangement of the face” – one that others will recognize as innocent. In addition to fabricating images of the disease, charismatic doctors such as Pierre Janet and Charcot theatrically staged the performance of hysteria (Harris 49–50). Charcot’s hysterical clinic was organized primarily around the visual, the photographic, the theatrical, and the spectacular; the working-class female hysterics, whose images were disseminated throughout Europe and America, were the “stars of Charcot’s public lectures and supermodels in his photography albums” (Showalter, Hystories 34). To their credit, the hypnotised female patients put on a spectacular show before this crowd of curiosity seekers. During his lifetime, however, Charcot was roundly criticized by the Nancy School and by lay healers and middle-class women, for abusing his female patients (see Ellenberger 96–7; Showalter, “Hysteria” 311). After his death in 1893, some claimed that he had been “a charlatan who had coached his female patients in their performances or produced their symptoms through suggestion” (Showalter, “Hysteria” 314).14 More recently, Thomas Szasz argued that hysteria itself is “not a real disease, whose

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nature has been progressively cracked, but a myth forged by psychiatry for its own greater glory” (qtd. in Porter 234). As Alias Grace’s climactic hypnosis scene demonstrates, theatricality informs all aspects of social interaction, including the supposedly objective quest of science. Indeed, as Harris reminds us, the worlds of the medical clinic and spiritualism were never entirely separate because “both shared styles of self-presentation which revelled in their virtually ‘magical’ powers” (50). Prior to hypnotising Grace, DuPont (alias Jeremiah) pointedly refers to “play-acting which has run out of control” as one of the social ills afflicting the age (301). Moreover, in keeping with Jeremiah’s observation that people want theatre, Dr Jordan admits that he is “as eager as a schoolboy at a carnival. He believes in nothing, he expects trickery and longs to discover how it is worked, but at the same time he wishes to be astonished. He knows this is a dangerous state of mind: he must preserve his objectivity” (395). Despite his professed desire to remain objective, Dr Jordan succumbs to the theatricality in this scene and, more generally, in his attempt to diagnose Grace because, as critics observe, virtually everyone associated with the hysteria craze in the nineteenth century – patients, doctors, carnival mesmerists, and lay healers – was, on some level, complicit in performing and reproducing the disease of “images and imagining” (Gilman 353). Rather than portray an individual psyche “run mad” and thereby affirm an essential connection between women and possession, Alias Grace supports Brogan’s insight that women write ghost stories that chart “the hidden passageways not only of the individual psyche but also of a people’s historical consciousness” (5). By exposing the conflicts between Rev. Verringer, Dr Jordan, Jerome DuPont, and Mrs Quennell, Alias Grace traces the historical consciousness of Upper Canadian society in the nineteenth century, and shows how possession was feminized and fabricated – in other words, how images of pathological, hysterical femininity were disseminated by a host of religious, medical, and cultural discourses. At the same time, however, Alias Grace also exposes the sordid and gritty aspects of nineteenth-century domestic affliction and the exploitation and abuse of female domestic servants. Relying on haunting images of the ocean and of cloth flowers that bleed, Alias Grace forges links between hysteria and the utopian and dystopian facets of the Irish diaspora. Ultimately, Grace attains the coveted position of mistress of her own home. In fabricating a conclusion for her novel, Atwood fills in the gaps of the actual story and hypothesizes Grace’s marriage to Jamie Walsh

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and the couple’s acquisition of a fine home in the United States. In this way, Alias Grace portrays one of the upper classes’ worst fears, since Grace rises above her station and, presumably, as a result, no one will be able to distinguish the true gentlewoman from the pretenders. In sum, if, as Ian Hacking and Mark Micale insist, our understandings of memory, hysteria, and multiple personality disorder have benefited greatly from the insights of nineteenth-century authors such as Flaubert, E.T.W. Hoffman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, and James Hogg, then Atwood’s contribution, as we have seen, lies in further refining our understanding. More precisely, Alias Grace invites a consideration of the historically entrenched relationships between the hysteria diagnosis, the impact of migration, and Irish working-class women’s experiences in the New World. By highlighting the connections among these elements through its own self-conscious play with a hysterical narrative style, Alias Grace demonstrates how cultural conceptions of memory and story-telling are radically transformed by gender-, class-, and race-inflected experiences of wandering. Moreover, by emphasizing hysteria’s paradoxical, dual locus in the body and in discourse, Atwood’s novel demonstrates that hysteria is “no longer a question of the wandering womb; it is a question of the wandering story” (Showalter, Hystories 335). In this way, the spectre of an elided or secret history – the exploitation and abuse of nineteenth-century working-class Irish women – lingers as a discursive rather than a somatic trace. As Mark Edmundson puts it, the Gothic is the art of haunting in two senses: “Gothic shows time and again that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the past ... And Gothic also sets out to haunt its audience, possess them so they can think of nothing else. They have to read it again and again to achieve some peace” (5). Thus far, in exploring the motifs of haunting and possession in contemporary Canadian literature, I have worked within the western paradigms of the Gothic, magic realism, performance, and trauma. Yet, as Dionne Brand’s writing demonstrates, while immensely useful, these frameworks have their limits. In the next chapter, I trace the ramifications of Brand’s self-reflexive narrative explorations of the muted consciousness of possessed bodies and argue that they gesture towards epistemological and ontological alternatives afforded by Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions. In effect, both chapter 5 on Brand’s writing and chapter 6 on Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water demonstrate the necessity of engaging Native and Afro-Caribbean critical paradigms.

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5 ‘The spirits call she and make their display in she’: The Trope of Possession in the Work of Dionne Brand This chapter on Brand’s corpus concludes Part II on transnational and diasporic haunting. Whereas the first two chapters in this part, on Away and Alias Grace, invoked the Irish diaspora, Brand’s work interrogates the haunting legacy of the Black diaspora. Although notions of haunting, trauma, and embodiment, which are fundamental to Urquhart’s and Atwood’s novels, are also central to Brand’s work, this chapter aims to sharpen the focus by concentrating on Brand’s engagement with a specific form of haunting – possession. I argue that throughout her corpus, Brand distills the process of possession into two gestures, an emptying-out followed by an occupation, in which the soul is evicted from the body and replaced by another’s spirit. These two gestures serve as the template for divine possession and mediumship, on the one hand, and for zombification, rape, and the logic of capitalism and slavery, on the other. In accordance with the insights of critics such as Baucom, Castricano, and Sonser, outlined in the introduction, Brand’s portrayal of slavery is an example of the workings of gothic globalism. In keeping with Steffler’s novel, Brand’s writing maps the microcosmic and macrocosmic facets of the gothic side of capitalism, which transforms living beings into commodities. Ultimately, I maintain that Brand’s reliance on the tropes of haunting and possession prompts a revision of hegemonic western paradigms of subjectivity, agency, power, and knowledge that support the operations of global capitalism. What emerges is an alternative way of knowing based on haunting, affect, and bodily experience. Owing to their emphasis on women who are possessed and informed both by ancestors (the dead who are granted agency) and by their subconscious and affec-

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tive experiences, Brand’s texts highlight ways of knowing that challenge the model of the individual and of private experience. By highlighting people’s subconscious and affective bonds, relational and intersubjective modes of being that transcend death, Brand’s texts launch an attack on what is accepted as real: specifically, the normative model of an autonomous, future-oriented, rational, self-possessed man. In this regard, Brand’s project is similar to that of Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean scholar who, as Michael Dash explains, likewise maintains a “sceptical view of the totalizing powers of the individual self ” and insists, instead, on “the need to assert a community, to write the ‘we’ into existence” (5). In keeping with Glissant, I argue that Brand also rethinks “the ideals of authority, comprehension and totalization in terms of participation, involvement and interdependence” (Dash 9). Glissant is, perhaps, most celebrated for insisting on the shift from individual imagination to group consciousness, from intention, to use Glissant’s terms, to relation (Dash 91). As Dash states, “the compulsive pursuit of the individual, of the sovereign ego is proposed by Glissant as one of the major thrusts of western thought” (91). In Glissant’s view, the west “constitutes itself by the rule of a spirituality whose most systematic intention was to isolate man, to restrict him to his roles as an individual, to confine him to himself ” (qtd. in Dash 91). For both Glissant and Brand, an important lesson for marginalized peoples from the Caribbean is “to combat this illusion of the sovereign subject,” to abandon the authoritarian or magisterial self for a relational and collective identity (Dash 95). In many ways, Brand’s writing and Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright are complementary in that they both explore, albeit from opposing sides, the traumatic and often unspeakable impact of slavery. In keeping with the other works in Part I by Watson and AndersonDargatz, Steffler’s novel invokes the tropes of haunting and possession to challenge western culture’s teleological and hierarchical master-narratives – the biblical and secular discourses that install and reify the patrilineal line, primogeniture, modernism, progress, singular identity, and the threat of degeneracy. In effect, all of the works considered in part II, by Urquhart, Atwood, and Brand, extend this challenge by relying on spectral tropes to reveal more precisely how Enlightenment notions of rational identity and autonomous agency are discursively, psychologically, and spatially encoded in the body, home, and nation-state. As we saw in the preceding chapter, Alias Grace shows how nineteenth-century,

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Upper Canadian, patriarchal, state-sanctioned biological modes of reproduction were haunted by transgressive, affiliative modes of social reproduction associated both with conscious mimicry and fabrication and with unconscious identifications born of trauma. Both the performative and the traumatic conceptions of identity-formation outlined in Atwood’s narrative undercut the ideal of the self-possessed man because they are also based on a relational approach to identity and agency – epitomized by what I described earlier as Grace’s “quilt of incorporated others.” To convey Brand’s related yet distinct challenge to the Enlightenment model of the rational, self-possessed man and the related logics of capitalism and slavery, this chapter offers an overarching exploration of the literal and figurative dimensions of possession rituals and their cultural and political repercussions as they appear throughout her entire corpus. My analysis of both the material and the metaphorical dimensions of the trope of possession in Brand’s oeuvre aims to trace the limitations associated with prior criticism that addresses the embodied, haunting, and traumatic features of her work solely within the prevailing epistemological frameworks. More precisely, I argue that theories of performativity and of trauma, which rely on poststructuralist and psychoanalytic paradigms to account for the endurance of embodied memories of slavery and of alternative Black knowledges, cannot fully account for Brand’s praxis because her texts also invoke Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and possession rituals that challenge these paradigms. In essence, I assert that Brand’s corpus portrays the multifaceted historical, cultural, and political dimensions of possession. As we will see, depictions of possession in Brand’s texts include 1) accounts of traditional possession rituals based on African religions practiced by Blacks in the diaspora; 2) references to historical and material forms of possession associated with the colonial and capitalist seizure and transformation of Africans into commodities during the slave trade; 3) portrayals of post-emancipation Black women’s struggles with dispossession and possession within the patriarchal sex-gender system; and, finally, 4) self-reflexive, counter-discursive engagements with the power of techne – film, television, and print – to (re)possess people’s minds and bodies. (In using the term techne – which is often translated as craft, craftsmanship, or art – I am referring to the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective through art.) For reasons that I explore in this chapter, Brand’s later works rely less on allusions to traditional

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possession rituals and more on the power of fiction-making itself to record the horrifying spectacle of capitalist possession and, where possible, to (re)possess her readers. In keeping with the mandate of radical literature with its debt to Enlightenment notions of revolution and freedom, Brand’s writing mobilizes the techne of postmodernity to generate a counter-discourse to the formidable spectral forces unleashed by global capitalism. Viewed in this light, Brand’s approach to the Canadian Gothic recalls that of the American Gothic since, in both cases, the essential horror springs from the genre’s latent power “to address the disenchanted world of production and the commodification of the social” (Sonser 12–13). Critics have helpfully contextualized Dionne Brand’s writing within a wide range of Black-Atlantic texts haunted by the spectre of the Middle Passage and the ghosts of trans-Atlantic slavery. In using the term “haunting,” I am referring to what Avery Gordon describes as the “living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with” (195). Gordon specifically uses the word “seething” to describe those haunting elements that make a powerful, unexpected, affective impression: “Seething ... it makes everything we do seem just as it is, charged with the occluded and forgotten past” (195). By focusing on elusive, spectral phenomena, Gordon attempts to engage with “the lost subjects of history” whose spirits continue to unsettle the present (195). Citing Raymond Williams, Gordon argues that haunting can be linked to what he terms “a structure of feeling,” an “‘actively lived and felt’ meaningful social experience as it intricately interacts with and defies our conceptions of formal, official and fixed social forms” (198). Williams’s concept is extremely helpful when parsing haunting since, as Gordon observes, it defines what Williams describes as “‘a social experience that is still in process’” and also social experiences “that are often not recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic and even isolating” (199). As Diana Brydon explains, Caribbean literature is haunted by ghosts “of slaves who died during the middle Passage, who killed themselves and others in defiance of the institution of slavery; of Caribs annihilated during the conquest; of the colonizers tied to the ruins of the places they once ruled” (216). In her memoir A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Brand refers to this type of haunting when she describes her early life in Guayguayare, Trinidad: “I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way ... I did not know what we were haunted by at the time ... But I had a visceral understanding of a wound

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much deeper than the physical” (11). For Brand, the Door of No Return – which identifies the forts located along the Guinea coast where captive Africans awaited transport to the Caribbean and the New World – serves as a synecdoche for the disaster that continues to haunt subsequent generations: The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet it exists as the ground we walk. Every gesture our bodies make somehow gestures toward this door ... The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora. Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives ... How do I know this? Only by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. (25) The statement that history “is already seated in the chair” prior to the individual’s arrival highlights the need to account for the broader historical context when considering what appears to be individual suffering or trauma. Her statement also points to the links between individual trauma and Euro-American modes of labelling and categorizing – what Baucom, discussing the practices of commodification associated with the logic of slavery, refers to as “the violence of becoming a type: a type of person ... property, commodity, money” (11). Throughout this chapter, I explore the implications of Brand’s statement and how her work depicts the manner in which individualism and rational, teleological thinking obscure alternative understandings of the body in relation to the Other and to the past. Moreover, as the narrator insists, the door exists as “a thing in fact which we don’t know about”; yet, it constitutes “the ground we walk,” and inflects “every gesture.” In contrast to “a thing,” known via “fact,” the door is known “by feeling.” In this case, embodied feeling supersedes rational and empirical knowledge because the violence and repercussions of transatlantic slavery represent the dark and unspoken facets of the Age of Enlightenment that exceed reason’s apparatus. In literature that explores slavery’s legacy, ghosts signal “a form of memory that is lived only through the body” (Brydon 217).1

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To date, Brand’s writing has generated perceptive criticism that underscores its attention to the body and its contribution to what Marlene NorbeSe Philip terms “a public genealogy of resistance”: “histories, names and places of black pain, language and opposition, which are ‘spoken with the whole body’ and present to the world, to our geography, other rhythms, other times, other spaces” (qtd. in McKittrick xxvii).2 While scholarly accounts of the embodied aspects of Brand’s work informed by poststructuralism remain extremely useful,3 as noted, Brand’s texts also self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of volatile possessed bodies associated with Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions and, in so doing, strain against the boundaries of the western frameworks out of which such critical paradigms arise. Moreover, in Brand’s writing, possession is not merely used as a metaphor; it also delineates a praxis. This praxis, while inflected by western culture and by the paradigms that accompanied the transplantation of the European traditions to the Americas, is routed and rooted in diasporic Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and knowledge. Thus, in contrast to scholars who interpret the trope of haunting in Brand’s work to a melancholy counterdiscourse that remains within the limits prescribed by hegemonic frameworks of power and knowledge, I maintain that her writing, particularly her early works, invokes the concept of possession to contest these frameworks. I argue further that significant literary and political dimensions of Brand’s writing are perhaps best elucidated in light of Afro-Caribbean possession rituals. In The Possessed and the Dispossessed, Lesley Sharp maintains that historical and other forms of knowledge and power are embedded in possession rituals so that the ritual operates as a force of resistance and change against the state. As Sharp explains, spirit possession is “significant to individual, social (as well as cultural), and political experiences” (17). Perhaps Paul Stoller puts it best when he says that spirit possession has the power to “evoke the past, manipulate the present, and provoke the future” (37). Viewed within the context of a vital global practice in which possession has demonstrated the power to transcend and transform capitalist economic relations, possession cannot be dismissed as a performance or as an archaic or oblique form of protest. Possession cults have, in fact, galvanized and sustained revolutions in Zimbabwe, Malaysia, and Madagascar. Moreover, scholars who have studied the possession cults insist on their power to “attack the real” and,

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in so doing, to transform “both local and state politics” (Stoller 20, 37).4 Both Aihwa Ong and Mary Keller, for instance, have investigated how episodes of possession countered contemporary global capitalism in Malaysia: In the 1970s, hundreds of incidents were recorded in the free-trade zones of Malaysia in which women who worked in the technologically sophisticated manufacturing plants were possessed by hantu, “spirits, often harmful to human beings, associated with a place, animal, or deceased person.” Fifteen women, possessed by a datuk, an ancestral male spirit associated with a sacred place, closed down an American-owned microelectronics factory in 1978. The possessed women were so volatile that ten male supervisors could not control one woman. (Keller 1; see also Ong) In these instances, the possessed woman becomes “a place in which the spirits exert their will, bringing to the workplace the territoriality of traditional Malay culture. Through the women a reterritorialization has occurred, creating the heterogeneous situation of an altered reality on the shop floor to which the managers must respond” (Keller 120). It is precisely these types of transformational operations that I trace in the following analysis of Brand’s reliance on the tropes of haunting and possession. In Brand’s narratives of the global Gothic, possession rituals are likewise invoked to transform the power relations associated with global capitalism. My methodology for this chapter takes as its starting point the trope of possession and analyzes how it is put to work in Brand’s writing. Section I offers a close reading of a single story, “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls” in Brand’s first short-story collection, Sans Souci (1989). This story provides a useful point of departure for the chapter’s exploration of possession since the story portrays an actual case of possession by the ancient Yoruba deity, Oya. In “Blossom,” the eponymous protagonist from Orupuche, Trinidad immigrates to Toronto and, after years of hardship, becomes a medium. My goal in section I lies in identifying the key features of possession as they appear in “Blossom” and distinguishing possession from the related concepts of performance and trauma. In section II, I examine how Brand deploys the trope of possession and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices throughout Sans Souci, her poetry collection No Language is Neutral

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(1990), and her first novel, In Another Place Not Here (1996). I would suggest that in these early works, Brand relies on the dynamics of possession to critique and transform the encrypted unconscious forces that drive both the sex-gender system and capitalism – institutions that remain haunted by the logic of slavery and that have been transported to the Canadian nation-state. To account for the persistence of this logic, section II draws on the historical and cultural materialist theories of Ian Baucom. As noted in the introduction, in Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Baucom traces the cultural and economic links between contemporary global capitalism and the origins of speculative finance in the eighteenth century. In the case of Brand’s writing, I argue that the trope of possession highlights crucial links between seemingly incommensurate cultural systems, namely, AfroCaribbean spiritual traditions and global capitalism. More precisely, within Brand’s texts, the discursive traces of possession rituals perform transformational operations by shifting the balance of power between the nation-state and the racialized Other. Critics have observed, for instance, that Brand’s writing repeatedly layers the troubling legacies of the Enlightenment – both the sufferings of and resistances to slavery and the colonization of the Caribbean – onto the more recent past (McCallum and Olbey 160). In her memoirs, however, Brand explicitly identifies possession as the common denominator that links contemporary global capitalism to the slave trade. She argues further that both global capitalism and the logic of slavery rely on two basic gestures, dispossession and possession. These gestures, in turn, produce what she terms a “psychological arrangement” that, in keeping with the dynamics of possession, entails being physically and mentally “emptied and occupied” (Map 94). As Brand explains, “The Black body is signed as physically and psychically open space ... not simply owned but constructed and occupied by other embodiments ... the Black body is a common possession, a consumer item” (39; my emphasis). At stake here is the act of “signing,” the symbolic construction of the other associated with the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. As Brand’s writing suggests, the latter continue to haunt contemporary practices of exploitation and commodification that characterize the “American capitalist experiment” (Sonser 5). As McKittrick likewise observes, one of “the many ways violence operates across gender, sexuality, and race is through multiscalar discourses of ownership: having

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‘things,’ owning lands, invading territories, possessing someone” (3; my emphasis). As Brand’s use of the term “signed” emphasizes, possessing someone can also encompass the desire for knowledge and discursive mastery of the other. This epistemological project aims to bring difference to light and, in the process, facilitates the exorcism of ethnic ghosts in the name of constructing a more heimlich self, home, and nation. Brand is not alone in conceiving of possession as the principal link between slavery and capitalism, owing to their mutual emphasis on dispossession and possession. In her study of spirit possession in feminist fictions of the diaspora, Carolyn Cooper observes, for example, that divine possession is mirrored by its subversive and materially corrupt other – zombification, a form of dispossession and possession, “that diabolical ownership of the enslaved in the material world” (64). Zombification, or spirit thievery, specifically involves the “appropriation of consciousness and destruction of will” (70). Cooper cites Erna Brobner’s 1988 novel Myal, which describes how possession has deformed Blacks in the Caribbean. As Brobner’s character Reverend Smith puts it, the colonizers have “[t]aken their knowledge of their original and natural world away from them and left them empty shells – duppies, zombies, living dead capable only of receiving orders from someone else and carrying them out” (qtd. in Cooper 70). In addition, other characters in Myal recognize that the principal tool for zombification is modern techne: most obviously, the printed word and filmic images. As the character Mr Dan states: My people have been separated from themselves, White Hen, by several means, one of them being the printed word and the ideas it carries ... Our people are now beginning to see how it and they themselves, have been used against us. Now, White Hen, now, we have people who can and are willing to correct images from the inside, destroy what should be destroyed, replace it with what it should be replaced with and put us back together, give us back ourselves to chart our course to go where we want to go. (qtd. in Cooper 76) Brand’s insistence on mobilizing a counter-discourse to colonial logic likewise springs from her awareness that her education effaced her:

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Within that writing there was never my presence ... That writing was predicated on imperial history and imperial aspirations – British or American. That imperial history included black slavery. It included the decimation of native peoples. And if the literature nurtured on this is presented to you as great art and you are absent, or the forms or shapes in which you are included are derided, then you know that this literature means to erase you or to kill you. Then you write yourself. (qtd. in Novak 273) In keeping with Black diasporic writers such as Cooper, who oppose these forms of spectral occupation, Brand invokes Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and obeah or Àjé (translated as witchcraft) that have the potential to transform the dispossessed into powerful mediums and conveyors of cultural and historical knowledge. Although these spiritual practices likewise entail being “emptied and occupied,” in Brand’s writings, the dispossessed are (re)possessed by African gods and ancestors. As Brand explains, for Africans forced into slavery and for their descendents in the diaspora, “the religious ritual across North and South America and the archipelago of being inhabited by the gods, goddesses and spirits of Africa may be another method of way finding” (Map 44). Rather than invoking ghosts to turn them into ancestors or subscribing to what Brogan terms the “masterplot” of cultural haunting that terminates with an exorcism, Brand’s fiction promotes opening oneself more fully to the relational possibilities associated with possession. This is precisely the strategy that the protagonist in “Blossom” uses to find her way. Of particular significance in Brand’s oeuvre is the shift from the early thematic treatments of possession in Sans Souci to more mythic and discursive engagements with this trope in No Language is Neutral and In Another Place Not Here. Section III addresses the implications of this shift in light of postcolonial critic Pheng Cheah’s writings on Marxism and radical literature. With the help of Cheah’s insights, I draw a comparison between Brand’s political and aesthetic efforts to expose and exorcise capitalism’s uncanny images, which are encrypted in the body, and the Enlightenment project of Bildung – a project that likewise entailed opposing modernity and incarnating the people’s “spirit” into culture. (Cheah invokes the terms Bildung and its synonym, Kulture, to recall the often overlooked positive aspects of the idealized view of Ger-

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man culture and civilization promoted by the exponents of German imperialism during the Hohenzollern and Nazi regimes.) The comparison between Afro-Caribbean spirit possession and Marxist notions of the people’s spirit is especially apt since Brand repeatedly acknowledges that Marxism is her “intellectual standpoint” (qtd. in Olbey 95; see also Wild 145). Equally important, Brand makes it clear that her early experience as an activist informed her perspective on writing: “I didn’t see writing as a career. I saw its role as making itself available to the liberation” (qtd. in Butling 79). When asked what she would have done had she not become a writer, Brand replied, “An urban guerilla in a clandestine cell red eyed and calculating which is the most urgent reason for writing” (“What” 6). Indeed, as Brendan Wild asserts, “a Marxist conception of art as a mode or practice of social critique, as a vehicle for change, binds Brand’s work to political praxis” (145). I argue further that Brand’s waning interest in practical and material engagements with possession rituals and her acceptance of secular, print-based modes of witnessing the traumas unleashed by the legacy of slavery and global capitalism can also be viewed productively in light of her experience as an activist in Grenada. As a supporter of Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement, Brand took part in the revolution to install a socialist government in Grenada.5 After the revolution was quashed by the us military in October 1983, Brand was profoundly disillusioned. She lost faith in the prospect of belonging to a particular country and of decolonizing and re-possessing the nation-state. After publicly rejecting the political machinery along with the dreams of purity and wholeness associated with the idea of the nation-state, Brand turned her attention to realizing radical literature’s potential for what might best be described as psychic decolonization and repossession. Whereas Baucom’s theories posit the existence of “the melancholy witness” who works within western frameworks to mobilize a counter-discourse to capitalism’s inhumanity, I argue that Brand’s early works transcend witnessing because they rely on the trope of possession to install the counter-discursive spirit of Afro-Caribbean Black culture in the body of mainstream Canadian literature. By contrast, Brand’s later works illustrate the type of melancholic witnessing Baucom describes. Unlike her early works, Brand’s later writing suggests that attempts to challenge the dehumanizing impact of global capitalism may well be doomed to fail. Ultimately, in section III, I argue that Brand’s most recent texts, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Map to the Door of No Return (2001), What We All

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Long For (2005), and Inventory (2006) demonstrate what happens when capitalist modes of possession are no longer powerfully challenged by alternative forms of knowledge.

Section I: “Blossom,” a Grammar of Possession As we saw in the previous chapter on Atwood’s Alias Grace, in the absence of a broader cultural and historical understanding of the trauma instigated by the Irish diaspora, the protagonist’s hysteria is conceived of by those around her merely as a symptom of an individual pathology. In contrast to this view, I argued that Grace’s hysteria and double consciousness reflect more widespread anxieties associated with immigration, social mobility, and assimilation. In effect, Alias Grace demonstrates that both the immigrant and the host-nation share the uncanny experience of “somebody else com[ing] in” (Atwood, Alias Grace 33), as alien spirits invade the body of the immigrant and the nation-state alike. By contrast, Brand’s early writing invokes haunting and possession to demonstrate the anxieties associated with immigration and to signal alternatives to assimilation – alternatives based, in this case, on retaining ties to Afro-Caribbean history and culture based on possession rituals. Since an understanding of possession rituals is integral to my argument and since the once-prevalent appearance of possession in the western world has been successfully “marginalized, medicalized, and socialized out of existence, in part because capitalism and imperialism together came to value the self-possessed man” (my emphasis; see Keller 6), it might be helpful to review the central features of these rituals. As we will see, the liberal humanist concept of the unified, autonomous, masculine subject is profoundly challenged by Brand’s invocation of Afro-Caribbean possession rituals, in which the medium’s subjectivity is effaced so that she can serve as a host for the divine spirit. Brand’s story “Blossom” traces the familiar phases of possession and invokes many of the Yoruba goddess Oya’s attributes. Typically, Afro-Caribbean possession begins with primary episodes that are involuntary, followed by a phase of more chronic bouts, and concludes with a phase in which the possessed recognizes and accepts the deity and assumes the position of medium (Lewis 83). In possession states, the spirit’s attributes do not arrive in the form of conscious thought, but as embodied cultural memory. As noted in the introduction, all of the works considered portray the installation of cultural

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memory as a spectral encounter. Moreover, as we have seen, to take possession and install the spirit of a Christian, patriarchal nation-state, the possessor must exorcise the pre-existing matriarchal and Native spirits. Possession involves what anthropologists term “soul-loss” or the “unseating of the ego” which prepares the body for its occupation by the deity (Lewis 49–51; Walker 28). This initial stage transforms the subject into “a horse” or “house” to be ridden or inhabited by a god. Whether this transformation renders the “house” heimlich or unheimlich, however, depends on the perspective of the medium and the observers. As noted in chapter 1, The Cure for Death by Lightning portrays Billy as Coyote’s unheimlich, gothic “house.” In the Haitian belief system, the explanation of possession trance provided by disciples indicates that spirits called loa have the power to take over the minds and bodies of the devotees: A loa moves into the head of an individual having first driven out “the good big angel” (gros bon ange) – one of the two souls that everyone carries in himself. The eviction of the soul is responsible for the tremblings and convulsions which characterize the opening stages of trance. Once the good angel has gone the person possessed experiences a feeling of total emptiness as though he were fainting. His head whirls, the calves of his legs tremble; he now becomes not only the vessel but also the instrument of the god. From now on it is the god’s personality and not his own which is expressed in his bearing and words. The play of his features, his gestures and even the tone of his voice all reflect the temperament and character of the god who has descended upon him. The relationship between the loa and the man seized is compared to that which joins a rider to his horse. That is why a loa is spoken of as “mounting” or “saddling” his chual (horse). (Metraux qtd. in Klauss 59) Moreover, in possession cults each deity has “a distinct character and the behavior of his devotees is determined accordingly” (Walker 28). No one has to tell possessed people how to behave, however, since “all members of the society have from childhood seen the deities manifest themselves in people” and “they are familiar with the behavior pattern of each deity” (Walker 28). As these comments concerning familiar behaviour patterns – and, more generally, the largely unconscious transmission of socially con-

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structed scripts or roles – suggest, possession seemingly overlaps with poststructuralist notions of performance and with notions of hysteria outlined in the previous chapter. Yet although possession and performance share some common elements, possession remains distinct from traditional understandings of performance. First, theories of performance do not accord legitimacy to the notion of ancestral spirits, gods, or nature spirits. Second, they implicitly or explicitly presuppose and privilege a conscious agential actor who plays a role. More precisely, possession gives credence to the notion of unconscious agency – a notion that troubles conservative understandings of individual will, guilt, and responsibility. In his groundbreaking study of possession (1930), T.K. Oesterreich identifies a key difference between possession and acting when he observes that, in the case of possession, the so-called “actor” often has no memory of the performance: “Autodescriptions of possession are ... extremely rare ... This poverty of autodescriptive narratives has a profound psychological reason which springs from the very nature of possession. We are to some extent dealing with states involving a more or less complete posterior amnesia, so that the majority of victims of possession are not in a condition to describe it” (12–13). More recently, Michel de Certeau grappled with the same enigma regarding the medium’s agency (his work concerns the mass possession of the nuns of Loudon in seventeenth-century France). He concluded that the medium’s speech is “doubly lost,” first, because the possessed person’s voice emanates from a deity and, second, because in most cases, the medium works with an attendant who witnesses and translates the meaning of the experience for the community (Writing 252). At bottom, theories of possession states and mediumship contrast with theories of performance because the former focus on an experience defined as “any complete but temporary domination of a person’s body, and the blotting of that person’s consciousness by a distinct alien power of known or unknown origin” (Keller 3–4). Rather than installing images of Black “self-possession,” Brand’s writing reflects an awareness of the dilemma described by Talal Asad, namely, that the quest for and the celebration of agency in conditions of oppression “may unwittingly imitate the very construction of subjectivity upon which the oppression rested; agency merely reverses its magical flow” (see Keller 63). In other words, a reification of individual agency would merely shore up hegemonic discourses of power and knowledge. As we will see, the waning of the connection to ancestral spirits in

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Brand’s writing results in this type of reversal and concomitant collapse of alternatives. In her early works, however, Brand, like Asad, recognizes the profound challenge to monological consciousness posed by embodied knowledge. “One does not have to subscribe to a full-blown Freudianism,” Asad writes, “to see that instinctive reaction, the docile body, and the unconscious work in their different ways, more pervasively and continuously than consciousness does. This is part of the reason why an agent’s act is more (and less) than her consciousness of it” (15). Glissant’s resistance to understanding personhood and agency in terms of the individual, and his term “relation,” apply in this instance since, for Glissant, relation is among other things a principle of narration: “what is ‘related’ is what is told. And it is also what is relayed from one person to another, forming a chain or network of narrative ‘relations’” (Britton 165). In keeping with the concept of relation, Brand’s treatment of possession highlights relation’s opposition to monologism since the former puts in the latter’s place “a plural text made up of a number of different contributions or versions, in which no one person has control of the whole story” (Britton 165). Relayed language counters an essentialist view of identity, which posits individual subjects as the origin of their language because it implies that “language is passed around a number of subjects” (Britton 165). Working against the valorization of self-possession, rationality, and conscious forms of behaviour – a legacy of the Enlightenment that continues to inform mainstream ideas about agency and identity – Brand invokes possession and raises the vexing question of how to evaluate the agency of the person whose consciousness is muted and whose volatile body is controlled by ancestral and other spirits. Following the lead of possession studies, my analysis of Brand’s work focuses less on the performance or praising the actor or uncovering the ruse than on exploring possession’s transformative capacity. This capacity is underscored in Brand’s first collection of fiction due to her selfconscious invocation of Oya, the Yoruba goddess of transformation. De Certeau likewise insists that what is at stake in the mystic’s account of possession is not so much a performance or a distinction between the truth or falsity of the spiritual encounter, but “the transformational operations”: “These stories depict relations. They do not treat statements (as would a logic) or facts (as in a historiography). They narrate relational formalities. They are accounts of transfers, or of transformational operations, within enunciative contrasts” (The Mystic 44–5). Here, too, the concept of relation is stressed. Put somewhat differently,

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possession conveys information not by conveying facts but, instead, by revealing the dynamics of power and of affective relations – what Williams, cited earlier, terms “structures of feeling.” As social experiences “still in process,” these affective structures interact with and defy “our conceptions of formal, official and fixed social forms” (qtd. in Gordon 198). In keeping with Glissant’s insights and my earlier discussions of the Gothic and magic realism, de Certeau’s comments likewise emphasize that narrative invocations of the trope of possession are less connected to truth-value than they are to altering “relational formalities.” More precisely, just as the introduction of magic realist elements in Away alters the balance between two opposing systems – Anglo-Saxonism and Celticism – episodes of possession effect similar “transformational operations,” but they are also prone to the same dangers of constructing reified, essentialized, mythological origins – a danger that is explored in Brand’s texts. Again, possession’s capacity for transformation is not predicated merely on its theatricality or the agency of the actor, but on what Keller calls the medium’s “instrumental agency” (9). Used as “an instrument” by ancestral spirits, akin to a hammer or a flute, the medium’s body serves as the conduit for politically charged historical and cultural information legitimized by an ancestral authority. In other words, the medium’s words gain force not because she is speaking, but, instead, because the voice of a recognized, authoritative, ancestral spirit is speaking through her. In specific instances, this information has had the power to challenge both colonialism’s and global capitalism’s competing modes of possession. Brand’s “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls” opens with a description of the eponymous protagonist’s home in Toronto that alerts readers to the centrality of Yoruba deities and possession rituals: “Oya and Shango and God and spirit and ordinary people was chanting and singing and jumping the place down” (31). Prior to Blossom’s transformation into a medium, as one of the many dispossessed Black female immigrant workers from the Caribbean, she struggles for several years to make a living. Shortly after arriving in the city, Blossom finds work in the home of a wealthy family. But her “white man boss-man,” a doctor, “make a grab for she” (33), and his wife, rather than side with Blossom, watches her “cut eye” (33). We are told that a “craziness fly up Blossom head and she start to go mad on them in the house” (33). In contrast to the often paralyzing impact

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of trauma and depression, this “craziness” inspires Blossom to try to drown the doctor in his swimming pool. It also prompts her to parade in front of his house, holding a placard proclaiming, “the Dr. So-and-So was a white rapist” (34). This same spirit motivates her to “rough [him] up” when he returns in his car (34). Later, Blossom finds herself possessed by a similar bout of uncanny, explosive energy when she is married to Victor, a selfish, exploitative man “really lacking in kindness,” who “had a streak of meanness when it come to woman” (36). One morning, Blossom wakes up “feeling like a old woman. Just tired” (37). Victor, on his way out to meet a friend, asks her pointedly why she isn’t at work, and, once again, “[s]omething just fly up in Blossom head and she reach for the bread knife on the table” (37). Knife in hand, Blossom chases Victor from the house, running down Vaughan Road “screaming loud, loud” (38). After spending the night crying, Blossom wakes the next morning “feeling shaky and something like spiritual” (38). For the next two weeks, she retreats to the Pentecostal Church where she was married, fasting and speaking in tongues “that she didn’t ever learn, but she understand ... The tongues saying the name, Oya. This Oya was a big spirit Blossom know from home” (38–9).6 In these episodes, Blossom’s uncanny, embodied responses to oppression support Gordon’s insight that haunting can help people to recover what James Baldwin terms the “‘evidence of things not seen,’ that paradoxical archive of stammering memory and witnessing lost souls” (Gordon 195). Blossom’s experience of possession reminds us further that “the very tangled way people sense, intuit, and experience the complexities of modern power and personhood has everything to do with the character of power itself and with what is needed to eradicate the injurious and dehumanizing conditions of modern life” (Gordon 194). Blossom might never be able to articulate the impact of slavery, racism, sexism, or the deprivations instigated by the state’s bureaucratic control. Yet her experience of possession demonstrates the haunting way these forces and other “systematic compulsions work on and through people in everyday life” (Gordon 197). Moreover, just as Blossom’s name conveys the hope of a potential flowering, haunting likewise simultaneously registers the wounds inflicted by oppressive social systems and gestures toward “some part of the missing better life and its potentialities” (Gordon 207). In Brand’s writing, the missing better life is linked to Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions. As Teresa Washington explains, Oya, the Yoruba Orisa (goddess) of transformation and wife of Shango, was especially significant to enslaved

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Africans and to their descendents living in the ìnànkálè (the lands to which Africans were forcibly exiled): “Whether wielding the Power of the Word or a man-disintegrating staff, Orisa Oya is the embodiment of purposeful transmogrification” (Washington 48–9). Unlike other female Orisa, Oya is extremely assertive. In fact, “Oya was said to have been male in the past and became female, though still exhibiting a virile personality” (Segato 10). Scholars, however, categorize Oya first and foremost as a “personification of natural forces and phenomena” (Awolalu 46). She “manifests herself in various natural forms”: “the river Niger, tornadoes, strong winds generally, breath in the lungs, fire, lightning, and buffalo” (see Gleason 1; Zauditun-Selassie 382). In addition, she is associated with specific cultural phenomena among the Yoruba people (the first to follow her), most importantly, the cult of ancestral worship known as Egungun, named after Oya’s child of the same name, as well as births and funerals. As one of Oya’s praise songs puts it: She “guards the road into the world and out of it” (qtd. in Gleason 4). Oya is also renowned for championing women. She is said to offer the leader of the market women in Yoruba communities “special protection and encouragement in negotiation with civil authorities and arbitration of disputes”; thus one may speak of Oya as “patron of feminine leadership, of persuasive charm reinforced by Àjé – an efficacious gift usually translated as ‘witchcraft’” (Gleason 1). Finally, Oya is known for her revolutionary fervour; she refuses “to stay out of areas of cult and culture preempted by male authority”: “[T]hough she might stay for a time in her corner (which is where her altars are always placed), suddenly she’s storming all over the place, a revolutionary” (Gleason 9–10). Indeed, as Michael Lambek observes, “possession provides a means for women to exercise their general moral concerns” (334). For Brand, a lesbian writer and activist concerned with women’s place and power, Oya may well have been an especially compelling deity because she wields the “Power of the Word.”7 In her account of the process of writing “Blossom,” Brand admits that she and her fellow Caribbean/Canadian writers “talked about whether we would write in the demotic or whether we would write in standard English” (qtd. in Butling 71). As she explains, “there was always the pull of the demotic,” but “Blossom” was her “first attempt at formally practicing it, and seeing if I could do it ... And I think I was successful at that” (qtd. in Butling 71, 73). In “Blossom,” then, the trope of possession marks both the content and the form, the moment when the demotic possesses standard

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English. Although Oya is identified with secrecy, she is also associated “with pointed speech” (Gleason 1). Legend has it that she keeps “a little bit of lightning hidden under her tongue, represented on her altars by a small pair of swords” (Gleason 66). In No Language is Neutral, Brand’s narrator recalls Oya’s attributes when she warns her readers: “Hush was idiom” (23) and that “[w]hat I say in any language is told in faultless/ knowledge of skin ... not in words and in words and in words learned by heart,/ ... told in secret and not in secret” (31).8 In keeping with the Door of No Return, “a thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know,” what Oya teaches Blossom “is told in faultless knowledge of skin” – embodied language. Some readers might be tempted to dismiss “Blossom” as a humorous but ultimately consoling fantasy featuring an oppressed Black woman who defeats her oppressors by calling forth exotic and primitive spirits from Africa. Alternatively, some readers might assume that Blossom goes mad.9 Readings, however, that interpret Blossom’s ordeal and the story as a whole as a theatrical performance by a woman who dupes various audiences, ranging from the white doctor to the husband to the reader, overlook the larger context and the very real material challenge posed by possession cults to hegemonic notions of subjectivity and power. More precisely, Brand’s portrayal of Blossom’s experience forces readers to contend with an alternative model of subjectivity that recalls Glissant’s concept of relation. Of course, “Blossom” is a story, but it is a story that “relates” a particular belief in spirit possession that, in one form or another, is reported throughout the world (Crapanzo 7). More important, scholars in the field rigorously and repeatedly distinguish possession from typical assumptions regarding individual pathology and fraud. In contrast to these assumptions, scholars emphasize possession’s curative and therapeutic benefits for the medium and her community.10 Observing that possession cults are dominated by women, I.M. Lewis initially postulated that these cults were “thinly disguised protest movements directed at the dominant sex” by “the politically impotent” (Lewis 26–7). More recently, anthropologists such as Klauss, Kenyon, Sered, and Sharp have revisited Lewis’s speculations and suggested, instead, that “despite the disadvantages, women may in fact be in control of an important dimension of the total religious domain. And even more ... this is understood and accepted by the men of the society, and so the participation of women [in possession cults] in no way necessarily reflects or derives from mental illness or social marginality” (Klauss

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72–3). Scholars also recognize that possession cults are directly related to the presence (or recent presence) of slavery and to rigid systems of stratification (two social classes or more) (Greenbaum qtd. in Bourguignon 31). Rather than treat possession as masking the supposedly real power relations that affect the possessed woman’s life – relations that span race, class, gender, forces of economy, desire, and politics – possession rituals are understood as constituting an axis of power that privileges the sacred and incorporates the power of the sacred instrumentally into the world (Keller 70). In Brand’s narrative, Oya’s possession of Blossom transforms the latter’s home into an “obeah house and speakeasy on Vaughan Road” where candles glow “bright on the shrine of Oya, Blossom’s mother goddess,” similarly fusing secular North America with traditional sacred space (31). Just as the Malaysian spirits found the workers in the free-trade zones, readers learn that the Yoruba goddess Oya travelled from Africa to the New World: “Quite here, Oya did search for Blossom. Quite here, she find she” (41). Echoing the Malaysian spirits that prevented the erasure of indigenous tradition and countered the forces of capitalism, in “Blossom,” Oya, the deity of the river Niger and of strong winds and tornadoes, also transmits embodied knowledge that likewise directs the protagonist’s protests against similar forces of patriarchal, capitalist exploitation. Oya’s attributes and behaviour patterns are evident in Blossom’s episodes of “craziness.” Mimicking a tornado, Blossom finds herself “flinging things left right and centre” (33). Oya’s signature elements of wind and water are also evident later when Blossom “run and dash all the people clothes in the swimming pool” (33). Oya’s power is most apparent when Blossom’s emotions fly upward like a whirlwind: “A craziness fly up in Blossom head” (38; see also 39). In keeping with Oya’s association with wind, breath, and water, Blossom’s emotional outbursts give way to a downpour of tears and, ultimately, result in a baptism: “Blossom just cry and cry and cry ... After two weeks, another feeling come; one as if Blossom dip she whole head in water and come up gasping ... During these weeks she could drink nothing but water” (38). In keeping with the Malaysian spirits that pounce on the workers’ bodies and, in the process, transform the physical and temporal dimensions within Malaysia’s free-trade zones, Oya similarly tempers and transforms Blossom’s body: “Sometimes, she [Blossom] crawling like a

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mapeepee snake; sometimes she walking tall, tall like a moco jumbie through desert and darkness, desert and darkness, upside down and sideways” (39). Possession, however, does not simply alter the body; time as well as space is transformed by Oya, since as guardian of the ancestors and founder of the cult of ancestor worship, she opens the channel between the living and the dead. Oya explicitly fractures the temporal dimension when she forces Blossom to confront the history of Black people’s suffering, an ordeal that nearly kills her: “the face of Black people suffering was so old and hoary that Blossom nearly dead. And is so she vomit. She skin wither under Suffering look; and she feel hungry and thirsty as nobody ever feel before. Pain dry out Blossom soul, until it turn to nothing” (39–40). As this passage demonstrates, the knowledge transmitted by Oya concerning Black people’s torment is primarily visceral and embodied. In this respect, Blossom’s experience of possession recalls Gordon’s account of Raymond Williams’ term a “structure of feeling,” which emerges as sensual knowledge that can be taken to be “private, idiosyncratic and even isolating” (199). Drawing on Williams, Gordon goes on to insist that haunting is “a social experience in solution as distinct from other semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (201). Precisely because haunting has not been reified as fact, as noted earlier, its relational context and transformational operations are of greater importance than its truth value. Moreover, in the episode cited above, what emerges is the opposite of individual or private experience; in many ways, Blossom’s encounter with Black people’s suffering recalls the uncanny forms of congealed social memory that seethe within Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. The cultural and philosophical implications of Brand’s invocation of Afro-Caribbean possession cults are profound because, to borrow Stoller’s words, possession “attack[s] the real” and profoundly reorients both participants and audience members alike (20). For one, the frontiers between natural and supernatural no longer exist (Walker 123). Second, possession changes our understanding of the locus and structure of subjectivity from an autonomous self to a shifting composite that spans time and space (Sharp 173). As a result, “the entire community of deracinated Africans affirms, in possession by deities who come from Africa for the occasion, its awareness of its historical origins and its belief in the continuing existence of the mythical community of the ancestors” (Walker 123). In essence, possession facili-

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tates the validation of relational modes of identity and of marginalized ways of knowing. Viewed in this light, there are similarities between the transformational operations effected by possession and magic realism. In contrast to Urquhart’s novel, in Brand’s writing, the transformational operations are not mobilized in response to a particular racist prejudice. Instead, Brand’s target is the vitiating impact of the global Gothic, which she traces to the slave trade and the rise of speculative finance in the eighteenth century. In the case of both Urqhart’s magic realist text and Brand’s global Gothic narrative, knowledge of the broader historical context is crucial: without it, their protagonists can easily be dismissed as hysterics. If a western psychological and pragmatic overlay of individual mental health were to be applied to Blossom’s behaviour, as it was to Grace Marks, then Blossom’s possession would similarly be interpreted either as crazy and maladaptive or as a guise to retaliate safely against her oppressors. Indeed, as Keller warns, should the spirits of the Malay threatened by global capitalism become extinct, then the Malay women “will only be hysterics” (121). On one level, trauma theory resonates profoundly with Brand’s depictions of haunting and of possession because both trauma theory and possession studies conceive of the body as an instrument or screen for an experience that is, to borrow de Certeau’s words, “doubly lost” (Writing 252). In Cathy Caruth’s conception of trauma, this doubleness arises because, in the first instance, the traumatic event is never registered consciously, and when it returns, it does so in the form of nightmares and flashbacks. As Caruth explains, trauma is an event that “‘has no place’ neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood” (153). Brand’s description of the Door of No Return, cited earlier, as “an absence,” a “thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know,” captures this sense of trauma’s placelessness. Yet just as performance theory cannot adequately capture the dynamics of possession, trauma theory likewise remains limited because it, too, does not credit the belief that communal gods and spirits speak through the body. Trauma theory also fails to capture the dynamics unleashed by possession because of its tendency to focus on individual notions of injury, victimization, and pathological and melancholic forms of haunting. That being said, some theorists, most obviously Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, posit a transgenerational view of trauma in which the

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secrets of ancestors are encrypted in the body of the possessed. As their translator, Nicholas Rand, explains, “The concept of the phantom moves the focus of psychoanalytic inquiry beyond the individual being analyzed because it postulates that some people unwittingly inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestor’s lives ... here symptoms do not spring from the individual’s own life experience but from someone else’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets” (Rand 166). Torok, however, explicitly describes the phantom as a result of “a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object ... the phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it ... the diverse manifestations of the phantom ... we call haunting” (qtd. in Rand 181). Their description of transgenerational haunting is thus limited to the abject psychic material of the parental object. Consequently, it does not account for the broader historical dimension – epitomized by Brand’s description in The Map to the Door of No Return of the spectre of history already seated in the chair before the individual enters the room – and the positive and therapeutic aspects of possession which are valued by the individual and her community. Within trauma theory, possession can only signal a historical “wound” to the psyche. This “wound,” in turn, can only be healed by restoring agency and consciousness to the melancholy, dissociated victim and by directing her psyche away from dead ancestors and, by extension, the past, to the living and the present. As a result, trauma theory’s implicit teleology (in keeping with psychoanalysis’s and modernism’s injunction to “make it new,” as discussed in chapter 1) pathologizes the medium’s preoccupation with ancestors as a regressive practice that attempts futilely to turn back the clock of history. Yet the temporal framework implied by possession cults and ancestral worship is not necessarily traumatic. Instead, it is in keeping with counter-discursive notions of accumulated time outlined by theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Edouard Glissant. As Ian Baucom explains, according to Benjamin, “as time passes the past does not wane but intensifies” (21).11 For his part, Glissant develops Walcott’s idea that “a linear, progressive view of history is a dangerous longing in the New World ... Glissant too eschews this view of history, which he characterizes as History with a capital ‘H,’ for a multiplicity of histories” (152). As Glissant writes, “‘Les histoires lézardent l’Histoire’ (‘histories [stories] fissure History’)” (qtd. in Dash 152). Moreover, as Lewis observes, women in possession cults often revitalize religions of “earlier ages which have been eclipsed by new faiths” (86).

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In addition to the challenges posed by possession’s temporal paradigm, its emphasis on the body and the senses of smell, taste, touch, and hearing specifically challenges western culture’s interconnected paradigms of rationality, visualization, and textualization, and the racist and sexist discourses these paradigms encode (see Stoller 15). Paradoxically, even as Brand mobilizes these paradigms within the medium of print, her writing demonstrates that they remain inadequate to account for human agency. Possession arrests western epistemology and ontology by stressing bodily senses that bypass consciousness and trigger cultural memory. As Paul Connerton explains, cultural memory cannot be “thought without a concept of habit [and] ... habit cannot be thought without a notion of bodily automatism” (qtd. in Stoller 27). In cultural memory, “the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body” (qtd. in Stoller 29). As a result, anthropologists who study possession insist on paying attention to “incorporating practices,” or “embodiment,” which include body postures, gestures, facial expression, and bodily movements (Stoller 30).12 Significantly, at the moment of crisis, Blossom does not seek the help of a psychiatrist to consolidate her rational subjectivity. Instead, she learns how to empty herself more fully so as to become suffused with the spirit of Oya.13 Initially, when confronted by the face of Black people suffering,” Blossom tries to “stone suffering” with her last ball of spit, but Suffering continues to speed toward her. Blossom changes tactics: “she roll and dance she grain-self,” transforming herself into “a hate so hard,” “a sharp, hot prickle,” she flies into Suffering’s face; the more Suffering “back back, the bigger Blossom get, until Blossom was Oya with she warrior knife, advancing” (40). Wholly possessed by Oya, Blossom “climbs into Oya lovely womb of strength and fearlessness” and learns the goddess’s sacred dance, song, and colours (40). Rather than view the womb as the seat of hysteria – a site of pathological feminine weakness – “Blossom” associates this organ with strength and courage. Viewed in light of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, Blossom’s uncanny experience signals the redemption of repressed traditional knowledge and the re-sanctification of place, ranging from the female body, to the immigrant home, to the nation-state. Through the receptive, open channel of Blossom’s “emptied and occupied body,” and through Brand’s writing more generally, Afro-Caribbean cultural memory is transported to Toronto and imprinted in the body of Canadian literature, instigating a profound change in its orientation – a queer shift from Toronto the

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Good, perceived as an alienating patriarchal Judeo-Christian space, to a matriarchal space infused with Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and haunted by Oya.

Section II: From Medium to Myth In this section, I turn to other stories in Sans Souci (named after a town in Trinidad and meaning, literally, “without cares”) and later works that less explicitly but no less potently rely on the dynamics of possession to emphasize the Black body’s capacity to be colonized – a capacity that reflects both the legacy of slavery and colonization and a relational approach to identity based on embodied Afro-Caribbean ancestral knowledge. Sans Souci highlights the persistence of and struggles between spirits, good and bad, and their ongoing contests over possession. Not surprisingly, many of Brand’s stories dealing with Trinidad in Sans Souci emphasize the indigenous spirits’ tenacious possession of the land. In “St. Mary’s Estate,” for example, the narrator observes that the spirits of dead unchristened children, called duennes, haunt a dried-out river bed by Schoener’s Road: “Not even Schoener, probably a Dutch privateer, with all his greed and wickedness, debauchery and womanburning, not even he could remove the shapes of duennes in this river bed by putting his strange name to it. It is still quiet, waiting for dusk for duennes to come out calling to play whoop” (44).14 In “Photograph,” the narrator likewise recalls how her grandmother taught them “to catch a soucouyant and a lajabless and not to answer to the ‘hoop! hoop! hoop!’ of duennes” (72). These entities attest to the persistence of AfroCaribbean spirits and magic which, owing to the Black diaspora, travel to the New World. Whereas the power of spirits to travel to the New World is celebrated in “Blossom,” the story “At the Lisbon Plate” offers a darker and far more apocalyptic account of possession. Like Blossom, the narrator of “At the Lisbon Plate,” a patron at a bar in Toronto’s Kensington Market, finds herself the recipient of powerful ancestral knowledge that disrupts her sense of space and time. This disruption can be traced to her encounter with an old woman who “sat at the crossroads, an ivory pipe stuck in her withered lips and naked as she was born” (98).15 Although the narrator recognizes that the old woman is “dangerous,” the narrator agrees to examine the old woman’s “condiments and books,” all “tied up and knotted in a piece of cloth ... A bone here and

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a fingernail there” (98). The narrative explicitly emphasizes that the old woman’s knowledge challenges the dominant paradigms of visualization and textualization. As the narrator states, “When it came to the books, it was before they had pages and the writing was with stones, which the old thing threw on the ground and read to me” (98). Following their initial meeting, the narrator realizes that she is slowly becoming possessed: “I cannot shake the old woman’s stories ... At first I didn’t mind her, but then she started to invade me like a spirit” (104). The narrator confesses that she carries around the old woman’s “juju belt,” full of “perfidious mixtures and insolent smells and her secrets”: She’s ground them up like a seasoning and she’s told me to wear them close to my skin, like a poultice. I thought nothing of it at first. A little perfume, I said, a little luxury. I now notice that I cannot take the juju off. I lift up my camisole and have a look. It’s hardly me there anymore. There’s a hole like a cave with an echo. (102) The references in this passage to holes, caves, and echoes recall the overarching preoccupation in Brand’s writing with paradoxical and affective entities such as the Door of No Return that exist only as absences. As we saw in Urquhart’s Away and Atwood’s Alias Grace, profound experiences of loss – of family, community, and nation – reveal the fact that individuals are never entirely separate or autonomous. In contrast to the monological paradigm of the self as singular, loss reveals that the self is relational and consists of its accumulated attachments to people and places. Viewed in this context, haunting and possession constitute a remedy and a consolation for the dispossessed. Yet, in the passage from “At the Lisbon Plate” cited above, Brand underscores a particular and strategic discursive attempt on the part of the dispossessed to undo the logic of slavery, which as noted earlier, relies on the basic gestures of dispossession and possession. Invoking both notions, the narrator confesses, it’s “hardly me anymore.” She has become an absence or, more precisely, an “echo” of a lost presence. Later, the narrator says that she has “practically turned into a spirit” (110). When her friend tells her that she is taking things too far, the narrator realizes it is impossible for her to stop because a “quaily skinned battle-axe” is riding on her shoulder and “whispering” in her ear (110). Although “At the Lisbon Plate,” echoes many features of “Blossom,” it differs from the latter in key respects,

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most obviously because in addition to invoking and merging with the spirits of ancestors, the narrator also views the other patrons at the bar as a palimpsest of their own victimizing ancestral spirits. When “the big white boy” arrives at the bar, for example, the narrator recognizes in him the embodied trace of his slave-trading ancestor: I would know those eyes anywhere. The last time I saw them, I was lying in the hold of a great ship leaving Conakry for the new world. It was just a glimpse, but I remember as if it were yesterday. I am a woman with a lot of time and I have waited, like shrimp wait for tide ... That hell hole stank of my own flesh before I left it, its walls mottled with my spittle and waste. For days I lived with my body rotting and the glare of those eyes keeping me alive, as I begged to die and follow my carcass. (107) In contrast to “Blossom,” which ends on a celebratory note, “At the Lisbon Plate” concludes apocalyptically with the old woman giving the narrator “the go ahead” to slaughter everyone at the bar: “Rosa, the big white boy, the professor, the moneychangers and the skin dealers, the whip handlers, the coffle makers and the boatswains, the old-timers and the young soldiers” (113). The narrator’s actions of chewing on “the stones” and “spitting into the eyes of the gathering” (113–14), recall Blossom’s confrontation with suffering. The horrific description of the witch’s revenge likewise parodically echoes the joyous possession ritual at Blossom’s home when “Oya and Shango and God and spirit and ordinary people was chanting and singing and jumping the place down” (31). As the narrator explains, “When they were all jumping and screaming, the old woman drew out her most potent juju and sprayed them all with oceans of blood which, she said, she had carried for centuries” (113–14). In essence, the rage expressed in this story and throughout the collection springs from the lethal combination of Black people’s subjection to colonial and capitalist forms of possession. Viewed in this light, the surreal accounts of possession in “Blossom” and “At the Lisbon Plate” constitute powerfully affective and counter-discursive attempts at “repossession” that, in Stoller’s words, “attack the real” (20). In this case, however, the depiction of the slaughter recalls Audre Lorde’s warning that you cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. That is, the narrative engages in the dynamics of othering by demonizing white men and violently expelling them and thereby mir-

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rors the violence unleashed by the dominant group on the Other. In keeping, then, with the European Gothic, in Brand’s early global gothic fictions, transgressive desires – most obviously the desire for revenge – are expelled. I would argue further that Brand’s formal reliance on surrealist images here and elsewhere signals the difficulty of resolving the clash between self and Other. In many ways, her treatment of the surreal recalls the writings of Edouard Glissant, whose use of Surrealism “is very much in the vein of Aimé Césaire” (Dash 2). For all of these writers, Surrealism remains central to their attempts to subvert the bourgeois and patriarchal norms that underpin both capitalist society and realist fiction. Historically, Surrealism, which began in the 1920s and whose members were initially concentrated in Paris, developed out of the earlier Dada activities, a movement whose beginnings coincided with the onset of World War One. The Dadaists believed that the reason and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expressions that appeared to eschew logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.16 Championed by André Breton, who studied medicine and psychiatry, the Surrealists rejected conventional notions of madness and relied on the practices of free association, automatic writing, and dream analysis in their attempts to alter civilization and liberate the imagination.17 In her embrace of Surrealism with its embrace of insanity, Brand again follows in the footsteps of Glissant. Contemplating the underside of “the zombified, consumerist society of Martinique,” Glissant suggests that resistance to the homogenizing socio-cultural forces of globalism’s neo-imperialism may involve becoming “‘nécessairement fous’ almost as a self-protective therapy”; as Dash puts it, where “order leads inexorably toward political absurdity and cultural extinction, insanity becomes a kind of restorative counterorder” (126). Although, as I note in the introductory chapter, it lies beyond the scope and the aims of my project to elaborate on the distinctions among the Gothic, the fantastic, magic realism, and Surrealism, it is nevertheless important to outline their distinct approaches to alternative ways of knowing in order to appreciate how they inflect Canadian tales of cultural haunting. As I suggested, the fantastic generates astonishment but the action typically takes place in a world that is not our own – somewhere down a rabbit hole or on an alien planet; hence its association with “escape.” By contrast, magic realism invites

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readers to consider the exciting possibilities associated with the multiple and often marginalized ways of understanding a world that is recognizably our own. Viewed in this way, the Gothic might be considered the shadow side of magic realism since the former shows the darker facets of a world that is also similar to our own. At stake in each is how best to resolve the tensions associated with challenges to social norms: the fantastic resolves the challenges by locating them at a distance. The Gothic renders the challenges proximate, but disarms them through the gestures of expulsion and exorcism. Magic realism likewise situates the challenges in the here and now, but effectively domesticates and drains them of power by rendering them ubiquitous and charming. Surrealism, epitomized by M.C. Escher’s interminable mazes, however, never affords a resolution because it locates the transgressive impulses and modes of perception within the psyche and locks them within. The fantastic and Surrealism thus lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. Whereas the former inspires wonder, the latter generates a delirium akin to being in a dream from which one cannot awaken.18 In an effort to liberate Black people from the corrosive logic of slavery and capitalism, Brand’s writing signals its debt to Surrealism by undermining realist conventions and championing modes of being that conventional society would view as mad. As the prevalence of female characters in Sans Souci attests, Brand’s early fiction explicitly addresses how possession, in its various forms, shapes women’s lives – lives that, as noted earlier, even after the abolition of slavery, continue to be bound by the patriarchal sex-gender system and, as a result, remain veiled by what Brand terms the “blood-stained blind of race and sex” (No Language 24). Brand’s fiction indicates that the legacy of transatlantic slavery imposed a racial-sexual categorization on Black women that resonates to this day. As McKittrick explains, the classificatory system of slavery entailed placing women “within the broader system of servitude – as an inhuman racialsexual worker, as an objectified body, as a site through which sex, violence and reproduction can be imagined and enacted, and as a captive human” (xvii; see also NorbeSe Philip). The title story “Sans Souci” offers a particularly vivid illustration of how the system takes possession of women and transforms them into zombies. “Sans Souci” offers a first-person account of a child who is raped and impregnated at the age of thirteen. For our purposes, it is significant that the depiction of the rape aligns violent sexual relations with the spectre of slavery and suggests that both rep-

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resent forms of uncanny possession. In her account of the rape, the narrator recalls how “[h]e did it as if she was not there, not herself, not how she knew herself ... From then, everyone explained the rape by saying that she was his woman ... [T]hey made her feel as if she was carrying his body around” (13). As McKittrick argues, the racial-sexual body is “territorialized, marked as ... subordinate, inhuman, rape-able, deviant, procreative, placeless” (45). Brand herself insists that the most regulated body is the Black female body: “By regulated I mean that there are specific societal functions which it is put to, quite outside of its own agency – functions which in fact deny and resist its agency” (Map 37). Both McKittrick’s and Brand’s comments are insightful. However, an understanding of possession enables readers to recognize that in “Sans Souci,” Brand is, in fact, portraying the narrator’s uncanny transformation from a child of thirteen to the “horse” or “house” of her rapist’s spirit. Here the trope of possession signals the profundity of a transformational operation predicated on soul-loss whose aim entails replacing the victim’s spirit with that of her victimizer – an operation that as Brand’s fiction demonstrates is informed by the logic of slavery. Brand’s first novel, In Another Place Not Here (1996), like her ironically titled short story “Sans Souci,” also aligns child-rape with dispossession and continues to outline the horrifying links between possession, the sex-gender system, and the institution of slavery. The novel traces the lives of three women: Verlia, an immigrant from the Caribbean to Toronto who becomes involved in the Black-Power movement and later returns to the Caribbean to volunteer in the revolution in Grenada and dies during the us invasion; Elizete, a peasant who becomes Verlia’s lover while she organizes the sugar cane workers on the island; and Abena, Verlia’s lover in Toronto, who counsels inner-city immigrant women. Like the narrator in “Sans Souci,” Elizete is only a child when she is “given” to Isaiah Ferdinand after her caregiver dies. When Elizete tries to run away from Isaiah, he whips her and at night he rapes her repeatedly: “It seem to me,” she says, “that one day I wake up under Isaiah. Isaiah ride me every night. I was a horse for his jumbie. His face was like the dead over me on the floor ... as he ride me to hell” (10). As in “Sans Souci,” Brand again relies on the trope of possession to convey the brutal and embodied force of sexual exploitation – a force that simultaneously empties and occupies the bodies and minds of its female victims. As Elizete’s subjugation by Isaiah’s whip intimates, however, the grammar that structures and facilitates the patriarchal form of possession, and

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Black women’s vulnerability or “receptivity” to it, can be traced to the prior “emptying” and “occupying” forces unleashed by slavery. As the narrator of No Language Is Neutral (1990) explains, “A morphology of rolling chain and copper gong/ Now shape this twang, falsettos of whip and air/ Rudiment this grammar” (20). This prior possession effected by slavery renders so-called normal and expected gestures of domestic tenderness between men and women, as well as the muchlauded capacity for self-possession and belonging, virtually impossible. Even when these positive features are seemingly present, they remain haunted and therefore suspect. In Another Place Not Here, Elizete lyrically addresses why notions of private property, ownership, lineage, and belonging – the basis of capitalism – have been compromised by the experience of slavery and, more precisely, the spilling of Black blood: Here, there was no belonging that was singular, no need to store up lineage or count it; all this blood was washed thick and thin, rinsed and rinsed and rubbed and licked and stained; all this blood gashed and running like rain, lavered and drenched and sprinkled and beat upon clay beds and cane grass. No belonging squared off by a fence, a post, or a gate. Not in blood, not here, here blood was long and not anything that ran only in the vein. (39) For Elizete, Black blood is a communal river that precludes the possibility of mimicking the ontology and epistemology of the self-possessed man. Elizete’s lover, Verlia, echoes these sentiments of radical dispossession when she recalls her aunt Emilia’s insistence that “We can’t own nothing ... Nothing. Black people can’t own nothing. They take it away so til we don’t know how to own it” (116–17). In her memoirs, Brand likewise insists that the structure of slavery precludes “self-possession”: “So having not ‘left,’ having no ‘destination,’ having no ‘self-possession,’ no purpose and no urgency, their departure was unexpected; and in the way that some unexpected events can be horrific, their ‘leaving,’ or rather their ‘taking,’ was horrific” (Map 21). Here she alludes to the traumatic erasure of Black people’s subjectivity and agency when they were abducted and sold into slavery. In her early writing, Brand relies on the trope of possession to drive home the embodied trauma unleashed by the combined forces of the eighteenth-century slave trade and contemporary global capitalism which, by “emptying and occupying” Black bodies, transform them into commodities (McKittrick 32). As the con-

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temporary narrator of “Sketches in transit ... going home” in Sans Souci puts it, “She, like them, had been grown for export, like sugar cane and arrowroot” (134). Ian Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic supports Brand’s insights concerning the uncanny similarities between the structure of capitalism introduced during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and contemporary global capitalism. As Baucom explains, “What we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among other violences it inflicted ... was the violence of becoming a ‘type’: a type of person ... property, commodity, money” (11). For Baucom, however, the fundamental connection between our historical moment and that of the eighteenth century’s Age of Enlightenment does not merely lie in the transformation of people into money, but, instead, in the unique spectral aspects of this type of commodification. As I suggested in the introduction, these novel spectral features are connected to the eighteenth century’s invention of new speculative money forms – the moment in which globalizing finance capital “begins to develop those stock, bond, and paper-money networks, those circuits of debt and credit financing, that ... world of imaginary and mobile property, which inaugurate an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation” (150). According to Baucom, owing to their mutual reliance on “pure money capital,” the past haunts the present, not merely rhetorically, but in a dialectical form: The hyperfinancialized late twentieth century and early twenty-first ... is not contemporary with itself alone. It accumulates, repeats, intensifies and reasserts the late eighteenth ... There is then no discrete late twentieth century or early twenty-first to speak of, only a nonsychronous contemporaneity in which an older deep-structural form inscribes, reasserts, and finds itself realized: an inordinately long twentieth century boundaried at either end by one of [a] ... transitional period of pure money capital. (30) In this passage, we hear echoes of Walter Benjamin’s and Edouard Glissant’s notion of accumulated time which, as noted earlier, does not wane, but, instead, intensifies. Baucom posits a link between this type of commodification and the work of allegory owing to the mutual “debasement” effected by both procedures upon “the ‘thingliness’ of the things on which they go to work” (18). As Baucom asserts, “whether allegorically construed or circulated as a commodity, things, in both sys-

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tems, signify not themselves but some superordinate ‘value’ – whether that value is understood as a meaning or an exchange value ... Thus the commodity is, in essence, practical allegory – allegory in the sphere of social practice” (18). Moreover, according to Baucom, in conjunction with the workings of practical allegory, the operations of discursive allegory are everywhere at work in the “speculative discourse” of the realist novel, the eighteenth century’s aesthetic counterpart to speculative finance. Although Baucom never explicitly refers to the spiritual facets of possession rituals, nevertheless, his account of commodification and its relation to allegory and realist fiction speak to possession’s primary dynamic of emptying and occupying, and the resultant arrangement in which “things” signify, in his words, “not themselves but some superordinate value.” Following Walter Benjamin, Baucom also conceives of a counterallegorical, melancholy critical project devoted to recovering or redeeming the life of the “things” lost in the process of commodification – a project that recalls Away’s exploration of the Primitivist and nostalgic impulse to redeem Celticism. Viewed in this light, Baucom’s description of a melancholy counterdiscourse can be understood as a theory of trauma and healing. Indeed, as Baucom argues, trauma theory as Cathy Caruth develops it “is undoubtedly also a theory of melancholy, a theory devoted to the unexchangeable singularity of loss and what has been lost, a theory which in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s terms incorporates its objects of loss rather than introjecting them, resolves itself to encrypt within its expressive text the exquisite corpse or corpses of its lamented dead and to guard them there” (132). Abraham and Torok contrast the operations of unconscious incorporation – the process “whereby the subject, more or less on the level of phantasy, has an object penetrate his body and keeps it ‘inside’ his body” (LaPlanche and Pontalis 211–12) – with what they view as “the ‘healthy’ introjective work of mourning which works by finally surrendering the object of loss and replacing it with some other affective attachment” (Baucom 132). According to Baucom, trauma and counterallegorical melancholia can inform fictionmaking, so as to oppose the practical and aesthetic speculative discourses that empty and occupy and transform the living into dead objects: “The counterallegorical fiction making of melancholy discourse ... sentimentalizes, romanticizes, or encrypts the facts that wound and haunt it (and which it thus finds invaluable, beyond all

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value because outside of all possibility of substitution, surrender, or exchange)” (225). As noted in the introduction and in chapter 1 on Watson’s The Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, the teleological psychoanalyst/modernist approach to trauma entails reviving the spirits of the dead in order to exorcise them. In both Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels, however, the inability to completely expel the Native spirits lends these fictions an ironic edge from which it is possible to perceive the discursively constructed nature of the spectral “intra-domestic alien.” At issue in the uncanny texts under consideration is how best to negotiate among competing models of individual, familial, and national identity. As I suggested in my analysis of the treatment of Celticism in Away, attempts on the part of marginalized groups to base their identity on an idealized and reified past run the risk of simply mirroring the epistemic violence perpetrated by the dominant group. In the previous chapter on Atwood’s Alias Grace, I discussed Caruth’s antithetical approach to trauma as a “sacred object or ‘icon’” that conveys an unspeakable Truth (see Leys 253). Drawing on Caruth’s theory, Baucom emphasizes the possibility of relying on trauma to preserve and memorialize the abject and wounded figures of history. According to Baucom, the ultimate goal of melancholy discourse is to preserve the dead. As he states, “The fantasy of both Freudian and post-Freudian accounts of melancholy (and of those theories of testimony and witness they inspire) is that melancholy ... serves to preserve, safeguard, or protect the dead by offering them an unsurrenderable, interminable, commemorative lodging within the social, political, and psychical imagination of the living” (258; my emphasis). Melancholia, like trauma, encrypts an iconic, lost object. On the one hand, Baucom’s theories concerning the accretive properties of eighteenth-century capitalism and the workings of melancholy discourse provide a useful context in which to understand Brand’s writing. On the other hand, just as earlier in this chapter, I distinguished between the concepts of performance and trauma, possession and melancholy must also be understood as distinct phenomena since, for Baucom, melancholy realism and the vital knowledge it imparts spring entirely from within hegemonic epistemological traditions. As such, melancholy constitutes the double or secret-sharer of speculative finance. The following passage powerfully illustrates both the promise and limitations of Baucom’s theory of melancholy and its connection to emerging aesthetic modes of witnessing:

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Melancholy romanticism, resolutely set against the tide of modernity, may contribute to a crucial reinvention of the human (as a type of sympathetic observer, determined to invest in and remonstrate against the sufferings of another). But if that interested observer is to exist, it must first find some vantage on history, some view from the window by which to witness the melancholy facts of history. And if these facts are lost? Inaccessible to inspection? Blocked from view? What then? The witness (and, by implication, humanity) then requires some theory of knowledge by which to render the invisible visible, some technology of displaced knowledge by which to make the work of witness possible, some way of authenticating the credibility of the melancholy facts it brings imaginatively into view. The witness requires what late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century epistemology, moral discourse, and novelistic and poetic practice [were] in the process of providing: a truth theory of lost but nevertheless present knowledge, of imaginary but credible facts, of absent but inescapable, haunting events and scenes. It requires the historical romance, the romantic history lyric, a developed theory of identification, and a remodeled account of what might constitute and be recognized as historical fact. (218–19) On one level, the necessity of a discourse that can authenticate “lost but nevertheless present knowledge” is everywhere apparent in Brand’s suggestion that the Door of No Return “exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place we do not know,” and is confirmed only “by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling” (25). In addition, in keeping with Baucom, in the absence of first-hand witnesses, Brand’s writing offers “imaginary but credible facts.” However, as I have been arguing, in her early writing, Brand’s theory of identification challenges the concepts of sympathy and empathy because it invokes the practice of spiritual possession that breaks down models of discrete or singular subjectivity. In Brand’s writing, possession indexes broad historical and social events rather than an individual pathology such as hysteria. Equally important, possession as conceived by Brand is not merely a wound that must be exposed, bandaged, and dismissed – in keeping with the psychoanalytic/modernist approach – or left gaping as a testament to the initial injury – in accordance with Caruth’s melancholy approach. Instead, in Brand’s early works, possession signals the eruption of repressed cultural memory and the creation of a channel

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through which ancestral voices can offer guidance that is integral to the preservation of a dispossessed community. In the words of Aimé Césaire: “ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche” – my mouth will be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth (qtd. in Dash 5). Unlike the stoic, melancholy witnesses described by Baucom, whose bodies provide “commemorative lodging” for the dead, the characters in Sans Souci blaze with the spirits and hatred of generations of oppressed ancestors. As we saw in “Blossom” and “At the Lisbon Plate,” this unholy wrath precedes and signifies the workings of a mystical “craziness” that transforms the characters into powerful agents of ancestral spirits. “Aren’t we all implicated in each other?” asks the narrator of The Map to the Door of No Return, a question that again emphasizes the self as a composite of multiple subjectivities – subjectivities that, in Brand’s view, are also enmeshed in and organized by the spectral forces of gothic globalism (166). For Brand, the various agonistic forms of possession supplement what Baucom describes as counterdiscursive forms of “investment” and “interest” to ensure that we are “all implicated in each other.” In Brand’s first novel, which portrays slavery as an early manifestation of global capitalism, Elizete views rage as AfroCaribbean peoples’ sole possession: “Belonging was too small, too small for their magnificent rage. They had surpassed the pettiness of their oppressors who measured origins speaking of a great patriarch and property marked out by violence, a rope, some iron; who measured time in the future only and who discarded memory like useless news. They owned the sublime territory of rage ... They saw with the bloodful clarity of rage” (42–3). In this passage, the references to oppressors who “measured origins speaking of a great patriarch” recall the relationship between haunting and the patriarchal house or family line. In keeping with Steffler’s novel, Brand’s fiction similarly addresses the microcosmic and domestic forms of haunting associated with the institution of slavery and the macrocosmic trajectories associated with more contemporary forms of gothic globalism. As in the Gothic fictions analyzed in section I, Brand’s texts battle the spirit of the master’s house with indigenous, Afro-Caribbean spirits. Elizete’s lover Verlia likewise recognizes and mobilizes the anti-teleological power of rage. However, she also realizes that Blacks in the diaspora require the additional embodied knowledge derived from the spirits: “People bring all that is useful to a new place, not only their

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bodies to wrap around a drawer, a desk, a machine, a broom handle but they bring whatever spirits will help them out. And later she learns that she is not enough for this place and they are right not to have cut themselves as sparse as she; that late at night they have chants and acts which suffice because they cannot be explained” (181). This embodied spiritual power becomes evident when Verlia is arrested for kicking a police officer during a demonstration. After she leaves the jail, she approaches the arresting officer, planning to say something eloquent along the lines of “You are nothing but an instrument of the ruling class” (184). When the words come out of her mouth, however, “it wasn’t only out of her mouth but first her finger marking his face, an old gesture marking an enemy, and then she spat on the floor in front of him. ‘Never have a day’s peace. Look for me everywhere.’ Such an old curse creeping out of her. She did not remember learning the gesture” (184). On the one hand, due to her leftist political affiliations and her collection of clippings, which critics have compared to “the fragments that characterize the materialist historiography of Benjamin” (McCallum and Olbey 161), Verlia recalls Benjamin’s and Baucom’s melancholy witness. However, she exceeds this category because her gestures are akin to those of a medium possessed by ancestral spirits that speak and act through her body; in other words, she engages in the process that Goddu terms “haunting back.” Her possession by ancestors is perhaps most apparent after Verlia returns to the Caribbean to participate in the revolution. At one point, she visits a site near L’Usine St Marie and tells Elizete, “You know how much of our people buried under this field. This place is old as water and since then Black people drown here in their own sweat” (84). Watching Verlia, Elizete recognizes her ability to serve as medium for the spirits: That was Verlia’s love, the people buried in the field ... Verlia would cry watching fields of cane or the stony remains of the sugar mills or the old tamarind tree which someone said was there since then. She understand their witness to them days and when she stand in front of them she was standing in that same time. I see she body curve in pain at these moments, the spirits rush up to hold she in their ache. Under the tamarind tree where they say many get hang, I see she turn transparent and blue in the rain-damp dirt. She had sadness enough for all their sorrow. She remember them in she body. Vein

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does remember blood. The spirits call she and make their display in she. You don’t ever live for yourself there. (84) In this passage and in Brand’s writing more generally, possession – in its positive, redemptive and negative, diabolical forms – supplements conscious knowledge by installing embodied knowledge. I chose the phrase “the spirits call she and make their display in she” as this chapter’s title because it epitomizes how possession constitutes a powerful trope in Brand’s early writing that, in keeping with the absent, unknown/known Door of No Return, is inflected both by the institution of slavery and by the alternative Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices that the colonizers and slave owners forcibly repressed. As we have seen, in Brand’s early writing, possession differs from an individual pathology such as hysteria because, in Brand’s words, history is already seated in the chair before the arrival of the individual, indicating possession’s broader social and historical dimensions. Possession is also distinct from trauma and melancholy remembrance because it is integral to transformational operations that shift the balance of power in favour of a dispossessed community. Simply put, in texts such as Sans Souci possession does more than protect and commemorate the dead; it attacks the real. In Glissant’s words, possession instigates a shift from individual intention to group consciousness or relation. Ultimately, the goal of this transformative operation is, as suggested earlier, not to repeat racism by mirroring it, but, instead, to expose the multiscalar workings and legacy of global capitalism and to challenge its basic gestures of dispossession and possession, an emptying-out followed by an occupation.

Section III: Possession, BILDUNG , and TECHNE : Media for the Ghosts and Orphans of Modernity As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Brand’s reliance on the trope of possession dramatically alters in the wake of the failure of the revolution in Grenada. As Brydon observes, Brand’s subsequent work addresses “‘the inability of power to rise to its responsibility for human decency,’ and while the history of slavery grounds her understanding of that inability ... for her the failure of the Grenadian dream of a sovereign socialism focalizes that continuing failure most dramatically” (219). Drawing on the work of Noam Chomsky, McCallum and Olbey likewise observe that “the Grenada invasion, despite the small size of the

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country, is no insignificant event, but rather signals the reinvigoration of the global offensive of transnational capitalism implemented through the exercise of us military power” (McCallum and Olbey 174). In No Language Is Neutral, the narrator states that after she came back from Grenada, she “went crazy for two years” (45). In her memoirs, Brand offers a more detailed account of her depression instigated by the failure of that dream. Recalling how she watched her friends and the leaders of the revolution being shot, Brand states, I wanted to be free. I wanted to feel as if history was not destiny. I wanted some relief from the enclosure of the Door of No Return. That’s all. But no, it had hit me in the chest and all the wind was gone out of me. It was all I could do to hold on to my mind ... You climb into a car taking you to a u.s. army base on the island. You look at your hands and you look at your feet and you don’t recognize them and you wait for what more is to be done to you. You find yourself at another base in another coming night waiting for an airplane to lift you out. But there is no you. (168) Viewed within the terms of possession, this passage suggests that Oya, goddess of wind, transformation, and revolution has literally been knocked out of her. Even the pronoun shift eerily attests to Brand’s absence; as the narrator says, there is “no you” after the us occupation. Again, this type of erasure of the self is a central facet of the ongoing dispossession instigated by the logic of slavery and capitalism. Viewed in this light, Brand’s comment recalls the narrator of “San Souci,” who comments after being raped that it was “as if she was not there, not herself, not how she knew herself ” (13). In keeping with Benjamin’s, Glissant’s, and Baucom’s theories of accumulated time, for Brand, colonialism has not ended, it has merely adapted and intensified. In the aftermath of the Grenada tragedy, Brand’s writing veers away from explicit allusions to Afro-Caribbean spirit possession as she reveals and rejects the underpinnings of belonging. In Land to Light On (1997), the narrator mournfully explains that she has found herself “framed and frozen on a shivered/ country road instead of where I thought/ I’d be in the blood/ red flame of a revolution” (6). Later, she confesses: “I’m giving up./ No offence. I was never committed. Not ever, to offices/or islands, continents, graphs, whole cloth” (47). “I don’t want no fucking country, here/ or there and all the way back ... I’m giving up on land to

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light on” (48). Whereas, as we have seen, the early stories insist on the positive aspects of Afro-Caribbean spirit possession, Brand’s later works dwell on the diabolical power of possession’s subversive other, zombification, and they gravitate toward more discursive agonistic engagements with the spectral power of techne – film, television, and print – to expose and to counter contemporary global capitalism’s transformation of people into objects. In other words, Brand ceases to invoke possession in the context of the pragmatic ideal of returning home and possessing the nation-state. This is an ideal that Verlia espouses in her efforts to liberate Grenada and that, as noted, Brand herself worked toward. In the wake of the failure of the revolution, possession becomes less material and more mythical. The origins of this shift can be found in the difference between Sans Souci and In Another Place Not Here. In the former, the narrator of “Sketches in transit ... going home” explains: “She was going home to own some place before she died” (145). The narrator in “I Used to Like the Dallas Cowboys,” expresses her political ambition to locate a home even more forcibly: “I came to join the revolution; to stop going in circles, to add my puny little woman self to an upheaval. You get tired of being a slave; you get tired of being sold here and there” (126). At the end of In Another Place Not Here, however, Verlia is herded along with her fellow revolutionaries by pounding machine guns over a cliff – the moment that marks the most explicit shift to the mythic. We are told that Verlia “leaps” to her death: “She feels nothing except the bubble of a laugh each time she breathes. Her body is cool, cool in the air. Her body has fallen away, is just a line, an electric current, the sign of lightning left after lightning, a faultless arc to the deep turquoise deep. She doesn’t need air. She’s in some other place already, less tortuous, less fleshy” (247). Like Urqhart’s and Atwood’s female protagonists, she, too, is “away.” Whereas George Elliot Clarke claims that a “Jonestown philosophy propels her death leap” (172), I argue, instead, that the narrative’s emphasis on “air,” “lightning,” and bodily transformation partially recode Verlia’s death as a sacred union with Oya. As noted, Oya, “the embodiment of purposeful transmogrification” (Washington 48–9), is known for her “revolutionary” leanings, is associated with “air,” “breath in the lungs,” and “lightning,” (see Gleason 1; Zauditu-Selassie 382). Moreover, as Cooper observes, the “ubiquitous tales of dying Africans miraculously shedding the weight of slavery to reclaim the freedom of African space testify to the authority of metaphors of transport in Afro-American/Caribbean iconography. Pos-

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sessed of divinity, the believer dares to make that liberating leap from fact and history into myth and metaphor” (64). Yet, as I argued in chapter 3 on Urquhart’s Away, there is often an opposing tension and a fall from myth back into history.19 This mythical reading is further undercut by the narrative’s strong emphasis on the tragic impact of Verlia’s death. In the next chapter, on Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, I discuss a similar tendency on the part of critics to favour mythical over realist readings although both are operative in the text. As I noted in my analysis of Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Urquhart’s Away, mythical readings are seductive because they offer consoling visions of victory over fragmentary and devastating circumstances. Yet, in many cases, accepting the myth can reinforce the repression of politically and historically informed analyses of these complex circumstances – a danger that remains evident in Brand’s Canadian tales of cultural haunting. Brand’s later writing increasingly underscores that it is hopeless for marginalized groups to rely on actual spirits to bind a dispossessed community and, in the process, to redeploy the strategies of nation-states and their material gestures of ownership and belonging. Instead, Brand opts for discursive, artistic modes of repossession that, in keeping with the dynamics of possession, “attack reality.” The final poem in No Language is Neutral (1990), for example, echoes In Another Place Not Here’s ultimate celebration of the narrator’s (re)possession of and by a powerful ancestral spirit. Like Blossom, who “climbs into Oya lovely womb of strength and fearlessness,” and like Beth in Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning who relies on her erotic connection to Nora to challenge patriarchy’s grip, the narrator of Brand’s poem aligns her emerging lesbian sexuality with a mythic possession and reterritorialization: There are saints of this ancestry too who laugh themselves like jamettes20 in the pleasure of their legs and caress their sex in mirrors. I have become myself. A woman who looks at a woman and says, here, I have found you, in this, I am blackening in my way. You ripped the world raw. It was as if another life exploded in my face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that is, my eyes, followed me to myself, touched myself

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as a place, another life, terra. They say this place does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic. I was here before. (50) Just as Oya finds Blossom “quite here,” the narrator describes how a similar, uncanny sexual force “says, here, I have found you.” Echoing Oya’s transformation of Blossom’s world, in the poem, this force likewise “exploded” her world and “ripped” it open. This force seizes the body and transforms it and, in the process, alters time and space. In keeping with Blossom’s physical metamorphosis and the transformation of her home into an obeah house, the narrator’s lesbian body (and the stanzas or rooms of the poem) become a paradoxically real and mythic “place” that “was here/ before.” In this case, the uncanny site teases out the sexual allusions associated with Blossom’s possession by Oya and, in the process, forges a “place” within literature informed by Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and queer theory. In contrast to the prevailing images of absence, erasure, and placelessness, the narrator of No Language Is Neutral ultimately identifies herself “as a place” within poetic discourse. Language serves as the medium in which she constructs a heim. In Brand’s later fiction, however, this type of joyous celebration gives way to far more despondent and pessimistic attempts to expose and challenge the spectral powers of modernity and modern techne. In the introduction, I suggested that Brand’s recasting of Black people’s struggle in terms of Afro-Caribbean spirituality recalls the Enlightenment project of Bildung or Kulture, its synonym. As McCallum and Olbey observe, Brand’s writing remains in dialogue with the Enlightenment practices of slavery and with the age’s more utopian and revolutionary efforts to resist the institution of slavery. I argue that Brand’s later writing tries to counter the darker forces of possession unleashed in the eighteenth century with the utopian forces of possession associated with Bildung or Kulture. As Pheng Cheah explains, the concept of Kulture was “a response to the shock of modernity ... More concretely, the institutions, skills, and spiritual powers of culture were seen as a shelter from and antidote to the vaporizing forces of industrial capitalist civil society and the ‘etiolation of humanity’” (Cheah, Spectral 37–8). According to Cheah, Bildung was recoded as the cultural of the well-being of the national body conceived in analogy with an individual person striving to maximize its capacities, and the Bildung of the nation-state was regarded as the condition for the cultivational relation between the state and

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its individual citizens, whether this was understood as the protection of individual civil and political freedoms or the respect for socioeconomic rights (Inhuman 7). Bildung maintains some affinity with possession because, as Cheah explains, “Bildung,” a term which has its roots in notions of agrarian cultivation, also has “religious roots in German mystical discourse from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietism that connect it explicitly to the remaking or transforming of the soul into the picture or image (Bild) of God through individual activity” (Spectral 40). Moreover, in Bildung, as in possession, the ideal form “is not separate from the process and resulting product in the same way a model is separate from its copy” (41). As Cheah explains, “A model is temporally prior and external to the copy, which is a reproduction or duplication of the original by mechanical means. In Bildung, however, the form is simultaneously a dynamic forming” (Spectral 41). In what follows, I draw on Cheah’s account of the legacy of the Enlightenment project of Bildung and its impact on radical postcolonial literature to theorize the political valence of the migration of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions into Brand’s early writing and, more importantly, to account for her increasing efforts to expose and challenge the spectral powers of modernity and modern techne in her later, more melancholic writing. Drawing on the work of Georg Lukás, Cheah observes that fictional forms, most obviously the novel, have become “the magical glue that symbolically holds together a demagicked world” (Spectral 242). Cheah argues further that through aesthetic representation, “literary culture can conjure up and reincarnate the national spirit. By giving this spirit sensuous form, the radical writer implants in his society an embryo from which will spring forth an organismic, dynamic, national public sphere that can transform the state” (258–9). Indeed, as Brand herself attests, “In each piece of work I write, I really want to own the world. Not as an imperialist, but as somebody who can speak of it and through it and for it” (qtd. in Daurio 40). As noted, it is in this sense – within art – that the narrator of No Language Is Neutral engages in transformational operations and becomes “a place.” Several critics, most obviously Brendan Wild, view Brand as a radical activist or, to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s term, an “organic intellectual,” whose “creative and non-fiction works are expositions produced in specific genres that together serve as a foundation upon which an imagined Black community can take shape. This is an imagined community with which Brand’s work is shared, rather

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than merely a constituency upon which it is focused” (Wild 157). Yet, as Cheah repeatedly reminds us, the radical writer’s power to conjure is dependent on modern knowledge and techne: Because it frees the subject from being tethered to the object’s immediate presence, modern knowledge deepens human vision and extends its reach beyond the field of immediate experience and faceto-face contact. One can know the truth about something without ever having seen it because the knowledge obtained from reading was originally empirically verified. Reading deepens how we see because concrete reality becomes penetrated or suffused by absence and the insubstantial, the spectrality of modern science and techne. Nothing evokes this deepening of visibility by techne more eerily than photography, especially in its intersection with modern print technology. (Spectral 270; my emphasis) With its emphasis on the transformation of concrete reality into absence, Cheah’s comments recall Brand’s repeated references to the spectralization of people and places – epitomized by the Door of No Return, which “casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness” (25). Cheah’s writing, however, underscores the role played by techne in this uncanny process of dispossession. Cheah argues further, however, that owing to the contemporary pervasiveness of techne, no discourse can wholly escape its spectralizing effects: “humanizing forms of solidarity are enabled by and inextricably imbricated within instrumental relations” (Inhuman 7). As noted in the chapters on Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Urquhart’s Away, a new sensibility that emerged in the late eighteenth century was associated with “a growing sense of the ghostliness of other people” (125). In keeping with the notion of accumulated time, this sensibility, like the impact of colonialism, has not waned; instead, it has intensified. In his account of Brand’s body of work and her engagement with techne (filmic or textual, nonfictional or poetic), Wild likewise appreciates the dangers of techne: “Articulations of communally held social values are disseminated through an all-embracing array of textual, visual, symbolic, and aural mediums. As such, oppositional discourse must also, and of course does, manifest itself in all mediums of communication and signification, although it can at times be stymied – or overrun – by hegemonic social paradigms” (154).

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Spectrality and competing forms of possession are thus endemic to modern forms of knowledge, according to Cheah: “Because the ability to step outside oneself that typifies a modern practical consciousness is premised upon the intrusion of the ghostly world of writing, print, and discursive space in the very heart of consciousness, a radical alterity always insists in the self-reflective act of ... Bildung regardless of the self-presence implied by concrete action, work, decisiveness, and other values of a self-determining free being” (Spectral 304). I would suggest that Brand’s waning faith in the powers of positive spiritual possession and her increasing engagement with the forces of modernity, which aligns her work more closely with Baucom’s notion of melancholy witnessing, likewise reflect an awareness of this “radical alterity” that always obtains “in the self-reflective act of Bildung.” In other words, the shift from optimism to pessimism that I have traced in Brand’s writing betrays her recognition that, on the level of techne, she has no choice but to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand ponders the power of techne, which provided her with a cognitive map of her identity and location as a Black woman in the Caribbean. Brand’s comments about the media recall Edna Brobner’s novel Myal, discussed in the introduction to this chapter. As noted, Brobner’s character Mr Dan explains that his people “have been separated from themselves ... by several means, one of them being the printed word and the ideas it carries” (qtd. in Cooper 76). Referring to the bbc broadcasts she listened to as a child living in Trinidad, Brand writes, “The world kept coming. We listened. Year in, year out ... The whole island pressed its ear against the radio, listening for itself ” (15). As Cheah argues, techne “brings the world closer and allows us to place ourselves within a larger totality” (Spectral 270). But, in this case, techne facilitated the possession of Trinidadians by the British: “Through the bbc broadcasts we were inhabited by British consciousness. We were also inhabited by an unknown self. The African. This duality was fought every day from the time one woke up to the time one fell asleep ... One had the sense that some being had to be erased and some being had to be cultivated” (17). Brand’s comments about the power of the printed word recall the description of Oya, who likewise wields the power of the word, and emphasize the importance of discourse and genre as loci for political struggle and transformation. In addition, the references to the opposi-

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tion between British consciousness and the African in this passage recall the binaries and struggles for possession and control traced in all of the works examined thus far, ranging from the settler/Native in Watson’s The Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning, to the self-possessed British gentleman/degenerate slave in Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, to the Anglo-Saxon/Primitivist Celt in Away to the biologically-determined upper class/fabricated, racialized, socially mobile lower class in Alias Grace. In Brand’s writing, this familiar figure of gothic doubleness continues to repoliticize the tropes of haunting and possession by indexing specific historical and geographic dimensions associated with colonialism in Trinidad. For Brand, the primary gothic tropes identified with colonialism include capture and (dis)possession: “Captured in one’s own body, in one’s own thoughts, to be out of possession of one’s mind; our cognitive schema is captivity” (29). Brand’s description of captivity aligns it with zombification: “the captors ... enter the captive’s body ... inhabiting them as extensions of themselves ... These captive bodies represent parts of their own bodies that they wish to rationalize or make mechanical or inhuman” (Map 30–1). Like Brobner’s character, Mr Dan, however, Brand realizes, in part, that captivity and possession have been challenged: “But what of all rebellions, emancipations, political struggles for human rights? Aren’t these part of the schema, too? Yes. Except for the perpetual retreats and recoveries. In the Diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity” (29). As Cheah explains, such ghosts are endemic to modernity since “[t]he putative nation people finds itself constitutively inscribed within a global force field that it cannot transcend or control in its efforts to return to itself ” (379). Sensitive to this struggle over techne and meaning – a struggle that takes place on the territory of the body – Brand argues that “to live in the Black Diaspora is ... to live as a fiction – a creation of empires, and also self-creation” (Map 18). Brand’s dual awareness of the ongoing schema of possession and its inherently fictive quality forces her to consider her own status as a wielder of techne, whose mind and body are also imbricated in the prior fictions of modernity and postmodernity or, as she puts it, “a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor” (19). Although she never underestimates her enemy, she nevertheless insists that to “reclaim the Black body from that domesticated captive, open space is the creative project always underway” (43). For Brand, as a

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writer, the project of reclamation or (re)possession predominantly relies on the techne of print culture. As Cheah observes: “Strictly speaking, culture itself is a form of techne because it involves the purposive shaping of objects. But as the self-recursive purposive shaping of subjects, it is also a form of individual and collective self-instrumentalization that lifts us beyond mere instrumentality, either because it points us toward moral ideals or because it is work that inspirits reality with norms” (Inhuman 6). Recalling the ability of the books that she read as a youth to possess her body, Brand argues that like a spirit, “a book asks us to embody, which at once takes us across borders of all kinds” (190). More precisely, like the spirit that mounts the medium, books ensure that we are all “implicated in each other” and transmit embodied knowledge to readers: Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitation. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story ... The fact is, I remember them only in my body. I cannot quote a single line from them, and I have not ever felt the need to return to them physically, though I always return to them as I write. (Map 192) As noted earlier, the following actants are required in possession rituals: 1) a deity, spirit, or ancestor; 2) a medium; 3) a witness or translator; and, finally, 4) a community. I would suggest that in translating this ritual to print culture, in Brand’s later writing, the book assumes the role of the spirit and the reader becomes both the medium and the translator. Somewhat paradoxically – albeit a paradox well-understood by Benedict Anderson and Pheng Cheah – the community is not present prior to the ritual, but, instead, is incarnated through the act of reading. Thus, for Brand, a passionate engagement with the world that inspires writing and reading becomes the means to instigate transformation: “To desire then, to read and translate, may also be to envy, to want to become ... Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together” (Map 194–5). In essence, Brand reads “to become” or to be transformed, and she writes so that her words can possess and transform others. Brand’s conception of writing is in this way aligned with Pheng Cheah’s description

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of Marx’s view of creative labour as a beneficial “appropriation” that rectifies the problem of alienated labour associated with capitalism and private property. As Cheah explains, for Marx, the “private relation of possession between particular individuals and things” [the property form or private property] ... violates and profanes creative labor as a purposive process properly unique to human beings, a process through which we create our universal humanity” (46). By contrast, as Cheah explains, Marx conceives of the proletarian revolution as “the reincarnation and magnification of appropriate labor into a world-historical movement against capital. It accomplishes the actualization of humanity by restoring the individual’s social being and self-activity. In the process, it destroys the property form as a defective, inadequate, and improper expression of humanity” (“The Future” 46). In her most recent writings, however, Brand’s awareness of the embodied and utopian spirit that subversive texts have and can encode is countered by a growing, pessimistic, and melancholy realization of the far more powerful forces of capitalization that appropriate people’s consciousness and will: “What is accepted with a shrug but erodes the soul, burns it like so much acid” (Map 101). The opening of Brand’s recent poem Inventory (2006) drives home the diabolical, spectral, and “acidic” power of modern techne, which remains the focus of the entire melancholy collection: We believed in nothing the black-and-white American movies buried themselves in our chests, glacial, liquid, acidic as love the way to Wyoming, the sunset in Cheyenne, the surreptitious cook fires, the uneasy sleep of cowboys, the cactus, the tumbleweed, the blankets, the homicides of Indians, lit, dimmed, lit, dimmed lit in the drawing rooms, the suicides inside us

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and the light turning to stone, inside and out, we arrived spectacular, tendering our own bodies into dreamery, as meat, as mask, as burden (3) Like evil spirits, Hollywood’s racist images seize the body and “bury” or encrypt themselves in their victims. In turn, these “spectacular” images inspire a death drive; they “lit ... the suicides inside us.” As Franz Fanon so poignantly argues, the process of colonial (dis)possession transforms Black bodies into commodities or “tender” that, in accordance with the dreams of the colonizers, assume the appearance of “mask,” “meat,” and the white man’s “burden.” In general, the shift in Brand’s works from positive images of possession to melancholic witnessing and traumatic forms of haunting signals a more despairing outlook in Brand’s writing in the face of the increasing gothic power of global capitalism to disseminate its dreams and discredit or even vaporize alternative knowledges. Possession is almost entirely absent from Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), which ranges from the 1800s to the end of the twentieth century and traces the lives of over a dozen people. On the surface, it seems as if the novel relies solely on the tropes of embodied haunting and trauma to examine the contemporary repercussions of the legacy of slavery. The narrative begins on the day the renegade slave Marie Ursule supervises the mass suicide of her fellow workers on an estate in Trinidad in 1824. Before distributing the deadly poison, Marie Ursule sends her four-year-old daughter, Bola, to safety. The traumatic impact of this event and of the institution of slavery, to which it constitutes a response, reverberate across the generations. Toward the conclusion of the novel, we learn about the life of a young girl, born in 1982, also named Bola, who maintains an uncanny connection with spirits. Bola is abandoned by her mother, Eula, and sent back to Trinidad to live with her grandmother, the only mother she ever knows. When the latter dies suddenly, Bola descends into what others interpret as madness. Unlike all of the other characters who have no memory of the Door of No Return, Bola serves as “a vessel of memory and knowledge in that she witnesses the ghost-worlds spawned by her parents’ suffering and trauma” (Johnson 9).

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In fact, traces of embodied Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions do surface in Brand’s account of Bola, yet they remain so cryptic that they go unrecognized both within the text and in critical commentary on the novel. In his study of Yoruba beliefs and sacrificial rites, J Omosade Awolalu remarks that to the Yoruba, “survival after death is not a matter for argument or speculation, it is an axiom of life” (62). In keeping with Afro-Caribbean faith in the after-life and in reincarnation, after Bola’s grandmother dies, Bola insists that Mama “had not died but had gone into another shape” (262). Bola is so adamant that her Mama has returned in the form of a ladybug that her sisters (her aunts, in fact) cannot convince her otherwise. Ultimately, Bola forces them to “agree that it [a ladybug] was dear Mama [and] we carried her in turns” (265). In this instance, however, the Afro-Caribbean belief in reincarnation is viewed as a hysterical disavowal of loss. Omosade Awolalu argues further that the Yoruba never believe that their ancestors have lost their senses: “rather the people strongly believe that the ancestors can see, hear, feel and have human emotions” (62). Bola likewise clings to the belief that there is “a communion and a communication going on all the time between those that have gone into the life beyond and those that are here on earth” (62). In contrast to her aunts whom she calls her sisters and who, like a Greek chorus, repeatedly intone, “Well, that’s the end of that” (275), Bola maintains a connection with her Mama. When she visits the Paradise cemetery, for instance, Bola initiates a conversation; as she says, she knew her mother “was listening” (266). After years of visiting the cemetery, Bola tells us that her “devotion paid off because my mother came out and sat beside me on the grave” (266). Bola subsequently lures her mother’s spirit home so that Bola can look after her. In another context, Bola’s eccentric behaviour might be understood as a legitimate and honourable form of ancestor worship. In another place and time, her abilities as a medium might earn her an elevated status as an Egungun, since it is through the latter that “the spirit of a particular ancestor may be invoked to assume a material form and to appear singly and speak to the living children and widows, bringing them assurance of the spiritual care and blessings which they desire” (Omosade 66). But when Bola performs this sacred function, informing her sister about “some message our mother had sent her,” they respond by telling Bola to shut up and by threatening her: “They going to lock you up if you don’t shut up” (268).

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In their eyes, Bola is not a gifted medium, an Egungun maintaining traditional beliefs and ensuring that the channel between the living and the dead remains open. She is merely crazy: “She’s mad,” her aunt says; “I wash my hands of her” (275). In this respect, Bola’s fate both within the text and within critical accounts confirms Keller’s warning, cited earlier, that should the spirits of the Malay threatened by global capitalism become extinct, then the Malay women “will only be hysterics” (121).21 Ironically, owing to the loss of the body of ancestral knowledge, it is Bola “who turned into a ghost” (278). Bola’s plight offers another way to conceive of Marie Ursule’s progeny and, more generally, of Brand’s conception of (dis)possessed, racialized, marginalized diasporic peoples in contemporary capitalist society: they are the spiritual and material ghosts and orphans of modernity. As Brand writes in her memoirs: “I am adrift, spilled out ... at the end of this century in any city all over the world with nothing as certain as Marie Ursule coming. We are all abandoned, all scattered in Marie Ursule’s hopelessness and her skill” (211). In fact, Brand dedicates a section of her memoirs to “[t]his spirit abandoned by all mothers, fathers, all known progenitors” (214). Brand is not alone in envisioning dispossessed peoples in the wake of modernity as orphans and ghosts. As the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Anata Toer puts it: “modernity is the solitude ... of orphaned humanity, impelled to free itself from all contingent ties ... custom, blood, even the earth, and if need be, from others of its kind” (qtd. in Cheah, Spectral 284). Pramoedya Anata Toer argues further, however, that “this solipsistic definition of freedom as the feeling of being without responsibilities other than the responsibility for one’s own actions and a freedom from reliance on others ... is limited and limiting ... It has no concrete political objectives or a larger plan” (qtd. in Cheah, Spectral 285). Pramoedya Anata Toer’s warning about basing the idea of freedom on the fantasy of a person who is solely responsible for himself recalls my earlier discussion concerning the limitations associated with the liberal humanist concept of the “self-possessed man.” Brand’s recent novel What We All Long For embodies this chilling form of orphaned humanity in the character Quy, a boy who is tragically separated from his parents as they flee from Vietnam by boat. His narrative erupts and interrupts the stories of four youths in Toronto who have, along with their families, immigrated to the New World and are struggling to make a home in Toronto. Quy’s ghostliness is marked both by his uncanny and haunting derailment of the text and by his zombie-like face – a face

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that, by his own account, looks like everyone else’s in the refugee camp: “I’ve seen the pictures. We look as one face – no particular personal aspect, no individual ambition. All one” (9). As he says, “I spent seven years at Pulau Bidong as an orphan ... Do you recognize me? I’m the one who is smiling brilliantly less and less and then giving up on that more and more. I don’t suppose it showed up in the pictures. Bidong became my home” (9). Quy’s brutal and selfish outlook as he grows up likewise confirms Pramoedya Anata Toer’s and Cheah’s insights about the solipsistic notion of freedom in modernity. He is akin to the abandoned spirits conjured by Brand in her memoirs: “These shake with dispossession and bargain, then change their minds ... Whatever is offered or ceded is not the thing, not enough, cannot grant their easement” (Map 215). In What We All Long For, however, there is no recourse to nostalgia or to ancestral knowledge to counter the terms of capitalist possession.22 Instead, there is only techne, the artist’s imagination, her passion, including rage, and the desire to counter the forces of global capitalism that turn people like Quy into zombies. Early on, the narrative introduces a crew of young, mixed-race graffiti artists whose endeavour to “fill in the details of the city’s outlines” contributes to this project (134). As the narrator explains, “They saw their work – writing tags and signatures – as painting radical images against the dying poetics of the anglicized city” (134). Similarly, Tuyen, the lesbian daughter of the family that fled Vietnam, is an installation artist with “a growing reputation in the avantgarde scene” (18). Owing to her surrealist bent, Tuyen is described as a Dadaist who makes “everything useful useless and vice versa in her chaotic apartment” (68). Here again, Brand signals her ongoing debt to Surrealism. Initially, readers witness Tuyen in her apartment, which doubles as a gallery, at work on a lobaio, which, as she tells her friend Carla, is a signpost. When this project is completed, Tuyen plans to invite the audience to post messages to the city (17). Tuyen is also at work on another project that develops from what she calls her “book of longings.” Tuyen created this book by travelling through the city and asking strangers what they longed for and writing down their responses. As she explains, “the city was full of longings and she wanted to make them public” (151). In both of her projects, Tuyen serves as a medium to express the desires of the city’s multi-ethnic community. Tuyen’s first encounter with longing, however, is not aesthetic and can be traced directly to her parents’ grief as they write countless letters and send thousands of dollars overseas in a futile effort to retrieve their lost son.

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As Tuyen explains, he was a ghost in her childhood, the unseen, the ununderstood ... Throughout her childhood Quy had looked at her from every mantel, every surface” (267). His face is the image of the dispossessed other that haunts modern society. In this narrative, however, there are no ancestors or deities to challenge his dispossession – there is only the artist with her secular powers. In What We All Long For, spectres and loss are not restricted to an isolated family. Tuyan’s friend Carla is also haunted by a ghost. In her case, the ghost is her own mother, Angie, an Italian who defied the racist codes of her family and the city and took a Black man, Derek, as her lover. When Derek abandoned Angie and her two children, Angie placed her infant son in her daughter Carla’s arms and jumped off the balcony. By arranging her life so that there was a “clear empty path to Angie as a living being” (111), like Bola in At the Full and Change of the Moon, Carla haunts her mother. As Carla explains, “Why should Angie disappear, what had she done? She had, yes, crossed a border. But wasn’t that daring! Wasn’t it hopeful? How come she had to disappear for it?” (112). In an episode that recalls Blossom’s crazy outburst, Carla confronts her father Derek for his part in her mother’s suicide: “A glass flew out of Carla’s hand uncontrollably” and it hit the wall beside her father’s head (254). As the narrator explains, Carla “was enraged; she felt as if she had completely lost control of her body. Or rather, she thought later, gained control of her body” (254). After informing Derek that he made Angie “walk off the edge of a building,” Carla flies at him, “slapping his face and kicking him ... he tried to fight her off, but she seemed stronger” (255–6). It is this whirlwind of wrath that ultimately frees Carla not from the memory, but from the pain associated with her mother’s death, and inspires Carla to “live her life” (316). Without directly linking Carla’s surge of wrath to possession or to Oya, the goddess of transformation, Brand nevertheless emphasizes that rage can still revitalize melancholy witnesses and transform their lives and those of others. The novel concludes with Carla envisioning a celebration that highlights the dream of community and the healing potential afforded by art making: “Tomorrow, she would have everyone over. She longed to hear Tuyen chipping and chiseling away next door” (319). Although the novel does not gesture to alternative spiritual practices and possession rituals, it nevertheless suggests that artists have the power to engage in transformational operations that generate a sense of home and community for displaced individuals.

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To conclude, in exploring Brand’s use of the trope of possession, this chapter traces a profound shift in Brand’s writing from overt thematic treatments of possession to far more mythic, allusive, and secular efforts to engage with techne to counter the spectralizing forces of modernity. For Brand, however, this project has grown increasingly less utopian in the wake of the failed revolution in Grenada, and as global capitalism accelerates its death drive. As the narrator of Inventory’s final poem puts it, “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job” (100). Instead, her job is “to revise and to revise this bristling list, / hourly” (100) and to witness global atrocities. Although she parodically invokes the medium’s role as a vessel for the ancestral and divine spirits, Brand’s narrator eschews transformational operations in favour of gathering the facts, and portrays herself finally as a post-apocalyptic medium and melancholy witness,23 with “atomic openings in [her] ... chest / to hold the wounded” (100). As I have suggested, the latter’s position has strong similarities to Baucom’s portrait of the melancholic witness. Unlike the dispossessed narrator of “Blossom” or the narrator of “At the Lisbon Plate,” who lifts up her camisole to reveal a similar hole in her chest like a cave, Inventory’s narrator is not re-possessed by a powerful matriarchal Afro-Caribbean spirit; in this instance, spirits from the Caribbean do not “call she and make their display in she” (84). As a result, Inventory’s narrative remains a melancholy witness to gothic globalism – a witness who, in Baucom’s words, “encrypts the facts that wound and haunt it” and provides the dead with “an unsurrenderable, interminable, commemorative lodging within the social political, and psychical imagination of the living” (255, 258). The next chapter examines Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, a novel that, in keeping with the other works under consideration, links haunting to the unresolved crimes against marginalized peoples. The ability to view haunting as a potentially positive and life-affirming experience ties Brand’s fiction to Tom King’s Truth and Bright Water. In addition, both Brand and King emphasize the artist’s ability to wield the power of the word to repossess displaced individuals and renew the bonds of community. In keeping with this chapter’s analysis of haunting in Brand’s writing, in my exploration of King’s fiction, I conceive of haunting in his writing as a liminal, intermediate, or transitional phenomenon that maintains both negative and positive valences. In essence, Truth and Bright Water offers a powerful rejoinder to Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning,

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which portray the spirits of Coyote and Native peoples primarily as malevolent revenants, although traces of their victimization and their resulting wounds can still be discerned. In King’s Truth and Bright Water, ghosts and the land on which they wander serve as transitional phenomena that fuse two seemingly opposite elements: traces of the traumatic impact of first contact and of subsequent crimes against Native peoples – the eerie trail of blood that cannot be erased – and traces of Native cultural practices with the potential to grapple with the devastation wrought by the settler-invaders. Unlike Brand’s works, which ultimately reject the alternative spiritual practices associated with Afro-Caribbean possession rituals, King’s fiction continues to rely on Native North American spiritual traditions to emphasize that the complete cycle of destruction and victimization also includes the capacity for restoration and repair.

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6 Ghost Play: The Use of Transitional Phenomena in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water

Like Watson’s Double Hook and Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning – the focus of chapter 1 – Cherokee/Greek/German Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999) invokes the spirit of Coyote and ghosts to trace the impact of the dispossession of North American Native peoples. Unlike the former novels, however, Truth and Bright Water infuses a tale of cultural haunting with a tragicomic trickster sensibility to examine the repeated failures of those in authority to safeguard the land, culture, and lives of Native peoples. Yet even as it documents these failures, King’s novel investigates the trickster-inspired possibility that Native peoples and their ways of life are not irrevocably gone and, hence, do not conform to western society’s stereotype of the doomed Indian. Instead, Truth and Bright Water suggests that they have merely vanished – a process less akin to a death and more like an optical illusion that has been perpetrated by the settler society, which continually needs to displace and erase Native people’s presence in order to feel at home in the New World. King’s narrative playfully subverts western culture’s terminal creed of the disappearing Native by offering readers alternative, generative illusions that emphasize the repatriation and renewal of Native people’s sacred objects, beliefs, and culture. King’s reliance on spectres to emphasize the importance of vision, perspective, and illusion with respect to the fate of Native North Americans is particularly appropriate given that the word, with its roots in the Latin “specere” (to look), has obvious appeal as a way of exploring representations of race and gender within a symbolic system largely based on presumed physiological and, hence, visual differences.

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I chose to conclude my study with a close reading of King’s novel because, of all the works considered, Truth and Bright Water relies on the trope of haunting to mount the most radical challenge to the settler-invader’s temporal and spatial frameworks. In keeping with the works examined in Part I, Truth and Bright Water subverts the settlersociety’s teleological narrative of progress by doubling back to the historical trauma associated with first contact. In King’s narrative, the uncanny return of Native spirits gestures simultaneously to death and the past – by recalling the ongoing dispossession and displacement of Native North Americans – and to life and the present – by emphasizing the continuation of Native histories, beliefs, rituals, and lives that have been elided by the dominant group. In addition to revising the temporal map, King’s novel offers an equally forceful challenge to the settler’s spatial and ontological paradigm of the self-possessed, autonomous man by emphasizing alternative relational conceptions of identity that efface distinctions between self and other, and entertain the possibility of fitting with the environment and establishing a profound rapport with the land. In effect, all of the works discussed in part II convey the uncanny possibility of undermining western culture’s ontological and spatial frameworks. In keeping, then, with Away, Alias Grace, and Brand’s early writing, Truth and Bright Water highlights experiences of dispossession and possession and conveys images of the self being invaded by the other. In King’s novel, the familiar western temporal and spatial perspectives shift because events are related from the perspective of indigenous peoples themselves. This shift recalls Edouard Glissant’s criticism of dominant modes of cultural engagement and traditional ethnography, in particular, which, in its treatment of marginalized groups denies them the right to participate in the scopic exchange on equal terms: “We hate ethnography ... The distrust that we feel toward it is not caused by our displeasure at being looked at, but rather our obscure resentment at not having our turn at seeing” (128). King’s novel gives Native peoples their turn at seeing, since Truth and Bright Water’s narrator is a fifteen-yearold Native boy named Tecumseh. Spanning a few weeks during the summer, Tecumseh’s narrative traces his adventures with his faithful dog, Soldier, and Tecumseh’s cousin and best friend, Lum, a gifted runner whose burning ambition is to win the long-distance race held annually at the Bright Water Indian Days celebration. The title of the novel refers to the fact that Tecumseh lives with his mother in a small American

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town called Truth, whereas Lum lives with his father across the river on the Native reserve, Bright Water, on the Canadian side. The towns are connected by a bridge which, as we will see, serves as a central trope in the novel. Owing to its focus on the development of two adolescent boys, Truth and Bright Water is a Bildungsroman. The narrative traces the young male protagonists’ vexed attempts to establish their identities and take their places within a divided and traumatized Native community.1 In this chapter, I focus on the similarities and differences between Tecumseh’s and Lum’s fates as they encounter the spirits of the past and try to orient themselves and establish a sense of home in the present within their families, community, and the nation-state. As the narrative repeatedly demonstrates, the difficulties the boys encounter spring from the fact that they live in a settler society that, as portrayed in Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Urquhart’s Away, imported its own spirits from the old world and either co-opted Native spirits or effaced them in its effort to make its home on Native land. Whereas Tecumseh makes the difficult crossing from childhood to adulthood, Lum never manages to assume a place within the community; he remains an outcast and ultimately commits suicide by leaping off the bridge. On the basis of the comparison between the boys’ fates, I argue that King’s narrative sheds light on the early stages of the crucial process of feeling at home in the world, establishing a sense of the heimlich, to borrow Freud’s term – a process that governs the fates of individuals, communities, and nation-states. Equally important, King’s novel forges links between infancy and adolescence, and demonstrates how they constitute pivotal stages in which the individual remains particularly vulnerable to the traumas that have impacted the Native community. In other words, by juxtaposing Tecumseh’s and Lum’s very different experiences, Truth and Bright Water illustrates how, like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, the fates of infants and adolescents in Canadian and American Native towns serve as indexes of the general wellbeing of Native communities. In accordance with the writings of Pueblo/Apache psychologist Eduardo Duran, King’s novel emphasizes not only individual but also historical and intergenerational traumas. As James Waldram explains, in their writings, Duran and his collaborators “outline a schema for the history of colonization as a means of explaining the development of historical trauma. They suggest that at ‘first contact’ there was ‘a total environmental and lifeworld shock’ as the ‘lifeworld of Native people was

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systematically destroyed through genocidal military actions.’ Several subsequent historical processes, such as subjugation and confinement to reservations, forced relocation, and termination, then served to exacerbate the situation” (Waldram 226). 2 Sherene Razack argues further that colonialism constitutes an ongoing process since the “emplacement of the white settlers remains predicated on the continual dispossession and displacement” of indigenous peoples.3 Put somewhat differently, since first contact Native peoples have served as what psychoanalysts term “selfobjects” for settler-society. In using this term, I am referring to the fact that in the national imaginary, Native peoples are not perceived as individuals but, instead, serve a psychological function.4 In other words, the settler’s obsessive reliance on and bond with the figure of the Native and the latter’s enforced displacement and homelessness – evident in Truth and Bright Water and other works considered in this study – perform the psychological function of consolidating and maintaining the settler-society’s sense of being at home. In this chapter, I trace how Truth and Bright Water relies on the trope of haunting to register the impact of the shock and aftermath of contact and the experience of being displaced and rendered invisible. Yet in King’s novel, haunting conveys the integral notion of transition – a liminal space that bridges the living and the dead, the past and the present. At bottom, due to its emphasis on the trope of haunting and the bridge, King’s text emphasizes the need for both revenants and narratives to conceptualize Native people’s traumatic experience of the shift from pre- to post-contact existence and to challenge the terminal creeds of the settler-society. In keeping with all of the works considered thus far, Truth and Bright Water engages in the familiar, gothic process outlined by Margaret Atwood: “the digging up of ancestors, calling up of ghosts, [and the] exposure of skeletons in the closet” (“Canadian Monsters” 100). Ghosts and ancestors are integral to the process of affirming cultural continuity and of establishing a sense of home for Native- and non-Native peoples alike. As Cynthia Sugars reminds us, “Ghosts, like good ancestors, affirm the continuity between our selves and the past. They put us in our rightful place. Ghosts give to the living texture, significance, legacy ... culture. Without them, we are the ghosts” (“The Impossible” 693). Yet, as noted in the introduction, the ghosts of the colonial subject and the racialized Other threaten the settler-invaders’ claim to the land, rendering the nation-state unheimlich. The ghosts that spring from the troubled legacy from the past is evident in the novel’s opening chapter when the boys glimpse a mysterious

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apparitional woman dancing on the edge of the cliffs known as the Horns. After dancing briefly, she throws the contents of a suitcase over the cliff into the Shield River. Then, to the boys’ amazement, she races off the cliff herself. Scrambling down to the flats by the river, the boys attempt to retrieve her body. Although her body is never found, Tecumseh’s dog, Soldier, unearths one of the items that she threw over the cliff – an infant’s skull with a red ribbon tied through its eye socket (13). Both the boys (and readers) are left wondering why anyone would throw away a baby’s skull as if it were garbage – in effect, engaging in symbolic infanticide – before committing suicide. In King’s trickster-inspired novel, however, as noted earlier, appearances can be deceiving; the fact that the ribbon is threaded through the skull’s eye-socket recalls the etymology of the word “spectre” and the need to look carefully and from diverse perspectives. As Tecumseh (and readers) eventually recognize, what initially appears to be an individual act of self-destruction is, in fact, an attempt at communal restoration and repair. In this chapter, I argue that Tecumseh’s gradual decoding of the meaning of this mysterious episode conveys a central message in King’s narrative. By entertaining different hypotheses and trying out different stories, Tecumseh reminds readers that it is not always necessary or beneficial to cling to a single, reified story or to focus solely on isolated gestures of destruction, because this type of circumscribed focus can obscure one’s ability to recognize and participate in the workings of larger, more complex cycles that include both violence and repair. In the opening episode and throughout the narrative, Truth and Bright Water deploys the haunting images of the child’s skull and the red ribbon to highlight the persistence of intergenerational trauma and the ongoing displacement of Native peoples – injuries and injustices signalled in the novel by the rupture of the mother-infant bond. By drawing attention to the failure of this bond, Truth and Bright Water portrays the ongoing toll of betrayal, abandonment, and dispossession on Native families, particularly on the children, who are most helpless. What I find most intriguing, however, is the way in which King’s portrait of intergenerational trauma and dispossession is tied to a multivalent understanding of haunting. As we will see, as in Brand’s writing, in King’s text haunting conveys traces of past crimes and simultaneously gestures to modes of relating to the land that undermine the difference between self and other and exceed western culture’s conceptual frameworks.

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To illustrate the legacy of abuse, the narrative forges haunted, liminal spaces that bridge past and present. Within these spaces, children commune with apparitional maternal figures, with ghosts from the Cherokee Removal, and with the spirits of children stolen from their graves by archaeologists to be displayed in museums. The intermingling of children and ancestral spirits recalls Cree-Métis film director Loretta Todd’s comment that, according to Native belief, “the ancestors and the unborn are never more than two days away” (Todd).5 In effect, Truth and Bright Water fashions a palimpsest of past and present crimes against Native families and their communities and, in the process, plots the events that contribute to intergenerational trauma (see Duran and Duran). All of the crimes are related to the dispossession and displacement of Native peoples, including those committed by external agents such as the nation-state, and they range from the ethnic cleansing of Native North Americans in the early nineteenth century – including the infamous Cherokee Removal also known as the Trail of Tears – to the contemporary dumping of bio-hazardous waste on Native lands. Equally important, the novel illustrates how the legacy of these crimes penetrates and harms the community, demonstrating the connection between external, macrocosmic and internal, microcosmic transgressions. Relying on the images of the skull and blood-red ribbon, the narrative ties the historical practices of grave robbing by archaeologists to contemporary events within the Native community that threaten children’s well-being. The novel uses the skull together with this “common thread” to signal how historical crimes against the community inform contemporary acts of violence – most obviously, the displacement, physical and psychological abuse, and/or abandonment of Native children. In essence, Truth and Bright Water demonstrates how these past and present crimes are bound up with the Canadian nation-state’s apocalyptic and modernist attempts to clean house by transforming living Native peoples into dead ancestors who can then be laid to rest. In light of my study’s overarching focus on the relationship between haunting and past histories of dispossession perpetrated by the nationstate, it is especially fitting to conclude with a close reading of Truth and Bright Water – a novel whose wandering revenants forcibly link the plight of the contemporary Native protagonists with prior betrayals, most obviously, the Cherokee Removal and Native people’s efforts to repossess stolen lands and lost languages, histories, and sacred rituals. Truth and Bright Water depicts the North American prairies haunted by

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spectres that testify to unresolved crimes against First Peoples and to the need for reparation. As Daniel Heath Justice explains, “Eurowesterners still seek to dispossess and possess Indian people: if not tribal lands then Indigenous voices, identities, and relationships to the cosmos” (156). Heath Justice argues further that, as an example of this impulse, the Cherokee Removal constitutes “a historical trauma that continues to reverberate in the memory and cultural expressions of Cherokees today” – a trauma that in King’s novel gives rise to ghosts (47). In virtually all of his writing, King “melds the worlds of the living, the dead, and the imagined to reveal the contradictions, absurdities, and tragedies of a world that tries to erase Indigenous peoples and their stories and replace them with colonialist lies” (Heath Justice 170). Seething with spirits of the past and present, Truth and Bright Water is perhaps King’s “most direct evocation of the Spirit World – the Cherokee Ghostland – a tangible haunting” (170). Although Heath Justice views this novel as King’s “darkest work” (170), I argue that the novel’s darkness is mitigated by an equally powerful emphasis on Native people’s capacity to undo the vanishing and to transform seemingly incontrovertible aspects of the external world. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the trope of haunting signals the unsettling impact of colonial trauma on Native peoples and the legacy of betrayal and dispossession in the form of fractured bonds along four interrelated matrices: mother and child, child and family, individual and community, and, finally, individual and nation-state. Yet, as noted, I also maintain that King’s deployment of haunting is multivalent and contains within it the key to the healing process, predicated on imaginative encounters with liminal, transitional, and sometimes supernatural phenomena. Due to their capacity to generate liminal areas of experience to which inner reality and external life both contribute – in other words, to serve as a bridge between self and other – supernatural elements in Truth and Bright Water provide powerful examples of transitional phenomena. The concept of transitional, intermediate, or third space, as it is variously termed, surfaces in a range of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, most obviously in the writings of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971). In what follows, I discuss this concept and its use at length. For the purposes of this introduction, suffice it to say that transitional phenomena “refer to a dimension of living that belongs neither to internal nor to external reality; rather, it is the place that both connects and separates inner and outer” (Abram 337).

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Moreover, transitional spaces have the capacity to efface static empirical categories and boundaries. Equally important, in encounters with these liminal phenomena and spaces, what is given and what is created are interwoven; hence these phenomena are inextricably linked “with playing and creativity” (Abram 337). By emphasizing the power of transitional spaces and objects to imbue the world with significance, Truth and Bright Water invites readers to consider “what options for cultural renewal or continuity might (and might not) be viable ones” (Higginson 8). Viewed in this light, the ghosts in Truth and Bright Water provide a striking example of transitional phenomena that attest to both destruction and survival. On one level, ghosts mark the end of life. However, traces of the lives of individuals return, unbidden and ineradicable, and not merely in memory. In this case, ghosts also offer an alternative perspective on the past, which in turn inflects the present and future, because they demonstrate that Native people’s lives, history, and culture – which have been elided by the dominant society – endure and continue to shape the present. My contribution to both studies of contemporary Native literature and to discussions of the concept of transitional space lies in showing how Truth and Bright Water challenges the dominant narratives by emphasizing how the land and its ghosts serve as shared transitional objects. As noted earlier, ghosts mark the environmental and lifeworld shocks associated with the arrival of the settler society, but they also establish an imaginative cultural continuity with – and promote the renewal of – Native beliefs and traditions that existed prior to contact. Owing to the novel’s emphasis on spectres and on transitional space, for example, it is not always possible to discern a separation between past and present or between the body of the land, the communal body, and the individual body. In her writings, Leslie Marmon Silko describes this type of holistic approach, which gives rise to the interpenetration of subjective and objective realms in Native writers’ portrayals of the land – an intimate rapport that transcends death. As a result, for Silko, the non-Native term “landscape” does not adequately capture the vital merger between Native people’s consciousness and the land: So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and the sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. ‘A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view’ does not

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correctly describe the relationship between the human being and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulder they stand on. (qtd. in Sarkowsky 39) In Truth and Bright Water, both the land and its ghosts bind two seemingly antithetical elements – traces of the devastating trauma associated with the dispossession of Native peoples, on the one hand, and the playful, artistic, and imaginative cultural practices that can facilitate reparation and healing, on the other. In effect, Truth and Bright Water offers a powerful response to Northrop Frye’s oft-cited question “Where is here?” For King, the answer is that we (as individuals, communities, and nation-states) are neither wholly inside the world of dream and fantasy nor outside in the world of shared reality. Instead, we are in the paradoxical third place that partakes of and bridges both of these places at once. Moreover, as Truth and Bright Water illustrates, it is primarily the experience of transitional phenomena and the deep rapport with the other it generates that allow individuals to establish a sense of home and to contribute to modes of cultural experience that transcend personal existence. In Truth and Bright Water, Lum’s tragic fate most forcibly drives home the disruption of transitional space and the impact of the dispossession and abandonment on Native youth in Canada. Both his experience of homelessness and his death confirm Razack’s contention that the settlersociety relies on the bodies of homeless aboriginals to define public and civil space; to this end, the settler-society requires that Native peoples always be in the process of disappearing.6 From beginning to end, Lum’s experience can be read as an allegory of dispossession and of the failure of the bonds between figures of authority and Native peoples, ranging from the connection between m/other and infant to the links between the citizen and the nation-state. Equally important, King’s narrative stresses how the ongoing destruction of these bonds damages Lum’s, and by extension, other Native youth’s capacity to creatively engage with the world and establish a sense of home. In this chapter, I focus on the depiction of mother-infant bonds because, as noted, this early connection constitutes the individual’s first bridge or transitional relationship. This is the child’s first experience of relating to the external environment and serves as the medium in which she generates the sense of fitting with

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the environment. As King’s portrayals of Lum and Tecumseh demonstrate, this primary experience also serves as the foundation for later efforts on the individual’s part to imagine the community and the nation-state. From the start, Truth and Bright Water underscores the significance of the primary, m/other-infant bond. The maternal apparition that appears on the Horns in chapter 1 instigates Lum’s regressive return to what might best be termed the novel’s core catastrophe – the annihilation of the parent-child bond. In the first chapter, readers witness Lum in his prime, racing across a railroad bridge: “Lum moves gracefully, effortlessly along the girders, like a dancer, until the curve of the bridge begins its descent into Bright Water, and he vanishes over the edge” (15). Later, Lum daringly races a train across this same bridge (73). Yet readers soon learn that Lum, who is traumatized by his mother’s death, is also being physically and psychologically abused by his father. Early in the novel, Lum is driven from his home. He camps out on the coulee, living naked on land contaminated by bio-hazardous waste. Unlike Tecumseh, who is cared for and supported by his mother, Lum lacks the physical and psychological support he needs to make the difficult crossing from childhood to adulthood. On the morning of the Indian Days race, which is also Canada Day, Lum is far too injured and abused by his father to dream of entering the competition, let alone winning. Yet in accordance with his initial dream of winning the race and his vow to “keep on running” and never stop until he “feels like stopping” (4), he invites Tecumseh to time him with his stopwatch. Tecumseh watches helplessly as Lum races to his death across the unfinished bridge that runs between Truth and Bright Water. Echoing his earlier description of Lum, Tecumseh reports how Lum “glides along the naked girders gracefully. Soldier hard on his heels and closing, until the curve of the bridge begins its descent into Bright Water and Lum and Soldier disappear over the edge” (258). Viewed in the larger context of non-Native/Native relations, the passages cited above that emphasize how Lum “vanishes” and, later, “disappears” remind readers that Native peoples have never been “a vanishing race.” Instead, according to the novel’s logic, Lum’s disappearance is largely a matter of perception and perspective. Moreover, I would argue further that, in this case, it is not Lum but the “race” itself that vanishes. Here “the race” symbolizes not one’s tribal or blood ties, but the opportunity to develop and demonstrate one’s human potential. In Lum’s case, the race does not vanish; instead, it is stolen from him.

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Although the novel underscores the devastation that attends the severed bonds between parents and children, Truth and Bright Water combats the essentialist stereotype of the doomed race by highlighting the complex historical and political forces that underpin the breakup of families and the violence in the Native community. In the process, King repoliticizes the Gothic because, in Luckhurt’s words, his novel risks “the violence of reading the ghost, of cracking open its absent presence to answer the demand of its specific symptomatology and its specific locale” (Luckhurst 542). But the novel also counterbalances Lum’s fate, and, by extension, the tragic legacy of the betrayal of Native children, with an equally powerful emphasis on Tecumseh’s survival and, more generally, on the benign cycle of restoration and the capacity of the artist to heal a wounded community. Through its emphasis on supernatural and transitional phenomena, the narrative challenges the discourse of the doomed Indian with two alternative possibilities – first, that what has vanished is not irrevocably dead, but, instead, might reappear. This possibility recalls Freud’s oft-cited “fort-da” game, in which vanishing constitutes the initial phase of a larger cycle that includes the reappearance or repair of the lost object. According to Freud, this game, which literally translates as “gone-there,” illustrates a stage in human development in which the infant/toddler is fascinated by the dis- and re-appearance of the object – a fascination that registers the profundities of existence and attachment that underlie even the most mundane vanishings and returns – for example, that of a toy or the mother’s face. As noted, a second, related possibility is that the vanishing act itself was a distortion – a trick or a lie – again drawing attention to the issues cited earlier concerning perception and perspective. Viewed in this light, the image of the vanishing Indian constitutes a subjective truth imposed by the hegemonic group as the nation-state’s official history. But “vanishing” also serves as a convenient euphemism that obscures the genocide of Native peoples. In keeping with Truth and Bright Water’s emphasis on alternative possibilities and in contrast to the spectral and earthly images of abandoned children, the narrative demonstrates how Tecumseh and the community as a whole are revitalized by the reappearance of “the famous Indian artist” Monroe Swimmer. To everyone’s shock, and in contrast to the rumour, Swimmer is not dead. Instead, he returns to his home on the prairie and enlists Tecumseh’s help in a series of “restoration projects” designed “to save the world.” Swimmer asks Tecumseh, “‘Did they tell

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you I’m crazy?’” Tecumseh replies, “‘They said you were dead’” (48), to which Swimmer quips, “‘Better to be a fool than to be dead’” (48). In keeping with Edouard Glissant’s awareness of the strategic necessity for oppressed peoples to play the fool (Dash 127), Monroe maintains that it is better to be an artist/trickster who survives than the doomed stereotype of the vanished or dead Indian. Ironically, as a result of Monroe’s restoration projects, it is not the “Indian” who disappears; instead, this “famous Indian artist” erases some of the most nefarious artifacts of the settler-invader culture. As an artist, Swimmer repeatedly models the capacity to generate transitional phenomena, and his projects depend on the creative fusion of subjective and objective realms. Moreover, in keeping with Silko’s and other Native scholars’ discussion of the land’s capacity to serve as a transitional phenomenon for Native peoples, Monroe’s varied restoration projects consistently entail engaging creatively with the environment. An especially memorable project involves buying the old Methodist church in Truth and “making it disappear” by methodically painting it so that it “blends in with the prairies and the sky” (43). As Kate Higginson observes, Monroe uses paint “to depict and accelerate the land’s reclamation of the colonial church” (2). An equally imaginative and ambitious project entails fashioning 360 life-sized iron statues of buffalo that Monroe and Tecumseh hammer into the prairies – a comic rejoinder to the settler-invader’s “Last Spike” (134).7 In addition, these two projects constitute aesthetic, political, and therapeutic modes of redressing two of the most brutal tactics – the slaughter of the buffalo and the so-called “civilizing mission” undertaken by Christian missionaries – deployed by the settler-society to exterminate the indigenous peoples (see Schweninger 44). References to the church as well as to the Horns and to buffalo more generally remind readers that the slaughter of the buffalo drastically reduced the food supply; meanwhile, the missionaries attempted to convince Native peoples to accept a more domesticated existence and relinquish their vast hunting grounds (Schweninger 44; Perdue and Green 32–3). After securing the last buffalo to the ground, Monroe and Tecumseh look back over the prairies. “‘You can’t see the church, and you can’t see the bridge, and you can’t see Truth or Bright Water,’ Tecumseh thinks. ‘Look at that,’ says Monroe. ‘Just like the old days’” (134). Rather than accept the stereotype of the vanishing Indian, Swimmer uses his art to efface traces of the settler-invaders’ presence and thereby create the illusion of “the old days”

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prior to first contact. Again, subjective and objective elements are in play in the creation of this illusion, which depends on the creative apperception of aspects of the external environment.8 In essence, Monroe subverts the settler-invader society’s terminal creed of apocalyptic destruction by engaging in a sophisticated game of fort-da. In accordance with this game, as noted earlier, what has vanished always has the potential to return, albeit sometimes in a slightly altered guise. Ultimately, Truth and Bright Water’s emphasis on the role of the Native artist affirms the power of transitional phenomena to promote the acceptance of “alternative ways of seeing” that can (re)construct both the land and communal identity (Davidson, Walton, and Andrews 187). Viewed in this light, Monroe’s effort to (re)install the buffalo mirrors King’s attempt to restore the elided history of the Cherokee Removal and its legacy. For King, as for many Native writers, story-telling and writing serve as powerful transitional phenomena. As Jace Weaver explains: Writing prepares the ground for recovery, and even re-creation, of Indian identity and culture. Native writers speak to that part of us the colonial power and the dominant culture cannot reach, cannot touch. They help Indians imagine themselves as Indians. Just as there is no practice of Native religions for personal empowerment, they write that the People might live. (44–5) Owing to their reliance on art and the imagination to forge transitional spaces that invest the world with meaning, both King’s and Swimmer’s restoration projects are integral to the efforts of Native recovery and re-creation. In N. Scott Momaday’s words, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined” (167). In what follows, I trace how Truth and Bright Water contributes to the broader project of the restoration of Native communities by evoking the spectres of Native peoples and a specific instance of ethnic cleansing that continues to haunt the land. As noted, this narrative strategy effectively undercuts the lie of the vanishing Indian because it illuminates traces of political and historical lives and events that continue to inform the present.

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Section I: Dispossession: Ghosts and the Legacy of Removal As I argued in chapter 1, in the Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning – “the spectral threat” of Coyote, with its “trail of blood,” provides evidence of both “a crime and a wound that cannot be erased” (see chapter one, page 30). In Truth and Bright Water, the revenants and the “trail of blood” – symbolized by the recurring image of the red ribbon – lead back to a singularly brutal historical experience of dispossession known as the Trail of Tears. Truth and Bright Water frames the contemporary events – most obviously, the fracturing of mother-infant and familial bonds, which profoundly complicates Lum’s and Tecumseh’s journeys to manhood – within the broader traumatic historical and political context of Native people’s dispossession. In keeping with the novel’s exposure of the abuse that Lum suffered at his father’s hands prior to Lum’s suicide, allusions to the Cherokee Removal powerfully affirm that Native people did not simply disappear. On the contrary, in keeping with their function as “selfobject” for the settler-society, they were forced to endure repeated attempts to exterminate them and, in some cases, internalized the ideology and behaviour of their victimizers. An exercise in what today would be termed ethnic cleansing, the Cherokee Removal took place during the late hot summer and early bitter winter of 1838–39, and involved the forced eviction and permanent relocation of thousands of people over a distance of nearly one thousand miles (Heath Justice 55; Perdue and Green 134). As Heath Justice states, “Troops of the u.s. government, assisted by Georgia militia and White squatters, drove nearly sixteen thousand Cherokees from their homes into ill-equipped concentration camps. From there, they were herded onto cramped boats or wagons for a brutal, thousand-mile trek to the Darkening Lands of the West, where the spirits of the dead reside” (55). It is estimated that nearly a quarter of the Cherokee nation died as a result (Perdue and Green 134, 139). For thousands of non-Natives, the West was the land of promise. But for the Native peoples its settlement “spelled disaster” (Perdue and Green xvi). For the majority of Cherokees and the other indigenous nations caught up in the Removal,9 abandoning their homelands “at the world’s centre and moving west, the direction associated with death, was unthinkable” (Perdue and Green). As Heath Justice and Robin Ridington observe, Truth and Bright Water features the ghosts of historical figures who endured the Removal,

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including the principal chief of the Cherokee nation, John Ross (Bu wi s gu wi); the man who devised a syllabary for writing the Cherokee language, George Guess or Gist (Sequoya’s English name); and Rebecca Neugin, who was a girl of three at the time of the Removal (175; see Ridington 100). In King’s narrative, Rebecca wears a torn dress and a red ribbon that she later gives to Tecumseh as a gift in hopes that he will help her find her lost pet duck. By alluding to key figures in the Removal and giving his protagonist the name Tecumseh, King links the fate of Native children in the past to those in the present.10 Within the narrative, the experience of dispossession and the rupture of the parent-infant bond experienced by Rebecca also doom Lum, and they are equally central to the mysterious return of Tecumseh’s aunt Cassie. In addition to trying to solve the mystery of the woman on the Horns and the skull, Tecumseh tries to piece together what happened to Cassie sixteen years ago. The latter mystery has something to do with baby clothes and birthdays. At one point, Tecumseh visits his aunt Cassie and glimpses a pile of baby clothes. On top of one of the piles is a red ribbon “tied in a bow” (161–2). At the end of the scene, the bow falls onto Cassie’s lap (161–2). Again, the appearance of this common thread suggests an ominous outcome. Pregnancy and childbirth underlie both past and present mysteries since from snatches of the adults’ contemporary conversations, Tecumseh concludes that Cassie has come home because she is pregnant. Later, however, he surmises that she has procured an abortion. In the process of sifting through the various clues, Tecumseh actually discovers that Cassie did give birth to a child named Mia.11 It would seem, however, that Mia was given up for adoption long before Tecumseh was old enough to register her existence. The narrative also intimates that Tecumseh’s father, Elvin, may be Mia’s father, since he and Cassie dated before Tecumseh’s parents were married.12 At one point, Tecumseh hears Cassie and Elvin fighting. Elvin tells Cassie, “If you want to chase ghosts ... go right ahead” (222). He goes on to warn her, “Even if you do find her ... you think she’s going to be happy to see you?” (222). Later, Tecumseh hears snippets of a conversation between Cassie and his mother, which again suggest that Cassie abandoned Mia as a child, and now feels as if she has no choice but to repeat the past.13 When the novel draws to a close, Cassie echoes the haunting gesture of the apparitional figure on the Horns and empties a suitcase full of baby clothes onto a bonfire. While neither Tecumseh nor the reader ever learn the details of Cassie’s ordeal, readers are left to speculate that

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Cassie performs this ritual because she despairs of ever finding her lost daughter, Mia. Furthermore, if Cassie is, indeed, pregnant, it would seem that she has also given up carrying another child to term, who might, like Mia, have worn these tiny clothes – icons of infant vulnerability. Moreover, as Elvin’s comments about chasing ghosts emphasize, Cassie’s missing children must also be counted among the spectres that haunt the text. Owing to the interweaving of historical and contemporary plotlines featuring failed bonds between parents and children, Cassie’s lost children serve as a counterpoint to Rebecca’s haunting experience of Removal and to Lum’s more recent loss of his mother and the unbearable experience of grief and dispossession that ensues.14 In this way, King’s narrative highlights the haunting, multigenerational impact of traumatic losses in Native North American communities. Ranging from the ribbon laced through the infant’s skull thrown from the cliff, to the red bow that falls onto Cassie’s lap, to Rebecca Neugin’s red ribbon which she gives as a gift to Tecumseh, and, finally, to the ribbons used in Monroe Swimmer’s healing rituals, Truth and Bright Water illustrates the historical and political continuities between the mysterious events that puzzle Tecumseh. As we will see, the ribbon, like the other transitional phenomena in the text, illuminates hidden connections between past and present, childhood and adulthood, and the ongoing impact of the traumatic ruptures in political, communal, familial, maternal, and individual, intra-psychic relations. As noted earlier, several parallel stories run through the novel: one concerns the identity of the figure on the Horns and of the infant’s skull, and another, the secrets of Tecumseh’s family concerning his aunt Cassie and her child. Yet, as Ridington observes, a third concerns the tragic history of Cherokee removals: “For King, Cherokee history is an extension of family history” (92). Although Truth and Bright Water elides the violence associated with the Removal, readers cannot fully comprehend the traumatic situation it unleashes in the narrative present without some awareness of the violence that occurred in the past. Writing as an adult in the 1930s about the terrifying process of the initial “roundup,” Rebecca Neugin states, “When the soldiers came to our house my father wanted to fight, but my mother told him that the soldiers would kill him if he did and we surrendered without a fight. They drove us out of our house to join the other prisoners in a stockade” (qtd. in Perdue and Green 124). Although Rebecca’s family remained intact, numerous fam-

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ilies were irrevocably separated (Perdue and Green 124). Worse, conditions along the Trail of Tears also led to the death of many family members. The Missionary Daniel Butrick wrote that while in transit, Native people were “obliged at night to lie down on the naked ground, in the open air, exposed to wind and rain and herd[ed] together, men women and children like droves of hogs, and in this way, many [were] ... hasten[ed] to a premature grave” (qtd. in Perdue and Green 125–6). In these conditions, dysentery, fever, whooping cough, and measles were rampant (Perdue and Green 126–7). The Removal returns to haunt Truth and Bright Water most forcibly in those episodes in which Lum, driven from home, likewise finds himself sleeping “on the naked ground.” Rather than rely on Lum’s homelessness to define the settler’s supposedly civil and civilized space, King’s novel treats Lum with respect while simultaneously parodying and historicizing the settler-invader’s ongoing, violent attachment to the figure of the homeless and disappearing Indian. At one point, Tecumseh muses that Lum looks “wild and fierce squatting on the prairie, streaked with mud, the river and the land and the sky rolling over his body” (153). Watching his cousin, Tecumseh wonders “what it must be like to be naked and not be afraid” (153). Viewed in this light, Lum’s plight on “the naked ground” remind readers of the ongoing project of colonization and the legacy of the Removal. The narrative suggests further that whereas Removal and the slaughter of the buffalo were the settlerinvaders’ historical weapons of extermination, nowadays, it is the land itself that is being poisoned. On the one hand, as noted earlier, Truth and Bright Water relies on supernatural phenomena and transitional spaces to underscore the historical and ongoing forces bent on the destruction of Native peoples and their environment. On the other hand, the narrative simultaneously affirms faith in the power of art and storytelling to (re)construct this transitional space and, in the process, communal identity. As Louis Owens writes, “Tribal people have deep bonds with the earth, with sacred places that bear the bones and stories that tell them who they are, where they came from, and how to live in the world they see around them” (45). By invoking these bonds, sacred places, bones, and spirits, Truth and Bright Water confirms Owens’s insights. In the next section, I invoke the concept of transitional space to elucidate King’s portrayal of the process by which these bonds are forged.

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Section II: The Land as Transitional Phenomena Truth and Bright Water not only challenges the stereotypes of the “doomed Indian” and the “vanishing race,” it also rigorously interrogates the myth of the Indian’s supposedly inherent, “special” relationship to the natural world and “mother earth” – myths that, as we saw, were also operative in The Cure for Death by Lightning and in Away, which identified the land with the figure of the mother. As Lee Schweninger asserts, this myth was “both imposed on and culled from American Indian cultures by non-Natives” (17; see also Waldram 275–85). Rather than dismissing Native peoples’ connection to the earth, Truth and Bright Water challenges the stereotype by gesturing toward the unsettling political and historical events leading up to and following the Cherokee Removal. As the narrative demonstrates, it is the accretion of these events that provides the basis for Indigenous people’s legitimate claims to the land. The narrative’s deployment of the haunting trope of Removal is crucial in this regard because it signals Native people’s legal claims to sovereignty over ancient territorial lands that predate the arrival of the settler-invaders. In the case of the Cherokee nation, historically, the claims included vast hunting grounds protected by treaties “signed between the Cherokee nation and the English as early as 1684” (Perdue and Green 15). These lands stretched “from the southern Appalachians to Kentucky, with villages and agricultural fields in the valleys and upcountry of South Carolina, western North Carolina, east Tennessee, north Georgia, and northeastern Alabama” (Perdue and Green xiii). I argue that in Truth and Bright Water, the ghosts haunting the landscape signal not only unpunished and ongoing crimes, but also the potential for Native and non-Native people alike to repair and renew their connection to the land. Given the importance of Native people’s territorial rights to and cultural investment in the land, it is significant that the first sentence of King’s prologue highlights the primacy of the environment. Juxtaposing the animate and vital land and the rotting artifacts of the settlerinvaders, the prologue raises a central question that resonates throughout the novel: What constitutes an ethical and efficacious strategy for balancing the legacy of betrayal and dispossession with the muchneeded creative and healing impulses that are tied to revising western culture’s reified conceptual frameworks and terminal creeds and to

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working toward the renewal or continuity of Native culture and beliefs? I would suggest that both the question and the answer are contained in the prologue, particularly in its final conceit. The prologue opens with the following statement: “The river begins in ice.” The omniscient narrator goes on to explain that the Shield River descends from the mountains, “fierce and alive,” leaving the foothills to “snak[e] across the belly of the prairies” (1). In contrast to the vital and sinuous motion of the river, however, the human artifacts, most obviously the bridge and the Methodist church, are portrayed as static and garish intrusions on the land. In the first chapter, Tecumseh assumes the role of narrator and offers his view of the subsequent events. He explains that from a distance, the bridge “looks whole and complete” (4), but, in fact, it was only “half completed when construction came to a halt” (38). Prior to Lum’s suicide, Lum and Tecumseh gingerly walk along the bridge’s planks only to discover that “the decking only goes so far before the construction stops and the planks and the plywood come to an abrupt halt” (255–6). At this point, Tecumseh realizes that the bridge is “nothing more than a skeleton, the carcass of an enormous animal, picked to the bone” (256). Lum confirms this insight when he asks Tecumseh, “You smell it? ... The whole thing’s rotting” (256–7). His comments recall similar references to rot and distemper in Watson’s The Double Hook. In both novels, distemper and rot are tied to unresolved Native land claims. In keeping with The Double Hook’s emphasis on the ongoing battle for literal and imaginative possession of the land and the nation-state, King’s novel stresses the transformative potential associated with shifts in vision (who focalizes events) and perspective (where the focalizer is situated). Like the rotting bridge, the church that sits on the rise above Truth also has the deceptive appearance of solidity. Its steeple makes it look “as if a thick spike has been driven through the church itself and hammered into the prairies” (1). But like the bridge, which is being repossessed by the elements, the church’s north side has “been completely stripped by the cold and the wind, leaving an open wound of wood” (2). As the narrator of the prologue explains, on days when “the sky surges out of the mountains ... if you stand on the river bottom looking up at the bluff, you might imagine that what you see is not a church gone to hell but a ship leaned at the keel, sparkling in the light, pitching over the horizon in search of a new world” (2). The final image of the church turning into a ship that sails over the horizon is perhaps the most striking example of this type of metamorphosis – an ironic allusion

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perhaps to Columbus’s ship being thrown “over the horizon” and, hence, off the earth. As I suggested earlier, by virtue of his playful/trickster storytelling in Truth and Bright Water, King enacts a similar kind of restoration to that performed by Monroe Swimmer. Ultimately, the novel itself can be understood as a healing ceremony since it balances the crimes of the past with contemporary imaginative discursive practices that are at once artistic, political, ethical, and therapeutic. In essence, Truth and Bright Water links personal and communal survival to the learned capacity, demonstrated in the prologue, to creatively commune with the land and its ghosts.15 This emphasis on the connection between the land and its ghosts is, of course, by no means exclusive to King’s narrative. Citing Louise Halfe’s book-length poem “Blue Marrow,” Warren Carriou maintains that the ancestral bones, a governing motif of the poem, “infuse the very landscape with the presence of spirits” (731).16 As noted, Leslie Marmon Silko likewise emphasizes the blurring of subjective and objective realms in Native writers’ portrayals of the land that transcend death. For the purpose of this chapter, Silko’s comments highlight what is most original and ethically significant about Truth and Bright Water, namely, its capacity to illuminate intermediate areas of experience and to illustrate the therapeutic and aesthetic benefits that obtain from engaging with transitional spaces. N. Scott Momaday uses the term “reciprocal appropriation” to describe this process whereby “man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience” (qtd. in Owens 226). The crucial aspect of Momaday’s deceptively simple account – an aspect repeatedly illustrated in Truth and Bright Water – is Native people’s capacity to generate and make use of what have been variously termed transitional phenomena, intermediate spaces, and third spaces. In referring to the concept of an intermediate dimension of experience, I am drawing on a range of Native and non-Native theories of transitional phenomena and third space. Postmodern geographer and urban planner Edward Soja, for instance, defines “thirdspace” as “the combination and transcendence” of “firstspace” (measurable, segmented material space) and “secondspace” (the concept of space as a purely mental construction) (qtd. in Sarkowsky 32). Homi Bhabha likewise posits a related notion of third space that, although unrepresentable, nevertheless “constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meanings and symbols of culture have no

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primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha 37). Arnold Davidson, a scholar of Native and non-Native North American writing, who has written extensively on Thomas King, points out that Native lands themselves can be said to constitute “a third space” since they “lie ‘in-between’ the borders of the nation-state – they are affected by them, but they are also independent entities” (Davidson, Walton, and Andrews 16). In the following passage, Davidson et al. bring together elements of Soja’s materialistic and Bhabha’s discursively oriented theories: “For Native peoples, the space between the borders of the nation-state and the lands that were historically occupied by a tribe generate gaps in meaning that allow writers, like King, to explore oppositional definitions of identity and community” (Davidson, Walton, and Andrews 16). My analysis of transitional or third spaces draws primarily on the theoretical insights of D.W. Winnicott.17 The leading representative of the British Independent tradition of object relations theory, Winnicott is acknowledged as “one of the most important figures in psychoanalysis since Freud” (Rudnytsky xi). In fact, Winnicott’s most original contribution to the study of human nature was the concept of “transitional objects,” introduced in a paper published in 1953 (xii). Throughout his writings, Winnicott uses several terms to refer to transitional phenomena – the third area, the intermediate area, the potential space, a resting place, and the location of cultural experience. Unlike Soja, Bhabha, or Davidson, Walton, and Andrews, however, Winnicott traces transitional phenomena back to the earliest developmental stages in the infant’s life – the mother-infant dyad (see Abram 337–54). Winnicott’s writings are particularly important because they articulate connections between the various bonds cited earlier, including mother-infant, child and family, individual and community, and, finally, individual and nation-state. Using Winnicott’s insights, we can see that Truth and Bright Water shows how the capacity developed in early infancy within the mother-child dyad to generate and utilize transitional space ultimately binds us to each other, to the land, and to the nation. Establishing a rapport with the environment entails investing it with subjective reality. What is known as “third space” is created through a merger of self and world facilitated initially by the mother. Moreover, this liminal space represents the nascence of the more sophisticated process of imagining the nation.

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An astute observer of children, Winnicott noticed that as the infant begins to distinguish Me from Not-me, going from absolute dependence into the stage of relative dependence, she makes use of the transitional object. These first possessions of infants and young children – typically, a teddy bear or a doll – can also take the form of “a bundle of wool or the corner of a blanket ... or a word or tune, or a mannerism – that becomes vitally important to the infant” (Winnicott, Playing 4). Moreover, this fundamental developmental journey leads to the use of illusion, symbols, and objects and, later, to all of human culture, including visual art and writing (Abram 337). Winnicott’s ideas grew in part out of his experience with traumatized children removed from their families during the Blitz in London.18 From the work that he performed during World War Two, Winnicott generated a body of theory that introduced new concepts, including that of the “transitional object” and “the holding environment,” which stressed developmental, environmental factors that exceeded the prevailing intra-psychic focus of Freudian analysts. In the process of developing his groundbreaking theories, Winnicott introduced profoundly social and aesthetic dimensions to psychoanalysis. Integral to my analysis of Truth and Bright Water is Winnicott’s fundamental recognition that transitional phenomena exist in this magical area of illusion – which is neither wholly “Me” nor “Not-me”; neither wholly subjectively created nor given. As he explains, One difficulty every child experiences is to relate subjective reality to shared reality which can be objectively perceived. From waking to sleeping the child jumps from a perceived world to a self-created world. In between there is a need for all kinds of transitional phenomena – neutral territory. I would describe this precious object by saying that there is a tacit understanding that no one will claim that this real thing is part of the world, or that it is created by the infant. It is understood that both of these things are true: the infant created it and the world supplied it. This is the continuation forward of the initial task which the ordinary mother enables her infant to undertake, when by a most delicate active adaptation she offers herself, perhaps her breast, a thousand times at the moment that the baby is ready to create something like the breast that she offers. (qtd. in Abram 346)

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From the mother’s empathic and “active adaptation” to the infant, the latter develops the belief that “the world can contain what is wanted and needed, with the result that the baby has hope that there is a live relation between inner reality and external reality, between innate primary creativity and the world at large which is shared by all” (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 41). Thus, for Winnicott, desire, illusion, and play remain central to healthy human development: “The communication to the baby is: ‘Come at the world creatively, create the world; it is only what you create that has meaning for you.’ Next comes: ‘the world is in your control’” (qtd. in Abram 117). As noted, the prologue’s witty reversal of Columbus’ so-called discovery of the New World and Monroe’s erasure of the artifacts of the settler-invader society demonstrate King’s commitment to this credo and its power to re-imagine the nation’s past, present, and future. For King, the primary psychic creativity associated with the creation of transitional or “third space” – generated initially in the motherinfant dyad – is likewise inextricably connected to more mature forms of creative living, playing, and cultural expression that persist throughout the individual’s life. Winnicott’s insights shed light on Truth and Bright Water’s emphasis on how the creative capacity to generate and use transitional spaces and objects develops within the mother-infant dyad. Equally significant, King’s novel also illustrates how holistic approaches to the earth – signalled by concepts such as mother earth – which enable us to feel part of our surroundings are generated. At the same time, the novel also shows how the capacity to efface the distinction between self and other, which invests the world with subjective meaning, can be compromised by intergenerational trauma. As Winnicott explains, creativity “is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to infant experience: the ability to create the world” (qtd. in Abram 121). Moreover, due to its emphasis on “creative living” (see Abram 121–2), Winnicott’s account of transitional space can also be considered a theory of psycho-aesthetics since both he and other object relations theorists, such as Christopher Bollas, link cultural expression to the primary and life-sustaining capacity to generate illusion. Although it may seem odd for psychiatrists to argue in favour of illusion, this is precisely where Winnicott and Bollas stand on the matter. “It is creative apperception more than anything else,” Winnicott maintains, “that makes the individual feel that life is worth living”

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(Playing 65). Both Monroe and King’s novel as a whole demonstrate, however, that it is not merely the individual’s life, but that of the culture as a whole, which is at stake. Since Winnicott’s theories were first published, theorists have continued to elaborate on the workings of transitional phenomena. Bollas, for example, argues that transitional spaces facilitate a vital, aesthetic encounter that provides what he terms “a rendezvous of self and other” that actualizes “a deep rapport between subject and object” (40). This rapport provides the person with “a generative illusion of fitting with an object, evoking an existential memory” (40). In Truth and Bright Water, Monroe creates this type of illusion when he erases the church and offers Native peoples an image of “the old days,” before the arrival of the settler-invader society. According to Bollas, these moments echo our earliest engagement with the m/other and, therefore, speak “to that part of us when the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of being ... the communicating of the infant with the mother” (41). In keeping with Winnicott, Bollas also identifies the creative, maternal foundation associated with the transitional moment. He refers, for example, to the mother’s “idiom of care” and the infant’s experience of this handling as “the first human aesthetic” upon which all subsequent encounters rest (41). Equally significant for the purposes of this chapter is the connection Winnicott forges between the initial creation of transitional space within the m/other-infant dyad and the subsequent relationship between the individual and his or her culture. As Winnicott explains, what he terms “cultural experience” springs from the primary experience of being – to borrow Bollas’ words “the first human aesthetic” (Bollas 14). “In using the term culture,” Winnicott writes, “I am thinking of the inherited tradition. I am thinking of something that is in the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find” (Playing 99). In this passage, Winnicott emphasizes that the child and, later, the adult must have at his disposal transitional phenomena and spaces (individual, familial, and cultural) that can accommodate his own playful and creative impulses. In effect, King’s prologue and the novel as a whole serve as microcosmic examples of the kind of creative apperception and rapport with the natural environment that have the power to contest non-Native conceptual frameworks. Contrasted with this creative apperception is a relation to external reality that is one of

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compliance – the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. As Winnicott observes, compliance carries with it “a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living” (Playing 65). For Native peoples, and particularly children and adolescents, who have repeatedly been threatened with coercive options – assimilate or die – the affirmation of alternative perspectives and the option of re-reading and revising history provide a much-needed antidote to this morbid double bind.19 By focusing on the lives of Tecumseh and Lum against the larger historical and haunting backdrop of the Removal, Truth and Bright Water illustrates how transitional phenomena and the threat of compliance continue to affect the lives of Native youth and their communities. King’s decision to focus on the liminal stage of adolescence is especially significant because in his writings Winnicott observes that adolescence is a perilous stage for all children. At this time, aggressive, even murderous fantasies predominate and are not always contained in fantasy. According to Winnicott, growing up “means taking the parent’s place. It really does ... In the total unconscious fantasy belonging to growth, puberty and adolescence, there is the death of someone” (Davis and Wallbridge 81). As this study demonstrates, the desire to usurp those who arrived first is informed by a range of individual and societal factors ranging from the Oedipal wish generated within the patriarchal family, to the fantasies generated by redundant sons and daughters living under the rule of primogeniture, to the settlers’ need to dispossess the First Nations people in order to feel at home. In his writings, Winnicott likens this phase of the child’s life to realizing the game King of the Castle. Yet Winnicott also maintains that the adolescent has a profound need to be able to return to the fold of the family: “In going away from the family, when the individual breaks through whatever is around him or her, giving security, the excursion is only profitable if there is a return ticket” (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 134). Fundamentally, Winnicott argues, it is the ability “to get back to the parents and back to the mother, back to the centre or back to the beginning” that makes the getting away from them “a part of growth instead of a disruption of the individual’s personality” (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 135). As a result, Winnicott asserts that “when home fails and children find themselves out in the world, children do not feel ‘free’; instead, they desperately seek stability without which they may go mad” (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 148).

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Within King’s novel, on the level of plot and characterization, the rupture of the benign cycle and the inability to return home leave Lum at the mercy of his own rage and despair; ultimately, Tecumseh possesses “the return ticket” that Lum lacks. But Winnicott’s notion of “a return ticket” also sheds light on the text’s overarching approach to the issue of acculturation. For example, in contrast to the outmoded belief that assimilation constitutes the only viable option for Native North Americans – an ideology supported by institutions such as the church and the residential school system – Truth and Bright Water portrays characters, most obviously Monroe Swimmer, moving across national borders and between cultural spaces, yet remaining connected to Native traditions. Moreover, due to its emphasis on Monroe’s aesthetic recreation of the “old days,” King’s narrative intimates that, after infancy – both individual and cultural – the ability “to get back to the parents and back to the mother, back to the centre or back to the beginning” occurs primarily within the context of transitional space. In keeping with Winnicott’s emphasis on the illusion, King’s novel reminds us that culture is a shared illusion – “that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own” (Playing 3). As novels such as The Double Hook, The Cure for Death by Lightning, and The Afterlife of George Cartwright illustrate, the imposition of patriarchal Christianity on Native North Americans constitute particularly vivid examples of this type of forced sharing of illusion. In Truth and Bright Water re-invention and restoration are both playful and serious business since what is at stake in the bonds between parents and children (and, later, between individuals and the land) is an engagement with transitional phenomena that exceeds the basic need for individual well-being and creative existence. More precisely, in conjunction with contemporary Native literature, Truth and Bright Water demonstrates that the ability to achieve this type of deep rapport with the m/other can provide a foundation for the construction of Native personal and communal identity. While never explicitly invoking Winnicott’s and Bollas’ notions of “compliance” or “transitional space,” N. Scott Momaday touches on similar ideas when he insists that it “is imperative that the Indian defines himself, that he finds the strength to do so, that he refuses to let others define him. Children are at the greatest risk. We, Native Americans in particular, but all of us, need to restore

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the sacred to our children” (76). Through its haunting images of ruptured parent-infant bonds and its allusions to the failure of authority figures to offer Native peoples safe passage, Truth and Bright Water highlights the importance to Native survivance of restoring these sacred transitional phenomena to Native peoples. In the next section, I offer close readings of key parts of the novel to illustrate its preoccupation with “third space.” More specifically, I trace Lum’s and Tecumseh’s radically different engagements with transitional phenomena. Taken together, their distinct experiences shed light on the two seemingly antithetical elements noted earlier – the devastating trauma associated with the Removal, on the one hand, and the playful and imaginative cultural practices that facilitate reparation and healing, on the other.

Section III: Loss of the M/other-Infant Bond: Lying Naked on the Land As we have seen, the novel’s prologue conveys a profound sense of the environment as powerfully animate, recalling Silko’s conception of Native consciousness that “remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and the sky.” In essence, the omniscient narrator identifies the river and the surrounding prairies with the animals that inhabit the land. The Shield River “shifts and breaks … fierce and alive” and “snakes across the belly of the prairies” (1). The Horns are similarly described as “an old place ... [where] you can turn into the wind and feel the earth breathing” (2). Chapter 1 deploys a slightly different yet related strategy when Tecumseh introduces Soldier and Lum. Tecumseh’s initial references to his companions strategically leave readers in some doubt as to whether we are encountering humans or animals. In the chapter’s first sentence, Tecumseh explains that “Soldier and I relax on the side of the coulee and watch Lum lengthen his stride as he comes to high ground” (3). While the description of Soldier leads us to assume that he is human, the language used to describe Lum as he “slows to a lope and circles back” aligns him with a horse or a buffalo (3). In this way, from the start the narrative simultaneously underscores two profound transitional phenomena: the stage of adolescence itself, which positions young people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood, and the category of the animal, which, in King’s narrative, overlaps with and makes profound claims on the territory of the human.

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This claim is perhaps most apparent in the novel’s treatment of the relationship between dogs and men. After Tecumseh chooses the name Soldier for his puppy, his father, Elvin, tells Tecumseh that dog soldiers “were the bravest men in the tribe ... the ones who stayed behind and protected the people from attack” (185). “So, they weren’t dogs?” Tecumseh replies. Viewed in light of the overarching ambiguity between dogs and men in King’s novel, Soldier’s name also recalls the brutal behaviour of the soldiers who drove out the Cherokee during the Removal. In King’s narrative, however, Soldier redresses this history by reminding readers of the Plains Indian culture in which Dog Soldiers are “people willing to sacrifice their lives in defense of the camp” (99). Soldier’s significance lies in his willingness and ability to protect the vulnerable and thereby highlight adult responsibilities that have eluded some members of the community. In effect, Truth and Bright Water’s conflation of dogs and men constitutes an ironic response to the binary opposition characteristic of primitivist discourse – a discourse that, as I have shown in earlier chapters, was used to portray marginalized groups including Irish Catholics and Native peoples as barbaric savages. In contrast to this essentialist discourse and in keeping with Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, King’s novel suggests that savages are made and not born. Tecumseh’s question about dog soldiers, like his initial description of Lum, reminds readers that in Truth and Bright Water there is no clearcut distinction between human and animal; they are, to borrow King’s words, all our relations. At one point, Lucy Rabbit tells Tecumseh, “Everybody’s related ... The trouble with this world is that you wouldn’t know it from the way we behave” (202). As Eva Gruber observes, some of the most profound changes for Native cultures resulted from the imposition of Christianity and its concomitant anthropocentric and patriarchal structures (227). By aligning dogs and men, King subverts the Judeo-Christian hierarchy. Later, when Tecumseh and Lum shoot paintballs at domesticated buffalo, Tecumseh muses that one cow looks “as if she’s scolding me ... [and] reminds me of my grandmother” (151). In contrast to Tecumseh’s ability to inhabit this type of transitional or third space, in which he experiences a profound rapport with animals, Lum remains unable to achieve this connection. This is most apparent in Lum’s repeated and vicious abuse of Soldier. Worse, Lum’s inability to sustain “a generative illusion of fitting with an object” leads to his profound alienation from the community (Bollas 40).

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Lum’s alienation is conveyed by the fact that after he flees his home and camps on the coulee, he is shadowed by the eerie trio of feral dogs named The Cousins. Their name is particularly apt because it stresses the larger vexed issue of kinship and belonging in the wake of Native people’s experience of dispossession. Moreover, the Cousins’ history, like that of Tecumseh and Lum, reminds readers that in contrast to primitivist stereotypes inspired, in part, by Thomas Hobbes, savagery is not innate. Instead, it is more often the outcome of long-standing abuse. In fact, just as Tecumseh and Lum serve as foils for one another, these three canine Cousins represent the antithesis of Tecumseh’s loyal, loving, and domesticated companion, Soldier. Like the Cousins, Lum finds it difficult to restrain his aggressive impulses, and on occasion, Lum mimics the dogs’ violent attempts to kill both Soldier and Tecumseh (126, 224). Given the similarities between dogs and men in King’s narrative, to understand the roots of Lum’s journey from alienation to savagery and madness, readers must first consider the fate of the Cousins. The Cousins are first introduced immediately following the boys’ discussion of Lum’s violent father, Franklin. As Tecumseh explains, Franklin “doesn’t joke around” like Tecumseh’s father, “so it’s hard to tell if he’s angry or in a good mood” (6). Lum tells Tecumseh that “you have to watch his [Franklin’s] eyes ... you’re okay until they stop moving” (6). Following this, the conversation shifts to the Cousins. “Saw the Cousins,” Lum says. “Up by the church ... Looks like they decided to come home” (6). Tecumseh enquires if Monroe Swimmer was there, too. “How should I know?” Lum replies. “Why don’t you ask the Cousins?” (6). Although the boys talk as if the Cousins were members of the community, in fact, they are pariah dogs whose history sheds light on the cycle of abuse, betrayal, and abandonment in which Lum is presently caught. No one in the community is quite sure who the Cousins originally belonged to. Tecumseh’s father explains that the dogs “had been there long before the church had even been built” (38). Lum hypothesizes that “the missionaries brought the dogs with them to keep the Indians in line” (38). The story about the Cousins that Tecumseh likes best, however, describes how the Cousins’ exposure to the church – “listening to the lies that white people told every Sunday” – transformed them from “small and brown” puppies to “large and black” dogs. “Except for the white ruff at their necks, which made them look a little like penguins. Or priests” (38). On one level, the mythical tale of the Cousin’s diabolical transformation alludes to the abuse Native people, particular-

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ly children, suffered at the hands of missionaries and priests in the residential schools. More specifically, however, it sheds light on Lum’s antisocial behaviour. As one member of the community remarks, “Dogs that don’t get fed on a regular basis revert to being wild animals ... The most humane thing to do is to go up there and shoot all three of them” (39). His comment suggests that degeneration – the western paradigm of transition that, as we saw, plays a profound role in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Away, and Alias Grace – is socially rather than biologically determined. Tecumseh observes that the Cousins “never barked, which made them seem friendly, but if you go up close and looked into their eyes, the only thing you would see was your own reflection” (39). The juxtaposition of the eerie stillness and blankness of Franklin’s eyes to the Cousins’ eyes intimates that violence and betrayal have permeated the Native community. The similarities between Lum and the Cousins are reinforced by the fact that, in the end, Lum is incorporated into the feral pack. Before he commits suicide, Tecumseh spies Lum; “[p]iled up around him are the Cousins” (228) who surround Lum like three vicious fates. It is equally significant that, while in the company of these abandoned animals, Lum cradles the infant’s skull that he and Tecumseh retrieved from the river. Rocking the skull back and forth, Lum sings it “a soft melody” (228). Both the melody – which recalls Winnicott’s observation that a “tune” can constitute a transitional object – and the skull – a memento mori that fuses helplessness and innocence with death – serve as transitional phenomena. Encompassing what is there and not there, real and not real, provided and imagined, his and not his, the tune and the skull are, in fact, the perfect transitional objects for Lum. His transitional objects, however, speak only to the destruction and loss of the m/other. Owing to their emphasis on loss and destruction, Lum’s transitional objects prove to be dangerous. The skull’s harmful aspects are confirmed when the boys take it to Tecumseh’s grandmother in the hope that she can identify it as animal or human. Although she complies with their request, she warns them that “it is bad luck to play with the dead” (159). After identifying the skull as human and female, she also tells the boys that “she had a short life ... She died hard ... But she wasn’t from around here ... She’s a long ways from home” (160). Her comments, which recall the legacy of the Cherokee Removal and literally warn the boys against “playing” with the dead underscore what I argue is the novel’s central concern, namely, the value of maintaining a balance

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between focusing on past crimes (playing with the dead) and engaging in creative efforts that contribute to communal restoration and healing (playing with the living). Yet, as Tecumseh’s grandmother’s comments alluding to the Removal suggest, in Truth and Bright Water the eponymous Native communities’ fundamental trauma or “core catastrophe” springs from the settler-invader society’s repeated dispossession of Native peoples and the destruction of their ability to feel at home in their community and in the modern nation-state. In Truth and Bright Water, as in the other works we have analyzed, it is the uncanny and socially sanctioned eviction of human beings from their homes that can turn men into dogs. Virtually every chapter in King’s novel underscores the importance of feeling at home in the world and of the maternal bond that sustains this feeling and, conversely, the devastation that attends their absence. In fact, the narrative signals the primacy of the mother-infant bond prior to the appearance of the maternal figure on the Horns. When the boys hear the music emanating from the strange woman’s truck, Lum informs Tecumseh that “it’s his mother’s favourite song” (9). “Yeah, it’s one of my mum’s favourites, too,” Tecumseh replies (9). After the woman empties the suitcase over the cliffs and jumps in, Lum tells Tecumseh, “It could have been my mum. She was always doing crazy stuff like that” (14). In his essay on the enduring power of the initial maternal-infant dyad, Bollas offers a view the world from the infant’s perspective. As he explains, the child “experiences distress and the dissolving of distress through the apparitional-like presence of the mother” (41). Moreover, because these moments allow for the incorporation of the other into what Momaday calls our most fundamental experience, they often feel “familiar, uncanny, sacred, reverential and outside cognitive coherence” (Bollas 40). The episode featuring the mysterious figure explicitly invokes what Bollas terms the “apparitional-like presence of the mother” and, by extension, the possibility of experiencing the generative illusion of fitting with the environment and the earlier existential memory of fitting with the m/other. In Lum’s case, however, this illusion is precarious; moreover, his fate epitomizes the devastating repercussions when the parent-child bond is destroyed. After Lum makes the comment about his mother, Tecumseh muses that “[s]ometimes Lum remembers that his mother is dead, and sometimes he forgets. My mother says it’s probably best to leave it alone, that in the end, Lum will work it out for himself ” (14). As I noted in chapter 3 on Urquhart’s Away, following the traumatic

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removal from the mother and their motherland, the characters are seemingly faced with the choice of remembering or forgetting. After their mother abandons them, Eileen becomes obsessed with remembering Ireland and maintaining the cause of Irish nationalism, whereas her brother Liam, like D’Arcy McGee, chooses the path of amnesia. In portraying Lum’s confusion, Truth and Bright Water gestures to a similar problem. King’s novel suggests, however, that for Native peoples one possibility entails learning how to engage creatively in the game of fortda, and thereby make what has vanished reappear as a generative illusion within transitional space. Viewed in this light, the figure’s gestures of throwing away the baby’s skull and jumping off the cliff signal both the complexity of Lum’s predicament and, by extension, Native North American peoples’ ongoing experience of their abandonment by the state. For both King and Winnicott, the m/other’s “survival” (a term that, for Winnicott, translates as “non-retaliation”) is integral to the creation of transitional space. In his writings, Winnicott maintains that to provide a child with the illusion of omnipotence and the sense that he has created the object – both of which are central to facilitating the child’s ability to distinguish between Me and Not-me – the m/other must “be able to survive” (Abram 8). As noted, the m/other’s survival, however, does not simply entail continuing to exist, which is assumed. Instead, it specifically refers to the m/other’s ability to accept the full blast of her child’s infantile ruthlessness without retaliating, which would violate the child’s developing sense of self or “being,” as Winnicott terms this early state.20 For the purposes of my analysis of Truth and Bright Water, however, what is most crucial is that Winnicott envisioned a complete cycle of aggression and concern which he terms “the benign circle of reparation and restitution.” As you will recall, I have mentioned this cycle in previous discussions regarding the novel’s emphasis on the need for a broader perspective – one that encompasses destruction and repair, akin to Freud’s fort-da game. In what follows, I offer a brief outline of the cycle’s specific phases, according to Winnicott. In the first phase, the infant, driven by instinct, aggressively takes something from the mother. Second, his ruthless behaviour and attendant fantasies of aggression prompt his recognition of his own capacity for destruction – the recognition that “if he consumes the mother, he will lose her” (qtd. in Abram 110). Third, the infant becomes aware that within himself, he contains both good and bad elements. Fourth, as a result of the

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inner work done, “the infant has good and bad to offer. The mother takes the good and the bad, and she is supposed to know what is offered as good and what is offered as bad. Here is the first giving, and without this giving there is no true receiving” (Winnicott, “Depressive” 269). In fact, the mother not only must survive the infant’s ruthless need of her, she must also be there to receive the “gift gesture” or the “spontaneous gesture” (see Abram 110). Ultimately, it is the m/other’s ability to receive the gift, which mitigates the child’s guilt and simultaneously attests to her individuality, originality, and creativity, that most fully establishes the m/other’s survival. Viewed in this light, one can appreciate why Monroe’s restoration projects are integral to the survival of Native culture. Simply put, his aesthetic practices and, by extension, King’s, do not merely affirm a pre-existing, reified culture; instead, they rely on art and illusion to establish its presence in the here and now. Taken together, the novel’s emphasis on transitional phenomena suggests that what we accept as reality – the incontrovertible existence, for example, of the patriarchal, Christian nation-state – might be better understood as the congealed illusion of the dominant culture. In this context, haunting signals traces of alternative generative illusions based on beliefs, histories, and lives that have been elided by the dominant group. Furthermore, as Winnicott observes, in cases in which the parent does not “survive,” the child loses the ability to “contribute-in” to the family and, later, to the community. Due to the break in the benign cycle of reparation, the child also loses the ability to feel concern or guilt. Instead, he must contend with “cruder forms of anxiety concerning the loss of the mother herself ” and the attendant defenses against this primal loss, which include splitting, disintegration, psychosis, and amnesia (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 76). At one point, in a thinly veiled expression of rage and grief, Lum imagines the apparitional maternal figure apologizing to the skull for abandoning it. Lum and Tecumseh return to the Horns and attempt to “recreate the crime” in an effort to solve the mystery of the woman’s identity and motives. Holding the skull in his hands, Lum walks to the edge of the cliff. “‘She’s sorry for what she did!’ he cries out to the night. ‘She’s sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!’” (176). Moving the skull closer to his face, Lum chastises it: “Did you really think she was going to come back? ... She throws you away and you think she’s going to come back” (176). In this scene, both past and present losses are being re-enacted. In this instance, Lum’s longing for

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repair is checked by the belief that it is unlikely his mother will be coming back to retrieve what she initially treated as garbage. Rubbing the skull against his cheek, a gesture that suggests both mockery and comfort, Lum whispers, “Silly baby ... Silly baby” (176). Poking his own fingers through the eye sockets, Lum murmurs, “Don’t cry.” Turning to Tecumseh, Lum says, “You hear the baby crying? ... He’s crying for his mother’” (176). Then, violently tossing the skull in the air, Lum shouts, “She’s not coming back! ... She’s never coming back!” Enraged, he grabs Tecumseh’s shirt and pulls him close: “Can you hear it?” Lum asks, with his eyes “black and slitted” and his mouth “trembling”; “Have you seen my mummy?” (177). As this passage suggests, the loss of transitional space and of the generative illusion of fitting in with the environment leaves Lum with a profound sense of worthlessness – feelings that spring from his belief that his mother rejected both him and his community. This pervasive feeling of unworthiness explains, in part, why Tecumseh and Lum are amazed that Monroe has returned and, moreover, has brought the infants’ skulls back with him for burial. Speaking of the skulls, Monroe explains, “I’d find them no matter where they had been hidden away. Sometimes those idiots had even forgotten where they had put them” (251). “You brought them back here?” Tecumseh marvels. “Look around you,” Monroe replies. “This is the centre of the universe. Where else would I bring them? Where else would they want to be?” (251). Due to the novel’s emphasis on intergenerational trauma, readers recognize that Tecumseh’s and Lum’s individual confusion is shared by marginalized groups who struggled and continue to struggle with the trauma of having been treated as disposable by the nation-state. Toward the conclusion, Tecumseh observes that Lum, who, like the Cousins, is not getting enough food and has started sleeping under the broken bridge, has shaved off his hair: it is “short and uneven, as if it’s been hacked off with a chain saw” (225). Lum has also painted his face “[r]ed on one side. Black on the other” (225) – the colours of “triumph and death in Cherokee symbolism” (Ridington 102). With his shorn hair, Lum seems even more like an abused and enraged infant. Although Tecumseh invites Lum to move in with him and his mother, Lum declines and insists that he is fine. His denial of reality is equally apparent when he smiles and assures Tecumseh again that the woman they saw on the Horns is, indeed, his mother: “She’s come home” (226). Lum goes on to explain that his father, Franklin, has been lying by “telling everyone that she’s dead” (226). Barely able to walk due to his father’s

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blows to his hip and leg, which have resulted in massive bruising, Lum nevertheless blithely insists that although he and his father “fight all the time,” it is “normal” (227). After Tecumseh leaves, he glances back and sees Lum rocking the skull and humming to it (228). Again, this episode highlights Lum’s obsession with the past coupled with his absolute denial of external reality. Yet this denial of reality represents Lum’s attempt to reclaim what was unjustly taken from him; hence, within the text, Lum’s predicament serves as a synecdoche for a larger experience of cultural melancholia. As noted in chapter 5 on Brand’s fiction, this type of melancholia has the power to oppose modes of discourse that empty and occupy and transform the living into dead objects. In Baucom’s words, “The counterallegorical fiction making of melancholy discourse ... sentimentalizes, romanticizes, or encrypts the facts that wound and haunt it (and which it thus finds invaluable, beyond all value because outside of all possibility of substitution, surrender, or exchange)” (225). As noted earlier, for Baucom, the ultimate goal of melancholy discourse is to preserve the dead. I assert, however, that Truth and Bright Water offers an alternative to melancholia in the form of Monroe’s restoration projects, which create bridges between the past and the present, the living and the dead. Before turning to Tecumseh and Monroe’s engagement in these restoration projects, it is worth noting that Lum’s antisocial behaviour – precisely those aspects of his character that readers likely find hardest to tolerate, most obviously his violent attacks against Tecumseh and Soldier – expresses the hope “that a way may be found across a gap ... [or] break in the continuity of environmental provision” (Winnicott qtd. in Abram 52). By engaging in antisocial behaviour, Lum is trying to make a bridge for himself that will carry him beyond the trauma instigated by his dispossession. As Winnicott explains, the child “knows in his bones that it is hope locked up in the wicked behaviour, and that despair is linked with compliance and false socialization” (qtd. in Abram 52). For the most part, Lum directs his aggression at Soldier. When Soldier is a puppy, Lum breaks his leg with a baseball bat. Yet the very next day, Soldier “wiggled and limped around after him as if he were his best friend” (184). Later, when Tecumseh ventures to Lum’s camp under the bridge and the Cousins attack Tecumseh, Soldier springs to his defense (224). Tecumseh praises Soldier, saying, “That’s a really good dog.” Appearing out of nowhere, Lum mimics Tecumseh, but says, instead, “Dead dog,” and begins firing his gun at Soldier’s feet (224). Lum’s behaviour sug-

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gests that he cannot comprehend or tolerate the survival of loyal and protective forces; he will even go so far as to shoot at Soldier to make present circumstances accord with his own tragic experience of loss. Caught in the grip of his traumatic loss, Lum compulsively reinscribes only the first half of the fort-da game. Yet when Lum shoots at Soldier, even though “the dirt around Soldier’s feet erupts,” the dog continues to stands his ground: “He doesn’t growl and he doesn’t snarl” (224). Despite the fact that Lum aims his gun at Soldier’s head, he ignores the threat. Rather than retaliate, Soldier’s “butt begins to wiggle” and, as always, he greets Lum like a long-lost friend (224–5). Unable to comprehend Soldier’s repeated shows of loyalty and protection, Lum remains convinced that there is only death and destruction. As a result, unlike Monroe or Tecumseh, or King, for that matter, Lum cannot transcend the stereotype of the doomed Indian. Despite Soldier’s heroic attempts, ultimately, no one can effectively shield Lum from the settlerinvader society’s tragic plot, which casts Native peoples as sub-human. Unlike Monroe and King’s narrative as a whole, Lum lacks the ability to deploy a trickster sensibility that can challenge western culture’s reified image of the vanishing Native. In sum, Lum’s fate illustrates two profound transitional phenomena in King’s narrative, adolescence and the category of the animal. When Lum begins his suicidal race, Soldier tears himself from Tecumseh’s grasp, and the latter watches helplessly as Lum “glides along the naked girders gracefully,” with Soldier “hard on his heels and closing, until the curve of the bridge begins its descent into Bright Water and Lum and Soldier disappear over the edge” (258). In using the word “disappear,” the text strategically leaves open the possibility that he merely vanishes. In keeping with the Dog Soldiers of Plains Culture, Soldier sacrifices his life in defense of the most helpless member of the tribe. In this case, a dog becomes a man. In fact, Soldier demonstrates a greater capacity for loyalty and protection than the adults in the community or the nationstate, for that matter. But the narrative also offers a contrasting example of a boy who turns into a dog, epitomized by Lum’s unity with the feral Cousins. The depiction of Lum, psychotically isolated in his grief and rage, attests to the profound legacy of Native people’s dispossession. In addition, Lum’s regressive transformation highlights the profound importance of the complete cycle of aggression and concern. In the absence of both phases of the cycle, the subjective investment in the external environment is compromised and individuals find themselves

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treating themselves, the land, and its inhabitants as if they were devoid of meaning or, worse, as garbage. Ultimately, as noted earlier, all of the fractured bonds – including mother-child, child-family, individual-community, and individualnation-state – coalesce in the governing image of the half-completed, rotting bridge. Originally conceived of as part of the new highway that was supposed to run through Truth and cross into Canada at Bright Water (38), the bridge clearly signals the betrayal and abandonment of the community by the nation-state. However, it also symbolizes the microcosmic rupture of the mother-infant bond. “In health,” writes Winnicott, “the child’s interest is directed both toward external reality and towards the inner world, and he has bridges between the one world and [the] other (dreams, play, etc)” (“Aggression” 208). Davis and Wallbridge argue further that the child copes with “the insult of the reality principle,” by using the transitional object to “bridg[e] the gap between fantasy and reality without falling into a too sudden abyss of disillusionment” (55). Adam Phillips likewise envisions the transitional object as “a bridge where otherwise the child would have to jump; and it bridges for the child what might seem, without this connection, to be two incompatible worlds” (118). In Truth and Bright Water the bridge also functions as a trope that underscores the need for narratives that can facilitate the transition from pre-contact days, through the legacy of contact and the Removal, to the present, and into the future – this type of bridge is epitomized by the story that Tecumseh eventually fashions; it is Tecumseh, in the end, who brings the world into being through storytelling. To demonstrate why Truth and Bright Water is not merely a tragic reinstatement of the legacy of the Removal but, instead, constitutes a healing ceremony, I turn in the next section to Tecumseh’s radically different encounter with transitional phenomena. In effect, the novel’s juxtaposition of the two boys prompts readers to discover what prevents Tecumseh from having to make the same perilous leap and fall like Lum into a “too sudden abyss.”

Section IV: Playing on the Land I suggested earlier that by comparing Lum’s and Tecumseh’s experience readers can trace how Truth and Bright Water illustrates both the failure and the successful transmission of the benign cycle. According to Winnicott, this cycle originates within the m/other-child dyad and is subse-

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quently passed down through the generations, thereby informing the creative capacity of an entire culture. Like Lum, Tecumseh comes from a broken family. Although Tecumseh’s father, Elvin, is unable to empathize with his son and his wife, and, despite his clumsy efforts, he never rejoins the family, he manages nevertheless to provide Tecumseh with an exemplary paternal surrogate in the form of Soldier. In fact, Tecumseh’s bonds with his mother and Soldier are so secure that even when they both go off on their own separate adventures, Tecumseh remains confident that they will return. Unlike Lum, whose core self is annihilated due to the loss of his mother, Tecumseh has internalized “the good object” and, as a result, even when it is absent, his sense of being remains intact.21 In King’s narrative, both Tecumseh’s mother’s and Soldier’s capacity for reliability and rapport mirror the enduring bonds Tecumseh begins to forge between himself, his community, and the land. Peering at the river, Helen tells her son, “It’s been here since the beginning of time ... Did you know that?” (52). Ostensibly, she is referring to the Shield River, but she could equally well be referring to her own capacity to support and “shield” her son from impingement and exploitation. Readers are also prompted to recognize that her ability to sustain this holding environment is based on the example provided by her own mother – Tecumseh’s grandmother – who repeatedly warns her daughters to protect their children from adult cares. In this way, Truth and Bright Water illustrates the practice of intergenerational holding and, in so doing, supports Winnicott’s observation that in the mother-infant bond, which provides individuals with “the experience of being” – the restful, unintegrated, liminal state from which creativity and doing naturally arise – “one finds a true continuity of generations, being which is passed on from one generation to another” (qtd. in Abram 74–5). Generally speaking, Tecumseh’s interactions with his mother recall Winnicott’s suggestion that “cultural experience” springs from the primary experience of being, or, in Bollas’ words, “the first aesthetic idiom” of maternal care. Equally important, as we will see, Tecumseh’s relationship with his mother allows him to draw on inherited tradition, to borrow Winnicott’s words cited earlier, “the common pool of humanity, into which individuals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we may all draw if we have somewhere to put what we find” (Playing 99). In keeping with Winnicott’s observation, Tecumseh’s mother serves not only as a non-retaliatory holding environment, but also as a role

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model who, by living creatively, shows her son where to put what he finds. More precisely, by indulging in her love of opera and fashion makeovers and her talent as an actress, Helen demonstrates how to fashion liminal spaces that contain both subjective and objective experience. Of the various modes of playing that Helen engages in, her dedication to quilting is perhaps the most salient example of her ability to generate transitional space. As Tecumseh’s father explains, the quilt had started off “simple enough”; in the beginning, “everything was pretty much squares and triangles” (61). Rather than remain compliant to external codes, however, Helen relies on her own imagination and subjective experience to transform the quilt: The geometric forms slowly softened and turned into freehand patterns that looked a lot like trees and mountains and people and animals, and before long, my father said you could see Truth in one corner of the quilt and Bright Water in the other with the Shield flowing through the fabrics in tiny diamonds and fancy stitching. (61) In effect, this passage invites readers to compare Helen’s imaginative conception of Truth and Bright Water with King’s – both are the “textual” products of individuals who have found transitional spaces in which to put what they find. Tecumseh’s father tells his son, for example, that after a while, she began sewing “a bunch of weird things” into the quilt, including chicken feet, hair, porcupine quills, fish hooks, needles, and razor blades. “Finding all that weird stuff and wasting time sewing it on probably helps calm her down,” Elvin says. Although he warns Tecumseh to stay away from the quilt, Tecumseh assures his father that “all the dangerous stuff is on top” (62). Not surprisingly, Tecumseh’s mother’s relationship to the quilt recalls many of the qualities that Winnicott identifies in the relationship between infants and their transitional objects.22 In suggesting that the mother’s quilt provides an important example for Tecumseh, I am by no means implying that he mimics her precisely. Instead, I am suggesting that like Grace Marks in Atwood’s novel, Tecumseh adopts and adapts the basic features of this activity. As a result, he is able to use his imagination to piece together elements of external reality with his own subjective dreams and hypotheses. His exercise in cognitive “quilting” is perhaps most evident in his successful

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attempt to solve the mystery of the apparitional woman and the secrets that haunt his aunt Cassie and the adults in his family. Unlike Lum who, from the start, repeatedly insists that the mysterious figure is his mother, Tecumseh engages in an evolving critical and creative process that includes dreaming and incorporating new empirical information. Immediately after the strange woman jumps off the cliff, Tecumseh demonstrates his capacity to generate healing illusions. As he explains, “For that first instant, caught at the limits of the truck’s lights, the woman appears to float on the air, her body stretched out and arched, as if she’s decided to ride the warm currents that rise off the river and sail all the way to Bright Water” (10). Yet, external reality also plays a part in his thinking because he subsequently admits that “this is nothing more than illusion. Instead, she plummets down the long spine of the Horns and vanishes into the night” (10). The initial reference to sailing and the optimistic imaginative transformation of a woman’s earthly fall into a mythical journey is reminiscent of the prologue’s imaginative conceit of the sailing ship. Both illusions underscore the power of third space, located at the limits of empirical knowledge and observation, symbolized here by the truck’s lights, to facilitate the creative investment in and transformation of seemingly objective phenomena. Later, Tecumseh spends the night at Lum’s camp on the coulee and he dreams about the woman on the Horns. In his dream, “[s]he’s pale blue, like the pad, and in the moonlight, as she rises out of the water and wades ashore, she looks cold and lonely” (180). After his mother returns from a mysterious trip with his aunt Cassie to Waterton Lake, Tecumseh again dreams of the mysterious woman. Tecumseh assumes that his mother and aunt have gone there for the abortion. Before he falls asleep, Tecumseh covers himself with his mother’s quilt, rolling back and forth until he is “wrapped up like a baby.” As he explains, I guess I’m still thinking about the woman on the Horns, because that’s what I dream about. In my dream, the woman is standing above the river with her back to me. She’s looking over the side of the Horns, and even though it’s dark, down below on the water you can see a duck swimming back and forth. Every so often, the duck dives down and comes up with a fish in its mouth. But other times, the duck bobs to the surface with a bone or a beak full of baby clothes.

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I keep trying to get the woman to turn around, but in the end she jumps off the Horns, but as she falls, the duck flies up and catches her and sets her gently on a suitcase that is floating on the water. (206) The symbolism of Tecumseh’s dream relates in part to his earlier encounter with the spirit of Rebecca Neugin who lost her pet duck. When they meet, Rebecca tells Tecumseh: “I’m looking for my duck,” says the girl. “Have you seen her?” Down at the tent, my father and Franklin are still working on the motorcycles. “This is kind of a dangerous place for a duck,” I say. “Some people think a duck is a silly thing,” says the girl. “But it was a duck who helped to create the world.” “Ducks are cool,” I tell her. “I have a dog and he’s pretty silly.” “When the world was new and the woman fell out of the sky, it was a duck who dove down to the bottom of the ocean and brought up the mud for the dry land.” (101–2) As the references to Falling Woman and the earth-diver stories suggest, within Tecumseh’s transitional spaces personal experience mingles with communal mythology. Wrapped in his mother’s quilt, Tecumseh is able to access, through his dreams, a transitional object that, as Winnicott asserts, springs from “the common pool of humanity” (Playing 99). Monroe affirms Tecumseh’s role as a communal storyteller when he first meets Tecumseh and invites him to act as his minstrel and charges Tecumseh with the responsibility of writing about Monroe’s great deeds. Tecumseh clearly accepts the role of minstrel. In keeping with the creative and communal efforts of Monroe, Helen, and King himself, Tecumseh’s narration effectively brings Truth and Bright Water into being. In effect, all of their creative endeavours recall Winnicott’s assertion of the m/other’s fundamental communication to the infant: “Come at the world creatively, create the world; it is only what you create that has meaning for you” (qtd. in Abram 117). In this case, King relies on the transitional space of the novel to re-imagine the Canadian nationstate. The connection between the mother-infant bond and Tecumseh’s ability to access sacred, healing stories that mitigate destruction through

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his dreams becomes explicit when Tecumseh wakes up and sees his mother standing before him: I snuggle down into the quilt until just my face is showing. “Look at me.” My mother glances my way and shakes her head. “I’m a baby.” “Get up, little baby,” says my mother. “I can’t move. I’m too little.” My mother walks over to the couch, her hands dripping wet. I duck under the quilt just as she flicks her fingers. “Missed me.” Which isn’t the smart thing to say. My mother sits on my stomach and runs her cold hands under the quilt. “No fair!” “My,” says my mother, “such a large vocabulary for a baby.” “You’re going to squish the baby.” “Then I guess the baby better get up.” I’m nice and warm, and I’m not sure I want to get up ... I lie on the couch and fiddle with the edge of the quilt. (206) In this episode, the text vividly juxtaposes adolescence and infancy. Equally important, this scene drives home the antithetical experiences of Lum and his cousin. More precisely, Tecumseh’s ability to regress and play with his mother, while toying with the edge of the quilt – a familiar transitional object – recalls Winnicott’s observation that it is the ability to “get back to the parents and back to the mother, back to the centre or back to the beginning” that makes the getting away from them “a part of growth instead of a disruption of the individual’s personality” (qtd. in Davis and Wallbridge 135). On the threshold of adulthood, Tecumseh needs and makes use of his “return ticket” home. King’s narrative also suggests that Tecumseh, Monroe, and the community as a whole benefit from making use of this ticket, by re-imagining and maintaining ties to Native culture before and after contact.23 Perhaps because his mother gives him the opportunity to regress and experience the healing associated with primary mother-infant dyad, Tecumseh mistakenly assumes that Lum is likewise capable of oscillating between dreams and reality. Unaware of his cousin’s extremely fragile mental state, Tecumseh reveals that it was not Lum’s mother whom they saw dancing on the Horns. It was, in fact, Monroe Swimmer, wearing a

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wig. Moreover, Monroe was not throwing the children’s skulls away. Instead, as he tells Tecumseh, he was “rescuing” the bones of Native children stolen from their graves and displayed in museums and returning them to the Shield River. In accordance with the ceremony Monroe invents to honour their return to “the centre of the universe,” he ties a red ribbon to the children’s bones (252). Earlier, I cited Louis Owens’s contention that “tribal people have deep bonds with the earth, with sacred places that bear the bones and stories that tell them who they are, where they came from, and how to live in the world they see around them” (45). Owens, however, goes on to explain that of course almost all tribal people also have migration stories that say we came from someplace else before finding home. The very fact that tribal nations from the Southeast were so extraordinarily successful in making so-called Indian Territory a much beloved home after the horrors of Removal and before the horrors of the Civil War underscores the ability of indigenous Americans to move and in so doing to carry with them whole cultures within memory and story. Motion is genetically encoded in American Indian being. (135–66) Monroe’s insistence that he is bringing the children home likewise attests to this ability to carry “whole cultures within memory and story.” Viewed in terms of Winnicott’s benign cycle, Monroe’s ceremony is also not what it initially appeared to be, namely, an act of destruction. Instead, it constitutes a response to destruction in the form of a gesture of concern. In response to this epiphany, Tecumseh states, “I see what I should have seen before” (249), and makes the necessary adjustment in perception and perspective, which allows him to appreciate the entire benign cycle. Tecumseh urges Lum to participate in this ceremony and invites his cousin to throw the skull that they found into the river. For the purposes of this ceremony, Tecumseh uses the ribbon Rebecca gave to him. Holding the skull at arm’s length, Lum says, “Baby wants to say goodbye. Bye-bye, baby. Bye-bye” (257), as he lets the skull roll off his fingertips. Standing on the bridge beside Lum, Tecumseh complains of being beaten by the wind. “What I’d really like to do is have some of my mother’s potatoes and go to bed” (257). Whereas only the wind “beats” Tecumseh, who has a loving mother and a home to which he can return, as noted, Lum is beaten by his father and has nowhere else to go. Worse, deprived of his fantasy of regaining and repossessing his mother, Lum is

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utterly “exhausted” (257) from the aggression and violation he has endured. “Nothing to it,” Lum murmurs after watching the skull drop. “All you have to do is let go” (257). For Lum, the loss of his transitional object entails the irrevocable loss of his fantasy of an unbroken mother-infant bond. Without the help of a transitional object to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, Lum falls into “a too sudden abyss of disillusionment” (Davis and Wallbridge 55). Put somewhat differently, human voices wake him, and he drowns.24 As I note in the introduction, however, the text counterbalances Lum’s fate, and the tragic legacy of the dispossession of Native peoples more generally, with an emphasis on survival and the artist’s capacity to heal a wounded community. In the next section, I turn from Lum to the aptly named Monroe Swimmer.25 Of all the characters, Monroe relies most powerfully on transitional phenomena to engage in what Winnicott terms “creative living” and, more importantly, to champion Native survivance and address the painful legacy of the Removal.

Section V: Post-Indian Warriors and Native Survivance Monroe’s first pronouncement stresses his fundamental commitment to restoration and the ongoing and uncanny process of doubling back to revise and rewrite the dominant group’s narrative of the modern nationstate: “‘Don’t mind the mess’ Monroe tells Tecumseh, ‘Renovation is a bitch’” (45). As Ridington asserts, Monroe is “a coyote/trickster, a master of reversals, and an actor in the archetypal earth-diver creation story. He is also a link between the narrator’s family story and Indian history. He turns out to be central to the secret that Tecumseh’s mother and her sister Cassie share, as well as central to the author’s re-writing and reversal of Indian removals” (92). The title of this section, however, refers to Monroe Swimmer’s performative and non-essentialist approach to restoration and to fashioning identity. The non-essentialist nature of Truth and Bright Water’s response to betrayal and dispossession aligns King’s text with Gerald Vizenor’s writing. In the face of Native people’s supposed disappearance, King, like Vizenor, resists the impulse to install an essentialist Native presence. In Stuart Hall’s words, “the past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past,’ since our relation to it, like a child’s relation to the mother, is alwaysalready ‘after the break’” (211). Rather than install a utopian fantasy that

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erases the traumatic history of Removal, King’s narrative serves as a bridge that offers an alternative perspective on events and forges a transition between the past, present, and future. Vizenor, for example, reminds readers that for five hundred years, “the reality of tribal people has been simulated under an artifact known as ‘indian,’ a misnomer that testifies more to the absence than to the presence of Native people” (qtd. in Pulitano 15). As Vizenor explains, “Indian became the homogenous name for thousands of distinct tribal cultures. The Anishinaabe were named the Chippewa. The Dakota were named the Sioux. Other tribal names are colonial inventions sustained in the literature of dominance. That some postindians renounce the inventions and final vocabularies of manifest manners is the advance of survivance hermeneutics” (Manifest 167). To subvert the settler-invader’s invention of “the indian,” Vizenor relies on “trickster hermeneutics” to put forward the concept of the Postindian Warrior, “the Native presence after the simulations who represents both resistance and survival, reinvented as survivance” (qtd. in Pulitano 152). A figure who, “with good humor and compassion,” hovers ghost-like over the “ruins of indian simulations,” the postindian “overturns the tragic notion of Manifest Destiny and eternal ‘victimry’” (qtd. in Pulitano 152). As Kimberly Blaeser asserts, Vizenor’s method becomes “a way in which Native peoples can assert and create a new identity, one not contained by tragic or romantic visions of a vanishing race ... It becomes the voice of a new social consciousness, one destined to liberate and to heal” (107). For both Vizenor and King, the assertion of Native identity and a commitment to healing the traumas of the past do not entail capitulating to the settler-invader’s essentialist strategies of categorization. As Vizenor explains, “I write for people who would rather imagine the world than subscribe to the lessons of anthropology” (qtd. in Pulitano 160). In accordance with Vizenor’s poststructuralist and postcolonial praxis, King strategically sets Truth and Bright Water on an imaginary Native reserve.26 Moreover, the narrative explores the lives of two boys from a tribal nation that remains unnamed. Both of these gestures emphasize the power of illusion and thereby undercut attempts to locate and reify a vision of a supposedly authentic Native culture. Finally, as noted, the text moves beyond what Vizenor calls “the terminal creeds” (68) of realism by featuring supernatural elements, including the ghosts of historical figures who endured the Removal and continue to haunt the land. As Vizenor declares, “The trickster arises in imagination and the trick-

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ster lives nowhere but in imagination. We all have a trickster in the mind if we have any sense of play and imagination about literature. Trickster is a brilliant tribal figure of imagination that has found a new world in written languages” (“Trickster Discourse” 68).27 Turning to Truth and Bright Water, when Tecumseh first ventures to Monroe’s home in the old Methodist church, he is greeted by a man in a wheelchair, with long black hair “tied back with a piece of red cloth” (45). Tecumseh’s observation that Monroe’s hair style reminds him of “Graham Green’s hair in Dances With Wolves” prepares us for the theatrical aspects of Monroe’s approach to life. Within minutes, Monroe “takes off his hair” (46) and, in their next encounter, the wheelchair is nowhere to be seen. Both Monroe’s play with the constructed identity of the Indian and the disabled body remind readers of the constructed nature of what were once taken as essential identities. Again, the novel insists that appearances can be deceiving and are largely a matter of vision and perspective. The connection between Native and disabled is especially apt since as Ato Quayson argues, “persons with disabilities, located on the margins of society as they are, have historically taken on the coloration of whatever else is perceived to also lie on the social margins of society” (5). Moreover, Lum is not born disabled; instead, he is rendered disabled by his own father. In fact, Monroe constantly toys with essentialist stereotypes and is famous for his politically barbed antics. Lucille Rain recalls how Monroe once showed up at Indian Days and joined the crowds of tourists that were milling about, wearing shorts and suspenders and puffing on a tuba, pretending to be a representative of the Bright Water German Club: “‘He said it was the least he could do ... seeing as how Germans were so keen on dressing up like Indians” (25). At the novel’s conclusion, Tecumseh attends the Indian Days celebration and runs into an obnoxious tourist wearing a red Hawaiian shirt, a white cowboy hat, and a pair of sunglasses. The man takes Tecumseh’s picture and just as Tecumseh is about to inform him that it will cost five dollars, the man pulls his dark glasses down. “‘Shhhhh!’ says Monroe. ‘I’m in disguise. Did I fool you?’” (216). In these episodes, Swimmer embodies his credo that it is better to be a live fool than a reified stereotype and, in the latter instance, successfully reverses the gaze of the unequal scopic cultural encounters between dominant and marginalized groups. Later, when Tecumseh asks him whether his “restoration projects” constitute “art,” Monroe replies, “My trade and my art is living” (132), recalling Winnicott’s insistence that “[i]n creative living

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you or I find that everything we do strengthens the feeling that we are alive, that we are ourselves” (qtd. in Abram 122). It is also worth noting that Monroe’s performative gestures are not merely tolerated by the community; quite the contrary, they are embraced with a vengeance by people who recognize the joy and healing powers associated with the trickster-inspired ability to play. Long before Monroe plays at restoration, Cassie and Helen play a trick on their then boyfriends. Tecumseh reports several versions of an anecdote that his mother and Cassie like to tell about when they were young in “another time, another life,” a phrase which they repeated to dismiss his questions (188, 207, 245). When they were young, Helen and Cassie looked so much alike, they could be mistaken for twins. (In keeping with the novel’s comic trickster sensibility, there is an abundance of doubles, ranging from Tecumseh and Lum, to Soldier and the Cousins, to Cassie and Helen, and Franklin and Elvin.) One evening, as a prank, Cassie and Helen switch dresses and hairstyles and successfully trick their boyfriends into thinking that they are with the right girlfriend. When Tecumseh first hears the story, he mistakenly assumes that the duped boyfriends were his father, Elvin, and his father’s brother, Franklin Heavy Runner, Lum’s dad. As it turns out, however, Tecumseh’s mother, Helen, was dating Monroe Swimmer at the time – a man who reputedly left home after getting a girl pregnant; hence, it is possible that Monroe is Tecumseh’s father. Furthermore, as Eva Gruber notes, at the Indian Days celebration, Elvin dresses up “as Elvis, complete with painted sideburns and coveralls. Assisted by Lucy Rabbit, who tries hard to look like her biggest idol Marilyn Munro, the couple points to the artificiality characteristic of all processes of mythmaking in American popular culture, be it show stars or Hollywood Indians” (155). Finally, as noted, at the end of the novel, everyone turns out to see Helen play the lead in a theatrical performance. As Tecumseh observes, “There are more people at the theatre than were at [Lum’s] ... funeral, but that doesn’t surprise me. Dying on stage can be funny, and most people would rather laugh than cry” (265). The emphasis on the play at the close of Truth and Bright Water is, in fact, in keeping with the text’s emphasis on the supernatural and on transitional space since the theatre is quite literally the space of (the) play, and thus a vivid example of the community’s reliance on transitional space. In effect, all of Monroe’s antics entail the creation of third spaces which, ultimately, represent his contribution to the restoration of the community. After they set up the last of the buffalo, for example, Mon-

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roe and Tecumseh survey their efforts. Tecumseh notices that Monroe has “staked a small buffalo by itself, away from the rest, looking back towards the church” (198). “Is that supposed to be a baby?” Tecumseh asks. Seeming to ignore the question, Monroe replies, “Magic ... If you want the herds to return, you have to understand magic ... Realism will only take you so far” (198). In effect, Monroe’s comments reflexively comment on King’s reliance on magic realism – a choice that is linked to Steffler’s, Urquhart’s and King’s understanding that alternative perspectives and narrative modes are required if one hopes to revise the national imaginary. “Where is its mother?” Tecumseh enquires. “Every so often,” Monroe explains, “a calf will get lost or separated from the herd. If the baby doesn’t make it back to the herd in time, the coyotes will find it ... It’s sad, but it happens all the time” (198). Their discussion effectively recapitulates Lum’s fate, and again blurs the distinctions between humans and animals. Equally important, Monroe’s comments suggest that only the magic associated with illusion and transitional phenomena can repair the damage that springs from intergenerational trauma and the rupture of the mother-infant bond. Ultimately, it is magic that will bring back the herd. In essence, Truth and Bright Water demonstrates that artists ensure that, to borrow Hall’s words, “the past continues to speak to us” (211). Within the transitional space of his text, King invokes the trope of haunting to re-imagine Native people’s relationship to the m/other, to the old days, and to the land. In the novel, spectres such as Rebecca Neugin – who magically reappears and offers her story like a gift during the Indian Days celebration – remind us that what has been lost, stolen, or erased is not necessarily gone for good because, as the prologue so vividly demonstrates and as Monroe’s renovation projects attest, traces can be evoked within the transitional space of narrative and other aesthetic practices (220). Essential to the magic and the communal healing ceremony, however, is the individual’s ability to achieve a balance between external reality and illusion – a feat that requires effort and has profound repercussions. When Tecumseh admits to Monroe that it is fun to set up the buffalo, Monroe turns on him angrily. “‘Not fun,’” he says, low and hard. “‘Serious. This is serious’” (135). Tecumseh is confused because he mistakenly assumes that serious is synonymous with external reality. Tecumseh tentatively informs Monroe that the buffalo “aren’t really real,” although they “sort of look real” (135). Upon hearing this, Monroe’s face “explodes in smiles and tears. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘yes, that’s exactly right’” (135). Monroe’s

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happiness at Tecumseh’s recognition of the fabricated/unreal aspects of the buffalo recalls Winnicott’s insistence, cited earlier, that illusion becomes “the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own” (Playing 3). As this statement suggests, Winnicott rejects attempts to coerce individuals to accept another person’s (or culture’s) transitional phenomena – a process that informed, in part, the settler-invader’s attempts at forcing Native peoples to assimilate. Winnicott argues further, however, that “[w]e can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings” (3). This voluntary gathering of the herd, to borrow Monroe’s words, is precisely what Monroe hopes to achieve. He warns Tecumseh, in effect, not to proselytize or give away the secret of the illusion: “You can’t tell anyone ... If they hear about it, it won’t work” (136). Unlike Lum, who falls apart when reality impinges too forcefully on his fantasy, Monroe’s “magic” depends on a balance between subjective and objective elements. In effect, this is a balance between absolute compliance and retreat into private fantasy – a balance epitomized by the prologue’s final and quietly allusive image of the church turning into a ship that sails over the horizon. Later, when Tecumseh asks Monroe what he plans to do next, Monroe replies, “Maybe buy an old residential school and paint it; that’s about all anyone can do” (248). Fundamentally, Monroe’s efforts at making the church disappear recall Davis and Wallbridge’s discussion of Winnicott’s account of the infant’s destructive impulses. As they explain, Winnicott’s theory of destruction in relation to permanence is perhaps easier to grasp if we consider that from a purely perceptual point of view, when an infant shuts his eyes he has, in fact, destroyed that bit of the world that was within his vision. If he then opens his eyes, and things have remained unchanged, this no doubt contributes to the permanent quality of external reality. Infants in their second half-year of life notoriously enjoy experimenting in this realm; games of ‘peep-bo’ fascinate them and so do hiding and finding things. (71) Playing his own game of ‘peep-bo’ or fort-da, Monroe paints the church and “makes it disappear,” demonstrating his power to subjectively come

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at the world and reinvest it with personal meaning; whereas tearing down the church would constitute a denial of history, as Monroe’s comment that repainting is “about all anyone can do” suggests an acceptance of the past and a commitment to re-interpret history from the perspective of Native peoples. Ultimately, Monroe’s artistic processes speak directly to Truth and Bright Water’s overarching effort to challenge the stereotype of the vanished or doomed Indian. Yet, from the close readings of Monroe’s various endeavours cited above, it is apparent that challenging the stereotype is not merely the responsibility of an isolated individual. Rather, it calls for the participation and collaborative efforts of the entire community. Monroe admits that as a painter, he made a bunch of money, but, as he confesses, “I was lousy. Stinko. Reactionary. Predictable” (129). He discovered his real talent for restoration when he began restoring nineteenth-century landscapes. His work with this art form recalls Silko’s comments cited earlier about the necessity of recognizing that “human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and the sky” (qtd. in Sarkowsky 39). According to Silko, the implied dichotomy between human beings and the land implied by the English word landscape, rendered the word misleading when applied to Native approaches to the land, which stress the continuity between subjective and objective realms. As Monroe tells Tecumseh, he spent time in all of the great cities of America and Europe. One day, the Smithsonian asked him to “handle a particularly difficult painting” of a lake at dawn. Everything was fine except that “the paint along the shore had begun to fade, and images that weren’t in the original painting were beginning to bleed through” (130). Although Monroe worked on the painting until “it looked as good as new ... something went wrong ... the new paint wouldn’t hold” and the images “began to bleed through again ... There was an Indian village on the lake, slowly coming up through the layers of paint. Clear as day” (130). Faced with this challenge – in essence, the persistence of Native consciousness within the settler society’s newly claimed territory – Monroe decided to paint the village and the Indians back into the painting, and from there, he went on to restore other paintings. Yet, as he tells Tecumseh, “there were too many ... And the museums kept firing me ... I don’t think they wanted their Indians restored ... I think they liked their Indians where they couldn’t see them” (247). Monroe’s humorous references to images of Native peoples bleeding through offi-

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cial, non-Native representations, despite the latter’s desire for the Natives to “vanish,” shed light on the narrative structure as a whole. As we have seen, Truth and Bright Water links contemporary Native life, via a blood-red thread, to healing images – generative illusions of Native life and the environment prior to settler invasion, the horrors of the Removal, and the dispossession and erasure of Native peoples. In conjunction with the novel’s conjuring of spectres from the past, Monroe’s restoration of First Peoples previously erased from European and American landscape paintings emphasizes the role of imagination and aesthetics in (re)creating the national imaginary. Indeed, as Monroe’s contemporary, playful games of “peep-bo” between Native peoples, settlers, and post-Indian warriors demonstrate, it is never too late to challenge the nation-state’s governing illusions. In King’s narrative, Monroe’s initial restoration of Native presence and the m/other-infant bond is integral to his larger effort to affirm the holistic, cultural vision of Native people’s rapport with the land. Viewed in this light, the past is never “over and done with” because, within transitional space, it is always possible to get “back to the mother, back to the centre or back to the beginning,” and thereby partly restore what was lost. The fact that Monroe wears a red ribbon in his hair when he first meets Tecumseh and that he ties the children’s skulls with this same thread attests to his particular kinship with and concern for the lost children. Monroe’s comments about the alienated buffalo calf likewise highlight his sensitivity to the problems facing Native youth. In response to the aggression unleashed against Native people, however, Monroe repeatedly emphasizes the need to participate in the benign cycle of restoration and repair. Whereas Lum paints his face the colours of triumph and death, Monroe also paints his face and divides it in half: one side is painted “black with red dots and the other side has been painted white with black dots. A thick yellow line runs across his forehead and there are long, thick blue marks on each cheek” (192). In this case, the juxtaposition of colours (the Cherokee colours representing the four cardinal directions) – black, the colour of death to red, the colour of success and victory; and black to white, the colour of peace and happiness – signals the complex and interconnected facets of human experience. Moreover, whereas Lum, having internalized the settler-invader’s view of the doomed Indian, treats himself as garbage and throws himself away, Monroe engages in a radically different type of spontaneous “giveaway.” This, as noted earlier, is Monroe’s “great deed” – something finally wor-

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thy of being recorded by his minstrel, Tecumseh (193). Again, in keeping with Winnicott’s emphasis on spontaneity, Monroe insists on the need for his giveaway to be “a surprise” (49). At the end of the novel, Monroe’s spontaneous gesture effectively reverses this theft by offering gifts to everyone in the community. First, Monroe asks Tecumseh to help him remove all of his possessions from the church. Next, he and Tecumseh build a bonfire and light flares that bring all of Truth and Bright Water to Monroe’s final surprise ceremony (243).28 The fact that King’s novel concludes with a potlatch ceremony – a native practice that was banned by the Canadian government from 1884 to 1951 owing to its transgressive approach to private property – recalls similar efforts depicted in Brand’s texts to destroy the property form. Whereas Heath Justice and Ridington read the novel’s conclusion primarily within the context of Native mythology, I argue instead that the novel’s unyielding emphasis on transitional phenomena alerts readers to the perils of concentrating on either external reality or illusion, in this case, mythology. As the foregoing analysis of transitional phenomena suggests, Truth and Bright Water offers a model of engagement that does not deny loss, grief, and anger even as it generates a magical and potentially therapeutic response to the problems instigated by the dispossession of Native peoples. Within the narrative, Tecumseh’s ability to grieve for his friend and his dog indicates that, in contrast to Lum, Tecumseh accepts loss and destruction, which are mitigated, in part, by aesthetic moments of deep rapport with the other. As we have seen, this duality is fundamental to transitional phenomena. For Winnicott and King, the destruction of the paradox results either in compliance with its concomitant loss of vitality or flight into sentimental fantasy. As I have shown, King’s novel maintains this paradox by relying on the temporally and ontologically liminal tropes of haunting and ghosts. In Truth and Bright Water, spirits gesture simultaneously to death and the past – by alluding to the devastating history of the Removal – and to life and the present – by returning to tell their stories to members of the community and thereby alter its present and future. King’s apparitional figures can also be thought of as genius loci who, despite being forced to wander, nevertheless attest to Native people’s capacity for rapport with the land. In the end, readers must contend with both loss and restoration, which ambiguously inform Lum’s unfinished race and Cassie’s decision to throw the baby clothes onto the fire on Canada Day. As Tecumseh explains,

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Auntie Cassie opens the suitcase, takes out a small shirt, and holds it up to the light. Against the heat of the fire, the shirt looks soft and golden, and even though I’m watching, I almost miss it, the motion is so quick and casual. In the end, all I really do see is the shirt spread out and floating, bright against the night. It settles onto the embers, lies there in the fire for the longest time, and then slowly curls up at the edges, glows briefly, and is gone. My mother circles the fire, the quilt dragging in the grass behind her. When she gets to auntie Cassie’s side, she doesn’t say a word, and she doesn’t try to stop her. She opens the quilt and wraps it around her sister’s shoulders, while auntie Cassie takes each piece of clothing out of the suitcase, deliberately, one at a time, and casts them all into the flames. (246) Here I would suggest that readers are invited to make a leap into third space which entails holding two antithetical interpretations together – a partial leap into death and loss and into healing mythology. In the chapter on Brand, I noted a similar opportunity to hold opposing possibilities together in In Another Place Not Here, which likewise seemingly depicts a death leap. In the case of Truth and Bright Water, maintaining a sense of duality is in keeping with Paula Gunn Allen’s insistence that “for Native people, reconciling the opposites of life and death, of celebration and grief, of laughter and rage is no simple task, yet it is one worthy of our best understanding and our best effort” (158). With respect to King’s novel, Ridington astutely observes that “July 1 is the date of the birth of Tecumseh’s aunt Cassie’s child and of Canada,” but “both King and Monroe Swimmer transform Canada Day into Indian Days” (98). Thus, in this final episode, loss and destruction are balanced against the narrative’s emphasis on Native people’s construction of and participation in sacred healing rituals, most obviously, the giveaway. Before leaving, Monroe asks Tecumseh what Cassie would like most. “‘Here,’ [Monroe] ... says, and he picks up an Inuit sculpture of a woman with a child on her back. ‘We’ll give her this’” (244). With this simple gesture, the novel affirms Cassie’s actual loss of Mia and, at the same time, the healing illusion afforded by art. This positive aspect recalls Vizenor’s fundamental assertion: “Trickster stories are not the exercise of tragic victimry” (30). At bottom, duality is the hallmark of the trickster – the figure who inspires Monroe, and, I would argue, King and Winnicott. The latter clearly appreciated trickster’s fundamental

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wisdom; to borrow Monroe Swimmer’s words, while engaging in the serious business of play, we must not “mind the mess” (45). To summarize, I began this chapter by suggesting that Truth and Bright Water emphasizes the connection between infancy and adolescence. Using Lum’s and Tecumseh’s fates as evidence, I showed how the narrative emphasizes the vulnerability of individuals in both stages of development to intergenerational trauma. I argued further that Truth and Bright Water also underscores how the characters’ engagement with transitional phenomena gestures beyond the crimes and traumatic legacy of the Cherokee Removal. Tracing Tecumseh’s engagement with his mother and with Monroe Swimmer, I argued that transitional phenomena can lead to artistic, political, ethical, and therapeutic modes of engaging with the world that have the potential to address past crimes. When he first meets Monroe, Tecumseh spies a piano inside the church. “I don’t play,” Tecumseh admits, “but if I did, this would be the piano I would want” (46). Throughout the narrative, both Tecumseh and Lum repeatedly overhear Monroe playing the piano. Before Lum kills himself, the boys again hear the piano and, as noted, Lum claims it “was his mother’s favourite song” (257). At one point, not realizing that he is being observed by Monroe, Tecumseh tries to play the instrument: “I work my fingers across the keys the way I’ve seen real pianists do on television, and even though the sound is all jumbled, I can hear that the piano is a good one and that, if I knew how to play, it would sound great” (192). As part of the communal giveaway at the end of the novel, Monroe bequeaths the piano to Tecumseh. Appropriately enough, the instrument sits in his mother’s beauty parlour (263). Although Tecumseh tells his mother that she can sell it or give it away, she refuses to part with it and wisely awaits the time when Tecumseh decides he is ready to learn to play. In keeping with the overarching discussion of transitional phenomena and the importance of learning to play, Monroe’s insistence that Tecumseh take on the role of minstrel and his gift of the piano epitomize the older generation’s responsibility toward the next generation, namely, to inspire and provide children with the opportunity to play and thereby transform the world. As we have seen, King, like Watson and Anderson-Dargatz, views the clash between the settler-invaders and North American Native peoples as a pivotal historical moment that instigated the haunting of the Canadian nation-state. In keeping with The Double Hook and The Cure for Death by Lightning, Truth and Bright Water reminds readers that, as

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noted in chapter 1, Canada remains haunted by “the ghosts that European settlers and their descendants refused to recognize as legitimate, the ghosts of those whom they killed, and the ghosts that they recognized and subsequently appropriated” (Sugars, “Haunted” 5). Whereas my analysis of the novels in chapters 1 through 4 focuses predominantly on exposing repressed cycles of victimization in the novels, my explorations of Brand’s work and of King’s novel investigates marginalized relational frameworks that are called upon to repair the devastation associated with the imperial and colonial strategies of dispossession. Perhaps the most hopeful and liberating of all the works in this study, King’s novel maintains that haunting can serve as more than an index to a dead past. Instead, in Truth and Bright Water the persistence of ghosts signals the possibility of recovering alternative pasts and, by extension, of conceiving of alternative futures based on the accrued cultural knowledge of Native peoples – communal knowledge that was only partially eclipsed by the patriarchal, Christian nation-state.

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conclusion

Toward an Ethics of Haunting

This study began with my desire to trace the motifs of haunting, ghosts, and possession through close readings of a range of contemporary Canadian fiction. As we have seen from the analyses in the previous chapters, these tropes shape both the form and content of much Canadian writing, ranging from the formal experimentation of Sheila Watson’s modernist classic, The Double Hook, to the hysterical narrative of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, to the trickster-infused fiction of Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water. Equally important, I argue that haunting and possession can be linked to three seminal experiences that define the Canadian nation-state: first, the clash between Canada’s indigenous population and the settler-invaders; second, the losses instigated by the impact of immigration, diasporas, and globalization; and, finally, the ongoing association between the uncanny and the female body – an association that in New World literature becomes even more significant because the female body often symbolizes the supposedly virgin land, both feared and desired by the imperial and colonial invaders. In essence, my study poses the following question: “What happens if the dead refuse to stay dead, but maintain a wayward and more or less obtrusive presence within the world of the living?”1 If, as noted in the introductory chapter, “historical knowledge, at least in the modern west, is founded on the silencing and sublimation of other ways of knowing, including communion with spirits and the dead,” then ghosts have the ability to challenge western ontological and epistemological frameworks (McLean 17). Indeed, as we have seen in the works under consideration, the return of the repressed unsettles the foundations on which historical and realist narratives are built, including notions of rational and con-

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scious agency; unified identity; linear and teleological temporality; spatiality; and, finally, reified hierarchies of race, gender, and class that entrench traditional forms of knowledge and power. On a formal level, my study also explores the extent to which the uncanny responses to these three key experiences that shape the Canadian nation-state rely on tropes derived from the Gothic, magic realism, and fantastic literature. My contribution to the discussion of the challenges posed by the Gothic to dominant literary, political, and social narratives lies in demonstrating the ways in which these Canadian tales of ethnic haunting, viewed in the context of the temporal and geographical specificities to which they gesture, transport these challenges beyond fictional discourses into the realm of history (Sugars and Turcotte, “Introduction” 6). In effect, I am suggesting that spectral fictions have the power to alter accepted, official versions of Canadian history by invoking and troubling the process of generating the genius loci and collective memories of the nation-state. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the persistence of seemingly archaic vestiges of the supernatural holds out the possibility of subsequent reformulations of alternative pasts and futures (McLean 30). Owing to the appearance of revenants in the works considered, the narratives through which we learn about and understand the past, and which constitute communal history and serve as the epistemological foundation for the present and the future, are unsettled and rendered uncanny. To demonstrate how the unfinished business of the past – specifically, stories about dispossession and possession that allude to the crimes associated with imperialism and colonialism – can potentially transform the present and the future, this study traces the effects of haunting on textual production. As we have seen, spectral and/or hysterical effects include the impulse towards decomposition, disintegration, and the breaking-up of language. I argue further that these effects rupture traditional narratives and that they open spaces for repressed histories and knowledges that challenge prevailing aesthetic and political assumptions about the nation and its narration. In other words, on both formal and thematic levels, the tropes of haunting and possession in contemporary Canadian fiction emphasize the resurgence of long-standing crises associated with visibility, recognition, power, and ethics. Understood as “a structure of feeling,” haunting, to borrow Avery Gordon’s words, “defies our conceptions of formal, official and fixed social forms” (198). Significantly, in the process of simultaneously revealing and concealing the

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spectre, the texts under consideration assume an ethical valence.2 In their challenges to official history, the haunted narratives draw particular attention to discursive acts – to writing and reading. The nature of their ethical engagement lies in the arena of representation. As such, they invite readers to consider several important questions. Who has the power to represent history and from where does this power derive? Who or what is supposedly being revealed to whom, how fully, and to what end? How does an engagement with spectral fictions re-enact existing power dynamics in society or resist such re-enactments? Finally, if reading is supposedly predicated on the capacity to see and to know the other, and on the ability to differentiate between self and other, then how is reading complicated by spectral texts that undermine these taken-for-granted axioms of discursive engagement? By referring to an ethics of haunting in the title of my concluding chapter, I am suggesting that the literary treatments of haunting and possession in Canadian fiction may be beneficial not because they grant us transparent access to the other, but, instead, because they prompt readers to engage with the histories and resistance of the other. As a result, they present a constructive addition to the current emphasis on what is known as “the ethical turn” in literary criticism. Before going on to explore the ethical dimensions of the spectral fictions under consideration, I want first to offer a brief summary of the previous chapters that will serve as the foundation for my subsequent discussion of what I term “an ethics of haunting.” In chapters 1 and 2, I evaluate the role played by haunting, and I delineate what might be said to constitute an ironic Canadian Gothic novel. As Sugars and Turcotte maintain, to a large extent, the Canadian Gothic examines “what has been silenced or forced to the sidelines in a national context, and [it] is therefore concerned with what emerges as uncanny reminders of a problematic colonial history” (Sugars and Turcotte, “Introduction” 7). My analysis of Watson’s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning in chapter 1 explores the insistent doubling back associated with haunting in these narratives, which instigates uncanny returns to both repressed Native and maternal origins. Due to these uncanny returns, attempts at entrenching biblical, patrilineal, and modernist teleologies bent on banishing the spirits of Native peoples remain futile. Throughout the chapter, I engage with the geographic and political specificity of these texts. I argue, for example, that in both novels Coyote’s haunting presence

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should be read in light of the fact that Watson and Anderson-Dargatz lived in neighbouring regions of British Columbia. In identifying these loci as haunted by the Native trickster-god Coyote, I maintain that both works register the ongoing conflicts between Native peoples’ and the settler-invaders’ claims to the land. Both race and gender play a key role in Watson’s The Double Hook since two part-Native women must die before the patriarchal, Christian home can be established. In The Cure for Death by Lightning, indigeneity is again linked to gender, but here lesbianism is also conflated with the spirit of Coyote; ultimately, these influences are supposedly exorcised. Yet, in The Double Hook, Coyote has the last word, and in The Cure for Death by Lightning, the trail of blood associated with Coyote – a symbol of the crimes against Native peoples – can never be erased. Part II narrows the study’s focus from an overarching analysis of haunting to a more precise examination of the relationship between dispossession and possession in Britain and its colonies from the eighteenth century to the present. To this end, chapter 2 analyzes how possession and dispossession are tied to biblical discourses of the Fall and to religious and secular concepts of degeneration. The analysis of Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright thus reinforces my study’s goal of politicizing and historicizing the discourses of haunting by reading the narrative within specific temporal and spatial contexts delineated by the actual George Cartwright’s travels in Britain and its colonies. In the case of Steffler’s novel, I elaborate on my analysis in chapter 1 of how settler/Aboriginal relations in Canada are gothicised and how New World landscapes and societies become gothic sites. Whereas chapter 1 identifies the dispossession of Native peoples and the ongoing Native land claims in British Columbia as potent sources of haunting and of images of the monstrous Other, chapter 2 locates an additional source in the eighteenth century’s British inheritance laws and religious and secular theories of degeneracy, which informed the historical George Cartwright’s imperialistic behaviour in the colonies and Labrador. At bottom, many of the ghostly effects of haunting and possession in Canadian literature remain tied to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Both Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Urquhart’s Away illustrate how imperialism is disseminated on the individual level. As noted earlier, Steffler’s novel suggests that Cartwright’s desire to conquer the colonies can be viewed, in part, as an acting out of an earlier traumatic dispossession instigated by the English laws of inheritance. In

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effect, Cartwright’s monomaniacal fantasies of (re)possession are unleashed in response to threats of dispossession and boundary loss instigated by the rule of primogeniture. Equally important, an awareness of this larger cycle of victimization – in which Cartwright is dispossessed by British law, dispossesses Native peoples, and is finally dispossessed and rendered a spectre by the novel – usefully complicates the traditional, sanctioned oppositions between colonizer-colonized, self-other, dominance-resistance, metropolis-colony, colonial-postcolonial. Using these insights, we can also consider the extent to which the writings of other settler-invaders, such as those of Susanna Moodie and her sister Catherine Parr Traill, can be read in the light of the uncanny law of primogeniture. An awareness of cycles of victimization and the legacy of dispossession prepares us for similar patterns and their attendant complexities in Away, the focus of chapter 3. Urquhart’s novel traces the formation of the Irish collective memory of the Famine, the diaspora, and Irish nationalism both in Ireland and the New World. Unlike The Double Hook, The Cure for Death by Lightning, and The Afterlife of George Cartwright, however, Away does not primarily rely on the Gothic to explore the Irish collective memory. Instead, Urquhart’s novel invokes the related yet distinct subgenre of magic realism. The shift from Gothic to magic realism has significant ideological implications. Whereas the novels in this study that borrow from the Gothic merely hint at uncanny crimes, Away’s use of magic realism forcibly instantiates the alternative perspective of the marginalized community. In Urquhart’s text, emphasis is placed on the perspective of Celticism and the Irish collective memory that was generated in contrast to the prevailing, dominant discourses of British and Canadian nationalism. Due to its positive emphasis on Celticism and Romantic Primitivism, Away’s reliance on magic realism seemingly legitimates attempts on the part of its diasporic characters – the majority of whom are displaced and dispossessed members of the Irish diaspora – to fashion a consoling vision of survival. Owing to the stereotypical use of Native characters and the conceit of a totem-transfer – most obviously, the gift of gold from the crow to Eileen – Away suggests that it was fated that the Irish inherit the New World. As in the preceding novels, however, despite the settlers’ understandable and legitimate efforts to transfer their ghosts and ancestors from the Old World to the New, and despite their desire to see in Native life echoes of their own beliefs and experiences of colonial dispossession, the erasure of Native North Americans intrudes on and

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unsettles the utopian fantasies of the settler-invaders by reminding them of indigenous people’s prior claim to the land. Ultimately, in keeping with The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Away warns against clinging to ancestral ghosts by showing how the characters who perceive themselves solely as the victims of history efface their own agency and their capacity to victimize others. Like Away, Atwood’s Alias Grace, the subject of chapter 4, also focuses on the trauma associated with the Irish diaspora and continues to rely on the tropes of haunting and possession to prompt readers to contend with what it means spatially and psychically to be “away.” In Alias Grace’s case, however, my analysis shifts to the novel’s depiction of the invasion of the self, home, and nation by the other in the form of the racialized, immigrant domestic servant. In effect, in both Urquhart’s and Atwood’s novels, hysteria and, more specifically, double consciousness emerge as unconscious traces of the losses associated with the Irish diaspora and to express the utopian desires associated with immigration. Unlike Away, however, Alias Grace does not align haunting with Celticism but, instead, with the fears and desires associated with gender and class mobility, more precisely, The Woman Question. Here double consciousness signals the impact of displacement and dispossession as well as the immigrant’s internally divided and doubled response to his or her transgressive desires for class mobility. Within the novel, repeated allusions to fabrication and performance underscore how nineteenth-century biological models of identity are haunted by constructivist models, more precisely, the spectre of the commodified self: an ever-shifting “social persona” produced through a series of “performances” (Goddu 33). In other words, the vision of social status as natural and based on filiation and blood is shadowed by an alternative and uncanny vision of society as constructed and subject to radical change. Ultimately, my analyses of both Away and Alias Grace contribute to my study by underscoring the connections between wandering ghosts and diasporic peoples in Canadian fiction. Atwood’s narrative, however, emphasizes in particular the historically entrenched relationships between the hysteria diagnosis, the impact of migration, and Irish working-class women’s experience in the New World. Chapter 4 on Alias Grace is followed by my analysis of Dionne Brand’s corpus to demonstrate a crucial point: when it comes to understanding the tropes of haunting and possession in Canadian fiction, although the paradigms afforded by the Gothic, magic realism, trauma,

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and performativity remain useful, not all evocations of haunting in Canadian literature can be subsumed under these paradigms. Analyzing both the material and the metaphorical dimensions of the trope of possession in Brand’s oeuvre broadens the terms of my study and, at the same time, augments prior criticism of Brand’s writing that addresses the embodied, haunting, and traumatic features of her work solely within the dominant epistemological frameworks. As I argue, when it comes to Brand’s writing, theories of performativity and of trauma do not account for the endurance of embodied memories of slavery and of alternative black knowledges because Brand’s texts repeatedly invoke AfroCaribbean spiritual traditions and possession rituals that demonstrate the partial nature of these theories. In different ways, both Brand’s writing, the focus of chapter 5, and Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, the subject of chapter 6, present similar challenges to monological and rational conceptions of identity because both authors’ works rely on haunting to portray affective and relational approaches to identity. In addition, Brand’s and King’s narratives rely on the tropes of haunting in ways that gesture beyond individual or private experience and thereby challenge familiar teleological spatial and temporal frameworks. In Brand’s short story “Blossom,” for example, the protagonist’s traumatic witnessing of Black people’s suffering constitutes an uncanny form of congealed social memory that continues to seethe in the present. Similarly, in Truth and Bright Water, evocations of the Removal and the red ribbon – which tie the legacy of colonial dispossession to the ongoing failure of the mother-infant bond – blur distinctions between past and present and the boundaries between self and other. Truth and Bright Water invites us to reconsider Watson’s and Anderson-Dargatz’s novels discussed in chapter 1 because King’s narrative also invokes ghosts and the spirit of Coyote to trace the impact of the dispossession of North American Native peoples. Yet, as I argue, King’s narrative unsettles the perspective afforded by the previous novels because it offers a view of Native life from the perspective of Tecumseh, a boy raised within a Native community. On one level, in Tecumseh’s narrative, haunting signals the legacy of crimes against Native peoples. But haunting and ghosts also reveal the salutary workings of transitional phenomena within the Native community. With an awareness of the role played by transitional phenomena, readers can appreciate how both the land and its ghosts bind two ostensibly opposed elements – traces of the trauma associated with the dispossession of Native peoples, on the one hand, and

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the playful, artistic, imaginative cultural practices that facilitate reparation and healing, on the other. As in Away, in Truth and Bright Water an important distinction is made concerning what it means to play with the dead. On the one hand, the text portrays Lum’s fatal obsession with the dead as a re-enactment of both his individual and the broader communal traumas of dispossession and abandonment. By contrast, the narrative’s emphasis on Monroe’s engagement with the dead suggests an alternative means of recalling the historical violence in the context of creative and communal aesthetic and therapeutic efforts to heal. Owing to its self-conscious engagement with the process of hiding and exposing the spectre, King’s novel, in keeping with all of the works under consideration, assumes an ethical valence. More precisely, by challenging the belief that literature can provide easy access to the other, works that thematically and formally invoke the ghost – the unseeable, unknowable, spectral Other – and possession present both hermeneutical and ethical challenges to the belief that literary works typically invite their readers to put themselves in the place of the characters and to take on their experiences (Nussbaum, Love’s 5). In contrast to Martha Nussbaum’s view that “we need ... texts that we can read together and talk about as friends, texts that are available to all of us” (Love’s 48), the works considered in this study respond to the awareness that literature is not always friendly, and that the community “formed by authors and readers,” which stresses “that living together is the object of our ethical interest,” may be bent on erasing all traces of your history and culture. The latter view of literature is perhaps best articulated by Brand, who, as noted earlier, describes writing predicated on imperial history and imperial aspirations – British or American – as erasing her presence. As she says, “That imperial history included black slavery. It included the decimation of native peoples. And if the literature nurtured on this is presented to you as great art and you are absent, or the forms or shapes in which you are included are derided, then you know that this literature means to erase you or to kill you” (qtd. in Novak 273). In what follows, I move beyond a summary of the findings of the discrete chapters to consider how the tropes of haunting and possession provide a foundation for what might best be termed an ethics of haunting and how this ethics might inform the process of imagining the nation. As I observe in a recent article, Northrop Frye began his 1963 Massey Lectures, entitled The Educated Imagination, by asking: “What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more

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sensitively, or live a better life ...?” Such questions are currently of great concern to many literary scholars in the United States, where there has been a tremendous surge of interest in the “turn to ethics” and ethical criticism. Writers including Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, and Marjorie Garber, to name only a few, have charted the connections among literature, literary theory, politics, and moral philosophy that have become increasingly apparent over the last twenty years. At the same time, critics have also identified troubling connections between the legacy of modernist humanism and the so-called “turn to ethics.” Gauri Viswanathan, for example, notes the entanglement of the roots of literary criticism with the “civilizing mission” carried out in England’s colonies through the supposedly moral influence of “good” English literature (2). Drawing on the close readings of the texts in this study, with an emphasis on Watson’s The Double Hook and King’s Truth and Bright Water, I would suggest that all of the works considered here complicate notions of literature’s ethical engagement. More precisely, by strategically introducing obstacles to communication, namely, the trope of the spectre – which frequently gestures to repressed histories and knowledges – these texts frustrate the hermeneutical impulse to cross barriers and merge self and other, particularly when this impulse is directed at marginalized groups. Ironically, because the works in this study rely on tropes of obstruction that prompt readers to relinquish “the exorbitant (and unethical) but usually unspoken assumption that we should know others enough to speak for them,” they may well be good for us (Sommer 206). In other words, Canadian literature that invokes haunting and possession is “good for us” precisely because it emphasizes the elided histories and resistance of the other. In speaking of ethics, I am invoking the standard definitions of the field of ethics, also known as moral philosophy, which involves “systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behaviour.”3 As Michael Eskin explains, moral philosophy concerns “how we ought to live and act so as to live a (variously conceived) good life” (Eskin, “On Literature” 574). Eskin argues further that anything that goes by the name of ethical criticism “must be supported by the skeleton of a minimum of abiding, fundamental concern that makes it what it is – such as the overall question of literature and its significance for the moral potential of the human being in a given community” (Eskin, “The Double” 560). Moreover, as Nussbaum contends, the

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novel is a particularly useful tool for ethical criticism because it is a controversial form, “expressing in its very shape and style, in its mode of interaction with its readers, a normative sense of life. It tells readers to notice this and not this, to be active in these and not these ways. It leads them into certain postures of mind and heart and not others” (Poetic 2). Contemporary ethical criticism, however, is not simply concerned with our relationship to literature and to the good, but, more specifically, with our relationship to the other: “it is the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on the reader’s part that is at stake in ‘ethics and literature’” (Eskin, “The Double” 560). Indeed, ethics is ultimately about otherness: “the decentered center of ethics ... [is] its concern for the ‘other.’ Ethics is the arena in which the claims of otherness ... are articulated and negotiated” (Harpham 394). My primary concern lies with the simplistic belief held by some readers and critics that literature primarily offers access to the other and permits us “to imagine what it is to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstances, be oneself or one of one’s loved ones” (Nussbaum, Poetic 5). To demonstrate the ways in which haunting and possession complicate the view that literature can provide a normative sense of life or easy access to the other, I draw on the theoretical writings of Edouard Glissant, Doris Sommer, Homi Bhabha, and Gerald Vizenor. Works such as Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas and “Attitude, Its Rhetoric” by Sommer are particularly valuable because in them she outlines what she terms “tropes of obstruction” that instigate strategic interferences in communication which demarcate the limits of intimacy between the text and the reader. Like Sommer, Bhabha also concentrates on discursive practices, but whereas Sommer focuses on tropes of obstruction, Bhabha analyses the distinction between the discursive registers of what he terms “recognition,” the supposedly static perception of a pre-existing other, and “the poetics of identification,” which take into account the often elided issue of power, which makes “recognition” seem transparent and natural and, further, determines who is allowed to assume the status of signifying subject. In his writings, Gerald Vizenor conceives of language first and foremost as deception, a view that applies particularly well to Thomas King’s trickster narratives. As Vizenor explains, “the primary purpose of language was to deceive by direction and metaphors the listener, who was a stranger ... Why else would humans have a need to create a language? Similarly, and in the context of

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language theory, trickster stories are openly deceptive, but the difference, of course, is that everyone is aware of the pleasures of illusion, transformation, and deception in trickster stories” (Vizenor qtd. in Pulitano 148). In Glissant’s writings, the concept of “relation” is intimately connected to “opacity,” another of his primary theoretical concepts. As Celia Britton explains, for Glissant, “respect for the Other includes respect for the ‘opacity’ of the Other’s difference, which resists one’s attempts to assimilate or objectify it ... In this sense, opacity becomes a militant position” (18). As Britton remarks, Glissant himself states unequivocally: “We must fight transparency everywhere” and he also claims that opacity is a right – the right not to be understood – which he equates with freedom (19). In effect, Sommer, Bhabha, Vizenor, and Glissant challenge theoretical models that implicitly accept an assimilationist view of literature. As many of the works in this study demonstrate, the power of literature to install the imperialist and colonial vision of the nation-state gave rise to alternative and uncanny narrative strategies on the part of the dispossessed – narrative modes whose efficacy lay in unsettling the nation rather than consolidating a normative view of life. According to Martha Nussbaum, “The only contact we have with the particularity and agency of another person is, in fact, in our relationship with the literary work of art: for the artist does succeed in capturing in the text his or her own particularity and agency, and through that lens we have access, the only access we will ever have, to the reality of someone else’s mind” (“Faint” 706–7). This perspective offers an appealing view of reading as communion, however, it overlooks the way in which literature can also act as a force of what is perhaps best described as zombification. As noted in chapter 5 on Brand’s writing, zombification, or spirit thievery, specifically involves the “appropriation of consciousness and destruction of will” (Cooper 70). Edna Brobner’s character explains this process as part of colonization’s impact on the people of the Caribbean: colonizers have “[t]aken their knowledge of their original and natural world away from them and left them empty shells – duppies, zombies, living dead capable only of receiving orders from someone else and carrying them out” (qtd. in Cooper 70). In contrast to critics who view literature as a friend or “an essential bridge to social justice” (Nussbaum, Poetic xviii), as my study demonstrates, it has also been a principal tool for zombification. In my reading of Glissant’s Poétique de la relation, I trace implicit connections between the processes of zombification, understanding, and transparency. As Glissant writes:

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If we look at the process of ‘understanding’ beings and ideas as it operates in western society, we find that it is founded on an insistence on this kind of transparency. In order to ‘understand’ and therefore accept you, I must reduce your density to this scale of conceptual measurement which gives me a basis for comparisons and perhaps for judgements. (204) As Britton explains, for Glissant, understanding appears “as an act of aggression because it constructs the Other as an object of knowledge” (19). In keeping with this study’s overarching concern with possession, Glissant traces the etymology of the verb comprendre (“to understand”) to its root, prendre, which means “to take.” In the light of the unequal distribution of power associated with colonialism and the neo-imperial facets of globalization, Glissant views attempts at understanding minority groups on the part of western society as “a gesture of enclosure if not of appropriation” (206). By relying on the tropes of haunting, double consciousness, and possession, however, the texts in this study challenge the view that literature offers an uncomplicated vision of the other or a normative sense of life. I would suggest that the works under consideration demonstrate that satisfying the desire for “access to the reality of another person’s mind” –whether author or character – may be neither possible nor ethical. As Britton observes, according to Glissant, the goal of reducing of another’s density lies in producing a transparent unity (21). Unity, however, is precisely what eludes all of the divided, dissociated, and possessed characters in the novels that form the basis of this study. Due to the pervasive legacies of colonialism, virtually all of the characters in the novels analyzed (ranging from The Double Hook to Truth and Bright Water) must contend with an uncanny and spectral affect that pervades their communities. Moreover, this type of affect is generated in communities that have established their lives and livelihoods significantly on the basis of properties belonging to another community that was officially repressed and accorded the status of the degenerate and inhuman other. In other words, the haunted facets of modern and modernizing nation-states preclude any such transparency. As McLean argues, the ghosts of the colonized and their spectral histories serve as “the obscure but indispensable referent of nationalist ideologies” (31). In their search for the other, readers find the ghost, an entity with an unsettled and unsettling ontological status that hovers somewhere between the visible and the invisible, life and death,

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the real and the unreal. Due to the affect associated with haunting and possession which, in keeping with McLean’s observations, signals the incommensurability between the nation and its fragments – between the synthesizing ambitions of the nation-state’s discourses and the recalcitrance of cultural forms the nation seeks to co-opt – it is not possible to render the other visible or “accessible in his or her singularity” (Nussbaum, “Faint” 31–2). As noted in chapter 1, although Coyote claims both Greta and her mother in The Double Hook, throughout the narrative, the old lady’s apparition, always in association with Coyote, haunts the community. Although I concentrate on the formation of the “civilized” community in chapter 1, it is equally important to recognize that Watson’s novel maintains a double focus on the community and on the individuals that it cannot access and accommodate. The fact that Watson’s text does not represent the Native trickster-god Coyote, effaces the markers of race, and features the ghost of a part-Native woman are of particular relevance in this regard. Rather than attempt to render the other, Watson’s narrative relies on invisibility and the trope of the ghost to underscore the limits of and the errors associated with vision, particularly when it comes to Canada’s indigenous peoples and their cultures. Although Coyote is referred to throughout the text, he is only glimpsed on one occasion, “on a jut of rock calling down over the ledge so that the walls of the valley magnified its voice and sent it echoing back” (100). Though he appears in this instance, he retains his inaccessible, otherworldly aura because his bark, in the ears of his listeners, is transformed into an oracular pronouncement: “Happy are the dead/ for their eyes see no more” (100). The characters’ and, by extension, the reader’s inability to pin Coyote down – is he an animal or a god? – signal the presence of a trope of obstruction that can “slow readers down, detain them at the boundary between contact and conquest” (Sommer 202). Similarly, despite the fact that various characters claim to have seen the old lady and criticize her repeatedly for her unethical behaviour, readers soon learn that the characters only thought that they saw her; all the while, the old lady was lying dead in her bed. What they encountered was a ghost, an entity that, as noted earlier, occupies a liminal space, between life and death, the real and the unreal, the visible and the invisible. Doris Sommer uses the term “disencounter” to describe engagements that interrupt the predictable expectation of the reader: “Disencounters are not only a nuisance to universal understanding; they are also

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enabling signs for reading the historical and cultural embeddedness of texts and of readers” (205). She goes on to insist that “[w]ell-meaning readers who hope to overcome limits through empathy and learning aren’t harmless when they violate difference. Without difference, writer and reader are ultimately redundant. One will do” (205). In effect, Watson’s treatment of Coyote and her use of the ghost stage this type of disencounter. As noted in the introduction, in comparison to Gothic novels that feature exorcisms, these types of disencounters lends Watson’s narrative an ironic edge. It is also useful to consider Watson’s novel in light of Homi Bhabha’s notion of “a poetics of identification”: Unlike the notion of recognition, which assumes that cultural value is, indeed, in place, requiring only just conditions of representation and recognition, a poetics of identification puts in play the question of the location of cultural difference, its modes of representation, and who or what might be authorized to be its signifying subjects ... What is at stake in the agonistic and ambivalent splitting of the minoritarian subject – I/You – is the emergence of a spectral or virtual “third” position that mediates the relation of self to others. (191–2) Glissant likewise opposes the notion of “essence” with “opacity” and “relation,” since to exist in relation, as Britton argues, is “to be an element of an ever-changing, and ever-diversifying process and to be nothing over and above this, in other words, to lack any permanent, singular, autonomously constituted essence” (14). For Sommer, Bhabha, and Glissant, what is at issue is not, as Nussbaum would have it, the recognition of an essential, pre-existing other, but, instead, the putting into play of representations of cultural difference and, equally important, the highlighting of who or what might be authorized to be its signifying subjects. Although I have emphasized The Double Hook, other texts examined in this study likewise engage in this process. As noted earlier, Away’s reliance on magic realism and Celticism, for example, effectively destabilizes the colonizer’s view of the Irish and installs the counter-discourse of the Irish collective memory. Similarly, Brand’s invocation of AfroCaribbean spiritual traditions and possession rituals counteracts the reifying process of recognition in favour of what Bhabha terms the poet-

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ics of identification. As we have seen, Brand’s writing remains reliant on Western paradigms and techne even as it inscribes alternative, diasporic Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and knowledge, most obviously the spirit of Oya. As a result, Brand’s texts emphasize the ongoing power struggles over the nature of difference and over “who or what might be authorized” to constitute signifying subjects within official discourse. Viewed in this light, Watson and Brand, despite the profound differences in their writing, share an interest in altering the terms of official knowledge. Discussing her own impetus for writing The Double Hook, Watson claimed that she wanted “to get rid of the condescension of omniscience” (qtd. in Morriss 55). Her comment recalls related attempts in the works under consideration at arresting unethical, imperialist desires for mastery. A similar impulse is also at work in The Afterlife of George Cartwright, which features a ghost whose journal is interrupted and interrogated by Mrs Selby’s transgressive counterdiscourse. Truth and Bright Water adopts a slightly different strategy to “get rid of the condescension of omniscience” by relying on an adolescent, firstperson narrator. As noted earlier, Tecumseh is unable to make sense of the adult world around him, let alone the ghosts who haunt the land. Ultimately, however, at issue in all of the novels considered in this study is the reader’s response to the trope of obstruction and to the emergence of the “spectral or virtual ‘third’ position that mediates the relation of self to others” (Bhabha 191–9). In The Double Hook, for example, the widow’s boy, Heinrich, claims to have seen Mrs Potter: “I knew it was the old lady ... Shadows don’t bend grass. I know a shadow from an old woman” (29). Despite his boasts about the accuracy of his vision, the novel ultimately supports poststructuralist and psychoanalytic insights into the workings of projection and the “shadow” of the ego. Here “projection,” refers to “the operation whereby a neurological or psychological element is displaced and relocated in an external position, thus passing from centre to periphery or from subject to object” (Laplanche and Pontalis 349). The subject who relies on this primitive defence “attributes tendencies, desires, etc., to others that he refuses to recognize in himself: the fascist, for instance, projects his own faults and unacknowledged inclinations on to the group he reviles” (351). This type of projection, also known as “disowning projection” (351), is “always a matter of throwing out what one refuses either to recognise in oneself or to be oneself ” (354). Freud holds that such projections have “‘a refusal to recognise something’ as their

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basic principle and raison d’être: ‘demons’ and ‘ghosts’ are embodiments of bad unconscious desires” (qtd. in Laplanche and Pontalis 352). In other words, in accordance with Bhabha’s insights, and in contrast to the notion of recognition which promises access to the other, the poetics of identification instigates the ghostly projection that, according to Bhabha, mediates the relation between self and other. In The Double Hook, Heinrich claims to know the old lady from a shadow – in essence, to recognize her – yet readers appreciate that, in conjunction with the rest of the community, he is engaged in this type of process of projection. Although all of the characters claim to see a selfish old lady, they gradually learn to doubt the accuracy of their vision: “Your old lady’s down to the Wagner’s,” Kip tells James (25). But Ara immediately contradicts Kip, saying: “She’s here” (25). When Heinrich arrives to tell James that the old lady was “down to our place, fishing in our pool,” Ara asks, “How could we both have seen her? How could we have seen her at both our places[?]” (36). Playing on the ambivalent splitting of the minoritarian subject and the ambiguity inherent in what it means “to see things,” the narrative casts into doubt Ara’s and the others’ claims to have seen the old lady and to be able to put her in her place. Greta chastises them for their presumption: “You’ve been seeing things ... Like everybody else around here” (27). By emphasizing that the old lady is present only when there is another person to encounter her difference, or, more precisely, to generate a ghostly projection, Watson’s novel complicates the assertion that, in our encounter with the other, we have access to the reality of someone else’s mind. In addition to demonstrating the role played by projection, Watson’s novel also supports Bhabha’s insistence that critics have been wasting time arguing about “who or what ‘is’ the subject” while ignoring “a far more significant contemporary question about where the ‘subject’ of difference lies”: Is the moment of differentiation internal to the history of a culture and integral to its communal existence? Or, are cultural differences to be read as borderline, liminal ‘effects,’ signs of identification produced in those translational movements in which minorities negotiate their rights and representations? (189) Put somewhat differently, Bhabha is asking where the difference of the other truly lies. Is the difference an essential and integral cultural factor,

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associated with a culture’s particular history, or is it more appropriately understood as the product of the encounter or “translational movements” between minorities and the more privileged members of the nation-state? In the haunted fictions examined in this study, in which spectres, double consciousness, fabrication, and alternative cultural codes jostle against official codes, cultural differences are, indeed, portrayed as borderline and liminal effects. Using Bhabha’s insights, we can also trace the import of these fictions to the national imaginary and the Canadian collective memory – the moment of national “differentiation” – to view the latter not as an essentialist substance born of the soil, but as the ongoing production of “liminal ‘effects’” and “signs of identification” produced in those translational movements in which minorities negotiate with the dominant members of society. Bhabha later suggests that “we move between recognition and a poetics of identification” (193), from a belief that we encounter essential others to an awareness that in our encounters with others, on the borderline, we produce the signs of the other whom we fear and desire. Turning to The Double Hook again as an example, I would suggest that something akin to this movement is comically illustrated when Felix recalls the time his wife, Angel, saw what she thought was a bear, but turned out to be a scrap of tar paper blowing in the wind: The rain pounding on the tar-paper roof. The memory of the time Angel had seen the bear at the fish camp. Seen the bear rising on its haunches ... Rising as if to strike ... Angel furious with fear beating wildly. Her hunting-knife pounding the old billycan. He chuckled remembering the noise and the white face of Angel when he picked up the bear in its devotions. Picked up paper blown off the fishshack roof. (29) Mistaking tar-paper for a bear is, as Felix’s laughter suggests, comical and does not (unless one is prepared to stretch culture to its eco-critical limits) involve the issue of cultural difference. Later, however, interpersonal differences are at stake when Angel’s lover, Theophil, explicitly questions her ability to comprehend his thinking and intentions. As he says, “Go on as if you were reading out of a newspaper what’s in my mind. Go on as if my head was as plain to see into as an old shack with the curtains off ” (67). It is worth noting that the least sympathetic characters in the novel, Greta and Theophil, are the ones

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who insist on the limits of vision and one’s access to the other. Both Theophil and Greta share a distrust of sympathy and the attendant assumption of a cultural continuity between orator and audience, and they draw attention to the limits of this assumption through varying degrees of uncooperativeness. Perhaps Watson distrusted her own radical interrogation of sympathy and left the work of resistance to the most marginalized and transgressive characters in her text. Yet, as Sommer reminds us, “A frustrated incitation to interpret, a lure to contemplate difficulties along with prohibitions against explaining them away, these can confront readers with their own desire to burn away difference” (207). This desire is gruesomely and tangibly depicted when Greta bolts the door and sets her house on fire to evade the probing eyes and questions of members of her community who neither understand nor sympathize with her position. In response to her community’s demands for access, knowledge, and power – “There’s a good girl, Greta, William said. We want to do what we can. Steady on and open the door” (74) – Greta rejects any desire for intimacy that refuses to accommodate her story of incest and betrayal. Her refusal forces readers to consider what it means to be “a good girl,” or a good Métis, for that matter, in the context of intercultural relations “in-between class, gender, generation, race, religion ... [and] region” (Bhabha 190). Before Greta strikes the fatal match, readers are told, “She wanted to cry abuse through the boards. She wanted to cram the empty space with hate” (74). The narrative goes on to relate her unspeakable and unspoken jealousy and hatred directed at Lenchen, who captured the erotic attention of her brother James – attention that had once been Greta’s. Her experience of incest – a familiar gothic trope – in effect, paralyzes normative judgment. As Bhabha reminds us, “Acts of judgment that deliberate on the good life, or the good citizen, become particularly difficult when the cultural norms by which we orientate ourselves, and the codes by which we signify value, are themselves rendered indeterminate and contingent” (183). Owing, in part, to incest and to the confused familial and social conditions that lead to the collapse of fixed subject positions, Greta cannot comply with her brother’s request to be “a good girl”; instead, like her mother before her, she antagonistically declines to identify with the good and the community that would demand this identification from her. (In this regard, she is akin to both Lum and, to a lesser extent, Monroe Swimmer in King’s Truth and Bright Water.) Given that Greta’s

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brother James is never punished for murdering his mother or for his incestuous relations with his sister, readers are left with the distinct impression that not everyone in this community is expected to be good. As F.T. Flahiff notes, “isolated from the work of justice” the novel portrays a world that operates by “silent consensus” (323). Whereas Flahiff discusses how James’s “vicious acts” are “somehow neutralized by the impulses that led to the birth of his child” and how “a kind of silent patience admitted another side to murderous violence,” I consider instead how this “silent consensus” operates in the service of hegemonic sexual and racial oppression. In essence, by arresting the desire for easy access and sympathy, Greta instigates a more thorough process of working through of what Bhabha terms the “shards that unsettle any easy sense of solidarity or community” (Bhabha 190). Rather than offer a utopian image of assimilation, instead, in its depictions of the Old Lady and of Greta, Watson’s novel highlights the nation and its fragments. In all of the novels considered in this study, a tension exists between the urge “to burn away difference” – and the related desire to render the other visible – and the equally powerful urge to arrest this impulse. I would add that this tension pertains equally to the desire to reveal the other and to reveal the crimes perpetrated against the other. Out of this tension arises the cryptic secret whose content often comprises both crimes against the colonized as well as alternative histories and knowledges associated with marginalized peoples, which have been repressed by the nation-state. For example, the eponymous protagonist in The Afterlife of George Cartwright is haunted by a crime that, to borrow Elias’s words, “jars with its Enlightenment context, that exceeds the parameters of Western logic and reason that heroic science would construct as cognitive boundaries for apprehending the real” (546). More precisely, the recurring nightmare image of Caubvick’s hair recalls Elias’s description of an event that “takes the form of the occult or the criminal that remains unrecognized, unspoken, and/or inexplicable within the framework of heroic science” (546). My point, however, is that the figure of Caubvick’s hair is not simply a gothic trope because an actual historical event lies buried beneath it. In Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, the ghost of Rebecca Neugin and the blood-red thread are tropes that perform a similar “arresting” function with respect to the crime and the legacy of the Cherokee Removal. In this way, these novels move beyond the realm of the Gothic into history.

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A slightly different emphasis on secrets, which recalls Glissant’s concept of opacity, can be found in Urquhart’s novel Away. Speaking of his doomed hedge school, Brian tells Mary, “There’s a rare beauty ... in something hidden and secret, and it’s a rare kind of education to be got in hidden places” (76). Later, by the tidepool, Mary is enchanted by the small aquatic creatures’ “fragility and gracefulness ... ‘See how that one moves,’ she said, once, ‘as if it were unfolding some great secret there in the water’” (90). As noted, Mary’s reference to the “great secret” recalls Brian’s comment about the power of the Irish Catholics’ “secret” education under the harsh Penal Laws. Finally, Brian and Mary’s daughter also refers to a secret. Speaking of the crow with which she communes in the willow tree, Eileen explains that he was “her bird; her secret. She had tried once or twice to share him with her brother but his lack of belief had eliminated the possibilities for the crow in any other life but hers” (220). Her comments suggest that secrets, like transitional objects – phenomena that mediate between the self and the environment – can only be meaningfully shared in an overarching context of belief as opposed to coercion. Furthermore, in Away, secrets are connected less with a specific crime than with alternative knowledges and occult ways of knowing that have been powerfully repressed by the patriarchal, Christian colonizers. In this regard, Away has affinities with Brand’s writing since both authors’ texts rely on ghosts and haunting to invoke oppressed spiritual traditions in narratives that perforce maintain a delicate balance between speech and secrecy. In this regard, as noted earlier, it is not a coincidence that the Afro-Caribbean spirit of Oya is known for secrecy; in fact, “most of what Oya is about is hidden” (Gleason 1). Brand’s narrator in No Language is Neutral, for instance, recalls Oya’s attributes of secrecy and pointed speech when she warns her readers first that “Hush was idiom” (23), and then somewhat paradoxically goes on to insist that “[w]hat I say in any language is told in faultless/knowledge of skin ... not in/ words and in words and in words learned by heart/ ... told in secret and not in secret” (31). Here she is referring to the memories of slavery and the embodied spiritual traditions passed down through gesture and speech from one generation to the next. In many ways, the co-existence of spectres and secrets in the novels under consideration recalls Donald Winnicott’s observation that, in artists of all kinds, “one can detect an inherent dilemma which belongs

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to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found ... It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found” (185). Winnicott’s views offer an interesting rejoinder to Nussbaum’s claim that art can provide access to the other – be it the author’s mind or that of the character. Moreover, as Adam Phillips explains, Winnicott is particularly sensitive to the oscillation between communicating and not communicating because, for him, language constitutes a potentially terrifying paternalistic object. As Phillips explains, for Winnicott, “there is a primitive terror in the form of a simple equation – to be found means to be exploited. And he takes it for granted that a person can be found in language” (147). I would suggest that this awareness informs all of the novels in this study. The texts by Urquhart, Atwood, Brand, and King not only support but historicize and politicize Winnicott’s insights by demonstrating how, in their novels, ghosts signal prior traumatic historical experiences of exploitation and intrusion. Furthermore, these experiences, in turn, give rise to cryptic, meandering, and evasive narrative strategies akin to what Michael refers to as Glissant’s strategy of “verbal delirium” – a strategy that allows marginalized groups to enter into a relation with the world with “an acknowledged opacité” (Dash 144). As Atwood reminds her readers, in writing Alias Grace, she was mindful that for every story there is an audience and that in her fiction, Grace is also a storyteller. As Atwood explains: [Grace has] ... strong motives to narrate, but also strong motives to withhold; the only power left to her as a convicted and imprisoned criminal comes from a blend of these two motives. What is told by her to her audience of one, Dr. Simon Jordan – who is not only a more educated person than she is, but a man, which gave him an automatic edge in the nineteenth century, and a man with the potential to be of help to her – is selective, of course. It is dependent on what she remembers; or is it what she says she remembers, which can be quite a different thing? And how can her audience tell the difference? Here we are, right back at the end of the twentieth century, with our own uneasiness about the trustworthiness of memory, the reliability of story, and the continuity of time. (“In Search” 36)

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Similar concerns about secrecy and disclosure, about truth and fabrication also inform Truth and Bright Water. Whereas Atwood focuses on an Irish, lower-class woman’s terror of being found and exploited, King addresses the long-standing exploitation of Native North Americans. I would suggest that this history of exploitation leads to circumlocution and elusive spectral apparitions that reveal and conceal evidence of prior crimes and of Native spiritual traditions and sacred societies. As Higginson explains, it is noteworthy that King names a key location in Truth and Bright Water “the Horns” since it is the common title of The Horns society, “the most prominent, and still very active, Blackfoot Sacred Society”; moreover, “when Monroe decides to take his repatriated bones to ‘the Horns’ for a ceremony, these events relay a specifically Blackfoot meaning, one that may be hidden for many outside Blackfoot circles. This seems an appropriate authorial move given the injunction prohibiting non-members from speaking in any detail about the The Horns or their activities” (7). In King’s novel, secrecy is both a weapon and a means of self-defense. For instance, within the narrative, before Cassie throws the baby clothes on Monroe Swimmer’s bonfire, Tecumseh sees her clutching a picture of a baby. “Is that someone I know?” Tecumseh asks. “No,” Cassie replies. “You never knew her.” Tecumseh then waits “to see if auntie Cassie is going to finish the story,” but, as he explains, “I can see that she’s gone as far as she wants to go” (245). Cassie’s story remains unfinished business that haunts the text. This is merely one of countless examples of how King’s novel arrests the desire to efface difference and to render the other wholly transparent. Tecumseh, as story-teller, meaning-maker, and producer of discourse, refrains from rendering the other transparent. As a result, readers remain estranged from Cassie as she burns the baby clothes on the fire. In Truth and Bright Water as in The Double Hook, fire does not burn away difference. I would go so far as to argue that due to Tecumseh’s protracted consideration of the meanings associated with the similar gesture initially performed by the woman (aka Monroe) on the Horns, Truth and Bright Water’s entire narrative prepares readers for Cassie’s mysterious gesture. More precisely, thanks to Tecumseh’s arduous and protracted exercise in “cognitive” quilting, readers appreciate that unless they are granted access to the array of subjective and cultural meanings associated with another person’s gestures, speech, and silence, it is both impossible and presumptuous to claim certainty that the other is at all acces-

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sible “in his or her singularity.” In Canadian fictions that rely on the tropes of haunting and possession, there are always ghosts that escape and exceed our grasp. This statement is not, as some readers might argue, a failure of interpretive mastery. Quite the contrary, it is entirely in keeping with my study’s overarching refusal to impose a singular and monologic interpretive frame that would presume to reduce and render transparent historically and geographically diverse expressions of opacity. Rather than leave readers contemplating Sommer’s notion of implacable arrest, however, I would prefer to conclude with Vizenor’s more generous and playful understanding of the promise afforded by elusive, spectral fictions. Quoting from George Steiner, Vizenor writes: “The best acts of reading are acts of incompletion, acts of fragmentary insight, of that which refuses paraphrase, metaphrase; which finally say, ‘The most interesting in all this I haven’t been able to touch on.’ But which makes that inability not a humiliating defeat or a piece of mysticism, but a kind of joyous invitation to reread” (Vizenor qtd. in Pulitano 156). As all of the works in this study demonstrate, the act of re-reading–of doubling back and engaging with the spectre–is integral to the process of coming at the self, community, and nation-state creatively. Indeed, the power and attraction of the ghost lie in its transitional status – the fact that it hovers elusively between life and death, past and present, self and other. Ultimately, our encounters with ghosts – whether as terrifying shadows or as benevolent ancestral spirits – signal to us that we have entered the complex territory of home.

1 Notes

introduction 1 For consistency, the term ‘gothic’ when used as an adjective has been written with a lower-case “g”; when used as a noun or as a description of the genre (e.g., Gothic tradition), the term has been capitalized. 2 Some critics have suggested that due to the legitimate and sustained focus on the haunting impact of slavery in the us, American literature and criticism has placed slightly less emphasis on the hauntings associated with the violent expropriation of Native American land and the genocide of Native Americans. Commenting on Toni Morrison’s writing, the recognized scholar of Native North American literature Arnold Krupat observes that “despite her admirable desire to map a new geographical ‘space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration,’” Morrison’s work does not find a place within that space for the literature of “the indigenous American” (657). 3 In A Passion for Consumption, Anna Sonser affirms Baucom’s argument that slavery in the new world intensified and transformed social experiences conducted at the level of the commodity form, and argues further that violence in the American Gothic “is predicated on the operations of subjectivity defined by commodity signs, a sense of identity that is conferred by the historical ownership of plantation and slaves, a sense of selfhood that is withheld by dispossession as a consequence of race and gender, a subversion of relationships into an economics of reproduction, and finally, a subversion of ontological certainty that destabilized the concept of subjectivity itself ” (2). Whereas Baucom links free-floating forms of capital to Fredric Jameson’s and Jacques Derrida’s notion of the spectre (143), Sonser likens their haunting presence to the Baudrillardian idea of the simulacrum, “the counterfeit, an empty symbol repeatedly recreated and manipulated” (20).

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4 I use the term “gothic” because as Pheng Cheah explains, critiques of globalism view its mechanism as monstrous and inhuman elements that, like Frankenstein’s monster, “have escaped the grasp of their creators” (Inhuman 2). 5 Scholarship by David Punter, Fred Botting, Maria Beville, and Khair Tabish directly addresses the global and gothic facets of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. 6 A key resource for the study of the global Gothic was instantiated with the launch in January 2008 of the Global Gothic International Network, based at the University of Stirling, Scotland. As their website suggests, the Network’s aim is “to initiate a multidisciplinary consideration of what may be termed gothic representations from around the world. We will be exploring the idea of a global Gothic with reference to both national and cultural forms and contexts, and global or transnational/transcultural forms and contexts.” http://www.globalgothic.stir.ac.uk/ 7 As many scholars of the Gothic persuasively illustrate, however, in early Gothic fiction, the “private subject and national subject are, as Carroll SmithRosenberg might say, ‘fused and confused’” (Bergland 91). 8 “Sir William Blackstone,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxford nb.com/view/printable/2536. Accessed 17/12/2008. 9 Despite their similarities in this regard, other critics stress that British and American racial anxieties are informed by distinct socio-political and historical contexts. In Britain at the fin de siècle, concerns about racial otherness were “closely tied to anxieties about imperial decline”; whereas, in America after the Civil War (1861–65), such issues were constituted in quite different terms: “Whilst Britain was nervously looking out a threats to its empire, the u.s. was going through a period of colonial expansion in Cuba (1895–99) and the Philippines (1899–1902)” (Smith 109). 10 As Wallace and Smith attest, Moers’ study of the Female Gothic was enhanced by the widely influential publication of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) in which the authors purportedly uncover the “single secret message of women’s writing in the nineteenth century” (qtd. in Wallace and Smith 2). Viewing women’s writing as a single plot, Gilbert and Gubar identity a pervasive split psyche produced by the women writers’ quest for self-definition in a patriarchal society (76). In her introduction to her 1983 collection of essays on the Female Gothic, Julian Fleenor cites Margaret Anne Doody’s assertions regarding early women writers: “It is in the Gothic novel that women writers could first accuse the ‘real world’ of falsehood and deep disorder” (560). Moreover, in keeping with Claire Kahane’s

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psychoanalytically informed work, “Fleenor finds as the centre of the Female Gothic, an ambivalence over female identity above all the conflict with the archaic all-powerful mother, often figured as a spectral presence and/or as the gothic house itself ” (Wallace and Smith 3).

chapter one 1 I refer to the old lady as part Native because Drafts I and II of the novel provide background information about the characters’ race. As Morriss explains, “Old Man Potter was an Englishman ... Kip and Angel are ‘pure-blooded’ Indians”; and while “no one knows where the Old Lady came from,” she must be at least part-Native because her children “William and James (and presumably Greta) are ‘a mixed lot’” (61). 2 The novel features a scene of horrific transformation: Suddenly he got up. He twisted, batted the air, and screamed, and the scream became a howl. His body flitted back and forth between man and coyote, then the coyote dropped on all fours and cowered away from me ... A movement made me look up, and there was Jack standing at the edge of the path, covering his puckered genitals with one hand. (272) 3 The recent Delgamuukw decision by the Supreme Court confirmed that aboriginal title had not been extinguished in any land that was not covered by treaty – virtually the entire province. For information about the Delgamuukw decision see Delgamuukw: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision on Aboriginal Title, introd. Stan Persky. Although it does not deal directly with the current Shuswap Nation’s land claims, the Delgamuukw Decision nevertheless set a precedent. 4 Perhaps owing to her profound encounter with the Natives in Dog Creek, her husband, Wilfred, referred to her in his letters throughout her life as “swp” a shortened form for Shuswap (Flahiff 166). 5 The area Watson writes about is now represented by the Cariboo Tribal Council which comprises four member communities located around the Williams Lake area. For more information, see http://www.cariboolinks.com. In a personal e-mail, Anderson-Dargatz explains that she grew up “in Glen Eden near Salmon Arm, on the Shuswap Lake” and that the novel is based in “China Valley nearby” where her parents grew up. She goes on to explain that she “grew up right next to the reserve near town.” This area falls within the Traditional Territory of the Ktunaxa Nation; see http://www.bctreaty.net /nations. 6 Coyote is known for introducing salmon, for creating the fishing places, and

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for making the world safe for the Shuswap Nation (see Jack, Matthew, and Matthew 11–12). I use the term “para-colonial” to highlight the fact that, as Malea Powell observes, “The occupying force has not been, nor will it ever be, withdrawn.” Gerald Vizenor’s term “para-colonial” thus appropriately denotes “a colonialism beyond colonialism, multiple, contradictory and with all the attendant complications of internal, neo- and post-colonialism” (Vizenor qtd. in Powell 399). In earlier drafts, the sexually transgressive incest theme was much more explicit. Morriss speculates that it was toned down because it was “too sensational” (Morriss 69). John Grube observes that Mrs Potter is “always associated with the chilling sound of the coyote” (Grube qtd. in Jones 43). Moreover, John Lennox argues that Mrs Potter “expresses the spirit of Coyote, for it is more her presence than her person which is perceived and felt in the community” (49). Morriss also observes that in earlier drafts Greta, like her mother, was a palpable presence even after her death: “Ara fears that ‘she would see Greta fleshed and sinewed, standing in the ruin she had made,’” and later, “Ara also sees Greta’s death as somehow facilitating the birth of Lenchen’s baby: ‘If it’s not too late, she said to the boy, Greta’s death will turn down the covers for Lenchen and she will bear her child in the hollow Greta made.’ During her labour Lenchen cries out: ‘It’s Greta’s baby I tell you. Ask her. She’ll tell you,’ though immediately after she revokes her odd statement: ‘It’s a lie, the girl cried. A lie. It’s my own. My very own’” (68). See Angela Bowering 62–8 and Atwood 41. Note, both Bowering and Atwood are referring to the supposed shift from matriarchal earth goddesses to patriarchal sky gods. Discussions of this shift and the concomitant devaluation of women were prevalent in feminist discussions in anthropology and religious studies during the 1970s and 1980s. Due to the numerous biblical references in the text and its reliance on biblical cadences, critics frequently read the novel as “a Christian parable of life lost in life but all resolved in salvation after death” (Davidson 34). Margot Northey asserts that “the message of The Double Hook is religious. It is a story about redemption written from a Christian vantage point” (55). In keeping with Watson’s intended association between Coyote and God, he is often understood as God, or at least to have “his prototype in the Jehovah-figure of the Old Testament” (Mitchell 111). For an overview of critics who have aligned Coyote with the Judeo-Christian God, see Davidson 34.

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12 George Woodcock hailed The Double Hook “one of the most important books [since the fifties] for itself and in terms of [its] influence” (93–4). His summary of the plot likewise emphasises the gothic nature of the novel: “In which the rural tale of a decaying society is mingled with the native mythology of the vanished Indians to create a strange and superb fantasy of moral strife and spiritual terror” (94; my emphasis). Woodcock’s description not only confirms the work’s status as a gothic text, it also contributes to the gothic effort to express the disturbing element, in effect, to “clean house,” by describing the Native peoples as “vanished.” 13 Watson changed the ending owing to reservations expressed by a highly influential reader and editor of the manuscript, Frederick M. Salter. As Watson’s biographer explains, “Salter’s main concern was with the ending…[which] seemed too calculatingly right” (Flahiff 82). As Salter explains, I suppose it could be justified as a happy ending, the baby being a promise of the future. Some readers would take it so. And, after all, you have got rid of some poisonous intrusions into your little Eden. (qtd. in Flahiff 82) Salter’s comment that Watson has created a “little Eden” is significant in light of the colonial, apocalyptic fantasy of creating a New Jerusalem; moreover, his account of the expulsion of “some poisonous intrusions,” namely the partNative Greta and her mother, confirm that, in this apocalyptic fantasy, Native North Americans who resist colonial ideology are aligned with satanic forces. With respect to the proposed revision, Salter went on to comment: “I feel the need of a hint or suggestion of some kind that you have been dealing with things eternal and not transitory.” And, as Flahiff observes, “Sheila herself was to achieve something of the effect he desired by reordering the last lines of this draft” (Flahiff 83). 14 At present, the Dog Creek people are part of the Canoe Creek band, which, in turn, has united with other bands to form the Cariboo Tribal Council. The Council is currently working with the bc Treaty Commission to resolve outstanding land claims (http://www.BCTreaty.net). 15 The term “overwhelmed” is especially apt given the fact that missionaries classified Shuswap Native practices and the language as pagan anachronisms and they did their best to eradicate both (Balf 8). 16 Kate Ferguson Ellis suggests that contemporary Gothic might be titled “men on the rampage” (263). In her essay “The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics,” she highlights important connections between gender, capitalism, and production, noting that “an unintended consequence of equality feminism has been

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that women, released from their essentialising ties to reproduction, are now theoretically ‘free’ to leave the home for the ruthless ‘world’ of production, with its myths of ever-increasing economic power – are free, that is to say, to go on the rampage” (265). This may be one reason that Beth, in contrast to Nora, decides to stay on the farm rather than flee to Vancouver and work in the factories. See 96, 152, 163, 189, and 259. See, for instance, 213, 272, 280–2. In using the word “property” within a patriarchal context, he is referring both to his farm and his daughter. For an analysis of the cyclical gothic violence against women and children, see “The History of Abuse” in Punter (288–92) and Massé. Beth’s mother presumably fails in her role as mother and protector of her child because, as the narrator observes, the mother was most likely abused by her father as a young girl (Anderson-Dargatz 207). The pit was dug 60–90 cm below ground level. Then a cone-shaped framework of poles was erected over the site and covered with grass, cedar bark, and earth (Wolf 8). Christian references abound within the novel; toward the conclusion, Billy and Beth frolic chastely in the snow making “angels,” while Nora, excluded from the game, “disappeared down one of the bush trails” (251). Coyote Jack’s body constitutes the ultimate, horrific image of abjection. Even in the dead of winter, his corpse is found writhing with maggots. His father, the Swede, explains: “He must’ve been there for a week or more. But rotting, can you believe it? Frozen solid and rotting. Full of maggots this time of year. I never seen the likes. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it” (278). For a detailed discussion of abjection, see Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. According to Bertha, her son, Billy’s father, “took care of Coyote. He was Coyote’s house, see? ... Once, when Coyote was resting inside him, my son took his own life – so Coyote would have to return to the spirit world with him – so we could walk in peace for a while ... My son gave us that as a gift” (172–3). Later, Beth follows a trail of blood in the snow that disappears in a clearing. As Billy tells her: “This is where my father (fuck) fought Coyote and took him back to the spirit world. (Shit) This is where my father died to (shit) save us” (257). Owing to their sacrifice to preserve humanity, both Billy’s father and his son, who for a time serves as Coyote’s house but is later reborn, are identified with Christ.

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25 For a detailed discussion of the repetition-compulsion phenomenon associated with trauma, see Massé 14. 26 As Gina Wisker observes, in “conventional fictions, women vampires connote unlicensed sexuality and excess, and as such, in conventional times, their invocation of both desire and terror leads to a stake in the heart – death as exorcism of all they represent” (167). Historically, female vampires represented the threat of the “independent feminist” (171). And, as critics remark, there is often a link posited between the lesbian and the vampire.

chapter two 1 Since the novel spans 1784 to 1984, my discussion of the novel avails itself of cultural theories concerning British imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism that range from the eighteenth century to the present. 2 Sherene Razack, “Death Worlds Where Bad Things Happen: Contemporary Settler Violence Against Aboriginal Peoples,” keynote address, caclals conference, Carleton University, Monday 24 May 2009. 3 My thanks to Kailin Wright for drawing my attention to this parallel doubleness in the text. 4 For a discussion of the relation between magic and the uncanny, see Freud, “The Uncanny” 216. 5 In Steffler’s novel, Mrs Selby accuses Cartwright of mistreating his employees and the Native peoples and, specifically, of using “the law as an instrument of your own savagery” (162). She insists that, as colonizers, she and Cartwright have “nothing to fear but what we bring with us” (126). 6 In the nineteenth century, it was argued that races, like animal types, tended to be confined to definite localities of the earth. As Nancy Stepan observes: The British geologist and friend of Darwin, Charles Lyell, commented in his “Species” journal, “Each race of Man has its place, like the inferior animals.” A race’s tie to its geographical, national and social place was aboriginal in function; it gave strength to races in their proper places. Movement out of their proper places, however, caused a “degeneration” ... Negroes were now made, by biological definition, a tropical “species” naturally found in hot places like Africa. Their movement out of the tropics caused a “degeneration” away from their type ... Contrariwise, the “proper” place of the white race was now defined as the temperate, “civilized” world of Europe. When the white race moved out of its “natural” home, it too underwent a process of biological degeneration – it became “tropicalized.” (Stepan 99)

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7 As Amy Elias explains, two aspects of eighteenth-century Enlightenment science, or what is called the “heroic model” of science, are particularly relevant. First is the idea that “scientific method in the Age of Reason saw itself as motivated solely by the search for truth and that this truth lay in the articulation of universally applicable, general laws. Second is the idea that heroic science offered transcendence” (535). 8 After his sojourn in Labrador, Cartwright returns to England, assumes the role of barracks master, and openly resigns himself to the implications of wearing the imperial uniform: “I would see myself inside my costume, my eyes inside my mask of a face, and I would admit to myself that my life had been all selfishness and vanity. I was a piece of human regalia” (258). 9 See Renger’s essay for details concerning Mrs Selby and her treatment in Steffler’s novel. 10 In contrast to Steffler’s narrative, which portrays Caubvick’s dissatisfaction with her former life, the historical Cartwright marvels “at her taking so cordially to her former way of living, after the comfort and luxury to which she had lately been used, and which she seemed most heartily to enjoy” (140). 11 In contrast to Donna Bennett, who argues that The Afterlife of George Cartwright can be classified among those novels that “celebrate Death By Landscape” and “conclude with a sense that human divisions are transitory and that the land reduces all to itself ” (210), my reading, in keeping with Lindy Ledohowski’s analysis of the treatment of Native peoples in Ukrainian prairie literature, stresses the irony of Steffler’s conclusion which vitiates this consoling fantasy.

chapter three 1 Nowadays, the essential ingredients of the Famine memory are formally engraved in the popular culture: “the Famine was the Irish migration event; these Irish were Catholics who had suffered their ‘time on the cross’; these Irish were the oppressed, the poor, the victims” (McGowan 11). Both the Irish collective memory and Away fail, however, to account for the experience of those thousands of Protestant and Catholic Irish who emigrated before and after the Famine. As McGowan asserts, in the “new historiographical assessment of Irish immigration, the Great Irish Famine has become an endpoint of a much longer migratory movement from Ireland to British North America, rather than the focus of Irish migration” (2). 2 Herb Wyile likewise categorizes the novel as magic realist, but concentrates on the interplay between myth and history, rather than on the nationalist impli-

Notes to pages 108–19

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cations of Away’s reliance on this sub-genre. He concludes his analysis by stating that the novel “demonstrates that what we think of as history and what we think of as myth are not neatly separable ... but are interpenetrating aspects of our perception – and hopefully our sustaining-of the past” (43–4). In her essay “The Irish Female Presence in Jane Urquhart’s Fiction,” Libby Birch reads Away in terms of the Celtic literary revival. Rather than offer a historical or political perspective of this discourse, Birch celebrates the text’s portrayal of its protagonist as the symbol of “a vanquished Celtic goddess” whose culture is “buried in the mists of time” (115). For a detailed discussion of this sub-mode, see the Parkinson Zamora and Faris study and the recent book by Maggie Ann Bowers. As Shelley Kulperger observes, in postcolonial Gothic, one frequently perceives “the exhaustion of the ghostly/supernatural as a source of fear, spectacle, awe, mystery and abnormality,” which “significantly reorders the traditional Gothic”; in other words, “the supernatural is right at home in the home” (121). Parkinson Zamora links magic realism to Romance (509). For a discussion of the similarities and differences between the Gothic and magic realism, see also Andrews 7–8. Long before the Famine of 1846, the English Penal Laws “poisoned Ireland for a hundred years” (McKay 43). As McKay explains, according to these laws, Catholics were deprived of the right to sit in the Irish parliament or to vote; they were banned from public office, the professions, and trades, and were deprived of the right to own property; finally, their religion was repressed (McKay 11). In the years 1847 to 1849, between 600,000 and 800,000 Irish people died of starvation and disease (McKay 309). Even those like Mary and her family, who were able to flee to the New World, endured untold miseries. In “an era of free enterprise,” the government had dropped passenger regulations completely in 1827 (McKay 203). Of the 97, 292 Irish who set sail for British North America in 1847, one-fifth would not live to see the new year (McGowan 4). As Birch explains, Moira is a pre-Christian form of Mary, and derives from the Trinitarian form taken by the goddess Aphrodite as “the Great Moira” said to be older than time (117). By contrast, Sugars argues that the name of the ship makes Mary’s destiny seem to be even more fated, “for the ship itself was bound for Canada, as Mary herself will be when driven from Ireland in the wake of the great famine” (12).

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Notes to pages 120–8

11 See my essay “Encounters with Alterity: The Role of the Sublime in Moodie’s and Urquhart’s Historical Fiction,” Etudes Canadiennes 53 (2002): 111–16. 12 As Birch explains, “I see the novel as being an allegory where the pre-Christian values of the Celtic goddess and her pantheon of gods survive in hidden secret places” (116). 13 This racism was perhaps best expressed by the infamous letter written in 1860 by the historian Charles Kingsley to his wife, in which he compares the Irish to apes: I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours. (qtd. in Curtis 84) 14 As Murray Pittock asserts, nineteenth-century Celticism in Ireland “passed almost seamlessly into increasingly more potent forms” (Pittock 63–4). Due to the efforts of W.B. Yeats, John Middleton Synge, and Lady Gregory, a political and territorial national identity was forged on the basis of Celticism’s belief in the Irish’s distinctive culture, language, and race. As Garrigan Mattar explains, Yeats urged his generation “to prepare the way for a new revelation by doing no more than listening to folklore (288). 15 Yeats himself forged connections between Primitivism and dance when he wrote about the primitive religious rituals of the Celts in which mystic facts are “danced out”: Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. (qtd. in Garrigan Matter 76–7) 16 While writing the novel, Urquhart commented that Irish Catholics are “tribal, hysterically Anglophobic and very sentimental about their lost homeland” (qtd. in Zettell 21).

Notes to pages 128–38

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17 In 1840 George Petrie wrote that “in the figure of the prostrate female we recognize at once the attributes of our country, a country personified by a beautiful female figure” (qtd. in Pittock 64). In 1860, Ernest Renan famously states in Poesie des Races Celtiques that the Celtic race is “an essentially feminine race” and he portrays the lands confined by conquest as “full of delicious sadness” (qtd. in Pittock 69). Matthew Arnold, in his Oxford lectures in 1865–66 on Celtic literature and culture, likewise described the Celts as a passionate, isolated, melancholy, creative, and “essentially feminine” race (Garrigan Mattar 9; see also Garrigan Mattar 24). According to Arnold, the Celt’s feminine sensibility “gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and the life of nature” (qtd. in Pittock 65). 18 In 1897, an article in the Contemporary Review stated that the “‘The Celtic Mind’ had ‘physical differences in nervous structure ... making them liable to explode on very slight stimulus.’ It differs from ‘the Teuton’ in its ‘very quality’” (qtd. in Pittock 66). Writers also began to invoke notions of “hereditary madness” in their descriptions of “The Celtic Mind” (Pittock 71). 19 As Castle reminds us, in the case of the “new cognitive dispensation” afforded by the romantic sensibility, “absence is preferable to presence ... An absent loved one, after all can be present in the mind. One is not distracted by his actual presence” (136). 20 The first session, which drew on the research and writing of Russell Brown, Donna Bennett, Lora Carney, and myself, was held at the acsus conference at the Hyatt Regency, San Antonio Texas. 14–18 Nov. 2001. (It was also presented 26 May 2002 at the accute conference, University of Toronto.) As Russell Brown and Donna Bennett observe: “For settlers in British North America, the new land gave new importance to literal crows and ravens, which turned out to have a special significance for Canada. The raven was one of the few birds that wintered over in the Canadian north. Thus the raven offered itself as a kind of natural symbol of Northern endurance and survival” (“Canadian Blackbirds”). 21 Old Irish mythology does not refer to the crow, per se, but the raven is considered an oracular bird. “To have the foresight of the raven” is a proverbial saying which refers to both the raven’s knowledge and his prophetic gifts. And “to have raven’s knowledge” is an Irish phrase meaning to see all, know all (see http://www.iwaski contemporaryart.raven.htm). 22 It is ironic that Away emphasizes the rejection of martial efforts to gain land and assert a tribal identity since, as I am arguing, a major aim of one strand of the narrative is to legitimize the Irish’s claim to British North America.

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Notes to pages 145–63

23 As Kertzer explains, a common narrative of romantic nationalism portrays that nation as “a sleeping giant that awakens, recalls its ancient glory, and resolves to fulfill its heroic promise. In this potent mixture of fact and fantasy, national history is both framed and validated by epochs that transcend history. It is inspired by a mythical pre-history ... and fulfilled by utopian post-history (e.g. the classless society, the peaceable kingdom)” (11). Sugars shares my criticism of McGee’s vision, noting that it is “compromised by its commitment to a select ‘settler’ branch of the Canadian polity that takes as its privilege the ability to omit questions of race from any discussions of national unity” (18).

chapter four 1 As scholars of hysteria including Smith-Rosenberg, Micale, and Showalter assert, the disease paradoxically served as a powerful mechanism for individuals ranging from the working class to upper-class society to act out socially conditioned distress. At the same time, by acting out their symptoms and retreating from society, these individuals were rendered impotent and consigned to a life of illness and invisibility. 2 As Hacking explains, “[i]n the great French wave of multiples, all multiples were, first and foremost, florid hysterics” (69). The physician Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), best known as the man who created schizophrenia as a diagnostic category in the first decade of the twentieth century, specifically links double consciousness or “alternating personality” as it was known in France, with hysteria and women (see Hacking 128–9). Many aspects of Bleuler’s description readily apply to Grace and to her behaviour in her dissociated state. 3 Jordan’s casual allusion to the Mental school recalls the famous dispute between Charcot’s Parisian anato-clinical method and Hippolyte Bernheim’s focus on the psychological aspects of hysteria. The latter approach, associated with the famous Nancy School, championed the idea that hysteria was a mental malady. In essence, Bernheim postulated that ideas and/or mental suggestions had an impact on the body and not, as Charcot insisted, the other way around. See Ellenberger for an account of the Nancy School (85–9). 4 In the late nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot, the French physician most famous for diagnosing hysteria, followed the “Linnean means of describing illnesses through the visible signs and symptoms” which was taken from the witch-hunting manuals of the Inquisition that likewise identified, to borrow Charcot’s term, “‘the stigmata of the illness,’ from the stigmata diaboli that marked the body of the witch” (Gilman 352).

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5 For a summary of feminist interpretations of hysteria, see Micale 66–87. 6 Ironically, as Ruth Harris points out, nineteenth-century European society was gripped by a peculiar anxiety directly linked to fears about the lower orders and the threat they posed to the sanctity of the family. The French, in particular, were “obsessed with the possibility that a respectable woman could be hypnotised by a male servant and made to do the latter’s evil, sexual bidding” (Harris 189–90). According to Harris, these anxieties can best be understood “as a projection onto these underlings of the clear historical reality of the sexual exploitation of female servants by male masters” (Harris 191). 7 Throughout the novel, Grace narrates her encounters with spirits as accounts of extrinsic haunting. However, during the nineteenth century, physicians such as Janet, Charcot, and Freud were refining the understanding of hysteria and double consciousness; in essence, they were developing psychological models of what Adam Crabtree refers to as “intrinsic” haunting. As Crabtree writes, “Until the emergence of the alternate consciousness paradigm the only category to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was that of possession, intrusion from the outside. With the rise of awareness of a second consciousness intrinsic to the human mind, a new symptom-language became possible. Now the victim could express (and society could understand) the experience in a new way” (qtd. in Hacking 149). 8 In his essay “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud notes that many people experience uncanny feelings in “the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts ... Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him” (218–19). Freud’s insights are particularly relevant to Alias Grace because before she undergoes the fatal abortion, Mary Whitney tells Grace, “Soon I may be dead. But you will still be alive” (175). Grace adds that Mary “gave me a cold and resentful look” (175). Along these same lines, Hilde Staels argues that Grace’s hysteria and haunting spring from “a guilt complex” (403). Generally speaking, Grace’s introjection of the lost object corresponds to Freud’s notion of melancholia. As Freud writes, “[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego ... that is ... an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification”; for Freud, this means that “the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and it contains the history of those object-choices” (Ego 367). 9 At the most basic level, in the nineteenth century, medical and religious discourses intersected owing to the shared belief that women were, by nature,

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Notes to pages 174–7

weak-willed and susceptible to various forms of pathological possession. At the same time, hypnotism was attracting attention and causing alarm because “of the dramatic way in which it […] showed the immense possibilities of manipulating subjects through the imposition of authority” (Harris 157). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, medical concern about hypnotism was doubly aroused by the fact “that women seemed particularly susceptible” (Harris 158). Medical practitioners were especially concerned about “seduction under hypnosis ... Discussion revolved around the notion of female suggestibility – since women were acknowledged in both the lay and medical discourse as weak-willed and fickle – and also centred on the exposure of a female population that needed protection from rapacious and unscrupulous sexual violators” (Harris 186). In Charcot’s view, “susceptibility to hypnotism was nothing more than a symptom of illness” (Harris 175). Harris argues that the debates concerning hypnosis which exploded during the Third Republic in France and spread to the new world represent “a refined stage in the medical ‘pathologization’ of women” (203). Charcot’s descriptions of hysteria tended to furnish evidence for the supposed universal pathological hysteria of all women (Harris 204). As a contemporary of Charcot reports, “One felt that in all the talk of this terrifying man, he barely distinguished between society ladies and the ‘hysterics’ he was treating in his ward and that if it had been up to him he would have placed the whole of society behind the bars of his institution” (Martin du Gard qtd. in Harris 207). 10 For a discussion of the rise of spiritualism in the us and the popularity of the Fox sisters, see Ellenberger 83–5. 11 For information about the rise of mesmerism and Braidian neuro-hypnosis, see Ellenberger 57–69; Crabtree 3–22; and Harrington’s essay, “Hysteria, hypnosis, and the lure of the invisible: the rise of neo-mesmerism in fin-de-siècle French psychiatry.” 12 In her study, Shattered Nerves, Janet Oppenheim locates the nervous male in the context of changing attitudes towards masculinity and male emotionality, and notes that many of the same social, cultural, and sexual forces constraining women during this period operated with deleterious effect on men too (qtd. in Micale 163). Ironically, the man who coined the term “neurasthenia” in 1873, George M. Beard, estimated that one out of every ten neurasthenics was a doctor (Showalter, “Hysteria” 296), and in Alias Grace Atwood portrays Dr Simon Jordan as one such case of shattered nerves. For one, although he embarks on a career as an alienist, he does so only “out of a young man’s per-

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versity” but finds after his wealthy father’s unexpected collapse that “[i]nstead of an amusing row down a quiet stream, he’s been overtaken by a catastrophe at sea, and has been left clinging to a broken spar” (55–6) – imagery that mirrors the significance of the sea for Grace and other immigrants. In addition to the family’s loss of fortune, Simon is also plagued by his hysterical mother’s insistence that he find a wife and settle down (50). Ironically, when he imagines married life, his nightmare vision recalls that of a gothic heroine trapped in the villain’s web (293). Simon himself admits that like the hysterics he has witnessed in Europe, he too is capable of indulging in “[i]magination and fancy”: “I must,” he says, “resist melodrama, and an overheated brain” – features typically associated with hysteria (60). After Grace is hypnotised, Simon writes to his friend Edward and admits how close he has come to losing his own mind (423). Ironically, Simon suggests that his fruitless pursuit of the truth is akin to being haunted: “Not to know – to snatch at hints and portents, at intimations, at tantalizing whispers – it is as bad as being haunted. Sometimes at night her face floats before me in the darkness” (424). Atwood concludes the novel by demonstrating that men as well as women suffer from mental trauma and, in keeping with the novel’s uncanny suggestion that we are all implicated in each other, the novel suggests that Grace Marks’s rise in social status is connected to Simon’s fall. As Simon’s mother reports, while fighting in the Civil War, Simon was struck in the head by a piece of flying debris and, as a result of his wound, “he had lost part of his memory” (429–30). As Staels observes, Simon succumbs to what was known as “combat neurosis,” a form of hysteria which results in amnesia (446). In keeping with his nightmares concerning domesticity, the end of the novel leaves Simon being cared for at home, where he is stupefied, silenced, and trapped in the socially appropriate feminine role. 13 See Mark S. Greenberg and Bessel A. van der Kolk, “Retrieval and Integration of Traumatic Memories with the ‘Painting Cure,’” in Psychological Trauma, ed. Bessel A. van der Kolk (Washington, dc: American Psychiatric Press, 1987), 191–215; cited in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. and introd. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 152. See also Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy. My thanks to Dr Jill Matus for sharing her insights into trauma theory and for turning my attention to Leys’ work. 14 Long after his death, there were “still a few of Charcot’s hysterical patients who would, for a small remuneration, act out for the students the full-fledged attack of the grande hystérie” (Ellenberger 101).

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chapter five 1 Marlene NorbeSe Philip, a Canadian/Caribbean writer who is Brand’s contemporary, clarifies the legacy of slavery and the relationship between writing and embodied memory: What confronts me daily as a poet and writer is that original loss of place for the African brought to the New World – place lost not willingly, not in anticipation of a new life like the immigrant, or of a better standard of living; not in the assured belief that they would find their El Dorado, but place as in language, religion, culture and kin – lost forcibly and irrevocably. What I try to do in my writing is to repair some of those fractures. I can’t ever recover or recapture the former “Paradise,” if there ever was one, but through memory, in which the body plays such a vital role, I can give voice to those who passed on and over silently. (104) 2 McKittrick’s feminist analysis, for example, traces Black women’s struggle to define space and place, and draws specifically on NorbeSe Philip’s concept of “bodymemory” to explain how this genealogy is transported from one generation to the next. According to McKittrick, “[b]odymemory is passed down and reinterpreted through generation remembrances, teachings, forewarnings, and advice” (49). As her comments suggest, however, McKittrick somewhat paradoxically conceives of “bodymemory” as a conscious, discursive process. Rinaldo Walcott’s cultural theorist approach locates Brand’s work within Black writing in Canada, and he, too, grounds his analysis within particular western rational “traditions and notions of performance, performativity and performer” (75). Commenting on Brand’s poem “No Language Is Neutral,” for instance, Walcott writes, “Here she is performing the displacement of immigrantness” (85). 3 Diana Brydon cites Manthia Diawara’s definition of Blackness as “a compelling performance against the logic of slavery and colonialism by those people whose destinies have been inextricably linked to the advancement of the West, and who, therefore, have to learn the expressive techniques of modernity – writing, music, Christianity, industrialization – in order to become uncolonizable” (221; my emphasis). In her essay on orality and the body in Brand’s poetry, Maria Caridad Casas relies on and extends Butler’s theory of performativity. Meira Cook’s “The Partisan Body: Performance and the Female Body in Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral” concludes by stating that “Brand’s writing constructs the female body as a site of performance” (91). Finally, Charlotte Sturgess, commenting on “Blossom,” argues that the protagonist “chooses performance over silence” (225).

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4 See the studies on possession cults by Stoller, Lan, Ong, and Sharp. 5 Brand worked as an information officer for the Caribbean People’s Development Agency (Butling 64). 6 The fact that Blossom finds asylum in a church indicates the syncretic nature of Afro-Caribbean spirituality in North America. 7 Brand, of course, is not the first female writer to invoke Oya. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston, known for her great respect for and deep personal and professional relationship with African American spirituality, was initiated by Luke Turner into the sect of hoodoo doctors. In this ceremony, Turner named Hurston “a child of Oya” (Washington 167–8). 8 In keeping with Oya’s gift for keeping secrets, at a symposium at the University of Toronto, Brand explained that since she was speaking for the most part to a white audience “there are some things I will say to you and some things I won’t. And quite possibly it will be the most important things that I will withhold” (Brand, Who 15). 9 In her essay, “Spirits and Transformation in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories” Charlotte Burgess describes Blossom as both going mad, traversing “states of insanity,” and as a woman who chooses “performance over silence” (224, 225). 10 See Bourguignon 38, Crapanzo 28, Krauss 45–6, and Lewis 169. 11 Baucom discusses his theory of temporal accumulation in connection with Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in chapter 12 of Spectres of the Atlantic. 12 In the Yoruba spiritual practice to which Brand alludes, knowledge is thoroughly embodied. To invoke the orisa, for example, “one must enlist the acoustic power of sound and the kinetic power of movement. Each orisa has its own sonic vibration that is stimulated through word, song, prayer, and oriki (praise songs), and its own kinetic and visual resonance that is triggered by dance and symbolic/mimetic movement” (see Jones 323–4). 13 As we saw in Alias Grace, the ability to host another soul is frequently aligned with the uncanny feminine and maternal capacity to bear two souls in one body – an alternative and transgressive form of social reproduction. 14 In No Language is Neutral, the speaker admits to “hesitating to walk right, turning to Schoener’s road, turning to duenne and spirit” (4); later, on the beach, she speaks of “fearsome artifacts”: “That is not footsteps, girl, is duenne!/ is not shell, is shackle!” (12). 15 The old woman’s location at the crossroads suggests that she may well be the spirit Esu, the subject of Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey. In her essay, Charlotte Sturgess views the old woman as imaginary, a figure for “starving and beleaguered” Africa (227).

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Notes to pages 213–39

16 Although both Dadaists and Surrealists maintained in common this rejection of logic and reason, the followers of both groups eventually separated. (The split of the Surrealists from Dada has been characterized as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist.) Equally important, unlike the Dadaists, the Surrealists were profoundly influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, specifically his notion of the unconscious. 17 In his Surrealist Manifesto, released to the public in 1924, Breton defined Surrealism as follows: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” In this same document, Breton infamously reported, “I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own” (http://www.opusforfour .com/breton.htmo#manifesto). 18 I am grateful, as always, to Professor Russell Brown for his insight into the similarities and differences among these formal approaches. 19 In Verlia’s leap, as Ellen Quigly argues, Caribbean spirituality and Marxist doctrine “meet tensely and tentatively ... The displacements of Marxist idealism into spiritualism and of spiritualism into narrative create intense deterritorializing jouissance” (55). In my essay on Brand, I trace this move from “flesh into thought” in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (26). Marlene NorbeSe Philip likewise envisions a similar leap from material to imaginative space for Black women: “to move/ leaping from occupying space to/ occupying the idea/ the thought/to make it your own” (87). As NorbeSe Philip explains, this is the space of “the spirit world, an imaginative universe” (87). 20 See NorbeSe Philip’s definition of a jamete, 77 and 111 footnote 8. 21 For example, although Erika Johnson recognizes that Bola provides “hospitality for the ghosts; she listens to them and lives with them, sustaining their presence in the world,” she interprets Bola solely within the Western paradigms of trauma and pathologizes her as “a melancholic” who “cannot mourn” (Johnson 12). 22 In No Language Is Neutral, the narrator heralds her increasing rejection of nostalgia: “My /lips cannot say old woman darkening any more, she/ is the peace of another life that didn’t happen and/ couldn’t happen in my flesh and wasn’t peace/ but flight into old woman, prayer, to the saints of my/ancestry” (48). 23 In my essay on Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, I suggest that this novel explicitly positions readers as witnesses of the horrors of slavery and the diaspora (26).

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chapter six 1 In using the term “traumatized community” I am drawing, in part, on the notion of intergenerational trauma posited by contemporary scholars such as Yael Danieli and E.F. Duran. Danieli, for example, argues for “the possibility of generating a family legacy in which the experiences and reactions of one individual are transmitted to his or her children or significant others, with the potential for emotional and behavioural consequences to reshape individuals in subsequent generations” (qtd. in Waldram 214). In fact, the dsm-iv acknowledges for the first time the existence of “a heritable component to the transmission of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” (qtd. in Waldram 214). In keeping with Danieli, Pueblo/Apache psychologist Eduardo Duran insists on the necessity of considering multigenerational trauma, and he criticizes the field of psychology for personalizing effects of genocide on Native North Americans: The past five hundred years have been devastating to our communities; the effects of this systematic genocide are quickly personalized and pathologized by our profession via the diagnosing and labeling tools designed for this purpose. If the labeling and diagnosing process is to have any historical truth, it should incorporate a diagnostic category that reflects the effects of genocide. Such a diagnosis would be ‘acute and/or chronic reaction to colonialism.’ (Duran and Duran 6) 2 As Waldram points out, however, Duran seems to be advocating “for a highly essentialized historical ‘truth’ that is not compatible with local histories and experiences. These histories and cultural traditions, especially as remembered and reified in the present, exist as disputed terrain” (226). 3 Sherene Razack, “Death Worlds Where Bad Things Happen: Contemporary Settler Violence Against Aboriginal Peoples,” keynote address, caclals conference, Carleton University, Monday 24 May 2009. 4 Stolorow, Robert, George E. Atwood, and Bernard Brandchaft. Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press, 1987. 16–17. 5 I am very grateful to Kate Higgenson for introducing me to Todd’s documentary films and for drawing my attention to the similarities between Todd’s and King’s efforts concerning the creative repatriation of Native artifacts. 6 Sherene Razack, “Death Worlds Where Bad Things Happen: Contemporary Settler Violence Against Aboriginal Peoples,” keynote address, caclals conference, Carleton University, Monday 24 May 2009.

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7 The latter project recalls the Blackfoot nation’s use of Buffalo Calling Stones and the Origination Story of the Horns Society, which details “how buffalo may transform into humans and how proper ceremony may be able to use even a small bone shard to bring a dead person back to life” (Higginson 7). There are powerful resonances between these intertexts and King’s depiction of Monroe’s sculptural buffalo “who wander at will and twice in the novel transform into stones” (Higginson 7). 8 In his essay “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Winnicott distinguishes between creative apperception and perception. “It is usual to refer to ‘reality-testing,’ and to make a clear distinction between apperception and perception. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion” (Playing 3). 9 As Perdue and Green observe, the Indian Removal is told in Cherokee terms, although only ten percent of the eastern Indians who travelled the Trail of Tears were Cherokee (xv). 10 As Ridington observes, Tecumseh is named for the Shawnee chief and warrior who struggled unsuccessfully to create an Indian confederacy before he was killed in 1813 at the battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was bound up with the history of the Removal because his defeat in part paved the way for the dispossession of the Cherokee (see Ridington 91; Perdue and Green 48). 11 The adults covertly mention Mia’s name and, eventually, Tecumseh finds a photograph of a newborn baby, dated jl 1 (July 1). Tecumseh also recalls that when he was young, Cassie sent birthday presents home in July. The gifts were given to Tecumseh, even though they were clearly intended for a girl and his birthday falls in April (118). 12 This is a matter of debate since Ridington concludes that Monroe is likely Mia’s father (96). As I see it, however, Monroe is more likely Tecumseh’s father. 13 “You giving up?” “Why not?” says aunt Cassie. “What about Mia?” “Gave up the first time ... Second time should be a snap.” (115) 14 Ridington suggests that the image of “the lost mother connects to Silko’s novel Ceremony, which turns around a quest for the lost corn mother whose absence has held back the life-giving rains” (99–100). I would add that Lum’s name also recalls the name of the infamous Wilson Lumkin, governor of Georgia, who “so believed that getting rid of the Cherokees was his mission in life that he entitled his autobiography, written some twenty years later, The

Notes to pages 262–3

341

Removal of the Cherokees from Georgia (Perdue and Green 108). In light of Lum’s fate, it is also worth noting that Governor Lumpkin believed that the Cherokee “should be treated like orphan children incapable of making decisions,” and that the government “should simply legislate their expulsion” (Perdue and Green 107). 15 As a result, in contrast to the Gothic frisson elicited by ghosts in non-Native writing, the spectres in King’s novel are not frightening. As Warren Carriou observes more generally in Native people’s writing, ghosts “are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror. They may be malevolent beings ... but they may also be figures of healing, ceremony, or political action. Or they may simply be ancestors. And while many such spirits do seem to address the transgressions of the colonial past, they usually do so as part of a call for some kind of redress or change in the present” (730). Tecumseh’s dog, Soldier, however, is afraid of ghosts and the sight of Rebecca terrifies him. This makes sense in light of the fact that, according to Tecumseh’s grandmother, dogs guarded the camp against “soldiers and ghosts” (39). 16 The fact that Indigenous peoples typically do not rigidly divide the universe between the natural and the supernatural helps to explain the absence of uncanny terror in the face of these spirits. As Paula Allen Gunn observes, In English, one can divide the universe into two parts: the natural and the supernatural. Humanity has no real part in either, being neither animal nor spirit – that is, the supernatural is discussed as though it were apart from people, and the natural as though people were apart from it. This necessarily forces English-speaking people into a position of alienation from the world they live in. Such alienation is entirely foreign to American Indian thought. At base, every story, every song, every ceremony tells the Indian that each creature is a part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being. (60) Despite its essentialist overtones, her point remains salient. 17 My decision to adopt a psychoanalytic perspective springs largely from the text’s emphasis on supernatural events. In her essay “Cherokee Stories of the Supernatural,” Janine Scancarelli writes that most traditional stories and most short anecdotes “focus on conflicts between characters or a fairly straightforward sequence of events. Those stories tend to emphasize events and circumstances rather than mental states. In contrast, an important focus of amazing stories is often an internal conflict within the mind of the speaker, or speculation as to the mental state of a character” (332). The emphasis on the intrapsychic dimension in King’s novel and in Cherokee supernatural stories

342

Notes to pages 264–74

more generally led me to rely on Native scholarship in conjunction with Winnicott’s psychoanalytic approach. 18 During World War Two, Winnicott found himself grappling with the psychologically devastating impact of another kind of removal. As an analyst and pediatrician, Winnicott gained first-hand experience of the evacuation of British children, which brought him into direct contact with “the confusion brought about by the wholesale break-up of family life, and he had to experience the effect of separation and loss, and of destruction and death” (Abram 48). In December 1939, with the help of two other psychiatrists, Winnicott wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal explaining why “the evacuation of small children between the ages of two and five introduces major psychological problems” (qtd. in Phillips 62). After that moment, Winnicott turned his entire attention to the problems instigated by evacuation, particularly on mothers and their children (Phillips 62). In 1940, he was appointed Psychiatric Consultant to the Government Evacuation Scheme in the County of Oxford (Phillips 62–3). 19 In 1829, the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, insisted that for the Cherokees the choice was either Removal or destruction (Perdue and Green 60). Waldram comments on the ideology that gave rise to these coercive options, noting that it posits “an assumed inherent conflict between values, beliefs, and behaviours ... Furthermore, there is an assumption that whatever new is adopted must automatically replace something of the old. In other words, a person only has so much capacity for ‘culture.’ According to this view, conflict will exist until the individual has made a complete transition to the new culture and all of the old is replaced” (Waldram 117). 20 To explain how infants move from the subjective object to the object objectively perceived, Winnicott offers what Adam Phillips describes as a “mock Punch and Judy show” (131): The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo object!” “I destroyed you.” “I love you.” “You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you” ... The subject can now use the object that has survived ... It is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way round and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control. In these ways the object develops it own autonomy and life, and (if it survives) contributes-in to the subject, according to its own properties. (Playing 90)

Notes to pages 280–7

21

22

23

24 25

26

343

Phillips explains that for Winnicott, “the object is first made real through aggressive destruction” (Phillips 132). Although Soldier jumps off the bridge and his body is never found, Tecumseh is not shattered by this turn of events. The fact that the body is never found strikes him as a positive element. “There’s always the chance,” he muses “that he survived the fall but was injured and lost his memory, and that one day he’ll remember and come home. I saw a movie where that exact thing happened, only it was a man and not a dog” (262). Here Tecumseh relies on his imagination, informed by movies, to sustain his faith in the possibility that Soldier will return. For example, the infant assumes rights over the object, and we agree to this assumption; the object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated; it must never change, unless changed by the infant; it must survive instinctual loving, and also hating, yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own (see Playing 5). King’s novel does not wholly subscribe to the vision of a non-violent, Arcadian Native culture prior to contact since Tecumseh wonders, at one point, if the buffalo have their own generative illusion: “I wonder if they can remember the good old days when they had the place to themselves, before they had to worry about Indians running them off cliffs or Europeans shooting at them from the comfort of railroad cars or bloodthirsty tourists in tan walking shorts and expensive sandals chasing them across the prairies on motorcycles” (235). “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ll. 130–1. Ridington points out that Swimmer’s first name, Monroe, recalls President James Monroe, a key figure in the shared American/Indian history of Cherokee removals. In 1817 Monroe wrote future President Andrew Jackson that “the hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life, and must yield to it” (Prucha qtd. in Ridington). In 1824 Monroe said in his annual message to Congress “that there was only one solution to the Indian problem: the Indians must be induced to move west” (Washburn 44 qtd. in Ridington 93). Vizenor quotes King as saying of this novel “that he is ‘trying to move away from a culturally specific area completely.’ The Indians ‘aren’t identified by tribe, for instance, and as a matter of fact, they’re not even much identified by geographic area.’ That his characters are pantribal would be more obvious to some readers than others; those who search for authentic tribal representations

344

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would be concerned that the author has not served the literature of dominance.” Vizenor also goes on to point out that King does not claim to possess an essential Native identity (Vizenor, Manifest 174). 27 I would suggest that both King and Winnicott can be counted among trickster’s disciples. As Winnicott’s biographer explains, “[p]aradox was his wisdom, the acceptance, as he urged, of the simultaneity of opposites. Out of it comes an impression of human beings as wholes: while unitary, they are always also divided. This is the freedom that bewildered others. In the face of the striving toward unification ... how could one make room for its opposite? Yet, without a kind of human disarray, there could be no life as we know it” (Rodham 374–5). 28 In these concluding scenes, the contrast between fire and water, between Lum’s self-destructive expression of aggression and Monroe’s communal bonfire supports Winnicott’s insight that aggression is a given; the only matter of concern is how we direct it. Citing Pliny, Winnicott writes, “Who can say whether in essence fire is constructive or destructive’” (qtd. in Abram 33). Equally relevant is the relationship between Monroe’s bonfire and the sacred fire of the Cherokee. As Heath Justice explains, “the spirit of the fire is also the spirit of the nation” (26).

conclusion 1 Stuart McLean 112. McLean argues that both he and Derrida pose this same question. 2 As noted in the introduction, I am wary of making simplistic claims about the politics of the Gothic. Nevertheless, I argue that the treatment of the trope of the spectre lends the works under consideration a political valence. 3 See http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/ethics.htm.

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Index

abjection, 43, 46–7, 58–60, 326n23 absence, 190, 211, 220, 229 accumulated time, 208, 217 Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, 228, 235–6, 337n6, 338n19. See also possession: Afro-Caribbean rituals The Afterlife of George Cartwright, 32, 62–99, 301, 312, 316 Alias Grace, 32–3, 147–85, 303, 318 amnesia, 46–7, 106, 132, 145, 155 anachronistic space, 85 Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 41–2, 323n5. See also The Cure for Death by Lightning Anglo-Saxonism, 108, 121, 123–4, 127–30, 139, 147 apocalypse, 47–9 art, 317–18; as consolation, 125; and renewal, 239, 254–5, 259, 275, 277, 283–4, 286, 288, 291–3, 295–6 At the Full and Change of the Moon, 196, 234–6, 338n23 “At the Lisbon Plate,” 210–12

Atwood, Margaret, 7–8, 150. See also Alias Grace; Surfacing Away, 32–2, 99, 103–49, 219, 273, 302, 317, 328n2, 329n3, 331n22 Baucom, Ian, 193. See also Spectres of the Atlantic Bildung, 195–6, 227–8, 230 Blacks; body, 173, 191, 193, 215, 231, 234, 336n1–3; colonization of 212, 216; community, 228; as ghosts, 10, 190. See also diaspora; possession. blood, 59, 61, 88, 120, 256, 300 “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls,” 192, 195, 197, 201–7, 209, 212, 226 Brand, Dionne, 149, 196, 224, 230, 337n5, 337n8; corpus, 32–3, 185–9, 191–6, 199–200, 203, 223, 226, 233, 239–40, 303–4, 317. See also At the Full and Change of the Moon; “Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms, and Waterfalls”; In Another Place Not

366

Index

Here; Inventory; “I Used to Like the Dallas Cowboys”; Land to Light On; A Map to the Door of No Return; No Language is Neutral; “Photograph”; “St. Mary’s Estate”; Sans Souci (book); “Sans Souci” (story); “Sketches in transit ... going home”; What We All Long For British law, 68–70, 317, 329n7. See also women: legal status Canada; and apocalypse discourse see apocalypse; as haunted, 9, 41–2, 49–50, 157; lack of history, 3, 7, 8; literature, 14, 16–17, 19, 21–2, see also magic realism: Canadian; national identity, 5, 11, 16, 21, 298, 314; slavery in, 10–11, 93. See also gothic: Canadian capitalism, 67, 186, 216; and slavery, 193–4, 217, 221. See also haunting: and capitalism; imperialism. captivity, 231 Caribbean literature, 189 Cariboo District, 42–3 Cartwright, George (historical figure), 64–8, 70, 72, 89–90, 92–4, 301. See also The Afterlife of George Cartwright Celticism, 108–11, 117–21, 124–9, 131–2, 135–7, 139, 144–7, 311, 330n14 character, 151 Cherokee Removal. See Trail of Tears children, 264, 266–7. See also mother/ infant bond; Natives: adolescents and children Christianity; imposition of, 48, 59, 61–2; symbolism, 61, 70–3, 78, 92,

98, 138, 324n11, 326n22, 326n24 class, 77, 158; anxieties, 33, 333n6; fear of mobility, 153–4, 185, 303; interclass relations, 157, 173–4; mobility 149–51, 173–5; preoccupation with status, 72–3, 75, 86; psychological distress, 158 colonialism, 65, 121, 127, 246, 324n7; colonial cringe, 7; para-colonialism, 42, 324; pornotropics, 83; racial violence, 65, 78; space, colonial 42. See also imperialism commodification, 11–13, 176, 190, 193, 217–18, 234 Coyote, 39–42, 45, 47–8, 57–8, 240, 256, 300–1, 310–11, 323n6; as Christian God, 48, 50, 324n11 creativity, 265–6, 280; creative living, 286, 288–9. See also art crow, 136–8, 140, 142–4, 331n20–1 culture, 232, 266, 268, 280; cultural differences see difference The Cure for Death by Lightning, 31–2, 47, 51–63, 98, 141, 198, 219, 239–42 Darwinism, 129–30, 327n6 degeneracy, 65, 72–3, 76–83, 98, 103, 147, 272, 301; and disease, 87–8, 90–1 diaspora, 11, 158–9, 164, 302; Black, 186, 195, 202–3, 210, 221, 231; Irish, 109, 127, 132, 140, 144, 149, 153–4, 156–7, 164, 167–8, 180; women, 194 difference, 311–16 disease, 87–95 dispossession, 20, 67, 83, 88, 154; and

Index slavery, 75, 98; of sons, 72, see also primogeniture. See also possession; zombification distemper, 45 Door of No Return, 204, 207, 211, 220, 229. See also A Map to the Door of No Return double consciousness, 169, 173, 303. See also hysteria The Double Hook, 31–2, 35, 39–43, 45–51, 61–3, 98, 141, 219, 300–1, 310, 313–16, 324n11, 325n12, 325n13 Enlightenment, 26–7, 63, 72, 74–5, 77, 81, 95, 107, 110–11, 187, 190, 193, 200. See also Bildung escapist literature, 44. See also fantastic literature ethics, 6, 306–7. See also haunting; literature exorcism, 16, 39 extinction discourse, 73–4, 80 fantastic literature, 44, 53, 112, 146–7, 213–14 fort-da, 253, 255, 274, 278, 291 freakishness, 56–8 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 27–8, 42, 46–7, 49, 103, 118, 155, 159, 172, 253, 333n8 ghosts, 16, 21, 44–5, 85, 97, 104–5, 118–19, 169–70, 190, 310, 320; as ancestors, 7, 49–50, 62, 98, 127, 234–8, 246, 248; as anxieties, 149; debunking, 131; and modernity, 231, 236; nations as, 106, 128; and the nation-state, 5, 8–9, 49–50; as

367

Native restoration, 250–1, 255, 260, 297; spectral vision, 125 Glissant, Edouard, 187 gothic, 6, 13, 22–31, 43–4, 46, 55–6, 64, 74–5, 95–7, 104–5, 185, 189, 214, 299; American, 9–12, 24–5; Canadian, 5, 7–9, 11, 21–2, 24, 31, 33, 40, 56, 60–1, 96, 98, 300; colonialism, 231; female, 17, 27, 46, 54, 57, 322n10, 325n16; global, 12–13, 186, 192, 207, 213, 234; and modernism, 48–9; politicization, 67, 253; postcolonial, 329n5; and primogeniture, 68–9, 80 75; protagonists, 45; violence, 321n3, 326n20 Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, 5 Great Hunger, 103–4, 115, 122, 125, 328n1, 329n8 Grenada, 194, 215, 224–5 “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” 112–14, 117, 119–20 haunting, 6, 14–16, 20–1, 41, 113, 152, 169, 189, 191, 202, 206, 208, 247, 275, 304–5, 309–10; and capitalism, 11–14, 82; ethics, 35, 300; haunting back, 7, 222; of history, 16, 29–30, 63–4, 248–9, 316, 318; and loss, 168–71; of textual production, 66, 84, 299–300; as transition, 246, 249–50; women, 17–19, 33 home, 14, 19–20, 169, 187, 320; anxieties of, 149, 157; and art, 238; feeling at, 113, 245–46, 251, 273; and storytelling, 116. See also uncanny house; as anxiety, 39; “cleaning house,”

368

Index

49–50, 248; in Gothic fiction, 20, 29, 60 hysteria, 33, 150–4, 156, 160–1, 166, 179, 182–5, 197, 332n1, 332n3–4, 334n12; doubleness, 332n2, 333n7; history of, 150, 155–9, 161–5; and loss, 165, 168–70, 258, 303; social reproduction, 179 identity, 16, 151, 153–4, 157–8, 170–3, 175–9, 180–2, 200, 211, 219, 244, 265, 288, 303–4; poetics of, 311, 314 illusion as madness, 291 imperialism, 67–9 73–6, 78, 82, 86, 145–7; as a disease, 87–8. See also colonialism In Another Place Not Here, 192–3, 195, 215–16, 221–3, 225–6 individualism. See identity Inventory, 197, 233–4, 239 Ireland, 115, 122–6, 128, 132, 135; as feminine, 109, 128–30, 331n17; rebirth of, 109 Irish; collective memory, 104, 107, 109–10, 115, 117, 121, 123–5, 128, 132, 142, 146, 151, 311; dancing, 126–7; extinction and migration, 130–1, see also Darwinsim; Famine (see Great Hunger; indigenization, 136–7, 140–1, 145; as Jews, 138; and Natives, 110, 137–44, 302–3; as savages, 108–9, 330n13; social class, 150; women, 131, 152, 157, 163–4, 167, see also Ireland as feminine. See also Celticism; diaspora, Irish “I Used to Like the Dallas Cowboys,” 225

King, Thomas, 110, 130, 138–9. See also Truth and Bright Water Kinnear, Thomas (historical), 152 Land to Light On, 224–5 laws of inheritance. See primogeniture lesbianism, 28–9, 52–4, 56–8, 61, 226–7 literature; American, 9–11, 15, 17; disencounter, 310–11; and ethics, 34, 306–9; and imperialism, 305–6. See also Canada: literature; Caribbean literature; fantastic literature; nationalism: literature; Natives: literature magic realism, 104–10, 112, 114–17, 119–21, 127–8, 134–5, 139, 144, 201, 213–14, 290, 302, 311; Canadian, 115–16, 144; Latin-American, 114–15, 137 Mantegazza, Paolo, 78 A Map to the Door of No Return, 189–90, 193–4, 196, 208, 221, 230–3, 236 Marks, Grace (historical), 152, 165 Márquez, Gabriel García, 115. See also “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” Marxism, 196, 233, 338n19 McDermott, James (historical), 152 melancholy, 218–20, 277, 333n8; witness, 196, 221–2, 230, 234, 238–9 mimic men, 81, 86–7 modernism, 16, 48–9, 208 Montgomery, Nancy (historical), 152 mother/infant bond, 251–2, 256–8, 263–8, 273–6, 279–86, 290

Index multiple personalities, 174, 181, 185. See also possession Myal, 194, 230–1 nationalism; history as triumph, 120; and literature, 74, 114; romantic, 112–13, 128, 142, 144–6, 332n23 National School, 122–3 nation-state, 14, 46–7, 117, 187; as collective identity, 106–8, 123; as imagined, 111, 117, 146, 264; problems with constructing, 127 Natives; adolescents and children, 245, 247–8, 251, 257, 267, 293; assimilation, 59–60, 268; commoditization of, 83, 86; conflict with settlers, 40–3, 48–51, 58–9, 63–4, 98, 245–6, 255, 342n19; dispossession of, 243, 246–9, 256, 273, 277–8; extinction discourse, 73–4; as haunters, 9, 302–3; land claims, 39–3, 45, 53, 55, 62, 260–1, 301–2, 323n3; literature, 141, 250, 255, 262–3, 268, 321n2; as magic helper, 138–9; relation to animals, 270–3, 278, 290; renewal, 304–5, see also art; and the supernatural, 341n16; survivance, 286–96; vanishing, 57–9, 144, 147, 243, 251–4, 292–3, 325n12 new Eden, 39, 47, 63, 71 No Language is Neutral, 192–3, 195, 204, 216, 224, 226–8 Oya, 202–6, 209–10, 224–5, 230, 317, 337n7 performance, 151, 175–8, 180, 183–4,

369

288–9, 303; of distress, 153–4, 179. See also possession “Photograph,” 210 possession, 6, 20, 162–3, 171–2, 178, 184, 186, 191, 198–9, 201–2, 206, 209, 218, 223; Afro-Caribbean rituals, 191–3, 195–8, 202–3, 206, 209–10, 232, 239, 304; Blacks, 194, 199; of bodies, 193–4; as critique, 193, 204; as healing, 204, 220–1, 238; multiple personalities, 154–6; and performance, 198–9; relational, 195, 200–1, 205; selfpossessed see self-possessed man; and slavery, 193–4, 205, 215–16; trauma, 208, see also trauma; and women, 203–4, 208, 214 postcolonialism, 120–1 Primitivism, 107–9, 131–2, 135, 139, 146–7, 270–1 primogeniture, 65–73, 75–80, 83, 86, 94, 301–2, 330n15 psychoanalysis, 16, 49, 53, 155, 246; and trauma, 208, 219–20. See also Freud, Sigmund; Winnicott, D.W. rape. See women: and abuse raven. See crow relation, 200–1. See also identity; possession: relational; Winnicott, D.W. residential schools, 41, 291 return of the repressed, 34, 67, 91, 147, 298–9. See also uncanny rot, 261 “St. Mary’s Estate,” 210 Sans Souci (book), 195, 200, 210, 214, 221, 223 “Sans Souci” (story), 214–15, 224

370

Index

secrets, 316–17, 319; as ghosts, 4, 29, 47, 208 self. See identity self-possessed man, 67, 197, 199–200, 216, 236, 244 settler-invaders; anxieties, 63; claim to land, 11, 142–3, 246; conception of natives, 110, 143, 246, 251; indigenization, 95–6, 98–9; originary sin, 94–5; as spectral presence, 97. See also colonialism; Natives: conflict with settlers Shuswap tribe, 41, 48, 50, 51, 325n15 “Sketches in transit ... going home,” 217, 225 slavery, 9–11, 71, 75–6, 82, 85–7, 92–3, 98, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 195, 211, 234, 321n3, 336n1; racial anxieties, 322n9; and women, 214. See also Spectres of the Atlantic; capitalism: and slavery Spectres of the Atlantic, 217–21, 277 spiritualism, 155–6, 174–6, 184 Surfacing, 150 Surrealism, 213–14, 237, 338n16–17 techne, 225, 228–33, 237, 239 third place, 262–3. See also transitional phenomena Thompson Okanagan, 42 Traill, Catherine Parr, 3, 7 Trail of Tears, 248–9, 256–60, 270, 272, 340n9–10, 343n25 transitional phenomena, 249–51, 254–5, 258–9, 262–70, 272, 276, 278–9, 281–4, 289–91, 293–6, 304, 312, 340n8. See also haunting as transition trauma, 95, 181–2, 190, 207–8,

218–19, 234; historical, 88, 245, 247–9, 265, 276, 339n1; and psychoanalysis, see psychoanalysis tribalism, 132–3, 145 Truth and Bright Water, 34–5, 46, 61, 141, 239–40, 243–97, 304, 316, 319 two-spirited, 53–4 uncanny, 3, 26–8, 42–4, 46, 64, 68, 84–5, 103, 118, 333n8. See also return of the repressed; women: and the uncanny understanding, 308–10 Urquhart, Jane, 105, 330n16 vampirism, 59, 327n26 Watson, Sheila, 41–3, 46–8, 312, 321n4 What We All Long For, 196–7, 236–8 Winnicott, D.W., 263–8, 274, 280, 291, 342n18 women, 57, 152, 154, 162, 214, 303; and abuse, 57–9, 153, 164–6, 183, 201, 214–16; bodies, 19–20, 53, 56–9, 82–3, 148, 160, 166–7, 298, 333n9; and class, 150–1, 158, 161, 163–5; and hysteria, 155, 160–1, 165, 179–80, see also hysteria; immigration, 164; legal status, 18–19; reproduction, 150, 167; and the uncanny, 17, 19, 298; vampires, see vampirism Yeats, William Butler, 135 zombification, 194, 225, 231, 308