Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Edwards examines a selection of nearly two centuries of Canadian gothic
writing here, including texts by Margaret Atwood, Maria Campbell,
Frederick Philip Grove, Barbara Gowdy, Anne Hébert, James De Mille,
Susanna Moodie, Shani Mootoo, Andrew Pyper, David Adams Richards,
Sinclair Ross, Jane Urquhart, and Rudy Wiebe (prominent examples of
British and American gothic writing are occasionally brought in for
comparison). Edwards focuses on the “fluidity” or “ineffability”
of Canadian identities, and how these contribute to anxieties that find
robust expression in the gothic mode. “[Gothic] production,” argues
Edwards, “is linked to the crossing of boundaries, of traversing the
limits whereby identity is conventionally fixed.” He sums up the
impact of the national sense of indeterminacy on our conceptions of
ourselves and our neighbours: “the very thought of Canadian others
might be experienced as the uncanny confirmation of the terrifying
possibilities of powerlessness (or subjugation) that Canadian
citizen-authors attempt to repress.”

This is a useful and generally very astute contribution to Canadian
gothic studies, and it should be of interest to all students of Canadian
literature. Though Edwards’s writing is, for the most part, admirably
clear, his rhetorical probing of narrative implications can sometimes be
banal: “The question at the heart of the text that the yachtsmen try
to answer is an inquiry into the limits of definition, classification
and identity: what is real? What is imaginary? What is fact? And what is
fiction?” Worse, some of this book’s readings are disappointingly
formulaic in their approach, reducing the idiosyncratic drama of
particular texts to pat critical conclusions. The uncanny thus haunts
this author’s work, too, on those occasions when interpretive
banalities float freely over the subject matter: “[Maud’s] autistic
child dislodges the boundaries imposed by the limitations of language.
This nameless boy, whose identity is never fixed in language, questions
the connection between linguistic signs and their referents. Through his
unique perception of the word and the world, his seemingly nonsensical
talk exposes the inadequacy of language and, by mimicking various words,
he illustrates the arbitrary nature of the pervasive sign system.”