Recovering Canada's First Novelist: Proceedings from the John Richardson Conference

Lorne Bellamy was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of British Columbia.

The six papers collected for Recovering Canada’s First Novelist were first delivered in December 1977. Many years later, Porcupine’s Quill hopes that they will stimulate further interest in Richardson and in our literary past. Unfortunately, some are marred by mechanical interpretations and hasty generalizations; and, too often in her introduction, Catherine Ross herself either misrepresents the contents of essays or exaggerates their value as studies of Richardson and his background. On the strengths of a few, however, Richardson will recover and live to be fairly represented.

According to Ross, the first three papers “increase our understanding of the historical, biographical, and economic background of Richardson’s writing,” but the documentary evidence concerning Richardson is sometimes scant indeed. David R. Beasley offers little more than a loosely connected series of anecdotes describing his difficulties while doing research, finding a publisher, and arranging materials for his biography of Richardson (The Canadian Don Quixote, Porcupine’s Quill, 1977). A few passing references to two American publications do not “demonstrate” the economics of publishing, nor do they suggest why Richardson could not make a living as a writer.

Of the remaining two papers praised for their documentary value, only one deals substantially with Richardson. Outlining the textual history of Wacousta, Douglas Cronk says that the only edition accurately representing Richardson’s work is the first, published by T. Cadell in London in 1832. All subsequent editions, including the New Canadian Library edition of 1967, were based substantially upon a drastically abridged version published in serial form for an American audience by Waldie’s Select Circulating Library in 1833. Waldie changes Wacousta into a “non-British, non-Canadian novel, [taking] as its main geographical setting the U.S.A. rather than Canada.” He bowdlerizes the more vigorous colloquial language of ordinary soldiers, weakens the dramatic impact of crucial scenes, and continually distorts character and plot.

In his essay, Carl F. Klinck contends that there is not “a shred of proof’ to support Beasley’s claim (made in his biography) that John Norton, who once worked as a fur trader for Richardson’s grandfather, is a model for Wacousta. To rescue him from Richardson’s “taste for romance, sex and violence,” Klinck writes a fascinating biographical sketch of this forgotten hero, misrepresented in his own time by the Indian agents he opposed in defence of Indian rights. For literary critics and others curious about the documentary value of Richardson’s fiction or his historical writing, Norton may be remembered most for The Journal of Major John Norton 1816 (The Champlain Society, 1970). Writing of his travels from Grand River, Upper Canada, south to Kentucky and Tennessee in 1809, Norton records his intimate observations of Indian life in language that is “not bound by the stereotypes of European fiction and travel literature,” which portrayed Indians as “noble savages, monsters, clowns, fools to be exploited, or souls to be saved.” Klinck illuminates Norton’s remarkable achievements in a complex world, but not the “world of the Indian, interpreter, and fur trader represented in Wacousta,” as Ross claims.

The remaining three essays concentrate on parallel passages and conventions that link Richardson’s work with the gothic and historical romance traditions of England and Europe. Two writers use Richardson’s Canadian romances to illustrate general theories about a Canadian mentality struggling but failing to adjust to new living conditions in North America. Contrasting the fictional worlds of James Fenimore Cooper and Richardson, I.S. MacLaren notes that Cooper’s Natty Bumpo embodies the best of both European an Indian cultures, but that in Wacousta no equivalent figure exists, only a world of warring extremes: “English-garrison culture in continuous counter-distinction to the Indian culture.” But here he completely ignores the ring that symbolically unites Oucanasta, an Indian woman, with Madeline and Frederick, representatives of the British/Canadian garrison; and in making Wacousta stand for “Indian culture,” he forgets that Wacousta’s desire for revenge and his increasing moral disintegration have their roots in England, in terms of both plot and literary tradition.

Michael Hurley looks more closely at Richardson’s doubles and triangles, but for him as well, Richardson divides the frontier into dual worlds of opposing forces — the British and the Indians, “law and nature, reason and passion” — which confront each other violently upon an impassable bridge. Hurley claims that Wacousta and its sequel rise above this simple dualism, but neither he nor Richardson can find a resolution to the polarized conflict; Richardson, apparently, is divided in himself, his “psyche obsessed with balancing one idea by another.”

Jay Macpherson deftly introduces us to many literary texts and conventions to show that Richardson’s work belongs to gothic and historical romance traditions. Her purpose is not to analyze texts in detail but to isolate conventions and trace their lineage. Among other conventions, she treats the rival-brothers plot; the avenger’s character and ensuing decline; fair and dark heroines; and narrative designs that allow “the destructive reach of the past into the present,” which, she argues, is central to Gothic and almost definitive of it.” Unlike MacLaren and Hurley, she regards romance conventions as “building blocks” of narrative, not as supports for generalizations about Richardson’s psyche or about a Canadian mentality.

On the whole, the essays in this collection fall far short of the claims made for them. The best essays (by Klinck and Macpherson) are very good; broad in scope, sensitive, and suggestive in their interpretation of evidence, they stand up to careful reading. But to say that this collection represents “the first full-scale scholarly examination” of Richardson is an empty boast indeed, since many more comprehensive and thoughtful studies of Richardson in the context of nineteenth century literature, Canadian and otherwise, have appeared in recent years, beginning with Margot Northey’s The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 1976).