Gardens, Covenants, Exiles: Loyalism in the Literature of Upper Canada/Ontario

Charles R. Steele was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is Dennis Duffy’s first full-length critical work, his most ambitious undertaking, and, unfortunately, not a wholly successful one. He has attempted to trace the various transformations of a Loyalist vision/myth in the literature of Upper Canada/Ontario from the beginnings of Loyalist settlement in the late eighteenth century until the present day. A continuous tracing, of course, would have produced a much larger work than this one. Duffy’s procedure is selective, and, he hopes, representative; he centres his outline on works by nineteenth century writers John Richardson, William Kirby, Charles Mair, and William Wilfred Campbell, and by twentieth century writers Mazo de la Roche, Hugh Hood, George Grant, Al Purdy, and Dennis Lee.

Duffy correctly demonstrates that the Loyalist vision very quickly revised historical experience. The facts of defeat, dispossession and exile, and of the occupation of a new land were compromised, altered, and refashioned into a narrative in which defeat was equated with moral nobility, dispossession and exile with Christian suffering, and occupation of the new land with images of the promised land and of redemption. This revisionist process was in evidence by the War of 1812, which was claimed as a Loyalist victory (thus ignoring the crucial contributions of British regulars and other groups), and as a vindication and reward for a “deep attachment to traditions of western civility” (p. 10). The process of Loyalist revisionism led to a similar appropriation of Family Compact government (which Loyalists did not monopolize), of Anglican establishmentarianism (the original Loyalists were not primarily Anglican), and of the defeat of the 1837 rebels (Loyalists did not alone constitute the victors).

Duffy’s discontinuous history then ignores Confederation (a serious omission) and picks up the late nineteenth century emanations of Loyalist myth in the work of Charles Mair and William Wilfred Campbell. In these, he perceives the myth losing moral vigour and being assailed by modernist liberalism, capitalism, and secularism. The myth is further eroded in the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche, according to Duffy, whose own wistful nostalgia for moral/romantic Loyalism is becoming more and more evident. He sees in the work of Hugh Hood the ultimate dominance of realist/pragmatic modernism, and then proceeds to record the lamentation for Loyalism’s passing which he finds in the writing of Grant, Purdy, and Lee.

The general outline of this unifocal literary history is intriguing, despite its discontinuity. But it is weakly organized. Chapters 1 (the factual history of Loyalist origins) and 7 (summarizing the development of Loyalist mythology) belong together, and no good purpose is served by putting the discussion of Kirby before that of Richardson. The chapter on Richardson is further weakened by factual error (Maria Drayson was his second, not his first, wife; the wolf-suckled child in Westbrook, the Outlaw! is the villain’s grandson, not his son). Duffy’s judgment of The Monk Knight of St. John is also undeservedly negative. His critical judgements of his other literary subjects are not so dramatically flawed, but his book as a whole is a less accomplished text than one might have hoped for and than the subject deserved.