Languages
Kirstine Steno
Call of the Wild - Heroines in Canadian
Women’s Wilderness Fiction
Master's Thesis
MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
Call of the Wild
Heroines in Canadian Women’s Wilderness Fiction
MA-Thesis by Kirstine Cecilie Steno
University of Copenhagen
February 2012
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MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land — oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back — and I will.
Robert W. Service: Spell of the Yukon (1916)
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Kirstine C. Steno
MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
Contents
Contents ...................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4
Canada’s Literary Quest for a National Identity ........................................................................ 6
Women Writing Wilderness ..................................................................................................... 15
Defining the Canadian Wilderness ........................................................................................... 20
The Female Quest Novel as a Genre ........................................................................................ 30
Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel and the Wilderness of Contrasts ............................................... 35
Wilderness Madness in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing............................................................ 50
The Wild Within - Marian Engel’s Bear .................................................................................. 65
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 78
Abstract .................................................................................................................................... 81
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 82
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MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
Introduction
The colonization and subsequent settlement of Canada forced an encounter between man and
the wilderness1. The wild Canadian nature was very different from that of Britain and came to
be considered untamable, inhospitable, and dangerous to civilized people. Like Australia’s
‘dead heart’, the American frontier, and Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’, the Canadian North has
been perceived as beyond the limits of civilized society, a place where manmade rules and
laws do not apply, order becomes chaos, and man is the inferior species. This landscape is
simultaneously dismissive and alluring to the protagonists of the Canadian quest novel. The
Canadian North has become a mythical place where people go in an attempt to find
themselves, their true identities, unaffected by the norms and values of society. This quest is
signified both by its destination, the wild, and by its point of departure, civilization, and the
need for both physical and mental escape.
More specifically related to women’s quest novels, is the search for a distinct
female identity and a place in society not dictated by patriarchal norms and values. Thus, the
escape from civilization marks the female protagonist’s liberation from male domination. In
this context, the male characters often play the role of colonizer, imperialist, oppressor. The
representation of nature as feminine establishes even further the fact that women’s bodies as
well as the land have been colonized by men. Author Margaret Atwood’s description of the
wilderness as a ‘femme fatale’ suggests that there are a number of shared characteristics
between Mother Nature and the natural female. She is the raw, natural, and real woman, not
the manmade illusion of a fragile and virginal angel. Like nature, she is both beautiful and
cunning, inviting and hostile, giver and taker of life. The discovery of a true identity as the
result of the encounter between woman and nature suggests a connection between the two that
is somehow inherent and beyond the control of man.
Women’s wilderness quest novels have come to form a distinctive genre within
the Canadian literary tradition in the twentieth century. I will attempt to define the
characteristics of this genre and determine its significance as part of Canadian literature as
1
I find it reasonable to use the terms ‘the wilderness’, ‘the North’, and ‘the wild’ interchangeably for the purpose
of this thesis. My aim is not to place the Canadian wilderness on a map, but rather to examine different
representations of this entity in Canadian fiction. This definition of the wilderness by Faye Hammill suggests the
multi-faceted and region specific variations of the wilderness found in Canadian fiction and makes obvious why
a single definition of the term is impossible: “although primarily associated with forested areas of eastern and
western Canada, it can also take on the broader sense of ‘the wild’, or uncultivated land, and refer to frozen
Arctic landscapes or even to the prairies of central Canada.” (Hammill, 64)
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MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
well as within a feminist and postcolonial tradition in the chapter The Female Quest Novel as
Genre. By examining three female-authored quest novels I want to explore the
transformations of their female protagonists as they move from civilization into the
wilderness. How does this transition affect their identities as women after having liberated
themselves from conventional gender roles and male domination? Are there common features
in these authors’ descriptions of their heroines before and after they have completed their
quests and discovered their natural selves? What exactly are the aims of the journeys and are
they reached? What role does the Canadian wilderness play in their quests? And more
importantly, what defines this ubiquitous wilderness? I will argue that women’s wilderness
writing is a genre in its own right and has long been independent of the tradition of male
explorer and quest literature which preceded it. In the Canadian context especially, the quest
novel has become a means to challenging the notion that nature is at the same time feminine
and unsuitable for women.
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954), and
Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) all feature female protagonists who enter the wild on their own
account to discover themselves and, for different reasons, to escape their lives in the cities.
These novels are the focus of this thesis in attempting to examine the unique relationship
between the Canadian heroine and the wilderness. My reading of these novels will bear traits
of the feminist2 approach, which is often used for this purpose, as well as their place in a
Canadian literary tradition concerned with writing the wilderness. I have chosen to structure
my analysis of these novels chronologically, starting with the oldest and ending with the most
recent, as these authors tend to have been directly or indirectly influenced by the works of
their predecessors. Their relation to earlier works is addressed in the second chapter Women
Writing Wilderness which considers the literary tradition of Canadian women writers. I will
begin this thesis by establishing Canada’s position as a postcolonial nation and its impact on
the literary and national identity.
2
I will use the terms feminism, feminist fiction, feminist authors, etc. throughout this thesis when describing the
chosen authors and their works. This does not necessarily mean that these writers consider themselves or their
work feminist, but merely that they deal with topics related to and critical of women’s position in society. My
interpretation of ‘feminism’ is thus as a genre which considers gender a social construct and advocates a critical
approach to this.
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MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
Canada’s Literary Quest for a National Identity
A country’s literary tradition is a major part of its national identity, but with Canada being
notoriously famous for its lack of identity one would expect the Canadian literary tradition to
be equally undefined. And until the end of the 20th century, it was. The 1960s and 70s have
been termed ‘the Canadian Renaissance’ to describe the upsurge of literary works published
in Canada by Canadian authors in those decades. The time was ripe for new writers such as
Margaret Atwood, Ethel Wilson, and Marian Engel who all established their careers in this
era, and a large number of literary critics3 engaged in discussions to determine the themes of
old and new contributions to the tradition. What occasioned this significant increase was not
only the economic growth and optimistic sentiment of the post-war era but also the centennial
of 1967, which prompted a national quest to assert a distinct national identity, previously
lacking in Canada. Policies to make the country multicultural and attempts to officially
incorporate the French population into the community4, made this a time of renewal and
reform.
As in many other countries throughout the world, this was also a time for
discussing women’s rights and, for former colonies, the rights of indigenous peoples. The
Canadian literature of the 60s and 70s thus reflects the dilemmas brought about by these
social changes and the national debates concerning them. Swamp Angel, Surfacing, and Bear
have been read as feminist novels that question the unnatural order of patriarchal society and
thus voice a need for change in gender relations. The importance of fiction in the national
debate should not be underestimated. Even in its more indirect form, fiction is a social
product that that can promote change by approaching political topics from different
perspectives.5 Many female authors thus began placing their female protagonists in what had
hitherto been a male dominated sphere: the wilderness. In the Canadian feminist tradition, the
3
Literary History in Canada (1965) edited by Carl Klinck is an example of these contributions, as well as
Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden (1971) and Margaret Atwood’s Survival (1972).
4
The election of French-Canadian Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister in 1968 and the official implementation of
bilingualism signified the union between the Anglo- and French Canadian peoples. (Salat, 1-28)
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“Examining the relationship between literature and society does not necessarily entail falling into the ‘realistic
fallacy’ which assumes that novels as factual transcriptions of real life. (…) It is (…) naïve to contend that there
is no relationship between literature and society, or to demand that literature only be read by referring to other
texts.” (Macpherson, 37) Especially Margaret Atwood has played a major part in shaping Canada’s national
identity through her writing and is by now considered a Canadian icon.
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MA Thesis
University of Copenhagen
Kirstine C. Steno
wilderness has come to be considered a tabula rasa, a location void of manmade divisions
between genders.
The significance of the Canadian landscape to the country’s identity as well as
its literary tradition has been great. Since the first settlers came to the country, Canada’s
natural environment has been the focus of most literary works and has thus been inscribed in
its historical conscience. In 1955, renowned Canadian scholar Northrop Frye wrote: “the most
dangerous enemy of Canada has been not a foreign invader but its own geography.” (Frye
1955, 270) By this he meant that the country had been challenged in establishing a shared
literary tradition simply because of its size. He argued that the individual’s regional
allegiances were stronger than their loyalty to the nation, and that the lack of a commonly
recognized national center made defining common traits between the inhabitants of the
prairies, the Maritimes, and those of the cosmopolitan areas nearly impossible. But it seemed
somehow that the feeling of being surrounded by nature, be it the ocean, mountains, forests,
prairies, or tundra, was familiar to most Canadians. This describes accurately the double
connotations of the term ‘forging a nation’ in the sense that the country’s shared identity is
based on that which they could agree not to disagree. Coral Ann Howells assesses Canada’s
identity crisis as follows:
“The Canadian problem of identity may not be the problem of having no identity but rather
having multiple identities, so that any single national self-image is reductive and always open
to revision.”
(Howells 1987, 26)
Even though the wilderness theme is open to interpretation depending on the
individual’s local environment, it encompasses both a national and regional perspective. A
more metaphorical interpretation of the wilderness motif proves even more suitable in
describing the country’s national identity: multi-faceted and indefinable. In a multicultural
and rootless country such as Canada, the wilderness becomes a third space6. This is not a
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Homi K Bhabha introduced the term ‘third space’ to describe encounters between different cultures. This is a
new space for communication and translation situated in-between the two nations; a new space that is neither one
nor the other, but a hybrid between the two. It thus provides a new identity to people in the third space (Ikas &
Wagner, 1-2). “Bhabha is more interested in the narratives and stories that make up a national identity than in the
notion that there is anything essential about such an identity.” (McWilliams, 62) The national myths keep
changing as the country refigures itself, and a national identity is thus dynamic and constantly moving.
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