Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905-1980

Terrence Craig

Description

Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980.

Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of such feelings. Beginning with the English-Canadian reaction to the mass influx of immigrants into Western Canada after World War One, it examines the fiction of novelists such as Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. The author then suggests that the cumulative effect of a number of individual voices, such as Grove and Salverson, constituted a counter-reaction which has been made more positive by Laurence, Lysenko, Richler and Clarke. The “debate” between these two sides, carried on in fictional and non-fictional writing, is seen to be in part resolved in synthesis after World War Two, as attitudes are forced by wartime alliances and intellectual pressures into a qualified liberalism. The author shows how single novels by Graham, Bodsworth, and Callaghan demonstrated a new concern for the exposure and eradication of racial discrimination, an attitude taken further by the works of Wiebe and Klein.

The book concentrates on single texts that best portray deliberately or not, racist ideology or anti-racist arguments, and attempts to explain the arousal in Canada of such ideas.

Sujets

• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554586615
• Langue: English

Extrait

Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905-1980
Terrence Craig
Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980.
Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of such feelings. Beginning with the English-Canadian reaction to the mass influx of immigrants into Western Canada before World War One, it examines the fiction of novelists such as Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. The author then suggests that the cumulative effect of a number of individual voices, such as Grove and Salverson, constituted a counter-reaction to the English-Canadian attitude, a counter-reaction which has been made more positive by Laurence, Lysenko, Richler, and Clarke. The debate between these two sides, carried on in fictional and non-fictional writing, is seen to be in part resolved in synthesis after World War Two, as attitudes are forced by wartime alliances and intellectual pressures into a qualified liberalism. The author shows how single novels by Graham, Bodsworth, and Callaghan demonstrated a new concern for the exposure and eradication of racial discrimination, an attitude taken further by the works of Wiebe and Klein.
The book concentrates on single texts that best portray, deliberately or not, racist ideology or anti-racist arguments, and attempts to explain the arousal in Canada of such ideas.
Terrence Craig is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905-1980
Terrence Craig
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Craig, Terrence L., 1951- Racial attitudes in English-Canadian fiction, 1905-1980
Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-88920-952-9
1. Canadian fiction (English)-20th century- History and criticism.* 2. Racism in literature. I. Title.
PS8191.R33C73 1987 C813 .5 09355 C87-093825-8 PR9192.6.R33C73 1987
Copyright 1987
WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
87 88 89 90 4 3 2 1
Cover design by Polygon Design Limited
Printed in Canada
No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system, translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
To Orma and Ernie Bradley
Contents
Preface
Chapter One Introduction
Chapter Two The English-Canadian Attitude, 1905-1939
Chapter Three The Immigrant Reaction Before 1939
Chapter Four The Immigrant Reaction, 1939-1980
Chapter Five The Synthesis of Multiculturalism, 1939-1980
Chapter Six Klein and Wiebe
Chapter Seven Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
Preface
This book was written to illustrate the racial attitudes that have been written into Canadian prose fiction in English in this century. I have not had any particular axe to grind, nor am I trying to make this topic out to be anything more than what it is-one of the many themes that constitute Canadian literature. I have tried to be comprehensive in my coverage of significant works that demonstrate racial concerns, and any failings in that respect I regret. Despite the recent increasing number of more sociological books appearing in Canada on the topic of race relations, there has been little attention paid to its appearance in literature. Although the focus of this book is somewhat specialized, I have tried to strike a balance between the necessity of some plot summary and the discussion of theme, a balance that I hope will attract the attention of readers with interdisciplinary interests.
There are a number of people who must be thanked for their contributions to this study, although, of course, its weaknesses and omissions are entirely my own responsibility. I owe much to the patience and discipline of Professor W. J. Keith of the University of Toronto, without whose advice and encouragement the work would be far less than what it is. In an earlier form this study benefited from the constructive criticism of Professors Frank Watt and Jack MacLeod of the University of Toronto, and Professor John Moss of the University of Ottawa. I thank Fred Bodsworth and Austin Clarke for their interviews on this and other subjects. So many people provided tips along the way that they cannot all be mentioned, but I would like to thank Professor Tom Tausky of the University of Western Ontario, Professor Russell Brown of the University of Toronto, Professor Jack Healey of Carleton University, and Dr. Henry Makow. I thank Beth Miller, Head of Special Collections at the D. B. Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario, and Richard Bennett, Head of Archives and Special Collections of the University of Manitoba libraries, for their assistance in obtaining the unpublished Grove material. Finally, I am greatly indebted to Kenna Marshall of London, Ontario, whose speedy and careful proofreading was a great help at a difficult time.
Parts of this book have appeared in different forms in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The Native in Literature: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives.
I am grateful to Mount Allison University for a grant in the summer of 1985 towards the preparation of the manuscript for publication.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Chapter One Introduction
One of the primary objects of racism is to turn the victim against himself.
Racism and National Consciousness, by F. I. Case
I
The terms race and racism are used to define a social problem as serious in the present as it has ever been in the past. Hardly a day passes without the Canadian press reporting incidents of racial discrimination against one minority or another, and periodically opinion polls on the subject reveal widespread feelings of an intensity approaching and at times reaching racism. Traditionally, English-Canadians have considered themselves free of the most blatant forms of prejudice which have so obviously afflicted the histories of Central Europe and the Southern United States. If we disregard, for the purposes of this study, the tensions between the French and English groups in Canada, we are left with what might be termed the multicultural tensions of a multi-ethnic nation, and these tensions have at times, sporadically and often independently, achieved the level of racial prejudice. While the artistic intentions behind works of literature are as varied as they are difficult to determine, this study is predicated on the belief that, among its other purposes and effects, literature has a responsibility and an established function to draw attention to social problems and to provide the moral leadership to search for solutions. In exploring ethnic tensions in Canadian prose fiction in English in the twentieth century, I am restricting myself to a sociological view of literature, but as I am concerned with a sociological phenomenon which has the kind of ideological ramifications that humanists have traditionally protected by means of literature, this approach seems not only necessary but legitimate.
In general the popular sense of the word race has several discrete meanings, and its appearance in literature is consequently often ambiguous and vague, particularly in situations where confusion with nationalism has arisen. 1 There is a popular sense of races being well-defined divisions of humanity, with recognizable boundaries which should be respected as fixed and unalterable. This approach leaves science behind as it merges with cultural and religious prejudices to approximate the equally loose term of ethnic group. Thus anti-Semitism, which may be simply religious intolerance, takes on a racial aspect when Jews are perceived as a race, as they officially were in the first half of this century by Canadian immigration authorities. Used in such a manner, the concept of race provides a means of over-simplifying a complex and still controversial question, reducing a physically diversified community to a limited racial group. Within this study the broader, popular meaning of race is usually used in the same sense as it so often appears in literature, but with the important qualification that as such it is almost always mistaken and misleading. Much that has nothing to do with race, in the limited scientific sense that may justify its maintenance as a term, is popularly used in a practical sense that attempts to force a philosophy out of unfounded prejudices.
Nativism, the historiographical term applied so usefully to the United States by John Higham in Strangers in the Land (1963), and applied with equal success to Alberta by Howard Palmer in Patterns of Prejudice (1982), has not been used in this study, for I have concentrated on the ethnic component of nativism. Although some of the attitudes discussed below may seem more nativist than ethnic, it is their contributions to the effects of ethnocentrism (contributions which are often neither predictable nor logical, but rather emotional) that I am most interested in. In addition, nativism seems a very mild, almost euphemistic term for such a destructive ideology.
Modern theories of race owe much to Arthur Gobineau, whose notorious Essai sur l inegalit des races humaines (1853-55) solidified in prose a topical aristocratic argument, derived in part from Boulainviller s distinction between the plebian Gauls and the Frankish nobility, 2 to found