Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction (review)

David Creelman's perceptive assessment of Maritime realist fiction after the late 1920s stresses that these texts 'have cast a small shadow within the national, economic, and cultural consciousness [of Canada].' It is difficult to know if those in the rest of the country who take the large size of their shadows for granted will pay attention to the crucial social context Creelman provides for his readings. In the late nineteenth century Maritimes, such values and experience were embedded in the industries of coal, iron, wood, and fishing, as well as the movement of goods under sail, and provided a 'sense of shared community.' But communities disintegrated as the nation's economy developed and shifted, and the result became remembrance of things past. '[B]road patterns of nostalgia and hesitation emerged in Maritime culture,' and resultant tensions permeated realist fiction.

Frank Parker Day, Hugh MacLennan, and Thomas Raddall wrote novels that assert the need for traditional communal structures in the face of modernist anxieties and uncertainties. Characters such as Neil Macrae in Barometer Rising and Isabel Jardine in The Nymph and the Lamp represent a liberal humanist vision, but nonetheless exist within an romantic, old-order ethos of quest motifs and mythically based patterns of experience that restrict their potential. In his The Channel Shore, Charles Bruce presents quests of individual freedom strongly at odds with efforts 'to retain a vision of the past as a secure and stable moment.' Creelman emphasizes that Bruce's 'Maritime community is a field of competing and contradictory assumptions that make it, ultimately [to employ Bruce's own term], "a country of the mind."'

For Creelman, Ernest Buckler avoided the country of the mind by situating The Mountain and the Valley 'in the very vortex of the cultural transformations sweeping the Maritimes in the 1940s and 1950s.' But, despite his detailed consideration of modernist despair in the figure of David Canaan, Buckler's narrative is conservative in nature: patriarchal gender roles are upheld and, indeed, protected in an ideal condition, and traditional rural life is celebrated throughout its dark decline.

The decline is met head on by Alden Nowlan, who focuses directly in his two novels, The Wanton Troopers and Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien, on the severe impact of regional inequalities that put people on welfare and distort their sense of identity. For Nowlan, conservative, liberal, and nostalgic impulses and actions cannot prevent descents into despair; rather it is the ambiguities of the modernist condition that steer his characters away from the tragedy of a David Canaan. In his stories and one novel, No Great Mischief, Alistair MacLeod investigates the same harsh regional territory whose determinism is softened only by 'mystical connection with the past' and 'gesture[s] towards freedom' that are manifestations of grace. Such gestures, often blood-based, are replete with a 'nostalgic, melancholic longing' that is essentially conservative and patriarchal in nature.

David Adams Richards's longevity as a writer displays an evolution of creative expression in the face of grimly perceived Maritime experience. Creelman points to the complete absence of the nostalgic, though not of the romantic, in Richards's writing and an absolute dissatisfaction with state interference in individual lives. The early Richards's fiction is strongly deterministic in nature, though his later work combines the ever-present integrity of marginalized characters with elements of free will and affirmation of selfhood against overwhelming odds.

It is ironic that Creelman remarks on the 'homogenous and uniform group' of male writers in his study, because his alternative is a catch-all chapter that includes seven female writers who deserve to be named here: Donna Smyth, Nancy Bauer, Budge Wilson, Deborah Joy Corey, Lynn Coady, Carol Bruneau, and Ann-Marie MacDonald. These women address the limitations of patriarchal culture and emphasize the 'necessity of feminism at the level of the self/community.' The struggle for visibility and effect is not easy, and Coady, according to Creelman, just pulls back from a nihilistic response to male oppression...