Puck’s Green England and the Professor of English: Post-Colonial Fantasies at the University of British Columbia

MARGERY FEE Puck's Green England and the Professor of English: Post-Colonial Fantasies at the University of British Columbia As everyone who has worked in university departments knows, the terse documents listing courses and publications cover an almost-forgotten underlay of gossip, mmour, and recollection filtered through friendship, rivalry, enmity, ego, and who knows what else. If even autobiography is a fictive shaping of a lived life, how can I capture anything of Garnett Gladwin Sedgewick (1882-1949), even though I work in the department he founded in 1918 at the University of British Columbia? Thus the title. The post-colonial fantasies I speak of there are three, primarily: mine; those of the students, colleagues, and successors who wrote about him; and his. In other words, although I have tried to learn as much of the facts of his life as I can, I am more interested in the sites where the comparison of various texts reveals fantasies about him, about Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, about English professors, about English literature, and about England. Jill Ker Conway remarks of her approach to history: LOur department Iat the University of Sydney] was strong on techniques of research, but no one could understand the kinds of cultural documents I wanted to study. They weren't in archives, but in peoples' minds and imaginations' (Conway, 215). As a result of my interest in such cultural documents, this paper leaves the traditional focus on a particular figure somewhat in the shade. This analysis is more literary than historical, one that permits the examination of recurring themes, characterizations, and tropes in the collective account and foregrounds how literary and narrative devices and allusions are used to structure people's political and social roles. As Leigh Dale notes, for the British at least, in the colonies Ithe main function of the teaching of literature was the interpellation of the uuncivilized" (colonial) subject' (Dale, 16): almost all the subjects examined here, including Sedgewick and me, have been 'hailed' by our literary studies as colonial. Or, as Louis Althusser argues, those destined to be workers (or colonials) learn 'submission to the ruling ideology' and those destined for more powerful roles, 'the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly ... so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class Hin words'" (Althusser, 128). The process of interpellation, or the inscription of social roles by social institutions, always becomes complicated in specific cases, particularly given that the UNTVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1995 POST-COLONIAL FANTASIES AT UBC 399 colonial elite learn how to manipulate words in ways that do not necessarily support imperial domination. In other words, all are called, but few respond to the call in completely predictable ways. Take the case of Sedgewick. First, although of English descent, he never went to England and, to understate it, did not like the English very much. Still, he deployed the English literary canon, not only to consolidate his own cultural authority, but also to underwrite his liberal (occasionally quite radical) political views in British Columbia. Further, Sedgewick, a Shakespeare scholar, produced Elizabethan fantasies that shifted Shakespeare to the New World, reconiiguring old texts for new purposes. His 'alternative Shakespeare' was Canadian. I begin, however, with my own rather dull fantasies, leaving his more theatrical ones until later. I am (to reduce a complicated history) the product of an ideological clash between my undergraduate education at Glendon College, York University, where I was hailed as a bilingual Canadian nationalist, and my doctoral education at the UniverSity of Toronto, where I was hailed as coloniaL My resistance to the latter is doubtless obvious in this paper, where I am trying to ground my intellectual history in Canada. Neither institution let me forget that I was female and, therefore, even when my marks were high, I knew I did not quite match the scholarly norm. As a result, writing about professors, I try to clear a space to write myself as a professor: thus my focus on gender politics. Further, as a post-colonial critic, I find my area of specialization almost requires a focus on nation and gender. Jonathan Dollimore recently made the...