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"A richer, variegated vest": Dressing Nature in Early Canadian Long Poems
- University of Ottawa Press
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"A richer, variegated vest": Dressing Nature in Early Canadian Long Poems WANDA CAMPBELL DESPITE THE DIFFERENCES between Adam Hood Burwell 's TalbotRoad (1818), Adam Kidd's TheHuron Chief (IS30), and Joseph Howe's Acadia (1832-33), they all present an essentially masculine vision. Whether the Indian or the settler is given the role of Adam, his first love is always the land, which is invariably portrayed as female. In "Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design ," Carole Fabricant reveals the sexual politics that governed the attitudes of eighteenth-century gardeners toward the landscape. Four aspects of the patriarchal relationship to "the garden as the repository of female mysteries" described by Fabricant (109), man to woman, artist to model, spectator to spectacle, and possessor to possession, will be examined in the poems under discussion. Related to these attitudes is the depiction of "Nature as a maiden in need of the sartorial assistance of her overseers" (Fabricant 126). According to Fabricant, "the three interconnected aspects of eighteenth-century thought and aesthetics" most relevant to attitudes toward nature were the ideology of use, the myth of restoration, and the ideology of improvement (124). All three appear in varying degrees in these long poems that define the quintessential Canadian garden as one that provides, to borrow Burwell's phrase, "enough for fancy and enough for use" (614). In Talbot Road: A Poem, Adam Hood Burwell introduces his readers to a land "created for delight" (85), but one that nevertheless requires a "master hand" (11) to bring it from "geographic night" into the "light" (93-94). This "great scheme" (24) to "transform the rugged wilds/ To fruitful fields, and bid tam'd nature smile" (89-90) is both conceived and 42 initiated by Colonel Thomas Talbot, whose deeds the poem waswritten to celebrate. The settler as Adam replicates God's task of transforming chaos into order, desert into garden. Significantly, Burwell describes "One solitary man/ ... unaided and alone" (112-13). Eveisnowhere to be found in this masculine world of "Herculean labors" (271); she appears only as an afterthought in the male promise to fetch "Our goods, our cattle, wives, and little ones" (148), sadly wedged between domestic animals and infants. The only female to elicit Adam's gaze is Flora herself. As the title of Annette Kolodny's TheLay of theLand suggests, an eroticized relationship with the land was everywhereevident in the literature of the new continent, expressed especially in the desire of the American Adam to "rape" the land. Burwell twice refers to Talbot "piercing" the woods of his new home (92, 117). The woodsman's axe fells the trees until "the shivered timbers lie" (220). This possessive violence toward a fertile land is also evident in the passage about the "wand'ring bird" who "Espies what Ceres' golden treasures yield" (151-52). He "comes"with "the feather'd squadron" to "Invest the harvest, and consume it all" (158). "Invest" in the military context implied by the passage means "to enclose or hem in with a hostile force, to lay siege to; to attack" (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]), but it also means "to cover or surround as with a garment" (OED). The use of the adjective "swarming" to describe the settlers that "left no vacant ground" (442) appears to undermine a heroic portrayal, but in fact, Burwell suggests it will require great industry to cover the land with "a richer, variegated vest" (104). This latter meaning introduces the notion of "dressing" nature that permeates the poem. Adam the gardener and AdamHood Burwellthe poet unite in the role of "uninterrupted" voyeur, watching as fair Flora "sports" upon the "charming plain" (67). Though they have "beheld her pristine form display'd" (472), they are glad that man has prepared "[a] robe, more pleasing, for herself to wear" (474). The "[w]ide wasting conflagration" that "quickly bares the bosom of the ground" can thus bejustified as a necessary step in this sartorial transformation (269-70). Now, "[a] beauteous zone shall guide the stranger's eye" (108). Michael Williamsglosses "zone" as "a geographical zone" but in contemporary usage it also refers to a woman's belt or girdle (OED). Not surprisingly, the poetic form Burwellselects to describe the transformation of the landscape has been called "the elegant corset of the eighteenth century couplet" (Caudwell89). During the War of 1812, the men temporarily abandon the land, "their implements of husbandry thrown by" (390), and the "half-clear'd field/ ... lies a common wild...