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The most valued story in English-language Canadian children’s literature is a narrative in which the central child character, pushed out of an originary home by the decisions or behaviour of powerful adults, journeys to an alien place and, after a series of vicissitudes that occupy most of the tale, chooses to claim the unfamiliar space as a new home. In this story, home is understood to be a product of human shaping and sharing, an understanding often signalled at the turn of the narrative by the exchange of a manufactured object between characters who have previously been in conflict with one another. The newly formed home is not constituted primarily through biological ties of filiation, but rather through affiliative bonds: the novels built on this pattern frequently end by celebrating a “family” comprising an assortment of people linked by their shared commitments to ideas, practices, and values.1 This narrative pattern is exemplified by the most decorated book in the history of Canadian children’s literature, Janet Lunn’s Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, which won five major juried awards in the years after its publication in 1986.2 Set during the time of the Highland clearances in Scotland in the early nineteenth century, Lunn’s story describes the solitary and perilous journey of fifteen -year-old Mary Urquhart from her ancestral home in Scotland to Upper Canada. The strangeness of the new country is emblematized by Mary’s fear of the “low, dark woods” that fringe the Ontario farming community in which she settles (203) and by the community’s fear of her preternatural “gift of the two sights” (6). Her story ends when she offers Luke, the suitor she has rejected° C H A P T E R 1 Homing and Unhoming: The Ideological Work of Canadian Children’s Literature Mavis Reimer 1 twice, a cloth she has woven for his wedding shirt. This gift consolidates her claim to membership in the “neighbourhood” that includes her adopted son, her students, and her employer: “Here where I have been so afraid and so sure I did not belong—teaching, working with Julia Colliver, living with Henry, being with you—I am more a part of your neighbourhood than I ever was of my own in my own hills” (214). A second gift, which Mary receives in a parcel from her father in Scotland, confirms her decision as a fitting one: the Urquhart cairngorm brooch he sends signals his belated acceptance of her decision to emigrate to Canada and marks her new, chosen family as the rightful heirs of the old family. The movement of child subjects from given bonds of filiation to chosen bonds of affiliation appears to align Canadian children’s texts with postmodern celebrations of mobile subjectivities. As many theorists and critics have observed, contemporary literature has embraced metaphorical homelessness as an ideal. The migrant, the exile, and the nomad are all figures through whom contemporary writers explore the illusory quest for fixed identity and the possibility of defying what John Durham Peters calls “settled power” (33). Indeed, Erin Manning has observed that “a certain territorial homelessness” attends the sense of “being Canadian”: “‘Being Canadian’ has always presented itself to me as somewhat coterminous with homelessness, if one can gauge a nation by its incessant preoccupation with its own sense of elusive identity ” (xvii). Canadian children’s texts extend her personal observation to a more general experience of Canadianness. Not only is a mobile subject at the centre of many Canadian children’s texts, but also the geographical and psychological separation of “home” and “away” typically is represented as impossible , since “home” and “not-home” are enacted on the same place. But the trajectory of most Canadian children’s texts, like children’s texts generally, is to home the child subject, both the subject inside the book and the subject outside the book. And this homing is accomplished by building what Rosemary Marangoly George has called the “pattern of select inclusions and exclusions” that constitute “the basic organizing principle” of the notion of home (2). Focusing on the long middle of Lunn’s Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, during which her central child figure is homeless, allows readers to make visible what Pierre Macherey calls “the conditions of the possibility” of this text’s ideological achievement of home (91), “what the work is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to say” (94). Refusing Homelessness Danielle Thaler, writing about Québécois fiction for...

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