Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature

6. Rebuffing the Gaze

137 Rebuffing the Gaze 6 | The work of Native, Black, and women writers in the Atlantic provinces increasingly serves to contest the prevailing power structures in the region, challenging the demographic and cultural hierarchy and exclusiveness of Folk stereotypes in the process. Another important strategy more and more evident in the literature of the East Coast is a conspicuously resistant, often subversive and parodic engagement with those cultural stereotypes, particularly as they are retailed by the tourism industry. Writers in the Atlantic provinces increasingly relect a consciousness of the ways in which their region is framed through monolithic and constricting cultural stereotypes and the impact of those stereotypes on the region’s self-image and on its relationship with outsiders. Central to this cultural self-consciousness is a recognition of the implications of the growing role of tourism in an economically vulnerable region like Atlantic Canada. Although it has had its ups and downs, tourism has become “the single most important place-based industry” in Atlantic Canada (Bantjes 2004, 259), and has had a pronounced inluence in various ways on cultural production in the region. As Rod Bantjes observes, all four provinces have been aggressively engaged in branding their provinces as leisure destinations: Newfoundland’s marketing has less to do with culture than with Atlantic wilderness—icebergs, whales, and fjords. PEI, with its Anne industry and its island appeal to the Japanese, has unassailable product differentiation and access to a unique international market. Recent Nova Scotia and New Brunswick promotional campaigns focus on 138 Section 2: “About as Far from Disneyland as You Can Possibly Get” ecotourism, whale watching, ine beaches, and eighteenth-century replica villages. (2004, 259) The inluence of tourism on cultural production can be seen in the conspicuous preoccupation with tourism itself in the literature of the region, which creatively dramatizes the cultural, political, social, and economic implications of the region’s reliance on that industry. A central theme in the growing body of tourism theory that is particularly relevant to the Atlantic provinces is the structural relationship between tourism and economic underdevelopment . In other words, tourist destinations are more likely to develop as such not out of some ingrained sense of hospitality and instinctive inclination of host societies to share the bounty of their locale with others but out of economic necessity. Thus tourism, as Kevin Meethan points out, reconigures “the boundaries between hospitality as a form of social obligation … and hospitality as a commodiied form” (2001, 149). Consequently, tourism (if not necessarily, then certainly commonly) is characterized by a fundamental tension: it requires a staged hospitality, an openness to visitors that, while potentially genuine, is also usually compelled to some degree. Rather than an innocent, free low of people from one area to another, tourism involves a kind of coerced hospitality, with host societies compelled to go out of their way to cater to tourists’ expectations and needs. Unsurprisingly, one result of such asymmetrical power relations is a resentment of and resistance to the material and symbolic imposition that tourism typically represents, a reaction increasingly visible in the literature of Atlantic Canada. “The Maritime Way of Life” If “resisting the outside gaze,” as Christopher J. Armstrong maintains, is “central to the literary and cultural regionalism of Atlantic Canada” (2010, 43), a good example of the strategic and subversive engagement of regional stereotypes that this resistance entails is the subplot of Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven, which revolves around Bridget’s relationship with Alan Voorland, an “adult” man from Guelph who works as an engineer at the local mill (Coady 1998, 32). The denizens of Strange Heaven are obviously a far cry from the simple, content, unrelective isherfolk who are the staples of Folk ideology. However, Coady’s depiction of an oppressive, patriarchal small town and the self-destructive adolescent histrionics its lack of opportunity breeds, lends itself to the lip side of the paradigm called Folk Innocence by Ian McKay: pervasive constructions of the East Coast as Canada’s social, economic, and cultural basket case, populated by alcoholic deadbeats, welfare mothers, and rockbound trailer trash. However, Coady complicates 139 Rebufing the Gaze the politics of this exposé of small-town claustrophobia through her portrait of Bridget’s relationship with Alan, an outsider who wanders “around town examining and exclaiming at everything like an anthropologist” (32). The characterization of Alan highlights how Coady’s strategic regionalism involves contesting the ways in which the region...