In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

33 Sucking the Mother Dry: The Fisheries 2 | As a whole generation of Atlantic-Canadian historians have illustrated, one of the main problems with mythologizing the life of the independent petty producer is that it tends to obscure a much more complicated economic and social reality. Writing of the reliance on wage labour of agricultural workers in the nineteenth-century Maritimes, for instance, Rusty Bitterman concedes that, “[l]ike any powerful and pervasive mythology, the image of the independent yeoman is partly rooted in a reality,” but points to the problems that develop “when a fragment of the rural experience becomes a characterization of the whole” (1994, 35). Bill Parenteau and Richard W. Judd examine how the rural working class in the Maritimes and New England were idealized as “friendly uncomplicated folk” (2005, 233) populating a pastoral landscape at the same time as governments and members of the elite collaborated to establish ish and game laws that criminalized traditional foraging practices often crucial to the survival of said folk. They argue that “[t]he rural areas of the region were, of course, much more complicated than the static portrait of rustic contentment presented in the tourist literature” (233) and instead offer a picture of sustained class conlict over the freedom to hunt and ish. Perhaps the best illustrations of the shortcomings of idealizing life in the resource sectors are offered by the ishing industry, particularly in its present state. There is perhaps no more central a symbol of the Atlantic provinces than the hardy isherman and the quaint ishing village that is his milieu. The staple maritime iconography of the region, however, tends to be resolutely anti-modern, seeking to preserve the romance of the era of “wood, wind, and sail,” and, as Ian McKay powerfully argues, seeking to avoid the taint of modernization and capitalist relations. The illusion of 34 Section 1: I’se the B’y That Leaves the Boats maritime romance, though, is at present even more tenuous, especially given the increasing visibility of the crisis in the isheries, most particularly the 1992 moratorium on the northern cod so vital to the economy and culture of Newfoundland and Labrador. Atlantic-Canadian literature of the past— works such as Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound, Norman Duncan’s depictions of outport life in Newfoundland, and the maritime adventures of Thomas Head Raddall—to some degree romanticized the ocean-going life. Contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature, though, has a much more postlapsarian tone and furthermore emphasizes the extent to which life in the isheries is shaped by larger networks of governmental oversight and global economic competition. The result is a more complex and much less idealized vision of hardship. What we see are not so much the elemental rigours of eking out a living in an often unforgiving environment, but the less tangible and less predictable struggle to survive in the face of rapacious modernization, governmental intervention, corporate domination, and dwindling resources. “Everybody Knew”: Donna Morrissey’s Sylvanus Now Underpinning essentialist Folk representations of the fishing life is the implicit presumption of the unlimited bounty of the sea. That is, if the Folk are engaged in a timeless relationship with the sea, the sea (however perilous and capricious) perforce will forever provide. A central aspect of the Atlantic provinces’ current economic and cultural plight, however, is the demolition of that belief by the exhaustion of groundish and other stocks and the consequent dilemma of what to do in the wake of recognizing this reality. Newfoundland writer Donna Morrissey’s third novel, Sylvanus Now (2005), is set against the backdrop of the dawning of that realization. It focuses on an outport Newfoundland isherman engaged in an occupation—the inshore ishery—that is in the process of being rendered obsolete. Sylvanus Now is an interesting book, because Morrissey’s sympathies for Sylvanus are often expressed in the idealized, anti-modernist tones associated with the discourse of the Folk, but at the same time her portrait of life in an outport community in the mid-twentieth century disrupts the sense of timelessness characteristic of Folk portrayals of the ishing life. Although these tendencies are sometimes at war with each other in the novel, ultimately Sylvanus Now delates the image of the ishing life on the East Coast as insulated from progress and, to the contrary, dramatizes the degree to which it has been victimized by it. Sylvanus Now is a good example of how recent Atlantic-Canadian literature often both exploits and subverts the...

Share