Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition by Elizabeth Waterston (review)

414 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Elizabeth Waterston. Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition University of Toronto Press. x, 334. $45.00 There are three major threads that weave themselves into a colourful ScotsCanadian plaid in Elizabeth Waterston=s fine new study. The dominant one is a literary-historical exploration of the Scottish writers whose attitudes and styles have influenced later Canadians of Scottish heritage. A secondary one attempts to trace traditional Canadian social attitudes and values to Scotland, values handed down from its writers and emigrants. The third thread describes the author=s own educational experiences and travels as she looks back enraptured and delighted by her own literary heritage and how it has remained such a strong force for so long. The implied narratives in each thread are woven loosely into the discourse. Waterston moves easily inside each chapter from summary to analysis to description to personal nostalgia. The literary-historical aspect of the book starts with the influence of Robert Burns on the oral roots of Canadian poetry. After a rather detailed study of Burns=s life and times, Waterston finds traces of his attitudes towards nature, his rhythms and easy rhymes, his use of dialect, and the flow of his short lines in the poetry of Alexander McLachlan, William Henry Drummond, Robert Service, Pauline Johnson, and Milton Acorn. Each chapter is similar to the first one, following along both chronologically and methodologically. The dreams of the past, the idealizing of the northerners in their epic confrontations with wild nature, even the suspicions of British imperialism in Walter Scott=s poetry, can be seen to influence the writings of Isabella Valancy Crawford, Duncan Campbell Scott, and E.J. Pratt. Scott=s novels deal with borders, the personal/national connection, and notions of clan identity B all aspects of early Canadian novels by Richardson, de Gaspé, Kirby, and later of Wiebe and Findley. Traces of Galt=s writing can be found in the factual accounts, eccentric characters, and regional (lowland) studies of Haliburton, Moodie, Galbraith, Sinclair Ross, and Carol Shields. Carlyle=s Yea and Nay are the pith of the novels of Mitchell and Laurence; Robert Louis Stevenson=s influence can be found in Dennis Lee and Farley Mowat; J.M. Barrie=s sentimental novels set the stage for L.M. Montgomery, while John Buchan paved the way for Hugh MacLennan. Narratives shaped from gossip and subversive feminism recall Catherine Sinclair and the women writers of the mid-nineteenth century. These writers anticipated Canadians such as Lily Dougal, Margaret Saunders, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Alice Munro. If there are any reservations about such a study, one might be the imbalance in attention given to individual writers. The Scots gain the upper hand here and the Canadian writers get only a light dusting off. Tracing traditions is always a tricky business, calling at times for a high level of generalization, but Waterston=s enthusiasm for the project, and her personal humanities 415 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 investment in it, generate a kind of infectious persuasiveness that allows the reader to ignore, at least for the time being, all the other possible explanations or counter-arguments. Waterston also remarks on the social institutions and cultural values that we have inherited from Scotland, including our educational system, our embracing of (and later reaction to) Presbyterian restraints, our early development of publishing houses, our aspirations for nationhood, and even our notions of coexistence. After all, the Scots had to find a way to accommodate two radically opposed peoples (Anglicized Scots of the Lowlands and indigenous clans of the Highlands), so it is likely not a coincidence that our Scot fathers of confederation imagined some regional model that would allow for the French and the Aboriginals to live in some sort of harmony with the new settlers. There are observations like these salted into the text which, although they beg many revisionist questions, nevertheless remind us of explanations that seem to contain, on their face, a good deal of common sense if not a lot of finesse. The book is clearly written, full of...