Do Something! Disciplinary Spaces and the Ideological Work of Play in James De Mille's The "B. O. W. C." and Richard Scrimger's Into the Ravine

When James De Mille's young male protagonists leave the carefully controlled space of their nineteenth-century boarding school in his 1869 adventure novel The "B. O. W. C.": A Book for Boys, it means, as protagonist Bart Damer enthuses,

[a]dventures of a hundred kinds; drifting about in wild tides; getting lost in dense fogs; running ashore on wide mud flats, or on precipitous cliffs, or on the edge of perilous breakers; landing on lonely headlands, or on solitary islands; penetrating far forests; camping out in wildernesses; living pirate fashion in their own schooner, where all would be given up to them; shooting, fishing; hunting for gulls' nests;—it meant not sham adventures, but real ones—with real dangers environing them instead of fancied ones.

(39)

In Confederation-era examples of Canadian adventure stories, a genre noted for its appeal to young male readers, adventure and survival in the wilderness are represented as necessary activities for white, middle-class boys who were to turn into the kinds of successful adult leaders the young nation desired. Notable texts, such as those in De Mille's B. O. W. C. (Brethren of the White Cross) series, functioned as Bildungsromane in which the growth of the protagonists mirrored the transition of the nation from childhood to adolescence, usually achieved after an apprenticeship in the wilderness spaces of the country. Texts produced at this time, such as Catharine Parr Traill's pre-Confederation The Young Emigrants and Canadian Crusoes and Ernest Thompson Seton's later text Two Little Savages, provided young readers with a wilderness playground in which characters could practise the serious business of survival. "[P]recipitous cliffs" and "perilous breakers" offered child protagonists the opportunity to practise through trial a way of life that required the qualities of fortitude and perseverance as well as an instinct for outwitting nature. In her work on recent Canadian novels for adolescents, Mavis Reimer observes that "[t]here is significant investment in the idea of the natural in these texts, an idea that is often associated with the wilderness, which has been a conventional setting in Canadian children's literature since the nineteenth century" ("Homing" 9). In Two Little Savages, for instance, twelve-year-old Yan longs to live in the shanty he builds in the woods beyond the established environment of his town (56). The wilderness is frequently coded as a feminine space in adventure novels (O'Malley 70); the "lonely," "solitary" forests of which Bart Damer enthuses are simply awaiting the penetration of young male adventurers. While De Mille's text defines as "real" the masculinized activities of "shooting, fishing, [and] hunting," there is a corresponding zeal for the less active pursuits of "drifting" and "landing," suggesting that in nineteenth-century texts, inactivity is as essential as activity, solitariness as desirable as those adventures "made in company with . . . other boys" (40).

For young male heroes of the contemporary adventure novel that remains invested in the natural or wilderness, maturity at the macro level has ostensibly been achieved since the nation has come of age. What is the point, then, of the Bildung or the development of the protagonists in the teleology of the genre? In contrast to De Mille's heroic boys, in Richard Scrimger's 2008 adventure novel, Into the Ravine, preteen suburbanites must be content with "sham adventures," fabricating perils they hope will mitigate their late-summer boredom in a built environment that narrator Jules refers to as a "paved wasteland of strip malls, gang violence, and cookie-cutter bungalows" (4). Scrimger's text begs us to ask what happens when young Canadian protagonists find themselves in environments like the suburbs, spaces in which the domestication of the natural and the wild appears to have precipitated a crisis in young men. No longer proximate to an actual wilderness space, young protagonists in contemporary Canadian urban novels published for adult and child audiences are still haunted by the legacy of the Romantic child's search for viable substitutes for...