Familiar Relations: A Canadian Family at That

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 RUSSELL MORTON BROWN Familiar Relations: A Canadian Family at That >This isn't some family in the mythic drama of Greece I'm telling you about; it is a family of the twentieth century, and a Canadian family at that, supposedly the quintessence of everything that is emotionally dowdy and unaware.= David Staunton in Robertson Davies, The Manticore, 1972 I A CANADIAN FAMILY One consequence of settlement is the disruption of family. The first Europeans who came to what is now Canada were chiefly single males who left families behind; here they had temporary arrangements involving >country wives.= As time passed, traditional family structures appeared. The best-known of our early family immigrants are the Strickland sisters, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie, who came with their spouses and their brother, formed a domestic community, raised their children, and wrote accounts of their settlement experiences. But whether settlers came here single or with family members, leaving the Old World behind inevitably meant leaving some family and abandoning the external evidence of a family past B childhood homes, graves, and the whole landscape of memory. How to cope with that disruption becomes a question for any settler-colony B and, despite the passage of generations, it can remain one. In Canada it is apparent in many of the narratives our writers have given us: consider Margaret Laurence=s The Diviners (1975), or Jack Hodgins=s The Invention of the World (1977), or Jane Urquhart=s Away (1993). Robertson Davies is one of several Canadian novelists to suggest that asserting claims on these lost family histories can be a source of strength. Near the end of The Manticore, David Staunton is caught in the exit of a cave trying to escape from his terrors; Liesl, the wise woman of the Deptford trilogy, rallies his strength when she demands of him: >Have you no ancestors?=: Ancestors? Why, in this terrible need, would I want such ornaments? Then I thought of Maria Dymock, staunch, in the street of Staunton, demanding money from the passers-by to get herself and her bastard to Canada ... Would Maria Dymock see me through? In my weakened, terrified, humiliated condition I 820 russell morton brown university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 suppose I must have called upon Maria Dymock and something ... gave me the power I needed to wriggle that last two hundred yards ... Out of the darkness into the gloom. Out of the gloom into sunshine. (275B76) There are many examples in Canadian poetry of this calling upon the ancestor . In particular, it is the thematic thread around which Al Purdy constructed his long poem, In Search of Owen Roblin (1974), which concludes: First my grandfather, then Owen Roblin me hanging on their coattails gaining strength from them ... In search of Owen Roblin I discovered a whole era that was really a backward extension of myself. Such depictions of calling upon, of looking back to, or of otherwise recovering one=s ancestors make up the family narrative across time. The family narrative across space is seen in books like Jane Urquhart=s recent novel The Stone Carvers (2001), which turns around a brother and sister, Tilman and Klara. It is the story of a woman who stays home and a young man who cannot, a man who feels that the family home is a trap and who obsessively repeats the settlement narrative by journeying away from his family and finding surrogate family connections at a distance. Yet if Tillman=s story is another image of the disruption of family, it is also a story of being drawn back to family, across the continent, across continents, to his home and the sister who has remained within it. In the end it is about the construction of new families across physical distances, families that, after all the losses of the First World War, may not look like the old. The narrative of family across both time and space is the genealogical novel, the extended narrative that traces the family across and through the generations and also shows it spreading outward, occupying ever more territory. One of...