Cultural Preservation and Metropolitan Transformation: Folk-Tale Traditions and The Queen of Paradise’s Garden, a Newfoundland Jack Tale

From Signal Hill, overlooking St. John’s, Newfoundland, the easternmost city of Canada, the forces of cultural preservation and metropolitan transformation are clear. Lines of small row houses with bright paint, many dating from just after the last big fire in 1892, and the stone presence of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist (built in 1855) are markers of important elements of Newfoundland’s past and culture, while the buildings along the harbour front, mainly housing banks and government offices, are indicators of twentieth-and twenty-first-century developments. In the harbour, the rows of fishing boats connect with Newfoundland’s colonial history as a fishing station, but they are dwarfed by the huge Coast Guard, cruise, and container ships signifying the current global economy. Even the site from which the city is viewed participates in the relationship between past and present and between rural and urban: Signal Hill is a Canadian National Historic Park, devoted to preserving and communicating social and natural history, created in the 1950s by clearing what was in essence a shantytown, with apple trees and lilac bushes remaining as reminders of the community that once existed there.

The tensions between past and present, urban and rural are part of an ongoing conversation about Newfoundland identity, which is seen within the province and in Canada, as unique. Within Newfoundland, identity is based on a mix of place and heritage, as Danielle Fuller notes: “A persistent place-myth upholds Newfoundland’s heritage and folk culture as distinctive, shaped by the hardships of life on a wind-battered rock in the midst of the Atlantic ocean and resistant to outside cultural influences” (24). In the time since Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there has been growing anxiety that its identity will be overwhelmed by globalizing forces, and, as a result, there has been increasing interest in preserving and disseminating that heritage, rooted in, as James Overton asserts, “certain essential ideological assumptions. The key assumption is that there exists a distinctive Newfoundland culture, way of life, ethos, character, soul, or ethnic identity (older writers tend to use the term ‘race’)” (8–9). Overton goes on to note that the interest in heritage is based in the fear that “[t]his unique culture, centred on the outports, has been undermined by industrialization, the welfare state, urbanization, and the introduction of North American values in the period since the Second World War” (9). The drive for preservation has come from Newfoundland’s metropolitan centre—St. John’s, the capital city of the province. Fuller, drawing on points made by Overton, indicates the importance of “institutional validation” to “a folk- and outport-centred notion of the province’s identity” that came “in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Memorial University’s folklore department, the scholarship and publications of the Institute for Social and Economic Research, and the university’s Extension Services” (22; see also Overton 9). All based in St. John’s, these various branches of Memorial University have had an important role in asserting the significance of heritage and tradition in the province.

As is apparent in the term “metropolitan” and in the anxieties about Newfoundland identity, elements of postcolonial discourse have a part in this analysis. Newfoundland is a settler colony that displaced—indeed, annihilated—the indigenous population. The resulting traditional culture is a sort of stew of English, Irish, Scottish, and French cultures. Because of its geographical isolation, the culture became something different—not quite European, not quite North American. Moreover, because its economy was traditionally resource-based and thoroughly exploited, first by Britain and then by Canada, there is a case for reading the cultural productions of the province in terms of a colony’s response to imperial forces. While based in the general postcolonial notion of the relationship between metropolitan centre and colonial periphery (see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 138–39), this analysis focuses on the dynamics within the province: in working to assert an identity that distinguishes Newfoundland from Canada as a whole, the metropolitan centre of St...