Local Colour in Canadian Fiction

LOCAL COLOUR IN CANADIAN FICTION IWilliam H. Magee The pride in local colour that gripped Canadian literature early in the twentieth century squeezed the life out of fiction because the storytellers generally fumbled their technique. Almost every one of them ignored his artistic duty of trying to find a new technique appropriate to his primary interest. Thus the unquestioning reliance on traditional devices which has characterized all Canadian fiction until recently particularly enervated the local colourists. For the problem of integrating this new aspect of fiction into a unified story was one of technique, facing not only Canadians but all novelists who stressed setting or atmosphere as a chief aspect of their art. The problem was basic to the widening art of the novel. In all English fiction regional settings had been growing more prominent and more vivid during the late nineteenth century. Both for huge panoramas of society like Trollope's and George Eliot's and for restricted dramas of small groups like Meredith's, the background was ceasing to be nominal. The regional novel was about to emerge as a distinct type. The first group in the trend appeared in North America, and the Americans and Canadians were the first fully to encounter the special problems involved. The reasons for the appearance of local colour at the end of the nineteenth century belong both to the fictional heritage from England and the United States and to social history. Both British and American novelists had been describing settings thoroughly for almost a century before the local colourists appeared. Early Gothic novelists like Mrs. Radcliffe had used wild scenery to intensify horror, and historical romancers from Scott and Cooper on had used both scenery and regional descriptions to vivify historical panoramas. By the third quarter of the century Trollope was building the charm of Hampshire and Wiltshire into a fictional country as real as either, and George Eliot avowed the intention of describing the Midlands as they really were. In the United States Hawthorne had made New England equally real in LOCAL COLOUR IN CANADIAN FICTION 177 fiction. Although each forged a technique for integrating a fondness for distinct regions into fiction, Trollope succeeded the most effectively by permeating every aspect of his social panorama with the sense of a provincial way of life. The local colourists completed this gradual trend towards emphasizing regional atmosphere when provincialism displaced a wider awareness of human conflicts in popular thinking. Late in the nineteenth century long-established communities which dreaded the increasing industrial disorder of manufacturing cities and mining camps, and in North America the new pioneering disorder of the prairies as well, proclaimed their own way in fiction as well as in the pulpit. Thus the strict Victorian morality became the ethics of the local colourists: stories set at home displayed a smug humour; those set against either of the new societies, industrial or pioneer, blandly preached the old order. As a result fiction that was written as both serious and optimistic now sounds childish. In contrast, the best stories for children still have their charm, for although they kept the smugness and the preaching they sound less pompous and often less provincial. Only the few tragedies and satires, which used the medium most successfully, achieved profundity instead of pomposity ; they too sound less provincial. The seriousness of the one approach and the ironic perspective of the other forced some attention to the general problems of human living, perhaps in contrast to local ideals. Such stories offer the best but isolated examples of what, at its little height, local colour used for its own sake could have contributed to fiction. Later regional novels have used setting quite differently, choosing as their models the pioneer and immigrant novels of Willa Cather or Frederick Philip Grove, and the psychological novels of Thomas Wolfe or Hugh MacLennan. Those few which, like Mazo de la Roche's, have continued to stress local colour sound escapist rather than provincial. The local colourists were the product of the provincial society which flourished in the United States after the Civil War and in Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century. American rather than British storytellers thus...