The Lure of the North: American Approaches to the Canadian Wilderness

TheLure of the North: American Approaches to the CanadianWilderness David D. Harvey Canada has for long represented something to the potential American immigrant which is different from images held by immigrants from other countries. After all, this person has chosen an alternative to "the American Dream," apparently, whereas the American and Canadian dreams are fused in the imaginations of most immigrants. Another very obvious yet very important distinction between the immigrants' imaginative images is based upon the American's relative familiarity with Canada, geographic propinquity, and the comfort of travel. Geography has encouraged the American immigrant to think of himself only as a traveler, moving overland, northward, into an extension of his own country. Not only has travel been relatively easy, these immigrants have generally come from easy circumstances, very rarely from abject poverty, famine, feudal bondage or persecution. Canada was clearly a refuge, it is true, for the Loyalists, for fugitive slaves, for draft dodgers and deserters, even for a few religious groups and communities. Most American immigrants, however, have seen Canada as an extension of geography as well as of opportunity. Some American immigrants, though, and increasing numbers since World War II, have seen Canada as an actual alternative to life in the United States and to its dominant culture, as a retreat, then, rather than a refuge. Whether or not this vision has been realistic or reinforced by experience, it is usually, in apparent paradox, a distinctively American vision or, more rarely, a Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 1986, 35-50 36 David D. Harvey deliberate choice of an alternative perspective. In either instance it seems inevitable to consider the American vision of Canada in primarily naturalistic rather than social terms, more specifically via the conception of the wilderness expressed through the written word. 1 Perry Miller, in Errand into the Wilderness, provided one classic definition of American character as expressed in literature ranging from Jonathan Edwards to William Faulkner: an essential romanticism based upon "the irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization-which is to say, between forest and town, spontaneity and calculation, heart and head, the unconscious and the self-conscious, the innocent and the debauched. We are all heirs of Natty Bumppo, and cannot escape our heritage." 2 The pertinence of this definition to a cultural study of immigration should be obvious from the start: immigration is often the route chosen to escape one's heritage and, on the other hand, the American immigrant may, willy-nilly, continue to express in his actions or words the conflict inherent in the American cultural myth. For, as Miller conceived it, conflict is of the essence, external conflict initiallybetween a literal wilderness and a settler attempting to impose order, and a subsequent internalization. An intriguingly different conceptualization of man's relationship to nature and of the internalization of this relationship is a key passage in W.L. Morton's The Canadian Identity. Here the basic elements of the Miller definition recur but in an image of reconciliation , in a balanced, harmonious, iftense, relationship. It isalso noteworthy that here "nature," or "wilderness," is a more continuing physical presence: "this alternate penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization is the basic rhythm of Canadian life, and forms the basic elements of the Canadian character, whether French or English, the violence necessary to contend with the wilderness, the restraint necessary to preserve civilization from the wilderness violence, and the puritanism which is the offspring of the wedding of violence to restraint." 3 Whether or not Miller's and Morton's formulations do justice to the mythic bases of the two cultures, they are resonant of two quite different approaches to this continent. It isquite conceivable that, as direct and indirect knowledge of Canada grows in the United States, the Canadian myth may be deliberately chosen, as it appears in one form or another, as in the myth of the "peaceable kingdom" where "the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb 1 ' (Isaiah Xl).4 Americans who choose Canada may in some sense envision an Arcadia, i.e., an ideal if rustic state in which simplicity and order prevail and the complications of urban life are...