Writing Canada

Two recent books examine the nature of Canadian identity, approaching the subject from vastly different perspectives. From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood presents a historical analysis of children's books published during the first five decades of the country's existence. Home Words is a collection of essays that employs contemporary cultural and critical theory to examine the meanings of the word "home" as they can be applied to more recent works, all but one of which have been published in the last three decades. Each book is a welcome addition to a small but growing library of critical and theoretical approaches to Canadian children's literature.

In From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood, University of Lethbridge (Alberta) scholar Elizabeth A. Galway considers early writers' belief in "the power of literature to influence national progress and growth as a particular strength of the literature consumed by young readers" (5). Focusing on the period between 1867, when Canada became a nation, and 1914, when World War I began, the author examines the use of novels, poems, and works of nonfiction to provide young readers with definitions of the new nation in which they were maturing. The topics Galway considers are the relationships between Canada and both Great Britain and the United States, attitudes toward French Canadians and Native Peoples, Canadian regionalism and history, and human beings' relationship with the physical environment and nonhuman creatures.

"If Canadian children were gradually learning that they were not British children," she writes, "they were actively being taught that they were not American either" (66). Although such English authors as G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne encouraged young readers to emulate the manly and British virtues of their heroes, Canadian authors sought to balance loyalty to empire with independence. Americans were viewed as threatening neighbors who might either attack or assimilate Canada, and writers created and promoted negative stereotypes of them.

Stories dealing with Canada itself presented the complexities of the new nation. The French were seen ambiguously: as "corrupt and often backward-looking" (80), as simple and hardworking, or, in the case of such explorers as Samuel Champlain and Jacques Cartier, as heroic individuals. Natives could be noble savages or just savages, or inferior beings to be taught and civilized. Good Indians were those who responded to the beneficent teaching of superior white, usually English, people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the works of Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson sought to break down stereotypes, most of them negative, about her people.

Galway considers the ways in which writers presented important events in Canadian history to inspire "a new Canadian mythology that [they] hoped would shape Canada's future" (116–17). The early English and French explorers, the struggles of the Loyalists, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the War of 1812 were key elements of the new mythology as it was presented to children. With the exception of Laura Secord's daring night-time journey during the War of 1812 to warn the British of an impending American attack, the writers' focus was masculine: "Men from Canada's past were portrayed as enterprising, strong, and fearless" (128).

The landscape and environment played large roles in children's books, as either positive or negative forces. In British and American eyes, Canada was largely a vast, untamed, dangerous wilderness. Canadian writers viewed it as a setting which was to be tamed in the name of progress; it required "a noble race to populate it" (158). Although Galway discusses writers' awareness of the nation's various regions in defining the new country, her focus is on works dealing with what are now Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces. While these were certainly the longest settled and most populated areas of the country during the period covered by the book—the homes of most of the writers and their intended young audiences—it would have been useful...