The Huron Chief by Adam Kidd, and: Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story by Isabella Valancy Crawford (review)

HUMANITIES 159 inclusion offeminist writers particularly from Quebec and practitioners of 'l'ecriture feminine' - Louky Bersianik, Madeleine Gagnon, Jovette Marchessault , Yolande Villemaire, and of course Nicole Brossard, for example - women writers comprise little more than one-quarter of the biographical entries, a startlingly small proportion in view of their centrality in modem Canadian literature. Not perfect then - did anyone dream it could be? - Canadian Writers since 1960 is, nevertheless, a welcome addition to our reference tools in Canadian literature. (HELEN HOY) Adam Kidd. The Huron Chief. Edited by D.M.R. Bentley with contributions and appendices by Charles R. Steele Canadian Poetry Press 1986. xliv [iv unpaginated], 139. $6.50 paper Isabella Valancy Crawford. Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story. Edited by D.M.R. Bentley Canadian Poetry Press. lxii, 102. $6.50 paper Critics of early Canadian literatureface a peculiar problem: we often have to produce persuasive readings of pre-modern texts without undergoing the salutary experience encountered by critics ofTennyson or Hawthorne - being stared down by the baleful eye of the writer's original readership. To expropriate these works for ourselves (which the critic is always doing and even the scholar can hardly escape) seems a spiritless task when we know that work - often of evident merit - may well have been published in a few dozen copies, at the author's expense, that it was read by few and written about by no one, and that it was subsequently forgotten for years until some hero/ine of the dusty stacks unearthed it. The parallel case of early American literature is not quite parallel; authors abandoned or ignored in their day (Melville and Thoreau spring to mind) nevertheless can now be read at least in the setting of the community of readers who misunderstood them. This is less easy north of the border, since our analysis of the community of readers in early Canada is still frozen in the grip of colonial terror: 'the assumption of British centrality in social and sacred matters brought with it a privileging of the literary models and aesthetics that were sanctioned by British overculture' writes D.M.R. Bentley, plucking yet once more the withered berries of the foreign ivy and doing his best to show he knows how withered they are. Everything he says is true of course, but true in ways that simply demand further exploration. If our antecedents read like that, why did they do so, and to what purpose? Scholars like Bruce Curtis (with his work on early education) or Nan Johnson (tracing the history of rhetoric in Canada) may eventually supply 160 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 us with some reasons for the shape of discourse in the worlds of Kidd, publishing in 1830, and Crawford, publishing in 1884. In the meanwhile, we are leftwith the problem ofhow to read works like The Huron Chiefand Malcolm's Katie without that energizing tension between the original audience and ourselves which forces us to test our expropriations even as we engage in them. One way of handling this is to emulate our antecedents and either despise or ignore their works; not an easy task in the case of Malcolm's Katie, which is a superlative Victorian poem, and difficult even with The Huron Chief, which is polished in craft, charming in its evocation of early Ontario, and poignantly visionary in its sympathy for the Indian. Another way is by allowing contemporary critical discourse to provide the primary vantage point on the works in question. Here is where a need for the perspective of an early readership is most desperate, even if that perspective was in its own day inhospitable. D.M.R. Bentley's two excellent and valuable editions (both supplied with sound critical apparatus and useful historical annotation) take the second of these two routes. Crawford's poem is presented through the glass of feminist criticism, Kidd's is set in the context of contemporary Canadian 'hinterland writers' like Kroetsch. The positive side df this is that it forces the contemporary Canadian reader (probably youthful, and certainly a student or scholar) to acknowledge that the literary past we still tend to repudiate can'tbe set aside quite that easily. The...