Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

an important vehicle for the formulation and interpretation of a shared history which,
at that point, formed a sort of national consciousness. Canadian novelists were
beginning to look for ways to express the distinctiveness of the new Canada,
identifying it somehow with the wilderness. Common to most of the early works is
the thematic emphasis on the preoccupation with nature and the confrontation with
the native population.
3.2 Madness and Terror in the Garrison:
The Colonial Conflict and John Richardson's Wacousta
One of the major representatives of early colonial literature, who saw as his task the
recording of the English-Canadian past, was John Richardson, author of the historical
novel Wacousta (1832). Although once marginalised, ignored, and even censured in
his own country Richardson is nowadays often regarded as "The Father of Canadian
Literature"17, just as Wacousta itself by dramatising the unresolved tensions of
colonial conflict, and indeed problematising the whole notion of a stable, coherent
national or personal identity, has often been regarded by Canadian critics as their first
national prose epic.18
As a late contemporary of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper Richardson
combined elements from the historical romance with those of the gothic novel, a
combination which is as common in nineteenth-century Canadian fiction, as it is
elsewhere. Yet, as many of the Canadian writers at that time, he imitates the styles
rather than the motives of the great Romantics. The unmistakably romantic and
gothic dimensions of Wacousta are evident in the depiction of the central character as
well as action and in its "narrative pattern of opening mystification followed by
gradual clarification of events and motifs"19. The whole book reeks of terror, evil,
chance circumstance, violent encounters, sudden deaths and theatrical feeling. It
provides us with fast-paced plots of shattered hopes and renewed catastrophes and
melodramatic characters who were larger than life in their villainy or virtue. While it
is at times stylistically contrived and not significantly original it is still worth paying
attention to since it reveals a variety of currents in the literary imagination of early
Canadians and illuminates the characteristic hesitation between tradition and
naturalization in colonial literature. Above all, however, the implications of terror
and madness in this book not only reflect the Canadian experience of the man referred
17Reany, James: Letter: Globe and Mail, 4 November 1977.-
18 cf for example Hurley, Michael: The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson.- Toronto; Buffalo; London:
Toronto University Press, 1992.-
19 MacLulich, T.D.: The Colonial Major: Richardson and Wacousta.- In: Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (1984).- p. 73
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