WITH THIS DOCUMENT, WE DO NOT INTEND TO PROVIDE MODEL ANSWERS

BUT RATHER TO INDICATE A GOOD APPROACH TO EACH QUESTION AND

REFER YOU TO THE RELEVANT SECTIONS OF THE BASIC BIBLIOGRAPHY.
THERE IS A FAIRLY WIDE RANGE OF ACCEPTABLE RESPONSES.

Literatura Canadiense en Lengua Inglesa (Grado) 1ª P.P. (Febrero 2013) Modelo A

PART ONE

1.- Identify this poem, and discuss its main stylistic features or rhetorical devices.

The poem is entitled “All the Spikes But the Last” (1957). It was written by F.R. Scott,
a member of the Montreal Group, also called the McGill Movement. The style of the
poem is plain rather than ornate, as suits the author’s purpose of clearly conveying a
direct message by means of a colloquial voice which sounds like the everyday or casual
speech of ordinary people. The speaker asks six questions which are explicitly addressed
to “Ned” in the first place, but which in fact are to be answered by all of us. This poem
illustrates F.R. Scott’s radical simplification of style, concentration and evocation. Its
three stanzas are written in free verse, with lines of diverse lengths and rhythms.

2.- How does this poem break with conventions both formally and thematically?

F.R. Scott was a technical innovator who wanted to meet the needs of an emerging
Canadian society that demanded an expansion of the range of poetical themes and was
ready to appreciate more flexible forms of versification. Far from being an old literary
theme, the subject matter of this poem was a modern social and economic issue: the
building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, an enormous collective
task which had helped to unify the country by connecting the eastern and western
provinces. E.J. Pratt had praised this great accomplishment at length in a very
successful poem which was full of complex rhetorical expressions, and in which he had
adopted a conservative choice of meter. F.R. Scott rejected the official version endorsed
by Pratt, and decided to revise that episode of Canadian history from a different
perspective, acknowledging the contributions of those people whose essential role had
not been properly recognized. In striking contrast with the triumphal tone of Pratt’s long
poem, Scott’s short poem is dominated by an accusatory voice which uses plain words
in order to focus on a single purpose: to make readers fully aware of a terrible injustice
which had been committed in the previous century and whose effects were perpetuated
for many decades.

3.- What prompted the author to write this poem? Explain the historical context in
which this poem was written.

A fierce believer in freedom and justice, F.R. Scott wanted Canada to become a more
egalitarian society. He wrote this brief poem in response to E.J. Pratt’s long narrative
poem Towards the Last Spike (1952), which had received a Governor-General’s medal.

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Pratt’s poem celebrated the heroic Canadian achievement of the Canadian Pacific
Railway (CPR) but failed to acclaim the decisive contribution of the 6,000 Chinese
workers who had accepted low wages and endured extremely harsh conditions. Instead
of getting recognition, they had met an increasing social hostility which ultimately led
to the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, known in the Chinese Canadian community as
the Chinese Exclusion Act because it banned most Chinese immigrants from entering
Canada.

4.- How is the author’s ideological position defined through this poem? What was he
reacting against?

F.R. Scott was a socially committed poet whose approach to politics was progressive, in
contrast with E.J. Pratt’s conservatism. Being engaged in left-wing political activities,
Scott was reacting against Pratt (who, in his famous national epic, had not taken into
account the fate of the Chinese coolies involved in the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railway), against the Parliament of Canada for passing the Chinese Immigration Act of
1923, and against the Canadian people who had strongly supported that restrictive
immigration policy.

PART TWO

1. Discuss the depiction of pioneer life in Susanna Moodie’s writings.

Susanna Moodie is one of the best-known contributors to the genre of Canadian pioneer
memoirs, which can be defined as realistic settlement narratives about the pioneers’
struggle against the natural environment in Canada, with particular emphasis on the
hardships of life in the colony. Born in England, in 1832 she emigrated to Canada with
her husband, encouraged by the attractive accounts which her brother, Samuel, had sent
home. The couple settled first on cleared farmland and later in the wilderness of what is
now Ontario, where they built their own log cabin. Throughout all her existence
Susanna Moodie thought of herself not as a Canadian, but as a tragically exiled English
lady, and felt compelled to write for her English audience about the difficult conditions
she and her family endured in the bush farms of Upper Canada in the 1830s. She
published Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada (1852), a collection of sketches
and poems in which she dealt with those “bush” experiences, laying special emphasis
on her psychological tensions and feelings of isolation and exile. Its sequel was Life in
the Clearings versus the Bush (1853), an amiable and more optimistic portrait of
Canadian society, in which she wrote about her life after she left the backwoods.

Roughing It in the Bush provides a realistic account of pioneer life in Upper Canada
in the mid-nineteenth century. In this didactic book, Susanna Moodie wished to convey
accurate information and practical advice to potential colonists so as to prevent their
disappointment by making them aware of the fact that making a fortune was no easy
task. One of her declared purposes was to deflate the illusions about life in Canada that
were being spread by unscrupulous land-agents in Europe. Some parts of the book can
be read as a useful guide intended to teach immigrants how to avoid failure by adapting

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to the bush without being swallowed up by it. For instance, chapter X, entitled “Brian
the Still Hunter,” has been interpreted as “a warning against the perils of a British
gentleman’s emigrating to Canada” (MacDonald, p. 29). 1 This sketch offers an ominous
picture of Brian, a British gentleman who goes mad in the bush.

Roughing It in the Bush has been praised as a “study of human character” because it
presents a number of vividly depicted personalities inspired by actual people Moodie
had met or heard about in the region near Cobourg and Peterborough. In many of her
sketches she portrays eccentric or peculiar characters that she describes in detail by
paying close attention to their life history, dress, occupation, and speech. The book is
full of anecdotes which are told in a lively and humorous style and powerfully recall the
particulars of specific events in a colonial setting.

Directness and simplicity are two important features of Roughing It in the Bush, a
contradictory work in which the author asserts both her own contentment in the bush (“I
was contented to live and die in obscurity”) and her dissatisfaction at living in a “prison-
house” where she felt that her existence was simply one of “toil” and “suffering.”
Indeed, Moodie’s response to the wilderness and its inhabitants includes references not
only to her enthusiastic attitude about the positive aspects she enjoyed (e.g. the
astonishing beauty of the landscape), but also to her disenchantment whenever she
thought about the unpleasant effects of a place where she often pined for England.

2. Discuss the main sources of inspiration for the Confederation Poets.

The Confederation Poets formed the first distinctly Canadian school of poetry. They
were primarily inspired by the imposing beauty of the Canadian landscape. Their
worship of nature led them to adopt as the centre of their mythology the rural figure of
Pan, the Arcadian fertility god of wild nature who became the patron of pastoral poets
from classical times onwards. All of them received a Victorian education and were
trained in the Greek and Roman classics. Their work shows a continuing link with the
British Romantic-Victorian literary tradition and the influence of the American
Transcendentalists, two approaches which they tried to reconcile in their own response
to the Canadian landscape and its inhabitants.

Sir Charles G.D. Roberts was the author of patriotic poems which urged his
readers to take pride in their country. His first collection of poetry, Orion, and Other
Poems, was written under the influence of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Arnold.
He mythologized the Maritime environment he was familiar with: the French and
English struggle for Acadia as well as the farming and fishing communities beside the
Tantramar Marshes, which he had known as a boy. Both “Tantramar Revisited” and
“The Skater” directly evoke the Maritime landscape from which he drew most of his
poetic inspiration.

Archibald Lampman was an enthusiastic admirer of Roberts’s poetry. With his

close friend Duncan Campbell Scott, he took short trips to the nearby countryside
surrounding Ottawa in order to seek the natural settings which he described in his
poems. Lampman’s celebration of nature is always touched by fear, because he
1
MacDonald, R.D. “Design and Purpose.” Canadian Literature 51 (Winter 1972): 20-31.

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invariably perceived the harsh Canadian environment as threatening. “The City of the
End of Things” was inspired by his grim vision of social desolation in a bleak industrial
city.

Duncan Campbell Scott was an accomplished pianist. His love of music was one
of the main sources of inspiration for his poetry and contributed to the development of
his skill with lyric forms. His position first as a clerk in the Indian Branch (later the
Department of Indian Affairs) and then as deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs
allowed him to explore the Canadian wilderness and to come into contact with Native
Canadians, thanks to a number of professional expeditions of inspection into the wilds
and particularly during a trip to the James Bay area. Both “The Onondaga Madonna”
(1898) and “The Forsaken” (1905) exemplify Scott’s ironic use of Christian imagery
(based upon his knowledge of the Bible) when dealing with Indian themes. “The
Onondaga Madonna” presents a savage mother with her “primal warrior” child, a
parodic infant Christ who does not bring any hope of peace, but rather pain and
violence. This poem reflects the author’s fatalistic perception of Indians as “a weird and
waning race,” doomed to disappear through the practice of intermarriage, and his “belief
in the inevitability of assimilation.” Written seven years later, “The Forsaken” also
makes overt references to Christian values and iconography, but shows “an increasing
knowledge and understanding of Chippewa culture” and “a sense of admiration for the
courageous stoicism the woman exhibits.”

3. Discuss the stylistic innovations of the short stories written by Margaret

Laurence, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood.

Laurence, Gallant, Munro and Atwood have successfully encouraged readers to

reconsider their notion of the short story genre, which is particularly suited to reflecting
the fragmentation of the postmodern and postcolonial experiences. These authors depart
from the conventions of simple mimetic realism as they engage in a typically
postmodern open self-reflexivity and self-consciousness. They also confront basic
notions about the creative process of storytelling by experimenting with metafictional
texts which deliberately expose their own artificiality. They involve readers in a process
of remembering history through fiction with narratives that rewrite events from new
juxtaposed perspectives. Certainty is undermined, and the readers’ role becomes more
complex as they are asked to deconstuct texts so as to reconstruct meanings. Parody and
irony are sometimes used in order to challenge the literary canon, subvert existing
traditions, question myths and contest inherited forms of British and American
literatures.

Margaret Laurence has been praised for her dexterous handling of retrospective
narrative techniques, of which we find a good example in “To Set Our House in Order.”
Laurence herself explained how she had experimented with such techniques when she
played with the voice of the protagonist of this short story: “The narrative voice had to
be that of an older Vanessa, but at the same time the narration had to be done in such a
way that the ten-year-old would be conveyed. The narrative voice, therefore, had to
speak as though from two points in time simultaneously.”

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 Mavis Gallant’s polyphonic narrations evoke complex situations ironically and
obliquely, through implication, indirection and understatement, with deliberate
omissions and discontinuities. Her story “Varieties of Exile” is a good example of
postmodern metafiction, that is, fiction about writing fiction. Likewise, the self-
conscious narrator of Alice Munro’s “The Progress of Love” calls attention to the
literary form of her material and engages in an examination of the powers and the limits
of storytelling when she gives an account of her mother’s life in an attempt to
understand it. Chronology and the progression of time are often disrupted in this
proleptic story, marked by a discontinuity that reflects its narrator’s reluctance to get to
the point. Munro blends the techniques of photographic realism with projections of
fantasy and irruptions of the legendary in order to combine the ordinariness and the
strangeness of human life in a web of contradictory discourses that expose the limits of
representation. In other words, she goes beyond the inherited conventions of realistic
fiction by using them in a newly articulated and subversive manner.

Margaret Atwood’s fiction deconstructs and subverts literary conventions. She

blends various narrative techniques, experimenting with framed narratives, interior
monologue, both unreliable and multiple narrators, shifts from third to first person,
playful reversals and intertexts, including classical myth, folklore, biblical passages,
fairy-tales, films, historical documents and literary texts. She also uses various
innovative devices that generate ironic effects, and there is often an impulse toward
comedy within her works. Atwood skillfully draws together the threads connecting
three characters in “The Age of Lead,” a short story that deals with people’s need to
confront mortality while it also expresses the author’s environmental concerns about the
increasingly unhealthy conditions of our planet.

Teresa Gibert