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Scattered Narrative and Scattered Character: Perpetual trauma and power Relation

In the Queen of the North

It is sometimes hard for young adults like university students to leave their hometown

and go far away to attend college, let alone children of very young age. However, owing to

colonialisation, tens of thousands of indigenous children were forced to separate from their

original families, culturally genocide by the residential school system. Except for forcibly

forbidding children to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own

languages, which claimed to “civilize” them, residential schools made these Aboriginals undergo

horrendous abuse on physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological levels (Hanson et al 1). This

dark history was projected on an individual’s traumatic experience by Eden Robinson. Her work

“Queen of the North” tells the story of an indigenous girl Adelaine, who was sexually abused by

her uncle Josh from an early age and grows up with pain and degeneration, failing her first

would-be serious romantic relationship with Jimmy. The boat Queen of the North is an important

image of trauma, which appears at the beginning and the end of this short story, leaving more

space for us readers to further reflect on how trauma comes back and forth in individuals’ lives.

By applying a non-linear plot organization, Robinson concretizes the way trauma works on the

human brain. Focusing on narratives and characters, this essay will analyse Adelaine’s

characteristics from Robinson’s use of fragmented narrative and try to uncover the power

relation underlying this abnormal coming-of-age story. This essay will first examine the

protagonist’s intellect and morality in a cause-effect relation, then delve into her emotions and

finally, elaborate on the trauma from the perspective of power relation and the image of the boat.

Adelaine’s intellect and morality seem to forge a cause-effect relation—her intellectual

perception of the world affects her moral judgments—as a victim of sexual abuse, Adelaine later
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becomes a bully and takes revenge on Uncle Josh. This could be seen in Robinson’s fragmented

depictions: she chooses to give the readers a direct clue by inserting a childhood memory of the

protagonist. “Uncle Josh undoes his pants…When it’s over he’ll have treats for me” and

Adelaine admits “it’s painful (Robinson 348).” But Adelaine chooses to not cry as a very

depressed way of expressing emotion. A similar thing happens when she is harassed by a white

male custom in Vancouver, although feeling “A hundred stupid answers came to my head,” she

replies with the least aggressive answer “Haisla, and you (Robinson 358)?” As Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak argued: “…the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as

female is even more deeply in shadow…(28).” As an Indigenous woman, Adelaine experienced

long-term sexual abuse by her uncle and the white gaze from a stranger. She realizes this is not

right, but still responds as a subaltern. These experiences finally lead to her moral downfall—by

taking on a powerful behavioural way and revenge. Robinson scatters Adelaine’s bullying deeds,

which perpetuate and appear sporadically throughout the whole story. These violent experiences

happen mostly in Adelaine’s adolescence, sometimes she is the one who takes the power and

bullies others, and others are simply violent quarrels and fights. Near the end of the story,

Adelaine attempts to end this unethical relationship with Josh by uncovering the truth of Josh’s

abuse by Priest Archibald and leaving him the hatbox gift. This, to a certain extent, is Adelaine’s

way of avenging Josh. Thus, Adelaine finally shares the same moral standard as the inflictors.

The Vice, then, becomes an endless circle passed on between the bullies and the victims. It is

Adelaine’s intellectual perception of the vicious deeds and the depressive manner she takes that

leads her to the moral downfall.

As mentioned above, affected by traumatic experiences, Adaleine chooses a relatively

passive way of expressing emotion. This could also be demonstrated through her dealing with
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intimate relationships. Still, Robinson breaks the chronological way of organizing plots but

manages to merge them together randomly, and she also uses dreams to indicate Adelaine’s

underlying desires. In reality, Adelaine seems to develop a trust issue when dealing with her

relationships. A distinct event is when she tries to tell the truth to her cousin Ronny and would-be

boyfriend Jimmy. Facing Ronny, she is about to tell her but is ruined by Ronny’s over-drinking.

But inside, one can still sense her hesitation: “What was the point? She had a big mouth, … [if I

tell her she may] shout to the world (Robinson 347).” She does not trust Ronny, even though

they have done so many intimate things and Ronny may be the only female good friend of hers.

Similarly, when confronting Jimmy, she “almost tell[s] him then. [She] wanted to tell him. [She]

wanted someone else to know and not have it locked inside [her] (Robinson 347).” But

considering twice, she still decides not to pour out and asks herself: “What was the point? He’d

probably pull away from me in horror, disgusted, revolted (Robinson 354).” She again, hesitates,

but this time with more terrified feelings—she is afraid—afraid of being hated by Jimmy, of

ruining her relationship with him. This shows that she does not trust herself and does not believe

a person like her deserves happiness. With twice failed communication in a similar situation, it is

clear that Adelaine’s traumatic experience prevented her from having a regular healthy

relationship with others. Besides, her dreams serve as significant hints of her inner desires. In the

first dream, she dismembered Josh, which suggests her hatred for him. The second time her

dream of Jimmy’s drowning prophets the plots and also indicates her interior fear of losing

Jimmy. Dreams are the outlet of her depressive emotions, through which the readers can peep at

her genuine thoughts.

From Adelaine’s intellect, morality and emotions, it is clear that all these aspects are

affected by her childhood sexual abuse of her uncle Josh, while Josh, was too, abused by his
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residential school’s teacher Archibald. This circle of vice thus creates two layers of power

hierarchy. Representing the residential school’s authority, Archibald is a figure of the colonizer

who takes on the name of “civilized” but abuses kids from colonialized indigenous people.

Within the indigenous society, Josh represents a patriarchal figure who takes on the name of “for

your good” or “special treatment” but abuses individual females like Adelaine. Yet the “for your

own good” becomes a lie of these inflictors as a means of pulling strings and manipulating those

who are less powerful than them, stating: “I am the one who owns the power. You are the one

who benefits from me so shut up and be submissive.” However, the “beneficiaries” have been

neglected, no matter how traumatic these abuses could be to them. Robinson applies a strategic

method to present trauma: the whole narrative is an imitation of how trauma works on the human

brain. The metaphor of the boat Queen of the North, which appears at the beginning, sets an

overall tone for the whole story, indicating that when trauma comes back to you, sometimes you

may be “frozen where [you] stand, waiting for [it] to come ashore (Robinson 345).” Although the

boat itself does not appear again until the end of this story, the trauma, along with all the

violence, over-drinking, and drug abuse scattered the whole narrative as fragmented pieces.

Robinson imitates the memory disorder that certain traumatic experiences would cause,

organising the plots in a nonlinear way and shattering the violent scenes into pieces to concretize

the ongoing trauma. Near the end, Jimmy gets on the Queen of the North, but the meaning there

remains unclear. Is Jimmy going to take revenge on Uncle Josh? Or will he, like Adelaine, join in

the circle of vice? We have no clear answer but this could be the possible explanation for the

uncertainty that trauma will lead you to. You do not know when it comes, or when it goes. You

have no choice, but “[coming] out of the bushes and [standing] on the dock, watching the Queen

of North disappear (Robinson 363).”

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In short, Eden Robinson’s Queen of the North adopts a fragmented narrative to imitate

how trauma works on an individual’s memories, which reveals a power hierarchy between the

colonizer and the indigenous people as well as male and female through the protagonist

Adelaine’s intellect, morality and emotions. Due to the limited words, this essay only focused on

the traumatic experience of Adelaine but may overlook other issues like identity politics and the

impact of colonialism. Just let the trauma be the departure, let it be, and be a part of you.
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Works Cited

Hanson, Eric, et al. “The Residential School System.” Indigenous Foundations. First Nations and

Indigenous Studies UBC, 2020. Website. Accessed December 24, 2023.

“In the Realm of the Queen of the North: Reading between the Lines of Erin Robinson’s

Work”. IvyPanda, 19 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/in-the-realm-of-the-queen-of-the-

north-reading-between-the-lines-of-erin-robinsons-work-critical-writing/, Accessed

November 21, 2023.

Lawrence, Alicia Marie. Shattered Hearts: Indigenous Women and Subaltern Resistance in

Indonesian and Indigenous Canadian Literature. 2009, https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/,

Accessed November 21, 2023.

Robinson, Eden. “Queen of the North”. The Short Story (1001) (Dr. Benjamin BARBER)

[Semester 1 of 2023-2024], UIC iSpace, ispace.uic.edu.cn, Accessed December 19,

2023.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty., and Rosalind C. Morris. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on

the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010.