The Dual Colonial Legacy

The British and the French – the official “founding peoples” of Canada – determined the nature and evolution of Canadian culture in a multitude of ways, both large and small. They did so not only as separate entities in the regions where each was dominant, but also as cohabitants of the northern part of North America, constantly aware of each another’s presence. Since both communities originated as colonial outposts in what they regarded as a threatening and uncivilized “new world,” they shared a similar cultural evolution and sensibility. However, the fact that the British eventually won the struggle for dominance of North America has been profoundly important in shaping the very real differences between the two communities’ respective sensibilities, as well as the fundamental patterns of Canadian history and culture.

The earliest French settlers established basic patterns of life in Acadia and New France (Quebec). The local culture was built on the religious and folk life that they brought with them from France, as well as on the imperatives of the North American landscape and their interaction with the aboriginal peoples. During the colonial period and even afterwards, the “high” culture in these communities was primarily imported. Because of its early settlement in the seventeenth century and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in encouraging artists to make religious works for churches, Quebec has a greater legacy of folk art than any other province. Local artisans created sculptures of saints, religious symbols, and altarpieces, while lay people honoured their church in ex-voto paintings, naively rendered illustrations of miraculous events. As well, the people demonstrated their faith by making religious objects and altars for their homes.

French-Canadian folk culture was also rich in oral literature. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of such traditions to the survival of French-Canadian culture, because of the dominance of English after the conquest. Folklorist Luc Lacourcière referred to the period from the founding of New France and Acadia in the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century as un age d’or for oral literature. The influence of Catholicism is reflected in the many religious stories, but tales of magic, such as the adventures of Ti Jean, make up the largest group. Music was another important element in the traditions of both Acadia and Quebec.

The first writing about Canada was by French explorers such as Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, travellers such as Marc Lescarbot, and missionaries, particularly the Jesuits, all of whom can be seen as the founders of a long tradition of travel writing in this country. French settlers also shaped one of the most fundamental features of Canada’s colonial and national development, the fur trade. As settlement expanded westward, French missionaries and settlers established communities in what is now western Canada that determined the material culture of these regions. Cultural life in all of these centres evolved to include authentic expressions of high culture. Quebec in particular developed a substantial literary tradition.

The evolution of literature in that province reflects its social and political development. A nationalist tradition in both poetry and fiction dates from the patriotic movement of the 1830s. The tradition established by Octave Crémazie and other writers whose work he published was carried on by the “romantic revival” of the 1840s and 1850s, in many ways a vigorous response to the infamous report of Lord Durham in 1839, which advocated assimilation of the French Canadians. The poetry of the latter half of the nineteenth century embodied what contemporary sociologist Marcel Rioux has called “the ideology of conservation” – the preservation of French-Canadian culture through a dedication to the traditional values of Catholicism and the land.

Fiction in French Canada likewise reflected the wider social and political milieu. It was a vehicle for articulating the ideology of conservation, with its emphasis on traditional religion, rural values, and devotion to the land. The novel of the land, which began with Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle (1846), was central to French-Canadian fiction for over a century. But even in this earliest version, one finds the tension between the idealization of agrarian life and a realistic portrayal of its darker sides that marks the entire genre.

At the turn of the century and the following two decades, a number of poets who were influenced by French symbolism rejected the ideology of conservation, choosing instead to turn their attention to more personal imagery and themes. In the 1930s and 1940s poets continued to focus on the private realm. Some, such as Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, explored themes of isolation, alienation, confinement, and death, which some critics have seen as reflective of the frustrations experienced by French-Canadian artists and intellectuals of the inter-war period and the population more generally.

In the years following World War II a number of poets rejected the emphasis on the past but at the same time championed the French language and an assertive cultural stance. Inspired by the work of poet Alain Grandbois, such writers as Gaston Miron, Gilles Hénault, Roland Giguère, and Paul-Marie Lapointe called for a renewed cultural vision. Equally important was the poetry and prose of Anne Hébert, which explored themes of repression, confinement, and ultimately rebellion and renewal. An increased focus on the tension between traditionalism and modernity is manifested by the rise of social realism in the urban novels of Roger Lemelin and Gabrielle Roy and the psychological novels of Robert Charbonneau, Robert Élie, and André Langevin.

Political poetry flourished during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White (presented 1967, published 1974) expressed the commitment to separatism of a generation of Quebec artists and intellectuals. Also important in this era were a number of poet-singers and songwriters, such as Claude Péloquin, Raoul Duguay, Gilles Vigneault, and Gilbert Langevin. One significant political dimension of writing in this period, as well as a form of artistic experimentation, was an increasing rejection of standard French in favour of joual, the speech of working-class Québécois. Fiction was the vehicle for both artistic exploration and nationalist expression in the hyper-realist novels of Marie-Claire Blais, the psychologically intense work of Hubert Aquin, and the dark social realism of playwright Michel Tremblay. Acadian culture also flowered during the 1960s, in part as a result of the founding in 1963 of the bilingual Université de Moncton in New Brunswick. Particularly noteworthy was the prolific novelist and dramatist Antonine Maillet, whose La sagouine (1974) gave literary expression to Acadian experience and sensibility.

The seventies and eighties brought a proliferation of voices. Among those being heard more forcefully than ever before were women novelists and playwrights such as Jovette Marchessault and Nicole Brossard, who explored feminist themes in technically innovative ways. As well, writers of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds such Naïm Kattan, Marco Micone, and Ying Chen asserted their presence in Quebec in a variety of languages, including French. The literature produced in French Canada, once a vehicle for preserving tradition, thus became a powerful means of contesting it. (For a fuller discussion of the French-Canadian cultural experience, see CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN FRENCH CANADA.)

French Canadians, as pioneer settlers in Quebec and other parts of Canada, founded and shaped fundamental social and cultural institutions. However, the most significant contribution that French Canadians have made to the country’s culture has been their survival as a distinct cultural and linguistic entity. Analysts have argued that this persistence has been central to Canada’s ability to resist Americanization politically and culturally since the continuing French presence has both fostered and required a particularistic mindset quite different from the more universalistic American one.

Indeed, the impact on Canadian culture generally has been so profound as to be virtually incalculable. For example, since the conquest, nationalism in Quebec has profoundly affected the political and cultural sensibility of the entire country. It has been expressed not only within Quebec in the literature produced by writers such as François-Xavier Garneau and Octave Crémazie in the nineteenth century and Félix-Antoine Savard, Philippe Panneton, and Robert Charlebois in the twentieth, but also in the recurring political debate throughout Canada over the related issues of federalism and linguistic and cultural policy.

Settlers from the British Isles have had a similarly formative impact as “founding peoples” of Canada, both as an identifiable, if heterogeneous, cultural strand and in continuous interaction with French Canadians. British explorers such as Martin Frobisher arrived as early as the sixteenth century, and like their French counterparts, some wrote about their journeys. Henry Kelsey, Anthony Henday, and Samuel Hearne articulated the nature of the encounter between a European sensibility and the North American landscape, thereby contributing not only to travel literature but also to what would evolve into the Canadian literary tradition in English.

More visible and immeasurably significant, of course, has been the British influence on Canadian institutions – political, legal, social, religious, and cultural. In part, this influence was exerted by immigrants from the British Isles and their descendants, but it also came from Loyalist refugees of the American Revolution, who helped to shape the various regions in which they settled – the Maritimes, the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (Quebec), and Upper Canada (Ontario) – and determined the general ethos of Canadian culture, accentuating its essentially conservative, counter-revolutionary character. It is also important to note that the influence of the “English” on Canadian culture must be addressed in terms of the quite different peoples sometimes encompassed in that label. The English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh must be distinguished from one another in any detailed look at Canadian culture since they have generally regarded themselves as separate peoples, and the nature of the cultural baggage that each brought was sufficiently distinct to warrant such consideration.

The Scots provide an interesting example, partly because their influence on Canadian culture, both as individuals and as a group, has been especially significant and partly because the culture that they brought with them was quite distinct. For example, many of the Scottish immigrants who came to Cape Breton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as refugees from the highland clearances, spoke Gaelic not English. These newcomers, like others from Scotland and Ireland, brought an intense religious sensibility, whether Protestant or Catholic, and a folk culture particularly rich in oral and musical traditions that have been the formative cultural influence in the areas of the Atlantic provinces where they settled. Aspects of their way of life, such as bagpipes, tartans, and highland regiments, have become synonymous with Canadian culture at both the official and the popular level. Moreover, Scots have exerted an extremely important influence on the country’s political, financial, religious, and educational institutions.

Several modern authors have explored what might be called the “Scots soul.” Such is the case not only with writers often regarded as regional, such as Alistair MacLeod, whose The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) depicts the culture of Cape Breton, but also with others who are widely regarded as major national figures. Hugh MacLennan in Each Man’s Son (1951) and The Watch That Ends the Night (1959) explores the strengths and vulnerabilities of Scots sensibilities, as does Margaret Laurence in a number of her fictional works, most notably The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), A Bird in the House (1970), and The Diviners (1974). Interestingly, for both of these writers, this “ethnic” project is inseparable from delineating intercultural interaction, influence, and synthesis. For example, Laurence’s The Diviners illuminates the complex interface between the Scots and the Metis.

The Irish, the Welsh, and the English can also be productively examined as separate strands. The Irish, in particular, have shaped regional cultures, perhaps most dramatically in Newfoundland and parts of the Maritime provinces, Quebec, and southern Ontario. Like the Scots, each of these groups brought folk traditions with them, and while the study of Anglo-Canadian folklore is underdeveloped compared to that of French Canada, the work which has been done reveals the significance of folk traditions to immigrants from each of these backgrounds. It is also important, however, to recognize that the Irish, the English, and the Welsh created a kind of synthesis variously expressed as Anglo-Canadian culture, which provided the fundamental framework of English-Canadian society from before Confederation until at least World War II.

High, as well as folk and popular, culture was profoundly influenced by this British sensibility and, more concretely, by the contributions of British-born artists, musicians, and writers. Modern English-Canadian literature, for example, is to a considerable degree founded on the work of the English-born Susanna Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill, who immigrated to Canada in the 1830s and whose literary works, particularly Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide (1854–55) articulated fundamental tensions in Canadian life between culture and nature, imperial centre and frontier outpost, and the closely related preoccupation with survival. Equally fundamental is the work of Scottish-born Thomas McCulloch and the “father of American humour,” Thomas Chandler Haliburton. McCulloch’s Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure, first published in the Acadian Recorder in 1821–22, were moral parables on the virtues of thrift and hard work and a seminal expression of a Scottish Presbyterian value system that would reverberate in mainstream Canadian culture. Like McCulloch, who viewed the Americans as morally suspect, Haliburton cast a satiric eye in the direction of the United States when he created the archetypal Yankee trader in The Clockmaker, or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick (1836). In this work he foreshadowed a dominant theme in Canadian popular and literary culture: the tensions between American and Canadian characters and their respective countries.

The mainstream literary, theatrical, and artistic traditions in “English” Canada today reflect the cultural value systems of early immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and their attitudes to the New World. They created a perspective that in the colonial period looked to Great Britain for cultural direction and that, well into the twentieth century, defined official culture as genteel and Anglo-Canadian. The Canadian-born writer Sara Jeannette Duncan, for example, made her literary debut in London, achieved an international reputation, and never returned to the country of her birth, although the subject of her novel The Imperialist (1904) was small-town Ontario. However, between the 1880s and 1914 Canadian-born writers and writing flourished, and a native tradition began to take shape. Poets and novelists such as Gilbert Parker, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carmen, Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Ernest Thompson Seton, Ralph Connor (Charles Gordon), Adeline Teskey, Marjorie Pickthall, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Nellie McClung, Stephen Leacock, and Robert Service were among the many fine Anglo-Canadian authors who published during this period.

Some of these writers made Canadian nationhood their fictional or poetic subject, thus nurturing a persistent theme in writing in English and strengthening the equation of Anglo-Canadianism with culture and identity. Roberts, for example, writing in the newly formed dominion, was a champion of both Canadian place and nation and British ancestry. In the poem “Canada” he celebrates the country’s heritage as “The Saxon force / the Celtic fire.” Stephen Leacock, a British-born professor of political economy at McGill University, was a nation builder of sorts in his historical writings, such as Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907). Better known as Canada’s foremost humorist, he held an unwavering faith in Anglo-Saxon civilization. He himself became an icon of the Canadian identity, even though much of his humour was addressed to British and American markets. He is best known in Canada for Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), a delightfully ironic look at small-town life in Ontario. Originally commissioned by the Montreal Star to “be typically Canadian,” the book mythologizes and anglicizes Anglo-Canadian life and experience. In retrospect, some early-twentieth-century writers have been condemned for presenting an ethnocentric point of view. Charles Gordon (“Ralph Connor”), himself a minister and, like a significant number of early Anglo-Canadian writers, the son of a minister, published The Foreigner in 1909. Once considered a work of distinction, this novel has recently been criticized for its portrayal of Slavic immigrant life in Winning as sordid, and for its championing of assimilation to Anglo-Canadian culture. Similarly, Leacock presents an ethnocentric point of view when he light-heartedly argues for preferred British immigration to the west and insists on assimilation to Anglo-Canadianism in My Discovery of the West (1937).

Unlike other ethnic groups, French Canadians have had a significant presence in the Anglo-Canadian literary tradition. Charles G.D. Roberts’s invocation of Cartier and Champlain, Montcalm and Wolfe, and “Quebec, thy storied citadel” in the poem “Canada” is typical of this presence. His sympathy for the country’s dual heritage is also demonstrated by his 1891 translation of Les anciens Canadiens (1863) by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé. In his introduction, Roberts provides an early authorial appreciation of this national and literary duality, demonstrating the sense of a shared evolution that is fundamental to the definition of Canadian culture. “In Canada there is settling into shape a nation of two races; there is springing into existence, at the same time, a literature in two languages.” Between 1890 and 1915 the French-Canadian experience was widely used by other writers in English. Gilbert Parker, for example, wrote historical fantasies with Quebec settings, such as When Valmond Came to Pontiac (1895), and the interface between French and Scottish Canadians around Ottawa was the subject of stories in Edward William Thomson’s Old Man Savarin (1895; revised 1917).

Even in the first half of the twentieth century, as modernism and a developing post-colonialism ushered in a search for new and more authentic language, forms, and content, the country’s major writers in English remained largely Anglo-Canadian in spirit. As well, a significant number continued to leave room for thematic considerations about nationhood, and in the spirit of Susanna Moodie’s literary aspirations in a new country, they demonstrated a concern for a national literature. Examples of those with Irish or English sensibilities are the novelists Morley Callaghan, who wrote with an Irish-Canadian and Catholic viewpoint in such novels as Such Is My Beloved (1934), and Ethel Wilson, the daughter of a Methodist missionary, whose novels about women in distress, notably Hetty Dorval (1947), display a lucid style and a British Victorian reserve. The poet E.J. Pratt, son of a Methodist minister in Newfoundland, became famous for his poetic treatment of national myths in such works as Brébeuf and His Brethren (1940) and Towards the Last Spike (1952). Similarly, F.R. Scott, the son of an Anglican clergyman and poet and himself a lawyer and a founder of the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, was known for his cultural nationalism, which included both English Canada and Quebec. He translated the poetry of several French-language poets, among them Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert. The common history of French and English Canada found perhaps its most explicit expression in the novel Two Solitudes (1945) by Hugh MacLennan. The title of this work of fiction has come to symbolize the tensions inherent in the national duality.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Canada’s literature in English has continued to be dominated by those authors who seem implicitly to project an Anglo-Canadian sensibility, although the literary scene has broadened to include other cultural heritages and points of view. Most notable have been the writers of Jewish background. Poets and novelists such as A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Adele Wiseman, Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, and Matt Cohen have drawn on their rich linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage, as well as their family’s immigrant experience, to create some of the most memorable works in Canadian literature. Many of these, including Layton’s poetry collection For My Brother Jesus (1976) and Wiseman’s novel Crackpot (1974), critique narrow Christianity and Anglo-Canadian ethnocentrism, while calling directly or indirectly for an expanded vision of Canadian society.

Despite the increasingly multi-vocal nature of Canadian literature since World War II, a British-Canadian point of view has continued to be demonstrated in the work of important writers. Obsessed by the questions of “what is Canada?” and “what is a Canadian?” Earl Birney penned such well-known poems as “Canada: Case History” and “Anglo-Saxon Street,” in which he mythologized the Anglo-Canadian identity in a new, less-inclusive way. The poet Margaret Avison often projects a Christian context, and her work has been compared to the British poets John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Playwright James Reaney has also been influenced by the traditions of English literature, basing his A Suit of Nettles (1958), for example, on Edmund Spenser’s Shepheards Calender (1579).

One of Canada’s most influential writers, Robertson Davies, was a prototype of the Anglo-Canadian man of letters. His education at Oxford and his acting experience at the Old Vic Theatre in London prepared him for an exceptional literary and theatrical career in Canada that was based on a British-derived sense of high culture. His brilliant novel Fifth Business (1970) is subtly rooted in the Anglo-Canadian experience and sensibility. The fiction of other outstanding authors, such as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Alice Munro, also takes as its subject Anglo-Canadian ethnicity, expresses itself in an Anglo-Canadian voice, or reveals the continuing influence of British literary traditions.

The British influence on Canada’s major cultural institutions has been as all-encompassing as its impact on the national literature. Theatre offers the most obvious examples of its persistence in such major enterprises as the Stratford (established 1951) and Shaw (1962) summer festivals, which feature the works of English and Irish playwrights William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. The professional Canadian theatre has historically been dominated by members of the charter groups, beginning in English-speaking Canada with the theatricals put on by British army officers in Halifax in the eighteenth century. More recently, the profound influence of the Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto and such theatrical figures as actress, teacher, and director Dora Mavor Moore, Scottish-born and a graduate of the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts in London, and her son Mavor Moore, who was chief producer of television for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early 1950s and subsequently chairman of the Canada Council, suggests the British temper of such cultural institutions. John Drainie, the quintessential Canadian actor and a feature of radio and television dramas from the 1940s to the 1960s, too, was early exposed to British-dominated theatre circles in Vancouver. His mid-Atlantic accent was typical of Canadian artists of the time. Together with director Andrew Allen and actors such as Tommy Tweed, Barry Morse, Austin Willis, Jack Creley, and Toby Robbins, he turned the CBC into a national theatre and prolonged the British character and voice of Canadian society.

Similarly, the development of painting in Canada was strongly shaped by British influence. Some of the earliest work was by officers trained as topographic artists at the military academy in Woolwich, who established a tradition that embodied a particular way of viewing the Canadian landscape. Twentieth-century Canadian painting continued to be influenced by artists who were born and trained in England, although their interpretation of the northern landscape came to be seen as uniquely Canadian. All the members of the well-known Group of Seven were of British ancestry, and three – J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, and Fred Varley – were born in England. Among contemporary painters, the heightened realism, austere detailing, and darkly foreboding quality of Alex Colville’s work suggest the Canadian penchant for documentation identified by Northrop Frye as the historical consequence of record keeping by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Jesuit fathers, and the British topographers and mappers. Colville’s scenes, often of leisure activities, are devoid of joy and keep the viewer at arm’s length, perhaps reflecting an Anglo-Canadian legacy of puritanism.

One leading Canadian national institution clearly shows the impact of Scottish Calvinism. The National Film Board of Canada was created during World War II by the Scots film-maker John Grierson, who had earlier coined the term “documentary film.” He laid the foundations for Canada’s international reputation in this field. Moralistic, didactic, and pragmatic, Grierson’s faith in documented realism was in part an expression of his Calvinist view that art must be purposeful and real. His influence on Canadian film-making was immense. After Grierson, cinematographers established an ethos of social realism that has come to be seen as characteristically Canadian. Grierson also brought to the film board the Scottish film-maker Norman McLaren, who would establish himself and his country as leaders in the field of comic animation. Paralleling film, the docudrama has had a strong presence in Canadian theatre, and the documentary poem has been identified by poet Dorothy Livesay as a distinctive Canadian genre.