from GEOGRAPHY, GENDER AND IDENTITY IN CANADIAN LITERATURE: SOME INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

THE LONDON JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES 1996 VOLUME 12

by Richard Dennis and Coral Ann Howells

            In his brief introduction to The Atlas of Literature, Malcolm

Bradbury (1996) quotes the American writer, Eudora Welty: `The truth is,

fiction depends for its life on place.' He also quotes Herman Melville: `nearly

all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books.'1 Characters have to

live somewhere, actions require locations, so - at the very least - geography

functions as a container for plot. But the relationship between geography and

literature goes far beyond this prosaic function. Bradbury's Atlas is

`geographical' in its focus on the geographical - cultural, social, economic and

political - context in which literature is produced. It has less to say about the

geographies that writers produce or what those geographies stand for, the

themes that are central to this collection of essays on Canadian literature.

            `Geography is destiny' affirms one of the characters in Carol Shields'

The Republic of Love, in this case referring to the density of relationships and

interconnections among the families and neighbourhoods of Winnipeg. Where

you live, where you grew up, affects who you are, whom you know and who

knows you. But the aphorism is true on a wider canvas, too. Later in the novel,

the principal characters engage in a party game where they name their `ideal

land form, what part of the earth's geography [they] would choose to be'. One

chooses a peninsula - `Because it was separate yet joined. Because, well, it

surrendered part but not all of its independence'; another opts for a coastal

ridge - `Like the Sierras, maybe, sharply defined, but at the same time not too

intimidating'; a third cannot decide between a river delta and a long low valley

`with a guaranteed abundance of rainfall'.2 In this collection, Emily Gilbert

discusses Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, where Joan describes her own

body in strikingly similar fashion, as a prairie across which her veins flow like

rivers. In this case, of course, a pock-marked prairie is exactly what she

wishes she was not. Evidently, physical geography is much more than a

container for action: it also functions metaphorically. The same is true of the

built environment of cities, as Gilbert goes on to show in discussing the

metaphorical uses of homes, suburbs, inner cities and downtowns in a series of

Toronto novels. As that Toronto denizen Margaret Atwood has remarked,

emphasising the significance of location, writers write out of what they know:

I don't think you transcend region, any more than a plant

transcends earth ... To me an effective writer is one who

can make what he or she is writing about understandable

and moving to someone who has never been there. All good

writing has that kind of transcendence. It doesn't mean

being something called `international'; there is no such

thing.3

1 Malcolm Bradbury, ed., The Atlas of Literature. London: De Agostini, 1996, 8.

2 Carol Shields, The Republic of Love. London: Flamingo, 1993, 121-22.

3 Earl Ingersoll, ed., Margaret Atwood: Conversations, London: Virago, 1992, 143.