Published in 1832 to little acclaim, the creation of an unsuccessful writer who would die twenty years later of malnutrition, John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, The Prophecy; A Tale of the Canadas did not come into its own until the final quarter of the next century. Surviving as a children’s book, savaged by a number of abridgements, this first long fiction to appear from the pen of a native-born Canadian writer continues to interest critics and scholars, who continue to insist on its importance. Why?
Certainly not for its formal virtues. This recounting of the doom of a colonizing military family, trapped within the earthquake of Native Canadian resistance to European imperial domination, is not a smoothly-finished product. Wacousta’s dialogue is stilted, stagey and verbose, its plot ultimately preposterous, its narrative a lurch between parallel melodramatic streams and episodes. Yet Wacousta, for all its ungainliness remains of significant historical interest. It created a century-long model for the imaginative projection of Canadian space and time, and for the exploitation of that model within the Anglo-American literary marketplace.
As constructed in Wacousta, the Canadian environment—cultural and material—is marked by three major attributes. It is exotic, indeterminate, and Gothic in nature. These attributes most engage the reading public when packaged within the formal medium of the historical novel as conceived by Sir Walter Scott, itself a perennially-popular genre in the literary marketplace.
To explain: locating the adventure narrative within a danger-filled, taxing wilderness environment implicitly defines Canadian space as an other to an increasingly urbanized European reading public living within a tightly controlled space. Canada thus occupies a position within the series of the numerous developing colonialized spaces whose geographic and biological features had come to absorb trans-Atlantic attention. That branding of uniqueness has proven an abiding asset when creating a metropolitan market for local materials.
The indeterminacy of such spaces arises not only from their unmapped or not-fully-mapped nature, but also from the economic systems functioning within such environments. Thus Wacousta reflects an imperial/commercial system in which whites and natives are not housed in discrete locations, but instead thrown together in roles at times adversarial, at times cooperative, in both peace and war. This was the case with the fur trade, the most productive of the enterprises driving the European penetration of the continent’s interior in the mid-Eighteenth century setting of the novel. It was a commercial and military world which John Richardson knew from his family’s occupation, and the trade’s reliance upon the interdependence of native and colonial cultures is reflected obliquely by the novel’s events. For no single racial side in Wacousta can be viewed without at least a glance at the other.
Within such a world of dramatic contrasts, appearances cloak the reality of past betrayals and intrigues, while vast engines of revenge and retribution appear to enmesh innocent and stalwart characters who stand horror-struck in the face of the apparently motiveless wickedness of their adversaries. For the ruined castle of Euro-Gothic, substitute the besieged wilderness stockade; for the corrupt aristocrat, the Satanically vital, fallen eponymous European of the novel. The disaster-strewn staples of Gothic convention determine the lurid, episodic course of this narrative.
Canada’s longest-ruling political leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King, characterized his country as having too much geography and not enough history. Wacousta imaginatively historicizes Canadian space. The 1763 native resistance movement widely (and erroneously) designated as “Pontiac’s Revolt” serves as Wacousta’s theater of action. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, dramatic historical events—often those set within the Anglo-French-American imperial struggles for control of what would eventually become Canadian space—serve as the setting for Canadian writers seeking to capture their share of the literary market.
Where are those gripping events that serve as fictional fodder to be found? In combat, personal and military, in the struggle that elicits heroic and exceptional behaviour from ordinary folk trapped within these global struggles. The Seven Years’ War insuring that British institutions would control a vast continent, the American Revolution whose refugees became the primal matter for English-Canadian settlement, the War of 1812 mythicized into a vindication of the onetime losers in the Revolutionary War: these became the staples of Canadian popular history and fiction alike, the building materials for the rise of a national consciousness that would flourish on the eve of the Great War.
However truncated a view of Canadian history this may now strike us as presenting (what happened to Canada’s aboriginal inhabitants?), such a concentration upon war’s alarms marked Canadian imaginative literary production. To put it another way, the popularity of historical fiction throughout the metropolitan English-speaking world presented Canadian writers with an avenue for the exploitation of their own national material, and John Richardson had been the first to have blazed that trail. Whether subsequent writers deliberately followed Richardson and Wacousta is less important than the fact that his was the discovery that the historical novel could serve as the vehicle for projecting Canadian material into the imagination of a metropolitan readership. This achievement carves out a place for Wacousta in any catalogue of Canadian literary creation.
Note: a complete Wacousta can be found online at GOOGLE books:
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