f. characteristics, themes, motifs in Canadian Literature

Motifs and Patterns
Some commentators have interpreted literary indirectness politically and psychologically, finding in it a sign of national insecurity and a group feeling of inferiority. Others argue that indirectness is a healthy demonstration of the culture's ability to adapt an inherited tongue to its own purposes. Although the national character is not always the subject of literature, the culture's social attitudes and values can be seen in the language and forms it uses.

Several specific narrative patterns recur in Canadian writing (1) a community walls itself off from the wilderness (the "garrison mentality"); (2) a person leaves the homeland, adjusts to the new world, then finds the "homeland" to be "alien"; (3) a person born in Canada feels like a permanent stranger in his or her own home; (4) people arrive in the new home only to find that they are excluded from power; (5) a person attempts to recover from the past the secret or suppressed life of a previous generation; (6) a woman struggles to come to terms with her own creativity and the inhibitions of her cultural upbringing (often told as conflict between colony and empire); (7) an apparently passive observer, surrounded by articulate tricksters and raconteurs, turns out to be able to tell both their story and his own, often ironically; (8) an adventurer turns failure into a form of grace; (9) a child grows up to inherit a world of promise, or a world of loss, or usually both at once; (10) a subjective historian meditates on place and memory; (11) a character celebrates space and wilderness, usually after a struggle to learn to accept that the wilderness provides spiritual therapy only on its own terms.

To epitomize the character of their society, many writers have portrayed historical figures, such as Samuel HEARNE, Louis RIEL, Susanna Moodie, Sir John A. MACDONALD, Emily CARR and William Lyon MACKENZIE, each possessing a vision, but still an ordinary, less than heroic, frail human being.

Settings often possess a symbolic dimension. Catholic Québec recurrently figures as a land of mystery, attractive but enthralling and morally dangerous; Ontario as an enigmatic blend of moral uprightness and moral evasiveness; Atlantic Canada as a repository of old values; the North as a land of vision; the Prairies as a land of isolation and acquisition; and the West Coast as a dream of the future in which people often mistakenly believe. Europe often appears as the home of refinement and discrimination, the US as a land of crass achievement and tangible success, and Africa as the embodiment of all that seems "other" to Protestant rationalism. The land itself is recurrently associated with power, whether as property, region, a hostile force, the site of communication, a godly gift, the contested territory of competing cultural claims, the border, or the ecological medium in which human life integrates with all other living beings in Nature.

Although most Canadians live in cities, until recently writers used rural and small-town settings more frequently than urban ones, and they often ignored problems of class, race and poverty. From early on, however, writers such as Frances BROOKE, Susanna MOODIE, Sara Jeannette DUNCAN and Nellie MCCLUNG have been important analysts of Canadian political life. Often they sharply pointed out social divisions within Canada that male adventure writers ignored or underplayed.

"Regional" writing also conveyed political stances, for by rejecting a single definition of "Canada," it asserted the viability of a nation with a plural character (see REGIONALISM IN LITERATURE). Increasingly, moreover, native writers and writers who draw on ethnic backgrounds other than western European ones have examined the social limitations and political opportunities of Canadian pluralism. Among such writers are Beatrice Culleton, Tomson HIGHWAY, Rohinton MISTRY, Neil BISSOONDATH, Smaro Kamboureli, Joy KOGAWA and Paul Yee (see ETHNIC LITERATURE).

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