The Glasgow Review Issue 3
Re-Figuring Imperialism: Gray, Cohen, Atwood & the Female Body
Christopher E Gittings
O Tongue of the Nation! Why don't you speak for yourself?
Leonard Cohen
Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, political or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing, or maintaining an empire
Michael W. Doyle
Doyle's definition of imperialism describes the Scotland constructed by Alasdair Gray in 1982, Janine and the Canadas written by two novelists he identifies as influences on his text, Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood. Gray cites Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature as sources for ideas he 'could steal and use' in his composition of 1982, Janine. In both countries, first England and then the United States act as the dominating power. Edward Said cites Doyle's definition in his own conceptualization of empire in Culture and Imperialism. Although it includes Australia and Ireland, Said's study excludes Canada and Scotland, countries where similar patterns of imperial authority have been inscribed. The Scot and the Canadian descendant of white settler-invader culture share the doubled space of colonizer/colonized; they are both agents of and subjects to imperial processes. Gray's 1982, Janine, Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Atwood's Surfacing contest the cultural, political and economic hegemony of an imperial other by allegorizing colonized territory as a bondage and violation of the female body. This paper places Gray's novel in a larger, comparative context to examine the problematic 'use' of women's bodies by colonizing and decolonizing narratives.
Cultural history is replete with the bodies of women who have been imported into the visual iconography of patriarchal political systems to personify the state: Marianne in France, Britannia in the United Kingdom, Alba in Scotland, and Cathleen ni Houlihan in Ireland. Britannia was modelled on Athena the Goddess of War, but Britannia herself was originally conceived of as a subordinate, half-naked woman at the feet of the conquering Roman Emperor Claudius. The British Empire allegorized its hegemonic relationship to its colonies in a mother-daughter image, a representation more palatable for 19th-century Victorians than the lascivious emblem of Roman imperialism, although perhaps not as truthful. Mother, or Britannia had herm-aphrodite powers and could transform herself/itself into a penetrating phallic entity. This phallic potential was manifest in male colonists who were invited to inscribe their British authority on overseas territories.
Imperial British iconography traditionally depicted Canada allegorically, as a passive woman waiting for the male British emigrant to till her soil and violate her forests. Scottish authors contributed to this system of representation in pamphlets and books published to encourage emigration to Canada as this verse from John Murray Gibbon's Scots in Canada (1911) illustrates:
I am the land that listens; I am the land that broods,
Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline water and woods;
I wait for the man who will win me, and I will not be won in a day;
And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
But by men with the hearts of Vikings, and the simple faith of a child.
Although the voice of a personified female Canada 'speaks' this invitation to Scottish men, her utterance renders her mute; Canada, as constructed by this Scottish text, is the land that 'listens' to the colonizing voice. This imperial cosmology conceives Canada as an empty space to be filled by a Scottish voice. The female subject of Canada expresses a desire to be taken by force; she wishes to be conquered by 'Vikings.' Here allegory is truly 'other speaking':
(allos = other + agoreuein = to speak);
through Gibbon's figuration of Canada the Empire speaks for the colony. The gendered discourse of imperial allegory, from the Roman tableau of Claudius and Britannia, to this image of a Canada that waits to be acted upon, is - in Andrea Dworkin's terms - a pornographic signifying system:
The word pornography does not mean 'writing about sex' or 'depictions of nude bodies' or 'sexual representations' or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores.
Gray, Cohen and Atwood appropriate the allegorical representation of the female body from the empire to expose the colonial process as rape of the body or territory for the economic and sexual satisfaction of the imperial power. These writers dismantle the civilized façades of British, French and American imperialism, to uncover the brutal Roman tableau of Empire at their cores where the colonized is translated into a whore by the colonizing gaze. They write the types of allegory Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin describe as postcolonial counter-discourses. Allegory, a trope that operates through a dialogue with previously existing signs, enables 'historyless peoples' - such as Canadians and Scots whose histories have been written by an Other - to reappropriate and reinterpret the concept of history as it relates to a rewriting of their past. Slemon's work on allegory in postcolonial writing provides a useful lens through which to read 1982, Janine, Surfacing and Beautiful Losers. For Slemon
allegory becomes the site upon which post-colonial [sic] cultures seek to contest and subvert colonial appropriation through the production of a literary and specifically anti-imperialist figurative opposition or textual counter-discourse ('Monuments of Empire', p. 11).
Atwood's Surfacing uses an ironic allegory to collapse the silencing iconography of imperialism. The narrative images the multinationals' objectification and violation of Canadian resources by figuring the narrator as a Canada who feels that Americans 'have been sent to hunt for [her],' that she'll be mistaken for 'a naked woman wrapped in a blanket: possibly that's what they've come here for,' she says 'if it's running around loose, ownerless, why not take it.' The allegorical level of the text becomes quite clear when this American 'hunt' for sex is juxtaposed to that nation's lust for Canadian property. Bill Malmstrom, a representative of the American Wildlife Protection Agency, a group with a 'flourishing little branch' in Canada, wants the narrator's tract of land to do a 'little hunting and fishing' (p. 188). The character David also constructs colonization as a patriarchal system, he parodies an anthem celebrating the British acquisition of Canada as 'The Maple Beaver For Ever' :
In days of yore, from Britain's shore
Wolfe, the gallant hero, came:
It spread all o'er the hooer house floor
On Canada's fair domain. (p. 113)
David relates the British colonization of Canada to sexual violation by replacing a line from 'The Maple Leaf Forever,' which describes the planting of Britain's flag in Canadian soil, with the pornographic image of British semen spreading over Canadian territory following penetration on the floor of a brothel. This metaphor equates colonized territory with sexual violence against women. Atwood's narrative plays on the doubled meaning of beaver in David's title; beaver is the animal icon for Canada that appears on a nickel, and also slang for female genitalia. The image of prostitution points to the collusion of Canadians in what is constructed as an economic transaction between colonized and colonizer. This image places the imperial project in the context of pornography as writing about whores and their activities; imperialism reduces Canada to a sexual slave perpetually available and dependent upon relations with the dominating patriarchal power. Atwood writes about the collusion of the colonial victim with the imperial victor in her thematic guide to Canadian literature Survival. According to Atwood, the first step out of victimization is recognizing complicity and 'repudiating the Victim role' by directing anger against 'the real source of oppression,' and channelling energy 'into constructive action.' In Surfacing that anger is channelled toward the United States and Britain by allegorizing both powers as rapists, but it is also directed at Canadians who refuse to recognize the role they play in their own victimization.
Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine also represent their respective countries' relations with Empire as pornographic violations of the female body. Both authors allegorize the female body as colonized territory, a fetish object subject to sexual penetration. The historical Iroquois saint Catherine Tekakwitha and her double, Edith are brutally raped by colonizing forces in Cohen's novel. And, as it does in Atwood's, and Gray's narratives, multi-national capitalism provides a context for rape in Beautiful Losers. Cohen's aboriginal, French-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian love triangle allegorises the past and present phases of Canada's colonial history. Edith is penetrated with ball point pens, twigs, and pipes wielded by the descendants of the original French colonists in an American-owned Quebec quarry. Cohen conflates twentieth-century U. S. multinational capitalism with 17th-century French imperialism in the rape of Edith, constructing both discourses as violent and damaging manifestations of male lust and power. As Sylvia Söderlind has observed, the allegory becomes literalized; Edith is raped, but synecdochically she, like Tekakwitha, represents a collective manifestation of colonial processes on Canada. Commenting on Edith's sexual assault, the narrator writes:
No wonder the forests of Quebec are mutilated and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the saplings. Bittersweet is the cunt sap of a thirteen year old. O Tongue of the Nation! Why don't you speak for yourself? Can't you see what is behind all this teen-age advertising? Is it only money? What does 'wooing the teen-age market' really mean? ... Look at all those thirteen-year-old legs on the floor spread in front of the tv screen. Is it only to sell them cereals and cosmetics? Madison Avenue is thronged with hummingbirds who want to drink from those barely haired crevices. ... Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Abishag to warm its bed. (p. 62)
In this passage the trees cut down with crucifix saws establish a relationship between the Jesuits who were imperial agents for Paris during the golden age of empire-building, and global American economic desires in the novel's present.
Here, the author's allegory connects the rape of the forest, not only with the rape of Edith, but also with the psychological rape of thirteen year old girls in general by the discourse of a neo- imperialist consumer culture: advertising. In Cohen's text advertising shapes the bodies of young women and the Canadian market into corrupt objects of desire for the financial and sexual gratification of Madison Avenue executives. American television sells far more than cosmetics and cereals to Canada; as Cohen's rhetorical question implies, it also sells a way of life, and a value system that displaces indigenous cultural forms.
Allegory is dependent on anterior signs, and the rape of Edith by imperial others recalls the Catholic Church's violation of Native culture, and the violation of Saint Tekakwitha. During her ordeal Edith cries out to Tekakwitha for help. Tekakwitha died from the extreme penitential lifestyle the Jesuit priests encouraged her to pursue; this included a self-flagellation of her genitals. The Catholic church take away Tekakwitha's culture, and her identity through baptism, and assume control of her body in life through a denial of the flesh, and in death by importing it into the pantheon of Saints. Under the auspices of the Jesuit brotherhood the body of Tekakwitha in the form of Holy relics is translated into a sign for Catholicism in the New World. The French Catholic image of her body is 'other speaking,' an allegory for the Christianizing of Canada's First Nations. Ultimately Cohen's narrative reconstructs the colonizing discourses of the Vatican and Madison Avenue as pornographic; imperialism and multinational capitalism are systems which exploit or - in Cohen's language - 'fuck one person for the entertainment, and benefit of an Other'.
Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine is influenced by Atwood's and Cohen's subversions of Empire. Gray transgresses the dominant and harmonizing historiography of Scotland's Union with England by allegorizing the ramifications of this union as a series of brutal rapes. Atwood's partial definition of the term 'colony' as a 'place where profit is made, but not by the people who live there' (Survivall, p. 35) could quite readily be transposed to the Scotland of Gray's 1982, Janine, where he maintains Scottish capital is sucked to the south of England. Of course, one major difference between Canada's political situation and Scotland's is the former's position as an autonomous state that initiated decolonization from Great Britain in 1867, while Scotland is a nation that was reduced to provincial status in a global empire after the political Union of 1707.
Gray's Jock McLeish, an alcoholic employed as a security systems supervisor, tells his life story and inadvertently reinvents himself through a subconscious psychological process that eventually explodes into his conscious thoughts. Jock settles down with a bottle of whisky in a hotel room in what could be Peebles, Greenock, or Selkirk for an evening of drinking and the performance of masturbatory bondage and rape fantasies. For Jock the sexual and the political are inseparable. An oppressed and damaged Scot, Jock brutally rapes imaginary women who are eventually revealed as allegorical referents for Jock and Scotland. The fracturing of these wicked fantasies by the persistent surfacing of a traumatic national and personal past he is trying to suppress brings about Jock's near death and his descent into a space he recognizes as hell.
Echoing Atwood's and Cohen's treatment of first English, and then American involvement in Canadian affairs, Gray textualizes the aggressive cultural and economic incursions of England and America into Scotland by conflating national power struggles with the struggle for autonomy between genders in the allegoric structure of Jock's pornographic fantasies. Jock's lover Sontag emphasizes the political nature of his sexual fantasies when she responds to his request that they forget about politics and return to sex ; she asks 'how can I forget politics when your fantasy has such a convincing political structure?' For as Sontag has commented previously, Jock's imagined Forensic Research Punishment and Sexual Gratification Clinic, the corporate headquarters of his imaginary international rape cartel, is disturbingly true to life:
This combination brothel and police station which you have devised is not, I hope you realise, a fantasy. A form of it exists in all nations except perhaps Scandinavia and the Netherlands. (p. 60)
Sontag goes on to recite a litany of horrific incidents where the rape of women is enacted by the patriarchal security structures which are entrusted with the protection of the public from sexual assault (pp. 60-61). Moreover, the 'convincing political structure' of the rape fantasy, its relation to multinational capitalism, is elucidated in Jock's 'A RECIPE FOR PORNOGRAPHY' (p. 29). Suggesting that pornography should offer the reader a series of masturbatory climaxes before delivering a final and tumultuous orgasm, Jock says that he will structure his fantasy like a historian describing the causes and effects of World War Two:
I will work like a historian describing in turn Germany Britain France Russia America China, showing depression and dread growing within each for domestic reasons, but distracted by challenges and threats from abroad until the heads of government move to their controls in the hidden bunkers, and make certain declarations, and then the tanks start rolling through the streets with evacuations, concentration camps, firestorms, frantic last-minute propaganda and the awful togetherness of total calamity before the last huge final bang. That is how a big piece of pornography should go. (p. 29)
Imperial powers, however, need not resort to military means to violate a country. Jock articulates what he sees as the destruction that multinational capitalism has wreaked on Scotland:
Our firms have been bought by bigger non-Scottish firms and then reduced in size or closed. Scottish investors prefer putting their money into business which operates in coolie nations where trade unions never had a chance. (p. 136)
The recognition of Scottish collusion in this process is an important element of Jock's re- membering of self and national history. Jock's victimization of self as it is manifest in the rape of Janine is a constant in Gray's delineation of the Scottish colonial experience. Furthermore, Jock links the erosion of the Scottish economy by foreign agents with interference in the nation's cultural production, stating that the Edinburgh Festival is 'mostly the work of foreigners' (p. 136). Gray develops this theme in Something Leather, where an upper-class English character reveals that the cultural production of Scotland, a country 'slightly like Rhodesia in the early yias [sic] of this century' (p. 172) is 'directed and mostly administrated by the English, of course' (p. 174). Gray subordinates the Received Pronounced English of upper class discourse here by reducing it to one english among many, a dialect which he reproduces phonetically.
Gray begins to dismantle imperial discourse through a figurative process that is reminiscent of Atwood's and Cohen's novels; he re-reads and then re-writes the imperial project in the language of conquest, subjugating and demarcating the Scottish landscape and juxtaposing these violations of the landscape with violations of the female body. Gray's feminization of Scotland as a captive woman subjected to the driving of a male's 'stiff etcetera again and again through her etcetera' is a structure which signifies the forceful penetration of the Scottish landscape by a dominant Other (p. 106). His imaging of Scotland as a country 'wired' for war where '[B]etween Loch Lomond and Gareloch one hill at least is honeycombed with galleries where the multimegaton warheads are stockpiled' (p. 136), and a Clyde awash with 'American and British missile submarines' is reminiscent of Atwood's concerns about American military installations that inscribed their authority on Canadian territory (Surfacing , p. 3).
In Gray's complicated allegorical design Jock is at once a figuration of Scotland and of Janine. Jock's self-generated rape victim is herself the manifestation of his divided soul and so a signifier for Scotland. Jock links the rape and exploitation of Scottish natural resources with his physical violation of Janine in his diatribe against the failure of the Scots to secure Home Rule, and Westminster's subsequent ability to 'spend the North Sea oil reserves building a fucking tunnel under the English Channel' (p. 66). In the heat of this monologue Jock tries to divert his attention away from the political 'fucking' of Scotland to the sexual 'fucking' of his imaginary women: '... cool down cool down you are goading yourself into a FRENZY my friend think about fucking Superb, think about fucking Janine, don't think about fucking POLITICS' (p. 66). Yet again traversing the novel's multivalent narrative matrix of rape fantasy, Scotland's political and cultural history, and his own personal past Jock explains how the Scotland he imagines to be 'shaped as a fat messy woman' (p. 28) has been raped:
But if a country is not just a tract of land but a whole people then clearly Scotland has been fucked. I mean that word in the vulgar sense of misused to give satisfaction or advantage to another. (p. 136)
Jock argues that Scottish oil resources will neither benefit Scotland nor the whole of Britain: 'now most of our oil goes to Americans who pay less for it than we do, and they'll have exhausted the supply within twenty-five years' (p. 145). Jock's will to self-allegorization is acknowledged in a discussion of his development of the Janine narratives:
I had started telling myself stories about a very free attractive greedy woman who, confident in her powers begins an exciting adventure and finds she is not free at all but completely at the disposal of others. As I aged the story grew very elaborate. The woman is corrupted into enjoying her bondage and trapping others into it. I did not notice that this was the story of my own life. I avoided doing so by insisting on the femaleness of the main character. (p. 193)
Jock responds to the pressure exerted by the operations of multi-national capitalism by inventing 'someone else,' Janine, upon whom he can transpose the bondage and torture he experiences.
The experiences of Jock and Janine recall Atwood's theorization of the colonial victim syndrome in Survival, a study which influenced Gray's thoughts and work during the writing of his novel. Jock 'chose to work for the trapmakers' at National Security, ironically undermining Scottish culture and his own sense of self (1982, Janine p.215). Jock, by his wilful entry into the trap of colonialism, is complicit in his subsequent objectification as colonial performer. Acknow-ledging that some elements of a colonial culture benefit from colluding with imperial powers, Gray articulates one of the obstacles encountered by Scotland in the decolonization process. Jock self-consciously parallels his complicity in his objectification with his alter-ego Janine; commenting on a scene in which Janine accepts money from her agent to compromise herself in a performance at the Forensic Research Institute, Jock says:
And I have placed this last bit of dialogue very carefully. Later when Janine is trapped and trying to escape, she will remember that she was given a chance to leave and refused because of money. (p. 26)
Similarly, Jock refuses to
deplore the process which has helped [him] become the sort of man [he] want[s] to be: a selfish shit but a comfortable selfish shit, like everyone I meet nowadays. The militarisation and depression has been good for the security business. (p. 137)
Jock McLeish may be plotted on Atwood's BASIC VICTIM POSITIONS CONTINUUM at a point which is, as Atwood writes, where 'you can distinguish between the role of Victim (which probably leads you to seek victimization even when there's no call for it), and the objective experience that is making you a victim'(Survival p.38). The major activity of this position is "repudiating the Victim role" by directing anger against 'the real source of oppression,' and channelling energy 'into constructive action' (Survival p. 38). Presumably, Jock's author has already arrived at this position by the time he begins to write his narrative. Jock, however, moves from acknowledging his victimization as predetermined to taking affirm-ative action; he endeavours to dismantle the imperial system that victimizes him. Part of this decolonizing process is the creation of a figurative counter-discourse which provides the colony with a means of escape from the exploitation of the imperial trap. Jock accomplishes this by transforming the allegorical structures for the imperial rape performance Max enacts upon Janine into a structure which could potentially liberate her:
Why should Janine feel helpless when she realizes Max has lied to her and is abducting her? He is driving a fast car along a motorway, his hands are occupied if she removes one of her ridiculous shoes and threatens his eye with the heel he will certainly stop or change direction if he sees she is serious. (1982, Janine , p. 194)
Jock struggles to escape objectification by resigning from National Security and confronting honest versions of Scotland's past, for as he says he "will not do nothing" (p. 340). At the end of the novel Jock lists the things he will do to subvert his victimization:
I will work among the people I know; I will not squander myself in fantasies; I will think to a purpose, think harder and drink less. I will be recognised by my neighbours; I will converse and speak my mind. (p. 340)
Similar to Cohen's narrative, Jock's pornographic scenarios are imported from America which he describes as 'a land of endless pornographic possibility' (p. 17). Incursions of dominating American cinematic texts infect the imaginations of Cohen's and Gray's narrators, providing them with the master/slave paradigm upon which they construct their gendered allegorical counter-discourses. Jock's first encounter with the sexual objectification of woman is in the form of a publicity photo of Jane Russell - one of the original pin-up girls - as she appears in the Hollywood film The Outlaw: 'her blouse pulled off both shoulders, leaning back against some straw' (p. 19). This image of Jane Russell is juxtaposed with our first encounter with Janine who is manipulated by Jock's imagination in a similar manner (p. 18). Beneath Jock's twisted images of female and male relations is a moral man whose imagination cannot sustain the sick fantasies that his split and damaged psyche demand. Explaining the development of his Janine fantasies Jock touches on the damaging and learned male roles of rescuer and torturer of women, and his inability to sustain these unrealistic fantasies:
When I had freed her from the Roman arena the pirates or the Gestapo, she vanished. I couldn't believe in her any more. She was a decent girl in those days, like the girls in my class at school, and I was decent too. But the balls sank into my scrotum, the wet dreams began, I gained a crude notion of what to put where, and now Janine has only one thing in common with the attractive women I know, she never stays long with me if she can leave. (p. 16)
In Gray's novel the images of American popular culture are written as a destructive pornography that contours an unbalanced construction of the self. Jock is driven to alcoholism, self-loathing and finally a failed suicide attempt, partly by the degrading fantasies which he uses to suppress his past and his inability to confront that past. After washing back three handfuls of pills, Jock's pornography-depraved imagination produces a scene in which Big Mamma leads around a 'leashed tethered barefoot nude-under-white denim-dungarees Superb' while another voice of his fractured psyche cries out in despair: 'Stop seeing, stop thinking such things I am not a very bad man parents were good folk were noble folk in a quiet way what condemns me to this filth filth filth ...' (p. 178).
The locus for a destabilizing of hegemonic signifying systems in Beautiful Losers is the System Theatre, a cinematic space where the newsreel merges with the feature (pp. 237-238), a contemporary palace of worship where Marilyn Monroe, a sexual object, is linked to Saint Catherine Tekakwitha, a sacred object. The narrator imagines that his contemporary search for Tekakwitha adumbrates a future scholar's quest for 'Lady Marilyn' (p. 4). One woman's body is transformed by the Hollywood star system into a commodified relic to sell American culture, while the other's is translated by the Jesuits into a commod-ified relic in a 'technicolour postcard' selling Catholicism (p. 4). In the tradition of allegorical carnivalization, Cohen's and Gray's texts read and appropriate the incursive pretexts of American cinema, and rewrite these colonizing sign systems counter-discursively as an assault on their respective cultures.
Although Gray, Cohen and Atwood endeavour to decolonize their cultures by re-reading and re- figuring self and nation as women raped by what they perceive to be the patriarchal structure of imperialism, the male textualization of pornography to signify victimization in Beautiful Losers and 1982, Janine marks its alterity to Atwood's female inscription. Surfacing relates the objectification of woman by man from a female perspective while Gray's and Cohen's novels depict men who construct pornographic paradigms in which women are tortured and raped. The element of pornography, defined by Susan Kappeler 'as one of the most patriarchal structures in our culture,' problematizes the allegories of Cohen and Gray. Dworkin reminds us that "the sexual colonization of women's bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women's bodies." Are Gray and Cohen merely reinscribing the sexual colonization of the female body? Does Cohen's construction of Tekakwitha re-enact the Jesuit writing on the body of the aboriginal Other? And where does this leave Atwood? Although all three writers necessarily reinscribe violence against women and the colonial subject in their appropriation of the colonizer's discourse, they do so in an ironic context where the sign systems of imperialism are reconfigurated to unmask imperial practice as destructive. At the risk of what Kappeler and other critics might perceive as my collusion with Cohen and Gray to exonerate pornography, I would argue that in Beautiful Losers and 1982, Janine, the pornographic is not employed to titillate the male reader, thereby affirming patriarchal dominance under the valorizing rubric of the literary. Rather, Cohen and Gray create these figures to sicken and repulse the reader. Beautiful Losers and 1982, Janine describe the damage caused by what both writers regard as the pornography of multinational capitalism and imperialism: systems which legitimize the 'misuse' of one group for the 'satisfaction or advantage' of 'another' (1982, Janine , p. 136).
Notes
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers, (Toronto: 1966, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart (NCL), 1991), p. 62. All further references are from this edition, and are identified parenthetically in the text by page number.
Michael W. Doyle, Empires, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 45.
Letter to the author, March 1992.
For an extended discussion of Canadian and Scottish Literatures in the context of postcolonialism see: Gittings, "Canada and Scotland:
Conceptualising 'Post-Colonial' Spaces in Testing the Limits:
Postcolonial Theories and Canadian Literatures, Essays on Canadian Writing (forthcoming).
See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: Allegory of the Female Form, (London: Pan Books, 1987), Fig. 19.
John Murray Gibbon, Scots in Canada: A History of the Settlement of the Dominion from the Earliest Days to the Present Time, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Ltd., 1911), p. 162.
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, (New York: 1981, London: The Women's Press, 1981), p.200.
Stephen Slemon, 'Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter- Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing,' Kunapipi, IX, 1987, p. 12 and Helen Tiffin, 'Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of History,' The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIII.1, 1988, pp. 169-181.
Colonial historiography reconstructed the negligible amount of Canadian and Scottish history that was taught in the public school systems of both countries from a predominantly English perspective. This Anglocentric approach to history has been displaced over the last century by Canadians and Scots who have begun to re-write their pasts. As Scottish historian Rosalind Mitchison writes 'There has been very little Scottish history in the experience of school children, beyond stories about Robert the Bruce and other monarchs and some naming of battle sites. Some prejudices, particularly those shown in Sir Walter Scott's The Grandfather have also been incorporated. But otherwise history has mainly meant English history.' See, 'The Purpose of this Book,' Why Scottish History Matters, ed. Rosalind Mitchison, (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1991), p. viii.
Steven Slemon, 'Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History,' Journal of Commonwealth Literature (XXII, 1, 1988) pp. 157-168.
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, (Toronto: 1973. London: Virago, 1979), p.77. All further references are from this edition, and are identified parenthetically in the text by page number.
See Dworkin's discussion of the porne (brothel slut) available to all male citizens of ancient Greece, op.cit., pp. 199-200.
Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), p.38. All further references are from this edition, and are identified parenthetically in the text by page number.
Sylvia Söderlind, Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Québécois Fiction, (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), p 45.
For a discussion of the events leading up to Union, and the ramifications of the treaty see P. H. Scott, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union, (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Limited, 1992).
Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), p. 67. All further references are from this edition, and are identified parenthetically in the text by page number.
Alasdair Gray, Something Leather, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 172 and p. 174.
Letter to the author, March 1992.
See Söderlind, op.cit., p. 45.
Stephen Slemon, 'Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter- Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing,' Kunapipi, IX, 1987, p. 12
Susan Kappeler, 'The White Brothel: The Literary Exoneration of the Pornographic,' Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Feminist Review, (London: Virago Press, 1987), p. 329.
Dworkin, op.cit., p. 203.