Pre- and Post-Mortem: Regendering and Serial Killing in Rioux, Dandurand, Dé, and Atwood

Abstract

When Northrop Frye wrote his now-famous concluding essay for 1965 Literary History of Canada, he argued that Canadians historically have had significant respect for law and order face of mammoth, threatening, and sometimes monstrous wilderness space. Although Frye uses European existentialism and Russian Revolution as examples of different social structures and philosophies, his underlying comparison throughout essay is, fact, between Canada and United States. Assuming Canada's overriding mythology to be pastoral, Frye found it an easy step to emphasize that Canada, unlike United States with its history of revolution and technological productivity, is on a quest for peaceable kingdom (249). Following Frye's lead, and writing a few years later, historians such as William Kilbourn have extended Frye's assertion; writing Quest for Peaceable Kingdom, Kilbourn suggests that British North America (BNA) Act sets up objectives of peace, order and good government (49) and, further developing assumed contrast between Canada and United States, argues that in a masculine world of assertive will and cutting edge of intellect, a certain Canadian tendency to amorphous permissive feminine principle of openness and toleration and acceptance offers possibility of healing (53). Both Frye's emphasis on peace and Kilbourn's--and other historians'--willingness to gender North America so casually have been roundly debunked. Contemporary theorists and critics rightly point to absurdities inherent such stereotyped generalities and place more emphasis, as Linda Hutcheon does, on irony, mentioned but only peripherally developed by Frye terms of Canada. For example, Hutcheon suggests that Canadians (and we must include here Quebecois) have made of border a marginal, postmodern space from which they can effectively use parody and irony both on themselves and certainly, as well, on their neighbors south of border. Yet, with or without irony, people living Canada/Quebec continue to contrast their society with that of United States, emphasizing Canada's careful gun laws, its unwillingness to subject its population to more bizarre results of mass-reporting frenzies and, somewhat smugly, pointing to general stability and safeness of its cities. Given this, it stands to reason, then, that Canadians/ Quebecois may well have a particular paranoia about boundaries, as Judith Halberstam uses this term about Gothic her 1995 book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and Technology of Monsters (36), and be invested keeping their own boundaries intact, perhaps most seriously because, as David Flaherty and Frank Manning note their preface to The Beaver Bites Back, one of more recurrent contemporary symbols of Canadian is the sense of an uncertain, ironic, ambivalent, and self-contradictory identity (xii). Writers are, however, not confined to borders. With increasing control of Canadian mass media by culture of United States these days, violence has become daily fare on television shown Canada/Quebec, films from United States, and even news reported throughout Canada. One need only turn on a television set connected to cable in, say, Saskatoon; there, American networks are provided by feeds from Detroit, one-time murder capital of U.S. In this discussion we are interested both ways which Canadian/Quebecois writers deal with violence--in this case, extreme of serial killing--and, further, going back to gendering of Canada as a feminine country, how women writers particular unsettle any causal links between fact and fantasy. In Force of Fantasy, Judith Butler discusses power of real to limit and fix interpretation. Writers, however, create fantasy, and it is at level of fantasy, according to Butler, that proliferation of identities prevents postulation of singular identities. …