The Realistic Animal Story in Canadian Children’s Literature: Northrop Frye’s Garrison Mentality in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known

Abstract

This paper aims to examine Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known through the lens of Northrop Frye’s garrison mentality thesis. According to Frye, the garrison mentality refers to a particularly Canadian response to elementary fear of the harsh Canadian wilderness. In this environment, Canadians make every effort to build both physical and psychological shields of civilization. The realistic animal stories in Wild Animals tackle Frye’s garrison mentality. Seton thinks that Canadian frontiersmen share the same fate with wild animals in the hostile natural environment. Such an ending in Wild Animals hints at the inescapable food chain that nonhuman beings face in the uncivilized natural world; it also ironically implies the triumph of civilization over exceptionally talented individual wild animals, which display both intellectual and moral abilities to survive in the harsh Canadian wilderness. At the same time, under the circumstance that the garrison mentality hardly works, the wretched of the wild nature cast people’s mind back to their innermost anxiety on the hostile nature.