You Can’t Get There from Here

Small-town Ontario was not always a representative of the past. At one point in the nineteenth century, the small Ontario community was a place of future promise, of expanding social and economic opportunity, a status best represented in Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings, which documents life in Belleville in mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canada. Moodie presents Belleville in its full flourishing, as a place of opportunity and wealth. The descendants of the town’s earliest settlers “have become rich, and the village of log-huts and frame buildings has grown into a populous, busy, thriving town” (7). Moodie’s Belleville was burgeoning, its commercial and political significance on the rise, and its success at the time only held promise for even greater achievement in the future. Moodie writes: “The day of our commercial and national prosperity has dawned, and the rays of the sun already brighten the hill-tops” (38). Yet with the urbanization of the province, perspectives on the small town would change.

In the late nineteenth century, D.C. Scott published In the Village of Viger (1896), a story cycle in which a small community is at risk of passing into obscurity. The most distinct threat to the community, which sits placidly on the Blanche River, is the encroaching boundaries and social influence of the city. The short-story collection opens with these lines: “It was too true that the city was growing rapidly. As yet its arms were not long enough to embrace the little village of Viger, but before long they would be, and it was not a time that the inhabitants looked forward to with any pleasure … But while the beechgroves lasted, and the Blanche continued to run, it seemed impossible that any change could come” (9). Viger, a francophone village, symbolizes a shift in small-town representation; no longer are these settlements the budding communities of promise, but they and their representative values are threatened by the rise of the cities, which, literally and figuratively, exist just over the horizon.2 The town of Viger is fading and is described in shades of melancholic regret: “The houses … were old, and the village was sleepy, almost dozing, since the mill, behind the rise of land, on the Blanche had shut down. The miller had died; and who would trouble to grind what little grist came to the mill, when flour was so cheap?” (9). The time of this town has now passed, as its day-to-day life becomes increasingly dominated by the commercial and cultural life of the outside world. This work emblemizes a conception of the small town as a place left behind, a place dozing on the margins of currency, a place only gently nudged by the forces of progress, while the city bustles along to the staccato rhythm of modernity.

Gerald Lynch has argued that Scott’s story collection contains an anti-modern viewpoint and that it expresses Scott’s hope that a “humane modern world” could emerge along with the urbanization of the country, a world in which “such concepts as family, community, place, and identity could be redefined without losing their traditional functions” (The One 35). The city in this collection threatens the long-standing traditions cradled by the outlying towns and villages, and Lynch suggests that Scott’s story cycle seeks alternative methods by which the modern, urban world can be linked to the values of a traditional, rural past. Within a modern, urban nation, what the small town offers is not economic prosperity and social advancement, but rather a vision of traditional values that descend from the distant fog of the past. The small town offers that link: to step into the village is to step out of the degraded present and into a kinder, or at least knowable past. This portrait is the product of a perspective that is distinctly uneasy with the values, direction, and significance of modern urban life.

The rural community is cast in such a recuperative role in Adeline Teskey’s Where the Sugar Maple Grows (1901), a collection of sketches focused on characters in the community of Mapleton. Time stands still in Mapleton, as the narrator states: “I returned summer after summer to find little change – the village life was not subject to many variations” (10). What the community has become is an easily used trope that becomes shorthand for all of the things the city has lost: simple innocence, natural benevolence, charity, and kindness. These virtues have a temporal dimension, as they are rooted in a place that itself has changed little over time. The rapidly industrializing city has lost its way, and the residents of Mapleton who do venture into the metropolis are corrupted through ambition and greed. A trip back to Mapleton becomes a trip back in time in order to reconnect with the age-old values of the rural past, a notion regarding a rural retreat that remains strikingly potent to this day.

In 1912, Stephen Leacock published Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, a book similar to Teskey’s in form, but remarkably different in its assumptions regarding the small-town past and the big-city present. While the small town is still representative of a past – a collective past, as Leacock makes explicit at times – the narrator plays with the distance in time and space separating the small town and the city. No longer is the small town unreflexively relegated to a happier time and place, but rather that status is ironically questioned, and Leacock draws the reader’s attention not only to the urge to locate a better past in the outlying rural towns, but also to the process by which the rural towns and countryside become the site of memory and nostalgia. In so doing, he highlights the degree to which the province had become urbanized, and how the notion of rural virtues rooted in a past is, partly, the product of figments and phantoms projected onto that past. If small-town Ontario is the known past, it is manufactured partly by the urban present. Small-town Ontario, after Leacock, becomes a conscious legacy that incorporates the urban present into its representations of the rural past, and a legacy with which subsequent writers are in conversation.

Ontario small towns maintain a sense of the familiar in part because of their common physical characteristics. For instance, in his autobiography, Leacock suggests there are usually four churches, three taverns, a post office, and many competing stores in Ontario’s small towns (Boy 70). Margaret Atwood, in her discussion of Alice Munro’s works, concurs with Leacock’s catalogue of physical features: “Each has its red-brick town hall (usually with a tower), its post-office building and handful of churches of various denominations, its main street and residential section of gracious homes” (“Alice Munro”). This typicality is something James Reaney plays with in his poem “Instructions: How to Make a Model of the Town,” in which two speakers catalogue the buildings and streets of a town, and construct a model of it using fallen sticks, leaves, berries, and vegetables. The courthouse and churches become potatoes in the model, the houses are berries, the trees simply represented by their leaves, and the streets sticks.

A small town comprises recognizable physical features, and yet it isn’t necessarily these features that are its most important distinction; rather, it is the lack of anonymity afforded to its residents. The ideal of the small town nurtures an associated sense of belonging and comfort because of the human scale of towns themselves. In the anti-ideal, that lack of anonymity becomes a bane to its residents, a restriction and constriction all at once. Thus, a small town is not defined strictly by the number of its inhabitants, but rather by how that community’s physical scale allows people to interact with each other and identify with a sense of place. W.J. Keith provides a similar definition in his discussion of literary small-town Ontario, one that acknowledges how the tangibility of the town’s physical boundaries affects the relationships of those living within: “‘small town’ means any cohesive, distinctive, yet relatively compact human community” (148). The term “cohesive” might suggest a community in which relationships are communal and fraternal. Many Ontario authors, such as Alice Munro and James Reaney, make a distinction between a rural space and the small town, between farmers and townsfolk, through their intimate knowledge of differences in behaviour, manners, and education. This study sees the small town and its surrounding countryside as intimately linked, as two regions that compose a community’s sense of place, which, in many literary works, exists in opposition to a nearby urban centre’s imagined ethos. This study appreciates Keith’s definition because it allows the conceptual boundaries of the small town to encompass both townsfolk and farmer, not only because the small town is generally a service centre for these farmers, but also because farmers are a distinct, though often patronized, part of that human community. My usage of “rural,” therefore, refers to the town proper, the surrounding countryside, and to its spatially and socially marginal residents.

The city is a place in which familiarity is much harder to cultivate: while the cityscape itself may become familiar, the majority of people one encounters within it will forever be strangers. A town’s scale, in terms of its space and population, is comprehensible; it is an intimate place within which one can feel kinship with one’s neighbours and be aware of the whole life of the community. These limitations are exactly what contribute to the small town’s reputation as a kinder antithesis to the urban sphere. Raymond Williams claims that a small community still maintains an association with an ideal, more natural way of life: “a country community … is an epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the real substance of personal relationships” (165). The “real substance” suggests something elemental, something absent from the cities, something that has been lost in the headlong rush towards urban modernity: the small town offers a ready-made “sense of community.” Within this perspective, the small town is seen as possessing the stable value of a past that, in larger places, has been lost to unrelenting change. Although the British village concerns Williams, his characterization nicely encapsulates the larger myth of the small town as the organic or natural community, as a place dominated by inherent virtue and familiarity, and, most importantly, as part of a kinder rural sphere that provides a stark contrast to anonymous urban life.

The literary small town is part of a critical binary involving the imagined contrast of country and city, which are separated not only by space but also by a belief in their vastly different experiences – social, cultural, and environmental – that appear as inherent conditions of each polarized site. This structure of city and country is nowhere more explicit than in Matt Cohen’s 1974 novel, The Disinherited. Here, city and country life are fractured by irreconcilable differences, which are embodied by Erik and Richard Thomas: the former the errant son who runs away to the city, the latter the farming father displeased with his son’s choice. Here are Richard’s thoughts about his urbanite son: “every year in the city seemed to remove him further from his body, every motion and action preceded by that slight hesitation, the time it took to send the signal from wherever he had decided to locate the control centre” (138). While both urbanite and rural dweller can cross into the space of the other, neither can wholly or successfully integrate, since they themselves are marked by this divide: the urbanite, Erik, will never acquire the physical vigour to thrive in the country, while the rural dweller, Richard, will never be able to resign himself to the physical constraints of city life, as he recalls in past experience of the city: “I felt out of place … sitting in a metal machine running down a piece of pavement. We were being shuttled along like cardboard boxes” (41). This rural-urban split is, in some works, essential and irreconcilable. But why?

As literary tropes, neither country nor city can exist without the other, and each has a part in the conceptual formation of its alternative. W.H. New argues that the ambivalent “‘representative’ characteristics” of a city/non-city binary in Canadian literature are the product of “a mutual aspiration for and dismissal of the condition of the other” (Land Sliding 157). When the urban centre overwhelms or frightens because of its noise, violence, pace, or immorality, the small town only appears to offer a respite, an antithesis to the hustle and grind of the city. Alternatively, when the small town offers merely ignorance, intolerance, or sluggishness, the city becomes the exciting, vibrant, but often illusory goal towards which small-towners strive. This imaginative interplay between the rural and urban spheres rests at the heart of Ontario’s small-town literature.

In the late 1970s, Eli Mandel offered a concise statement on how the rural-urban binary operates in literature. He argues that small-town life is hardly the sole focus of small-town literature. He uses Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the most influential of Ontario’s literary small towns, as an example. Mariposa, he suggests, “exists only as a version of a town that we in the cities think we remember. Mariposa is not a place; it is a state of mind. It is the dream of innocence that we attach to some place other than here and now” (114). Mandel asserts that this town has nothing to do with representing an actual past, but that Mariposa is formed from a mixture of memory and desire: “[Leacock] plays on this dream of town and city: the city as an image of the small-town mind; the small-town as an image of the city mind. And in so playing, he gives us a clue as to how in poem and story, town and city are metaphors” (115). Mandel’s comments allude to how, in Sunshine Sketches at least, the dominant images of the country and the city are the products of reciprocal longing;3 Mariposa as small-town archetype does not simply emerge from depictions of small-town life, Mandel suggests, but is sculpted from across the spatial and conceptual distance between country and city. A “process of perception” has as significant a role in Mariposa’s representation as does Leacock’s representation of “place” (115).

By overemphasizing the “what” that small-town narrators construct, critics largely pass over “how” these narrators construct it – that is, the “process of perception” that Mandel claims is responsible for Mariposa’s characteristic ethos. For that reason, this study remains sceptical of the types of broad statements made on behalf of the small town’s culturally representative or non-representative status; the small-town past has just as much to do with remembering the past as it does with the individualized circumstances in which the remembering or imagining subject finds herself in the here and now. The small town may be a common setting in Canadian and specifically Ontarian literature, but the nature of its representation depends on the distance – temporal, spatial, or cultural – that separates the narrator from his small-town subject. This is demonstrated in subsequent treatments of the central image of the maple-shaded small-town streets offered by Teskey: “Tall sugar-maples stood here and there on either side of the street, and during the short fervid Canadian summer threw their grateful shade” (10). In Leacock’s consideration of that image in his autobiography, temporal-spatial distance allows him to state that small-town Ontario has fallen asleep under its somnolent maples: “the little Ontario town grew till the maples planted in its streets overtopped it and it fell asleep and grew no more” (Boy 109). Proximity to her subject, on the other hand, causes an Alice Munro narrator to infiltrate and destabilize Teskey’s and Leacock’s small-town image: “The street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards” (“Walker Brothers Cowboy” 3). Leacock’s distanced perspective allows him to cast the small town as part of the past, a quiescent thing enclosed by the shroud of its own entropy. Munro’s narrator stands under that canopy of leaves and shatters the integrity of Leacock’s static image. Where Leacock sees stagnation and repose, an enclosed, somewhat mournful image of finality, Munro sees continued, possibly malignant, growth.

Leacock’s and Munro’s narrators utilize two very different processes of perception. Leacock’s persona is separated from the small town by a distance that is central to nostalgia. Distance in time and space allows the nostalgic subject to see the remembered object more comprehensively, as a whole rather than its parts. Subsequently, this nostalgic perspective provides the past with an aura of comprehensibility, even comfort, as nostalgics conflate how they remember the past with that past’s reality. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Sunshine Sketches is simply a nostalgic text, as Leacock consistently and ironically plays with the distance that separates his narrator from Mariposa. The temporal, spatial, and cultural gap separating his narrator from the small town is very much a part of the narrative structure of other small-town texts. Of course, this distance is only rhetorical, built into the narrative structure itself, but it, in turn, effects a certain type of small-town past, one that ostensibly offers an imagined alternative or innocent precursor to modern urban existence; yet even the idyll represented by Mariposa is far more a comment on the need for memory’s consolation than it is a product of a sincere belief in a kinder, gentler rural past. The obverse, represented by Munro’s narrative technique, transcends the softening effects of memory to question the values commonly associated with the small town. Because rural and urban represent an imaginary binary in small-town Ontario texts, really a product of memory’s process, the nature of experience in a small town, Munro’s texts reveal, can be as complex and sophisticated as anything gained through urban life.

The contrast between rural and urban life in small-town Ontario literature is the product of urban narrators who reconstruct small-town Ontario from an urban space and time. This is not to suggest, however, that these narrators are simply nostalgic for a rural past, as this line of interpretation would not acknowledge that very rarely do these voices posit an uncomplicated social ideal within their versions of the small town. Mariposa, for instance, a town consistently contrasted by its narrator with its nameless urban counterpart and cited by numerous critics as an image of the Canadian past par excellence, neither functions nor fails to function as an ideal, but circumnavigates one through the narrator’s unrelenting irony. Mariposa can be read in the light of Leo Marx’s “complex pastoral,” a subgenre of the pastoral that “manage[s] to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony to a green pasture” (25). Identifying Mariposa as an example of a “complex pastoral” thus raises questions about why and how it is constructed as such: what symptom of modernity does Mariposa soothe for those wealthy club men deep in the heart of the city for whom the town is manifested, and what are the ramifications of the town’s eventual dissolution in the final chapter, leaving these men bereft of further succour? This present book is not so much concerned with discussing the type of idyll or anti-idyll represented in individual small-town texts as it is in examining something Marx identifies as the “pastoral design,” which he defines as the “larger structure of thought and feeling of which the ideal is a part” (24). What does the narrator “feel” about his or her present condition, and how does his or her reconstruction of small-town and rural Ontario address or reflect it?

At first glance, Mariposa constitutes a small-town ideal that provides a direct contrast to its urban counterpart. The image of the town, however, dissolves and is revealed to be a projection of those in the corresponding city; it exists only across an impassable temporal-spatial gap from the urban centre, and the text ends with the melancholic club men’s unresolved longing for a now absent small-town past. The “memories” ostensibly responsible for Mariposa are, in fact, projections from an urban sphere onto a time and place distant enough to maintain the desired fantasy. The degree of distance – spatial, temporal, and cultural – between the narrator and the subject plays a crucial role in establishing the particular nature of small-town Ontario, not only in its most influential manifestation, Mariposa, but also in Deptford, Jubilee, Shoneval, and numerous other communities rendered in the literature of Ontario authors. Narrative distance accommodates the aestheticization of a small-town Ontario experience as something oppositional to urban life, but this difference, often an idealization, can remain intact only when it is constructed across a temporal or spatial divide. A rural idyll is the product not simply of a narrator’s rural memories, but also of the dominance of an urban modernity that entices that narrator to construct its conceptual alternative beyond the here and now, as something other than the temporal-spatial present.

Throughout small-town Ontario literature there appears a concern with change, loss, and even decay, a reaction that emerged from actual changes to the status, role, and importance of the small town in Ontario during the early part of the twentieth century. Leacock noticed a trend in the settlement patterns of Ontario’s smaller communities: quick growth followed by a slow, melancholic stagnation or decline. Leacock himself was the product of a small, rural community, and, much like the situation that precipitated his move to the city for academic opportunities, small towns increasingly held little promise for their ambitious young around the turn of the twentieth century. His comment on the somnolence of the little Ontario towns, that “they fell asleep and grew no more,” is a melancholic description of those towns that did not continue to grow. Leacock’s sentiment is echoed in lines from a book by another small-town writer, Alice Munro, in Lives of Girls and Women. Munro’s narrator portrays Wawanash County, Huron County’s fictional representative, as a place that has seen better days, and while it may have had a vibrant past, it does not have much hope for a vibrant future: “It was the same with the history of the county, which had been opened up, settled, and had grown, and entered its present slow decline” (31). The town’s name, Jubilee, is a perpetual reminder of the locale’s more prosperous days, which would have corresponded to the time of Queen Victoria’s golden and diamond jubliees, days that were left behind as the energy of the province relocated to the cities.

Raymond Williams explains the impulse to locate in the rural landscape a picture of the lost past, an impulse he labels a “problem of perspective.” The problem manifests in the tendency to see the end of rural traditions in the age just before the present one, a tendency that is as old as English literature:

If we take a long enough period, it is easy to see a fundamental transformation of … country life. But the change is so extended and so complicated … that there seems no point at which we can sharply distinguish what it would be convenient to call separate epochs … [O]ld practices and old ways of feeling survived into periods in which the general direction of new development was clear and decisive. And then what seems an old order, a “traditional” society, keeps appearing, reappearing, at bewilderingly various dates: in practice as an idea, to some extent based in experience, against which contemporary change can be measured … What is really significant is this particular kind of reaction to the fact of change. (35)

In Ontario, it is these “traditional” towns on the fringes of the cities that appear to harbour this old order, to be a holdover from a different, earlier epoch, and against which life in the cities is measured; side-by-side exist the urban present and the rural past, as either end of this temporal relationship exists at opposite ends of the highway. To drive out to the country is to drive out to the past, allowing one to measure the temporal change that such spatial distance implies. This temporal-spatial relationship is made explicit in Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven, in which her narrator states, “The highway connects everything: the countryside and the city, the known and the unknown … An hour and a half of grey speed and you are able to enter the nineteenth century; its general stores, its woodstoves, its large high-ceilinged rooms, its dusty roads” (44). The rural past is the known, while the urban present is unknown, and the valorization of a “traditional” space in Ontario’s small towns is a method of understanding, even contextualizing within a broader temporal sweep, the pace and effects of change.

The rise and dominance of the small town in Ontario lasted but a few brief generations and was over by the early decades of the twentieth century, yet its influence reverberates through the memory of these times and their physical remnants. In reflecting the shift towards the primacy of the cities, literary small-town Ontario became a place outside the centre, but one preserved, or in some cases mouldering, on the social and economic fringes; it is a place of childhood, a place of tradition, a place to leave behind and return to. While this notion can only be urban-centric, it also dominates how small-town Ontario has been written for the past century.

Keith states that “[f]or most Ontario writers, the small town about which they write is a version – sometimes idealized, sometimes satirized – of the community in which they grew up” (163). Leacock (b. 1869) was raised in the vicinity of Orillia, the model for Mariposa; more importantly, he returned to Orillia every summer throughout his career, and eventually retired to his home on Old Brewery Bay in Lake Couchiching. Today, Leacock’s connection to Orillia is celebrated, as the town holds an annual folk festival named after Mariposa, and his former residence is now a popular tourist attraction. Robertson Davies (b. 1913) spent the first few years of his life in Thamesville, shortly thereafter moved to Renfrew, and later to Kingston. These places find their way into his fiction: Thamesville as Deptford, Renfrew as Blairlogie, and Kingston as Salterton. This study is concerned with Davies’s best-known small-town depiction, Deptford, as it appears in the Deptford trilogy. Recently, the town of Thamesville installed a plaque on the house in which Davies spent the early part of his childhood to recognize its connection to his fiction. Munro (b. 1931) grew up in Wingham and, after a long period spent on the west coast, moved back to rural Ontario, where she currently resides for much of the year. She has famously discussed Wingham as her model for a number of her small towns, including Jubilee from Lives of Girls and Women and Hanratty from Who Do You Think You Are?, the former text constituting Munro’s most extended examination of a small Ontario town. While much has been made in the past of Wingham residents’ displeasure at being the focus of Munro’s stories, the town now closely identifies with Munro’s achievements: it has a walking tour of prominent locations that appear in Munro’s stories, and it has a literary garden that celebrates Munro’s works. In the case of these three authors, the places that have influenced their writings have chosen to celebrate their connections to the literature, to see it as part of the communities’ pasts, part of their identities. The final chapter of this study examines two texts by Jane Urquhart (b. 1949): The Stone Carvers and A Map of Glass. Shoneval from The Stone Carvers is modelled on Formosa, a small agricultural community in western Ontario that possesses a distinctive German-Catholic history in an area that is largely British Protestant. A Map of Glass takes as its setting a small community in Prince Edward County on the north shore of Lake Ontario. This study is structured on the work of these four authors. However, they are discussed with a number of references to the works of many of their contemporaries, such as Adeline Teskey, Mazo de la Roche, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Raymond Knister, George Elliott, James Reaney, John Bemrose, Matt Cohen, Elizabeth Hay, and Richard Wright, whose works are both contemporaneous and similar in theme to those authors more central to this book.

This book begins with a look at how landscape, rural and urban, acquires a temporal association, specifically within Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. It first situates the book within the context of Leacock’s literary contemporaries and then suggests that, while Leacock was working within an established genre of regional idylls, he was also drawing attention to the patterns and conventions within this genre. Leacock’s town, Mariposa, is a “middle landscape” located between city and wilderness, yet Leacock’s final chapter suggests that the town is, and has always been, a product of reminiscence and longing. Where my argument differs from those of others is in its suggestion that the struggle for control over Mariposa’s characteristic ethos is reflected in the tension between the city and hinterland, which I also read as a tension with temporal dimensions between urban present and distant hinterland past. Only through the actions of Josiah Smith, the rough, semi-literate hotel owner who emerged from the distant hinterland past, can Mariposa maintain its status as an idyll of the recent past for the reminiscing urbanites who dominate the last chapter of the book. In Sunshine Sketches, Mariposa, while on one hand a product of memory, is also perpetually at risk from the same men for whom it functions as an idyll. However, Mariposa as an idyll is only temporary: it cannot and could never be located geographically; it can only, and only ever did, exist in imagined memories.

Throughout Sunshine Sketches, Leacock draws attention to the processes of memory, particularly in his extended description in the final chapter of the train journey that moves from urban present to small-town past. Here, the journey functions as an allegory for how memory sculpts a past from contemporary desires, longings, and regret, and projects into the temporal distance a mirage of the past as it never was. And yet it is this mirage of the small-town past that becomes emblematic of a small-town convention that later writers must contend with in their own stories of small-town Ontario life. Chapter 2 explores Robertson Davies’s negotiation of Leacock’s influence in his Deptford Trilogy from the 1970s. I argue that this trilogy, but primarily the first novel, Fifth Business, grapples with the influence of Mariposa in its narrators’ depictions of small-town childhoods. Davies’s protagonist from the first novel, Dunstan Ramsay, contends with the small-town idyll and anti-idyll, and struggles to represent his memories uninfluenced by conventions or patterns. The trilogy offers three different versions of Deptford, versions largely dependent on the role the village plays in the protagonists’ adult, cosmopolitan lives. The trilogy, in effect, further draws attention to and transcends the small-town conventions by exploring how those conventions are formed and maintained in memory. Fifth Business also suggests that the notion of a small-town past–urban present binary is impossible to maintain in an increasingly cosmopolitan world: both urban centre and small-town fringe are influenced by and respond to the same homogenizing effects of a globalizing modernity.

Chapter 3 looks at two works by Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? While ostensibly similar to the works of Davies and Leacock, in that it contains a reminiscing narrator recalling a small-town childhood, Munro’s Lives is remarkably different from those earlier novels. Del Jordan, Munro’s narrator, neither recounts her small-town childhood from a temporal distance nor narrates it in the present first person, but through a shifting hybrid of both. Del does not maintain a narrative division between past and present, between remembering subject and remembered object. By forging the child and adult experience into a unified voice, Del’s narration contains little recognizable division between an urban present and rural past, a division that has a recognizable consequence for the depictions of Mariposa and Deptford. Instead, the very same forces that have moulded her community’s landscape are Del’s primary artistic influences. Her narrative technique approaches organic continuity between the artist and the landscape upon which members of her community have sketched their lives, and is used by Del as an authentic method of depicting her small-town past: this is a far cry from the unfailing affection the former Mariposans have for a place that they see as both remote and irretrievable. Munro’s work destabilizes the projected divide between rural past and urban present upon which previous small-town texts are structured. In some measure, Lives is the exception to this book’s thesis, and its perspective on the past is revised in Munro’s later collection of short stories Who Do You Think You Are. This collection questions the past manufactured by memory and stories, particularly when recollections determine action in the present; the past, it is suggested, may offer stories, certainly, but forgetting that those stories are filtered through and shaped by the present places her characters in peril.

Chapter 4 looks at the small-town past dynamic in a more contemporary context; it argues that, as the rendered rural past recedes further in time and is unconnected to personal memory, its representation becomes more malleable, and yet its cultural importance to the present intensifies. To make this argument, that chapter examines two works by Jane Urquhart: The Stone Carvers and A Map of Glass. Urquhart has been accused of a conservative “nostalgia for pre-modern times” (Branach-Kallas Whirlpool 173), and while these two works ostensibly do little to counter that criticism, they are not mired in irresolvable longing for a lost past: they, in fact, contain complex and ambivalent nostalgic yearning. Klara Becker, the Depression-era protagonist of The Stone Carvers (2001), endlessly recounts her idealizations of the distant past of her community, Shoneval, to alleviate feelings of loss, which are caused by the disrupting effects of technology on the town’s cultural traditions and her personal life. Klara overcomes her melancholy by externally solidifying her memories in a memorial, a structure that comes to symbolize a new national affective community. A modern nation has been forged by collective loss, and this community has replaced prior heterogeneous cultural traditions. Urquhart’s modern urban reality is defined by what it is not, which is the cradle of continuous cultural practices; those, Urquhart suggests, experienced their final manifestation in the small towns prior to the First World War. A Map of Glass (2005), on the other hand, re-examines the source of that rural-urban binary. Like Klara, Sylvia Bradley longs for the traditional stability she recognizes within a rural past, yet, unlike Klara, Sylvia has no first-person experience with the object of her longing. The histories she constructs through the material remnants of the rural past are, ultimately, self-projections. Even though she imagines herself to be in touch with local history, her story of the local past is unfettered by any past reality. Like Leacock, Urquhart makes a rather subtle, shrewd observation that the notion of rural difference is the product of melancholic, alienated figures whose search for something comprehensible or secure in the past will reveal only echoes of their own voices.

This book examines how small-town Ontario pasts are not only framed in and by memory, but also how these memories are shaped in the present. If Robert Kroetsch has called the small town the “ruling paradigm” of Canadian literature, but remarks that “[t]here seems to be little literature in Canada that tells of the small-town person going to the city” (51), this study suggests that small-town Ontario literature is often already situated in the city, but that memory projects outwards onto the surrounding towns and villages. This memory, though, is more a search than a recollection; it is not simply a search for a fictionalized or embellished past, but a search for a method of understanding the often dislocating present in which characters find themselves.

1 Small towns capitalize on this association. Places like Picton and Collingwood have marketed themselves as weekend escapes, where urbanites can “reconnect and unwind” within an area of “rural calmness and authentic sophistication.” (“Welcome to the County” 2016). As Lucy Lippard states, urban escapees want a cultivated rural retreat, where they can enjoy “solitude, authenticity, a good cappuccino, and a nearby health club” (152). This is a type of curated rural retreat, one that caters to expectations of what a small town should be all the while providing the amenities associated with the urban centre.

2 Viger is either a francophone Ontario village or a village in Quebec just north of Ottawa. It would be foolhardy to suggest that the themes identified here abide by provincial borders.

3 In The Disinherited, it might be mutual ambivalence