Chapter Two

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Saying Goodbye to Mariposa: Rebutting the Small-Town Convention

Stephen Leacock’s rendering of Mariposa as a typical Canadian small town offers readers an attractive, imaginary, even fantastic ideal of a “home place” whose iconic status and broad recognition is unmatched in Canadian literature. Sunshine Sketches has become paradigmatic of a type of small-town fiction with which many subsequent texts are in conversation. Specifically, the aspect of the book most resonant in the literature that follows it is the theme of return.1 Many Ontario small-town texts of the past century re-imagine the final chapter of Leacock’s work. Yet, where Leacock’s imagined return is truncated, these later authors follow through to explore how notions and visions of the small-town childhood home alter when one is allowed access into this past space.

That Ontario authors return to the themes examined in Leacock’s work should come as no surprise, yet the ways in which these authors explore these themes in subsequent texts are as diverse as the texts themselves. For instance, the protagonist of Raymond Knister’s White Narcissus (1929), Richard Milne, revisits his hometown in his temporal present. Knister, himself from a small rural community in southwestern Ontario, had his work published seventeen years after Leacock’s, yet Knister’s novel literally begins where Leacock’s ends. Unlike Leacock’s urban travellers, Knister’s urban figure is allowed to step off the train into the rural community of his upbringing. Time has changed this community as much as it has left its mark on Milne. He initially finds the village of his birth “foreign” (7) and characterizes it as “torpid” (8); this town bears nothing of the exuberance and comfort that ostensibly await the returnee to Mariposa. Milne has come home for a very specific purpose, which is not to relive cheering nostalgic memories, but to convince his childhood love to accompany him back to the city, a type of strategic rescue operation to deliver his loved one from the privations of small-town life to the sanctuary of urban living. The return home is a reluctant but successful one.

Northrop Frye has disparagingly characterized Knister’s style as “provincial.” The deliberately “heightened” tone of the novel tells Frye that Knister is “a writer who thinks of the highest standards of his craft as being already established outside his community … and as having to be met by very deliberate efforts” (“Culture” 185). That narrative style aligns with the themes of the story as well; a successful urban writer returns to the rural community of his youth and encounters a wicked pettiness among its inhabitants, as if the insularity of the community itself has turned malignant. The successful urban writer stays only long enough to rescue his sweetheart from the clutches of her maddeningly perverse parents, and the book ends just before the two hightail it back to the city to live, it is assumed, with reasonable, erudite sophisticates. The rural area has changed in Milne’s absence, and not for the better. The city offers refuge in this instance, which is an inversion of the failed pastoral movement away from the city into the country sketched at the end of Leacock’s text.

Knister’s novel possesses an ambivalent reputation among Canadian critics. The heightened style is a method of deliberate distancing between the narrator, whose perspective never veers far from Milne’s, and the small-town setting, a distance on full display in the juxtaposition between the narrative prose and the dialogue: the one erudite while the other a caricature of rusticity. Implicit in this style is an element, however small, of reflexive, almost immature, condescension to one’s unsophisticated rural origins; the same attitude is most likely prevalent in university dorms across the country. The narrator seems infatuated with the urban standard with which he now appraises the rural community. Knister’s book is not without its loving descriptions of rural landscape, nor void of a hearty respect for the people who work the soil, but, as Frye suggests, the “deliberateness” of his diction constructs a protracted, artificial distance between the returned small-town boy and the small town itself, a distance that, when examined closely, is perhaps not as great as the boy would like it to be. If Mariposa is the idyll for Leacock’s club men, formed in their minds from long years away from home, Knister’s rural community approaches the anti-idyll, as it is written by one whose departure occurred only too recently and whose attachment to the place has not yet faded.

Another of the texts in which Leacock’s influence can be gauged is George Elliott’s The Kissing Man (1962), a collection of interrelated stories set in a single small town. Yet, apart from a number of superficial influences (the single setting, the cycle of interrelated stories), the way both texts portray the past, specifically how the past and the present interdepend, is vastly different from each other. Leacock explores how memory shapes notions of origin and identity as seen in the symbolically rich Mariposa; he sees the present as shaping the past. Elliott, on the other hand, explores the reverberations of myth and ritual within those same maple-shaded streets; the past, here, shapes the present. Elliott reveals his affinity to the concerns of the modern primitivists with his book’s epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture: “But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces … a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote.” This epigraph immediately places the book within a lineage that is less concerned with exploring the echoes of the past of place than it is in examining the mythic echoes of a fluid, “universal” heritage that carries on within the unconscious of the collective. Elliott’s work is not so much an exploration of small-town Ontario as it is a belated work of modern primitivism that explores the rhythms of ritual that exist, according to those who adhere to such theories, within all cultural forms. Elliott does not necessarily see small-town Ontario as a “home place”; rather, he sees within small-town Ontario the cultural echoes extending from the mists of time. Return, in this case, is not something necessarily physical or geographical: it is an unconscious movement towards the ingrained patterns that are hardwired in cultural expressions (or so the thinking goes).

Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy also explores the same thematic ground covered by Leacock. Davies’s Fifth Business (1970), the first of the trilogy, is a return story that follows a former small-town resident who, like Richard Milne but unlike Leacock’s club men, is able to revisit his place of origins.2 Rather than depicting a small-town exile either longing for or chastising his place of birth, Davies explores the subtle process whereby these polarized responses take shape. He does more than invert Leacock’s themes, as Knister does; Davies seeks a type of balance between the idyll and the anti-idyll through a mode of perception that declares its own awareness of small-town conventions and its insistence on its own descriptive and memorial accuracy. His novel reveals a process of rejecting not only Mariposa’s influence but also that mode of memory that produces Mariposa’s golden glow or perceives its opposite: the idyll and the anti-idyll. Through his distinctly ambivalent memories of Deptford, Dunstan Ramsay, Davies’s narrator, explores the nostalgic small-town archetype for which Mariposa serves as a template, and his final departure from the small town constitutes an allegorical exodus from Mariposa’s aesthetic and cultural influence, something that reverberated, and reverberates still, through much of small-town Ontario literature.3 If Davies has stated that Sunshine Sketches is “one of the finest, if not the finest, book ever written about Canadian life” (Papers 65), this chapter examines what Mariposa’s influence might be in Davies’s own stories of small-town Ontario.

Deptford, meet Mariposa

Second only to Mariposa in terms of its significance to small-town Ontario’s literary reputation is Davies’s Deptford, a town that appears in his Deptford Trilogy. Davies was a Leacock scholar who produced a short biography and study of his works in Feast of Stephen.⁴ The cover of that volume more than hints at an affinity between these prominent men of letters, giving equal standing to both names. The illustration by Graham Pilsworth is an ink drawing of both men shaking hands, with Davies staring out at the reader as if the current comic laureate is re-introducing us to the previous one.

Fifth Business, the first novel of the Deptford Trilogy, appeared in 1970, fifty-eight years after Sunshine Sketches. At that point, Davies was considered to be past his prime: his previous series of novels had been written in the 1950s, and he had, during the 1960s, settled into a busy life as master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Fifth Business re-launched his writing career. This phase, which begins with Fifth Business and includes the remaining Deptford novels, also includes the Blairlogie trilogy, a series of novels set partly in a town based on Renfrew, Ontario. This phase culminated in both Booker and Nobel award buzz in 1986. Both Leacock and Davies were, in their own times, sought after literary and cultural authorities, and, importantly, their most significant works are not only set in small-town Ontario, but have helped establish that setting as a type of Canadian literary trope.

The Deptford Trilogy is not the first series of books Davies wrote that is set in an Ontario community. While the Deptford Trilogy appeared in the 1970s, his Salterton Trilogy appeared roughly twenty years before. In the latter, Davies is content to present amusing stories of the foibles of the citizens of Salterton, a university town closely modelled on Kingston, Ontario, a place where Davies spent a good part of his youth and early adulthood. Popular targets of his satire include pompous academics, overbearing mothers, and indecisive, bookish young men. Salterton is a large, urbane community set in the present in which it was written and home to a diverse cast of international, cosmopolitan characters. It seems, unlike Mariposa, to be very much caught up in the events of the larger outside world.

A resemblance to Mariposa is far more apparent in Deptford. The narrative premise of Fifth Business is, not surprisingly, similar to Sunshine Sketches. As the bases for their works, both Leacock and Davies were recalling past small-town experience from the very centres of elite urban academies: McGill University in Montreal and Massey College at the University of Toronto, respectively. Yet rather than nostalgically romanticize past experience, both authors draw attention to the process of memory, and how that process can embellish and idealize the distant long-ago.

At least a superficial link between the towns can be found in their similar temporal settings. While our first view of Deptford is prior to the First World War, Davies also depicts the town after the war. In the process, he reveals changes relating to postwar modernization, influences that do not affect Mariposa. Thus, unlike Mariposa, Deptford is not a static ideal, as the town is subject to external forces and influences. Nonetheless, Clara Thomas points out further similarities: “it [Fifth Business] is set in Southern Ontario and its total tone and makeup is specific to the past of this country, at a time when such towns played a keystone part in the country’s development” (“The Town” 221). What Thomas means by the “total tone and makeup” of the novel may be clarified by W.J. Keith’s comments on the “detached perspective” of Leacock’s and Davies’s narrators: “They have widened their own horizons and look back at the town in question with affection or amused irony or occasionally with disgust, but certainly from outside” (167). However, we must not confuse looking back with looking at, as the two modes of perception have very different consequences.

As the melancholic last chapter of Sunshine Sketches implies, the text’s tone is influenced by, and also alludes to, the diminishing importance of the small town in early twentieth-century Ontario; as the final image of Mariposa fades, the club men and reader come to realize that the town may have been no more than a mirage of reminiscence. The early part of the twentieth century in Ontario was a period of general emigration from the small towns to the increasingly industrialized cities; with the decline of the countryside came the clearer definition and increased appeal of “rural values,” a trend on which Leacock both capitalizes and comments. Thomas appears to commit the same error as other critics of Leacock’s work: that is, to confuse the light-hearted, ironic, jovial tone of the book with an accurate distillation of the spirit of the age, one thought to be defined by the vitality of organic communities as opposed to their decline and desertion. It is a further error to read Deptford as an homage to the popular conception of that age and to its literary predecessor, as profound tension exists between Deptford and Davies’s protagonists, all of whom experience acute anxiety as a result of the identity and moral confines the village erects around individuals.

The willingness to read similarities between Sunshine Sketches and Fifth Business glosses over some important differences. The most prominent features of Leacock’s text are his sensitive character portrayals and the unanimity and collectivity of those characters, all of which contribute to a tone that oscillates between hilarity and sentimentality. Early critiques of Davies’s Fifth Business, on the other hand, concentrate on the characters’ “moral imperatives” (Reid 179) and Deptford’s “practical common sense and … solid reliance on material, down-to-earth reality” (Bjerring qtd. in Lennox 24). Deptfordian sobriety provides a sharp contrast to the well-oiled exuberance of the Mariposans.

A more fruitful avenue of comparison is through one of the books’ other similarities: their shared narrative premise. While the final chapter of Sunshine Sketches reveals that Mariposa exists only in the collective memories of melancholic urbanites, each of the Deptford novels consists of the reminiscences of successful men who spend their formative years in small-town Ontario: the narrative of Fifth Business consists of a letter Dunstan Ramsay has written to his former headmaster at Colborne College; The Manticore is made up largely of the writings and reminiscences of David Staunton while undergoing Jungian psychoanalysis; finally, World of Wonders, while narrated by Dunstan, is dominated by the voice of Magnus Eisengrim (Paul Dempster), a childhood resident of Deptford who was kidnapped by carnies. Mariposa and Deptford are products of memory, but a far more complicated relationship between retrospect and longing runs throughout Davies’s novels. If nostalgia is largely responsible for Mariposa’s allure, its alternating absence/presence in the Deptford novels marks an important difference between the two towns: the varying renditions of Deptford reveal more about the development of the reminiscing subjects and that development’s influence on their “process of perception” as opposed to the reminisced object.

Patricia Monk states that a central concern of Davies’s “telos” is “an understanding of the nature of human identity” (Smaller Infinity 17). She later states that one of Dunstan Ramsay’s central struggles is “towards self-knowledge and individuation” (83). This process is often situated in terms of escape from the physical and moral restrictions of Deptford. Monk identifies the Jungian process of “individuation,” or the development of the autonomous self, as a recurring theme in Davies’s novels, and argues in The Smaller Infinity that this process in Fifth Business occurs largely through Dunstan’s evolving “religious belief” (79). In this chapter, I read the effect of that process of individuation on the evolving nature of his childhood memories of Deptford. While an analysis of Mariposa reveals that town to be an inaccessible, retrospective ideal, an analysis of Dunstan’s relationship to Deptford reveals the town to be the product of a developing, reminiscing subject. In Sunshine Sketches, the general trend is towards a return; Mariposa offers both the reader and the club men of the final chapter a passive, static, and contained small-town ideal situated in a generalized recent past. Deptford’s influence, however, proves far more persistent, as it has an active role in the psyches of its residents.

While Deptford represents only a limited place along his trajectory of esoteric achievement in the field of hagiography, Dunstan’s psychic escape from that village is never quite successful, and he must synthesize his current individuated self with the undesired, collective values of Deptford, what are really presented as the physical, spiritual, and moral confines placed on the individual and enforced by the village collective. Dunstan’s struggle to negotiate the residue of his childhood results in shifting retrospective visions of the town, which, in effect, serve as alternating foils to best highlight the present state of his psychic individuation. As these versions construct a process of small-town escape, they can be read as Davies’s own symbolic attempt at escaping from the cultural archetype epitomized by Mariposa. If Leacock’s town is read as a “home place” of Canadian fiction and cultural identity, then Fifth Business draws attention to the mode of memory responsible for that type of exegesis and can be read as an allegorical leave-taking of Mariposa’s cultural and literary hegemony. If Mariposa is the past perfect, Deptford is the past progressive.

Dunstan Ramsay’s Deptford

The overarching concern of the narrator of Fifth Business, Dunstan Ramsay, is to represent both himself and his hometown accurately. In the opening section of the novel, Dunstan addresses a central problem of autobiographical writing: “Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man’s idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born” (15). With this attempt at disregarding childhood nostalgia, Dunstan declares that happy childhood memories often emerge during the intervening years between youth and adulthood, a temporal span that can allow the past to become, in one’s imagination, both benevolent and stable. While the final train journey back through time and space in Sunshine Sketches suggests that this interim is responsible for the nature of Mariposa’s representation, Dunstan wants to avoid the trap of idealization; his narrative may be a retrospective, but he wants it to be one unfiltered through this common method of stylization.

By further prefacing his description of Deptford with the following remark, Dunstan reveals his awareness of small-town life as a popular theme already thoroughly explored in literature and other cultural media:

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, lovable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice as Krafft-Ebing might have been surprised to uncover in Vienna; incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism … Our village never seemed to me to be like that. It was more varied in what it offered to the observer than people from bigger and more sophisticated places generally think, and if it had sins and follies and roughnesses, it also had much to show of virtue, dignity, and even of nobility. (15–16)

While this passage contains Dunstan’s thoughts on small-town conventions, thoughts that indirectly reference Leacock’s dominance of the sunnier of the two conventions, it echoes Davies’s own thoughts on small-town writing, which he expresses in Feast of Stephen, a book on Leacock and his writings. There Davies writes:

Descriptions of small-town life have become commonplace, especially in the literature of this continent. In Leacock’s day they tended, with a handful of notable exceptions, to look on the sunny side of village and rural life and to accept the widely-held view that small-town people were kindlier, less corrupt, and more chaste than dwellers in great cities. Since then, of course, a school has arisen which portrays small towns, very profitably, as microcosms of Sodom and Gomorrah in which everybody but a handful of just men and women are deep in corruption, especially of the sexual order. (14–15)

In Fifth Business, Dunstan’s thoughts directly mirror those expressed by Davies himself. An obvious overlap between author and protagonist exists, at least in their shared awareness of a popular literary trope. Dunstan acknowledges the existence of small-town representational conventions, and thus attempts to situate his own portrayal beyond them by writing of the small town in a way that transcends the conventions. He is aware of the idyllic convention dominated by Leacock and the subsequent anti-idyll that arose after Leacock’s time. In this chapter, I suggest that this idyllic/anti-idyllic frame has been formulated by Davies through Dunstan in order to transcend that frame in his small-town narrative; in the process, however, Dunstan reveals how alluring that idyllic mode can be when crafting a rural, small-town retrospective.

Dunstan Ramsay asserts a narrative voice that purports to provide an unconventional – in that it claims not to rely on convention – look at the past of small-town life by first identifying and then disregarding trends and fashions. Through Dunstan, Davies acknowledges the existence of small-town representational types, and thus attempts to situate his own portrayal beyond them. He speaks of small-town life with one eye on what has been said before. Furthermore, if the small-town type is popularly associated with this country’s cultural foundations,5 then particular versions sketch an author’s nostalgic, critical, or condemnatory cultural perspective. Dunstan suggests that his narrative possesses no ulterior agenda other than to represent accurately his small-town childhood.

Dunstan’s and Davies’s discussions of small-town representational conventions also sketch a “problem of perspective”⁶ that perhaps rests at the core of familiar small-town portrayals. The small-town convention that makes use of “laughable and lovable simpletons” is a veiled reference to Mariposa, and as the final chapter of Leacock’s text reveals, the creative source for Mariposa is the urban club. Stylized versions are the creations of, and products for, those from “bigger and more sophisticated places.” Dunstan maintains that these literary conventions are really generalizations produced by those with insufficient knowledge of small-town life, or by those whose distant perspective, across time and space, allows them to think they see what they want to see. This problem of spatio-temporal distance is also something Dunstan ironically draws attention to when he discusses the smaller village located near Deptford: “We did … look with pitying amusement on Bowles Corners, four miles distant and with a population of one hundred and fifty. To live in Bowles Corners, we felt, was to be rustic beyond redemption” (18). By ironically drawing an analogy to Deptford’s own tendency to patronize smaller, distant locales, Dunstan claims to be aware of, and to have transcended, distance’s simplifying effect, a claim supporting his own representational and rhetorical reliability. His initial claim is that Deptford is a village depicted by a village voice, one that provides a contrast to Mariposa’s consolatory or “fashionable” social aesthetics. However, Dunstan’s initial proposed mimesis of Deptford life is one he cannot maintain, as Deptford’s representational in/stability relies on his self-identification with the village; that “problem of perspective” responsible for the creation of conventional representation comes to influence Dunstan’s descriptions of town life as he begins to identify with those “bigger and more sophisticated places.” This phenomenon is particularly striking during Dunstan’s return to Deptford after the war.

The novel opens with an early-winter scene involving two boys sledding in the late afternoon in the days immediately following Christmas. Despite initial appearances, which resemble a type of Krieghoff-ian idealization, Dunstan refuses to infuse the scene with a warm retrospective glow; he is recounting not a happy memory, but an incident that comes to define the remainder of his life:

My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on the 27th of December, 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarreled, because his fine new Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one. (9)

The details of time and place reveal the magnitude the event takes in Dunstan’s later consciousness, but these details, applied to what might otherwise be an idyllic memory, lend the scene an atmosphere of parodic gravity; how could such an apparently innocent scene be subject to this type of narrative treatment? The minutiae imply that this is no nostalgic memory: its precision reveals that Dunstan’s grasp on his own past is as vivid as his present perception. The exact detail of time and place negates any sense of temporal distance separating the narrator from the events, a marked difference from the generalized nature of Sunshine Sketches’ opening. Leacock’s opening constructs a sense of ambiguity around the town’s placement in time, and that ambiguity accommodates Mariposa’s broad appeal, as particular regional or temporal details can be glossed over. The specificity of Dunstan’s narrative, as he recounts particular events from over sixty years previous, focuses on the individualized nature of his experiences, highlighting their singularity in both time and place. Readers are not invited to identify with this initial description of village life in the same way they are encouraged to see their own past in Mariposa.

Dunstan intends to capture the distinctiveness of life in Deptford; this is a story about individuals, he makes us believe, not about character types. Davies seems to want to right a wrong by providing a view of village life based on verisimilitude, a view that is both interesting and mundane, as opposed to one based on an agenda. Dunstan sketches town life through unadorned details: one private banker, two doctors, a dentist with an unhappy domestic life, and a veterinarian “who drank” (16). The private life of the village is a little more colourful. For instance, Dunstan’s story of the old Athelstan woman, “who used from time to time to escape from her nurse-housekeeper and rush into the road, where she threw herself down, raising a cloud of dust like a hen having a dirt-bath, shouting loudly, ‘Christian men, come and help me!’” (16), is both pathetic and absurdly funny.7 These details allude to a darker side of village life, a side that reveals (even revels in) unmentionable psychological aberrations tinged with prohibited erotic desire; here, Davies refuses to mitigate private eccentricities that Leacock either excludes or turns into an element of his comedy or sentimentality (e.g., Judge Pepperleigh’s brusque approach to his wife, in Chapter 7). The Athelstan woman’s behaviour and the exclusion of the First Nation soldier from the town’s war commemoration (88) seem to be part of Davies’s agenda in Fifth Business, which incorporates the bad and the ugly with the good. What is more important than the contents of Dunstan’s narrative is how he conceives of and constructs it – the impression of it as “record” as opposed to memory.

Deptford’s Dunstan Ramsay

Although Dunstan’s narrative initially claims Deptford’s inimitability, the town itself does not accommodate individuality. Dunstan attributes Deptford’s often narrow and intolerant perspective to the influence of the village’s settlers: “[W]e were all too much the descendants of hard-bitten pioneers” (23–4). This offering explains Deptford’s lack of an aesthetic sensibility, but it also helps explain the town’s pious exclusion of those not involved in the same dominant improving-by-cultivation philosophy of which practicality, self-denial, and moral orthodoxy are inherited traits. The perceived strength of character derived from this pioneer lineage constitutes one side of a Janus-faced philosophical heritage, the other reflecting a restrictive morality and literal mindedness. Dunstan diagnoses this lineage long after he has both felt and escaped its imperatives, yet his narrative reveals to what extent the village’s moral heritage played a chafing but determining role in the making of his identity prior to his initial departure.

This small-town moral norm marks the core difference between the nature of Mariposa’s ethos and that of Deptford. Mariposa’s moral lenience reflects the source of the town’s construction, the urban sphere. The retrospective image of the town seems to offer leisure opportunities to the wealthy urban dweller, much like the fishing and hunting camps of the north or a steamship voyage to Europe. Mariposa is the fantasy of childhood, perhaps conjured to sooth temporarily some metaphysical ache or feeling of urban alienation, but it also contributes to the diversity of experience available to the urban plutocrat, although this experience is accessed not through money but a nostalgic memory. The small-town fantasy in Sunshine Sketches is an experience not of any specific past, but of an agglomerated cultural childhood, and it is the product of the collective memories of the wealthy deep in the heart of the city. As it is the product of leisure time, those idle hours spent at the club, it offers other possible existences in which complex moral confrontations and alienation cannot exist. Mariposa offers a fantasy in which identity exists in perfect harmony with place, a fantasy that is projected onto the past and subsequently becomes an exuberant and glossy, but finally impossible, historical model for the present. The indeterminacy of Mariposa’s eventual melancholic dissolution into ephemeral fantasy can be interpreted as Leacock’s refusal to allow the leisure class its desired simulation of a childhood idyll. This may be read as a manifestation of Leacock’s well-known dislike for that class’s profligacy, a dislike on fuller display in his subsequent Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich.

While Deptford is similarly reconstructed through memory, its main ontological thrust is towards the closing off of experiential possibility. It is a product of neither recreation nor yearning; instead, the source of the village’s ethos is a circumscribing past, an overbearing moral heritage. The past weighs heavily on Deptford. Dunstan’s lack of nostalgia for his childhood is partly the result of his ability to place the village into an historical trajectory, a sequence of events that contains a before (pioneer ancestry) and an after (post–First World War Deptford), unlike Mariposa’s static and temporally contained ideal.

Tension between the rural past and urban present, therefore, exists entirely within Dunstan’s psyche; the dichotomy’s polarities are represented by the moral imperatives of the village’s forebears and the more cosmopolitan life Dunstan reads about in his books and yearns for. His mother subscribes to the historically sanctioned proscription of unconventional intellectual activity and is a practical embodiment of the town’s pioneer morality, wholly disapproving of Dunstan’s increasing idiosyncratic intellectualism; the result is a fearsome domestic tension in the Ramsay household. This tension suggests that Deptfordian identity is modelled on a convention different from that found in Sunshine Sketches; it is wholly opposed to Mariposa’s welcoming bonhomie. The controlling impetus for these constrictions is ostensibly the past. Unlike the experiential freedom the urban present projects onto the Mariposa past, Deptford projects onto itself experiential limitations ascribed to its revered ancestry; in Deptford the absent, imagined moral past determines the moral present.

Deptford’s deference to its forebears presents the major obstacle to Dunstan’s personal, social, and intellectual individuation. This struggle mainly involves Mrs Ramsay’s disapproval of her son’s wholly conscious attempt at becoming a “polymath,” which includes his interest in saints and his fumbling cracks at mastering some simple examples of sleight-of-hand; for Dunstan, these actions exemplify the larger world outside of Deptford, particularly cosmopolitan Europe. Mrs Ramsay’s anxiety about her son’s divergence from a modest historical norm is liberated in a flood of resentment after an incident of Dunstan’s cheek: “She cried too, hysterically, and beat me harder, storming about my impudence, my want of respect for her, of my increasing oddity and intellectual arrogance – not that she used these words, but I do not intend to put down what she actually said – until at last her fury was spent” (33). Mrs Ramsay’s anger is enflamed by Dunstan’s developing personality, his lack of “respect,” and his refusal to acquiesce to the dictates of the previous generation. His behaviour is aberrant only according to the behavioural norms of Deptford’s practicality, the internal sweep of the village’s history.

Mary Dempster’s transgression with Joel Surgeoner reveals Mrs Ramsay’s full adherence to the collective values of the community, and it also reveals Dunstan’s inability to subscribe to the town’s moral code, which neglects the mystery of the spirit in favour of the demonstrability of the flesh. Patricia Monk sees Mrs Dempster’s experience with the behavioural codes of the town as prefiguring Dunstan’s own increasing moral independence from his home place (Mud 69). Like all Deptford women, Mrs Ramsay feels she had “standards of decency to defend” (Fifth 45); this phrase encapsulates the generalized female opinion that ostracizes the Dempsters. Mrs Ramsay’s intolerance clashes with the earlier impression that Dunstan creates about his family as the “literary leaders of the community” (17), a description alluding to their independence of mind. Yet their literary distinction amounts to very little against the sway of moral orthodoxy.

Because she conflates her religious beliefs with the dictates of Deptford’s limiting moralism, Mrs Ramsay, like the majority of Deptfordians, does not appreciate the nature of what she opposes. Dunstan, however, is developing a nascent understanding of the metaphorical in reality, what Monk refers to as the “numinosum” (Smaller Infinity 80). His initial sympathy for Mary later develops into his belief that her act was a Christian miracle resulting in the saving of a lost soul, and although he struggles against Deptford’s religious understanding during the length of his adult career, he must first extract himself from the consequential grasp of this blinkered comprehension. During this process, he is aware that the Dempsters’ expulsion from the town serves as a warning to those who would transgress Deptford’s conception of normality. The initial stages of Dunstan’s movement towards something “bigger and more sophisticated,” really a spiritual understanding whose basis lies outside of Deptford, is further fraught with difficulty since he is still very much a part of the town and experiences acute emotional anguish as a result of this tension.

Through her eventual ultimatum, Mrs Ramsay demands that Dunstan clarify his loyalty, something he conceives of as a type of identity proscription: “she was so anxious to root out of my mind any fragment of belief in what I had seen, and to exact from me promises that I would never see Mrs. Dempster again and furthermore would accept the village’s opinion of her” (57–58). To resign himself to the town’s opinion would compromise Dunstan’s growth: “She did not know how much I loved her, and how miserable it made me to defy her, but what was I to do? Deep inside myself I knew that to yield, and promise what she wanted, would be the end of anything that was any good in me” (58). Yet to his mother, such a promise would symbolize his final acquiescence to the collective morality of the village, or a normative standard derived from custom.

A fatalistic streak underlies Mrs Ramsay’s ultimatum: she is really demanding that her son comply with the moral outlook conveyed by his received station in life. His refusal would cast off the yoke of historical and cultural determinism; by resisting the influence of the synchronic collective, Deptford in the present, he would also resist the diachronic demands of Deptford’s collective historical voice. He opts for a third choice: “the next day I skipped school, went to the county town, and enlisted” (58). His military service allows Dunstan at least to delay his mother’s demand to accept his place in Deptford’s moral fold. This third choice initiates his European education, which only succeeds in protracting the existing intellectual/cultural distance between the increasingly cosmopolitan Dunstan and the parochial Deptford. Yet upon his return, this distance results in his temporary utilization of the imagined rural-urban conventions as typified by the rural-urban dichotomy in Sunshine Sketches; however briefly, Dunstan flirts with those small-town conventions he initially claims to transcend.

Dunstan’s Second Education: Something “Bigger and More Sophisticated”

While Dunstan is fairly reticent about his combat experience, he is rather effusive about his recuperation from the war. This period takes place mainly at the home of the Marfleets, an upper-middle-class English family: “How my spirit expanded in the home of the Marfleets!” says Dunstan. “To a man who had been where I had been it was glorious” (76). This last line, of course, refers to the trenches of France, but “where [Dunstan] had been” also includes small-town Ontario. The permissive atmosphere of the Marfleets’ home helps heal Dunstan’s physical wounds acquired in France and also those invisible wounds acquired in Deptford. His first taste of cosmopolitanism comes in the form of a genteel, frivolous, even sensual intellectualism that provides a direct experiential contrast to his first sixteen years in Deptford. During his stay with the Marfleets, Dunstan experiences his “sexual initiation” alongside his first notable cultural event, and he comments on their likeness: “I see that I have been so muddle-headed as to put my sexual initiation in direct conjunction with a visit to a musical show … [T]he two, though very different, are not so unlike in psychological weight as you might suppose. Both were wonders, strange lands revealed to me in circumstances of great excitement” (77–8). The two events appear similar in “psychological weight” to Dunstan because their symbolic content – what really amounts to their emphasis on sensual and aesthetic pleasure – is antithetical to Deptford’s ethos, what Monk describes as its corporeal notions of good and evil: “Deptford’s ideas of good … manifest an old-fashioned Puritanism whose cardinal virtues are prudery, prudence, and hard work … Deptford ‘good’ … is life-denying … [I]t is essentially the world of thanatos, or anti-life” (Smaller Infinity 92). Dunstan’s cultural initiation is a fitting counterpart to his transgression of Deptford’s moral barriers because, just as intellectual paucity and chastity are his lot at home, experiential and epistemological possibility within this new place helps reveal the spiritual pleasures existing within and beyond the carnal encounter.

Mrs Marfleet, the Honourable, embodies the oppositional ethos of this new physical and conceptual space and is a binaristic counterpart to Mrs Ramsay: “The Honourable was a wonder, not like a mother at all. She was a witty, frivolous woman of a beauty congruous with her age … and talked as if she hadn’t a brain in her head. But I was not deceived” (76). She is the perfect contrast to Dunstan’s existing icon of motherhood. His experiences with the Marfleets revise the previous dichotomy between Dunstan’s “conjuring” – really just his naive conception of the sophisticated life – and Deptford’s corporeal practicality. Now Dunstan’s psyche negotiates the gaiety and frivolity of the Marfleets’ home (middle-class English life) and the lingering asceticism of Deptford. The home of the Marfleets and the village of Deptford rest at opposite ends of a cultural spectrum, situating the Marfleets as representatives of an urban polarity analogous to the one in Sunshine Sketches that provides a productive contrast to Mariposa; the Marfleets give Dunstan a taste of the larger world, and, much like the Mariposans are drawn towards the supposedly more expansive world of the urbanites, Dunstan is attracted to the permissive luxuriousness of the British upper middle class.

While much of Sunshine Sketches’ appeal stems from the humorous and ironic contrasts of urban and rural life, Daniel Coleman finds an analogous phenomenon occurring between two nodes on the imagined cultural continuum of empire. His model would suggest that the rural-urban dichotomy apparent within Sunshine Sketches really involves the past and the present of the same conceptual line of socio-cultural development. The relationship between imperial centre and colony, says Coleman, produces anxiety within the “settler-colonist” who has internalized his colonial subjectivity. This anxiety involves a feeling of “belatedness” resulting from the colonist’s inability to adapt adequately to the imperial centre’s model of “civility” (16), which itself stems from a belief in civilization’s mono-linear trajectory. This conceptual timeline both produces and justifies the instructive posture adopted by the cultural and administrative centre, as it invariably conceives of its colonial possessions as following behind in its cultural-temporal wake. What I would like to take away from Coleman’s text is his suggestion of a cultural chronology inherent to the physical and philosophical space resting between colonial outpost and imperial centre, a phenomenon similar to that within the rural past–urban present dichotomy.8 Dunstan is a descendant of those “hard-bitten pioneers” who finds himself in the centre of the empire, and the Marfleets personify the “British model of civility,” or normative standard for Anglo-Canadian cultural identity (Coleman 5). If we follow the logic of Coleman’s reflections, Dunstan’s sexual and cultural initiation represents the “updating” of his cultural temporality, as these firsts are part of the experience of place. What has previously been expressed as a cultural dichotomy between the urban present and rural past, or centre and margin, Coleman suggests, can also be expressed as two ends of a cultural continuum that only appear to be antithetical.

Therefore, Dunstan’s implied engagement to Diana Marfleet offers him a hybrid identity that synthesizes divergent elements of the cultural continuum/polarity. The potential marriage between the daughter of old-world petits bourgeois and the descendant of new-world pioneers reveals Diana’s romantic hopes for their future life, which will combine elements of both worlds: agrarianism and gentility. Dunstan, however, harbours no misconceptions about agricultural life:

[A] life with Diana was simply not for me. As girls do, she assumed that we were drifting toward an engagement and marriage … [I]t was clear she thought that when I was strong enough we would go to Canada, and if I did not mistake her utterly, she had in her mind’s eye a fine big wheat farm in the West, for she had the English delusion that farming was a great way to live. I knew enough about farming to be sure it was not a life for amateurs or wounded men. (80)

Diana’s “delusion” springs from the deliberately romantic tales of the Canadian West used to lure settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this idealized rural existence is one that Dunstan’s childhood experience could never allow him either to internalize or to perform. What Dunstan characterizes as a particularly “English delusion” is really a misconception more representative of the Marfleets’ class, as it is shared by a number of wealthy urbanites in Sunshine Sketches. For instance, as we have seen, Pupkin Sr, a particularly ensconced member of the urban elite, longs for the “simple, simple life … some place that would remind him of the little old farm up the Aroostook where he was brought up” (102). Similarly, the club men stare longingly through the train window at the passing farm seen in the fading twilight during the final trip to Mariposa, while the narrator intones, “it must be comfortable there” (143). Rural nostalgia in both Sunshine Sketches and Fifth Business relates to the experiential distance between the classes, a distance that Diana longs to cross but one that Dunstan knows accommodates embellishment and projection. As Dunstan has emerged from the “belated” rural periphery, he knows something of farming’s hardships and restrictions, while, for Diana, the occupation remains quaint and romantic, safely resting across the experiential divide.

His “escapes” from Deptford and Diana are crucial to Dunstan’s process of individuation, yet these also represent departures from the roles each mother figure has devised for him: “I know how clear it is that what was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another … If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody’s own dear laddie, ever again” (80). “Dear Laddie” is Mrs Ramsay’s pet name for Dunstan, and it suggests how her expectations, based largely on her own cultural past, inhibited Dunstan’s internal process of self-development. He fears that Diana will similarly project onto him identity prescripts that clash with his process of individuation, a fear of hemming-in made explicit when he says about Diana, “I was not blind to the fact that she regarded me as her own creation” (79–80). Evading a marriage to Diana continues the process by which Dunstan circumnavigates the boundaries of a cultural narrative as opposed to developing within its parameters, suggesting Dunstan strives to be entirely of his own making.

His journey has an iconoclastic aura, as it involves his successful negotiation of the conventional cultural identities of a British colonial mentality; although Dunstan escapes maternal figures, he is symbolically eluding the sway of a cultural lineage. By first escaping the role small-town Ontario holds for him, and subsequently escaping a partnership to one of his own culture’s elites, he navigates and seemingly rejects a rural-urban dichotomy that mirrors the provincial-cosmopolitan dichotomy inherent to colonization. He has experienced both the “old values” and “sophistication” that the rural and urban spaces offer, and his departure from both displays a desire for total self-fashioning. The symbolism of such a journey aligns with the Promethean vision of Canada during the Pierre Trudeau era, perhaps reflecting the cultural context out of which Davies was writing.

Dunstan recognizes that socio-cultural roles, much like small-town conventions, are products of “bigger and more sophisticated” places or, more appropriately, that both are products of those whose representational authority out-shouts any intrinsic identity possessed by the thing itself. However, one role Dunstan appears satisfied with is his designation as war hero. The Victoria Cross, given to him by the king, the powerful hub of the imperial centre, represents the completion of his second apprenticeship, this time in a place much “bigger and more sophisticated” than Deptford. The medal symbolizes a new experiential divide established between Dunstan and Deptford, one that temporarily affects his portrayal of the village upon his hero’s return. Dunstan’s “second education” hampers his ability to describe Deptford as an insider, as one whose propinquity to the village affords a precise appraisal.

Dunstan’s Return and Deptford’s Distance

Dunstan survives the war only to discover that both of his parents have died during the flu pandemic, and his rather callous response to their deaths suggests that he feels relief that he will no longer have to negotiate the moral norms of Deptford according to his mother’s wishes. His attachment to the town is now severely limited, and his physical and psychical escape from Deptford now appears to be a matter of Dunstan’s choice alone. His cultural distance from the village is revealed through the town’s altered, conventional representation, and his return demonstrates his increasing cosmopolitanism through the narrative’s temporary resemblance to Mariposa’s narrative tone and description. This later description of village life marks Dunstan’s emphasis on the distance – intellectual, emotional, and cultural – between himself and Deptford. Monk interprets Deptford as a “background of conventional Canadian attitudes and behaviour” that clashes with “Ramsay’s new attitudes and behaviour” (Mud 14); yet only after his return from the imperial centre do his “new attitudes and behaviour” clash with what might be called “convention.” This tension results in a temporarily benign and comic Deptford whose nature seems characteristic of the idyllic Mariposa, as Dunstan now sees and describes the village as someone who is more familiar with small-town types than with the idiosyncrasy of a particular settlement.

Dunstan first describes his grand tour of the village immediately upon his arrival as “the strangest procession I have ever seen, but it was in my honour and I will not laugh at it. It was Deptford’s version of a Roman Triumph, and I tried to be worthy of it” (86). His designation as war hero by the fulcrum of empire, King George V, is a role Dunstan has accepted, but is also a role about which he remains self-aware, and this split subjectivity accounts for his tendency to condescend to the village’s rituals and simultaneously resist that impulse. The procession appears odd to Dunstan because he now sees it as a provincial anachronism, as only a simulation of the imperial centre’s grand rituals: this may exemplify Deptford’s “belatedness,” but it also reveals Dunstan’s new sense of distance from the town.

The town has changed during the war years, a change reflected in the village’s new interest in international affairs. Dunstan regards this new internationalism as one possible reason for his latest estrangement from the town: “I had little idea of what four years of war had done in creating a new atmosphere in Deptford, for it had shown little interest in world affairs in my schooldays. But here was our village shoe-repair man, Moses Langirand, in what was meant to be a French uniform, personating Marshal Foch” (85). What has changed more than the village itself is Dunstan’s perspective, enhanced by his own vast experience in the larger world and revealed by an altered narrative tone that has acquired an element absent from his earlier descriptions of Deptford. He sees the town now with that fond kindliness of the sort present in Sunshine Sketches: “There were two John Bulls, owing to some misunderstanding that could not be resolved without hurt feelings. There were Red Cross nurses in plenty – six or seven of them. A girl celebrated in my day for having big feet, named Katie Orchard, was swathed in bunting and had a bandage over one eye; she was Gallant Little Belgium” (Fifth Business 85).

As Dunstan’s experiences have increased his sense of distance – social, cultural, or otherwise – from Deptford, his reliance on literary convention similarly increases. Gone is the town’s small and quiet dignity, best displayed in the dead-serious search for the missing Mrs Dempster: “But if Mrs. Dempster was lost at night, all daylight considerations must be set aside. There was a good deal of the pioneer left in people in those days, and they knew what was serious … I was surprised to see Mr. Mahaffey, our magistrate, among them. He and the policeman were our law, and his presence meant grave public concern” (41–42). Dunstan’s involvement in this search marks his official recognition by his mother “as a man, fit to go on serious business” (41). The lack of irony in his recollection mirrors the pride he feels that this event, with its great significance to the whole community, marks his coming of age, a good indication of his previous cultural propinquity to Deptford’s rituals and markers of maturity.

W.J. Keith claims that both Leacock and Davies write of the small town “from a detached perspective. [Their narrators] have widened their own horizons and look back at the town in question with affection or amused irony” (167). In Fifth Business, however, it is Dunstan’s description of his triumphant return to Deptford after the war that marks the beginning of his bemused irony and detached observation of the village’s spectacles, celebrations, and rituals. This is best displayed by his ironic appreciation of the (very) local talent performing at the ceremony held in honour of the returning soldiers. It may be genuine, but his condescending affection is directed more towards the performers than their talent. Muriel Parkinson’s singing voice is affecting, but Dunstan considers her songs “shrieked (for her voice was powerful rather than sweet)” (88). The humour of Murray Tiffin is perhaps funnier for its intractable parochialism and good nature than for the wit of the actual jokes: “Then Murray got off several other good ones, about how much cheaper it was to buy groceries in Bowles Corners than it was even to steal them from the merchants of Deptford, and similar local wit of the sort that age cannot wither nor custom stale” (88). Prior to his departure for war, Dunstan describes Bowles Corners as “rustic beyond redemption,” yet, after his return, Deptford appears that way as well, as Dunstan’s new frame of reference extends to the stages of London’s West End and the habits of the British upper middle class.

Dunstan’s narrative becomes most like Leacock’s in his treatment of Deptford’s gifts for its veterans; the railway watches are valued for their practicality and they further reveal Deptford’s inability to condone luxury. This pragmatism becomes an element of fun, as it no longer represents an effective opposition to Dunstan’s developing personality: “These were no ordinary watches but railway watches, warranted to tell time accurately under the most trying conditions, and probably for all eternity. We understood the merit of these watches because, as we all knew, his [the reeve’s] son Jack was a railwayman, a brakeman on the Grand Trunk, and Jack swore that these were the best watches to be had anywhere” (89). This passage contains a slip into free indirect discourse, a common characteristic of Leacock’s narrative, through a subtle break from Dunstan’s elevated diction in the latter half of the quote; the break is made up of elements of the reeve’s presentation speech. But the irony of the preceding passage rests in the insinuation that Deptford’s luminaries most likely got the “‘family discount” when procuring these keepsakes, a situation that does not necessarily diminish their authentic gratitude for the veterans’ efforts but comically re-emphasizes the village’s thrift. A similar duplicity occurs in Dunstan’s review of the member of Parliament’s attitude towards the allied nations of the First World War: “Then the Member of Parliament was let loose upon us, and he talked for three minutes more than one hour … hinting pretty strongly that although Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson were unquestionably good men, Sir Robert Borden had really pushed the war to a successful conclusion” (89). The MP’s speech contains those types of inflated cosmopolitan comparisons that are ubiquitous in Sunshine Sketches: the real nation of consequence is not those grand industrial and military powers, but the relatively diminutive Canada, a boast perhaps suitable for the mouth of a Mariposan comparing the wide streets of the town to the grand boulevards of Paris.

Through this irony, Dunstan reveals his increased emotional and cultural remove from Deptford. Deptford now appears as a provincial village of diminished significance to the hero/narrator, and as a refuge from the horrors of modern warfare. Mariposa’s bucolic character is the product of the urban sphere, its representational source. The distance between the retrospective gaze of the narrator and Mariposa consists of a spatial-temporal gap that accommodates idealization, and the description of the town can only be that of a non-, or perhaps one-time, resident. This same process now occurs in Dunstan’s review of his hometown; he is simultaneously looking back at Deptford while he is looking at Deptford. As Dunstan’s psyche is no longer fully subject to Deptford’s restrictions, his version of the town displays a corresponding shift towards the innocent, and despite his stated awareness of small-town conventions, the town now appears to be a place “inhabited by laughable, lovable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life” (15), a characterization suggesting Dunstan is no longer a fully integrated member of the community.

This narrative shift implies that the dominant tone of Sunshine Sketches, that which helps construct the idyllic small-town archetype, is possible only for those narrators who can put that home place into a context that also includes life after the small town. When the small-town influence is impotent or exists only in memory, a narrator is then free to project onto that influence associations with bucolic or provincial naivety, or what Davies terms elsewhere Canada’s “myth of innocence” (One Half 275) – that is, the popular belief in the country’s inherent benevolence and simplicity. In the initial chapters of Fifth Business, however, Dunstan recounts his experiences in the town with the real, imposing, and even menacing influence of naivety’s ugly cousins: ignorance and intolerance. During his return to Deptford, a time when he is free to escape the village’s influence, the town temporarily appears backwards, charming, harmless, and colourful. Dunstan’s situation now mirrors that of the club men in Sunshine Sketches’ “L’Envoi,” as his material independence offers him freedom of mind, values, and opinion. As the phrase “home place” entails subsequent experience, Mariposa as “cultural archetype” is suitable only for a “culture of experience”; its rural simplicity is an urban projection of an imaginary loss. Dunstan’s unsettled narrative tone offers a type of meta-critique on a conventional rendering of small-town childhoods: his journey outlines the process of psychical, cultural, and temporal detachment from his origins, and their subsequent, idealized retrospective.

However, Dunstan’s utilization of this “fashion” amounts only to a brief foray into convention. After the comical proceedings of the official welcome-home ceremony, Dunstan provides an inversion or “anti-masque” of the dominant archetype of small-town Ontario, a portrayal that steps out of the sunshine and into torchlight. Immediately after the official proceedings at the courthouse, the members of the village gather outside, and the atmosphere acquires a palpable difference: “here the crowd was lively and expectant; children dodged to and fro, and there was a lot of laughter about nothing in particular” (91–2). That is until “down our main street came a procession, lit by the flame of brooms dipped in oil – a ruddy, smoky light – accompanying Marshal Foch, the two John Bulls, Uncle Sam, Gallant Little Belgium, the whole gang dragging at a rope’s end Deptford’s own conception of the German Emperor, fat Myron Papple” (92). Ultimately, the town burns and hangs the Kaiser in effigy. This scene displays an inversion of the earlier moral imperatives that the village received from its pioneer forebears. While the village may still demand moral conformity, that unanimity now more clearly revolves around a muscular and rancorous political identity.

Dunstan’s description of these unofficial events lacks the “amused irony” of his earlier description of the ceremony. During the anti-masque, Dunstan “watches them with dismay that mounted toward horror” as he realizes this “symbolic act of cruelty and hatred” is perpetrated by “my own people” (92). The symbolic act is an inverted manifestation of the same impulse that ostracizes the Dempsters, which precipitates the first of Dunstan’s crises. While the exclusion of the Dempsters is ostensibly based on collective Christian norms, the hanging of the kaiser is a grotesque parody of those norms; both involve an individual punished by a collective as the result of that individual’s moral or military transgression. Each retributive act has the same effect on Dunstan, disgust and horror, as both reflect the dark side of the imperatives of unanimity, whether it is moral or political: the majority revels in both its dominance and its opponent’s defeat. What before was portrayed as Dunstan’s moral unorthodoxy as a result of his refusal to acquiesce to “Deptford morality” is, during the anti-masque, fully articulated as direct opposition to the collective and unconcealed cruelty that is another part of such unexamined conformism. At this moment, Dunstan would most like to distance himself from the actions of his fellow townsfolk, yet this moment marks the reaffirmation of his shared identity with the town, when he calls the Deptfordians “my own people.” Dunstan thus rejects the special role into which he has been thrust, that of hero, as he can no longer be a representative icon of what he is witness to. By rejecting this role, Dunstan negates the heroic status that both distinguishes him from the rest of Deptford and renders him beholden to it through that role’s attendant obligations. This rejection also dissolves the narrative’s slip into Mariposan convention, as Dunstan can no longer maintain the newly minted distance resting between his imperial identity and the peripheral village; Dunstan’s and Deptford’s colonial roles dissolve.

The instability of Dunstan’s temporary “amused” distance from the town points to the instability of the very archetypes it helps construct. The village before Dunstan’s eyes is composed of complexities, some noble and some sinister. His earlier desire to escape the clutches of “Deptford morality” first turns into a simplistic re-view of village life and characters, which then translates into his more mature realization that, as his own origins rest within Deptford, to render it with anything less than an understanding of its complexity is doing the village and himself a disservice. The archetype represented by Sunshine Sketches emerges from a colonial mentality that perceives out-of-the-way places as the antidote to modernity; Dunstan discovers differently, and the dissolution of that archetype in his own narrative signals his transcendence of an immature flirtation with a colonial mentality that condescends to the imagined periphery. To write of small-town Ontario with a kindliness created by one’s cultural, temporal, or spatial distance from it is to write of it falsely, and, at least for Dunstan, this narrative technique cannot maintain itself in the presence of its literary subject.

Dunstan’s mature individuation can thus account for his Deptfordian past and his place within its historical lineage. This individuation does not reject origins by seeking a solitary place outside of a heritage, but rather incorporates them into his current subject position, a realization Dunstan later confirms when speaking to Joel Surgeoner, the formerly homeless man with whom Mary Dempster had sex: “What Surgeoner told me made it clear that any new life must include Deptford. There was to be no release by muffling up the past” (122). The small-town archetype is a type of “muffling up” of the past, as it conceals or resists historical complexity and can be used to justify a belief in one’s current moral infallibility through a nostalgic approach to the past. (For example, see Pupkin Sr from Sunshine Sketches: if this rich industrialist is schooled in the old-fashioned virtues of farm life, how could he possibly do harm in the present?) Dunstan’s complex realization allows him to resist locating a small-town idyll in Deptford, and it suggests the capacity for evil is inherent in human nature as opposed to a specific time, place, or culture.

The instability of Dunstan’s retrospective also hints at the increasingly difficult distinction between the provincial and the cosmopolitan in the modernizing postwar world. Dunstan’s description makes special mention of Deptford’s new interest in global affairs (85), a result, perhaps, of the ongoing technological dissolution of the divide between the rural and urban spheres in an age of rapid communication. Particularly revealing of this nascent modern homogeneity is the behaviour Dunstan witnesses in both cultural centre and outpost. Immediately after the war, Dunstan watches a disturbing spectacle in London: “I saw some of the excitement and a few things that shocked me; people, having been delivered from destruction, became horribly destructive themselves; people, having been delivered from license and riot, pawed and mauled and shouted dirty phrases in the streets” (77). These depictions of postwar rampage indicate that both imperial centre and periphery are affected by, and respond to, the same global events, news of which is transmitted instantaneously along transatlantic cables. Deptfordians and Londoners fight in the same war and celebrate its conclusion in similarly degraded fashions. Deptford’s insular identity has been replaced by its own self-identification with a type of “imagined community,” a community whose centre of influence is situated beyond the borders of not only the town, but also the nation; the town’s moral imperatives are now determined not by the village elders or its own particular past, but by the demands of the larger international community into which it now imagines itself. The increasingly globalized experience reflected in postwar Deptford resists the tangibility of rural difference, as modernity collapses the spatial relation upon which imagined rural and urban values are ostensibly based; the distance between the rural and urban spheres can no longer maintain the mirage of difference, as modernity degrades the effects of that distance. This process, though, does nothing to eliminate the rural nostalgia of those seeking a more innocent antitype to modern, urban experience; it is a nostalgic impulse, however, that Dunstan has overcome. The divide between the rural and urban spheres, however productive in Sunshine Sketches, is shown to be increasingly tenuous in Fifth Business.

Leacock was, of course, self-aware in his depiction of the “good old days” of the small town, and his narrator’s incessant irony continually draws attention to and undercuts the more idyllic aspects of his depictions. The danger, however, is in simply disregarding the irony and viewing Mariposa as a veritable representation of Canada’s golden age of the small town, as various critics have nostalgically done. Nostalgia, says Jonathan Steinwand, relies on distance, either temporal or spatial, to help “fashion a more aesthetically complete and satisfying recollection of what is longed for” (9). In order to read Mariposa, we must first acknowledge the source of its depiction deep within a melancholic, urban club for wealthy businessmen. Mariposa is a nostalgic consolation projected onto a distant past in order to help soothe the effects of urban anomie. At the margins of Leacock’s text rests the reality that Mariposa’s community idyll is not a memory, but a fabrication prompted by the dominance of an urban sphere and its attendant features: anonymity, industrialism, and impersonal commerce, all things conspicuously missing from Mariposa. Dunstan’s resistance to, in the words of Eli Mandel, the “process of perception” (115) that allows the small town to be viewed as an innocent or bucolic urban antitype is effected by his continued spatial and cultural propinquity to his hometown; in other words, his physical return dispels any small-town illusions distance may protract.

Life in Mariposa offers an imagined escape for urban titans of capitalism. Mariposa is remembered from a distance in both time and space, allowing life in the town to be re-imagined as that of the idyllic, organic community. Because its purpose is to provide imagined escape and consolation, Mariposa exists as the direct polarized counterpart to the urban sphere, a town wholly separate from the economic and cultural systems of modernity (apart from those it chooses to involve itself in), as that is exactly what its creators in the urban club desire; they want to remember other, better selves, and this imagined past accommodates that fantasy. Dunstan’s similar illusions of Deptford as a parochial complement or antitype to urban modernity rapidly dissolve upon his return to the town. Deptford, Dunstan’s reminiscences suggest, is fully implicated in the economic, cultural, and martial forces that shape the globe.

Deptford’s postwar international concerns reflect its movement from what Benedict Anderson may define as a “primordial village,” a community defined by “face-to-face contact” (6), to a larger imagined community in which the townsfolk see themselves as full participants in global affairs. For their part, the residents would not be incorrect in discerning a place for themselves and their village within the fabric of a global modernity; Dunstan’s experiences in both the war and London are testament to those dissolving spatial boundaries. However, just as important as Deptford’s changes is Dunstan’s response to them. Rather than remembering his rural childhood hometown as the antitype to the forces of modernity, as the safe space of childhood embedded in the surety of the past, Dunstan perceives the ease with which its traditional moralism transmutes into modern martial nationalism; the latter, Dunstan suggests, does not corrupt the former, but rather both are expressions of a similar impulse.9

Yet as boundaries appear to dissolve, the effect on cultural and place-based identities can be paradoxical: “The more global our interrelations becomes … and the more spatial barriers disintegrate, so more rather than less of the world’s population clings to place and neighborhood or to nation, region, ethnic grouping, or religious belief as specific marks of identity” (Harvey “Between” 427). David Harvey’s statement proclaims that cultural identification becomes firmer as spatial, and thus cultural, boundaries become increasingly fluid; it might also suggest that Mariposa as home place, or any home place recalled fondly, is, in some measure, a nostalgic response to broader cultural exposure. Mariposa is not a vision of a past, either cultural or individual, but a study in how the past is reshaped as an alternative to the culturally dislocating present. In Fifth Business, however, this process is far less benign. Dunstan’s observations suggest that the town’s pioneer morality has been shaped by an influence whose stress on the collective is perhaps even stronger and whose reach extends to any who have access to modern forms of communication – that is, modern nationalism. In that shift, the town’s process of cultural identification has become intransigent, muscular, not only exclusionary but also vindictive. Deptford is no home place; it merely refracts its dominant influence, whether that stems from a pioneer past or a transnational modernity.

Dunstan’s new “horror” is the expression of an individual against the calcification of a political-cultural identity, and not simply against Deptford’s collective moral voice. His sentiment may be based on a culturally elitist impulse, but it is a message of critical and independent thought that will be crucial to that dark age of political polarities about to begin, an age of extremes that is replacing Deptford’s moral conformism with a seemingly more potent message of postwar nationalism; and this new force similarly relies on cultural myths to support its manufactured sense of inherent righteousness. Dunstan’s inability to gaze lovingly upon that small village from which he emerged is the type of sober historical consciousness needed to think clearly about the “biggest outburst of mass lunacy” (171) the first war precipitates and to resist the pull of ideologies that will soon plunge the globe into an even larger conflagration than the one Dunstan was fortunate enough to have survived.

Postscript: Deptford’s Other Sons

The Deptford Trilogy includes two other novels, The Manticore and World of Wonders, which were released in 1972 and 1975, respectively. Like in Fifth Business, Deptford plays an important role in the early life of each book’s protagonist; unlike in Fifth Business, however, the representations of the town in these later novels approach the polarized convention of small-town writing that Dunstan Ramsay is both aware of and transcends in the trilogy’s first entry. While in Fifth Business, Dunstan denies the small-town nostalgia and retrospective condemnation that help craft these conventions, the latter two novels explore how both idyllic and anti-idyllic small-town representations emerge in the minds of remembering subjects. The trilogy as a whole offers a type of “meta-” critique of the conventions of rural writing, conventions that the major figure of the trilogy, Dunstan Ramsay, mentions at the trilogy’s outset, as if his thoughts present a loose thematic frame for the entire series.

The Manticore is a novel narrated in large part by Boy Staunton’s son, David. Traumatized by the sudden death of his father, an event that occupies the final sections of Fifth Business, David flees to Zurich at the outset of the second novel in order to undergo Jungian psychoanalysis. What develops is a talky narrative in which David’s psychoanalyst examines the Jungian archetypes that populate David’s autobiographical ramblings. Deptford plays a minor but important role in his story. Unhappy with his early life in Toronto, David spends his summers in Deptford with his rich grandparents. His parents have roundly rejected Deptford, a place they refer to as “that hole” (80), yet it is a place David longs for, indeed, a place that inhabits his happiest memories of childhood. It offers an escape not only from life in the city, but also from the simmering domestic difficulties darkening the Staunton household: “I suppose unless you are unlucky, anywhere you spend your summers as a child is an Arcadia forever” (80–1). For David, Deptford is a traditional Arcadia, a conventional pastoral landscape; his summer visits generate memories of a perpetually sunny rural landscape in which he enjoys a relative amount of autonomy.

Generations of critics view traditional pastorals as forming a literature of “retreat,” in which protagonists flee from the confines of a restrictive society into the relative freedom of a controlled nature. The pastoral landscape is not untouched or pristine wilderness, but a gentle “middle landscape,” as Leo Marx calls it, located between civilization and wilderness; the “middle landscape” is the “garden” that combines elements of the “half-wild, half civilized” (104–5). This literature can offer merely an escapist fantasy, what Marx labels a “sentimental pastoral,” or it can offer a sophisticated commentary on the nature of modern experience, what Marx terms a “complex pastoral.” The former is a simple nostalgic mode of writing that figures the countryside as the innocent antidote to the corruption, vice, and restrictions of the urban centre; the latter, however, “do[es] not finally permit us to come away with anything like the simple, affirmative attitude we adopt toward pleasing rural scenery” (25). Complex pastorals urge us to reflect on the contrasting and often illusory experiential differences between rural landscapes and urban centres, a process of reflection that ultimately “enrich[es] and clarif[ies] our experience” (11). Both complex and sentimental pastorals are the literature of retreat, but they have different outcomes: one confirms the sentimental understanding of the healing properties of nature, while the other, rather than denying complexity, engenders a deeper understanding of the self within modernity.

David’s middle landscape is not necessarily Deptford proper but, rather, his grandfather’s massive sugar beet plantation. His visit to Deptford may be his first proper retreat from the city, but it is a compromised one, in part because he fails to achieve the freedom that such a move should entail. That is because he is hounded at all hours by his nanny – his grandmother’s domestic servant, Netty Quelch. Netty is a personification of rural Ontario, an embodiment of place and of the values it ostensibly represents. David explains:

Her parents, Abel and Hannah Quelch, had been farmers, and were wiped out by one of those fires caused by an overheated stove which were such a common disaster in rural Ontario … Netty regards work as the natural state of man. Not to be doing something is, to her, to be either seriously unwell or bone idle, which ranks well below crime. I do not suppose it ever occurred to her when she took on the job of being my nurse that she was to have any time to herself or let me out of her sight, and that was how she functioned. I ate, prayed, defecated, and even slept in the closest proximity with her. (81–2)

David enjoys life in Deptford, and, as he explains to his psychoanalyst, his memories of it are “happy” (80). Yet, unlike in other simple pastorals, David is not fully autonomous within this rural landscape but is under the control of Netty, a literal and figurative shepherd. The appeal of the pastoral rests largely on the absence of restriction placed on the retreating figure. Shepherds, those who inhabit the pastoral landscape, are generally picturesque background figures, distant objects that contribute to the beauty of the rural scene. This distance maintains the illusion that the life of the shepherd is enviable, one of relative ease and freedom; they should have no power over the experiences of the retreating figure. Yet, because David’s summers are spent in close proximity to Netty, she limits the potential of his pastoral experience. She denies David’s stature, which in pastoral literature is something Terry Gifford calls a “privileged observer.” Netty’s coarse common sense erodes David’s “privileged” status, and only by escaping or retreating from Netty can young David flee his real position as a ward and enjoy his autonomy within the rural landscape.

His grandfather’s massive sugar beet plantation offers to David an escape within an escape, a doubling of pastoral retreats that serves a distinct purpose. His time on the farm provides David with his only opportunity to escape Netty and thus to gain the status of privileged observer. His grandfather, sensing David needs a break, sends him out into the fields on a miniature train designed to pick up loads of beets: “Whether Grandfather wanted to give me a rest, or whether he simply thought women had no place near engines, I don’t know, but he never allowed Netty to go with me, and she sat at the mill, fretting” (90). David’s train journey represents a successful pastoral retreat within a retreat that has been compromised, as his experiences are no longer dependent on the whims of his shepherd-guardian. David and the train’s driver, Elmo, “chuffed and rattled through the fields, flat as Holland, which seemed to be filled with dwarves, for most of the workers were Belgian immigrants who worked on their knees with sawed-off hoes” (90). Elmo is the “laughable, lovable simpleton” found in the more benign variety of rural writing, as his ignorance of ethnic nationalities (he thinks the Belgians working in the field are “Eye-talians”) is not malicious but, rather, comical to the more urbane folks who know better. David’s miniature train journey is analogous to the train journey at the conclusion of Sunshine Sketches, as both allow the traveller to view the rural landscape from a comfortable distance with no obligation to interact with or respond to the landscape’s inhabitants; furthermore, the distance between the privileged observer and the landscape maintains the scene’s picturesqueness, and it is this distance that accommodates the feeling of being within the rural landscape without being a part of it. From David’s perspective, the Belgians are not itinerant workers toiling on their knees in the full heat of the sun, as they might view themselves, but rather obliging dwarves cheerfully earning their day’s pay. This moment yields David’s happiest memories of Deptford, yet it is also the moment that re-establishes the distance between the one retreating and the rural landscape, distance that allows him to be a privileged observer who mentally sculpts the scene according to his own wishes. This moment most closely resembles a sentimental pastoral and is the source of David’s most acute nostalgia.

In contrast, for the central figure of World of Wonders, Paul Dempster, Deptford is a village that is “rotten with vice … [the site of] incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism” (Fifth 15–16). Paul’s upbringing is of the gothic variety; his fiercely religious father, a misguided Baptist minister, possesses a narrow understanding of religious values, which consigns Paul to a life of bible verses and strict, ascetic morality. Paul grew up in a home in which his mother was tied to a wall with a rope in order to keep her confined to the house. As bleak and gothic as Paul’s domestic life is, being outside among the Deptfordians offers no solace, as the town is cruel and mocking. In his discussion of the special cruelty of the town’s children, Paul, as the illusionist Magnus Eisengrim, his adult persona, states:

They really enjoy giving pain. This is described by sentimentalists as innocence. I was tormented by the children of our village from the earliest days I can remember. My mother had done something – I never found out what it was – that made most of the village hate her … They said my mother was a hoor … When I cried, somebody might say, “Aw, let the kid alone; he can’t help it his mother’s a hoor.” I suppose the philosopher-kings who struggled up to that level have since become the rulers of the place. (23)

To ease the oppression, Paul surreptitiously visits the annual agricultural fair: “O what a delicious release it was!” (24) he says of the experience. However, after being enchanted by a travelling carnival troupe, he is raped and subsequently kidnapped by its magician, a heroin addict by the name of Willard the Wizard. Paul’s life after this traumatic event only gets worse: he may have been taken out of the frying pan, but has been forced into the fire.

Paul becomes the “gaff” in Willard’s act, a card-playing automaton, Abdullah. This device is, of course, not an automaton at all but rather inhabited by the diminutive Paul who is controlling things from the inside. As the carnival travels from small town to small town, year after year, Paul observes the people for whom Abdullah represents a sort of wonder. The portrait of Deptfordians, indeed of all of small-town Ontario inhabitants, painted by Paul’s later stage persona, Magnus Eisengrim, is decidedly negative. His intimate knowledge has been acquired not strictly through his own experiences with those unkind acquaintances of his childhood, but by his unimpeded observation of the audience, which largely comprises small-town folk:

As I sat inside Abdullah, I saw them without being seen, while they gaped at the curiosities of the World of Wonders. What I saw in most of those faces was contempt and patronage for the show folks … They wanted us; they needed us to mix a little leaven in their doughy lives, but they did not like us … But how much they revealed as they stared! When the Pharisees saw us they marveled, but it seemed to me that their inward parts were full of ravening and wickedness … Day after day, year after year, I defeated them, and scorned them because they could not grasp the very simple fact that if Abdullah could be defeated, Abdullah would cease to be. (119–20)

Inside Abdullah, Paul is a “nobody,” the unseen hinge of a cheap carnival trick, and in this role he develops an intimate knowledge of audiences. What Paul discovers of the audience, all audiences, is that they willingly participate in the illusion to which they are witness.

Paul’s subsequent apprenticeships teach him how to craft not just illusions, but illusions in which the audience is complicit. As an actor with Sir John Tresize’s theatre troupe, Paul understands that the romance of the theatre is an exquisitely crafted illusion that requires the audience to want to believe in what they are watching: not merely a suspension of disbelief, but a desire to believe. And it is in this troupe that Paul must be “born again” into the image of Sir John, an image that is, just like Abdullah, a patina of exterior detail. A stage play’s illusion is a series of carefully crafted detail, and, as Sir John’s stunt double, Paul must craft his stage time to maximize the illusion’s effect. Davies suggests that both the magician’s show and a theatrical production possess parallel functions; both are designed to entertain, but they can do so only through the careful management of what remains visible and invisible to the audience.

In his discussion of his final apprenticeship, as a clockmaker, Paul explores this idea of the seen and unseen components of illusion through an extended metaphor of the mechanical toys. In his story of fixing the toy contraption of a monkey’s head at the end of a cane, Paul relates in some detail the inner workings and gears that allow the monkey to stick out his tongue at the press of a button. The monkey’s animation is the illusion, and Paul’s expertise rests with orchestrating the mechanisms that rest beneath the façade but that are crucial for the illusion to occur. Paul’s entire life, indeed his very survival, has depended upon his ability to craft illusions by orchestrating detail.10

If Paul as Magnus is renowned for crafting illusion, and if his entire professional career has been spent mastering the choreography of control, there was a time during which he was utterly powerless: his boyhood in Deptford. In order for Paul to gain some level of autonomy in his life, he has to become someone else: first he inhabits Abdullah, then he becomes Sir John’s doppelgänger, and finally he becomes Magnus Eisengrim. Paul is never able to develop from his boyhood self and mature into an older version of Paul Dempster, but rather he continually thrusts himself into the identity of something or someone else: while inhabiting Abdullah, he is reborn as a “nobody,” and during his time as an actor in England, he had “to get inside Sir John,” which required him to be “born again physically” (202). His life is spent mastering the external details that are required to adopt the visible markings of a different identity, yet this does not necessitate intellectual or spiritual growth; underneath the accumulated layers of artifice, Magnus Eisengrim is still Paul Dempster, a fact that he reveals in his solitary return to Deptford.

Deptford was the one place in which Paul did not control how others saw him, and it is in Deptford that Magnus refers to and thinks of himself in his original incarnation: Paul Dempster. Much like in other small-town novels, World of Wonders contains a homecoming scene that is very similar to those in Fifth Business and Sunshine Sketches. It occurs while Paul is on tour in Canada with Sir John’s company. As the train stops at the Deptford station, Paul steps down and views the town, which has changed very little in the intervening years.

I recognized a few buildings and saw the spires of the five churches … among the leafless trees. Solemnly, I spat … Spitting is not a ceremonious action, but I crowded it with loathing, and when I climbed back on the train I felt immeasurably better. I had not settled any scores, or altered my feelings, but I had done something of importance. Nobody knew it, but Paul Dempster had visited his childhood home. I have never returned. (293–4)

Deptford is the one place in which Paul cannot see himself as anybody other than Paul. That is the identity he has attempted to bury beneath years of alternative, surface identities, which were merely stage illusions. When he states that he has “never returned” after this visit, he is referring not only to Deptford but also to his identity as Paul Dempster, whom he refers to in the third person in the passage.

Deptford, though, will always be his home, not in the comforting aspect of that word, but rather as the place from which he emerged. His Deptfordian identity is the one he did not craft as an illusion, and it is one he can no longer abide. The distance between Paul’s former and current selves is very short indeed; his current self, Magnus Eisengrim, is merely a series of carefully crafted details, a stage artifice that is the cumulative effect of Paul’s training. However, small-town Ontario is Paul’s earliest influential environment, and the only place in which Paul had no ability to craft his identity. It is something from which he is thrust, and therefore, something he did not grow apart from organically, under his own power, into an older version of Paul. Dunstan has an epiphany in Fifth Business when he realizes that to bury his past would give it unparalleled power over his current life, a realization that sheds light on Paul’s situation: “I had tried to get Deptford out of my head; I wanted a new life. What Surgeoner told me made it clear that any new life must include Deptford. There was to be no release by muffling up the past” (Fifth 122). In order to grow – psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually – Dunstan must remain conscious of the impact his experiences in Deptford have on his identity. In contrast, by burying his past self, Paul “muffles up” the past, which then remains in stasis underneath the layers of his subsequent identities. For Paul, that past is his small-town Ontario upbringing, something with which he remains intimately familiar and, therefore, something that he acutely despises.

The degree of distance between perceiving subject and perceived object determines the nature of how Deptford will be remembered. All three novels of the Deptford Trilogy adopt a different mode of small-town writing, modes that Dunstan Ramsay explicates at the beginning of Fifth Business, almost as if his identification of small-town conventions should alert the reader to the nature of subsequent representations of Deptford. While Dunstan’s experiences lead him to transcend these conventions, the protagonists of the other two novels illustrate just how the small-town idyll and the anti-idyll are manufactured. David Staunton’s momentary autonomy, his freedom from restraint in the beet fields, is what allows him to form a happy memory of his trip through his grandfather’s acreage. For David, Deptford is an Arcadia because his freedom from labour and his return to Toronto are always assured. Paul Dempster, though, has concealed his original identity underneath layers of artifice, yet underneath those manufactured details rests the frightened, abused boy for whom small-town life was a nightmare. Upon his brief return to Deptford, he still despises the town: during that moment, the layers of artifice slip away and he thinks of himself again, perhaps for the last time, as Paul. Those early experiences are the impetus for his continued burying or “muffling” of his past. Yet, because he merely muffles his past, it remains at the very core of his continued and elaborate attempts to distance himself from it; despite his marvellous stage persona, or perhaps because of it, Magnus Eisengrim will forever remain Paul Dempster.

The Deptford Trilogy, in both name and function, explores how different modes of perception form and which determine how very different people will establish very different understandings of one place. While memorial representations of the small town may be as numerous as its inhabitants, the nature of those memories depends not simply on what happened in the past. The memories under our control, those that can be remembered as what we need them to be, are the ones most distant and inconsequential to our present identities; those memories that control us, however, those that motivate us in the here and now, are the ones that rest at the very core of our identities. For David, Deptford is a pleasant diversion from the real life he led in Toronto, and his happy memories of the place reflect that. For Paul, however, his time in Deptford is what consistently motivates him to transcend the place, yet, paradoxically, it is for this reason that Paul will never achieve that desired escape from his hometown.

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1 For discussions of the role of “return” in Canadian literature, see W.H. New’s Land Sliding and Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many.

2 Writing in the guise of Samuel Marchbanks, Davies comments on his own return to his hometown, Thamesville: “I found this Sentimental Journey quite exhausting, and returned to London in the shaky condition of a man who has had a good long look at his past” (Marchbanks’ Almanack 39 qtd. in Peterman 2).

3 It should be clear that this chapter will not consider Mariposa as a Jungian or Frygean “archetype.” In A Smaller Infinity: The Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies, Patricia Monk offers a thorough exploration of Davies’s work in the context of Jung’s influence. If Mariposa is a manifestation of an unconscious pattern or deep cultural symbol, it is not my goal to discuss it as such. Rather, Mariposa is an archetype in a culturally conscious (or for the Canadian context, a culturally self-conscious) sense, in that it constitutes a prototype for subsequent literary renditions of small-town Ontario; some suggest that Mariposa has a permanent status as intertext, intended or not (see Lynch’s discussion of Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? in The One and the Many 182–5).

4 Its long introduction was previously published as simply Stephen Leacock, part of McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library series.

5 This notion is particularly apparent in discussions of both Sunshine Sketches and Fifth Business. For Leacock’s text, see Douglas Mantz and Gerald Lynch (Stephen Leacock; The One). For Davies’s text, see Patricia Monk (Mud) and Barbara Godard (“World”).

6 Raymond Williams uses this phrase to refer to the common practice of associating a receding rural past with disappearing traditions and the “timeless rhythms” of an agricultural past: “Is it anything more than a well-known habit of using the past, the ‘good old days,’ as a stick to beat the present? It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places, the successive Old Englands to which we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms” (12).

7 Judith Skelton Grant tells us this story is based on events from Davies’s own boyhood experiences in Thamesville, Ontario (11).

8 In the rural past–urban present dichotomy, the former is associated with cultural origins. In Coleman’s model, the site of origins has been reversed, as the cultural influence flows from the imperial centre. However, if one reads Mariposa’s defining ethos as really the product of the urban sphere, the two cultural models are similar.

9 The alteration of Deptford’s traditional moralism into a force reflecting broader political-cultural concerns is on full display during the evening celebrations in honour of its war vets. This type of shift, suggests poet/critic Jeff Derksen, should not be seen as the triumph of the global over the local. Rather, Derksen speculates that the “discourses” of the local and global are not contradictory, but that the “discourse” of globalization can utilize “aspect[s] of place” (110) in order to conceal the constitutive effects of the global on the local. The night-time parade of nations in Deptford, while conducted by the exceedingly local cast of Deptfordians, enacts a type of transnational narrative that incorporates the idiosyncrasies of the village, both past and present, with the fluid cultural exchange of a transnational modernity. This event is a conflation of its exclusionary moral past and the synchronous events occurring on the other side of the ocean.

10 The profuse detail of his autobiographical narrative suggests that his life story is, just like his stage illusions, an exquisitely crafted misdirection. There remains the possibility that his entire narrative is another of his hoodwinkings – that it is a carefully managed ploy to distract and enchant.