Abstract
The paper focuses on the Canadian novel The nine lives of Charlotte Taylor, published in 2007 by renowned Amnesty International reporter Sally Armstrong. Acclaimed immediately as a national bestseller, the novel depicts, according to the author herself, “Canadians’ fascination with their roots and their pride in an unwavering pioneering ethics”. Seen in this Eurocentric light, Charlotte Taylor (a real life pioneer of the late 18th c. Canada) becomes “everyone’s ancestor”. My analysis focuses on the dynamics of gender, race, and land acquisition, as depicted in the novel. The paper demonstrates how Armstrong rewrites the pioneer experience from a woman’s perspective; I approach the protagonist as a boundary crosser, emphasizing women’s liminal position in the early stages of colonization in Canada and their ambivalent relationship to settling the land. I also show, however, that Armstrong fails to recognize the complex dynamics of race relationships in early Canada. While the feminist intention of the novel is therefore (at least partly) realized, the figures of First Nations and their relationship with the white pioneers remain highly stereotypical.
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- 1.
The novel thus illustrates the radical change in the policy of the British imperial government in Canada, who, in the 1830s moved away from the earlier trade and military alliances with the indigenous population “towards a policy that effectively reconstituted First Nations people as wards of the state” and initiated an intense civilizing mission (Henderson 2003, p. 91).
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This tendency to generalize diaspora experience and loss of homeland is not uncommon in contemporary Canadian fiction. Examples of sentimental novels, filled with settler nostalgia, in which the relationship between the settler communities and Canadian First Nations are depicted in a perplexingly ambivalent way include Jane Urquhart’s celebrated Away and Alistair MacLeod’s No great mischief. See Smith 2008; Goldie. In a review, Sally Armstrong’s The nine lives of Charlotte Taylor has been praised for its “enlightened historical perspective” (Quirk 2000, p. 158).
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Branach-Kallas, A. (2013). Female pioneers, Good Indians, and Settler Nostalgia: Colonial Ambivalence in Sally Armstrong’s The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor . In: Fabiszak, J., Urbaniak-Rybicka, E., Wolski, B. (eds) Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_16
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