John Richardson's Wacousta and the Transfer of Medievalist Romance

MEDIEVALIST ROMANCE IN Canada did not appear out of nowhere. Its presence in early Canadian literature was firmly grounded in the situation in which, to quote from Kathryn Brush's introduction to Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier , “the Middle Ages [were] embedded in Canadian history, identity, and culture in the form of mental conditioning.” In architecture, Gothic/Medieval Revival buildings were erected, including, for example, the London District Courthouse built between 1827 and 1829. Gothic conventions started to be used in literary texts, including novels such as John Richardson's Wacousta , in which the Gothic conventions acquired a medievalist element. In this novel the literary medievalism is complemented with medievalist buildings, starting with Fort Détroit and ending with the medieval and post-medieval castles of Scotland and Cornwall. More specifically, the literary tradition of romance writing was transferred to Canada in a manner very similar to the transfer of Gothic architecture to the British colony. Furthermore, the indigenous past could provide white settlers with an equivalent of the medieval European past. Richardson's classic Wacousta , published in 1832, exemplifies both the cultural transfer of gothicisms to Upper Canada and the transmission of romance as a genre from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, where it often adopts the form of colonial romance. The novel demonstrates the two manners in which the Middle Ages existed in the Enlightenment, which was apparently continued in Romanticism, at least in Canada. John Simons comments on this two-faceted presence of the medieval in this cultural period in England as the vogue for the Gothic, understood as the fanciful “Strawberry Hill” Gothic of Horace Walpole and his imitators.3 On the one hand the Middle Ages were imagined as the time of barbarism and viciousness, and on the other, as Simons argues: the Gothic romances of Walpole, Radcliffe, Reeve and others exploited this very distaste and made it a subject for fiction. Contrary to the current critical orthodoxy on Gothic fiction, which tends to offer to an otherwise repressed audience a titillating and almost pornographic alternative to mainstream literature and representing a revolutionary new direction in taste, careful reading of the romances will disclose that the Gothic actually reproduced very faithfully a body of opinion about the Middle Ages that had been current in one form or another for the best part of half a century.

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