Contemporary Readings of the Canadian Gothic: A Comparative Approach to Anne Hébert and Alice Munro

This dissertation compares the work of the Quebecois author Anne Hebert (1916–2000) and the Southern Ontarian author Alice Munro (1931) by focusing on their readaptation of the Gothic genre in a corpus of three selected texts: Hebert’s novel Kamouraska (1970) and Munro’s short stories “Meneseteung” (1988) and “A Wilderness Station” (1992). The comparison considers how they rework the Gothic to fictionalize Canada as a place and its history, and what their different ways of doing so can tell us about the different realities of which they speak—namely, Quebec and Ontario. The analysis develops from an introductory background, which presents an overview of the history of Gothic literature, defines its characteristics and outlines its presence in Canadian literature, where parallel Francophone and Anglophone traditions have developed. A brief biographical account presents Hebert’s and Munro’s belonging to these separate cultural and social contexts. An acknowledgement of the different forms in which they write sets the framework for their comparison. This moves from the proposed definition of the Gothic genre to show how Hebert and Munro renew it. The first chapter considers the texts’ settings, and their reconsideration of the boundary between Nature and civilization. The second chapter analyzes their description of psychological experiences and links it to the phenomena of violence represented by the texts, which are similarly gendered but refer to different socio-historical contexts: the Protestant pioneer “garrisons” of late 19th-century Ontario for Munro, and the Catholic, feudal society of Quebec of mid-19th century for Hebert. The final chapter investigates how the use of Gothic narrative devices calls into question these histories, asserting their relevance to the authors’ respective presents.

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