Beyond Window Dressing? Canadian Children’s Fantasy at the Millennium (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Window Dressing? Canadian Children’s Fantasy at the Millennium Roderick McGillis (bio) K. V. Johansen. Beyond Window Dressing? Canadian Children’s Fantasy at the Millennium. Sackville, NB: Sybertooth, 2007. A study of Canadian fantasy literature for young readers is welcome since in Canada, as elsewhere, the publication of fantasy has burgeoned since the appearance of The Golden Compass (1995) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997). K. V. Johansen does not explicitly say that the reason for the rise of a kind of book sparsely evident in Canada prior to the 1990s might have something to do with market forces, but she does make the point that Canada has been inhospitable territory for fantasy since the beginnings of its literature. Prior to 1975, little indigenous fantasy was available for children in Canada. We did have Catherine Anthony Clark, books of folklore, and an early example of utopian fiction, James DeMille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). In 1975, Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang appeared and this book managed to encourage a few writers to create fantasies in the years that followed: Donn Kushner, Welwyn Wilton Katz, William Pasnak, Nancy-Lou Patterson, and others. But, as Johansen says, things do not really get rolling until the late 1990s and the early years of the present century. Why this should be receives little consideration in Johansen’s book. She does speculate that “the lingering, in the Canadian juvenile literary world, of an early-Victorian, one might even say Calvinistic, suspicion of the fantastic” (25) has something to do with the paucity of fantasy in [End Page 360] Canadian children’s literature until recently. What she refers to is most likely the legacy of Puritan and later dissenting suspicion of fantasy’s deleterious effects upon the young reader’s sense of reality and the seriousness of purpose that this reality demands. As an explanation for the lack of fantasy in this country’s children’s literature, the notion of a lingering eighteenth and early nineteenth century sensibility probably holds some truth. However, we can see in that most canonical of Canadian children’s books—Anne of Green Gables (1908)—a lingering of the Romantic sensibility that champions the imagination and the fantastic capabilities of that mental faculty. Anne knows her romances, and she spends much time exercising her imaginative capacity for fantasy. She sees features of her landscape as a “White Way of Delight” and a “Lake of Shining Waters.” Early animal stories by the likes of Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton may also be viewed as a form of fantasy. If we can get our heads around the notion of the realistic animal tale as a form of fantasy, then we can grasp the idea that in Canada, nature itself was fantastic—and continues to be so. Fantasy that takes us to worlds different from the one we inhabit was unnecessary to a people who inhabited a strange and wild and fantastic nature. A look at Canadian painting by the Group of Seven or by Emily Carr will deliver landscape haunted by mystery. It has taken a long time for writers in this country to feel comfortable in the land of maple syrup and expansive wheat fields and rocky mountains and inhospitable tundra. But fantasy has arrived in Canadian literature. Just what fantasy means, however, remains a tad under defined in Beyond Window Dressing? Johansen does not set out to define the genre, but she does categorize fantasies in her chapter headings: “Time-Travel,” “Magic in the Primary World,” “Speculative Fantasy,” “Re-imaginings of Older Tales,” “Historical Fantasy,” “Animal Fantasy,” “Dual-World Fantasy,” and “Secondary and Alternate World Fantasy.” These categories are not hard-edged. “Magic in the Primary World,” for example, has something in common with “Dual-World Fantasy,” which in turn has something to do with “Secondary World Fantasy,” and “Speculative Fantasy” is an uneasy category because, as Johansen says, “All Fantasy is by its nature speculative, founded on imaginative considerations of ‘what if . . .’” (60). Gathering all of these categories together are two terms Johansen uses in her survey: “unabashed fantasy” (8) and “traditional fantasy” (106...

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