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rfmcdonald) wrote2003-02-27 01:19 pm
rfmcdonald) wrote2003-02-27 01:19 pm
[HONOURS] MacLennan's Barometer Rising
Here's the next-to-final draft for the MacLennan segment of my Honours English esaay.
Comments, criticism?
C. MacLennan’s Barometer Rising
Hugh MacLennan’s novel Barometer Rising is similar to Ringuet’s Thirty Acres in that the two novels each deal with the decline of traditional cultures at the hands of an aggressive modernity. The traditional cultures of rural Nova Scotia–often simplistically equated with a primeval transplanted Scottish culture, as observed by Uwe Zagratski (307)–did in fact share much with the traditional culture of rural Québec. These cultures all shared a decided agrarian orientation, founded upon the meshing of extended families through marriage and traditional patterns of cooperation, manifesting cultural traits (religiosity, for instance, and a distinctive dialect or even language) which marked them as different and inferior compared to the populations of the urban centers. These cultures were all informal cultures, existing outside of state structures and governed equally by secular custom and by religious morality, not by theoretically universal law. In both novels, it the First World War that triggers the collapse of these cultures; in Thirty Acres, the First World War encourages an agricultural boom that creates an unsustainable and artificial prosperity for the peasant economy of rural French Canadians, while in Barometer Rising the economic demands of the war encourage standardization and the assimilation of marginal cultures even as the Halifax Explosion obliterates Nova Scotia’s core. Thirty Acres and Barometer Rising each memorialize the fading of these cultures.
The two novels differ significantly, however, in that whereas Ringuet tracks the growth and decline of French Canadian folk culture (personified in Euchariste Moisan) over generations, MacLennan focuses upon a specific timespan and a specific place, exploring in real time a climactic moment in the decline of Nova Scotian folk culture. The specificity of Barometer Rising reflects the greater decisiveness in the assimilation of Nova Scotia to Canadian culture, for unlike French Canadian society which was complete in itself and posed what appeared to be a viable challenge to Canadian norms, Nova Scotia was not complete but rather fragmented and dependent on the outside world almost from its foundation. Though this fragmentation ensured the rapid decline of practical Nova Scotian distinctiveness, it did at least ensure that Neil McCrae and Penelope Wain were far better prepared for life outside of the shell of tradition than Euchariste Moisan.
Hugh MacLennan has been identified as Canada’s first great English-language novelist in spite of his stylistic and thematic flaws, particularly what Roger Nyman identified as his failure to balance adequately the instructive and entertaining elements, to present his social commentary in a sufficiently palatable narrative framework (315-8). Despite this criticism, MacLennan’s critical reputation as a pioneering Canadian author remains, resting substantially upon his first published novel Barometer Rising, which explores with a sympathetic realism the formation of a Canadian national identity among the innumerable strains of the First World War. One of the most important elements of Barometer Rising is its realistic treatments of Nova Scotia and of the city of Halifax, one of the earliest realistic treatments of Nova Scotia in Canadian fiction. MacLennan uses his characters particularly the wanderer Neil Macrae to provide readers with a detailed view of Halifax’s social geography and, through such characters as Evelyn Phillips and Alec MacKenzie, the cultures of outlying areas of Nova Scotia. This realism helps Barometer Rising successfully execute the thorough transformation that define its characters and landscapes. The most notable example of this transformation is Neil Macrae’s change from a despairing wanderer lacking intimate connections with others to a man reunited with his native community and his family. Other characters, most notably Geoffrey Wain, whose hopes for some kind of military-supported political power end with his death, see similarly vast transformations that bring them closer to or farther from their goals. Even the city itself is subjected to the most spectacular transformation, as most of its buildings are razed by the Halifax Explosion. Landscapes, societies, and individuals once thought invulnerable have been transformed utterly by the events of the few days described in Barometer Rising. This explosion and the ways in which MacLennan’s characters respond to the Haligonian catastrophe constitutes what Carol Beran calls a “revolutionary break” (79) with the Canadian experience, which was never considered to have been marked by violent convulsions or transformations until the Halifax Explosion.
Many of these transformations can be thought of as improvements. It is certainly an improvement that Neil Macrae and Penelope Wain can find happiness together, free from the neuroses that they suffered and the restraints once imposed upon them. Murray’s new confidence as a doctor is another unexpected byproduct of the Halifax Explosion. Even the death of Geoffrey Wain has a positive effect for some characters, inasmuch as it allows Neil to resume his place in Haligonian society without fear of persecution and removes the threat of Wain’s aspirations for political power. One transformation that MacLennan’s characters witness but do not adequately describe, however, is the death of traditional Nova Scotian, specifically, Haligonian and Cape Breton, culture, with all of its localisms of geography, ethnicity and class, and their melding into a new Canadian identity. This decline reflects Nova Scotia’s own incorporation, moving in from the outer perimeter of Canada towards a stronger identification with Canada as part of MacLennan’s hoped-for consolidation of Canada as a whole. It also reflects Nova Scotia’s own internal consolidation, for at the beginning of the twentieth century and on the eve of the Halifax Explosion, Nova Scotia was exceptionally fragmented, with geographical divisions accentuating strong ethnic divisions. This fragmentation was not a recent innovation, as John Bartlet Brebner observed in his survey of pre-Revolutionary Nova Scotia:
This pattern of fragmentation, marked by the creation of distinctive islands of settlement, was, if anything, increased by the wave of immigrants that arrived in Nova Scotia in the several generations after the War of American Independence. The Loyalist immigrants in peninsular Nova Scotia overwhelmed the prior New England Planter and Acadian settlers in most of western Nova Scotia, while from the beginning of the nineteenth century a massive wave of Scottish immigrants, predominantly from the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlands, arrived in Nova Scotia, as in Canada as a whole.
Nova Scotia’s connections with Scotland date back to 1621, when King James VI of Scotland (also James I of England) ordered the foundations of a Scottish colony of Nova Scotia, then a broad region considered to stretch as distantly as the Gaspé peninsula. However, it was not until rural overpopulation and the collapse of the Highlands’ clan system that large-scale Scottish emigration to Nova Scotia truly began (Gittings 2-3). In the modern territory of Nova Scotia, Scottish immigration was initially concentrated in Pictou County, but the exhaustion of arable land there and the increasing volume of immigration, particularly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, caused the focus of this immigration to shift eastwards, to Antigonish County and Cape Breton Island, from 1820 a component territory of Nova Scotia (Campbell and MacLean 35-75). In Cape Breton, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Scottish Highland culture survived strongly, being considered by some experts an “off-island of Scotland” (Lotz and Lotz 153).
The internal diversity of MacLennan’s early twentieth century Nova Scotia is in marked contrast to Ringuet’s contemporary rural Québec. Nova Scotia’s internal diversity contrasted markedly to the relative homogeneity of rural Québec, which despite strong attachments to local communities and a diversity of folk customs was ethnoculturally homogeneous, with strong state and church structures helping to maintain this homogeneity (Bilodeau 69). Nova Scotia lacked any comparable province-wide structures; indeed, more often than not Nova Scotian social structures tended to encourage division. For instance, whereas French Canadians in rural Québec were united within the ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church, Scots in eastern Nova Scotia settlements were divided between hostile Presbyterian and Catholic Churches, to say nothing of the presence of distinct Irish and Acadian minorities with their own distinctive traditions, or the presence of numerous other Protestant sects.
The internal diversity of Nova Scotia exacerbated the effect of a certain distance from the rest of North America, which according to Brebner can be traced to Nova Scotia’s unique geographical position:
This distance translated into a relatively balanced structure of relations that did not, by any means, tie Nova Scotia particularly close to the rest of British North America, in particularly to the Canadas. Nova Scotian ties with New England, characterized by thriving primary-materials exports from Nova Scotia and a growing number of Nova Scotian emigrants to New England from the 1870s, were just as intense, while Nova Scotia’s original foundation in the mid-18th century as a British naval outpost was reflected in strong sentimental and current links to the British Isles. Québec, in the heart of the North American continent and British North America, had no choice but to embrace both environments; indeed, well into the twentieth century ideologues of all stripes believed that Québec possessed a continental destiny, whether as the hearth of a greater New France or as an economic dynamo connecting interior North America with the wider world. Nova Scotia, at least, appeared both willing and able to remain autonomous.
Dreams of Nova Scotian independence, however, were impossible, just as surely as were dreams that Nova Scotian localism could be maintained. This acceptance is mirrored in Neil Macrae, who transcends his provincial roots of both his mother and his father to become someone greater. Before the First World War, Neil Macrae was already isolated from most of the Wain family; after the debacle under his uncle’s command, Macrae was isolated from his provincial homeland, unable even to visit Nova Scotia at risk of court-martial and execution. This isolation can be ascribed to Macrae’s father, a Highland Celt from Cape Breton Island who unexpectedly married Geoffrey Wain’s sister Jamesie, in the eyes of many of the Wains contaminating their staid family’s purity with a sort of uncontrollable Celtic romanticism.
The Wains and the Macraes came from wildly different social environments. Most of the Wains were not firmly attached to their homeland, like Geoffrey Wain: “For Nova Scotia he had no real respect; he merely felt it was a little less inferior than the rest of North America” (70). The Wains were a well-established Haligonian family which, like most other established members of Haligonian society, was entirely reconciled to its second-rate status inside the British Empire. On the night before the Halifax Explosion, the narrator comments:
Jim and Mary Fraser, living in Prince’s Lodge out in Halifax’s outskirts, are perhaps the only members of the Wain family who disagree with this short-sighted isolationism. They might believe with Macrae that “[m]erely to have been born on the western side of the ocean gave a man something for which the traditions of the Old World could never compensate,” possessing something of the same sort of confidence in the providential elements of the New World as Euchariste Moisan, if more intellectually grounded and sober (4).The Frasers, however, are marginal members of the Wain family compared to Geoffrey Wain or Aunt Maria. Most of the Wains are quite content to adhere to their self-destructive ideals of imperial honour and excessive attachment to Britain, and to condemn Macrae as a traitor. The Wains are representative of a Halifax that placidly accepts its isolation in exchange for its ideals, that is happy to exist as a solitary organism, “a diminuitive cage of streets and houses illumined after dark, an oval of rocky soil surrounded by sea and forests” (197) cut off from its hinterland.
Nonetheless, Barometer Rising includes many characters from Nova Scotia’s hinterlands, particularly from Cape Breton. Neil Macrae, of course, is partly of Cape Breton origin, as are Murray and Big Alec MacKenzie. Both Halifax and Cape Breton were integral territorial components of Nova Scotia, but life for Cape Bretoners in their insular homeland–or even, as evidenced by the life of Big Alec MacKenzie and his family in their North End slum home, outside–differs immensely from the life of the Wains. Upon arriving at the Wain house, Murray observes that “[t]he Wain house represented an aspect of Nova Scotia he had formerly seen only from the outside, for he had been born in a farmhouse in Cape Breton. The people in his district were plain and rugged, and they compensated for their poverty by pride and the hope of emigration” (31).
MacKenzie, in particular, still longs for his marginal Cape Breton farm despite the new prosperity enjoyed by his family and is still a man attuned to the Gaelic folkways of his native territory. The Cape Breton characters that Macrae meets in his quest are almost invariably friendly towards him and provide crucial assistance even at risk to themselves.
Cape Breton culture was traditionally marked by a very strong communal orientation aided by shared ancestry and folkways, described by Neil MacNeil in his autobiographical Highland Heart in Nova Scotia, which described traditional Cape Breton in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by MacLennan himself in this novel and elsewhere. In Barometer Rising, the character of Simon Perry, though not obviously a Cape Bretoner, typifies the reasons for the unviability of this culture: “Like most of the old craftsmen of the province, Simon Perry worked from models of his own contriving, miniatures exquisitely carved out of soft wood and complete to the last detail. But to get a contract from the government the submission of a blueprint was necessary […].” (12) Once, before the cultural patterns brought to Nova Scotia from Scotland and elsewhere had been disrupted, the marginal subsistence lifestyle of fishing and farming would have been enough; if Cape Breton had been isolated, perhaps the old ways could have been sustained. Even before end of the 19th century, however, this homeostasis was impossible to maintain thanks to the emergence of urban industrial societies elsewhere in North America and in Cape Breton Island itself–until the 1920s, the city of Sydney was a relatively prosperous industrial city, though admittedly marginal to traditional Scottish life. Cape Bretoners were forced by circumstances to change, and so they did. For instance, MacKenzie went to great lengths to ensure that his children would be properly educated and capable of white-collar employment, while Murray went to some lengths to become a doctor, and Neil Macrae became an innovative ship designer. The connections of the three men with their Cape Breton roots would be further weakened by their demoralizing experiences in the First World War.
The decline of this Cape Breton culture, however, was irreversible. Before Confederation, Cape Breton Island was a thriving traditionally Scottish enclave in an increasingly modern North America: two-thirds of Cape Breton’s population in 1871 was of Scottish background, rising to almost four-fifths of the total population in western Inverness and southern Victoria counties, while only one-third of Nova Scotia’s population and less than one-sixth of Canada’s population were Scottish (MacLean 66). This compactly homogeneous settlement allowed for the prolonged survival of traditional Scottish Highlands culture, transplanted into the New World with all of its complexities intact, well into the twentieth century. (Campbell and MacLean 169-192). The chief marker of this identity was use of the Gaelic language, which remained widely spoken well after Confederation. One source estimated that in 1890, three-quarters of Cape Breton’s population spoke Gaelic, while as late as the 1940s one-fifth of Cape Bretoners may have been fluent in the language (Lotz 153). Arguably, this Scottish identity manifested itself in distinct Cape Breton political trends, significantly in the way in which Confederation was welcomed by many prominent Cape Bretoners–for instance the popular Sydney-based politician and merchant John George Bourinot–“as an expression of regional discontent, an attempt to repudiate the 1820 union of Cape Breton with Nova Scotia and an attempt to join the island to a larger unit with a more dynamic economic and political future” (Tennyson 65). Support for Confederatino was an attempt to increase Cape Breton’s relative autonomy in a broader British North America.
Soon after Confederation, however, the maintenance of tradition became impossible for Cape Bretoners. This impossibility was manifested not least by a massive wave of emigration beginning in the 1880s that precipitated a catastrophic decline in Cape Breton’s Gaelic-speaking populations, particularly in the rural areas where the traditional culture was strongest (Campbell and MacLean 100-110). MacLennan’s Cape Bretoners, like the Haligonian Wains, are forced to accept this shift away from tradition; unlike the Wains, who are wealthy enough to carry on their traditional lifestyles regardless of the outside world’s changes, and who have already been integrated into a wider British imperial world, the Cape Bretoners belong to an epoch that is no longer viable.
For the individuals described by MacLennan’s narrator, Nova Scotian identity cannot stand as a viable substitute for Haligonian and Cape Breton parochialism. It is irrelevant that “in being Nova Scotians they possessed a peculiar cause for satisfaction, an excellence which no one had ever troubled to define because no one outside the province believed it existed and everyone on the inside took it for granted” (130). The Halifax Explosion would demonstrate as effectively as anything could that Nova Scotia could not stand alone in a violent world. More to the point, in the following decade, wartime prosperity would fade, as MacLennan would have witnessed, as all the Maritime provinces suffered severe economic decline and depopulation. All Nova Scotians are forced to change in varying ways and to varying degrees just like the veterans of the First World War, their visions “altered . . . breaking some and healing the gashes it had made in others by enlarging their consciousness. They could never be the same again, nor could the land they had returned to inhabit” (129). Indeed, MacLennan himself favoured the eventual dissolution of Gaelic-Canadian culture, romantic as it might be, to benefit the Gaels themselves and to allow their genius to be shared with the wider Canadian community (New 168).
It is not enough, as Murray drunkenly suggests, to “[m]ake everyone live in the country [so] there won’t be any more of these goddam wars” (137). Nova Scotians must shed their parochialisms and enthusiastically embrace the wider world, just as they did before the explosion as foreign crews and ships arrived incessantly in Halifax harbour. Like Big Alec MacKenzie, Nova Scotians must “bridge the gap out of the pioneering era and save [their] children from becoming anachronisms” (208) at the relatively cost of being lost to their native regions. They must, like Penelope Wain and Neil Macrae, become people “who could seem at home almost anywhere” (208) even while preserving what remnants of Nova Scotian identity they could.
Comments, criticism?
C. MacLennan’s Barometer Rising
Hugh MacLennan’s novel Barometer Rising is similar to Ringuet’s Thirty Acres in that the two novels each deal with the decline of traditional cultures at the hands of an aggressive modernity. The traditional cultures of rural Nova Scotia–often simplistically equated with a primeval transplanted Scottish culture, as observed by Uwe Zagratski (307)–did in fact share much with the traditional culture of rural Québec. These cultures all shared a decided agrarian orientation, founded upon the meshing of extended families through marriage and traditional patterns of cooperation, manifesting cultural traits (religiosity, for instance, and a distinctive dialect or even language) which marked them as different and inferior compared to the populations of the urban centers. These cultures were all informal cultures, existing outside of state structures and governed equally by secular custom and by religious morality, not by theoretically universal law. In both novels, it the First World War that triggers the collapse of these cultures; in Thirty Acres, the First World War encourages an agricultural boom that creates an unsustainable and artificial prosperity for the peasant economy of rural French Canadians, while in Barometer Rising the economic demands of the war encourage standardization and the assimilation of marginal cultures even as the Halifax Explosion obliterates Nova Scotia’s core. Thirty Acres and Barometer Rising each memorialize the fading of these cultures.
The two novels differ significantly, however, in that whereas Ringuet tracks the growth and decline of French Canadian folk culture (personified in Euchariste Moisan) over generations, MacLennan focuses upon a specific timespan and a specific place, exploring in real time a climactic moment in the decline of Nova Scotian folk culture. The specificity of Barometer Rising reflects the greater decisiveness in the assimilation of Nova Scotia to Canadian culture, for unlike French Canadian society which was complete in itself and posed what appeared to be a viable challenge to Canadian norms, Nova Scotia was not complete but rather fragmented and dependent on the outside world almost from its foundation. Though this fragmentation ensured the rapid decline of practical Nova Scotian distinctiveness, it did at least ensure that Neil McCrae and Penelope Wain were far better prepared for life outside of the shell of tradition than Euchariste Moisan.
Hugh MacLennan has been identified as Canada’s first great English-language novelist in spite of his stylistic and thematic flaws, particularly what Roger Nyman identified as his failure to balance adequately the instructive and entertaining elements, to present his social commentary in a sufficiently palatable narrative framework (315-8). Despite this criticism, MacLennan’s critical reputation as a pioneering Canadian author remains, resting substantially upon his first published novel Barometer Rising, which explores with a sympathetic realism the formation of a Canadian national identity among the innumerable strains of the First World War. One of the most important elements of Barometer Rising is its realistic treatments of Nova Scotia and of the city of Halifax, one of the earliest realistic treatments of Nova Scotia in Canadian fiction. MacLennan uses his characters particularly the wanderer Neil Macrae to provide readers with a detailed view of Halifax’s social geography and, through such characters as Evelyn Phillips and Alec MacKenzie, the cultures of outlying areas of Nova Scotia. This realism helps Barometer Rising successfully execute the thorough transformation that define its characters and landscapes. The most notable example of this transformation is Neil Macrae’s change from a despairing wanderer lacking intimate connections with others to a man reunited with his native community and his family. Other characters, most notably Geoffrey Wain, whose hopes for some kind of military-supported political power end with his death, see similarly vast transformations that bring them closer to or farther from their goals. Even the city itself is subjected to the most spectacular transformation, as most of its buildings are razed by the Halifax Explosion. Landscapes, societies, and individuals once thought invulnerable have been transformed utterly by the events of the few days described in Barometer Rising. This explosion and the ways in which MacLennan’s characters respond to the Haligonian catastrophe constitutes what Carol Beran calls a “revolutionary break” (79) with the Canadian experience, which was never considered to have been marked by violent convulsions or transformations until the Halifax Explosion.
Many of these transformations can be thought of as improvements. It is certainly an improvement that Neil Macrae and Penelope Wain can find happiness together, free from the neuroses that they suffered and the restraints once imposed upon them. Murray’s new confidence as a doctor is another unexpected byproduct of the Halifax Explosion. Even the death of Geoffrey Wain has a positive effect for some characters, inasmuch as it allows Neil to resume his place in Haligonian society without fear of persecution and removes the threat of Wain’s aspirations for political power. One transformation that MacLennan’s characters witness but do not adequately describe, however, is the death of traditional Nova Scotian, specifically, Haligonian and Cape Breton, culture, with all of its localisms of geography, ethnicity and class, and their melding into a new Canadian identity. This decline reflects Nova Scotia’s own incorporation, moving in from the outer perimeter of Canada towards a stronger identification with Canada as part of MacLennan’s hoped-for consolidation of Canada as a whole. It also reflects Nova Scotia’s own internal consolidation, for at the beginning of the twentieth century and on the eve of the Halifax Explosion, Nova Scotia was exceptionally fragmented, with geographical divisions accentuating strong ethnic divisions. This fragmentation was not a recent innovation, as John Bartlet Brebner observed in his survey of pre-Revolutionary Nova Scotia:
There was not even a sense of solidarity in Nova Scotia. Settlements were scattered at intervals along the edges of a long, narrow peninsula whose rough surface defied the road makers. The unpredictable sea was the road between settlements. There were long stretches of uninhabited forest along the shores all the way from Canso to Annapolis Basin. Annapolis and Granville were separated from Wilmot and Cornwallis by an unprofitable barren. The south shore of Minas Basin was fairly solidly occupied, but empty speculative grants lay between Newport and Truro, and one travelled by ferry from Windsor to Partridge Island on the way to Fort Cumberland and the Isthmus townships. Mere paths reached through the Cobequid Mountains from Truro to Tatamagouche and Pictou. There simply could not be an integral Nova Scotia. (262)
This pattern of fragmentation, marked by the creation of distinctive islands of settlement, was, if anything, increased by the wave of immigrants that arrived in Nova Scotia in the several generations after the War of American Independence. The Loyalist immigrants in peninsular Nova Scotia overwhelmed the prior New England Planter and Acadian settlers in most of western Nova Scotia, while from the beginning of the nineteenth century a massive wave of Scottish immigrants, predominantly from the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlands, arrived in Nova Scotia, as in Canada as a whole.
Nova Scotia’s connections with Scotland date back to 1621, when King James VI of Scotland (also James I of England) ordered the foundations of a Scottish colony of Nova Scotia, then a broad region considered to stretch as distantly as the Gaspé peninsula. However, it was not until rural overpopulation and the collapse of the Highlands’ clan system that large-scale Scottish emigration to Nova Scotia truly began (Gittings 2-3). In the modern territory of Nova Scotia, Scottish immigration was initially concentrated in Pictou County, but the exhaustion of arable land there and the increasing volume of immigration, particularly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, caused the focus of this immigration to shift eastwards, to Antigonish County and Cape Breton Island, from 1820 a component territory of Nova Scotia (Campbell and MacLean 35-75). In Cape Breton, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Scottish Highland culture survived strongly, being considered by some experts an “off-island of Scotland” (Lotz and Lotz 153).
The internal diversity of MacLennan’s early twentieth century Nova Scotia is in marked contrast to Ringuet’s contemporary rural Québec. Nova Scotia’s internal diversity contrasted markedly to the relative homogeneity of rural Québec, which despite strong attachments to local communities and a diversity of folk customs was ethnoculturally homogeneous, with strong state and church structures helping to maintain this homogeneity (Bilodeau 69). Nova Scotia lacked any comparable province-wide structures; indeed, more often than not Nova Scotian social structures tended to encourage division. For instance, whereas French Canadians in rural Québec were united within the ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church, Scots in eastern Nova Scotia settlements were divided between hostile Presbyterian and Catholic Churches, to say nothing of the presence of distinct Irish and Acadian minorities with their own distinctive traditions, or the presence of numerous other Protestant sects.
The internal diversity of Nova Scotia exacerbated the effect of a certain distance from the rest of North America, which according to Brebner can be traced to Nova Scotia’s unique geographical position:
The northeastward trend of the coast, the Appalachian uplands of Maine and New Brunswick, and the deep invasion of the Bay of Fundy . . . push her outward toward Newfoundland and Europe from the main body of North America. Nova Scotia has always had to contemplate the possibility that she may be in North America but not of it, and this mould of circumstances has pressed with varying weight on some generations of Nova Scotians to modify their traditional loyalties and inclinations. (262-3)
This distance translated into a relatively balanced structure of relations that did not, by any means, tie Nova Scotia particularly close to the rest of British North America, in particularly to the Canadas. Nova Scotian ties with New England, characterized by thriving primary-materials exports from Nova Scotia and a growing number of Nova Scotian emigrants to New England from the 1870s, were just as intense, while Nova Scotia’s original foundation in the mid-18th century as a British naval outpost was reflected in strong sentimental and current links to the British Isles. Québec, in the heart of the North American continent and British North America, had no choice but to embrace both environments; indeed, well into the twentieth century ideologues of all stripes believed that Québec possessed a continental destiny, whether as the hearth of a greater New France or as an economic dynamo connecting interior North America with the wider world. Nova Scotia, at least, appeared both willing and able to remain autonomous.
Dreams of Nova Scotian independence, however, were impossible, just as surely as were dreams that Nova Scotian localism could be maintained. This acceptance is mirrored in Neil Macrae, who transcends his provincial roots of both his mother and his father to become someone greater. Before the First World War, Neil Macrae was already isolated from most of the Wain family; after the debacle under his uncle’s command, Macrae was isolated from his provincial homeland, unable even to visit Nova Scotia at risk of court-martial and execution. This isolation can be ascribed to Macrae’s father, a Highland Celt from Cape Breton Island who unexpectedly married Geoffrey Wain’s sister Jamesie, in the eyes of many of the Wains contaminating their staid family’s purity with a sort of uncontrollable Celtic romanticism.
The Wains and the Macraes came from wildly different social environments. Most of the Wains were not firmly attached to their homeland, like Geoffrey Wain: “For Nova Scotia he had no real respect; he merely felt it was a little less inferior than the rest of North America” (70). The Wains were a well-established Haligonian family which, like most other established members of Haligonian society, was entirely reconciled to its second-rate status inside the British Empire. On the night before the Halifax Explosion, the narrator comments:
[T]hey lived tonight as they had done for years, with their thoughts and actions mainly determined by the habits they had inherited from their forefathers . . . They lived in Halifax in an anomalous permanency, still tied to England, suffering when she did but rarely partaking of her prosperities, unreconciled to be Americans or even Canadians, content for the moment to let their status drift with events. (130)
Jim and Mary Fraser, living in Prince’s Lodge out in Halifax’s outskirts, are perhaps the only members of the Wain family who disagree with this short-sighted isolationism. They might believe with Macrae that “[m]erely to have been born on the western side of the ocean gave a man something for which the traditions of the Old World could never compensate,” possessing something of the same sort of confidence in the providential elements of the New World as Euchariste Moisan, if more intellectually grounded and sober (4).The Frasers, however, are marginal members of the Wain family compared to Geoffrey Wain or Aunt Maria. Most of the Wains are quite content to adhere to their self-destructive ideals of imperial honour and excessive attachment to Britain, and to condemn Macrae as a traitor. The Wains are representative of a Halifax that placidly accepts its isolation in exchange for its ideals, that is happy to exist as a solitary organism, “a diminuitive cage of streets and houses illumined after dark, an oval of rocky soil surrounded by sea and forests” (197) cut off from its hinterland.
Nonetheless, Barometer Rising includes many characters from Nova Scotia’s hinterlands, particularly from Cape Breton. Neil Macrae, of course, is partly of Cape Breton origin, as are Murray and Big Alec MacKenzie. Both Halifax and Cape Breton were integral territorial components of Nova Scotia, but life for Cape Bretoners in their insular homeland–or even, as evidenced by the life of Big Alec MacKenzie and his family in their North End slum home, outside–differs immensely from the life of the Wains. Upon arriving at the Wain house, Murray observes that “[t]he Wain house represented an aspect of Nova Scotia he had formerly seen only from the outside, for he had been born in a farmhouse in Cape Breton. The people in his district were plain and rugged, and they compensated for their poverty by pride and the hope of emigration” (31).
MacKenzie, in particular, still longs for his marginal Cape Breton farm despite the new prosperity enjoyed by his family and is still a man attuned to the Gaelic folkways of his native territory. The Cape Breton characters that Macrae meets in his quest are almost invariably friendly towards him and provide crucial assistance even at risk to themselves.
Cape Breton culture was traditionally marked by a very strong communal orientation aided by shared ancestry and folkways, described by Neil MacNeil in his autobiographical Highland Heart in Nova Scotia, which described traditional Cape Breton in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by MacLennan himself in this novel and elsewhere. In Barometer Rising, the character of Simon Perry, though not obviously a Cape Bretoner, typifies the reasons for the unviability of this culture: “Like most of the old craftsmen of the province, Simon Perry worked from models of his own contriving, miniatures exquisitely carved out of soft wood and complete to the last detail. But to get a contract from the government the submission of a blueprint was necessary […].” (12) Once, before the cultural patterns brought to Nova Scotia from Scotland and elsewhere had been disrupted, the marginal subsistence lifestyle of fishing and farming would have been enough; if Cape Breton had been isolated, perhaps the old ways could have been sustained. Even before end of the 19th century, however, this homeostasis was impossible to maintain thanks to the emergence of urban industrial societies elsewhere in North America and in Cape Breton Island itself–until the 1920s, the city of Sydney was a relatively prosperous industrial city, though admittedly marginal to traditional Scottish life. Cape Bretoners were forced by circumstances to change, and so they did. For instance, MacKenzie went to great lengths to ensure that his children would be properly educated and capable of white-collar employment, while Murray went to some lengths to become a doctor, and Neil Macrae became an innovative ship designer. The connections of the three men with their Cape Breton roots would be further weakened by their demoralizing experiences in the First World War.
The decline of this Cape Breton culture, however, was irreversible. Before Confederation, Cape Breton Island was a thriving traditionally Scottish enclave in an increasingly modern North America: two-thirds of Cape Breton’s population in 1871 was of Scottish background, rising to almost four-fifths of the total population in western Inverness and southern Victoria counties, while only one-third of Nova Scotia’s population and less than one-sixth of Canada’s population were Scottish (MacLean 66). This compactly homogeneous settlement allowed for the prolonged survival of traditional Scottish Highlands culture, transplanted into the New World with all of its complexities intact, well into the twentieth century. (Campbell and MacLean 169-192). The chief marker of this identity was use of the Gaelic language, which remained widely spoken well after Confederation. One source estimated that in 1890, three-quarters of Cape Breton’s population spoke Gaelic, while as late as the 1940s one-fifth of Cape Bretoners may have been fluent in the language (Lotz 153). Arguably, this Scottish identity manifested itself in distinct Cape Breton political trends, significantly in the way in which Confederation was welcomed by many prominent Cape Bretoners–for instance the popular Sydney-based politician and merchant John George Bourinot–“as an expression of regional discontent, an attempt to repudiate the 1820 union of Cape Breton with Nova Scotia and an attempt to join the island to a larger unit with a more dynamic economic and political future” (Tennyson 65). Support for Confederatino was an attempt to increase Cape Breton’s relative autonomy in a broader British North America.
Soon after Confederation, however, the maintenance of tradition became impossible for Cape Bretoners. This impossibility was manifested not least by a massive wave of emigration beginning in the 1880s that precipitated a catastrophic decline in Cape Breton’s Gaelic-speaking populations, particularly in the rural areas where the traditional culture was strongest (Campbell and MacLean 100-110). MacLennan’s Cape Bretoners, like the Haligonian Wains, are forced to accept this shift away from tradition; unlike the Wains, who are wealthy enough to carry on their traditional lifestyles regardless of the outside world’s changes, and who have already been integrated into a wider British imperial world, the Cape Bretoners belong to an epoch that is no longer viable.
For the individuals described by MacLennan’s narrator, Nova Scotian identity cannot stand as a viable substitute for Haligonian and Cape Breton parochialism. It is irrelevant that “in being Nova Scotians they possessed a peculiar cause for satisfaction, an excellence which no one had ever troubled to define because no one outside the province believed it existed and everyone on the inside took it for granted” (130). The Halifax Explosion would demonstrate as effectively as anything could that Nova Scotia could not stand alone in a violent world. More to the point, in the following decade, wartime prosperity would fade, as MacLennan would have witnessed, as all the Maritime provinces suffered severe economic decline and depopulation. All Nova Scotians are forced to change in varying ways and to varying degrees just like the veterans of the First World War, their visions “altered . . . breaking some and healing the gashes it had made in others by enlarging their consciousness. They could never be the same again, nor could the land they had returned to inhabit” (129). Indeed, MacLennan himself favoured the eventual dissolution of Gaelic-Canadian culture, romantic as it might be, to benefit the Gaels themselves and to allow their genius to be shared with the wider Canadian community (New 168).
It is not enough, as Murray drunkenly suggests, to “[m]ake everyone live in the country [so] there won’t be any more of these goddam wars” (137). Nova Scotians must shed their parochialisms and enthusiastically embrace the wider world, just as they did before the explosion as foreign crews and ships arrived incessantly in Halifax harbour. Like Big Alec MacKenzie, Nova Scotians must “bridge the gap out of the pioneering era and save [their] children from becoming anachronisms” (208) at the relatively cost of being lost to their native regions. They must, like Penelope Wain and Neil Macrae, become people “who could seem at home almost anywhere” (208) even while preserving what remnants of Nova Scotian identity they could.