Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 127-38.
Abstract
In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with place is not confrontational but synergistic.
Typically, the male response to prairie landscape in earlier works of fiction by Robert Stead, Frederick Philip Grove, and Sinclair Ross, has been a posture of either triumph or defeat-a paradoxical configuration of vertical man in a horizontal landscape.1 Approached wholly as a masculine enterprise, the encroachment of man on the prairie environment has been defined by two things-solitude and an awareness of the surrounding emptiness: "The basic image of a single human figure amidst the vast flatness of the landscape serves to unify and describe Canadian prairie fiction" (p. ix). In his seminal essay "The Prairie: A State of Mind," novelist and playwright Henry Kreisel similarly defines the relationship of qtan to the landscape as being that of an intruder: "Man, the giant-conqueror, and man, the insignificant dwarf always threatened by defeat, form the two polarities of the state of mind produced by the sheer physical fact of the prairies" (quoted on p. xi). Travel writer Edward McCourt also sees the relationship as paradoxical: "The Saskatchewan prairies [are] a world that persuades [man] to accept the fact of his own curious duality-that he is at once nothing and everything, at once the dust of the earth and the God that made it."2 Struggle and conflict characterize a masculine perspective of human interaction with the land in early twentieth-century Canadian prairie fiction. In Wolf Willow (1955) by Wallace Stegner, the relationship is more ambivalentboth adversarial and nurturing:
Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.
It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones.3
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln