SOURCE: "Border Doubles: Twin Poles of the Canadian Psyche," in The Borders of Nightmare: The Fiction of John Richardson, University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 69-109.

[In the following excerpt, Hurley discusses family relationships and the doppelgänger theme in Wacousta.]

In Canada, the wilderness, symbolized by the north, creates a kind of doppelganger figure who is oneself and yet the opposite of oneself . . . The Canadian recurring themes of self-conflict, of the violating of nature, of individuals uncertain of their social context, of dark, repressed oracular doubles concealed within each of us, are now more communicable outside Canada in the new mood of the world.

NORTHROP FRYE, Divisions on a Ground

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE, In the Skin of a Lion

'Break boundaries'—points of reversal generating a paradoxical blurring, merging, or exchanging of identity—occur between specific characters in Wacousta as well as between the larger cultural groupings of regiment and tribe. In the preceding chapter, I sought to show how two cultures, one indigenous, the other immigrant, apparently without any relationship to each other, progressively intertwine and fuse in a curiously complementary fashion. Similarly, the twins, doubles, or doppelgänger figures so prominent in descent imagery participate in the border dialectic of Richardson's works. Here, too, there is opposition in which the opposing forces endlessly turn into one another.

Such doubleness gains in depth and impact from being reflected in the setting and structure of the work and is integral to the exposition of the central themes. Richardson's predilection for doubles and love triangles seems to issue from a psyche fascinated with balancing or undoing one element by another. This tendency plays havoc with conventional notions of identity. Lives reduplicate one another, giving rise to an eerie sense of doubleness, of reflections within reflections. Like the double exposure in a photo, under the intense compressional force of the borderland, characters and situations are superimposed over one another until it becomes hard to distinguish where one leaves off and another begins. Indeed, it soon becomes futile—not to say exasperating—to define identity in terms of separate and neatly isolatable individuals. Identity is communal; the focus is on groups rather than single characters.

Unlike many American frontier romances featuring a lone protagonist devoid of ancestry, Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers describe a claustrophobic world of uncles, nephews, aunts, cousins, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers. All are caught in a web of family relationships which is so densely interwoven as to be labyrinthine in complexity. Two family trees take root in Richardson's borderland of the Canadian psyche: that of the respectable De Haldimars and that of the outcast Mortons, the former, according to Wacousta, destined to be the bane of the latter. Their branches become inexplicably intertwined to the point where they are indistinguishable; when the Wacousta limb is chopped off, the De Haldimar branch withers and falls to the ground soon thereafter. Moreover, they are set within the tightly knit society of the garrison, itself comprising tense groups who are 'by a communionship of suffering, isolation, and peculiarity of duty, drawn towards each other with feelings of almost fraternal affection.'

The major double, of course, is constituted by the De Haldimar/Wacousta relationship, a relationship examined in depth in this chapter beginning with the section entitled 'The Struggle-of-Brothers Theme.' To borrow a term from separate studies of doppelgängers in literature by Miyoshi and Tymms, this is a 'double-by-division'; it features two characters of opposing yet complementary temperaments who are strangely bonded. In addition, there are also 'doubles-by-duplication' in which one figure is multiplied or mirrored in almost identical form. Here we have two Reginald Mortons. Both adopt pseudonyms, names and naming—as well as 'unnaming'—being of great importance in Richardson's works. ('Wacousta' is the uncle of 'Frank Halloway,' this family connection discovered by the former late in the story.) Besides a common name and lineage, they share similar physical and personality traits and meet the same fate.

Passionate, impetuous, high-spirited, energetic, daring, proudly independent, and defiant, both Reginald Mortons are men of strong feeling unafraid of expressing emotion in a constricted culture within limits and frowns upon such open expression. Tender, generous-hearted, and frank, both are impassioned lovers who risk all for love. Halloway's family rejects him after he, like Wacousta, refuses a marriage of convenience for one of affection. Marrying the woman he loves, Halloway is forced by adverse circumstances to conceal his status as a gentleman by birth and assume a new name and a lower rank. By fateful coincidence, Ellen Halloway becomes the wife of both Mortons. In each case as well, Colonel de Haldimar separates them from the woman they cherish.

Both Mortons form brotherly attachments with De Haldimars. Echoing Sir Reginald Morton's friendship with Ensign de Haldimar, Frank Halloway's best friend is Frederick de Haldimar who closely resembles his father. Such is their affinity that Clara de Haldimar avers that 'Frank Halloway . . . loved my brother as though he had been of the same blood!' Like his uncle in his youth, Halloway is selfless and altruistic: on the Plains of Abraham, he shows himself willing to sacrifice his life to preserve that of his friend, throwing himself in front of Frederick as one of Montcalm's favourite officers discharges his pistol. Ironically, this 'French' officer turns out to be Wacousta who recognizes the son by his resemblance to the father. Wacousta nearly kills his nephew; Colonel de Haldimar will be the next one to have Halloway shot.

Both Mortons fall victim to De Haldimar. He blackens their honour and their reputation, has them court-martialled on trumped-up charges as traitors, and ensures their exile or execution. What Ellen describes as 'the persecutions of the Morton family' in the Old World continue in the New, prompting her prophetic curse on the race of De Haldimar. A bitter Wacousta laments that his nephew has been rewarded for saving Frederick's life by 'an ignominious death, inflicted, perhaps, for some offense not more dishonouring than those which have thrown me an outcast upon these wilds . . . what but ingratitude of the grossest nature could a Morton expect at the hands of the false family of De Haldimar!' In the sequel, the last of the Mortons, locked in a death embrace with the last of the De Haldimars, perishes in the Niagara border abyss between Canada and the United States during the Battle of Queenston Heights.

Like the defendants themselves, the work's three trials seem to condense into one. Overlapping and paralleling one another, they suggest the cyclic nature of the herd mentality's insatiable appetite for scapegoats. During his second court martial, Wacousta stands on the same spot previously occupied by his nephew. He, too, insists on his status as a gentleman. Both ask for a delay in the proceedings pending Frederick's return, a request initially denied then granted by Governor de Haldimar in each case. Both are accused of conspiring with Ponteac and with François, the Canadian innkeeper; as in modern treatments of Louis Riel, each Morton is branded an outlaw and traitor to be exhibited as an example to native peoples so that 'when they behold your fate, they will take warning from your example; and .. . be more readily brought to obedience.' Both the Reginald Morton within the fort and the one without are killed at the exact centre of the 'Bloody Bridge.' Frank Halloway's declarations that 'Appearances . . . are against me' and 'I am not indeed what I seem to be' echo earlier statements by his uncle and suggest that the work's controlling irony lies in the abyss between appearance and reality.

The merging of the two Mortons is, perhaps, the most obvious example of a pervasive blurring of boundaries between characters in this borderland where identity is never static but always changing and indeterminate. Like De Haldimar and Wacousta, Charles de Haldimar and Sir Everard Valletort are doubles-by-division. 'Nearly of the same age,' 'the one was all gentleness, the other all spirit and vivacity.' Again, a passive and an active figure are bonded in strong friendship. They balance one another even as Wacousta's 'wild spirit was soothed by the bland amenity of his [De Haldimar's] manners.' Unlike that later relationship, 'not a shade of disunion had at any period intervened to interrupt the almost brotherly attachment subsisting between them, and each felt the disposition of the other was the one most assimilated to his own.' Indeed, in yet another important passage from the original 1832 Wacousta edited out of subsequent editions, Everard speaks of Charles de Haldimar as one 'whom I loved as though he had been my twin brother.' As in the case with Wacousta and De Haldimar and most doubles, they die within a short time of each other.

Such friendships represent a spirit of selflessness, camaraderie, and community that balances the mean-spirited herd-mind that often dominates garrison life. Recalling Richardson's Frascati's and anticipating a similar motif in his The Monk Knight of St. John, the bond between the two is further strengthened by Charles's desire that his friend wed his identical sister, his 'counterpart' Clara, 'that dearer half of myself.' (An analogous relationship obtains in Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley; identities merge as the aggressive, energetic Toby and the reflective David are balanced by their common inspiration, the latter's twin sister Anna.) Both brother and sister, in turn, bear an uncanny resemblance to their deceased mother, Clara Beverley, and both are killed by Wacousta at the fatal bridge.

By the end of the story, the identities of Clara, Charles, and Everard have coalesced in bizarre fashion; as Clara suddenly materializes at the opposite side of the bed upon which her dead brother lies in state, Everard is disoriented by the dizzying reflections from this human hall of mirrors: 'Her likeness to her brother, at that moment, was so striking, that, for a second or two, the irrepressible thought passed through the mind of the officer, it was not a living being he gazed upon, but the immaterial spirit of his friend. The whole attitude and appearance of the wretched girl, independently of the fact of her noiseless entrance, tended to favour the delusion. Her features, of an ashy paleness, seemed fixed, even as those of the corpse beneath him.' The permutations of identity are infused with an unsettling gothic light that becomes even more tenebrous during the ensuing vows of love. Declares Everard, 'In you will I love both my friend and the sister he has bequeathed to me.' For Clara, he will be 'both a brother and a husband.'

Like 'The Canadian Brothers,' the De Haldimar brothers also reveal Richardson's obsession with balanced pairs of characters, an obsession to which he, like Kroetsch, will remain faithful throughout his oeuvre. 'Captain de Haldimar had none of the natural weakness and timidity of character which belonged to the gentler and more sensitive Charles. Sanguine and full of enterprise, he is the allegro figure contrasting with the penseroso type his brother represents. While the active Frederick undertakes two heroic quests across vast distances and through the wilderness, his passive brother remains inside the fortress walls. Frederick is Colonel de Haldimar's favourite son; Charles is neglected, even rejected by his father, also named Charles, whose austere and puritanical nature is the opposite of his warm and emotional son's. In an epic informed by the Cain and Abel story, these two brothers, oddly enough, do not struggle; in the sequel, however, a similar tension between opposites is more exacerbated in their descendants as they quarrel over a woman (Wacousta's descendant) and one brother—inadvertently—kills the other.

Just as there are two Charles de Haldimars and two Reginald Mortons, so there are two Claras, mother and daughter. Abducting Clara de Haldimar from her father as he had Clara Beverley from hers, Wacousta sometimes confuses the two. Ravishing the former in the Indian oasis which parallels the Highland Eden of the latter, Wacousta—who has just told his other 'bride' Ellen Halloway that she has been the wife of two Reginald Mortons—swears that 'the love I have so long borne the mother [will] be transferred to the child.'

There is a similar commingling of identity among the five major female figures: Oucanasta, Madeline, Ellen, and the two Claras. Clara Beverley's capacity for uninhibited outpouring of affection is shared by Oucanasta, Ellen, and Madeline. The latter, possessing the 'voluptuousness' of 'the Medicean Venus,' shares her aunt's fearless nature and her sexual attractiveness. The portrayal of her impassioned meetings with her fiancé Frederick appears to echo that of the meetings between Morton and Clara Beverley. Madeline de Haldimar and Clara de Haldimar, first cousins, strike admirers at Fort Michillimackinac as a study in contrast, 'Venus and Psyche in the land of the Pottowatomies.'

Passionate and earthy, Oucanasta, the Ottawa woman at home in her forest oasis, is the true New World counterpart of Clara Beverley in her Scottish garden and is, I suggest, the true heroine of the work. Her love for Frederick goes unrequited, however; she is forsaken by the 'civilized' white man much as Keejigo is abandoned by Nairne of the Orkneys in D. C. Scott's At Gull Lake: August, 1810. Though fascinated by such liaisons which recall Richardson's own family history, garrison propriety is less offended by Frederick's marriage to his first cousin than to one of another race. Other parallels knit these characters even closer together. Madeline, for instance, bravely throws herself between her doomed father and the attacking Indians at the besieged fort which he commands. Later, she interposes between Frederick and Wacousta aboard the captured schooner; falling at Wacousta's feet, begging for mercy, she is spurned by the warrior even as the supplicating Ellen at the beginning of the story was rebuffed by Colonel de Haldimar and as a wildly distraught Clara de Haldimar at the end pleads at the feet of Wacousta.

Further blurring distinctions between Ellen and Clara de Haldimar are similar physical characteristics: both are delicate, fair-skinned, blue-eyed. Charles remarks that Clara 'had ever treated Ellen Halloway rather as a sister.' Both women are abducted and taken to wife by Wacousta who keeps them in his tent. As Charles is remarkable for his feminine appearance, female characters are sometimes made to look like men, thus blurring sexual identity. Like Clara Beverley who is disguised as a man as she leaves her Eden to cross over the abyss separating it from the garrison world below, Ellen is disguised as a drummerboy as she approaches the bridge over the border abyss dividing European from Indian. So, too, Oucanasta appears in the guise of a male warrior as she leaves the forest to enter Fort Michillimackinac to rescue Madeline.

Not surprisingly, the paradigmatic love triangle constellated by Wacousta, Clara Beverley, and De Haldimar also undergoes eerie multiplication. Shattered in the Old World, we catch reflections from it off a myriad of splinters in the New. Disclosed only towards the end of volume 3 in Wacousta's flashback, like a magnet it draws all the doubles and triangles whose significance may have escaped the reader, or seemed gratuitous, into meaningful patterns. A list which does not pretend to be exhaustive would include the following triangles: Everard—Clara de Haldimar—Charles; Oucanasta—Frederick—Madeline; Frank Halloway—Ellen—Wacousta; Everard—Clara de Haldimar—Wacousta; Clara de Haldimar—Wacousta—Ellen. Wacousta's liaison with François's daughter, Babette, moves us into 'love rectangles,' to borrow a term from Atwood's article on Rider Haggard. As with each double, each triangle is an analogue to, and comment on, the others, tending to suggest by parody, analogy, or correspondence characters and situations not immediately present.

In Richardson's fiction, the ideal triangle emerges out of the dialectic of opposites. An active and a passive male character revolve around an anima-like female who effects or mediates a larger reconciliation or equilibrium between conflicting forces. On a personal and psychological level, this represents a Jungian integration of the personality. On the cultural level, the Apollonian and Dionysian elements are harmonized in a new, dynamic synthesis. Although such themes of reintegration and communion are central to Richardson's art, this 'ideal' is only realized momentarily in The Monk Knight of St. John, perhaps because it is set outside the hopelessly schizophrenic nineteenth-century Canadian milieu. Most often, it is as though an original wholeness were split into antithetical fragments which war on each other.

The core triangle in Wacousta is homeomorphic to all others. It is traced and retraced with a redundancy characteristic of the borderline which, we recall, McLuhan describes as an area of spiralling repetition, replay, and metamorphosis. One example must suffice to illustrate how Wacousta's proliferating doubles and triangles are deployed by Richardson to recapitulate in miniature the thematic implications of the main plot and to anticipate its further development. The triangle involving Middleton, the Indian 'Venus,' and Baynton portrayed in the chapters on Fort Michillimackinac in volume 2, has complete congruity with that of the Wacousta—Clara Beverley—De Haldimar triangle revealed in volume 3. A variation on this theme, it is set in a comic rather than a tragic key. Chatting idly to Madeline and Clara about his friend Middleton, Captain Baynton remarks that he 'stole cautiously behind him, and saw that he was sketching the head of a tall and rather handsome squaw . . . a Venus, a Juno, a Minerva.' As Middleton goes on duty, Baynton playfully teases him: 'I think I shall go and carry on a flirtation with your Indian Minerva.'

This brief interchange does not draw attention to itself and, indeed, is quickly forgotten in the avalanche of details concerning the Indian attack. It is not until the embedded narrative of Wacousta's flashback many chapters later that the attentive reader begins to see double—or triple. Wacousta tells of being alone in his room sketching a picture of the Highland Clara; he suddenly realizes that De Haldimar has silently entered and is standing looking over his shoulder. Instinctively, 'I asked him, laughingly, what he thought of my Cornish cousin.' De Haldimar feigns indifference; yet, later, when Wacousta—or Morton—is called away on duty, De Haldimar quickly seizes the opportunity and marries the inexperienced Clara. The exactness of the mirror image is blunted by the omission in the edited versions of Charles's fleeting allusion to Baynton and Middleton whom Everard fears may be potential rivals for Clara: 'the musical and sonnetteering Middleton' is an artistic individual like Morton. De Haldimar, who does not appreciate 'the talent of so perfect an artist,' is reflected in the practical, scoffing Baynton with his polished manner.

Spiralling Repetition and Replay

The feeling one has is of entering a haunted world of reflections within reflections, of story within story that is also experienced in the work of Davies, Reaney, Munro, Atwood, Kroetsch, and many Canadian post-modernists. The original situation happens again and again one way or another. One set of relationships is constantly viewed or inflected through another in a kind of infinite regress. I will provisionally call this technique 'amplification by analogy,' a term borrowed from Edward F. Edinger's Jungian inquiry, Ego and Archetype. For the most part, the parallels, which tragically evade the awareness of the characters themselves, are casually introduced without any editorializing whatsoever. Richardson leaves it to the reader to make the connection, a considerable act of faith in an audience which has only recently come to appreciate the depth of his artistry.

Despite such a complex web of interrelationships uniting everyone and resonating with ambiguity, the garrison inhabitants themselves perceive things in terms of simplistic, either/or categories, seeing a world of sharp borders and unbridgeable gulfs. The tragic irony of such blinkered vision is nowhere more dramatically underscored than in the network of correspondences between the garrison's major characters—especially those rebuked by Colonel de Haldimar—and Wacousta. Just as the line between Indian and European blurs, so, too, a curious overlapping of identity occurs among the De Haldimar brothers, Everard, Johnstone, and the warrior who seeks to destroy them. As I shall soon suggest, Richardson attempts, not altogether successfully, to create in Frederick de Haldimar a character who balances the Colonel's arid intellectual nature with Wacousta's fiery passions. Tall, handsome, heroic, Frederick shares the latter's adventurousness, daring spirit, and athletic prowess. Ponteac proclaims him a faster runner than the Indians; on one occasion, he even outruns Wacousta.

Both men are passionate lovers. Recalling the language Morton uses to describe his 'cousin' Clara, Frederick's cousin is to him 'a divinity whom he worshipped in the innermost recesses of his being.' Her 'almost superhuman voice' enchants him as Clara's does Morton. 'His brain whirling with very intoxication,' the enraptured Frederick is likewise a lover who obeys 'wild impulse.' Like Wacousta, he also undergoes a series of metamorphoses, disguising himself as a common soldier and a Canadian duck hunter, and at one point he is dressed as an Indian. Like both Mortons, Frederick is ordered arrested by De Haldimar for defying the law. Both men are believed dead on several occasions, although each seems unable to wound or kill the other. Wacousta, however, does kill Donellan who 'was remarkable for the resemblance he bore, in figure, to Captain de Haldimar.' That the first victim of the gigantic Wacousta is Donellan, the tallest and largest grenadier who is also Frederick's mirror-image, suggests the uncanny interdependence of all characters in this radically contracted borderland, down to the least of them.

At first glance, Charles and Wacousta seem to possess little in common. Yet both are men of feeling and sensibility who suffer from broken hearts in a society dominated by those who place value only on the intellect. Each sheds copious tears. Constantly worrying for the safety of his closest friend and Clara, Charles has violent paroxysms of grief which threaten to dislodge his reason; they parallel the fever and madness that plague Wacousta after he loses both Clara and his best friend. Giving vent to his emotion, Charles, like the Mortons and Everard, fears his reputation for courage will be assailed. Like these figures and Ellen, he, too, is intuitive and given to presentiments, making statements which later prove prophetic. (In folklore, meeting one's double foreshadows death or the onset of prophetic power.) Charles is also insulted by De Haldimar and, like Wacousta, impulsively moves to draw his sword to defend his honour. Given such resemblances, it is ironic that he should be the first De Haldimar killed by the Warrior of the Fleur de Lis.

We find other reflections of Wacousta in Johnstone and Clara Beverley's misanthropic father. The latter, also a Jacobite rebel, is an eccentric gentleman heartbroken by the loss of a beloved wife and disgusted with English society. Lieutenant Johnstone is another distorted image of the young Lieutenant Morton. Johnstone is a brave, fiery, and reckless Scot, the motto of his Highland ancestors 'Nunquam non paratus.' (This is the inscription on Richardson's own ring and recalls his Jacobite ancestry.) The head of his family was also branded a traitor by the English. Like Everard and Charles, the impetuous Johnstone is repelled by the obsequious Ensign Delme, a yes-man who recalls Ensign de Haldimar and is, appropriately, the last European shot by Wacousta. Delme insults Johnstone and twists his words, threatening to denounce him as a traitor. Once again, an outspoken, marginalized individual, critical of garrison administration, is associated with treason, his honour challenged in a public manner by a hypocritical representative of law and order.

Sir Everard Valletort also mirrors Sir Reginald Morton in surprising ways. Both are lively and adventurous baronets, heirs to titles. Everard is also somewhat of a romantic idealist out of step with garrison society; the narrator associates him, too, with the power of the imagination and the heart and the quest for ideal beauty. Active and impulsive individuals, each is linked with a more passive and retiring double. Such friendships involve them in love triangles with either Clara or her daughter. Both claim the latter as their bride, and Wacousta sees his own situation reflected in the Everard-Clara relationship. A disoriented Clara confuses the two men herself, imagining that she is in Everard's arms while actually being ravished by Wacousta. Wacousta ties Everard to the Indian flagpole, and later the former is bound to the garrison flagpole; both captives escape carrying Clara, reversing roles of pursuer and pursued. Likewise gifted with a keen eye and ear, Everard, too, is an expert rifleman; his first shot at the beginning of the border romance and his last at the end wound Wacousta.

Like both Mortons, Charles, and Johnstone, Everard begins to manifest many of the outcast stigmata. He is also unjustly accused and publicly humiliated by Colonel de Haldimar. It is Everard's 'undisguised perception' of the man behind the Governor's mask of impartiality that draws down this severity. Again, it is the most frank and astute individuals who are victimized, pushed out of the centre of the garrison world to its borders. It is appropriate that it is Everard, a man appreciative of paradoxes, who alone voices Wacousta's Conradian status as 'one of us': 'That man, savage and even fiendish as he now is, was once possessed of the noblest qualities. . . . Colonel de Haldimar has brought this present affliction upon himself.' Wacousta the wild man is not as primitive as the soldiers imagine, but they haven't known that until this point.

Such is the delirium of doubles, complementary personalities, twins, and modulations of the twin theme characterizing Richardson's border milieu. A product of the author's fascination with dualities and the convergence of opposites, the resultant vertigo is an essential part of the romance's intent: unlike the American frontier of independent loners, the Canadian borderland is a world of uncanny interdependence, a mosaic mesh in which the most disparate and seemingly autonomous groups of people become entangled. Paradoxically, the text confirms both the continuity and discontinuity of this scattered world. Characters seem irresistibly drawn together even when they are bitterly antagonistic. This skillful marshalling of doubles and triangles sustains a great deal of resonant ambiguity; multiplicity, fragmentation, incompleteness, and discontinuity are posited even as their opposites are suggested: unity, completeness, and continuity. It also generates psychic conflict in which anxieties are sharpened to the point of madness. The details of such interpenetrating lives are intricately wrought and attest to a very careful use of echoes—of phrases and images—always setting up parallels and correspondences. Again, this pattern of recurrence, of an unabashed use of coincidence and analogy, emerges out of a very McLuhanesque sense of the borderline as an area 'of maximal interplay and subtle interpenetration.'

Such repetition and duplication is found in a number of Canadian writers, especially in recent years, as our literature has moved in the direction of fantasy. Richardson's proliferating Claras and Reginalds take their place among the doubled Annas, Demeters, and Billys in Robert Kroetsch's Badlands, The Studhorse Man, and Alibi respectively; the three Maud's in F. P. Grove's The Master of the Mill; the array of Georges in George Bowering's Burning Water; the nine sisters named Mary in Marian Engel's study of inbred Southwestern Ontario in The Glassy Sea; and the numerous Marys in Brian Moore's I Am Mary Dunne who have almost as many selves as the protagonist in Alden Nowlan's Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien. As I emphasize throughout this study, a very Richardsonian concern with the overlapping and fusion—and confusion—of identity, with the very notion of self as isolate, distinct, definable, enclosed, autonomous, is prominent in the work of many modern Canadian authors, with their radical challenges to the humanist notion of the self as coherent, unified, and stable. The twins and other characters who are described as 'Siamesed' in Matt Cohen's Salem novels, no less than the 'characters [who] split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble' in Tom Marshall's Rosemary Goal, also set in gothic Southern Ontario, suggest the efficacy of Richardson's border model of a radically contracted Canada; 'maybe,' muses the protagonist of the latter work, a novelist fond of stories within stories, 'that's what this town is anyhow. A daisy chain, a sexual commune . . . connections between everyone, the endless interrelationships that make us one people .. . A cast of characters whose lives are all interconnected.'

In two other books structured round an exchange of identity, we discover similar avowals which help place Richardson's modus operandi in a larger context. In Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night, the solidly middle-class George Stewart, who finds his double, the dynamic, reckless Jerome Martell 'to be inside me, to be me,' declares 'Each one of us is everybody, really.' (Similar realizations are also shared by the protagonist of Chris Scott's postmodernist Antichthon and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers.) The Studhorse Man is one of many Kroetsch tales of a bizarre swapping of identities; it illustrates what this writer, in conversation with Margaret Laurence, asserts as a very Canadian concern: 'the doppelgänger thing.' Perched in an insane asylum bathtub, Kroetsch's mirror-gazing narrator recounts the epic story of his roving uncle and adversary into whom he appears to metamorphose; reflecting on 'the act of naming,' the mad historian discourses on 'the fact that we are all, so to speak, one—that each of us is, possibly, everyone else.' Such observations by both madmen and conservative middle-class citizens may help to orient us when confronted by the dizzying prospect of Richardson's fictional world.

The Struggle-of-Brothers Theme

Colonel de Haldimar and Wacousta, like Gerald Grantham and Matilda Montgomery in the sequel, or Abdallah and the Baron in The Monk Knight of St. John, are doubles-by-division or by opposition. They are set within the dual cosmology they express—the border world of garrison and wilderness. Here the forces of restraint, repression, and reason present in the imported European culture presided over by Governor de Haldimar are at war with those of spontaneity, passion, and irrationality as expressed in the criminal outcast Wacousta and the North American Indian. In nineteenth-century Canada, the tragedy, as Richardson envisions it, is that no one bridges the psychological and cultural gulf between the two domains.

The De Haldimar-Wacousta relationship, like that of Linton and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), conforms to a recurrent romantic convention which Richardson tailors to reflect the New World border dichotomy of civilization and wilderness. Frye's comments on the struggle-of-brothers motif in A Study of English Romanticism illumine all of Richardson's works and echo statements by Chase, Davies, Lee, and McLuhan cited in my earlier discussion of the 'intermingled vision' :

The paradoxical relation of civilized and rude nature, a relation partly antithetical and partly complementary, is often expressed in Romantic fiction and drama by some variant of the struggle-of-brothers theme. This has several Biblical archetypes—Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Ishmael and Isaac—which become important in its development. In the conventional interpretation of the Bible, the figures of the social establishment, Isaac and Jacob, are the accepted ones; with Romanticism, there comes a transfer of sympathy to their exiled brethren. The so-called Byronic hero is often a Romantic version of the natural man, who, like Esau and Ishmael, is an outcast, a solitary much given to communing with untamed nature, and who thus represents the potentially expanding and liberating elements in that nature.

De Haldimar and Wacousta, certainly, are struggling brothers in Frye's sense. So, too, are Manvers and Haverfield in the earlier Frascati's. In particular, the fratricide of the first 'Canadian Brothers'—unlike the marriage of American Adams in their forest Edens—ominously recalls the tragic crime of our first brothers. The figures of Cain and Abel may be more relevant to the Canadian experience than that of Adam, as Richardson and later writers suggest. In The Secular Scripture, Frye links Cain and Abel with the theme of the demonic double. His further comments on the Byronic hero in his study of romanticism help focus this theme: 'He has great energy, often great powers of leadership, and even his vices are dignified enough to have some aesthetic attraction. He is often aristocratic in birth or behaviour, with a sense that, like Esau, he is the dispossessed rightful heir—here the theme combines with the sense of nostalgia for a vanished aristocracy. When he is evil, there is often the feeling that, as with Byron's Cain, his evil is comprehensible, that he is not wholly evil any more than his evil is a force that society has to reckon with.' For Frye, the greatest of all his incarnations in English literature is Brontë's Heathcliff, an embodiment of the wildness of Yorkshire moors and heath as Wacousta is of Canadian bush and rivers. The hideous Heathcliff, appearing fifteen years after the dark Wacousta, 'has in full the sense of a natural man who eludes all moral categories just as nature itself does, and who cannot be simply condemned or accepted. In contrast, the Jacob-figure, the defender of the establishment, often seems unheroic and spoiled by a soft or decadent civilization.'

The theme of brotherhood or friendship and their betrayal is of paramount importance in all of Richardson's writing, fictional, historical, and autobiographical. It informs his inquires into what constitutes authentic community and his portrayals of North American garrisons. In the flashback in which Wacousta recounts to Clara de Haldimar the history of his family and her own, the betrayed and once very naive outcast blind to the dark side of others bewails the 'intimacy [which] suddenly sprang up between' himself and her father: 'this incongruous friendship—friendship! no, I will not so far sully the sacred name as thus to term the unnatural union that subsisted between us.' 'Fire and ice,' he exclaims, 'are not more opposite than were the elements of which our natures were composed.'

In a key passage, Wacousta, once a romantic idealist, describes his 'partly antithetical and partly complementary' relationship with De Haldimar, the cautious law-and-order figure: 'He, all coldness, prudence, obsequiousness, and forethought. I, all enthusiasm, carelessness, impetuosity, and independence.' Here is the 'original' pattern of opposites in tension. This paradigmatic relationship is boldly stated in order to establish that the ideal bond between 'brothers' implies balance and complementarity. What later appear to be warring opposites are actually two component parts of a complex psychological entity. Their friendship conforms to that outlined by Jean Paul Richter, the coiner of the word 'doppelgänger':

Jean Paul's characteristic Doppelgangers are pairs of friends (in the original sense of 'fellows, two of a pair'), who together form a unit, but individually appear as a 'half,' dependent on the alter-ego . . . they are like contrasting, but complementary, sides within one complex nature . . . The divergences seem, in fact, to emphasize the mutual need for completion and support, in the sense of Friedrich Schlegel's definition of intimate friendship: 'A wondrous symmetry of essential characteristics, as if it had been pre-ordained that one should complete the other on every point.' These symmetrical pairs feel as instinctive an impulse towards one another as the urge which impels the Platonic twin-souls to seek out their respective partner and restore the original unity between them.

'Opposition is true friendship,' writes Blake. Wacousta speculates that 'my wild spirit was soothed by the bland amenity of his manners.' Ideally, impulse and intellect, feeling and reason, wild daring and caution, body and head are harmonized, just as, on a larger scale, Indian and European, wilderness and civilization are brought into balance. Such seems to be the case, for a brief moment, only in the Old World. What is dramatized in the New World borderland in peculiarly Canadian terms is a tragic dissociation of sensibility, a separation of thought and feeling, head and heart, which seems to have widened into an unbridgeable gulf. In the Wacousta-De Haldimar struggle, I suggest, Richardson dramatizes what he sees as the conflicting opposites that keep the Canadian psyche in tension, developing them with the fugues and arabesques so dear to the Canadian double vision. One aspect of this vision relevant to Richardson's work is discussed by Robertson Davies in his essay 'The Canada of Myth and Reality.' Davies cites a line from Douglas Le Pan's poem Coureurs de bois which encapsulates what he terms the dual nature of the Canadian soul: 'Wild Hamlet with the features of Horatio.' Inside the cautious, prudent Horatio, there lies a dark, fiery brooder. Similarly, in Davies's The Manticore, Dunstan Ramsay, the dull Canadian schoolmaster from Southwestern Ontario who is also a vigorous spiritual seeker, avers that 'Mackenzie King rules Canada because he himself is the embodiment of Canada—cold and cautious on the outside, dowdy and pussy in every overt action, but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations.'

The wild Wacousta's struggle with his staid double is highlighted in his 'Eden' flashback, chapters 7-11, volume 3 of the 1832 edition. Coming as it does towards the end of the romance, revealing the betrayed idealist, the accomplished artist, and man of sensibility behind the shadowy monster, it is literally and figuratively 'the inside story.' It is also the untold story, displaced in the novel's myriad doubles and triangles, and one which the silent Governor de Haldimar would keep the voluble Wacousta from telling. Those qualities which receive the most emphasis as Wacousta tells his story are the aristocratic Morton's 'exiled brethren' qualities: his impassioned communing with the rugged, untamed nature of the Scottish Highlands and the sea, romantic sensibility and intuition, boundless energy and animal boisterousness, athletic prowess and thirst for adventure. Above all, Richardson stresses the young man's aesthetic and mystical strivings and his intense imagination which enshrines the mountain-top maiden Clara Beverley as the embodiment of 'ideal beauty,' 'the being of my fancy's creation.' At the same time, Wacousta himself is presented as a story-teller, a voice, narrating himself into existence and out of the silence in which the tight-lipped Governor has confined him.

'Years of passionate imagining,' exclaims Wacousta to the second Clara, daughter of the woman he loves and the man he hates, had left his vision unrealized. Edited out of most editions is a crucial scene indebted to the Narcissus myth so familiar in Romantic literature and repeated with variations throughout Wacousta: 'How often, too, while bending over some dark and threatening precipice, or standing on the utmost verge of some tall projecting cliff, my aching head (aching with the intenseness of its own conceptions) bared to the angry storm, and my eye fixed unshrinkingly on the boiling ocean far beneath my feet, has my whole soul—my every faculty, been bent on that ideal beauty which controlled every sense! Oh, imagination, how tyrannical is thy sway—how exclusive thy power—how insatiable thy thirst.'

Addressing the imagination, Morton/Wacousta proclaims Clara Beverley as its creation: 'no sooner didst thou, with magic wand, conjure up one of thy embodiments, than my heart became a sea of flame, and was consumed in the vastness of its own fires.' The 'master passion' of Reginald Morton is the spiritual or mystical pursuit of an elusive yet consuming vision of the soul's other half. His is a rage for beauty and transcendence as fierce as that of Le Pan's Rusty in The Deserter, Cohen's F. in Beautiful Losers, or Symon's multiple protagonist in Combat Journal for Place D'Armes. By his very nature, he stands in opposition to established society and its official representatives; humourless, practical, unimaginative soldiers preoccupied with the matter-of-fact, utilitarian concerns of a materialistic and puritanical culture, they misunderstand, patronize, ridicule, persecute, and finally forcibly reject him.

It is highly significant that Morton, as representative of 'the imaginative man' devalued and exiled by the garrison, is an artist. Again, this important aspect of his identity is omitted in most editions. Morton speaks of his devotion to painting, an art 'in which I had attained considerable excellence; being enabled, from memory alone, to give a most correct representation of any object that particularly fixed my attention.' Such a 'photographic' memory is not out of place in a romance marked by duplication, water- and mirror-reflection. Given 'the talent of so perfect an artist . . . there could be no question that the painting' of Clara's portrait by Morton 'was exquisite'; 'The likeness was perfect, even to the minutest shading of her costume.' Indeed, she mistakes it for a 'mirror that reflected back her living image.' This portrait is itself 'doubled,' the painter making an exact copy of it.

Like other romantic questers in search of reintegration and wholeness, Morton is alternately restored and torn apart by the 'influencing agency of that Unseen Power' that claims him for its own: 'Why did my evil genius so will it . . . that I should have heard those sounds and seen that face [Clara's]? But for these . . . my life might have been the life—the plodding life—of the multitude; things that are born merely to crawl through existence and die, knowing not at the moment of death why or how they have lived at all. But who may resist the destiny that presides over him from the cradle to the grave?' Mystic and artist, lover and explorer, Morton is odd man out in a regimented garrison society which places little value on individuals following the uncertain inner promptings of an Unseen Power. His reflections appear to be shared, in part, by the narrator: 'It is in solitude, our thoughts, taking their colouring from our feelings, invest themselves with the power of multiplying ideal beauty, until we become in a measure tenants of a world of our own creation, from which we never descend, without loathing and disgust, into the dull and matter-of-fact routine of actual existence. Hence the misery of the imaginative man!—hence his little sympathy with the mass, who, tame and soulless, look upon life and the things of life, not through the refining medium of ideality, but through the grossly magnifying optics of mere sense and materialism.'

The Eden flashback reveals a Morton/Wacousta who represents what D. G. Jones, describing F., the mystic, madman, and terrorist in Beautiful Losers, terms 'the two poles of the irrational, the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit.' 'All enthusiasm, carelessness, impetuosity, and independence,' the athletic Morton, unlike the cautious, sedentary De Haldimar, is animated by a 'spirit of adventure,' playfulness and 'wild daring.' An experienced mountain climber, he scales the precipitous crags for the pleasure of overcoming the difficulties they present. Danger, chance, the unpredictable, the tumultuous, the unexpected—everything the garrison worries about and plans against—he delights in encountering. Abjuring the closed-in garrison, he exultingly 'rides' the whirlwind, the vast open spaces of sea and mountain-top, of heights and depths.

Whether in the Highlands or the vast Canadian space, Morton/Wacousta gives himself up to the flux and flow of the cosmos. All is energy, a dynamic interplay of elemental forces as in Gibson's Perpetual Motion or the storm-tossed universe of D. C. Scott and Lampman. Morton embraces both the beauty of terror and the beauty of peace. Unlike the static De Haldimar, he is always moving. Moving across continents and oceans, he aligns himself with the fluid realm of wilderness and nomadic Indian, a world constantly in movement; to the garrison soldiers, Wacousta is little more than a blur. His descendants in The Canadian Brothers are roving American frontiersmen associated with the turbulent border river. His literary progeny also include Reaney's endlessly spinning Donnellys, Callaghan's whirling, changing Peggy Sanderson, Kroetsch's restless Michael Hornyak in But We Are Exiles,—a dynamic figure in love with motion, racing crazily across Canada with his reserved Ontario law-student double—and perhaps even Aritha Van Herk's perpetually moving adventuress Arachne Manteia in the parodic, post-modernist No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey.

Wacousta's extremely mobile face—such a contrast to De Haldimar's rigid mask—receives repeated emphasis. 'The constant play of his features betrayed each passing thought with the same rapidity with which it was conceived,' not unlike the strange swift whiteness of Judith West's face, symbolically linking this outcast with the swirling wind blowing across the prairie in Ross's As For Me and My House. Associated with the realm of water and the fluctuation of the seasons in the new land, Wacousta can be passionately violent at one moment and tranquil and reflective the next, a paradoxical characteristic he shares with Reaney's Donnellys, Mitchell's Bens, Callaghan's Peggy Sanderson, and Wiebe's Riel. In contrast, the secretive De Haldimar, a stiff 'martial-looking man,' possesses 'stern, haughty, and inflexible features.' A mask concealing his real thoughts, his face denotes his aversion to change, movement, and metamorphosis which disturb De Haldimar as much as they do Ondaatje's Billy and Pat Garrett, because they resist control.

Morton's animal vitality and boisterousness are constantly in evidence throughout the flashback. While the soaring, high-spirited youth is associated here with a stag and an eagle, his Canadian incarnation as Wacousta evokes comparisons with a wide range of animals, ferocious or swift-moving, predatory or hunted: a tiger, a wolf, antelope, deer, and a wounded lion at bay. Dressed in deerskin, Wacousta as wild man is adorned with porcupine quills, wild deer hooves, bird feathers, and a buffalo horn inscribed with pictures of birds, beasts, and fish. Like other impetuous, energetic idealists and passionate outcasts associated with animals and the landscape or seascape, Wacousta symbolizes the life of the body; one thinks of MacLennan's Jerome Martell, Le Pan's Rusty, Cohen's F., Crawford's Max, Reaney's Will Donnelly, Ross's Judith West, and O'Hagan's Tay John. Morton places his confidence in himself—in imaginative vision and love—and in nature and its spontaneous processes rather than in the law, the rules, and regulations of the garrison world which only frustrate and, he feels, unnecessarily limit him.

His is a romantic zest for life, a recklessness and devilmay-care attitude that attends a surrender to one's instincts. In contrast with a society caught up in memories of the past or in anticipating the future, Morton manifests an absorption in the present moment; at times, his is the childlike wonder and awe before nature and the mysteries of a forbidding yet inspiring landscape which characterizes Mitchell's Brian and the Young Ben, Buckler's David, or Grove in Over Prairie Trails. 'Obeying, as I ever did, the first impulse of my heart,' the artist-idealist-lover takes delight in and draws strength from the irrational, the devastating, and the savage in nature. At home in 'the raging elements,' he comes to embody their inexhaustible power and variety. Rather than make nature over, he takes it as it is. Morton enters into ecstatic, sensuous communion with the stormy Highlands even as he merges into the more forbidding Canadian environment; in contrast, De Haldimar tries to conquer and consolidate his power over it.

The sailor and mountain climber accepts, even affirms, the violence of an uncontrollable nature. Immersing himself in the destructive element of life, he finds it buoys him up. Morton's energies are rooted in the irrational vitality of nature, not in the rational activity of the intellect, the domain of his prudent friend Ensign de Haldimar. Guided by 'presentiment,' he follows his intuition and the promptings of the unconscious while De Haldimar, going by the rule-book, demonstrates what many observers, discussing our cultural climate, see as an overreliance on the arguing intellect and an insistence that reality be absolutely rational. As a result, Richardson's outcast comes to represent all that is wayward, wanton, mysterious, unpremeditated, overwhelming, illegal, and lusty in life—a Lord of Misrule, a carnivalesque figure of Riot and Dionysian revel.

Wacousta: Poseidon and The Wild Man

Riding his chariot of horses across the sea, Poseidon, god of the oceans and god of horses, embodies the two age-old symbols of . . . our fluid unconscious. With no predetermined shape of its own, [water] is constantly in movement. . . Poseidon was the most primitive of the gods, the earthshaker, the god of storms and earthquakes, of the sudden devastation of tidal waves—the dangers unleashed when the forces slumbering under the surface of consciousness erupt.

ARIANNA STASSINOPOULOS, The Gods of Greece

Poseidon is also a metaphor for the man or woman who can go deeply into the realm of feeling and emotions, and gain access to what is down there: soul and sorrow, great beauty and monsters of the deep .. . Poseidon's sphere is the realm of emotions, and the man for whom Poseidon is the archetype is directly in touch with his instincts and feelings, which he expresses spontaneously and immediately if he's extroverted, and may harbour within if he's introverted. And he grows up in a culture that prefers boys and men to be unemotional.

JEAN SHINODA BOLEN, Gods in Everyman

The struggle between Wacousta and the Governor is a Canadian version of an ancient conflict whose mythological context is the antagonistic yet complementary relationship of the two brothers Poseidon and Zeus who divided the world between themselves (and Hades). Its dimensions are best gauged by an appeal to recent feminist scholarship and commentary by members of the 'mythopoetic' wing of the contemporary men's movement. Both explore the fascinating link between Greek myths—allusions to which abound in Richardson's writings—and the psyche. Jungian analyst Jean Bolen in Gods in Everyman (1989) suggests that the pattern of male Greek deities represents different qualities in the male psyche; they exist both as archetypes that predispose certain types of behaviour and response and as cultural stereotypes of masculinity. In her chapter on Poseidon, Bolen delineates an archetypal configuration of which Wacousta seems a nineteenth-century manifestation.

Poseidon's mythology as she elucidates it encompasses patterns we have been attentive to in Richardson's work and will find greatly elaborated in The Canadian Brothers. As in Wacousta, the emotionality and spontaneity that the sometimes turbulent, sometimes reflective Poseidon personifies is conveyed through imagery of the powerful, ever-changing moods of the sea which can be both a beautiful and a terrifying realm; like the indistinct border region of wavy curves and circles, the realm of watery depths is another blurred world 'so deep and so dark that clear vision is no longer possible and one can only dimly sense what is there.' Poseidon enjoys a double identity as sea god and as 'husband of the earth' (the meaning of his name), a pre-Olympian consort of the great goddess known for his intense sexuality and fertility. As is the case with Wacousta and De Haldimar, Poseidon contrasts with the impersonal Zeus who submerges feeling to maintain control; Zeus has much to learn from this god, notes Bolen, even as Poseidon might counter a susceptibility to being overwhelmed by rage by developing abilities to plan, reflect, focus, and think objectively. Like Wacousta, Poseidon in his negative or shadow aspect is the ultimate grudge holder; the depths he sinks to in an irrational revenge which drowns all rationality are evident in his relentless ten-year pursuit of a treacherous Odysseus. Like Wacousta, Poseidon reacts emotionally to betrayal, loss, and public humiliation by opening the floodgates to rage and grief. And like Wacousta, Poseidon is father of destructive monsters and savage giants who inherit his own worst nature.

'Poseidon is Zeus's shadow,' states Bolen. This 'looka-like of Zeus' in his positive aspect mediates 'access to emotional depths' which 'is an unappreciated aspect of men's psyches . . . devalued and repressed in patriarchal cultures.' In a section of her study entitled 'Poseidon as Archetype of The Wild Man,' Bolen identifies the rejected god with 'the wild man at the bottom of the pool' in the story of Iron John in Grimm's Fairy Tales, the commentary on which forms the basis of poet Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book about Men (1990)—perhaps the text of the men's movement. As the personification of that vibrant, instinctive masculinity that men must reclaim or be in touch with to be whole, the dishonoured wild man of the forest Bly describes so well is, for Bolen, Poseidon known by another name.

Richardson seems to have been familiar with some variant of this ancient story 'called "Iron John" or "Iron Hans" .. . first set down by the Grimm brothers around 1820' (Bly). In his non-fictional exposé of the garrison mentality The Guards in Canada, Richardson wittily confides to us that such is the apprehension he seems to have inspired in his detractors on one occasion that they, as well as 'the Militaires, already felt in anticipation the iron grasp of a Hans of Iceland, a Rob Roy, or a Wacousta himself.' The explicit connection Richardson makes between himself, Wacousta, and Iron Hans is too tantalizing to ignore and invites comment. As the story of Iron John opens, we find out that when travellers or hunters leave the comfortable, familiar surroundings of the king's castle and venture 'beyond the boundaries . . . outside the enclosure' into the strange depths of the nearby wilderness, they never return. One day, a young man risks going into the forest dreamscape alone, and as he passes by a pond, a gigantic hand suddenly reaches up to him from deep down in the water, not unlike that of the spectral Wacousta seizing Frederick at the bottom of the border river abyss. The hand succeeds only in pulling under the dog the man has wisely brought with him. Eventually, with several other companions, he bravely and laboriously buckets out the pond to discover lying at its bottom a huge, wild-looking man covered from head to foot with flowing, rusty-red hair.

This frightening being 'lives in the water, under the water,' comments Bly. Not unlike Poseidon and Wacousta, 'he also lives wholeheartedly on earth; his wildness and hairiness in fact belong to earth and its animals.' The primitive giant is brought back to the castle where the rather security-conscious and judgmental king imprisons him in an iron cage in the sunlight and pronounces him 'Iron John.' Like Wacousta, Iron John or The Wild Man is perceived as dangerous, and labelled as such, especially by those whose goal is to achieve position, keep power, look good, and control emotion. 'Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark.' What Bly suggests at more length 'is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche' under layers of cultural conditioning, just such a 'deep male' being of true strength, exuberance, joyous sexuality, deep feeling, and compassion, one whom Bly is careful to distinguish from the savage or macho male men—and women—already know too well.

Just as Frederick de Haldimar disobeys his father's direct order and journeys into the forest, the king's son sets Iron John free and goes into the dark forest with his unlikely mentor. 'As the boy leaves for the forest, he has to overcome, at least for the moment, his fear of wildness, irrationality, hairiness, intuition, emotion, the body, and nature'—everything De Haldimar's garrison walls out. 'Iron John is not as primitive as the boy imagines,' nor Wacousta as primitive as the soldiers believe, 'but the boy—or the mind—does not know that yet.' Indeed, the Wild Man is actually a baronial king just as within Wacousta there resides the chivalric Sir Reginald Morton. Before the end of the story, the king's son under Iron John's influence grows into an authentic masculinity issuing in genuine community with other men and women and communion with the earth. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the king's domesticated enclave no less than the Governor's, he learns from 'the instinctive one' what Morton/Wacousta, the Monk Knight, and his companions the Baron, Zuleima, and Ernestina know, that 'sexual energy is good . . . that animal heat, fierceness, passionate spontaneity is good; and that excess, extravagance, and going with Pan out beyond the castle boundaries is good too.'

Wacousta is a wild man, but he is not the Wild Man Bly delineates far more evocatively than I can suggest here. Though Wacousta the lover, the risk-taker, the instinctive one, the wounded grieving one rings true, Wacousta the killer and rapist is the opposite of Iron John who nurtures and gives life rather than takes it and who enters into equal partnership with the feminine. The Wild Man is not opposed to civilization, but he is not completely contained by it either, notes Bly. Perhaps we see in him that 'good double energy,' a balance of 'both Apollo and Dionysus,' that fascinated but eluded Richardson in his doubles from Wacousta/De Haldimar to the Monk Knight/the Baron.

Governor de Haldimar: 'Moral Monster' and Establishment Manticore

The double hook. The total ambiguity that is so essentially Canadian: be it in terms of two solitudes, the bush garden, Jungian opposites, or the raw and the cooked binary structures of Levi-Strauss. Behind the multiplying theories of Canadian literature is always the pattern of equally matched opposites.

ROBERT KROETSCH

Structurally, Wacousta's flashback is juxtaposed to chapter 6, volume 3 of the original 1832 edition. This key chapter, focused exclusively on Colonel de Haldimar, is entirely missing from most editions, transforming the story into the type of black/white melodrama of Manichean opposites favoured by American editors operating out of another literary tradition. As a result, both De Haldimar and Wacousta are thinly rendered as villains, although Richardson has created characters who are an ambiguous mixture of 'positive' and 'negative' traits. Intent on balancing the attractiveness and repulsiveness of these twin figures for the Canadian psyche, Richardson does not resolve the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the troubled relationship of these equally matched opposites. The original work is characterized by a disturbing ambivalence in the conflict between authority and rebellion— here linked with the clash of disparate cultures and of modes of being—that we now identify as highly distinctive of our literature. American editors have blurred this issue by creating a totally despicable law-and-order figure consonant with the 'biases' of their own literary tradition. In so doing, they subvert Richardson's intentions by eradicating the ambivalent double response the reader of the original work is obliged to make. They distort the qualified acceptance of the need for boundaries, limits, and some form of societal order, ideally one protective of community and fostering its growth while at the same time allowing for the maximum degree of individual freedom and personal self-realization.

De Haldimar and Wacousta are figured forth as archetypal forces vying for possession of the New World. Together, they explicate the nature of the national psyche as Richardson knew it, the conflicting opposites that keep it in tension. As in Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear and Scott's Antichthon, 'reality' is a double-edged affair in Richardson, and the divergent or multiple perspectives which are generated are part of a system of balances designed to counter the reader's (and author's?) own leanings and prejudices. There is a temptation to side with one or the other at different times in the story, either with De Haldimar, whom Robin Mathews calls 'the perverse expression of law and order,' or with Wacousta, 'the perverse expression of romantic individualism.' To do so is to get caught in defending one extreme without seeing what the author is intent on us seeing: that they are interdependent and, in themselves, tragically incomplete. In this sense, Wacousta is a litmus test of the Canadian sensibility.

As often happens, we are pulled both ways at once. The reader's sympathies shift constantly as the text discloses more essential aspects of each figure; their claims on our approval or sanction are alternately supported and undercut. Wacousta's balanced appeal to our romantic sympathies and our sober judgment is nowhere more apparent than in the juxtaposition of the outcast's flashback and the chapter reviewing De Haldimar's past. Just as the Eden chapters mitigate Wacousta's ferocity by disclosing his ardent idealism and romantic imagination, chapter 6 of volume 3 establishes the 'survival' value of De Haldimar's prudence and forethought; it shows his previously repressed emotions beginning to thaw his reserve, explains his extremely harsh behaviour towards Halloway, and qualifies his severity, locating the roots of his inhumanity in the tyrannical, patriarchal ideal of order enshrined by the British military institution he so single-mindedly serves. The tragic and inescapable imperfection of the imported garrison social order in the New World is the source of Wacousta''s endless tragic dilemmas. The most dramatic assimilate themselves to the conflict of group versus individual, of the herd sacrificing a pharmakos. Besides the antagonism between civilization and nature, the romance delineates a parallel opposition of order and violence within the garrison enclave itself. As in Kroetsch, Callaghan, Findley, Reaney, and Davies, the romantic energies of the individual battle with the traditional, unquestioned restraints of the garrison. Both sides, Richardson insists, have their creative and destructive aspects.

What is indicted in Richardson's tale is not so much De Haldimar, however culpable and morally obtuse, but the entire imported military/social system of the British Empire which he represents. His are not just personal defects but cultural ones. As the narrator informs us, 'the stern peculiarities of his character . . . originated in an education purely military.' The zealous empire builder is governed by a strict, unquestioning adherence to a militant ideal that is being transplanted to a New World milieu which resists the imposition of an order foreign to it. It is a vision of imperial order rather than one of freedom that he serves.

Sober, industrious, distrustful of emotion, De Haldimar is a strong-willed, self-righteous exponent—and an unconscious victim—of the old European order and what today would be called the patriarchy. His sensibilities have been irremediably skewed and locked into the fixed posture dictated by the army, and a culture that privileges the head over the heart.

Without ever having possessed any thing like acute feeling, his heart, as nature had formed it, was moulded to receive the ordinary impressions of humanity; and had he been doomed to move in the sphere of private life, if he had not been distinguished by any remarkable sensibilities, he would not, in all probability, have been conspicuous for any extraordinary cruelties. Sent into the army, however, at an early age, and with a blood not remarkable for its mercurial aptitudes, he had calmly and deliberately imbibed all the starched theories and standard prejudices which a mind by no means naturally gifted was but too well predisposed to receive.

Addiction to Perfection

De Haldimar is an extreme expression of the garrison's either/or mentality, which is a Procrustean bed carving recalcitrant individuals to fit the ideal of a homogenized society. '[H]e was a severe and a haughty man,—one whose military education had been based on the principles of the old school—and to whom the command of a regiment afforded a field for the exercise of an orthodox despotism, that could not be passed over without the immolation of many a victim on its rugged surface.' Both Reginald Mortons may be numbered among such 'victims,' prey to what in The Studhorse Man is called 'the eternal violence of law and order.' Both fall foul of what D. G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock identifies throughout our literature as an overly exclusive, arid, and militant ideal that would reduce life to a purely rational and mechanical system. And addiction to perfection, as Marion Woodman reminds us in her book of that title, leads to the wasteland. Richardson is our first novelist to inveigh in both fiction and non-fiction against 'the sterile self-destructive character of that ideal,' that 'arrogant and aggressive masculine logos' (Jones) so perceptively assessed by figures associated with the men's movement such as Robert Bly, Robert Moore, James Hillman, Michael Kaufman, and Ray Jones, and feminist writers such as Riane Eisler, Jean Bolen, Charlene Spretnak, and Carol Christ.

Unlike Wacousta who chooses emotion and intuition over practicality and calculation, 'Colonel de Haldimar was not one given to indulge in the mysterious or to believe in the romantic. Everything was plain matter of fact.' A stolid exemplar of the daylight consciousness that Davies and Kroetsch speak of, armed with a sharp, penetrating intellect, the reader first sees this Zeus figure—perhaps symbolically—'bearing a lamp in one hand and a naked sword in the other.' 'A caution and vigilance of no common kind were unceasingly exercised by the prudent governor,' we are told on the first page of the story; De Haldimar's last words urge the officers dutifully to 'pay every attention to the security of the garrison.' Indeed, the opening chapters are choked with the repetition of such garrison watchwords as 'prudence,' 'caution,' 'discipline,' 'vigilance,' and 'precaution.' De Haldimar's first sentence is the now classic opening question of all 'westerns,' one posed by the lawman in baffled pursuit of an elusive outlaw: 'which way did he go?'

De Haldimar opposes to nature and the instinctual side of human beings the world of the mind. Such is his over-emphasis on the intellect and on will-power that he strives to effect what Grove's Edmund Clark, a tyrant likewise motivated by pride and fear, calls an order that represents a dictatorship of mind over matter. As Jones notes in Grove's works, the arid and militant ideal De Haldimar devotes himself to implementing in the New World invariably incurs the destruction of human life and constitutes an assault upon the human spirit. What is gained in security and stability is lost in terms of vital energy and heartfelt passion.

Other establishment or law-and-order figures in Canadian literature have inherited Colonel de Haldimar's perverse, virulent strain of rationality. The cool, detached, intellectual streak that makes him an 'inhuman murderer' renders Mitchell's Mrs Abercrombie 'the town assassin,' Ondaatje's Sheriff Pat Garrett 'a sane assassin' and 'an academic murderer,' and Grove's Edmund Clark 'an almost insane schemer' prepared 'to assume the most absolute power, as a dictator . . . to maintain law and order' and to 'eliminate' dissenters through 'Police and soldiery . . . machine guns and tanks . . . for the good of the masses themselves.' Although Wacousta seems to be mad, perhaps, as Perry Nodelman notes in an article on Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 'the real madmen are those who believe that sanity is total control and total lack of emotion.'

Perhaps the most important clue to De Haldimar's ambitious, patriarchal behaviour and the betrayal of his best friend comes right at the beginning of the romance before the full extent of its significance can be gauged. In a work in which so many things are doubled, it is not surprising that there are two curses. "'Ah!" observed Captain Blessington, "this is indeed the greatest curse attached to the profession of a soldier. Even among those who most esteem, and are drawn towards each other as well by fellowship in pleasure as companionship in danger, this vile and debasing principle—this insatiable desire for personal advancement—is certain to intrude itself; since we feel that over the mangled bodies of our dearest friends and companions, we can alone hope to attain preferment and distinction.'" If De Haldimar is the victim of Ellen's curse, Wacousta has been the innocent victim of this, 'the greatest curse.' Richardson chooses to emphasize this first curse at length in the opening chapters. He deems it important enough to detract from the surface action of tight suspense and mystery, reiterating it twice. For all the fear of the wilderness, this selfish, divisive desire for personal advancement is the real law of the jungle. Garrison life lived according to this 'debasing principle' is analogous to contemporary business life which for Bly 'allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear . . . Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all.'

Here an expression of the Cain and Abel motif, the scramble, for preferment 'over the mangled bodies of our dearest friends' is a particularly fertile theme in Canadian literature; it informs works from Heavysege's The Advocate to Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to Davies's Deptford trilogy. The story opens and closes in an enactment of this curse. Blessington, Charles, and Everard speak out against promotion obtained through the misfortune of others. Delme and Murphy, like the young Ensign de Haldimar, indulge in 'such selfish anticipations.' It is dramatically appropriate, therefore, that Wacousta's first stray shot kills the ambitious Murphy, that 'eternal echo of the opinions of those who look forward to promotion,' while his last shot kills the calculating Ensign Delme, Ensign de Haldimar's mirror-image. Both unfeeling men are shot through the heart, their deaths as symbolic as that of Grove's Edmund Clark, likewise killed by a bullet through the heart whilst defending the mill that now resembles a beleaguered fortress.

Richardson's poignant description of Governor de Haldimar in chapter 6 is a classic portrait of a type now all too familiar to readers of Canadian and feminist writings and the literature of the men's movement. It demands quotation at length.

As a subaltern, M. de Haldimar had ever been considered a pattern of rigid propriety and decorum of conduct. Not the shadow of military crime had ever been laid to his charge. He was punctual at all parades and drills; kept the company to which he was attached in a perfect hot water of discipline; never missed his distance in marching past, or failed in a military manoeuvre; paid his mess-bill regularly to the hour, nay, minute, of the settling day . . . and, to crown all, he had never asked, consequently never obtained, a day's leave from his regiment . . . With all these qualities, Ensign de Haldimar promised to make an excellent soldier; and, as such, was encouraged by the field-officers of the corps, who unhesitatingly pronounced him a lad of discernment and talent, who would one day rival them in all the glorious privileges of martinetism.

De Haldimar's quest to have and to hold power and position has become his life and has cost him his human features, as Wacousta's quest has cost him his. The Governor resembles an efficient, merciless machine exacting unquestioning obedience and grinding out robot-like conformity—a machine that works incessantly and works at keeping everything under control. Yet despite all his weaknesses, De Haldimar is presented with the same ceasing ambiguity, understanding, and sympathy as is Wacousta. In that very important chapter 6, the narrator maintains that

Whatever might be the stern peculiarities of his character,—and these had originated in an education purely military,—Colonel de Haldimar was an officer well calculated to the important trust reposed in him; for, combining experience with judgement in all matters relating to the diplomacy of war, and being fully conversant with the character and habits of the enemy opposed to him, he possessed singular aptitude to seize whatever advantages might present themselves. The prudence and caution of his policy have already been made manifest in the two several council scenes with the chiefs.

L. R. Early argues that 'a case can be made for De Haldimar as an exemplar of competence and responsibility.' The Governor is an able administrator and a shrewd organizer. Like the practical business men in Five Legs, he knows how to get things done; in both cases, this is part of their Puritan heritage. 'Scrupulously exact in the arrangement of his papers,' the fastidious bureaucrat is efficient, orderly, organized, pragmatic, analytical. Under his prudent supervision, the fledgling British colony does survive and endure, despite hardship and disaster and in the face of what strikes them as cosmic indifference and perhaps hostility. While his actions often end up sacrificing lives, they also preserve them; as Foucault's works testify, power is an ambivalent force. In some matters, De Haldimar does display a very Canadian genius for compromise. His policy of conciliation with regard to Ponteac and the three tribes he commands receives approbation. When the Indians are trapped inside the fort, De Haldimar cleverly uses the occasion to impress upon them the benevolent intentions of the empire he represents, to declaim against the French and to castigate Wacousta as a treacherous French spy unworthy of associating with a people he only misleads. So impressed is Ponteac by this show of forbearance and good will that he later concludes a peace with the British. Fort Détroit survives, in part then, through De Haldimar' s competent deployment of well-disciplined troops who defeat Ponteac's plans to capture it.

Neither De Haldimar nor Wacousta is a one-dimensional character. They may have a symbolic or iconic dimension, but they are also well-defined individuals alive with contradictions. The Governor is as capable of feeling as Wacousta is of systematically formulating a 'feasible and rational plan' to effect Clara Beverley's descent down the mountain. Both men display leadership capabilities, although Wacousta is certainly a more spell-binding orator. At the same time, the excessive severity of De Haldimar's treatment of Halloway, Ellen, Everard, and others proves divisive and increasingly alienates him from his troops; so, too, the extent of Wacousta's revenge estranges Oucanasta and stirs up his nemesis in the person of her brother. Both leaders are capable of change. Chapter 6 reveals a lonely, isolated De Haldimar who is beginning—albeit too late—to moderate his extreme behaviour.

He, too, becomes, in Wacousta's phrase for himself, an 'altered being.'

Whether it was that he secretly acknowledged the too excessive sternness of his justice in regard to Halloway (who still, in the true acceptation of facts, had been guilty of a crime that entailed the penalty he had paid), or that the apprehensions that arose to his heart in regard to her on whom he yearned with all a father's fondness governed his conduct, certain it is, that, from the hour of the disclosure made by his son, Colonel de Haldimar became an altered man. Without losing any thing of that dignity of manner, which had hitherto been confounded with the most repellent haughtiness of bearing, his demeanour towards his officers became more courteous; and although, as heretofore, he kept himself entirely aloof . . . there was more of conciliation in his manner, and less of austerity in his speech.

This change parallels that mellowing which the ferocious Wacousta undergoes in Clara de Haldimar's company, the captive beauty, in turn, feeling compassion for the savage beast. Growth begins only after the Governor experiences humility, vulnerability—and grief. Grief is the door to feeling in De Haldimar as Bly maintains it is for most men. Charles's death helps free the loving father long buried within the physically and emotionally undemonstrative Governor. The Governor's coldness and cruelty become painfully apparent to him—and to the garrison. The formerly insensitive man of the head 'goes out of his mind with grief and comes to his senses. Descending from his summit, De Haldimar begins to regain some humanity through 'learning to shudder' (Bly), a phrase Davies also uses to describe a similiar process in David Staunton, his aloof manticore. Explains Bly in a section of Iron John entitled 'The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief,' 'Gaining the ability to shudder means feeling how frail human beings are, and how awful it is to be a Titan. When one is shuddering, the shudder helps to take away the numbness we spoke of. When a man possesses empathy, it does not mean that he has developed the feminine feeling only; of course he has, and it is good to develop the feminine. But when he learns to shudder, he is developing a part of the masculine emotional body as well.'

As in the fiction of Grove, Davies, Atwood, Laurence, Kroetsch, and Callaghan, it requires a costly irruption of irrational forces to change or moderate the ways of characters like De Haldimar. The Governor appears to be at the very beginning of that painful journey toward the reintegration of undeveloped feelings later undertaken by law-and-order figures like Davies's Justice Staunton or Callaghan's 'Commander' Ira Groome.

Of Shadow Kings, Dark Fathers, and Father-Hungry Sons: Zeus and the Patriarchy

Zeus is the archetype of the dynastic father . . . Zeus is emotionally distant, does not have an earthy nature, doesn't try to please women, and isn't passionate. Because the Zeus man may focus on achieving power, other aspects of his personality become stunted . . . Zeus's realm was the sky, and the Zeus archetype predisposes a man to live in his head . . . The message that something is wrong needs to get through to the Zeus man.

JEAN BOLEN, Gods in Everyman

The sterile and self-destructive character of De Haldimar's ideal of mechanical perfection is tragically manifest in his severe conduct towards members of his own family. Such behaviour forecasts that of Gibson's Robert Fraser in Perpetual Motion, Grove's wilful, domineering patriarchs, Hagar Shipley's father in Laurence's The Stone Angel, Ostenso's Caleb Gare, Maggie's tyrannical parents in Reaney's The St. Nicholas Hotel, Kroetsch's William Dawe in Badlands, and countless others. De Haldimar not only pits his will against the new land but also against anyone who dares question his pronouncements, including his children.

Much of the despotic military character of Colonel de Haldimar had been communicated to his private life; so much, indeed, that his sons,—both of whom . . . were of natures that belied their origin from so stern a stock,—were kept at nearly as great a distance from him as any other subordinates of his regiment. But although he seldom indulged in manifestations of parental regard towards those whom he looked upon rather as inferiors in military rank, than as beings connected with him by the ties of blood, Colonel de Haldimar was not without the instinctive love for his children which every animal in the creation feels for its offspring.

The father-son bond is treated with great importance in Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers. The emotionally distant De Haldimar possesses the lineaments of 'The Remote Father' or 'The Darkened Father' whose literary manifestations Bly traces in stories about the Titans Uranus and Cronos through to the contemporary figures of the Emperor and his deadly servant, Darth Vader (whose name is a pun on dark father). Like the suspicious and uneasy Governor, such men tend to compete as rivals even with their own sons. De Haldimar considers his son Charles—a Poseidon 'feeling' type who openly talks about and shares his feelings—embarrassingly inferior and effeminate because he reacts emotionally rather than rationally in a culture that regards such behaviour as negative. Although the father in his dynastic urge has named this son after himself, hoping he will mirror or replicate his ideal of manliness, the gentle, sensitive, and receptive Charles is a 'soft male' (Bly) who recalls the Governor's emotionally expressive wife whom he seems to have singlemindedly pursued only to neglect and let quickly suffocate in his passionless presence.

Charles, in turn, experiences grief due to the remoteness and secretiveness of his workaholic father. Rather than reject his punitive parent outright as an American son might do, the introspective Charles becomes a 'Father-Hungry Son' bent on suppressing his nature and—like 'The Canadian Brothers'—living up to his father's expectations by excelling as a soldier under his command. He also gives himself over to taking care of others at the expense of his own well-being. All such reactions are familiar attempts of emotionally abandoned and shamed sons to 'ascend above their wound,' as Bly would say. Harshly and coldly critical, De Haldimar is unable to give his blessing to his son, who seeks this elsewhere in a male mentor aptly named Blessington. In Iron John we read, 'Not receiving any blessing from your father is an injury. Robert Moore said, "If you're a young man and you're not being admired by an older man, you're being hurt.'"

As the foregoing quotation from Wacousta suggests, in a text that emphasizes relationship and the interconnectedness of all characters, Governor de Haldimar and the culture he tries to establish through force in North America privilege a model of human relationships—whether in personal or professional spheres—based on the principle of ranking and rivalry rather than linking or affiliation. Feminist scholar Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and The Partnership Way (1990) refers to the former as 'dominator model' societies which tend to be authoritarian, hierarchial, competitive, aggressive, frequently patriarchal, and defiantly set apart from nature, and to the latter as 'partnership model' societies which constellate 'feminine' values like egalitarian linking and bonding, non-violence, active caring and nurturance, and connection with the earth. Partnership or 'the power of affiliation'—what Canadian educator Mac Freeman calls 'duetting'—is the hallmark of cultures opposed to dominator modes. It reflects a sense of the interconnectedness of human beings that Richardson surely appreciated and of the interwoven texture of all life which feminist writers like Jean Bolen, Merlin Stone, Charlene Spretnak, Carol Gilligan, Luisah Teish, Starhawk, and Mary Daly discern in goddess cultures. While partnership societies conceptualize the powers governing the universe in the female form of the goddess, dominator ones—of which De Haldimar's garrison is typical—often worship and pattern relationships after a sternly divine Father who wields a thunderbolt or a weapon, devalue the feminine, and equate true masculinity with the power urge, dominance, total control, and rational thinking.

Eisler's historical study of Western civilization helps to clarify some of the male-male and male-female relationships in Richardson's work, throwing light on the Governor's plans to establish a patriarchal dynasty, to rule over the wilderness, his children, and his own instinctual nature. It is a plan shared by his symbolic descendants, the haughty, ambitious, and autocratic empire-builder Abe Spalding in Grove's Fruits of the Earth, an Ontarian determined to 'conquer this wilderness,' to force the land to take 'the impress of his mind and will,' and the dogmatic John Elliot senior in Our Daily Bread, 'a thinker' 'proud of the preponderance, in him, of brain over impulse' and 'appraising reason above all else.' Interestingly, both men are paired with their opposites. Abe's best friend is the philosophical Nicoli whose words seem the 'utterance of that very landscape itself; as though Nicoli were the true son of the prairie, and he, Abe, a mere interloper.' John Elliot senior is balanced harmoniously with 'his complement,' his wife Martha who 'seemed to do instinctively, action coming from the heart, what he chose to do after mature deliberation, his action being dictated by the brain.'

Like Grove's empire-builders or Atwood's Commander of the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, Governor de Haldimar is a 'Shadow King,' a term coined by psychoanalyst and theologian Robert Moore, author (with Douglas Gilette) of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1990). In contrast to the firm but kindly King (or Sacred King) who is powerful and 'uses power to empower,' nurture, validate, and bless others, the Shadow King exercises abusive power over others, and does not foster creativity, facilitate growth or enhance potential. As the shadow part of the father archetype, whether in the individual male psyche or in society at large, he is visible in the Governor's paranoiac suspicion of motives and loyalties and in his capacity to remain unmoved in the face of the suffering of others. It is this very lack of empathy which calls down Ellen's curse on him and his family, thus animating the plot of the epic. In a mythological context, both the King and the Shadow King are manifestations of the Zeus archetype, for Moore, Bly, and Bolen the presiding 'god' of Western culture. Governor de Haldimar possesses positive Zeus energy to some extent; he is not without leadership qualities, an overview perspective, and a capacity for quick, decisive action taken to sustain the community. He also manifests the dark side of this distant, authoritarian, power-seeking sky god who, as Arianna Stassinopoulos puts it, 'becomes in his darkness an enemy of the life-force, locked in his structures and laws, fearing and resisting change and any threat to the status quo.'

Jean Bolen's insightful analysis of the central Olympian god 'who excels .. . at determining boundaries' and of his psychological resonance as an archetype of the male psyche will help draw together my comments on the personality traits of Governor de Haldimar and his symbolic descendants in Canadian literature. 'Like all successful rulers, Zeus was adept at strategy, forming alliances . . . Zeus has the ambition and the ability to establish a realm over which he was the chief god, and the urge to preside over one's own territory is a major drive of this archetype, which shapes men (and women) to be and behave like Zeus .. . He exalts control, reason and will above all other qualities .. . To sit at the summit, with power, authority, and dominion over a chosen realm is the Zeus position . . . The driving force is the urge to extend the boundaries of the kingdom.'

Where the Governor/Zeus establishes, defends, extends borders, Wacousta/Poseidon leaps over them or finds himself unable to recognize or set them. And unlike his counterpart, 'For Zeus, finding a suitable wife is not a matter of heart or soul connection, but a matter of state .. . He went after women with the singleness of purpose that is characteristic of his "eagle" nature. Seeing who he wants, he does whatever is necessary to get close to her . . . Once he has succeeded, his attention most likely again focuses on his work realm.' Bolen's description of Zeus as 'the archetype of the dynastic father' succinctly clarifies the Governor's attitude towards his children: 'His expectation of them is similiar to what he expects of his subordinates: to be obedient and carry out his will. His favourite children replicate his ideal of himself as a fair-minded, superior person who does not let emotions ever get "out of control" . . . He considers showing vulnerability or neediness or being emotional signs of stupidity or weakness.'

Such is the 'god' of the man Richardson depicts as the mythic founder of the Canadas. He is a man whose distant descendants—respectable sons of the patriarchy manning the bastions of Zeus power—are doomed through the curse of the marginalized Ellen to struggle with the offspring of his outlaw double in the sequel to Wacousta, The Canadian Brothers.