Gardens, covenants, exiles: Loyalism in the literature of Upper Canada/Ontario

Scraps, tags, figments of the United Empire Loyalist heritage dot the Ontario landscape. Something of Loyalism lies in the very Ontario air and pervades the imagination of its people.

In Gardens, Covenants, Exiles, Dennis Duffy sets out to describe and analyse the effects of Loyalism on the literary culture of Ontario. He explores the enduring nature of an attitude of mind whose historical origins lie in the Loyalist settlements in the forests of Upper Canada. No single source can explain a culture's characteristic way of viewing moral, social, and literary matters. This study, however, reveals how one historical event and the mythology it engendered have helped to shape a province and its literature.

The collective experience of the Loyalists underlies Ontario's view of the Canadian destiny. Their defeat, exile, endurance, and their final mastery of a new land confirmed their belief that their own destiny lay within a larger imperial framework. But they lived at the same time as both North Americans and monarchists, victims and founders, heroes and the dispossessed. Writers in this culture, faced with the declining importance of the British connection and the rising of American presence, were ill-prepared by their political and imaginative lives to comprehend the vision of an independent nation. In our own time this has led to a renewed sense of fall, to a disillusionment that contrasts sharply with the feeling of 'paradise regained; that pervaded an earlier era.

The book is a study of dislocation, seen through vignettes of various authors and their writings: William Kirby's The Golden Dog, Major Richardson's Wacousta, Charles Mair's Tecumseh, and the Jalna series by Mazode la Roche. Contemporary analogues of the Loyalist habit of mind are pursued in the works of George Grant, Dennis Lee, Al Purdy, and Scott Symons: the journey returns to its Loyalist starting point, in pain, loss, and the sense of a vanished home.

Loyalism, both as fact and as myth, is one of the cultural forces that has given Ontario its sense of place. Professor Duffy concludes that in some way the culture of Upper Canada/Ontario remains continuous, that it has kept faith with its origins. His study heightens our understanding of a nation's roots.