The Melodramatic Immagination: Selected English-Canadian Fiction 1925-1932

Abstract

<p>The decade of the nineteen-twenties has generally been recognized as a dynamic period in English-Canadian literature, but so far as fiction is concerned its achievement is widely assumed to be the introduction of social realism into the Canadian novel. Those novels which employ other than realistic conventions have been assumed by many critics to be inferior because of their non-realistic aspects. </p> <p>This dissertation examines four such novels, supposedly flawed by melodramatic excess~ Raymond Knister's White Narcissus (1929), Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925), Morley Callaghan's A Broken Journey (1932), and Frederick Philip Grove's The Yoke of Life (1930) - in order to discover the function and significance of melodramatic conventions and the sort of vision they project.</p> <p>The first part of the dissertation defines such terms as "realism" and ''melodrama." and explains the critical approach to be used. In the central four chapters, this critical approach is applied to each novel in turn.</p> <p>When the novels are compared, following the detailed analysis of each, significant similarities emerge. In thematic terms, a quest is undertaken, in each case, which is meaningful on several levels: on the literal level there is an arduous physical journey across or into a specific (and generally threatening) landscape; on a symbolic level there is a journey of mythological and/or religious import; in psychological terms the journey is into the less rational aspects of human experience in an attempt to re-integrate a personality divided against itself. In terms of structure, as well, certain patterns emerge: each novel employs a balanced, rather symmetrical structure, formal devices which tend to distance the reader from the material, and vortex-like patterns of movement on the part of the protagonist.</p> <p>The formal and thematic patterns which emerge from a comparison of the four novels, then, suggest that there is a "melodramatic mode" common to them, and possibly to novels of periods other than the one explored in this thesis. Indeed, it is further argued, melodramatic conventions (which are related to the gothic mode and romanticism in general) may serve as an appropriate vehicle for the expression in fiction of a profound modern theme, the portrayal of alienated man in a secularized and relativistic universe.</p>