Uniquely Suited to this Place: The Discourse of Scottishness in Twentieth-Century English Canada

The author argues that English-Canadian writers throughout the twentieth-century have used a discourse of Scottishness to consolidate white hegemonic national identity. In Canada's ethnically diverse context, she argues that the discourse of Scottishness offers a visible white ethnicity that suggests a template for assimilation to other immigrants, allows for a narrative of settlement that is disassociated from colonization, and adds to the illusion that under official multiculturalism race is invisible. The discourse collapses a British romantic image of the hardy, noble Highlander — whose conquered position in Britain after 1745 contains the threat of past savagery channeled into Imperial military success — and the image of Lowlanders with some means who became prosperous colonial citizens to produce a stereotype of the Scot as uniquely suited to the challenges of pioneer life. She explores how a variety of authors have used the plurality of meanings that signs of Scottishness evoke in the Canadian context for their influence on the development of Canada's national identity. Among the books analyzed are Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes to show how the model of the "family of Empire" allows MacLennan to produce a genealogy for white Canada: the ethnic Scot becomes the national English-Canadian subject through a national domestic allegory of marriage and reproduction.

PhD dissertation

University of Alberta

Edmonton, AB

2009

en