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Canadian Imagination

For Canadians, nature creates the terror of the unknown rather than producing awe and blessedness. Northrop Frye explores a distinctive collective psychology of Canada in his book, The Bush Garden. In reaction to the wild wilderness and the power of U.K, France and America, Canadians have developed special mental attitudes on which Canadian literature was founded. Frye labels this special Canadian psychology as ‘garrison mentality.’ It is characterized by a shared attitude of community members who have been isolated from political, economic, and cultural centers, while being surrounded by a huge, menacing, and formidable landscapes. The garrison mentality ultimately produces literary works colored by an anxiety dream. Yet Canadian literature is not a single dream-world. The Canadian myth-making power produces a wish-fulfillment dream as well. Pastoral myth in genuinely imaginative form has been developed in Canada. This mythological imagination gets along with peculiar animal stories in Canada in which animals are assimilated to human beings. Additionally, Canadian imagination glorifies sympathy with the Other and retains the belief in the superiority of the primitive, which can be sharply contrasted with the masculine myth in America found in Thoreau’s Walden and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In brief, Canadian imagination is the combination of two dreams, an anxiety dream and a wish-fulfillment dream. The former is a product of garrison mentality, and the latter one of pastoral myth.