White Masculinity and Civility in Contemporary Canadian Short Stories: the Fantasy of...

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White Masculinity andCivility in ContemporaryCanadian Short Stories:The Fantasy ofReterritorializationand Return

Neta Gordon1

AbstractExamining the representation of white men and masculinity in two recently publishedCanadian short stories, both of which contend with the cultural fallout of globalization.The literary readings of ‘‘The Number Three,’’ by Alexander MacLeod and ‘‘TheBeggar’s Garden’’, by Michael Christie are located within three critical contexts:the concept of ‘‘white civility’’ developed by Daniel Coleman, which describes adistinctively Canadian model of masculinity; the notion of ‘‘white masculinity incrisis’’; and the form of the ‘‘return story,’’ defined by Canadian literary criticGerald Lynch as the concluding story in a short story cycle. The stories ultimatelyconfirm a particularly Canadian form of hegemonic masculinity, which derives thepatriarchal dividend by projecting anti-elitism, commitment to community, andcivility; underneath that projection, however, the fantasy of traditional social struc-tures and gendered labor divisions is affirmed. In their experimentation with thegenre of the short story cycle and the return story, MacLeod and Christie workto represent white men reeling from an awareness of their own economic and domes-tic marginalization, and yet who manage to reaffirm a sense of hegemonic masculinityvia the staging of gendered settlement activity, or reterritorialization. What emerges

1 Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Neta Gordon, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Ave, St Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1.

Email: [email protected]

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from a close reading of the two short stories is a picture of a distinctively Canadianhegemonic masculinity, whereby the assertion of the ‘‘natural’’ right to control spaceis related to—indeed, ensues from—an ability to empathize with community, to per-form modest economic and domestic aspirations, and to cope with loss in civil terms.

KeywordsCanadian literature, masculinity, globalization, short story, white civility

In her chapter on ‘‘Masculinities and Globalization,’’ included in The Men and the

Boys, Connell (2000, 41) argues that, notwithstanding the discursive construction

of globalization as a new set of phenomena, the course of globalization is con-

nected historically to imperialism, beginning with the ‘‘gendered process’’ of

‘‘colonial conquest and settlement.’’ Jay (2010, 7), author of Global Matters: The

Transnational Turn in Literary Studies similarly points out that ‘‘in seeing globa-

lization as a long historical process,’’ its contemporary cultural effects are neces-

sarily viewed in context with particular ‘‘histories [that are] absolutely central to

the evolution of globalization.’’ This essay examines the representation of white

men and masculinity in two recently published Canadian short stories, both of

which contend with the cultural fallout of globalization, particularly as it pertains

to conceptions of home and labor. Within a Canadian context, the distinctive ‘‘his-

tory’’ that must be attended to in considering this cultural fallout involves Canada’s

status as an invader–settler nation: its dual record of the colonization of indigenous

peoples and of immigration and settlement. As Coleman points out in White Civility:

The Literary Project of English Canada, a crucial feature of the modern Canadian

identity is a belief in multiculturalism: in the myth of Canada’s benignly progressive

attitude toward the vitality of its diverse cultural mosaic. Importantly, this belief

persists in spite of the nation-state’s often brutal history of suppression of and vio-

lence toward indigenous peoples and non-British immigrant groups (Coleman

2006, 7–9). Thus, in Canada, the process of colonial conquest and settlement, and

the aftershocks of that process as associated with contemporary indexes of globa-

lization, comprises both gendered and racialized dimensions.

When attention is given to the operation of whiteness in Canadian culture, the ten-

dency is to examine older texts in which the identity of the white, and usually male,

Canadian settler–citizen manifests and becomes normative. In addition to Coleman’s

(2006, 5) study—which is an analysis of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts

tracing the Canadian ‘‘formulation and elaboration of a specific form of whiteness

based on a British model of civility’’—such work includes Henderson’s (2003, 39)

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada, which argues that white settler women

asserted their ancillary role in promoting good government in the new British colony

via discursive constructions of proper (white) femininity, and Brodie’s (2012, 87–88)

recent essay exploring ‘‘the ways in which the iconic national citizen, as well as racial

2 Men and Masculinities

and ethnic hierarchies and exclusions, were embedded in the formative biopolitics

of Canadian state building.’’ This article examines two contemporary literary

representations of white men who, in trying to come to terms with the way the

forces of globalization threaten their hegemonic cultural position as Canadian

men, reaffirm a colonialist narrative of settlement. The short stories examined

are MacLeod’s (2010) ‘‘The Number Three’’ and Christie’s (2011) ‘‘The Beggar’s

Garden’’ both of which are the final stories of the short story collection in which

they are included (Light Lifting and The Beggar’s Garden, respectively).1 Thus,

each individual story operates, more or less explicitly, as a type of ‘‘return story’’

within the short story collection, so that the general thematic of reaffirming settle-

ment is echoed in the literary form.

Before turning to an analysis of the literary texts, the readings will be located

within three significant critical contexts: the concept of ‘‘white civility’’ developed

by Coleman, which describes a distinctively English–Canadian model of masculi-

nity; the notion of ‘‘white masculinity in crisis,’’ an idea explored by scholars

Robinson and Carroll, among others, who deal with literary and other cultural

representations of white men asserting a sense of their own powerlessness; and the

form of the ‘‘return story,’’ defined by Canadian literary critic Lynch (2001, 28) as

the concluding story in a short story cycle, in which the focus tends to be ‘‘reflec-

tions on the passage of time, change, and identity.’’ In their experimentation with

the genre of the short story cycle and the return story, MacLeod and Christie work

to represent white men reeling from an awareness of their own economic and

domestic marginalization, and yet who manage to reaffirm a sense of hegemonic

masculinity via the staging of gendered settlement activity, or reterritorialization.

What emerges from a close reading of the two short stories is a picture of a distinc-

tively Canadian hegemonic masculinity, whereby the assertion of the ‘‘natural’’

right to control space is related to—indeed, ensues from—an ability to empathize

with community, to perform modest economic and domestic aspirations, and to

cope with loss in civil terms.

White Civility

Brodie (2012, 91) points out that the popular conception of Canada as a multicultural

nation ‘‘is very recent in origin,’’ arguably emerging within national discourse as a

prominent myth only in 1970s and 1980s when the Canadian government adopted

policies encouraging multiculturalism and—in 1988—passed into law The Canadian

Multiculturalism Act. Notwithstanding its relatively recent appearance in dis-

course, Brodie notes that the myth has influenced the way scholars and social com-

mentators have dealt with Canada’s history of colonization and settlement, which

involved not only state-imposed subjugation of and violence toward Indigenous

communities but also the privileging of white, British settlers over other immigrant

groups. Brodie (2012, 91) mentions not only the privileging of anglophones over

francophones in the British North America Act (1867) but also legislative acts

Gordon 3

and policy measures that sought to discourage nonwhite settlement, disenfranchise

racialized groups, and ‘‘reduce [Indigenous peoples] to the status of wards of the

federal state.’’2 Even while this history of colonization and settlement is censured,

however, it is also represented as inconsistent with the ‘‘real’’ story of Canada’s

development as a nation distinguished by its celebration of diversity. As Brodie

(2012, 93) points out, however, ‘‘these are stories that only the dominant group

can tell.’’ In other words, the retroactive framing of racist state practice as anom-

alous—as simply growing pains along the way to the ideal of multiculturalism—

depends on two problematic notions: first, that the dominant group should be

commended for their enlightened attitudes toward those marginalized groups

whose differences from the cultural standard are now tolerated, and, second, that

systemic power imbalances between the dominant group and marginalized groups

no longer exist.

The contradiction embedded in the pairing of these two notions—whereby the

effort of performing ‘‘tolerance’’ (which is an exclusive purview of a dominant

group) is not recognized by that group as a reification of the very power imbal-

ances that are claimed to no longer exist—accords with Coleman’s (2006, 9)

assessment of the way the idea of ‘‘civility’’ is ‘‘structurally ambivalent. This is

to say that at the same time that civility involves the creation of justice and equal-

ity, it simultaneously creates borders to the sphere in which justice and equality are

maintained.’’ Coleman (2006, 19) examines the nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century popular discourse defining the model Canadian citizen as someone not

only embodying the orderly and enterprising spirit of ‘‘cooperative, pan-ethnic

Britishness,’’ but whose responsibilities toward the emerging nation include pro-

moting ‘‘the civil norm to which non-British Canadians should assimilate.’’

Though Coleman’s (2006, 7) immediate focus is the way British whiteness is

discursively produced as Canada’s ‘‘fictive ethnicity,’’ his analysis of such per-

vasive allegorical figures for the Canadian nation as ‘‘the Loyalist brother, the

enterprising Scottish orphan, the muscular Christian, and the maturing colonial

son’’ (Coleman 2006, 37) sheds light on the way a distinctively Canadian hegemo-

nic masculinity is similarly bound up with the ambivalence of civility. Even more

important than various masculine traits exemplified via allegory—traits such as

honor, brotherliness, enterprise, independence, and belief in a code of justice—are

the overarching ideals of maturation and civic progression, whereby the masculine

figure exemplifies the developing nation, and whereby ‘‘development’’ is always

figured under the rubric of social advancement. Thus, the code of white civility, as

it is embedded into specifically Canadian conceptions of hegemonic masculinity,

is inherently flexible and self-correcting. When instances of social injustice or strife

become popularly accepted as such, they are discursively contemplated within

an ongoing narrative of civic progress. The rhetoric made use of in such contem-

plations—for example, the rhetoric intrinsic to what Wakeman (2012) refers to as

Canada’s ‘‘Age of Apology’’—deliberately deploys the viewpoint of the extra tol-

erant, extra developed, extra civil white male, thereby reaffirming his normative


position of dominance within the ‘‘the sphere in which justice and equality are

maintained.’’ What is important to consider here is that a pervasive insistence

on the viewpoint of the civil white male as normative diminishes any sense that the

Canadian plurality remains a site of contestation and conflict; as Dobson (2009, 74)

argues in Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization,

the multicultural ideal enacted by the state frequently employs ‘‘gesture[s] of

inclusion [ . . . which appear] at times to reify existing power structures.’’ In ana-

lyzing two recent Canadian literary texts representing the viewpoint of the white

male experiencing the exigencies of globalization as a potential threat to his privi-

leged status within labor and/or domestic spheres, the aim is to discover how such

figures work to recover a sense of cultural dominance that is positioned within the

narrative of Canadian civility.

White Masculinity in Crisis

In the preface to the third edition of Manhood in American: A Cultural History—

published in 2012—Kimmel notes that, in updating his study since it was first pub-

lished in 1998, he takes into account ‘‘a shift in American men’s attitudes’’:

If the history of middle-class white American masculinity that I trace here has

been a history of a self-made man . . . anxious, driven to prove his masculinity at

every turn, the past decade has seen that anxiety morph into anger . . . While many

American men drift toward greater gender equality . . . there is also a growing

vitriolic chorus of defensively unapologetic regression. American men have prob-

ably never been more equal with women, and many American men have never

been angrier. (Kimmel 2012, ix)

The ‘‘shift’’ Kimmel identifies is often written about as it relates to the concept of

‘‘crisis,’’ whereby one of the grounds given to account for expressions of male

anger is the idea that, under the conditions of changing social spheres, white men

have increasingly found their privileged access to power within those spheres at

once newly detectable and under threat. In her study Marked Men: White Mascu-

linity in Crisis, Robinson (2000, 5) argues that ‘‘In post-sixties American culture,

white men have become marked men, not only pushed away from the symbolic

centers of American iconography but recentered as malicious and jealous protec-

tors of the status quo.’’ Robinson further argues that articulations of crisis in post-

1960s cultural texts representing the viewpoint of the American white man, for

example, the work of John Updike or John Irving, typically makes use of the lan-

guage of identity politics and victimhood, noting that the question of whether or

not American white men have actually become socially and economically margin-

alized is ‘‘moot’’; what is important is that ‘‘dominant masculinity consistently

represents itself in crisis’’ (Robinson 2000, 11). More recently, in Affirmative

Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, Carroll (2011, 9) asserts that

Gordon 5

such consistent assertions of marginalization, victimhood, injury, and/or discrim-

ination operate strategically, so that ‘‘failure [is turned] into a profoundly powerful

form of success.’’ In his analysis of various post-9/11 cultural objects—from

popular representations of firefighters to the reality television show American

Choppers—Carroll shows that, far from trying to retreat into a space of normative

invisibility, current performances of whiteness highlight its status as a marked

ethnicity, drawing attention to congruencies between white male experience

and other sites of marginalization, in particular class. In loudly proclaiming their

‘‘failure,’’ Carroll (2011, 23) argues, white men manage to recuperate a space for

their own cultural privilege. Finally, Genz and Brabon have argued that, as a prod-

uct of the perception of crisis, various iterations of the postfeminist man have

emerged, for example, the ‘‘new man,’’ the ‘‘metrosexual,’’ and the ‘‘new lad,’’ which

are ‘‘categories or types of men . . . [trying] to come to terms with the shifting social

and economic environment’’ (Genz and Brabon 2009, 136).

In defining the limits of his analysis, Carroll (2011, 3) points out that ‘‘The cri-

sis of masculinity is a local (i.e., nationally specific) response to a global phenom-

enon, for while globalization accounts for some of the most profound

transformations of modern American society, the national is still the level on

which such transformations are most commonly felt, negotiated, and understood.’’

Following Carroll, my project—albeit here on a much smaller scale—is to under-

stand how the effects of globalization are ‘‘felt, negotiated, and understood’’ by

Canadian white males, as evidenced in two literary objects. While Kimmel

(2012) locates the ‘‘shift’’ toward white male anger within a much longer cultural

history of manhood in America, such a history on manhood in Canada is—as yet—

less discernible, although some important work in this area does exist. Along with

Coleman’s conceptualization of ‘‘white civility,’’ assessments of the characteristic

qualities of Canadian manhood are to be found in three recently published essay

collections: Making it like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice, edited

by Ramsay (2011); Canadian Perspectives on Men & Masculinities: An Interdis-

ciplinary Reader, edited by Laker (2012); and Canadian Men and Masculinities:

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Greig and Martino

(2012).3 For example, Robidoux’s essay locating conceptual links between the ico-

nic coureurs de bois and professional hockey players considers such aspects of

hegemonic Canadian masculinity as the romanticization of so-called bush mascu-

linity (Robidoux 2012, 118), which comprises an enjoyment of rough danger, the

ritualized imitations of ‘‘indigenous’’ behavior, and a complex insider–outsider

status, whereby the homosocial ‘‘team’’ of adventurers remains economically sub-

servient to ‘‘aristocratic and later corporate elites, whose existence and power are

enabled by the bodies of others’’ (Robidoux 2012, 119). In surveying Canadian

popular culture, for instance the CBC’s 2004 Greatest Canadian competition,

Greenhill (2012, 138) notes that the majority of the top ten candidates—all of

whom were male—are ‘‘associated with communitarian activities, teamwork, and

laboring for the benefit of many.’’ Willcocks and Garlick (2012, 338) augment the


idea that Canadian hegemonic masculinity is somehow associated with underdog

moral authority in their analysis of pro wrestler Bret ‘‘Hitman’’ Hart’s career

‘‘gimmick’’ of proclaiming his ‘‘morality against a nihilistic wave of aggressive

American amorality,’’ as exemplified in the figure of Stone Cold Steve Austin.

What emerges from even this most cursory of critical perusals is a hegemonic

masculine figure associated with dynamic physical labor, who—despite a rugged

individualism in terms of activity—commits to a team or community-oriented pur-

suit; and whose moral authority rests in claiming a social position that is not quite

at the top of the food chain. Somehow the ‘‘real’’ Canadian man is not the Old

World aristocrat or shadowy (American) corporate figure, but rather one whose

claim to social privilege paradoxically derives from a civil rejection of the concept

of elitism. This assessment coheres with what emerges in the literary texts here

examined, in which the response to a perceived crisis in masculinity—wherein the

male has lost a sense of control within the economic and/or the domestic sphere—

is a process of individual reterritorialization represented as modest, anti-elitist, and

socially progressive activity. While it is certainly the case that recuperating the

patriarchal dividend via such activity seems less overtly troubling than reclama-

tions proceeding via anger, or even violence, it is also important to critique how

strategic deployment of civility operates as a way to shore up hegemonic power.

The Return Story

Lynch’s (2001, 4) goal in his study The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short

Story Cycles is to indicate how the short story cycle is ‘‘distinctly and distinctively a

Canadian genre.’’ He takes as his starting point Ingram’s (1971) oft-cited definition

of the short story cycle: it is ‘‘a book of short stories so linked to each other by their

author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of

the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts’’

(Ingram 1971, quoted in Lynch 2001, 18). Augmenting this definition, Lynch

argues that what makes short story cycles distinct from miscellanies is that individ-

ual components are connected by either place or character; what makes short story

cycles ‘‘cyclical’’ (as opposed to merely sequential) is that the collection of stories

explore ‘‘the failure of place and character to unify a vision that remains tantaliz-

ingly whole yet fundamentally suspicious of completeness’’ (Lynch 2001, 19–23).

In other words—as with Coleman’s notion of ‘‘civility’’—Lynch regards the short

story cycle as ‘‘structurally ambivalent,’’ whereby the characterization of the genre

depends on competing heuristics: short story cycles encourage both a sense of

completion and a sense of fragmentation. The structural ambivalence embedded

in the short story cycle, argues Lynch, is what accounts for the genre’s prevalence

in Canadian literary history (Lynch 2001, 9), and as Kuttainen (2010, 1) notes, the

association between what she refers to as ‘‘short story composites’’ and the history

of a settler nation such as Canada emerges from a shared preoccupation with

‘‘boundary trouble.’’ Lynch further argues that the formal and thematic uncertainty

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embedded into short story cycles is most acutely reflected in what he calls ‘‘the

return story,’’ for ‘‘As much as . . . return stories tempt with hints of comfortable

closure, they often destabilize, resisting closure’’ (Lynch 2001, 31).

The short story cycles that include the stories examined in this article operate—

more or less explicitly—according to Lynch’s model. MacLeod’s Light Lifting is

perhaps less exemplary, for although all the stories are set in Windsor, Ontario, there

is no sense of a recurring character or integrated community to additionally link

them. That said, the status of Windsor as both a border town (situated directly across

the Detroit River from Detroit) and a locus for the Canadian automotive industry

becomes increasingly important in relation to the thematic that ‘‘In the Canadian

short story cycle, place plays an essential role in the formation of character’’ (Lynch

2001, 21). In MacLeod’s ‘‘return story,’’ entitled ‘‘The Number Three,’’ the prota-

gonist—an ex-General Motors (GM) employee, whose wife and son have been

killed in a car accident—must find a way to affirm control over the physical and

psychic territory represented by Windsor in order to reassert a sense of his own

hegemonic masculinity. Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden is more obviously a

proper short story cycle, as the author’s explorations of the Downtown Eastside of

Vancouver, British Columbia, are more tightly focused on a specific space within

the city, though the characters—some of whom appear in more than one story—

offer distinct perspectives on an urban area known as much for its high rates of

poverty, homelessness, drug use, and violence as for its tourist areas and attempts

at urban economic renewal. Christie’s ‘‘return story’’ is likewise formally

paradigmatic, revisiting in brief many of the sites and figures included in the

previous stories; the focus of this story—also called ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’—is

the odd business relationship that develops between Sam, a fraud analyst working

for a bank, whose wife has recently left him, and Isaac, a homeless man; in

pursuing a relationship with Isaac, Sam seeks to reassert a sense of masculine

belonging to place.

Globalization and Deterritorialization

In discussing such canonical Canadian short story cycles as Duncan Campbell

Scott’s In the Village of Viger (published 1896) and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine

Sketches of a Little Town (published 1912), Lynch (2001, 29) draws attention to the

way each text considers how ‘‘the onslaught of modernity and metropolitanism’’

takes its toll on conceptions of identity, family, and community. For MacLeod and

Christie, writing in the early twenty-first century, the context impinging on their

male protagonists is the global cultural economy; as Connell (2000, 39–40) writes,

‘‘Locally situated lives are now . . . powerfully influenced by geopolitical struggles,

global markets, multinational corporations, labor migration, and transnational

media.’’ In Globalization and Culture, Tomlinson (1999, 29) suggests that a sig-

nificant ontological change produced by the myriad forces of globalization is the

‘‘idea of deterritorialization,’’ an idea naming the way ‘‘complex connectivity


weakens the ties of culture to place.’’ In other words, the increasingly convoluted

imbrications of various world systems—financial, technological, political, cul-

tural—produce a sense of identity and being in the world that becomes unhinged

from/at odds with locality, whether locality is conceived in terms of the nation-

state, the domestic sphere, or any place in between. Connell points to such contempo-

rary manifestations of the deterritorialized masculine identity as ‘‘transnational busi-

ness masculinity’’ and, a seeming flip side, ‘‘hard-line masculine fundamentalism’’;

whereas, the transnational businessman obtains the patriarchal dividend by practi-

cing a determined rootlessness, laboring, traveling, and interacting with others

solely in the interests of participating in and personally benefiting from the global

flow of capital, the masculine fundamentalist—whether in the guise of the Taliban

or the American right-wing militia movement—responds to the anxiety of deterri-

torialization via attempts to reassert patriarchal control over a local area, often by

means of the violent suppression of female rights and a professed antipathy for the

global flow of culture (Connell 2000, 52–53).

Even as she investigates the effects of globalization on ‘‘the politics of mas-

culinity,’’ Connell (2000, 52–54) cautions against overdetermining the category

of a global hegemonic masculine identity, stating, ‘‘Different forms of masculinity

exist together, and the hegemony of any given form is constantly subject to chal-

lenge.’’ Though neither of the protagonists in the cultural objects examined here

emulates the self-identity of the transnational businessman or the masculine fun-

damentalist, MacLeod and Christie both engage with the effects of deterritoriali-

zation on the symbolic role of the patriarch, especially as that role is associated

with specifically Canadian forms of hegemonic masculinity, thus offering a frame-

work for considering the characteristics of this ‘‘given form’’ of masculinity. Each

story draws upon Canada’s history of colonial settlement via images of the prota-

gonists interacting with the local geography; this history is deployed not to chal-

lenge the deeply problematic mythology of the nation’s status as a ‘‘wilderness’’

before the arrival of European explorers and settlers but rather to affirm the ‘‘nat-

uralness’’ of masculine efforts to define, mark, and dominate territory, especially

as such efforts are connected to Canada’s specific history as a New World colony/

settler nation. Further, the representation of masculine reterritorialization is para-

doxically represented as a socially progressive response to crisis. Kuttainen (2010,

8) remarks that, in settler narratives, ‘‘settlers position themselves in shifting, and

sometimes shifty ways alongside images of marginality or centrality, depending on

what is at stake’’. In representing images of masculine reterritorialization,

MacLeod and Christie explore both the marginalization of the Canadian patriarch

‘‘in crisis,’’ and the apparent naturalness of his desire to control space.

MacLeod’s ‘‘The Number Three’’ employs a basic structure of a story frame set

in the present and an embedded series of analepses; while the story frame concerns

the protagonist’s journey on foot toward the scene of a car accident occurring a

year prior, the analepses describe the protagonist’s history as a GM employee and

family man. The story opens with a description of the day before the journey, with

Gordon 9

the protagonist studying a map and calculating distances, while at the same time

waiting for a phone call from his daughter and fuming about her inability to recall

the imminent anniversary. After describing both the accident itself—in which the

protagonist’s own driver error caused the collision, and in which the failure of

some of the vehicle’s airbags to deploy contributed to the death of his wife and

son—the narrator notes the protagonist’s ensuing decision to ‘‘really walk away,

to move exclusively under his own power. Walk and never drive again’’ (MacLeod

2010, 209). While such a decision is mostly manageable for everyday living, as the

protagonist learns to negotiate the city on foot, the distance to the scene of the acci-

dent is a much more daunting thirty miles. MacLeod emphasizes the length and

arduousness of the journey via his story’s plotting: while scenes of past events are

mostly summaries, he slows the narrative pace to describe the walk. The narrator

makes careful note of various streets and locations passed on the way to the Num-

ber Three (all of which can be found on a current map of Windsor) as well as of the

homemade memorials for other car accidents along the highway. In addition to

affecting the narrative pace, the clear delineation of the route implicitly draws

attention to the road’s buried history. Though MacLeod refers to the road accord-

ing to Ontario’s King’s Highway numbering system, the Number Three High-

way—at least the part that runs from the Ambassador Bridge through

Windsor—is built on top of the historical Talbot Road, named for Colonel Thomas

Talbot, an early nineteenth-century private landowner who when applying for gov-

ernment land grants suggested he could encourage and supervise settlement along

the north shore of Lake Erie. As noted in The Story of Canadian Roads, Talbot

‘‘exercised . . . semi-feudal rights’’ over settlers, requiring them to clear their own

plots and contribute to the building of a roadway in exchange for land (Guillet

1966, 47); by 1820, the Talbot Road ‘‘became known as the best road in Upper

Canada,’’ further enhancing Talbot’s stature as a land baron (Guillet 1966, 48).

Buried even further beneath this history of settlement is the use of the land by Indi-

genous peoples prior to European immigration and the influx of United Empire

Loyalists in late eighteenth century, a history that can be traced only by way of the

street names MacLeod mentions, for example, ‘‘Indian road,’’ ‘‘Wyandotte,’’ and

‘‘Huron Church’’ (MacLeod 2010, 211–12).

In walking the Talbot Road toward the site of his own family’s tragedy, the pro-

tagonist asserts his ability and desire to regain control over space. The accident has

not only left the protagonist a patriarch without a sense of his own domain, eating

meals of a ‘‘single fried egg’’ in a ‘‘house [that] is too big for him now,’’ angrily

waiting for his daughter to call (MacLeod 2010, 193) but has coincided with his

leaving his job at GM; as the narrator insists, the protagonist’s real moment of

transformation occurred on the ‘‘day he decided to take the buyout . . . Not the acci-

dent. Not the day he left the hospital or the week when his daughter went back to

her own life’’ (2010, 209). It is this sense of threat to his masculine identity that

compels the protagonist to walk, and in doing so to ‘‘[take] matters into his own

hands’’ (2010, 212). Because the route is not meant for pedestrians, the protagonist


walks ‘‘fac[ing] the traffic and tries to make eye-contact with each driver’’ (2010,

213), thus forcing a type of recognition of his existence and the symbolic rightness

of his place on the road. Further, he persists in taking note of every homemade

memorial along the road, ‘‘pull[ing] himself in and out of the ditches and read[ing]

every one,’’ as a way to mark a sense of belonging to this community of mourners,

to a group working hard to ‘‘[hold] on to their rituals’’ (2010, 213–214).

Also significant in terms of MacLeod’s representation of the protagonist’s

attempt at reterritorialization are the story’s frequent references to migration

routes. The car accident occurred during the family’s annual visit to a tropical gar-

den center and a bird sanctuary, a visit timed to coincide with the return of the

Canadian Geese to Canada; thus, the family’s journey is implicitly compared with

a natural migration. While the protagonist’s son has apparently outgrown the

ritual, calling it ‘‘stupid’’ and complaining bitterly during the drive, the protagonist

maintains that family traditions are important (MacLeod 2010, 203). After describ-

ing the flight of the geese, with their ‘‘Tight formations and instinctive patterns,’’

the narrator again makes the link between this natural phenomenon and what the

protagonist thinks is best for his family: ‘‘It can make you believe in order if

you are the kind of person who wants to believe in order’’ (MacLeod 2010,

204). Arguably, it is precisely due to the protagonist’s intractable belief in (patri-

archal) ‘‘order’’ that the accident occurs: because he has turned around to berate

his son for his ‘‘bullshit,’’ he is too late in braking for the flatbed that has come

to a stop in front of them (MacLeod 2010, 204). Nevertheless, when he finally

reaches the location of the crash after his walk, the protagonist sees a Monarch

butterfly and recalls his knowledge of their ‘‘incredible migration’’ (MacLeod

2010, 214–15); the metaphorical connections made between the protagonist’s own

journey/journeys and those of the geese and butterflies show MacLeod’s reaffir-

mation of the ‘‘naturalness’’ of the male desire to reterritorialize, especially in the

face of a crisis in masculinity.

The narrative of Christie’s ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’—like MacLeod’s—begins

in medias res, with a depiction of Sam already living in his backyard shed, having

dropped the key to his house down a manhole: Sam moved into the shed because

the house ‘‘felt much too large’’ after his wife Anna leaves, taking their daughter

with her (Christie 2011, 228). After two analepses, one of which describes the way

Anna left and another explaining Sam’s work at the bank as a fraud analyst, the

chronology of the narrative resumes with a description of how Sam meets Isaac,

a homeless man, on his route home through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside;

eventually, Sam seeks out Isaac again and proposes to become his financial man-

ager: ‘‘Sam would offer the panhandler advice, at no charge, on how better to ply

his trade, and the beggar would agree to follow his instructions, however odd they

might seem . . . They agreed the beggar would keep a twelve-dollar per diem,

which Sam saw as ample, and the rest Sam would deposit in the bank’’ (Christie

2011, 243). One of Sam’s suggestions to Isaac is that he leave the Downtown East-

side and try begging in a new spot, ‘‘‘historic’ Gastown, where hundreds of

Gordon 11

stunned cruise-ship passengers . . . washed ashore to lumber and gawk on the

bricked sidewalks’’ (Christie 2011, 247). As noted in The Chuck Davis History of Met-

ropolitan Vancouver, the area now comprising the scenes of Christie’s story were, at

‘‘the time of European settlement in the mid-1850s . . . largely occupied by the Mus-

queam people’’ (Davis 2011, 3); further, Davis notes that Gastown was settled in

1867 by Yorkshire-emigrant John ‘‘Gassy Jack’’ Deighton who offered millworkers

free drinks if they would help him build the first saloon in Vancouver and who was

known for being ‘‘garrulously confident about the area’s future’’ (Davis 2011, 10).

Traces of these histories are present in Christie’s (2011, 247) story: items intended to

entice tourists to the city include ‘‘authentic Coast Salish carvings [and] Cowichan

sweaters,’’ while the Downtown Eastside is referred to as a ‘‘tortured, unsettled

dominion’’ (Christie 2011, 235), suggesting that the process of settlement and/or

reterritorialization is necessarily ongoing. When Isaac initially resists relocating

to Gastown on the grounds that he has ‘‘a whole bunch of interest in this place, the

sights’re familiar to me,’’ Sam points out that—from a strictly financial perspec-

tive—the move is sensible (Christie 2011, 248). Like ‘‘Gassy Jack,’’ Sam looks at

inhabiting space in terms of the potential for profit, though not exclusively personal

profit; as noted previously, a hegemonic Canadian masculinity is as community

oriented as it is entrepreneurial.

Whereas ‘‘The Number Three’’ explores the idea of masculine reterritorializa-

tion in part via metaphorical references to migration, ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’,

unsurprisingly, makes use of the symbol of the garden in order to explore Sam’s

mode of reasserting patriarchal masculinity in the wake of his failed marriage. Sam

and Anna originally moved to Vancouver as a means of escaping the expectations

of Anna’s overbearing family, in particular her father Dennis, who supported her

financially during her schooling; thus, ‘‘At first, the city had been thrilling—as if

their adventurousness, their willingness to scuttle the past, had been rewarded with

their own earthly paradise, a temperate garden way out on the golden fringe of

everything’’ (Christie 2011, 234). This image of Canadian territory as a New Eden,

without a prior history, is a common trope in national narratives of discovery and

settlement, and it is Anna’s betrayal of this mythology that most acutely produces

Sam’s sense of crisis. Anna tells Sam that she has returned to Calgary in order to

‘‘[reconnect] with family’’ (Christie 2011, 229), though the only family member

characterized in detail is her father. As a foil to Sam, Dennis is an archetypal patri-

arch: he is a wealthy engineer, who presides over a ‘‘rustic log mansion at the heart

of a rolling plot of ranchland’’ (Christie 2011, 240); in a scene describing Sam’s

visit to Calgary on the occasion of his daughter’s birthday, Dennis is described

as ‘‘lean[ing] back in his chair at the head of the table with a self-satisfied look’’

(Christie 2011, 253). In contrast, when Isaac asks Sam why he is living in a shed,

Sam answers, ‘‘Because I can’t stand being in my own house’’ (Christie 2011,

251). Sam’s resentment of Dennis-the-patriarch notwithstanding, the narrative arc

of Christie’s story focuses on how Sam finds his way back into his home, indicat-

ing that such reterritorialization is both necessary and natural. Via his mutually


beneficial relationship with Isaac, Sam regains a sense of controlling space: in

exchange for Sam’s financial advising, Isaac teaches Sam how to tend the home’s

garden plot, which had previously been Anna’s domain; as the narrator notes, ‘‘she

stalked the . . . garden like a wolverine and was determined to keep [its] secrets

from him’’ (Christie 2011, 231). Isaac’s instructions for care are decidedly primal,

as he advises dealing with the soil’s nitrogen deficiency by ‘‘piss[ing] on the beds’’

(Christie 2011, 258). While it is true a garden has the potential to be coded as fem-

inine, in the case of Christie’s representation of Sam’s attempts at reterritorializa-

tion, the desire for the male to mark and occupy such a space evokes New World

myths of masculine exploration of the feminized wilderness. On the morning after

Sam awakens to find that Isaac has moved on, he sits and listens to how the breeze

‘‘rustled the leaves of his garden’’ (Christie 2011, 261, emphasis added) and then

decides to break down his own door to reinhabit his home.

Crisis and the Labor Market

In their introduction to Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contem-

porary Perspectives, Greig and Martino assert that, while the term ‘‘crisis’’

denotes circumstances both anomalous and acute, a state of affairs requiring imme-

diate and possibly drastic response, the discourse of ‘‘masculinity in crisis’’ has

been around for some time (Greig and Martino 2012, 4). That said, Greig and

Martino note that they are ‘‘particularly concerned about contemporary public

assertions of male ‘disadvantage’ at a time when neoliberal capitalism has gained

ascendency across Western democracies’’ (Greig and Martino 2012, 5), especially

in relation to how the effects of globalization on labor markets transform the per-

ceived normative status of men as wage earners. On one hand, publications such as

the 2010 policy brief produced by The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, entitled

Downturn, Recovery, and the Future Evolution of the Labour Market, note that, in

2009:

Job losses were particularly severe for men, especially for those in their prime

working years (25 to 54 years of age). The unemployment rate for men hit 9.6 per

cent in December 2009, up from 7.4 per cent in December 2008, while that of

women edged up to 7.1 per cent from 6.2 per cent. The difference in the unem-

ployment rate between men and women is partially related to the respective fields

of work in which each gender is most represented. In 2009, there was a high con-

centration of job losses in traditionally male dominated and cyclically-sensitive

industries, like manufacturing and construction—the hardest hit sectors. Women,

on the other hand, were highly represented in recession-resistant fields like health

care, social assistance and educational services. (Canadian Chamber of Commerce

2010, 2)

Gordon 13

On the other hand, the Canadian ‘‘crisis’’ of rising unemployment rates for men in

certain sectors does not necessarily mean that, as a whole, males are disadvantaged

in the labor market. In the 2010 report, Wage Gap between Women and Men, pro-

duced for the Library of Parliament, Cool (2010, 1) notes, ‘‘Statistical evidence

demonstrates that women continue to earn less than men in Canada . . . This is the

case despite the fact that women are catching up with men in labour force partic-

ipation, and have caught up with men in educational attainment.’’ Further—in

direct opposition to the notion that men are increasingly disadvantaged in the

changing labor market—Cool’s analysis of median earnings of men and women

between 1980 and 2008 indicates that ‘‘the wage gap between men and women

consistently widened between the ages of 25 and 44. For example, the generation

of women who were between 15 and 24 in 1990, earning 97% as much as their

male counterparts, earned only 76.8% as much ten years later and 70.7% as much

in 2008’’ (Cool 2010, 6). Cool concludes that both the type of work taken on by

men versus women and the continued expectation that women take on the bulk

of unpaid labor within the domestic sphere account for the persistence of the

gendered wage gap in Canada (Cool 2010, 9). The stories by MacLeod and Christie

reflect the contradiction between the discourse of masculine crisis as it pertains to

the globalized labor market and the way gendered types of labor are represented as

normative. Further, while both authors offer provisional criticisms of the forces of

neoliberal capitalism and globalization, thus suggesting a commitment to social

progression and justice, their resistance is limited. The critiques themselves ulti-

mately confirm a particularly Canadian form of hegemonic masculinity, which

derives the patriarchal dividend by projecting anti-elitism, commitment to commu-

nity, and civility; underneath that projection, however, the fantasy of traditional

social structures and gendered labor divisions is affirmed.

As the narrator of ‘‘The Number Three’’ makes clear, throughout the 1980s and

1990s, the automotive industry functioned as the chief economic and social driver

of Windsor, Ontario, especially in terms of the production of GM’s signature prod-

uct of that period—the minivan: ‘‘Around here, nineteen-eighty-three is the year

that counts . . . The way it came along and shook up the whole domestic side of the

business . . . It was the last of the real game-changers and they decided to build it

here’’ (MacLeod 2010, 197). When the protagonist lands a full-time union job at

the factory, the position allows him both to feel secure enough to have another

child, his son, and to become a part of something larger, a union that ‘‘Campaigned

for the need to make progress, to look out for working families, to stand up to the

big guys’’ (MacLeod 2010, 202). In describing the protagonist’s work at the fac-

tory, the narrator draws attention to the unease produced by the encounter with

modern mechanization: ‘‘When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating,

lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range

of a hundredth of a millimeter, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was

more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty’’ (MacLeod 2010, 199).

The protagonist manages this discomfort, however, by using the vehicle as a way


to perform his masculinity, for example, when he speeds down the wrong side of a

road in order to pass slower drivers; despite his wife’s protests, ‘‘He usually took

his shot because he trusted the guts of the van’’ (MacLeod 2010, 2013). In describ-

ing the moment before the protagonist takes the buyout, the narrator refers to the

way global systems have overturned this simple symbiotic relationship between

man and vehicle:

Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shift-

ing value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection

Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the

Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the aver-

age person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered. (MacLeod

2010, 207)

Thus, it might be argued that the protagonist’s decision to ‘‘walk away’’ represents

a type of resistance to the way industry has determined his gender role, both in

terms of encouraging a desire to perform outsize masculinity via the control of a

machine and in terms of the way changing world systems can provoke an acute

identity crisis. In walking away, however, the protagonist shows a reinvigorated

sense of masculinity, one that may reject neoliberal principles but that nevertheless

explicitly mourns more traditional notions of ‘‘order.’’

MacLeod’s critique of the effects of globalization, therefore, does not correlate

with a critique of the protagonist’s desire to retain a sense of his own cultural

power, as is clear from the way the story represents types of labor and from the way

the rights of the patriarch are ultimately upheld. Though the narrator does refer to

the ‘‘men and women who work in the plant’’ (MacLeod 2010, 198), other clues in

the story indicate the same gendered division of labor Cool refers to her 2010

report. Items that remind of the protagonist of his dead wife include ‘‘her preferred

paring knife’’ and ‘‘Her half-completed plan for renovating the basement. Maga-

zines flopping though the slot every two weeks. Style at Home and Canadian Liv-

ing’’ (MacLeod 2010, 194). Though such items do not necessarily preclude the

possibility that the protagonist’s wife worked outside the home, there is no indica-

tion in the story that she was anything other than ‘‘The World’s Greatest Mom,’’ as

a gift from one the children attests (MacLeod 2010, 194). Significantly, in a text so

concerned with the control of vehicles, the protagonist’s wife is always portrayed as

a passenger in the family van. Beyond the scant details associated with this female

character are references to ‘‘the soccer mom’’ and ‘‘the lady who teaches grade two

French immersion’’ (MacLeod 2010, 198), and ‘‘the person who dispatches the cops

and the ambulance,’’ who is also marked as female (MacLeod 2010, 213). References

to male laborers, on the other hand, include mention of an engineer who works in the

plant, the union leaders ‘‘Ken and Buzz and Bob’’ (MacLeod 2010, 202), the ‘‘Ford

guys’’ (MacLeod 2010, 207), and the ‘‘businessmen’’ who argue about the need for

a second bridge between Windsor and Detroit (MacLeod 2010, 211).

Gordon 15

Even more striking is the way the protagonist imposes his will on his grown

daughter whose adult life is portrayed in fairly general terms (she is reported to

be at university, though there is no reference to what she might be studying). After

having fallen asleep for a spell at the site of the crash, the protagonist finally begins

the long trek home, exhausted, dehydrated, and stumbling along the highway’s

shoulder. When his daughter locates him, she expresses both exasperation and

fear for her father, before trying to get him into her car so that she can drive him

home. The protagonist’s refusal to enter the vehicle becomes ‘‘The still moment of

confrontation’’ between father and daughter who takes a moment to reproach him:

‘‘This doesn’t change anything . . . You know that, right? This won’t change what

you did.’’ Eventually, however, the protagonist’s daughter accedes to his will, his

‘‘plan,’’ driving slowly behind him with her hazards on as he ‘‘walks on the

shoulder, then on the side, then in the middle of the lane’’ (MacLeod 2010,

218–19). The final image describes the protagonist slowing down traffic as he

walks the highway, ‘‘A string of red tail lights extend[ing] back into the darkness

[as] the whole strange parade inches forward’’ (MacLeod 2010, 219)4; the phrase

‘‘strange parade’’ suggests that this instance of a masculine assertion of nostalgia

and power is to be celebrated.

Christie’s ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’ is also concerned with the relationship

between labor and identity and, interestingly, rehearses a perhaps distinctively

Canadian notion that labor within the financial sector does not necessarily produce

the patriarchal dividend. Though Sam takes on the role of Isaac’s financial advisor,

he is ambivalent about the work he does at the bank. The narrator reports that Sam

has ‘‘politely refused’’ promotions that would have moved him into ‘‘more crucial

departments like corporate finance or strategic initiatives,’’ because he likes work-

ing in fraud (Christie 2011, 232). The work Sam does as head of his department,

however, is depicted as insubstantial; far from taking masculine pride in the way

his labor translates into personal wealth, the narrator notes that Sam ‘‘often felt

guilty and fraudulent to be in receipt of such a generous salary’’ (Christie 2011,

241). Christie’s text thus critiques the way forces of globalization have created

conditions undermining a man’s somatic labor experience; whereas Sam hears that

‘‘his job used to entail tracking down real flesh-and-blood con artists, cheque

kiters, and crooked tellers,’’ the work is now a purely a matter of creating a ‘‘for-

mula [that] flagged any statistically anomalous event’’ (Christie 2011, 232). In

contrast, the text valorizes forms of labor that correlate with Canadian notions

of hegemonic masculinity. Sam’s father—who as an accountant is also nominally

involved in the world of finance—is primarily depicted in terms of his embedded-

ness within and his patriarchal/colonial service toward his community: he ‘‘made

his living filing returns for the various Indian bands outside their rural Manitoba

town,’’ refusing to move to a larger city because ‘‘These people need me . . . They

don’t know their asses from tea kettles’’ (Christie 2011, 239). Prior to ending up on

the street, Isaac worked for a logging company, an occupation that ends when a

tree falls on him, ‘‘snapping his pelvis, and pinning him to the emerald moss’’


(Christie 2011, 244). This sort of bush experience exemplifies an appropriately

Canadian form of masculine labor, as indicated by Sam’s response to the story

of Isaac’s accident: ‘‘It was as if Isaac had entrusted him with a thing of great

value, a sort of artifact that Sam felt honoured to possess’’ (Christie 2011, 244).

Further, although Dennis’s paternalism irks Sam, his role as an engineer in the

oil industry is depicted in terms that highlight the productive personal labor

involved in dealing with one of Canada’s natural resources: ‘‘[he’d] made a king’s

fortune in the eighties by buying up drained Albertan oil wells and using a method

he’d innovated to wring from them a few more thousand barrels of crude’’

(Christie 2011, 240).

Finally, Christie’s text accords high status to the labor of the city’s most socially

and economically disadvantaged underclass, the beggars and scavengers. Aside

from Isaac, the narrator refers to ‘‘the men who came on trailered bikes to rum-

mage his blue bins for anything they could return for a deposit’’ (Christie 2011,

227), a type of labor Isaac muses might occupy him during a period when he

‘‘shed-sits’’ for Sam, as he dislikes free time. And begging, of course, is the labor

activity, given the most complex treatment in the text, especially in terms of infer-

ences made about the relationship between begging and truth telling. The problem

of ‘‘fraudulence’’ is thematized throughout ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’, not only with

respect to Sam’s profession but also in the description of the way Sam and Anna

courted one another with ‘‘copious amounts of false self-advertisement’’ (Christie

2011, 230). When Sam takes on the role of Isaac’s financial advisor, he comes to

realize that ‘‘Isaac was essentially in the business of advertising; that his product

was his story, the authenticity of it.’’ As he explains to Isaac, the job of the beggar

is ‘‘To tell the truth’’ (Christie 2011, 245). Ironically, Sam’s intervention into

Isaac’s approach to this job is predicated on encouraging Isaac to lie and thereby

increase profits: Sam insists that Isaac pretend he has just arrived in Vancouver,

that he hide his shoes while begging, and that he adopt more ‘‘humble’’ and less

eloquent speech patterns (Christie 2011, 242–45). Finally, Sam advises Isaac to

relocate to Gastown, where he has access to easily duped tourists who indeed turn

out to be ‘‘helpless against Isaac’s dirty feet and murmurs of humble appreciation’’

(Christie 2011, 248).

Christie’s story thus explores the ethically complex nature of Sam’s attitude

toward Isaac’s labor, as indicated by the narrator’s comment that—indeed—Sam

is cognizant of his own questionable motives in taking on the role of advising

Isaac: ‘‘He was enacting a dubiously selfish plot in order to convince himself, and

[Anna] and [his daughter] and everyone else, that he was actually a good person’’

(Christie 2011, 257). The explicit treatment of Sam’s ambivalence reflects the

extent to which the text represents Sam’s own search for a kind of authentic labor,

one that will in some way assuage the blow to his masculinity occasioned by his

wife’s retreat back into her own father’s domain, but that will also allow him to

think of himself as a socially progressive Canadian man. Though Sam’s awareness

of the emptiness of his profession appears on the surface to be a critique of the

Gordon 17

impersonal, deterritorialized global economy, the final images of the story suggest

that Sam’s goal is to emulate—to reterritorialize—a traditional enactment of

Canadian masculinity. After an evening spent with Isaac, during which he enjoys

the rejuvenated garden and gives Isaac the balance of his earnings, Sam is awa-

kened by Isaac who heard has noises outside the shed. Upon investigating, Sam

finds a family of raccoons ‘‘rummaging a torn-open orange bag of yard clippings.’’

Though young raccoon kits are always raised by their mother, Christie’s text delib-

erately refers to the adult raccoon using the pronoun ‘‘it,’’ inviting a metaphorical

comparison between Sam’s confused sense of his masculine identity and the parent

raccoon, which is described as ‘‘A lonely thing. Something that would rather live at

night off table scraps and garbage than face the roaring bustle and endless conflict

of the day . . . Really, it looked more weary than anything’’ (Christie 2011, 260).

One important element in this metaphor is the authenticity or ‘‘naturalness’’ of a

simple, extremely localized economy, which is the economy represented by Isaac,

especially before any of Sam’s interventions. Thus, Christie’s text criticizes the

‘‘roaring bustle and endless conflict’’ of a deterritorialized global economy

as implicitly un-Canadian. That said, the ‘‘lonely’’ and ‘‘weary’’ raccoon is still

responsible for taking charge of a family, as shown by the way it ‘‘muster[ed] a

final glance over its shoulder . . . before ushering its family beneath a camper van’’

(Christie 2011, 260, emphasis added). In the wake of this encounter, Sam decides

to reclaim his own house, ‘‘dr[iving] his brown loafer into the centre of his front

door’’ (Christie 2011, 260). In this way, Christie’s text asserts the necessity for

even the most lost of men to repossess his patriarchal domain.

Conclusion: Returning to the Return Story

In discussing the destabilizing effect of return stories, Lynch (2001, 31) considers

the way such a text will represent ‘‘provisional possibilities respecting the recup-

eration of community for its displaced former and current inhabitants and the ten-

tative presence of a sense of self and identity that is intimately connected to place

as home.’’ The final image in both MacLeod’s and Christie’s stories depicts an

attempt to take control over space, via the insistence on walking and the reclama-

tion of garden and home, respectively. Thus, each protagonist signals a revitalized

‘‘sense of self and identity.’’ Further, both stories suggest the importance of com-

munity, as evidenced in the way MacLeod’s protagonist laments the diminishing

strength of unions and honors memorials to other car accidents, and in the way Sam

comes to respect the authenticity of a localized economy. That said, both stories

show the same kind of resistance to closure that Lynch identifies as a crucial com-

ponent of the return story, and it is in this resistance that each text most tellingly

inheres with the discourse of masculine crisis. In terms of plot, both stories leave as

many questions unanswered as not: the journey home in ‘‘The Number Three’’ is

just beginning, and it is unclear how the protagonist and his daughter will manage

their anguished relationship; while the end of ‘‘The Beggar’s Garden’’ portrays


Sam forcibly reentering his house, the narrative does not indicate whether he will

return to his job at the bank, or how he will manage to maintain a relationship with

his daughter. Also, both men are depicted as wounded, either physically or psychi-

cally (or both), having been humbled by their encounters with the forces of globa-

lization and domestic upheaval.5 Yet, in each text, it is the very weakening of the

male protagonist—his bumbling acceptance of personal failing within both the

labor and domestic sphere—that makes the desire to assert a sense of patriarchal

due seem compelling, appropriate, and—indeed—natural. The image of a

distinctively Canadian hegemonic masculinity that emerges justifies the idea of

a man’s right to reterritorialize space on the grounds that such activity ensues from

a newfound, quasi-politicized awareness about problematic global systems or eco-

nomic inequities. Thus, in these explorations of distinctively Canadian responses

to the discourse of masculine crisis as associated with globalization, it is not male

anger that defines or occasions the rightful performance of hegemonic power, but

rather the strategic adoption of a modest, anti-elitist, and socially progressive atti-

tude toward the work of belonging. Though such relatively restrained, or at least

ambivalent, acts of reterritorialization offer a contrast to more aggressive and ret-

rograde responses to ‘‘masculinity in crisis,’’ the coupling of claims to domain/

dominion and claims to inhabiting a moral high ground recalls the insidious way

the rhetoric of civility is used in Canada to reconfirm traditional power structures.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Notes

1. Light Lifting, published in 2010, was the winner of the Atlantic Book Award, and was

a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Frank O’Connor Award. The Beggar’s Garden,

published in 2011, won the City of Vancouver Book Award, was long listed for the

Giller Prize, and was a nominee for the Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize.

2. The issue of anglophone privilege in Canada is also explored by Coleman (2006, 189)

who notes the way public discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth century tends

to figure ‘‘the conquest of New France by the British as a blessing in disguise’’ within a

narrative of the maturing nation; Coleman (2006, 210) further argues that ‘‘the allegory

of maturation cannot be relegated to a long-eclipsed embarrassing past [ . . . as]

it remains a staple of English Canadian discourse.’’ For an excellent overview of the

particular features of Quebecoise masculinity, see Vacante’s (2012, 37) ‘‘Quebec

Manhood in Historical Perspective,’’ which draws attention to the way francophone

masculinity has been tied to the quest for Quebec sovereignty.

Gordon 19

3. Earlier work includes Kaufman’s (1987) edited collection Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by

Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change and Haddad’s (1993) edited collection Men and

Masculinities: A Critical Anthology. Although many of the contributors to Beyond Patri-

archy are Canadian, none of the essays focus on distinctively Canadian subjects (in fact,

many of the articles survey American culture). Haddad’s (1993, xiii) collection does pro-

fess to ‘‘be a part of the process of understanding men and masculinities in Canada,’’

though the question of a distinctively Canadian notion of hegemonic masculinity is not

made explicit. Of particular interest in Haddad’s collection, however, is Luxton’s (1993)

essay ‘‘Dreams and Dilemmas: Feminist Musings on ‘The Man Question,’’’ which

focuses on the development of the White Ribbon Campaign in the wake of the 1989

Montreal Massacre, drawing attention to the way this campaign emerged out of a shift

in the national discourse about male violence against women (Luxton 1993, 360–361).

Luxton’s consciousness of a distinctively Canadian milieu—visible in her comments

about Canadian politics and her references to ‘‘Quebecoise, Francophone, Aboriginal,

Black, Immigrant and other so-called minority women’’ (Luxton 1993, 354)—is some-

what anomalous in these earlier collections.

4. This image—of the wounded white man slowly making his way down the highway—

recalls the iconic pilgrimage of Terry Fox who, after having lost his right leg to cancer,

famously attempted his cross-Canada Marathon of Hope to raise money for cancer

research; as it happens, Fox had the number two spot in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian

competition.

5. See also Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, in which Robinson (2000) makes

note of the prevalence of representations of wounded male bodies in contemporary

American culture.

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Author Biography

Neta Gordon teaches Canadian literature at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

She is the author of Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to

World War I and is a coeditor of The Broadview Introduction to Literature.


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