Reading Evangeline and What Is Left the Daughter: Tracing American Projections of Grief onto Atlantic Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do the experiences of the grieving body and the rituals of private and public mourning as depicted in two American-authored texts – Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem about the Acadian deportation from Grand Pré in what became Nova Scotia, Canada, and What Is Left the Daughter, Howard Norman’s 2011 novel also set in Nova Scotia – complicate and potentially undermine America’s desire to create ‘a selectively transnational sense of modernity’ or ‘synchronicity across borders’ with one of its closest neighbours, Canada (Luciano 11)? A close reading of these works demonstrates how the bodily grief exhibited by the female protagonists in each one offers a means of exploring Atlantic Canada as a place from which to contest the limitations of American progress, while conversely cautioning against the assumption that Atlantic Canada, whether pre- or post-Confederation, is any more inclusive than the United States.