White Masculinity and Civility in Contemporary Canadian Short Stories

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 discourse, Brodie notes that the myth has influenced the way scholars and social commentators 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 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 anomalous—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 imbalances 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 equality, 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 promoting “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 pervasive 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 hegemonic 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 contemplations—for example, the rhetoric intrinsic to what Wakeman (2012) refers to as Canada’s “Age of Apology”—deliberately deploys the viewpoint of the extra tolerant, 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 analyzing two recent Canadian literary texts representing the viewpoint of the white male experiencing the exigencies of globalization as a potential threat to his privileged 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 published 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 probably 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 Masculinity 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 protectors 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 language of identity politics and victimhood, noting that the question of whether or not American white men have actually become socially and economically marginalized 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 such consistent assertions of marginalization, victimhood, injury, and/or discrimination 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 product 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 crisis of masculinity is a local (i.e., nationally specific) response to a global phenomenon, 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 understand 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 Interdisciplinary 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 iconic coureurs de bois and professional hockey players considers such aspects of hegemonic Canadian masculinity as the romanticization of so-called bush masculinity (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 subservient 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 pursuit; 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 reclamations 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 individual 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 tantalizingly 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 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 protagonist—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 significant 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, cultural—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 contemporary manifestations of the deterritorialized masculine identity as “transnational business masculinity” and, a seeming flip side, “hard-line masculine fundamentalism”; whereas, the transnational businessman obtains the patriarchal dividend by practicing 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 deterritorialization 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 masculinity,” 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 challenge.” Though neither of the protagonists in the cultural objects examined here emulates the self-identity of the transnational businessman or the masculine fundamentalist, MacLeod and Christie both engage with the effects of deterritorialization on the symbolic role of the patriarch, especially as that role is associated with specifically Canadian forms of hegemonic masculinity, thus offering a framework for considering the characteristics of this “given form” of masculinity. Each story draws upon Canada’s history of colonial settlement via images of the protagonists interacting with the local geography; this history is deployed not to challenge 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 “naturalness” 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 paradoxically 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 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 accident 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 Number 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 according to Ontario’s King’s Highway numbering system, the Number Three Highway—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 government 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 Indigenous 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 protagonist 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 accident. 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 garden 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 describing 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 (patriarchal) “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 reaffirmation 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 manager: “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 Eastside and try begging in a new spot, “‘historic’ Gastown, where hundreds of 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 Metropolitan 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 Musqueam 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 perspective—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 reterritorialization 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 patriarch: 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, indicating 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 feminine, in the case of Christie’s representation of Sam’s attempts at reterritorialization, 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 Contemporary Perspectives, Greig and Martino assert that, while the term “crisis” denotes circumstances both anomalous and acute, a state of affairs requiring immediate 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 perceived 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 unemployment 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 concentration 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)

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, produced 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 participation, 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 ultimately confirm a particularly Canadian form of hegemonic masculinity, which derives the patriarchal dividend by projecting anti-elitism, commitment to community, 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 product 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 factory, 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 describing 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 shifting 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 average 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. Magazines flopping though the slot every two weeks. Style at Home and Canadian Living” (MacLeod 2010, 194). Though such items do not necessarily preclude the possibility that the protagonist’s wife worked outside the home, there is no indication 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).

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 working 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 “formula [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 embeddedness 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 rummage 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 inferences 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 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 awakened 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 deliberately 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 recuperation of community for its displaced former and current inhabitants and the tentative 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 reclamation of garden and home, respectively. Thus, each protagonist signals a revitalized “sense of self and identity.” Further, both stories suggest the importance of community, 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 component 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 psychically (or both), having been humbled by their encounters with the forces of globalization 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 economic 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 attitude toward the work of belonging. Though such relatively restrained, or at least ambivalent, acts of reterritorialization offer a contrast to more aggressive and retrograde 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.