This thesis participates in a reconsideration of English-Canadian literary critical history through a reading of the critical construction of Sheila Watson's novel, The Double Hook. The thesis examines the rhetoric by which Watson's novel has been read as central to and representative of Canada's literary cultural maturity. That maturity has been measured by such modernist formal principles as the objective correlative and the mythical method, formalist standards and tastes valorized by New Criticism and by the synchronic mythographies of Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and structuralist literary criticism (such as Frye's mythopoeics). The thesis argues that a structural mechanism of sacrifice is central to the literary critical narrative about this novel; that the myth-making by which violence becomes sacred and thereby marks the establishment, redemption, or survival of culture, is founded specifically on the sacrifice of women in The Double Hook.

This thesis examines the significant role of expressionist and minimalist visual aesthetics in the construction (imagery, structuring, language) and subsequent interpretation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. While Sherrill Grace's Regression & Apocalypse the groundwork for a literary expressionist reading of Watson's novel, this study elaborates the crucial links between literary and painterly expressionism in the novel and suggests Watson's critique of the expressionist aesthetic. A reading of the minimalist aesthetic, as both an extension of and an alternative to the expressionist reading of the text, emphasizes the relevance of noniconic painterly strategies to the novel and, by implication, of alternate forms of spectatorship that are demanded by the text. This study ultimately shows how Watson creatively synthesizes these extremes of modernist visual aesthetics and asks for the reader's imaginative and critical engagement with the modernist arts.

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Ce mémoire est une lecture hantologique du roman The Double Hook de Sheila Watson. Une telle lecture accorde une importance particulière aux fantômes et aux spectres qui se trouvent dans un texte ou qui le hantent. La hantologie étant un mouvement de pensée introduit par Jacques Derrida dans Spectres de Marx, cet ouvrage de Derrida se veut à la fois un point de départ et un site important de mon analyse auquel je retourne tout au long de ce mémoire. De plus, à travers les écrits de plusieurs spécialistes de la littérature canadienne-anglaise tels que Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner et Cynthia Sugars, ce mémoire explore ce que le roman de Watson permet de découvrir à propos de ce qui hante l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Dans une première partie de ce mémoire, je concentre mon analyse sur les spectres textuels qui hantent les pages du roman de Watson. Les mythes autochtones, les récits chrétiens, les conventions du ‘Western’ et du roman régional, ainsi que les traces de plusieurs textes modernistes, semblent hanter la structure du roman et l’utilisation du langage qui crée l’histoire présentée par Watson. Dans le deuxième chapitre de ce mémoire, mon analyse se tourne vers les fantômes et les personnages fantomatiques qui existent dans le monde fictionnel créé par Watson. Les personnages tels que la mère de la famille Potter et Coyote sont fréquemment associés aux tropes du gothique et lus comme étant des spectres et ce sont de telles lectures qui ponctuent mon analyse de cet important roman. / This thesis consists of a study of haunting, both at the textual and fictional level, in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. In this hauntology of the novel, I explore the texts and cultural archetypes that haunt Watson’s novel as well as the ghosts, spectral figures, and haunting spaces and places represented in the novel. The theoretical movement of hauntology introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx is a fundamental work in contemporary studies of the tropes of the Gothic and of a more generalized haunting that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Moreover, the haunting figures and texts in Watson’s novel subvert the heterogenous conception of a national discourse in Canada. The insights provided by scholars such as Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner, and Cynthia Sugars, who are concerned with what Watson’s use of spectral figures in her narrative accomplishes in relation to writing the settler-colonizer nation of Canada, contribute to informing my argument about the place Watson’s novel occupies in the Canadian collective imaginary. In the first chapter of this thesis, I focus on the textual hauntings in the pages of Watson’s novel. Indigenous myths, Christian rituals, conventions of the western and regional novel, and modernist texts haunt the novel’s structure, content, and the language that constitutes it. In the second chapter of this thesis, I direct my attention towards the haunting and haunted figures that exist in the world created by Watson. In both chapters, my goal is to converse with the specters I see in the novel, to give a voice to what is not explicitly said and to find what lies between the fragments of Watson’s experimental prose.