130,000 Canadian soldiers were wounded or made ill in the First World War and this is reflected in Canadian fiction of the interwar years. The portrayal of wounded servicemen in fiction went beyond the usual stereotypes of the disabled as either victims or monsters. The First World War is often claimed as the defining moment of English-speaking Canadian history. The country’s national myth asserts that Canadians’ toil and sacrifice in the fields of Flanders commanded international respect, promoted patriotic pride and assured its status as an independent country. Both the men who gave up their health for the attainment of these goals, and the literature that documented those events have been given short shrift in literary analysis. This thesis hopes to partially redress that imbalance. The impact of enlistment, trauma, moral and physical danger and civilian disability affected wounded soldiers’ identity formation. The disabled soldier’s body challenged the construction of masculinity, heroism and male and female roles at a period in history when gender relations were perceived as intensely changeable. Authors used disabled soldiers to express the struggle to construct a national identity while Canada was caught between “mother” England and “big brother” United States. Representations of disability exposed exclusionary attitudes to non-white immigrants and indigenous populations. Despite the racist attitudes of the Anglo-Saxon elite, that same group claimed nationhood and moral authority based upon Canada’s treatment of the returned soldier. Myths of Canadian landscape informed the portrayal of the healing powers of the bush, reinforcing notions of Canada as wilderness. Just as Canadian citizens in the postwar years were confronted with limping, coughing, blinded or even paralyzed young men in the streets of their cities, Canadian authors exposed these same injuries in the pages of their novels. For a period in Canadian literature, the experiences of the disabled were imagined, again and again. While such imaginings were not always progressive or enlightened, they nonetheless gave a prominent role to disabled people and generally portrayed them in a positive, if not a heroic, light.

\ / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished