Some of these stories are important mechanisms for conveying social values and appear as cautionary tales (including a specific genre carrying this title – as found in Belloc, 1907). We wish to be ‘lion-hearted’ while perhaps abhorring being as ‘stubborn as a mule’. While some of this is associated with children’s stories, assigning anthropomorphized motive allows animals to depict important human values. Eventually, even the fantastic menace is subdued or diverted.ģThe anthropomorphizing of animals is a well-established device. This article focuses on the black panther of the woods between Dorchester and Westcock, New Brunswick, a quasi-magical creature that lurks but never attacks, is present and menaces but never actually overcomes its human prey.
Robert’s animal stories are particularly interesting examples as they demonstrate numerous positive depictions of fantastic, talking, anthropomorphised animals – as well as several negative examples. This article argues that rather than being built solely on a realist perspective, Canadian national identity in the post-Confederation era was influenced also by fantastic and magical depictions of the natural world, particularly the anthropomorphizing of wilderness animals as part of creating a mystique of the wild.ĢThe existing scholarly literature suggests that there is a longstanding component of the fantastic in the cultural expression of the Canadian wilderness.
While Weiss’s focus is commendable, it ignores the historical examples of the use of the fantastic in Canadian nature writing. His analysis of contemporary urban fantasy writing in Canadian settings draws explicitly on John Clute’s definition of fantastic literature as involving “texts where fantasy and the mundane world intersect and interweave throughout a tale” (Clute and Grant, 1997 : 975). Haut de pageġAlan Weiss argues that the fantastic has assumed greater prominence in Canadian literature over the past two decades but has been seldom studied academically (Weiss, 2006). Tolkien but sets these animal characterizations (both fantastic and realist) within a discourse of national identity construction and the tension between colonial and metropolitan world views.
Roberts’ writing, with menacing panther and other animals carrying out Roberts’ interpretation of their instinctive actions, foreshadows similar characterizations found in the later work of C.S. Is the panther real or imagined ? The anthropomorphizing of wild animals through Roberts’ writing, part of a genre of Canadian writing that included the work of Edward Thompson Seton and others, ensured the mystique of the Canadian wilderness, making it at once familiar and fantastic and creating an important and destabilising dichotomy in the construction of a sense of Canadian identity. By analysing Roberts’ use of the menacing, somewhat fantastical presence of the panther in the woods, this paper argues that the fantastic (and dark supernatural) was given a place in the construction of Canadian wilderness and identity alongside the more familiar romantic images of benign nature. Similar episodes are present in many of Roberts’ animal stories, including those focusing specifically on the black panther such as ‘Watchers of the Campfire’ (1905). As the rector of the parish guides his sleigh along the road on a snowy Christmas eve, he is shadowed by a panther, which attempts to leap onto the sleigh, bringing the dark forces of the primeval (and prime evil) forest against the good Christian priest.
Roberts’ 1892/1896 short story ‘Lou’s Clarionet’ focuses on the potential attack by a black panther, a shadowy creature that is at once dangerous and comforting, real and fantastic, disturbing and uncertain.
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