Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996) tells of a Canadian in
Hollywood in 1923, working as a screenwriter for a megalomaniacal producer
making an epic American movie out of the events surrounding the 1873 Cypress
Hills massacre. The Canadian narrates his story retrospectively in the
early 1950s. I see the novel as a palimpsest, its chronological anchor
points as sites where Canadian theatre has attempted to mediate a sense
of national identity between imperial American and colonial British influences.
The novel’s earliest date resonates in Nicholas Flood Davin’s 1873 lecture,
“British versus American Civilization.” In plays and articles published
in 1923, Merrill Denison examined how Hollywood helped shape the way Canadians
perceived themselves. Finally, 1952-53 featured Ted Allan’s The Money-Makers
at Toronto’s Jupiter Theatre and on CBC-TV (“highly principled young Canadian
writer goes to Hollywood where a corrupt movie producer has optioned his
book about the history of the Métis,” according to Bronwyn Drainie),
and the opening of the Stratford Festival where, with the help of the English,
Canadians challenged American cultural hegemony, raising the tent like
a flag.
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