Charles G. D. Roberts - Animal Stories

Animal Stories

The Canadian Encyclopedia says that "Roberts is remembered for creating in the animal story, along with Ernest Thompson Seton, the one native Canadian art form." A typical Roberts animal story is "The Truce".

In his introduction to The Kindred of the Wild (1902), Roberts called the animal story "a potent emancipator. It frees us for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean tenement of self of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to return to nature, without requiring that we at the same time return to barbarism. It leads us back to the old kinship of earth, without asking us to relinquish by way of toll any part of the wisdom of the ages, any fine essential of the 'large result of time.' (Kindred 28)"

Critical interest in Roberts's animal stories "emerged in the 1960s and 70s in the growth of what we now know as Canadian Literary Studies.... But these critics tended as a group to see in the animal stories a masked reference to Canadian nationhood: James Polk 'attempts to subsume the animal genre entirely within the identity crisis of an emerging nation the sympathetic stance of Seton and Roberts towards the sometimes brutal fate of the “lives of the hunted” as a larger political allegory for Canada’s “victim” status as an American satellite. (Sandlos 74)'"

Margaret Atwood devotes a chapter of her 1971 critical study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature to animal stories, where she states the same thesis: "the stories are told from the point of view of the animal. That’s the key: English animal stories are about the 'social relations,' American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. (qtd. in Sandlos 74; emphasis in original)."