To live somewhere else : migration and cultural identity in Alistair MacLeod's fiction

Abstract

As an interdisciplinary effort, this thesis will supplement its primary commitment to literary analysis with discussion of Alistair MacLeod's interpretation of the occupational culture of Western Cape Breton Island, including twentieth century fluctuations in the strength of the Scots-Gaelic community there. MacLeod is committed to an honest presentation of the occupational past and present, but moreover, he is an interpreter of the Scots-Gaelic identity, its persistence, and the subtle adaptations to change that create simultaneously a link to the past and a crisis in continuity. A discussion of his body of work as a whole provides the opportunity to examine his efforts at the development of a sustained ethnic character or range of characteristics that surface and resurface within individual stories. The consistencies that occur among a range of his characters contribute to a profound cultural identity whose roots lie in the Highland Scots past and emigrations to North America, and whose twentieth century struggles are subject to the waning population of its isolated communities. MacLeod not only records individual experience but traces collective cultural consciousness and identity through character. MacLeod seems to pursue the essence of this culture. The manner in which it is manifested within individual identity is the central element of this discussion.