LE3 .A278 2013

2013

Wyile, Herb

Acadia University

Bachelor of Arts

Honours

English

English & Theatre Studies

Both Thomas Wharton’s depiction of the Columbia Icefields in Icefields and Suzette Mayr’s portrayal of Niagara Falls in The Widows confront the impact of tourism on the Canadian landscape and the influence it has had on history and national identity. By engaging with the history of tourism, Wharton and Mayr show how, under the influence of tourism, the identity of a locale becomes a patchwork of fiction and fact. At the center of Wharton’s novel—which tracks the development of tourism in the Rockies from the discovery of the icefields in the late nineteenth century to the interwar years—is a clash between the impurities of tourism and the integrity of the environment. Mayr’s novel, which is a more contemporary novel than a history novel per se, follows three elderly German immigrants in their quest to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Mayr grapples with tourism’s framing of Niagara Falls through their obsession with adventurer Anna Taylor, whose story of going over the Falls has been rewritten to make it more enticing to tourists. Both Wharton and Mayr rework the histories of tourism in Jasper and Niagara Falls to emphasize how the narratives of tourism have come to reconfigure and define these two iconic landscapes. Despite the invasive force of tourism and the way that it reworks the idea of a nation and environment, the final images of the natural setting in Icefields and The Widows show nature transcending the designs of tourism. Ultimately, as the icefields continue to shift and the Falls relentlessly flow, the landscape triumphs over human intervention and exploitation.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:989