Locating ambivalence : "new light" on the imperial allegory of Alexander Henry the Younger in Canada's fur trade

This thesis approaches the imperialist narrative of Alexander Henry the Younger from two perspectives: first, it views the journal from a theoretical distance within a temporal network of related texts, each reflecting and mediating his imperial meanings; second, it sees Henry's work as an isolated text bearing its own imperial inscriptions. With the theoretical guidance of certain post-structuralist and post-colonial works, this thesis will first enter an intertextual field of traditional, popular history, in order to recognize the "central" role that historical narratives such as Henry's continue to play in present historical discourse; then it will attempt a resistant reading of Henry's journal in order to problematize traditional readings and to suggest future approaches. This study is intended to have broader implications for the historical genre of travel writing in Canada. Allegorical theory is used in this thesis to expose the fictionality of both Henry's journal and the scholarly discourse that surrounds it. Henry's discourse is imperialism: his ideologically driven, narrative associations are as much the product of Eurocentric mercantilism as realistic observation; and the traditional, academic climate of his reading has tended to perpetuate that system. In this "light," the meanings of Henry's narrative are seen as fundamentally imposed on the landscape and peoples of his accounts: rather than historic truths of natural history or native culture, they tell more about the ideologies of European imperialism and of the problematic nature of the allegorical "great" man of Western history. This thesis is concerned with the power of representation — particularly the discursive power of certain problematic texts to pose as authentic historical reflection; it seeks to identify such oppressive illusions and dispel them.