Sheila Watson as a Reader of Simone Weil: Decreation, Affliction, and Metaxu in the The Double Hook

This article examines Sheila Watson’s interest in the notoriously difficult thought of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Watson read Weil’s work in English and French throughout the 1950s, especially during the time she spent in Paris in 1955 and 1956. While critics have examined Watson’s Paris journals for her discussion of modernists such as Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, little attention has been paid to her synthesis of, and response to, Weil’s thought in the same pages. Contextualizing Watson’s revisions to The Double Hook in her sustained reading of Weil, this article argues that Weil’s thought informs Watson’s aesthetic and ethical project in the novel. The article analyses Watson’s understanding of three central concepts in Weil’s philosophy – decreation, affliction, and metaxu – and offers a Weilian reading of The Double Hook. By resituating Watson as a reader of Weil, the article also highlights the Canadian author’s belonging within a wider circle of women writers in the mid-century who, like Weil and Watson, also demanded unsentimental responses to violence and suffering.

An Experimental Documentary: Making a Case for Baird’s Modernism

The refutation and the obliteration of the modernist era in Canadian literature by Robert Kroetsch and reasserted by Glen Wilmott makes it imperative to look at highly experimental literary works in the first half of the 20th century in Canada. The purpose of this paper, thus is to make a case for the inclusion Irene Bird’s Waste Heritage in the repertoire of modernist works in North America. The various criticism of Canadian literature as not having a modernist era needs to be debunked. The false assertion that Canadian literature moved straight from the Victorian era to a postmodernist face is probably due to the difficulty of defining what modernism is. The evolution and the expansion of the term modernism makes it imperative for one to reappraise the creative works of Irene Bird (Waste Heritage) and Sheila Watson (Double Hook) as modernist. An attempt to include Waste Heritage in the new modernist discourse of global literature by looking at the experimental way by which Baird used documentary modernism. The sustainability of a growing modern society vis-à-vis modernism, and the resistance of capitalism in Baird’s narrative would be used to make a case for Baird’s modernism.

Watson, Sheila (1909–1998)

Canadian writer Sheila Watson (1909–1998) is best known for her modernist novel The Double Hook (1959) about the redemptive struggles of a small, rural community as they deal with the murder of one of their members. Born Sheila Martin Doherty in New Westminster, BC, Watson received her BA, (Hons) in English (1931) and MA (1933) from the University of British Columbia. She taught elementary students in a number of rural schools in British Columbia before marrying Wilfred Watson in 1941. She then continued to teach in Toronto, in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia, and in Powell River, BC While living in Calgary during 1951–52, Watson completed The Double Hook, which was published to mixed reviews. After its publication, Watson began her PhD under he guidance of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto and completed her dissertation Wyndham Lewis: Post Expressionist at the University of Alberta in 1961. While working as a professor at the University of Alberta, Watson continued to write and publish. She maintained correspondence with several Canadian scholars and writers, including Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt. After her retirement in 1980, Sheila and her husband moved to Nanaimo, BC, where they died in 1998.