Occupational Exile in Alistair Macleod's Island

Working-Class Life in Mid-Twentieth Century Nova Scotia

Jun 16, 2009

Canadian writer Alistair Macleod portrays the complex allegiances, shattered dreams, and hardships of working-class life in mid-twentieth century Nova Scotia.

Macleod delves into the traditions, social rules, and bonds that ultimately stifle, paralyze, and sometimes destroy his characters. Throughout Island, Macleod explores themes of occupational bonding, exile, and alienation that bind the person fatalistically to the society that creates him.

Non-Conformity Leads to Alienation

In the story entitled “The Vastness of the Dark”, occupational bonding is realized through the submission to traditions and social expectations while exile and alienation are also recognized as the penalties for betraying family and social expectations. The characters both recognize the need to conform to the family’s occupational background and the alienation that results when one member chooses an alternative life. Here, family traditions destroy a son’s life.

The Mining Consignment

Occupation is the root of one’s pride and Grandpa sternly demands that his son become a miner like himself. He tells James, “when I learned your mother was knocked up I was so happy...[your father] will have to stay now and marry her...[to work] in my place now just as I’ve always wanted”(Macleod 31). Although James’ father accepts responsibility for his unborn child, he never accepts the filth and the hazards of the mining life.

Family Survival Hinges on the Labourer's Efforts

It is a painful revelation for young James who can only think of clumsy back-seat sexual escapades and how “all of us, like to think of ourselves as children of love rather than of necessity”(32). By sating himself in a moment of lust, the father condemns himself to a life of tension and animosity. If labour has necessitated marriage, then, regardless of love, the man must provide for the woman whose life he ruins.

Mining Hazards and Horrific Injuries

The unreasonable demand to remain loyal to one’s occupational heritage causes a dilemma within the characters who realize conformity means a life of hazardous working conditions. James’ father had previously lost a hand during an accident. When he is injured again, the family can only pray “because it [was] the only good hand that he had”. Macleod describes how the tempest-tossed family rides upon father’s remaining hand “as perilous passengers on an unpredictably violent sea”(Macleod 37).

A Demeaning Occupation

When James is about to leave, his mother tells him to find work in the “Blind River” mines of Northern Ontario and this awakens a curious response. Resenting her inability to allow him to be his own man, James recalls “the way Charles Dickens felt about the blackening factory and his mother’s being so fully in favour of it. In favour of a life for him which he considered so terrible and so far beneath his imagined destiny”(Macleod 40).

Paralysis and Perpetual Poverty

Written on the faces of the townspeople are the questions, “what can [outsiders] know of our deaths and pain and who lies buried in our graves”(55). If notions of blood and belonging tie a person to his life, then how can one be set free? James contemplates his so-called freedom. He is painfully aware that he has never been “free,” that it is “not so easy to abandon the only life he [knew] for...eighteen years”(Macleod 56).

It is a regional exile demanding the inhabitants’ participation. To conform means to be treated like kindred.

Macleod, Alistair. Island: The Collected Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2000.

The copyright of the article Occupational Exile in Alistair Macleod's Island in Modern Canadian Fiction is owned by Christopher Mansour. Permission to republish Occupational Exile in Alistair Macleod's Island in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.