Unceasing occupation : love and survival in three late-twentieth-century Canadian World War II novels

Abstract

The unprecedented acts of brutality, persecution, and genocide perpetrated in the Second World War caused ruptures within language, creating a need for both individual and collective re-definitions of love, privacy, truth, and survival. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of Second World War fiction in both Canada and abroad, which suggests a need among contemporary authors to analyse and to understand retrospectively the way World War II has influenced current political and racial divisions. By looking specifically at the romantic relationships depicted in The Ash Garden, The English Patient, and The Walnut Tree, three Canadian World War II novels all written approximately fifty years after the war, this thesis not only examines the question of what is necessary for survival and how the public world of war either enables or inhibits individual survival, but also isolates how race, gender, and the public world influence the characters’ ability to endure in reciprocal love.