Southern Ontario Gothic

People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
                               - Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971

I never heard of the literary subgenre “Southern Ontario Gothic” before exploring obituaries of Alice Munro in May. Another Canadian author, Timothy Findley, coined the term half a century ago when an interviewer compared his fiction to writing from the American South: “Sure, it’s Southern Gothic: Southern Ontario Gothic. And that exists.” It exists in Munro, Findley, Margaret Atwood, and more.

Classic Gothic literature features crumbling castles or mansions, innocents isolated and trapped, with undercurrents of potential violence and horror. American Southern Gothic is haunted by a history of racial violence. What haunts southern Ontario?

My ancestral roots run through Ontario on both sides of the family. To me, southern Ontario culture feels as ordinary as it comes. I have to step back to grasp a sense of place distinguished by what The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature calls “the merciless forces of Perfectionism; Propriety, Presbyterianism, and Prudence.” Then I can sense the ghosts of family secrets buried deep under the kitchens of small Ontario towns.

​Image: Gothic architecture of Hillary House National Historic Site, Aurora, Ontario, built in 1862.