Humoring settlers: Kirsten Sandrock, ‘Scottishness, Humour, and the Aesthetics Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 47, 1, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Humoring settlers: Kirsten Sandrock, ‘Scottishness, Humour, and the Aesthetics Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 47, 1, 2022

22Oct25

Excerpt: Today, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) is no longer viewed without controversy as “the ‘father of American humour’” (Cogswell). Whereas earlier scholarship praises the author’s “compassionate humour” and reads Sam Slick’s witticisms as part of the “free exchange of ideas between men and women” (Harding 224), recent approaches to The Clockmaker have flagged the political nature of Slick’s humour. Ruth Panofsky (“Breaking”) and George Elliot Clarke (“Must”; “White”) have demonstrated how Slick’s jokes target female characters and Black characters especially often. As Panofsky claims, “Women and Blacks represent two disenfranchised groups whose vulnerable positions in an all-white patriarchy make them easy targets for his often-times vicious humour” (“Breaking” 42). For Clarke, Slick’s gibes align with the “English-Canadian conservatism” of Haliburton, who was “bourgeois in his blood, Tory to the bone, and Gothic in spirit” (“Must” 4). Following up on these inquiries into the ideological nature of Slick’s jokes, this article suggests that The Clockmaker’s humour is part of a nineteenth-century settler colonial tradition that creates an illusion of a harmonious British Atlantic Canada. While laughter has been recognized as a veritable tradition in postcolonial and transcultural literatures (Balce; Dunphy and Emig; Reichl and Stein), the following discussion links the forms and functions of humour in Haliburton’s works to discussions of settler colonial aesthetics (Bryant; Gould; Rudy; Veracini; Wolfe). Haliburton’s humour idealizes settler colonial relations in Atlantic Canada and turns conflict into comedy. This pertains to differences not only between British and non-British characters but also within the English-speaking community. Settlers from different parts of the British Isles are satirized, though with the overall function of imagining them as a diverse, agreeable body of like-minded settler colonists. Discourses of Scottishness in The Clockmaker and its sequels illustrate this naturalizing and idealizing function of humour in settler colonial fiction.

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