Re-writing History in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool

Abstract

Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool addresses the overlooked contributions and sacrifices of Canadians in the War of 1812, which have been largely absent from colonial documents written by British and American historians. By focusing on the reality of war from a Canadian perspective, the novel offers a new and inclusive narrative of the war, one that challenges and falsifies the colonial record. This paper uses the theory of post-colonialism, which brings the colonizers and the colonized into a dispute over writing history, to investigate the events of the novel. This paper concludes that literary texts, such as novels, have the potential to construct alternative histories, providing a more comprehensive and representative account that counters the traditional colonial narrative.