In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature … Margaret Atwood argues that every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core: for America, the Frontier; for England, the Island; for Canada, Survival, la Survivance. In her Afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) she had previously diagnosed the national mental illness as paranoid schizophrenia …; here she develops the idea that most Canadian writers must be neurotic because, "given a choice of the negative or positive aspects of any symbol—sea as life-giving Mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree as what falls on your head—Canadians show a marked preference for the negative."… This general immersion in the turgid depths of what Northrop Frye calls "the world of experience," where tragedy darkens into irony, she attributes to Canada's colonial status. The very function of a...