Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Prairie’ functions primarily as an archetypal landscape: a charged, liminal terrain in which individual and collective psyche are tested against vastness, rootlessness, and the memory of dispossession. The term appears most substantially in the literary-critical essays published under the aegis of Canadian studies, where it operates as both a topographical marker and a symbolic container for power, identity, and historical grief. Peter Easingwood’s contribution to the Leeds seminar papers (published under Jung’s Visions imprint) furnishes the richest deposit: the prairie is never merely background but ‘the central image of power,’ the site where colonisation unfolds as a psychic as well as political struggle over possession. Margaret Laurence’s fiction is read as an imaginative reckoning with prairie history, its harshness encoding what W.L. Morton called ‘the mediocrity of survival.’ Rudy Wiebe extends this further: his fictional prairie is the place where visionary experience occurs—where ‘the Great Spirit speaks with the voice of the land itself.’ A secondary, neuroscientific register appears in the corpus through the prairie vole, deployed by O’Connor and Panksepp as the paradigm case for monogamous bonding and the neurochemistry of attachment. These two registers—landscape as psychic crucible and rodent as bonding model—rarely intersect yet share an implicit concern with belonging, place-attachment, and the consequences of severed bonds.
The prairie is always there in Wiebe’s fiction, as the place where things happen and as the central image of power.
The passage argues that the prairie in Wiebe’s fiction is not mere setting but an archetypal locus of power, where visionary experience and colonial struggle over land converge as a psychic and political contest.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997thesis
MARGARET LAURENCE: PRAIRIE FICTION AND PRAIRIE HISTORY Peter Easingwood… RE-VISIONS OF PRAIRIE INDIAN HISTORY IN RUDY WIEBE’S THE TEMPTATIONS OF BIG BEAR
The table of contents frames ‘prairie’ as a dedicated critical category, anchoring two of the seminar’s central essays and establishing the term as a major conceptual node for the re-vision of Canadian literary and historical identity.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997thesis
What I share, most of all, with Morton is the sense of my place, the prairies, and of my people (meaning all prairie peoples), within the context of their many and varied histories.
Laurence’s statement, quoted approvingly, defines prairie identification as a form of imaginative belonging that fuses topographic, communal, and historical memory into a single psychic ground.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997thesis
LAURENCE: PRAIRIE FICTION… I don’t often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past — that’s nonsense.
The passage situates prairie fiction within Laurence’s technique of layered temporal consciousness, showing how the prairie landscape becomes the affective medium through which the protagonist negotiates personal and communal memory.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting
Morton documents with bitter precision ‘the long ordeal of the twenties and the thirties’ and the legacy it entailed on succeeding generations down to the time of writing his book.
Morton’s historical record of prairie hardship is presented as the foundational substrate for Laurence’s fiction, making prairie suffering a template for collective psychic obligation across generations.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting
Manawaka remained, as it always had been, a harsh and impoverished environment, but it now seemed to invite fresh treatment.
The prairie township of Manawaka is characterised as a psychically resistant but creatively generative environment, its harshness the very condition enabling the novelist’s re-visionary project.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting
Prairie voles live all over the plains of North America, whereas montane voles live at higher elevations in the western United States and Canada.
O’Connor introduces the prairie vole as the neuroscientific model for monogamous pair-bonding, using its habitat as a distinguishing marker to frame research into attachment and the neurochemistry of loss.
, The grieving brain the surprising science of how we learn, 2022supporting
Carter, S. C., DeVries, A. C., & Getz, L. L. (1995). Physiological substrates of mammalian monogamy: The prairie vole model.
Panksepp cites the prairie vole as the canonical mammalian model for the physiological substrates of monogamy, linking oxytocin-based bonding research to the broader affective neuroscience of social attachment.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Amphetamine alters behavior and mesocorticolimbic dopamine receptor expression in the monogamous female prairie vole.
The prairie vole appears here as a pharmacological test subject, with the citation noting that amphetamine disrupts bonding-related dopamine expression in this monogamous species.
The defeat of the Métis at Batoche… the novel most fully conveys Laurence’s vision of regional character and national identity.
The passage situates prairie history—specifically the Métis defeat—within Laurence’s mythopoeic project, suggesting that regional historical trauma constitutes the bedrock of Canadian national identity in her fiction.
, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997aside