On the threshold: Haunting transgressions in Gaétan Soucy's The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to show how Gaétan Soucy’s 1998 bestselling novel The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches both extends and complicates the Canadian Gothic tradition. The first part focuses on Canada as a “haunted culture,” and attempts to identify the ghosts which haunt Canada and make themselves manifest in the nation’s gothic literature. I ponder the postcolonial character of Canadian Gothic, and reflect on the representations of monstrous nature in Canada’s early fiction. A short section is devoted to the characteristics of French-Canadian Gothic. The second part of my article proposes a reading of Soucy’s novel which concentrates on gothic transgressions the story revolves around. One of my assumptions is that the novel invites ecocritical and ecofeminist inter-pretations, and that its representations of nature also reveal the subversive character of the text whose narrator, by her own admission, locates herself on the threshold of things.