Celebrity Walking The Walk

Celebrity Walking The Walk From the flamboyant fabrications of Mazo de la Roche to the jealously guarded privacy of Michael Ondaatje, clearly there is no distinctive mode of Canadian literary celebrity Still, given the tendency of celebrity studies to focus on the most contemporary of examples, it is instructive to see how many of the concerns and tensions involved in current Canadian literary celebrity have had a longer history in this country than one might suppose.

Ondaatje's privacy finds its historical counter- part in the carefully protected domestic life of Stephen Lea- cock, and the canny interventions of Margaret Atwood into her own celebrity representations find their historical precedent in the clear-eyed awareness of L.M.

Montgomery. But each celeb- rity performs his or her fame in a somewhat different key. Ondaatje's celebrity citizenship is complicated in a way that Atwood's is not by the widespread tendency to exoticize and eroticize his origins, his work, and his star persona,

Shields's late-coming literary celebrity was marked by a public prurience about her domestic arrangements, as Margaret Atwood's has been, and yet Shields's public persona often adhered to the model of the good middle-class woman in a way that Atwood's has not- Indeed, it becomes clear that Atwood has, at numerous points in her career, been punished by the media, by literary reviewers and b readers, for not adhering to this image of the modestly accomplished domestic woman — for inhabiting her celebrity for the most part, unapologetically.

For all that each of these literal. celebrities performs these familiar celebrity tensions in a distinctive key, in popular par- lance and in my owri classroom experience teaching Canadian literary celebrity, we continue, as Canadians, to cling to the belief that there is something different — often something more simple, modest, or ennobling about our approach to celebrity than what we perceive in the celebrity culture of the nation to our south.

And yet a suidy such as this one reveals the flimsiness of such an assumption. In my classroom experience teaching topics such as Canadian women's literary celebrity, or famous Canadian women in the arts in general, I have found this belief in our national distrust of celebrity to he persistent and deep- rooted. In studying a work like Carol Shield's Swyznii, for instance, students are often tempted to sec poor, neglected, murdered Mary Swann as a metaphor for Canadian celebrity culture and women's celebrity- in general.

According to this myth, Canadians, and Canadian women in particular, are more modest about their fame, less affected by it (in a way that media commentaries of Shields herself tended to depict her), and, therefore, more authentic and unspoiled as celebrities. As the g-rowing bod:L.,' of theoretical work on celebrity has amply main- tained, however., this claim of authenticity holds both powerful and unstable cultural currency.

And in the context of this study, the strikingly different approaches to literary celebrity shown by women such as Lazo de la Roche, Margaret Atwood., and Carol Shields would seem to disperse any critical claim that there is a distinctive Canadian female performance of celebrity or that it is necessarily characterized by modesty or a lack of awareness. Because this study has thrown into question these sorts of assumptions,

I close my study of Canadian celebrity with a brief glance at an institution that seeks to define celebrity in a distinctively national key: the Canadian Walk of Fame. The Walk of Fame is a collection of concrete stars embossed with the names of Canadian notables Set into several sidewalks in Toronto's Theatre District. Each June, several new stars arc inducted into the Walk, nominated by members of the general public and chosen by a selection committee and board of directors.