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How would Canadian literary criticism have developed differently if Margaret Atwood had titled her 1972 study of Canadian literature not Survival but Adaptation? It seems easy enough to imagine a tweaking of her premises to accommodate such a shift. One might even see adaptation as already implicitly valued in her description of the fourth, most successful "victim position" she identifies in the nation's writing: namely, that of the "creative non-victim," someone who does not merely fall prey to her or his surroundings but responds to them in positive ways (38). If Atwood had undertaken her survey of Canadian literature with adaptation in mind, she might have found it to be just as pervasive a theme as survival. Given how recently she had produced her own adaptive text, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, it is tempting to think that adaptation was just too close to her nose for her to see it.
Rather than conducting an overview of Canadian literature from the perspective of adaptation, I wish to address two texts, Alice Munro's story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" and its filmic adaptation Away from Her, which provide rich material for an initial attempt. The story, first published in The New Yorker in 1999 and then collected in Munro's 2001 book Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, follows an Ontarian married couple, Fiona and Grant, as they deal first with Fiona's development of what appears to be Alzheimer's disease and then with her entrance into the assisted living centre Meadowlake. Concomitantly, they confront the mutually remembered but seldom discussed matter of Grant's past adulteries. As a result, in this text there is a relationship between memory, fidelity, and adaptation, and it is a complex one. Taken as a story about an intimate relationship between two people, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" offers insights into how notions of fidelity can adapt to changing conditions.
Meanwhile, these insights have only grown more complicated in the course of being filmed as Away from Her by the Canadian actor Sarah Polley. The motion picture was Polley s feature debut as screenwriter and director, and it has been an international success, earning Oscar nominations for lead female actor Julie Christie and for Polley's adapted screenplay. But if Away from Her...