Locating Illicit Empathy: the Extractive Ecology of Marian Engel’s Bear

Abstract

This article demonstrates the indissociable role of empathy in sustaining the systemic violence of extractivism, a term describing the global drive to exhaustively extract resources. The article contends that empathy not simply fails to serve as a corrective for settler colonial guilt but reinforces extractivist logic, which is exemplified by Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976). Although Engel has not been widely recognized as one of the Canadian authors addressing colonial dispossession and ecological depletion, her novel offers a witty exploration of Canadian nature and indigeneity through the protagonist Lou’s illicit practices of empathy. After Lou attempts to form an anthropomorphic love relationship with the eponymous bear, she is struck by the animal on her back, leaving a painful wound that is often interpreted as a symbol of her repentance and personal growth. However, its significance in the context of racialized empathy becomes more pronounced when compared to the rarely noticed yet strikingly similar slashed upper torso of an Indigenous woman in Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s photograph Fringe (2007). Engel’s novel suggests that while empathy towards Indigenous people and ecological entities can catalyze ethical action, it also reenacts extractivist ideology by appropriating indigeneity, exploiting commodifiable text resources, and instrumentalizing sexuality.