Book Review

Canada and the United States

The dramatic mass murder of five members of the Donnelly family in late nineteenth-century Ontario has long captured the imagination of Canadians and has drawn both popular and scholarly attention, largely because multiple homicide is an infrequent event in the country's history. The tragedy occurred in a complex environment of economic dislocation, ethnic and religious tensions, and heated political contests. Norman N. Feltes seeks to apply a theoretical approach to "determine" the historical context of these murders. By his own admission, he has nothing new to add to the narrative.

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Preferring to leave aside all but the briefest descriptions of the events that triggered the crimes, the murders themselves, and the court cases that followed, Feltes disparages the attempts of others to understand the subject by focusing on narrative elements. Thus the Donnelly murders become a springboard to Feltes's real agenda, which is to apply "marxian" structuralist theory to nineteenth-century Canadian history. This critical design is not by itself the problem; leaving out the history of the event is. Remarkably, the reader finishes the book without a clear sense of the Donnelly family, the ethnic and religious tensions that surely were important precursors of the tragedy, the vigilante group that was formed immediately before the murders, the individuals arrested for the murders, the trial proceedings, and the event's larger significance.

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