Monsters and near-death experiences in Eric McCormack’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women

Following Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody as “repetition with a difference”, this essay exposes how a contemporary Canadian novel parodically responds to seminal Early Modern English pre-texts. Eric McCormack is not only a Canadian postmodernist (and postcolonial) writer born in Scotland but also a specialist in Early Modern English literature and thus an ideal representative of the intertextual situation of Canadian writing between literary tradition and the challenges of postmodern/postcolonial writing. The essay interprets McCormack’s sexual gothic novel First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women discussing the way in which a literal or even literalist—rather than metaphorical—interpretation of literary and religious texts of the Early Modern period can make an important and sometimes harrowing difference in the lives of somewhat unsophisticated literary characters. McCormack’s ominously named character Andrew Halfnight literally interprets religious and literary texts he sees as signposts and guidelines of his personal behavior, thus showing how a literal interpretation of “canonical” texts limits the character’s ability to lead a self-determined happy life. The texts he refers to include the pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by Scottish reformer John Knox, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and these subtexts are more than challenged through their intertextual transfer into erotic or perhaps even pornographic contexts which probably would have shocked the Early Modern authors (although, for example, Milton was at least not unwilling or unable to include eroticism in his work). Towards the end of the novel, the imagined reversal of the life-giving act of birth turns into a monstrous sexual act, which coincides with the protagonist’s near-death experience in an automobile accident on a snow-covered road in northern Ontario. This experience cum sexual act leads to the “un-birth” or “re-birth” of the novel’s main character into what he takes to be a happier and more fulfilled life in a paradise found or regained in Camberloo, Ontario.