Killing kings in Canada: The role of community in William Dempsey Valgardson's "Bloodflowers"

Abstract

Canadian short story writer, William Dempsey Valgardson, may not belong among the best-known authors, but his short stories are highly regarded as valuable contributions to the canon of Canadian literature. This paper focuses on Valgardson's flagship short story, "Bloodflowers," and demonstrates the author's usage of the universal mythological pattern of human sacrifice via carefully chosen imagery and symbolism. The basis for critical analysis of the mythological pattern will be James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which serves as a source of information on a variety of human sacrifice patterns that can be found in Valgardson's story. The result of the analysis should be a demonstration of how such a general myth resurfaces in the Canadian environment, confirming Carl Gustav Jung's theory of collective unconscious, which is based on the belief that almost all cultures share the same primordial images on which their mythologies are based.