“This is a fundamentalist town”: The Prairie Town as a Site of Social and Cultural Conflict in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House

Sinclair Ross’s novel As for Me and My House has long since been canonized as Canadian prairie fiction. Accordingly, it has been the subject of many critical studies and academic papers. Most commentators have concentrated on such literary issues as the representation of the western landscape or the reliability of the female narrator. But so far little consideration has been given to the social and cultural implications of the novel. Few attempts have been made to analyze the text from a cultural perspective including such social markers as class, gender and ethnicity. That is all the more surprising because Sinclair Ross has often been credited for being a realistic author and As for Me and My House has often been interpreted as a regional novel characteristic of a particular time and place.