The two novels differ significantly, however, in that whereas Ringuet tracks the growth and decline of French Canadian folk culture (personified in Euchariste Moisan) over generations, MacLennan focuses upon a specific timespan and a specific place, exploring in real time a climactic moment in the decline of Nova Scotian folk culture. Thirty Acres and Barometer Rising each memorialize the fading of these cultures. In both novels, it the First World War that triggers the collapse of these cultures in Thirty Acres, the First World War encourages an agricultural boom that creates an unsustainable and artificial prosperity for the peasant economy of rural French Canadians, while in Barometer Rising the economic demands of the war encourage standardization and the assimilation of marginal cultures even as the Halifax Explosion obliterates Nova Scotia’s core. These cultures were all informal cultures, existing outside of state structures and governed equally by secular custom and by religious morality, not by theoretically universal law. These cultures all shared a decided agrarian orientation, founded upon the meshing of extended families through marriage and traditional patterns of cooperation, manifesting cultural traits (religiosity, for instance, and a distinctive dialect or even language) which marked them as different and inferior compared to the populations of the urban centers. The traditional cultures of rural Nova Scotia–often simplistically equated with a primeval transplanted Scottish culture, as observed by Uwe Zagratski (307)–did in fact share much with the traditional culture of rural Québec. Hugh MacLennan’s novel Barometer Rising is similar to Ringuet’s Thirty Acres in that the two novels each deal with the decline of traditional cultures at the hands of an aggressive modernity.

Here's the next-to-final draft for the MacLennan segment of my Honours English esaay.

Barometer rising by hugh maclennan