Cigarettes in Canadian Literature

In the Republic of Gilead, where women are stripped of autonomy and reduced to their biological functions, the cigarette becomes a potent symbol of resistance and fleeting freedom. Atwood uses smoking as a marker of the “before times” — a small pleasure now criminalized, available only to those with power or access to the black market.

🚬 The Cigarette as Currency and Status

Throughout the novel, cigarettes signify power and connection to the underground economy. When Offred first sees Nick, the guardian who will become her lover and ally, she immediately recognizes his cigarette as proof that he “has something he can trade on the black market” [citation:1]. This single detail establishes him as someone who operates outside Gilead’s rigid rules — a dangerous but potentially valuable connection.

🚬 The Ritual of the Cigarette

When Offred is given a cigarette by Serena Joy — the Commander’s Wife — the act is loaded with humiliation and power dynamics. Offred must beg for a match, reduced to “a small begging child” [citation:1]. The cigarette itself becomes a prop in a psychological drama, a tiny gift that reinforces the power imbalance.

🚬 Violence Encoded in Smoke

Literary analysts have noted the violence embedded in Atwood’s smoking imagery. When Serena Joy extinguishes her cigarette, the gesture is described with deliberate brutality: “She put her cigarette out, half-smoked […] one jab and one grind” [citation:9]. The violence of the action reflects Serena’s repressed rage and the casual cruelty of the ruling class. The fact that she wastes half a cigarette in front of Offred — who is not allowed them at all — is a deliberate act of humiliation [citation:9].

🚬 Matches as Dangerous Freedom

In one pivotal passage, Offred considers the match in her hand and contemplates burning down the entire house — or simply smoking a cigarette [citation:4]. Atwood uses this moment to illustrate Offred’s transformation: “these abnormal thoughts highlight Offred’s character change because she used to be a quiet, obedient handmaid, but ever since she had a little freedom for herself, she becomes a ruthless and dynamic individual” [citation:4]. The match represents agency — the ability to choose destruction or small pleasure.

Few Canadian writers have captured the melancholic, introspective quality of smoking like Leonard Cohen. In his poetry and songs, the cigarette appears as a companion to loneliness, a marker of time passing, and a symbol of existential waiting.

🚬 The Disoriented Smoker

This famous stanza from Book of Longing captures the dissociative quality of both smoking and grief. The cigarette becomes a metronome for a disoriented mind — a simple physical act that measures time when memory fails. The speaker cannot remember lighting it, cannot remember if they are alone or waiting. The cigarette is both the problem (a habit so automatic it bypasses consciousness) and the solution (a reason to be present in the moment).

🚬 “Leonard, Light My Cigarette” — A Cinematic Homage

The 1996 experimental film Leonard, Light My Cigarette by J. Jacob Potashnik (poetry by Tony Babinski) pays direct homage to Cohen’s iconic status [citation:5]. The film’s title poem addresses Cohen directly:

The film, which Cohen himself saw and called “brilliant,” explores three themes: Cohen as cultural pop icon, the survival of poetry in interdisciplinary art, and the effects of the past on the present [citation:5]. The cigarette acts as a bridge between Cohen and his acolytes — a shared vice that connects generations of Montreal artists.

🚬 The Poet as Smoker

Cohen’s public persona was inseparable from his smoking habit. The image of Cohen in black turtleneck, cigarette in hand, became iconic. In the film’s production notes, the filmmaker describes the Prince of Darkness “stand[ing] there in black pants, black jacket, and a black, wool turtleneck sweater. He still takes the heat” [citation:5]. For Cohen and his followers, smoking was not just a habit but a performance — a way of embodying the romantic, world-weary artist.

In Elizabeth Ruth’s novel Smoke, cigarettes are not just a literary device — they are the literal landscape. Set in the tobacco-growing community of southwestern Ontario in the 1950s, the novel revolves around a boy whose life is transformed by a fire caused by drunkenness and careless smoking [citation:3][citation:6].

📖 The Plot

The novel follows Buster McFiddie, the son of a leading tobacco farmer, who loses his facial features in a fire sparked by a lit cigarette after a night of drinking [citation:6]. Through the process of healing, he is visited by the voice of Doc John Gray, the town doctor, who tells stories of Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang. The convergence of these two lives — a disfigured boy and an old man grappling with his past — changes their small town in ways they could not have imagined [citation:3].

🔥 Irony and Moral Complexity

The novel deliberately complicates readers’ expectations. As one reviewer notes, “Our heightened awareness of the dangers of smoking may cause readers to reject such heroes” as the tobacco farmers who are community leaders [citation:6]. The author contrasts Tom McFiddie’s ordered world with the underworld of the Purple Gang — and cynics may conclude that “the gangster caused less suffering than the farmer” [citation:6].

Smoke uses cigarettes not as a minor prop but as the central metaphor: the substance that brings life (tobacco farming as an industry) also brings destruction (the fire that disfigures Buster, the health risks that readers bring to the text).

To understand the literary uses of cigarettes, one must understand the social history of smoking in Canada. Jarrett Rudy’s The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco Consumption and Identity examines how smoking was tied to class, gender, and racial identity in Montreal between the 1890s and 1950s [citation:8].

🚬 Bourgeois Men and the Rite of Passage

For bourgeois men before World War I, smoking represented a “rite of passage to manhood” — so long as they did not smoke to excess and used their inherent rationality to choose quality products and appropriate places to smoke [citation:8].

🚬 Women and the Fight for Respectable Smoking

Bourgeois women, by contrast, were not supposed to smoke. They allegedly “did not possess the power of self-control,” making them “more susceptible to abusing tobacco because of their apparently weaker wills” [citation:8]. After World War I, however, women began using smoking “as a tool in attacking traditional liberal assumptions about their alleged gender-related weaknesses” — a form of resistance echoed in Atwood’s depiction of Offred’s small rebellions [citation:8].

🚬 World War I and the Rise of the Cigarette

The mass production of cigarettes during World War I “undermined” long-held traditions about respectable smoking. Before the war, cigarettes had projected an effeminate image, but widespread consumption by troops facing the horror of combat turned cigarettes into a “truly ‘manly’ product” [citation:8]. This historical shift informs the masculine associations of smoking in Cohen’s poetry and the darkly masculine world of Ruth’s tobacco farmers.